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Chapter 1: Defeat of France
- Fordham University Press
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1 Defeat of France In the spring of 1940 France suffered the most humiliating defeat in its modern history as the German military overran it in a few weeks, leading to a demoralizing armistice in June. No one had expected such a devastating outcome. The western democracies, England and the United States, were stunned. Nazi Germany was ecstatic. The long, defensive war that France and England had anticipated, in light of World War I, did not occur. Instead, blitzkrieg prevailed—at least in the short run. The effort to understand why France fell so easily to the Germans has concentrated on specific French circumstances, ranging from the thesis of internal decay to the failure of the military to prepare for the right kind of war and to respond effectively to the German invasion. Today most historians place the primary blame on the military, but in 1940 the thesis of internal decay dominated interpretation. Marshal Philippe Pétain, who became head of state in the summer of 1940, focused attention on national decadence as the cause of defeat, dismissing any criticism of the military for the national catastrophe. The socalled Vichy regime that the Marshal created in July 1940 was based solidly on the perceived necessity of rejuvenating traditional morality in order to realize national salvation. On June 25, 1940, Marshal Pétain explained the harsh provisions of the armistice with Germany in terms of the need for a new order in France, one based on peasant values (‘‘The earth does not lie,’’ he exclaimed) and the rejection of the ‘‘spirit of pleasure,’’ which had undermined the ‘‘spirit of sacrifice’’ during the interwar years. France’s leading intellectual, André Gide, supported Pétain on this, despite his 2 | france during world war ii having openly embraced homosexuality, which was considered decadent at the time. Gide wrote in his diary that the Marshal’s statement was ‘‘simply admirable.’’ Others, more inclined to rightist views, such as the Catholic writer Paul Claudel, expressed open disdain for the discredited republic: ‘‘this foul parliamentary regime that for years has been eating away at France like a generalized cancer.’’ And Church leaders such as Cardinal Gerlier viewed defeat as an opportunity for spiritual renewal: ‘‘If France had been victorious it would have remained the prisoner of its errors.’’ To most intellectuals on the Right and some on the Left the Third Republic and its apparent decadence were responsible for the debacle of 1940.1 How much truth is there to this argument? Did France lose the war in 1940 because of internal rot, which made it unprepared for battle? The answer is simple: Rot existed, but it explains more the reaction to defeat than defeat itself, which was due primarily to the errors of the military high command. To understand what this means requires more detailed explanation. France during the Interwar Years: An Interpretation of Some Reasons for Defeat in 1940 France came out of World War I a victorious but exhausted nation. The war had taken such a heavy toll that the vast majority of the French had no stomach for another. Out of a population of slightly less than 40 million, over 1.3 million soldiers were killed, an average of 890 per day for more than four years. Another 2.8 million—40 percent of all soldiers—were wounded one or more times. The dead soldiers left behind approximately 600,000 widows, 760,000 orphans, and 1.3 million grieving parents. Nearly all of France mourned the loss of someone , a fact that contributed powerfully to interwar pacifism. Birth rates, already troublingly low before 1914, suffered greatly from men being at the front, creating ‘‘hollow years’’ in the late 1930s when those born during the war reached the age of military service. Concern about population stagnation that continued into the interwar years contributed to a postwar backlash against women and laws repressing abortion and contraception. To make up for wartime losses, France [44.222.149.13] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 08:10 GMT) Defeat of France | 3 imported laborers to work in factories and mines in the prosperous 1920s such that France surpassed the United States as the industrialized nation with the largest percentage of its population comprised of immigrants. Meanwhile, the native population was disproportionately made up of war veterans, widows, and old people. Youth comprised a definite minority in this gerontocratic society.2 The material costs of World War I were also important. The ten invaded...