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Music Hello everyone and welcome to History of the Second World War, Episode 68, the Third

Republic, Part 8, the French Army.

We started this series of episodes with a lengthy discussion on the Maginot Line.

The entire thesis of that episode was that it can be dangerous to judge decisions based on their

outcomes. Or in the case of the Maginot Line, judge a series of fortifications based on whether

or not the nations who built those fortifications won the war they were designed to participate

in. Over the last six episodes,

we've taken a fantastic voyage through French politics during the 1930s, the goal of which

was to provide background for why certain decisions were made around rearmament and reactions to

other events in Europe, and, as we will discuss today, around how the French military plan to fight a future war.

This is a topic where it can once again be very easy to start at the end and work backwards, hunting for reasons for the failure.

In the summer of 1940, the French military would, almost in its entirety, fail at its primary task of preventing a German invasion of France.

There were several key trends in the French military in the decade before 1939 that

would lead to this outcome. Two of the most important were a distinct feeling of inferiority

and a complete incorrect read on what the future of war would look like.

...