The French government leaves Paris

On 10 June 1940, as the German armies were crossing the Seine west of Paris and closing in on the capital from the north, the French government left the city. President Albert Lebrun departed early in the morning, the ministries spent the whole day packing their files, and the Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, set off southwards late in the evening. Their destination was Touraine, the country around Tours on the Loire, where the authorities were billeted in a dozen or more châteaux and manor houses. The stay on the Loire lasted less than four days. It was taken up by the last two conferences between the French and British leaders, at Briare and at Tours, and by two cabinet meetings at the Château de Cangé, at which the demand for an armistice with Germany was voiced for the first time. On the evening of 13 June the ministers decided to move on to Bordeaux, which they reached the following day, in the very hours when the Germans were marching into Paris.

War chronologies date the government’s move to Tours to 10 June and its move to Bordeaux to 13 June. The first date is accurate. The second needs qualifying: the decision to leave for Bordeaux was taken late on the evening of 13 June, but the government convoys set out on the morning of 14 June and arrived that day. President Lebrun noted that he reached Bordeaux at 5 p.m.

The front breaks

From 5 June the Germans had been attacking the line of the Somme and the Aisne, which General Maxime Weygand, Commander-in-Chief since 19 May, was trying to hold with the remnants of an army beaten in Belgium and Flanders. The best French divisions and nearly all the heavy equipment had been lost in the north in May, and those evacuated from Dunkirk by 4 June were mostly soldiers without weapons. Weygand had some sixty divisions on a front nearly a thousand kilometres long, with no reserves and with an air force that was losing more aircraft than it received. On 3 June the Luftwaffe bombed airfields and factories around Paris. After several days of fierce fighting the front on the Somme broke. On 9 June the German spearheads reached the Seine near Rouen, the same day an offensive opened in Champagne, and on 10 June the Germans crossed the Seine at Elbeuf and were encircling Reims.

On the morning of 10 June Weygand presented the Prime Minister with a note in which he wrote that the final rupture of the front might come at any moment, and that the army would then no longer be capable of organised resistance. That afternoon news came from Rome that Italy was declaring war on France and Britain. Reynaud sent President Franklin Delano Roosevelt a telegram begging for help: “Today the enemy is almost at the gates of Paris.” France, he wrote, would fight in front of Paris, behind Paris, in one of her provinces and, if driven out, in North Africa and in her possessions in America.

The departure

Preparations for evacuating the authorities had been under way since mid-May, when archives were burned in the garden of the Foreign Ministry. The government took the decision to leave on 10 June. Lebrun travelled with the secretary-general of the presidency to the Château de Cangé at Saint-Avertin, on the eastern edge of Tours. In his Témoignage (“Testimony”), published in 1945, he recalled the journey as a “Calvary”: for a Lorrainer who had dreamed all his life of seeing Metz and Strasbourg restored to France, and who had ended the previous war as a minister in Clemenceau’s cabinet, leaving Paris before the enemy was a humiliation.

Reynaud left at around 11 p.m. together with Brigadier General Charles de Gaulle, Under-Secretary of State at the War Ministry since 6 June. He stayed at the château at Chissay-en-Touraine, some 30 kilometres from Cangé. The Deputy Prime Minister, Marshal Philippe Pétain, lodged at Athée-sur-Cher, de Gaulle at Azay-sur-Cher, the Ministry of Finance at Chinon, and the Ministry of the Interior at the prefecture in Tours. Weygand’s headquarters lay further still, at Briare on the Loire, more than 150 kilometres to the east. The châteaux often had just one hand-cranked telephone, and the roads between them were choked with refugees. For several days the French government could barely communicate with itself.

The army and the police stayed in Paris. It was decided not to defend the capital: on 10–11 June Weygand and the government agreed that Paris would be declared an open city, and on 13 June this was announced to the inhabitants.

The exodus

The government travelled south together with millions of refugees. The flight of the population had begun in May in Belgium, the Netherlands and the departments of northern France, and in June it engulfed the Paris region. French historians estimate that in May and June 1940 between six and ten million people – French, Belgian, Dutch and Luxembourgers – took to the roads. According to some estimates, around two million Parisians, roughly two-thirds of the city’s population, left in June. The trains were packed to bursting, and the railways laid on goods wagons. People walked, drove cars with mattresses on their roofs, rode in horse-drawn carts and on bicycles, and pushed wheelbarrows and prams. Fuel, water and food ran out. Towns along the route, such as Chartres, emptied, while hundreds of thousands of strangers poured into cities in the south, Bordeaux and Pau. German aircraft attacked columns in which civilians were mixed up with retreating troops. Tens of thousands of children were lost in the crowds, and the French Red Cross spent many months searching for their parents.

The exodus paralysed not only the country but the army too. The roads along which reinforcements and supplies were to move were clogged with civilians. On 14 June Lebrun noted that he had driven to Bordeaux along minor departmental roads because the main roads were blocked by refugees.

Briare

Churchill demanded a meeting. The Supreme War Council, the body in which the leaders of the two allies had met since September 1939, convened on the evening of 11 June at the Château du Muguet at Breteau, a few kilometres from Briare, where Weygand was quartered. From London came Winston Churchill, the Secretary of State for War Anthony Eden, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff General John Dill, General Hastings Ismay and Churchill’s personal liaison officer to the French government, General Edward Spears. France was represented by Reynaud, Pétain, de Gaulle, Weygand and his deputy, General Alphonse Georges. The talks began at 7 p.m.

Weygand presented the situation without illusions. He could not guarantee that the front would hold for another day, and he demanded that the entire British fighter force be thrown into the battle. Churchill refused. According to his memoirs, he explained that the decisive moment would come when the Luftwaffe struck at Britain, and that if the island kept command of the air over itself, it would win the war for both countries. He suggested that the French defend Paris house by house and wage guerrilla warfare in different parts of the country. Pétain replied that reducing Paris to ruins would change nothing. Reynaud and de Gaulle talked of fighting on in Brittany and North Africa; Weygand and Pétain were already thinking of an armistice. Spears later wrote that on that evening he understood that the Battle of France was over and that nobody believed in a miracle. The British did, however, remember de Gaulle, the only Frenchman who did not look beaten.

On the morning of 12 June the commander of the French fleet, Admiral François Darlan, joined the conference. Churchill’s greatest fear was that the modern French fleet, the second in Europe after the Royal Navy, would fall into German hands. Darlan assured him that this would never happen. At the end Reynaud promised that France would take no final decision without first informing the British. Churchill flew back to London.

Cangé

On the evening of 12 June the Council of Ministers met at the Château de Cangé under Lebrun’s chairmanship. Weygand gave an account of the fighting since the day he had taken command and concluded that “an armistice is necessary”. He added that thought had to be given to maintaining order in the country, and that the army, if it disintegrated further, would not be equal to the task. Lebrun noted that this allusion to the threat of revolution took most ministers by surprise. Reynaud opposed a request for an armistice. He recalled the undertaking of 28 March that neither France nor Britain would conclude a separate peace with Germany, and listed what France still had: the fleet, the colonial empire, the possibility of a defence in Brittany. He was supported by the Minister of the Interior, Georges Mandel, the Minister of Marine, César Campinchi, and Louis Marin. Pétain backed Weygand. Most ministers were still against an armistice, but wanted to hear Churchill before deciding. The meeting broke up before midnight without a decision.

Tours

On 13 June Churchill flew in for the fifth time since 16 May – and, as it turned out, the last. This time he was accompanied by the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, the Minister of Aircraft Production, Lord Beaverbrook, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Alexander Cadogan, Ismay and Spears. The airfield at Tours, bombed the night before, was full of craters, and nobody was waiting for the British. The talks at the prefecture began at about 3.30 p.m. On the French side sat Reynaud and Paul Baudouin, an under-secretary of state and a supporter of an armistice; Mandel joined later.

Reynaud declared that unless the United States gave immediate help, France would have to stop fighting. He acknowledged that on 28 March the two countries had pledged not to conclude a separate peace, but France was no longer physically able to fight. He asked whether Britain, in view of the sacrifices France had made, would release her from that undertaking. Churchill replied that Britain would fight on, refused to release France from her word, and persuaded Reynaud to appeal to Roosevelt once more before taking any decision. He also promised that, if Britain won, she would restore France to her dignity and greatness. In the course of the conversation Churchill said in French, “Je comprends” – “I understand”. Baudouin afterwards spread the version that the British Prime Minister had agreed to a separate armistice, which Churchill and the British firmly denied. The dispute over what had been said at Tours went on for years.

As he left the prefecture, Churchill passed de Gaulle in the corridor; de Gaulle had not been invited to the talks. According to the British Prime Minister’s memoirs, he said to him in French: “L’homme du destin” – the man of destiny.

The British flew back to London without meeting the French ministers, who had spent the whole afternoon waiting for them in the park at Cangé. Lebrun wrote that he still did not know whether Churchill had promised to attend the cabinet meeting or only the meeting of the Supreme Council. Spears thought this absence a missed opportunity that helped to tilt the cabinet towards capitulation.

The last meeting on the Loire

Reynaud and Mandel arrived at Cangé at about 6 p.m. When they announced that the British would not be coming, the Deputy Prime Minister, Camille Chautemps, spoke bitterly of France being abandoned by her ally. Reynaud reported on the talks at Tours and urged the ministers to stand by the position of the previous day. Weygand renewed his demand for an immediate end to the fighting. According to several of those present, he also declared that the Communists had seized power in Paris and that their leader, Maurice Thorez, had installed himself in the Élysée Palace. Mandel telephoned the Prefect of Police in Paris and was told that the city was calm. The Minister of Finance, Yves Bouthillier, read out a note in favour of an armistice. Pétain read a declaration announcing that he would on no account leave France: a government that departed would kill the soul of the country and deliver it to the enemy, and France’s rebirth would come not from Allied guns but from the suffering of a nation that stayed where it was. Lebrun noted that the declaration did not change the government’s position but made an impression on the waverers.

It was decided to wait for Roosevelt’s reply and in the meantime to move further away. Two destinations were considered. De Gaulle and some of the ministers wanted to go to Brittany, to Quimper, from where it would be easy to cross the sea to England or sail for Africa, and where the so-called réduit breton, a last bastion of defence in Brittany, was to be established. Weygand and Pétain regarded the plan as a pipe dream. Bordeaux was chosen, a port on the Gironde, further from the front and closer to the Spanish border. The city had a tradition in this role: in December 1870 the delegation of the Government of National Defence moved there from Tours, in February 1871 the National Assembly sat there, and in September 1914, before the Battle of the Marne, the French government took refuge there for several months. The meeting ended late at night.

Bordeaux

On the morning of 14 June, in the hours when the German 18th Army was entering Paris, the government columns set off south-west. Lebrun reached Bordeaux at 5 p.m. and took up residence in the house of the prefect of the Gironde department, where the Council of Ministers met from then on. Reynaud occupied the headquarters of the 18th Military Region in the rue Vital-Carles. The ministries took over the prefecture, the law courts, the chamber of commerce, schools, university faculties and even the slaughterhouse. Refugees, members of parliament, diplomats and journalists poured into a city that before the war had had some 250,000 inhabitants. That evening, in the restaurant of the Hôtel Splendide, de Gaulle shook hands for the last time with Pétain, who did not say a word. The same night the general set off for Brittany and from there for England, to seek ships to carry troops to Africa.

Roosevelt’s reply to Reynaud’s appeals arrived on 14 June and was what the advocates of fighting on had feared. The President promised as much equipment as possible, but could not commit the United States to taking part in the war, which only Congress could decide. Nor did he agree to the publication of his reply, on which Reynaud and Churchill had been counting.

Significance

The four days on the Loire settled that France would leave the war. In Paris Reynaud had still had a majority of the government against an armistice; at Cangé he heard for the first time from his Commander-in-Chief and his Deputy Prime Minister that the Germans must be asked for terms. Scattered among the châteaux, cut off from the administration and with uncertain communications, the government could no longer impose its will on the army. The British who came to Briare and Tours saw for themselves that their ally was breaking, and to their pleas to keep fighting the French responded by asking to be released from their word. The choice of Bordeaux rather than Brittany also mattered: from Brittany the government could have crossed to England; from Bordeaux it was easier to stay.

In Bordeaux the crisis played out within two days. On 15 June most ministers backed Chautemps’s proposal to ask the Germans for armistice terms; on 16 June the government rejected the British offer of a Franco-British union, and that evening Reynaud resigned. Lebrun, although he himself favoured continuing the war from North Africa, entrusted the government to Pétain, who that same night asked the Germans for a ceasefire. On 22 June the armistice was signed at Compiègne, and at the beginning of July the government moved to Vichy, where on 10 July parliament handed full powers to the Marshal and the Third Republic ceased to exist. Millions of refugees were left on the roads of southern France; most of them made their way home over the following months, by then across the demarcation line between the occupied and unoccupied zones.

The departure from Paris on 10 June thus began a journey whose stages – Tours, Bordeaux and Vichy – marked the road from a republic at war to a state that concluded an armistice and entered into collaboration with Germany. Those who wanted to fight on – de Gaulle in London, and Mandel and a group of parliamentarians aboard a ship bound for Africa – found themselves off that road.