FULL FEATURE: The Fall of France, 1940

Today I wanted to talk about the Fall of France. But this is me, so it’s not going to be a blow by blow of how it happened. Not this time, anyway. I wanted to share an amazing account by a man called Marc Bloch. Born in the 1880s into a Jewish family, though he did not consider himself religious. ‘I feel neither pride nor shame in my origins,’ he wrote. ‘I am, I hope, a sufficiently good historian to know that racial qualities are a myth, and that the whole notion of Race is an absurdity. Bloch began teaching in 1905; history, to be precise and in the summer following his country’s capitulation, he wrote Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940, ‘in a white heat of rage.’ It’s not the account of the French collapse that makes it exceptional, but the soul-searching by a defeated Frenchman committed to paper in the weeks immediately afterwards.

His Alsatian family had served in all of France’s recent wars. A Great-grandfather in the revolutionary army in 1793, his father in 1870 in the defence of Strasbourg.

That both my uncles chose to leave their native Alsace after its annexation by the Second Reich; that I was brought up in the traditions of patriotism which found no more fervent champions than the Jews of the Alsatian exodus, and that France, from which many would like to expel me to-day (and may, for all I know, succeed in doing so), will remain, whatever happens, the one country with which my deepest emotions are inextricably bound up. I was born in France. I have drunk of the waters of her culture. I have made her past my own. I breathe freely only in her climate, and I have done my best, with others, to defend her interests.

Raised in Paris, Marc himself had fought in the First World War:

Destiny decided that I, with most of my generation, should, on two separate occasions, separated from one another by a stretch of twenty-one years, be jerked violently from the ways of peace… I have served in two wars. I began the first, in August 1914, as an infantry sergeant: in other words, as an ordinary 'foot-slogger', only just above the level of a private. In the course of the next four years I became successively a Platoon Commander, an Intelligence Officer, an A.D.C. at Regimental Headquarters, and finished up as a Captain on a Corps Staff.

The war

It was a captain that Bloch was recalled in both 1938, then In August 1939. When war came, he was miffed at the role assigned to him. Originally slated for a job in intelligence at Corps level, he was quickly downgraded to a sub-divisional headquarters based in Strasbourg. areas. The kind of jobs his unit was assigned to were ‘in themselves, flat and dismal enough,’ but eventually he began looking for a way out.

I had managed to make contact with a high-ranking officer at G.H.Q. Wire-pulling with the object of landing a better job is not an activity in which one naturally takes much pride, but it was scarcely my fault that only thus could I find any useful outlet for my enthusiasm. Thanks to my influential friend, I was transferred early in October to H.Q., First Army, and reported, without losing a moment, at Bohain in Picardy.

(Collection CHRD Lyon)