To Lose a Battle (7 page)

Hopes for Reparations

When the Budget had been postponed in December 1918, the Minister of Finance, Louis-Lucien Klotz (according to Clemenceau ‘the only Jew who knows nothing about money’), made it clear that he expected France’s budgetary deficits to be redeemed then and thenceforth by German reparations. At the Peace Conference, France had estimated her total war damages at 209,000 million gold francs, while the overall claims of the Allies amounted to some 400,000 million. But British Treasury experts reckoned that the most that could be squeezed out of Germany would be 75,000 million. With the British showing marked distaste for the whole subject from the outset, most bitter discord had surrounded the talks on reparations at Versailles, a discord that certainly did not go unobserved beyond the Rhine. Finally – and fatally – the sum to be paid by Germany was left open for future negotiation. It was as an open
sore that the issue of reparations remained open, gaining little for France but ill-will. In 1923 Germany defaulted on her payments, and France occupied the Ruhr to force her to pay. Britain, seeing political ambition behind the financial pretexts (and indeed there were nationalist Frenchmen who openly expressed hopes that the occupation might prove permanent) dissociated herself. From the ensuing industrial breakdown resulted the final collapse of the German mark. Down in Bavaria an angry unknown Austrian acquired his first national publicity. Throughout Germany a legacy of lasting resentment was created, as well as a few martyrs of whom Hitler would later make excellent capital. Relations with Britain became chronically estranged, and would hardly regain their former cordiality before the eve of the second world crisis, while in France herself the franc threatened to run after the Reichsmark. On being forced to retreat from the Ruhr, the illusion of France’s power in the post-war world received its first serious shock.

Reparations, with the international hostility they caused, did more than anything else to clear the way for the Second World War. They certainly did not result in balancing France’s Budget, as Klotz and his successors had hoped. In fact, out of all the international transactions intertwining reparations with the repayment of war debts in the 1920s, Germany probably gained more than France. During the first half of the 1920s, seven different Ministers of Finance, following on each others’ heels, failed to put France’s house in order. Although the return of Raymond Poincaré in 1926 brought France an almost miraculous three-year period of quasi-stability (as well as prosperity), in the seventeen months after his retirement in 1929 another five governments came and went. France’s financial dilemma extended itself into the 1930s, bringing down government after government, rendering impossible any consistent foreign policy – let alone any policy of reconciliation with Germany – bedevilling the Third Republic throughout the remainder of its existence, and finally hamstringing it when the necessity to rearm confronted France with desperate urgency.

Lack of Men and Ideas

‘The means by which Providence raises a nation to greatness are the virtues infused into her great men.’ So said Burke in his memorial to Pitt. By the end of the 1920s it was painfully apparent that the political being of the Third Republic was suffering from a grave deficit of great men, as much as it was of great ideas. Clemenceau had been rapidly dispatched, in much the same manner as the British nation was to deal with its warlord in 1945 – ‘
passé le péril, maudit le saint’.
Briand was tottering, Painlevé ageing, while in the same year that both Clemenceau and Foch died, 1929, ill-health forced Poincaré from the political scene. After the ceremony solemnizing the liberation of Strasbourg in 1918, he had been heard to sigh ‘Now I can die.’ Despite his own remarkable resurrection in 1926, the overtones of Poincaré’s remark were loaded with a double significance. With the return of Alsace-Lorraine, the supreme motivating and uniting ideal had been removed from French politics. Where was there now a Holy Grail worth questing and fighting for? Balancing the Budget was hardly a substitute. At the same time, Poincaré’s sigh echoed the psychological lassitude that was increasingly to beset French politics, later to be compounded with the physical consequences of France’s terrible war losses; for among these, the one category bled whiter than all the rest comprised the liberal professions (of the total mobilized, 23 per cent had been killed), the source which should have supplied the new Clemenceaus and Poincarés. In her autobiography,
The Prime of Life
, Simone de Beauvoir tells of a Dr Lemaire, who, on returning from the front where he had operated on hundreds of wounded under the most sickening conditions, ‘took to his bed and never got up again’. How many of France’s young intellectuals lucky enough to survive the trenches and who should now be taking over the reins of government, had, like Dr Lemaire, simply slumped within themselves, mentally and morally drained?

The left-wing challenge immediately following the end of the war was succeeded in France by a brief phase of deceptive parliamentary stability. Thoroughly alarmed by fears of the
Bolshevik menace, the bourgeois parties had rallied together to form a right-of-centre
Bloc National Républicain.
At the elections of November 1919, the
Bloc
swept into power, winning nearly three-quarters of the seats in the Assembly, and furnishing France with the most right-wing parliament she had known since 1876. Meanwhile, the Left wing seemed to be tearing itself apart by internal divisions. During their congress at Tours in December 1920, the Socialist Party had split into the new
Parti Communiste Française
– uncompromising devotees of the Soviet Revolution – and the more moderate Socialists calling themselves the
Section Française de la II
^e
Internationale Ouvrière
(S.F.I.O.). This was followed, in 1921, by a similar split within the trade unions from which emerged the dissident
Communist Confédération Générale du Travail Unitaire
(C.G.T.U.), obedient to every instruction from Moscow and pledged to total war against management, in contrast to the more moderate line pursued by the old
Confédération Générate du Travail
(C.G.T.). Until the great reunion under the Popular Front of 1936, Communist would chastise Socialist, the C.G.T.U. would revile the C.G.T. Short-sightedly, employers and bourgeois rejoiced at this rift in the left-wing camp, and were encouraged by its apparent weakness to backtrack on essential social reforms, thereby building up for the future an explosive reserve of grievances and ill-will.

Expressing his fundamental mistrust for the League of Nations, Clemenceau once remarked: ‘If you want to have a new spirit between nations, start by introducing a new spirit at home.’ In fact, post-war French politicians swiftly showed an instinct to return to the old spirit of the Third Republic – only worse. Before the war, issues had at least been relatively clear-cut and simple; hardy perennials such as anticlericalism and the Dreyfus Case helped define boundaries between parties, and there was always the supreme polarizing force of Alsace-Lorraine. Now revenge –
la revanche
– was fulfilled, and anticlericalism virtually a dead duck; issues were blurred and complex, and there was this mounting shortage of strong wills and clear minds capable of guiding their parties in the search for a coherent programme. Like amoebae, parties divided and
redivided within themselves. Politicians became subject to the pull of the rapidly growing numbers of pressure groups all acting upon Parliament, and for many self-interest came, in the absence of any other grander motive, to be their guiding star. With the collapse of each successive government, it proved just that much harder (especially after Poincaré had gone) to create a majority with any promise of stability. A mad game of musical chairs ensued, to be played at a giddier and giddier rate until Hitler’s Panzers finally stopped the music.

Though France’s governmental instability in the 1920s was principally provoked by discord over internal matters, such as the Budget, it was upon her external policy – particularly towards Germany – that this had the most baneful effects. The overriding practical purpose of the Versailles Treaty had been to guarantee the security of France, to prevent her from ever again being swamped by the Teutonic hordes. To this end the Germans were required by the Treaty to disband their General Staff, to reduce their Army in perpetuity to a militia of only 100,000 men, and forbidden tanks, heavy artillery or aircraft. Under the separate treaties of St Germain and Trianon, the Hapsburg Empire had been broken up into a row of small nations so as to deprive Germany of any powerful potential ally in Central Europe; and it was hoped that these Poles, Czechs, Yugoslavs, Hungarians and Roumanians would all show their gratitude by remaining constant allies of France. By augmenting French industry at the cost of Germany’s it was reckoned that reparations would help erase the traditional disparity between the economic power of the two countries. Finally, to secure her vulnerable eastern frontier, France had been granted a footing in Germany’s Rhineland. But here she had got less than she wanted. Foch had declared: ‘If we do not hold the Rhine permanently, no neutralization, or disarmament, or any kind of written clause can prevent Germany… from sallying out of it at will.’ In the future, he added prophetically, there would not be time for the arrival of Anglo-American aid to save France from military defeat. But Lloyd George and President Wilson had thrown up their hands in horror, exclaiming that they could not countenance annexations
by France that would only create another Alsace-Lorraine. In the end, France had had to be satisfied with the permanent demilitarization and a temporary occupation of the left bank of the Rhine.
⁴
Foch boycotted the signature of the Treaty, grumbling in disgust and with some accuracy: ‘This is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty years.’

As the realities of the post-war world proceeded systematically to destroy France’s illusion that she was capable of maintaining the peace of Europe, so her leaders were beset by mounting anxiety that the provisions of Versailles could at best offer her only partial and temporary security. In the background there stood constantly the one unalterable fact of life from which they could never avert their gaze: even with the addition of Alsace-Lorraine’s 1,800,000 inhabitants and the effects upon Germany’s population of her territorial losses, there were in 1919 still only 39 million Frenchmen compared with 59 million Germans. Moreover, Germany sustained a vigorously expanding birth-rate, whereas that of France was static, so that even by 1931 she had still barely made good her war casualties. This was the one fundamental, constant factor at the back of France’s European policy throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s.

But because of her chronic state of governmental instability she found herself incapable of facing this problem with any consistent strategy of her own. One moment she would show herself bent on grinding down the Germans by marching into the Ruhr; the next, she was offering the olive branch of reconciliation. She would vaunt the supremacy afforded by the offensive might of the French Army, then hide herself behind a twentieth-century Great Wall of China. She would appear to place her faith in the League of Nations, while with the other hand she endeavoured to hem Germany about by alliances with the new East European buffer states, although it was all too doubtful whether any combination of these could ever replace the weight of the Russian behemoth, France’s defaulting ally now engrossed in the dream of Marxism and the nightmare of civil war. Even during the most hopeful post-war
period of the Briand–Stresemann entente, which stretched intermittently from 1925 to 1929, attacks from the Right and lack of support on the Left forced Briand again and again to renege on his declared aims of Franco-German rapprochement. Finally, in 1929, when Premier for the eleventh time, Briand proposed from the tribune of the League of Nations a European Federation embracing Germany. It was a grandiose ideal a generation, alas, ahead of its time, and Briand was promptly overthrown by the French nationalists. Almost simultaneously came the death of Stresemann, the Weimar Republic’s most inspiring and inspired leader, and possibly the one man capable of stemming the rising tide of Nazism. Shortly before he died, exhausted and disillusioned, Stresemann summed up his dealings with France: ‘I gave and gave and gave until my followers turned against me… If they could have granted me just one concession, I would have won my people. But they gave nothing… That is my tragedy and their crime.’

In actual fact, by the end of the first post-war decade France had made substantial concessions; she had, for instance, agreed to withdraw her troops from the Rhineland five years ahead of the specified time. But her concessions were so hedged about with the reservations imposed by the waverings of her diverse governments that, in German eyes, they bore no signs of genuine magnanimity or forward-looking statesmanship; rather they seemed acts of weakness and irresolution, forced upon France by her dissident allies or by the
force majeure
of external events. As the 1930s opened, Briand lamented with bitterness that despite all recent concessions made on reparations, nothing had diminished Germany’s ill-will. By 1931 Germany was like the genie in the bottle, who, instead of showing gratitude to his innocent liberator, slew him by way of requital for his prolonged sufferings.

Now in the midst of France’s perennial game of legislative musical chairs, there burst the malignant, irreconcilable figure of Hitler.

Chapter 2

‘Thank God for the French Army’

Against an army sailing through the clouds neither walls nor mountains nor seas could afford any security.

SAMUEL
JOHNSON
,
Rasselas

‘Thank God for the French Army,’ cried Winston Churchill before the Commons on 23 March 1933. It was two months after the coming to power of Hitler. Few statements by Churchill outraged even Tory opinion more than this one. All round the House, he observed looks ‘of pain and aversion’. For it was also the year in which, having reduced her own arms expenditure to its all-time low for the inter-war period, Britain was urging France to follow suit. Preoccupied with the row over Larwood’s body-line bowling in the Test Match against the Australians, the yo-yo craze, trunk murders and the amorous successes of the Rector of Stiffkey,
¹
Britain had assumed a progressively detached attitude towards Europe’s problems. The emotional view of the Great War as a glorious crusade had been widely replaced by the doubts voiced by Lloyd George when he declared: ‘We all blundered into war’, and France’s role in leading Britain into this supreme blunder seemed to be illuminated with ever-increasing clarity. British public opinion, shocked at accounts by the Spenders and Isher-woods of starving, ricket-ridden children growing up in a Germany apparently broken by France’s avarice for reparations, had, unlike the French, ceased to regard Germans as the eternal enemy.
²
By and large it had lapsed back into that normal, healthy Anglo-Saxon
status quo ante
of mistrusting
all French designs, a spirit of the age which, as late as July 1934,
The Times
epitomized with its forecast: ‘In the years that are coming, there is more reason to fear for Germany than to fear Germany.’ It was the vision of the huge French Army, still presumptively the most powerful in the world, constantly poised over European affairs, which alarmed Britons, among whom, in praising it, Winston Churchill stood for only a dissident minority.