This is a really excellent study that coordinates the ebb and flow of French politics with the estimates of the German military threat by the officials responsible for intelligence work through the 1930s. What is most significant to Jackson is not the threat analysis of the French military, which was usually bleak, but the realities of the French political situation to which the assorted French governments had to respond. If there is a particular irony in all this it's that the nadir of French morale after the Munich accord rapidly turned around into conditional optimism, as the French leadership at that moment resolved to take action, if for no other reason that the only other option was abject submission to Hitler's hegemonic aims. If nothing else the lesson here is in terms of the limitations of intelligence as a factor of decision and the admission that there are times when one simply has no good options, and the French in the 1930s certainly didn't; not when confronted by a state bent on war almost for its own sake. ( )