Abstract
This chapter evokes the pervasive fear in interwar France that the country was in decline and at a growing disadvantage to a more populous, industrially developed and re-arming Germany. France’s failures to contain Germany and its subsequent pursuit of collective security was burdened by the lack of Anglo-American support on the contentious issues of reparations, disarmament and the need to resist German aggression in Europe. Nevertheless, at the end of the 1930s, despite widespread fears of war, France staged an economic and diplomatic recovery, setting its face against further German expansion. If war came, few people expected France would be defeated.
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- 1.
Sally Marks (2003) The Illusion of Peace: International Relations in Europe 1918–1933 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 17. See also Hans-Christoph Kraus (2013) Versailles und die Folgen: Aussenpolitik zwischen Revisionismus und Verständigung 1919–1933 (Berlin: Berlin Brandenburg Verlag), 31; Ulrich Herbert (2014) Geschichte Deutschlands im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: C.H. Beck), 192–195; Ursula Büttner (2008) Weimar: Die überforderte Republik 1918–1933 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta), 129–130; Boris Barth (2016) Europa nach dem Grossen Krieg: Die Krise der Demokratie in der Zwischenkriegszeit 1918–1938 (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag), 36; Wolfgang Elz (2009) ‘Foreign Policy’ in Anthony McElligott (ed.), The Short Oxford History of Germany: Weimar Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 55; and Colin Storer (2013) A Short History of the Weimar Republic (London: I.B. Tauris), 117–118. For a comprehensive account of the making of the post-war treaties, see Alan Sharp (2018, 3rd ed.), The Versailles Settlement: Peacemaking After the First World War 1919–1923 (London: Palgrave).
- 2.
Richard Overy (2009) The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of Civilization 1919–1939 (London: Penguin), 2.
- 3.
Pierre Laborie (2001) L’opinion française sous Vichy: Les Français et la crise d’identité nationale 1936–1944 (Paris: Seuil), 208.
- 4.
Raymond Aron (1990) Memoirs: Fifty Years of Political Reflection (New York: Holmes & Meier), 106.
- 5.
Debbie Lackerstein (2012) National Regeneration in Vichy France: Ideas and Policies 1930–1944 (London: Routledge), 29. See also Robert Frank (2014) La Hantise du déclin: La France de 1914 à 2014 (Paris: Belin).
- 6.
Jean-Jacques Becker and Serge Berstein (1990) Victoire et frustrations 1914–1929 (Paris: Seuil), 148. See also Paul Vincent (2015) ‘La situation démographique de la France à la veille de la guerre’, in Jean-Marc Rohrbasser and Martine Rousso-Rossmann (eds.), 1939–1945: Une démographie dans la tourmente (Paris: Ined), 145–158; Dominique Borne and Henri Dubief (1989) La crise des années 30: 1929–1938 (Paris: Seuil), 15.
- 7.
Ralph Schor (1985) L’Opinion Française et les Etrangers en France 1919–1939 (Paris: La Sorbonne), 711–729.
- 8.
Eugen Weber (1995) The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s (London: Sinclair-Stevenson), 87–93.
- 9.
Vicki Caron (1999) France and the Jewish Refugee Crisis 1933–1942 (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 354–356. See also Borne and Dubief, La crise des années 30, 213–216.
- 10.
Jean Giraudoux (1939) Pleins Pouvoirs (Paris: Gallimard), 35–77, 160.
- 11.
Becker and Berstein , Victoire et frustrations, 314–326.
- 12.
Borne and Dubief, La crise des années 30, 20–37.
- 13.
Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu (1931) Décadence de la nation française (Paris: Rieder).
- 14.
William Fortescue (2000) The Third Republic in France 1870–1940: Conflicts and Continuities (London: Routledge), 213–215.
- 15.
Omer Bartov (1998) ‘Martyrs’ Vengeance: Memory, Trauma and Fear of War in France 1918–1940’, in Joel Blatt (ed.), The French Defeat of 1940: Reassessments (Providence and Oxford: Berghahn), 56–57.
- 16.
Julian Jackson (2003) The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 147.
- 17.
Becker and Berstein , Victoire et frustrations, 146; Jean Doise and Maurice Vaïsse (1992) Diplomatie et outil militaire 1871–1991 (Paris: Seuil), 267.
- 18.
Robert Frank (2014) La Hantise du déclin: La France de 1914 à 2014 (Paris: Belin), 130.
- 19.
Marc Trachtenberg (1980) Reparations in World Politics: France and European Economic Diplomacy 1916–1923 (New York: Columbia University Press), 193–195.
- 20.
Stephen A. Schuker (1976) The End of French Predominance in Europe: The Financial Crisis of 1924 and the Adoption of the Dawes Plan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 12.
- 21.
David Stevenson (2005) 1914–1918 The History of the First World War (London: Penguin), 536.
- 22.
Peter Jackson (2003) ‘France’, in Robert Boyce and Joseph A. Maiolo (eds.), The Origins of World War Two: The Debate Continues (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), 86–110.
- 23.
Charles H. Feinstein, Peter Temin, and Gianni Toniolo (1997) The European Economy Between the Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 95–96. See also Roger Middleton (2016) ‘The Great Depression in Europe’ in Nicholas Doumanis (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of European History 1914–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 179–206.
- 24.
Richard Overy (2017) The Origins of the Second World War (London: Routledge), 18, 32. See also Zara Steiner (2007) The Lights That Failed: European International History 1919–1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press); Robert Boyce (2009) The Great Interwar Crisis and the Collapse of Globalization (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan); and Adam Tooze (2014) The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of the Global Order (London: Allen Lane).
- 25.
Daily Herald, 1 July 1931, 1, 8.
- 26.
R. A. C. Parker (1993) Chamberlain and Appeasement: British Policy and the Coming of the Second World War (Basingstoke: Macmillan), 16.
- 27.
Ivan T. Berend (2006) An Economic History of Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 53.
- 28.
Fred Kupferman (2006) Laval (Paris: Tallandier), 111.
- 29.
Quoted in G. E. R. Gedye (1939) Fallen Bastions: The Central European Tragedy (London: Gollancz), 158.
- 30.
G. D. H. and Margaret Cole (1933) The Intelligent Man’s Review of Europe Today (London: Gollacnz), 312.
- 31.
Letter from Astor to E. D. Ryder, 17 March 1938, MS 1066/1/155 (Box 9) in Astor Papers, University of Reading.
- 32.
Letter from Dawson to Robert Brand, 2 October 1938, The Times Newspapers Archive (TNL). See also Stuart Ball (ed.) (1999) Parliament and Politics in the Age of Churchill and Attlee: The Headlam Diaries 1935–1951 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 9 October 1938, 139.
- 33.
Philip Ziegler (2016) Between the Wars 1919–1939 (London: MacLehose Press), 24–25.
- 34.
Simon Jenkins (2018) ‘Britain Will End Up in Europe. History Proves It’, The Guardian, 21 November 2018, G2, 1.
- 35.
Robert Young (1996) France and the Origins of the Second World War (Basingstoke: Macmillan), 61.
- 36.
Quoted in Nicolas Beaupré (2015) Les Français dans la guerre 1939–1945 (Paris: Belin), 21.
- 37.
P. M. H. Bell (1996) France and Britain 1900–1940: Entente & Estrangement (London: Longman), 155–160.
- 38.
Boyce, The Great Interwar Crisis, 112–113; Michael Howard (1972) The Continental Commitment: The Dilemma of British Defence Policy in the Era of Two World Wars (London: Temple Smith), 82–83.
- 39.
Robert J. Young (1978) In Command of France: French Foreign Policy and Military Planning 1933–1940 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press), 43–51.
- 40.
Daily Herald, 16 October 1933, 1, 10.
- 41.
Peter Jackson (2000) France and the Nazi Menace: Intelligence and Policy Making 1933–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 77.
- 42.
Doise and Vaïsse , Diplomatie et outil militaire, 345–357. See also Judith M. Hughes (1971) To the Maginot Line: The Politics of French Military Preparations in the 1920s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
- 43.
Roxanne Panchasi (2009) Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 94–95.
- 44.
(Pierre) Drieu la Rochelle (1934) Socialisme fasciste (Paris: Gallimard) 162–164; also quoted in Fortescue, The Third Republic in France, 215–217.
- 45.
James Emmerson (1977) The Rhineland Crisis 7 March 1936: A Study in Multilateral Diplomacy (London: Temple Smith).
- 46.
Overy , The Origins of the Second World War, 54.
- 47.
Robert Frank (2017) Le prix du réarmement français 1935–1939 (Paris: La Sorbonne).
- 48.
Overy , The Origins of the Second World War, 55.
- 49.
Talbot Imlay (2003) Facing the Second World War: Strategy, Politics and Economics in Britain and France 1938–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 33. See also Jackson, France and the Nazi Menace, 45–82.
- 50.
‘If These Cannibals Persist in Making Us Heroes, Our First Bullets Must Be for Mandel , Blum and Reynaud’. Quoted in Alexander Werth (1939) France and Munich: Before and After the Surrender (London: Hamish Hamilton), reproduced in Alexander Werth (1942) The Twilight of France 1933–1940: A Journalist’s Chronicle (London: Hamish Hamilton), 299.
- 51.
Chris Millington (2018) Fighting for France: Violence in Inter-War French Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
- 52.
Jackson, The Fall of France, 112.
- 53.
Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac (1990) Les Français de l’An 40 I: La Guerre Oui ou Non? (Paris: Gallimard), 183.
- 54.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1938) L’Ecole des cadavres (Paris: Denoël).
- 55.
Quoted in Jean-Pierre Azéma (1979) De Munich à la Libération 1938–1944 (Paris: Seuil), 21.
- 56.
Talbot Imlay (2002) ‘Retreat or Resistance’, in Kenneth Mouré and Martin S. Alexander (eds.), Crisis and Renewal in France 1918–1962 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn), 105–131. See also Imlay , Facing the Second World War, 33–48.
- 57.
House of Commons Debates 6 February 1939 Column 623; Brian Bond (1980) British Military Policy Between the Two World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 296–298, 300–301; Jackson, France and the Nazi Menace, 325–327; Michael Dockrill (1999) British Establishment Perspectives on France 1936–40 (Basingstoke: Macmillan), 122–123, 125–126, 129; and Howard, The Continental Commitment, 129.
- 58.
Imlay , ‘Retreat or Resistance’; Mouré and Alexander, Crisis and Renewal in France, 121.
- 59.
Daniel Hucker (2016) Public Opinion and the End of Appeasement in Britain and France (London: Routledge).
- 60.
Young , France and the Origins, 120–121. See also Norman Ingram (1991) The Politics of Dissent: Pacifism in France 1919–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 112–118, 235–243; Norman Ingram (2002) ‘Nous Allons vers les Monastères: French Pacifism and the Crisis of the Second World War’, in Mouré and Alexander (eds.), Crisis and Renewal in France, 132–151.
- 61.
Frank , Le Prix du réarmement, 201–217.
- 62.
William D. Irvine (1998) ‘Domestic Politics and the Fall of France in 1940’, in Blatt, The French Defeat of 1940, 90.
- 63.
Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac (1990) Les Français de l’An 40 II Ouvriers et Soldats (Paris: Gallimard), 348–355; Imlay , Facing the Second World War, 244–281.
- 64.
Philippe Garraud (2002) ‘Les contraintes industrielles dans la préparation de la guerre de 1939–1940: la modernisation inachevée de l’aviation française’, Guerres Mondiales et Conflits Contemporains, 207, 46–48.
- 65.
Louis Chauvineau (1939) Une invasion est-elle encore possible? (Paris: Berger-Levrault); Marc Bloch , Les Cahiers politiques, April 1944, reproduced in 1990 in L’étrange défaite: Témoignage écrit en 1940 (Paris: Gallimard), 246–253. Bloch wondered whether Chauvineau had written the book at Pétain’s request in order to propagate the latter’s ideas.
- 66.
Crémieux-Brilhac , Les Français de l’An 40 I, 114–115.
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Carswell, R. (2019). Premonitions and Predictions. In: The Fall of France in the Second World War. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03955-4_2
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