Once upon a time, before it became the Paris printing of the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune published its late sports editor Dick Roraback’s ode to baseball’s opening day each year.
Under the fold, “The Crack of the Bat.”
Continue reading
Would it be too cynical to say that, with yesterday’s French close-support air mission, Nicolas Sarkozy’s war aims in Libya have been fulfilled in their entirety? After a string of false starts – such as re-announcing the Union for the Mediterranean, having to dispose of his foreign minister, and sending the amphibious-assault ship Mistral to pick up Egyptian refugees who turned out to have already left by air – he’s finally managed to assert himself. And the Libyan rebels certainly benefited from the air support, probably more than the 110-odd Tomahawks last night. Further, specifically European will and capability have been demonstrated. It’s probably worth noting this UK-French air exercise last week, which may have been a final rehearsal or just as well, a final warning.
A certain idea of French foreign policy is in crisis. On one hand, a serious (non-dickhead) terrorist threat to French interests – like Areva’s uranium mines – in Niger and Mali just isn’t going away, and the French military is semi-permanently involved. Jean-Dominique Merchet has an excellent post on the failed operation to rescue the two hostages and especially on the fact that several of the apparent kidnappers were in Nigerien police uniform…and they fired at the French helicopters. Whether this was a case of insurgents masquerading as police, rogue police cooperating with insurgents, real police acting as fake ones for some twisted reason, or a disastrous friendly-fire incident is far from clear.
Further south, in Cote d’Ivoire, the political crisis grinds on with a steadily increasing background level of violence. The many, many French citizens present have been officially advised to leave. Well, perhaps that’s what Foreign Minister Michéle Alliot-Marie meant to say – instead she advised them to return “en metropole”, thus giving the unhelpful impression she regards the place as a French colony. Oddly enough, former foreign minister and multiple-scandal case Roland Dumas, who is now one of Laurent Gbagbo’s lawyers, described it as “the jewel of French colonialism” in an interview with Le Monde. He went on to say that the water supply belonged to Bouygues, the oil to Total, and the port to Bolloré. Which is true. Typically, he left open whether he thinks this is a good thing or whether behaving as if the country was still a French colony might be a little irresponsible.
And not only did the Tunisian president, dictator, and friend of France end up fleeing, he was apparently refused entry to France. Actually, I monitored air movements over Corsica at the time thanks to this lot and I couldn’t find the plane (registration TS-IOO) – I rather suspect that even if he did apparently stop for fuel in Italy, he went straight east from there. The timings tend to support this. This was after Alliot-Marie, whose reputation as a safe pair of hands is looking dicey, had gone so far as to offer Ben Ali the assistance of the French police in dealing with the crowds. Seriously. In fact, looking at the exact wording, she may have meant some sort of low-key training team giving lessons on policing by consent, but the timing couldn’t have been less appropriate. Anyway, the minister ended up being formally disavowed by her own ministry.
What seems to be clear is that not only are there problems, but there is also an entirely unhelpful smell of imperial arrogance wafting about.
In my role as the AFOE occasional film critic, off to the Curzon Mayfair for Of Gods and Men/Des dieux et des hommes. After the DICKHEADS, we’re going to deal with some much more serious terrorism in this post.
Of Gods and Men is a classic peace movie, in the sense that there are classic war movies. In fact, it mirrors quite a lot of the structure and tropes you expect from a war movie – a neat trick. The film deals with the hostage-taking and eventual murder, by unidentified gunmen, of a group of French monks in the high Atlas mountains of Algeria in 1996, during the grim worst of the Algerian civil war. The monks, to begin with, are living at peace – in fact, as we learn from some of their conversations, their elected leader Brother Christian sees their mission (that word, already) as a project in deliberately waging peace, a continuation of the alternative-leftist dream of 1968. Every time the monks have a meeting, Christian takes his seat directly in front of an icon of 1980s internationalists, the world map redrawn to make the size of Africa and Latin America more obvious.
The monks tend their land, produce honey and wine, worship. Christian is writing a book. They practice social service – one of them, Luc, is a doctor, who holds a weekly surgery for the poor. They live in apparent harmony with the Algerian villagers across the valley in their structural-tile favela settlement.
Nobody wants to be involved with the war, but the war wants very much to be involved with them. A group of Croatian engineers working nearby are murdered by insurgents. Gradually, the violence infects everything else. They try to refuse it – Christian meets with the Algerian governor, who offers to post troops near the monastery, and he refuses as a matter of principle. As a result, the monks fall out among themselves, not so much about the troops but because he has acted without getting their approval first. The war draws progressively closer, and they debate endlessly whether to abandon the whole project and go back to France, to move temporarily to a place of safety, to go back on the governor’s offer, or to stick it out. One night, the insurgents appear and demand medical assistance. Christian persuades their leader to stay outside the monastery, and they accept drugs and dressings.
Things rapidly become more serious. It becomes obvious that one side, or another, wants them dead. The insurgent leader is killed in action with the army and Christian has to identify his body, thus becoming suspect to both the insurgents and the army. A succession of monks struggle with their fear and doubt, but Christian talks them around one by one. Eventually, gunmen kidnap all but two monks (who succeed in hiding) and march them off into the mountains. They ended up dead in reality; who killed them, and how, remains a mystery.
I liked the way this film showed people at work – the monks, the Algerians, like the village haji who they hire to bring his Polish tractor and plough their patch. We see him hit a sticky patch, carefully raise the hitch, reverse, and try again. The doomed Croats boom around the site with their Caterpillars and a sort of proud working-class confidence.
I also liked the role of time. The monks initially seem to be blessed with the gift of all the time in the world, but as the film progresses, the slow progress of time becomes a source of cranking suspense and maddening waiting.
That’s another war-movie trick, of course. Among other things, Brother Bruno makes a dangerous journey through the checkpoints and the debatable lands to bring in an urgent supply run, including cheese, medicines, and several hundred rounds of communion wafers. People write home illuminatingly. One of the monks demands of their leader “What are we doing here – trying to be heroes? Martyrs?”, and his leader talks him down reminding him of the importance of their mission and his obligations to his brothers (another telling word). The characters seek out their leader one by one to talk to him in confidence, and he pays out the big cheap words used on all such occasions. After they are captured, one after the other, the hostage-takers make them read out their name, age, and monastic affiliation. (Monks don’t have serial numbers.) In fact, it’s arguable that this is how the war seeps into the monastery – the monks get pressganged into a war movie.
As well as being a great war movie about peace, it’s a pretty good peace movie about war. The Algerian regional governor honestly doesn’t want the monks to get killed, but he also has political motives – it would be welcome if they were to simply leave, but he would prefer they stay, so he can install a detachment of troops in the village and establish the government’s authority there on the pretext of protecting them. He would like to make the monks part of his counter-insurgency plan. And if the insurgents were to butcher them, despite all he could do, that would make useful propaganda.
The insurgents would much rather have the monks in place – it’s always possible to slaughter them if a dose of revolutionary terror is required, and they are a source of medical assistance. Although the insurgent leader doesn’t give Brother Christian any assurances, he does let others believe that the monks are under his protection.
And the people, it turns out, are hoping that the presence of the monks will deter the insurgents from doing anything to them, for fear of committing an atrocity awful enough to wreck their reputation. They don’t want the insurgents and they want the government still less – they want, most of all, to survive and to avoid being governed. It is telling that the villagers and the monks are the only people in the movie who practice a sort of democracy – the Algerian military, of course, couldn’t care less, and the insurgents obey their leader. But this doesn’t mean they are passive. Part of the horror is that the relationship between the villagers and the monks subtly changes, from peace to something approaching a hostage situation. After all, the villagers are in a position to denounce them to the insurgents (or the army) and then carefully see nothing.
Obviously, this situation is intolerable to both the insurgents and the military. Neither the insurgent nor the counterinsurgent will put up with people who insist on escaping from their joint demand that they take sides. In a sense, the monks are wiped out by an unconscious conspiracy between two factions desperately competing to deliver their rival visions of government to people who want no part of either. Monks don’t have serial numbers, and all the killers of the Algerian war want to impose them.
Oddly enough, the Algerian governor, with his Ottoman title of Wali, is quite a sympathetic character. A curious feature of his role is that every time he appears on screen, he speaks the unvarnished truth as a sort of bureaucratic Greek chorus. Also, he always appears in a black suit, a uniform that marks him as a survival of civilian power. In his office, though, when he talks about the people and gestures out of the window, you can’t see any people.
A quick Woerth/Bettencourt note. The prosecutor-general for Versailles has intervened in the complex dispute between jurisdictions in the case, in which the prosecutor for Nanterre, Philippe Courroye, an old political chum of Nicolas Sarkozy’s, has been trying to prevent the case being sent to an investigating judge. As the Versailles prosecutor is Courroye’s official superior, they’re in a position to simply order the whole mess shifted out of his responsibility, which would trigger a judicial inquiry.
Meanwhile, just to add an extra something to the general atmosphere of paranoia and zizanie, journalists’ laptops keep disappearing, in a string of burglaries at Le Point, Le Monde, and Mediapart. There’s an interview with one of the journalists here, who turns out to be the same one who was being illegally wiretapped.
He says he doesn’t want to “wallow in paranoia”, but frankly, who’d pass up an opportunity like this?
So, remember the 10 million francs in 500 franc notes, that were meant to have come from passing round the hat at campaign rallies? Sure you do. Those will be the ones Nicolas Sarkozy personally banked in his capacity of treasurer to Edouard Balladur’s presidential campaign in 1995. Well, back in April, it was alleged that they originated from a large kickback paid as part of the deal under which France sold three submarines to Pakistan. Not good. Thanks to Mediapart, you can consult the original receipts here, as issued by the Boulevard Haussmann branch of Crédit du Nord.
Now, you may also recall that in 2002, terrorists blew up a busload of French engineers in Karachi, working on one of the boats. Everyone took this for an Al-Qa’ida or related job at the time, not surprisingly, but some people later began to doubt this. The latest news is that the judge investigating the affair, Renaud Van Ruymbeke has decided to inquire into the possibility that considerable sums of money were paid both to Pakistani officials to achieve the sale, and that some of this money made its way back to France and into the Balladur campaign’s accounts.
When Jacques Chirac beat both Balladur and the Socialists to the presidency in 1995, he ordered a stop to all the commissions paid as part of the contract. This was almost certainly out of revenge on Balladur for running in the first place, which implies he knew about the campaign funding. The whole affair seems to have turned on the vicious rivalry between the circle around Chirac and that around Balladur (and Nicolas Sarkozy). It’s also well worth remembering that the tiny but then influential Parti Républicain’s leaders were heavily involved in a whole succession of arms contracts a few years before this, which also involved the payment of large commissions and resulted in some of the commissions being paid back to important people in France.
If you want to know more, Mediapart has a sort of bible of the issue. You’ll need it.
So the president is accused of having cleared the creation of a special shell company and having banked the money himself. As well as the newspapers wanting him prosecuted for illegal wiretapping. And they’re demonstrating all over France.
So they capped the leaking oil well in the end. What about the other one? Not so much.
Back before the summer break, we’d just had the eruption of the “microparties”, and Nicolas Sarkozy had discovered that it was suddenly imperative to lock up gypsies. Everyone knew very well that the scandal would take the summer off, getting out of Paris to the sea as if it was itself a character in the story. And now, it’s back. There’s been a certain amount of fallout about the Roma, by the way; this week’s leak reveals that Brice Hortefeux’s original circular to all prefects did indeed mention them by name as an ethnic group, which isn’t meant to be something that the Republic believes in. In fact, that’s precisely what Immigration Minister Eric Besson has been saying in public – so he’s been left to protest that he didn’t get the e-mail.
This is, however, now a side issue, one with the passing summer, even though the European Commission is officially displeased. As August came to an end, a few new tarballs began to wash up on the beaches. Eric Woerth turned out to have intervened to get Patrice de Maistre, Liliane Bettencourt’s financial adviser and his wife’s employer, a Légion d’Honneur. He’d initially denied this. Then, Le Canard Enchainé ran a slightly gnomic story mentioning that one David Sénat, an official on Justice Minister Michéle Alliot-Marie’s staff, had been forced to resign.
The significance of this has just become more obvious than it perhaps was.
Le Monde opened this week by announcing on the front page that the newspaper was about to bring criminal charges alleging that persons unknown had been spying on communications between one of its reporters and a source. Communications between journalists and their sources are legally privileged in France under a measure introduced by Nicolas Sarkozy. The source, it turns out, is none other than David Sénat, and in practice, the persons unknown can only have been agents of the state.
Wham! It’s a gusher!
The UMP, through its general secretary Xavier Bertrand, responded immediately:
Pourquoi un journal comme Le Monde se permet d’accuser sans preuve, pourquoi une telle agressivité du journal Le Monde?
He also blamed the Socialists and the Communists and claimed there was no proof of anything in the story. This may not have been the best decision ever, as within the day, the Director General of the National Police confirmed in an interview with the same newspaper that the DCRI – Central Directorate of Internal Intelligence, the reorganised counter-intelligence agency – had indeed carried out an investigation into leaks to the press in which they had monitored Sénat’s office phone. To sum up: Le Monde alleged that the DCRI had been ordered to find out who was communicating with the press, had “examined” Sénat’s phone, had demanded communications data from a mobile operator, and had identified Sénat. Bertrand denied all this.
The DGPN Director then confirmed that the DCRI had been ordered to find out who was communicating with the press, had examined the phone, had demanded data from the operator, and had identified Sénat. Xavier Bertrand would therefore appear to be in a certain amount of trouble.
The only difference in their accounts is that the DGPN Director denies that they intercepted Sénat’s phone calls, only that they retrieved the call-detail records showing who he had been telephoning, when, and for how long (and also possibly from where and under which billing codes). He seems to be relying on this distinction to claim that this exercise was legal. Le Monde‘s sources, whose PGP keys are presumably getting a workout, claim that they also obtained geolocation data.
Keen and agile minds will recall that this is precisely the argument the US National Security Agency asserted in the case of STELLAR WIND, its mammoth and illegal Bush-era surveillance operation which also relied on the analysis of CDRs rather than on the interception of calls. It is a telecomms industry truth that the real business is all about signalling and billing and operations support – telephony itself is a relatively small part of the machine. This is never more true than in surveillance cases.
It does not seem to be the strongest argument ever that journalistic sources are protected as to the content of their communications but not as to the fact of being a source, but that’s a matter for the courts. The police have also claimed that they ran the idea by the national commission for the supervision of surveillance, which unfortunately denies this as well, and it seems to be confirmed that the leaks in question were ones about the Woerth-Bettencourt affair.
Who is David Sénat, anyway? A judge by training, he’s been working for MAM for years, at the ministries of Defence, the Interior, and now Justice, and also in her capacity as head of the RPR in its shadow existence as part of the UMP.
MAM considered running for president in 2007, during the period when it appeared that the traditional Gaullist wing of politics and the circle around Jacques Chirac might stand a spoiler candidate to derail the Sarkozy campaign. Not surprisingly, she’s considered much more of a conservative conservative than Sarko, and a potential future presidential candidate. Even her microparty seems designed to contrast with either Sarko’s Rolex-and-yacht look or the IT-director professionalism of someone like Francois Fillon – it’s called Le Chêne, The Oak. Feel the Burkean traditions on that. So the fact that…someone…called the spooks on her office implies a certain tension, to say the least.
Meanwhile, the “someone”? Who he? Well, the President did have the DCRI investigate the source of rumours about his wife. So he’s got form for making use of the intelligence services personally. She’s in the news as well, by the way:
..avoids charity work, held up filming on Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, and had three former lovers as houseguests when Nicolas Sarkozy first visited her Mediterranean villa.
Who was it who said that the cavalry lent tone to what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl?
Anyway, it’s hard to overstate and understate the importance of this story. Imagine if the Bush administration had been spying on the New York Times‘s phone calls to, say, Valerie Plame – not perhaps the biggest leap of fantasy ever undertaken – and the Times both detected this somehow, and called the FBI to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, under a source-protection law introduced by the same administration. On the other hand, the weirder any political scandal gets, the greater the pressure to find some sort of amicable resolution. (See the quote above.) The system, after all, must preserve itself. But the exit strategy from here is very far from obvious.
This week’s Canard Enchainé has a cartoon likening the Woerth/Bettencourt scandal to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. This annoys me, as I’ve been making the same joke to anyone who will listen for weeks. So what happened? Well, just to run up to speed…
So there’s the heiress to L’Oreal, Liliane Bettencourt, the richest woman in France. (Among other things, she is the second biggest taxpayer and receives a reputed €34m in dividends a month.) She’s in her eighties, and she has a daughter. She also has a faintly boho circle of friends and a crack team of accountants. Now, she fell out with her daughter about the amounts of money she spends on her mates. The daughter sued, trying to get rid of her mother’s accountant and have mamma placed under a power of attorney. Mamma doesn’t agree, and the fact that she manages to pay the same marginal tax rate as someone on a salary of €3,000 monthly would tend to support the notion that she can well look after herself.
Then it turned out that her servants had been secretly taping conversations between her, her accountants, and various others. Sensation; one of the people involved is Eric Woerth, the former Budget Minister and now Minister of Labour. Eric Woerth’s wife, Florence, is an accountant employed by the Bettencourt family office. Further sensation.
But what were they talking about? One of the plaintiffs in the original lawsuit now gets her own back, by telling the newspapers, specifically the former Le Monde editor Edwy Plenel’s subscription-only website Mediapart. She says that Mme Bettencourt was in the habit of inviting key right-wing politicians for dinner and distributing yer actual brown envelopes stuffed with raw cash. Names include Woerth, Prime Minister Francois Fillon, and…Nicolas Sarkozy. El presidente himself.
Suddenly, no-one was talking about the family dispute any more, and a certain Macondo quality took hold. A string of efforts to cap the leaking well began.
Activating the giant shears
First of all, the UMP’s underwater robots tried to cut off the information source, encouraging legal efforts to suppress the documents of the case. That didn’t work; they were clearly “d’intéret génerale” and anyway, bits were washing up everywhere. Including in Switzerland, where it was alleged that €100,000 of the campaign money had come from. This would be highly illegal.
Top Hat
Then they tried to place a steel cap over the leak. The ex-accountant was quizzed by the police, and suddenly decided that Sarkozy hadn’t received the money and that the dates were wrong. What was wrong about them wasn’t clear, but it was certain who was at fault. Le Figaro somehow got what purported to be an extract from the transcript of the police interview, which said that Mediapart had “romanced”, perhaps a careful choice of words. (Remember that bit – it’ll come up later.)
There was only one problem; the police had already seized the bank statements, and large sums of cash had been withdrawn on each of the dates in Mediapart’s original report. Bubbles of hot air were building up beneath the cap, rendering it dangerously unstable.
A string of new leaks began to appear; a rather well connected racing stable, which had turned up just in time for its owners to benefit from a special tax break, for example. The tax break allowed those subject to France’s wealth tax to shield some of their assets by investing in small businesses. It had probably not been foreseen that such a small business might include buying horseflesh. Who changed the rules? M. Woerth, while his wife was one of the shareholders.
Actually, the affair has a curious horsey scent. Woerth is also accused of having sold a publicly owned racecourse, at mates’ rates, in his capacity as mayor of Compiégne…
There was more serious stuff, too. Bettencourt’s tax file, as one of the biggest in France, should have been audited every 3 years at least. Somehow, this had not happened since 1995 (significantly, since the end of the Mitterand presidency). The internal inquiry denied that Woerth had anything to do with it, but not many people believed this.
In the light of all this, containment efforts broke down. The accountant changed her mind again. The new line of defence was that the large cash withdrawals represented the Bettencourts’ pocket money. Even Le Figaro noted the curious coincidence that this requirement spiked by a factor of eight immediately before elections.
Top Kill
Clearly something more powerful than the underwater robot was required, and it was decided that a shot of Presidential authority might do it. Nicolas Sarkozy appeared on national television, in an awkward cross between an interview and a formal address, during which he talked a great deal about pensions. Afterwards, the semi-interviewer was accused by the France 2 journalists’ union of having done the government a favour.
Then came a new shocker – the discovery of the “microparties”. In France, it is illegal for a party to accept more than €7,500 a year from any one person or organisation. There is, however, no restriction on how many parties one candidate may be a member of. Also, someone who is a member of a party may give it as much as they like, and an association (as opposed to a party) can do as it likes and can also turn into a party at any moment. As a result, France has over 300 active political parties, many of which have no members. Inevitably, Woerth turns out to have such a personal party. The President himself has two. Valérie Pecresse has three. Laurent Wauquiez took the opportunity of an official trip to London to solicit money for his pocket party from French businessmen here.
Thick, sticky cash kept spilling from the damaged well. It turned out that Bettencourt had received €100 million in refunds over four years under a Sarkozy-initiated tax cut. Woerth was discovered to have pulled strings with the Bettencourts for his wife. The ex-accountant had been paid by both Bettencourt and her daughter. And there was that thing with the island in the Seychelles of unknown ownership.
This week’s Canard has an informative article on the Bettencourts’ tax affairs; thanks to a neat structure, the dividends from L’Oreal (a sort of feudal tribute imposed on every artificial blonde) flow into a shell company and sit there. Having been taxed as income at source, they are not then subject to further taxation. The lady draws on this company’s funds as required, and therefore manages to pay income tax only on what she spends.
Junk Shot
The situation, therefore, is grim. Sarkozy has been quoted as complaining that Woerth is “un poids, pas un atout” (a burden, not an asset) that it was “impossible de se délester” (impossible to jettison). Which begs the question, why is it impossible to get rid of him? It probably has something to do with the time he spent as the UMP’s treasurer. The president has some experience of these things – as Edouard Balladur’s campaign director in 1995, he was responsible for banking 10 million francs of campaign contributions. Ostensibly collected at campaign rallies, the only unusual feature of this transaction was that it consisted entirely of 500 franc notes. As Arthur Goldhammer says, one way of looking at Sarkozy is in terms of a swap of elites – the electorate turning to the private-sector rich rather than the civil service/industrial technocracy. “I call you…my base!”, indeed, but surely that took it a little too far.
So, what to do? Fortunately, there’s always the option of abasing yourself in a binge on racist demagoguery. So the police shot a gypsy, which started a riot.
Ce matin, au cours du Conseil des ministres, Sarkozy a donc annoncé qu’il organiserait une réunion, le 28 juillet, à l’Elysée sur « les problèmes que posent les comportements de certains parmi les Gens du voyage et les Roms » et qu’on y déciderait « l’expulsion de tous les campements en situation irrégulière ».
One of his own senators wouldn’t agree, but we’re in “don’t confuse me with the facts!” territory. After all, they also want to pass a flag-burning law, despite the fact there already is one. But sometimes, the best solution is a million gallons of old rope, balls, and toxic mud.
I mentioned that the Figaro story would come up again. Look at it closely; you’ll notice that there is no byline attached. This week’s Canard has a news-in-brief item mentioning a protest by the paper’s journalists about a story that was dubious and “part of the presidency’s communications strategy”, in connection with an unsigned article.
A.K.A. The Bundesbank
Just a quick note for Matthew Yglesias and the three of our readers who read both his blog and ours.
He’s rightly exercised about Greece and its implications for the eurozone. The positions of the ECB and the anti-inflationary approach of the ECB come in for particular criticism. He writes,
Rather than try to run monetary policy that would be suitable for the median European economy, the European Central Bank has insisted on trying to run monetary policy that would be suitable for Germany. And not even suitable for Germany in general, but “suitable for Germany according to hard money fanatics.” That’s probably bad for Germany, but there’s certainly no reason to think it’s appropriate for southern Europe.
The ECB is a Frankfurt-based central bank that is extremely cautious about inflation, in which all members of the eurozone have a seat at the decision-making table. The alternative to the ECB is a Frankfurt-based central bank that is extremely cautious about inflation, in which only German central bankers have a seat at the decision-making table: the Bundesbank.
In the years before the introduction of the euro, only the UK and Sweden managed marginally independent monetary policies, as they do today. (Indeed, German supremacy within European monetary policy dates as far back as 1983 with Mitterrand’s turn away from nationalizations.) Whether Greece weathers this crisis, leaves the euro, or some larger mechanism brings monetary union to an end (unlikely in the extreme), monetary policy will still be made in Frankfurt. The ECB may not be all that good for some eurozone members, but if that is true, then surely a return to the Bundesbank as Europe’s de-facto central bank would be worse.
I’ve just been reading Ernest May’s Strange Victory – Hitler’s Conquest of France, which I was recommended in this thread at Abu Muqawama.
Strange Victory‘s main point is that everything you think you know about the German invasion of France in 1940 is wrong. The French (and British) armies weren’t catastrophically ill-equipped for modern war; the French tank park was almost a third bigger than that of Germany, and the advantage was concentrated in the newer and heavier types – the French had many more Somua S35s and Renault B1s than the Germans had Panzer III and IVs. In terms of quality, the B1 and the British Matilda were the heaviest tanks either side deployed; the S-35 was probably the best all-round tank on the battlefield. The French Army’s historic strength, its artillery, disposed of a huge advantage in big guns.
Similarly, there is no reason to believe that French morale was particularly poor, or worse than that of the Germans. Where they had the opportunity to fight, the French fought; in the Gembloux gap in Belgium, Rene Prioulx’s French Cavalry Corps – actually, a pair of armoured divisions – fought the 3rd and 4th Panzers for four days, covering the First Army’s move up to the Dyle line. They lost 105 tanks to 160 for the Germans; some German accounts suggest that had they kept going, rather than breaking off the engagement once the main force was in place, the whole German front in the north might have collapsed. On the other side of Antwerp, the 9th Panzers ran into another French armoured division, and this time lost another hundred tanks for the loss of five French. May quotes a German cavalryman’s account of their horses screaming in terror as French tanks surged towards their lines, a reversal of every traditional account of 1940.
Even the hapless 9th Army in the Ardennes, May argues, did better than might have been reasonably expected; it was made up of the bits and pieces of the French Army, with a high concentration of the oldest reservists and youngest conscripts, the last pick of equipment, a lot of ageing dug-out officers, and sent to guard a front no-one expected to be important, where it met the very best the Germans had to offer. May argues that it was no worse than the German forces facing the Maginot Line in Army Group C, or the Leeb Museum as the troops called it after its commander and the quality of its equipment. Had they been facing a concentrated attack by Prioulx’s tanks, they might have been routed as the 9th French Army was.
So what happened? How did the Allies end up with the best of their armies, and the whole of their mobile forces, successfully defending positions two hundred miles from the German schwerpunkt? May begins at the beginning, examining the German and French planning processes. It is a commonplace that the Allies did exactly what the Germans were hoping they would. Up until the early spring of 1940, however, the German army was planning to do exactly what the French were hoping they would – to commit their forces to a westwards push across Belgium and southern Holland, something like the Schlieffen plan of 1914.
The Allies planned to counter this with a left-flanking manoeuvre pivoting on the Ardennes, rolling the motorised 1st and 7th French Armies and the British Army, including three French armoured divisions and a British tank brigade, onto a river line running half-way across Belgium. This would provide a shorter line and defence in depth, and would concentrate the Allied strike force directly opposite the Germans’. This was roughly the plan – plan D – that they put into effect on the 10th of May, 1940.
The Germans were never satisfied with their plan; it was obvious to both sides that Germany could only lose a long war, as Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction recently bore out. And the General Staff plan for the Western Front didn’t offer much chance of a decisive victory. Germany needed a battle that would transform its strategic position. May describes the emergence of the final plan, which moved the main attack from the area around Liege to the southern Ardennes, as a collective product, pointing out that the first person to call it the Manstein plan was von Manstein. He certainly did have a major influence on it, lobbying against the original plan until he was transferred away from Army Group A headquarters to shut him up. But so did many others.
Hitler correctly realised that the original plan wouldn’t do. But he also offered his own inimitable negative contribution – why not decide not to decide where the main attack should go in, and make the decision on the night? Eventually, the debate was settled by a string of major war-games designed to test the three competing proposals. As it turned out, the original plan usually delivered stalemate in Flanders, and occasionally, defeat. Hitler’s proposal reliably resulted in failure, varying between mere fiasco and the French conquest of the Ruhr. The Group A plan usually worked.
That the war games were an accurate simulation was the work of the General Staff intelligence branch, Foreign Armies (West), led by General Tippelskirch, with Colonel Liss in charge of the French desk. One of the duties of this office was to act as the enemy commander during war games. The French and German intelligence services were radically different; France had invested hugely in intelligence collection, with formidable capabilities in photo-reconnaissance, electronic intelligence, and agent-running. Germany, short of cash, was also short of information; however, the Germans had compensated by concentrating on analysis. Tippelskirch’s staff spent most of their time studying what would now be called foreign doctrine – how potential enemies thought about war, how they trained for it, and how they made decisions.
Their conclusions about France was that the French Army relied heavily on centralised command and control, which was implemented through staff procedures that generated extremely detailed written orders and reports. Also, the French communications system was much more effective vertically than it was horizontally – in the name of security, landlines and dispatch riders linking major headquarters were preferred to radio, which meant that French army units had to have very detailed instructions in order to coordinate with their neighbours. One of the few clear technological advantages the Germans had over the French was their Enigma-encrypted mobile radio network – which they had developed to support their own concept of Auftragstaktik.
Therefore, they proposed that the greatest weakness of the French Army would be in responding to unforeseen events. Whatever the final plan would be, it could only succeed by forcing the French to abandon their own plan; if they got to execute their own plans, they would win. When Tippelkirch and Liss got in character for their parts as French generals, they played them as men trapped by their own thoroughness.
Of course, it wasn’t enough to design a plan that would confront the French with an unexpected crisis and force them to abandon their own plans. It had to stay unexpected. French intelligence certainly had the data to find out what the Germans were planning; they identified most of the Panzer divisions from aerial photos and radio intercepts, discovered that two of the four major supply depots in the Western theatre of war were located in the Eifel, just across the border from the Ardennes sector, and analysed German aerial reconnaissance overflights statistically, showing that they were concentrating on a rectangular zone behind the Ardennes and leading towards the coast. They interrogated a shot-down reconnaissance pilot and got him to spill the beans on his targets, which all lay in this area. All this data was written up in careful summaries and delivered to the commander in chief, mixed with a vast quantity of noise and German disinformation.
But the French understanding of intelligence specifically barred intelligence officers from commenting on the content of their reports; rather like traditional journalists, they were not supposed to editorialise or speculate. Judgment about the enemy’s intentions was left to the commander; detailed planning was left to the operations branch. The very quantity of data that the Deuxieme Bureau delivered to Gamelin, Georges, and the rest every day meant that nobody was asking questions about its meaning. As the Germans installed extra railway sidings and temporary bridges in the Mosel valley, put in more telephone lines, and cleared parking space next to the roads leading towards Luxembourg, the French general staff was drowning in reports, endlessly revising the detailed plan for the move into Belgium, and creating an entirely new and ambiguous headquarters shoehorned between the General Staff, the Northern Front, and the Commander in Chief.
One book that doesn’t come out of this well is Alistair Horne’s To Lose a Battle: France 1940. May is scrupulously courteous to Horne, and credits him with providing the definitive account of combat in 1940, but it’s impossible not to revise your opinion of Horne as a result of this book.
For example, Horne doesn’t mention that the French divisions cuirassees, whose role as part of the strategic reserve he discusses at length, weren’t actually armoured divisions in the sense of a unit equivalent to a Panzer division. Rather, they were more like a British Army Tank brigade, a force made up of heavy, slow-moving tanks intended to lead a set piece assault on a fixed front. French doctrine foresaw that they would break through the enemy lines, and then let the “light mechanised division”, which had as many tanks as a Panzer division, pass through and exploit the breach. The DC would move back into reserve and put its vehicles back in order.
As a result, they didn’t have the mobile logistics or supporting arms of an armoured division and couldn’t manoeuvre like one, no matter what the high command wanted of them. This – not specific French incompetence or cowardice or Communist infiltration – explains why they were frequently in the wrong place, and why the 2nd DC could be caught with its tanks on one side of Rommel’s 7th Panzers and its soft-skinned vehicles, including all the fuel, on the other. It is true that the French never succeeded in using the three DCs effectively. It is also true that their tanks simply had to move to the battlefield by rail.
And there is far too much national-character stuff in Horne. May takes a much harder line with himself on this. Also, he is more able to recognise that a lot of postwar Gaullist writers wrote the way they did because they were politically on the Right and in the grip of the prejudices of the pre-war era. There is simply too much cheap frogbashing in the world to add to it. You can often hear the effort being made to resist it in Horne’s prose, but too much leaks through.
This story has a sort of tragic duality. The Germans won because they had been able to plan more like a democracy than democratic France or Britain – they constantly questioned their assumptions, criticised superiors, and threw out bad ideas – but they would never do so again, precisely because of their triumph over France. Hitler rapidly convinced himself it was all his own work, and the independent authority of the army was permanently destroyed. The technology – tanks, close air support, and mobile radio – and the doctrine of Blitzkrieg had been validated. Many people concluded that fascism itself had also been validated – they had seen the future, and it worked. The prestige of the Nazi Party and of Hitler rose to a degree that finally saw off any hope that the military would depose him; at the same time, the generals were faced with the possibility that Germany had a combination of technology and operational art that might actually win. Between Hitler’s triumph, and their new status as potential world conquerors, the generals’ opposition to Nazism faded, and any hope of limiting the damage went with it.