READING: Why William L. Shirer Spent þe 1960s Thinking About Interwar France

His explanation of why he wrote The Collapse of the Third Republic : An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940

Why William L. Shirer decided to spend much of the 1960s writing his history of the collapse of the French Third Republic:

Sitting in Berlin that summer of heartbreak  [of 1940] when almost everyone in Europe, except in Britain, believed—and was this not true also in the United States?—that the Old World must come under the ruthless rule of Adolf Hitler and the self-styled German Master Race, I pondered these questions. The Germans, the men of Vichy, and even some Americans were sure that Hitler represented the "Wave of the Future." To many of us who had lived through the Nazi time in Germany it was clear that a Europe dominated by the German Herrenvolk would be doomed to a long night of mindless barbarism. Pétain and Weygand do not seem to have understood this, and Laval perhaps didn't care.

Even during that dark summertime of 1940 I could not bring myself to believe, as my broadcasts, dispatches, and diary show, that Europe was destined to such a sorry fate. I never lost hope that in the end Hitler would be brought down, his savage empire destlryed, and some semblance of decency restored in the world. Then I would try to find out how it was that Europe came to the brink of such an abyss. First there would be the task of trying to get to the bottom of the German story and to learn, if possible, out of my own experience and whatever documentation came to light, how it happened that a great and cultured people, the Germans, succumbed in the twentieth century to the barbarism of the Third Reich. Then I would turn to the French, with whom admittedly I was more in sympathy, to try to find out why this people, equally great and more civilized, and for most of the last century and a half the champions of personal freedom, of equality and fraternity among men, went down so quickly and easily that early summer of 1940 in a collapse more terrifying and more complete than any other in their long history.

Chance had made me an eyewitness to a good part of both of these cataclysmic events. But though I had seen them unfold and reported what I saw daily over the turbulent years, there was a great deal, obviously, that a journalist, working under the pressure of daily deadlines and largely ignorant of the secrets of state, did not know or understand.

Two decades later I accomplished the first task, concerning the rise and fall of the German Third Reich, as best I could. then turned to the second one, an inquiry into the collapse of

the French Third Republic. The roots of this story go far back -to the very birth of the Republic, and even further…

LINK: William L. Shirer (1971): The Collapse of the Third Republic : An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940 (New York : Pocket Books) <https://archive.org/details/collapseofthird00will>