France and the Nazi Menace: Intelligence and Policy Making, 1933-1939, by Peter Jackson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. xii, 446 pp. $139.50.

The fall of France during World War II continues to attract the interest of historians who struggle to understand and explain the shocking collapse of the French army in May-June 1940. How could this formidable military force, thought to be the backbone of Allied resistance to Nazi aggression, collapse like a house of cards in scarcely more time than it had taken the Wehrmacht to conquer Poland in September 1939? Was the debacle the result of craven, incompetent French politicians and generals, or was it the unique bad luck of leaders who had done their best in difficult circumstances to protect France against the Nazi menace? Was it the "decadence" and rot of interwar France, divided between left and right, and riddled with sympathy for fascism, which explains the catastrophe? Or did a strong and confident France embark upon a national struggle against fascism, and tragically, accidentally falter despite the best which its leaders and the French army could give?

This book, while it focuses on French military assessments of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, is really about war origins from the peculiar angle of French "intelligence". The author is a lecturer at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and the book originated as a doctoral dissertation defended at Cambridge. It is a highly detailed account of French army, air, and naval analyses of Nazi German military strength in the seven year lead-up to the beginning of World War II. Jackson shows enormous industry in his work: there is thorough and wide-ranging research and a vigourly argued case for a resurgent France in 1939. Anyone interested in the origins of World War II will want to read this book.

Here you can find the mounting count of German infantry and armoured divisions, fighter aircraft and bombers, pocket battleships and submarines, year by year, as Adolf Hitler prepared for a war of conquest in Europe. French military intelligence almost always scandalously exaggerated this power while denigrating France's own military resources. The German gun was bigger than the French even when it was not. But French intelligence accurately identified the predatory intentions of Hitlerite Germany from the very beginning. General Gaston Renondeau, the French military attaché in Berlin, saw them early on. "If Hitler becomes Chancellor, Germany will be transformed into one huge military barracks" (February 1932, p. 57). After Hitler took power in early 1933, Renondeau had this to say: "There is little doubt that Germany intends to regain her position as the greatest military power in Europe… The government which now controls the destiny of the Reich has made no secret of the fact that its first priority upon taking power will be the building of the largest military force possible in the shortest space of time possible" (March 1933, p. 58).

It was no secret, said Renondeau, that Hitler was bent upon German hegemony in Europe. Nor was it a secret in London or Moscow. Renondeau had his counterparts in London, most notably Sir Robert Vansittart, the Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign Office. And Winston Churchill, then a renegade backbench Tory, became the most public partisan of rapid rearmament to counter the rising Nazi danger.⁽¹⁾ Maksim M. Litvinov, the Soviet commissar for foreign affairs, also saw the threat: "so long as there is a Hitler regime, just so long is Germany a mad dog that can't be trusted, with whom no agreements can be made, and whose ambition can only be checked by a ring of determined neighbors" (October-November 1934).⁽²⁾ One did not need to be privy to secret intelligence to understand the Nazi menace; informed people had read or knew of Hitler's book Mein Kampf, his plan for the German conquest of Europe, or could read Churchill and others in the press. Litvinov facetiously asked German diplomats in 1933, what about "the literary works of Hitler [Mein Kampf]"?  "That was ten years ago," came the disingenuous reply, but the commissar was not persuaded.⁽³⁾

This context outside France Jackson does not provide, but he reports that in Paris generals and politicians at first recognized and began to react to the danger. Nazi Germany was "preparing to impose its will with a policy of force… as soon as it has gained a clear military superiority" (Conseil supérieur de guerre, August 1933, p. 62). The French government resisted proposals for disarmament favoured by Britain. And France improved its relations with the long hated Bolshevik Russia. Russia had been an important French ally before World War I and the Soviet Union represented a vital eastern counter-weight against a resurgent Germany. The Radical premier and foreign minister Édouard Herriot signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union in late 1932, and his successor the socialist Joseph Paul-Boncour, concluded a trade agreement with Moscow in early 1934. Trade was to lay the foundations for an improvement of political relations.⁽⁴⁾

Conservative Louis Barthou continued the Herriot-Paul-Boncour initiative when he became foreign minister in February 1934. As Jackson notes, Barthou began to discuss a Franco-Soviet defence pact with Commissar Litvinov. It was an obvious gambit: France needed the Russian counter-weight, Red or not. But then things went terribly wrong. Barthou was assassinated in October 1934 by Croatian fascists, and Pierre Laval, a renegade socialist who had turned to the right, succeeded him. He halted the movement toward an alliance with the Soviet Union and sought reconciliation with Nazi Germany. It is true that Laval signed a watered-down mutual assistance pact in Moscow in May 1935. But as soon as Hitler held out false hopes of reconciliation, Laval fell for them like a besotted suitor. In November 1935 he told the Soviet ambassador in Paris, V. P. Potemkin, that the unratified Franco-Soviet pact was an obstacle to a Franco-German rapprochement and a threat to his "peace policy". "These signals from the head of the [French] government," reported a dismayed Potemkin, "must naturally put us on our guard."⁽⁵⁾

Laval was a determined anti-communist who feared the spread of socialist revolution into the heart of Europe. For Laval war was intrinsically wrong and unacceptable, but war also threatened European "civilisation" with the plague of Bolshevism. This was the "war-revolution nexus", as William Irvine has called it.⁽⁶⁾ Such views were pervasive in France and Britain from the highest levels of government to the highest levels of society. About these spoken and unspoken assumptions Jackson has only a little to say.

In 1935 Laval's policy had consequences beyond French relations with the Soviet Union. In eastern Europe, the Rumanians, for example, who were watching Laval carefully, began to doubt French resolve to resist German hegemony, and this weakened the Rumanian government's commitment to collective security. Nicolae Titulescu, the Rumanian foreign minister, was plain about it: the small countries were going to have to choose between German security and collective security, and Laval's anti-communism was making the latter more difficult.⁽⁷⁾

After Laval everything went down hill. French intelligence repeatedly exaggerated German armed strength, sometimes to obtain greater government expenditure for defence, sometimes to discourage aggressive government action against Germany, and sometimes because of a sense of inferiority and inadequacy. The first great test of French resolve came in March 1936 when Hitler sent troops into the demilitarized Rhineland. The French high command wanted no resistance to the flouting of the Locarno security accords, which Germany had freely signed in 1925. Germany, said Chief of Staff General Maurice Gamelin, could mobilize 120 divisions, when in fact it had only thirty (p. 171). The black pessimism continued, to reach its nadir in September 1938 during the Munich crisis when Czechoslovakia was sacrificed. "French policy evolved from retreat in advance to open retreat" (p. 264). Jackson sees Munich as unavoidable particularly because of the weakness of French air power. War was not a viable alternative to capitulation.

The French air force was in lamentable shape, but the French intelligence estimate of the actual modern air strength of Germany "was significantly overblown" to frighten the government into capitulation (p. 271). The same was true of the German army. And yet French intelligence noted that Germany was vulnerable: the westwall, the Siegfried Line facing France, would not be ready to resist a determined offensive until mid-1939. Germany did not have enough trained aircrew to fight a major war in Europe. And France had a strong ally in Czechoslovakia with its 35 divisions, and the Soviet Union with 100 and a large air force. Britain, though it declared it would not fight, would have been compelled to do so if France, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union had fought (pp. 284-85, 295). And if the Siegfried line was weak, why not attack it before it became too strong?

Because the French government needed allies, and Britain was reckoned to be France's only serious ally. France would not move without Britain, and Britain, under Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, would not move. What is more, the French general staff had no plans to take the offensive, and no generals capable of making plans in a hurry. Jackson reports that Czechoslovakia could not have held out for more than two months and that French intelligence considered the Red Army a headless corpse because of the Stalinist purges in 1937 (pp. 277, 279, 291). But two months of Czech resistance would have been an eternity for the British or French governments to stay out of the war, and Jackson does not say that the Red Army carried out an impressive mobilization on its Polish and Rumanian frontiers in September 1938 or that it defeated the Japanese in fighting along the Manchurian frontier (August 1938).⁽⁸⁾ This was not so bad for a headless corpse. French perceptions of Soviet power were "a product of ideological bias" (p. 291), concedes the author. "France was neither materially nor psychologically prepared for war" (p. 247). This was the crucial point: "the exaggeration of German power was in many ways a product of the inferiority complex which reigned in both civilian and military circles" (p. 297).

But then as if by magic the French back stiffened, and France adopted a politique de fermeté, realizing that France's status as a great power was at risk (p. 298). 1939 marked a period of French self-assertion, of economic and financial strength, of increased war production. The French government belatedly began to talk again to the Soviet Union, that scorned, critical counter-weight essential to any war against Nazi Germany. The conviction finally took hold in key government ministries that Hitler was bent on conquest. And yet in view of all the reliable intelligence from men like Renondeau and in view of all the other public evidence available to any informed bystander, the question begs why it took so long for the obvious to sink into the heads of the civilian leadership (cf., p. 317).

For Jackson, Édouard Daladier, the French premier, the "bull of the Vaucluse", was determined that France would resist a further German advance. He was "the key"; Daladier "clearly doubted Hitler's good faith" (pp. 320 & 324). In July 1939 the Bastille Day military parade in Paris reinforced an image of strength "as had not been seen in France since the end of the last war" (p. 331). France, Daladier told his cabinet, needed a politique de virilité, like the one French and British conservatives so feared and yet admired in Nazi Germany. France was "girding for war" (pp. 336ff.); it was determined and ready in September 1939.

"Nous vaincrons parce que nous sommes les plus forts" went the war propaganda (p. 395). And yet Jackson does not mention another popular notion amongst French soldiers: Il faut en finir. Let's get on with it. "France fights to defend her skin and only to defend her skin. All else is rubbish," commented a French journalist in September 1939.⁽⁹⁾ This was scarcely inspiring stuff on the eve of the war. Daladier was strong, the "bull of the Vaucluse", goes Jackson's argument; he was the most popular leader since Georges Clemenceau, France's tough World War I premier. But Daladier was no Clemenceau. Many of his contemporaries derided him as "a hesitating cow" or "a bull with snail's horns".⁽¹⁰⁾ Jackson does not say that Daladier often took strong opening positions, only to surrender them against opposition. This occurred frequently in negotiations with the British. If Daladier was to be France's salvation, he proved to be a hell of a hope.

The author hedges a little his strong assertions about a French revival. "The recovery," says Jackson, "had failed to repair the deep ideological fissures that had beset French political life throughout the pre-war decade" (p. 334). France was a deeply divided society in the 1930s between right and left, communist and fascist. Hatred, street violence, anti-Semitism, intense political animosity permeated French society. Jackson makes peripheral references to these circumstances, but his account of French intelligence assessments of Germany is oddly disconnected from the popular turbulence racking the country.

Jackson concludes that there was an important transformation in France in the year after Munich. And yet how could circumstances have changed so much in so short a time? To echo historian Tony Judt in his review of Ernest May's related Strange Victory: Hitler's Conquest of France (New York, 2000), they did not change all that much.⁽¹¹⁾ The drôle de guerre, the phoney war, which continued from September 1939 until April 1940, was no evidence of French determination to fight. The French high command still lacked confidence and did not wish to provoke the enemy.

Hatred and animosity still swirled between right and left. Daladier suppressed the French communist party after the conclusion of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact in August 1939. In jailing communist deputies and militants, he showed more grit than he showed against Nazi Germany. And "murderous stupidity" too, according to Arthur Koestler, for France lost an opportunity to enlist rank-and-file French communists, several million potential patriotes, in a great anti-fascist cause.⁽¹²⁾ For Daladier the cause was too great: it risked decisive victory and the spread of socialism. The French officer corps was represented by many men who thought the greater danger was the Communist Party and the Soviet Union, not Nazi Germany. When the Winter War broke out between Finland and the Soviet Union at the end of November 1939, some French generals and politicians were eager to fight the reds, an adversary far more desirable and easier to beat, so they believed, than "Colossus Germany". And was not General Maxime Weygand more worried about a communist uprising in Paris in May 1940, as France collapsed, than about stopping the German army? There was some confusion in French government and society about who was "enemy no. 1", Nazi Germany or Communist Russia.⁽¹³⁾ Jackson occasionally speaks of right wing anti-communist animosity, but these are peripheral references, which hedge his argument only slightly.

The other interesting peripheral in Jackson's account is the Soviet Union. And yet in France and Britain many reckoned Soviet cooperation to be essential to the success of an Allied war effort against Nazi Germany. Jackson does not take much notice except when he reports the view of the intelligence chief, Colonel Maurice Gauché, that the Soviet Union would be indispensable to the success of an "eastern front" (December 1938, p. 371). But three months later, in March 1939, Gauché contradicted himself: "the democracies could expect nothing in the way of military assistance from Russia. It was to Stalin's interest now as always that the democracies and totalitarian states should cut one another's throats, which would pave the way for bolshevism and effectively safeguard Russian territory; but he was no more interested in seeing the totalitarians vanquished by the democracies than vice-versa."⁽¹⁴⁾

Jackson refers to the "urgency with which French military and diplomatic officials sought to obtain Soviet military support for Poland and Romania in the spring and summer of 1939." Georges Bonnet, the French foreign minister and quintessential appeaser, changed his tune and pursued with "increasing ardour" a Soviet alliance (p. 371). What Jackson does not mention is that many of Bonnet's contemporaries, French and Soviet, considered him to be a yellow, treasonous, double-talking four-flusher. Neither he nor Daladier had any credibility in Moscow, nor even among French anti-appeasers like Georges Mandel. There was only a short period of French independence from British policy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union during three weeks in April 1939. At other times French policy was subordinated to a British line.⁽¹⁵⁾ And there was no British "urgency" to bring in the Soviet Union.

During the Bastille Day parade in which Jackson sees so much symbolism, Daladier walked up to the Soviet ambassador who was on the reviewing stand with him. "Anything new from Moscow?" he asked.⁽¹⁶⁾ Daladier should not have had to ask, but he and Bonnet were letting the British "make the running" in negotiations of vital importance to France. ⁽¹⁷⁾ Here was symbolism of a different sort.

In his conclusion Jackson reiterates his belief in a French resurgence and that France was not so badly served by its intelligence agencies. He adds that "ethnic typecasting [i.e., the particularly German propensity for war], 'worst case' thinking, and bureaucratic politics" were the main reasons for "exaggerat[ing] German capabilities" (p. 390). But other possible explanations, such as the "war-revolution nexus", admiration and awe of Nazi power, confusion about who was the main enemy are peripheral to, or absent from Jackson's account. And the French domestic context, the bitter divisions and violent animosities of French politics and society, are found in this study only as barely audible "noise".

Jackson has produced an impressive scholarly account of French intelligence in the 1930s, but the resurgent France he depicts, with all its shortcomings, still appears "decadent", divided, and demoralized. French resurgence was bravado that gave way at the first test.
 

University of Akron
 
 
 
 
 

Endnotes
 

1. For example, M. J. Carley, "'A Fearful Concatenation of Circumstances': The Anglo-Soviet Rapprochement, 1934-36," Contemporary European History, vol. 5, pt. 1 (March 1996), pp. 29-69; and Idem, "Generals, Statesmen, and International Politics in Europe, 1898-1945," CJH, vol. XXX, no. 2 (August 1995), pp. 289-321.

2. William C. Bullitt, U. S. ambassador in Moscow, to State Department, no. 340, strictly confidential, 5 Oct. 1934, 500.A15A4/2588, National Archives, Washington, D. C., Record Group 59 (1930-1939) box 2396; "Memorandum of Conversation with Litvinov," strictly confidential, by Hugh R. Wilson, U. S. observer at the League of Nations, Geneva, 21 Nov. 1934, 500.A15A4/2618, ibid.

3. For example, "Meeting with [Rudolf] Nadolny," Litvinov, 11 & 13 Dec. 1933, Arkhiv vneshnei politiki Rossiiskoi Federatsii [AVPRF], Moscow, fond 082, opis' 17, delo 1, papka 77, listy 6-2 [hereafter f., o., d., p., l(l).].

4. M. J. Carley, "Five Kopecks for Five Kopecks: Franco-Soviet Trade Relations, 1928 - 1939," Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique, vol. XXXIII, no. 1 (janv.- mars 1992), pp. 23-58.

5. Potemkin to N. N. Krestinskii, deputy commissar for foreign affairs, no. 5346, secret, 26 Nov. 1935, AVPRF, f. 0136, o. 19, d. 814, p. 164, ll. 119-122.

6. William D. Irvine, French Conservatism in Crisis: The Republican Federation of France in the 1930s. (Baton Rouge, 1979).

7. M. S. Ostrovskii, Soviet polpred [minister] in Bucharest, to Litvinov, extremely secret, 14 June 1935, A. A. Avdeev, M.-R. Ungurianu, et al., eds., Sovetsko-Rumynskie otnosheniia, 1935-1941, dokumenty i materialy, vol. 2, (Moscow, 2000), pp. 18-19; and Litvinov to Ostrovskii, secret, 10 Nov. 1935, ibid., pp. 30-33.

8. Hugh Ragsdale, "Soviet Actions during the Munich Crisis of 1938," résumé of a paper given at the Kennan Institute, Washington, D. C., June 1998; idem., Soviet Military Preparations and Policy in the Munich Crisis: New Evidence," Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, vol. 47, no. 2 (1999), pp. 210-26; and Jonathan Haslam, The Soviet Union and the Threat from the East: Msocow, Tokyo and the Prelude to the Pacific War (Pittsburgh, 1992), pp. 114-21.

9. Arthur Koestler, Scum of the Earth (New York, 1968), p. 54, citing the editorialist Gallus, in the Paris daily L'Intransigeant.

10. John C. Cairns, "Reflections on France, Britain and the Winter War Prodrome, 1939-1940," Historical Reflections, vol. 22, no. 1, (Winter 1996), pp. 211-34; Anthony Adamthwaite, France and the Coming of the Second World War, 1936-1939 (London, 1977), pp. 95-98; and Jules-Émile Jeanneney, Journal politique, septembre 1939 - juillet 1942 (Paris, 1972), pp. 44-45.

11. Tony Judt, "Could the French Have Won?" New York Review of Books, 22 Feb. 2001, pp. 37-40.

12. Koestler, Scum of the Earth, p. 91.

13. M. J. Carley, 1939: The Alliance that Never Was and the Coming of World War II (Chicago, 1999), passim.

14. Sir Eric Phipps, British ambassador in Paris, to Edward Lord Halifax, foreign secretary, no. 373, 28 March 1939, Documents on British Foreign Policy, 3^rd series, vol. IV (London, 1951), p. 535.

15. Carley, 1939, passim.

16. Ia. Z. Surits, Soviet polpred in Paris, to commissariat for foreign affairs, Moscow, highest priority, very secret, 14 July 1939, V. G. Komplektov, et al., eds., Dokumenty vneshnei politiki, vol. 22, book 1 (Moscow, 1992), p. 543.

17. Untitled memorandum by William Strang, head, Central department, Foreign Office, reporting on a meeting with Roger Cambon, the first secretary of the French embassy in London, 16 May 1939, C7206/3356/18, Public Record Office, London, F[oreign] O[ffice] 371 23066.