Was recently browsing through The Pit and saw the old French are “cheese eating surrender monkeys” thing and I got to thinking about it a bit, going through history in my own mind. I thought I’d start a debate on it just for kicks from a historical perspective. ARE the French ‘surrender monkeys’ (I won’t go into the whole ‘cheese eating’ part)?
It seems to me, from my recollections of history, that the French have been fairly weak militarily from a winning standpoint since Napoleon. Certainly after the revolution until Napoleon was finally defeated the French were THE military power for land warfare. It took the combined efforts of much of the rest of Europe to finally defeat the French and depose Napoleon.
However, after that it seems the French kind of went somewhat into a military decline if I’m recalling correctly. During WWI the French were within a hairs breath of being wiped out repeatedly, even with the assistance of the British. I recall one episode from the history channel where they describe the Germans taking a prominent French fortress…with a single soldier. The French attempts at offensive operations generally lead to disasters…and without the British there to help France would have certainly been defeated by Germany.
WWII of course is the example generally pointed at showing the French to be ‘surrender monkeys’, and it certainly wasn’t a shinning moment in French history. The entire Maginot Line concept was a disaster from the git go, and the way the French actually deployed their forces was also a disaster. The way the French pretty much surrendered without really going to the wall was also…odd.
After WWII of course there was Vietnam and Dien bien phu. Much of the latter part of the century saw France in a series of actions to attempt to hold together their empire…to no avail.
So…for debate a couple of things. If my reading of history is even close to accurate…what happened to the French militarily? Was it their losses during the Napoleonic wars that caused them to go into military decline? Was there some other factor at work?
If my read on history is totally off, then what are the mitigating circumstances for the French? Was there really no military decline…its just perception, and that perception is not accurate? Was it simply the defeat during WWII shaping that perception?
Anyone actually from France or having some special incite into their thoughts…what do the French think of their rap militarily? How do they look at the series of conflicts I listed…especially WWII?
I want to keep this out of the pit…I would like a debate from a historical perspective.
I think there are a few reasons, but a large part, I think, is due to the poor foreign policy of Napoleon III. His millitary adventures in Mexico and Italy were poorly thought out and backfired on him, demoralized the military, and hurt France’s diplomatic status.
I don’t think you can blame the French for surrendering when they did in WWII. By the time they did, Britian had withdrawn their forces, their lines had been overrun and couldn’t be reformed, and Paris had been taken. I don’t know if the French situation was recoverable at that time. Of course, like you said, their strategy of a static defense was a mistake, as were their tank tactics, but that’s a different story.
Well after Napoleon French military history isn’t all bleak. IIRC they defeated the Austrians in their fight over Italy and did alright against Russia in the Crimean war. They also successfully subjugated large parts of Africa. Their unduing was a result actually of the success of Napoleon. Before Napoleon what is now mostly Germany was thousands (or a lot I forget the exact number) of little principalities and kingdoms collected under the Holy Roman Empire. Militiarily they were weak and were dominated by France as you know. When Napoleon conquered that area he broke what became Germany into 15 or so administrative districts that eventually unified.
The country that ended up dominating this coalition was Prussia a highly militarilized country. They were on the cutting edge of tactics and weaponry which translated into success on the battlefield. Prussia beat Austria in a war in 1866 IIRC for domination of the federation. Using the same tactics and superior weaponry Prussia (basically Germany at this point) defeated France and England in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. At this point Prussia had defeated one superpower in Austria a few years before and defeated France despite Englands help. So its not as though France was in bad company here, Prussia was the military power at that time.
They gained this advantage by having better Iron production (2nd to England I believe) and railroads than its continental counterparts. Germany had coal and iron reserves that they exploited well. This allowed their manufacturing base and railroad network to outstrip that of Frances. By this point in military warfare manufacturing and transportation were the deciding factors in war. The answer to your question of why France began losing wars is simply becuase they were located next to a more industrial and more militaristic country that wanted to dominate Europe.
In summary, France’s military was not that poor compared to other superpowers. Russia was saved from Prussia by its size, Austria becuase Prussia wanted it as an ally and England becuase of water. France was a neighbor to an aggressive country that defeated a superpower and fought 4 superpowers to a draw twice. If you look at it that way they actually did pretty well for themselves.
Indeed you are correct about the English. I thought they had a small (division or so) component in that war but I belive I was thinking of the start of WWI.
As I understand it, the rate population growth of France has been in decline (when compared to their neighbors) since the 1820s. At some point this has to impact upon military potential.
I disagree with that. The Maginot line served its purpose by preventing an attack in eastern France. Despite being always mentionned, the causes of the frenh defat aren’t related to the Maginot line, but mostly to the expectations of a static war similar to WWI, instead of a blietzkrieg (essentially all others mistakes were to a large extent consequences of this expectation : absence of large armored units, no defenses in deep, assumption that the German army couldn’t cross the Ardennes quickly, etc…)
I’m not sure what you man by “not going to the wall”, but at the date of the armistice France was toast. Most of the country was already occupied and there were no military forces left to oppose the German army. They pretty much advanced without opposition by roughly 50-100 kms/day. It would have taken maybe a week more for all the country to be occupied.
Most of the french army had dissapearead in the debacle that culminated in Dunkirk, the other “wing” was surrounded in eastern France, as shown on the map I linked too previously. Units engaged in Norway couldn’t came back in time (and anyway there weren’t much of them). Troops that had been evacuated (from Dunkirk in particular) were completely disorganized and had lost all their equipment (guns, vehicles, etc…), and the british had made pretty clear that they wouldn’t send a soldier to France (which would have been a stupid move given the situation, anyway). The last attempt to organize a defense line along the Loire river, 150 kms south of Paris, had been a failure, since the German army had advanced south of it even before anything could be organized. There was more or less no french army left.
The choice, at this time, as I mention quite frequently, wasn’t fighting in France or not, but surrendering or forming a government in exile that would have kept the french colonies and the french fleet.
It’s very difficult to know what the french in general think about their military reputation (or anything else, for that matter) . I would guess that on the overall, they’re unaware of having such a poor reputation, excepted for the 1940 defeat. The colonial wars (Indochina and Algeria) are generally considered as stupid adventures that were doomed from the start, and WWI certainly isn’t considered as a display of military weakness.
To back up treis summary of the effect of German unification, here’s some key numbers. At the outbreack of WWI, France had a population of 40 million; Germany had a population of 60 million. (Keegan, The First World War, p. 19.) In any encounter, if the French Army and the German Army lost exactly the same number of men, Germany came out ahead because the French had lost a greater proportion of their total number of soldiers.
By contrast, during the period of the Napoleanic wars, the population balances were:
In other words, France was the single largest country in Western and Central Europe. Only Russia, in Eastern Europe, was larger. To the extent that military power depends on the size of one’s population, France was the front-runner.
As well as population, France also had the benefit of unified, central government. Notice that Italy doesn’t register here: like Germany, Italy during the Napoleanic period was not unified, being divided up between various monarchies, oligarchic republics, and the Papal States. Thus, on France’s eastern and south-eastern borders, its opponents were fractured into multiple small states, which made military dominance even easier.
You are responsible for the fate of France and her people. It’s summer 1940. Your country is overrun by superior military power, Germany. Your army lost 84,000 soldiers killed in 6 weeks of brutal fighting, plus more then 100,000 wounded. There also are considerable civilian casualties. Your only real ally, England, also defeated and hastily retreated across the Channel. Russia is still German ally at the moment, for all effects and purposes. You appeal to US, but US refuses to enter the war: they promise you materiel supplies but they also have some commerce with Germans.
What would you do, keep on fighting or sue for peace?
the French army fought hard May-June '40. They inflicted the vast majority of the 140-odd thousand casualties that the German army suffered in less than five weeks of hard fighting (I know that ‘officially’ it was six weeks). It is a disgrace that the many tens of thousands of french lads who perished in a desperate fight against the mighty thing called the German army are remembered such, when the pathetic (no disrespect to British fighting men meant) BEF (of such small fighting power) ran across the sea. I, being British, feel great shame.
in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, the best & brightest of French society did not go into the military. As colonial fighters they were every bit as good as the other Europeans, but by the time of the next big inter-European war came around, they had been eclipsed. The French officer corps was a hold-out of aristocratic privilege in an otherwise republican nation. The enlisted ranks were filled with men from the bottom strata of society who couldn’t fit into the growing industrialization of French society.
Compare this to the Germans. What German national pride that had been salvaged from the Napoleonic Wars was done not by the professional soldiers, but by the Landwher (militia.) Subsequently, Germans put on uniforms and drilled the same way Americans today play softball. The French would have viewed doing this with the same distaste that Americans would at putting on orange jupsuits and picking up roadside trash today.
The French continued to see war, as they did life in general, as more an art than a science, and, most significantly to the OP, were the last of the Western nations to embrace the concept of mobilizing their entire economy to a war footing.
No, no they weren’t, this is simply wrong. The French reputation as surrender monkeys is a post-WW2 phenomena based upon the 1940 surrender and it has no bearing upon WW1 where the French military has no case to answer. Their army performed as well as any other in WW1 and it would be a fool indeed who regarded the soldiers of say Verdun as cowards. The French army was regarded by many for years after WW1 as the best in the world.
Far from being repeatedly within a hair’s breadth of being wiped out it was largely the French (and British) that were doing the attacking. Once the French had beaten off the German’s opening offensive in 1914 (which they did within the first six weeks of the war), the Germans were content in the main to remain on the defensive in the west until they had defeated the Russians on the eastern front. Verdun is the main exception here, with no other large German offensives until their major attempt in March 1918. This latter offensive succeeded in breaking the allied front in sectors held by the British Fifth Army.
Certainly the French army felt the strain of unrelenting attritional warfare as all the powers did, but there was never a point at which the French were repeatedly in hair’s breadth of being ‘wiped out’. It just didnt happen.
Never heard of it. Any details?
How is this different from German and British disasters of WW1 such as the Somme, Verdun, and Passchendaele etc? All of these saw appalling loss of life for minimal gain. Both the German and French opening offensives failed dismally. Offensive operations in the WW1 period before the invention of the tank were extremely difficult. The armies were big enough and the front short enough that the ENTIRE front could be heavily manned and fortified and that’s exactly what happened. To give an example on 1 July 1916 the German 180th Regiment beat off an attack by a British division three times its size at Ovillers, the British lost 5,121 men, the Germans lost 280, does this mean the British lack military spirit? Or does it mean it’s not an easy thing to attack with a purely infantry force against heavily fortified positions protected by thick belts of barbed wire and backed by heavy artillery? That’s a recipe for disaster, but that’s the situation all armies were faced with in the west.
I agree here but this doesnt mean much given the numerical advantage that the Germans would then have. Numbers count.
One poster has already pointed out the considerable population advantage that Germany had over France in WW1. What does not get nearly enough attention is just how drastically this had worsened for the French by the opening of WW2. Throughout the interwar period the French birth rate fell and the German one rose. In the 1936 census the French population was 41.5 million. By contrast the German population using the 1939 census figures was 79.7 million, almost twice the size of France.
This meant that when it came to the crunch in 1940 the French fought with a rough numerical parity when the British, Dutch and Belgian troops were added into the equation. But once the Blitzkrieg swept them away as it did (the Dutch only held out 4 days, and the Belgians 17 days, and the British got evacuated from Dunkirk), the French were hopelessly outnumbered. This was worsened by the very heavy losses of men and equipment in their best formations in the early fighting in Belgium. In the latter part of the campaign the French actually fought some very stubborn ‘hedgehog’ actions but they did not have sufficient strength to form a strong enough front to withstand the german armoured thrusts.
None of which is to say the French military put up a good showing in 1940. They didnt. They were surprised by the location of the german offensive and slow to adequately react to it. A revolution in military affairs in the form of the blitzkrieg had arrived and they were not ready for it. No army other then the German army was (and even then only partially). But its simply a myth to say the French didnt fight hard (about 100,000 french soldiers were killed in action in six weeks) or were just cowards. Many later actions in the war showed the French were anything but cowards.
None of the european empires remained intact. All of them defended by force were lost. So were all the others. Dien Bien Phu was just a single battle, fought at an isolated location in Laos, at which French only lost a few thousand men, a trifling proportion of their total strength in Indo-China. In itself it didnt defeat their cause. It just brought on home to the French population that this war was going to go on and on and on and on (it was already nearly 10 years old at that point). So like the US population later did, they just grew tired of it and went home.
Note also that today, France is the country with the second-largest contingent of troops in Afghanistan (after the U.S.). They’re considered excellent soldiers.
Yes they did, but that does not affect their overall creditable performance. There were large scale refusals in 1917 to keep going with offensive operations, and many soldiers said that while they would continue to defend their positions they would no longer take part in ‘useless’ attacks. They have this too in common with other powers. Russia and to a lesser extent Germany also saw military mutinies. The US came late into WW1 so its perhaps not fully appreciated how much the war strained the powers that fought its entire length. Russia broke under the strain, and Germany came close and briefly collapsed into revolutionary chaos after the surrender.
All of the armies and societies of 1917 had morale problems. They were exhausted and sick of it. For some strange reason losing say 300,000 men to capture twenty square miles of terrain tends to depress soldiers and give them a rather grim view of their survival prospects. Soldiers risk death but they like to think that their lives arent just being thrown away for nothing.
The 1917 mutinies weren’t really “mutiny” in the true sense of the word. Large contingents refused to go on offensive operations, which they rightly saw as pointless, until changes were made. But they didn’t actually MUTINY, e.g. shoot their officers or rebel. They continued to serve and fight - in defense - in the front lines.
The performance of the French army overall in WWI was very impressive.