Opening of The Trial in February 1942
The trial began on 19 February 1942 before the Vichy regime Supreme Court of Justice, which was empowered by a decree "to judge whether the former ministers or their immediate subordinates had betrayed the duties of their offices by way of acts which contributed to the transition from a state of peace to a state of war before September 1939, and which after that date worsened the consequences of the situation thus created." The crimes with which the defendants were charged were retrospectively created: that is, at the time these acts were allegedly carried out, they were not illegal. This was contrary to the principle of Nullum crimen, nulla poena sine praevia lege poenali forbidding retroactivity of laws.
Gamelin, the former commander of the French Army, refused to recognise the right of the court to try him and maintained complete silence. La Chambre and Jacomet were minor figures. Daladier and Blum were thus left to carry the burden of the defence. Blum, who was a lawyer as well as a politician and polemicist, turned on what was widely recognised as a brilliant performance, cross-examining the government's witnesses and exposing the falsity and illegitimacy of the charges. He argued that the largest reductions in defence spending under the Third Republic had taken place under governments in which both Pétain and Pierre Laval, the Vichy Prime Minister, had held office. On the other hand, he showed that the Popular Front had made the greatest war efforts since 1918. Blum even defended the French Communist Party (PCF), declaring about Jean-Pierre Timbaud, a Communist who had been executed, along with 26 other communist hostages, in retaliation for the assassination of a Nazi official: "I was often opposed to him. However, he has been executed by a firing-squad and died singing the Marseillaise... Thus, I have nothing to add concerning the PCF."
Although the court was supposed to consider only the period from 1936 to 1940, excluding military operations from September 1939 to June 1940, the defendants refused to accept this and demonstrated how the responsibility of the defeat of 1940 rested mainly on failures of the French general staff. They also showed that the June 1940 armistice had been signed although the French Army still possessed considerable forces in metropolitan France.
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