In Command of France: French Foreign Policy and Military Planning, 1933-1940

by Robert J. Young

Overview

No other attempt to explain French civil and military leadership during the 1930s has been so gracefully written, so firmly based on archival material, or so sensitive to French conditions and purposes as In Command of France. It combines a detailed survey of French foreign policy during the Nazi period with a careful examination of France's corresponding military planning and preparation. France was under control, the author argues, and credits the civilian and military command with more vision, more determination, more competence than hitherto recognized.

Young introduces the reader to some of the leading personalities of the day—Laval, Bonnet, Weygand, Pétain, Gamelin, Delbos, Cot, Daladier—soldiers and statesmen whose names have come close to fading from our view. He outlines the problems and alternatives that confronted them in the Nazi years—strikes, lockouts, unemployment, inflating prices, devalued currency—and finds that they failed not because of an absence of policy or incompetence but because the problems they faced were insuperable.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674434905
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	02/05/1978
Edition description:	Reprint 2014
Pages:	355
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.81(d)

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. Land, Resources, and Strategic Planning

2. Disarmament and the Drift toward Arms Equality, 1933

3. Security First, 1934

4. The Foreign Policy of Pierre Laval, 1934-1935

5. Anglo-French Relations, 1935-1936: Ethiopia and the Rhineland

6. The Foreign Policy of the Popular Front, 1936-1937

7. National Defense and the Popular Front, 1936-1937

8. Anglo-French Relations, 1938: Austria and Czechoslovakia

9. Preparing for War, 1939

10. Denouement, 1940

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index