- It can happen with frightening speed!
"A great nation, though it experiences the worst of luck, does not suddenly collapse out of the blue.
The seeds of its ruin are planted long before.
The threads that lead to ultimate disaster can be traced back.
"This was particularly the case with the Third Republic.
The seeds can be seen planted during the nineteenth century; the threads are not hard to pick up and follow.
France, it is true, fell as the result of one battle that raged for six weeks in the spring and summer of 1940.
But as Montesquieu observed: “If the hazard of a battle, that is, a particular cause, ruins a State, there was a general cause which determined that this State had to perish from a single battle.”
Yet only a quarter of a century before, the Third Republic had been strong enough, its government, Army, people, and institutions tough enough, to survive a succession of bloody and disastrous battles.
In the ensuing twenty-five years something happened that sapped that strength and toughness so that at the first visitation of adversity the Republic floundered and expired.
This is the subject of most of this book.
...As the French poet-diplomat. Paul Claudel once observed: “It is not enough to know the past. It is necessary to understand it.”
The lessons follow from that."
Shirer, William L.. The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940 (p. 14). RosettaBooks. Kindle Edition."
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