The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940

The

Collapse of the Third Republic

An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940

William L. Shirer

The Collapse of the Third Republic

Copyright © 1969, 2014 by William L. Shirer

Cover art, special contents, and electronic edition © 2014 by RosettaBooks LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Cover design by Alexia Garaventa

ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795342479

To the memory of my brother John,

who died suddenly

as the last lines of this book

were being written

Contents

Foreword

PROLOGUE

1. Debacle! Summer 1940

BOOK ONE THE RISE OF THE THIRD REPUBLIC 1871–1919

2. A Freakish Birth and Early Growing Pains 1871–1891

3. The Dreyfus Affair 1894–1906

4. The Consolidation of the Republic 1880–1914

5. Classes and Conflict 1875–1914

6. The Permanent Political Crisis 1875–1914

7. The Achievements of the Third Republic 1875–1914

8. The Coming of the First World War 1905–1914

9. The Third Republic’s Finest Hour 1914–1918

BOOK TWO ILLUSIONS AND REALITIES OF VICTORY 1919–1934

10. Victorious France—The Greatest Power in Europe 1919–1931

11. Decline, I: Political and Financial Chaos, and the Poincaré Recovery 1924–1930

12. Decline, II: The Erosion of Military Power 1925–1934

13. Decline, III: The World Depression Shakes the Third Republic 1931–1934

BOOK THREE THE LAST YEARS OF THE THIRD REPUBLIC 1934–1939

14. A Fateful Turning Point February 6, 1934

15. Aftermath: Widening of the Gulf 1934–1936

16. Coup in the Rhineland: The Last Chance to Stop Hitler and Avert a Major War March 1936

17. France Further Divided—the Front Populaire and the Spanish Civil War 1936–1937

18. Dissension and Disarray: France and the Anschluss March 1938

19. The Road to Munich, I: April 27–September 13, 1938

20. The Road to Munich, II: September 15–28, 1938

21. The Conference at Munich September 29–30, 1938

22. The Turn of Poland 1939

23. A Summer’s Interlude in Paris May–July 1939

24. The Talks with Russia Summer 1939

25. On the Eve of War August 23–31, 1939

26. The Launching of World War II September 1–3, 1939

BOOK FOUR THE WAR AND THE DEFEAT 1939–1940

27. La Drôle de Guerre September 3, 1939–April 9, 1940

28. On the Eve: The War in Norway, the Threat to Belgium and the Crisis in Paris Spring 1940

29. The Battle of France, I: The Armies Close In May 10–15, 1940

30. The Battle of France, II: Disaster at Sedan. The Breakthrough at the Meuse May 13–16. 1940

31. The Battle of France, III: Disaster in Flanders and the Surrender of Belgium May 16–June 4, 1940

32. The Fall of Paris June 5–14, 1940

33. The Flight to Bordeaux June 11–14, 1940

34. The Agony of Bordeaux. The Fall of Reynaud. Pétain Takes Over June 14–16, 1940

35. Armistice! June 17–29, 1940

BOOK FIVE THE COLLAPSE OF THE THIRD REPUBLIC

36. The End at Vichy June–July 1940

Epilogue

Footnotes

Notes

Acknowledgments

FOREWORD

This is the second book in which I have attempted to set down out of my own experience and from the mass of historical material that eventually became available what happened to a great European nation in the years that were climaxed by the Second World War. In the first work I wrote of the rise and fall of Nazi Germany and how it came that a cultured, Christian people lapsed into barbarism in the midst of the twentieth century, gladly abandoning their freedoms and the ordinary decencies of human life and remaining strangely indifferent to the savagery with which they treated other nations, other races. I was aided in that task by the availability of a unique source of information: the secret archives of the Third Reich, which were captured by the Allies at the end of the war. I was helped too, I feel, by a personal acquaintance with Nazi Germany, in which I had lived and worked during more than half its twelve years of existence.

The lack of the perspective of time for all who labor in the field of contemporary history is more than compensated, I believe, by the experience of having lived through the events themselves, by the firsthand knowledge one acquires of the leading characters caught up in them, by the feel one gets for the nature and mood of the country, the society, the institutions, and above all the people at a time of crisis. The History of the Peloponnesian War does not suffer, it seems to me, for Thucydides having lived through, as he tells us, the whole of the war, of which he has left us such an unforgettable account. One is grateful to him for not leaving the writing of it to others who came later.

I lived and worked in France for a good many years, beginning in 1925 when the country was not only the greatest power on the continent of Europe but, to me at least, the most civilized and enlightened. In the ensuing years I watched with increasing apprehension the Third Republic go downhill, its strength gradually sapped by dissension and division, by an incomprehensible blindness in foreign, domestic, and military policy, by the ineptness of its leaders, the corruption of its press, and by a feeling of growing confusion, hopelessness, and cynicism (Je m’en foutisme) in its people. And though at the beginning of the 1930s I left for assignments elsewhere, I returned frequently to Paris throughout the decade and thus was able to keep in touch with the deterioration one could see—or at least feel—all around.

From the very beginning I liked the country and the people, became sympathetically involved in discussion and study of their problems, their leaders, their politics, their journalism, their literature, and like Jefferson and many other Americans who have lived and worked there, came to feel that Paris was my second home, a sentiment that has never left me. Though I did not try to hide my sympathies and prejudices, I was, after all, a foreigner, and this gave one a certain objectivity, keeping one out of the partisan battles and making one skeptical of many claims from the Right, Left, or Center. Since the extreme Right and Left in the thirties wanted, for opposite reasons, an end of the Third Republic, my affinities were with the Socialists on the Left, the Radical-Socialists in the Center, and the moderate conservatives slightly right of Center. These represented the vast majority of Frenchmen, were the bulwark of the Republic, and one hoped they would know how to preserve it through thick and thin.

Obviously the fall of France and the collapse of the Third Republic the summer of 1940 is a painful subject to Frenchmen and they would sooner forget it. Not many French historians have yet tackled it. René Rémond, the political scientist and historian, deplored in 1957 the lack of books on the last ten years of the Republic. Not only historians but journalists, he said, stayed off the subject, and even the learned journals were wary of approaching it. Since then a beginning has been made. Jacques Chastenet and Edouard Bonnefous have rounded out their multivolumed histories of the Third Republic with accounts of its last years and end. Earlier, E. Beau de Loménie wrote well of its death, and other French historians have covered various aspects, among them Pierre Renouvin, Maurice Baumont, François Goguel, René Rémond, J-B. Duroselle and Pierre Dhers.

In no country, including my own, have I ever received such cooperation in the work of research as I got in France from historians, editors, librarians, and some of the leading political figures in the drama itself. The first three, besides offering new insights, guided me to material I would not otherwise have obtained and often provided it themselves from their own private sources. Paul Reynaud, the Premier during the last climactic months of the Republic, sent me letters and memoranda of great length in answer to my queries and supplemented them with long talks in his apartment behind the old Chamber of Deputies. Edouard Daladier, who was either Premier or Minister of Defense, or both, for four years until replaced by Reynaud toward the very end, talked with me for hours. These were the two key political figures during the last years of the Republic.

There were difficulties, to be sure. The main one was a law which forbids making available to scholars, or to anyone else, confidential state documents until they have gathered dust in the files for fifty years. But even after fifty years the French government holds back. I was informed in writing, for example, by the technical counselor of the Ministry of the Armies, M. de la Fournière, that unfortunately the archives of the Historical Section of the Army were not available to researchers—not even, he added, to the generals of the French Army—for any period later than 1900. The French Foreign Office kindly sent me a copy of an order releasing for the perusal of scholars certain dossiers up to 1815, others up to 1849, still others up to 1896. It seemed to shy away from the twentieth century. Recently, however, the Foreign Office has begun to publish its confidential papers for the 1930s, though it has been handicapped by the loss of many of its original documents, burned in the courtyard of the Quai d’Orsay on May 16, 1940, in a moment of panic when reports reached frightened officials that German tanks and troops were approaching the capital. Winston Churchill was among the notables who watched the bonfire from a second-story window.

André Chamson, director of the National Archives, wrote that he was deeply grieved that he could not make accessible the Riom Court papers I had asked to see. But we have to stick very firmly, he added, to the ‘law of 50 years,’ especially in the matter of papers covering the last war and the occupation. Chamson’s grief is genuine. He is a noted author and member of the Académie Française, and understands a writer’s problems. He was not, unfortunately, in this instance, the law. Even the eminent Professor Pierre Renouvin of the Sorbonne, himself in overall charge of the postwar publication of the state’s secret papers, was complaining in 1958 that the French archives… are still not accessible, even to privileged researchers. And Reynaud and Daladier complained to me that, because of the law, they were being denied access to their own state papers acquired when they were in office, though Reynaud must have taken the bulk of his with him, for they pile up in his published memoirs.

French historians have fretted and fumed about the famous, or, as they say, infamous loi de cinquante ans. Still, I found in the end, as they did, that most of the confidential material could be obtained—without breaking the law. For one thing, the political leaders and generals, particularly the latter, have made them available either in their memoirs or in their sworn testimony at the postwar trials of collaborators, especially those of Pétain and Laval, or during exhaustive questioning by the Parliamentary Investigating Committee, which was charged by the National Assembly to look into the events that took place in France from 1933 to 1945. It heard testimony and accumulated documentation for five years, from 1945 to 1950. It became a rather common sight to see former cabinet ministers, diplomats, generals, and admirals appear on these occasions and, as they testified, pull out of bulging briefcases sheafs of secret documents which they had retained and which they used to bolster their case. The Parliamentary Investigating Committee published several hundred key documents, many of them left by those it interrogated, others pried out of a reluctant government. The Committee’s nine volumes of testimony of nearly all the principal figures of the last years of the Republic, all of them subject to searching cross-examination, provides much firsthand material.

In fact, before I had finished my research in Paris in the late 1960s, the material was becoming mountainous, and it took some time to make one’s way out of the thick woods of documentation and testimony into the clearing.

The so-called Wilhelmstrasse Documents, published by the German Foreign Office in 1941 and covering events in France from May 29, 1939, to June 3, 1940, are of considerable value. These consisted of a selection from 1800 cartons of secret papers from the French Foreign Office (apparently all that had not been burned) and 30 cartons of confidential military documents, including many papers of General Gamelin, the Commander in Chief of the French armies in 1939–40. German troops had found them in June 1940, in a French railroad train stalled by bombing at a village on the Loire.i To lend authenticity to its publication, which it entitled The Secret Documents of the French High Command, the Wilhelmstrasse included in its volume the photostats of the originals.

It would have been impossible to write of the Battle of France without having at hand the secret orders and reports of the French High Command and of the commanding generals in the field. (We already have those of the Germans from their captured papers.) Despite the restrictive law, most of these are now available through the writings of Colonel Pierre Lyet, the semiofficial military historian, both in his book on the battle and in articles in the Revue Historique de l’Armée, of which he is editor. Other officers, some from the Service Historique de l’Armée, presided over by the genial and learned General de Cossé-Brissac, have revealed further orders, dispatches, and decisions in that publication and also in the invaluable Revue d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale. General Gamelin in his three volumes of memoirs gives many more, as does General Weygand, his successor, in his memoirs. General Roton, Chief of Staff to General Georges, who commanded actual operations during the battle, has added still more in his published journal. Though they are not nearly as complete as the French military papers published after the First World War, when France was victorious, and which included two volumes of orders and dispatches, they suffice to give an accurate picture of what happened and, especially, what went wrong.

The memoirs, journals, and diaries of the prominent figures in government, Parliament, the Army, and diplomacy, of which there has been a virtual torrent since the end of the last war, have a value, I think, far beyond the run of such sources ordinarily. With the usual reservations for the special pleading of the authors (Gamelin’s, Weygand’s, Paul Baudouin’s, and Georges Bonnet’s are at times staggering), they not only provide firsthand information of what was said and done—and sometimes plotted—but they are full of the texts of secret documents often not obtainable elsewhere. And they can be checked not only against the writings of each author’s French rivals but against the confidential dispatches and memoranda of the British, Germans, and Americans in their dealings with the French, most of which are now available.

All in all, I have come to the conclusion that by one means or another, despite the law of fifty years, we now have almost all the essential documentary material concerning the last years of the Republic and its collapse in July 1940.

As with the book on the Third Reich, I have found it necessary to go back a bit in history. This seemed to me to be especially important for the story of the Third Republic’s end. I have not tried to write its history. That would take several volumes. But it was necessary to delve into it in some depth in order to comprehend not only what was lost when it went under but how and why it became ripe for its fall. A great nation, though it experiences the worst of luck, does not suddenly collapse out of the blue. The seeds of its ruin are planted long before. The threads that lead to ultimate disaster can be traced back. This was particularly the case with the Third Republic. The seeds can be seen planted during the nineteenth century; the threads are not hard to pick up and follow.

France, it is true, fell as the result of one battle that raged for six weeks in the spring and summer of 1940. But as Montesquieu observed: If the hazard of a battle, that is, a particular cause, ruins a State, there was a general cause which determined that this State had to perish from a single battle. Yet only a quarter of a century before the Third Republic had been strong enough, its government, Army, people, and institutions tough enough, to survive a succession of bloody and disastrous battles. In the ensuing twenty-five years something happened that sapped that strength and toughness so that at the first visitation of adversity the Republic floundered and expired. This is the subject of most of this book.

Deliberately I have avoided drawing lessons from this story for the benefit of those living in or running the democracies of the Western world today, though it would not be difficult, I suppose, for the reader to draw his own conclusions. History must speak for itself. A historian is content if he has been able to shed some light. As the French poet-diplomat. Paul Claudel once observed: It is not enough to know the past. It is necessary to understand it. The lessons follow from that.

Prologue

1

DEBACLE!

SUMMER 1940

The collapse of the French Third Republic in the balmy May-June-July days of 1940 was an awesome spectacle.

In the span of six weeks during that spring and early summer of weather more lovely than anyone in France could remember since the end of the previous war, this old parliamentary democracy, the world’s second largest empire, one of Europe’s principal powers and perhaps its most civilized, and reputedly possessing one of the finest armies in the world, went down to utter military defeat, leaving its citizens, who had been heirs to a long and glorious history, dazed and then completely demoralized.

Before they could recover their senses an eighty-four-year-old, nearly senile Marshal, a legendary hero of the First World War, aided and indeed prodded by a handful of defeated generals and defeatist politicians, completed the debacle by jettisoning in mid-July, with the approval of a stampeded parliament, the Third Republic and its democratic way of life, and replacing it with a fascist dictatorship that attempted to ape a good many aspects, though not all, of the totalitarian regime of the Nazi German conquerors.

By this means these Frenchmen hoped not only to alleviate the bitter consequences of defeat but to wipe out their country’s admittedly imperfect democracy, which, though it had heaped honors and favors on them and afforded them vast opportunities to further their professional careers and enrich their lives and, more often than not, their pocketbooks, they had long despised, and which now, in its agony, they scorned, claiming that it was responsible for the terrible defeat.

The twentieth century, strewn as it was with the wrecks of many a mighty empire, had not previously seen such a sudden cataclysm. One had to go back to the previous century to find even the faintest parallel. In 1806 the France of Napoleon I had quickly brought Prussia to heel. In 1870 the France of Napoleon III had been crushed by Prussia in forty-two days. But in the First World War, France, with the help of her allies, not only had held out for four years against the onslaught of the ancient foe but had emerged victorious in 1918. Little wonder that in June 1940 the swift annihilation of France by Hitler’s Germany stunned the minds of vanquished and victor alike and of most men who had followed the course of battle from near or from far. It seemed beyond the power of the mind to grasp.

It was the most terrible collapse, a French historian sadly recounted, in all the long story of our national life.ii,¹ To the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain it was an unprecedented humiliation of a great nation.²

In Paris, the fallen capital, I noted in my diary on June 17: I have a feeling that what we’re seeing here is the complete breakdown of French society—a collapse of the army, of government, of the morale of the people. It is almost too tremendous to believe.iii,³

How, I wondered, had it come about? How was it possible? What were the terrible weaknesses, the defects, the blindness and the stumblings that had brought this gifted people to such a low and pitiful state? Sometimes in history, I tried to remember, a nation went down not so much because of its own flaws as because of the attacking nation’s unexpectedly tremendous strength. Was this but the latest example? For years from Berlin I had watched Nazi Germany’s mercurial rise in military might, which the sleeping democracies in the West did little to match. I had followed too at first hand Hitler’s cynical but amazingly successful diplomacy, which had so easily duped the West and which had paved the way for one quick military conquest after another. But still—and notwithstanding—the French debacle in the midst of which I now found myself was quite incomprehensible. Not even the German generals I had talked with in Berlin had expected it. Though they knew some of its weaknesses and had planned to take advantage of them, they had had a decent respect for the French army, acquired by personal experience in the 1914–1918 war and by their remembrance of history that went back to the Napoleonic wars.

***

About noon that day, June 17, I had come into Paris on the heels of the rapidly advancing German army, with which I was an accredited, neutral, American correspondent, the United States not yet having been shoved into the war by the Japanese and by Hitler. It was one of those lovely June days, bright and sunny under a cloudless sky and not too warm, that had often made life seem so wondrous in this ancient and beautiful metropolis, where I had worked and lived for some years between the wars before moving on to other European capitals and eventually to Berlin—though there never was a year that I did not return to Paris on some kind of assignment or pretext and thus was able to follow at first hand, to some extent, the troubled affairs of a country that had become, spiritually, my second home.iv

On this June day the usually teeming streets were empty of the French. On the sidewalks there was scarcely a human being to be seen except for an occasional group of strolling German soldiers in their dark-gray uniforms gaping like tourists at the familiar landmarks of the great city. The stores were closed, the iron shutters drawn tight over the shop windows, the blinds closed snugly on the windows in the residential quarters, much as they would be in an ordinary August when half the Parisians deserted the city for vacations at the seashore or in the countryside or up in the mountains.

Now, most of them had fled. According to police estimates, only 700,000—out of five million—inhabitants were left in the city by June 14, the day the Germans entered.⁵ Two days before, when a great pall of smoke from burning oil depots in the suburbs hung over the nearly deserted capital, a stray herd of cows from a dairy farm at Auteuil could be seen meandering about the Place de l’Alma in the center of Paris almost under the shadow of the Eiffel Tower across the Seine.⁶

There was now, in this third week of June, a horde of more than eight million panic-stricken refugees strung out for hundreds of miles on the roads south of Paris between the rivers Seine and Loire and beyond. Before the Parisians fled en masse on the approach of the Germans, six million others, including two million from Belgium, had abandoned their homes and farms in the north and northeast and lit out by any means available toward the south to keep from being captured by the enemy. Many of them had experienced life under German occupation in the first war and were determined to spare themselves and their children that fate this time. Since almost all roads in France led to Paris, many of these refugees had passed through the capital during the last fortnight of May, a considerable number in the relative comfort of packed railroad trains. Their passing had been quite orderly and some had remained in the city in the belief that Paris, as in 1914, would be held. Their arrival, however, increased the feeling of uneasiness among the Parisians, who, without accurate news of the collapsing front from their government and army chiefs, fed on mounting rumor and began to fear the worst.

There had been a bad scare toward the end of the first week of battle, on May 15, when it was learned that the Germans had broken through at the Meuse river crossings at Sedan and north of that ill-fated city, whose fall had doomed France in 1870. The High Command had informed the government—to its amazement—that there was nothing to stop the enemy armored columns from reaching Paris within twenty-four hours.

Last night, Premier Paul Reynaud had wired the new British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, urgently, we lost the battle. The route to Paris is open.⁷

Seized by panic, high officials at the French Foreign Office began dumping secret state documents out of the windows to bonfires in the yard below, and the smoke had drifted up the Seine to the nearby Chamber of Deputies, giving its members pause for thoughts about getting away in time. Word spread over Paris, and many citizens hastily departed. But the German panzer columns had bypassed Paris and raced unimpeded westward to the Channel, cutting off the flower of the French army, all of the Belgian army, and nine of ten divisions of the British Expeditionary Force in Flanders. This had given Paris a respite.

On Sunday, May 19, the day after Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain, eighty-four, the hero of Verdun, had joined the government as Vice-Premier, and the very day General Maxime Weygand, seventy-three, the aide of Foch in the first war, replaced the faltering Generalissimo Maurice Gamelin, sixty-eight, a former aide of Joffre, as Commander in Chief, the members of the government and Parliament, led by the President of the Republic and the Premier, had gone to pray at Notre Dame for the miracle of deliverance.v No doubt they were thinking of the miracle of the Marne that had stopped the onrushing Germans before Paris in the second month of battle in 1914 and turned the tide of the whole war. But now on barely the tenth day of battle there was neither a Joffre nor a Foch nor a Galliéni to lead and inspire the French army. Their successors, Gamelin and Weygand and Georges, were of a different stripe.

The prayers, led by the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, had not been answered. The Germans, after rounding up the trapped French forces which had not been able, or willing, to get away by sea with the British at Dunkirk—the Belgian army had surrendered unconditionally on May 28—resumed their offensive on the Somme and Aisne on June 5. The French defenders, now outnumbered two to one and assisted by only one British division, quickly gave way. By June 9 the enemy armor was close enough to Paris to prompt the government to decide to depart the next evening. When the Parisians learned of the government’s flight they joined it.

Between June 9 and 13, when the Germans arrived at the gates of the city, two million Parisians, men, women, and children, took off in utter panic toward the south, packing a few belongings on the roofs of their small cars or on the racks of motorcycles or bicycles or in baby carts, peddler’s carts, wheelbarrows, or in any wheeled contrivance they could lay a hasty hand on, for many were on foot.vi They had no idea of their destination; they wanted only to keep out of the clutch of the Germans, who under Hitler’s brutal rule were rumored to be even more barbarian than the Germans of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had shot so many hostages when they overran Belgium and northern France in 1914.vii

No provision for food, drink, and lodging had been made for so many suddenly uprooted millions. The authorities had not foreseen such a massive and pitiful exodus. At night these desperate people, when they were not on the move, slept in their cars or in the fields. By day they scrounged for food where they could find it and sometimes pillaged. The towns and villages through which they inched their way on the jammed roads were usually emptied of their own dwellers, who, in a sort of chain reaction, had joined the first column of refugees that appeared, so that the food stores and bakeries were closed or their shelves empty. A few peasants along the route dispensed food and even water, sometimes at a highly profitable price, but this was but a drop in the bucket.viii

In Paris we heard from returning correspondents of this frightened, leaderless swarm of citizenry fleeing down the roads so choked with traffic and so snarled that even when the gasoline held out and the overheated motors continued to revolve, a man was lucky to make twenty-five or thirty miles in twenty-four hours in a car packed tight with the members of his family and bulging with baggage roped down on the roof under a mattress to protect, it was somehow hoped, against bombs from the sky. For the German Luftwaffe, which first had terrorized the French troops, was now bombing civilian refugees, especially those crowding the approaches to bridges and crossroads, which might have been military objectives had they been defended by French soldiers. For a week the German aviators had been joined by the Italians, who seemed to the terror-stricken refugees to outdo the Germans in attacking them.¹²

On June 10 Italy had entered the war on the side of Germany and had tried to assault what was left of a stricken France.ix The Italian army had not had any success for a week, nor would it to the end, against the handful of determined French troops defending the Alpine passes and the entrance to the Riviera. But against the logjams of terrified civilians on the roads the Italians, from the safety of the undefended air, were more successful.

Along the congested thoroughfares French soldiers were now enmeshed with civilians in the wild scramble to keep out of the reach of the pursuing enemy. Most of these troops, cut off from their units in the confusion of retreat, had thrown away their arms. They blended quickly into the columns of fleeing refugees. Units that were still intact and armed milled around in the towns or villages or at the approaches to bridges waiting for orders that never came. The President of the Republic, Albert Lebrun, himself fleeing with the government from Tours to Bordeaux on June 14, noted that the towns and villages are full of idle troops. What are they doing there, inert, when one needs them so badly elsewhere? It was for him, he added, a mystery.¹³

By blocking the roads the refugees not only impeded the movement of those troops that did try to move forward to stem the German tide but often held up the retreat of units until they were overrun by enemy armored formations and captured. The General Staff of the French Seventh Army, drawing back from the Seine to the Loire, complained that its movement has been rendered almost impossible by the afflux of refugees encumbering the roads with their cars and carts. The villages and crossroads are places of indescribable bottlenecks.¹⁴

Most demoralizing of all to army units still trying to fight were the efforts of civilians to prevent them from offering further resistance that might damage their homes and shops. At one village on the River Indre the local inhabitants extinguished the fuses of explosives already lit by army engineers to blow the bridge there and slow down the German advance. French troops digging in at Poitiers were surprised to see the mayor driving out with a white flag to surrender the town to the Germans. He was backed by the inhabitants, who had threatened to tear down the barricades erected by the soldiers.¹⁵ French civilians, like so many of the troops, had no more stomach for the fighting that had started only a month before.

Perhaps it made little difference now. The remaining French armies that had tried to stand on the Somme and Aisne and then along the Seine and Marne had either been chewed to pieces by German tanks or were in disorderly retreat toward the Loire and upper Seine east of Paris. On June 11 General Alphonse Georges, commanding the collapsing front, estimated he had left the equivalent of only thirty divisions—out of sixty in line the week before—from the sea to the beginning of the Maginot Line, and they were exhausted from trying to fight by day and retreat by night. On June 12 the great Maginot Line of fortifications in the east, which had not been penetrated by the enemy, was abandoned on the orders of General Weygand. But the move came too late, and four days later the 400,000 retreating fortress troops were encircled by the Germans.

On the abandonment of Paris, Supreme Headquarters had been moved temporarily to Briare, on the Loire east of Tours, where General Weygand, backed by Marshal Pétain, spent much time relaying the increasingly catastrophic news to the government and urging it to acknowledge defeat and give up the hopeless struggle.

The government itself was in disarray. After struggling all night to get their cars through the mass of refugees on the clogged roads, the cabinet members and their skeleton staffs had arrived from Paris at the Loire on the morning of June 11 and scattered to various châteaux in the region of Tours. There was only one antiquated telephone in each castle (usually in the downstairs toilet), none of them in good working order and each connected only with the nearest village, where the operator insisted on taking off the customary two hours for lunch and closing down at 6 P.M.

There was little communication between the cabinet ministers and none at all with the outside world. Paul Baudouin, Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs, who was in charge of the displaced Foreign Office, found his only source of news in a portable field radio which the British Ambassador had thought to bring along. When Baudouin, on the afternoon of the 11th, went to see the President of the Republic at the Château de Cangé, he found the nation’s chief magistrate entirely isolated, without news from the Premier, without news from Supreme Headquarters, depressed, overwhelmed. He knows nothing.¹⁶

Parliament, which might have helped to sustain the bewildered government in its determination to fight on in spite of the faltering generals, could not be assembled during such a headlong flight. Everyone knew that the halt on the Loire would be brief because of the approaching Germans, but no one knew where the government would flee to next. On the 12th, Reynaud, weary and disheartened but still resolved to continue the fight, tried to persuade his colleagues to agree to the government moving westward into the Brittany peninsula, where he hoped a stand could be made with the help of the British. But he was overruled. Bordeaux, to which the government had gone temporarily in 1914 at the time of the Marne, seemed a safer haven to the majority. General Weygand himself had urged the government to remain in Paris even at the risk of capture, prompting President Lebrun to exclaim that the general must be mad.¹⁷

To one foreign observer they all seemed a little mad, the leaders of government and of the army, as they thrashed about the Loire quarreling as to what to do next. A mad-house, General Sir Edward L. Spears, Churchill’s liaison officer with Reynaud, called it. He had been exasperated when on the morning of June 13 he arrived at the Château de Chissay to see the Premier.

In the courtyard, I saw to my utter astonishment Madame de Portes in a dressing-gown over red pyjamas, directing the traffic from the steps of the main entrance. She was shouting to the drivers where to park.¹⁸

Countess Hélène de Portes, Reynaud’s mistress, was reputed to have a strong and strange hold over the Premier, and the dismayed British general felt that she was now making the most of it. She had joined Pétain, Weygand, Baudouin, and other defeatists to try to wear him down to the point of taking France out of the war.

There had been another titled lady very much in the picture until a few days before. This was the Marquise de Crussol, the mistress of Edouard Daladier. The two women had been as bitter rivals as were their illustrious lovers. By their driving ambition on behalf of their respective men they had added to the intrigues, the confusions—and the titillation—of French politics. But Daladier, one of the political bulwarks of the Third Republic for a decade, and Premier and Minister of Defense when France entered the war, had fallen from power when Reynaud, who had succeeded him as Premier on March 21, finally eliminated him altogether from the government on June 5 in the midst of the debacle. The Countess de Portes now had the stage to herself, so far as a woman was concerned, and she would flutter on and off it, raging, ranting, weeping, and intriguing to make the man she supposedly loved and for whom she had been so ambitious do what he seemed resolved not to do.

***

The day the German army entered Paris, June 14, the French government fled from its temporary halting place on the Loire to Bordeaux in the southwest corner of France. The end was approaching. Late that evening the haggard cabinet ministers, after struggling through the traffic jams of milling refugees and troops, straggled into the port city, exhausted and demoralized. General Spears, who saw Reynaud at midnight, found him worn out… forlorn and undecided.¹⁹

General Weygand, the Commander in Chief, journeyed to Bordeaux more leisurely in his special train, arriving the following afternoon in fighting trim to pit himself against the Premier, who, though weary and depressed, still stubbornly refused to give up. The general was convinced that further fighting against the Germans was senseless. He intended to concentrate on fighting Paul Reynaud and a government he despised.

The showdown between these clashing temperaments came at Bordeaux on the weekend of Saturday—Sunday, June 15–16. Reynaud insisted on General Weygand asking for a cease-fire while the government moved on to French North Africa to continue the war from there. Weygand refused, declaring that such a step would be contrary to the honor of the French Army. He demanded that the government which had declared war on Germany now ask for an armistice. The venerable Marshal Pétain backed him up. At a cabinet meeting on the morning of June 16 he submitted his resignation, in writing. The government, he stated, must immediately cease hostilities. Many ministers, led by the other Vice-Premier, Camille Chautemps, the great compromiser, began to side with the military.

Feeling himself opposed by the majority of his cabinet and by the High Command, Paul Reynaud gave in and resigned shortly after 8 P.M. on June 16. The President of the Republic, who already had caved in, immediately named Pétain to succeed him. At thirty minutes past midnight of that fateful Sunday the new French government of the Marshal, with Weygand as Minister of Defense, asked the Germans for an armistice.

***

Six days later, on June 22, 1940, in the little clearing in the Forest of Compiègne at Rethondes north of Paris, on the exact spot where the defeated Germans had signed an armistice on November 11, 1918, I watched the French, in their turn, capitulate. Hostilities ceased at thirty-five minutes past midnight on June 24, after the French had signed that evening in Rome an armistice with Italy. The day before, Pierre Laval, who had been so long in eclipse, since 1936, and deeply resented it, was named a Minister of State in the Pétain government. In the chaotic corridors of Bordeaux he had already set to work to bury the Third Republic, which had accorded him the highest political honors but which he could not forgive for keeping him out of office the last four years. It had vomited him, he said, and now he was going to vomit it.²⁰

He and Pétain and Weygand and others of like mind accomplished this at Vichy on July 10, 1940, when they stampeded a frightened National Assembly into voting to abolish itself and the Third Republic and to set up a dictatorship of the aged Marshal, behind whom Laval began to pull the strings.

***

By this date, July 10, I had returned to my post in Berlin, where I heard over the German radio the news of the vote of the National Assembly at Vichy. It was difficult to believe. We did not know then the pressures which had been brought upon the members of the Assembly, nor the extent of the confusion in which they met, nor the awesome dimensions of their moral collapse, nor the machinations of Laval and his followers, nor the nature of the ideas and ambitions of the half-senile octogenarian Pétain, though, as anyone who had been in France during the last tragic days could see, the hero of Verdun had emerged as a shining light of hope to the stricken, beaten people. Still, it seemed incomprehensible to me that the French, despite the shattering debacle, could in one frantic step go back on their own history and so basely betray their national character and their democratic institutions.

How, I kept asking myself, as during the mid-June days in Paris, had the French fallen to this state? What were the reasons for the swift military defeat and the sudden political and moral collapse? Had the French truly fought, as in the previous war against the Germans? I myself had seen little sign of it, but I had not seen all the battlefields, and in fact had seen very little of the fighting. It had moved too fast to catch up with. And, admitted that a crushing military defeat often brings down a regime held responsible for it, as had happened in France in 1870 and in Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1918, and in Russia in 1917—was it necessary for the Third Republic to commit hara-kiri as it apparently had done at Vichy on July 10, 1940? Certainly the French people had not been consulted.

And who was responsible for the staggering collapse of the army and the government? The generals, who had prepared and led the army so badly? The politicians, who, as Vichy had already begun to charge, had failed to provide the army with the necessary arms? Or did the main responsibility lie with the French people themselves, who, as the Vichyites—and some of the Catholic clergy—were beginning to say, had gone soft under the godless Republican regime? What responsibility fell on the extreme right, with its antipathy to the Republic, its sympathy for the Fascist dictators, and on the extreme left, whose Communists had slavishly followed the dictates of Moscow even when, as happened after the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939, they opposed France’s vital interests? Did the fall of France prove, as Laval was saying, that democracies in our time could not stand up to the dictatorships? Was democracy in the Western world, as Vichy—after Rome and Berlin—proclaimed, finished? Was France’s collapse inevitable, the logical consequence of one of those straight, descending lines of history which some historians, Spengler and Toynbee for example, claimed, after the event, they could detect?

Had it been inescapable because the price of victory in 1918—nearly a million and a half Frenchmen killed in battle—was too murderously high to allow France to recover sufficiently to oppose the more numerous and more highly industrialized Germans so soon on anything like equal terms? Could the British, who had furnished so relatively few troops and planes even after the eight months of grace provided by the phony war, have done more? And, if so, would it have been enough to stop the Germans, as had happened in France in 1914, when the British contribution had been even smaller because the fighting then had started immediately after the declaration of war? Would the French debacle have been averted if there had been time for American intervention, as there was in the first war?

Sitting in Berlin that summer of heartbreak when almost everyone in Europe, except in Britain, believed—and was this not true also in the United States?—that the Old World must come under the ruthless rule of Adolf Hitler and the self-styled German Master Race, I pondered these questions. The Germans, the men of Vichy, and even some Americans were sure that Hitler represented the Wave of the Future. To many of us who had lived through the Nazi time in Germany it was clear that a Europe dominated by the German Herrenvolk would be doomed to a long night of mindless barbarism. Pétain and Weygand do not seem to have understood this, and Laval perhaps didn’t care.

Even during that dark summertime of 1940 I could not bring myself to believe, as my broadcasts, dispatches, and diary show, that Europe was destined to such a sorry fate. I never lost hope that in the end Hitler would be brought down, his savage empire destroyed, and some semblance of decency restored in the world. Then I would try to find out how it was that Europe came to the brink of such an abyss. First there would be the task of trying to get to the bottom of the German story and to learn, if possible, out of my own experience and whatever documentation came to light, how it happened that a great and cultured people, the Germans, succumbed in the twentieth century to the barbarism of the Third Reich. Then I would turn to the French, with whom admittedly I was more in sympathy, to try to find out why this people, equally great and more civilized, and for most of the last century and a half the champions of personal freedom, of equality and fraternity among men, went down so quickly and easily that early summer of 1940 in a collapse more terrifying and more complete than any other in their long history.

Chance had made me an eyewitness to a good part of both of these cataclysmic events. But though I had seen them unfold and reported what I saw daily over the turbulent years, there was a great deal, obviously, that a journalist, working under the pressure of daily deadlines and largely ignorant of the secrets of state, did not know or understand.

Two decades later I accomplished the first task, concerning the rise and fall of the German Third Reich, as best I could. I then turned to the second one, an inquiry into the collapse of the French Third Republic. The roots of this story go far back—to the very birth of the Republic, and even further.

BOOK ONE

The Rise of the Third Republic

1871–1919

2

A FREAKISH BIRTH AND EARLY GROWING PAINS

1871–1891

By the very nature of its freakish birth and of the dissensions it inherited from the turbulent years after the great revolution of 1789, the Third Republic seemed destined for a short and stormy life. It is a wonder it was born at all, since a large majority of the National Assembly, elected to choose a new regime to succeed the fallen Empire of Napoleon III, preferred a monarchy. It is almost a miracle that it survived as long as it did—longer than any other form of government since the overthrow of Louis XVI—for most of the upper classes, backed by such powerful institutions as the Church, the Army, and the bureaucracy of permanent high officials, including the judiciary, opposed its very existence and for long fought to undermine it and bring it down.

It came into being by a fluke. The National Assembly, elected in 1871 after the debacle of France’s swift and humiliating defeat by Prussia, had not wanted a republic. Nearly two thirds of its members—some 400 out of 650 deputies—were Monarchists. But they could not agree on a king. Some wanted the Comte de Chambord, the legitimate Bourbon heir; others wanted the Comte de Paris, the Orleanist pretender. A few hoped for the return of still another Bonaparte.

There is only one throne, Adolphe Thiers, the President of the Provisional Republic, told the Assembly in 1873, and three men can’t sit on it. Thiers himself, who once had served the Orleanist King Louis-Philippe as chief minister, was being reluctantly won over to the republic. It divided us least, he said later, thus putting his finger on one of the weaknesses which dogged it to its end—its negative and compromising character, its inability to win over all the nation and unite it.

Since 1792, when Louis XVI was finally deposed, arrested, tried, and guillotined, the French had tried almost every conceivable form of government: a short-lived republic culminating with the Terror of Robespierre and replaced in 1795 by a sort of constitutional republic under a Directory that lasted until Napoleon Bonaparte took over as First Consul in 1799; the Napoleonic Empire from 1804 to 1814; the Bourbon Restoration under Louis XVIII and Charles X from 1814 to 1830 (except for the 100 days when Napoleon returned from Elba); the Orleans bourgeois monarchy under Louis-Philippe from 1830 to 1848; the Second Republic from 1848 to 1852; and then the Napoleonic Second Empire under Louis Napoleon, the Republic’s first and only elected president, who had already taken over dictatorial power in 1851 and proclaimed himself Emperor the next year. He and his Empire came crashing down in 1870 with France’s crushing defeat by Prussia. On September 4, two days after the Emperor was made prisoner at the capitulation in Sedan, Leon Gambetta, at the head of a revolutionary mob, proclaimed a new republic in Paris. But it was not until nearly five years later that the members of the National Assembly, anxious at last to adopt some kind of permanent regime that would give the country the political stability it so badly needed after so long a period of uncertainty, and weary of the futile attempt to agree on a king to sit on the throne of a monarchy most of them wanted restored, in one fashion or another, reluctantly chose a republic.

***

The story of the inability of the Monarchist majority to reach an accord on who should be king is too long and complicated to be adequately treated in a book of this kind. French historians, depending on their political views, give varying accounts and explanations. But most of them agree that it was mainly the intransigence of the Legitimist Pretender, the Comte de Chambord, out of touch with the realities of life and public opinion in France after decades of exile in a provincial Austrian castle, which cost him the chance to restore the Bourbons to the throne. The two candidates for the throne were Chambord, the grandson of Charles X, and the Comte de Paris, the grandson of the Orleanist King Louis-Philippe. What seemed to be a reasonable solution of the rivalries of the two Bourbon houses was reached by 1873 when it was agreed that Chambord, who was fifty-three and childless, should become king, and that Paris, who was thirty-five and had a growing family, should be his heir. In this way the choice of king would be settled and the rival houses reunited.

But in a series of ill-timed, ill-conceived manifestos Chambord showed himself so uncompromising that even most of his supporters came to the conclusion that he would never do. He insisted, for one thing, that the flag of France must be not the tricolor of the Revolution, which the Orleanist king had found no difficulty in accepting, but the white fleur-de-lis banner of the earlier Bourbon kings. In the minds of most Frenchmen, the blue-white-red flag was a symbol of the overthrow of feudalism by the Revolution and of the social and political gains which had followed it. Chambord seemed to threaten these solid achievements and to be determined to bring about a fundamental counterrevolution. I do not wish to become the legitimate king of the Revolution, he declared, and when his own backers in the Assembly suggested that he would have to make some sacrifices and compromises he replied: I have neither sacrifices to make nor conditions to accept.

His stubbornness doomed him—and the monarchy. As Thiers, then President of the Provisional Republic, quipped: Henceforth people will denounce only one person as the founder of the Republic in France—M. le Comte de Chambord. Posterity will christen him the French Washington!

The matter, of course, went deeper than Chambord’s obstinate inflexibility. The divisions among Frenchmen, which played so fateful a part in the life of the Third Republic, were a major factor. Though the Legitimists and the Orleanists did seem to reach agreement in the end, since both were Monarchists, a world separated them. As René Rémond has pointed out, they represented two systems, two religions, two histories, two societies. Between them lay an abyss.¹

But that was not the only split among Frenchmen in the early 1870s. A growing minority were Bonapartists who yearned for the return of another Napoleon. And a much larger and faster-growing minority, which would soon become a majority, were Republicans, who thought that France had had enough of kings and emperors, Bourbons or Bonapartes, and who believed it was high time that France seriously try a republic. The failure of the Monarchist majority to select a king played into their hands.

***

And so the lawmakers at Bordeaux, weary from four years of futile argument as to who should sit on the throne, sort of backed into the harness of a republic as if it were the least of evils—and by a majority of one vote in the Assembly, 353 to 352, though there would have been a tie had one deputy, who was against it, not been late in arriving for the balloting. Even then it was not clear to many members that they were actually choosing a republic. The day before, they had rejected it, or thought they had.

After four years of marking time the Assembly had finally got around to discussion of a constitution. A thirty-member committee had prepared several drafts of a constitution in 1874. All had been rejected. Now, in January 1875, a new draft was being debated. Time was pressing. The mandate of the Assembly was nearing an end. If it did not agree on some form of government there would be anarchy or another coup d’état, of which the French were now weary. There were rumors of plots to restore a Bourbon or a Bonaparte king by force. Two right-wing military men of royalist sympathies, Marshal MacMahon (of Irish descent), as President, and General Cissey, as Premier, were at the head of the provisional government. They could facilitate a military takeover.

Toward the end of January two amendments came up for a vote. The first, offered by a deputy named Laboulaye, read simply: The Government of the Republic is composed of two Chambers and two Presidents. It was voted down by the Assembly on January 29 by 359 to 336. Decidedly, as one French historian wrote, the Assembly did not want a Republican form of government.² The next day an amendment by a former provincial professor of classics named Wallon was taken up and seemed destined for rejection by the same vote. It read: The President of the Republic is elected by absolute majority vote of the Senate and the Chamber sitting as the National Assembly. He is elected for seven years and is re-eligible. There seemed to be nothing very new in this. Marshal MacMahon’s term as President of the Republic had already been set by the Assembly in 1873 at seven years, because the Monarchist majority had believed that within that time the differences between the two royal houses could be settled and the President would then step aside for a king. But the Wallon amendment was hotly debated, and Wallon himself, a moderate man who did not consider himself a Republican, apologized to God and to the Assembly for even introducing it.³ It squeezed through, 353 to 352, on January 30, 1875.

Confusing though it must have been to members of the Assembly, the acceptance by one vote of the seemingly innocent Wallon amendment would be considered afterward by politicians and historians alike as the act which established the Third Republic. By mid-July 1875 the Assembly had completed its task of drawing up the constitutional laws on which the Republic was to be based. Almost immediately the fledgling Republic was plunged into a constitutional crisis which nearly wrecked it at its very inception, the first of many political crises which plagued Republican France until the end and brought the overthrow of 107 cabinets—an average of almost two per year.

The constitution which gave France modern history’s first parliamentary Republic provided for a legislature of two houses, the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, a cabinet responsible to them, and a President with considerable powers, including the right to dissolve the Chamber with the consent of the Senate. In the minds of the Monarchists the presidency could easily be converted into a throne; indeed most of them saw in the patchwork constitution a framework for a monarchy. In the meantime the Republicans would be kept in their place by a strongly conservative President, Marshal MacMahon, and by a Senate which by the very rules of its election was bound to be a conservative force.

One fourth of the 300 members of the Senate were to be elected for life, first by the expiring National Assembly and thereafter by the Senate itself. The rest, who would serve for nine years, one third of them to be renewed every three years, were to be chosen indirectly by electoral colleges in which the rural councils were predominant. Each commune had one vote regardless of population, so that the conservative villages were vastly overrepresented compared to the large towns and cities. A senator had to be at least forty years old. Thus the Senate was designed to be a bulwark of conservatism and a strong check on the Chamber of 618 members, who were to be elected by universal manhood suffrage.ccclxiv The Republic, as Thiers had insisted, was to be conservative or there would be no Republic.

But how conservative? That question was soon to be resolved by a political crisis which shook the country, put to rout the extreme conservatives, and finally established by vote of the people what was to be called a Republic of Republicans. The event is remembered in modern French history by its date: Seize Mai, May 16 (1877). It gave France the kind of republic it was to have until the catastrophic finale in 1940.

THE CRISIS OF THE SIXTEENTH OF MAY

The first elections under the new constitution, early in 1876, had given the Senate, as was inevitable, a Conservative-Monarchist majority and the Chamber of Deputies an overwhelming majority of Republicans—some 363