Long-term history, in its motionless slowness, sometimes exasperates men stuck in everyday life, but when the event arises, it swoops down by surprise, like a bird of prey on its prey. It is already too late. The defeat of 40, which could be described as a “debacle”, belongs to these humiliating catastrophes that conceal the history of France. Like, in 1415, the battle of Agincourt, at the end of which the fine flower of chivalry was annihilated. On May 10, 1940, after a "phoney war" where nothing seemed to happen, Hitler launched his armies on the Western Front. On June 22, the French forces crushed, Marshal Pétain signs an armistice in Rethondes. Against all expectations, the Germans won a lightning victory. That was 80 years ago.
On the one hand, the “phony war” of anxious expectation – so well rendered by Julien Gracq in A balcony in the forest – brings us back to the “funny health crisis” we are experiencing today. Event not long ago unimaginable. But suddenly a sneaky virus appears, the dangerousness of which imposes general confinement. The trap has closed. What economic and financial panzers, in addition to the deadly pandemic, will fall on us?
This kind of calamity can arouse, especially if it incites to a start, a saving self-reflection. On the other hand, one can consider the guilt of the French by the Vichy regime as manipulation. Because if the staff revealed a serious incompetence, the soldiers fought, on the whole, with pugnacity. And then, the defeat of 40 was not an end point:the war, including that of the shadows in occupied territory, was going to continue. Until release.