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The Maginot Line ((フランス語:Ligne Maginot), ), named after the French Minister of War André Maginot, was a line of concrete fortifications, obstacles, and weapons installations that France constructed on the French side of its borders with Switzerland, Germany and Luxembourg during the 1930s. The line did not extend through to the English Channel because the French military did not want to compromise Belgium's neutrality. The line was a response to France's experience in World War I and was constructed during the run-up to World War II, shortly after the Locarno Conference that gave rise to a fanciful and optimistic "Locarno spirit". The French established the fortification to give their army time to mobilize in the event of attack, and allow French forces to move into Belgium for a decisive confrontation with Germany. The success of static, defensive combat in World War I was a key influence on French thinking. French military experts extolled the Maginot Line as a work of genius, believing it would prevent any further invasions from the east. While the Maginot Line was impervious to most forms of attack (including aerial bombings and tank fire) and had state-of-the-art living conditions for garrisoned troops, air conditioning, comfortable eating areas and underground railways, it proved strategically ineffective during the Battle of France. Instead of attacking directly, the Germans invaded through the Low Countries, by-passing the Line to the north. While the French and British officers at the time anticipated this, and carried out plans to form an aggressive front cutting across Belgium and theoretically connecting to the Maginot Line when Germany invaded Holland and Belgium, the French line was weak near the Ardennes forest since they considered it unlikely that the Germans would be able to traverse the rough terrain in this region. The German Army took advantage of this to split the French-British defensive front The Allied forces to the north were forced to evacuate at Dunkirk, leaving the forces to the south unable to mount an effective resistance to the German invasion and France surrendered in about six weeks. == Planning and construction == The defences were first proposed by Marshal Joffre. He was opposed by modernists such as Paul Reynaud and Charles de Gaulle who favoured investment in armour and aircraft. Joffre had support from Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain, and there were a number of reports and commissions organised by the government. It was André Maginot who finally convinced the government to invest in the scheme. Maginot was another veteran of World War I; he became the French Minister of Veteran Affairs and then Minister of War (1928–1932). In January 1923 after Germany defaulted on reparations, the French Premier Raymond Poincaré had French troops march in and occupy the Ruhr region of Germany in response. During the ensuing ''Ruhrkampf'' ("Ruhr struggle") between the Germans and the French that lasted until September 1923, Britain condemned the French occupation of the Ruhr, and a period of sustained Francophobia broke out in Britain, with Poincaré being vilified in Britain as a cruel bully punishing Germany with unreasonable reparations demands. The British—who openly championed the German position on reparations—applied intense economic pressure on France to change its policies towards Germany. At a conference in London in 1924 to settle the Franco-German crisis caused by the ''Ruhrkampf'', the British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald successfully applied strong pressure on the French Premier Édouard Herriot to make concessions to Germany. The British diplomat Sir Eric Phipps who attended the conference commented afterwards that: "The London Conference was for the French 'man in the street' one long Calvary as he saw M. Herriot abandoning one by one the cherished possessions of French preponderance on the Reparations Commission, the right of sanctions in the event of German default, the economic occupation of the Ruhr, the French-Belgian railroad ''Régie'', and finally, the military occupation of the Ruhr within a year".〔Sally Marks, "The Myths of Reparations" pages 231-255 from ''Central European History'', Volume 11, Issue # 3 1978 page 249.〕The great conclusion that was drawn in Paris after the ''Ruhrkampf'' and the 1924 London conference was that France could not make unilateral military moves to uphold Versailles as the resulting British hostility to such moves were too dangerous to the republic. Beyond that, the French were well aware of the contribution of Britain and its Dominions to the victory of 1918, and French decision-makers believed that they needed Britain's help to win another war; the French could only go so far with alienating the British.〔Young, Robert ''An Uncertain Idea of France'', New York: Peter Lang, 2005 page 20.〕 From 1871 onwards, French elites had concluded that France had no hope of defeating Germany on its own, and France would need an alliance with another great power to defeat the ''Reich''.〔Smith, Leonard; Audoin-Rouzeau, Steéphane, & Becker, Annette ''France and the Great War, 1914-1918'', Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 page 11〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Maginot Line」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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