L'Attaque Brusquee and Its Use as Myth in Interwar France

"Having entered the first war with a determined dive, followed by a vigorous and stimulating swim, the French entered the war of 1939 like a timid bather, inching forward, toes first, teeth chattering." So wrote Alfred Sauvy not many years ago.1 The expression is forceful, the imagery brilliant, the judgement bordering on the commonplace. For this France of the 1920s and particularly the 1930s long has been regarded as timid, indecisive, paralyzed before the perceived peril from east of the Rhine. France, or more accurately her military and civilian leaders, acquired a reputation between the wars for unparalleled timidity, the result, so it is said, of an unchecked, uncontrolled fear of war. Evidence for this reading of official French behaviour is customarily marshalled from the diplomatic register of events between the Versailles and Munich settlements, to which not even the French occupation of the Ruhr valley in 1923 need be reckoned as an exception. Although such appraisals are not central to this paper, it may be fair for the author to acknowledge his scepticism at the outset.2 On balance, they seem to me to have been overdrawn and distorted. But there is another