Why was France defeated so quick in the first world war?

Question

that should have been the 2nd world war

Answer 1

They've got the Surrender Gene.

They share it with the Italians.

Answer 2

Considering you asked about the First world war there's an incredible amount of answers for the second!
They did not surrender at all in the First world war but were very hard pressed as any country would and that includes Britain.
Read up on the Battle of Verdun and the 'Sacred way' and then you'll see what the French did in WW1.

Answer 3

The same reason the BEF were beaten, the Germans quickly overwhelmed them with thier revolutionary "blitz-krieg" tactics.
The British and French army chiefs imagined that the 2nd world war would be fought from trenches and defensive positions as was the 1st war in 1914-18 and were completely unprepared for the tactics the Wehrmacht used, fast-moving armour and ground troops with a powerful airforce in support.

Answer 4

OK, all France-bashing jokes aside...

Keep in mind the following:
Much of the fighting in the Western Front occurred on French Soil during WWI.

Imagine if it had been the U.S. Imagine all the land between New York City and Philadelphia turned into a barren patch of blood soaked mud. Imagine so much lead in the ground that nothing would grow on that land for another 80 years. Imagine three of every four males between age 18 and 25 killed or maimed.

Something like that tends to stick in a nation's psyche. Just as the Japanese emerged from Hiroshima as a steadfastly pacifist people, most Europeans would have done anything to avoid further carnage after WWI.

Their greatest failing, and something that can stand as a lesson today, is understimating the attitudes of the Germans. They felt they had evolved beyond war and assumed the rest of the world was as enlightened as they. They failed to realize that there were some people in the world who still craved violent retribution.

They also failed to recognize that warfare too was evolving. What preparations they did make were based on early 20th Century ground combat....They were expecting light armor and waves of troops...they got Blitzkrieg and were totally overwhelmed.

In their unwillingness to recognize the Nazi threat until it was too late; in their desire to avoid the carnage of a previous generation, they sealed their own fate.

Answer 5

The German were able to breach the Maginot Line by going via the Belgian town of Sedan, on to France, and enveloping the French forces from the rear. The secret of how to breach or bypass that defensive obstacle was given to them in a book published in 1936. The author was a French Lieutenant Colonel by the name of Charles De Gaulle. Instead of being tried for treason by the post-war French government he was elected President of France under the Fifth Republic.

Answer 6

France wasn't prepared to face the blitzkrieg tactics of the Germans due to their over-reliance on the (financially cheaper) static defenses of the Maginot Line. The Germans bypassed the line and managed to encircle the best French divisions in the northeast of the country, where they had been concentrated. There were no reserves available.

The French also suffered from an overwhelming wave of defeatism. This may have been the result of so many government changes in the interwar period (upwards of twenty?).

All in all, they weren't ready to fight to begin with and then they seriously underestimated the speed of the Germans.

Answer 7

Because they had lost an entire generation (millions) of young men in World War One in a horric war which took place on French soil for 4 years.

When World War Two came and the Germans attached with such skill and force the French Army whilst not totally defeated was in retreat and the politicians and Generals decised that the nation of France could not again suffer the loss of a generation and four years of war on its soil.

Wrong decision, but I guess you can understand why.

Answer 8

they were still folowing old tactics like the maginot line. they did not embrace the technological advances that britain and germany did. for example they did not think the germens would not vome through the ardens as it was a forrest and as such built the maginot line (fortresses); they though the germans would follow the static tactics of previous wars; however the germans with there new tanks just pushed through the forest and routed them.

there are various other reasons this is just an exaple

Answer 9

France built what they thought was an impregnable line of defence against Germany. It was known as the "Maginot Line". However the crafty German generals went around the maginot line by coming through belgium and the low countries and surprised the French by coming in at the back door.

Answer 10

France was defeated in terms of battles in WWI, but they did not surrender. They were on the winning side after all the begging they and the Brits did by crawling on their collective bellies to the US to save their BUTTS. It is true they were both bankrupt and on the verge of defeat especially with the Germans bringing large forces back from the Eastern Front where the now communist govt signed a peace treaty giving Germany the Ukraine and numerous other territories. But they managed to stay on the winning side.

Answer 11

France was not defeated in WW1, along with the British she held out till the war was won!!

22/08/1914 27,000 French soldiers are killed on this single day in an offensive thrust to the east of Paris, towards the German borders,

Yes Twenty-Seven thousand French men killed in one day's fighting!!!

French casualties in W. W. I.

World War I cost France 1,357,800 military dead,
4,266,000 military wounded (of whom 1.5 million were permanently maimed),

and 537,000 made military prisoner or missing -- exactly 73% of the 8,410,000 men mobilized, according to William Shirer in "The Collapse of the Third Republic."

Some context: France had 40 million citizens at the start of the war; six in ten men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight died or were permanently maimed.

10% of the active population and 3,5% of the total population died on the battlefields.

(As a comparison, if this were to happen now in the United States, the number of casualties would reach 10 million.
There would also be 680,000 widows and 760,000 orphans.)

Between 1914 and 1918, the drops in births in France is estimated at 1 million.