22 - The British Empire, 1939–1945

Summary

When France went to war in September 1939, it did so as a global imperial power. The French Empire emerged from the Second World War mired in crisis, and only partially intact. Between 1939 and 1945, this empire experienced three types of armed conflict, world war, civil war and contested decolonization. Much of this was unanticipated by the empire's rulers before the calamitous French defeat of June 1940. The empire's governing elites were bitterly divided about the causes of France's defeat, about its implications for republican democracy, about the probable outcome of the war. Economic crisis proved no barrier to the embrace of Vichy's 'National Revolution' by colonial regimes. With an empire wracked by violent internal division, the ebullience of French imperialism in 1945 seems puzzling. France moved in rapid succession from a nation defeated and occupied to one liberated and resurgent. A longer wartime constant was the state of undeclared civil war in its colonies.