INTRODUCTION
There have been many wars and many defeats, but France’s defeat in 1940 was among the most momentous in Europe’s history. France, not twenty years before, had emerged a victor in the Great War, its army as a result earning a reputation as one of the strongest in the world. That war had ground on for more than four years. The campaign of 1940 by contrast was over in a comparative twinkling after just six weeks of combat, and the result was a rout. An estimated 90,000 French soldiers died in the fighting and well over a million and a half were taken prisoner. France’s parliament gave up on democratic institutions and turned over the reins of power to a military man, Marshal Philippe Pétain, who proceeded to construct an authoritarian regime that entered into collaboration with Hitler’s Germany.
The Führer’s tank commander, Heinz Guderian, was astounded by Germany’s lightning victory over France, calling it nothing less than a “miracle.”1 The accumulating misfortunes, though, were not France’s alone. The British, Soviets, and Americans had all predicated their own defense policies on the sure-fire staying power of the French army and now had to scramble to recalibrate their plans. Hitler in the meantime was unleashed on Europe, and it would take almost five years more of bitter warfare to bring him at last to heel.
A defeat of such dimensions—not just massive but also unexpected—cried out for explanation. Pétain, as might be imagined, had one ready to hand, which he articulated in a speech on 20 June, just four days after he had become prime minister and three after appealing to the Germans for an armistice: “Too few babies, too few arms, too few allies—these were the causes of our defeat,” as he put it.2 Marc Bloch had an account of his own, which he laid out with prosecutorial brilliance in L’Etrange Défaite, dashed off in 1940 while the wounds of the battlefield collapse were still fresh (although the text would not be published until after the war). Bloch had unkind words for France’s British ally, complained of a shortage of weaponry, but most of all insisted on the lack of imagination of French military planners who, still under the spell of the Great War with its set-piece battles, had failed to grasp the speed of modern mechanized combat. Bloch did not stop there, though, but, like Pétain, shifted from military critique to social indictment. It wasn’t, of course, demographic deficits that upset Bloch but the self-centered individualism of the French body politic, from the blinkered bourgeois down to the wage-grubbing trade unionist. A generalized selfishness had eaten into public life, draining away the Jacobin esprit de corps that Bloch so well embodied himself and that he believed to be the sine qua non of victory in war.3
For Pétain and Bloch, the defeat of 1940 was not just a military event but a moral judgment on France as a nation. Such a view had a long life ahead of it. In Search of France, a collection of half a dozen essays, was published in English and French editions in 1963.4 The volume is and remains a classic, the product of a collaborative effort undertaken by top scholars, social scientists all, from Harvard and the Paris Institute of Political Studies (better known as Sciences Po). It does not deal in the specifics of the 1940 campaign, but it does present a picture of the France that went before, of a nation en route to defeat, and it is a devastating portrait. That France, the France of the Third Republic, is characterized as a “stalemate society,” anchored by an alliance of conservative peasants and bourgeois committed to preserving the status quo. The Republic’s parliamentary constitution, “plenty of brakes and not much of a motor,” helped to keep change at bay, which was fine in the sunny days of the Belle Epoque, but not so fine in the Depression years when a France wedded to backward ways failed to modernize, when a risk-averse France failed to face the Nazi threat head-on. One of the book’s contributors, Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, spoke of a “decline in France’s élan vital.” He went on in later years to author a weighty tome, anatomizing French foreign policy in the 1930s, and he titled it with lapidary simplicity La Décadence. Duroselle was just as pithy when it came to characterizing the unavoidable outcome of decadence: catastrophe.5 Now, In Search of France was a hopeful volume in the end. The catastrophe of 1940 and the years of Occupation that followed, the authors proposed, had incubated a generation of new men who, inheritors of power after the war, would set the nation on a modernizing course that promised a return to grandeur. This narrative of decline and renewal, with 1940 cast as the turning point, achieved wide currency in the 1960s. It was relayed to a general public (minus the renewal end of the story) in a pair of massive histories which recapitulated the received wisdom but framed it in compelling, readable prose that demanded the reader’s assent: William Shirer’s The Collapse of the Third Republic and Alistair Horne’s To Lose a Battle, both, as it happens, published in 1969.6
The consensus, however, did not long endure. An alternative interpretation began to take shape in the 1970s that questioned the notion of a decadent France. It has picked up speed since, generating a flood of fresh material, and this new, revisionist view is now summed up in a couple of first-rate recent English-language histories: Ernest May’s Strange Victory (2000) and Julian Jackson’s The Fall of France (2003).7
These authors see effort where critics have seen abdication and bankruptcy. French diplomats may have been slow to catch on to the Nazi threat, but catch on they did, and they then labored hard to build an anti-German coalition, dragging along allies who were reluctant to abandon entrenched policies of appeasement and neutralism. Pétain and Bloch blamed the French defeat on too few arms. Not so, answer the revisionists, who counter that France’s rearmament drive in the late 1930s—except in the domain of aircraft production and perhaps even in that domain too—was more success than failure. Nor was the French public so slack and pacifist as is oftentimes supposed. In the wake of the Munich debacle of 1938, opinion stiffened, rallying to the banner of national defense. As for the defeat itself, no doubt French soldiers were ill served by their generals, but they fought well nonetheless, and the military catastrophe that unfolded in May–June 1940 was due as much to what the Germans did right as to what the French did wrong. Not just that: France went to war with allies. The “strange defeat” of 1940 was a defeat for them too—for the British, Belgians, and Dutch—so why read the event as a reflection on the French alone?
So, who is right? No definitive conclusion, of course, is possible, but I will make the case for a more sympathetic understanding of France’s defeat.
This book is as much an argument as a narrative history, and unlike much of the work on the subject, it will set the French experience in a comparative perspective. There is a strong tendency to view France’s fate in isolation. In many ways, to be sure, the 1930s were a “low dishonest decade” for the French, but they were that too for most of Europe. France was routed in the spring of 1940, but for Hitler’s military the Battle of France was just one victory in an unbroken string (the Battle of Britain apart) that did not come to an end until the German army’s advance ground to a halt outside Moscow in early December 1941. Add in the defeats dealt by the Japanese to Great Britain and the United States in the Pacific theater on into 1942—from Singapore to the Philippines—and France’s own misfortunes begin to look a good deal less “strange.” If France’s debacle is proof of moral decay, then the entire non-fascist world must stand in the dock alongside.
Yet in one crucial, even paramount, respect, France’s defeat was exceptional, and the comparative perspective brings that aspect into sharp relief. In the aftermath of the 1940 debacle, the Dutch sovereign, Queen Wilhelmina, the Dutch government by her side, departed for exile in Britain. So too did the Belgian government, though the king, Leopold III, elected to stay behind. In France, just one government member made his way to London, Charles de Gaulle, and he was no more than a junior minister acting on his own initiative. It is not that the French government made no effort to continue the fight from abroad. There was an attempt to relocate the Republic’s most senior officials to North Africa in June 1940, but that effort was sabotaged. No, the French government did not take the path of exile but transformed itself, step by step, into an authoritarian and collaborationist regime, Vichy.
This was a unique outcome, one that requires a France-specific explanation, and I will advance just such an explanation at the end of the book. Suffice it to say for the moment that Vichy’s advent was not proof of French decadence but of another, no less consequential malaise whose diagnosis remains as yet to be worked out. Most discussions of 1940 stop with the armistice in June; this one will carry the story a month further to show how and why defeat ended in the Third Republic’s demise and its replacement by the Vichy government of Philippe Pétain. In this respect, my account will be more encompassing than previous ones. While adding on a month to the story may not sound that consequential, it is, for in those few weeks a democracy, abetted by its enemies, self-destructed, a dispiriting spectacle that raises questions about the vulnerabilities of democratic institutions in France (as elsewhere for that matter).
Last of all, let’s assume for a moment that the revisionists have got a persuasive case, that the story of France’s defeat is one of military failure and not a commentary on the moral and political failings of the nation as a whole. Does such a finding have any bearing on the larger course of French history?
This book is divided into three parts, each composed of two chapters. The first part takes the story to 1939. The second focuses on the Battle of France itself, while the third deals with the political consequences of French defeat. I conclude with some general reflections on the final issue raised. What difference does it make that the Third Republic was not so rotten as often imagined and that the French, contrary to much received opinion, put up a creditable fight in 1940?