Summary 1: The Third Republic

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Condenses the Third Republic series into a refresher on France’s politics, military planning, and brittle society between the world wars.

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Summary 1 - The Third Republic

Hello everyone and welcome to History of the Second World War Summaries #1 - The Third Republic. This is a new series of episodes that are designed to solve one problem, this podcast is going to take a long time. One side effect of the amount of content the podcast needs to cover is that there are times when there is information from previous episodes or series that originally released years in the past which is now important background information for episodes that are about to release. This is where the summaries come in. Moving forward I will drop in a few summaries at appropriate times which will take a old series of episodes, in the case of today’s episode the Third Republic series, and condense the entire series down into one roughly 25 minute episode. Obviously this will not have the detail level of the earlier episodes, but it will allow for the key facts and themes of the earlier episodes to be brought back into everybody’s memories right before it is most important. To that end, the next three episodes will be be summary episodes of the following series: The Third Republic, Germany Prepares for War, and The September Campaign. All three of these summaries are in preparation for the episodes on the German invasion of France in 1940. As this is a new type of episode and a new content but I hope that it helps those listeners who stay current ever week remember what the podcast covered as far back as August 2021 for the Third Republic series. With that preamble out of the way, lets dive in.

The France of 1940 was still connected to the France of 1918 more than maybe any other nation in Europe. The First World War had been a pivotal event for the French nation, with the war on the Western Front fought on French soil and millions of French soldiers perishing during the conflict. The French had eventually prevailed, and were victorious, but this victory was bought only at very great cost. France was broken, an entire generation of Frenchmen was gutted, and the victory over Germany did not result in the type of peace that the French nation needed to make up for all of its sacrifices during the war years. Instead the French were pushed into what was seen at the time as leniency, pushed by their own Allies in the United States and Britain to try and find a recipe for peace that they felt would be successful, even if it meant that the French did not get the reparations they wanted, the German territorial concessions the French believed they deserved, or the strong commitments of American and British peacekeeping forces that French leaders felt that the French, through their sacrifices had earned. The resulting Versailles treaty was in some ways a hollow victory for a France that would face over a decade of reconstruction and would take generations to truly recover from the economic and demographic damage. During the Paris Peace Conference the French, led by Premiere Clemenceau, had held on to one guiding principle, they must do their best to keep the British and Americans committed to helping France in the future. Upon this goal many things were sacrificed, many demands muted. But there were challenges that no amount of American or British support could resolve. One of these challenges, and one of the important challenges to the events of the late 1930s, was the demographic hole that was left by the First World War. During the conflict birth rates in France plummeted, as so many men were away at the front that there simply were less babies born, and the dishevel caused by the war did not help, with large groups of French families forced to become refugees. This missing wartime generation would then have been coming of age in the late 1930s, entering into their conscription years, starting to really contribute to the economic, industrial, and military future of France, but they simply did not exist. This generational ticking time bomb would move the French to make certain choices during the 1920s and 1930s to try and make up for the coming manpower shortage. One of these decisions was the creation of the Maginot Line. Few large construction projects have become so synonymous with military failure as the Maginot Line, but it was created to solve some serious problems that the French would have in any future war with Germany. France did not have enough men, and static defenses could act as a force multiplier, allowing fewer Frenchmen to slow and maybe even stop a larger number of Germans. France desperately wanted to stop a German attack as close to the border as possible, because so much of French industry and war critical raw materials like coal and iron were clustered close to the German border in territory that had largely been in German hands for much of the First World War. Finally, France wanted to do everything in its power to fight the next war without the absolutely staggering number of casualties of the four years after 1914, and defenses like those in the Maginot Line seemed to provide the best chance to save French lives. One final way that the France of 1940 was impacted by the First World War was in the military. France had won the war, and the generation of officers of 1940 had often fought in the earlier conflict. Unlike some other nations, the victorious French did not truly re-evaluate their armies between the wars, and instead of moving in a different direction the goal of French military preparations was to double down on what had worked in 1918 which could be summarized as an army that was built around set piece offensives backed up by a simply staggering amount of firepower. It was a formula that it had taken literally millions of French lives to arrive at, and the French military was hesitant to move away from it. This resulted in French doctrine that was in some ways quite backwards when compared to those of Germany in 1940, but the path of the German and French armies to 1940 could not have been more different. The German army had been defeated, and it has been dismantled to its very core by the Versailles Treaty, its own path through the interwar years was one of recreation and regeneration. The French army had been victorious, and it would not be able to shake the legacy of that victory, and its chains, until the great defeats of 1940.

Another very notable feature of interwar France was the seeming political instability of the 1920s and 30s. From the time that Clemenceau’s government was replaced on January 20th, 1920, after seeing France through the end of the First World War and the Paris Peace Conference, until Daladier’s government took the country into its second world war in 1939 there were 31 French Prime Ministers, which means that there was a different Prime Minister every 214 days, so on average they lasted less than a year in office. But there were points in time where the average tenure was much less, for example during the four years between June 1932 to June 1936, during the heart of France’s Great Depression there would be a new Prime Minister every 132 days, 11 total over the span of four years. This obviously points to some level of political instability due to how quickly the coalitions that led to a Prime Minister being put into office then broke apart and somebody else was brought in, but there is some hidden stability here as well. During these years when the Prime Minister was replaced it almost never meant the full replacement of all of the government ministers, and in fact the vast majority of the top ministries would either stay with one person through all of the turmoil, or would rotate through a small group of men as the governments rose and fell. This meant that while there was a lot of instability at the very top, at the Minister level there was actually quite a bit of stability which was probably good for France. 1936 would see an important shift from the relative stability when the Popular Front government won a majority in the elections of 1936. The Popular Front was a coalition of left leaning political groups that was led by the Socialists and their leader Leon Blum. They had come to power with a lengthy list of economic and industrial reform policies that found a very receptive ear among the French people that were still feeling the economic pressures of the Great Depression. The top criticism that could be levied against the earlier governments is that they had not been active enough in trying to fix France’s economic problems, and the Popular Front promised to begin a reform package immediately. There were many things that the Popular Front would be able to complete, the 40 hour work week, 12 days of mandatory leave for workers, protecting the worker’s right to strike, generally increasing wages that had been stagnant for years. These reforms would be important, and would make the lives of many workers meaningfully better, but it was not really the far reaching reforms that many of the more radical Popular Front supporters wanted the new Socialist government to pursue. The larger Popular Front reforms fell victim to the fact that France was in a rough spot economically by the mid-1930s. It had stuck with the gold standard longer than other nations, which helped it weather the storm of the early depression years, but as other nations devalued their currency, going off of the gold standard, their economies began to recover very quickly. It would not be until September 1936 that France would finally move off the gold standard, a delay that probably squandered any benefit that they had received from staying on it for as long as they had. Eventually Leon Blum’s government would fall in June 1937 due to yet another economic crisis involving the French Treasury, having spent just around a year in power. The Popular Front would remain in power for several more months before the entire coalition came apart from the inside due to economic disagreements and disagreements on what France should be doing about the Spanish Civil War. After the Popular Front the French leadership would pass back to a series of center and center-right coalitions which would take it into the war years.

A very important topic for all of the nations of Europe that would eventually become embroiled in the Second World War was the timing and resources allocated to rearmament efforts during the 1930s. For the French, the Popular Front years were an important moment for their rearmament efforts, because it would be the Popular Front government that put in place the first four year plan for French rearmament. While the injection of money that they plan represented was very good, around 14 billion francs over the four years. It did nothing to fix some of the problems within the French military, planning, and industry that would plague the rearmament efforts until 1940. By the mid-1930s French armament and heavy industry was suffering from years of lack of investment. It was all well and good for the government and the military to want to buy more military hardware, but when they wanted to they found that often times French industry was not up to the task. This was due to either a simple lack of modern tooling and equipment, or just generally disorganization along the supply chain. The situation was so bad that eventually the only path forward seemed to be to nationalize the industries, which would eventually see the various military ministries taking over some factories, although it would always be a relatively small percentage. Even with these nationalization efforts, many within the French government believed in that the free market was an essential part of France’s economy and economic future with Finance Minister Paul Raynaud saying in November 1938 “We live in a capitalist system, for it to function we must obey its laws. These laws are those of profits, individual risk, free markets, and growth by competition.” This mindset and belief would make it difficult for the French government to put meaningful pressure on areas of the economy that were needed for rearmament, because there were always those that would speak out against any direct government action. During these rearmament efforts every nation would have to cope with any pre-existing labor relations problems that existed before the rearmament programs were put in place, and in France this was a real problem because there was already tension between the workers and the industrialists due to the recent Popular Front working reforms. An example of this was the new 40 hour work week, having just been granted that right by the Popular Front government, workers were very resistant to the idea that they should be working more than 40 hours for any reason. Eventually the government would step in to protect the power of the industrialists, and by 1939 the average working hours in armament industries would exceed 60 hours, even though by that time the actual purchasing power of the pay for those 60 hours had dropped precipitously. Due to the threat of war the workers of France were working longer hours, while those hours gave them less purchasing power, and even with all of that work the French would find themselves far behind other nations when it came to rearmament not due to the workers but instead the backward state of French industry in 1936 when rearmament started.

The need for rearmament was of course caused by the growing tension within Europe due to the actions of Germany after Hitler came to power in 1933, setting off 6 years of diplomatic and military conversations that would take all of Europe into the war years. During the interwar years France had two important pillars of its foreign relations, the first was the maintenance of relationships with a collection of Eastern European nations. This was an attempt to replace the role that the Russian Empire had played in the years before 1914, making sure that if Germany went to war with France the German military would have to dedicated some resources to defend against attacks from the east. The two most important nations in this relationship structure were Poland and Czechoslovakia, both of which were perfectly positioned to push pressure on Germany’s eastern border. Other nations that were the target of French diplomatic efforts were Romania and Yugoslavia. There were three key problems that the French had in maintaining these relationships, most of which would never be solved. The first was that there was a lot of tension between the nations of Eastern Europe due to how they had been created in the years after the First World War. The source of most of this tension were unresolved territorial disputes as the border regions of the nations were often disputed. The second problem was the strained relationship between the new nations of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, this would cause several problems throughout the interwar years as nations like Poland considered the Soviet Union just as much of a threat as Germany and this would cause Polish leaders to always be very hesitant to enter into any agreement that opened them up to possible Soviet aggression. The final problem with the diplomatic efforts, and the one most attributable directly to France was the fact that while France wanted to maintain the alliance, and wanted to use these nations to distract Germany in time of war, the French military and the French government was not in a position to actually extend help to those nations if they were attacked. This would be the challenge that would end up making all of the diplomatic relationships useless in the face of German aggression because when push came the shove, when the chips were down, France simply would not attack into Germany to save the nations of Eastern Europe. This would be evident at Munich when Czechoslovakia was offered up to Germany, and it would also occur in September 1939 when the Panzers were rolling into Poland and all that the French military did was do a reconnaissance in force into Germany. France wanted all of the benefits of having friends in Eastern Europe, but was not able to be the friend that they needed when the German military arrived at the border.

The other pillar of French foreign policy during the interwar years was simply that no matter what happened, no matter the threats, the developments, the relationships with other nations the one overriding concern was that relations with the British. In everything that the French did, and all of their plans, the one constant is that they believed they had to maintain their alliance with Britain if they wanted to have any chance in a future conflict. In fairness to French decision makers, the contributions of the British were critical to the eventual French victory in the First World War and so the precedent was there. But the extreme concern for the feelings of the leaders in London would cause the French government to sacrifice almost every other meaningful relationship they had, simply because that is what the British wanted to happen. During the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936 and the Munich Crisis it is likely that France would have been better served by taking a different path, a path of confrontation with Germany instead of negotiation. In both cases the British leaders wanted to avoid conflict, and when this voice was added to the French leaders who agreed the course of action was to always steer away from stopping Germany from doing what it wanted to do. It can be said that in the long run this focus on Britain would pay off, as the British would continue fighting and eventually defeat Germany, but it is hard to ignore the fact that the French focus on following British foreign policy priorities during the 1930s caused them to take actions that they otherwise would not have. However, it did allow the French to keep the relationship with the British strong, although that relationship would not end up providing the strength France needed in 1940 to resist the German invasion.

While relations with Britain and other nations were important to the security of France, the most important tool to defend France was the French military itself. And in the area of the military there were definitely some challenges facing France in 1940. The root of all problems for the French military was the fact that French military leaders made an incorrect assumption about what the future of warfare would look like, and this assumption was not really challenged throughout the 1920s and 1930s. French military theory stated that the battlefields of the future would be dominated by firepower, an assumption largely based on the state of military technology at the end of the First World War. The follow up from that assumption was that for the French military to be successful they needed to be able to bring more firepower than the enemy to any engagement, and then they had to develop a military doctrine that maximized how that firepower was applied. This then led French leaders to continue the trends that they had already been experiencing at the end of the last war, which was based on methodical battle that was built around preparation, detailed planning, and then a steamroller like mentality once an attack was launched. They were not blind to the growth in mobility that motor vehicles, tanks, and aircraft brought to the battlefield, they just misunderstood how the mobility would translate onto the battlefield. The ideal French plan for a German invasion would be meeting the Germans at the border, or even beyond it in Belgium, absorbing the German attack, using mobile reserves to contain any penetrations. The goal was simply to stop the German attack, and then after the attack was halted French planning and preparations for their offensives could begin. Obviously the critical piece of that, and the part that would fail in 1940 was that they needed to stop the Germans. In their attempts to stop the German attack they would encounter another major problem with the French Army in 1940: a lack of adaptability. This lack of adaptability was present from the very top down to even small units in the French military as they simply did not teach and train their officers to quickly adapt to the situation that they might find themselves in. Instead the French military took a very top down, follow the orders, type of approach that would not serve them well on the Second World War’s dynamic battlefields. The French also failed to build new doctrine around the technological advances that were occurring, instead just taking their existing doctrine and grafting on new technology without ever really reconsidering any of the foundational elements of how their military planned to fight a war. Every army goes into a war with different plans, but the key difference between France and Germany in 1940 was not just how they planned to use the various pieces of their army, but also how they planned to force their enemy to fight. The French army, with its defensive and methodical mindset, completely lacked the ability to force that structure of war on an enemy. They could not force the Germans to fight the war a certain way, and when they were met with something that they did not expect, they were unable to adapt and adjust quickly enough.

To summarize here at the end of the summary episode. France during the interwar years was a nation with many challenges, just like every other nation. Their attempts to resolve these challenges would result in some mistakes, and when these mistakes were combined with an incorrect core assumption about the future of warfare it would end in disaster in the spring of 1940.