Mobilisation in France

2 September 1939 was the first day of general mobilisation in France. President Albert Lebrun had signed the decree the day before, a few hours after Germany invaded Poland, and mobilisation took effect from midnight on 1–2 September. That afternoon both houses of parliament met in extraordinary session. Prime Minister Édouard Daladier asked for war credits, and the deputies and senators approved them unanimously, by a show of hands and without debate. There was no formal vote on war. At the same time the Foreign Minister, Georges Bonnet, was trying to the very last to use the Italian proposal for a conference to avert war. France, bound to Poland by an alliance of 1921, was preparing to fight, while part of its government was still looking for a way out.

An ally with obligations

France was the only great power that could bring Poland real help on land in the event of a German attack. It was tied to Warsaw by the alliance of 1921, and in March 1939 it had joined the British guarantee. In May 1939 General Maurice Gamelin and the Polish Minister of Military Affairs, General Tadeusz Kasprzycki, signed a protocol in Paris in which the French army promised that, if Germany launched its main attack against Poland, it would open an offensive with its main forces no later than the fifteenth day of mobilisation. The protocol never formally came into force, because the political agreement that was to accompany it was not signed, but the Polish high command based its calculations on it. The French mobilisation timetable was therefore a matter of life and death for Poland.

The French army had been through several alerts: it had been put on standby in March 1936 after the remilitarisation of the Rhineland and in the spring of 1938 after the Anschluss, and in September 1938, during the Sudeten crisis that ended at Munich, a partial mobilisation had been carried out. In the summer of 1939 the procedures were set in motion again. From 21 August the fortifications of the Maginot Line were manned, on 24 August reservists of the fortress units were called up, and at midnight on 27–28 August the so-called general covering force (couverture générale) came into effect: the call-up of the younger reserve classes to active units, which was to put 25 divisions on the frontier. All this was done without proclaiming mobilisation, by means of individual call-up cards, much as Poland was doing in those same days.

The decree of 1 September

News of the German attack reached Paris early on the morning of 1 September. The Council of Ministers met before noon and decided to proclaim general mobilisation, impose a state of siege throughout the country and summon parliament to an extraordinary session. In the afternoon white posters bearing tricolour flags, familiar to the French from August 1914, appeared on town halls in every commune: “By order of the President of the Republic, the mobilisation of the land army, the navy and the air force is ordered, together with the requisition of animals, carts, harness, aircraft, motor vehicles, ships, boats…”. The first day of mobilisation was 2 September.

At the same time the border with Germany was closed and the evacuation of the frontier zone in Alsace and the Moselle began, prepared for years in fear of artillery fire and fighting in front of the Maginot Line. Within a few days Strasbourg was deserted, and several hundred thousand people were moved out of the whole frontier belt, mostly to the south-western departments. A blackout was imposed in Paris and other cities, and some children were sent away to the provinces.

Mobilisation proceeded smoothly and calmly. There was none of the enthusiasm of 1914, when reservists had gone to the front with flowers in their rifle barrels, but there was no resistance either. Observers wrote of resignation: men who remembered Verdun and the Somme joined up without illusions, feeling that “this has to be finished”. In all, some five million men were called to the colours, of whom, according to French figures, slightly more than half went to front-line units and the rest to rear services and to the arms industry as so-called special assignees (affectés spéciaux).

The session of 2 September

The Chamber of Deputies met in the Palais Bourbon under the presidency of Édouard Herriot, the Senate in the Luxembourg Palace under Jules Jeanneney. Daladier, who was both prime minister and Minister of National Defence and War, made a speech in the Chamber in which he recalled the efforts to settle the Polish–German dispute peacefully and presented the war as a matter of France’s obligations and honour. The government, he said, had placed the country in a position to act in accordance with its interests and its honour. “A France that allowed this aggression to be carried out would soon be a despised France, an isolated France, a discredited France, without allies and without support,” he declared. Herriot condemned the German aggression and the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.

The houses then voted the war credits. Sources give different sums, most often 70 or 75 billion francs. The group chairmen had agreed beforehand that the motions would pass without discussion, and the vote was by show of hands, so the official journal contains no lists of how individual members voted. The Communists voted in favour too: on behalf of their group the deputy Georges Cogniot announced their support “in a spirit of national unity”, and the Communist senators Marcel Cachin and Jean-Marie Clamamus raised their hands with the rest. The few advocates of peace at any price, among them the deputy Gaston Bergery and, in the Senate, Pierre Laval, wanted to speak on the Italian mediation, but no debate was allowed.

What mattered most was what was not put to the vote. The constitutional laws of 1875 laid down that the President could not declare war without the prior consent of both houses. Daladier’s government did not ask for that consent. It merely requested credits to meet obligations “arising from the international situation”, and treated their approval as sufficient authorisation. This avoided a stormy debate in which supporters of an accommodation with Germany might have gained a platform, but it later became an argument for opponents of the war – and, after the defeat of 1940, for Vichy propaganda – that France had gone to war without a decision of parliament. After the brief session the houses dispersed and did not meet again until 30 November.

Bonnet and the Italian mediation

Bonnet, one of the architects of the policy of concessions to Hitler in 1938, did not believe that France should fight for Gdańsk (Danzig). On 31 August Benito Mussolini had proposed convening a conference on 5 September to review the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles that lay at the root of the current crisis. At the evening cabinet meeting on 31 August Bonnet spoke in favour of accepting the proposal, but Daladier, backed by Gamelin and by the Secretary-General of the Foreign Ministry, Alexis Léger, read out a letter from the ambassador in Berlin, Robert Coulondre: Hitler gives way in the face of strength, so France must stand firm. The Council of Ministers rejected the idea of a conference that would be “a new Munich”.

Bonnet did not give up. On 1 September, after the news of the attack on Poland had arrived, he assured the Italian ambassador that France accepted the Italian proposal, and during the night the Havas agency announced that the French government had given it “a positive reply”. The warning to Germany delivered by Coulondre on the evening of 1 September set no deadline, and the next day Bonnet assured the Italian Foreign Minister, Galeazzo Ciano, by telephone that it was not an ultimatum. On the morning of 2 September the Polish ambassador, Juliusz Łukasiewicz, burst into his office demanding to know why France had still not declared war; a second, equally stormy conversation followed in the afternoon. Poland in any case had no intention of attending any conference while German troops stood on its soil, and Foreign Minister Józef Beck made this plain to the French ambassador in Warsaw.

The conference plan collapsed in the course of 2 September. The British Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, declared that Great Britain would take part only if Germany withdrew its troops from Poland, and Ribbentrop replied that there could be no question of any withdrawal, even a symbolic one. In the evening Ciano concluded that such a condition could not be put to Hitler, and the Italian initiative fell through. That day the French government decided that France would declare war, but the question of timing caused friction with London. Gamelin asked for time to complete the first days of mobilisation and the evacuation of the cities before, as was feared, German bombs began to fall on them. In London, meanwhile, on the evening of 2 September the House of Commons came close to revolt against Chamberlain, who had still not presented Germany with an ultimatum. In the end the two states acted separately: on 3 September Great Britain issued an ultimatum expiring at 11 a.m., and France one expiring at 5 p.m.

Mobilisation and the promise to Poland

French mobilisation took about two weeks, as planned. Chronologies state that it was completed on 18 September, after sixteen days. The fifteenth day of mobilisation, on which, under the Kasprzycki–Gamelin protocol, the offensive with the main forces was to begin, therefore fell on 16 September. No such offensive ever took place. On 7 September several French divisions crossed the border in the Saar and advanced a few kilometres into Germany, and on 12 September Gamelin halted the advance. By the time mobilisation was drawing to a close, Poland was fighting not only Germany but, from 17 September, the USSR as well.

Significance

The mobilisation of 2 September put a vast army under arms, but it did not change French strategy. The high command intended to wait behind the Maginot Line until the naval blockade and British rearmament tipped the balance, and planned a great offensive for 1941 at the earliest. For Poland this meant that its principal ally would not strike while most of the Wehrmacht was tied down in the east.

The rift in the government was partly resolved on 13 September: Daladier took over the Foreign Ministry himself, and Bonnet moved to the Ministry of Justice. The unanimity of 2 September soon came to an end. On 26 September the government dissolved the French Communist Party, which after the German–Soviet pact had begun to call the war “imperialist”, and at the beginning of October its leader, Maurice Thorez, deserted from the army and fled to Moscow. Five million mobilised men spent the autumn and winter in barracks and in the shelters of the Maginot Line, in a boredom and uncertainty that the French called the “drôle de guerre”, the Phoney War. When Germany struck in the west in May 1940, the army that in September 1939 had faced a thin German screen lost the campaign in six weeks.