Pablo Picasso's massive painting Guernica is exhibited in the Spanish pavilion at the World Fair in Paris

French writer Jean-Paul Sartre succeeds with his first novel, La Nausée ('Nausea')

US author Henry Miller publishes in Paris Tropic of Capricorn, about his adolescence in New York

Igor Stravinsky moves to the USA from Paris, his home for nearly 30 years, and settles in Hollywood

The recent fate of Czechoslovakia prompts France and Britain to guarantee the security of Poland

A Franco-British military mission arrives in Moscow to persuade Stalin to join a pact in defence of Poland

Ribbentrop flies to Moscow to sign a Nonaggression Pact with Molotov, depriving Britain and France of an ally

Britain and France, receiving no answer from Hitler to their ultimatum over his attack on Poland, declare war on Germany

French troops rush to defend France's border with Germany, along the heavily fortified Maginot Line

A British Expeditionary Force (BEF) of about 150,000 infantry crosses the Channel to help defend France's border with Belgium

Roger Schutz establishes an ecumenical religious order at Taiz&eachute; in France

Schoolboys, out hunting, discover paintings in a cave at Lascaux after their dog falls into a hole

German troops force their way into France through the Ardennes, launching the Battle of France

The French rely on the heavily fortified Maginot Line to keep out the Germans, but they outflank it

A German army races west through northern France, aiming to cut off the Allied troops in Belgium

Fishing smacks and private launches are enlisted from southern England's coasts and rivers for a rescue mission across the Channel

German tanks reach the French coast at Abbeville, nine days after crossing the border from Germany

Evacuation begins from Dunkirk, and over the next ten days some 860 vessels ferry troops across the Channel

Some 340,000 British and French troops have by now been rescued from Dunkirk, but a million Allied soldiers are now prisoners of the Germans

Mussolini declares war on a France already on the verge of defeat

June 14 - a German army takes Paris and pushes on further south into the Rhone valley

Marshal Pétain, French hero from World War I, becomes France's prime minister

Marshal Pétain, as the new premier of France, immediately asks Germany for an armistice

Charles de Gaulle broadcasts to the French nation from London, declaring himself the leader of the Free French

Mussolini invades France in the last-minute hope of gaining some territory in the armistice settlement