I don’t want to rain on the new Entente Amicale’s parade; it’s just that whenever we get cosy with the French, military disaster seems to follow.

In 1914, a decade after the signing of the Entente Cordiale, the War Office fell hook, line and sinker for the Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre’s doctrine of Attaque à outrance (attack to the extreme limits) and ludicrous Plan XVII. By April the following year we’d lost most of the regular army.

In 1939 we again sent an expeditionary force to France and in May 1940 we fell for the Conseil’s ‘Dyle Plan’. This involved abandoning the field defences constructed during the winter and advancing into Belgium to confront the German Blitzkrieg in the open, leaving behind the greater part of the French army on the Maginot Line – the sophisticated fixed fortifications along the Franco-German border, the supposed ‘continuous line of fire everywhere’. But for the miracle of Dunkirk, it would have cost us even more dearly than in 1914.

Kevin Passmore, professor of modern European history at Cardiff, writes:

In the ninth decade after this catastrophe, the Maginot Line remains a symbol of an expensively useless response to real or perceived danger. The myth is used to discredit policies, from Donald Trump’s wall on the Mexican border, through the US Army’s response to artificial-intelligence-powered weaponry and Ukrainian defences against the Russian invasion, to the EU’s proposed tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles.

The Maginot Line symbolises decadence, too; but the reality is more complex, he adds.

Marshal Foch despaired that the Treaty of Versailles was not a peace but a 20-year........

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