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The French won WWI, yo. It was a Pyrrhic victory, but it was a victory. That's partly why they lost WWII; they were resting on their laurels.
by alricb 11y ago
The French won WWI, yo. It was a Pyrrhic victory, but it was a victory. That's partly why they lost WWII; they were resting on their laurels.
- kincardine 11y agoI think it would also be hard to say that France lost the Second World War. The French government signed an armistice, but France was also part of the victorious Allies (with French units being involved in both the liberation of France and the invasion of Germany).
- vonnik 11y agoGermany may have been defeated at the end of WWII, but France was routed during the war. The Germans occupied the northern parts of the country, and were widely accepted by a population of collaborators and anti-Semites. The Vichy government of the south was a puppet structure controlled by the Nazis. The French did not successfully resist, or participate in the victory in any meaningful way, until they started writing textbooks in the post-War period. France was reconquered by Americans, British and Canadian soldiers with a token French army.
- Thimothy 11y agoThe textbook comment is pretty funny, as the french from 1945 have a quite different opinion about who actually won the war. http://www.les-crises.fr/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/sondage-nation-contribue-defaite-nazis.jpg http://www.les-crises.fr/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/sondage-...
- vonnik 11y agoYeah, I think there's more acknowledgement in Europe of the sacrifices the USSR made during the war, particularly in countries like France with a strong communist tradition. But winning the war and reconquering France were two different things. The latter was an affair for the western powers.
- vonnik 11y agoSigning an Armistice is not a victory. The French and Germans both signed, after French soil was occupied for years and many of its best farmland destroyed during the war. The Germans were outmaneuvered during the negotiations of the Treaty of Versailles, because their government had been destabilized. The French were resting on their laurels every time the Germans invaded, all through the 19th century and the 20th. It's a national pass time.
- georgeecollins 11y agoThe Germans signed an armistice because they were beaten. By mid 1918 they didn't have the capacity to keep fighting. The allies accepted surrender in 1918 because fighting to total victory would have been costly for them as well. The destabilization started in 1918 because of the economic impact of the war, and the hopelessness of it.
- restalis 11y ago"The Germans signed an armistice because they were beaten. By mid 1918 they didn't have the capacity to keep fighting." Hitler in his "Mein Kampf" disagrees with you. Like in WW2, in WW1 Germans were forced to fight on two fronts, but unlike the events of WW2 where Germany suffered the most of its defeats, in WW1 on the eastern front they were victorious and ready to transfer their forces to the western front. In Hitler's words - "the sword from the east should have been ready to strike in the west, which was hold only by a shield". Was he too detached from reality?
- cafard 11y agoYes. Ludendorff threw the responsibility for the armistice on the politicians. But Austria-Hungary and Turkey were collapsing even faster, and America was shipping fresh divisions to Europe. By September 1918, Ludendorff said that the government would have to seek terms for peace. He held a somewhat higher position in the German Army than Hitler did.
- alricb 11y agoThat "sword" was the spring offensive of 1918, and it didn't work. Germany had fought on three fronts: East, West, and the Sea, and they were badly beaten at sea, resulting in the suffocation of their economy (see: food shortages of 1918) and the arrival of the US, which would have really come online in 1919.
- cafard 11y agoResting on their laurels? How about hollowed out by the demographic losses?