The Face of Dishonor

It was Riom reversed. In 1942 Vichy-france had brought the fallen Third Republic to trial. Now, in Paris, a representative of fallen Vichy stood before the High Court of the "Fourth Republic." The charge was the same as at Riom: betrayal of the nation.

To prosecute the Government of Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, the Government of General Charles de Gaulle called from retirement the scourge of World War I's spies and traitors. At 75, famed Counselor Andre Mornet was tired, bent and heavy-eyed. His frayed red robe might have been the one he wore at the Mata Hari trial. But when he rose, red of face and white of beard, to open the case against Vichy, his years fell away, his old fire flashed.

This time the defendant was no Mata Hari. It was Vichy's bewhiskered, palsied, senescent (64) Jean-Pierre Esteva, the five-star admiral who had been Marshal Petain's Resident General of Tunisia. Cried Counselor Mornet: Esteva was the creature of Petain, who will soon be brought to trial in absentia. Esteva did not resist the Germans in Tunisia; instead, he appealed to the Free French to desert, conscripted Tunisians to help the Axis. "I ask death for the man who was content to accept dishonor."

To the prisoner's dock stumbled the defendant. He poured out garrulous excuses: "The Germans were blackguards. I hated them. I want to fight them now. I ask permission to continue in the war to the end--if God permits--with weapons in my hands, at the most dangerous and exposed position at the front that is possible, in the most humble grade, even as a plain sailor. . . ."

But in Tunisia what could he have done? "I sacrificed everything for France. . . . Some people asked me why I did not go to Algiers or to England and join the Free French. But what would I have been with the Free French? I would not have been Resident General of Tunisia. I might not even have been an admiral. I might have been just Monsieur Esteva."

With averted, shame-filled eyes his fellow Frenchmen listened. Swiftly the three judges and 24 jurors, mostly men of the Resistance, rendered their judgment: for Traitor Esteva not death but life imprisonment, confiscation of his possessions. loss of his five stars.

In the courtroom's silence the prisoner clutched his gold-braided cap, turned his face toward dishonor, mumbled: "I would have preferred death."

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