France and the Nazi Threat: The Collapse of French Diplomacy 1932-1939 (4 page)

Although on some topics like military strategy, intelligence assessment and Franco-British relations research has fleshed out Duroselle’s account, the literature since the 1970s has not outdated or discredited his main findings.
¹⁴
No important new archival material has been discovered. Yet it would be quite wrong to suppose that Duroselle’ story represents a scholarly consensus on France’s response to the dictators. The reasons for the collapse of French diplomacy and for the subsequent debacle are as controversial and debatable as they were a quarter of a century ago; there is no agreement on what caused the eclipse. Partly this is because there are big gaps in the record, partly it’s because all history is contemporary history, with each generation filtering the past through its own preoccupations and perspectives. While Bloch indicted political and military leaders collectively, other post-mortems produced different suspects: the Popular Front of 1936, a Fascist Fifth Column, perfidious Albion, and the 200 families of the Bank of France. The classic statement of this approach was Pertinax’s (André Géraud)
The Gravediggers of France
(1944). In its bid for legitimacy Gaullism thickened the controversy by condemning the rottenness of both the Third Republic and Vichy. As events receded the collapse assumed an appearance of inevitability, a convergence of structural singularities: an ageing population, diseased body politic, the bloodbath of 1914-18, a Maginot mentality, deep economic depression, and social strife. 1940 administered the coup de grace to a regime on its last legs. William L. Shirer’s
The Collapse of the Third Republic
(1970) encapsulated this gloom-and-doom reading.

More recently some writers, notably Robert J. Young in
France and the Origins of the Second World War
(1996), have sought to rehabilitate the governing elite, arguing that the retreats and defeats reflected not the machinations of a guilty few or a general atrophy of will but genuine doubts and uncertainties. In brief, the complexities, constraints and challenges overwhelmed well-intentioned leaders. Their recourse to ambivalence and indecision was both understandable and unavoidable. Given their plight they did the best they could: “contradiction or ambivalence is inherent in the human condition… the trick …is to neither inculpate nor exonerate. It is to explain.”
¹⁵
True, historians should not rush to judgment. Yet can explanation be separated from assessment of responsibility? Eschewing judgment leaves us with little more than a truism, namely that the French wrestled with dilemmas common to decision-makers everywhere. Demonstrably, ambiguity and uncertainty belong to the human condition. But why did the French perform so miserably in the 1930s and succeed
so well after 1958? Why do some countries get their act together while others fail? Young’s attempt to rehabilitate verges on determinism: things could only have happened in the way they did. Yet in everyday life our explanations of the choices people make is usually accompanied by comparative judgments about performance, effectiveness and achievement or lack of it. Why adopt different modes of discourse for the present and past? Duroselle’s sympathy for the trials and tribulations of French decision-makers does not inhibit him from taking stock of character and conduct.

Understandably, the trauma of 1940 made the politics and diplomacy of the 1930s seem like a one-way street to Vichy. But in the light of what we now know about the Battle of France it makes sense to disentangle the diplomatic and military stories. 1940 was primarily a military disaster, not an inexorable outcome of a terminally sick society. Moreover, it was an Allied disaster, product of a shaky Franco-British alliance and divided counsels. Scandals, political instability and a supine foreign policy had marked other decades without leading to ruin. The post-1932 hemorrhaging of French power was not irreversible. Events were more open than Duroselle and other writers have allowed. Indeed, he errs on the side of fatalism: “Men can, at certain moments, struggle successfully against deep and blind forces. But that was not to be France’s destiny. In this instance, men proved weaker than fate.” France was trapped in a “mechanism, which seemed inexorable.”
¹⁶

However an alternative and arguably more cogent reading of French foreign policy would stress not the role of “deep and blind forces” but rather the chanciness and openness of events.
¹⁷
Individuals could and did make decisive differences. This was as true of France as of Germany. Ironically Bonnet’s dogged fight to keep France out of war ensured not only that war came but also that France entered it in the worst circumstances. Consider the robust revival of French policy in the spring of 1939: instead of taking orders from the English governess the French demanded conscription and guarantees for Romania—and got them! More’s the pity that they left it so late in the day. “The French have not been clever at taking their opportunities with us “observed Ralph Wigram, head of the Central Department of the British Foreign Office in the mid-1930s.
¹⁸
On one occasion he sent his wife to Paris, ostensibly on a shopping trip, in reality to convey privately to members of a French delegation what they should ask for in London. Shortly after the Munich Agreement of 29 September 1938 the French foreign minister’s wife wrote
to an English friend: “Georges has been admirable, so calm, so resolute. He never despaired. On the two final days, all the newspapers, ministers and even his assistants abandoned him… you see what a cool mind and willpower can do for the destinies of peoples.”
¹⁹
If France’s rulers had concentrated their minds and wills on preserving their country’s great power position the history of Europe and of the world might have turned out very differently.

Anthony Adamthwaite
    

Berkeley, California
    

October 2003
    

F
OREWORD

T
he purpose of this book, and the series of which it is part, is to take the vantage point of France and the French people in describing French foreign policy without diluting those very specific characteristics in the broader context of international relations. This is an ambitious project insofar as foreign policy is elaborated within a wider debate that extends beyond diplomacy. One must constantly consider the objectives set by those in key positions and the political forces at work exerting their influence and leading to the discrepancies that may appear between viewing policy objectives on one hand and considering the causes of underlying events on the other.

I have used mostly French archives and those at the Quai d’Orsay in particular. Foreign archives, namely those in Great Britain, Italy, Germany, and the United States have only been published in selective fashion and are also being studied scientifically in many cases. I have used those existing studies and materials for those specific countries. Some books and articles published in the United States and Great Britain appear to have been written using mostly British and American sources with the French archives being listed quite impressively in the bibliography but rarely appearing within the footnotes (with the exception of the excellent works by authors such as Adamthwaite, Robert Young, etc.).

I was able to use the huge body of work undertaken by the Commission for the publication of documents dealing with the origins of the war that was founded by my late teacher and friend Pierre Renouvin (who died in 1974), with the help of Maurice Baumont, historical advisor at the
foreign ministry who also died in 1981. I succeeded Pierre Renouvin as president of the Commission that in 1984 became the Commission for the publication of French diplomatic documents. I am pleased to thank the various directors of the Archives: Martial de La Fournière and Guy de Commines; the head curators: Maurice Degros, Mlle. Paulette Enjaran, M. de Vienne, Georges Dethan, Mme de Nomazy and their staff. As for the team I have been leading, after the late Pierre Mandoul, François Gadrat, Colonel Chalmin, Georges Taboulet and its current members, Mr. Monicat, Degros, d’Hoop, Labaste, Marquand and Yvon Lacaze, archivist and paleographer the most knowledgeable regarding the documents of the period. I owe to all the better part of my sources of information.

I must also mention the help provided to me by my students (who for the most part are now full professors at various universities) within the framework of the Institut d’histoire des relations internationales contemporaines. Some of them (Jean-Claude Allain, Jacques Bariéty, etc.) were kind enough to reread my manuscript. Ambassadors Léon Noël, of the Institut, René Massigli, Armand Bérard, Jean Daridan continuously helped and encouraged me. I also used the written and oral remarks of Ambassador E. de Crouy-Chanel, Generals Jacques Humbert and Philippe Maurin, Colonel J. Defrasne, Yves Jann and Bernard Sinsheimer and Professor H. Batowski.

I wish to express my thanks to all. I also wish to thank the Imprimerie Nationale and its directors, Georges Bonnin and Guy Beaussang. It is very comforting for a writer to be published by this prestigious institution.

J.-B. D.
    

P
REFACE

A
ristide Briand, the “Apostle of Peace,” died on March 7, 1932, just as his glory was fading. After heading the Quai d’Orsay for seven years—starting in April 1925—he had been replaced in January 1932 by the new prime minister, Pierre Laval. Briand, who was not yet seventy, had aged prematurely; he suffered from uremia, was worn out and would easily doze off. Politically, he was the victim of many factors beyond his control, as they were beyond the control of every politician of Briand’s time. The most serious issue was the economic crisis engulfing the world after the Wall Street Crash (Black Thursday, October 24, 1929). For over two years France had mistakenly managed to convince itself that it was immune because of the “wisdom” of its economy based on family farming, protectionism and a mostly aging industrial base managed by small-minded businessmen, an enduring commitment to the gold standard, the containment of wages and minimal expenditures on social programs. It was basically an archaic system.

Thanks to our well-balanced French economy and the virtues of our people—wrote
Le Temps
—France has become one of the two pillars that are now supporting the world economy.
¹

Briand, like most of his contemporaries, disdained what was referred to at the time as political economy, which, in the scale of things politicians valued, rated far below parliamentary deal-making and had become, especially after Poincaré had left the government (July 1929), a vast collection
of quick fixes and sham policies. In September 1931, as “France enjoyed the final moments of prosperity,”
²
the devaluation of the British currency led to the sudden acknowledgment of a decline that had in fact begun early that same year. By the end of 1931, industrial production had dropped 23% below the 1929 average (in Germany, 42% and in the United States, 37%). The unemployment rate suddenly jumped from under 100,000 to 248,000 by January 1932.
³
The French people understood that they too were now into the crisis, and this explains in part the narrow victory of the left-wing Cartel des Gauches in the elections of May 1 and 8, 1932. As in 1924, the Radical Socialist leader Edouard Herriot became prime minister as well as foreign minister on June 3, 1932. It is at this point our narrative begins.

Still another factor, which the crisis cannot entirely explain, was the sudden surge in Germany of an ultra-nationalism that was more perverse and worrisome than that of the National Germans and the Stahlhelm of the 1920s. Prior to September 1930, there were only 14 National Socialists elected to the Reichstag. With the general elections of September 14 under a strictly proportional election system, their number climbed to 107. On July 31, 1932, just one and a half months after Herriot came to power, 230 of them returned. In the meantime in April, Adolf Hitler, who was generally thought to be something of a half-crazy stooge, not to be taken seriously, had forced the aging Marshal von Hindenburg, the standard-bearer of the old reactionary Germany, into a run-off during the presidential elections, Hitler’s votes increased even more during the second round.

Besides a few small groups, no one in Germany liked France. Hitler and his NSDAP party (the German communists nicknamed them Nazis and the name became popular) hated France out of habit and because of their political doctrine. In his famous book
Mein Kampf
, that very few Frenchmen had read, he referred to France as the hereditary enemy, not a novel idea in itself (German historian Heinz-Otto Sieburg had shown how such a completely subjective thought came to be widely accepted in Germany during the crisis of 1840 and in France following the battle of Sadowa in 1866.)
⁴
However, as far as Hitler was concerned, those were not empty words or platonic ideas. He explained unhesitatingly and in a meandering way that elicited smiles from the professors at the École libre des sciences politiques, the need to crush France in order to fulfill his grand designs in the East, the conquest of the so-called Lebensraum in the vast expanses where the inferior and degenerate Slav race was living.

Thus, the trickle of concessions that France had made to Germany at the expense of the treaty of Versailles, culminating in the early evacuation of the Rhineland in 1930 rather than 1935, turned out to be completely useless. Germany, with its population of 65 million, appeared potentially more threatening than ever. Briand had promised that as long as he lived there would be no war. Now Briand was dead. The French people feared Germany and war. Only fourteen years had passed since “the war to end all wars” with its horrible bloodshed of 1,300,000 young men and about one hundred thousand colonial troops. France was full of crippled men. Soon the “low birth-rate classes,” created by wartime conscription, of young men born between 1915 and 1918 would be of military age. What would become of France?