Seventeen months after the armistice of Compiegne, the leaders of the Third Republic stood in the dock at Riom to answer war-guilt charges dreamed up by Adolf Hitler. Instead they attacked the Vichy regime, praised General Charles de Gaulle. Delicate, scholarly, 70-year-old onetime Premier Léon Blum raised his grey head proudly and accused his accusers of rank mockery. Cried onetime Premier Edouard Daladier: "We shall make it clear where treason lurked and by whom France was betrayed."
These voices of defiance struck sympathetic chords in millions of French hearts. Hitler called the trial off hurriedly. But it was too late. France had...
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