French Intelligence Assessments of the Nazi Threat, 1933-1939.

Many realist explanations of French and British appeasement policies in the 1930s, including our own, assume or imply that policy was closely informed by intelligence assessments. One potential threat to these interpretations is the possibility that instead of intelligence shaping policy, the policy preferences of political leaders may have shaped intelligence, either through the politicization of intelligence or perhaps through the motivated biases of political leaders. In an earlier paper we demonstrated that the reports of British intelligence agencies in the 1930s were not politicized. In this paper we turn to French intelligence assessments of Nazi Germany in the 1933-39 period. Our general finding is that French military intelligence was consistently accurate in its assessments of Nazi intentions, but that until 1938 it consistently overestimated German capabilities relative to those of France. In terms of the politics of intelligence, we find very little evidence of French military intelligence assessments being significantly shaped by pressure from top political leaders for "intelligence to please." We find some evidence, however, that French military leaders deliberately inflated assessments of German capabilities in struggles to increase military budgets after years of neglect, that top political leaders were aware of this, and that they discounted some of these estimates. At many critical times, however, French intelligence assessments had a decisive impact on French policy, including the shift towards increasing reliance on Britain in the mid-1930s and the shift towards a more confrontational policy toward Germany after the Munich conference in 1938. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]