I’m not a French apologist, but enough is enough. The French fought valiantly in WWI and in WWII were basically let down by their leadership. The following stats speak for themselves:
World War I cost France 1,357,800 dead, 4,266,000 wounded (of whom 1.5 million were permanently maimed) and 537,000 made prisoner or missing — exactly 73% of the 8,410,000 men mobilized, according to William Shirer in The Collapse of the Third Republic. Some context: France had 40 million citizens at the start of the war; six in ten men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight died or were permanently maimed.
Thank you for that breath of reason. It seems many posters bashing france don’t know much about the first world war, particularly that the western front was effectively a meat-grinding stalemate for nearly 4 years.