A Shattered People: The Fall of France, 1940

The French had been on the winning side in World War I. But in May 1940 they were quickly overrun, they quickly capitulated, and then they sold their soul to the devil. How and why did this happen?

The way Ian Ousby tells it, in Occupation: The Ordeal of France, 1940-1944, the French after the First World War were a scarred and wounded people, simmering with resentment, distrust, and fear. One in three of their young men had died in WWI—their “Lost Generation.” The Battle of Verdun (1916)

did not just kill or maim...It infected men with what Louis Madelin called a crise de tristesse sombre, an attack of black sorrow...Soldiers deserted without warning, or abandoned positions they were supposed to hold. Some collapsed into a lethargy so deep they lost the will to defend themselves.

Britain and then America had fought with France on the Western Front, but it was French land they were fighting on, and it was French civilians who suffered the collateral damage. After peace was made, another war was thought so horrible, that the French refused to believe another war was possible. Thus, despite the appearance of preparations, the French were not ready, when Germany invaded.

When, six weeks after the invasion, the swastika went up over Paris, France became “a body without a head”:

troops near the Maginot Line killed an officer, Colonel Charly, who ordered them to fight their way out of their encircled position...[France] became a country of civilians who no longer wanted to be part of any war and of soldiers not in retreat but in open flight, soldiers who no longer wanted to be soldiers at any price.

To save the country’s sovereignty, if not its territory, one official proposed an “indissoluble union” with Great Britain, “joining their governments, resources, liabilities, and above all, their destinies.” Churchill agreed (he was a francophone), but too many in the French government thought Britain would fall immediately: “its neck would be wrung like a chicken.” This, and grievances against Britain, from centuries of antagonism, and from perceived sleights during the last war, killed the plan:

Better to be a Nazi province. At least we know what that means.