Question: Guy Pedroncini wrote the biography of this man, who ranks as France's oldest head of state?

Henri Philippe Benoni Omer Joseph Pétain (24 April 1856 – 23 July 1951), generally known as Philippe Pétain (] ) or Marshal Pétain ("Maréchal Pétain"), was a French general who reached the distinction of Marshal of France, and later served as the Chief of State of Vichy France also known as Nationalist France or the French State "(Chef de l'État Français)", from 1940 to 1944.  Pétain, who was 84 years old in 1940, ranks as France's oldest head of state.  Today, he is considered the French equivalent to his contemporary Quisling in Norway.  Because of his outstanding military leadership in World War I, particularly during the Battle of Verdun, Pétain was viewed as a national hero in France and was not executed.  He was sometimes nicknamed "The Lion of Verdun". <SEP> Maurice Noël Floquet (Poissons, 25 December 1894 – Montauroux, 10 November 2006) was, at age 111, France's oldest man on record and was one of the last surviving French veterans of World War I.  He was, at the age of 111 years and 320 days, France's longest-lived soldier ever.  Moreover, Floquet was France's oldest living man for more than four years.  France's oldest person was a woman, Jeanne Calment, aged 122 years 164 days when she died, who still remains the oldest verified person ever, is more than a decade older than Floquet. <SEP>  He was born in Paris on 17 May 1924 and died on 11 July 2006, at the age of 82. Guy Pedroncini was a French academic and military historian specialising in the First World War, and notable as the biographer of Philippe Pétain and for his work on the French army mutinies of 1917. <SEP> Jonny Steinberg is a South African writer and scholar.  He is the author of several books about everyday life in the wake of South Africa’s transition to democracy.  Two of them, "Midlands" (2002), about the murder of a white South African farmer, and "The Number" (2004), a biography of a prison gangster, won South Africa’s premier non-fiction award, the "Sunday Times" Alan Paton Award.  In 2013, he was among the inaugural winners of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prizes, awarded by Yale University.  Steinberg’s books also include "Three-Letter Plague" ("Sizwe’s Test" in the United States), which chronicles a young man’s journey through South Africa’s AIDS pandemic.  It was a "Washington Post" Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize, among others.  Steinberg is also the author of "Thin Blue" (2008), an exploration of the unwritten rules of engagement between South African civilians and police, and "Little Liberia: An African Odyssey in New York" (2011), about the Liberian civil war and its aftermath in an exile community in New York and described as an "extraordinary, stylistically varied mix of reportage, history and biography".  Steinberg's 2015 book, "A Man of Good Hope", was described as "superb" by "Observer" reviewer Ian Birrell, who wrote: "On the surface, it is simply the biography of a lonely young migrant who dreams of a decent life, hardening his shell and hustling to survive in hostile human environments.  Yet it is really an epic African saga that chronicles some fundamental modern issues such as crime, human trafficking, migration, poverty and xenophobia, while giving glimpses into the Somali clan system, repression in Ethiopia and lethal racism in townships."