The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940

by William L. Shirer

A great nation, though it experiences the worst of luck, does not suddenly collapse out of the blue. The seeds of its ruin are planted long before.

Paul Claudel once observed: “It is not enough to know the past. It is necessary to understand it.”

Third Republic was moving into the twentieth century. The Radical Republicans, supported by most of the Socialists, had finally triumphed over the forces of the Right, but the bitterness between them had been exacerbated almost beyond hope of repair. They seemed to dwell more and more in two separate, hostile worlds, divided not only politically but by their fundamental attitudes toward morals and religion. There was no tolerance, no breadth of understanding, which might have led toward reconciliation in the interest of national unity.

1905, even though Combes, for reasons other than clerical, had been forced out of office. And though the pope condemned the law, forbade its acceptance by French Catholics, and excommunicated every deputy who voted for it (there were 341 of them in the Chamber), the French government went ahead with the task of separating Church and state once and for all. Title to all Church property was taken over by the state, priests and bishops were removed from the public payroll,

Of the 132 billion gold marks assessed Germany for reparations in 1921, Germany had paid a total in money and goods of 22,891,000,000

Actually, on balance, Germany never had to pay a single mark out of her own resources. Her borrowings from American bankers, which were never repaid, amounted to more than her total reparation payments. Naive American investors footed the German reparations bill.

Though the United States refused to take a cent of reparations from Germany, its government and Congress insisted that its Allies, especially Britain and France, pay their war debts in full and with interest.

Would that have brought an end to Hitler and the downfall of the Third Reich (and averted the Second World War)? Hitler’s own answer, made in confidence, has been preserved. “A retreat on our part,” he said long afterward, in reminiscing of his Rhineland gamble, “would have spelled collapse…. The forty-eight hours after the march into the Rhineland were the most nerve-racking in my life.”81

It was a theme he kept repeating throughout the evening. Still, he was “haunted and undermined,” he says, “by the grief I felt that Britain, with her forty-eight million population, had not been able to make a greater contribution to the land war against Germany, and that so far nine-tenths of the slaughter and ninety-nine hundredths of the suffering had fallen upon France and upon France alone.”