I think the godawfulness of WWI was the primary factor that lead the French to capitulate to Hitler rather than fight on from their colonies.
The French clearly had no stomach for real fighting. Part of the reason was the awful carnage of WW1. Perhaps more important was that France was very much a house divided between left and right. A socially divided country led to a fragile political system, And the divisions were bitter. William Shirer did a good job recounting this in “The Collapse of the Third Republic,” the lesser-known companion to his epic “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.”
There are some similarities between the France of 1936 and United States of 2013.