1 - France in the Age of Total War

Summary

This chapter tackles the dilemmas of French defense planning in a factious Europe, increasingly divided by ideology, with a French population haunted by the sacrifices of the Great War, and the deep political divisions within France brought to the surface in 1936 with the election of the Popular Front government. A coherent defense scheme proved difficult to agree on in a military roiled by inter- and intra-service rivalries, under the uncertain direction of commander-in-chief General Maurice Gamelin and defense chief Édouard Daladier. As international conditions in Europe deteriorated, France was in a poor posture to surmount them, in the front line against a populous, powerful, and rearming Germany, led by the bombastic and belligerent Hitler. With a Soviet alliance off the table, this left as potential alliance partners a constellation of quarreling Eastern European nations, or Great Britain, in the hands of conservatives whose policy until 1938 was one of “limited liability” in a continental conflict. This situation required France to rely at least initially on its own military forces. One of the arguments of post-war historians was that the Third Republic, and in particular the Popular Front, did little to shore up French defense. In fact, that was not true. While the Maginot Line had absorbed a large share of the defense budget in the 1930s, the Popular Front had expended a great deal of money to modernize the French Air Force and create one of the world’s largest tank armies, despite the risk of capital flight, inflation, and the sacrifice of much of the social agenda of the French left. But defense modernization hit two snags. The first was a lack of government-directed coordination, which joined outmoded plant and industrial practices to put ambitious production quotas out of reach. The second was that this armament upgrade was bestowed on a multifaceted, Balkanized military organization whose leadership lacked a coherent defense vision for inter-arm and inter-service cooperation. It was with a military force that was modernizing in a piecemeal and improvized way that France plunged into war.