page_title: Remilitarization of the Rhineland
section_title: France
hierarchical_section_title: Remilitarization of the Rhineland / Reactions / France
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Albert Sarraut, années 1930.
context_page_description: The remilitarisation of the Rhineland began on 7 March 1936, when German military forces entered the Rhineland, in direct contravention of the Treaty of Versailles and of the Locarno Treaties.
  After the end of World War I, the Rhineland came under Allied occupation. Under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, the German military was forbidden from all territory west of the Rhine and within 50 km east of it. The 1925 Locarno Treaties reaffirmed the permanent demilitarised status of the Rhineland. In 1929, German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann negotiated the withdrawal of Allied forces. The last soldiers left the Rhineland in June 1930.
  Following the Nazis', taking power in 1933, Germany began working towards rearmament and the remilitarisation of the Rhineland. On 7 March 1936, using the Franco-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance as a pretext, Chancellor and Führer Adolf Hitler ordered the Wehrmacht to march 3,000 German troops into the Rhineland, to joyous celebrations across Germany. The French and the British governments, unwilling to risk war, decided against enforcing the treaties.
context_section_description: Historians writing without benefit of access to the French archives (which were not opened until the mid-1970s) such as William L. Shirer in his books The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960) and The Collapse of the Third Republic (1969) have claimed that France, although possessing at this time superior armed forces compared to Germany, including after a possible mobilization 100 infantry divisions, was psychologically unprepared to use force against Germany. Shirer quoted the figure of France having 100 divisions compared to Germany's 19 battalions in the Rhineland. France's actions during the Rhineland crisis have often used as support of the décadence thesis that during the interwar period the supposed decadence of the French way of life caused the French people to degenerate physically and morally to the point that the French were simply unable to stand up to Hitler, and the French in some way had it coming when they were defeated in 1940. Shirer wrote that the French could have easily turned back the German battalions in the Rhineland had the French people not been "sinking into defeatism" in 1936. Historians such as the American historian Stephen A. Schuker who have examined the relevant French primary sources have rejected Shirer's claims, finding that a major paralyzing factor on French policy was the economic situation. France's top military official, General Maurice Gamelin, informed the French government that the only way to remove the Germans from the Rhineland was to mobilize the French Army, which would not only be unpopular but also cost the French treasury 30 million francs per day. Gamelin assumed a worst-case scenario in which a French move into the Rhineland would spark an all-out Franco-German war, a case that required full mobilization. Gamelin's analysis was supported by the War Minister, General Louis Maurin who told the Cabinet that it was inconceivable that France could reverse the German remilitarization without full mobilization. This was especially the case as the Deuxième Bureau had seriously exaggerated the number of German troops in the Rhineland when it sent in a report to the French cabinet estimating that there were 295,000 German troops in the Rhineland. The Deuxième Bureau had come up with this estimate by counting all of the SS, SA and Landespolizei formations in the Rhineland as regular troops and so the French believed thary only a full mobilization would allow France to have enough troops to expel the alleged 295,000 German troops from the Rhineland. The real number was actually 3,000 German soldiers. The French historian Jean-Baptiste Duroselle accused Gamelin of distorting what the Deuxième Bureau's intelligence in his report to the cabinet by converting the SS, SA and Landespolizei  units into fully-trained troops to provide a reason for inaction. Neurath's truthful statement that Germany had sent only 19 battalions into the Rhineland was dismissed by Gamelin as a ruse to allow the Germans to claim that they had not committed a "flagrant violation" of Locarno to avoid having it invoked against Germany, and he also claimed that Hitler would never risk a war by sending such a small force into the Rhineland.  
  At the same time, in late 1935 to early 1936 France was gripped by a financial crisis, with the French Treasury informing the government that sufficient cash reserves to maintain the value of the franc as currently pegged by the gold standard in regard to the US dollar and the British pound no longer existed, and only a huge foreign loan on the money markets of London and New York could prevent the value of the franc from experiencing a disastrous downfall. Because France was on the verge of elections scheduled for the spring of 1936, devaluation of the franc, which was viewed as abhorrent by large sections of French public opinion, was rejected by the caretaker government of Prime Minister Albert Sarraut as politically unacceptable. Investors' fears of a war with Germany were not conducive to raising the necessary loans to stabilize the franc, and the German remilitariza
caption: Albert Sarraut, the French prime minister at the time of the crisis
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