The Wilmington morning star., 1940-06-27
Editorial Comments
From Other Angles
THE COLLAPSE OF FRANCE
New York Herald Tribune

With the signing of the Italian armistice
Frences humiliation is complete; her national
existence is given up in pawn to the two die,
tators; her war is over. And of the whole swift
appalling story, perhaps no aspect is more ap-
palling than the utter collapse in which this end
has come.
Some of the evidences of this collapse are
pathetic, as when a cabinet minister who will
not even give his name accuses the British of
violating a promise that they would under
stand" the surrender. Some are bitter, as when
the Bordeaux government cashiers General de
Gaulle for issuing a luminous to the sort of
resistance which could alone entitle any govern
ment of France to the name. Some are fantastic,
as when Laval declares that France has mot
lost rank as a major power" thus seeking to
exercise the overtowering truth that France
the France of the officials, the politicians, the
army staffs and big business men and news
papers and diplomats-has ceased to be a power
of any kind. And some-in the form of a sud
den flood of stories of treachery, defeatism and
inertia in high places coupled with disillusion
and despair in the ranks-are terrifying.
The stories may be exaggerated; tie moral
collapse itself is obvious and unarguable. How
far it may extend through the mass of the
French people we do not know; for the French
people are now cut off from the civilized world
behind the walls of military occupation, censor
ship and the timid suppressions of their own
leaders. How far it was unavoidable under the
hammer blows of the blitzkrieg it is not for
those who did not feel them to say. But the
fact is that in her extremity France found her
self suddenly under a government without con-
vlctlon, with no national will to resistance, with
no policy but to surrender everything as quickly
as possible in the illusory hope of saving some
thing out of a wreck which the attempt made
only more irretTievable.
The Bolshevists made their bitter peace at
in 1918 in order to free themselves
for new beginnings; the French Republic made
its peace at Compiegne only that it's m
might by submission be permitted to cling to
some prerogatives out of a past which they had
failed to defend. Like that of Napoleon's Grande
Armee, the republics career ended not simply
in a defeat but in a "sauve qui peut!" and it
has as little chance OF revival as had the Grande
Armee. If France herself revives it will not be
the France of the politicians and parliamentary
ians, the procrastinators and half-measure men,
the partly pto-Hitler aristocrats and partly pro-
Stalinist agitators, the cynics and the recall
citrants and the disillusioned who step by step
guided her to this, disaster. There will be no
revival unless France finds herself again as a
nation, capable of responding to a national ideal,
of making a common and unselfish effort to
meet a national danger.
No American can say such things in scorn,
for there is no American who has a right to
feel anything but humility in face of Frances
trial. But Americans can look at this moral
collapse in which the trial ended and understand
from it, perhaps, something of the depth of
their own moral unpreparedness for the world
in which they now find themselves living. Have
we the inner conviction, the confidence in our
institutions and the ability to work them despite
all their faults, the common ideal, the unity of
purpose, which could have saved us in such an
extremity from a similar fate? If not we had
better get them, for they will be needed.