Survey of Defeat 1940

Abstract

Fauxbras produced a remarkable document during his time as a prisoner of war in German camps. This chapter explores this text, which provides a unique insight into the debacle of June of 1940. France’s ‘strange defeat’ was the focus of obsessive scrutiny in its immediate aftermath, but it was forgotten amid the redemption of liberation and, since the publication of Marc Bloch’s celebrated examination, has become the subject of historical dissection.¹ In the short term and domestically, this traumatic defeat led to fierce recriminations, the search for alibis and villains. A one-sided literature flowed from French publishing houses in the Vichy years. Fauxbras commented on several of these works in his diary.² Initially, those within the Vichy regime sought political explanations for France’s defeat: it was pacifism, the Third Republic’s democracy, the Popular Front, the Communist Party that led to the loss of nerve and failures of duty amongst the ordinary soldier. Vichy established a tribunal to investigate defeat and tried General Gamelin and Popular Front politicians at Riom opening on 19 February 1942. This sideshow articulated the regime’s ideological explanation of France’s collapse. Indeed, Julian Jackson observed defeat ‘provided Vichy with its moral authority; it was the foundation myth of the regime’.³