We’re delighted to see Julian Jackson’s France on Trial on this year’s Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize shortlist.

Published by Allen Lane, France on Trial uses Pétain’s three-week trial as a lens through which to examine the central crisis of twentieth-century French history – the defeat of 1940, the signing of the armistice and Vichy’s policy of collaboration – what the main prosecutor Mornet called ‘four years to erase from our history’.