The Perils of Marianne

THE COLLAPSE OF THE THIRD REPUBLIC by William L. Shirer. 1082 pages. Simon and Schuster. $12.50.

Few events in history seem as melancholy as the failure of France to face up to Adolf Hitler. Even now, almost 25 years after the end of World War II, the Nazi era remains a trauma on both sides of the Rhine. Most Germans who lived through die Nazi Zeit will speak of it only guardedly. Many Frenchmen grow defensive or hostile at mention of the time of resistants and collaborateurs. The rise of Hitler and the fall of France still pose troubling questions about political appeasement, the power of human evil, and the divisive, almost anarchic vulnerability of men of good will when confronted by it. In many ways France watched disaster approach with the helpless immobility of a bird set upon by a snake.

Tireless Researcher. In his 1960 bestseller The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer chronicled the German side of the war. Now he has turned to France to tell a more elusive story that goes back as far as 1870, when the Third Republic was proclaimed, and ends when Hitler swaggers into the famous railway car in the Compiegne forest to dictate the surrender terms to a humiliated and prostrate-enemy. A correspondent and broadcaster who covered France and Germany between the wars, and a tireless researcher, Shirer seems well qualified for the job. Yet his basic technique--the accumulation of detail rather than the use of incisive perception--is less effective in elucidating the French mystery than it was in outlining the rise of the Nazi monstrosity.

Why did France fall apart in six weeks in 1940, when it had fought hard and victoriously against the Kaiser's army in 1914? Shirer finds partial answers--most of them familiar, none of them entirely satisfactory. France's generals were timid and tactically rigid. They wildly overrated their enemy, while as late as 1940 German military leaders credited France with the strongest land army in Western Europe. The country had been bled almost to death by World War I, which killed one-tenth of the fighting force. By 1939 France had less than half as many men aged 20 to 34 as Germany. The French Third Republic, moreover, was a rickety democratic instrument at best. At least twice --in 1889 and 1934--it barely escaped a coup d'etat. It changed governments 107 times in 63 years--an average of almost two a year. It failed to heal the split between right and left over trumped-up charges of treason against Captain Alfred Dreyfus, which created a sordid spectacle of antiSemitism. The Dreyfus case produced as profound a division as the one caused by the Algerian crisis half a century later. It shielded French industry from competition and failed, until the front populaire government of 1936, to grant French workers basic welfare reforms that Bismarck had begun instituting in Germany as early as 1881.

Failure of Will. Most of all the inner French weakness lay in a kind of spiritual fatigue, a failure of the national will to fight. When Frenchmen saw themselves entirely alone facing the panzer divisions, the cowardly or prudent logic of common sense infected them. It is not impossible to believe that Frenchmen of good will, under those conditions, preferred to spare their land a second bloody round of destruction within 22 years. That was the logic, at any rate, used by Marshal Petain and Pierre Laval. When a French journalist recently wrote that in 1940 his countrymen were all Petainists, he was probably close to the truth. As Shirer records, a French historian reflected: "Perhaps it was for the best. If we had stopped the Germans, as we did in 1914, and fought on, we would have had another terrible bloodletting. I doubt if France could have survived."

The horrible fascination of Nazi Germany kept Shirer's earlier volume compelling through mounds of minutiae. What happened to France in 1940 was very different--an enormously complicated tragedy of confused men who meant their country well but were powerless to agree on how to save her. What Shirer has written at great length is a kind of "Perils of Marianne," a melodrama of cardboard good guys and bad guys in which the few who saw the danger clearly were ignored or subdued by a venal and cowardly majority. The darkest corner of modern French history deserves better illumination than that.

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