[1] David Owen Kieft described him as "a good example of French condescension towards Belgium", noting that "whenever the Belgians asked questions about their obligations to France [under the Franco-Belgian Accord of 1920], Corbin wrote them off as a response to Flemish agitation and failed to recognize that they reflected also the genuine misgivings of professional diplomats and soldiers".

[17] The issue of the "Eastern Locarno" was considered so important that on 9–10 July 1934 a French delegation consisting of Barthou, Corbin, the Secretary-General of the Quai d'Orsay Alexis St. Léger, the Political Director René Massigli, and Roland de Margerie met in London with Simon, Vansittart, Sir Anthony Eden, Orme Sargent and Lord Stanhope.

[18] Concerned that Laval and Flandin were taking too short term of a view, Corbin rushed out to meet them when they landed in Dover and told them that the British public were terrified of the potential of strategic bombing to destroy entire cities.

[19] Laval and Flandin took up Corbin's suggestion for an "air pact" to ban strategic bombing, only to find that the British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald was a man whose mental capacity had seriously declined as he proved incapable of focusing his thoughts on any issue for a sustained period of time.

[23] Corbin in his dispatches to Paris made clear his personal preference for anti-appeasement Conservative MPs by often favorably mentioning Winston Churchill, Leo Amery, Alfred Duff Cooper, General Edward Spears, and Sir Anthony Eden together with the Francophile National Labour MP Harold Nicolson.

[22] Corbin noted in his dispatches to Paris a connection between Francophilia and an anti-appeasement stance by commenting that those MPs most inclined to be Francophiles like Churchill, Duff Cooper, Spears, Amery and Nicolson were the ones most likely to be opposed to appeasement.

[24] The Non-Intervention Committee consisted of Lord Plymouth who served as the chairman plus the ambassadors in London of France, Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Sweden and Portugal.

[25] At the next meeting of the Non-Intervention Committee on 7 May, Corbin submitted a list of "open towns" and politely accused aircraft flying for the Spanish Nationalists of bombing Guernica to avoid angering Ribbentrop.

[28] Francis Hemming, the Foreign Office clerk who served as the secretary to the Non-Intervention Committee, drafted a statement that Corbin objected to as he stated: "The general impression given is that the British initiative has been met only with doubts, which is not the case".

[30] Corbin in response stated: "it would be highly regrettable that in a situation...where we see development of war bring to the non-combatant population sufferings unacceptable to the civilised world, a scruple of this kind could stop us and prevent the Committee from showing its opinion".

[15] On 21 March 1938, Foreign Minister Joseph Paul-Boncour instructed Corbin to seek to "interest" the British in Eastern Europe, especially in the states of the cordon sanitaire: Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia.

[33] However, Paul-Boncour's strategy of deterrence diplomacy was abandoned with the fall of the government in Léon Blum in Paris on 10 April 1938 as the new premier, Edouard Daladier, appointed as his foreign minister, Georges Bonnet, who was opposed to the idea of France going to war for the sake of its allies in the cordon sanitarire.

In October 1938, Bonnet demoted René Massigli, the anti-appeasement Political Director of the Quai d'Orsay, by making him ambassador to Turkey while Pierre Comert of the Press Department was sent to the French embassy in Washington.

[40] Corbin was following his own agenda in his dispatches, as he wanted to convince Daladier and other decision-makers in Paris that the British public and government were starting to favour "firmness" towards the Reich as a way to undercut Bonnet's foreign policy of giving Germany a "free hand in the East" in exchange for leaving France alone.

[53] Given the traditional British opposition to any sort of security commitments in Eastern Europe, Corbin was astonished by the speech given by Prime Minister Chamberlain before the House of Commons on 31 March 1939 announcing the "guarantee" of Poland.

[54] Corbin reported to Bonnet on 4 April 1939: "Had I been told three weeks ago that during this time period the British government would have guaranteed the independence of Poland... that such a decision would have been cheered by a nearly unanimous Parliament and that no opposition to it would appear in the press or the public, I would have no doubt greeted such a forecast with an incredulous smile....

[71] On 2 August 1939, Bonnet told Sir Eric Phipps, the British ambassador in Paris who shared his support of appeasement, that his main enemies inside the Quai d'Orsay were St. Léger along with Corbin.

[73] As Italy was not ready for war in 1939, despite the offensive alliance known as the Pact of Steel, the Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano proposed an international conference for 5 September 1939, to be chaired by Mussolini, to discuss the crisis.

[78] However, at 4:10 pm on 1 September 1939, Corbin telephoned Bonnet to say that Lord Halifax had told him that Britain would not take part in the Italian plan for a peace conference unless Germany pulled out all of its forces from Poland immediately.

[82] Chamberlain told Corbin: "Public opinion unanimously considers the Italian offer to be trap, intended to favor the advance of the German armies into Poland by immobilising the Allied forces.

[81] With the backdrop of heavy thunderstorm, Corbin was summoned to 10 Downing Street on the evening of 2 September and discovered a scene of chaos with Chamberlain, Lord Halifax and Cadogan all telephoning Paris in attempts to get hold of Daladier, Bonnet or anybody else in the French government who might be able to tell them what was going on in France.

[80] Chamberlain also had Corbin speak to Simon to assure him that the reason for the delay in declaring war was the crisis in Paris, not because the prime minister was seeking a way to avoid honouring his commitments to Poland.

About 10 minutes after the king had announced that the United Kingdom was at war, Corbin received at the French Embassy two Labour MPs, Hugh Dalton and A. V. Alexander, both of whom accused France of avoiding its obligation to Poland.

On 28 March 1940, Corbin took part in an Anglo-French summit in London that issued the first public declaration of Allied war aims and signed a treaty under both Britain and France promised not to make a separate peace with Germany.

[97] After much lobbying, Raczyński and Corbin got Lord Halifax to issue a joint Anglo-French-Polish statement saying the countries held "the German government responsible for these crimes and they affirm their determination to right the wrongs inflicted on the Polish people".

[100] Corbin was with Jean Monnet on 16 June 1940 when the proposal for the union of France and United Kingdom was put to Charles de Gaulle, who had been sent to London by the French Premier Paul Reynaud.

[1][b] De Gaulle was staying at the Hyde Park Hotel and was shaving when Corbin and Monnet burst into his room to bring their plan for an Anglo-French union to keep France in the war.

[101] Churchill congratulated de Gaulle on signing the statement of union by saying that he was going to become the Commander-in-chief of all the Anglo-French forces in the world, but King George VI was not informed of the plan and was openly hostile when he heard about it.

On 23 June 1940, de Gaulle announced the formation of a French National Committee, which the British supported but did not recognize as a government-in-exile, unlike for Poland, Czechoslovakia, Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium.

[109] The British historian Nicholas Atkin described Corbin's attitude as ambivalent, as he was opposed in principle to the "New Order" but was also convinced for a considerable period of time, at least until 1942, that Germany was going to win the war and that resistance was futile.