Abstract
In July 1939, when the French military discovered the possibility of breaking Enigma thanks to revelations from the Polish Cipher Service, it came as a complete surprise. Although the French secret services had known about the German machine for almost ten years, the military cryptologists based in Paris had quickly concluded that it was impossible to break it. Only the forced exile of Polish mathematicians in France after the 1939 campaign enabled the French to decipher Enigma from January 1940 until the June defeat. While the story of the Polish and British cryptological successes is now well known through academic and mainstream literature, the French failure has received virtually no attention until now. Using unpublished archives held at the Defense Historical Service in Vincennes, this study analyzes the reasons for this fiasco and paints a picture of French military cryptanalysis in the 1930s, quite different from the past success of French codebreakers in the First World War.
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