This book is avail­able online from: QuestiaSchool.com.

by Pierre Cot
1944, Ziff-Davis, 432 pages

Pierre Cot’s book is a remark­able first-hand account of the sub­ver­sion of France by pow­er­ful domes­tic inter­ests, who saw polit­i­cal con­trol by their ide­o­log­i­cal allies (and car­tel busi­ness part­ners) in Ger­many as prefer­able to power-sharing with their own democratically-minded cit­i­zens. (Cot had been the French Min­is­ter of Avi­a­tion in the imme­di­ate pre-war period, and wit­nessed the delib­er­ate, suc­cess­ful attempts at weak­en­ing France’s abil­ity to resist the Nazis mil­i­tar­ily. The trai­tors who sub­verted French democ­racy then blamed the French col­lapse on their patri­otic polit­i­cal oppo­nents.) NB: Due to the wartime print and page lay­out, scan­ning this book proved overly dif­fi­cult and time con­sum­ing. For­tu­nately, it is avail­able online in its entirety.

A scathing and out­spo­ken cri­tique, Cot’s words pre­fig­ure recent events in the U.S. as well.

“Enough evi­dence has been pub­lished already to prove that France was stabbed in the back by those who saw in Hitler the new St. George who would slay the Com­mu­nist dragon. When Pierre Lazareff, for­mer editor-in-chief of Paris Soir (the French news­pa­per with the widest cir­cu­la­tion), reports roy­al­ists as say­ing: ‘We need the defeat to wipe out the Repub­lic;’ when Elie Bois, for­mer edi­tor of the Petit Parisien (the most influ­en­tial polit­i­cal news­pa­per), reports great indus­tri­al­ists admit­ting to him, dur­ing the win­ter of 1939–1940, that a plot had been orga­nized to replace the demo­c­ra­tic regime by a ‘gov­ern­ment of author­ity’ and that this plot pre­sup­posed a Nazi vic­tory; when Ana­tole de Monzie writes, in a book passed by the cen­sor of the Vichy gov­ern­ment, that Mar­shal Pétain said in Feb­ru­ary, 1940: ‘They will appeal to me in the third week in May’; when Genevieve Tabouis tells of the work accom­plished in the Parisian salons by the Fifth Column’s ‘brigade mondaine’; when Henri de Ker­il­lis, for­mer offi­cer and nation­al­ist deputy, exposes the inroads of the Fifth Col­umn in the con­ser­v­a­tive and mil­i­tary cir­cles which he knew; when Henry Tor­res reveals to us what was going on in the offices of the offi­cial pro­pa­ganda . . . we have every rea­son to accept their affir­ma­tions, which tally so per­fectly with the events. . . .”

Tri­umph of Trea­son, page 63