Introduction
Why did France fall in the summer of 1940? And why did it fall so fast? The Battle of France lasted a mere six weeks. These are questions to which, it seems, there is no definitive answer. One of the latest military historians to offer a view, Victor Davis Hanson , asserts that ‘the “strange defeat” of the huge French Army in June 1940 [was] a catastrophe still inexplicable nearly eighty years later’.1 He joins Alistair Horne , who concluded in his popular book To Lose a Battle: France 1940 that time did not make it easier to answer the questions about the responsibility for, and the possible alternatives to, the disaster.2 And what is one to make of Jonathan Fenby’s single-sentence explanation?
The reign of reason had been undone by military defeat but the seeds of collapse lay much deeper, in the failure to resolve inherent conflicts rooted in the past century-and-a-half and to rally round a narrative which could enable France to live up to its view of itself.
Of the military defeat itself, Fenby points simply to the ‘the incapacity of the high command’s military planning’ and the prevalence of the ‘defensive mentality’, without elaborating further.3 But he does bring together two aspects of the Fall of France that must always be borne in mind: the military defeat provoked the self-dissolution of the Third Republic and its replacement by what came to be known as the Vichy regime under Marshal Philippe Pétain .
The conclusions of Hanson , Horne and Fenby are but three in an array of writings, which began to pour forth from 1940 onwards and continue to this day. They include memoirs, official reports and philosophical musings. They range from journalistic reportage to unbridled polemic to simple narratives of events without analysis to popular and academic histories. Some writers and historians seek to place the Fall of France in the context of the Second World War, gauging its importance to the wider conflict. Thus, for example, David Reynolds highlights two of its features: its immediate international effects and its strategic significance.
With hindsight, the fall of France seems one of the most inevitable moments of the Second World War. The awesome Panzers and the feeble Third Republic have become historical clichés. One must therefore stress that what happened in May 1940 was by no means inevitable and that it came as a devastating shock to British policymakers.4
What the effects of the shock would be were difficult to predict. In 1940, the respected journalist Alexander Werth wrote in unsurprisingly dramatic terms:
The defeat of France, and the destruction by Nazi Germany of the greatest independent civilization on the Continent of Europe, constitute so immense a disaster that the full extent of it cannot yet be measured, nor even understood.5
Hitler and his generals were surprised by the speed of his victory too. France’s rapid collapse had not been foreseen and found the dictator with no firm guidelines for the immediate post-war period.6 Since then, of course, historians—knowing the outcome of the war—can emphasise the Fall of France as a turning point, as Philip Bell wrote:
The defeat of France by Germany in May and June 1940 marked not so much a turning point in the war as several. The torpor of the phoney war changed overnight into lighting movement. All the previous expectations that the Second World War would be, at any rate in western Europe, a replay of the First were swept away. France had lost its army, its Republican regime and its role as a great power in two months. Germany had conquered half of Europe, and Hitler had attained the peak of his career as a political wonder-worker and military genius.
And Bell made the same point as Werth about the contemporary view:
The war was utterly changed from the limited, half-hearted conflict that began in September 1939, and the world was changed in ways that proved impossible to foresee.7
For Gerhard Weinberg , the ‘spectacular events’ of the summer of 1940 ‘set the framework for the balance of the war’.8 For Robert Frank , the Fall of France was an ‘upheaval of the world order’.9 And Reynolds has famously bestowed the epithet of ‘fulcrum of the twentieth century’ on the year 1940: ‘more than anything else it was the fall of France which turned a European conflict into a world war and helped reshape international politics in patterns that endured for nearly half a century’.10
History
But while historians are generally agreed on the place of the Fall of France within the global conflict, they are less so on the causes of the fall. This book seeks to trace the attempts that have been made to tackle the question over the years, starting with the instant reactions of participants and observers of the events of May–July 1940 and continuing to the academic and non-academic historical works of the present day. In examining the writings on the Fall of France from 1940 to the present day, this book adopts a mixture of thematic and chronological approach. A strictly chronological perspective, examining the works appearing year by year, would become repetitive; whereas grouping them according to their thematic character allows us to see more clearly the four main ‘emplotments’ that have been used to write about the Fall of France. These emplotments may be called decadence, constraint, failure and contingency. They form the ‘diagnostic grid’ adopted by Pierre Grosser and endorsed by Patrick Finney , both renowned specialists in the origins of the Second World War.11 Their grid serves as the basis of this book. Of course, all classifications are arbitrary to some extent; and in some histories of the Fall of France, it is not always easy to delineate the emplotment being used by the writer. Nevertheless the grid serves as a useful tool to assess the interpretation being offered by a particular work.
For many years, the notion of decadence was the dominant explanation of the Fall of France. At its simplest, it was alleged that the French did not want to fight. John Lukacs believes that they ‘gave up too easily. … The mind as well as the flesh of the French were mottled with weakness in 1940’.12 In his analysis of France and the origins of the war, Robert Young called this particular emplotment the ‘tricorne of decadence, defeatism and inevitability’.13 Robert Frank makes the same point this way: ‘[f]or a long time, the standard view of the military debacle of 1940 was a linear and teleological narrative that emphasized cowardice, flight, chaos and material inferiority’.14 This narrative claimed that the defeat was the inevitable consequence of a weakness, which was often not defined but was covered by the notion of decadence. Decadence was interpreted in many different ways: diplomatic, political, social, moral, demographic or biological, for example. The essential thrust of the argument is that the military defeat was the preordained outcome of a society in crisis, a country in decline. The widespread depiction of the fall as a moral collapse caused by deep-rooted factors was articulated at the time by, for example, the British politician Edward Spears thus:
Lack of political and military leadership since the last war, together with the pe...