Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940

As both an avid reader of WWII history and early 20th century European history I find Marc Bloch's analysis of the French defeat not only insightful but his first hand accounts amazingly accurate. His original book was hastily written following the French loss. At the time he was a renowned Medieval history professor who took up his reserve status in the French Army at the age of 52 only to see the arrogance, ineptitude and disgrace of the self-serving leadership of the French Army and government under Jenri Phillippe Petan. This later to be published book was found in a desk of the family home in the south of France. Having read several other short essays and books on the French defeat it's fascinating that the French, better armed, better prepared completely ignored the German's new strategies of combined air, tank and infantry tactics and the fast, penetrating attacks of the blitzkrieg. He clearly saw this first hand the alternatives the French had to stop the Germans following several eye witnesses accounts of battles and the unwillingness of the French to change tactics and to simply resupply their army. This is a shocking and eye opening view of how leadership can fail a nation.

Other reviewers have given an excellent account of this book's main subject. What Bloch also reveals in these pages is the effect of ideology on the 20th century European mind. For example, he blasts the Germans for their embrace of "Hitlerian physics" but contrasts this to the "Marxist mathematics" promoted before the War by the French Left. He argues the spread of pacifism, first under Leon Blum and later under the High Command, prevented France's superior military from attacking the still-relatively weak Germans when they moved on the Rhineland. As he states: the German victory was fundamentally an intellectual victory, which is what made it so scary and ominous for the rest of the bloody 20th century. In this regard, consider Heidegger's towering intellect compared to Sartre's feebleness. The book is filled with interesting anecdotal accounts of the Wehrmacht. Given the stereotypes, who knew German officers had "the bad habit of not returning salutes" properly? Who knew the German Army appeared in all respects "more democratic" than the French, with an easy camaraderie between officers and grunts? He attributes this to the powerful metaphysical bond the Nazis tapped into, especially among the young. Anyone with knowledge of the disastrous political ideas of the 20th century will find a first-hand account confirming the worst. Bloch believed himself fully integrated into the French Republic and considered his Jewishness as secondary. The Nazis disagreed. The saddest thing in this story is that France has shown his optimism in the Republic was misplaced: French Jews are leaving in greater numbers today than anytime since Vichy.

This slim, unpretentious volume, written at the time events took place, and validated by the author's subsequent death at German's hands, is the best witness account we have of the disintegration of what at the time was regarded the most powerful army in the Allied camp. There is a dry-eyed innocence in the reporting that makes the shattering news it conveys more momentous than anything I have read in more scholarly, more documented, chronicles of the period which overwhelm citizen experience with broader perspectives. This is not to minimize others' works, nor to regard M. Bloch as a "minimalist": au contraire. He was a world-renowned medieval scholar, so his mind was nuanced and perceptive, his approach unsentimental and objective; he brings the full intellectual rigor of his training and experience to extract all possible social, historical, and moral truth from the seemingly mundane. He was in his late forties when the war started but nonetheless, served with honor, very much with his eyes-opened, did his duty in the army and kept his brain functioning throughout rather than putting it on hold in blind patriotism (such a treacherous, over-rated popular paliative). He kept at his craft but rather than delving in ancient manuscripts he reported on what he observed around him of an army, indeed a state, in rapid collapse. The macro waves drowning the country are inferred from his micro observations. Indeed the many treasures come in seemingly casual descriptions of mundane events like millions of naked, flickering, low-wattage light-bulbs adumbrating the tragedy of national collapse. Bloch comes to a melancholic but inherently optimistic conclusion: the future of France will be built not by men of his generation, but by a new breed. How ironic this observation in the midst of the overwhelming propaganda for Petain's phony reactionary, bullying National Revolution and its relatively widespread support (at least in its early stages) in Occupied and Vichy France. This book was written after the defeat and before he joined the Resistance (in whose service he was captured, tortured and killed by the Gestapo). Even in the most abject moments of defeat, I don't think Bloch ever wavered in the belief that the Germans would eventually have to go. Indeed, without regret or melancholy, there seems to have been an absolute faith in the eventual disappearance of the old, pre-popular front, pre-war French order, as much as of French political and military men, as of pre-war French bourgeoisie. The book could have been written by a character in Renoir's 1939 masterpiece "Regle du Jeu." This is real though, and our author a genuine hero. Perhaps it would have been ironically interesting, had he lived, to learn what he would have made of Indochine, Algerie, Gaullism and the heady days of 1968. For anyone interested in the second world war and French history, this little book is indispensible.

The simple-minded are apt to chalk up the shocking defeat of France in the summer of 1940 to French weakness. If you'd rather think a bit more deeply, read this classic account by the pioneering medieval historian. Bloch, who lived through the defeat and died fighting with the French resistance, lays out a penetrating analysis of the French defeat. It is vivid, perceptive, beautifully written, and unsparing in its examination of the failures of the generals, the politicians, and the people. It is a thought-provoking cultural critique of a society in a moment of crisis. A classic.

I keep returning to this book as among the best I've ever read. It is both good reading as military history and failure analysis: no one has been able to write so deftly and originally about why France fell so swiftly in 1940. Unlike other military history books, this one is not heavy on maps nor units nor armament, merely a very incisive and friendly discussion of why France fells so quickly. Having served during WW1 and serving during WW2, Marc Bloch points to a litany of reasons why the French army, which was better equipted than the Germans, collapsed so suddenly. Despite what I learned in highschool about the French defeat of WW2 (France was overconfident behind the Maginot Line), Marc Bloch tells a different reason. The French army never understood how the speed of modern weapons had shortened space. Marc Bloch, serving at the front in 1940, recalled that the German offensive actually seem to overtake each French retreat: whenever Marc Bloch's unit retreated in 1940, they constantly found the Germans in their rear. The consequence was the French army was in a perpetual retreat and lacked the time to mount a proper counter offensive. Marc Bloch also points to the cultural factors in the French defeat, namely the French education system which ignored history and visual arts in its cirriculum. He proposes a greater emphasis on both. I agree with the latter: in the US, we are saturated with images but we are visually illiterate. As for history, there is now too much emphasis on history without a comparable attempt to work things out in the present. This is a terrific book that reads like a no-holds barred fight.