• 1 P. M. H. Bell, A Certain Eventuality: Britain and the Fall of France (Farnborough, Saxon House, 197 (...)

1What did the British think of the fall of France in 1940? By the fall of France I mean what most historians call the military defeat of May-June and the end of the Third Republic in July. To find an answer to the question, a good starting place is the book, published over forty years ago by the late Philip Bell, entitled A Certain Eventuality: Britain and the Fall of France.1 It is an account of how Britain’s political and military leaders reacted to the crisis. The book draws heavily on the government documents which are housed in The National Archives at Kew in south west London. As numerous diaries and memoirs also indicate, Bell shows how Britain’s leaders - like many people around the world - were astounded and dismayed by the speed and relentlessness of Germany’s crushing military victory.

• 2 Paul Addison and Jeremy A. Crang (eds.), Listening to Britain: Home Intelligence Reports on Britain (...)

3As far as more popular opinion is concerned, a useful source is contained in the so-called Home Intelligence Reports compiled by the Ministry of Information in 1940. These Reports were a form of qualitative opinion polling, conducted almost daily if somewhat unscientifically during the summer of 1940. They were an attempt to monitor and measure public morale at a time of acute crisis. The Reports are available for consultation at The National Archives under the rubric of the Ministry of Information. They have also been collected in a volume edited by Paul Addison and Jeremy Crang called Listening to Britain: Home Intelligence Reports on Britain’s Finest Hour May to September 1940, published in 2010.2

• 5 Daily Express, 30 May 1940, p. 4.

6The Allies’ military position continued to deteriorate. The Dutch had capitulated. The Belgian King announced he was seeking a stop to the fighting. Two days later the Daily Express argued that Britain had to admit its mistakes as frankly as Reynaud had admitted France’s mistakes: “the people of Britain lingered long in slothfulness while France was fully mobilised for war. All this belongs to the past … Henceforth we are not two nations, but one united force.”5 On 31 May The Manchester Guardian considered it:

• 7 The Daily Telegraph, 4 June 1940, pp. 1, 8; Daily Sketch, 4 June 1940, pp. 1, 3; 5 June 1940, pp. 3 (...)
• 8 Daily Express, 4 June 1940, pp. 3, 4. See also The Manchester Guardian, 4 June 1940, p. 5.
• 9 Daily Mail, 4 June 1940, p. 4.

8On 3 June Paris was bombed; civilians were killed.7 For Geoffrey Cox of the Daily Express, “it was as if someone had slashed the face of a beautiful woman.”8 The air raid would “arouse the deepest sympathy for the French people”, wrote the Daily Mail, “It renews our own resolve to crush the authors of this outrage.”9 Broadcasting from Paris that evening, Duff Cooper told his British radio listeners that:

• 11 HIR, Tuesday 4 June 1940, p. 75.
• 12 HIR, Tuesday 4 June 1940, p. 76.
• 13 HIR, Wednesday 5 June 1940, p. 80.

9According to Home Intelligence, the bombing of Paris had become “the dominant topic of conversation today.” It had “affected [British] people in a special way. Paris, for this purpose, is London and the reality of air raids on London has been brought home.”11 Thus “anti-French feeling has strongly declined today … The French are suffering what we shall soon suffer. The French are, therefore, more nearly ourselves than at any previous time.”12 But Home Intelligence thought it “a matter of anxiety” that popular feeling could swing extremely easily. On 5 June, by which time over 330,000 British, French and Allied troops had been evacuated by sea from Dunkirk, Home Intelligence reported that Churchill’s reference to Britain fighting alone (if need be) had caused “apprehension throughout the country” and “some slight increase in doubt about the intentions of our ally. Consequently our close study of anti-French feeling shows that it has increased.”13

• 14 HIR, Monday 10 June 1940, p. 97.
• 15 HIR, Saturday 15 June 1940, p. 115.

10By Monday 10 June, the day on which Italy declared war on the Allies and the French government quit Paris for Touraine, Home Intelligence reported that the course of events in France was “dispelling the superficial expression of anti-French feeling. That feeling, however, is still latent and may have to be reckoned with in the future.”14 The fall of Paris on 14 June “brought some slight relaxation of tension”, according to Home Intelligence. “The heart is heavy and sadness broods over conversation. There is relief that Paris has been spared by withdrawal, and opinions about the strategic value of the capital are confused. There is disquiet but no feeling of panic.”15

• 16 HIR, Monday 17 June 1940, p. 123.
• 17 HIR, Tuesday 18 June 1940, p. 126. On 17 June Churchill broadcast: “The news from France is very ba (...)
• 18 House of Commons Debates (Hansard), 18 June 1940, volume 362, columns 51-64.

11Marshal Pétain’s request for an armistice on 17 June caused “confusion and shock, but hardly surprise”, Home Intelligence wrote. “From all parts come reports of bewilderment and great anxiety” about the fate of the British Expeditionary Force and about the French Army and Navy. “Are they going to fight on with us? If not, things are indeed black.”16 The next day Home Intelligence remarked that there was “extremely little anti-French feeling and the PM’s [Prime Minister’s broadcast] remarks about ‘the [gallant] French people’ are fully in line with public opinion.”17 But, in his speech on 18 June in the House of Commons on Britain’s “finest hour”, Churchill argued that Britain had done all that it could to assist France in the battle and that it was not the time to indulge in recriminations against his and previous British governments for their alleged failures.18 Churchill’s references to France “brought a recrudescence of anti-French feeling. The latency of anti-French feeling must never be forgotten”, Home Intelligence insisted.

• 21 Daily Sketch, 20 June 1940, p. 7.
• 22 HIR, Friday 21 June 1940, p. 141.

13In the meantime, partly at the authorities’ prompting, all the mainstream press reported General de Gaulle’s broadcast of 18 June on the BBC that the war was not lost and that the fight must go on. The broadcast stimulated uplifting editorials, including one in the Daily Sketch entitled ‘The Spirit of France Lives’.21 At the level of the man in the street, it naturally took time for the significance of de Gaulle’s position to be appreciated. On 21 June Home Intelligence reported from the Kodak camera factory in Harrow in north London that “Anti-French feeling [is] growing very strong since [the] capitulation. People remember at [the] end of [the] last war our soldiers said they would rather fight with the Germans than with the French”.22 And three days later, on 24 June, while in the north western region “De Gaulle’s broadcast made a good impression”, Home Intelligence reported that:

• 24 See, for example, The Times, 24 June 1940, p. 2; Daily Worker, 24 June 1940, p. 1.
• 25 HIR, Tuesday 25 June 1940, p. 156.
• 26 Daily Sketch, 27 June 1940, p. 7. The paper invented a new word meaning to betray: “Pétainer”.
• 27 See, for example, Daily Express, 27 June 1940, pp. 1-2; Daily Mail, 27 June 1940, p. 1.
• 28 HIR, Saturday 6 July 1940, p. 196.

14On the same day, the press quoted de Gaulle’s condemnation of the armistice. It was “not only a capitulation but a submission to slavery.” So long as France’s allies continued the war, “her Government had not the right to surrender to the enemy … This war is a world war … Honour, common sense, the interest of the country demand that all free Frenchmen should continue the fight.”24 At the same time, on 25 June, the day on which the German and Italian armistices came into effect, according to the Home Intelligence Report, in southern England “all classes show increased bitterness against France, due largely to [the] failure to distinguish between [the] Government and [the] public.”25 The press did not share that failing. It was very severe in condemning Pétain and his government. The Daily Sketch would not “waste time disputing with a man who was once a French soldier the meaning of the word ‘honour.’”26 De Gaulle told Pétain: “you played a losing game, threw down your cards, emptied our pockets, as if we had no trumps left.” Now “M. le Maréchal” had called on France to rise again. “But in what sort of atmosphere, by what sort of means, in what name do you expect her to rise again beneath the German jackboot and the Italian dancing-slipper?”27 After the British attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir at the beginning of July, Home Intelligence reported “some growth of anti-French feeling of an indiscriminate kind. Most people condemn the Pétain government, but some say ‘we shall be fighting the French soon,’ [others say] ‘we were never real friends with the French’”.28

• 29 Memorandum by Minister of Information, 20 July 1940, CAB 66/10, National Archives, quoted in Ian Mc (...)

15In summary, the government and the press by and large refrained from public recriminations against the French for the military defeat. Yet it appears that popular opinion turned against France, because – according to Home Intelligence – it failed to distinguish between the actions of the French government and the French people. While the press made a clear distinction between the French government and the French people, the Home Intelligence Reports reveal a pattern of ambiguous and sometimes contradictory popular attitudes: a mixture of compassion for the plight of the French people, contempt for the country’s leaders for agreeing to the armistice, and burgeoning resentment that France had stopped fighting and abandoned its ally to face the enemy alone. Perhaps, given the dramatic and bewildering nature of the dizzyingly fast-paced events of the previous two months, it was not surprising that ordinary people experienced such a jumble of emotions. But was the pattern now fixed? According to a memorandum from the Ministry of Information to the Cabinet in late July 1940, “few English people would be found willing to make sacrifices” on France’s behalf.29

• 30 Addison and Crang, Listening to Britain, p. xvi.
• 31 P. M. H. Bell, France and Britain 1900-1940: Entente and Estrangement (Harlow, Longman, 1996), p. 2 (...)
• 32 See, for example, Robert Malcolmson (ed.), Love and War in London: The Mass Observation Wartime Dia (...)
• 33 Nicholas Atkin, The Forgotten French: Exiles in the British Isles 1940-44 (Manchester, Manchester U (...)
• 34 ‘Cato’, Guilty Men (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1998; originally published by Victor Gollancz, 1940), p (...)

16How representative of public opinion as a whole – or at least of a majority of public opinion – were the views portrayed in the press and in the Home Intelligence Reports? It is difficult to know for sure. The question surely merits further research. In their introduction Addison and Crang judge the quality of the evidence in the Home Intelligence Reports as “uneven” and “invariably impressionistic”; but the Reports were “a genuine attempt to synthesise the best available sources.”30 Certainly, opinions in Britain varied. As Philip Bell wrote in another book, there was “a small but ardent company of British Francophiles, who in June 1940 suffered a sense of loss so acute as to amount almost to bereavement.”31 Some contemporary diaries provide evidence of sympathy for France and even an understanding of how the French could blame the British for having abandoned them at Dunkirk.32 We know also that individual French men and women present in Britain in the summer of 1940 were shown great kindness and generosity by some of the ordinary local population, even if “government officials could often be uncaring and critical.”33 Moreover, there was no Francophobia in that famous polemic published in July 1940, Guilty Men by ‘Cato’, castigating Britain’s leaders for the plight which the country found itself in. Rather, the book wrote of the “unsurpassable heroism” of the French.34 On the other hand, broadcasting on Bastille Day in 1940, no less a personage than the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, conveyed a mixed message. He was sure that France would rise again and he argued against reproaches.

• 36 Gun Buster, Return Via Dunkirk (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1940) pp. 148-149, 221.

19The narrator is not entirely dismissive of the French armed forces. He also writes of a French fighter plane “attacking a big German bomber. He swoops, fires, climbs, circles, dives, fires again in thrilling style. … Without any warning the Frenchman has suddenly driven his machine head-on at the German at a terrific pace.” After the two planes collide, the German bomber crashes to the ground. “There is no sign of the heroic Frenchman who made sure of victory, and death, in one and the same instant.”36

• 37 For an overview of Went The Day Well? see James Chapman, The British at War: Cinema, State and Prop (...)

20Popular recrimination against France obtrudes in the film called Went The Day Well? Produced in 1942 by Michael Balcon and directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, the film is a fiction about a sleepy, picturesque English village infiltrated by German soldiers disguised in British military uniforms assisted by the local fifth column. Based on a short story by Graham Greene, the film features the scene of a dinner party in which la notable du village, the lady of the local manor house, Mrs Fraser, is “furious” at the thought of “the Germans gorging themselves on French wines.” She is interrupted by Nora, the spinster daughter of the local vicar. Nora hasn’t “much sympathy for the French [she says] … They let us down so abominably. I think they deserve to suffer for it.” Mrs Fraser disagrees vigorously.37 The dialogue demonstrates the ambiguity of popular attitudes towards France’s appalling misfortune. There is no disguising the resentment. It points also to the notion that there was a reckoning of accounts to be made in the future between the former allies. In the same year as the making of Went The Day Well?, Sybil Eccles, the wife of a British diplomat, wrote to her husband as follows:

• 39 Richard Weight, Patriots: National Identity in Britain 1940-2000 (London, Macmillan, 2002), p. 109.

21Or, as Richard Weight interprets her letter, she was warning her husband “that the quick collapse of the Third Republic had aggravated the perennial Francophobia of the British.”39

• 43 See, for example, Bell, France and Britain 1900-1940, pp. 250-252; Mark Connelly, We Can Take It! B (...)
• 44 Weight, Patriots, p. 27.
• 45 See, for example, The Earl of Avon, The Eden Memoirs: The Reckoning (London, Cassell, 1965) p. 113; (...)
• 46 Michael Howard, The Continental Commitment: the dilemma of British defence policy in the era of two (...)
• 47 HIR, Tuesday 18 June 1940, p. 126.
• 48 David Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: a Twentieth-Century History (London, Pengu (...)

25But it was too tempting to ignore such judicious advice. In Britain the myths that germinated in the year of 1940 joined forces with a reversion to the atavistic stereotyping of the French as the ‘other’. This combination was too strong not to impregnate the British collective memory of 1940.43 Richard Weight argues that the collapse of the Franco-British alliance in 1940 “marked the start of the patriotic legend of the Finest Hour, according to which the British – standing alone and defiant on their island home – saved the world from tyranny.”44 Numerous writers and historians have recorded that some British people in 1940 were glad – elated even – that Britain was now rid of its ally and that it faced the enemy alone in the ultimate contest between heavyweights.45 But, as Michael Howard has written, “agreeable as such sentiments may have been, they were totally illusory, and they were shared neither by the Prime Minister nor by the Chiefs of Staff.”46 The Ministry of Information took a similar view. Home Intelligence commented at the time of the French request for an armistice that “Many people express relief (of a quite unrealistic kind) that at last ‘There are no more Allies.’”47 The reality was, as David Edgerton for example has pointed out, Britain was not alone.48 It still had its dominions and empire as comrades-in-arms and, also, access to the potentially crucial economic assistance of the United States.

• 49 Weight, Patriots, p. 109.
• 50 Richard Carswell, The Fall of France in the Second World War: History and Memory (London, Palgrave (...)
• 51 Philip Nord, France 1940: Defending the Republic (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2015), p. 86,
• 52 Brian Bond, Britain’s Two World Wars against Germany: Myth, Memory and the Distortions of Hindsight(...)
• 53 Jeremy Black, Rethinking World War Two: The Conflict and its Legacy (London, Bloomsbury, 2015) pp.  (...)
• 54 Have I Got News For You?, BBC2 Television, broadcast 31 October 2014, rebroadcast 13 July 2015. Rem (...)

26At the end of the war the British tasted victory and experienced a “sense of superiority”, according to Weight, not only towards the defeated Germans but also “to allies who had been invaded in 1940.”49 This sense of superiority was partly based on the myth that the French did not fight in 1940 because they were decadent. It is a view that has not disappeared entirely, despite the modern academic consensus that the causes of the fall of France were essentially military and contingent.50 Typical of that consensus is Philip Nord, who writes that “It was the army command that lost the Battle of France, not civilian error or a disinclination to fight, let alone faults, real or imagined, in French society as a whole.”51 But, as Brian Bond concludes in another context, “innovative and revisionist [scholarly] work has, on the whole, not filtered through to the non-specialist general public.”52 And Jeremy Black writes that many contemporary analyses of the French defeat were partisan in nature; and that “they have almost subliminally affected subsequent interpretations.”53 This subliminal influence is responsible for a strand of popular thinking still alive in Britain today that France lost the battle in 1940 because it was unwilling to fight. It comes to the surface from time to time in the mainstream British media, as in the joke in a recent television quiz programme that the French allegedly wrote “the original book” on how to lose wars.54

• 55 Weight, Patriots, pp. 110-111.
• 56 Bond, Britain’s Two World Wars, pp. 10-11, 16-17. Examples of such films include The Wooden Horse ( (...)
• 57 Connelly, We Can Take It! p. 273, pp. 280-281; Smith, Britain and 1940, p.  8, pp. 120-123. On film (...)

27Richard Weight also contends that just as de Gaulle created the myth of La France Résistante, so “Churchill convinced the British that they would never have surrendered”. By definition, Churchill was making a counter-factual assertion, namely that Britain would have continued to fight, come what may. “At the root of this hubris was the fact that the British had not been invaded. Nor had their national character been questioned by subsequent defeat and collaboration.”55 At the same time, the myth of invincibility downplays the crucial factor of Britain as an island fortunate in being defended by the sea. A symptom of this hubris were the numerous and hugely successful British films of the nineteen fifties and early sixties conveying a nostalgic and reassuring view of Britain’s role in the Second World War, a war which Britain had ostensibly won single-handedly.56 This variation on the theme of ‘Britain alone’ consisted of portraying in film stiff upper-lipped characters (usually male), confronting or fighting against overwhelming numbers and acquitting themselves honorably, ultimately successfully. But this interpretation of Britain alone ignores the crucial fact that the war was a world war. It ignores the wider picture. As Mark Connelly remarks (endorsing Malcolm Smith), these films are evidence that Britain quickly forgot that “the most significant fact about 1940 was the collapse of France and its political and military implications … As a nation we have no concept of the vital importance of France in 1940 as a great bastion against fascism, as a great nation, as a great military power, as a great empire.”57

• 58 Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, p. 564.
• 59 Weight, Patriots, pp. 48, 114-115.

28Britain’s rejection of peace with Hitler in 1940 was an important turning point in the war. In the eyes of the British, the eclipse of France and much of continental Europe made their country all the more heroic, all the more glorious in their resistance to the enemy. As Robert and Isabelle Tombs remind us, “France’s defeat was seen by many in Britain … as a failure of determination, leadership and national cohesion.” Yet, Britain’s “contribution to the Alliance was shamefully feeble.”58 If we accept Richard Weight’s thesis that the British people felt guilty about appeasement – and ‘Cato’s Guilty Men was a symptom of that national guilt59 – the following questions arise: could it be that, buried under the resentment that Britain was abandoned by France in 1940, there lingered a guilty conscience that Britain had failed France diplomatically and militarily; that its pre-war policy of keeping France at arm’s length and its refusal to enter into a formal military alliance with France until almost the last minute amounted to a colossal dereliction, a betrayal even of France? Does this guilty conscience – if it exists – concede that the ten divisions of the British Expeditionary Force in 1940 were a paltry contribution to France’s defence on land, a contribution that would have been laughable if its consequences had not been so disastrous? These questions are worth pondering, I suggest. Work still needs to be done to determine the exact nature of the British collective memory of the fall of France and of Britain’s direct if partial responsibility for the defeat of 1940. Is there a single memory or are there multiple memories? How much is explicit, how much sub-conscious? How did the British memory of France in 1940 evolve and how did it affect attitudes to the France from then to the present? How did myths and prejudices combine? Can further research help us to disentangle the myths and prejudices from the reality?