<i>Defeat and Division: France at War, 1939–1942</i> by Douglas Porch

In the first volume of an anticipated two-volume study on France in Cambridge University Press’ series on “Armies of the Second World War,” Porch offers an impressively researched, trenchantly argued, and immensely readable study that takes the story up to the end of 1942. Porch is certainly an excellent choice; as a prominent and prolific historian of modern French political and military history, he has in his scholarship ranged across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as across France and its empire.The first of the book’s two parts seeks to explain the débâcle, adopting a resolutely counter-revisionist position. The current consensus in the specialist scholarship is that France’s defeat was not the result of deep-seated weaknesses in the Third Republic’s structure and functioning (a position dismissed perhaps a little too readily as the “decadence” thesis, which supposedly substitutes moral judgment for analysis). Rather, defeat was the outcome of short-term military mistakes, especially the decisions to send the best of the Anglo-French armies into Belgium in 1940 and to leave the Ardennes sector relatively unfortified.In rejecting this revisionism, Porch makes two related arguments. One is the truism that wars are waged by societies and not solely by armies (46). The second point involves a careful examination of the French military’s capabilities and performance in 1940, which Porch uses to highlight its many shortcomings, such as outmoded and insufficient equipment, shoddy training of troops, archaic logistics systems, and indifferent leadership, among others. One of the more telling problems was in communications. Unlike the Germans, the French failed to modernize their field communications; the ratio of German to French radio operators in 1940 stood at 12:1 (149). Chaotic breakdowns on the battlefield were the result.For Porch, this striking inferiority, among others, testified to the Third Republic’s inability to prepare properly for the war with Germany, which the Republic’s army, and much of its political class, deemed all but inevitable after 1919. The problem was far less the strategic mistakes made in May 1940 than it was the generalized failure to adapt in response to the surprise German breakthrough. Porch’s assessment is damning: “That the French army and ultimately the Third Republic unraveled inexorably in the face of an easily anticipated tactical setback suggests the systemic fragility of France’s entire political/military system” (178).Porch frames the second part of the book as a struggle between the Vichy regime and General Charles de Gaulle’s fledgling Free French movement, much of it waged in France’s African empire. Not surprisingly, he is scathing toward Vichy and the cohort of French generals who quickly rallied behind the new regime. For Porch, Vichy represents less a break with the Third Republic, notwithstanding the regime’s insistence that it did so, than the bitter fruit of France’s divisions and deficiencies before 1940.This position arguably downplays the searing effects of crushing defeat, which numerous French and foreign observers viewed as a verdict on the Third Republic; the dearth of attractive options in 1940 regarding the feasibility and costs of continuing the war; and the somewhat open-ended nature of Vichy’s ambitions for national renewal, a function partly of the regime’s raging factionalism. At the same time, Porch captures a fundamental truth in remarking that Vichy’s future ultimately depended on a German victory (271). He rightly dismisses the idea that, under German tutelage, France could ever be more than an exploited satellite state.If Porch is contemptuous of Vichy, he is generally sympathetic toward de Gaulle and the Free French while also underlining their minority if not marginal status—as well as their dependence on the Allies. In August 1940, the Free French counted 2,721 officers and soldiers; in the summer of 1943, the number of French volunteers (40,000) roughly equalled that of Vichy’s paramilitary units (Groupe mobile de réserve) and milice. As late as July 1943, of the Free French forces of 60,000 or so, two-thirds were colonial conscripts and only 2 percent were French citizens.But however meager its military strength, the Free French had positioned France to be on the side of the victors in what de Gaulle astutely understood, first and foremost, as a political struggle with the Western Allies to ensure that France recovered its great power status following the inevitable Axis defeat. And, for all his infuriating and sometimes absurd pretentions, de Gaulle waged this struggle with remarkable success. For this reason alone, the second volume of Porch’s study is eagerly awaited.

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