Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize 2023 A Telegraph Book of the Year A Times, Spectator and Prospect Book of the Year One of the great contemporary historians of France on one of the most controversial periods of twentieth-century French history Few images more shocked the French population during the Occupation than the photograph of Marshal Philippe Pétain - the great French hero of the First World War - shaking the hand of Hitler on 20 October 1940. In a radio speech after this meeting, Pétain told the French people that he was 'entering down the road of collaboration'. He ended with t.