The Maginot Line reviewed in Literary Review

In 1968, the French politician Pierre Mendès France was interviewed for the film The Sorrow and the Pity. Mendès France – who had escaped from a Vichy prison to join the Free French air force – described what he took to be the absurdity of the spirit in which the last governments of the Third Republic approached military matters before the defeat of 1940, which ended that republic.