After following the retreat to Dunkirk, and the evacuation by sea of thousands of British and French soldiers, Chapter 4 examines the impact of Weygand’s command. Weygand’s organization of his so-called “hedgehogs” on the Aisne supposedly revived French resolve and resilience. In fact, examination of the archives reveals that these “hedgehogs” were improvized and most collapsed quite quickly. Second, more concerned with an imaginary communist uprising in Paris rather than prolonging French resistance to an inexorable German advance, Weygand’s defeatism and fear of popular insurrection became a major catalyst in France’s decision to request an armistice. The chapter concludes with a summary of the maneuvers and calculations in the French cabinet and High Command that scuppered the opportunity to fight on from the colonies and solidified support for the armistice.

This chapter tackles the dilemmas of French defense planning in a factious Europe, increasingly divided by ideology, with a French population haunted by the sacrifices of the Great War, and the deep political divisions within France brought to the surface in 1936 with the election of the Popular Front government. A coherent defense scheme proved difficult to agree on in a military roiled by inter- and intra-service rivalries, under the uncertain direction of commander-in-chief General Maurice Gamelin and defense chief Édouard Daladier. As international conditions in Europe deteriorated, France was in a poor posture to surmount them, in the front line against a populous, powerful, and rearming Germany, led by the bombastic and belligerent Hitler. With a Soviet alliance off the table, this left as potential alliance partners a constellation of quarreling Eastern European nations, or Great Britain, in the hands of conservatives whose policy until 1938 was one of “limited liability” in a continental conflict. This situation required France to rely at least initially on its own military forces. One of the arguments of post-war historians was that the Third Republic, and in particular the Popular Front, did little to shore up French defense. In fact, that was not true. While the Maginot Line had absorbed a large share of the defense budget in the 1930s, the Popular Front had expended a great deal of money to modernize the French Air Force and create one of the world’s largest tank armies, despite the risk of capital flight, inflation, and the sacrifice of much of the social agenda of the French left. But defense modernization hit two snags. The first was a lack of government-directed coordination, which joined outmoded plant and industrial practices to put ambitious production quotas out of reach. The second was that this armament upgrade was bestowed on a multifaceted, Balkanized military organization whose leadership lacked a coherent defense vision for inter-arm and inter-service cooperation. It was with a military force that was modernizing in a piecemeal and improvized way that France plunged into war.

Operation Torch, the 8 November 1942 Anglo-American landings in French North Africa (AFN), strengthened and ballooned the Mediterranean into a major “Second Front” and put the Anglo-Americans on the strategic offensive until the war’s end. Torch also crystallized the contradictions of Vichy’s wartime posture, and dispelled all ambiguity of “the order to defend against whomever.” The collapse of the Vichy formula of a French Army surviving within a sovereign, neutral France, an open invitation to Axis forces to enter Tunisia and Constantine, and the scuttling of the French High Seas Fleet at Toulon confirmed France’s descent to the status of a second-, if not third-tier power. Going forward, Torch removed any incentive for the Germans to cease to meddle in French internal politics, and ironically accelerated Vichy collaboration. Torch became the first instance in which resistance was integrated into operational planning. The Darlan deal alienated the resistance in France and drove them into the arms of de Gaulle, making it virtually impossible for the Allies to jettison the nettlesome French Leader. AFN supplied both a geopolitical “trampoline” to advance the Allies’ strategic agenda and a fragile venue for France’s resurrection. The French reaction to the Anglo-American invasion was undermined in part by confused command arrangements in AFN, made more complex by Darlan’s fortuitous presence in Algiers. This chapter traces the tortuous hesitations of the French command in Algiers and Rabat, which allowed Axis forces to gain a foothold in Tunisia. The so-called “Darlan deal” struck between Darlan and Eisenhower to cease French resistance in AFN was to have far-reaching consequences. In the wake of Torch, all the accouterments of Vichy independence disappeared – the zone libre, the empire, the armistice army, and the fleet.

The Epilogue traces the complex afterlife of gas masks for civilians in five ways: in popular culture and memory of the Second World War; as a sign of protest against government regimes and in favor of social justice and democracy; as an emblem of the antiwar movement especially during the outbreak of the Iraq War in 2003; as an indicator of living during a climate emergency; and in relationship to the face masks of the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Starting with popular memories of the civilian gas masks of the Second World War, this chapter argues that the emergence of this singular, material object signals the arrival of the civil defense state and its accompanying militarization of civilian life. It reveals the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of The Age of the Gas Mask, and shows how the gas mask connects the histories of both world wars, of combatants and civilians, of men and women, of metropole and colony, of the state and the individual, thus shedding new light on total war.

While civilians in the metropole had mixed responses to concerted efforts to urge them to carry their gas masks, popular culture continued to make the gas mask an object of humor as well as something to manage panic or fear. As the war continued, new questions emerged that showed the limits of the gas mask’s reach, notably who was responsible for providing gas masks for internees in camps on the Isle of Man or for colonial subjects in places ranging from Aden to India to Singapore to the West Indies. Those planning for civil defense had not considered provisions for those in Britain’s extensive empire, and those in the colonies came to treat imperial civil defense with ambivalence. As Britain’s access to its overseas empire – and most importantly its source of rubber – shifted by the middle of 1942, so too did its instructions about gas masks. It now no longer asked its inhabitants to carry their gas masks everywhere but instead to ensure that they knew where they were and would keep them in good order. Despite poison gas not being deployed in massive attacks on civilians, as feared in the planning stages, the government continued to provide babies’ anti-gas protective helmets to all infants, and to inspect and repair gas masks for other ages throughout the war. At the war’s end, however, it decided not to collect these devices, just in case they could be of use in a future war.

Responding to imagined threats about chemical weapons delivered aerially, the British government intensified its efforts to create gas masks for everyone, testing fit and designs for those who might be unable to wear standard equipment. It did so in an atmosphere where popular culture continued to offer dire imaginings about poison gas’s potential for widespread destruction and where questions about anti-gas protection in the empire continued to emerge. By the start of 1938, the government’s air raid precautions department had developed extensive plans for how to distribute gas masks in case of an emergency across the United Kingdom. However, as it began to unveil such plans further, it encountered resistance from pacifists and antimilitarists as well as some grudging acceptance. The first significant test of these schemes came amid the Czechoslovakian or Munich Crisis in September 1938. On what became known as “Gas Mask Sunday,” the government asked its civilian inhabitants to line up across the nation to be fitted for gas masks. Although the outbreak of war was avoided, the limitations of anti-gas protection and the lack of suitable gas masks for all would propel this aspect of civil defense to the forefront as Britain’s entry into war seemed more likely than ever.

The civilian gas mask made total war seem normal. As an object that could remind wearers of an existential threat to their lives and families and livelihoods while being carried on the body, the gas mask could encapsulate both the warfare state and the welfare state of the twentieth century. A government that freely distributed civilian gas masks made it acceptable to factor its noncombatant population fully into the waging of modern war.