CHAPTER 11

Losing the Peace

Yes, we have won the war, and not without difficulty; but now we are going to have to win the peace, and that will perhaps be even more difficult.

GEORGES CLEMENCEAU, 1918¹

This is not a peace, it is an armistice for twenty years.

MARSHAL FOCH²

The greatest failure in our common history was to have lost the opportunity to consolidate peace after the costly victory of 1918. This was not solely, or even primarily, a Franco-British responsibility. Germany, without doubt, was the chief culprit. The United States was to blame for its culpable irresponsibility. The Soviet Union, Japan and Italy dripped poison. But a firm and trusting Franco-British partnership would have been the best hope of preventing another, even more devastating, war. It was the world’s tragedy that firmness and trust were qualities they could not summon up. This is a story not of wickedness, but of fear and selfishness, individual and collective.

Paris and Versailles, 1918–19: A Tragedy of
Disappointment

What I seem to see – with all my heart I hope that I am wrong – is a tragedy of disappointment.
WOODROW WILSON, 1918³

I beg you to understand my state of mind, just as I am trying to understand yours. America is far away and protected by the ocean. England could not be reached by Napoleon himself. You are sheltered, both of you; we are not.
GEORGES CLEMENCEAU, 1919⁴

I find [the French] full of intrigue and chicanery of all kinds, without any idea of playing the game.
MAURICE HANKEY, secretary to the conference, 1919⁵

The peace conference, on French insistence, was convened in Paris. Delegations from the now numerous Allied states,² journalists and not a few political voyeurs flocked to the city. The mixture of politics and pleasure reminded many of Vienna in 1814. The Foreign Office thoughtfully commissioned a history of British diplomacy in that period by Charles Webster, in case it provided useful insights. It is a valuable work. Not many read it. Yet there were similarities between 1814 and 1918. The ‘Big Three’, President Woodrow Wilson, and prime ministers David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau, frequently closeted together in secret, and all speaking English, exercised personal power not very different from that of Lord Castlereagh, Tsar Alexander and Prince Metternich. They ignored advisers, colleagues, and parliaments, left piles of expert reports unread, and excluded journalists. While they did not, of course, share the manners and assumptions of a cosmopolitan aristocracy like their predecessors in Vienna, they did establish close personal relationships. They also attempted to balance altruism and national interest in order to create a durable peace. But unlike those predecessors, they did have to pay occasional attention to electorates – a diplomatic difficulty, but also a useful diplomatic lever.

A thoughtful reader of Webster’s history, while approving Castlereagh’s dictum that the aim was ‘not to collect trophies but to bring back the world to peaceful habits’, would have realized that there was a geopolitical problem not present in 1815. Then it was clear that France had lost, and that the Allies, whose armies were in Paris, had a common interest in preventing the re-emergence of a French threat. They also had ample power to do so. The French had few illusions, and the restored Bourbons had an interest in cooperating with the Allies, who consequently allowed Talleyrand to join in the negotiations. Even after Napoleon’s Hundred Days, the Allies were confident enough to treat France quite generously – not that the French thought so. But in 1918, it was not clear that Germany had really been defeated. It had suffered negligible material damage. Its armies were on foreign soil, and even the most belligerent soldiers, such as Foch, feared invading the German heartland. Only small border areas were occupied by the Allies, whose war-weary armies were being demobilized. It was Germany’s relative strength, not its weakness, which necessitated its exclusion from the negotiations. How to deal with that strength was the most difficult and divisive problem for the victors. They failed to solve it.

Large delegations installed themselves in Paris in some style. Lloyd George was lent a large flat by a wealthy Englishwoman, where he installed himself with his mistress and secretary Frances Stevenson, his teenage daughter Megan, and his assistant Philip Kerr. The British Empire delegation was based at the Hôtel Majestic. This became a little bit of England near the Arc de Triomphe, as the French staff (to prevent spying) were replaced by Britons. The food was therefore that of ‘a respectable railway hotel’, and the house rules reminded some of school. Free drinks were provided for the Dominion and Indian delegates, but the British had to buy their own. Once settled in, the delegates and their staffs put on concerts and had plenty of parties (Augustus John, the bohemian official artist, spent more time partying than painting, and his colleague, William Orpen, designed posters for the concerts). The Saturday night dances became so popular that the authorities thought of stopping them. One elderly diplomat found the nurses and typists like ‘nymphs’. They knew all the latest dances, and Foch was astonished that ‘the British have such sad faces and such cheerful bottoms’. Lord Balfour, the foreign secretary, was taken out to a nightclub for the first time in his life by an American socialite, Elsa Maxwell – ‘the most delightful and degrading evening I have ever spent’. The leading statesmen, however, worked hard and with few distractions. Clemenceau, aged seventy-eight, led a monk-like existence, going to bed at nine o’clock after a supper of bread and milk; Wilson, aged sixty-three, was usually asleep by ten. Lloyd George, a vigorous fifty-six, ‘as free from care as a schoolboy on holiday’, had rather more fun, going out to cafés and restaurants to observe the Parisians, and leading sing-songs round the piano in his flat.⁶

The ‘Big Three’ did not like each other. Wilson, as all soon realized, was amply endowed with the defects of idealism: priggishness, vanity and arrogance. Clemenceau, nicknamed ‘the Tiger’, struck Lloyd George as ‘a disagreeable and rather bad-tempered old savage’. He had risen in the carnivorous world of French politics, beginning on the extreme Left in opposition to Napoleon III, and thrusting himself to the fore from the 1880s onwards as a wrecker of governments, and then in power as a breaker of strikes. One of his many enemies said he was feared for three things: his sword, his pistol and his tongue. Age had not mellowed him. He had come to power in the dark days of 1917, when he had snuffed out defeatism by means of the prison cell and the firing squad. Many thought he dominated the Conference, as he chaired its sessions. But he knew that France was the smallest of the Big Three, and was more moderate than critics or admirers believed. Clemenceau regretted that Lloyd George – an archetype of the modern professional politician, clever, hard-working, duplicitous and shallow – was not ‘an English gentleman’. He found him devious, opportunistic and rude – ‘You are the very baddest boy’ he exclaimed after one shouting match, and is said to have challenged him to a duel.⁷ Yet they knew that they had to get on, and to a remarkable extent they did. But the personal clashes aggravated the divergences of national interest. They made it more difficult to understand and sympathize with genuine differences of view.

Clemenceau’s genuine anglophilia had years before given rise to nationalist accusations that he was in British pay – in this 1893 cartoon he juggles bags of sterling.

CLEMENCEAU, A DISILLUSIONED ANGLOPHILE

England is the disillusion of my life.

GEORGES CLEMENCEAU

The man who epitomized French intransigence in British eyes was the greatest anglophile to dominate France since Guizot, and probably the last. This was not only a matter of fashion – English clothes, English dogs, furniture from Maples, attendance at Ascot, the habit of shaking hands – but also of ideas, friendships and tastes. As a young man he met John Stuart Mill, one of whose books he translated, and he formed lasting associations with prominent English radicals, liberals, and socialists. He said in 1917 that he had read ‘every substantial book published in the English language in the past twenty years’,⁸ which is more than Lloyd George could have claimed. He had also lived in New York, and had married (unhappily) an American. His closest cross-Channel relations were with British disciples of Positivism – the progressive French philosophy-cum-sect – who were francophile, democratic, anti-imperialist and anti-German. He formed a lasting friendship with the unusual Maxse family – ‘ma famille anglaise’ – who somehow managed to combine Positivism, journalism, and interest in French culture with successful careers in the armed forces. In their circle were francophile intellectuals including Matthew Arnold and George Meredith and radical politicians such as Joseph Chamberlain and John Morley. These English connections led to damaging attacks on Clemenceau in the 1890s, when he was accused of being in English pay: nationalists heckled his speeches with shouts of ‘Aoh yes!’

As prime minister from 1906 to 1909, Clemenceau worked to turn the entente into an alliance. Secret military talks began and he ordered the army to tear up its war plans against Britain. In 1910 he toured the frontier with Sir John French, and in 1911 even joined the British National Service League, campaigning for conscription. During the war, his friendship with General Ivor Maxse, one of the ablest British corps commanders, facilitated a cordial association with the British army; and perhaps helped decide him to back Foch’s decision to reinforce the British in the crisis of spring 1918. These very contacts developed in Clemenceau a healthy mistrust of the British political establishment, and especially for centrist politicians such as Lloyd George. But, as we shall see, he was not mistrustful enough.

Clemenceau came to England in 1921 to collect an honorary doctorate from Oxford, and visited Parliament at Lloyd George’s invitation. Unmollified, Clemenceau asked him why he had become an ‘enemy of France’, to which he replied ‘was it not always our traditional policy?’⁹ Clemenceau was not ‘English’ enough to realize this was a rather awkward joke, and he took it as a ‘cynical’ admission by the man he regarded as the embodiment of perfidious Albion – or perhaps perfidious Wales. But he still regarded the Franco-British relationship as essential. The British, however, did not.

The Conference found itself dealing with all the problems of the world, especially those arising from the collapse of the Russian, Austrian and Turkish empires. But its biggest problem was what to do about Germany. German politicians claimed that they had asked for an armistice on the understanding that a peace settlement would follow Woodrow Wilson’s announcement of ‘no annexations, no contributions, no punitive damages’. The notion peddled by many Anglo-Saxons that France had insisted on harshness in contrast with their own enlightened generosity was self-serving propaganda. All agreed that Germany must be punished and restrained. None were ready to be generous until their own interests had been met. The British had got what they wanted: Germany was deprived of its navy and colonies, and Belgian independence restored. They also insisted on financial reparations, and secured a good share. Yet there were differences of principle too. Wilson and the Americans – and their many British admirers – wanted a new world order based on self-determination, and they believed that their cherished League of Nations would solve all problems. Lloyd George, aiming at reconciliation with Germany, opposed territorial changes that would cause lasting resentment, as the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871 had done in France. Rather to their surprise, the British and Americans found themselves taking similar views. Clemenceau and the French were sceptical about the League of Nations, Anglo-Saxon promises, and German reconciliation. Unlike their Allies, they did not think that a change to a republic removed the potential German threat. They would have liked to break up the Reich, and failing that wanted concrete territorial, strategic, economic and treaty guarantees against renewed attack. They focused on issues that Louis XV would have found familiar: creating a strong Poland, and controlling the Rhine, the ‘natural frontier’ between France and Germany. Marshal Joffre wrote that ‘the frontier of 1815 was a frontier for the defeated, and is no longer suitable for the victors of the Great War’.¹⁰

The Rhineland 1919–1936 – Deterring Germany: possession of the Rhineland threatened the vital Ruhr and offered a possible link with France’s ally Czechoslovakia, 150 miles away.

A compromise was reached over Polish borders. The Rhine was far more difficult, because the French regarded it as essential to their security. Controlling its crossings would protect France and make Germany vulnerable. Combined with disarmament, it made future German aggression unthinkable. Annexation of German territory was ruled out by America and Britain. The French demanded instead to turn the Rhineland into a separate state under French influence, and to garrison troops on the west bank and in bridgeheads on the German side, at Cologne, Koblenz and Mainz (considered by Napoleon to be the strategic key to central Europe). The French also wanted the Saarland, mainly because of its coalfields. The Anglo-Saxons would agree only to limited occupation and subsequent demilitarization of the Rhineland, and temporary occupation of the Saar.

This confrontation nearly wrecked the conference, amid much bad temper and threats to walk out. In March 1919, Lloyd George dramatically offered a permanent British guarantee to France against German aggression, and Wilson agreed to do the same. Lloyd George backed this up with an offer to build a Channel tunnel to speed up British reinforcements in case of a future German attack. This broke the deadlock: the French agreed to drop their insistence on a separate Rhineland state. Clemenceau, a realist who regarded Allied solidarity as France’s only real security, was delighted: ‘What a stroke of fortune for France!’ But he hid his feelings, and demanded military occupation of the Rhineland for up to fifteen years, with reoccupation if Germany misbehaved. This annoyed the Anglo-Saxons, but they agreed. Balfour thought that ‘no manipulation of the Rhine frontier is going to make France anything more than a second-rate Power’, so the French ought to work for a stable international system, rather than treating it with ‘ill concealed derision’.¹¹ But Clemenceau seemed to have got what he really wanted.

The other great issue was ‘reparations’ – a politically correct neologism. The payments levied on Germany became, and perhaps have remained, the most criticized part of the treaty, dismissed as squalid and irrational, and blamed for destabilizing Germany, distorting the world economy, bringing Hitler to power and contributing to a second war. Yet in 1919 all accepted reparations in principle as just, necessary and a deterrent to future aggressors. In the words of the Allies’ blunt official statement, ‘Somebody must suffer the consequences of the war. Is it to be Germany or only the peoples she has wronged?’¹² Germany had suffered less cost and damage than most of the victors. It had pillaged conquered territories, shifting most of the northern French textile industry lock, stock and barrel to Germany. It had deliberately wreaked destruction on France and Belgium in the closing months of the war, and even during the armistice negotiations. It seemed just that Germany should help to ‘repair’ the damage, especially as economic and financial health determined military strength. All countries had run up huge debts, to their own citizens through war bonds, and to Britain and America. Britain and France had been the largest per capita spenders. France’s national debt has been estimated as equal to 94 per cent of its national wealth. Britain had itself spent £7 billion – equal to forty years of pre-war public spending. It had also been the biggest lender, advancing £1.6 billion to the Allies, principally Russia. It had lent £416 million to France, which in turn had lent to Russia and smaller Allies. Britain had also borrowed over £800 million from the USA, largely to lend on to less credit-worthy countries.¹³

If Germany, potentially Europe’s strongest economy, did not pay, then the burden would fall on the French, British or American taxpayers – above all the British. The Americans, who posed as disinterested, vehemently rejected every suggestion of cancelling or writing down inter-Allied debts. The British would not simultaneously pay their debts to America while cancelling their loans to France and Italy, though they did repeatedly seek all-round cancellation. No French government dared to impose taxation and unemployment on its people while letting Germany off scot-free. The only acceptable solution seemed to be to extract as much as possible from Germany and divide it among the Allies according to their costs – which led to unseemly haggling, as well as German lamentation. A liability clause was inserted into the peace treaty – subsequently notorious as the ‘war guilt clause’, though it made no mention of guilt – to provide a legal foundation. The amount finally demanded was £6.6 billion to be paid over thirty-six years. But this was a notional figure, less than half being considered actually recoverable.¹⁴

German delegates had taken no part in negotiations. On 7 May 1919 they were summoned to receive the text of the Treaty of Versailles in what turned into a bitter scene, in which the chief German delegate refused to accept responsibility for the war – ‘a lie’ – and falsely accused the Allies of killing ‘hundreds of thousands’ of German civilians ‘with cold deliberation’ by continuing the blockade after the armistice.¹⁵ The Germans were given two weeks to make written comments, and these, when they came, practically rejected the whole treaty. It seemed possible that they would refuse to sign, in which case the Allies would face having to invade and administer a Germany in chaos. Lloyd George and the British Empire delegation were the first to get cold feet. The South African General Jan Smuts was ‘grieved beyond words’ and said that he might not sign a treaty ‘full of menace for the future of Europe’. The Cabinet was unanimously critical, most on practical, some on moral grounds. Youthful officials were outraged: ‘this bloody bullying peace is the last flicker of the old tradition . . . we young people will build again’.¹⁶ They began lobbying to weaken the terms concerning Poland, reparations and the Rhineland. At the Hôtel Majestic on 30 May they set up an Institute of International Affairs to express their disquiet. The Archbishop of Canterbury voiced unease. Lloyd George began to back-track.

This astonishingly perceptive cartoon parallels Marshal Foch’s prediction that the peace was only a twenty-year truce, but Dyson’s explanation is quite different – he blames Clemenceau for ignoring the future.

A crippled French soldier comes to the conference chamber to ask the politicians ‘whether I’m a victor, yes or no’. It was not an easy question to answer.

The corollary of a desire to mollify the Germans was to blame the French for being vindictive. ‘There is far too much of the French demands in the settlement,’ Smuts told the Delegation. ‘They seem completely defective in all sense of justice, fair-play or generosity,’ thought an influential Foreign Office official. ‘They bargain like Jews and generally are Jews.’ Winston Churchill declared that ‘the hatred of the French for the Germans was something more than human’.¹⁷ Thus, hopeful idealism at the end of the war began the ‘appeasement’ current that quickly dominated official British policy, and made enforcement of the Treaty of Versailles unfeasible. As a first step, the British insisted on allowing Upper Silesia to remain part of Germany rather than joining the despised French satellite, Poland (‘Kaffirs’, to Smuts).¹⁸ Otherwise, an impatient Wilson refused modifications. Preparations were made to invade Germany, so the Germans gave in. The French arranged a grand signing ceremony in the Hall of Mirrors, where the German Empire had been proclaimed in 1871 as German armies completed their conquest of France. Some thought this was poor taste. British officers saluted the German delegates – the only ones who did.

THE POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES OF MR KEYNES

If we take the view that . . . our recent enemies . . . are children of the devil, that year by year Germany must be kept impoverished and her children starved and crippled, and that she must be ringed round with enemies; then . . . heaven help us all.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES¹⁹

We must be sweet
And tactful and discreet
And when they’ve suffered defeat
We mustn’t let
Them feel upset
Or ever get
The feeling that we’re cross with them or hate them
Our future policy must be to reinstate them.
NOEL COWARD, ‘Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans’²⁰

In June 1919, in the tense days when the treaty hung in the balance, J.M. Keynes, a Cambridge don and principal Treasury adviser at the conference, resigned, concluding that ‘hope could no longer be entertained of substantial modification in the draft Terms’. Smuts urged him to write an accessible critical account of the conference. The Economic Consequences of the Peace duly appeared in December. It quickly sold over 100,000 copies, becoming a bestseller in Britain and America, and it was translated into eleven languages. In the opinion of one French critic, no book since Burke’s Reflexions on the French Revolution had wielded ‘such a widespread and immediate influence . . . over the destinies of Europe’.²¹ More than any single work, it discredited the Versailles settlement, and its assertions became the commonplaces of progressive opinion for generations. It also fed British hostility to France.

Part of its impact was due to Keynes’s position as an insider, expressing views widely shared among British and American officials. Much was due to his authority as a recognized expert on the difficult and opaque subject of reparations. But much came from the vehemence of his opinions expressed in thumping prose. Paris had been a ‘morbid . . . treacherous . . . morass’, a ‘nightmare’. Wilson, a ‘blind and deaf Don Quixote’, had been hoodwinked by sophisters and hypocrites, especially the crafty Lloyd George and the cynical Clemenceau. In the background were ‘hard-faced men who look as if they had done very well out of the war’. The treaty was motivated by ‘imbecile greed . . . prejudice and deception . . . one of the most outrageous acts of a cruel victor in civilized history’. Its imposition of fraudulent and impossible reparations ‘reduced Germany to servitude’. He endorsed the protest of the chief German delegate: ‘Those who sign this treaty will sign the death sentence of millions of German men, women and children.’²²

If the victims were the Germans, the villains were the French, to whom Keynes had already during the war shown a lack of sympathy.²³ Though he claimed to understand Clemenceau’s fears, nevertheless he presented him as a wizened misanthrope, blind to the new dawn:

dry in soul and empty of hope . . . he had one illusion – France; and one disillusion, mankind . . . His philosophy, therefore, had no place for ‘sentimentality’ in international relations [and had] a consequent scepticism of all that class of doctrine which the League of Nations stands for . . . He sees the issue in terms of France and Germany, not of humanity and of European civilization struggling towards a new order.²⁴

Keynes accused the French of ‘shamelessly exaggerating’ the extent of physical damage through ‘ill-judged greed’, and told them rhetorically that ‘my arguments are not seriously disputed, outside France’, where politicians ‘blind their eyes and muffle their ears’. He later condemned France as a ‘Shylock’, ‘whining’ for its ‘pound of flesh’, and he accused it of following ‘a definite and scarcely concealed plan [to dominate] the whole of Europe’.²⁵

That pound of flesh, of course, meant reparations, and Keynes’s main thrust was the impossibility as well as the iniquity of the sums imposed through ‘revenge’ and ‘greed’. This was a travesty of the truth. Modern economic historians mostly agree that the reparations were reasonable, and within Germany’s capacities. Keynes made himself the invaluable accomplice of a calculated propaganda effort by the new German republic to undermine the treaty. His personal motives were guilt as a liberal intellectual involved in running a war, sharpened by his crush on an ‘exquisitely clean’ Hamburg banker named Karl Melchior.²⁶ But biographical details explain little, for Keynes had written what many were saying: his very vocabulary can be found in the letters and diaries of British Empire and American delegates in Paris.

Why were Keynes’s arguments welcomed by the liberal elites in Britain, America and even France? The young Kingsley Martin, later editor of the New Statesman, then a Cambridge undergraduate attending Keynes’s lectures, found it ‘wonderful for us to have a high authority saying with inside knowledge of the Treaty what we felt emotionally’.²⁷ This emotion sprang from the idealism which had been used to justify the war, from revulsion against the horrors of the trenches, and from the late flood of optimism evoked by Woodrow Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points’. War-weary people were horrified at any suggestion that the sacrifices of the war to end war might be thrown away in what Keynes condemned as ‘a peace to end peace’. Future reconciliation could be guaranteed if the victors were generous, guided by ‘our moral and emotional reaction to the future of international relations’.²⁸ Idealists wanted to believe, in Balfour’s words, ‘that Germany was repentant, that her soul had undergone a conversion and that she was now absolutely a different nation’.²⁹ Besides, encouraged by German and Soviet propaganda, many insisted that Germany had not been ‘guilty’ of starting the war: the fault lay with the tsar, or Poincaré, or Grey, or imperialism, or capitalism.

So all were guilty. And France, not Germany, was the danger now: France would be blamed in Britain for interwar tensions. Keynes was right to see Clemenceau as his opposite. Few wanted to listen to Clemenceau’s grim message that ‘we must have a great deal of vigilance . . . Yes, this treaty will bring us burdens, troubles, miseries, difficulties, and that will continue for long years.’³⁰ It was another slightly disillusioned anglophile Frenchman, Etienne Mantoux, who wrote the most heart-felt refutation of Keynes’s thesis, The Carthaginian Peace, or The Economic Consequences of Mr Keynes (1946). The son of the professor of French at London University who had acted as official interpreter at the Paris conference, Mantoux had been partly brought up in England. His argument was that Keynes had weakened Allied solidarity and encouraged appeasement of Germany, which had paved the way for Hitler and another war. He completed his book in 1944, while serving in the Free French air force. ‘It was to the coming generation that Mr Keynes dedicated his book twenty-five years ago. This is an answer which comes from that generation.’ He was killed ten days before the war ended.

Wilson and Lloyd George left France immediately after the treaty was signed. Wilson had to persuade the United States Senate to ratify the treaties and join the League of Nations. In the debate his opponents extensively quoted or paraphrased Keynes in their attacks on the treaty. The Senate refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, membership of the League, or the treaty guaranteeing French security. Americans withdrew with relief from European affairs. Thus ended the one fleeting moment in world history when the United States held uncontested moral leadership.

Lloyd George had no such problems with the House of Commons, which in 1919, without a division, accepted the Anglo-French Treaty (Defence of France) Act, unprecedented in peacetime. He could have maintained the alliance even without the Americans – and without the Dominions, who also cried off – but he chose not to. He had slipped into the draft treaty a provision that it would come into force ‘only when [the American treaty] is ratified’, and when this had been read out to Clemenceau it had apparently not registered. Lloyd George had probably made up his mind to trick the French, knowing that the American guarantee was unlikely to materialize.³¹ He may have made the decision when Clemenceau, having agreed to give up the idea of separating the Rhineland from Germany, insisted instead on military occupation – this too a piece of duplicity, as the French intended to use every pretext to stay as long as possible, and use the time to work secretly for Rhenish separation. The British, including Lloyd George, did not realize that France’s ability to balance German power unaided could only be temporary.³² Their chargé d’affaires in Paris warned that if the French held the Rhine, they ‘would have Germany at their mercy for all time; and then as sure as winter follows summer they, feeling themselves absolute masters of the Continent, will turn round on us’. This fear was shared by the foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, who said that France might become ‘the military monarch’ of Europe. If this was an absurd exaggeration, it was given credence by French sabre rattling. At an imposing military ceremony in 1919, the revolutionary General Hoche was reburied in the Rhineland to symbolize reconquest: ‘Here,’ proclaimed a French general, ‘France feels again that she is la Grande Nation.’ So neither side was innocent; but the British were more efficiently perfidious. ‘I trusted Lloyd George,’ admitted Clemenceau, ‘and he got away from me.’³³

Estrangement, 1919–25

The Latin mind was more logical than ours and was always inclined to press arguments . . . to their logical conclusions. It was our nature to shun these logical conclusions.
AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN, foreign secretary, 1926³⁴

It is childish to make long-range policy with people who dislike hypotheses and live only for the present.
PAUL CAMBON, ambassador in London, 1898–1920³⁵

Lloyd George’s nullification of the defence treaty began a parting of the ways between Britain and France. Paris had considered the British guarantee more important than the nebulous American commitment. As a senior French diplomat put it, ‘We cannot remain at peace in Europe if we are not in agreement with England.’³⁶ As much as the League of Nations, that guarantee was a pillar of the peace settlement. Without it, the French might have refused to make crucial concessions over the Rhineland. French politicians and public felt cheated by Britain. Deprived of both the strategic and political guarantees of their security, they fell back on trying rigorously to enforce the Treaty of Versailles, and established close military ties with Poland and Czechoslovakia. This worsened their relations with both Britain and Germany.

The Middle East, a source of Franco-British rivalry since Napoleon, was the occasion of more ill-feeling. The British, in their struggle against the Turks, had made potentially conflicting promises: to Zionists, to T.E. Lawrence’s Arabs, and not least to the French, in the Sykes–Picot agreement of 1916. The eccentric diplomat Sir Mark Sykes (who privately considered French colonists ‘incapable of commanding respect, they are not sahibs, they have no gentlemen’) had agreed to French control of the Syrian coast. The British now wanted to water down the deal, arguing that the French had done little of the fighting against the Turks. This incensed the French, who considered that the diversion of large British forces to the Middle East had left them to do disproportionate fighting on the Western Front. In reality, a deal, including over oil, was not difficult to reach – indeed, it would have been in the interests of both countries to involve themselves as little as possible in the region, as they soon began to realize – but prestige was at stake. The British thought it impertinent of the French to interfere in an area that should not concern them. The French were determined to show that they were not a British satellite. The very triviality of some of the issues made the quarrels all the more venomous. ‘The notes that are coming in from the French government,’ reported the British ambassador in 1919, ‘could hardly be worse if we were enemies instead of allies.’³⁷ During the early 1920s, British intelligence constantly uncovered French ‘dirty work’ in the Levant. ‘The French were considered cads. They did not . . . play cricket.’ After one confrontation with his counterpart Raymond Poincaré in 1922, the British foreign secretary Lord Curzon staggered out of the room in tears repeating, ‘I can’t bear that horrid little man. I can’t bear him.’³⁸ Colonial exhibitions had been planned to take place simultaneously in London and Paris as a gesture of imperial cooperation; the French postponed theirs.

Money was the root of much evil and resentment. The Americans insisted on repayment of loans, convinced that they had done more than enough to help Europe. The French believed that they should repay nothing, as they had contributed disproportionately in blood: how could their Allies charge extortionate prices for the imported uniforms in which French soldiers had died? The British kept pressing for a general writing down of debts and reparations, but were unwilling to be the only ones paying. The Germans sought every excuse not to pay. The French authorities tried to use the unstable world financial situation to amass a hoard of sterling and gold, and rival London as Europe’s financial centre. This created a chill between the Bank of England and the Banque de France, and caused the governor of the former, Montagu Norman, to add the French to his list of dislikes (Catholics, Jews, chartered accountants and Scotsmen).³⁹ Money meant power. The British were annoyed, and even alarmed, that the French, while pleading their inability to pay interest on their debts, were spending more money on arms. France was the world’s largest military power by far, following the demobilization of the British and Americans and the disarmament of the Germans: it still had 900,000 soldiers in July 1920, and the world’s largest air force. Further spending, especially on bombers, caused concern in London. Although few thought the ‘world calamity’ of an Anglo-French war likely, Britain felt obliged to spend more on air defence just in case.⁴⁰

In January 1923, after warnings to Germany, and despite British and American disapproval, 70,000 French troops occupied the Ruhr basin, which furnished 85 per cent of Germany’s coal and 80 per cent of its steel. Many French soldiers hated the Germans, and were glad of the opportunity to avenge what German troops had done in France. There were complaints of looting, vandalism, casual violence and rape, though it seems that French commanders made efforts to maintain discipline. There was a shrill German propaganda campaign against French brutality, which stressed the presence of African and Arab soldiers, a racial insult and a menace to Aryan women.⁴¹ (Recent research suggests that sexual relations were generally consenting, and even long-term; resulting mixed-race children were later to be victims of the Nazis.) Though British public opinion had also been anti-German during the war, it had fewer personal causes for lasting resentment, and now some were receptive to German propaganda. A leading Labour MP, Philip Snowden, attacked the Ruhr occupation as ‘an old and vicious policy’, aggravated by its use of ‘barbarians . . . with tremendous sexual instincts’. The French socialist party also condemned their government’s action.⁴²

Poincaré at first defied criticism. The Germans began strikes, ‘passive resistance’ and sabotage, partly spontaneous, partly organized by Berlin. The currency collapsed – a bus ticket soon cost 150 million marks. The French proclaimed martial law, shot some saboteurs, and eventually expelled 150,000 ‘trouble-makers’ from the occupied zone, including civil servants and policemen. The Germans had to abandon resistance and make at least some reparations payments. Berlin had been given a serious fright by the economic chaos and ensuing political unrest – including a failed nationalist coup in Munich involving one Adolf Hitler. The occupation cost the French more than it secured in reparations, and it also precipitated a devastating run on the franc, which lost 48 per cent of its value. For many it confirmed the already common view that France had become dangerously aggressive. Balfour thought them ‘impossible’ and ‘insane’, ‘afraid of being swallowed up by the tiger . . . yet they spend all their time poking it’.⁴³ The Americans and the British, briefly under a Labour government that sympathized with the Germans, called for compromise. This produced the Dawes Plan, meant to be a final agreed settlement of reparations. The bill was reduced, and provisions for enforcement dropped. In all, Germany paid only about £1 billion over thirteen years, less than one-third of it in cash.⁴⁴ But the Weimar Republic was further weakened, and nationalist propaganda given a plausible grievance.

The Dawes Plan was followed up by a treaty concluded at Locarno between Britain, France, Germany and Italy. It admitted Germany to the League of Nations and jointly guaranteed Germany’s western – though not eastern – borders. The signatories renounced military aggression. The new Tory foreign secretary, the comparatively francophile Austen Chamberlain, waxed lyrical: ‘I rub my eyes and wonder whether I am dreaming when the French Foreign Minister invites the German Foreign Minister and me to celebrate my wife’s birthday, and incidentally talk business, by a cruise on the Lake in a launch called Orange Blossom, habitually used by wedding parties.’⁴⁵ The treaty was formally signed in London on 1 December 1925, and for the occasion the delighted Foreign Office redecorated its grandest rooms, still called the Locarno Suite.

Behind the euphoria, France’s single-handed attempt to enforce the Versailles treaty had been defeated. Faced with German resistance, the Anglo-Saxons compromised. This had ‘an enormous psychological impact’ on the French.⁴⁶ There were few regrets in Whitehall. Churchill, chancellor of the exchequer, voiced a common opinion when he argued that Britain should keep out of European disputes and concentrate on the Empire. France would have to make ‘sweeping’ concessions to the Germans, who could flex their muscles in eastern Europe, a matter of no concern to Britain. The Locarno frontier guarantee was considered the end of a problem, rather than the beginning of a military commitment, and British defence spending was further cut. The French evacuated the Ruhr, and soon afterwards the remaining Allied troops left the Rhineland. The French government made a virtue of necessity, and led by foreign minister Aristide Briand briefly won plaudits by advocating Franco-German reconciliation and European federation. When he spoke of French and German mothers no longer having to worry about the future of their children, cynical diplomats wept. He himself was dry-eyed: ‘I make the foreign policy of our birth rate.’⁴⁷ The discordant notes came from Berlin, where even the Dawes Plan was denounced. Communists and Nazis attacked it as an imposition by capitalists and Jews. The German government was working to re-establish Germany as the dominant power in Europe, including by illegal rearmament. Locarno wound up the vestigial organization for monitoring German disarmament: foreign politicians preferred to turn a blind eye.

Only five years after their victory, the French and British regarded each other with mistrust, dislike and incomprehension. What the French took for British machiavellianism was mostly wishful idealism. What the British took for French militarism was a fearful sense of vulnerability. The responsibility for this misunderstanding was shared. French politicians, led by ‘the Tiger’ Clemenceau and his unbending successor Poincaré, were not good at making friends or influencing public opinion. Perhaps their post-war flexing of military and financial muscle was ill-judged. The misjudgements north of the Channel were vastly greater: over-estimating French strength, and absurdly suspecting a battered and worried France – a victor scared of the vanquished – of aiming to resurrect Napoleonic hegemony. Some of this can be put down to the strength of old prejudices on both sides. Les Anglais could never be other than mercenary and hypocritical; the French were necessarily posturing and vainglorious. But the real problem was their conflicting assessment of Germany. The French did not trust the Germans. They saw no reason, as Clemenceau said, to apologize for their victory. This was unsporting of them, but alas, they were right. Only a penalty-free peace treaty, which would have left Germany dominant in Europe and its neighbours weak and impoverished, would have been enough to avoid resentment. Even that would have been no guarantee of future peace: it was not Hitler who invented Lebensraum. German nationalism, even before the emergence of the Nazis, was strong, and it had never accepted the outcome of the war. Allied concessions failed to mollify it. But British opinion – at least among the political elite, probably less among the public at large – believed that a democratic Germany must be conciliated and strengthened. A confidant of Lloyd George noted in his diary:

The official British point of view is that the German nation were not responsible for the war, that the Junkers have been ejected, that the German government should be supported, that German industries should be revived, and that, generally, the Germans should not be regarded with suspicion.⁴⁸

A leading British historian has recently concluded that ‘international stability would have been better protected if the Anglo-Saxons had accepted more of the French demands’.⁴⁹ Instead, France’s policy of deterrence, based on occupation of the Rhineland, was opposed. The disarmament provisions of the treaty were tacitly abandoned. So in the long run, security in Europe would depend on German self-restraint. This was accepted in Whitehall and Westminster, except perhaps in the armed forces. Austen Chamberlain did not think Germany could possibly be a threat before 1960. The old enemies Poincaré and Clemenceau were at one in their foreboding. Peace, the former observed, ‘rests upon the good faith of Germany . . . not only of the present government in Berlin, but of all those governments that will follow it’. Clemenceau saw another German attack as inevitable – ‘in six months, in a year, in five years, in ten years, when they like, as they like’.⁵⁰

THE TUNNEL: BOWING TO PROVIDENCE

Providence has made us an island – I think for a great purpose in the history of Europe and of the world.
MAURICE HANKEY, cabinet secretary, November 1919⁵¹

Early in 1914, a Channel tunnel was again discussed by the Committee of Imperial Defence. It concluded that ‘if our troops were to become engaged in a European war fighting alongside the French the more tunnels we possess the better, if on the other hand no such operations are in contemplation then we want no tunnels at all.’ Only if Britain and France were such close allies that ‘in the event of war they could be regarded as one nation’ would the project be desirable.⁵² The French set up a committee to study the project in 1918, and they decided that it would be strategically and economically beneficial. In 1919 Lloyd George, as we have seen, dangled the prospect of a tunnel to persuade the French to give up their plans for the Rhineland: it would so speed up British deployment that, unlike in 1914, the Allies would be able to protect France’s northern industrial areas, and so make the Rhineland defensive zone less vital. A House of Commons Channel Tunnel Committee obtained indications of support from 310 MPs for what they asserted would be a highly profitable project. The French proposed a joint study. But Whitehall then had second thoughts. To build a tunnel, said the army, would bind Britain firmly to the defence of France and Belgium, and because Russia was no longer an ally this would demand ‘nothing short of our maximum effort’. Otherwise a tunnel would be a danger: ‘for an offensive war on the Continent we want the Tunnel, but for a defensive war in England we do not.’ If this was the case, thought Austen Chamberlain, it made the tunnel ‘the master of our military and political future’, and hence undesirable.⁵³ Besides, it would be expensive: the estimate was £60 million. Hankey, who wrote the Cabinet minutes, delayed a decision. The Foreign Office reminded everyone that ‘until a century ago France was England’s historic and natural enemy, and that real friendship between the inhabitants of the two countries has always been very difficult’. The damning conclusion was that ‘our relations with France never have been, are not, and probably never will be, sufficiently stable and friendly to justify the construction of a Channel tunnel’.⁵⁴

By the interwar period, the Tunnel had become a joke

Mixed Feelings, 1919–39

Nothing can alter the fundamental fact that we are not liked in France, and never will be. Foreign Office memorandum, 1920 ⁵⁵

No more wars for me at any price! Except against the French. If there’s ever a war with them I’ll go like a shot.
EDMUND BLUNDEN, war poet⁵⁶

The war affected every aspect of life. It forced itself into thoughts and memories; it changed culture, behaviour, beliefs, loyalties, ideologies, fears and hopes. Yet revulsion from its horrors also created a desire to return to normal, and to recover what seemed to have been the pillars of pre-war society. Relations between the French and the British fitted this pattern. Alongside new circumstances stemming from the war, we also see ideas and habits that continued seemingly unaltered.

British intellectuals soon reconnected with Paris’s pre-war avant-garde: ‘The war has not killed the movement,’ wrote the Bloomsbury critic Clive Bell. In 1919 young Osbert Sitwell, just out of the army, organized the first exhibition of French painting in London since 1914. The show featured the leaders of Parisian modernism – Matisse, Picasso, Derain, Vlaminck and Modigliani. As tradition required, it was controversial, with six weeks of press debate provoked by ‘the fury of the philistines’, some of whom had not forgotten the polemics of the 1880s.⁵⁷ Things were changing within the art establishment, which for years had been dithering about introducing modern French art into Britain’s national collections. Still in 1914, one elderly trustee of the National Gallery protested that he would ‘as soon expect to hear of a Mormon service . . . in St Paul’s Cathedral as to see an exhibition of . . . modern French Art-rebels in the sacred precincts of Trafalgar Square.’ But thanks largely to the generosity and enthusiasm of the textile magnate Samuel Courtauld, change came rapidly, and during the 1920s the National Gallery and the Tate both acquired stunning Impressionist and post-Impressionist works.⁵⁸ Paris still retained its status as the Mecca of art. This primacy was vigorously asserted by the French, who were aware of its national and political value – though Proust felt embarrassed at ‘assuming that role ourselves’.⁵⁹

But a younger generation – from Christopher Isherwood to P.G. Wodehouse – were looking elsewhere for stimulation: Berlin, Moscow, Vienna, Rome, even New York and Hollywood. Paris was no longer the only foreign city offering liberation and a good exchange rate. Moreover, probably for the first time, Anglo-Saxon tourists met open hostility and even crowd violence in Paris, with occasional attacks on tourist buses.⁶⁰ This seems to have been a mixture of economic resentment and a feeling that the former Allies were betraying France’s interests. Tourists at least brought money. People who went to work in France felt that ‘we . . . are not really welcomed, but are merely tolerated’.⁶¹ Britain had long been a source of new entertainments for the French, but it was eclipsed by the impact of the United States, accelerated by the presence of American troops. American influence on fashionable culture was unmistakable. Jazz hit Paris in the 1920s, and Britain offered nothing as sexy as Josephine Baker. The American impact aroused some opposition. George Duhamel, famous for his anti-war novels, called on ‘us Westerners’ to root out everything American ‘from our houses, our clothes, our souls’.⁶² The career of Maurice Chevalier illustrates the shift of fashion from London to New York and Hollywood.

FROM ENGLISHMEN IN PARIS TO
FRENCHMAN IN HOLLYWOOD

The young Maurice Chevalier, born in 1888, had begun as a comic singer before the war. Wounded and captured, he learned English in a POW camp from British fellow-prisoners, and joined them in putting on concerts – his introduction to British show-business. He worked in London after the armistice and adopted an English performing style, with dinner jacket or striped blazer, bow tie, and boater – trademarks throughout his long career. He incorporated British elements into his off-stage persona, notably a highly publicized keenness on sport, and so created a modern image of French masculinity: ‘He is elegant . . . he is a sportsman, he is casual. He belongs to the times of the automobile, boxing and rugby . . . we thank him for so well representing us.’⁶³ But American influence counted increasingly in what became a mid-Atlantic style, combining Anglo-Saxon sheen with a traditional Parisian content of risqué working-class cheekiness and seductive charm. He went to America in 1928, and earned more money than any contemporary French performer, remaking himself as an archetypal Frenchman for the English-speaking world (with a carefully preserved French accent) rather than as an English-style performer in France.

In Britain, for the first time since the Second Empire – perhaps since the revolution – progressive opinion became francophobic. As the playwright and diplomat Jean Giraudoux lamented, ‘in five years from a country which represented the liberty of the world we have become a personification of reaction’.⁶⁴ In different ways, this attitude extended across the political spectrum, from pacifists such as the Labour leader George Lansbury, who wanted Britain to disarm and give up its empire, to Tory imperialists such as Churchill who wanted to abandon European entanglements. Support for appeasement of Germany was strongest among Liberal and Labour sympathizers. These views were idealistic, generous, and decent, at least towards Germany. They were also self-righteous, self-deluding – and inevitably anti-French. If the Germans were doing their best to be good citizens, any trouble must logically be the fault of those ‘impossible people’ the French.⁶⁵

On both sides of the Channel, polemicists searched for historical parallels and explanatory stereotypes. Both sides referred learnedly to the Napoleonic wars. According to H.N. Brailsford, a leading Labour journalist, ‘France has recovered the military predominance she enjoyed under the first Napoleon’, and he warned of ‘the persistent military tradition of this most nationalist of peoples’. The aggressive attitude of the Labour chancellor, Philip Snowden, led him to be threatened with a duel by his French counterpart and compared with Joan of Arc’s executioners by the French press (his wife explained it was only his Yorkshire manner). Widely read attacks on Britain appeared in France, which sufficiently upset Whitehall for official complaints to be made.⁶⁶Nationalists and the Left denounced the sins of the City of London. In the most notorious attack, published in 1935, the prominent journalist Henri Béraud asked whether ‘England must be reduced to slavery’. His gist would have been familiar in the 1890s or even the 1790s: ‘John Bull has only one policy, that of its bankers and its merchants.’ Britain foments global discord to gain power and profit, sending shiploads of ‘Messrs Vickers’ toys, the gentlemen of the Intelligence Service, the yapping cargo of big-footed ladies and insipid male virgins from Oxford’ to govern the Empire. Béraud lacked the space ‘to recall every notorious example of the violence, perfidy, implacable selfishness and disloyalty that sully its national history’. Its habitual victims were the Irish, the Boers, the Indians, the Arabs (in a particularly dastardly trick, it was encouraging them to resist beneficent French rule), Europeans as a whole (‘les nègres commencent à Calais’), and above all the French. ‘The Englishman has always been both our hereditary enemy and the enemy of Europe.’ During the war, the English ‘fought with us’ but ‘not for us’. Now they were siding with the Germans, even gratuitously insulting France by signing a naval agreement with Germany on the anniversary of Waterloo. ‘I hate this people, for myself and for my ancestors, by instinct’: they were deliberately ‘sabotaging our victory’.⁶⁷ A new villain had appeared: the ‘infernal’ Intelligence Service, which in several popular books became the symbol of British global power and an explanation for the world’s mysterious problems. In a sensational 1926 exposé Robert Boucard revealed its secret headquarters at 10 Downing Street – ‘a building with an imposing façade and impeccable sobriety of line – English puritanism in all its splendour’. The Intelligence Service had kept the war going so that the City could profit from clandestine trade with Germany.⁶⁸ Such widely-sold works must have had an effect. A shocked embassy official reported in October 1935 that a newsreel showing the Prince of Wales had been hissed in Paris. Armed police were stationed outside the embassy.⁶⁹

Cross-Channel hostility was not universal. There were pro-French voices in Whitehall and Westminster – some of them recent converts – who began in the mid-1930s to press for closer relations and a firmer line towards Germany. These ‘pro-Frog boys’ (as that political Bertie Wooster, the Tory MP and diarist ‘Chips’ Channon, called them) included Sir Robert Vansittart, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Edward Spears, chairman of the Great Britain–France Association, and their patron, Winston Churchill. At the Quai d’Orsay, and more widely in France, persistent voices emphasized that partnership with Britain was indispensable. Advocates included the urbane Philippe Berthelot, Vansittart’s opposite number at the Quai d’Orsay, and his entourage of diplomat-intellectuals, including his eventual successor, Alexis Léger (alias the poet Saint-Jean Perse). There were small-scale educational and local initiatives, and polite contact through elite pressure-groups (such as the Club Interallié). The Great Britain–France Association combined something of both, holding annual dinners to which ministers were invited, and local branches organizing talks and social events. On the British side, the government was slow to take an interest in propaganda, considering it un-British. Hence, the British Institute in Paris, set up in 1926, received a subsidy of £2–3,000, compared with the Institut Français in Kensington, which received £200,000. The British Council only opened a Paris office in 1939. Academic contacts, never vigorous, dwindled in the 1920s, despite gestures such as the establishment of the Foch Professorship of French History at London University. Before 1914, some 200 French students annually attended courses at British universities; by 1926, there was only one.⁷⁰

In the late 1930s, when cordiality became frighteningly urgent, efforts were made in both countries to bring public feeling into line with strategic necessity. Artistic events were organized. In 1937 Sir Thomas Beecham and the LPO performed Elgar, Delius and Berlioz in Paris. The Cambridge University Madrigal Society followed. In 1938, an exhibition of British paintings was held at the Louvre. In July there was a successful royal visit. An Ode à l’Angleterre was run up, paying tribute to ‘English soldiers lying beneath white crosses’, and Le Figaro helpfully printed a phonetic version of ‘Godd saive zhe Kingg’. A huge monument to Britannia was unveiled where the first BEF units had disembarked in 1914 at Boulogne, not far from where Napoleon had failed to embark in 1805. (It was blown up by the Germans two years later.) President Lebrun visited London in March 1939 in what Channon dismissed as ‘Frog week’ (though he enjoyed wearing court dress – ‘my Lord Fauntleroy velvet number’). In July, the 150th anniversary of the revolution, the Grenadier Guards marched down the Champs Elysées. The intention was to stress the democracies’ shared cultural, historical and political heritage. This was the avowed aim of the Cannes Film Festival, set up in 1939 to rival Mussolini’s Venice festival. The French cultural attaché asked for Alexander Korda’s patriotic spectacular The Four Feathers to be shown there instead of at Venice. This story of a British officer who abandons the army because he is afraid of war, but recovers to become a hero, must have resonated with many in the circumstances. So did Marcel L’Herbier’s lavish Entente Cordiale (1939). This romanticized history, scripted by André Maurois, gave a flattering portrait of Edward VII, ‘the greatest of diplomats’ and stressed the historical necessity of Anglo-French partnership for peace and victory. It gently celebrated cross-Channel stereotypes with a love triangle between the pretty but pallid daughter of an English diplomat (‘I’d prefer her to marry an Englishman – less fun but more durable’) and two dashing French brothers, one a soldier from the Fashoda expedition, the other a journalist on a rabid anglophobe newspaper – ‘A Frenchman, a dancer, and a journalist – that’s all we need!’ There was a lot of ground to be made up, however, before cross-Channel love broke out en masse, and as before 1914, it would need a German matchmaker all could agree to hate.

Towards the Dark Gulf, 1929–39

There was no sense in rushing into alliance and making Germany feel that she was being threatened.
JAMES RAMSAY MACDONALD, prime minister, 1933⁷¹

It’s high time the French were ‘told where to get off’ . . . It’s time we ceased being tied to their leading strings, and a rare lot of people in this country think so too. Assistant secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence, March 1936⁷²

Who in France would have imagined in 1930 that in less than 10 years this great democratic nation would have become a second-rate power shorn of its influence in central Europe and dependent on a stubborn and demanding ally for its own security?
HENRY MORGENTHAU, Us treasury secretary, September 1938 ⁷³

Optimists could be fairly content as the 1920s reached their end. Churchill told an audience in Montreal that ‘the outlook for peace has never been better for fifty years’.⁷⁴ The legacy of the war seemed to have been liquidated by a combination of coercion, pay-offs and exhaustion.⁷⁵ Germany was borrowing from the United States, partly to pay much-reduced reparations, but also to increase public spending at home. Britain had returned to the gold standard at the pre-war parity of sterling to the dollar, to demonstrate that things were back to normal and that London was still the world’s financial market-place. The United States was enjoying an investment boom. France had stabilized the franc at a quarter of its pre-war rate against sterling. Thanks to this undervaluation France was exporting vigorously, and turning its foreign earnings into gold, in part to increase its clout against what the governor of the Banque de France called ‘the imperialism of the Bank of England’.⁷⁶ The financial system, however, was fragile; and over much of Europe political systems were equally so. In October 1929 the New York stock market crashed. Individuals and businesses were ruined. Banks failed. America stopped lending. All countries sought to protect themselves by cutting domestic spending and costs, and reducing imports. World trade collapsed. Millions lost their jobs. The causes of the crash and its aftermath still engage economic historians. Many at the time thought the cause was obvious: France. The British Treasury thought that ‘the monetary policy pursued by the French was largely responsible for the world crisis’.⁷⁷ Its cheap currency and accumulation of gold had undermined the international financial system, forced other countries to take deflationary measures, and thus widened and deepened the slump. France itself, meanwhile, was relatively immune from the consequences. This analysis held some truth, though there were more profound causes.

Every country felt the political shock. Resentful voters turned to extremist parties, which drew on the experience of the war to advocate state action, discipline, and violence. In July 1932, the most extreme of the German nationalist parties, Hitler’s National Socialists, doubled their 1928 vote to 37.4 per cent of the total, and the following January were brought into a coalition government. They seized the opportunity to establish a one-party dictatorship. Their supporters wanted them to bring down unemployment – which broadly speaking they did. They also planned to speed up and radicalize the policy pursued by all their predecessors: destroying what was left of the Versailles settlement, on which they blamed Germany’s economic disasters, and thus nullifying the outcome of the war.

This frightening development did not alter British and French policies. Many made the same assumption as Hitler’s erstwhile coalition partners: that he could not really mean his own rhetoric, and that the realities of being in power would sober him up – or he would be overthrown. The logic of appeasement was confirmed: it was because Germany had been treated ‘harshly’ that this nationalist backlash had occurred, and therefore it had to be calmed by moderate and just concessions. As the Manchester Guardian saw it, ‘the Nazi revolution’ was an outcome of ‘brooding over the wrongs of Germany’. This was blamed largely on the French: ‘Had there been no Tardieu,’ thought the prime minister MacDonald, referring to France’s recent hard-line prime minister, ‘there would have been no Chancellor Hitler.’⁷⁸

Furthermore, the danger of not appeasing Germany had suddenly increased. British and French intelligence reports tended to underestimate German ambitions, and overestimate German force – the perfect recipe for concession. In both countries, any response was inhibited both by cost and by vehement public opposition to any hint of military confrontation. In Britain the Labour party condemned it as ‘the merest scaremongering . . . to suggest that more millions of money needed to be spent on armaments’. Churchill hoped that Hitler could be contained by a mixture of deterrence and concession, and that a strong Britain could ‘stand aside’ from European conflicts: ‘I hope and trust that the French will look after their own safety, and that we shall be permitted to live our life in our island . . . we have to be strong enough to defend our neutrality.’⁷⁹ In France, now also belatedly stuck in economic depression, the arguments were similar. French politicians and diplomats who were sceptical of appeasement had no option but to wait and hope that British and French voters would come to support a stronger policy before it was too late.

In the meantime, France’s policy rested on two foundations. Having lost the Rhineland, it had built an elaborate and expensive system of fortifications, the Maginot Line – modernized Vauban. It consolidated links with other potential targets of Germany, most crucially Poland and Czechoslovakia. It was unclear whether these states were militarily viable. Mussolini’s Italy was another matter, however, for it shared with France an interest in preventing Germany from absorbing Austria. An alliance with Italy would transform France’s strategic position. Mussolini was planning to conquer the independent African monarchy, Abyssinia. The French government, and less willingly the British, were prepared to acquiesce as the price of Italian support in Europe. Prime minister Pierre Laval and foreign secretary Sir Samuel Hoare agreed a secret compromise in December 1935 to give part of Abyssinia to Italy. This was leaked to the press, and it caused an outcry in Britain: here was a plot to connive in blatant aggression and undermine the League of Nations. Hoare resigned. Britain supported economic sanctions imposed on Italy by the League, and also sent a fleet into the Mediterranean. France was forced to follow Britain. The main effect of the sanctions was to end the prospect – perhaps illusory – of a Franco-Italian alliance. French nationalists were apoplectic. Perfidious Albion had deprived France of defences on the Rhine and was now wrecking its best alternative chance of security. The idealism of the British public was thus interpreted as Whitehall cynicism.

That year did see Whitehall cynicism, however. Britain wanted to avoid an arms race with Hitler, and offered bilateral arms limitation agreements. But this meant accepting German rearmament, despite its being illegal under the Versailles treaty. France was not even consulted. Britain began a five-year rearmament programme, but its purpose was not to resist Hitler. Early advocates of rearmament, notably Churchill, wanted a bigger navy and air force to make Britain strong enough to avoid European quarrels and safeguard the Empire. It was hoped that the RAF would provide a means of deterrence that would be relatively cheap in money and manpower. The army was not a priority. The term ‘British Expeditionary Force’, redolent of 1914, was taboo. The most Whitehall would envisage was a token ‘Field Force’ of two divisions.

Franco-British disarray encouraged Hitler in his first gamble: the illegal remilitarization of the Rhineland in March 1936. This began as the most tentative dipping of the jackboot toe. The German army was unready for a war, so a mere 3,000 troops advanced into the zone, with orders to withdraw immediately if the French reacted. This was the point at which, legend has it – a legend encouraged by Hitler himself – the Nazi adventure could have been snuffed out: the Führer would have been humiliated, and the army might have overthrown him. In fact the risk was small. Even Churchill hoped for a ‘peaceful and friendly solution’.⁸⁰ For idealistic appeasers, the Rhineland issue was a hangover from the ‘unjust’ Versailles treaty and a symbol of French ‘militarism’. MacDonald hoped that Hitler’s bold action had taught the French a ‘severe lesson’. Snowden muttered that the ‘damned French are at their old game of dragging this country behind them in the policy of encircling Germany’.⁸¹ Nothing could have been further from the truth. London did not have to restrain Paris from military action, because there was no appetite for it. The commanders of the army, still seen abroad as dangerously powerful, informed their government that they had no rapid reaction force to evict the Germans, whose strength they vastly overestimated.⁸²

The pattern for the next three years was of usually relieved French acquiescence in British appeasement. The French historian François Bédarida described this as France being on the leading-strings of its ‘English governess’ – an influential idea in French accounts. British historians reply that French politicians used Britain as an excuse for their own unwillingness to act. This is clearly shown in Spain, where a nationalist military rebellion against the left-wing government began in July 1936. Spain became an ideological and political battleground for Europe, especially when Italy and Germany gave aid to the nationalists. Spain was governed by an anti-fascist ‘Popular Front’ coalition of republicans, socialists and Communists, and so, since June 1936, was France, under the socialist Léon Blum. The Blum government, especially certain of its ministers, wanted to help the Spanish republicans. So did the whole of the European Left. In contrast, the British government, and most of the public except groups on the Left, had little sympathy for either side. They wanted to prevent the war from spreading and remain on reasonable terms with whoever won. At the time, and in many accounts since, Britain was shown as preventing the French government from helping the republicans. In fact, it was the Blum government that proposed a policy of non-intervention and encouraged London to take the lead in ineffective measures to enforce it. Blum knew that open French aid to the Republic would destroy his coalition and cause civil unrest in France, so while permitting token arms deliveries, he was relieved to have Britain as an excuse for neutrality. The Quai d’Orsay thought this saved the French government.⁸³ French nationalists identified strongly with Mussolini and the Spanish General Franco, and now supported appeasement. French foreign policy became far more ideologically divisive than before. Nevertheless, Blum took the brave step in September 1936 of beginning substantial French rearmament, though its cost forced him to suspend social reforms, disappointing his own supporters.

Rejection of war was even stronger in France than in Britain, and came from both sides of the political spectrum. Conservatives feared that only the Communists would benefit. Here John Bull and Marianne squabble with Mussolini and Franco while Hitler looks on. Stalin gloats in the background.

Rearmament in France and Britain was not undertaken with resolve or confidence. All feared new Sommes and Verduns, of which many politicians had personal experience. All feared the economic and political effects of rearmament. All feared gas and biological weapons. The nervous lay awake at night listening for air-raid sirens. The British, warned by the new prime minister Stanley Baldwin that ‘the bomber would always get through’, were convinced that for the first time in history the Channel gave no protection. The philosopher Bertrand Russell predicted in 1936 that ‘London . . . will be one vast raving bedlam, the hospitals will be stormed, traffic will cease, the homeless will shriek for help . . . the government . . . will be swept away by an avalanche of terror’. One French expert stated that in an hour 100 bombers could cover Paris with a sheet of poison gas twenty metres thick. The commander of the Paris fire brigade gave lectures warning that fifty incendiary bombs could reduce the city to ashes, and the only hope was flight. It was seriously suggested that Parisians should be rehoused in tower blocks with armoured roofs, to raise them above the gas sheet.⁸⁴ These were not the fears of lunatics: the British Committee of Imperial Defence expected half a million casualties in the first weeks of war, and planning for them was the first step towards what became the National Health Service.

In France especially, there was a dull apprehension that all effort was hopeless: Germany was continuously increasing its superiority in both manpower and production. The French population, stagnant for half a century, actually decreased in the 1930s as a delayed consequence of 1914–18. Pacifism among veterans and the peasantry (who were conscious of providing most soldiers, and many of whom turned to Communism as a result) was based on the conviction that France could not stand another war. One farmers’ newspaper wrote in 1938 that ‘another bloodbath would mean the destruction of our peasantry, and without peasants what would be left of France? A victory would be almost as devastating as a defeat.’⁸⁵

The high point of anti-war fervour in Britain had come when the Nazis, who came to power in January 1933, first revived the spectre of war. There were highly publicized events such as the Oxford Union’s ‘King and Country’ debate in February 1933³ and the Peace Ballot in 1934–5. This, organized by the League of Nations Union, was signed by over 11 million people. It urged disarmament, support for the League, and prevention of aggression by economic sanctions alone. In France, much of the Left shared the quasi-religious attachment to the League of Nations of their British comrades, and also their condemnation of the treaty of Versailles, their suspicion of ‘imperialist’ military alliances, and their idealistic desire to appease Germany. French schoolteachers’ leaders saw themselves as working for ‘moral disarmament’ by teaching hatred of war.⁸⁶ George Lansbury, leader of the Labour Party, and Paul Faure, secretary-general of the socialist SFIO, were both pacifists. But the Left began to change as fascist power increased. Lansbury was brutally attacked by the trade unionist Ernest Bevin at the 1935 party conference for ‘hawking his conscience round . . . asking to be told what to do with it’ – a scene that reduced Virginia Woolf to tears. The French Communist Party, responding to Moscow’s sudden alarm at the fascist threat, supported Blum’s rearmament. Abyssinia, and even more Spain, encouraged the shift. The Labour Party began slowly to turn away from the blanket rejection of rearmament dear to its intellectuals and party workers, and in 1937 it gave cautious support to the Conservatives’ programme. Yet the great majority of French and British people believed that appeasement could defuse conflict. ‘Even Hitler,’ wrote Blum, ‘cannot be thought to have such absurd and mad intentions.’ Lansbury went to meet Hitler, and wrote enthusiastically of the latter’s desire for peace – he was, after all, ‘a total abstainer, non-smoker [and] vegetarian’.⁸⁷ Because they had rejected the germanophobic propaganda of 1914–18, well-meaning progressives refused to see Hitler’s Germany as truly evil. Like the generals, they were preparing for the last war.

Even soldiers, sailors, and diplomats who were professionally hardened to the prospect of war were haunted by insoluble strategic problems. The French were now potentially threatened by Italy and Spain as well as by Germany and Japan, and accepted that their richest colony, Indochina, was indefensible. The British expected to face war from the Hebrides to Hong Kong, which would mean the end of Britain as a world power. They refused to join the French in any serious planning, because the latter would ‘flaunt’ it and this would annoy Germany. Rearmament, all hoped, would lead eventually to negotiated disarmament, not to war. To make sure, the Foreign Office laboured to ‘embarrass and weaken’ Blum, regarding him as too close to the Czechs.⁸⁸

In March 1938 a Nazi coup was engineered in Vienna, and Hitler was invited to incorporate Austria into the Reich. The Versailles treaty had forbidden this, but legality had become irrelevant. Self-determination backed by tanks prevailed. Churchill now sounded a clear warning: ‘I have watched this island descending, incontinently, fecklessly, the stairway which leads to a dark gulf.’ He began to contact like-minded people in France. But public opinion still supported appeasement, ‘the most noble term in the diplomatic vocabulary’.⁸⁹ As Neville Chamberlain, prime minister from May 1937, put it, ‘we are all members of the human race . . . There must be something in common between us, if only we can find it, and perhaps by our very aloofness from the rest of Europe we may have some special part to play as conciliator.’⁹⁰

Czechoslovakia, the last true democracy east of Switzerland, was now largely an enclave in Germany, and the obvious next target. The Treaty of Versailles, mainly to give the new state defensible frontiers, had incorporated within it the largely German-speaking Sudetenland, whose ethnic nationalists had been a pernicious nuisance since Habsburg days. Hitler promised to rescue them from Czech domination. Czechoslovakia, like Poland, was a French protégé, one of the states that Paris had hoped might collectively balance German power. However, this strategy had withered. The Czechs had a well-equipped army of thirty-five divisions which was prepared to fight. But Italy’s alignment with Germany and Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland meant that France could give no rapid help. Whitehall had always deplored France’s east-European alliances as a provocation to Germany, and was dead against war for ‘a country which we can neither get at nor spell’, and which was widely regarded as one of the Versailles treaty’s mistakes. Both French and British intelligence grossly overestimated the German army and airforce, which the British believed could cause 50,000 civilian casualties in Britain within twenty-four hours.⁹¹

It seemed absurd even to think of fighting a world war – in which Japan and Italy were expected to join – in order, as a left-wing French trade unionist put it, ‘to force three million Germans to remain within the Czechoslovakian border’.⁹² The right-wing journalist Henri Béraud agreed: ‘Why die for the Sudetenland?’ Frightened people began to leave Paris – including the family of the air minister. London and Paris were resigned to German economic and political dominance of much of central and eastern Europe, if only the Germans would, however crudely, play by the rules. The foreign office view was that ‘as long as Hitler could pretend he was incorporating Germans in the Reich we could pretend that he had a case’.⁹³ London and Paris separately concluded that the Czechs must allow the Sudeten Germans to go their own way, and the Czech government reluctantly acquiesced. But Hitler wanted to take by force what was being offered peacefully. Chamberlain, believing a German attack imminent, disconcerted Hitler by inviting himself to Berchtesgaden on 15 September 1938 to tell him in effect that he could have the Sudetenland in return for a four-power guarantee of the new borders. The Daily Herald, the popular Labour paper, declared that he had ‘the sympathy of opinion everywhere, irrespective of Party’. Léon Blum admitted in his party paper Le Populaire that he was ‘torn between cowardly relief and shame’ – a feeling widely shared on both sides of the Channel. One of his party comrades replied defiantly that ‘we are scared, and that’s a good thing’.⁹⁴ On 22 September, Chamberlain met Hitler again at Bad Godesberg, on the Rhine, to seal the bargain, but found to his surprise and anger that Hitler was now tearing away the fig-leaves of international diplomacy by claiming more territory and threatening an immediate invasion. Chamberlain returned to London, and the Cabinet rejected the German demand. In both Britain and France, public opinion was divided and volatile.

The French prime minister Edouard Daladier, a stubborn southern radical known as ‘the Vaucluse bull’, made the agonizing decision that it was ‘better to fight and die than accept such a humiliation’.⁹⁵ He came to London on 25 September and told Chamberlain that France would resist the destruction of Czechoslovakia. He warned eloquently of Hitler’s ambitions, far more dangerous than those of Napoleon – ‘awful rubbish’, thought the Foreign Office.⁹⁶ The French armed forces began partial mobilization. London warned Berlin that Britain would join in. But Chamberlain made clear to the French – while trying not to ‘offend France beyond what was absolutely necessary’ – that there was little Britain could do on the Continent.⁹⁷ The British ambassador, friendly with Daladier’s pro-appeasement opponents, insisted that the French really wanted peace.

The leaders addressed their peoples. Hitler gave one of his frightening rants to a baying Nazi audience at the Berlin Sportpalast. Daladier stoutly told the French nation that they could not buy peace at the price of national dishonour, which would ‘open the door to future disasters’. Chamberlain made his notorious and characteristically disheartening broadcast lamenting the ‘nightmare’ of war over ‘a far away country of which we know nothing’. This the French found ‘a perfect example of appeasement policy.’⁹⁸ With war seeming inevitable, Mussolini proposed an immediate conference to reach a peaceful settlement.

‘Munich’, where the conference met on 29 September, was to became part of the political vocabulary of the western world, a byword for myopia, betrayal and cowardice, and one of the most discredited episodes in Franco-British history. At the time, it seemed the only chance of saving the world from war. People cheered, from the benches of the House of Commons to the streets of Munich, where they threw flowers and shouted ‘Heil Chamberlain!’ Even Churchill – now the leading critic of appeasement – wished him well. Daladier had tried to telephone Chamberlain before they left for Bavaria, but he was unobtainable. When the delegations arrived at their Munich hotels, the French tried again to contact the British, but without success. There was no consultation at all. Chamberlain and Daladier did not meet before the conference opened in the flashy new Führer Building. The former seemed aloof, and Daladier began to fear having ‘fallen into a trap’.⁹⁹ The meeting began with a blustering attack on the Czechs by Hitler, to which Daladier replied angrily, saying that if Hitler planned to destroy Czechoslovakia, it was a crime that he would not connive in, and he would return to Paris. Mussolini calmed things down by producing a ‘compromise’ plan (which the Germans had given him) and the delegations went to study it over lunch. Again, there was no consultation between the French and the British. The accounts given by the two sides diverge. The French believed that Daladier, who was trying to take a strong line, was being deliberately isolated and abandoned by Chamberlain, bent on appeasement: ‘I was on my own, Chamberlain did not help me at all.’ But Chamberlain claimed that the French delegation was ‘passive’ and ‘demoralized’, and Daladier so timid and unsure of himself that he gave up on them.¹⁰⁰The likely explanation is that the British had in general lost confidence in French political leaders, and in particular believed that Daladier was not supported by his own Cabinet – a view pushed by the Paris embassy. Consequently, Chamberlain kept the real negotiations in his own hands, leaving Daladier in the dark. The ‘Italian’ plan was accepted, with a few minor concessions by Germany – notably that the takeover of the Sudetenland should take place in stages under international supervision.

Chamberlain asked for a private meeting with Hitler, where he produced a declaration of ‘the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again’ and promising ‘consultation’ and ‘efforts to remove possible sources of differences . . . to ensure the peace of Europe’. He and Hitler signed. Daladier only learned of this after he had returned to Paris, and could not but think that it cast doubt on British commitment to France. Hitler was angry at having been tricked, as he saw it, into negotiations that deprived him of the prestige of a military victory – ‘that fellow Chamberlain has spoiled my entry into Prague’.¹⁰¹ He was secretly ashamed of his loss of nerve, and was determined next time to engineer the war he desired. Ironically, his popularity and prestige benefited anyway, for he had gained the Sudetenland despite the pessimism of many of his military and diplomatic entourage, and without the war the German people feared. An insubstantial army plot to remove him in case of war was cancelled. Thereafter he acted without constraint: ‘Our enemies are small worms. I saw them in Munich.’¹⁰²

Chamberlain and Daladier won plaudits, for a time. In France, socialist pacifists proclaimed a ‘Victory of the democracies’, in which there were ‘no corpses, no wooden crosses, no widows, no orphans. The age of Napoleons, of heroes, of Joans of Arc is over.’¹⁰³Chamberlain was ‘the most popular man in the world’, receiving 40,000 mainly congratulatory letters and hundreds of presents. Blackpool football club offered to build twelve houses for ex-servicemen in his honour. The French right-wing intellectual Charles Maurras – who had been proposed for a Nobel Peace Prize by sympathetic academics in fourteen countries – announced that he would prefer the prize to go to Chamberlain.¹⁰⁴ Many a French town acquired its ‘Rue Chamberlain’, and a new dance, ‘Le Chamberlain’ (involving an umbrella), appeared in Paris. The newspaper Paris-Soir started a subscription to buy him a trout stream so that he could indulge his hobby in France. In Fleet Street, only the Daily Telegraph was strongly critical. So, at the other end of the political spectrum, were some left-wing anti-fascists. Chamberlain was convinced that he had won a success. Daladier, who returned to France visibly downhearted, was not. Both had been met on their return by cheering crowds. Chamberlain responded, waving his friendship declaration and speaking of ‘peace for our time’. Daladier’s terse remark was ‘people are mad’ – or, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s account, simply ‘Les cons!’

This difference between Chamberlain and Daladier was the culmination of the disagreement between British and French attitudes since 1919. Daladier had at least as profound a hatred of war as Chamberlain – he had been seriously wounded in the trenches. Both knew the horrors war would bring, and how distant were the prospects of victory. It would be too simple to say that Chamberlain believed Hitler and Daladier did not, but it was the case that Chamberlain was still willing to hope that Hitler could be induced to behave rationally and with some regard to international proprieties. That had been the basis of appeasement since 1919: that Germany had a set of reasonable grievances that could be resolved, and the causes of hostility removed. But Daladier realized that Hitler was using grievances arising from the Versailles treaty as pretexts for unlimited expansion, and concluded that as France would be forced to fight, it should fight without further loss of self-respect, international credibility, and allies. But without British support, that was impossible. There is still debate over whether the real aim at Munich was to gain time to prepare for an inevitable war. It does not seem that such a calculation existed on the French side, where the government was bitterly divided. On the British side, the aim was not to prepare for future conflict, but to win time to build up an air force that could deter one – even if this meant having an army incapable of fighting on the Continent and a navy too weak to face up to Japan. The only people planning to use the respite to prepare for war were the Germans: ‘Now it’s a matter of rearm, rearm, rearm.’¹⁰⁵

Although Munich was and is a powerful symbol, it was not the ideal occasion for forcing a confrontation with Germany. It is surprising that the French, and even the British, contemplated going to war at all. The transfer of Sudetenland, arguably an act of self-determination, had already been accepted, so the dispute was over means, not ends – a French trade-union declaration denounced it as merely ‘procedure, ego or prestige’.¹⁰⁶ Such an issue would not rally appeasers in France, Britain and the Dominions, let alone America. Hitler, convinced he could win, would not have accepted humiliation by backing down, so France, Britain and Czechoslovakia would really have had to fight. It remains a matter of debate whether the chances of defeating Germany were greater in 1938 than in 1939 or 1940. All knew that they could do little or nothing to help the encircled Czechs, who, the French army reckoned, might hold out for a month. One could argue that September 1938 was either too late or too early to go to war with Germany. Too late because the Rhineland, the jumping-off point for invasion, had been lost, and the French army had been run down. Though still numerically impressive, it was not trained or equipped to invade Germany. Too early, because appeasement had not yet been discredited: Hitler proclaimed repeatedly that Sudetenland was his last territorial claim in Europe, and many wanted to believe him. Also too early because British and French rearmament had only just begun. The French air force thought it would be wiped out in two weeks, and the RAF was barely emerging from post-1918 hibernation. They were better armed by 1940. So were the Germans.

Yet if Hitler had persisted in forcing a war, if Chamberlain had not leapt at negotiations, if Daladier had had his way and resisted concessions, and if the Franco-British could have girded themselves up to invade – a steep mountain of ifs – so weak was the German army and so incapable of sustaining a simultaneous war on two fronts that it is just imaginable that Hitler would have been defeated or overthrown, and the world spared its looming catastrophe.

The leading critic of the Munich agreement was Churchill: ‘do not suppose that this is the end . . . This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup.’ (An unknown French colonel, Charles de Gaulle, wrote similarly to his wife: ‘We shall drink the cup to its dregs.’¹⁰⁷) Churchill called for a Franco-British alliance as the core of a ‘grand alliance’ to contain Hitler. Public opinion in both Britain and France was now moving in the direction of Churchill and his French friends such as the centre-right politican Paul Reynaud. But appeasement was not dead. There remained strong grass-roots pacifism on the French Left: ‘The most onerous concessions are better than the most victorious war.’¹⁰⁸ The extreme Right was virulently anti-war, sniffing out a plot in Moscow to provoke war in the west to destroy France and bring about a Communist revolution. Britain was less ideologically divided. Much of the press – notably The Times – continued to favour appeasement, though it was probably lagging behind public opinion. Some Welsh miners even demonstrated against Munich. But despite Bevin and the TUC, many in the Labour and Liberal parties still criticized arms spending and opposed – the Labour leader Clement Attlee ‘shaking with rage’ – the first steps towards conscription in April 1939.¹⁰⁹

Events soon confirmed Churchill’s grim predictions. Kristallnacht, the first mass violence against Jews in Germany, took place on 9 November 1938. ‘I must say Hitler never helps, and always makes Chamberlain’s task more difficult,’ grumbled Channon.¹¹⁰Opinion polls showed that most people no longer believed Hitler’s statement that he had no further territorial ambitions in Europe. In France, 70 per cent thought that further German demands should be resisted. The subscription for Chamberlain’s trout stream raised only £1,500. On 13 March 1939, the German army occupied Prague, violating the Munich agreement. A Gallup poll showed 87 per cent in Britain now favoured an alliance of Britain, France and Russia, though 55 per cent still trusted Chamberlain.¹¹¹

Sensational intelligence reports arrived that Germany was planning surprise attacks on Holland and even Britain. This was false information, leaked by conservative anti-Nazi elements in Germany in the hope of goading the West into action. They succeeded in creating high excitement and galvanizing Whitehall. Far from panicking, the British were strangely confident as their rearmament programme accelerated: ‘We have at last got on top of the dictators,’ wrote Chamberlain in February.¹¹² He surprised Parliament with a sudden public pledge of support to France – ‘Really Chamberlain is an astonishing and perplexing old boy,’ noted one MP.”¹¹³ Joint military planning at last began. The British government now adopted French political and military strategy wholesale – years too late. Offers of support were showered on France’s allies in Eastern Europe, especially Romania (important for its oil) and Poland. Poland was the crux, as the Nazis had begun to repeat their Sudetenland tactic, using as a pretext for aggression Danzig and the corridor through German territory connecting Poland with the sea. On 31 March 1939 Chamberlain told the Commons that Britain and France would aid Poland if its independence were endangered.¹¹⁴ It was not, however, that he had decided to pick up Hitler’s gauntlet and face an inevitable war. Ministers and officials in London and Paris aimed to avert war by combining deterrence (through rearmament and alliances) and appeasement (offering Hitler African colonies and economic inducements).

Deterrence was also the purpose of the unenthusiastic Franco-British attempt in August 1939 to negotiate an alliance with the Soviet Union, even now a controversial issue. It was not clear – and is still not – what the duplicitous and paranoid Stalin really wanted, and whether he would or could provide effective aid in case of war. Moreover, neither Poland nor Romania wanted the Red Army on their soil. Negotiations stagnated. On 23 August, Stalin astonished most of the world by concluding a non-aggression pact with Germany instead. This is probably what he had intended all along: negotiations with France and Britain were bargaining counters to get a good deal from Hitler, while promoting a destructive war among the ‘imperialist’ states. The Soviet Union began to sell huge amounts of food and raw materials to Germany. This set the seal on Hitler’s war.

It arrived with chilling predictability. Hitler increased pressure over Danzig. This time there was no Munich: Hitler wanted his war, and Daladier and Chamberlain were less willing to offer concessions. Hitler had exhausted appeasement, by showing that both its idealism and its expediency were illusions. A right-wing French newspaper asked sarcastically, ‘Die for Danzig?’ But opinion polls showed that 76 per cent of the French people were ready to risk precisely that.”¹¹⁵ There was little of the emotion of the Munich crisis, only twelve months before. ‘I suppose it is like getting married,’ reflected Channon. ‘The second time it is impossible to work up the same excitement.’”¹¹⁶ The French and British governments renewed their guarantees to Poland – whose military strength, for no obvious reason, they exaggerated – and their peoples resigned themselves to war. Their last hope was that Hitler might be bluffing.

Appeasement, broadly speaking, had been a British choice, and a French necessity. ‘Anglo-Saxon’ opinion had always been far more sanguine about building a new world order based on the League of Nations, which they assumed Germany would willingly join, once its reasonable grievances had been met. As the Foreign Office put it, ‘from the earliest years following the war, it was our policy to eliminate those parts of the Peace Settlement which, as practical people, we knew to be untenable and indefensible’.”¹¹⁷The arrival of Hitler made no difference: Whitehall did not grasp what Nazi foreign policy was really aiming at – unlimited conquest. The failure of appeasement was not only a failure of British diplomacy, but also of British understanding of Europe – in a sense, of British understanding of human nature. The pessimistic predictions of Foch, Poincaré and Clemenceau were confirmed: Europe had not had peace, but only a truce, during which France had grown weaker. The supposedly theoretically minded French had been sceptical and hard-headed; the supposedly practical and empirical British – veering crazily between fear of French power and disdain for French weakness – had been governed by utopianism and wishful thinking.

Could the war have been prevented? Churchill in his memoirs and later historians have concluded that the only chance would have been by a strong alliance between France and Britain. The only problem with this analysis is that no one in Britain, including Churchill, wanted it until it was far too late. So, as Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary, summed it up, the French thought that ‘war has come upon them again owing to our having taken the teeth out of the Versailles settlement, and having ever since shown a sentimental spinelessness in dealing with Germany’.”¹¹⁸

Whitehall and Paris even failed to act together when the Germans attacked Poland on I September. Mussolini tried to repeat the Munich trick by proposing another conference. An angry House of Commons forced the flustered Chamberlain to ignore him and send an ultimatum to Germany at nine o’clock on 3 September. The French, however, in the person of their foreign minister Georges Bonnet, wanted to delay, which caused increasingly heated exchanges between the Allies. France finally declared war six hours after Britain.

² Technically, the United States was not an Ally, but an ‘Associated State’.

³ A motion was passed in the prestigious student debating society that ‘This House will not fight for King and Country’ – widely interpreted as evidence of pacifism among the youthful elite.