France in the Age of the World Wars

Champagne, gas, and Artois

Joffre's grandes offensives in Artois (May, September) and Champagne (February, September) gain a few kilometres at a cost of three hundred thousand French casualties for the year. On 22 April at Ypres the Germans first use chlorine gas; from 1915 the chemical war is permanent. The Western Front does not move.

'Ils ne passeront pas'

On 21 February, a million-shell bombardment opens the German attack on the salient at Verdun. Falkenhayn's stated aim is to 'bleed France white'. General Pétain, brought up from the rear, organises the defence and the supply route called the Voie Sacrée. The slogan attributed to him — they shall not pass — becomes the watchword of the year.

By December, when the Germans were pushed back to their starting line, the ten-month battle had cost some seven hundred thousand French and German casualties between them. Almost every French regiment of the line passed through the meat-grinder; Verdun is to the French what the Somme is to the British. Pétain's prestige, born of these months, would carry him to the head of state twenty-four years later.

The Chemin des Dames disaster

General Nivelle, who has replaced Joffre, promises that his April offensive will break the German line in forty-eight hours. On the Chemin des Dames ridge above the Aisne, French infantry charge into uncut wire and machine-gun nests. By 9 May they have lost 187,000 men for a few kilometres of ground.

Pétain restores the army

From late April, units in some seventy divisions refuse to attack. Some 30,000-40,000 men are involved. Pétain replaces Nivelle, suspends offensives, improves food and leave, has 49 mutineers shot and 600 imprisoned. By August the army holds — and waits for the Americans.

Clemenceau forms his war ministry

On 16 November, President Poincaré recalls his old enemy Georges Clemenceau — the Tiger, seventy-six years old, anti-clerical, anti-defeatist, anti-everything — to form a government of national war. His program: 'I wage war. In foreign policy, I wage war. In domestic policy, I wage war.' Joseph Caillaux, the leader of the peace party, is arrested for treason.

Ludendorff strikes — and Foch takes command

On 21 March Ludendorff opens his last gamble: five great offensives that drive the British and French back, in places sixty kilometres. Paris is shelled by the Big Bertha. On 26 March, at the conference of Doullens, the allies agree to put all their armies under a single commander: Ferdinand Foch is appointed généralissime.

Foch and Mangin counter-attack

On 15 July Ludendorff makes a last push on the Marne. On 18 July, with Mangin's tanks emerging from the forest of Villers-Cotterêts, Foch counter-attacks. The German front gives way. From 8 August — Ludendorff's 'black day' at Amiens — the allies advance for one hundred days without stopping until the armistice.

The eleventh hour at Rethondes

On 11 November at 5 a.m., in Foch's railway carriage standing on a forest siding at Rethondes near Compiègne, the German plenipotentiaries sign the armistice. At 11 a.m. the guns fall silent on the Western Front. France has lost 1,400,000 dead, 4,000,000 wounded, 700,000 prisoners — and she has Alsace and Lorraine back.

The cost in men — proportionally the heaviest of any major belligerent — emptied the villages, broke the demographic curve, and produced a generation of mutilés de guerre who became permanent fixtures of French life. The black-clothed widows of the 1920s were everywhere; every commune in France would build its monument aux morts. The peace had been won; but the country that won it would never be quite the same again.

The peace is signed in the Hall of Mirrors

On 28 June, five years to the day after Sarajevo, the Treaty of Versailles is signed in the Galerie des Glaces — where the German Empire had been proclaimed in 1871. Clemenceau wins Alsace-Lorraine, the demilitarised Rheinland, the Saar, reparations, and Article 231 — but not the eastern frontier on the Rhine that Foch had demanded.

'This is not a peace,' Foch is supposed to have said as he left the conference, 'it is an armistice for twenty years.' He was off by sixty-five days. The American Senate would refuse to ratify the treaty or the security guarantee that came with it; Britain would soon drift towards revisionism. The French diplomatic system after Versailles — small allies in eastern Europe, the Maginot Line — was a system designed to make the impossible work.

Poincaré sends the troops into the Ruhr

Tired of German reparations defaults, Premier Poincaré sends sixty thousand French and Belgian troops into the Ruhr industrial basin on 11 January to collect coal and coke at gunpoint. Berlin orders passive resistance; the hyper-inflation that ruins the German middle class follows. By autumn France has won the dispute and lost the peace.

Parliament votes the Maginot Line

On 4 January 1930 the Chamber votes three billion francs for a chain of underground forts along the German border, designed by the war minister André Maginot. By 1936 the line of casemates, barracks, and ammunition lifts runs from Switzerland to Luxembourg — but stops on the Belgian border, where high command does not dare offend a small ally.

The right marches on the Palais Bourbon

Inflamed by the Stavisky financial scandal, the leagues — Croix-de-Feu, Action française, Jeunesses patriotes — converge on the Place de la Concorde on the evening of 6 February. The Garde mobile fires on the crowd; 17 demonstrators and one policeman are killed, more than two thousand wounded. The Daladier government falls overnight. The Third Republic has had its 'fascist' scare.

The shock of 6 February drove the socialists, communists, and radicals into the anti-fascist coalition that would become the Popular Front. Within a year the PCF was instructed by the Comintern to abandon its 'class against class' line; in July 1935, on the Bastille Day procession, Léon Blum, Maurice Thorez, and Édouard Daladier marched together at the head of half a million.

Blum's government and the Matignon accords

After the May elections give the Popular Front a majority, Léon Blum — the first socialist and the first Jewish prime minister of France — forms a government on 4 June. Two million workers occupy the factories. The Matignon agreements of 7 June grant the forty-hour week, paid holidays of two weeks, and collective bargaining. Workers go to the sea, many for the first time.

Blum's government also nationalised the railways, brought the Bank of France under public control, and reformed the rural lending banks. But it was paralysed abroad by the Spanish Civil War — Blum, terrified of dividing France further, accepted non-intervention while his heart was with the Republic — and at home by the flight of capital. Within a year his ministry had fallen and the social conquests began to be quietly rolled back.

Daladier returns from Munich

On 29 September, at Munich, Daladier and Chamberlain consign Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland to Hitler in return for promises of peace. Landing at Le Bourget on the 30th to a crowd cheering him as a hero, the premier mutters: 'the fools — if they only knew!'

France declares war on Germany

On 3 September, two days after Hitler invades Poland, France honours her treaty obligations and declares war. The army mobilises five million men. There follows the drôle de guerre — the Phoney War — eight months of inactivity behind the Maginot Line while Poland is partitioned and Stalin invades Finland.

Guderian breaks the line at Sedan

On 10 May Hitler attacks west. Three Panzer corps under Guderian, Reinhardt, and Hoth slip through the supposedly impassable Ardennes, cross the Meuse at Sedan on 13-14 May, and race for the Channel. By 21 May they have cut the allied armies in two; by 4 June the British and French rearguards are evacuating Dunkirk.

The fall of Paris, the appeal of 18 June, the armistice of Rethondes

On 14 June the German army enters an open Paris. On 16 June Pétain replaces Reynaud as premier and asks for an armistice. On 18 June, from a BBC studio in London, General de Gaulle broadcasts the Appel: 'whatever happens, the flame of French resistance must not and shall not go out.' On 22 June, in Foch's railway carriage at Rethondes, Hitler dictates an armistice. France is to be cut in two; she is to keep her empire and her fleet; the Vichy regime is born.

The 'strange defeat', as the historian Marc Bloch would call it from the maquis before being shot in 1944, lost France 100,000 dead, 200,000 wounded, and 1,800,000 prisoners in six weeks. The military catastrophe was not — as both Vichy and the Resistance would later claim — the result of an internal rottenness; it was the result of bad doctrine, bad command, and the misuse of equipment that in some categories outnumbered the German. But it ended the Third Republic.

Full powers to Pétain at Vichy

On 10 July at the casino of Vichy, the National Assembly — by 569 votes to 80 — grants full constituent powers to Marshal Pétain. The Third Republic, born in defeat in 1870, dies in defeat in 1940. The 'État français' replaces it. Liberté · Égalité · Fraternité is replaced by Travail · Famille · Patrie.

By 3 October Vichy had passed without German prompting the first Statut des Juifs, excluding Jews from the public service, the army, and most of the liberal professions. The 'national revolution' of Pétain and Pierre Laval would commit France to collaboration with the occupier, to its own anti-Semitic legislation, and ultimately — through the gendarmerie's roundups of Jews for deportation — to complicity in the Final Solution.

Thirteen thousand Jews are arrested in Paris

On 16-17 July, more than thirteen thousand Jews — including four thousand children — are arrested in Paris by French police acting on German requisitions. Thousands are crowded into the Vélodrome d'Hiver near the Eiffel Tower without food or water for five days. From there they are sent to Drancy, and from Drancy to Auschwitz.

Of the seventy-six thousand Jews deported from France during the Occupation, fewer than three per cent returned. The role of the French state in the deportation — through the Statuts des Juifs, the Commissariat aux Questions Juives, and the gendarmerie — was officially acknowledged by President Jacques Chirac only on 16 July 1995, on the anniversary of the round-up.

The Germans occupy southern France; the fleet scuttles itself at Toulon

After the allied landings in French North Africa on 8 November, German troops cross the demarcation line on 11 November and occupy the southern zone. On 27 November, to keep them out of German hands, the French Mediterranean fleet at Toulon scuttles itself: 77 vessels, including three battleships and seven cruisers, are sunk by their own crews.

Jean Moulin's National Council of the Resistance

On 27 May, in a clandestine apartment on the rue du Four in Paris, Jean Moulin gathers the eight major Resistance movements, the two trade-union centrals, and the six pre-war political parties into a single Conseil national de la Résistance. The CNR recognises de Gaulle as head of the French resistance. Within a month Moulin will be betrayed, tortured by Klaus Barbie, and die.

The Normandy landings

On 6 June, 156,000 American, British, Canadian, and Free French troops land on the five beaches of Normandy from Utah to Sword. The maquis rises behind the German lines on the BBC's signal: 'les sanglots longs des violons de l'automne'. Twelve weeks later, on 25 August, the 2nd Armoured Division of General Leclerc enters Paris.

'Paris outraged! Paris broken! Paris martyred! But Paris liberated!'

After six days of insurrection by the Parisian FFI, Leclerc's tanks enter the capital on 25 August. The German commander Choltitz surrenders at the Hôtel Meurice, defying Hitler's order to burn the city. The next day de Gaulle walks down the Champs-Élysées at the head of the procession, from the Étoile to Notre-Dame, snipers still firing from the rooftops.

De Gaulle's speech at the Hôtel de Ville on the same evening set the tone of the liberation myth: 'Paris liberated by herself, liberated by her own people, with the help of the armies of France, with the support and assistance of all France, of fighting France, of the only France, of the true and eternal France'. The éclipse — the four years of Vichy and Occupation — was officially closed in a single sentence.

Women win the vote; the épuration begins

By an ordinance of 21 April 1944, signed at Algiers, French women have been granted the right to vote and stand for election. They cast ballots for the first time at the municipal elections of April 1945. Meanwhile the épuration is under way: nearly 10,000 collaborators are summarily executed in the months around the liberation; the journalist Brasillach is shot, Pétain and Laval tried, Pétain's death sentence commuted to imprisonment on the Île d'Yeu, Laval shot in October 1945.

Victory in Europe; massacre in Algeria

On 7 May at Reims and again on 8 May at Berlin-Karlshorst — in the presence of General de Lattre de Tassigny for France — Germany surrenders unconditionally. The same day, in the Algerian town of Sétif, a victory parade turns into demonstrations for Algerian independence; the army and settler vigilantes kill thousands of Muslims. The war that ends in Europe begins in the empire.

The second 8 May, in the words of the Algerian historian Mohammed Harbi, 'began the war of independence'. Behind the victory parades of Paris and London, the next thirty years of decolonisation — Indochina, Madagascar, Cameroon, North Africa, Algeria — were already being prepared. The triumphant moment of 1945 was the watershed of two histories: the end of the war against Hitler and the beginning of the long agony of the French colonial empire.