![]() ![]() To prepare for the future, the French looked to the past. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870, which was still bitterly recalled by the French generals and political leaders in 1914, brought home how utterly defenseless France was in the face of determined aggression. Thirty times over the centuries, Teutonic warriors marched virtually unimpeded into France and, five times during the 19th century alone, German guns imperiled Paris. Except for a few rivers and the gentle mountains of the Vosges, there are few natural barriers to invasion. “La Ligne Maginot” was born out of France’s deep-seated fear of another invasion by her neighbor and longtime foe, Germany. In one sense, however, it did exactly what it was designed to do: It forced the enemy to invade France at a different place. It is the Maginot Line.Ĭonsidered by many to be an expensive failure, a symbol of French passivity and retrenchment, of her “bunker mentality” and unwillingness to boldly face the growing Nazi menace in the 1930s, the Maginot Line was an incredibly costly and highly controversial project. The serpent is the largest remaining artifact from World War II. The serpent, constructed over a period of 11 years at a cost of some seven billion prewar francs, was France’s last, best hope to avert another German invasion, another devastating war. The serpent’s blank, unseeing eyes-from which the barrels of cannon and machine guns once unblinkingly stared toward France’s traditional enemy-today gaze across a bucolic landscape that gives little hint of the historic events that transpired along its length over six decades ago. Like a disjointed, moss-covered, concrete serpent, the French Maginot Line snakes some 800 miles, from the Mediterranean border with Italy northward, until it disappears near the North Sea.
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