Reappraisals

by Tony Judt

  May misses this because he is unconcerned with domestic disputes, believing that by the late 1930s the corrosive hatreds of earlier years had been set aside and France was as stable and united as Britain, if not more so. But it was in October 1937 that the eminently respectable Nouvelles économiques et financières was sneering at the “Jew Blum,” “our ex-prime minister whose real name is Karfunkelstein.” In April 1938, after the Anschluss, Pierre Gaxotte (later of the Académie Française) was still describing Blum as “a disjointed un-French puppet with the sad head of a Palestinian mare. . . . Between France and this cursed man, we must choose. He is the very incarnation of everything that sickens our flesh and our blood. He is evil. He is death.”10

  In Scum of the Earth Arthur Koestler wrote of the vicious nationalist hatreds and threats swirling around France in the months preceding the battle of France. And from no less a source than Charles de Gaulle we have contemporary testimony to the partisan, paranoid, hate-filled atmosphere of the French parliament during the installation of Paul Reynaud’s government on March 21, two months before the German invasion. If Ernest May believes that France in May 1940 was a nation resolute, united, and in a condition to face the German threat, he is deeply mistaken.11

  The Communists had not forgiven Blum for his failure to intervene on behalf of the Spanish loyalists in 1936; for his insistence on compromise in the Popular Front legislation of that year; and perhaps above all for his success in preserving the French Socialist Party following the schism with the Communists in December 1920. In December 1940 they approached the Vichy authorities with an informal offer to testify against Blum at his forthcoming show trial. (Fortunately for the French Communist Party’s future standing, their proposal was ignored.) The unions were still seething in resentment at Daladier’s November 1938 laws abrogating the labor reforms of 1936. Anti-Fascism, which might once have been an effective motive for unity, had been undermined and corroded by successive governments’ obsession with not alienating Mussolini, to whom France continued to look for support until the very eve of defeat. The army was riddled with conspirators—May makes no mention of the Cagoule, the shadowy officers’ plot scotched by Interior Minister Marx Dormoy (for which he was later murdered by the Vichy Milice). Anti-foreign and anti-Communist legislation was in place by September 1939, long before Pétain came to office.

  Above all, the French lacked confidence. For twenty years they had been reminded by politicians and generals of the failure of the French population to grow, of the trauma of the Great War, of the need to avoid another conflict. When it came time in 1940 to assure the French that they were as brave, as well equipped, as strong, and as confident as their foes, these same politicians and generals sounded understandably hollow. A collective fear and self-doubt had been instilled in the nation, adding an irrational dimension to the country’s all-too-real shortage of men.

  May himself quotes the British ambassador in Paris in September 1938 claiming “all that is best in France is against war, almost at any price.” When war broke out a year later, Brigadier Edward Spears, bilingualand warmly Francophile, reported home that “many French people . . . argue . . . that . . . they have perhaps been duped and are fighting for England.”12 Did everything and everyone somehow come together in the next six months? Of course not.

  None of this sufficiently explains what happened when the Panzers crashed through the woods at Sedan. But without it we don’t have any explanation at all. Is it necessary to abandon the constraints of the political and cultural setting in order to engage in fruitful counterfactual speculation? I don’t think so. Nor do I see why good military history need ignore the political and social background in order to keep faith with the fortunes of war. As it happens, there is a classic work of military history which encompasses all these concerns, and it is highly germane to Professor May’s theme.

  In Michael Howard’s account of the Franco-Prussian War, first published in 1961, the events of 1870-71 closely anticipate those of May 1940.13 On both occasions the French displayed strategic confusion, planning for an offensive but waiting to be attacked; as Friedrich Engels observed in July 1870, when the war began, if the French didn’t take the offensive their declaration of war made no sense. Yet in 1870 as in 1939, the generals made a pointless advance into the neighboring Saarland, then retreated and waited upon events. The tactical and administrative failings were also strikingly similar: At seventy years’ distance French generals twice failed to understand railway timetables, put men and supplies in the right place, concentrate troops effectively, organize retreats, or communicate among themselves—mistakes their predecessors had already made in Emperor Napoléon III’s Italian campaign of 1859. Both Michael Howard and Marc Bloch write of the “chaos” of mobilization. And in 1870 as in 1940 German officers proved more flexible, took more initiative, and adapted better to changing circumstances.

  On neither occasion were the French at a significant technical disadvantage. Indeed, in 1870 they had the new chassepot breech-loading rifles, superior to anything the Germans could field. But French soldiers weren’t trained in the use of the new weapon (one is reminded of Sartre’s description of the “respectful terror” with which French reservists in 1939 handled weapons they had never even seen before being mobilized). Thousands of the guns were left forgotten in obscure and poorly sited arms dumps. The French were as deficient in intelligence gathering in 1870 as they would be in 1940, with the result that they were constantly wrong-footed by German movements. Moltke, like his successors in Hitler’s general staff, believed in bypassing French defensive positions whenever possible; together with the French habit of exaggerating enemy numbers, this led the static French armies to surrender even before giving battle.

  The outcome of the Franco-Prussian War, when huge French armies were surrounded and captured at Sedan and Metz, was as much a shock to the French and the rest of Europe as was the battle of 1940: “The completeness of the Prussian success in 1870 thus astounded the world,” Michael Howard writes. Meanwhile the nineteenth-century generals were as determined as their successors to avoid a social revolution even at the cost of national surrender. But some of them appreciated the scale of their humiliation and tried, like General Bourbaki, to salvage their honor by taking their lives (no comparable sense of shame is recorded for the men of 1940).

  Howard is cuttingly dismissive of these failed generals, writing of their “incompetence and paralysis,” and he shows time and again how they might have acted differently. But throughout the narrative he restrains his speculation about what might have been to the limits of what was plausible, in view of the broader context. Thus, of the demoralizing impact on soldiers of a badly organized mobilization he writes, “They might yet, with brilliant leadership, win victories; but they were in no condition to stand up to the shock of defeat.”

  Howard’s general conclusion (which can be applied virtually unchanged to the collapse of 1940) is tellingly different from May’s: “The incompetence of the French high command explained much: but the basic reasons for the catastrophe lay deeper, as the French themselves, in their humiliation, were to discern. The collapse at Sedan, like that of the Prussians at Jena sixty-four years earlier, was the result not simply of faulty command but of a faulty military system; and the military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of it in its totality. The French had good reason to look on their disasters as a judgment.”

  Pace Ernest May, we should do likewise.

  This essay, a review of Ernest May’s new study of the fall of France in 1940, first appeared in the New York Review of Books in February 2001.

  NOTES TO CHAPTER XI

  1 Nicole Jordan, “Strategy and Scapegoatism: Reflections on the French National Catastrophe, 1940,” in The French Defeat of 1940: Reassessments, ed. Joel Blatt (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1998), 13.

  2 Marc Bloch, Étrange Défaite: Témoignage écrit en 1940 (Paris: Société des Éditions Franc-tireurs, 1946
).

  3 Raymond Aron later wrote that “I lived through the thirties in the despair of French decline. . . . In essence, France no longer existed. It existed only in the hatred of the French for one another.” See Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 15.

  4 The Belgian government, which had declared its neutrality in 1936, was always reluctant to cooperate with the French and did not allow French and British troops to enter Belgian territory until 6:30 a.m. on May 10, the day the Germans attacked.

  5 See Nicole Jordan, “The Cut-Price War on the Peripheries: The French General Staff, the Rhineland and Czechoslovakia,” in Paths to War: New Essays on the Origins of the Second World War, ed. Robert Boyce and Esmonde M. Robertson (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989), 128-166; see also Nicole Jordan, The Popular Front and Central Europe: The Dilemmas of French Impotence, 1918-1940 (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

  6 Les Événements survenus en France de 1933 à 1945: Témoignages et documents recueillis par la Commission d’Enquête Parlementaire (Paris: Imprimerie de l’Assemblée Nationale, n.d.), 2:548. Gamelin’s testimony was given on December 23, 1947.

  7 Donald Cameron Watt, How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second World War, 1938- 1939 (New York: Pantheon, 1989); Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Français de l’an 40 (Paris: Gallimard, 1990); Alistair Horne, To Lose a Battle: France 1940 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969).

  8 See Collaboration and Resistance: Images of Life in Vichy France 1940-1944 (New York: Abrams, 2000), 24; French edition published by La Documentation Française, Paris, 1988.

  9 People do not speak much of the 1871 Paris Commune today. But for over one hundred years it was the principal historical and symbolic reference of the French and European Left and a bogeyman for conservatives everywhere. From Lenin to Weygand and on into the streets of 1968, its memory and its shadow were constantly invoked, as both a model and a warning. For the most recent account in English see Robert Tombs, The Paris Commune, 1871 (London, New York: Longman, 1999).

  10 See Pierre Birnbaum, Un Mythe politique: “La République juive” (Paris: Fayard, 1988).

  11 Arthur Koestler, Scum of the Earth (New York: Macmillan, 1941); Charles de Gaulle, Mémoires de guerre, vol. 1: L’Appel (Paris: Plon, 1955), p. 25.

  12 Spears is quoted by John C. Cairns in “Reflections on France, Britain and the Winter War Prodrome, 1939- 1940” in Blatt, The French Defeat of 1940, p. 283. Spears’s memoirs cast an unflattering light on the mood of the time: Edward L. Spears, Assignment to Catastrophe, vol. 1, Prelude to Dunkirk, July 1939-May 1940; vol. 2, The Fall of France, June 1940 (A.A. Wyn, 1954 and 1955).

  13 Michael Howard, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Invasion of France, 1870-1871 (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1961; Collier, 1969).

  CHAPTER XII

  À la recherche du temps perdu: France and Its Pasts

  As you drive along the magnificently engineered, impeccably landscaped autoroutes of France, you cannot miss the unusual information panels set off to the right at frequent intervals. Conspicuous but somehow unobtrusive, in warm earth colors, these cluster in pairs. First comes a panel of two or three symbols—sufficiently simple and pointed to arouse the interest of the speeding motorist, but not immediately self-explanatory: a bunch of grapes, perhaps, or a stylized depiction of a building or a mountain.

  Then, a kilometer or so farther on, allowing just enough time for the occupants of the car to ask one another what it meant, the panel explains itself in a second panel, similarly sited, telling you that you are now passing the vineyards of Burgundy, the cathedral at Reims, or the Mont Sainte-Victoire. And there, off to right or left (the second panel has a helpful arrow suggesting where you should look), a field of grapes, a Gothic spire, or Cézanne’s favorite hill emerges on cue.

  These panels are not necessarily accompanied or followed by an exit road. Their purpose is not to lead you to the thing depicted, much less tell you about it. They are there to alleviate the boredom of high-speed motoring, to tell the traveler on advanced modern highways what it is that he or she is passing through unawares. And there is an obvious irony in the fact that you need to be traveling on roads that rigorously separate you from the minutiae of the landscape in order to have that landscape interpreted for you.

  Moreover, these panels are intentionally and unapologetically didactic: They tell you about the French past—or about present-day activities (wine-making, for example) that provide continuity with the past—in ways that reinforce a certain understanding of the country. Ah, we say, yes: The battlefield of Verdun; the amphitheater at Nîmes; the cornfields of the Beauce. And as we reflect upon the variety and the wealth of the country, the ancient roots and modern traumas of the nation, we share with others a certain memory of France. We are being led at seventy miles an hour through the Museum of France that is France itself.

  France is unique. But it is not alone. We are living through an era of commemoration. Throughout Europe and the United States, memorials, monuments, commemorative plaques, and sites are being erected to remind us of our heritage. In itself, this is not a new development: At the battle site of Thermopylae in Greece, the Leonidas Monument (erected in 1955) reproduces an ancient text exhorting passersby to remember the heroic defeat of the Spartans at the hands of Xerxes in 480 BC. The English have long celebrated and commemorated defeats (from Hastings in 1066 to Dunkirk in 1940); Rome is a living memorial site of Western civilization; and the brief story of the U.S. is recounted, incarnated, represented, and monumentalized across the land, from Colonial Williamsburg to Mount Rushmore.

  In our day, however, there is something new. We commemorate many more things; we disagree over what should be commemorated, and how; and whereas until recently (in Europe at least) the point of a museum, a memorial plaque, or a monument was to remind people of what they already knew or thought they knew, today these things serve a different end. They are there to tell people about things they may not know, things they have forgotten or never learned. We live in growing fear that we shall forget the past, that it will somehow get misplaced among the bric-a-brac of the present. We commemorate a world we have lost, sometimes even before we have lost it.

  In erecting formal reminders or replicas of something we ought to remember, we risk further forgetfulness: By making symbols or remnantsstand for the whole, we ease ourselves into an illusion. In James Young’s words, “Once we assign monumental form to memory, we have to some degree divested ourselves of the obligation to remember. . . . Under the illusion that our memorial edifices will always be there to remind us, we take leave of them and return only at our convenience.” Moreover, monuments—war memorials for example—blend imperceptibly over time into the landscape: They become part of the past, rather than a reminder of it.1

  In the United States discussion of such matters usually takes place under the sign of “memory wars.” Who has the right to design an exhibition, assign meaning to a battlefield, inscribe a plinth or a plaque? These are tactical skirmishes in the greater cultural conflict over identity: national, regional, linguistic, religious, racial, ethnic, sexual. In Germany (or Poland) arguments about how to remember or commemorate the recent past have been distilled into painful, compensatory attention to the extermination of the European Jews—planned in Germany, executed in Poland. Instead of recording and giving form to pride and nostalgia, commemoration in such circumstances rouses (and is intended to rouse) pain and even anger. Once a public device for evoking and encouraging feelings of communal or national unity, public commemoration of the past has become a leading occasion for civic division, as in the dispute over whether a Holocaust memorial should be built in Berlin.

  The place of the historian in all this is crucial but obscure. The contrast between memory and history should not be overstated: Historians do more than just remember on behalf of the rest of the community, but we certainly do that too. Mere remembering, in Milan Kundera’s words, is, aft
er all, just a form of forgetting, and the historian is responsible, at the very least, for correcting mis-memory.2 In Nice today, for example, the main shopping street has been relabeled with a plaque reading “Avengueda Jouan Medecin. Consou de Nissa 1928-1965.” This is a politically correct attempt, in the French context, to remind passersby that the local inhabitants once spoke an Italianate Provençal patois and to invoke on behalf of the city’s distinctive identity the memory of that language. But Jean Médecin, the mayor of Nice between 1928 and 1965, had no particular interest in local dialects or customs, did not use the old Niçois form of his name or title, and was as French, and French-speaking, as they come—as were most of his constituents in his day. This one instance can stand for many where a false past has been substituted for the real one for very present-minded reasons; here, at least, the historian can help set memory back on its feet.

  Historians do deal in memory, then. And we have long been in the business of criticizing and correcting official or public memory, which has ends of its own to serve. Moreover, in the writing of contemporary or near-contemporary history, memory is a crucial resource: not just because it adds detail and perspective, but because what people remember and forget, and the uses to which memory is put, are the building blocks of history too. Saul Friedländer has put memory—his own and others’—to exemplary use in his history of Nazi Germany and the Jews; Henry Rousso very effectively turned an account of the way in which the French successively remembered and forgot the Vichy years into a history of postwar France itself. Memory here is made a subject of history, while history resumes, at least in part, an older, mnemonic role.3