France and the Nazi Threat: The Collapse of French Diplomacy 1932-1939 (17 page)

After the war, he was the chairman of the committee of the Treaty of Versailles to parliament, after which he was appointed minister of national defense under Briand and Poincaré from 1921 to 1924. An influential senator during the Cartel des Gauches period; his last cabinet post had been as minister of justice under Poincaré from 1926 to 1929.

When Doumergue put together his government in February 1934, Barthou was ready to serve.
⁶
Why was he appointed to foreign affairs? Probably because of his long experience and his patriotism.

He remains mysterious and difficult to assess as a man. He had many enemies.
L’Action française
had singled him out for years
⁷
and Sennep, a caricaturist, had published a vicious little book in which Barthou was
accused of sexual perversions and portrayed with a dog’s tail. That kind of pamphlet discredited its author more than the victim. A more serious accusation was that of political infidelity. At the end of the nineteenth century, the radicals dubbed him “the traitor,” because he had provoked the fall of the Brisson cabinet in 1898. The socialists didn’t like him any better. Jaurès accused him of corruption, saying he had been paid by the
Compagnie des chemins de fer du Midi
. They fought in a duel and an “honor jury” vouched for his complete honesty. Still, the communists hated him even more. He had violently attacked the Soviets at the Genoa Conference of 1922 and, as Poincaré’s minister of justice, had prosecuted several communists: Jacques Doriot, Marcel Cachin, André Marty, Jacques Duclos, and Paul Vaillant-Couturier. His allegiance to Poincaré, whose ideas he by and large shared, doesn’t seem to have been unfailing.
⁸

Louis Barthou was a member of the
Alliance Démocratique
, a moderate republican party, founded in 1902 and favorable to the “Bloc des Gauches” of the time. Above all, he was a liberal and a patriot
⁹
with little interest in social issues. He admired Paul Déroulède and was part of a generation that was deeply hostile to Germany. “We must enforce the treaty,” he said on September 2, 1919. “We must do so in a spirit of fairness but also with unbending rigor.” He also used the phrase, “This peace is a vigilant peace.”
¹⁰
Therefore, he showed little enthusiasm for the politics of Briand. “I would have liked some changes, a slower pace and some precautions.”
¹¹

To complete the portrait of the man we should point to his great culture. He dedicated his fortune to book collecting and spent his leisure time writing. Diderot, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Musset, Baudelaire and the French revolution were his favorite subjects. He wrote a remarkable biography of
Danton
. But he was not an ivory tower-type scholar. He liked sports, practiced gymnastics daily and went on long hiking trips in the Alps around Bürgenstock in Switzerland, where he spent his vacations. Despite his stuffy appearance—he sported a goatee and wore spectacles—he was full of vim and vigor and worked at a furious pace. The documents he read were so thoroughly annotated that at the Quai d’Orsay his notes could be used as the basis for a response. Paul-Boncour, his predecessor at the Quai d’Orsay, was glad to see him pursue the same policies with “a vigor that age had not diminished. He charged into politics, upset the old boys, more than our people did with those who had preceded us.”
¹²
His Belgian counterpart, Paul Hymans, spoke of his wit and “his
béarnais
verve.”
¹³

Barthou was essentially a very creative man of action, a doer and a realist; he was more of an opportunist rather than doctrinaire. It would be difficult to identify him with any kind of structured plan. Still, we can outline his main initiatives before moving on to a detailed description of events.

First, he viewed
Germany as the enemy
. Those who for internal political reasons preferred Germany to the USSR were totally mistaken. On March 5 he received Ribbentrop who, referring to
Mein Kampf
, said the book reflected outdated circumstances. It was passé. Barthou, who had read the book, stopped him short by asking, quite innocently, why then was it being constantly reprinted?
^14
.

The security of France was the main goal
. “Security above all,” he wrote in the margin of a document,
¹⁵
and this was his motto. However, he didn’t feel it could be guaranteed by the League of Nations. His predecessor, Paul-Boncour, called this the “turning point of 1934.”
¹⁶

In the absence of collective security, it became necessary to enter into alliances
, or to strengthen the existing ones. But that view was in contrast with the British who did not want to isolate Germany. So be it! Barthou was quite prepared to overcome the British obstacle. He knew that beyond the terms of the Locarno treaty, he could not count on a British alliance. All he asked was that England not prevent France from entering into alliances it deemed necessary! Indeed, England was relatively unconcerned by the alliances France struck with Poland (this alliance was much compromised when Germany and Poland signed an agreement on January 26, 1934), with Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania or even with the secret military convention with Belgium. Barthou went through the usual unimportant French ritual of visiting the allied capitals. A Franco-Italian alliance would have much greater value. But above all else an alliance with the USSR was something France could count on. What if the British disliked the idea? They would be ignored.

It seems quite clear that Barthou conceived of a
direct Franco-Soviet alliance
, above and beyond the Eastern pact as we shall show further ahead.
¹⁷

And so the very same man who hounded the communists didn’t hesitate regarding the most obviously realistic alliance. For a long time he had been critical of France’s unrealistic policy towards Moscow. This is what he said, for example, in a speech on March 26, 1920:
¹⁸
“The way we deal with Russia will determine the path it takes with Germany.” Up until then, he said, France had conducted an “unfortunate policy” towards
Russia. “We had a policy of force… It failed. Then there was a policy of metaphors (
applause and laughter on the extreme left
)…this policy was first defined by the image of the “
cordon sanitaire
,” then it was further sharpened by the image of barbed wire.” But other countries were trying to enter into a relationship with the USSR. “And so, my dear colleagues, we must take heed, first for the protection of our interests, but also for the preservation of our authority. Certainly, we are going to be latecomers, but I would not want us to be too late.”

The Soviets did not dislike this type of pragmatic politician, fiercely anti-communist inside his country but seeking an alliance with the USSR. I personally heard old ambassador Maïsky say, that with all due proportion, he deemed Barthou another Churchill.

2.

T
HE
N
OTE OF
A
PRIL
17, 1934

There were at least two critical issues where Barthou felt powerless. The first was France’s economic isolation, something we will discuss later on.
¹⁹
The second issue was German rearmament. This was precisely what Germany was doing since leaving the disarmament conference and the League of Nations. We shall start with this issue since Barthou gave it his undivided attention and all his energy for two months.

What was the meaning of the German decision? The Quai d’Orsay and the French delegation in Geneva were trying to figure it out and a few officials had already reached a conclusion. For Captain Decoux of the navy staff, “the French government is ‘playing games’ in pretending to the world that the British and the Americans are behind us… Indeed they are, on condition that we disarm and become defenseless on the ground, on the sea and in the air.”
²⁰
François-Poncet, after reading an interview Hitler gave to the journalist Fernand de Brinon—someone we shall encounter later on—on November 22, 1933, in
Le Matin
, still felt that Hitler was only seeking partial rearmament and that he wished to return to the League of Nations.
²¹

Things would take a new turn when Hitler, assisted by von Neurath, received François-Poncet for an hour and a half on November 24, 1933. Hitler declared that he fundamentally hoped for an “immediate and far ranging disarmament of all the great powers.” But he did not believe it
would take place. That was why he was asking that Germany be allowed not just a 200,000-man army, as Macdonald was proposing, but 300,000 men recruited on a short-term basis, plus a “number to be discussed” of fighter planes, 150 mm cannon, and light tanks. At the same time, the British declared that it seemed inappropriate to investigate German rearmament! Paul-Boncour expressed “extreme surprise.”
²²
But why should he be surprised? England expected France to disarm or Germany to rearm, wishing to see France negotiate directly with Germany on that issue.
²³
This was very dangerous as Viénot, the deputy delegate to the disarmament conference, wrote to Massigli, Boncour, Léger, Chautemps, and Daladier. “Even from a defensive standpoint, the almost tragic battle that our diplomatic services are now fighting is on the verge of being lost.” Since October 14, France no longer has the initiative. Direct conversations will force us to break with Germany. When that happens, and it will come soon, we will have lost.”
²⁴

On January 6, 1934, the French section at the League of Nations provided the following comparison between French and German forces. In 1914 France had a standing army of 754,000 men stationed within its borders; it now had only 350,000 men, of which only 175,000 were battle-ready. It could mobilize 2,800,000 reservists. As for Germany, the Reichswehr was already 150,000 men strong, with another 40,000 paramilitary policemen, and 1,200,000 men in the SA and the SS.
²⁵
The balance was tipping in its favor. On February 20, Pétain estimated the “total number of Hitler’s troop capacity”
²⁶
to be 2,500,000 men.

When Barthou took over at the Quai d’Orsay, the agenda was full. He immediately took on the key issue: the 300,000-man calculation as the total amount of troops allowed in both French and German armies had to be made along clear guidelines. Germany wanted to include French colonial troops in that number; France also wanted to include SA and SS troops. This discrepancy had to be cleared before the issue of whether France ought to sign an accord with Germany on the basis of 300,000 men could be agreed to or whether talks should be terminated. Throughout the winter, in an exchange of notes
²⁷
and conversations conducted through diplomatic channels, France, England, Italy and Germany discussed these points in remarkable detail.

In a memorandum dated January 29, 1934, the British proposed a Franco-German compromise, since “the inability to strike a perfect agreement would be a terrible setback for all those in favor of peace.”
²⁸
They did not include controls on location, but were limited to a vague system
of consultations, and trusted the German government to resolve the question of the SA and the SS. The “trial period” the French had wanted was abandoned, and finally, in Massigli’s opinion, the project “seems closer to German than to French thinking.” Massigli also added, “England cannot be an impartial arbiter; when something doesn’t concern her directly, she either doesn’t pay any attention and doesn’t even mention it, or tends to pander to German interests, while at the same time demanding that France make inordinate concessions. Conversely, when the issue is of direct importance to the United Kingdom, French wishes are no longer taken into account; witness the case, for instance, of the air force.”
²⁹
We are the only ones—it is written in another note
³⁰
—who aren’t driven by the desire to sign an agreement. England wants an agreement for ideological reasons, Italy as an economic measure, and Germany “because it would absolve her, cost-free, of the hidden violation of international treaties it has conducted for the past fifteen years. Therefore, let us obtain as much as we can for our good will. Let us give in only against concessions. But if we refuse an agreement, we must take precautions to ensure that the responsibility for the failure of the British plan will not be attributed to the French government.”
³¹

With this in mind, the army general staff prepared a note, on March 5, weighing the pros and cons. Signing would mean limiting German rearmament, substituting a freely agreed treaty to the
Diktat
of Versailles, “making it possible,
if the system of controls is effective
, to draw up evidence of violations of the agreement, that could be used at the international level,” to finally bring about a détente in Europe. But everything would depend on the effectiveness of controls. If they weren’t effective, then we would end up playing Germany’s game and increasing the prestige of Hitler’s regime. Signing an agreement also meant, “dangerously postponing the inevitable return to the system of alliances.” (Here the general staff appeared to be in step with the main point in Barthou’s thinking.)
³²

Weygand, vice president of the Supreme War Council, opted for breaking with Germany.
³³
He cited “the nefarious accord of December 11, 1932”—meaning the granting of “equal rights.” The German threat was greater than ever. Would it be possible to count on controls to guarantee security? “What was control worth in the absence of sanctions?” “Anything is better than disarming when Germany is rearming.”
³⁴
Marshal Pétain, the minister of war, agreed with Weygand;
³⁵
Barthou, on the other hand, insisted in many of his notes on the need for controls and “guarantees of implementation.” Military sanctions must be “absolutely automatic.”
But Barthou, the Quai d’Orsay and France’s ambassador to Germany, all favored signing an agreement. François-Poncet came to Paris on April 9, 1934. “Limited and controlled rearmament,” he explained to the government ministers, “was better than the unlimited, unchecked and unrepressed rearmament of the Reich.”
³⁶