Patriotism: Insights from Israel By Eyal Lewin

region. The account of Rommel’s attacks shows how the French armies were attacked and rendered powerless. The French 5th Motorized Infantry Division was sent to block Rommel’s Panzer Division, but the Germans advanced quicker than anticipated, and Rommel surprised the French vehicles while they were refueling. The Germans were able to fire directly into the neatly lined French vehicles and overrun their position completely. The French unit disintegrated into a wave of refugees; they had been overrun literally in their sleep. In about 48 hours, Rommel managed to take 10,000 prisoners and suffered only 36 losses. It took France no more than 12 days to surrender and to remain conquered for almost the rest of the war (Chapman, 1968).

The question of how a nation practically handed itself to its enemies was not only a matter for historians to pursue. After the war, the French Parliament also instituted a committee to investigate the causes of the defeat, but it was disbanded in 1951 with its work unfinished. The historian Jean Jacques Becker demonstrated that as early as 1914, despite the image of mass national enthusiasm, the prevalent mood was somber as demonstrations against the war took place in French cities. As the Germans advanced to Paris in 1914 and the French government fled to Bordeaux, morale was not only low, but army troops also proved unreliable, and some of them were dismantled even before being involved in any fighting (Jackson, 2003). Viewing the events of World War II, the philosopher Henri Michel claimed that the defeat was the outcome of a long process of disintegration affecting all the activities of the French nation. France, according to this claim, was a divided country characterized by political instability (Jackson, 2003).

In a report to his journal’s headquarters on July 8, 1940, a few days after he left France which had just been conquered, Ralph Delhey Paine, head of the European staff of Life and Time magazines, asserted that the French had defeated themselves. His impression was that there had been little hard fighting and that defeated French troops preferred to exist as refugees with their families.

If the French had fought to their last drop of blood, would they have won the war? Had France stood firmly, determined to prevent its