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From Socialist Appeal, Vol. IV No. 26, 29 June 1940, pp. 1 & 7.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The military phase of the war in continental Europe ended at 12:35 a.m. on June 25 with the total capitulation of the French to Hitler.
That the French ruling circles, chose this road after the defeat, of their armies showed that they had no hope whatever in Britain’s ability to withstand the Nazi assault.
Nothing prevented them from abandoning France, setting up a government-in-exile like their many predecessors, and with their fleet and colonial armies continuing in the war.
Instead, to the angry dismay of the British, the French rulers decided to throw themselves wholly on the mercy of Hitler and his satellite in Rome, Mussolini.
Hitler exploited his advantage to the last drop of irony implicit, in the reversal of historic rotes. His choice of Compiègne, where the humiliated Germans signed the armistice in 1918, his use of the same railway car used by Foch to receive the German emissaries, and the extreme harshness of the terms imposed upon the conquered adversary, formed the mixture of a potion bitter indeed to the defeated French.
But along with the crow they have to eat, the French rulers have hopes of getting a few more edible morsels from the table of the new master of Europe. In the Hitlerite reorganization of Europe a potent section of the French capitalist class can hope to play a role, even if only a subordinate one. And France, of all countries, has no lack of venal politicians ready to scramble for the crumbs of office.
To the capitalist class, patriotism is like a spigot, to be turned on and off when needed. It called for patriotism from the masses it herded to the slaughter. It entered upon the conflict with a positively myopic disregard of the real relationship of armed strength. Now that hundreds of thousands of Workers paid with their lives for this “error,” the French bourgeoisie will be concerned mainly in seeing what it can save of its profits and its wealth. By capitulating to Hitler now, they hope for more of a share than they could expect if they waited until Hitler had crushed Britain, too.
The British were furious and badly frightened,. When it became clear after the fall of Paris on June 14 that the French armies were smashed and that the retreating French government would sue for peace, the British made desperate efforts to prevent it. They even offered France a “union”—an offer which amounted to inviting France to become part of the British Empire. But the French capitalist were not buying any British Empire stock just then. They were all already thinking that Hitler, Preferred, was a better buy. The British emissaries were turned back. Even Churchill himself, by report, flew over to plead. But to no avail. The armistice went through.
Then the dirt began to fly. Overnight, the gallant, heroic, indissoluble ally was transformed in the British press and in the speeches of Churchill into a venal and traitorous knifer-in-the-back. The positively faultless, French High Command was uncovered as a gang of blunderers who were really responsible for the debacle of Flanders. The matchless leaders of the French people only yesterday were now revealed in unlovely nakedness as office-grabbers, grafters, do-nothings, and outright traitors who had been selling the country short down the river for years.
From Bordeaux came retorts, that the British were really responsible for the disaster because they hadn’t sent enough men or guns over and were in no position to dictate to the French what to do.
The British immediately set in motion a campaign to split the French colonies from France and to pull in such French warships and fighting men as they could lay their hands on. Under direct British inspiration, a General de Gaulle began a movement in London to form a government-in-exile. British newspapers suddenly remembered there was a French parliament and pointed out that the Pétain ministry had acted without sanction of the chambers. Even the dead corpse of democracy has its uses!
This split from the British was the prime card the French rulers had to play when they sat down at the far end of Hitler’s table. And it is a card, of no small use to the Nazi chieftain. With it his play against Britain becomes; even more of a sure thing. France, totally stripped of resources and remaining fighting equipment, becomes now the jumping-off place for the invasion of the British Isles.
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