Introduction: Strange Defeat?
1.Guderian cited in Karl-Heinz Frieser, Blitzkrieg-Legende: der Westfeldzug 1940 (Munich, 1995), 3.
2.Philippe Pétain, Actes et écrits (Paris, 1974), 450.
3.Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940, tr. Gerard Hopkins (New York, 1968).
4.Stanley Hoffmann et al., In Search of France: The Economy, Society, and Political System of the Twentieth Century (New York, 1965; orig. 1963).
5.Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, “Changes in French Foreign Policy since 1945,” in Hoffmann et al., In Search of France, 318; idem, La Décadence, 1932–1939 (Paris, 1979).
6.William L. Shirer, The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940 (New York, 1969); Alistair Horne, To Lose a Battle: France 1940 (Boston, MA, 1969).
7.John C. Cairns, “Some Recent Historians and the ‘Strange Defeat’ of 1940,” Journal of Modern History, 46 (March 1974), 60–85; Robert J. Young, In Command of France: French Foreign Policy and Military Planning, 1933–1940 (Cambridge, MA, 1978); William D. Irvine, “Domestic Politics and the Fall of France in 1940,” in Joel Blatt, ed.,The French Defeat of 1940: Reassessments (New York, 1998), 85–99; Ernest R. May, Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France (New York, 2000); Julian Jackson, The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940 (Oxford, 2003). The French have also taken a fresh look at the subject. See Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Français de l’an 40(Paris, 1990), 2 vols.
Chapter 1: Diplomacy
1.Jean Doise and Maurice Vaïsse, Diplomatie et outil militaire, 1871–1991 (Paris, 1992), 398.
2.Ibid, 368.
3.Julian Jackson, The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940 (Oxford, 2003), 77; Jeffrey A. Gunsburg, Divided and Conquered: The French High Command and the Defeat of the West, 1940 (Westport, CT, 1979), 77.
4.The toughest critics are the French themselves, starting with Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, but historians of Eastern Europe are not far behind: Piotr Wandycz, The Twilight of French Eastern Alliances, 1926–1936: French-Czechoslovak–Polish Relations from Locarno to the Remilitarization of the Rhineland (Princeton, NJ, 1988); Nicole Jordan, The Popular Front and Central Europe: The Dilemmas of French Impotence, 1918–1940 (Cambridge, 1992); Michael J. Carley, 1939: The Alliance that Never Was and the Coming of World War II (Chicago, IL, 1999).
5.For a good summary of France’s Locarno policy, see Wandycz, The Twilight of French Eastern Alliances, ch. 1. See also Peter Jackson, “French Security and a British ‘Continental Commitment’ after the First World War: A Reassessment,” European Historical Review, 126 (April 2011), 383.
6.P. M. H. Bell, France and Britain 1900–1940: Entente and Estrangement (London, 1996), 186–8.
7.Martin S. Alexander, The Republic in Danger: General Maurice Gamelin and the Politics of French Defence, 1933–1940 (Cambridge, 1992), 188–90.
8.Gunsburg, Divided and Conquered, 30–1; Martin Thomas, Britain, France and Appeasement: Anglo-French Relations in the Popular Front Era (Oxford, 1996), 30–4; Bell, France and Britain, 205–6; Anthony Adamthwaite, France and the Coming of the Second World War, 1936–1939 (London, 1977), 37–9.
9.William Shirer, The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940 (New York, 1994; orig. 1969), 247.
10.Adamthwaite, Grandeur and Misery: France’s Bid for Power in Europe, 1914–1940 (London, 1995), 204.
11.Robert Frankenstein, “The Decline of France and French Appeasement Policies, 1936–9,” in Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Lothar Kettenacker, eds, The Fascist Challenge and the Policy of Appeasement (London, 1983), 241.
12.Cited in Robert O. Paxton, Europe in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1975), 419.
13.The exchange of views is recounted in Shirer, The Collapse of the Third Republic, 330–40.
14.Gunsberg, Divided and Conquered, 66–7.
15.David Reynolds, From Munich to Pearl Harbor: Roosevelt’s America and the Origins of the Second World War (Chicago, IL, 2001), 47; Frankenstein, “The Decline of France and French Appeasement Policies,” 243.
16.Adamthwaite, “France and the Coming of War,” in Mommsen and Kettenacker, eds, The Fascist Challenge and the Policy of Appeasement, 250; Adamthwaite, France and the Coming of the Second World War, 252–3; Daniel Hucker, Public Opinion and the End of Appeasement in Britain and France (Farnham, 2011), 63–4; Talbot C. Imlay, “France, Britain and the Making of the Anglo-French Alliance, 1938–39,” in Martin S. Alexander and William J. Philpott, eds, Anglo-French Defence Relations between the Wars (Basingstoke, 2002), 93.
17.Robert A. Doughty, “The Illusion of Security: France, 1919–1940,” in Williamson Murray, MacGregor Knox, and Alvin Bernstein, eds, The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States and War (Cambridge, 1994), 487–8.
18.Adamthwaite, Grandeur and Misery, 222.
19.Carley is insistent on this point. See Carley, “Prelude to Defeat: Franco-Soviet Relations, 1919–1939,” in Joel Blatt, ed., The French Defeat: Reassessments (New York, 1998), 171–203.
20.Bell, France and Britain, 224–5; Adamthwaite, France and the Coming of the Second World War, 49–50; Robert J. Young, France and the Origins of the Second World War (London, 1996), 126.
21.Wandycz, The Twilight of French Eastern Alliances, 323.
22.Richard Overy, 1939: Countdown to War (London, 2009), 13.
23.For a general assessment of Great Britain’s diplomatic Weltanschauung, see Paul Kennedy, “The Tradition of Appeasement in British Foreign Policy, 1865–1939,” idem, ed., Strategy and Diplomacy: 1870–1945 (London, 1983), 15–39; Bell, France and Britain, 178–9, 182, 223; Williamson Murray, “Britain,” in Robert Boyce and Joseph A. Maiolo, eds, The Origins of World War Two: The Debate Continues (Basingstoke, 2003), 123–4; and Brian Bond, “The Continental Commitment in British Strategy in the 1930s,” in Mommsen and Kettenacker, eds, The Fascist Challenge and the Policy of Appeasement, 197–201.
24.Reynolds, From Munich to Pearl Harbor, 31–2, 66.
25.Ibid, passim.
26.Sylvio Pons, Stalin and the Inevitable War: 1936–1941 (London, 2002), 179–81.
27.Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953 (New Haven, CT, 2006), 61–4.
28.Gabriel Gorodetsky, Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia (New Haven, CT, 1999), 279, 298–9.
29.Peter Jackson, “France,” in Boyce and Maiolo, eds, The Origins of World War Two, 104.
Chapter 2: Armaments and Morale
1.Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Français de l’an 40 (Paris, 1990), vol. I, 17.
2.John Cairns, “Planning for la guerre des masses: Constraints and Contradictions in France before 1940,” in Harry R. Borowski, ed., Military Planning in the Twentieth Century (Washington, DC, 1986), 41; Jean Doise and Maurice Vaïsse, Diplomatie et outil militaire, 1871–1991 (Paris, 1992), 349–50; Eugenia C. Kiesling, Arming against Hitler: France and the Limits of Planning (Lawrence, KS, 1996), 171.
3.Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London, 2006), 65.
4.Robert Frankenstein, Le Prix du réarmement français (1935–1939) (Paris, 1982), 33; Julian Jackson, The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940 (Oxford, 2003), 13.
5.See Herrick Chapman, State Capitalism and Working-Class Radicalism in the French Aircraft Industry (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1991), Part II.
6.Frankenstein, Le Prix du réarmement, 71, 74, 86, 91.
7.Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Français de l’an 40, vol. II, 167–8; Robert A. Doughty, The Seeds of Disaster: The Development of French Army Doctrine, 1919–1939 (Hamden, CT, 1985), 183.
8.Frank[enstein], La Hantise du déclin. Le rang de la France en Europe, 1920–1960: finances, défense et identité nationale (Paris, 1994), 49.
9.Doise and Vaïsse, Diplomatie et outil militaire, 402, 404; Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Français de l’an 40, vol. I, 129.
10.Doise and Vaïsse, Diplomatie et outil militaire, 402; Frankenstein, Le Prix du réarmement, 34–5; Robert J. Young, France and the Origins of the Second World War (London, 1996), 122.
11.Jeffrey A. Gunsberg, Divided and Conquered: The French High Command and the Defeat of the West, 1940 (Westport, CT, 1979), 16; Martin S. Alexander, The Republic in Danger: General Maurice Gamelin and the Politics of French Defeat, 1933–1940 (Cambridge, 1992), 166; Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Français de l’an 40, vol. II, 55–6.
12.Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Français de l’an 40, vol. II, 27; Frankenstein, Le Prix du réarmement, 189; Frank[enstein], Hantise du déclin, 45.
13.For the first line of criticism, see Doise and Vaïsse, Diplomatie et outil militaire, 387, 398; for the second, see Talbot C. Imlay, Facing the Second World War: Strategy, Politics, and Economics in Britain and France 1938–1940 (Oxford, 2003), passim.
14.Sylvio Pons, Stalin and the Inevitable War: 1936–1941 (London, 2002), 194; Gabriel Gorodetsky, Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia (New Haven, CT, 1999), 115.
15.Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953 (New Haven, CT, 2006), 16.
16.Gorodetsky, Grand Delusion, 241, 243; Roberts, Stalin’s Wars, 54.
17.David Reynolds, From Munich to Pearl Harbor: Roosevelt’s America and the Origins of the Second World War (Chicago, IL, 2001), 78; Waldo Heinrichs, Threshold of War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Entry into World War II (New York, 1988), 160.
18.Heinrichs, Threshold of War, 8, 10; Reynolds, From Munich to Pearl Harbor, 115.
19.Heinrichs, Threshold of War, 10–11; Reynolds, From Munich to Pearl Harbor, 115.
20.Heinrichs, Threshold of War, 67, 183.
21.Tooze, The Wages of Destruction, 176, 454; Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (New York, 1997).
22.Tooze, Wages of Destruction, 65, 164, 315.
23.The phrase is Klaus Hildebrand’s, as cited in Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Français de l’an 40, vol. II, 347.
24.Tooze, Wages of Destruction, 304, 315, 317, 321, 328–9.
25.Doughty, Seeds of Disaster, 2; Anthony Adamthwaite, France and the Coming of the Second World War, 1936–1939 (London, 1977), 358; Cairns, “Along the Road Back to France 1940,” American Historical Review, 64 (April 1959), 601.
26.G. C. Peden, British Rearmament and the Treasury, 1932–1939 (Edinburgh, 1979), 1–2, 10, 184.
27.Imlay, Facing the Second World War, 14–15.
28.Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Français de l’an 40, vol. II, 132, 351.
29.Andrew Shennan, The Fall of France, 1940 (London, 2000), 136; Pierre Laborie, L’Opinion française sous Vichy (Paris, 1990), 55; Imlay, Facing the Second World War, 26.
30.L’Herbier cited in Jean Bertin-Maghit, Le Cinéma français sous l’Occupation (Paris, 1994), 31.
31.Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Français de l’an 40, vol. I, 62–5; William D. Irvine, “Domestic Politics and the Fall of France in 1940,” in Joel Blatt, ed., The French Defeat of 1940: Reassessments (New York, 2006), 95.
32.Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Français de l’an 40, vol. I, 62; Young, France and the Origins of the Second World War, 33. See also Jessica Wardhaugh, In Pursuit of the People: Political Culture in France, 1934–39 (London, 2009), 217–25.
33.Reynolds, From Munich to Pearl Harbor, 92–3, 98.
34.Paul Kennedy, “The Tradition of Appeasement in British Foreign Policy, 1865–1939,” in Kennedy, ed., Strategy and Diplomacy: 1870–1945 (London, 1983), 36.
35.Julian Jackson, “Etrange défaite française ou étrange victoire anglaise?,” in Maurice Vaïsse, ed., Mai–juin 1940: Défaite française, victoire allemande, sous l’oeil des historiens étrangers (Paris, 2000), 177–213.
36.Roberts, Stalin’s Wars, 19.
37.Ernest May, Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France (New York, 2000), 83, 92, 215, 221; Karl-Heinz Frieser, Blitzkrieg Legende: Des Westfeldzug 1940 (Munich, 1995), 69; Donald Cameron Watt, Too Serious a Business: European Armed Forces and the Approach of the Second World War (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1975), 144; Jackson, “Etrange défaite française ou étrange victoire anglaise?,” 185.
Chapter 3: Battle Plans
1.Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940, tr. Gerard Hopkins (New York, 1968), 36, 52–3.
2.Nicole Jordan, “Strategy and Scapegoatism: Reflections on the French National Catastrophe, 1940,” in Joel Blatt, ed., The French Defeat of 1940: Reassessments (New York, 2006), 18, 21.
3.Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Français de l’an 40 (Paris, 1990), vol. II, 378.
4.Alistair Horne, To Lose a Battle: France 1940 (Boston, MA, 1969), passim.
5.Robert A. Doughty, The Seeds of Disaster: The Development of French Army Doctrine, 1919–1939 (Hamden, CT, 1985), 69–70.
6.Ibid, 59–60, 70–1.
7.Ibid, 90–1, 111.
8.Jeffrey A. Gunsburg, Divided and Conquered: The French High Command and the Defeat of the West, 1940 (Westport, CT, 1979), 268.
9.Ernest May, Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France (New York, 2000), 402–3; Gunsburg, Divided and Conquered, 209–10; Karl-Heinz Frieser, Blitzkrieg-Legende: Der Westfeldzug 1940 (Munich, 1995), 302–3.
10.This is very close to the argument advanced in Eugenia C. Kiesling, Arming against Hitler: France and the Limits of Military Planning (Lawrence, KS, 1996), 118, 171.
11.Martin S. Alexander, The Republic in Danger: General Maurice Gamelin and the Politics of French Defence, 1933–1940 (Cambridge, 1992), 269–70.
12.John Keegan, Six Armies in Normandy (London, 1994), 41–6.
13.Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953 (New Haven, CT, 2006), 67, 69–70, 79–80; Gabriel Gorodetsky, Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia (New Haven, CT, 1999), 126–30, 241–2, 319.
14.Russell Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (New York, 1973).
15.Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939–1945 (New York, 2011), passim.
16.See Robert Frank[enstein], La Hantise du déclin. Le Rang de la France, 1920–1960: finances, défense et identité nationale (Paris, 1994), 92–3.
17.Talbot C. Imlay, “Paul Reynaud and France’s Response to Nazi Germany, 1938–1940,” French Historical Studies, 26 (Summer 2003), 527–30.
18.May, Strange Victory, 6.
19.Frieser, Blitzkrieg-Legende, 18.
20.Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London, 2006), 328–9.
21.Robert Frankenstein, Le Prix du réarmement français (1935–1939) (Paris, 1982), 269; and Frank[enstein], “The Second World War through French and British Eyes,” in Robert Tombs and Emile Chabal, eds, Britain and France in Two World Wars: Truth, Myth and Memory (London, 2013), 181.
22.Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Français de l’an 40, vol. I, 410; vol. II, 365.
23.Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (Cambridge, 2005), 111.
24.Frieser, Blitzkrieg-Legende, 71–82, 91, 111; May, Strange Victory, 236.
25.Tooze, Wages of Destruction, 377.
26.Alexander, Gamelin, passim.
27.Don W. Alexander, “The Repercussions of the Breda Variant,” French Historical Studies, 8 (Spring 1974), 478–84; Gunsburg, Divided and Conquered, 270; Doughty, “The Illusion of Security: France, 1919–1940,” in Williamson Murray, MacGregor Knox, and Alvin Bernstein, eds, The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and War(Cambridge, 1994), 492–4.
28.Alexander, “The Repercussions of the Breda Variant,” 484. See also Williamson Murray, “May, 1940: Contingency and Fragility of the German RMA,” in MacGregor Knox and Williamson Murray, eds, The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300–2050 (Cambridge, 2001), 164–5; Doughty, Seeds of Disaster, 67.
Chapter 4: Lightning War
1.Jeffrey A. Gunsburg, Divided and Conquered: The French High Command and the Defeat of the West, 1940 (Westport, CT, 1979), 124–5; Nicole Jordan, “Strategy and Scapegoatism: Reflections on the French National Catastrophe, 1940,” in Joel Blatt, ed., The French Defeat of 1940: Reassessments (New York, 2006), 26; Julian Jackson,The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940 (Oxford, 2003), 93.
2.Robert J. Young, France and the Origins of the Second World War (London, 1996), 142; Robert A. Doughty, The Seeds of Disaster: The Development of French Army Doctrine, 1919–1939 (Hamden, CT, 1985), 2–3.
3.Alistair Horne, To Lose a Battle: France 1940 (Boston, MA, 1969), 306.
4.Karl-Heinz Frieser, Blitzkrieg-Legende: Der Westfeldzug 1940 (Munich, 1995), passim; on Guderian’s insubordination, see idem, 242–3; Young, France and the Origins of the Second World War, 232; Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (Cambridge, 2005), 108–9.
5.Edward R. Hooten, Luftwaffe at War: Blitzkrieg in the West, 1939–1940 (Hersham, 2007), vol. II, 61.
6.Jackson, The Fall of France, 47–8; Frieser, Blitzkrieg-Legende, 248–50.
7.Hoth, cited in Horne, To Lose a Battle, 355; Frieser, Blitzkrieg-Legende, 250–66.
8.Williamson Murray, “May, 1940: Contingency and Fragility of the German RMA,” in MacGregor Knox and Williamson Murray, eds, The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300–2050 (Cambridge, 2001), 172.
9.Gunsburg, Divided and Conquered, 248–50, 255–8, 265; Jackson, The Fall of France, 86–8.
10.Jackson, The Fall of France, 85–8.
11.Jean Doise and Maurice Vaïsse, Diplomatie et outil militaire, 1871–1991 (Paris, 1992), 424–5; Doughty, Seeds of Disaster, 190; Weinberg, A World at Arms, 127.
12.Gunsburg, Divided and Conquered, 191.
13.On France’s air war, see Patrick Facon, “L’Armée de l’air dans la bataille de 1940: mythes, légendes et réalités,” in Christine Levisse-Touzé, ed., La Campagne de 1940 (Paris, 2001), 216–19.
14.John C. Cairns, “Some Recent Historians and the ‘Strange Defeat’ of 1940,” Journal of Modern History, 46 (March 1974), 79; Général Jean Delmas, “La Manoeuvre générale, surprise allemande, défense française,” in Levisse-Touzé, ed., La Campagne de 1940, 124; Martin Alexander, “Dunkirk in Military Operations, Myths and Memories,” in Robert Tombs and Emile Chabal, eds, Britain and France in Two World Wars: Truth, Myth and Memory (London, 2013), 96.
15.Gunsburg, Divided and Conquered, 266; Doughty, Seeds of Disaster, 190; P. M. H. Bell, France and Britain 1900–1940: Entente and Estrangement (London, 1996), 240–1; Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Français de l’an 40 (Paris, 1990), vol. II, 644, 648.
16.Colonel Jacques Vernet, “La Bataille de la Somme,” in Levisse-Touzé, ed., La Campagne de 1940, 198–208; André Martel, “Conclusion générale,” in ibid, 565.
17.Martel, “Conclusion générale,” 557. But in the same volume Jean-Jacques Anzalier makes the case that the losses may have been a deal less severe. See Anzalier, “La Campagne de mai–juin 1940. Les pertes?,” in Levisse-Touzé, ed., La Campagne de 1940, 442.
18.Charles de Gaulle, The War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle: The Call to Honour, 1940–1942, tr. Jonathan Griffin (New York, 1955), 8; Tony Judt, “Could the French Have Won?,” New York Review of Books (22 February 2001), 37–40.
19.David Reynolds, “Churchill and the British ‘Decision’ to Fight on in 1940: Right Policy, Wrong Reasons,” in Richard Langhorne, ed., Diplomacy and Intelligence during the Second World War: Essays in Honour of F. H. Hinsley (Cambridge, 1985), 149–51; idem, “Churchill in 1940: The Worst and Finest Hour,” in Robert Blake and William Roger Louis, eds, Churchill (New York, 1993), 248–9.
Chapter 5: Armistice
1.See Jean-Pierre Azéma, 1940: l’année terrible (Paris, 1990), 207.
2.Olivier Wieviorka, Les Orphelins de la République. Destinées des députés et sénateurs français (1940–1945) (Paris, 2001), 53, 93, 97. This is by far the best book on the subject.
3.On Ybarnégaray, see William Irvine, French Conservatism in Crisis: The Republican Federation of France in the 1930s (Baton Rouge, LA, 1979), 14.
4.Paul Baudouin, Neuf mois au gouvernement (avril–décembre 1940) (Paris, 1948), 90–1.
5.On Weygand, see Philip Bankwitz, Maxime Weygand and Civil-Military Relations in Modern France (Cambridge, MA, 1967), 9, 183.
6.Charles de Gaulle, The Complete War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle: The Call to Honour, 1940–1942, tr. Jonathan Griffin (New York, 1955), 55; Baudouin, Neuf mois, 89, 162.
7.Baudouin, Neuf mois, 122.
8.See Fred Kupferman, Laval (Paris, 1987), 244–5.
9.24 May to be precise. See Baudouin, Neuf mois, 76, 91; and Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Français de l’an 40 (Paris, 1990), vol. I, 268.
10.Emmanuel Berl, La Fin de la IIIe République (Paris, 2007, orig. 1968), 87; Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Français de l’an 40, vol. I, 269.
11.Baudouin, Neuf mois, 133–6.
12.Ibid, 149.
13.P. M. H. Bell, France and Britain 1900–1940: Entente and Estrangement (London, 1996), 242–5; Hanna Diamond, Fleeing Hitler: France 1940 (Oxford, 2007), 94–100.
14.Baudouin, Neuf mois, 149, 152, 162; Yves Bouthillier, Le Drame de Vichy: face à l’ennemi, face à l’allié (Paris, 1950), 68–70.
15.Baudouin, Neuf mois, 143–4, 165–6; Bouthillier, Le Drame de Vichy, 74.
16.Bouthillier, Le Drame de Vichy, 25, 73–87.
17.Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Francçais de l’an 40, vol. I, 597.
18.Historians have debated the North African option. Some have expressed doubts about its feasibility: see the discussion in Christine Levisse-Touzé, L’Afrique du Nord dans la guerre, 1939–1945 (Paris, 1998), 81–4. But others have arrived at the opposite conclusion: Douglas Porch, “Arms and Alliances: French Grand Strategy and Policy in 1914 and 1940,” in Paul Kennedy, ed., Grand Strategies in War and Peace (New Haven, CT, 1991), 132: and at greater length, Jacques Sapir, Frank Stora, and Loïc Mahé, 1940. Et si la France avait continué la guerre … Essai d’alternative historique (Paris, 2010), passim. In any event, the option was not tried.
19.Julian Jackson, The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940 (Oxford, 2003), 142; Bouthillier, Le Drame de Vichy, 75, 126.
20.Bankwitz, Weygand, 315, 318.
21.De Gaulle, The Complete War Memoirs, vol. I, 60–3.
22.Cited in Michèle and Jean-Paul Cointet, eds, Dictionnaire historique de la France sous l’Occupation (Paris, 2000), 375.
23.Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Français de l’an 40, vol. I, 605; see also Martin S. Alexander, The Republic in Danger: General Maurice Gamelin and the Politics of French Defence, 1933–1940 (Cambridge, 1992), 2.
24.Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York, 1972), 268.
Chapter 6: The Road to Vichy
1.H. Roderick Kedward, “Patriots and Patriotism in Vichy France,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 32 (1982), 181; Jean-Pierre Rioux, “L’exode: un pays à la dérive,” Histoire, 129 (January 1990), n.p.; Nicole Dombrowski, Beyond the Battlefield: The French Civilian Exodus of May–June 1940 (PhD dissertation, New York University, 1995), 514, 527; Hannah Diamond, Fleeing Hitler: France 1940 (Oxford, 2007), 176.
2.The point is argued vigorously by Dombrowski, Beyond the Battlefield, 7, 317.
3.Joseph Paul-Boncour, cited in Diamond, Fleeing Hitler, 98.
4.Paul Baudouin, Neuf mois au gouvernement (avril–décembre 1940) (Paris, 1948), 224–5; see also 215–18.
5.Ibid., 195.
6.Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Français de l’an 40 (Paris, 1990), vol. I, 601.
7.Jean Montigny, Toute la vérité sur un mois dramatique de notre histoire (Clermont-Ferrand, 1970), 24–30; see also Fred Kupferman, Laval (Paris, 1987), 252.
8.Montigny, Toute la vérité, 24, 30–1.
9.Christine Levisse-Touzé, L’Afrique du Nord dans la guerre 1939–1945 (Paris, 1998), 75.
10.Yves Bouthillier, Le Drame de Vichy: face à l’ennemi, face à l’allié (Paris, 1950), 107–9.
11.Philip Bankwitz, Maxime Weygand and Civil-Military Relations in Modern France (Cambridge, MA, 1967), 322.
12.Baudouin, Neuf mois, 229.
13.Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Français de l’an 40, vol. I, 620.
14.Blum speaking at Pétain’s trial in 1945, cited in Kupferman, Laval, 259.
15.Montigny, Toute la vérité, 70–9; Kupferman, Laval, 264–7; Bankwitz, Weygand, 331.
16.Jean Sagnes, “Le refus républicain: les quatre-vingts parlementaires qui dirent ‘non’ à Vichy le 10 juillet 1940,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 38 (October–December 1991), 563.
17.Andrew Shennan, The Fall of France, 1940 (London, 2000), 117; Olivier Wieviorka, Les Orphelins de la République. Destinées des députés et sénateurs français (1940–1945) (Paris, 2001), 195.
18.Wieviorka, Orphelins de la République, 328–32, 336, 350.
19.Paxton’s exact words are: “The Battle of France from the French side was a bit like one of those nightmares of slow-motion emergency in which one knows exactly what needs to be done but moves with agonizing slowness.” Idem, Europe in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1975), 441.
Conclusion: The 1940 Syndrome
1.I have borrowed the phrase from Robert Frank[enstein], “The Second World War through French and British Eyes,” in Robert Tombs and Emile Chabal, eds, Britain and France in Two World Wars: Truth, Myth and Memory (London, 2013), 182.
2.Hence the title of Ernest May’s book, Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France (New York, 2000).
3.Hugh Frey, “Rebuilding France: Gaullist Historiography, the Rise-Fall Myth and French Identity (1945–58),” in Stefan Berger, Mark Donovan, and Kevin Passmore, eds, Writing National Histories: Western Europe Since 1800 (London, 1999), 205–16; Peter Jackson, “Post-War Politics and the Historiography of French Strategy and Diplomacy before the Second World War,” History Compass, 4/5 (2006), 870–905.
4.This is not such a new point: see René Rémond and Janine Bourdin, eds, Edouard Daladier, Chef de Gouvernement (Paris, 1977); Elisabeth du Réau, Edouard Daladier, 1884–1970 (Paris, 1993); and more recently Philip Nord, France’s New Deal: From the Thirties to the Postwar Era (Princeton, NJ, 2010).
5.Robert Frank[enstein], La Hantise du déclin. Le rang de la France en Europe, 1920–1960: finances, défense et identité nationale (Paris, 1994), 255; Pierre Laborie, L’Opinion française sous Vichy (Paris, 1990), 239; H. Roderick Kedward, “Patriots and Patriotism in Vichy France,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 32 (1982), 191.
6.Serge Klarsfeld, Vichy-Auschwitz: La ‘solution’ finale de la question juive en France (Paris, 2001), vol. I, 11.
7.Laborie writes of the French public’s general “non-consent.” See Le Chagrin et le venin. La France sous l’Occupation, mémoires et idées reçues (Paris, 2011), 208.
8.See Jacques Semelin, Face au totalitarisme, la résistance civile (Paris, 2011); idem, Sans Armes face à Hitler, 1939–1945: La Résistance civile en Europe (Paris, 2013); idem, Persécutions et entraides dans la France occupée. Comment 75% des Juifs en France ont échappé à la mort (Paris, 2013); François Marcot, “Pour une sociologie de la Résistance: intentionnalité et fonctionnalité,” in Antoine Prost, ed., La Résistance, une histoire sociale (Paris, 1997), 23, 26; and Claire Andrieu, “Sauvetages dans l’Europe allemande,” unpublished ms. My special thanks to the author for permitting me to cite from her work.
9.Cited in Hanna Diamond, Fleeing Hitler: France 1940 (London, 2007), 193.
10.Olivier Wieviorka, Les Orphelins de la République. Destinées des députés et sénateurs français (1940–1945) (Paris, 2001), 311.