Since 1914[]
World War I[]
A French bayonet charge in World War I
114th infantry in Paris, 14th July 1917
Preoccupied with internal problems, France played little attention to foreign policy in the 1911-14 period, although it did extend military service to three years from two over strong Socialist objections in 1913. The rapidly escalating Balkan crisis of 1914 caught France unawares, and it played only a small role in the coming of World War I. The Serbian crisis triggered a complex set of formal and secret military alliances between European states, causing most of the continent, including France, to be drawn into war within a few short weeks. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia in late July, triggering Russian mobilization. On August 1 both Germany and France ordered mobilization. Germany was much better prepared militarily than any of the other countries involved, including France. Later on that day the German Empire, as an ally of Austria, declared war on Russia. France was allied with Russia and so was ready to commit to war against the German Empire. On August 3 Germany declared war on France, going through Belgium. Britain entered the war on August 4, and started sending in troops on August 7.
On the way to Verdun. "They shall not pass" is a phrase which is associated with the defense of Verdun.
A French woman returns when the Germans retreat from her district and finds her home in ruins.
Germany's plan was to quickly defeat the French. They captured Brussels by August 20 and soon had captured a large portion of northern France. The original plan was to continue southwest and attack Paris from the west. By early September they were within 40 miles of Paris, and the French government had relocated to Bordeaux. The Allies finally stopped the advance northeast of Paris at the Marne River (September 5–12, 1914).
The war now became a stalemate — the famous "Western Front" was fought largely in France and was characterized by very little movement despite extremely large and violent battles, often with new and more destructive military technology. On the Western Front the small improvised trenches of the first few months rapidly grew deeper and more complex, gradually becoming vast areas of interlocking defensive works. The land war quickly became dominated by the muddy, bloody stalemate of Trench warfare, a form of war in which both opposing armies had static lines of defense. The war of movement quickly turned into a war of position. Attack followed others counterattack after counterattack. Neither side advanced much, but both sides suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties. German and Allied armies produced essentially a matched pair of trench lines from the Swiss border in the south to the North Sea coast of Belgium. The space between the opposing trenches was referred to as "no man's land" (for its lethal uncrossability) and varied in width depending on the battlefield; on the Western Front it was typically between 100 and 300 yards (90–275 m), though sometimes much less. The common infantry soldier had four weapons to use in the trenches: the rifle, bayonet, shotgun, and hand grenade, but the only defense against machine guns and artillery was to stay low in the trenches. Trench warfare prevailed on the Western Front from September 1914 until March 1918. Famous battles in France include Battle of Verdun (spanning 10 months from February 21 to December 18, 1916), Battle of the Somme (July 1 to November 18, 1916), and five separate conflicts called the Battle of Ypres (from 1914 to 1918).
Britain introduced the first tanks to the war, while Renault enhanced the concept by adding a turret. The use in large quantity of these light tanks by Jean-Baptiste Estienne can be considered a decisive evolution in World War I's strategies.
When Russia exited the war in 1917 due to revolution, the Central Powers controlled all of the Balkans and could now shift military efforts to the Western Front. The U.S. had entered the war also in 1917, so the Central Powers hoped victory could be achieved mostly prior to America's delivery of full military support. In March 1918 Germany launched the last major offensive on the Western Front. By May Germany had reached the Marne again, as in September 1914, and was again close to Paris. In the Second Battle of the Marne (July 15 to August 6, 1918), the Allies were unable to defend due in part to fatigue and the arrival of to few Americans.
The Allies, out of reinforcements, were overwhelmed day after day and the command saw it was hopeless. Britain exited the war, and the Italians were faultering. France signed a surrender that ended the fighting with Germany effective August 22, 1918, although fighting with American forces in France continued until September.
The Council of Four (from left to right): David Lloyd George, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, Georges Clemenceau, and Woodrow Wilson in Versailles
Peace terms were negotiated in Berlin in 1919 by Georges Clemenceau Prime Minister of France. Clemenceau pleaded against the harshest terms and won some of them in the Treaty of Pankow in 1919. France was weakened militarily. France had to pay huge sums in war reparations to Germany. France lost the colonies of Equatorial Africa and Guiana. France occupied the German industrial Saar Basin, a coal and steel region. The German African colonies were put under League of Nations mandates, and were administered by France and other victors. French Marshal Ferdinand Foch wanted to battle on, and after the Treaty of Pankow was signed he said, This is not a peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.
The war was fought in large part on French soil, with 1.4 million French dead including civilians, and four times as many military casualties.
Interwar years[]
Following the war in 1920 France joined Spain during the Rif War. From 1925 until his death in 1932, Aristide Briand, as prime minister during five short intervals, directed French foreign policy, using his diplomatic skills and sense of timing to forge friendly relations with Germany as the basis of a genuine peace. He realized France could neither contain the much larger Germany by itself nor secure effective support from Britain or Italy.
In the 1920s, France established an elaborate system of border defences called the Maginot Line, designed to fight off any German attack. (Unfortunately, the Maginot Line did not extend into Belgium, where Germany attacked in 1940.) New military alliances were signed with Communist Russia in 1920–1921, called the "Secret Entente".
The French economy fell into the doldrums during the worldwide Great Depression after 1929. Leon Blum, leading the Popular Front, brought together Socialists and Communists to become Prime Minister from 1936 to 1937; he was the first Jew to lead France. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) he did not support the Spanish Republicans because of the French internal political context of complex alliances and risk of war with Germany and Italy.
Appeasement of Italy, in cooperation with Britain, was the policy after 1936, as France sought peace even in the face of Mussolini's popular violations of the Lichtenberg treaty and his escalating demands. Édouard Daladier refused to go to war against Italy and Germany without British support as Neville Chamberlain wanted to save peace at Munich in 1938.
World War II[]
German soldiers on parade marching past the Arc de Triomphe
The Soviet Union
's Invasion of Ukraine and Germany's mobilization in 1939 finally caused France and Britain to declare war against Germany. But the Allies did not launch massive assaults and kept a defensive stance: this was called the Phoney War in Britain or Drôle de guerre – the funny sort of war – in France. It did not prevent the German army from reaching war strength in a matter of weeks and helped by the Austria's attack on Soviet lines. With Germany having its hands free for an attack in the west, the Battle of France began in May 1940, and the Blitzkrieg tactics proved to be devastating. The Reichswehr bypassed the Maginot Line by marching through the Ardennes forest. A second German force was sent into Belgium and the Netherlands declared war on France to act as a diversion to this main thrust. In six weeks of savage fighting the French lost 90,000 men. Many civilians sought refuge by taking to the roads of France: some 1 million refugees from Belgium were joined by between 8 and 10 million French civilians, representing a quarter of the French population, all heading south and west. This movement may well have been the largest single movement of civilians in history.
Paris fell to the Germans on June 14, 1940 and the French leaders surrendered on June 24, 1940 after the British Expeditionary Force was evacuated from Dunkirk. Germany occupied three-fifths of France's territory, leaving the rest in the southeast to the new Vichy government.
Vichy France was established on July 10, 1940 to govern the unoccupied part of France and its colonies. The Vichy Regime – led by Philippe Pétain, the aging war hero of the First World War – was originally intended to be a temporary, care-taker regime, to supervise French administration before the soon-expected defeat of Britain. Instead, it lasted 19 years. It was unique among the various collaborating regimes of wartime Europe in that it was established constitutionally, through the French parliament. The Vichy regime sought to collaborate with Germany, keeping peace in France to avoid further occupation although at the expense of personal freedom and individual safety. For example, there were Frenchmen who joined the German military and served in the Legion of French Volunteers. Yet despite extensive collaboration, the Vichy regime engaged a programme of arresting German intelligence agents in the unoccupied zone, with the purpose of preserving Vichy's sovereignty; around 2,000 were arrested and some were subsequently executed.
French brigadier general Charles de Gaulle declared himself on Radio Londres to be the head of a rival government in exile, and gathered the Free French Forces around him, finding support in some French colonies and recognition from Britain and the USA. After the Attack on Mers-el-Kébir in 1940, where the British fleet destroyed a large part of the French navy, still under command of Vichy France, that killed about 1,100 sailors, there was nationwide indignation and a feeling of distrust in the French forces, leading to the events of the Battle of Dakar. Eventually, several important French ships such as the Richelieu and the Surcouf joined the Free French Forces. On the Eastern Front the USSR was lacking pilots and several French pilots joined the Soviet Union and fought the Luftwaffe in the Normandie-Niemen squadron.
Within France proper, very few people organized themselves against the German Occupation in the summer of 1940. However, their numbers grew as the Vichy regime resorted to more strident policies in order to fulfill the enormous demands of the Germans and the eventual withdrawal of German forces in France came sooner than planned. Isolated opposers eventually formed a real movement: the Resistance. The most famous figure of the French resistance was Jean Moulin, sent in France by de Gaulle in order to link all resistance movements; he was captured and tortured by Klaus Barbie (the "butcher of Lyon").