[Dear H-Diplo Members: Included below is the final piece in our roundtable
review of Joel Blatt (ed.), _The French Defeat of 1940: Reassessments_,
which was scheduled to appear when we posted our roundtable on the book.
We are pleased to be able to post Peter Jacksons's review at this time.
Please feel free to comment online.  Many thanks to Sally Marks for her
efforts as roundtable editor -- Diane Labrosse]

_________________________________________________
H-DIPLO ROUNDTABLE

Joel Blatt, ed., _The French Defeat of 1940: Reassessments_ (Providence
and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1998).

Roundtable Editor: Sally Marks

Reviewers:  Paul du Quenoy, Samuel Goodfellow, Sean Kennedy, Eugenia C.
Kiesling, Peter Jackson

______________________________________________________________


Review by:
Peter Jackson
University of Wales, Aberystwyth

The essays in _The French Defeat of 1940: Reassessments_ provide a
valuable summary of recent research and writing on the fall of France and
the origins of the Vichy regime. All of the contributors to this
collection are highly-regarded experts in this field and the end product
combines much new research with useful summaries of existing scholarship.
Given space restraints, I have decided not to discuss all of the essays in
this book in detail.  I will instead provide a brief precis of each and
focus in depth on only two, those of Nicole Jordan and Omer Bartov.
Both, in different ways, represent what might be termed the 'orthodox'
interpretation of the fall of France.  This view is based on the
assumptions that France was in the final stages of a lengthy period of
national decline and suffered from incompetent leadership and a pervasive
defeatism.  Since my own approach to the subject is different, a closer
examination of these two essays might prove most interesting to the
reader.

What is perhaps most remarkable about this collection is that there is no
consensus about the causes of the debacle. Several of the essays paint a
truly dismal picture of French military, political, diplomatic and moral
preparation for war.  Michael Carley charges that France's civilian and
military leadership was crippled by a cold war mentality which distorted
its analyses of the international situation. He argues that blind
anti-Bolshevism among French elites ruined all chances of forging a grand
alliance against Nazi Germany.  Only a Soviet alliance could have provided
French strategy and diplomacy with the military weight it required to deal
with Nazi Germany.  Unfortunately, according to Carley, French foreign
policy was restricted by anti-communist ideology and the chance to forge a
war-winning coalition was therefore lost.

Vicky Caron's analysis of French refugee policy before the Second World
War is another powerfully argued indictment of French policy on the eve of
war.  Caron makes a persuasive case that the xenophobia and anti-Semitism
that characterised this policy were symptoms of a deep malaise in French
society.  It is hard to deny the force of this argument.  My only
reservation would be that France was by no means the only state to follow
appalling refugee policies.  Many of the world's other democracies,
including Canada, Britain and the United States, took a similarly shameful
line. Yet these societies were not on the verge of collapse.

John Cairns has also identified serious failings within the France's
political leadership in his analysis of the internecine quarrels between
various policy makers during the phoney war. Daladier's government became
badly divided during the 'Winter War'.  Incessant infighting at times
threatened to paralyse French war policy.  Cairns makes a strong case that
this was an important factor in the failure of the Entente.  There was
also considerable pettiness and mutual incomprehension between the French
and British officials who were charged with coordinating the war efforts
of the two states.  The detailed evidence that Professor Cairns has
unearthed to support his argument makes for depressing reading.

Carole Fink credits historian Marc Bloch with having recognised the causes
of the defeat even before the military catastrophe.  Fink's description of
the situation in France on the eve of the German offensive through the
Ardennes is summed up in one sentence: 'Sixty-seven divisions, lacking
strong leadership, public support, and solid allies, waited almost three
quarters of a year to be attacked by a ruthless, stronger foe.' (40)  But
this is an assertion rather than a careful weighing up of the available
evidence.  Fink relies exclusively on Bloch in this analysis of France
during the phoney war.  As a result, although Bloch was a wise and
perceptive observer, Fink's perspective is rather limited.  It would have
been interesting to compare Bloch's views with those of his contemporaries
and those of historians who have studied the period since the publication
of Fink's biography of Bloch more than a decade ago.  Instead, what we get
is Bloch's perspective and not much else.  One might be better advised to
turn to Bloch's own magisterial analysis of the disaster, which retains
all of its power and immediacy even fifty years on.

Also compelling reading are the eye-witness accounts of both the battle of
France and the campaign of 1944 written by P.C.F. Bankwitz, a
distinguished historian and author of a brilliant analysis of Maxime
Weygand and civil-military relations in inter-war France.  Bankwitz's
reflections on the causes of the defeat are similar to those of the
contributors mentioned above.  The same is true of the two essays by
Nicole Jordan and Omer Bartov which are analysed in much greater depth
below.  Both weigh in with contributions to the view that France was
poorly led and ready to collapse in May 1940.

Taken together the above essays make a compelling case for the orthodox
interpretation of the French defeat that has been prominent in one form or
another ever since the summer of 1940.  France's foreign and security
policy appears almost completely devoid of clear direction and French
society seems in no way committed to a long struggle against Nazi tyranny.
At the same time, however, the other essays in this collection provide a
very different perspective on the origins of France's collapse. William
Keylor provides an illuminating study of Franco-American relations which
reminds us that the United States made little contribution to French
efforts to redress the unfavourable strategic situation in Europe on the
eve of war. Drawing on her recent biography of Edouard Daladier, Elisabeth
du Reau provides a very different interpretation of France's war policy
than the one offered by John Cairns. Both Keylor and du Reau stress
France's difficult strategic position in relation to Germany.  The same is
true of Martin Alexander's contribution, which underlines the shortcomings
of Britain as an alliance partner in his study of the deployment of the
British Expeditionary Force in 1939-40. Robert Young provides an
interesting and original account of efforts to bolster French diplomacy
with a robust propaganda campaign in the United States.  He stresses that
this campaign met with considerable success and argues persuasively that
there is plenty of evidence of vigour and resolve in France's diplomatic
war effort.  The essay by William Irvine is every bit as convincing when
he argues that interpretations based on the assumption of French defeatism
and moral decline before 1940 ignore clear evidence of a remarkable
recovery in national confidence and resolve from late 1938 onward. Drawing
on much recent scholarship, he makes the strong case that mono-causal
theories of decadence and decay simply do not explain how France moved
from appeasement to war during this period.

The debate over the French defeat is thus an ongoing affair.  One school
of interpretation argues that the defeat and collapse of 1940 was the
product of a long process of national decline. The other side of the
argument attributes more importance to the operational defeat of the
French army on the battlefield. The former view identifies 'internal'
factors such as poor leadership and a lack of national cohesion as
decisive in the national disaster.  The latter, conversely, points to the
central importance of 'external' factors such as France's demographic and
industrial inferiority or the attitude of Great Britain and the United
States.  There is no consensus, and this is as it should be. Historical
study thrives on discord.  Wisely, Joel Blatt has not tried to impose a
false interpretative unity on his contributors.

Nicole Jordan's contribution to this volume is, in the main, an
uncompromising indictment of General Maurice Gamelin, the commander in
chief of the Allied land forces in western Europe in 1939-40.  There are,
I think, two central arguments being advanced in this essay.  The first is
that Gamelin made a number of crucial misjudgements in the formulation of
French strategic policy and that catastrophic results ensued for France in
June 1940. The second is that Gamelin indulged in 'scapegoatism' after the
battle was lost in an effort to shift the blame for the military disaster
onto the shoulders of politicians (particularly those of the Popular
Front), trade unionists and even common soldiers caught up in the
whirlwind of military catastrophe during that horrible six week campaign.

Professor Jordan is absolutely right to criticise Gamelin for his efforts
to shift blame for the collapse of France elsewhere and to absolve himself
of any responsibility for the defeat.  As the work of Robert Frank and
others has clearly demonstrated, the socialist-led Popular Front
government made massive strides in getting the long overdue rearmament
effort up and running in France. Moreover, and as Martin Alexander has
also argued recently, Gamelin did a grave injustice to many hundreds of
thousands of French soldiers who fought (and often died) bravely,
particularly during the closing phases of the disastrous battle.  It is
also fair to censure the long dead General for the decision to commit an
important portion of the French strategic reserve to a headlong rush
through Belgium, leaving the high command without a powerful reserve force
capable of executing an effective counter-attack in the event of a German
breakthrough. But Professor Jordan links this decision to an overall
strategy of a 'cut-price war on the peripheries' that was based on getting
allies to do the bulk of the fighting while France cowered behind its
continuous front.  This argument is original and thought provoking.  But
is also problematical.

The prevailing view of French military strategy before the war is that
planning envisioned a long war in which France's frontier defences and its
mobilised army would withstand an initial onslaught from Germany.  France
and its allies (most importantly Great Britain) would then wage a
sustained campaign of economic warfare, weakening the German war effort
before finishing it off with a decisive strategic offensive mounted on a
number of fronts at once.  Professor Jordan contends that this
interpretation of French strategy is flawed and further argues that it is
only when French strategy is viewed as a misguided and cynical attempt to
avoid fighting altogether that the true causes of the fall of France can
be understood. Gamelin and his colleagues on the general staff wanted to
fight 'une guerre ailleurs' (a war elsewhere) that would be based on the
principle of 'allied immolation' (a rather curious term which I take to
mean channelling German revisionism away from France).  Czechoslovakia,
Poland and finally Belgium were thus sacrificed in order to ensure that
the war was fought outside France's frontiers.  Jordan explains that 'This
was the blood-of-others theme central to French strategy under Gamelin'
[p. 20]. She further argues that Gamelin was so committed to this
conception that he made the further error of abandoning the military
doctrine that the French general staff had developed ever since the end of
the last war for a risky strategy of plunging through Belgium to meet the
German advance before it reached France's frontiers.  It is almost as if
Professor Jordan would have us believe that the fall of France was
basically down to the stupidity and myopia of this unfortunate general.

But the case as it is made is based on an idiosyncratic view of French war
planning that all but ignores the decrepit state of France's armed forces
during this period.  Recent research has made clear, for example, that the
army was desperately short of all kinds of modern equipment through to the
very end of the 1930s.  The rearmament schemes introduced by the Popular
Front in 1936 had only just begun to pay dividends when war broke out.
The air force was in worse shape.  The decision not to fight for
Czechoslovakia is often cited as the lowest point in the history of French
strategy and diplomacy during the inter-war period. It certainly seems to
illustrate many of the trends Jordan has identified in her analysis of
French military policy. What is not mentioned, however, is that during the
Czechoslovak crisis the French air force possessed only a handful (fewer
than fifty) aircraft that were in any way comparable to the latest
fighters and medium bombers in service in the Luftwaffe. While there is no
doubt that French intelligence exaggerated the size and combat
effectiveness of the Luftwaffe, the crucial factor was the acute weakness
of French air power at this juncture.  But Professor Jordan is not alone
among the historians that have misunderstood the air factor during the
Munich crisis.

Other factors that entered into decision making during the crisis included
financial weakness and a lack of public support for war.  In an excellent
article published recently in _Diplomacy and Statecraft_, Martin Thomas
has demonstrated how the acute weakness of the franc during the summer of
1938 made a decision to go to war very risky for the Daladier government.
Moreover, France was profoundly divided over the question of war.  The
massive study of French public opinion during the Czechoslovak crisis
published some years ago by Yvon Lacaze demonstrates clearly the lack of
consensus over this question at every level of French society.  This state
of affairs should be contrasted with the situation one year later, when
popular opinion appeared clearly in favour of a policy of firmness in the
face of Nazi aggression.  Another crucial difference in 1939 was that
France could count on the full support of Great Britain, without which
another war against Germany was inconceivable for most French leaders.

It has always been my view that these factors, rather than cynical plans
for channelling German military expansion towards allies in the east, was
the key issue at the heart of French policy in 1938.  It is clear that
Gamelin and his colleagues preferred that Poles, Czechoslovak, Romanians
or Belgians would do most of the fighting and dying in the next war. Nor
is there any doubt that in the summer of 1939 Gamelin considered that
Poland's chief contribution to an allied war effort would be to tie down
as many German divisions as possible while France mobilised and Britain
began deploying its expeditionary force on the continent. There is much to
criticise in this overly fatalistic perspective on the strategic
situation. But it is one thing to say that Gamelin and his colleagues
misread the strategic balance, it is quite another to argue that they were
interested only in 'allied immolation' and had no intention of fighting
the Germans at all.  There is to my knowledge no evidence that, during the
phoney war, the high command did not wish to prosecute the war to its
conclusion.

This leads to the question of military and strategic doctrine and its role
in the defeat.  Professor Jordan's contention that French planning was
exclusively defensive is difficult to accept.  There can be hardly any
doubt that the configuration of French strategy was defensive-offensive,
with the overwhelming emphasis on the all-important task of withstanding
the initial German onslaught. And there were good reasons for this. A
careful reading of Eugenia Kiesling's excellent and recent book reveals
the social, economic and political underpinnings of French doctrine.
Although this argument can be pushed too far, it seems clear to me that
the high command planned to fight a defensive-offensive strategy not
because they were stupid or cowardly, but because they lacked the
resources at the war's outset to mount a massive offensive into Germany to
relieve France's allies in eastern Europe. Constructing a powerfully
equipped professional army with an offensive doctrine (as advocated by de
Gaulle, Reynaud and others) was politically impossible under the Third
Republic. Many historians consider this state of affairs evidence of the
decadence and decay of the Third Republic. I have always been inclined to
view it as a positive reflection on the political culture of republican
France.

The argument that the policy of forward defence in Belgium constituted 'a
clear violation of classic French doctrine' is also difficult to accept.
Jordan contends that Gamelin was so seduced by the idea of a 'war
elsewhere' that he was prepared to risk an 'encounter battle' with the
German army in the low countries.  But the decision to fight in Belgium
had been in place since the early 1930s.  The plan was never to fight a
war of movement with the Wehrmacht. It was instead to establish a field of
fire in Belgium that would blunt the advance of German armour and force
the Germans to engage in the kind of set-piece military engagements for
which the French army had been preparing since 1919.  The grave mistake
made by the French was to fail to plan for a major German breakthrough on
French soil. The idea that the German army might force a war of movement
was apparently too terrible to consider. As Ernest May has shown in his
excellent new study of the fall of France, the combination of brilliant
planning and execution by the Germans and inflexible French operational
doctrine was catastrophic for the fate of France.

Yet one should not go too far in explaining the collapse of the Third
Republic exclusively in terms of military failure.  Political decisions
taken over the course of the 1930s also had a major impact on the outcome.
In holding Gamelin and his collaborators responsible for the lost battle,
Jordan contends that 'in a situation of rough parity, the number of arms
is less important than the use made of them'. This is no doubt true.  It
is also precisely the point. The delays in setting in motion vast and
complicated processes of modernisation of the armaments and aircraft
industries were crucial to the military situation in the spring of 1940.
It is important to remember that, despite the fact that its industries did
not begin mass-production of all kinds of war material until 1937, Nazi
rearmament had nonetheless gained a crucial head-start between 1933 and
mid-1936 because the modernisation of Germany's war industries was made an
immediate priority upon Hitler's accession to power. Rearmament cannot
happen without the necessary industrial infrastructure.  And when new
tanks and planes begin rolling off assembly lines, soldiers till have to
work out how best to use this equipment.  To employ a computer age
metaphor, a software has to be developed to permit effective use of the
military hardware.  This is where the Germans were so far ahead in 1940.
While France's rearmament effort had gone far to redress the material
imbalance between the French and German armies, the Germans were better
versed in using their new kit.  The experiences of large-scale manoeuvres
with modern equipment, and above the practical experience gained in Spain
and especially in Poland, provided the German army with a decisive
tactical, operational and even a strategic edge in the spring of 1940.

This is not to absolve the French general staff of all charges of
intellectual rigidity or lack of imagination (there is no doubt that
French tactical and operational doctrine would no doubt have remained
wedded to fighting cautious set-piece battles) . It is merely to point out
that France's military leadership had less time to adapt the recently
arrived machinery of war to its doctrinal concepts and to adapt its
tactics to the new machinery.  The ramifications of France's 'rearmement
trop tardif' (to quote Maurice Vaisse) were a major factor in the military
confrontation.  This is a point too often overlooked in the existing
literature on the fall of France.

To sum up, while I obviously do not find the arguments advanced by
Professor Jordan convincing, this is an important essay that puts forward
an original case.  It should not be ignored in the ongoing debate over the
fall of France.

Omer Bartov has written a fascinating essay on the deeper causes of the
French defeat.  It seems to me that there are two arguments being made in
his essay 'Martyrs' Vengeance: memory, trauma and fear of war in France'.
The first is that 'In speaking about the France of the entre-deux-guerres,
it is impossible to understand any of the major political, cultural,
military or popular trends and attitudes without realizing that visions of
war, memories of past massacres and fears of their recurrence dominated
the minds of the French'.[p. 56-7] The second argument is that France was
'a society torn between competing images of war whose ultimate inability
to reach a consensus on the meaning and implications of domestic and
foreign conflict was at the root of its collapse'.  The two themes are
linked by what Bartov describes as 'the fluidity of war imagery' which
'was a crucial factor in destabilizing and undermining French society as a
whole'. [p. 59] France's ultimate reaction to the horrible experience of
1914-1918 is described as one of 'increasing paralysis' and contrasted
with the German response, which is diagnosed as 'a resurgence of
destructive energy'.[p. 62]

All of this makes for a heady brew of ideas and explanation.  It is also
frustrating because Bartov's analysis is confined, for the most part, to
the level of generalities about French politics and society.  It is a
complicated argument that is based on the assumption that the French
defeat must necessarily have had roots in some kind of cultural or
political _maux_. He submits that:

Historians' unwillingness to undertake an analysis of interwar France with
an eye to the deep roots of the collapse was, and still is, probably due
to the discomfort of discovering in a post-1945 world that fear of war
could lead to collaboration in atrocity, that anti-militarism can bring
about fascism, and that lack of a certain ruthlessness in policy-making
can easily allow for much greater abuse by others.[p. 60]

This is as precise as Bartov gets in his analysis of the French defeat.
At its core, therefore, the argument being advanced in hardly new.  It is
the familiar Gaullist diagnosis of the malaise in French society during
the final years of the Third Republic.  As I have argued elsewhere, the
concept of _decadence_ has been a constant in French political rhetoric at
least since 1870.  The concept of decadent France was used as a political
tool used by Gaullists to highlight the contrast between the degenerate
Third Republic and the robust Fifth Republic, to whom de Gaulle had
restored French grandeur.

Where Bartov is original is in his consideration of the ambiguity in
French attitudes towards future war.  I would take issue here with
Bartov's repeated use of the term 'the next war'.  For, while even the
most insular of French citizens must have had a constant sense of the
impending threat of war, particularly after 1936, it was never an absolute
certainty. And this is why most continued to hope that the nightmare could
somehow be avoided. This, in my view, does not constitute evidence of
either decadence or decay.  I have never understood this line of
reasoning.  It seems to me that to accept the argument that pacifism and
opposition to war is somehow degenerate is to buy into the fascist world
view that equated militarism and war with national virility.

Bartov argues that the great divide between left and right only compounded
French 'bewilderment' at the prospect of war.  For the right in France the
spectre of war was always double-headed. Two types of war seemed to loom
over the horizon: war against Germany and civil war pitting the forces of
order against the agents of Bolshevik revolution.  According to Bartov
(and many other pundits commenting on the right in France during this
period), by the mid-1930s the danger of civil war took precedence over the
external threat from Nazi Germany.  From this point onward various right
wing movements began to manipulate general abhorrence of war in France by
equating left wing politics with inevitable Franco-German war.  For the
left the chief threat was fascism - either German and Italian fascism or
the home grown variety that reared its head in February 1934.  Again the
ideological enemy within became as much of a danger as the enemy across
the Rhine.  Hence images of war had become 'mainly a struggle between
competing forces within France [w]ar became a national obsession, perhaps
greater even than in Germany of the late 1930s; and yet, it was civil war
about which everyone spoke, whether to prevent another catastrophe such as
that of 1914-1918, or to ward off a Franco-Bolshevik uprising'.[p. 84] The
image of French popular opinion painted by Bartov is therefore one of
collective terror. If we are to accept his view, the average French person
thought of war and little else, going about his or her daily routine in a
permanent state of panic, pessimism and 'bewilderment'.

But instinct and experience suggest that this is a distorted picture of
the French mentality.  Human nature is multi-dimensional and it is
changeful.  Fear of war could co-exist with patriotism and even collective
resolve.  French citizens unnerved by the prospect of war could regain
their nerve and provide overwhelming support for a policy of defiance to
Nazi threats.  Indeed, this is what public opinion polls tell us happened
in the spring of 1939.  Recent scholarship on French official and popular
sentiment on the eve of war by Jean-Louis Cremieux-Brilhac and others
(including William Irvine in this volume) has detected the beginnings of a
national revival in France. According to Cremieux-Brilhac, it was the
unusual conditions of the Phoney War that had the most pernicious impact
on French public opinion and sapped popular resolve.

It is not a stretch to attribute this latter phenomenon, at least in part,
to memories of the previous war.  But what is needed, in my view, is a
systematic study of the links between the experience of 1914-1918 and the
tremors in French resolve during the _drole de guerre_. What Bartov has
provided is instead a series of thought provoking assertions based on a
selection of war monuments, propaganda posters and films. Not
surprisingly, the examples selected are interpreted in such a way as to
complement the overall argument.  There is, for example, a discussion of
Jean Renoir's two cinematic masterpieces of the 1930s: _La Grande
Illusion_ and _La Regle du jeu_.  Both of these are essentially
pessimistic, even disquieting films.  There is no doubt that they both
reflect aspects of the mood in France at the time.  But Renoir also made a
very upbeat film during this decade, _La Marseillaise_, based on themes of
patriotism and unity.  This film was panned by critics but, unlike _La
Regle du Jeu_, it was also a commercial success.  There are also
alternative readings to several of the political posters that Bartov
argues reflect the faltering resolve of the right towards the Nazi threat.
Right wing posters warning that a Popular Front government would render
France vulnerable to Germany were not designed, as Bartov seems to
suggest, to reassure the French public that the right would secure a
lasting peace with Germany. They were instead attacking left wing
opposition to rearmament during the early 1930s and implying that only the
right could be trusted to follow a realistic national security policy.
But the left's policy towards security was changing. It was the Popular
Front that implemented the largest peacetime rearmament programmes in
French history. These nuances are lost in Bartov's analysis of public
discourse on security issues in France in the 1930s.

In order to make a persuasive case Bartov would have to incorporate the
national revival that took place in France in late 1938 and 1939 into his
analysis.  He does not.  The question of how deep this national recovery
actually went remains open.  But it is a question that cannot be ignored
in any study of the 'mood' in France on the eve of war. Bartov should have
conducted a more comprehensive survey of the relevant historiography on
French politics during the 1930s.  There is no doubt, for example, that,
while there were figures on the right who argued 'better Hitler than
Stalin', and even 'better Hitler than Blum', these were a distinct
minority.  As William Irvine notes in his essay (and Irvine is certainly
no apologist for the right in France) the vast majority of the French
right remained patriotic through to the outbreak of war.

In sum, Omer Bartov's attempt to link the trauma of 1914-1918 with the
defeat and collaboration of 1940-1944 does not convince. It is an
impressionistic argument based on a series of very general assertions that
is not supported by much in the way of evidence.  My hope is that it is an
introductory chapter to a longer study which takes a more systematic
approach to this important question.

One last observation might be made about this collection: it lacks an
essay on the politics of history writing on the defeat both inside and
outside France.  Stanley Hoffmann's concluding essay provides a brilliant
analysis of the impact of the defeat on French society and politics ever
since.  There is certainly a need for some discussion of how this
political context has affected the historiography of the decline and fall
of the Third Republic.  Indeed the lack of any such discussion is a rather
puzzling gap in the ever growing literature on the role of memory in
French history.  Since the early 1980s a range of fascinating studies of
history and memory have been published by scholars such as Henry Rousso,
Pierre Nora and Robert Gildea, to name only a few.  More specifically,
Raoul Girardet, Christopher Flood and Hugo Frey have considered the role
of Gaullist political discourse in the historiography of the Second World
War.  They have argued that Gaullist rhetoric was based largely on
interpreting French history as a continuous cycle of decline, suffering
and renewal.  This model has been used to explain the place of Vichy in
both the history and the popular imagination of France.

But no similar attempt has been made to understand how competing
narratives of the pre-war years and the collapse of France have been
shaped by their political context.  The politicisation of this particular
history began with the Riom trials of 1941-2, when various centre-left
politicians (along with poor General Gamelin) were charged with
responsibility for the defeat.  Interestingly, despite the purges that
followed the end of Vichy and the liberation of France, Gaullist
historiography did not dispense altogether with the dominant Vichy
narrative of the defeat.  Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, for many years the
doyen of French international historians and author of what must still be
considered the standard work on French strategy and diplomacy before the
Second World War (_Politique etrangere de la France, 1932-1939: la
decadence_), was unequivocally Gaullist, and his interpretation was
clearly influenced by his politics. It is also interesting that the first
challenge to the 'decadence' view emerged not from within France but from
a number of Anglo-Saxon scholars, among whom were Geoffrey Warner and John
Cairns.  The first French historian to write favourably about aspects of
France's security policy before the war was Pierre le Goyet.  But le
Goyet's biography of Gamelin was not at all well received in France and
damaged considerably his career prospects.

Things have changed.  The historiography inside France was revolutionised
by two colloquiums on the Daladier government held in 1975 and 1978 and
published as _Edouard Daladier, chef du gouvernement_ and _La France et
les francais, 1938-1939_.  Subsequent studies of this period by Maurice
Vaisse, Robert Frankenstein and Elisabeth du Reau eschew grandiose
theories of decadence as explanations for the fall of France.  Indeed it
seems, at the risk of making an unfair generalisation, that the orthodox
or 'decadence' view is far more popular among scholars of an older
generation.  Research done on these questions in the nineteen -seventies,
eighties and nineties has, in general, been more sympathetic to the
predicament which French decision makers faced during the inter-war
period.  There are exceptions to this rule (even John Cairns appears to
have changed his mind and adopted a more uncompromising view in recent
years) but this has certainly been the trend in scholarship on inter-war
France.

The debate over the French defeat will doubtless continue over the next
few generations.  My point is that we should give more thought to the
politics of this debate.  But this volume is an important contribution to
our understanding of the fall of France and should stimulate more research
into this question.

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