The Popular Front, Civil-Military Relations and the French Army’S Plan to Defeat a Second Paris Commune, 1934–1936

Home , French Communist Party, Roger Salengro, Treaty of Versailles

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Plan Z: The Popular Front, Civil-Military Relations and the French Army’s Plan to Defeat a Second Paris Commune, 1934–1936

Andrew Orr* Kansas State University [email protected]

Abstract

Following the formation of the Popular Front in 1934, French generals feared that the alliance, which included the French Communist Party (pcf), could foreshadow a coming revolt in Paris. Generals Maxime Weygand and Maurice Gamelin responded by preparing to implement Plan Z, a plan to defeat a Parisian revolt. Given politicians’ fear that many French officers were antirepublican, the French Army would have faced a major political crisis if Plan Z had leaked. Plan Z called for a multidivisional assault on Paris, which showed that the General Staff believed a large-scale revolution was possible. Understanding the development of Plan Z adds to scholars’ recognition of French officers’ long-term fear of communism and mistrust of civilians. It reveals that senior officers were more politicized and afraid of civilians than most scholars have realized and helps explain the military’s central role in betraying the Third Republic and creating the Vichy Regime in 1940.

Keywords

France – Civil-Military – Communism – Interwar – Popular Front – Vichy

* Andrew Orr is Associate Professor of Military History and Security Studies at Kansas State University. He received his PhD in Modern European History from the University of Notre Dame in 2007. He is the author of Women and the French Army during the World Wars, 1914– 1940 (Indiana, 2017) and has published articles on military history and civil-military relations in the Journal of Military History, French Historical Studies, and French History. He resides in Manhattan, Kansas. The research for this article was supported by a grant from the Nanovic Institute for European Studies and a Sorin Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of Notre Dame.

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1 Introduction

Interwar French military leaders’ fear of communism and lack of faith in France’s democratic institutions was a major weakness in the structure of the Third Republic. From 1925 until the declaration of war against Germany, French generals maintained detailed plans to crush a popular revolt in Paris. Between 1934 and 1936, many of France’s generals feared that the formation of the Popular Front, an alliance of left-wing parties including the French Com- munist Party (pcf), could precipitate an armed revolt in Paris and responded by preparing Plan Z, a plan to crush a new Paris Commune. These fears were rooted in officers’ long-term mistrust of civilians, exacerbated by their fear of communism, and magnified by Paris’s history of radicalism. The 1934–36 version of Plan Z was part of a decade-long planning process. Officers’ fears proved to be exaggerated, and they often conflated communism with the civilian world, but Plan Z should inform scholars’ understanding of the military’s relationship with the civilian world and its role in creating the Vichy Regime. Plan Z, and senior generals’ preparation to use it in the spring and summer of 1936, showed that the army’s officer corps was politicized, feared a communist revolt, and lacked faith in the civilian government’s ability to govern France. Historians of the French Army and civil-military relations during the 1930s broadly agree that the French officer corps was strongly anti-communist. Mar- tin Alexander, Philip Bankwitz, Jean-Jacques Becker, Serge Bernstein, Peter Jackson, and Georges Vidal have all shown that at some point in the interwar era, French officers feared a communist revolution or coup, however that con- sensus masks major divisions.1 Often these scholars have focused on the views and personalities of key individual commanders, especially Generals Maxime Weygand and Maurice Gamelin, to explain changes in civil-military relations, but this has obscured the deeper continuity of views within the military high command. The traditionalist approach, epitomized by Philip Bankwitz and

1 Martin Alexander, The Republic in Danger: General Maurice Gamelin and the Politics of French Defence, 1933–1940 (New York, 1993); Philip Bankwitz, Maxime Weygand and Civil-Military Re- lations in Modern France (Cambridge MA, 1967); Jean-Jacques Becker and Serge Bernstein, L’anticommunisme en France (1917–1940), Vol. 1, (Paris, 1987); Peter Jackson, “Stratégie et idéologie: le haut commandement français et la guerre civile espagnole”, Guerres mondiale et conflits contemporains, 199 (3) (2001); 111–133; Georges Vidal, La Grande illusion?: le Parti communiste français et la Défense nationale à l’époque du Front populaire, 1934–1939 (Lyon, 2006).

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Paul Marie de La Gorce, emphasized the fragility of civil-military relations in the 1930s and the politicization of the army high command by General Wey- gand, while Alexander, a revisionist who defended Gamelin, argued that the officer corps he led was apolitical until the German victory in 1940.2 Together with Peter Jackson, whose positions partly support his own, Alexander claimed that previous historians had exaggerated officers’ hostility toward the Popular Front before the 1936 elections and focused on the Spanish Civil War as the catalyst for officers embracing extreme anti-communism.3 Alexander, Jack- son, and Robert Doughty incorporated the work of John Steward Angler and Henry Dutailly to assert that although the officers were anti-communist, they remained apolitical and retained general confidence in the republican government throughout the late-1930s.4 This article uses Plan Z to challenge the revisionist position. It builds on and revises Philip Nord’s claim that the Fall of France in 1940 represented a double defeat, a military defeat and a political defeat inflicted on the Third Republic by senior generals by showing that the political climate of June-July 1940 was rooted in officers’ longstanding fear of communism and public disorder.5 Georges Vidal’s expansive work on communism and the French Army in the 1930s provides important background to this article. Vidal recognized the strength of military anti-communism and presented a more fearful officer corps than the revisionists, while arguing it was not politicized based on officers being more discrete than civilian politicians. Vidal’s compromise implicitly relied on a wave model of military anti-communism with peaks during the 1925–26 Rif War, the 1932 Fantômas Affair, and a period in late 1936 and early

2 Bankwitz, Maxime Weygand, 252–256; Alexander, The Republic in Danger; Martin Alexander, “Soldiers and Socialists: the French officer corps and leftist government 1935–7” in The French and Spanish Popular Fronts: Comparative Perspectives, Martin Alexander and Helen Graham eds. (New York, 1989), 62–66, 73–78; Paul Marie de La Gorce, The French Army; a military- political history (New York, 1963). 3 Martin Alexander, “Soldiers and Socialist,” 62–66, 73–78; Jackson, “Stratégie et idéologie”, 111–133. 4 John Steward Ambler, Soldiers Against the State: The French Army in Politics, 1945–1962 (New York, 1968); Henry Dutailly and François André Paoli, Les problèmes de l’Armée de terre fran- çais: 1935–1939, Vol. 5 (Paris, 1980); Robert. Doughty, “The French Armed Forces, 1918–1940” in Military Effectiveness: Volume 2 The Interwar Period, Alan Millett and Williamson Murray eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 40–41. 5 Philip Nord, France 1940: Defending the Republic (New Haven: 2015), 107–111.

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1937 associated with the Spanish Civil War.6 This article builds on Vidal’s work while rejecting the wave model, showing that officers were more politicized and afraid of the Popular Front than most scholars have recognized. Vidal and Jackson have both discussed plans to use the French Army in Paris, but they have underestimated the scale and importance of the plans. Vidal explored a 1932 plan produced by the military governor of Paris’s staff which involved a force of 28,000 to 50,000 men in greater Paris, many of whom would be civilian police.7 Alexander tangentially identified one part of the final preparations of the 1935 version of Plan Z when he found a request that Gamelin authorize sending six battalions to reinforce Paris in September 1935. He dismissed the episode’s importance by noting that Gamelin only sent one colonial regiment (3 battalions).8 Neither scholar however realized that what they found were merely pieces of a much larger and repeatedly updated plan. Although this article does not use gender as a category of analysis, it draws on the work of Geoff Read and Valerie Deacon, whose gendered analyses of interwar politics and the military have helped show the depth of left-right divisions in France and the politicization of critical parts of the officer corps. In his pathbreaking work on interwar French party politics, Read showed the pcf spent the interwar era publicly declaring its goal of infiltrating and subverting the military as part of creating a hyper-masculine proletarian man who would strike physical blows against the bourgeois republic.9 Deacon’s studies of the extreme right in the late 1930s and in the wartime Resistance have illuminated the construction of gender on the right and emphasized that many officers were deeply politicized and antirepublican in the 1930s.10

6 Georges Vidal, “L’Armée française face au problème de la subversion communiste au début des années 1930”, Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains, 204 (2001); 47; Vidal, La Grande illusion?; Georges Vidal “L’Affaire Fantômas (1932): Le contre-espionnage fran- çais et les prémices de la préparation à la guerre”, Vingtième Siècles. Revue d’histoire, 119 (2013); 3–14. 7 Georges Vidal, “Les chefs de l’armée Française face au communisme au début des années 1930”, Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire, 70 (2001); 117–125. 8 Alexander, “Soldiers and Socialists,” 69. 9 Geoff Read, The Republic of Men: Gender and the Political parties in Interwar France (Baton Rouge, 2014), 65–71. 10 Valarie Deacon, The Extreme Right and the French Resistance: Members of the Cagoule and Corvignolles in the Second World War (Baton Rouge, 2016), 2–3; Valerie Deacon, “Fitting into the French Resistance: Georges Loustaunau-Lacau and Marie-Madeleine Fourcade at the intersection of politics and gender”, Journal of Contemporary History, 50 (April 2015): 259–273.

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2 Fear of Subversion

Plan Z reflected the French Army’s anti-communism and its institutional memory of the 1871 Paris Commune. During the commune, French soldiers lost control of Paris and had to wage a protracted siege of the city that cul- minated in house-to-house fighting in Paris’s working-class neighbourhoods. Scholars debate the exact scale of the massacre, with Robert Tombs and John Merriman suggesting figures ranging from 7,500 to as many as 20,000 dead, but in the 1930s most educated French people believed the army had killed roughly 30,000 Parisians.11 The memory of the Commune and its repression made any discussion of using military force within Paris politically dangerous. During the interwar era, officers’ fear of communists in the ranks and mistrust of their short-service conscripts’ loyalty led them to expand their political surveillance of soldiers and civilian employees. By cutting the term of conscript service, and thus the number of active duty troops, the 1927 and 1928 Army Laws made the army more dependent on civilian labour and, officers feared, vulnerable to subversion by disloyal civilians. Officers’ fear of communist subversion and espionage was already firmly established by the early 1930s, and events like the 1932 Fantômas Affair, in which the pcf, operating on orders from Moscow, used party supporters working in armaments plants to gather intelligence on French weapons, helped sustain officers’ fears.12 During the April 1932 general election campaign, the commander of the Paris Military Re- gion, General André-Gaston Prételat, warned that it was not enough to simply intercept communist propaganda aimed at troops. He criticized an officer who surprised a pcf activist handing out propaganda to soldiers. The officer con- fiscated the illegal propaganda, took the man’s name, and sent him on his way. Prételat complained that he had been too lenient and should have detained the activist and handed him over to the police.13 In January 1933, Prételat ordered all units in the Paris region to designate an officer to monitor the local propaganda situation and make daily reports to the commanding officer.14 The 1933–1934 Stavisky Affair enflamed political opinion in France and military leaders suspected the pcf was trying to manipulate the resulting riot and backlash to its advantage. In January 1934, after Serge Stavisky’s bond fraud had

11 Robert Tombs, Paris, bivouac des révolutions. La Commune de 1871 (Paris, 2014); John Merriman, Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune of 1871 (New Haven, 2014). 12 Georges Vidal, “L’Affaire Fantômas”, 3–14. 13 Service historique de la Défense (shd)-Département Armée de terre (dat), 5 NN 7, Dos- sier 4, Report (Prételat), 18 April 1932. 14 shd-dat, 5 NN 7, Dossier 4, Report (Prételat), 13 January 1933.

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68 Orr already been exposed, he was found by the police dying of an allegedly self- inflicted gunshot wound, leading many to assume he was killed by the police to cover up his ties with senior legislators. On 6 February 1934, public frustration with the affair, the alleged cover-up, and rightist anger that the minister of the interior had fired the right-wing prefect of Paris’s police spilled over into violent demonstrations by some of the rightist leagues and the pcf in Paris’s Place de Concorde. The protests got out of control and the police fired into the crowd to stop it from storming the Chamber of Deputies.15 Although most scholars agree the riots were not a fascist plot and many have questioned whether a fascist coup was ever a possibility during the 1930s, during 1934 and 1935 the pcf, the Socialist Party (sfio), and the centre-left Radical Party formed the Popular Front, an alliance to oppose fascism in France. They all contained elements that suspected that France’s generals were a threat to the republican government. Generals Weygand and Gamelin responded by modernizing plans to crush a revolt. Historians of the pcf have shown that from 1934 until 1939, the party obeyed orders from Moscow to support a stronger military to defend against Germany. By 1935 the pcf had shifted from attacks on social democracy to attacks against fascism as its primary political trope.16 The pcf’s national defence turn made it a palatable partner to other left-wing parties, but military leaders remained focused on its long-term anti-military and insurrectionary stances. While the pcf was moderating its defence policies, the Soviet Union reached out to the French government. In 1934 and 1935 French and Soviet diplomats negotiat- ed the Franco-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance. Signed on 2 May 1935, and ratified by the French government in February 1936, the treaty involved only strictly qualified promises of military support, but created the groundwork of a possible Franco-Soviet front against Germany.17 Despite the pcf’s official policy of supporting national defence, in January 1935, General Marie Joseph Émile Niéger, the commander of the Paris Military Region, complained about the increasing frequency and severity of politically- motivated attacks against soldiers, which he blamed on communists. He re- ported that officers and men were being accosted in the streets by anti-military activists who were verbally and sometimes physically abusive. Niéger recognized that the activists were trying to create brawls which they could blame on soldiers but admitted that despite his orders to ignore the provocations,

15 Paul F. Jankowski, Stavisky: A Confidence Man in the Republic of Virtue (Ithaca NY, 2002). 16 Vidal, La Grande illusion?, 109–121. 17 Peter Jackson, “Stratégie et idéologie”, 113.

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Plan Z 69 some soldiers responded with physical force.18 On 31 October 1935, Niéger again warned his superiors that barracking protestors were molesting troops while on training manoeuvres and assaulting or insulting soldiers on Parisian streets.19 The instances that Niéger complained about were troubling, but less so than the pcf’s campaign to provoke mutinies during the 1925–1926 Rif War.20 How- ever, the rise of the Popular Front, which many officers feared was a communist Trojan Horse, convinced some generals that the army was about to come under concerted attack by a foreign-controlled force within France that sought to weaken the French Army and capture the French state. These campaigns were thus seen as a precursor to a second act that could play out during or after the 1936 elections.

3 The Defence of Public Order

Military leaders’ fear of a breakdown in public order grew in tandem with their belief that the Popular Front would win the elections. In October 1934 and again in January 1935, the Ministry of War provided guidance to commanding officers in case they were called on to assist in the “maintenance of public order”. The circular made clear the strict limits that circumscribed the military’s role in repressing domestic disturbances and thus aimed to dissuade officers from unnecessarily or illegally involving the army in a political crisis. It advised civil authorities to employ the departmental gendarmes, the Garde Républicaine Mobile and, in Paris, the Garde Républicaine before resorting to the army.21 Under the Law of 2 July 1879 and the Law of 13 July 1927, the presidents of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate each had the right to requisition military forces. They could make their requests outside of the normal chain of command either in person or through subordinates designated as quaestors. Other civilian authorities, including prefects and certain judges and prosecutors, could request aid through the Ministry of War. However, in an emergency, gendarme commanders could ask for immediate military intervention. Civilian

18 shd-dat, 5 NN 7, Dossier 4, Note, 9 January 1935. 19 shd-dat, 5 NN 7, Dossier 4, Report (Nieger) 31 Oct. 1935; Report (Nieger) 9 Jan. 1935. 20 David Slavin, “The French Left and the Rif War, 1924–25: Racism and the limits of Interna- tionalism”, Journal of Contemporary History 26 (1) (1991): 5–32. 21 shd-Département Marine (DM), 1 BB2 63 “Instruction Interministérielle relative à la participation de l’armée au maintien de l’ordre public”.

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70 Orr officials could appeal to senior military leaders including the military governor of Paris or the commanding generals of military regions, but they could also call on unit commanders provided that their troops would be used within a ten kilometre radius of their garrisons.22 As a result, mid-career officers could find themselves faced with a valid request, or even a binding order if it came from the president of the Senate or Chamber of Deputies, to use force against civilians. During the Stavisky Riots, parts of the 5th Infantry Regiment had been deployed near the Palais Bourbon in case they were needed to defend the deputies, and in August 1935 the 2nd Colonial Infantry Regiment was used to support the police in Brest.23 The circular emphasized that military officers did not have the right to take matters into their own hands, regardless of how provocative protestors might be. Any request for military support had to be submitted in writing and had to specify the exact nature of assistance that the civil authority was requesting. However, after the civil authority made a valid request, “the military authority remains the only judge of the means of its execution”, which meant that military forces would not be under civilian operational command. The military’s authority to act remained in force until the requisitioning authority ended its mission in writing.24 The instructions covered the legalities of when and how soldiers could intervene against civilian protestors or rebels and advised officers on how to make sure that their units were effective and loyal in the face of a crisis. The ministry’s instructions warned military and civilian leaders alike that they should not forget that calling on “short service troops” was dangerous because the conscripts were closely tied to the civilian world. To reduce the risks that soldiers would mutiny, as some did at the beginning of the Paris Commune, commanding officers were enjoined only to use troops in pre-formed units which had trained together in advance. The instructions also advised selecting units based on the quality of their officers because they would have to use all their prestige and rapport with their men to lead them during the crisis. The report urged officers to avoid close and prolonged contact between their troops and civilians because the conscripts might side with civilian protestors or revolutionaries over their military superiors. It recommended that units should be accompanied by police or gendarme officers who could make arrests and deal with prisoners while the soldiers focused on defeating violent resistance.25

22 Ibid. 23 Vidal, L’armée française, 202. 24 shd-DM, 1 BB2 63, “Instruction Interministérielle relative à la participation de l’armée au maintien de l’ordre public”. 25 Ibid.

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Article 23 emphasized that troops must use controlled, but effective, force. Soldiers were only allowed to open fire on crowds if their officers specifically ordered them to do so. Although empowered to use deadly force at their discre- tion, officers were advised to restrain themselves and their men unless pushed beyond the limits of “sang-froid, patience, and humanitarian sentiment”. If they did open fire, they were to order a ceasefire after the first volleys to give the crowd a chance to disperse, but officers were warned not threaten the use of deadly force unless they were prepared to use it. The instructions specifically banned troops from using blank ammunition or firing warning shots. In other words, officers should not make idle threats and if soldiers opened fire, they should shoot to kill least their warnings be misconstrued as weakness.26

4 Preparing for the Popular Front and Subversion

The continuing depression, the sfio-pcf alliance in July 1934, and its expan- sion to include the Radicals in the summer of 1935, made a Popular Front victory in the 1936 elections look likely. From the officers’ perspective, the advent of the Popular Front, which had been proposed by the pcf, raised the stakes of failing to swiftly deal with public disorders. Concern with communist infiltra- tion extended beyond the generals to their political allies as well. In October 1935, Minster of War Jean Fabry warned commanders that “certain political groups” were again attempting to spread propaganda inside the army. He advised the generals to destroy any influence that outside groups had among the conscripts and reservists, but also laid out the primary missions of the armed forces in terms that urged officers to avoid any show of political or religious partiality:

The army must remain attached to its unique mission, which is to be al- ways ready to defend the country against foreign aggression and to be ready to contribute to the maintenance of order in the interior. Its loyalty vis-à-vis the Republican Government which represents France must be beyond doubt; she is without parties and at the sole service of the entire France, and under no pretext can she tolerate in her house the least manifestation having a political or confessional character.27

By linking political neutrality, which was a code phrase within the army for resisting leftist influence, with confessional neutrality, which harkened to the

26 Ibid. 27 shd-dat, 1 NN 8, Letter from Minister of War Fabry, 8 Oct. 1935.

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Dreyfus Affair and suggested resisting right-wing Catholic antirepublicanism, Fabry exploited officers’ fear of communism as a tactic to discourage them from openly opposing the Popular Front. The circular warned that “political groups which have an interest in weakening the forces of order are exploiting all incidents able to give material to critique the actions of the command”.28 The circular showed that Fabry believed that officers were scared enough of the Popular Front that they might speak out against it. Although Alexander has painted Fabry as a liminal figure whose fear of communism and the Popular Front was atypical of most military leaders, his background and views were well in line with senior officers. Fabry was a retired colonel and long-time political ally of military leaders.29 His concerns reso- nated with warnings from senior generals, including commanders of the Paris garrison, stretching back to the early 1930s. At a minimum, his strategy exposed his assumption that many officers thought a revolt or coup was a real danger. While political leaders tried, usually successfully, to make sure the generals did not speak out against the Popular Front, worrying intelligence reports continued to accumulate. In 1936, French counter-intelligence officers warned that Trotskyite leaders were trying to infiltrate the military. Party leaders advised members to gain positions of trust and power within the military, explaining that “The Party [Parti de la Jeunesse Socialiste Révolutionnaire] recommends he be a good soldier and becomes a corporal or non-commissioned officer” because “by this means tell him, you will be placed at the head of a detach- ment and at an opportune moment you will serve the orders of the Party by overthrowing the capitalist regime and instituting the dictatorship of the pro- letariat”. This was especially worrying to officers because at the time Trotsky had ordered his followers to join the left-wing of the sfio, so cracking down on Trotskyites risked also cracking down on sfio members.30

5 Planning for the Unthinkable: Plan Z

As the 1936 elections approached, senior officers feared that any result, whether the Popular Front won or lost, could trigger a crisis. Martin Alexander found that there was some contingency planning for a revolt in 1935 but underestimated its scale. Instead of merely planning to keep a transportation and communi- cation corridor open through Paris as he believed, the 3rd Bureau (Operations)

28 Ibid. 29 Alexander, “Soldiers and Socialists”, 74–75. 30 shd-DM, 1 BB2 83, Note, 26 Sept 1936.

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Plan Z 73 had a plan to launch a multi-divisional assault against the city and the discus- sions Alexander chronicled were likely just one part of finalizing that over- all plan.31 In April 1934, just weeks after the Stavisky Riots and while the sfio and pcf were discussing an alliance, General Maxime Weygand ordered Army Chief of Staff Maurice Gamelin to study how to defeat an urban insurrection in Paris. In September 1935, eight months after the more conciliatory Gamelin replaced Weygand as designated wartime commander and de facto army chief, while remaining chief of staff, the 3rd Bureau completed its politically explo- sive study.32 Producing a plan to attack and occupy Paris could have looked a lot like planning a military coup from the perspectives of the many Radical, Socialist, and Communist leaders who wrongly believed that Weygand and the army had secretly encouraged the Stavisky Riots. Weygand was well-known to be a devout Catholic and as a junior officer he had been an anti-Dreyfusard. Much of the left believed he was at best a reactionary, and at worst an aspiring dictator. Even his family background was suspect; he was born in Brussels to unknown parents and rumours circulated that he was the illegitimate child of a Belgian or Austrian royal. When André Tardue’s first cabinet appointed Weygand Vice-President of the Conseil Su- périeure de la Guerre and wartime commander-in-chief designate, the sfio and pcf had attacked the appointment and Minister of War André Maginot was forced to have Weygand write a letter defending his loyalty to the Repub- lic.33 Weygand’s politics remain almost as controversial among scholars as they were for his contemporaries. Anthony Clayton presented him as a moderate republican, Bernard Destremau as a pessimistic realist who almost alone understood the true weakness of France’s defences, while Philip Bankwitz painted Weygand as having clear pro-authoritarian impulses.34 More recently Philip Nord argued Weygand sympathized with the Stavisky Affair rioters, supported military conspirators “plotting to rescue a France they thought was too much in the thrall of leftist politicians” (the Corvignolles network), and was a vis- cerally antirepublican figure.35 Many contemporaries would have agreed with Nord’s evaluation.

31 Alexander, “Soldiers and Socialists,” 69. 32 shd-dat, 7 NN 64, Dossier 2, “Note relative à l’investissement de Paris en cas d’insurrection grave”, 30 September 1935. 33 Bankwitz, Maxime Weygand, 38–39. 34 Anthony Clayton, General Maxime Weygand, 1867–1965: Fortune and Misfortune (Bloom- ington IN: 2015), 61–62. 35 Nord, France 1940, 114–115, 127, 147–148.

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Weygand laid down three conditions that the plan had to meet. Most im- portantly, the siege of Paris had to be accomplished without weakening the defence of the German frontier. In addition, the plan could not interfere with the mobilization process or plans for the military and civil defence of interior regions against air attacks. These were stiff conditions because the 1927 and 1928 Army Laws had created a mobilization system that required dividing every peacetime metropolitan unit into three new units which would be brought up to strength by recalled reservists.36 Gamelin’s planning built on the work of previous planners which sped up the process, but also left officers with difficult choices. In 1932, the Paris Mil- itary Region prepared a plan, also dubbed Plan Z, to crush a Parisian revolt which closely conformed to the Ministry of War’s later guidance that it was dangerous to try to use recent conscripts to fight civilians. That plan used civilian security forces and all-professional infantry regiments to form a mixed force of 28,000 men grouped into twelve regiments to reassert control over Par- is. Another five regiments would form the core of a 12,000-man force to control the suburbs. The plan did not specify exactly which units would be used, but finding so many intact long-service units would have required relying heavily on colonial regiments because metropolitan regiments relied on short-service conscripts. Some of the colonial units were all-white professional units raised for colonial service and could have been supplemented by the Foreign Legion, but it might still have proven necessary to use indigène units to get enough professional infantry to Paris quickly. The infantry would need armour and other support, much of which could not be provided by standing professional units, so the planners recommended that officers select reliable junior officers and ncos from conscript units as well as reserve and retired soldiers recalled to the colours to serve in the strike force.37 Georges Vidal framed the 1932 initiative as an independent plan, but it was really the Paris Military Region’s plan to implement its part of a much larger plan; it bears a striking resemblance to one phase of a 1925 plan which the French General staff used as a starting point for their plans to retake Paris in the 1930s—it too was labelled Plan Z. When Weygand ordered the 3rd Bureau to prepare a plan to deal with a revolt in Paris in 1934, the officers assumed that most colonial forces would be needed to fight the Germans on the frontier and so drew on earlier plans that had also assumed that most colonial forces would be indisposed during a revolt. In 1925, during the pcf’s subversion campaign against the Rif War,

36 shd-dat, 7 NN 64, Dossier 2, “Note relative à l’investissement de Paris en cas d’insurrection grave”, 30 September 1935. 37 Georges Vidal, “Les chefs de l’armée Française”, 117–125.

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Plan Z 75 the General Staff had studied the “maintenance of order”, as it euphemisti- cally called suppressing a civilian revolt, in Paris. Because it was prepared during a major colonial war in Morocco, most of the Colonial Army was already committed there and thus unavailable to fight in Paris. With an eye toward the chaotic response to the 1871 Paris Commune, the plans emphasized the need to act quickly before disorder turned into outright revolution. In the event of “order being threatened by armed bands”, the military governor of Paris would prepare his forces to execute “Plan Z”.38 Plan Z included three eventualities ranging from supporting the police during a riot to a full-scale revolution requiring the declaration of a state of siege and martial law in Paris. If the situation was localized, commanders would prepare their troops to intervene if called upon, but would leave matters to the police and the Garde Républicaine until then. The plan instructed Parisian commanders to begin by mobilizing the available transportation resources, especially trucks, as soon as possible. It assumed a shortage of drivers which was usually a problem for the army and advised doing everything possible to get all available drivers to their posts. The army’s vehicles and drivers would stand ready in case troops had to intervene or the police needed additional transportation.39 The second variant of Plan Z focused on the military’s response to a major strike or rioting in Paris. The planners emphasized the need to obtain the prefect of police’s request for aid as quickly as possible. If a revolutionary strike was taking shape, commanders were advised to prepare all available forces in the Paris region, save those under the operational control of other ministries, such as the Garde Républicaine, the gendarmes, and the Brigade de Sapeurs- Pompiers de Paris (the Paris fire brigade).40 In the event of a revolt or uncontrollable disturbances, the military governor would declare a state of siege in Paris and call for reinforcements. Ini- tially, he would use his available forces to establish small fortified islands within Paris. They would be organized in public spaces and around important government buildings and would form a defensive barrier intended to slow the revolt’s spread while protecting public officials. They would also provide bases for mobile operations designed to harass rebels and retake captured

38 shd-dat, 7 NN 64, Dossier 2, “Note relative à l’investissement de Paris en cas d’insurrection grave”, 30 September 1935. 39 Ibid. 40 shd-dat, 7 NN 29., Dossier 2, “Conception d’ensemble des mesures à prendre pour le maintien de l’ordre dans le G.M.P.”, 27 January 1925.

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76 Orr positions.41 These strongpoints could have functioned as the transportation and communications corridor that Alexander found references to in General Victor Schweisguth’s papers and strongly resembled the 1932 plan prepared for the military governor of Paris, further evidence that both plans were pieces of the General Staff’s Plan Z. The strongpoints would prevent rebels from consoli- dating control over the entire city as had happened when the army fled Paris in March 1871. In 1934, the planners started with the 1925 plan as a base, but modified Plan Z to take account of German rearmament. The 1925 study, which was begun shortly after the first Cartel, an alliance of the Socialists and the Radicals, had come to power, assumed that a revolt in Paris would be a result of France’s internal divisions or a colonial conflict like the Rif War. Given that French forces still occupied the Rhineland in 1925 and the German Army was limited to 100,000 men by the Treaty of Versailles, a Ger- man invasion was impossible. However, by 1934, the situation had changed and commanders worried that dissidents could revolt to stop mobilization against Germany or that the Germans could invade to take advantage of a domestic revolt. Planners presented an initial draft to Weygand late in 1934 but continued to work on a more comprehensive plan during 1935. The final plan, which was finished and accepted by Gamelin in September of 1935, after he replaced Weygand, modified the initial draft to allow the army to conduct a siege of Paris without using units slated for immediate service against the Germans.42 Neither the pcf’s national defence turn nor the Franco-Soviet Mutual Defence Pact reassured Gamelin enough to stop updating Plan Z. The new plan shifted regular units to reinforce the eastern border and assigned a larger number of reserve troops to operations against Paris. The 1934 draft called for the 5th, 19th, 21st, 23rd, and 36th Infantry Divisions and the 3rd Colonial Infantry Division to move against Paris. It also called for support units, including cavalry and anti-aircraft artillery units, to be sent from other commands scattered around France. In 1935, planners determined that the 5th Division, a designated “regular” division, one in which pre-war soldiers would make up a maximum of 37 percent of the troops, would be needed to oppose an initial German thrust and could not be spared from the eastern frontier. The all-professional 3rd Colonial Infantry Division was also deemed too important to lose and planners replaced it with a composite division. The composite division would be formed from the 7th Demi-Brigade (two regiments) of Chasseurs Alpins from the general reserve, the 3rd Regiment of Colonial Infantry (R.I.C.)

41 Ibid. 42 Ibid.

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Plan Z 77

(a white unit stationed in Bordeaux and Rochefort) detached from the 1st Colo- nial Infantry Division, the Régiment d’Infanterie Coloniale du Maroc (another white colonial unit) from the 4th Colonial Infantry Division, and the 3rd Air Defence Regiment.43 Depending on the number and strength of support units, the revised siege force would have numbered 90,000-125,000 men before add- ing police and gendarme forces. The composite division was crucial to the projected force because it was the most professional unit assigned to strike force. If Plan Z had been implemented the demi-brigade of chasseurs would have contained some professional forces, up to 37 percent in one regiment and no more than 9 percent in the second. However, because they were colonial units and thus did not rely on conscripts or reservists, the Moroccan Regiment and the 3rd ric consisted exclusively of long-service volunteers; they alone among the besieging force would meet the ministry’s recommendation that only units whose men were used to serving together should be placed in close contact with hostile or rebellious civilians. The other infantry divisions would have relied on reservists to provide the bulk of their enlisted manpower. As such, it was virtually certain that the composite division would have been the primary assault force used against Paris.44 The central role colonial troops would have had in crushing a revolt recasts Game- lin’s September 1935 decision to substitute a single colonial infantry regiment (three battalions) for the six battalions of reinforcements his deputy chief of staff wanted to send to Paris ahead of the elections. Instead of being a sign of his confidence in the Popular Front and that Paris would remain peaceful, it fit into preparing to execute Plan Z’s worst-case scenario. The General Staff’s plan revealed staff officers’ mistrust of France’s civilian population which they assumed to be dangerously unstable and even treason- ous. The new Plan Z was built on fears that communist, and possibly socialist, workers were ready to ally with foreign powers or sabotage the war effort to advance their parties’ aims. This identification of a large portion of the population with corrupting foreign influences ominously foreshadowed the army’s central role in creating the Vichy Regime in 1940. Given that the original version of Plan Z was prepared after a left-wing alliance took power and it was updated when another, broader, left-wing alliance looked set to win the elections, Plan Z is strong evidence that the high command was politicized.

43 Ibid. 44 Ibid.

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78 Orr

6 The Popular Front’s Victory and the Revolution that Never Happened

The Popular Front parties won the legislative elections on 26 April and 3 May 1936 with an absolute majority in the Chamber of Deputies. However, instead of the centre-left Radical Party leading the coalition, the sfio unexpectedly emerged as the largest party. As a result, pressure began to mount on the So- cialist leader Léon Blum when fear of a Socialist government sparked a panic in financial markets and the pcf and sfio’s left wing demanded that he purge the government of suspected fascists and call the workers to revolutionary action if financial interests tried to thwart his government.45 Although Blum sought to carefully balance the factions within his coalition and followed a rigorously legalistic course, military leaders worried that the advent of a sfio- led and pcf-backed government could herald a revolution, especially after a massive strike wave broke out after Blum’s electoral triumph. The strikes that followed the Popular Front’s victory briefly appeared to vali- date the military elite’s fears. On 14 May, strikers illegally occupied the Bloch factory outside of Paris and won sweeping concessions from the management, which inspired more factory occupations. When Blum attended the annual commemoration of the Paris Commune on 24 May, he and the Communist leader Maurice Thorez led the procession which allegedly reached 600,000 people. However large the crowd really was, the event had the feeling of a triumph marking the Communards’ long-delayed victory.46 On 26 May, a new wave of sit-down strikes broke out in factories, including armament factories.47 Despite calls for calm from Léon Blum, the Confédération Générale du Travail, the sfio, and the pcf, the strike wave kept building. General Henri Gouraud, the military governor of Paris, feared that the strikes were building toward a general revolt that would necessitate executing Plan Z. On 5 June 1936, he warned the General Staff that he was poorly prepared to deal with “the current situation in Paris”. He explained that because of the defensive measures taken against the German remilitarization of the Rhineland in March 1936 and the need to discharge conscripts before their replacements had finished training, he was not sure if he had enough troops to maintain order in Paris if the government called on him to do so. Plan Z assumed that 9,100 men

45 Le Populaire (Paris), “Tribune du Parti”, 11 May 1936; Le Populaire (Paris), Reprint of Zyrom- ski’s speech to the national council, 11 May 1936. 46 Le Populaire, “Deux Réponses”, 15 May 1936; Julian Jackson, The Popular Front in France: Defending Democracy, 1934–38 (New York, 1988), 115. 47 Joel Colton, Léon Blum: Humanist in Politics (Cambridge MA, 1966), 135.

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Plan Z 79 would be immediately available in Paris, but Gouraud’s force was expected to fluctuate between 8,500 men and 5,100 men in June and July. He was also short of transport because so many drivers and trucks were needed on the frontier and to arrange the movement of new conscripts to their training centres.48 At the same time, General Schweisguth, a deputy chief of staff of the army, was convinced that the strikes were the opening stage of a revolution and was urg- ing his colleagues to prepare for the coming battle.49 Officers in the Ministry of War were concerned that radicalized strikers might have access to weapons, including tanks and artillery, stored in the factories they were occupying. During May and June 1936, officers frantically tried to track down and take possession of war material in factories.50 On 5 June 1936, the same day Gouraud warned that he had too few men to subdue Paris, strikers took over the Renault tank factory. Officers on the General Staff warned that access to heavy weapons could encourage strikers to become more ag- gressive and that they might even use the weapons against the police and the government. They were, however, relieved to learn that the soldiers overseeing production at the Renault factory had, on their own initiative, sabotaged the undelivered tanks before the strikers occupied the factory.51 The officers’ actions revealed the depth of their concern that the strikes could evolve into a revolution. Perhaps recalling the Fantômas Affair, military leaders feared the strikers included Soviet and German agents. During the crisis, the Minister of War’s staff urged officers to take immediate delivery of all war supplies to reduce the quantity of weapons and munitions which could fall into rebel hands. It also asked industrial leaders to identify the location and state of completion of all military material in factories and any secret documents which needed to be secured “in case of trouble”.52 Similar warnings continued for days as military commanders braced for a revolution that never came. When Blum was for- mally invested as premier on 6 June, over 6,000,000 workers were on strike and the police were overwhelmed. Blum admitted that the sit-down strikes were illegal, but instead of calling on the police or the military to clear the factories,

48 shd-dat, 7 NN 64, Dossier 2, “Effectifs de la Garnison de Paris en Juin et Juillet”, 5 Juin 1936. 49 Archivés nationales (AN) 351 AP/3, Carnet Schweisguth, May 1936 in Alexander, “Soldiers and Socialists”, 69. 50 shd-dat, 7 NN 64, Dossier 2, Note, 17 June 1936. 51 shd-dat, 7 NN 64, Dossier 2, Note, 5 Juin 1936. 52 shd-dat, 7 NN 64, Dossier 2, “Note pour l’état-major de l’armée”, 17 June 1936.

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80 Orr he promised to enact emergency labour reforms and mediated talks between the major unions and employer groups.53 On 7 June, Blum succeeded in securing the Matignon Agreement between unions and employers. It improved pay and working conditions for workers and secured protections for unions. In addition, his cabinet pushed through laws that granted workers paid vacation and nationalized some war indus- tries. Although it did not immediately restore calm, the agreement marked the beginning of the end of the strike wave. Ironically, despite military leaders’ fear that the pcf would use the strikes as a launching pad for a coup, Maurice Thorez encouraged the strikers to accept compromises with employers for the good of the Popular Front. In so doing, he followed the spirit of the Soviet- controlled Third International’s orders to support the Popular Front as an anti- fascist bulwark. On 12 June 1936, Blum assured the Senate that progress was being made on ending the strikes and that “the government is resolved to maintain public order because it is not a government of anarchy, but a government of true order”. He also promised to act firmly against “all elements which seek to infiltrate into the labour movement”.54 Blum’s government was worried enough that Minister of War and National Defence Édouard Daladier ordered the Garde Républicaine Mobile and the army to prepare to deploy into Paris and other areas. Blum later swore that he would have resigned rather than use force, though given Daladier’s order and the fact that Minister of the Interior Roger Salengro, a Socialist, announced some of the measures in the Senate, his government was clearly worried that the situation could spin out of control. Histo- rians have rightly emphasized that the strikes were neither centrally organized nor instigated by foreign agents, but in June 1936 military leaders, and at times even Léon Blum himself, suspected otherwise.55 The end of the strike did little to calm officers’ fears. In August 1936, military intelligence sources claimed to have uncovered evidence of newly formed communist cells inside the army.56 By late November 1936, Major Georges Loustaunau-Lacau, an officer on Marshal Philippe Pétain’s staff, was making the rounds in Paris asking officials if they knew anything about a planned pcf- led coup attempt centred in Paris’s vii Arrondissement. Army Chief of Staff General Louis Colson expressed a similar concern and officers contacted the

53 Colton, Léon Blum, 140. 54 Journal Officiel de la République Française, Sénat, Débats, June 12 1936, 476. 55 Colton, Léon Blum, 146–147, 153, 157; Statement by Roger Salengro JO, Sénat, Débats, June 12 1936. 56 shd-dat, 7 NN 2015, “Renseignements concernant Olden” 14 August 1936.

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Plan Z 81

Prefecture of Police and the Sûreté Générale looking for more information about the non-existent plot. By 26 November, Loustaunau-Lacau was telling officials about a document Pétain had received from Spain which outlined how the communists would strike.57 The coup plot was fictitious, but the underly- ing beliefs the panic exposed were well in line with the mindset that produced Plan Z. Pétain’s role in the affair remains obscure. He emerged from the Great War with a reputation as a humane, politically moderate, and generally republican figure. Although understood to be a conservative, politicians saw him as a safe general in comparison to Weygand or Marshal Ferdinand Foch. When the Rif war began in 1925, Marshal Hubert Lyautey had recommended that Maxime Weygand take command in Morocco, but the Cartel cabinet sent Pétain because they mistrusted Weygand’s politics. The fact that Pétain’s staff was push- ing the conspiracy theory is evidence that radical anti-communism had spread beyond the paranoid fringes of the army. During December, rumours circulated that communists planned to take lycée students hostage during a coup attempt to forestall a military counter- stroke, and officers in the Ministry of War, with Daladier’s authorization, ordered preventative measures designed to detect and resist any potential coup attempt. Some measures were taken in liaison with the prefects, but others were kept secret and applied only within the army. Whether Daladier knew it or not, he was authorizing the early stages of Plan Z for the second time since June.58 Also in December, Loustaunau-Lacau passed the 2nd Bureau (In- telligence) a document which he claimed came from Spain and which he had been showing to other officials since late November. Although the provenance of the document was never established, it was marked as being produced in April 1936, before the Spanish Civil War began, and Loustaunau-Lacau claimed it contained instructions relayed to Spanish radicals from the Soviet agents. It advised revolutionaries to coordinate with dissident soldiers to arrange for a simultaneous rising of conscripts inside a base and an invasion of the base by armed militants. The local committee would then identify the political leanings of the soldiers and officers, recruiting some into the coup effort while imprisoning or executing conservatives. Loustaunau-Lacau claimed the

57 George Vidal, L’armée française et l’ennemi intérieur: 1917–1939, Enjeux stratégiques et culture politique (Rennes, 2015) 105. 58 Ibid., 106.

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82 Orr document was based on instructions from the Soviets, but it specifically re- ferred to anarchists, not communists.59 On 1 January 1937, without obtaining permission from either Colson or Gamelin, General Paul-Henry Gérodias, the head of the 2nd Bureau, sent a copy of the report to every divisional and regimental headquarters in France. By doing so he implicitly warned officers that French militants might have been taught the same tactics. Senior military leaders’ easy acceptance of such a questionable document was consistent with years of concern and planning. Almost immediately, someone leaked it to the press. The resulting scandal forced Daladier to demand Gérodias’s firing and to assure the public, and his own allies in the Popular Front, that the army remained politically neutral and that there was no reason to fear a communist or military coup. Gamelin threatened to resign if Gérodias was forced out of the army, which led to a compromise in which he was removed from the General Staff but made commander of the 13th Infantry Division.60 The fact that such a minor affair, the dissemina- tion of a single questionable document, created a scandal makes clear the risk Weygand and Gamelin took in preparing Plan Z. If it had leaked to the press, the result would have been a much bigger scandal. Plan Z was politically dangerous, but the army had a legal right to create the plan. Some officers, however, crossed the line into clearly illegal activity as part of their anti-communist struggle, including keeping quiet about the Cagoule and joining the Corvignolles network. The Comité secret d’action révolutionnaire, commonly known as the Cagoule (hooded ones), was the most dangerous manifestation of interwar French anti-communism, but was only indirectly linked to the army. The Cagoule included many veterans and its existence was known to senior officers, including Pétain, Marshal Louis Franchet-d’Esprey, and General Henri Giraud.61 It originally drew heavily from disaffected Camelots du roi, the monarchist league attached to Action fran- çaise and took shape in June 1936 after Léon Blum and the Popular Front cabinet banned the rightist leagues. The police investigation made clear that most members joined to oppose a communist coup which they, like many officers, believed was likely.62 In September 1937, the Cagoule tried to provoke an anti- communist backlash by carrying out several bombings which it attempted to

59 shd-dat, 7 NN 64, Dossier 2, “Instructions donner aux milices espagnoles pour neutral- iser l’Armée en cas de putsch anarchiste”, April 1936. 60 Bankwitz, Weygand, 267–268; Vidal, L’armée française et l’ennemi intérieur, 106–107. 61 Ibid., 55; Pierre Péan, Le Mystérieux Docteur Martin (Paris, 1993), 140; Philippe Bourdrel, Les Cagoulards dans la guerre (Paris, 2009), 288. 62 Ibid., 55.

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Plan Z 83 blame on the pcf. The police broke the Cagoule in November 1937, forestall- ing a possible coup attempt, and in the process, discovered a separate secret military network.63 In December 1936, Major Loustaunau-Lacau organized the Corvignolles network, a clandestine and illegal anti-communist network inside the army. He later claimed that the network was approved by “the highest authorities” in the army and sought to “rid the army of cells that the communist party is continuously creating with a view toward fomenting indiscipline and destroy- ing morale”.64 Most scholars now agree that the network, although illegal, was not a conspiracy against the state, but divisions remain. Valerie Deacon and Georges Vidal’s interpretations diverge, with Deacon seeing it as more clearly antirepublican than Vidal.65 The Corvignolles network included officers stationed in combat, support, and staff units throughout France.66 Scholars have rightly connected the Corvignolles network to officers’ fear that the Spanish Civil War could radicalize French civilians, but it also fits perfectly into a longer-term fear that the Popular Front could open the way for a communist takeover of France and that the pcf sought to infiltrate and destabilize the army as a first step toward a revolution, the same fears that motivated Plan Z. Deacon argued that the shift to a clandestine organization was a result of the Popular Front’s victory making official campaigns against communists in the military harder to sustain rather than a sudden shift in officers’ politics.67 Understanding the true scale of Plan Z validates Deacon’s point and further embeds the Corvignolles network in the long-term politics of the interwar French Army. When police investigators exposed the network, Dala- dier removed Loustaunau-Lacau from the army. He later rebuilt his reputation during the occupation of France by creating Alliance, one of the most effective Resistance spy networks.68 The Corvignolles network showed the depth of officers’ fear of a Communist revolt and the officers corps’ politicization. Plan Z and officers’ post-Popular Front scheming helped set the stage for the army’s role in Pétain’s seizure of power in 1940. After French lines collapsed in May 1940, Paul Reynaud replaced Gamelin with his predecessor, General Weygand. When the Germans overcame Weygand’s last stand in front of Paris in early June 1940, military leaders’ fear of communism drove them to demand

63 Deacon, The Extreme Right and the French Resistance, 44–49. 64 Ibid., 66. 65 Ibid, 65–85; Vidal, L’armée française et l’ennemi intérieur, 199–202. 66 Vidal, La Grande illusion?, 299. 67 Deacon, The Extreme Right and the French Resistance, 65–69. 68 Ibid., 86–90.

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84 Orr an armistice. Weygand’s fear of the pcf and civilian disloyalty was on display throughout the retreat from Paris when he repeatedly warned against fictitious communist revolts. Philip Nord has documented Weygand and Pétain’s attempts to force an armistice on the cabinet to forestall a left-wing takeover. During a cabinet meeting on 13 June 1940 Weygand warned that pcf leader Maurice Thorez had proclaimed a revolutionary government in Paris. Minis- ter of the Interior Georges Mandel quickly rebutted his claim, calling the still- functioning Paris police to prove no such government existed, but Weygand’s pressure tactics continued.69 Pétain, who had been known as a relatively moderate general, could have reigned Weygand in, but instead joined him in demanding the civilians accept an armistice. During the same meeting in which Mandel and Weygand clashed, Pétain declared continued resistance to be futile and, like Weygand, refused to leave France if the government did because of his fear abandoning the country would cede post-war France to the pcf or other left-wing radicals. Rather than rally to the civilian government, most senior officers backed Wey- gand and Pétain’s open defiance of civilian authority. Philip Nord rightly noted their choices were made possible by the military crisis, but this article shows they were also shaped by the army’s history of exaggerated anti-communism.70

7 Conclusion

Plan Z reflected military leaders’ deep-seated fear of civilian disloyalty and communism. It reinforces Deacon and Nord’s claims that the French officer corps retained a strong antirepublican streak and an exaggerated fear of the pcf. Scholars have underestimated the politicization of the French Army’s high command in the 1930s, but this article shows that Weygand, Gamelin and other French generals feared a communist revolt enough to begin politically dangerous preparations to defeat a new commune before the Spanish Civil War. The military elite’s fear of a popular insurrection transcended commanders’ personalities and was endemic, not episodic, during the 1930s. The exten- sive planning to crush a revolt before both the strike wave that accompanied the Popular Front’s victory and the Spanish Civil War undermines claims that the there was a period of calm in civil-military relations in the mid-1930s. It also challenges Alexander’s belief that Gamelin had succeeded in maintaining an apolitical officer corps and was unperturbed by the rise of the Popular Front.

69 Nord, France 1940, 115. 70 Ibid., 121, 124–125.

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Plan Z 85

Instead of the episodic conflicts marked by the 1932 Fantômas Affair and the late 1936-early 1937 crisis derived from the Spanish Civil War, this article shows that the Plan Z was updated during the alleged peaks of waves and in the troughs between them. France’s generals, senior staff officers, and the military governor of Paris all feared the Popular Front could trigger a revolution. Given Blum’s success in defusing the May-June 1936 strike wave, it is easy to assume that negotiations were the obvious response to the mass strikes, but they looked a lot like proto-revolutionary events to many observers at the time, and even Blum’s cabinet ordered preparations to use force against the strikers. Those orders set the early stages of Plan Z in motion. It is impossible to know what would have happened if Blum had resorted to using force, but given the scale of Plan Z, officers fear of communism, and the disloyalty that senior officers showed in June and July of 1940, the possibility that military leaders would have exploited the crisis atmosphere created by executing Plan Z to demand changes to the Third Republic cannot easily be dismissed. That prospect underscores politicians’ long-term failure to republicanize the army and the importance of Blum’s successful strategy of using negotiations to end the strike wave. Understanding the scale and importance of Plan Z reinforces an emerging historiographical turn that locates the origins of the collapse of the Third Republic inside the French Army. The 1990s and 2000s were dominated by historians arguing the French Army was essentially reconciled with the republican government and more closely aligned with political leaders than had previously been believed. They correctly argued that the Third Republic’s collapse was contingent on Gamelin’s operational mistakes and the German Army’s ability to anticipate and exploit them, but they did not explain why military leaders chose to exploit the crisis to displace civilian leaders. This article does not claim to fully answer that question, but it does contribute to finding the answer. Weygand and Pétain’s behavior in June and July of 1940 was consistent with the military leaders’ previous fear of popular unrest and lack of faith in democratic institutions. The battlefield defeat in 1940 created the opening that allowed military men to move against the Third Republic, but Plan Z showed that the groundwork of that move was already in place in the 1930s.

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