France before the German offensive, 1936–1940
Crowds fill the streets in 1936, French soldiers eat and wait, keep watch on the Rhine, and German soldiers send banners and balloons across the river.
Dense crowds move through a street beneath a garage sign, and men dance in a ring on a crowded square. Soldiers in berets eat soup and pour wine at long tables; soldiers in crested helmets keep watch behind sandbags on the bank of a broad river, gas masks hanging on hooks, peer through an observation telescope and doze in a trench. On the other bank German soldiers raise a banner and release balloons before a ruined Gothic front.
The strikes and factory occupations of 1936, after the election victory of the Popular Front, divided French society deeply. When war came in September 1939 the French army advanced a few kilometres into the Saarland and then waited for eight months behind the Maginot Line and the Rhine. German propaganda units used loudspeakers, posters and leaflets to tell the French soldiers that they were fighting for Britain.
Film Soldiers in a position by a river
Film Crowds in the streets of a French city
Film French soldiers at the mess table
Film German soldiers with a banner and balloons
Film A river, an observation telescope and a helmeted soldier
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