Tony Judt. Could France have won?

Could France have won?
Tony Judt

Tony Judt

Publication date: August 27, 2004

Ernest R. May. Strange Victory: Hitler's Conquest of France. - Hill and Wang, 2001.

1.

Today Europeans live in peace with each other. They even began to look alike. Public opinion polls conducted by the European Union over the past decade (the so-called Eurobarometer) show that closer acquaintance between peoples has melted the ice of mutual mistrust surprisingly quickly. Of course, there are exceptions: the small countries of Central and Eastern Europe retain a certain wariness towards their closest neighbors (this is partly explained by a forty-year period of forced “brotherhood”); Italians, while respectful of all Europeans, do not trust their fellow citizens living in other regions (the same can be said about the Greeks); The English media show suspicion and sometimes contempt towards the French, who pay them in kind. In addition, there are the Balkans. And yet, in general, Europeans get along well with each other, and the French and Germans are much better than others.

This friendship is the result of relatively recent historical events. In 1946, Winston Churchill, speaking in Zurich, noted that “the first step towards the revival of the European family of nations must be the establishment of cooperation between France and Germany.” At that time, nothing foreshadowed such a change. Between 1800 and 1940, the French and Germans entered into major armed conflicts five times: in 1806, when Napoleon defeated the Prussian army at Jena; in 1813-1815, when the Prussians took revenge; in 1870-1871, when Prussia won a victory that led to the proclamation of the German Empire in occupied Versailles; in 1914-1918 and finally in 1940. Each time, a military victory was crowned with the signing of an unequal agreement and the seizure of part of the territory of the defeated side, which considered the resulting situation unfair and insulting. The national memory on both sides of the Rhine was filled with unkind feelings towards their neighbors. The Prussians after 1806 saw the French as rude and arrogant victors, which is why the cruelty of the Prussian troops in conquered France after 1815, and even in 1871, was regarded by them as legitimate revenge. It is well known that the wife of German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 proposed “to shoot and slaughter all the French, including infants” (her husband, however, did not agree with her).

During the First World War, when German troops reoccupied parts of northern France, much was written and said about the brutal treatment of civilians by the invaders. When the war ended and Germany was defeated, the French with all determination demanded compensation for the damage suffered in full, and even with interest. France regained Alsace and Lorraine (annexed by the German Empire in 1871) and also received reparations that were substantially higher than what Germany had forced it to pay in the 1870s. When the Germans were unable to contribute the required amount, French troops, on the orders of Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré, occupied the Ruhr in 1923. This demarche did not bring any particular benefits to France, but it contributed to the spread of hostility towards the French among the Germans. Stories about how French soldiers insulted and oppressed unarmed civilians remained in the memory of the Germans for a long time.

So, when Hitler’s troops attacked France on May 10, 1940, the behavior of the military and the gloomy forebodings of civilians were largely determined by the existing historical background - simply put, the mutual hostility in which seven generations of Germans and French had been raised. In their strategic plans, the French military command never thought about anything other than a war with Germany. And when the war broke out, millions of ordinary Frenchmen were driven from their places not only by fear of the current soldiers of the Third Reich. Their memories were filled with stories from their fathers and grandfathers about what the Kaiser’s troops did at Verdun and General von Moltke’s divisions at Sedan in 1870, or even more ancient stories about the behavior of Marshal Blücher’s troops at Waterloo. In turn, German officers and soldiers recalled the Ruhr, the Western Front, Napoleon - in a word, the whole set of edifying stories with which they frightened mischievous schoolchildren and fed students of military schools. The new clash between the Germans and the French promised to develop into a difficult and bloody battle.

These were the general expectations. No one could have foreseen the actual development of the military campaign of 1940. As you know, it took German troops only seven weeks to invade Luxembourg, break into French territory through the Ardennes forests, disperse the enemy units that stood in their way, drive the English, French and Belgian armies into the Dunkirk sack, impose a truce on the new French government led by Marshal Pétain, occupy Paris and organize a victory parade for Adolf Hitler on the Champs-Elysees. In six weeks of fighting, France lost 124 thousand people killed, and another 200 thousand were wounded. On May 16-17, General Erwin Rommel captured 10 thousand French, losing only one officer and forty soldiers. As historian Nicole Jordan writes, “the collapse that France suffered in 1940 was one of the greatest military disasters in world history ” 1 .

Hitler's victory contributed to the inclusion of Mussolini in the war, who naturally wanted to fish as many fish as possible out of troubled waters. This victory determined the skeptical attitude towards France on the part of the Americans and the British for several generations to come. It accelerated the fall of the Third Republic and the establishment of the authoritarian collaborationist Vichy regime. It strengthened Hitler, who already fancied himself a strategic genius, into delusions of grandeur, strengthened his power over the German generals, gave him a free hand to prepare for an attack on Great Britain, and when this plan failed, allowed him to direct the spearhead of aggression to southeastern Europe and Soviet Union. Such a severe catastrophe could not but prompt the French to deep self-criticism and introspection. How could this even happen? Why, some twenty years after Versailles, did the most powerful army of continental Europe so mediocrely collapse under the pressure of its sworn enemy?

At least one example of such introspection is provided by Mark Bloch's brilliant and unsurpassed essay "Strange Defeat." An eminent French historian, a reserve officer (the oldest in the French army), who volunteered for military service in 1939, Bloch recorded his observations in 1940. They were published only after the war - by that time the author, an active member of the Resistance, had been shot by the Germans. All historians who subsequently wrote about the events of 1940, including Ernest May, who published the most recent historical study of this war, paid tribute to Block's fundamental work, characterizing their own works as a kind of commentary or clarification to his exhaustive analysis. They were right, for Blok in his essay briefly outlined the main conclusions, which are still recognized as the best explanation of the French collapse 2 .

These are the conclusions. France has put itself in an extremely difficult position, in two ways. First, its military leadership was incompetent. Anticipating war with Germany, the French built a line of fortifications starting at the Swiss border and stretching north all the way to Luxembourg. Later it was called the "Maginot Line" - after the minister Andre Maginot, who led the construction. However, the entire long border zone between Belgium and France remained unprotected. According to the French strategic plan, which excluded military operations on French territory, it was assumed that the battles would certainly be transferred to the territory of Belgium, or even further to the east - in other words, despite the Maginot forts, the French generals clearly intended to conduct offensive operations. This desire of the country's leadership to move the future conflict with Germany beyond its territory was also reflected in France's foreign policy: between the First and Second World Wars, France persistently sought allies, primarily in Southern and Eastern Europe. But, since the French high command sought to avoid war at all costs, France could not offer any significant support to these allies - its weakness was exposed both in 1938 in Munich and in 1939, when the French and British allowed Hitler to calmly, without any fears for their western borders, to deal with Poland.

The French generals not only showed strategic blindness, but in addition turned out to be completely incompetent tacticians and managers. As Bloch and many later historians have shown, the French high command showed a chronic inability to delegate some of its powers to others, to respond quickly to a changing situation, to organize transport, to organize communications, to create fuel reserves, and even to keep basic records of the location of military depots. French officers allowed their recruits to idle from September 1939 until May 1940 (it would have been better if they had occupied them with work in military factories during this time), for some reason expecting that after such “training” they would be able to successfully withstand the rapid and demoralizing onslaught incomparably better than an organized enemy.

When the Germans began their offensive, the French general staff for a long time could not understand what was happening - however, even if the generals had thought a little better, they still would not have been able to give the enemy a worthy rebuff. There was no question of any comparison with the qualifications of the German General Staff. Tanks were in service with both armies, but Rommel and Heinz Guderian, unlike their French colleagues, knew perfectly well how to use them. German officers, under favorable circumstances, were allowed to act independently, and they did not neglect this right at all. The French were accustomed to following orders and detailed instructions, but when the situation changed dramatically, they simply were not able to receive new orders from their superiors, since radio communication could not be established between the commander-in-chief, General Maurice Gamelin, and his subordinates.

The second source of difficulty lay in the political sphere. France was split into right and left, but this was only a scar on the body of the nation, under which a deeper wound was hidden - the memory of the First World War and a passionate desire to avoid a new military conflict. Most French people in the 1930s became convinced that it was impossible to form any stable government in the country. The Popular Front government that came to power in 1936, the only one with a clear program of action and a real majority in parliament, was hated by both the right and the left: the former because of its reform program and because it was headed by the Jew and socialist Leon Blum , the second - for the fact that he failed to continue the revolutionary transformations. Both the right and the left were too consumed by internal strife to properly assess the impending crisis. And although the tanks and airplanes that the French were building at that time were not at all as bad in terms of quality as is sometimes thought, their quantity was far from sufficient.

Those few political figures (including Blum) who belatedly began to call for the creation of a united front against the Nazi threat were accused of wanting to drag France into the war for the sake of foreign interests: because of Danzig, because of the British or because of Jews. The press, like the political parties, was venal and corrupt, often financed by interested foreign governments and private groups. Taking all this into account, the defeat of France, if not so easy to foresee, is at least quite simple to explain in retrospect. The rotten country, torn from within, collapsed without the slightest resistance, and its mediocre military caste crumbled at the first blow of the magnificent German military machine. For millions of French people, like for Mathieu from Sartre's "Death in the Soul", the war ended before it even began 3 .

2 .

In his impressive new book, Ernest May attempts to challenge the above concept. In his opinion, the point is not that the defeat of France in 1940 was an unexpected blow for it, but that it might not have happened at all. Events could have developed completely differently, moreover, this almost did not happen. The political situation at home was not nearly as hopeless as later commentators claimed, and in any case did not have much influence on the course of events. The French General Staff was indeed incompetent (May provides further evidence to support this well-known fact), but it lost the Battle of France due to a small number of unfortunate and avoidable mistakes. If the cards had laid out a little differently, the whole story would have taken a completely different path and we would not now be engaged in a painstaking study of the causes of the crash at that time. According to May, it is not so much the French defeat that needs explanation as the German victory. According to him, what happened in May 1940 "indicates the state of certain parts of the French army, and not the French national soul."

A short review does not do justice to May's book. He comprehensively and carefully examined German, French, English and American archives, studied a huge amount of supporting literature and masterfully built his argument. The conclusions he made can be briefly summarized as follows. Hitler was convinced that he would defeat France, but his generals were not so sure. Like most experts of that time, they were afraid of French military power, taking existing assessments of it at face value, and tried to delay a direct clash as long as possible. It later turned out that Hitler was right, but if he had miscalculated, the grip with which the Fuhrer held Germany (in May’s opinion, not at all ironclad) would have immediately loosened and the country would have fallen out of his hands. And he guessed right only thanks to amazing luck.

Hitler initially intended to attack France in the late autumn of 1939, following the successful conclusion of the Blitzkrieg in Poland. Unfavorable weather conditions interfered, and the attack was postponed to a later date. But if the original plan had been implemented, the offensive would have developed not in the southwest, through the Ardennes, but in the west, through central Belgium and, further, on the flat part of northern France. This circumstance is important because the strategic plan for the war with Germany, developed by Gamelin, also assumed a deep advance of the French army into Belgium in order to meet the Germans as far as possible to the north and east of the French borders. Then, having secured the Franco-German border and eastern Belgium, the advanced units of the French army were supposed to move into enemy territory. According to this scenario, the elite divisions of both armies would clash in Flanders, with the French, supported by the British, Belgians and possibly the Dutch, having a clear chance of winning.

The German General Staff guessed the direction of French strategic thought and was therefore skeptical of Hitler's plans, which they tried with all their might to resist. Nevertheless, in January 1940, information about the impending German invasion accidentally came into the hands of the Belgians. It confirmed Gamelin’s already unshakable conviction that the offensive should be developed in the Belgian direction (the so-called Dil-Breda option - from the name of the Belgian river and the Dutch city, which were to become the targets of the French first strike). However, the Germans realized that there was an information leak and decided to radically change their plan: strike through the Ardennes, and send weaker units to central Belgium as a diversion.

The densely forested Ardennes hills around Sedan, where the Germans made their breakthrough in May 1940, may appear to the casual observer as almost impenetrable terrain, hardly conducive to a modern army's advance. Even now, when many more good roads and bridges have been built in the area, the local forests and the Meuse River present a very serious obstacle. The members of the French general staff, from Pétain to Gamelin, are, apparently, difficult to recognize as inexperienced people, but they also came to the same conclusion long ago. As the German Army's five armored divisions fought through the forest and took control of the bridges over the Meuse, they were met by General André Corap's Ninth Army, manned mostly by elderly reservists and poorly trained recruits, one of the weakest links in the French defense.

Apparently, at first no one even noticed the long columns of German troops approaching Sedan from the north. When the Meuse Front collapsed and Corap's army was scattered, there were no strategic reserves that could rectify the situation - they simply were not available (together with the rest of the French army, reserve units were sent to Belgium). General Charles Enciger (his Second Army defended the eastern part of the border, from where no threats actually came), under whose overall leadership this entire sector was, refused to send reinforcements to the Ardennes. He was unaware of the scale of the disaster and, in any case, was misled by the misinformation of Goebbels, who intimidated the French with an immediate attack from the area adjacent to Switzerland.

When the French military command realized what had really happened, it was too late. Guderian and Rommel had penetrated northern France, advancing unstoppably towards the English Channel. Trapped, the main forces of the French army and the British Expeditionary Force retreated in despair, clinging to the coast; Moreover, on May 28, the Belgian king, having betrayed his allies, hastened to announce his surrender. This betrayal after the war cost him the throne. Gamelin and his officers, after several hesitant and poorly coordinated attempts at resistance, admitted defeat, and France fell 4 .

According to May, the weakness of the French defense was revealed only when Hitler got a head start thanks to the breakthrough in the Ardennes. The clumsy and pessimistic French generals, victims of the overestimation of the valor and power of the German army, common in the pre-war period, were unable to propose an emergency plan to eliminate the German breakthrough. They simply couldn’t think of anything better than sluggish attempts to patch up the holes and restore the front. It was no easier for the French to prepare for a quick war of maneuver than to believe that the Maginot Line would be completely unnecessary. Gamelin was so devoted to the concept of a “war with little blood on foreign territories” that neither he nor his political leaders were able to offer any constructive solutions when the war was transferred to French territory 5 .

But the weakest point of the French defense department was its ugly intelligence. May is particularly knowledgeable on this issue and convincingly shows how and why the French generals either did not know what the Germans were up to, or, worse, could not draw the necessary conclusions even from the information they had. They ignored any information that came to them that might cause them to shift their attention from the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg to the Ardennes, and, unlike the Germans, they did not have a special headquarters structure dedicated to the analysis, sifting and further dissemination of the intelligence received. And the quality of this information in any case left much to be desired: one of the messages from the intelligence service of the French air force, received in October 1939, said that “according to information received from reliable sources, the Hitler regime will remain in power until the spring 1940, after which he will be replaced by the communists."

In this context, the truly shocking confessions made by Gamelin after the war before the commission investigating the causes of the defeat become more understandable. Answering a question about the illiterate management of tank units, he said: “Personally, I believed that there were four tank divisions in the vicinity of Chalons. How was I to know that the Germans would scatter them? We had no information about where and how they would attack " 6 .

Professor May has written a study that is understandable to the general reader and, at the same time, impeccable from a scientific point of view, dedicated to one of the most important events in the history of the 20th century. Some of the minor touches of the picture he created are also brilliant (for example, Neville Chamberlain’s letter to his sister dated March 12, 1939, that is, exactly three days before Hitler captured Czechoslovakia: “As Chatham said, “I know that I can save this country , and I don’t believe that anyone else can do this""), and the selection of details, especially when it comes to Germany, is very wide and helps to understand much of what was previously unclear.

In general, May’s presentation, apparently, cannot be considered completely new: the international and domestic political situation against the backdrop of which Hitler launched an attack on France has already been described by Donald Cameron Watt and other researchers; the situation in France itself on the eve of the invasion was described in detail by Jean-Louis Cremieux-Brilac; many scientific works are devoted to military actions themselves 7 . It must be said that May treats her predecessors with complete and well-deserved confidence; I believe that the interpretation of events he proposed would generally not have raised any objections on their part. It is now generally accepted that Hitler was a lucky player who had to overcome the resistance of his overly cautious staff, and in the same way no one disputes the assertion that France, with better generals, could have drawn the enemy into a long war and fought it successfully. What actually happened was not inevitable .

However, Professor May places particular emphasis on the fact that the outcome of the Battle of France was largely predetermined by an element of chance, and this sometimes forces him to put forward very bold hypotheses that are not entirely consistent with the facts. If the French had foreseen the Ardennes offensive, he writes in the introduction to his book, “it is easy to imagine that it would have been the Germans who would have been defeated, and it would have ended with a French victory parade in Berlin, on Unter den Linden.” And this is not a random remark “as things go.” Four hundred pages later, May makes an even stronger statement: “But for the defeat of May 1940, moral disaster would, I think, threaten France no more than Great Britain, and less than Germany.” If the 1940 offensive had faltered, Nazi Germany “might have collapsed.” In my opinion, these statements are exaggerated and insufficiently thought out, although in general the attention that the author pays to the factor of chance can only be welcomed. If we want to explain the chaotic actions of the French in 1940, it is not enough to refer to collaborationism or to the internal political strife that plagued France between the wars. And if the cards had fallen differently in May, then, of course, many other things would have changed.

Here, however, difficulties arise. May writes: "If hostilities had begun where the French planned, the latter would have been able to do much more than they expected." Let's say. As evidence, May cites the short-term success of one of the best French generals, Georges Blanchard. On May 13, near Anne, southeast of Brussels, his armored units under the command of General René Priou quickly gained the upper hand over the enemy. This event allows May to hypothesize that, had Blanchard's First Army been in the right place at the right time, French tanks could have overwhelmed the German tank units.

But I can also add a whole series of “ifs” here. Blanchard's armored divisions were the flower of the French army, and in Belgium they were opposed not by Rommel's Fourth Armored Division, but by the small and relatively weak First and Second Armored Divisions. If Blanchard's troops had dealt with more powerful forces, they would probably have had a much more difficult time. And even if they had won, it would not have changed the situation radically. May asks a rhetorical question: what could have happened if Blanchard's troops had moved on after their success? Nobody knows: they didn’t do it. But I also ask: would they have moved further (even if they had managed to disperse not the secondary, but the main forces of the German army)? Gamelin's "plan" did not provide for this, and he, like the ill-fated Marshal Bazin in 1870, did not want to give up a single point. But if Prieu had been defeated, the French, still without a strategic reserve, suffering with their poor supplies, ineffective command system, etc., would have found themselves in a completely bad position. The matter would have turned into a complete disaster.

As we see, a whole chain of specifically directed “ifs” is needed to arrive at the point where the final victory of the French begins to look possible and even plausible. We have to discard not one or two random circumstances, but a whole sequence of factors - a complex structure that included the decisions made, the personalities of the people involved in what was happening, and the established order - thanks to which luck smiled on the Germans, and not on the French. nothing against the "Cleopatra's nose" approach to key historical events I have . Indeed, if Lenin had not managed to travel through Germany and arrive at the Finlyandsky Station in Petrograd in 1917, the history of the 20th century would have been completely different. But while the German victory was undoubtedly due in large part to Hitler's foresight in recognizing the weakness of the French, the very flaws he exposed (and which his generals failed to see) can only be explained in a broader context. This is the problem with all speculative reasoning: their authors snatch the last link in the chain of events, rightly note that it could have been completely different, and from this they conclude that either all the other links could also be different, or they do not have any significance.

However, in order for all other links to also be different, and in the sense we desire, a parallel universe is needed. And in order for them to have no significance, the historical context must be significantly distorted. Professor May traces with exceptional attention the undercurrents of internal German politics that made Hitler's position rather vulnerable, but completely ignores the contradictions of political life in France. This is understandable: he needs to support the thesis according to which Hitler, in the event of defeat, would be deposed, and France could well win. But this method of reasoning can hardly be called objective and balanced. Whenever Nazi generals expressed doubt or disagreement with Hitler's opinions, May accepted their statements on faith; When French generals express such fears or pessimistic sentiments, he calls their words mere rhetoric for the sake of inflating the military budget. If the statements of French generals or politicians sound optimistic, he takes them at face value. He lavishes praise on the technical power of the French army, but underestimates, if not completely neglects, the opinions of many people who testified to the cynicism widespread in French society and the contradictions that tore it apart.

Thanks to this systematic imbalance in understanding the facts, a peculiar picture is built: the victory of the Germans begins to look like something unexpected, and the defeat of the French - a coincidence of many accidents. However, truly significant historical factors are relegated to the shadows. In the end, I want to ask: why, in fact, were most of the French generals such scammers? Why, for example, on May 7, 1940, Gamelin restored the usual regime of vacations and dismissals in the French army - a decision that was downright blatant in its ignorance? Why did Encije, near Sedan, refuse to cover his troops from the air, turning them into an easy target for the German stormtroopers who were sowing wild terror? If, as May believes, good generals could save their homeland, the absence of such in the French army is the fact that requires explanation in the first place.

The answer should be sought in a photograph taken in September 1940 at a meeting of the Council of Ministers in Vichy. We see General Enzige here - he has exactly the same smug look as his boss Pétain, sitting nearby. Three months after the most brutal defeat of France in its entire history, the people directly responsible for this disgrace found cozy places for themselves in the government that came to power thanks to their mediocrity. General Maxime Weygand, who replaced Gamelin as commander-in-chief in the last days of the battles, became the first minister of defense of the Vichy government. As the Battle of France rapidly wound down, his main concern was not opposing the Germans, but the prospect of a Communist uprising in Paris that might follow hot on the heels of defeat. Perhaps these people did not necessarily have to lose the war, but they certainly accepted defeat too quickly, not least because they did not see the Germans as the main threat.

Weygand, like Pétain, was old enough and still remembered the Paris Commune of 1871 - the memory of that uprising weighed heavily on all the reactionary and monarchist-minded officers of this generation. France, which they swore to defend, from their point of view, had nothing to do with the left - the heirs of those communards whose martyrdom was commemorated every spring in eastern Paris. Even Gamelin, an apolitical general with stereotypical patriotic convictions, was not completely immune from prejudices of this kind. Back on May 16, when the outcome of the battle was not clear, he began to look for a scapegoat. The army, he told the country's political leadership, had collapsed due to the corrupting influence of the communists 9 .

May does not say a word about all this, because she is not at all interested in intra-French political contradictions, believing that by the end of the 1930s, destructive hatred was a thing of the past, and France had become no less, if not more, a monolithic and united country than Great Britain. Is it so? As recently as October 1937, the highly respectable publication Nouvelles economiqees et financieres spoke contemptuously of “the Jew Blum,” “our former Prime Minister, whose real name is Karfunkelstein.” In April 1938, after the Anschluss of Austria, Pierre Gaxotte (later a member of the French Academy) was not ashamed to call Blum “a wobbling puppet of non-French origin with the sullen face of a Palestinian gelding.” He further wrote: “We have to choose between France and this vile type. He is the embodiment of the disease that weakens the flesh and blood of the French. He is pure evil. He is death itself” 10 .

In The Dregs of Society, Arthur Koestler wrote about the terrible climate of nationalist hysteria and threats that developed in France in the final months leading up to Hitler's attack. However, the testimony of such a participant in the events as Charles de Gaulle is sufficient: it is clear from them that in the French parliament on March 21, 1940, at the time of the formation of the government of Paul Reynaud - when less than two months remained before the German invasion - an atmosphere of intolerance, paranoid anger, mutual hatred. If Ernest May really believes that in May 1940 the French were a united and unshakable nation ready to repel the enemy, he is deeply mistaken 11 .

The communists also did not forgive Blum for much: his policy of neutrality in the Spanish Civil War, the refusal of military assistance to the legitimate republican government in 1936, and his consistent efforts to achieve a compromise in the legislative initiatives of the Popular Front in the same 1936, and - this, probably most importantly, he successfully maneuvered, allowing him to maintain the independence of the French Socialist Party, which broke with the Communist Party in December 1920. In December 1940, the Communists approached the Vichy authorities with an informal offer to testify for the prosecution in the upcoming show trial against Blum. (Fortunately for the future reputation of the French Communist Party, the Vichyists ignored this kind offer.) The unions continued to seethe with anger over the Daladier laws introduced in November 1938, which effectively annulled the labor reforms introduced in 1936. The anti-fascist movement, which could have become an effective tool for uniting the nation, was undermined and disintegrated from within by the policies of several successive governments, most of all afraid of ruining relations with Mussolini, from whom France for some reason continued to expect help even when Hitler ironized its troops and she was on the verge of death. The army was flooded with conspirators - May does not mention a word about the so-called officers' conspiracy "Cagoul", uncovered by the Minister of the Interior Marx Dormoy (for which he was later killed by the Vichy militia). Laws against foreigners and against communists were passed in September 1939, long before Pétain came to power.

The worst thing was that the French did not feel confident in their abilities. For twenty years, their politicians and generals did nothing but talk sadly about the demographic decline, about the trauma caused by the great war, about the need to avoid a new conflict at all costs. When in 1940 the time came to encourage fellow citizens, to remind them that the French were not inferior to their enemies either in courage, or in weapons, or in bodily strength, or in fortitude, the pompous speeches of the same politicians and generals were naturally perceived by everyone as empty ritual spells. Collective fear and uncertainty had already permeated the nation's consciousness, compounding the very real shortage of the male population with an irrational sense of impotence.

None other than May cites in his book the words of the British ambassador in Paris, who in September 1938 stated: “All the best forces in France are against war and are ready to prevent it by almost any means.” When the war began a year later, Brigadier General Edward Spears, a Francophile who spoke two languages ​​equally well, wrote home that "many French... are angry that they may have been deceived and are now fighting for England " . It’s natural to ask the question: did the passions completely subside over the next six months? Of course no.

All this poorly explains the panic that erupted after the breakthrough of German tanks that came out through the Ardennes forests to Sedan. And without explaining to ourselves why it arose, we cannot understand everything else. Is fruitful historical speculation really impossible without distorting the real political and cultural context? I don't think so. And I don’t understand why, in order to write a good historical work about the war, one must, on the one hand, ignore the political and social background, and on the other, blindly believe in the power of chance. I can point to an exemplary essay that comprehensively takes into account the factors that determined the situation (it is interesting that its author analyzes a subject related to Professor May's topic).

I am referring to Michael Howard's work on the Franco-Prussian War, first published in 1961. The events of 1870-1871, as they are presented in this book, literally anticipate the events of May 1940 13 . In both cases, the French demonstrated extremely confused strategic thinking: while planning an offensive war, for some reason they always expected the first strike from the enemy. As Friedrich Engels noted in July 1870, when hostilities finally began, if the French had not launched an offensive, their declaration of war would have made no sense at all. However, in 1870, as in 1940, for some reason the French generals sent troops to the Saar region, after which they retreated and began to wait for further events. The tactical and managerial blunders were also strikingly similar. With an interval of seventy years, French military leaders stepped on the same rake twice with amazing consistency: they did not have time to look at the train schedule in time, send people and ammunition to the right places, effectively concentrate troops, properly organize a retreat and establish communications with each other. The same mistakes, but only earlier, were made by their predecessors in 1859, during the Italian campaign of Emperor Napoleon III. Both Michael Howard and Marc Block write about the "chaos" that reigned during the mobilization. And in 1870, as in 1940, German officers acted more flexibly and proactively, better adapting to changing circumstances.

As in 1940, the Germans did not have a serious technical advantage. Moreover, in 1870, the French had a new rifled rifle of the Chassepot system, loaded from the breech - the Germans at that time could not boast of anything similar. However, the French soldiers were not properly trained to use the new weapons (one is reminded of Sartre's description of the "reverent horror" with which French reservists in 1939 approached weapons that they had never seen before being drafted into the army). Thousands of rifles were simply abandoned in poorly located field armories. The French were as bad at intelligence gathering in 1870 as they would be seventy years later, so that German troop movements became a constant nightmare for them. Moltke, like his followers on Hitler's General Staff, attached great importance to skillful outflanking of the defensive positions of the French army and resorted to this maneuver as often as he could. This tactic, coupled with the French habit of invariably exaggerating the size of the enemy forces, led to the fact that static French divisions capitulated before the battle began.

The outcome of the Franco-Prussian War, with numerous French armies surrounded and captured at Sedan and Metz, was as much of a shock to France and the rest of Europe as the 1940 war. “The certainty of the victory won by the Prussian army amazed the whole world,” writes Michael Howard. It should be noted that in the 19th century, French generals, like their followers, were determined to avoid social revolution even at the cost of national capitulation. However, some of them fully appreciated the scale of their humiliation and tried, like General Bourbaki, to save their honor by committing suicide (the soldiers of 1940, as far as we know, were far from such motives).

Howard is scathing about these goofball generals, writing about their "incompetence and confusion" and repeatedly pointing out that they had the opportunity to behave completely differently. However, in his narrative he avoids speculating about what, based on the broad hypothetical context, was in principle possible. For example, about the demoralizing effect that poorly organized mobilization had on soldiers, he writes the following: “Under the leadership of talented generals, they could have won more than one victory, but even this would not have allowed them to withstand the shock of defeat.” The general conclusion that Howard comes to in his work differs very significantly from May’s conclusions:

The incompetence of the French high military command explains a lot, but the main reasons for the collapse should be sought deeper than the French who survived the severe humiliation could see them. The defeat at Sedan, just like the defeat that the Prussians suffered at Jena forty-six years earlier, was the result not simply of incompetent command, but of a vicious military system as such, and the military system of a state cannot be an independent fragment of its social system: it is one from the facets of society, taken in its entirety. The French had every reason to see their misfortunes as a kind of verdict on their society.

With Ernest May's permission, we will apply this conclusion to the 1940 disaster.

The New York Review of Books, February 22, 2001

Translation by G. Markov

Notes:

1 Nicole Jordan. Strategy and Scapegoatism: Reflections on the French National Catastrophe, 1940, in Joel Blatt, editor, The French Defeat of 1940: Reassessments. - Berghahn Books, 1998, p. 13.

2 Marc Bloch. Strange Defeat: Testimony written in 1940. - Paris: Societe des Editions Franc-Tireurs, 1946.

3 As Raymond Aron later wrote, “in the 30s I felt despair at the decline that France was experiencing... If you look at it, France no longer existed. If there was anything else, it was in the hatred that the French had for each other.” See: Tony Judt. Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956. - University of California Press, 1992, p. 15.

4 The Belgian government, which declared its neutrality in 1936, never showed much desire to cooperate with France and did not allow French and British troops to enter Belgian territory until 6.30 am on May 10, the day the Germans attacked France.

5 Nicole Jordan. The Cut-Price War on the Peripheries: The French General Staff, the Rheinland and Czechoslovakia, in Robert Boyce and Esmonde M. Robertson, editors, Paths to War: New Essays on the Origins of the Second World War. - St.Martin▓s, 1989, pp. 128-166; Nicole Jordan, The Popular Front and Central Europe: The Dilemmas of French Impotence, 1918-1940. - Cambridge University Press, 1992.

6 Events that occurred in France from 1933 to 1945: Testimonies and documents collected by the Parliamentary Inquiry Commission (Paris: Imprimerie de l▓Assemblee Nationale, nd), Vol. 2, p. 548.

7 Donald Cameron Watt. How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second World War, 1938-1939. - Pantheon, 1989; Jean-Louis Cremieux-Brilhac. Les Francais de l▓an 40, two volumes. - Paris: Gallimard, 1990; Alistair Horne. To Lose a Battle: France 1940. - Viking, 1969.

8 “If Cleopatra’s nose were shorter, the whole face of the earth would change” (B. Pascal. “Thoughts”). - Approx. translation

9 Today the Paris Commune of 1871 is not often remembered. Yet for more than a century it has remained one of the main historical symbols for the French and European left and a bogeyman for conservatives around the world. From Lenin to Weygand and beyond, including the streets of Paris in 1968, her memory and her shadow were constantly invoked by figures from different political camps, pointing to her as a model or, conversely, a formidable warning. More recent work in English on this subject: Robert Tombs. The Paris Commune, 1871. - Longman, 1999.

10 Pierre Birnbaum. A political myth: "The Jewish Republic". - Paris: Fayard, 1988.

11 Arthur Koestler. Scum of the Earth. -Macmillan, 1941; Charles de Gaulle. War Memories, Vol. 1: The Call. - Paris: Plon, 1955, p. 25.

12 This letter appears in the article by John C. Cairns, “Reflections on France, Great Britain and the Winter Lead-up to the War, 1939-1940,” in the above-mentioned book, edited by Joel Blatt: The Defeat of France in 1940: Towards a New Appraisal of Events; 1998, p. 283. Spears' memoirs shed bright light on the mood that prevailed in France at that time. See: Edward L. Spears. Assignment to Catastrophe, Vol. 1: Prelude to Dunkirk, July 1939 - May 1940; Vol. 2: The Fall of France, June 1940. - AAWyn, 1954 and 1954.

13 Michael Howard. The Franco-Prussian War: the German Invasion of France, 1870-1871. - London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1961; Collier, 1969.