France and the Nazi Threat: The Collapse of French Diplomacy 1932-1939 (61 page)

Georges Bonnet was the most difficult to understand. The problem can be attributed in part to the fact that he spent some thirty-five years after Munich incessantly crafting his own image. British historian Anthony Adamthwaite, some thirty years after Sir Lewis Namier, has written an excellent analysis of Bonnet’s historiography.
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Prior to 1940 it was written by authors sympathetic to him such as Alfred Fabre-Luce,
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Louis Thomas,
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and Pierre Dominique.
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Under the Vichy government Jacques Fouques-Duparc was in charge of reconstituting the documents that had been burned at the Quai d’Orsay on May 16, 1940. Georges Bonnet provided his papers, which were copies that a former minister was entitled to keep. These were copied under the supervision of an archivist working in the ministry. Some of the documents retained by Georges Bonnet were either hidden in his garden in the Gironde or held for safekeeping by the French consul in San Sebastian. Besides the synopsis written after the fact, there was reason to consider those documents as being authentic. We feel that Adamthwaite was a bit too suspicious on this issue.
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It is reasonable to assume, however, that Georges Bonnet may not have provided every document and, therefore, the “Fouqus-Duparc reconstruction” may contain some rather large omissions. Finally, Georges Bonnet wrote a few long books in his own defense:
Défense de la Paix
(1946–1948) in two volumes and, much later,
Le Quai d’Orsay sous trois Republiques
(1961). The approximations, omissions and contradictions they contain have been pointed out quite often. In addition, the book
Vingt ans de vie politique
(1969) is very revealing of one
aspect of Bonnet’s life, namely his extreme opportunism in joining the Radical-Socialist Party

From all this and many other documents it becomes very clear that Georges Bonnet tended to tailor his statements to the various persons he was talking to. Anatole de Monzie, who hated Beneš and Czechoslovakia and, as we have noted, encouraged Bonnet into making concessions during the Munich conference, drew a portrait of the man dated November 6, 1938.
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Monzie praised his “quite exceptional qualities.” “He knew and gauged each one according to his importance at the moment. He certainly knew the political “black book,” had his informers everywhere, and went to dinner strategically, he never made mistakes due to his temperament or to passion.” He “would take on big risks” but “refused small skirmishes.” Was he an intriguer? “No, his was a case of obvious agility, an excess of agility. He was too quick to jump on the bandwagon, on every bandwagon.”

Bonnet was, in other words, the prototypical opportunist. Therefore, the Bonnet of October to December 1938 may—and would—have a view of French interests that would be completely different from that of the Bonnet after March 1939, who was different from the Bonnet of the end of August.

In October 1938 it appeared that his ideas came from a deep sense of weariness towards the smaller Eastern European allies. Like Daladier, he was loyal to the “British line” and went further than his prime minister in considering ridding France of its eastern alliances. On that subject we have the definite confirmation of Léon Noël, ambassador to Poland after having been minister to Prague and that is also borne out by the documents. Noël knew Bonnet very well, “one of my friends as a youth and a colleague at the
Conseil d’État
.”
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Léon Noël, having witnessed how a reliable ally such as Czechoslovakia had been betrayed by Colonel Beck’s Poland, concluded that “we must revise our political relations with Poland not only for our security but even more for our own dignity.” In a long dispatch dated October 25,
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he carefully built his case. There was every indication that Poland was next in line and Hitler was treating her carefully only temporarily. The agreements of 1921 and 1925 were to provide “automatic” military aid between France and Poland as was the case between France and Czechoslovakia. Rather than being backed into a “new Munich,” wouldn’t it be preferable, while maintaining the privileged relationship,
to withdraw from the automatic nature
of France’s obligations
? The military attaché in Warsaw, General Musse, agreed with his ambassador who traveled to Paris to gain support for his position. He obtained the unofficial approval of General Weygand (who had fought in Poland in 1920) and of General Gamelin. Then he went to see Georges Bonnet.

Bonnet wanted to go further. “The way he was speaking, he intended to quite simply cancel all of France’s agreements without further delay, meaning the Franco-Polish agreements and the Franco-Soviet mutual assistance pact.”
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As we shall, see this did not happen. However, during his stay in Paris—he would not succeed in meeting with Daladier—Léon Noël found out that many officials agreed with Bonnet’s opinion for a “pull-out from the East.” Louis Aubert, an historian on the French delegation to the League of Nations, supported a similar viewpoint and it is possible that the memo he wrote on this subject was in fact read by the minister.
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“We must pull back,” he wrote. “Nothing could be more useless, for some time to come in any case, than to repeat the words and take once again those positions that were thwarted at Munich.” In the final analysis the minister decided to leave as they were for the moment.
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The reason Bonnet, like Daladier, Léger and most of the politicians who were close to power, wanted to hold the “British line” and attempt a rapprochement with Germany and Italy was because of the different opinions about withdrawal, a sort of French neutralism in Eastern Europe. It wasn’t due to an attraction to Germany. When Bonnet told German ambassador von Welczeck on November 7 that a Franco-German agreement would be “the fulfillment of a lifelong dream,” we shouldn’t forget his exceedingly strong capacity to adapt to the person he happened to be talking with.
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We should point out that Gamelin was also leaning toward the “British line.” He said so clearly on October 12
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and was rather skeptical about the Franco-German rapprochement. “Our only possibility to resist,” wrote Admiral Darlan, navy chief of the general staff, “is in the close agreement that must exist between ourselves and England on the political level and for the preparation of military capabilities.” Darlan had read the Gamelin memo we have just cited.
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1.

M
UNICH AND THE
E
CONOMY

While examining the issue of the part played by business interests in the foreign policy decisions of 1938–1939, René Girault concluded that these remained divided:
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“For some the future was to be found in the colonial empire and therefore in the retreat from Eastern Europe. They viewed the appeasement policy as a rational one, even more so since it would bring France closer to the powers defending the established order. Nevertheless other businessmen favored solutions entailing resistance to Germany, either because they opposed Hitler’s racism or due to nationalist feelings.” He feels the first category would include the Lazard Bank, the Banque de l’Indochine and Paul Baudoin, its director general. He places François de Wendel in the second category. De Wendel was a friend of Georges Mandel and felt that Germany represented “the only real danger.” He wanted France to respect her commitments and deplored the fact that the Czechs were unpopular among the moderates. He viewed Munich as a disaster and on October 5 said that Mandel was “the man who wanted war that the future would probably vindicate.”
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France—as we have noted previously—had some very large interests in Czechoslovakia, a highly industrialized country with only 20% foreign debt (compared to 63% for Poland, 85% for Yugoslavia, and 90% for Romania). France was the number one investor in Poland and Yugoslavia, third in Romania behind the United States and England, second in Czechoslovakia behind England. Therefore, the very active French policy and the political aloofness of Great Britain toward Eastern Europe were not due to an obvious disproportion in their investments.

During the 1950s and 1960s the historians of communist Czechoslovakia offered the view of an “economic Munich that preceded the political Munich.” In an excellent work published in 1974, the Czech historian Alice Teichova showed, through an enormous amount of statistics, that “if a tendency existed to avoid new long-term investments in Czechoslovakia, especially following Hitler’s rise to power, the idea of a willful withdrawal of Western capital in order to leave a vacant space for German penetration to move in is unfounded.”
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As of December 31, 1937, before the Anschluss began to dislocate the country’s economy, she estimated that British investments represented 30.8% of
all foreign investments; France 21.4%; Austria 13.1%; Germany 8.8%; Switzerland 7.2% and Belgium 7.1%. After the Anschluss Germany’s amount became as large as that of France. France was in first place in banking (44.5%), the mechanical industries (73.8%), in second place behind Belgium in the chemical industry (24.8%), in second place behind Austria in sugar refineries, very far behind Great Britain in second place in mining and steel works (15% to 61%), in third place behind Austria and Great Britain in textiles, and in third place behind Great Britain and Germany for glass works ceramics and porcelain (14.2%). France was weak in the electric industries compared to Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and Great Britain.

Since 1919 Schneider-Le Creusot et Cie. played a key role in the Skoda enterprises (73% of capital investments in 1919), along with its subsidiary the
Union européenne industrielle et financière
(headed by Aimé Lepercq), which employed many French engineers. The Schneider company, it must be noted, was forced to sell its shares in Skoda in December 1938 and would do so again following France’s defeat for its shares in the
Compagnie métallurgique et minière
. Far from “laying the groundwork” for Germany, it held on to its position as long as possible.
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Schneider and de Wendel also owned a large part of the Austrian and Slovak magnesium mines.

“French influence in Skoda enterprises was decisive since its original investment by Schneider until December 1938, following the Munich agreement…The decisive nature of the French shareholders was not only due to the fact that they owned the majority of the shares but also to a network of personal and contractual financial relationships.”
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Apart from a recession in 1933, the Skoda Company continued to grow from 1921 to 1938. A capital increase in January 1937 reduced Schneider’s shares to 46.49%—allowing it to maintain control but this was not at all a transfer to the Germans. On the contrary, the Czech state and banks, along with British banks and private Czechoslovak shareholders, owned the new shares. Since 60% of Skoda’s weapons production went to the Czechoslovak army, one can see how the loss of the Sudetenland was a disaster for Czechoslovakia and Schneider-Le Creusot. The sale of December 31, 1938, signaled Skoda’s entrance into Germany’s sphere of influence.
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France was present in the chemical industry through the
Société française de dynamite
, part of international Nobel Trust. In the oil industry the
Société française des pétroles tchecoslovaques
held a position smaller than Royal Dutch and the American companies.

One of the four largest Czechoslovak banks (the Länderbank which became the
Banque pour le commerce et l’industrie
), 77.8% of which belonged to the
Banque des pays de l’Europe centrale
and headquartered in Paris with a branch in Vienna, played a key role by making long-term loans especially to the mechanics industry. Following the Anschluss the
Banque des pays de l’Europe centrale
had to sell its shares in its Vienna branch to the Dresdner Bank, but insisted on maintaining its Prague headquarters (which had long been headed by the famous economist Charles Rist).

Through Skoda, Schneider owned 10.5% of the bank shares that was just as important the Anglo-Czechoslovak and Prague Credit Bank. We must point out that during the period we are examining the French government had accepted two Czechoslovak loans with the guarantee of the French state: one for 600 million in 1932; the other renewing the first one and taking it to 700 million in 1937. Right after Munich Great Britain approved 20 million pounds sterling in help and France 600 million francs for Czechoslovakia.
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As for Munich there is every indication proving that politics took the lead over the economy.

Nevertheless, the economic consequences of the agreement appeared disastrous. While France succeeded until 1938 in holding on to its financial positions and let go of them only under duress, she discovered that little by little
Germany was taking over trade in Eastern Europe
. This was being discussed as early as the beginning of October,
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and the decision was reached to send an economic mission to various Central and Eastern European countries headed by a young senior treasury official, Hervé Alphand.

Before recounting the inquiries of the Alphand mission, its conclusions and results, we may attempt to summarize the situation as the French viewed it. At the beginning of November, the Quai d’Orsay received from the London embassy an optimistic report by Baron Stackleberg, head of the foreign section of a group of financial newspapers in the City (
The Financial News
, the
Banker
). “In the final analysis,” said Stackleberg, “I have reached the conclusion that until now France and Great Britain have not really suffered because of what is commonly referred to as ‘the Germanic thrust’ in Central and Eastern Europe.”
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