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> No French merchant shipping is to leave harbor and all merchant ships outside of France are to be recalled or sent to neutral ports until further notice. No French aircraft is to leave the ground; airdromes are to be under German or Italian control. All French radio stations are to stop operation. The Government is to prevent the transfer of valuables and stocks abroad. The French Government is to facilitate the transport of merchandise between Germany and Italy across unoccupied territory.
> The armistice will continue in effect until the conclusion of a final peace treaty.
It can be denounced at any moment if Germany decides that France has not lived up to its provisions.
The Second Armistice. From Compiégne the four tired French delegates drove to Munich, where Hitler and Mussolini had agreed to their joint peace terms (TIME. June 24). There they spent the night. Next day German planes carried them to Rome to hear Italy's conditions.
They were received at the null Villa Incisa, twelve miles from Rome, by Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano, Chief of Staff Marshal Pietro Badoglio, Admiral Domenico Cavagnari and General Francesco Pricolo. Although acceptance of Italy's conditions was inevitable, it took the delegates 24 hours to study the terms and discuss them with Bordeaux. Meanwhile the armies still fought.
At 7:15 p.m., Italian summer time (which is the same as German), two days after the armistice with Germany, General Huntziger and Marshal Badoglio signed the second armistice.
The End. At 1:35 a.m., German and Italian summer time, June 25, 1940, fighting ended in France. "In humility," proclaimed Adolf Hitler, "we thank God for His blessing. I order the beflagging of the Reich for ten days, the ringing of bells for seven days." France proclaimed a day of mourning.
France had not only been defeated in battle; her institutions had been discredited. Said Le Petit Gironde of Bordeaux: "Thus came the end of 20 years of errors and faults. We shall not say of crimes, since we still believe that those who have brought us to this pass were merely ignorant and blind—but they have drawn us into an adventure that dumbs us with stupor." So shattered was France's strength, so humbled her prestige, that a greater miracle than Germany's rise after Versailles would be needed ever to restore them.
The best that Frenchmen could hope for was to be allowed to live in peace in Adolf Hitler's Europe. And in Hitler's Europe France faced an unknown future, blaming for the past, not Hitler, but her own people and leaders who had let slip through their fingers the heritage of Louis XIV.
*Assassinated Aug. 26, 1921, by two German veterans to avenge the Armistice.