The Republic in Danger: General Maurice Gamelin and the Politics of French Defence, 1933-1940

This is the first full-length reappraisal in English of the role of France's chief of defense forces, General Maurice Gamelin (1872-1958). Reviled by many of his contemporaries and by two generations of historians as "the man who lost the Battle of France" in 1940, Gamelin is here presented as a man seeking to provide France with security and armed readiness in the face of the aggression and expansionism of Hitler's Third Reich. The reader sees him playing the decisive part in overcoming civil-military friction in the prewar years so that France was able to choose the path of resistance to Germany in September 1939.