Wow.
Are you saying that France, with the largest Army on the Continent, allowed itself to be bullied by one man, who happened to be the English PM?
That France had to retreat from the Ruhr? Because Chamberlain told them to?
What's that telling you about France?
Floppy ears is oversimplifying a lot. The French troops were far from a model of good behavior and their national policy was to steal everything industrial they could unbolt and ship back to France, much like the Russkiis did in 1945-50. Civil wars between the Freikorps and the Reds followed by national economic collapse in Germany post-WW1 resulted in the Germans being really ready to have someone just take charge, and while the rest of the world was booming economically Germany was heading down the crapper, with war debt around its neck to pull it quicker. Their economy recovered from the War long after everyone else's, followed in just a few years by the worldwide Great Depression. By the time it started to become clear that there were problems with the 'Strong man' plan, ol' Adolf was irrevocably in the driver's seat and had closed the gates he had played to get there.
For their part the French were bled white in the War, and had a vindictive outlook that was certainly understandable if ultimately counterproductive and fatal to their own cause. They did not have a civil war between left and right after the war, but they proably would have been better off if they had, because they were chronically incapable of picking a direction and staying with it. The only thing their government could really grasp consistently was that they really wanted to get back at the Germans for the rest of their lives but also that the French public had no real stomach (or voting political support) for any plan that might involve extended ground combat anywhere, especially against Germany and without substantial support from allies.
Chamberlain's ideas were not as insane as the ultimate course of events makes them look in hindsight, if he had been dealing with anyone but a megalomaniac. The Nazi party had peaked short of a majority before Hitler was able to consolidate power, and at the time it probably looked like internal German political forces would eventually constrain him once demands that would actually unite the German people behind him were defuzed. Chamberlain failed to grasp that Hitler had effectively short-circuited all such constraints by the unique (and totally foreign to Anglo-Saxon tradition) idea of holding more than one political appointment at the same time and then abolishing one of the positions as 'No longer necessary.' This little trick should have told everyone all they needed to know about Hitler, but relatively little attention seems to have paid to it at the time by even his die-hard opponents.
