Premonitions and Predictions
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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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