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but reckless military decision to send more troops to France, to stiffen the resolve of its government. In June, two ill-equipped divisions were shipped to join the residual British forces on the Continent. After the armistice, because the Germans were overwhelmingly preoccupied elsewhere, it proved possible to evacuate almost 200,000 men from the north-western French ports to England, with the loss of only a few thousand. Churchill was fortunate thus to be spared the consequences of a folly.

Britain’s ambassador to France, Sir Ronald Campbell, wrote in valediction after the collapse: ‘I should … describe France as a man who, stunned by an unexpected blow, was unable to rise to his feet before his opponent delivered the “coup de grace”.’ In the decades that followed French defeat, there was intense debate about alleged national decadence, which had caused such an outcome. That summer of 1940, the Bishop of Toulouse thundered: ‘Have we suffered enough? Have we prayed enough? Have we repented for sixty years of national apostasy, sixty years during which the French spirit has suffered all the perversions of modern ideas … during which French morality has declined, during which anarchy has strangely developed.’

Modern staff-college war games of the 1940 campaign sometimes conclude with German defeat. This causes a few historians to argue that Hitler’s triumph on the battlefield, far from being inevitable, might have been averted. It is hard to accept this view. In the years that followed the 1940 débâcle, the German army repeatedly demonstrated its institutional superiority over the Western Allies, who prevailed on battlefields only when they had a substantial superiority of men, tanks and air support. The Wehrmacht displayed a dynamic energy entirely absent from the 1940 Allied armies. Contrary to popular myth, the Germans did not conquer France in accordance with a detailed plan for blitzkrieg – lightning war. Rather, commanders – and especially Guderian – showed inspired opportunism, with results that exceeded their wildest expectations. If the French had moved faster and the Germans more slowly, the outcome of the campaign could have been different, but such an assertion is meaningless.

In 1940 the Germans were not obliged to divert large forces to an eastern front, as they were in 1914 when France was allied with Russia. Despite the indisputable superiority of the invaders’ air arm, Allied defeat was the consequence less of material than of moral inferiority; with rare and isolated exceptions, at every level Allied responses to German initiatives lacked conviction. Winston Churchill was almost alone among Anglo-French directors of the war, as well as among soldiers on the battlefield, in being willing to demand a struggle to the last man. French politicians and generals, by contrast, adopted a rationalist view: they identified limits to the damage acceptable to the population and fabric of their country to avoid bowing to a foreign invader, as often before in history France had been compelled to bow. Relatively few French soldiers felt willing to sacrifice themselves for the cause, because they believed neither in their national leaders nor in their commanders; the country had endured forty-two chronically weak governments between 1920 and 1940. Gamelin wrote as early as 18 May: ‘The French soldier, yesterday’s citizen, did not believe in the war … Disposed to criticise ceaselessly anyone holding the slightest amount of authority … he did not receive the kind of moral and patriotic education which would have prepared him for the drama in which the nation’s destiny will be played out.’

Irène Némirovsky wrote reflectively in 1941, looking back on the collapse: ‘For years, everything done in France within a certain social class has had only one motive: fear … Who will harm them the least (not in the future, not in the abstract, but right now and in the form of kicks in the arse or slaps in the face)? The Germans? The English? The Russians? The Germans won, but the beating has been forgotten and the Germans can protect