William Shirer was one of the most famous American journalists of the mid-twentieth century. From the 1920s to the 1940s, he worked in France, India, and Germany, first as a newspaper correspondent and later as a broadcaster for CBS radio. He reported from Berlin in the late 1930s and covered, on site, the surrender of France to the Nazis in the spring of 1940.  His book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a history based partly on first-hand observations, became a best-seller in 1960. This course will study selections from his 1969 sequel to that book, a history of France from 1870-1944 called The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940.  We will read and discuss portions of the book which analyze France's sectarian and polarized politics in the 1930s, its propagandistic press elements, and the low morale and strategic incoherence affecting its responses to the Nazis before and after France declared on Germany in September 1939. Shirer's account rivals a good novel for drama, often offering surprising or debatable insights about France in 1939-1940; we will also occasionally check Shirer's views against other historians.