Grandeur And Misery: France's Bid for Power in Europe, 1914-1940 PDF
Preview Grandeur And Misery: France's Bid for Power in Europe, 1914-1940
G R A N D E UR AND M I S E RY For my mother G R A N D E UR A ND M I S E RY France's bid for power in Europe 1914-1940 ANTHONY ADAMTHWAITE Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley www.bloomsbury.com/thegreatwar B L O O M S B U RY LONDON • NEW DELHI • NEW YORK • SYDNEY Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com/thegreatwar Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Pic First published in Great Britain in 1995 by Arnold, a division of Hodder Headline PLC © 1995 Anthony Adamthwaite All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. 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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: PB: 978-0-7131-6576-0 ePDF: 978-1-4725-7801-3 ePUB: 978-1-4725-7802-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog entry for this book is available from the Library of Congress Contents Illustrations, maps and tables vi Preface vii Acknowledgements x Chronology xi Presidents and ministers of France, (1914-1940) xviii 1 France and the World 1 2 Armageddon 16 3 Peace-making, 1919 40 4 The Price of Victory 64 5 A flawed response 77 6 Predominance, 1919-1924 89 7 Locarno, 1925 110 8 Indian summer, 1926-1931 124 9 Economics, armaments, decision-making 140 10 Ideology, opinion and foreign policy 162 11 Challenges, 1932-1936 183 12 War again, 1936-1939 201 Epilogue 224 Notes 232 Guide to further reading 253 Index 267 Illustrations, maps and tables Illustrations 1 'Does Daddy know that we won?' 41 2 'List me the English colonies' 80 3 'Your roast beef is overdone' 80 4 'The voice of the merchants of death' 170 5 'Here's what's in store for us' 213 6 'No thanks ... I'd rather "Live for France"!' 215 7 'And now, I'm coming - to work in France' 218 Maps 1 Diplomacy in Europe, 1914 17 2 Europe's frontiers, 1918-1937 60 3 The Defence of France, 1925-1940 150 4 Diplomacy in Europe, 1939 217 Tables Table 1 Long-term external investments 72 Table 2 Gold and foreign exchange holdings of the Bank of France 130 Table 3 Recovery from the Great Depression 141 Table 4 Military expenditure in France, Germany and Great Britain, 1930-1939, as a percentage of GNP and national income 145 Table 5 Armies and navies of the great powers in 1913 and 1932 149 Table 6 Opposing forces, September 1939 223 Preface W hy study French policy? Of course, the sub-plot of scandal and sleaze has a racy readability, half Feydeau farce, half Chevalier's Clochemerle: a senior politician duelling with an electoral rival; his wife shooting a newspaper editor in order to prevent publication of her love letters; a war minister trying to throttle a colleague in cabinet; a former finance minister, who condemned Germany for non-payment of reparations, arrested for fraud when his cheques bounced; a president of the republic streaking into a lake and alighting from trains in pyjamas. 'Publishers know they can sell any amount of books about France', wrote Nancy Mitford, 'in fact, France, like Love, is a certain winner on a title page.'* More seriously, the fall of France in 1940, along with Germany's two bids at continental hegemony, is one of the defining events in twentieth-century world politics. It proved decisive in shaping the pattern of international politics after the Second World War. 1940 was much more than a French humiliation; it ended four centuries of European primacy. The Japanese conquest of European colonial empires in Asia began the process of decolonization. Breaking Nazi Germany's hegemony required the intervention of the two great flanking powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Thus France's eclipse accelerated the rise of the superpowers and contributed to global Cold War rivalry. German occupation of western Europe provided an impetus for European integration. France's disappearance as an independent great power shaped British policy for the next twenty years, both underlining the necessity of a close Anglo-American alliance and demonstrating the unreliability of continental European allies. Don't Tell Alfred (London, 1980), p. 63. GRANDEUR AND MISERY France's fall was indeed, as David Reynolds argues, 'the fulcrum of the twentieth century'.* The debacle of 1940 cast a long shadow over French society. The defeat swept away the seventy-year-old Third Republic, unleashing a civil war of resisters v. collaborators; a renewal of the 'Franco-French War' of 1789. Hitler's vassal, the authoritarian Vichy regime headed by Marshal Philippe Petain, collaborated even to the extent of rounding up and deporting French Jews. In the settling of accounts that followed liberation in 1944, Petain received life imprisonment and his chief minister, Pierre Laval, was shot. Ten thousand collaborators were summarily executed. Even in the 1990s the French are still coming to terms with the Vichy past, particularly its anti- Semitism. As late as 1971 the persistence of the Resistance myth prevented the screening on French state TV of Marcel Orphuls' film The Sorrow and the Pity, depicting the extent of collaboration. How did the victorious great power of 1918 come to grief in less than a generation? In the post-mortems that followed 1940, guilty men abounded. France had been sold, betrayed and corrupted. The classic statement was Pertinax's (Andre Geraud) The Gravediggers of France (New York, 1944). As events receded, analysts tended to explain the collapse as the inexorable outcome of a cumulative moral and political disintegration, stemming from structural weaknesses: an ageing population, a diseased body politic, the blood-bath of 1914-18, social strife, the profound pacifism of the peasantry. William L. Shirer's The Collapse of the Third Republic (London, 1970) encapsulated this interpretation of the defeat. The consensus was that France had been an overambitious second-class power without the resources to stay in the race. Recently, however, a reappraisal has taken place. Analyses of 1940 now argue against determinism, stressing the contingency and chanciness of events. First and foremost, the defeat was a military defeat, largely explicable for military reasons. Contingency is the theme of this book. The argument is that there was nothing preordained or inevitable about France's performance as a great power in the years 1914-40. These years were not one long slide to disaster. Interwar France was not as shabby and stagnant as traditionally portrayed. If the Third Republic had ended in 1931, it would have been celebrated as a success. Many sections of French society were creative, adaptable and enterprising. In the 1920s the economy made a remarkable recovery from the war. Post-1945 renewal had its antecedents in the interwar years. Intellectual and cultural life flourished, as evidenced in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Andre Malraux, Roger Martin du Gard, Georges Bernanos and Louis- Ferdinand Celine. The Annales school, the most influential of *'1940: Fulcrum of the Twentieth Century', International Affairs 66, 2 (1990), p. 350. PREFACE IX twentieth-century historiography, dates from 1929 when Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch founded the journal Annales. A new assessment of French policy is long overdue. The opening up of archives in the 1970s breathed new life into the study of France's role, illuminating controversial episodes such as reparations, France's Rhineland policy, disarmament and appeasement. This book provides an overview for the student and general reader. In addressing the debates, themes and problems of the period I have sought to integrate the latest research, while at the same time presenting the material in a clear and ordered way so that it can be read by those coming fresh to the subject. Secondary sources have been supplemented by my own archival research. The focus is on the years 1914-31 because this period shaped the options for the 1930s. In David Lodge's novel, Changing Places, Professor Morris Zapp has the ambition to kill Jane Austen forever as a subject of criticism and research by dealing with each and every subject that could possibly arise out of reading her novels. I have no such ambition. This is not an exhaustive blow-by-blow account ot all aspects of French policy. The book's central theme is the fluidity and open-endedness of French policy. I have highlighted four features often overlooked or minimized: the role of statecraft, the attitudes and assumptions of the political elite, the deficiencies of the government machine, the failure to sell France. The mindsets and methods of movers and shakers like Tiger' Georges Clemenceau, Raymond Poincare and Edouard Herriot influenced France's performance as a great power much more than supposed. The key question addressed is whether France could have translated the treaty predominance of 1919 into a real hegemony? The crucial years for France were not the 1930s but 1919-24, when it had an opportunity to shape Europe's future. Questions are one thing, answers another. The record has important gaps. We have no French record of Poincare's talks with Tsar Nicholas II in July 1914; no French account of the Munich Conference of 1938; little documentation on the decision to devalue the French franc in 1936. For British policy after 1916 there is a plethora of sources, official and private. By comparison French governmental and private archives are meagre. Many foreign-ministry papers were lost or destroyed in World War II. British foreign office files are extensively minuted, French papers hardly at all. Third Republic cabinets did not keep a record of their deliberations. Moreover, politicians had no scruples about pocketing or destroying official files. Clemenceau warned historians to beware of documents and helped by leaving as few as possible. Aristide Briand as interior minister sent for his own police file and burnt it. Ex-premier Joseph Caillaux made off with Briand's tax records. Poincare conducted correspondence by hand, often keeping no copies of his letters. Memoirs only partly compensate for the lacunae. They are always tendentious and frequently mendacious. Petain wrote nothing, explaining that he had nothing to hide.
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