From the taxis of the Marne and Verdun through Clemenceau and the armistice of Rethondes, the unsettled interwar of the Ruhr and the Maginot Line, the 6 February riots and the Popular Front, the Strange Defeat of 1940 and the regime of Vichy, the Vel d'Hiv round-up and the National Council of the Resistance, to D-Day, the liberation of Paris, and the second 8 May of 1945. Slide month by month through France's most violent generation.
After the disasters of the Battle of the Frontiers in August, General Joffre turns at the Marne on 5 September. Six hundred Parisian taxicabs requisitioned by Gallieni carry six thousand infantry to the front. By 12 September the German First Army is in retreat. The Schlieffen Plan, and the hope of a short war, are dead.
From the taxis of the Marne and Verdun through Clemenceau and the armistice of Rethondes, the unsettled interwar of the Ruhr and the Maginot Line, the 6 February riots and the Popular Front, the Strange Defeat of 1940 and the regime of Vichy, the Vel d'Hiv round-up and the National Council of the Resistance, to D-Day, the liberation of Paris, and the second 8 May of 1945. Slide month by month through France's most violent generation.
After the disasters of the Battle of the Frontiers in August, General Joffre turns at the Marne on 5 September. Six hundred Parisian taxicabs requisitioned by Gallieni carry six thousand infantry to the front. By 12 September the German First Army is in retreat. The Schlieffen Plan, and the hope of a short war, are dead.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.