I have rarely enjoyed reading a book that so dramatically upsets the myths of several generations, certainly since Marc Bloch’s seminal, polemical work on the fall of France and the Maginot Line, L’Étrange Défaite (Strange Defeat), published posthumously in 1946. I taught the Fall of France to British Army officers as a subject many years ago, read widely on the subject, and was much taken with Bloch’s thesis. Like all polemical works it musters the right arguments in the right order, although some of the planks of the arguments prove, on investigation, to be much weaker than others. In this spirited counter-blast to Bloch, Professor Kevin Passmore does a magnificent job of demonstrating the weakness of Bloc’s primary presumptions about supposed French decadence and moral failure leading to military defeat and the fall of France in 1940. The biggest surprise for me was that the Maginot Line was never meant to be a binary, fixed defence against German attack on France, but a means to channel the enemy to the north. Sacre bleu!
Read this: you’ll be as pleased with this significant act of revisionism as I was.
