Ambassador Bullitt and the Fall of France

In: World politics: a quarterly journal of international relations, Band 10, Heft 1, S. 63-90

Abstract

DIPLOMATS in our day rarely make much history, but in times of crisis they occupy unique vantage points from which to see it made. Such an observer was William Christian Bullitt, the American Ambassador to France from 1936 to 1940. Few other foreigners resident in Paris enjoyed so intimate a view of high politics during the last years of the Third Republic, and even fewer have left so lively and colorful a contemporary record of that period. Perhaps it is true that the bulky file of Bullitt's daily telegrams from Paris reveals more about Bullitt himself than about the state of France.1 Yet those cables, sprawling, scrappy, and personal though they may be, also illumine two significant aspects of Bullitt's era: the slow conversion of American leadership from isolationism to interventionism, and the disintegration and destruction of the Third Republic.