ABSTRACT
The circumstances of the Winter War crisis were improvised and dramatic, France's decisions finally dependent on a foreign government, itself seeking a suitable wartime civil-military modus vivendi. Historians with their "flickering lamp stumbling along the trail of the past" toward the European disaster of 1940 must pass through the thicket of the Russo-Finnish Winter War. The British government was not well informed on the fragile state of the French polity, the conditions, cross-tides, and disaffections of a country threatened again by invasion-vulnerable to propaganda that Britain was not pulling its weight. Gamelin was indeed alive to the importance of the British connection as his conduct in the "Royal Marine" affair showed. Reynaud's accusation that Britain had mobilized only one in forty compared with France's one in eight annoyed people in London. Successful at Finance, Paul Reynaud had borne much of the criticism for suspending, in the name of national defence, certain Front Populaire reforms, and imposing new taxes.
