Jean-Pierre Esteva

After the armistice of June 1940, Esteva, like many other admirals including François Darlan, chose to serve the Vichy regime. A trusted man of Marshal Pétain, he left for French North Africa. On July 26, 1940, he became general resident of France in Tunisia. In this position, he succeeds Marcel Peyrouton who is called upon to take up his new ministerial functions in Vichy. In November 1942, when the Anglo-Americans launched Operation Torch, the admiral was still stationed. Then begins a series of procrastinations which ends with a collaboration with the Italo-Germans. The November 9, 1942, he began by condemning the arrival on the ground of El Aouina of Luftwaffe aircraft sent on the spot by Field Marshal Albert Kesselring. But very quickly, out of loyalty to Pétain and under pressure from Pierre Laval's instructions, Esteva was forced to change position. He provided German pilots with several French bases on Tunisian territory as well as fuel stocks. In the process, he neutralized Admiral Derrien who had encouraged his troops to join the Allies in order to fight against the Axis.

In May 1943, when the Allied troops entered Tunis, Esteva was repatriated to France by the Germans. The admiral was evacuated on May 7 by plane and at the same time as the consul general of the Third Reich in Tunisia. In Paris, he was taken to the Ritz (then partly occupied by the Luftwaffe) in order to be put there under house arrest while waiting for the German authorities to rule on his fate. Locked in his room, he was guarded by German sentries. Finally released on May 18, he arrived at Vichy where he was warmly welcomed and congratulated by Pétain for his loyalty to the orders received. German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop sent him a message of sympathy and thanks him for having "facilitated the conduct of the war by the Axis powers. Esteva said at his trial before the high court: "This letter doesn't interest me. I am a French civil servant. I had nothing to do with von Ribbentrop".

In North Africa, however, a War Council, chaired by General Henri Giraud on May 15, sentences Esteva to the death penalty in absentia.

On 22 September 1944, he was arrested by French police in Paris and then imprisoned in Clairvaux Prison. A new trial is organized. Accused of delivering wheat to the Italian army in Libya, granted facilities to Axis troops to establish themselves on the coast and Tunisian airfields after the Allied landing in 1942, recruited workers and combatants in a Phalanx African in the service of Germany, manifested on several occasions his sympathy for the German cause, he sketches the so-called “double play” defense, often repeated later. Thus, he affirms that in spite of his fidelity to Pétain, it was not a blind discipline which guided him, that he only composed with the enemy to save the essential: his departure would have done pass Tunisia under Italian control, the delivery of wheat to the Italians in Libya was compensated by identical shipments to the French populations, he sabotaged the recruitment of the African Phalanx, he did not have enough troops, with 12,000 men, to oppose the Axis forces, the Allies being too far away. Admiral Muselier testified in his favor during this trial. He was nonetheless found guilty of treason on March 15, 1945. Militarily degraded by the High Court of Justice, he was sentenced to forced labor for life. Claude Morgan, resistant communist founder of the French Letters, takes this punishment to witness, in an article entitled "The smallpox", to denounce the indulgence of justice, which did not condemn him to death, and the complicity which would benefit Vichy, saying: "If Esteva is not a traitor, it is because there is no traitor."

Sick, Esteva was pardoned on 11 August 1950. He died a few months later and was interred in Reims.

Leaning, in The Great Trials of Collaboration, on Esteva's journey, and in particular his Tunisian period and his trial, Roger Maudhuy considers, on the basis of several testimonies, that Esteva helped the local Resistance and provided false identity documents to members of the Jewish community, communist activists, German escapees and Alsatian refugees.

General de Gaulle, in his War Memories, commented on this trial in these terms:

“Admiral Esteva was sentenced to imprisonment. At the end of a career which, until these events, had been exemplary, this old sailor, led astray by false discipline, found himself an accomplice, then a victim, of a harmful enterprise." For his part, Pierre Messmer said to Roger Maudhuy: " What do you want? The High Court could not begin with an acquittal. Esteva did not deserve such a fate, I agree. Two or three years later, he would no doubt have been acquitted. But it was war ... Pétain, Laval, all those responsible, the big ones, were out of reach. He was there. He was unlucky, that's all.”

He was decorated with the Order of the Francisque.