Volume 29, Number 15 · October 7, 1982
So Big
By Malcolm Muggeridge
End of the Affair: The Collapse of the Anglo-French Alliance, 1939-1940
by Eleanor M. Gates
University of California Press, 630 pp., $28.50
Churchill and De Gaulle
by François Kersaudy
Atheneum, 476 pp., $19.95
Ever since William the Conqueror, Anglo-French relations have been a major preoccupation on both sides of the English Channel. In 1940, when the Wehrmacht bypassed the Maginot line and was on the way to Paris, a crisis arose in this relationship such as had never occurred before. From the British side came a belated proposal to unite the two countries in a common citizenship. But it was too late; the French capitulated, and turned to their aged but greatly venerated Marshal Pétain, with the unsavory Pierre Laval at his elbow, to make the best terms he could with Hitler's Third Reich, without reference to France's obligations to its allies.
Review, 4407 words
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