With the defeat of France in June 1940, production of tanks and other armoured vehicles for the French army stopped. Some vehicles were produced for use by the Germans, but in the main, French factories were used largely for maintenance and conversion of French vehicles for the German Wehrmacht. Emulating what Germany had done after the First World War, French engineers worked on technical improvements by hiding them in seemingly innocent approved projects as disparate as a trolleybus, a desert tractor for use in Africa and a tracked snow blower intended for use in Norway by the Kriegsmarine. With the liberation of much of France, including Paris, by August 1944, the French government wanted to return to its pre-war importance and felt that only by contributing to the industrial war effort directly could France regain her position as an important world power. The French wanted to re-start tank production, but ran into the problem of obsolescence - virtually all pre-war French tanks were obsolete and not suitable for use against later German designs. Looking for an area to exploit, the French decided that a heavy tank project would be the most useful with their limited capabilities, since the Allies had little that compared with the late war German tanks like the Panther and Tiger II. It was also important to keep the tank designers busy to maintain the capability to design tanks, since engineers would leave if there was no new design work.
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