"I lived and worked in France for a good many years, beginning in 1925 when the country was not only the greatest power on the continent of Europe but, to me at least, the most civilized and enlightened. In the ensuing years I watched with increasing apprehension the Third Republic go downhill, its strength gradually sapped by dissension and division, by an incomprehensible blindness in foreign, domestic, and military policy, by the ineptness of its leaders, the corruption of its press, and by a feeling of growing confusion, hopelessness, and cynicism (Je m'en foutisme) in its people. And though at the beginning of the 1930s I left for assignments elsewhere, I returned frequently to Paris throughout the decade and thus was able to keep in touch with the deterioration one could see - or at least feel - all around."
- William L. Shirer, The Collapse of The Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940
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