THE INEXORABLE DEFEAT – May–June 1940

11 November 1918. An unfinished victory… France believed it had won the war; it had won only a precarious peace. This dramatic observation is the starting point of a long via dolorosa that would inexorably lead the country toward the denouement of June 1940. Along the stations of this via dolorosa, France — in total contradiction between its foreign policy and its defence policy — would move from disillusion to capitulation, never realising that it had not, or had not given itself, the means to match its ambitions. The disappointment of the Treaty of Versailles, the arrogance of the years of occupation in the Rhineland, the illusion of the Locarno Pact, the choice of a defensive posture even as it had guaranteed its protection to numerous countries with which it shared no common border, the passivity in the face of Germany's rising power, the failure to react to Belgian neutrality, the capitulation of Munich — all of this could only lead to a war entered into ill-prepared and ill-managed. When on 10 May 1940 Germany launched its western offensive, the French army would accumulate blunder after blunder, unwittingly amplifying German successes. Caught in the whirlwind of the lightning German breakthrough, the high command would never be in a position to reverse the course of events, and one calamitous piece of news followed another like a Greek tragedy.