10 - Conclusion

Summary

This chapter revisits the arguments of the book concerning France’s experience of the Second World War – the debate over the Fall of France in 1940 that swings between “Decadence” and revisionist “Contingency,” and systemic collapse or “military misfortune.” The period after 1940 saw France struggle to recover its power and influence through two opposing strategies – Vichy through collaboration with Germany, whereas de Gaulle sided with the Allies. While de Gaulle proved the more strategically insightful, his struggle was, unfortunately, inhibited by diminutive numbers, which, to Eisenhower’s ire, contributed to a faltering French military performance in 1944–1945, emphasizing the fact that 1940 had reduced France to the status of a courtesy power in Allied eyes. Furthermore, like many leaders of France’s internal resistance, Franklin Roosevelt remained deeply skeptical of de Gaulle’s democratic intentions. Upon Liberation, de Gaulle maneuvered to restore the French state not only against the Americans, who refused to recognize the Gouvernement provisoire de la République française, but also against the chaos caused by resistance “feudals” with their own political agendas. Nor did l’amalgame of 1944 repair severely damaged French civil–military relations. The “resistance myth” underpinned France’s liberation narrative, one embraced by multiple actors led by de Gaulle, whose purpose was to minimize the pivotal role of the Allies and Africans in France’s liberation, exclude 1940, POWs, and Vichy collaboration from France’s wartime memory, and mask the fact that the “post-war” era found France in a weak position to reassert power over an empire where wartime mobilization had transformed mentalities, as the aftershock of wars of imperial independence was to prove. The mild punishments and blanket amnesties issued for wartime collaboration, the onset of the Cold War, which allowed former Vichy supporters to evoke a “lost cause” anti-communist “shield of France” alibi for their murderous conduct, and refusal to accept France’s role in the Shoah combined to undermine Gaullist promises of “renewal.” In fact, the post-war Fourth Republic resembled in essentials its pre-war predecessor.