A commander-in-chief caught between defensive doctrine and forward deployment
On 16 May 1940, when Churchill asked him 'Where are the strategic reserves?', Gamelin answered: 'There is none.'
Maurice Gamelin was a French general who rose through the high command on the strength of his First World War staff experience and his reputation as a republican military coordinator. Expecting a long war against Germany, he built strategy around the Maginot Line, yet he limited the Saar Offensive and committed the main Allied movement toward the Dyle and the Belgian frontier when Germany invaded in 1940. After the German breakthrough at Sedan in May 1940, he was dismissed, later detained by Vichy and Germany, and became a central figure in the contested assignment of responsibility for France's defeat.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1893Graduated first from Saint-Cyr
- 1906–1914Staff officer to General Joffre
- 1914–1918Served in the First World War; commanded the 9th Infantry Division
- 1919–1924Head of the French military mission in Brazil
- 1924–1929Commander of French forces in the Levant
- 1931–1939Chief of the Army General Staff; senior coordinator of the armed forces
- 1939–1940Commander-in-chief; directed the Saar Offensive and Dyle Plan
- 1940Dismissed and detained by the Vichy regime
Related historical events
Vichy detention, the Riom Trial, and postwar self-defence
After his dismissal on 19 May 1940, Gamelin left Paris as the German advance threatened and settled in the Dordogne region. Certain that he would soon be indicted for the defeat, he began preparing his defence. On 6 September the Vichy regime arrested him and placed him under house arrest at the Château de Chazeron alongside Léon Blum, Édouard Daladier, Paul Reynaud and Georges Mandel. After a transfer to the Château de Bourassol, he was moved to the Fort du Portalet in the Pyrenees on 12 November 1941. During this detention he underwent a lasting religious transformation and at the same time worked systematically on a defence of his own conduct.
The Riom Trial was held before the Supreme Court of Justice, created by a decree Pétain issued on 30 July 1940, as an attempt by the Vichy regime to prove that the leaders of the Third Republic had caused the defeat of 1940. The period examined ran from the Popular Front government of 1936 to Paul Reynaud's cabinet, and the trial, supported by the Nazis, had the secondary aim of showing that responsibility for the war rested with France rather than with Hitler. More than 400 witnesses were called. Gamelin answered four examinations by the investigating magistrate in writing and sent nearly 2,500 pages of notes, yet when the trial opened on 19 February 1942 he maintained complete silence out of a refusal to recognise the court's right to try him.
His silence had the effect of passing responsibility to the politicians. Although the charges of inadequate war preparation were framed to exclude the period of military operations from September 1939 to June 1940, the defendants set out to show that responsibility for the defeat lay mainly with failures of the French general staff. As the Germans grew irritated by the conduct of the trial, it was suspended in April 1942 and formally ended on 21 May 1943.
On 31 March 1943 the Germans arrested Gamelin and transferred him to a lodge near Buchenwald, and in May he was moved to Castle Itter in Tyrol. When the French VIP prisoners were freed in the Battle of Castle Itter in May 1945, he reached Le Bourget Airport on 8 May. After the war he recovered the archives he had secured in June 1940 and began writing his memoirs, publishing the three volumes of Servir in 1946 and 1947. In them he justified his actions and shifted responsibility for the defeat onto his subordinates, acknowledging none himself; from publication and for a long time afterwards they were received with severe criticism. He died of a cerebral haemorrhage on 18 April 1958 after a fall on 22 January, and the government refused him an honour guard or a mass at the Cathedral of Saint-Louis-des-Invalides.