Doomed by a mutual disdain (THE FALL OF FRANCE: The Nazi Invasion of 1940 by Julian Jackson)

Financial Times ^ | 4/11/03 | Jackie Wullschlager

[Valin]

"If I have to choose between Europe and the open sea, between you and Roosevelt, I will always choose America," Churchill told de Gaulle in 1944. British prime ministers, Tony Blair the crowning example, have followed Churchill; French leaders have held to de Gaulle's suspicion of Britain as an American Trojan horse in Europe. France, like Germany, was shaped by defeat in the second world war; undefeated Britain continues to look to its war-time saviour America. The route from France 1940 to divisions over Baghdad 2003 is clear.

The fall of France was a heart-churning event that signified the end of an era. France, a major military power for three centuries, was knocked out by Germany in a few weeks. With no numerical superiority, the Germans bypassed the impregnable Maginot Line and their massed tanks - if lined up in single file they would have stretched from Prussian Königsberg to Trier on the Luxembourg border - poured across the Ardennes into Belgium and France. Overcome by German shock and awe, Paris surrendered. As the boats left Dunkirk, it took French soldiers, wrote a future Resistance fighter, "superhuman doses of charity not to feel bitter as ship after ship carried their foreign counterparts to safety".

Why was the French collapse so rapid and total? Was it military miscalculation or an indictment of the values of an entire nation? Like Antony Beevor's Stalingrad and Berlin: The Downfall, Jackson's book tells in gripping detail the military, human and political story of a few crucial weeks whose ramifications for European relations for decades afterwards were enormous.

"Too few children, too few arms, too few allies," was Marshall Pétain's lapidary comment on 1940. Jackson balances the evidence for the first two, then shows with devastating, ghastly comedy how France not only had too few allies but loathed the ones she did have. To General Gamelin, the Belgians were "unthinking shortsighted mediocrities", while for prime minister Daladier, Chamberlain was "a desiccated stick", George VI "a moron", Eden "an idiot" and he had never met "a single Englishman for whose intellectual equipment and character he had respect".

Touring the French army in 1939, General Brooke, on the other hand, noted "French slovenliness, dirtiness and inefficiency worse than ever", while having to eat oysters was "the highest test of the entente cordiale". Communicating without interpreters, British generals grunted "d'accord" to speeches they did not understand, or stared in amazement at French histrionics ("My god how awful to be allied to so temperamental a race," exclaimed General Pownall at weeping French officers).

Once the conflict began, it was hardly surprising that these resentful allies could not agree. At the Foreign Ministry on the Quai d'Orsay Churchill sought to persuade the French to fight on while thick smoke encircled the building - officials were already burning all papers to prevent them falling into German hands. Inside, Gamelin shrugged his shoulders when asked for a strategy, while General Ironside, visiting General Billotte on the front, found "no plan, no thought of a plan. Ready to be slaughtered . . . I lost my temper and shook Billotte by the button of his tunic."

The French were defeatist, the British failed to understand French pacifism, "rooted in exhaustion, in deep pessimism about whether France could survive another bloodletting on the scale of the Great War". That had been fought on French not British or German soil; France had lost 10 per cent of working men, more than any country except Serbia.

French soldiers noted gloomily the neat crosses of war cemeteries they saw on all sides; regiments took flight at the sight of Germans crossing the Meuse, their men stunned into derangement by shrieking Stuka dive bombers. And with the first whiff of defeat 8m civilians took to the roads, fleeing south, their livestock behind them until they abandoned dead horses and unmilked cows by the roadside.

Lille's population fell from 200,000 to 20,000 in a few days; Chartres' from 23,000 to 800. The exodus revealed "the underlying fears of a population . . . not psychologically prepared to face the strains of war", and transformed the fall of France from military defeat into the disintegration of its society.

Hours before his dismissal, cultured General Gamelin wafted elegantly, imperturbably around a reception whose centrepiece was a massive confection of spun sugar. "The French soldier, yesterday's citizen, did not believe in the war," he said. "Disposed to criticise ceaselessly anyone holding the slightest amount of authority, encouraged in the name of civilisation to enjoy a soft daily life, he did not receive the kind of moral and patriotic education which would have prepared him for the drama in which the nation's destiny will be played out."

Revisionist histories now deny the French decadence theory, but it is impossible to refute it when reading Jackson's dazzling account of ageing politicians evacuated from Paris, trying to rule from various Loire chateaux, barely a field telephone between them, their mistresses floating into international negotiations in dressing gowns.

Jackson argues that although defeat in 1940 was avoidable, it was indicative of French decline, which in the longer term was inevitable. A shudder went round the world in May 1940 because, as The New York Times wrote, "when Paris is bombed, the civilised world is bombed". Too many parallels between France in 1940 and Europe in 2003 make this a chillingly uncomfortable read: a steadily falling birth rate, in contrast to that of her enemies; a decadent society unable to believe in itself or its policies (Daladier, returning from Munich to crowds cheering his appeasement of Hitler, muttered "the idiots"); a crisis over defence strategy; the challenge, as a French diplomat wrote in 1921, of sliding his country "reasonably smoothly into the ranks of the second-rate powers to which she belongs". More than a military history, this sharply written account is also an elegy for a fading culture in which we all have a stake.

THE FALL OF FRANCE: The Nazi Invasion of 1940 by Julian Jackson OUP £17.99, 274 pages

[headsonpikes]

'Forty Days That Shook The World' is a book I recommend,

It's a compelling account of the Fall of France.

France, c'est mort.

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