France basically spent the period between the late 1880s (when the Boulanger crisis hit after a period of warm civil-military relations post Franco-Prussian war) and 1946 in a state of cold civil war. It took France an extremely long time to decide what the country should be based on, and the army remained a critical hotbed of not only monarchist, but also traditionalist thinking and Catholicism. This only got worse when the French republican movement basically declared war on the Church in a deeply Catholic country in 1905, the French army was rocked by the anti-semitism crisis of the Dreyfus affair, and the French state then participated in its own debacle during the "affaire des fiches", where it was revealed that the French state was interfering with promotions based on secret lists of officers where, among other things, their frequency of going to Church and family backgrounds (like if a brother was a priest), were recorded. In short, the French army goes into WWI deeply shaken, with no real internal doctrine (the
offensive a la outrance theme hit on a by a lot of histories, including infantry rushing forward unsupported, is now argued to have been a product of the lack of definitiveness in doctrinal education leading to poor implementation), and under deep suspicion by the state. This had natural consequences for its budget, leading to the lack of large training grounds and heavy artillery that would cost it dearly in 1914 and 1915.
Things only got worse after WWI. The French state and its military actually managed to make a remarkable reconciliation during the war. While there was an incredible amount of internal tension over civilian involvement in the war effort, the fact that Petain, an ardent right wing Catholic, was the man chosen to lead the army in 1917 is impressive. However, once the war ended the mass sacrifices created an incredible war weariness. In addition, France devolved back into its usual political dysfunction, something only made worse by the Great Depression. By the mid-1930s you had major French military figures connected to the hard right movement in France, which, in 1934, came pretty close to potentially seizing power. This only got worse when the French communist movement, following the Soviet party line after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, turned against the war as "imperialist" and urged peace with Hitler in 1939. The end product of this all came in the soft coup d'etat of June 1940, where Weygand forced the French state to abandon its plans to follow the Dutch model and continue the fight in the colonies, and accept an armistice instead. The specific reasoning here was the need to "protect the army as an institution capable of maintaining order", i.e. a force sufficient to take power in the country. Which the army did, with a surprising amount of civilian support, forming the Vichy regime. The cold civil war only came to an end following the defection of some blocks of the Vichy state starting in 1941-1942 as the Germans increasingly encroached on its independence, and then the mass reprisal killings of the "savage purge" of 1944 and then the even larger legal reprisals of the "legal purge" of 1946.
Add to this the fact that French leadership in WW2 didn't understand that tactics had advanced significantly and didn't outfit their tanks with radios or pay attention to German forces moving through the Ardennes and you have the recipe for disaster in 1940.
Source
https://old.reddit.com/r/WarCollege...re_german_soldiers_on_the_eastern_front_just/
