Philip Nord on France 1940: Defending the Republic

This is a production by the National History Center in cooperation with the Woodrow Wilson Center’s History and Public Policy Program in Washington DC France suffered a crushing defeat in 1940, and its democratic constitution was then set aside to make way for the authoritarian regime of Vichy. A classic explanation chalks up this series of events to decadence, to France’s moral failings as a nation. Philip Nord argues, however, that the defeat was contingent, the result of poor military decision-making on the part of the army brass, and that the turn to authoritarianism thereafter was the result of a betrayal by the nation’s military and administrative elites, more interested in national regeneration than in democracy. Does such an analysis alter how France’s history in this period is to be understood? Philip Nord is the Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1981. He is the author of five books on French history since the Rev