In the Anglophone sphere, the stereotype of the French as cheese-eating surrender monkeys is not uncommon, and the swift fall of France, as well a Vihy collaboration, seemingly proves this assumption about the French. The American journalist William Shirer in particular helped popularize the picture of a French polity entering into the Second World War deeply divided and whose war effort was fatally undercut by both French Communists on the left and the French right, both of whom saw the Third Republic as a bigger threat than Hitler. This supposition lies on incredibly shaky ground and at best, a very skewed reading of the causes of French defeat in 1940.

The rumor that the French Communist Party (PCF) sabotaged France's war effort on orders of Moscow because of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is one that began almost as soon as the war began and grew in the postwar period. This theory overestimates the importance of Stalin and the Comintern influence upon PCF. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact created a great deal of confusion for the non-Soviet left and France was no exception. Many PCF officials expressed great hope in the revival of the politics of the Popular Front in between the 1 September and the Soviet invasion. Stalin lost an inordinate amount of prestige worldwide for his pact with Communism's nemesis and the USSR would only regain it after Barbarossa. Although the Republic outlawed PCF in September 1939, French Generals frequently would blame their misfortunes in 1940 upon Communist betrayals from within. For example, General Lafontaine attributed his unit's (the 55th Infantry Division) collapse due to a Communist fifth column, but the division's "organized panic" had more to do with its poor training and deployment. The only area where there was a sizable Communist subterfuge was in French industry, where some labor activists like Roger Rambard sabotaged military equipment. These tales found a wider audience in the later Cold War environment and magnified their scale and importance.

While there were some sympathies for fascism and anti-democratic politics in the 1930s, to ascribe French defeat to such a right-wing fifth-column is grossly misleading and absurd in many respects. Sympathy for fascism doesn't translate into lackadaisical or poor generalship. While there were many archconservatives within the French military leadership, it stands to follow that a military victory would be the best way to rekindle French national spirit. The fact is that many French generals fought quite hard in the 1940 campaign, but were frequently out of position and hobbled with a doctrine and a command structure that did not allow them to seize the initiative as the debacle unfolded.

Placing such importance on this internal factor inadvertently recapitulates a Vichy-era discourse on the causes of French defeat. Vichy's partisans often drew a heavy correlation between the Republic's alleged decadence and its ignominious defeat. This was both a blame-shifting tactic and an adjustment to the immediate political reality of German occupation. Not surprisingly, Jews, Communists, liberals and other sorts became the scapegoats for defeat. While these anti-democratic and illiberal sentiments predated the outbreak of hostilities, the magnitude of the defeat in 1940 allowed for a whole host of actors on the political margins to make their way into the corridors of power, and defeat made their ideas relevant.

The reasons for French defeat in 1940 were polyvalent and political division was only one factor. The swift speed of the German campaign often obscures some very hard fighting that took place. The French army did suffer an extreme amount of casualties and in places fought very hard. One German veteran of the Battle of Sedan compared the French tenacity at the village of Stonne thus: there are three battles I can never forget: Stonne, Stalingrad and Monte Cassino. The French leadership was very much a prisoner of its own doctrinal and strategic assumptions. They assumed that the best way to meet a German invasion was through a methodical counterattack, so they assumed they would have time to do so, which Guderian's panzers did not give them. Moreover, the French troops often lacked radios and communications to make such a massive coordinated counterattack possible.

Yet even with all of these problems, Fall Gelb was, in some respects a "near-run thing" to use Wellington's famous quip. At points in the campaign French resistance seemingly threatened to upset the entire German advance. For example, the commander of the 55th French Infantry division (the main French unit in Sedan), Pierre Lafontaine, was lethargic and waited for orders in light of the German advance. This was typical of French command tactics which emphasized immediately stopping the enemy followed up by a methodical clockwork operations. To paraphrase the official Bundeswehr study of the 1940 campaign, Lafontaine had everything he needed for a successful counterattack except an order from a superior. The Germans were just as awed by their own success in 1940 as the rest of the world. Planning for Fall Gelb was often fraught with tensions within OKH and OKW, a good number of generals did not think that Manstein's plan would work. The post-Gelb German attitude towards for the follow-up invasion of France proper, Fall Rot, alternated between elation over imminent victory and apprehension that another Miracle of the Marne or Valmy present itself.