why did the maginot line cause the loss of france
Battle of France During the 1930s, the French had built the Maginot Line, fortifications along the border with Germany. The line was intended to deter a German invasion across the Franco-German border and funnel an attack into Belgium, which could then be met by the best divisions of the French Army. A war would take place outside of French territory avoiding a repeat of the First World War.[16][17] The main section of the Maginot Line ran from the Swiss border and ended at Longwy. The area immediately to the north was covered by the heavily wooded Ardennes region.[18] General Philippe Pétain declared the Ardennes to be "impenetrable" as long as "special provisions" were taken. If so, he believed that any enemy force emerging from the forest would be vulnerable to a pincer attack and destroyed. The French commander-in-chief, Maurice Gamelin also believed the area to be safe from attack, noting that it "never favoured large operations". French war games held in 1938, with the scenario of a German armoured attack through the Ardennes, left the military with the impression that the region was still largely impenetrable and that this, along with the obstacle of the Meuse River, would allow the French time to bring up troops into the area to counter an attack.[19]
The General Crisis The term was coined by English Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm in his pair of 1954 articles entitled "The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century" published in Past and Present, and cemented by his contemporary, Hugh Trevor-Roper, in a 1959 article entitled "The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century" published in the same journal. Hobsbawm discussed an economic crisis in Europe; Trevor-Roper saw a wider crisis, "a crisis in the relations between society and the State".[2] Trevor-Roper argued that the middle years of the 17th century in Western Europe saw a widespread break-down in politics, economics and society caused by a complex series of demographic, religious, economic and political problems. In this "general crisis", various events such as the English Civil War, the Fronde in France, the climax of the Thirty Years' War in the Holy Roman Empire and revolts against the Spanish Crown in Portugal, Naples and Catalonia were all manifestations of the same problem. The most important cause of the "general crisis",[3] in Trevor-Roperâ€™s opinion, was the conflict between "Court" and "Country"; that is between the increasingly powerful centralizing, bureaucratic, sovereign princely states represented by the court, and the traditional, regional, land-based aristocracy and gentry representing the country. In addition, the intellectual and religious changes introduced by the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation were important secondary causes of the "general crisis". The "general crisis" thesis generated much controversy between those, such as the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who believed in the "general crisis" thesis but saw the problems of 17th-century Europe as being more social and economic in origin than Trevor-Roper would allow, and those who simply denied there was any "general crisis". Current historians interested in the General Crisis include Geoffrey Parker, who has authored a book on the subject.