For France, too, here was the memory of the First World War.  Most of the decision-makers of the Thirties had been through the first war.  Edouard Daladier, the prime minister who would eventually sign the Munich agreement abandoning France’s Czechoslovakian ally, had a chest covered with medals he had won in the trenches.  Marshall Petain, the senior military officer in the country, had made his reputation holding Verdun in the First World War.  One of those was enough for anybody.  They knew just what would be involved. 

There was a powerful pacifist movement.  Pacifism had an especially strong grip on the French school teachers, so it got passed on to the next generation as well.  French people didn’t really believe in the League of Nations the way British people did, so it had less support. 

The French population pyramid had a narrower base and steeper sides than did the German one, so French casualties in the first war would take a lot longer to replace than would German ones.  France would run short of 18 year-olds in the early 1930s.  These came to be called the “Hollow Years.”  Hard to have an army without soldiers, hard to fight a war without an army. 

France lacked the industrial base for rearmament.  France ranked behind Germany, Russia, and Britain as an industrial economy.  There was also less big industry and more small workshops than was the case elsewhere.  Hard to produce a lot or to impose standardization under these conditions.  Then, the “hollow years” also meant that there was a shortage of factory workers at the same time that there was a shortage of soldiers.  Pushed to an extreme, the argument could be posed as a choice between soldiers without guns or guns without soldiers.  Neither one seemed very promising. 

For much of the Thirties, France teetered on the edge of a civil war between Left and Right.  France had a strong Communist Party.  The appeal of the Communist Party among workers pulled the Socialist Party over toward the extreme left.  France had a strong anti-republican conservative movement and some people were drawn to a French form of fascism.  This pulled the conservative parties toward the extreme right.  The middle ground thinned out. 

In 1934 a slimy political scandal sent the right-wing groups into the streets in huge demonstrations that seemed like an attempt at a fascist coup.  In 1936 the Popular Front (an alliance of Communists, Socialists, and middle-class Radicals) came to power.  This triggered a wave of strikes that forced employers to raise wages, shorten working weeks, and accept mass unionization.  All of this slowed down industrial rearmament.  Tanks and warplanes were slow coming off the assembly lines.  Employers were outraged; middle class people were frightened by the presence of the Communists.  The Popular Front government then botched its economic policy causing many middle-class voters to drift back toward the right. 

The French interpreted the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) in different ways: the right thought that it resulted from a Communist plot and France was next on the list; the left thought that it resulted from a fascist plot and France was next on the list.  The left wanted an alliance with the Soviet Union, while the right thought that this would just allow the Bolsheviks to revolutionize France.  The right wanted an alliance with Italy, while the left thought that this was just French support for fascism and aggression. 

The pre-war and wartime alliances were gone.  In 1918 France had won as part of a powerful coalition.  Now Russia had become an anti-Western outlaw country; the Italians were leaning toward Germany; the British might support France when push came to shove, but they refused to support France’s allies in Eastern Europe (Poland, Czechoslovakia); and the United States had retreated into isolationism. 

The Locarno Pact (1926) hindered France’s ability to aid its eastern allies.  Britain had promised to fight to defend France against a German attack, but not if France attacked Germany.  How could France support its threatened allies in Poland and Czechoslovakia against a German attack?  It could not move into Germany without international approval. 

So it wasn’t a case of “cheese-eating surrender monkeys.”  It looks to have been a shipload of people caught on a lee shore in a storm.