France's Rhineland Policy, 1914-1924: The Last Bid for a Balance of Power in Europe
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France's Rhineland Policy, 1914-1924: The Last Bid for a Balance of Power in Europe
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Overview
The author's new view of the struggle for execution or revision of the Versailles treaty holds sober implications for assessment of the political origins of international anarchy during the 1930s and European integration in the 1950s. He shows that the Treaty of Versailles was unenforceable, and that the French postwar government, far from enjoying predominance in Europe, suffered from financial crisis and economic and political inferiority to Germany. Versailles was thus the "Boche" peace, and the only path to a stable Europe seemed to lie through permanent restriction of German economic and political unity.
Originally published in 1978.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691635804 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1517 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 438 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d) |
Read an Excerpt
France's Rhineland Policy, 1914-1924
The Last Bid for a Balance of Power in Europe
By Walter A. McDougall
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1978 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05268-7
CHAPTER 1
BEYOND ALSACE-LORRAINE: FRENCH WAR AIMS ON THE EASTERN FRONTIER, 1914-1918
France entered the war with an offensive military doctrine but a defensive purpose. The expansionist French war aims revealed in 1919 evolved from the nature and course of the conflict itself. For the strategic and economic problems that French war aims were to counter in 1918-1919 did not exist in 1914. First, the revelation of the true extent of Germany's power and intentions, next the sacrifices demanded by an unforeseen war of attrition and materiel, then the irreversible dependence on foreign economic and financial power, and finally the collapse of the dynasties in Eastern Europe and the continental order — these factors, developing gradually or only gradually perceived in the course of the war, obliged French governments to endorse war aims beyond the mere recovery of the Lost Provinces, Alsace-Lorraine. Indeed, all the needs of postwar France seemed to point to the efficacy and even dire necessity of extension of French power into Western Germany itself. There Germany's strength could be tapped and transfused into the "anemic victim of her aggression."
The French Rhenish war aims, a compendium of "traditional" desires for annexations, protectorates, and commercial strictures, were unaffected by the dissemination of Wilsonian ideals in 1917. French governments tactfully concealed the extent of their claims against Germany or cloaked them in Wilsonian rhetoric until 1919. But the advent of Wilsonianism did encourage the formulation of another body of French war aims, directed not against Germany but at France's own allies. Each new loan approved or ton of coal imported to support a total war on French soil revealed to the official consciousness with growing clarity the likely condition of postwar France. Victory might be won, Germany might even be rendered harmless, but what would become of France, mangled and destitute? Demands on Germany must be matched by demands on the Allies — "war aims" of an entirely new ilk. France must be assured continued unity of purpose, financial and economic solidarity with the Anglo-Saxon powers, if she were to survive the peace. In this context, Wilson's apparent internationalism was not entirely unwelcome.
By 1918 the government of Clemenceau had developed two sets of war aims — traditional aims to be extracted from its enemy, and transcendent aims to be begged from its friends. The old requirements of peace demanded the first if European stability were to endure; the new requirements of war demanded the second if recovery were to be achieved at all. His failure to achieve either set of war aims — German disruption or Allied unity — earned Clemenceau the vitriol of his allies and his countrymen alike. But the scope and duality of French war aims were only a measure of the enormity of France's sacrifice and the sudden inadequacy of her own resources to perpetuate her status as a Great Power.
THE RHENISH QUESTION
The essential war aim, supported by the entire spectrum of French opinion, was the restitution of Alsace-Lorraine. It was a justification of the war and a rallying cry for the embattled nation. But the course of the opening battles convinced French observers that war aims had to be based on containment of Germany, whatever it might require. After the stabilization of the Western front in early 1915, the emerging "war aims bloc" in Parliament, confident of ultimate victory, argued the need for further claims against Germany. In a series of articles, nationalist deputy and littérateur Maurice Barrès opened the campaign for French war aims on the Left Bank of the Rhine. Postwar France would need a buffer against German aggression. The separation of the Rhineland would provide it, as well as reduce the Reich's economic and demographic strength to that of her neighbors.
Such strategic arguments quickly produced echos. But Barrès' personal contribution to the French "Rhine" literature was his justification of annexation or "organization" of the Left Bank by France on racial and cultural grounds. The cis-rhenian provinces, Franco-German battleground for a thousand years, fell under Prussian control at the Congress of Vienna and had remained unquestionably German for a century. But Barrès revived the myth that the Rhineland was an unwilling captive of Berlin. The Rhenish population, being of Celtic origin, Catholic faith, and Latin culture, was antagonistic to Germanic, Protestant, and authoritarian Prussia. If given the opportunity to choose, Barrès believed, the Rhineland would opt for republican France as in Revolutionary times. In the atmosphere of war, respected French historians hastened to elaborate the myth of Franco-Rhenish affinity. Ernest Lavisse, Alphonse Aulard, and Édouard Driault were among the most distinguished who lent academic blessing to Barrès' thesis. Capturing the imagination of the French Right, the military, and friends of the Church, the Rhenish myth awakened dreams of French expansion to the Rhine.
The government resisted the early calls for an enunciation of French war aims. Premier Réné Viviani instructed the war censor in February and April 1915 to forbid all published discussion of the subject. Articles concerning the peace conditions, he warned, could create an annoying movement of opinion. The government certainly feared circulation of ideas that could foment agitation for a separate peace. But the opposite could also be dangerous. Propagation of ambitious ideas would invite foreign and domestic accusations of French imperialism, or lead the public to expect a peace that might prove unattainable. Silence was the only reasonable counsel.
The government extended this policy to the alliance as a whole. In October 1914 Russian Ambassador Alexander Izvolski requested an exchange of views on war aims, but French Foreign Minister Théophile Delcassé insisted it was "too early to sell the bearskin." Nevertheless, Izvolski was convinced that while French territorial ambitions did not extend beyond Alsace-Lorraine, France's essential goal was the destruction of the German Empire and the greatest possible weakening of Prussia. The French ambassador in Petrograd, Maurice Paléologue, suggested informally that France might seek to extend her influence beyond Alsace-Lorraine into the Rhineland. In March 1915 the Tsar gave his blessing: "Take Mainz, take Coblenz, go farther if you judge it useful." But when an interallied conference was suggested, French President Raymond Poincaré wrote Paléologue personally that "war aims ought not to be discussed. There will be a general règlement at the end." The ambassador responded bitterly: "When [Russian Foreign Minister Sergei] Sazonov asks me what impression the imperial confidences produce in the French government, I am forced to answer 'Je l'ignore absolument!'" Paris was concerned with keeping Russia in the war while resisting her ambitious war aims. But silence served France poorly. The Gallipoli expedition obliged Russia to demand assurances that yielded an Anglo-French promise of Constantinople to the Tsar, Turkish gains for Britain, and nothing for France.
The year 1915 fixed the pattern of the war of attrition. To French generals and politicians who had looked for élan to prove decisive, the real elements of modern war revealed themselves: manpower, steel and the iron and coal to produce it, and above all, money. French industry was particularly ill-suited to support the war effort. Before 1914 it was dwarfed by the metallurgies of Germany and Britain. Critics even accused French steel men of "economic Malthusianism," of seeking to limit production for private benefit. But France was sorely lacking in coal, and its richest iron regions were now in the hands of the enemy. During the war, deficiencies could be made good through interallied cooperation, and 1915 and 1916 brought unprecedented experiments in military and economic coordination. Nascent command economies gradually replaced the free market in Britain and France; the two nations pooled their resources and, in the end, fueled their war machine with the financial power of a third, the United States. But peace would come eventually, with France left more dependent than ever on foreign powers for raw materials and investment capital. How could she recoup her loss of economic autonomy?
The powerful combine of French iron and steel interests, the Comité des Forges, was preoccupied by the coal shortage. The recovery of the Lost Provinces with the rich Lorraine iron deposits would only aggravate matters. In a postwar struggle for markets, the high price French industry must pay for coal would cripple French firms at a time when they must be seeking ever wider markets for their expanded capacity. On 28 October 1915 Secretary-General Robert Pinot testified to French industrial needs before the Senate Committee of Economic Expansion. The return of Lorraine would increase French coal and coke deficits to thirty and seven million tons per year, respectively, leaving France gravely dependent on foreign combustibles for an industry basic to national power. If, on the other hand, France found a secure source of coal, the return of Lorraine could double her steel capacity and make her the equal of Germany. He urged that annexation of Alsace-Lorraine be matched by annexation of the Saar with its rich coal deposits. But Saar coal was unsuitable for coking and of little use to French metallurgy. In July 1916 the Comité des Forges adopted a formal resolution: "Any extension of French territory beyond Alsace-Lorraine and beyond the Saar could only simplify the problems that recovery of Lorraine would create for France by providing combustibles, new markets, and the transport facilities of the Rhine." The failure to solve French coal problems, Pinot warned, would make France a second-rate power.
The enhanced dependence of France revealed by modern war produced a reaction expressed in terms of power political war aims. The Rhineland now assumed economic as well as strategic importance. But the potentialities of the remarkable Allied cooperation also suggested themselves, and it was in 1916, before American belligerency, that French officials first considered a second approach to the problem of peace. Planning for postwar financial and economic problems fell almost by default to the French minister of commerce, Étienne Clémentel. While wartime premiers and their ministers of armaments and finance were preoccupied with the management of a total war, only Clémentel was free — at this early stage — to consider France's postwar requirements. His long tenure in office, from October 1915 to November 1919, lent continuity to French economic planning. He presciently expected little in the way of an indemnity once Germany was beaten, and based his hopes for French recovery on the preservation of Allied economic unity. Encouraged by the success of Allied wartime cooperation in raw materials distribution, price and marketing controls, as well as mutual exchange supports, Clémentel dreamed of making these permanent features of the world economy. Although he had developed a theoretical dislike for "the anarchy of the marketplace," his plans for postwar cooperation were founded on precise judgments of French interest. The German economy must be restrained, even as her military expansion was contained; the French economy must be subsidized by her great allies if it were not to collapse upon the shock of peace. These considerations led Clémentel to sponsor the Paris Economic Conference of June 1916, where the "second set" of French war aims was revealed. There the European Allies pledged to continue economic solidarity past an armistice, to act jointly against German economic resurgence and for their own reconstruction. To the extent that France must remain dependent, at least she might guarantee that her dependence would not be used against her by the enemy or by allies reverting to economic particularism.
French war aims policy shifted under the leadership of Aristide Briand, premier since October 1915. In his ministerial address, Briand confined his war aims to restitution of Alsace-Lorraine and Belgian independence, but he reversed this reticent policy in 1916. Under relaxed censorship, not only rightist papers but the grands journaux of Paris publicized war aims of wider scope. L'Echo de Paris and Le Petit Journal demanded annexation of the Saar. journal des Débats proposed neutralization of the Rhineland, and in the Revue des Deux Mondes, ex-Foreign Minister Gabriel Hanotaux insisted on the dissolution of the German Reich. The idea found support in Le Matin, Figaro, and other mass circulation papers. A flood of new pamphlets appeared, going beyond those of the previous year in advocating Rhenish separation or the smashing of German unity. In the other direction, none questioned the government's program of Allied unity in peace as well as in war. Allied solidarity in reconstruction — meaning cheap coal, financial relief, and restrictions on German competition — was becoming a French war aim.
Military opinion developed in accordance with the journalists' new ambitions. In August 1916 Poincaré asked Marshal Joseph Joffre to study conditions for an armistice. He returned instead a peace program: Alsace-Lorraine and the Saar to France, three or four independent states on the Left Bank of the Rhine, the breakup of Prussia within rump Germany. In October, the cabinet, military, and parliamentary leaders all gathered at the Elysée to consider French interests on the Rhine. No firm policy emerged, but whatever the solution adopted, Briand declared, France must have the major voice in its determination. But could this be achieved in the context of a grand coalition? The Belgian government-in-exile at Le Havre reacted first to the change in French policy. Baron Gaiffier d'Hestroy, ambassador in Paris, reported that Briand and the Quai d'Orsay under Director of Political Affairs Philippe Berthelot, had taken up the policy of Louis XIV. Domination of the Rhineland by France alone, he felt, meant encirclement for Belgium. Belgian interests were more in tune with the thoughts of veteran French diplomat Jules Cambon, who favored an independent Rhenish republic guaranteed by the Western alliance as a whole.
The decision to air France's new ambitions and to seek Allied approval seems to have been dictated by a concatenation of pressures at the beginning of 1917. The German peace note, Wilson's request for definition of war aims, and fears about the reliability of the Russian war effort all suggested the need to press French claims By 1917, the Allies had not even recognized Alsace-Lorraine as an Allied war aim, much less French interests on the Rhine. On 12 January 1917 Briand summarized the French view on "the general directions of future accords." Alsace-Lorraine was not the only question; without guarantees the recovery of those provinces would be in vain. But England, he wrote, must recognize that French goals in the Rhineland were not dreams of conquest. "The organization of these territories, their neutrality, their provisional occupation are to be envisioned," Briand insisted, "and it is important that France, being most directly concerned, have a preponderant voice in the solution of this grave question." The Rhenish question had become a diplomatic reality.
The occasion for an exchange of views with Russia arose during the Allied military conference in Petrograd in early 1917. French Minister of Colonies Gaston Doumergue carried instructions that looked beyond wartime strategy. Tsar Nicholas received him on 3 February and agreed that France needed firm guarantees against Germany, given the "phony humanitarianism" of Woodrow Wilson, which he likened to that of Theodore Roosevelt at the time of the Russo-Japanese war. Doumergue responded with the French plan: Alsace-Lorraine and the Saar to France, the Left Bank of the Rhine made into independent states temporarily occupied by France. The Tsar approved and Paleologue wired Paris for authorization to conclude a written accord. Philippe Berthelot saw "only advantage in consecrating by a written accord the conversations of Doumergue with the Tsar," and he began drafting a project. It would refer in general terms to the support France and Russia would lend each other "to secure all military and industrial guarantees necessary to the security and economic development of the two nations." But this was not the agreement signed at Petrograd.
Believing they had the Quai d'Orsay's approval to proceed in situ, Paleologue and Doumergue plunged ahead with a draft of their own that detailed precisely the French program in Western Germany. When news of the pact reached the West, there was consternation. Camille Barrère, ambassador in Rome, and Paul Cambon protested the specification of French aims, and Cambon also feared the impact the note would have in London. To make matters worse, the Russian ambassador in Paris called at the Quai d'Orsay on 16 February with instructions to negotiate a similar formula for Russia's western boundaries. The French considered their Rhineland agreement the quid pro quo for the 1915 Constantinople pact. Now Russia asked further concessions that posed an obstacle to an independent Poland. Paleologue insisted that he and Doumergue had promised no such exchange, but Briand and Izvolski took up the vague Paris draft promising mutual support and letters were exchanged on 10 March.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from France's Rhineland Policy, 1914-1924 by Walter A. McDougall. Copyright © 1978 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- CONTENTS, pg. vii
- ILLUSTRATIONS, pg. ix
- PREFACE, pg. xi
- ABBREVIATIONS, pg. xv
- INTRODUCTION, pg. 1
- 1. BEYOND ALSACE-LORRAINE: FRENCH WAR AIMS ON THE EASTERN FRONTIER, 1914-1918, pg. 15
- 2. RHENISH SEPARATISM AND PARIS PEACEMAKING, 1919, pg. 33
- 3. RHENISH VERSUS GERMAN POLICY: THE BIRTH OF FRENCH REVISIONISM, 1920, pg. 97
- 4. SANCTIONS, FULFILLMENT, AND THE EROSION OF THE ENTENTE, 1921, pg. 139
- 5. POINCARE AND DIPLOMATIC DEADLOCK, 1922, pg. 178
- 6. FRANCE AT THE RUBICON: THE RUHR DECISION, 1922, pg. 214
- 7. ECONOMIC WAR ON THE RHINE AND RUHR: THE STRUGGLE OF POSTWAR REVISIONISMS, 1923, pg. 250
- 8. CONFLAGRATION: RHENISH SEPARATISM, 1923-1924, pg. 305
- 9. CONCLUSION: THE DEFEAT OF FRENCH REVISIONISM, pg. 360
- BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 380
- INDEX, pg. 405