“We were alone. A diplomatic history of France”, by Gérard Araud: twenty years of solitude

by time news

2023-05-08 19:21:14

We were alone. A diplomatic history of France, 1919-1939

by Gerard Araud

Tallandier, 336 pages, €22.90

This is the story of twenty years of solitude, between victory and defeat. In 1918, France was victorious but ruined. The Great War bled it dry and weighed down with a massive public debt. Dropped by the “Anglo-Saxons”. She finds herself alone to implement the Treaty of Versailles. Washington does not ratify it, which deprives Paris of a military guarantee.

London is pushing to get France out of the Rhineland occupied for fifteen years. To counterbalance the German power, the French leaders bet on an alliance with Great Britain above all anxious to limit its commitments. Paris tries to break its isolation, signs treaties with Poland and Czechoslovakia, creates the Little Entente between Yugoslavia, Romania and Czechoslovakia, seeks to get closer to the USSR then with Italy.

Walk towards tragedy

A France too dependent on its “English governess”, a defensive military strategy: the inter-war period revisited by Gérard Araud resembles a march towards tragedy. In a position of strength after the occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923, Raymond Poincaré did not take the opportunity to negotiate a bilateral agreement on the calculation and payment of German reparations with the new German Chancellor Gustav Stresemann. The President of the Council does not want to fall out with London and accepts American arbitration.

It is the beginning of an Anglo-American supervision which sees France adopting “a foreign policy of the greatest inclination”, a succession of abandonments, until the sadly famous Munich agreement, the logical continuation of the policy of« appeasement » practiced by London and Paris. Eighty-three years later, underlines the author, the “Forty Syndrome” still weighs on French foreign policy, this “dread of decline” which leads its leaders to want to prove, against the evidence, the status of “great power” of a France that is no longer so.

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