Strange Defeat

Strange Defeat (L'Etrange Defaite) is a book written in the summer of 1940 by French historian Marc Bloch and was published after his death in the summer of 1944.

The main thesis of the book is that French leadership was failing to recognize that "the whole rhythm of modern warfare had changed its tempo."

There are only three chapters: "Presentation of the Witness", being a short personal history of a life devoted to historical study and interrupted by World War I; "One of the Vanguard Give Evidence", a factual account of one man's experience in the battle of France; and, "A Frenchman Examines His Conscience", a biting analysis of the thinking and action of the generation between the wars.

Bloch's conclusion is harsh and forthright: "Whatever the deep-seated cause of the disaster may have been, the immediate occasion was the utter incompetence of the High Command."

References

* Edward Baron Turk (1989) Child of Paradise:Marcel Carne and the Golden Age of French Cinema. Cambridge, Massachusetts:Harvard University Press

External links

* "Original French text" [http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/bloch_marc/etrange_defaite/etrange_defaite.html]
* [http://www.cmb.hu-berlin.de/cmb/ Centre Marc Bloch]
* [http://u2.u-strasbg.fr/ici/UMB/site/pageindex.php Université Marc Bloch]
* [http://www.marcbloch.fr/ www.marcbloch.fr]