Volume 1, Number 2 · June 1, 1963
French Army
By John Lukacs
The French Army: A Military Political History
by Paul Marie de la Gorce
George Braziller, $10.00
Dare Call It Treason
by Richard M. Watt
Simon & Schuster, $5.95
It is almost a century since 1870, a year that marked a turning point in French, European and, thus, world history. That year the armies of France were beaten by the Prussians, and they have never since recovered their position as the principal military force on the continent (except perhaps for a few scattered years after the First World War). During the First World War, even with the aid of the allied British and Russian continental armies, they barely held their own; during the Second World War, with the British, they could not prevent the Germans from overrunning France; and for the last twenty years the French Army has been defeated and humiliated several times by Japanese and Indo-Chinese forces. Yet the history of its last hundred years is not simply one of deadening defeats and steady decline, but is often punctuated by inspiring feats of arms. On the one hand, there is Sedan, Metz, the Aisne, the collapse of 1940, Dienbienphu; on the other, Orléans, the Marne, Verdun, Bir Hakeim, Strasbourg (in 1944). On the one hand, the incompetence of Bazaine, Nivelle, Gamelin, Weygand; on the other, the astonishing, almost Pascalian insight and intelligence of certain rigid military figures, such as Lyautey, Galliéni, Leclerc and De Gaulle.
Review, 1982 words
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