June 22nd, 1940. The Forest of Compton. Yet the setting is deliberately theatrical. Adolf Hitler has ordered French officials to a specific railway carriage, the very same carriage where Germany was forced to sign its humiliating surrender in 1918. The air inside is stifling. The symbolism is crushing. In a matter of minutes.

The ink dries. On the armistice. The Third Republic, a global superpower with one of the largest standing armies in Europe, has ceased to exist as a free entity. The numbers are catastrophic. Six weeks of blitzkrieg have left 90,000 French soldiers dead in the dirt. Another 60,000 civilians have been strafed on the roads.

10 million people, a quarter of the population, are currently refugees clogging the southern roads in the largest mass exodus in the history of the continent. The logic of the moment is absolute. The German war machine is unstoppable. The very marked has done in six weeks. What the Kaiser couldn’t do in four years for the French marshals, for the politicians, and for the average man on the street in Paris.

The war is over. Europe is German. To continue fighting is not just militarily impossible. It is, in their eyes a sin against the survival of the French people. But then a voice comes crackling across the English Channel. Winston Churchill, a man many in the French government consider a drunkard and a warmonger.

He takes to the airwaves and announces something that defies every metric of military logic available in 1940. He announces that Great Britain will fight on alone in the occupied streets of Paris, where swastikas now drape the hotel de Ville in the smoldering villages of Normandy and in the chaotic, overcrowded free zone of the south.

French civilians hear this news, and their reaction is not what history books have told you. We assume they cheered. We assume they secretly toasted the British defiance. But when you open the diaries, the letters and the police reports from that specific week in June 1940, you find a reaction that is far more complex, far more bitter, and profoundly shocking.

To understand what happens next, we have to understand what sanity looked like in 1940. Because to the average French citizen looking across the channel at their British allies, Churchill’s refusal to surrender didn’t look like bravery. It looked like madness. Consider the perspective of Simone de Beauvoir. She is 32 years old.

She is sitting in a Parisian cafe that is no longer hers. It is now crowded with officers of the government ordering wine, paying with occupation currency. She opens her diary. She is an intellectual, a woman who understands history. And she writes something that admits a terrible truth about the human condition under extreme pressure.

She confesses to feeling a shameful relief. Why relief? Because the Stukas have stopped screaming. The artillery has stopped pounding. Her friends, the young men of her generation, have stopped dying in the fields of Flanders. The armistice, humiliating as it is, has bought them life. But then she hears the news from London.

Britain refuses to negotiate. Does she feel inspired? No. She writes. The English are mad. Her logic is cold and hard. France had the finest land army in Europe and it dissolved. Britain has a tiny expeditionary force that fled the continent without a single heavy gun. The Luftwaffe controls the air. The Panzers are resting, refueling and turning their turrets toward the coast to De Beauvoir and to millions of Parisians.

The British decision is not heroic. It is a delusion, she predicts, as do the German generals, that Britain will be invaded within three weeks. And if Britain fights on for three weeks, only to be crushed, what is the point? It will only bring more fire, more bombing, more destruction to the continent. For a result that is inevitable.

This is the first layer of the French reaction. It is the exhaustion of the people who have watched their world collapse. But travel south, down the refugee clogged roads, past the checkpoints to the city of Lyon. Here the anger is less philosophical and more visceral. A woman, her name lost to the archives, but her voice preserved in a furious letter to her sister in America, puts pen to paper.

She captures a sentiment that is boiling over in the bread lines. The British ran away, she writes. They left us to face the Germans alone. And now they say they will keep fighting. Let them. We have had enough. This is the narrative of Dunkirk that we in the United States often forget. We see Dunkirk as a miracle of deliverance, a snatching of victory from the jaws of defeat.

But to the French civilian in June 1940, Dunkirk was a betrayal. They saw the British Expeditionary Force evacuate 338,000 men. Yes, they took 123,000 French troops with them. But the perception on the ground was abandonment. The British retreated to their island fortress, pulled up the drawbridge and left France to suffer the occupation.

In the cafes of Marseilles and in the spa town of Vichy, where Marshal Philippe Tan is establishing his new authoritarian government, a bitter joke begins to circulate. It is dark humor born of despair. The British, they say, will fight to the last French soldier. This cynical view serves a psychological purpose.

If the British are traitors who abandoned France, then France’s surrender is not cowardice. It is a necessity forced upon them by a faithless ally. It allows the French to salvage a shred of dignity from the wreckage. So in the immediate aftermath of June 1940, the dominant emotion toward Britain is not hope.

It is resentment. But history is rarely a monolith. If you leave the cities, if you step away from the intellectuals and the bitter refugees and you walk to the coast of Brittany, the story shifts. In a small fishing village, a man named Jean Marie Cervello stands on the dunes. He is 41 years old. He fought in the first war.

He is too old for this one. But he has two sons. Both were mobilized in May. Both vanished into the chaotic maelstrom of the collapse. He does not know if they are dead or if they are rotting in a temporary P.O.W. camp in Germany. He looks out over the gray waters of the channel. He can almost see the coast of England.

When the news reaches Jean Murray that Churchill has vowed to fight on the beaches and landing grounds. He does not think of military strategy. He does not think of the Maginot Line or the Luftwaffe. He feels a sudden, sharp intake of breath. Hope. He turns to his wife and says the words that define the counter narrative.

If the English keep fighting, then this isn’t over. And if it isn’t over, maybe my boys will come home. This is the prisoners calculus for the families of the 2 million French soldiers who have been captured by the Germans. The end of the war means the permanence of their captivity. If France surrenders and Britain surrenders, those men are gone.

They are labor for the Reich. But as long as the cannons are firing across the channel, the board is not set. The game is not finished. This hope is fragile. It is whispered in the occupied zone, speaking it aloud can get you reported to the Gestapo. But it is there. And as the summer of 1940 grinds on, this divide and public opinion begins to fracture along lines of class and politics.

This brings us to a harsh reality about the internal politics of 1940s France. The bourgeoisie, the property owners, the industrialists, the old money families. They look at the armistice with a pragmatic eye. They have seen their world turned upside down. They fear one thing more than they fear. The Germans. Communism.

To the established families. The chaos of the war is a breeding ground for revolution. Marshall Patton offers them an intoxicating alternative. He speaks of work, family, fatherland. He promises order. He promises a return to traditional values. The armistice to them is a shield against anarchy. But human resilience is a strange thing.

Anger burns hot, but it burns fast. Reality is slower and harder to ignore. As summer turns to autumn, the French people look up. They expect to see the Luftwaffe triumphant. They expect to hear the news that London has fallen. That the King has fled to Canada. That the swastika flies over Parliament. This is what the newspapers tell them is inevitable.

This is what the German newsreels playing in the cinemas show. Burning London docks. Spitfires spiraling into the sea. But days turn into weeks. Weeks turn into months, and Britain is still there. This is the turning point. The Battle of Britain, the German invasion operation Sea Lion, is scheduled for August, then September.

Then it is postponed indefinitely. In occupied Paris, a baker named Henri du Bois performs a ritual that becomes the defining act of the occupation. He waits until dark. He closes the shutters. He drapes a heavy blanket over his radio set to muffle the sound, and he tunes the dial through the static until he hears the drumbeats of the BBC.

He silent. Let France say pardon. Oh, France, here is London. The French speak to the French. He hears reports of R.A.F. victories. He hears that the Luftwaffe is bleeding. He hears that London is burning. Yes, but London is fighting. He doesn’t know if it’s propaganda. He knows governments lie. But he has his own eyes.

He sees the German soldiers in the streets of Paris. He sees their faces. In June, they were arrogant, invincible tourists. By October, they look worried. They look at the sky. Henri whispers to his wife in the safety of their bedroom. Maybe the English aren’t as finished as we thought. This is the moment. The story loop of inevitability breaks.

The Germans and Vichy had sold the story. The war is over. Accept the new order. Britain’s survival creates a glitch in that story. In the southern zone, a farmer watches a German newsreel. It is meant to show British weakness, showing the devastation of the Blitz. But the farmer sees something else. He sees firemen digging people out of the rubble.

He sees civilians drinking tea amidst the ruins. He sees Churchill set walking through the wreckage. He thought the fight on decision was suicidal stupidity. Now he sees it as grit. By the winter of 1940, into the bleakness of 1941, the opinion shifts again. It is a slow thaw. Lucio Brock, a young woman in Lyon who is destined to become a legend of the resistance, captures this psychological pivot.

She writes When Britain didn’t fall, when they survived the bombing, it changed something in us. It made resistance seem possible. If they could stand alone against Germany, maybe we didn’t have to accept defeat either. The madness of June has transmuted into the miracle of December. But this shift creates a dangerous paradox.

In the occupied north, the German control tightens. The Gestapo and the French collaborationist police know that hope is dangerous. They begin to crack down. Listening to the BBC becomes a crime punishable by prison or worse. A woman in Lille is arrested simply for saying aloud in a market square that she hopes Britain wins.

She disappears into a prison cell for six months. The danger forces the sentiment underground, which only makes it stronger. It becomes a secret brotherhood. A nod on the street, a hum tune of It’s a Long Way to Tipperary. In the unoccupied south. The Vichy government is in a bind. They have staked their entire legitimacy on the idea that Britain is doomed.

If Britain wins, Vichy is comprised of traitors. If Britain loses, Vichy are the Saviors who spared France from destruction. The newspapers controlled by Vichy double down. They print frantic articles predicting the imminent collapse of the UK. But the French people are cynical. They know how to read between the lines.

A librarian in Clermont-Ferrand makes a sharp observation to her husband. The newspapers spend every day screaming that Britain is defeated. If they were truly confident, they wouldn’t need to say it. So often the propaganda begins to backfire. The desperation of the lie reveals the truth. This brings us to a crucial element often overlooked in military histories.

The moral awakening of the youth. A teacher in Montpellier, taking a terrible risk, asks his class of teenagers to write an essay on the war. He expects rote answers, repeating martial patterns, slogans about discipline and acceptance. Instead, a 14 year old boy hands in a paper that stops the teacher in his tracks.

The boy writes Marshal Petrus, as we must accept our defeat with dignity. But the English show that defeat can be refused. I don’t know who is right politically, but I know which one makes me feel less ashamed. The teacher keeps the essay. He hides it. He does not turn the boy in. That essay is a microcosm of the shift happening in the French soul.

The argument is moving from strategy. Can we win to morality? How should we live? By 1942, the war expands. Hitler invades Russia, America enters the fray. The lone island of Britain is no longer alone. The madness of 1940 is now retroactively seen as brilliant foresight. Those who cursed Britain for prolonging the war now look to the skies for American bombers.

Those who supported Vichy collaboration begin to quietly distance themselves. Burning incriminating letters, changing their tune in the town square. But we must be careful not to paint a picture of total unity. The scars of 1940 run deep. There are families in Normandy that are irrevocably broken. A father who truly believed better saved France.

A son who joined the monarchy in the woods. Inspired by the BBC. A daughter who fell in love with a German soldier because he was polite and gave her chocolate when she was starving. There is a woman in Paris whose brother died at Marseille, cambiar. Even when the allies liberate Paris in 1944, even when the Americans marched down the shining city.

Say she closes her curtains, she never forgives the British to her. They are the murderers of her kin. There is a man in Bordeaux who praised British courage in 1940, but by 1942, worn down by hunger and propaganda, he becomes a collaborator. He bets on the wrong horse just as the tide turns. The diversity of these reactions tells us something profound about the nature of defeat.

When a nation falls, it does not react as a collective hive mind. It shatters into millions of individuals, each making a desperate calculation about survival, dignity, and family. Some saw British defiance as a beacon. Some saw it as a death sentence. Some saw it as a betrayal. And the most haunting part. Many people felt all three of these things at the same time.

Consider the letter from a man in Toulouse, written in 1943. He had been a prisoner of war in 1940. Released early due to illness, he writes to his sister. When we surrendered and the English kept fighting, I thought they were idiots. I thought they would be invaded in weeks and we would all be under German rule anyway.

So what was the point of more death? I hated them for it, he continues. But they weren’t invaded. They kept fighting. And now. Now I am in the resistance. The English were right. Some things are worth fighting for even when you have lost. But look at the archives. Look at the reply from his sister. It provides the necessary counterweight to our hero narrative. She writes back.

You say the English were right, but how many more French people died because they kept fighting? How many more cities were bombed by the RAF? Maybe if everyone had made peace in 1940, we would all be alive. Maybe the English just prolong the suffering. Both of these letters are real. Both perspectives are valid.

The sister asks the utilitarian question. Does the cost of liberty justify the body count? The brother asks the existential question, is life worth living without liberty? This debate tore France apart for four years in the occupied north. A woman hides a British pilot shot down over the fields. The penalty for this is death.

She has children. She does it anyway. When asked later why she took such an insane risk, she gave a simple answer. Because when we gave up, they didn’t. Someone had to remember that fighting back was possible. In the same city, three streets away. A neighbor reports her to the authorities. This neighbor isn’t a monster.

She isn’t an ideologue. She is a terrified woman who believes the authorities when they say that terrorists and British agents are endangering the village. She believes collaboration is the path to peace and safety for her children. Two mothers, two choices, both driven by the shock wave of Britain’s refusal to surrender.

In the southern zone. A mayor of a tiny village is ordered to hand over a list of Jewish families to the Vichy police. He refuses his reasoning. The English are still fighting. That means the war is not over. That means the Germans haven’t won yet. And if they haven’t won, then I don’t have to obey. He saves 17 families.

His defiance is directly fueled by the knowledge that he is not alone in the universe. That somewhere across the water, the swastika does not fly. In the next village over, the mayor complies. He hands over the list. He believes Vichy is the legitimate government. He views Britain’s continued war as a foreign irritation, totally disconnected from his duty to follow orders.

We judge these men from the comfort of hindsight. We know who won. We know about the Holocaust. We know that Hitler was doomed. But the French civilians of June 1940 stood in the absolute darkness of the unknown. They stood in the ruins of a superpower that collapsed in six weeks. They had no idea America would enter the war.

They had no idea the Red Army would break the Vermont. They had to make sense of the world with only the information they had. The fear, the exhaustion, the shame of defeat. And the confusing, infuriating, inspiring spectacle of a stubborn island nation that refused to read the writing on the wall in 1945, after the dust had settled.

An interviewer spoke to an elderly woman in Provence. She had lived through the collapse, the occupation, the hunger and the liberation. The interviewer asked her, what did you think? Back in June 1940, when you heard Britain was fighting on? The woman said, quiet for a moment. Then she said, I thought they were crazy.

I thought they would be destroyed. I thought we would all be destroyed. She paused. But I also thought somewhere deep down that maybe crazy was exactly what the moment required. Maybe sanity was surrender and madness was hope. And maybe, just maybe, we needed more madness. She looked at the interviewer and smiled.

Tired. Smile. I was right. We needed the madness. We needed someone to refuse the logic of defeat. Even if they had left us at Dunkirk. Even if they had killed our sailors at Marseille Kebir. We needed someone to show us that no was still a possible answer. Then the reveal. The kicker, she adds, though I didn’t know that in 1940.

In 1940, I just thought they were crazy. That is the texture of history. The French civilians of 1940 didn’t know they were characters in a global morality play. They were just people terrified and confused, watching their world fall apart. Their reaction to Britain wasn’t one thing. It was everything. It was anger and admiration, despair and hope, betrayal and inspiration.

Millions of voices responding to an impossible moment and millions of different ways. Some got it right. Some got it wrong. Most got it partly right and partly wrong, just like the rest of us would have done. Because when the world collapses and you have to decide whether to surrender or fight, whether to hope or despair, the line between courage and madness is terrifyingly thin.

And in June 1940, standing amidst the ruins of France, looking across the gray channel at a defiant, lonely Britain, nobody knew which was which.