The first twenty years of the life of Marshal Pétain help to determine his psychology, his behaviour and his reactions in the face of the glorious events and tragedies which he was to experience later on.

A childhood in the countryside : Philippe Pétain is born on April 24, 1856 in the family farm at Cauchy-à-la-Tour. His parents are farmers, and the oldest document relating to his ancestors is a notary’s act of October 25, 1697 by which Estienne-François Pétain, lieutenant bailiff, obliges four inhabitants of the burg of Floringhem-en-Artois to recognize the damage caused « by the grazing of cattle on a piece of land located at Cauchy-à-la-Tour. » He will express his attachment to the land in his appeal of June 25, 1940: « The land, it is not mendacious ; it remains your recourse ; it is the Homeland itself ; when a field which becomes a wasteland, it is a piece of France itself that dies ; A land which had lay fallow sown again with cereals, it is France which is born again. » And in a message to the peasants at Pau on April 20, 1941: « The city-dweller can live from day to day; the farmer must envisage, calculate, struggle; disappointments have no grasp on this man characterized by the necessary work instinct and his passion for the land; no matter what happens, he confronts, he holds on. HE IS A CHIEF ».

Philippe’s mother dies in 1858, after having given birth to a fifth child. His father, Omer-Venant, doesn’t wait long to remarry. Major events for a child, events which will foster his taste for loneliness, silence and secrecy. Henceforth, his paternal grandmother assumes responsibility for him and teaches him to read and to pray. She relates to him the marvellous story of his ancestor, Saint Bénoni, born near Cauchy in 1748, deceased in Rome in 1783, and canonized in 1850 by Pie IX, as being « God’s poor one. » He carries the same first name after that of Philippe. As soon as he is old enough, he will go each morning to the church of the village to serve mass.

His great-uncle, Father Lefebvre, lives in the Bomy presbytery. Almost a hundred years old, he served Bonaparte then the Empire, and the account of his campaigns moulds the imagination one of a sensitive child whose spirit will be struck by the disaster of 1870 and by the subsequent desire for revenge. His destiny is then determined : he will be a soldier. But the cost of those studies requires some financial support. Providence will provide for it.

The lord of the manor of Bomy, Edouard Moullart de Vilmarest, who, because of a wound received during the battle of Castelfidardo (September 18, 1860), was deprived of any hope of an offspring, had expressed the intention of financing the studies of a young man without fortune who would dedicate himself to soldiering and the defence of his country. It is thus that the priest of the parish of Bomy, Father Legrand, had presented to Moullart de Vilmarest, the son of his sister Cécile Pétain, his nephew Philippe, as the most gifted and worthy candidate. In 1867, Philippe enters the Saint-Bertin College located at Saint-Omer, thirty kilometers from Cauchy. There, his distinguishes himself by his get-up-and-go, his physical capacity and his prizes in geometry, his courses in Greek and English.

He is a young man « with a broad frame, an oval, open and sympathetic face, crowned with slightly wavy light brown hair, and with an intelligent and sharp glance who, in 1875, enters the Saint Cyr preparatory class at the Dominican College at Arcueil and Saint Cyr itself in 1876. Notably, in his graduating class is Charles de Foucauld, the future hermit of Tamanrasset and Asekrem, as well as Driant who will marry the daughter of General Boulanger, will protest against the «records» of the Grand Lodge of France, will resign in 1905 and will heroically fall on February 22, 1916, at Bois des Caures, leading the way for his men, the very same day General Pétain arrived at his command post on the Verdun battlefront.