In the first volume of an anticipated two-volume study on France in Cambridge University Press’ series on “Armies of the Second World War,” Porch offers an impressively researched, trenchantly argued, and immensely readable study that takes the story up to the end of 1942. Porch is certainly an excellent choice; as a prominent and prolific historian of modern French political and military history, he has in his scholarship ranged across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as across France and its empire.
The first of the book’s two parts seeks to explain the débâcle, adopting a resolutely counter-revisionist position. The current consensus in the specialist scholarship is that France’s defeat was not the result of deep-seated weaknesses in the Third Republic’s structure and functioning (a position dismissed perhaps a little too readily as the “decadence” thesis, which supposedly substitutes moral judgment for analysis). Rather, defeat was the outcome...