The War Guilt Problem and the Ligue Des Droits de l'Homme 0198827997, 9780198827993

Table of contents :
Cover
The War Guilt Problem and the Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1914–1944
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Abbreviations
1: Introduction
PART I: THE GREAT WAR AND ALL THAT
2: War Origins: The Debate Begins
THE JULY CRISIS, THE LIGUE, AND A NEW IDEA OF THE STATE
THE BEGINNING OF DISSENT
3: The Ramifications of the War Origins Debate: War Aims and Ending the War
WAR AIMS, OR WHAT WAS THE POINT OF IT ALL?
PART II: A LA RECHERCHE D’UNE GUERRE GAGNEE . . .
4: The Wounds of War (1919–24): Challenges to Orthodoxy on the War Guilt Question
WAR ORIGINS AGAIN . . . AND AGAIN
5: Bridge over the Abyss?: Talking to the Germans
REPARATIONS
6: Turning the Page?: The War Guilt Problem in the Era of Locarno
PART III: LES FLEURS DU MAL…
7: In the Shadow of the Swastika
NAZI PERCEPTIONS OF THE LIGUE (AND THUS OF ITS RELATIONS WITH THE DLFM)
THE 1933 LIGUE CONGRESS AND THE DEBATE ON NAZISM
THE 1934 CONGRESS
1935 HYÈRES CONGRESS
THE LIGUE AND THE POPULAR FRONT
8: 1937, or the Aventine Secession
9: Once More with Feeling?: The Ligue des droits de l’homme and the Slide into War
THE 1938 AVIGNON CONGRESS
THE MUNICH CRISIS
1939
THE SECOND WORLD WAR
10: When All Is Said and Done . . .: En guise de conclusion
Bibliography
PRIMARY ARCHIVAL SOURCES
Archives départementales du Gard (ADG)
Archives de la Préfecture de Police (APP)
Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris (BHVP)
Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF)
Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde
Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes (PA/AA), Berlin
Centre de documentation juive contemporaine (CDJC), Paris
International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam
Bibliothèque municipale de Nîmes
Archives René Gerin
Institut d’histoire sociale, Paris
Wiener Library, London
Archives du Ministère des Affaires étrangères (MAE), Paris
Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine (BDIC), Nanterre
PRIMARY PRINTED SOURCES
Newspapers and Journals
House of Commons, London
Publications of the Ligue des droits de l’homme
Congresses of the Ligue des droits de l’homme
Books and Articles
SECONDARY LITERATURE
Index

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T H E WA R G U I LT P RO B L E M A N D T H E L I G U E D E S D RO I T S D E L’ H O M M E , 1914 – 1944

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The War Guilt Problem and the Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1914–1944 NORMAN INGRAM

1

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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Norman Ingram 2019 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2019 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2018950708 ISBN 978–0–19–882799–3 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Acknowledgements This has been, as the French would say, un travail de longue haleine. I began work on the Ligue des droits de l’homme in 1991 while still a Canada Research Fellow at the University of Alberta. My book on interwar French pacifism had just come out and I was eager to follow up leads on the origins of what I called ‘historical dissent’. This dissent over the origins of the Great War became one of the progenitors of the new-style pacifism that emerged in France in the interwar period. In 1991, there were no Ligue archives to speak of. The Ligue’s papers had been seized by the Nazis in June 1940, shortly after their arrival in Paris following the defeat of France, and were presumed lost. Madeleine Rebérioux, the Ligue’s first woman president and an eminent historian of the early Third Republic, confidently told me that the Nazis had burned the Ligue’s papers. I found this a questionable assumption and, sure enough, the Ligue’s papers were returned to France in 2001 from the former Soviet Union where they had languished as war booty since 1945. The papers were opened to historians in 2002 and I began working on them the following year. Alone among historians of the Ligue, I have followed the archival trail to Germany in an attempt to find out what the Nazis were doing with these papers. I have incurred many debts to institutions, colleagues, students, and friends while working on this book. I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for providing me with a research grant from 2004 to 2008 which enabled me to do much of the primary research for this book in Paris and Berlin. I am deeply thankful to the archivists and librarians at the following institutions: the Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine, Nanterre; the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris; the Archives Nationales, Paris; the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris; the Archives de la Préfecture de Police in Paris; the Archives du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères; the Archives départementales du Gard, Nîmes; the Bibliothèque Municipale de Nîmes; the Institut d’Histoire Sociale, Paris; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Magdalen College Library, Oxford; the University of Edinburgh Library; the University of St Andrews Library; the Hoover Institution for War and Peace at Stanford; the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, Paris; the Wiener Library, London; the Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes, Berlin; the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin; and the Bundesarchiv in Berlin-Lichterfelde. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Sonia Combe, then the director of archives at the Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine, who allowed my research assistant and me to digitally photograph large parts of the archives of the Ligue des droits de l’homme—to the point where another archivist at the BDIC floating by the Reserve room one morning was heard to exclaim, more than a little ironically, given the context, ‘Monsieur le Canadien est en train de piller nos archives!’

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vi Acknowledgements At critical junctures, I was blessed with fellowships at three great universities, which enormously facilitated the writing process. In 2009, I was the inaugural fellow in the Centre for French History and Culture of the School of History at the University of St Andrews, to whose then director, Professor Guy Rowlands, I am particularly grateful. During Hilary Term 2017, I was elected to a Visiting Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, which was a tremendously stimulating place to work; I am grateful to the President and Fellows of Magdalen for provision of this fellowship. From April to June 2017, I was elected to a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh; my office overlooking the Meadows with a view south to the Pentlands was a marvellous place to work and I am very thankful for the fellowship. I have been blessed with four truly exceptional PhD students at Concordia (Andrea Levy, Marie-Eve Chagnon, Sebastian Döderlein, and Audrey Mallet), and two more at McGill (Cylvie Claveau and Emmanuelle Carle), of whom I am very proud; they have all challenged me in varying ways and I record my thanks to them here. One of our honours students, Denis Robichaud, worked two summers for me in Paris, digitizing documents; his work was invaluable. In the early 1990s, three research assistants, Pierre Cenerelli, Christian Roy, and above all, Cylvie Claveau, worked under my direction preparing a huge analytical database of the contents of the Cahiers des droits de l’homme from 1920 to 1940. The heart of this database is the ‘subjects’ rubric for everything that was ever published in the Cahiers; it is not merely a listing of names, organizations, and places but far more importantly an analytical rendering of the topics covered in the 7,270 articles and other entries, long and short, contained in the Cahiers. I am also very thankful to a host of colleagues and friends who have listened patiently to my thoughts about the Ligue des droits de l’homme. In Canada, they are Ken Mouré, Pat Prestwich, John Cairns, Jo Vellacott, Talbot Imlay, Robert Tittler, Fred Bode, Linda Derksen, Travis Huckell, and Michael and Elva Jones. Andrew Barros, both a good friend and a valued colleague, read the entire manuscript and offered many helpful suggestions. In Germany, Peter Grupp at the Auswärtiges Amt and Jana Blum at the Bundesarchiv were particularly helpful. In the United Kingdom, many friends and colleagues have either heard me give papers about the Ligue or have discussed the project with me. I record here my thanks to Jeremy Crang, Jill Stephenson, Martin Ceadel, John Horne, Daryl Green, Ged Martin, John Keiger, Guy Rowlands, Nick Stargardt, Sudhir Hazareesingh, Peter Jackson, and Margaret MacMillan. In France, my thanks are due to Emmanuel Naquet, with whom I  disagree on many points of interpretation, but whose knowledge of the  Ligue is encyclopaedic, to Antoine Prost, the late Jacques Bariéty, Nicolas Offenstadt, Matthias Steinle, and especially to Maurice Vaïsse, who has always been most encouraging and supportive. I am also greatly in the debt of dear friends in Paris. John and Claudia Moore and Charlie and Heather Tatham have all been faithful friends over the years. I am thankful to the anonymous readers of Oxford University Press for their helpful comments. The manuscript was expertly copyedited by Phil Dines. My editor at OUP, Cathryn Steele, has been wonderful. It goes without saying that any errors in the text that follows are my fault alone.

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Acknowledgements vii One person is especially deserving of my thanks. He is William Irvine, emeritus professor of history at York University in Toronto. I first met Bill in 1989 at the annual meeting of the Western Society for French History in New Orleans, Louisiana. This was my first ever North American scholarly conference after my PhD at the University of Edinburgh. The organizers had put my paper on French pacifism together with two papers on fascism given by Bill and Bob Soucy, perhaps under the assumption that politics makes strange bedfellows. Whatever the case, I became fast friends with Bill and his wife, Marion Lane. He has been a constant and tireless support ever since. His refreshingly iconoclastic and analytical book, Between Justice and Politics: the Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1898–1945, has been an inspiration when I have doubted myself. Three other couples deserve special mention. My aunt and uncle, Janet and Norman Patten, have been a constant presence in my life since I was five years old. Just about every year since 1982, I have repaired to their wonderful house, ‘Tamarack’, in Guernsey for a much-needed and restorative vacation. To Christopher and Caroline Herbert, I express my heartfelt thanks. I was best man at their wedding and they are my dearest friends in France. On every research trip to Paris, extending over many years, they have hosted me almost every weekend at their home. My sister and brother-in-law, Bernice and Curtis Hobbs, have also been wonderfully supportive and generous. Bernice was disappointed not to be mentioned in my first book; I hope that this goes some way to repairing the inadvertent damage and to underlining the esteem of an older brother for a much-loved younger sister. Finally, this book is dedicated to the memory of my parents, to whom I owe so much, and to my partner, Matthew Skelton, who is a far more gifted writer than I shall ever be, and whose steadfast love has urged me on towards the prize. Montréal, June 2018

Norman Ingram

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Contents List of Abbreviations

xi

1. Introduction

1

I .   T H E G R E AT WA R A N D A L L T H AT 2. War Origins: The Debate Begins 3. The Ramifications of the War Origins Debate: War Aims and Ending the War

17 46

I I .   A L A R E C H E RC H E D ’ U N E G U E R R E G A G N E E  . .  . 4. The Wounds of War (1919–24): Challenges to Orthodoxy on the War Guilt Question 5. Bridge over the Abyss? Talking to the Germans 6. Turning the Page? The War Guilt Problem in the Era of Locarno

75 108 137

I I I .   L E S F L E U R S D U M A L   .   .  . 7. In the Shadow of the Swastika 8. 1937, or the Aventine Secession 9. Once More with Feeling? The Ligue des droits de l’homme and the Slide into War 10. When All Is Said and Done . . . En guise de conclusion

181 217

Bibliography Index

269 285

239 265

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List of Abbreviations ADG ALDH APD APP BA BDIC BHVP BMN BnF CC CDJC DLfM KPD LDH MAE PA/AA SEDCG

Archives départementales du Gard Archives de la Ligue des droits de l’homme Association de la paix par le droit Archives de la Préfecture de police, Paris Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine, Nanterre Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris Bibliothèque municipale de Nîmes Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris Comité Central Centre de documentation juive contemporaine, Paris Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands Ligue des droits de l’homme Archives du Ministère des Affaires étrangères de France Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes, Berlin Société d’études documentaires et critiques sur la guerre

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1 Introduction This is not a book about the origins of the Great War, a topic on which oceans of historical ink have been spilt.1 Nor is it meant to engage with the substantial scholarship on French policies and European crises from one war to the next.2 Rather, its purpose is to examine the impact of the debate about the origins of the Great War on the Ligue des droits de l’homme (LDH), an organization which lay at the heart of French Republicanism in the period of the two world wars. The war guilt/ war origins debate occasioned the decline and fall of the Ligue, which, even though it lives on today, has been an institution much diminished in size, stature, and political influence in France since the Second World War.3 While it is a commonplace that the war guilt question was one of the factors leading to the demise of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism, virtually no attention has been given to the political ramifications of the war guilt debate across the Rhine in France. What John Maynard Keynes famously called the ‘Carthaginian peace’ had enormous political ramifications in France as well, not least around the issue of German war guilt.4 The war origins debate also lies at the heart of the dissenting new-style pacifism which emerged from the belly of the LDH towards the end of the 1920s after a long gestation period running all the way back to 1914.5 Furthermore, it is a debate that 1 A far from exhaustive list of recent scholarship on the origins question in English includes: Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (New York: Harper Collins, 2013); Sean McMeekin, The Russian Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011); McMeekin, July 1914: Countdown to War (New York: Basic Books, 2013); Dominic Lieven, Towards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia (London: Penguin Books, 2016); William Mulligan, The Origins of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Margaret MacMillan, The War that Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (London: Penguin, 2013). 2  There is a massive historiography on French and European international relations during the interwar period. See, among many others, Sally Marks, The Ebbing of European Ascendancy: An International History of the World, 1914–1945 (London: Arnold, 2002); Zara Steiner, The Lights that Failed: European International History, 1919–1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Peter Jackson, Beyond the Balance of Power: France and the Politics of National Security in the Era of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 3  On the impact of the Second World War on the Ligue’s fortunes, see William D. Irvine, Between Justice and Politics: The Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1898–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 213–24. 4  See John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920). 5  For the distinction between old- and new-style pacifism, see Norman Ingram, The Politics of Dissent: Pacifism in France, 1919–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991 and 2011), pp. 1–16, 19–22, and 121–33. Old-style pacifism was a heritage of the nineteenth century. It was bourgeois, liberal, internationalist, and collaborative in orientation towards French political society. New-style pacifism,

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War Guilt and the Ligue des droits de l’homme

links the moral dilemmas of one war with the choices of the next. For if the war guilt debate caused the implosion of the Ligue and the emergence of new-style pacifism in France, both of these phenomena had, as collateral damage, the development of pro-Vichy sentiment. This development was not the result of philo-fascism, but rather of an overriding commitment to peace which had its origin in the belief that the last, Great War had been fought by France under false pretences. The tragedy was that when the barbarians really were at the gates in 1940, the LDH had ceased to be of much importance. By 1938–39, the Ligue was increasingly a spent force in French political life, a victim of the war origins debate which began in 1914 and gradually consumed it. The German invasion of France put an end to that debate for the Ligue; the Nazis arrived in France thinking they would have to extirpate an entire Weltanschauung, but to their surprise, the LDH was already in extremis.6 The glory days of the LDH were thus over by the end of the 1930s, before the Nazi invasion of France in May 1940. This is not a comforting thought to presentday Ligueurs or indeed to some historians of the Ligue.7 There is something oddly discomfiting about the notion that a great French Republican institution might have succumbed to self-inflicted wounds rather than to the undoubted violence of the Nazi occupation of France. Such is the uncomfortable truth, however. The paradox is that the political positions taken by the Ligue in the First World War effectively emasculated it by the time of the Second. This is not to say that the Germans did not play a pivotal role in the unravelling of the Ligue des droits de l’homme, or indeed in its final death throes. They did. This was achieved at one remove and it was the Great War, not the Second World War, which spelled the death knell of the Ligue less than twenty years after its birth. It was the Ligue’s inability to square the circle of its commitment to human rights with a doctrinaire Republican political engagement that led to its ultimate undoing. The human rights legacy, of which the LDH could rightfully be so proud, became overlaid during the post-First World War years with a political agenda, which was more than a little tinged with a certain Republican parti pris. William Irvine, most ­notably, has commented extensively on the ways in which a particular view of the Third Republic clouded the Ligue’s human rights vision on several key domestic political issues, including that of the rights of women.8 But while the various domestic political positions of the LDH arguably weakened its claim to be defending human rights which emerged from it by the end of the 1920s, was on the other hand radical, absolute, often socialist or even anarchist, and sectarian in orientation. 6  See Norman Ingram, ‘Selbstmord or Euthanasia? Who Killed the Ligue des droits de l’homme?’, in French History 22, 3 (September 2008), pp. 337–57; Ingram, ‘La Ligue des droits de l’homme et le problème allemand’, Revue d’histoire diplomatique 124, 2 (June 2010), pp. 119–31. 7  See Norman Ingram, ‘Qui a tué la Ligue des droits de l’homme? La Ligue, les nazis et la chute de la France en 1940’, in Être Dreyfusard, hier et aujourd’hui, edited by Gilles Manceron and Emmanuel Naquet (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009), pp. 397–402. This paper, together with two by Cylvie Claveau and Simon Epstein, given at the eponymous conference at the Ecole Militaire in December 2006, elicited a spirited rejoinder from Manceron and Naquet that was longer than the published version. See Manceron and Naquet, ‘Le Péril et la riposte’, Être Dreyfusard, pp. 315–22. 8  See Irvine, Between Justice and Politics, and Irvine, ‘Politics of Human Rights: A Dilemma for the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme’, in Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 20, 1 (Winter 1994), pp. 5–28.

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Introduction 3 in an entirely impartial, disinterested manner, it was the issue of the origins of the Great War that laid bare the Ligue’s internal contradictions and occasioned the bitter, internecine strife which ultimately dealt the organization the body blow from which it has never recovered. Why study the Ligue des droits de l’homme? The Ligue viewed itself as the conscience of democracy, as the defender of all things republican in Third Republic France. In many ways, this was a correct perception. The LDH was instrumental in defending a huge number of people, groups, and causes which might otherwise have had no voice in early twentieth-century France. The Ligue was founded in 1898 at the height of the Dreyfus Affair to defend the rights of the individual—at its origin, those of one individual, Alfred Dreyfus— against the all-encompassing claims of a raison d’état gone mad. By 1914 and the advent of the Great War, the LDH was already an important voice in French ­politics, with members sitting as deputies and senators, representing an enormous moral authority in French political culture. It is difficult to overemphasize the importance and centrality of the Ligue in the political culture of the second half of the Third Republic. Hardly a government was formed from 1914 to 1940 without the significant, and often massive, participation of Ligue members. The list of Ligue ministers and présidents du conseil is lengthy, and includes names such as Herriot, Blum, and Painlevé; indeed, fully eighty-five per cent of Léon Blum’s Popular Front cabinet were Ligue members.9 Moreover, as William Irvine points out, the Popular Front itself ‘might never have been formed’ were it not for the ‘energetic activity and pleas for unity’ of the president of the Ligue, Victor Basch, in the face of the perception of a domestic fascist threat.10 Like French pacifism, at first glance the Ligue might appear a lost cause, one of the losers of history, a grand idea whose time has come and gone. Even in 1914, on the eve of the Great War, the Ligue’s secretary-general, Henri Guernut, noted that some members and former members of the LDH wondered if it had lost its reason for being following its success in the Dreyfus Affair.11 As with French pacifism, the Ligue has suffered from an almost total amnesia on the part of historians of France, as it also has from historians of human rights.12 Even a French historian of the stature of Lynn Hunt seems not to be aware of the Ligue des droits de l’homme, despite writing an influential book on the history of human rights. The same can also be said of the works of some of the other prominent historians of human

9 Irvine, Between Justice and Politics, p. 164, n. 10. See also Emmanuel Naquet, ‘La Ligue des droits de l’homme: une association en politique (1898–1940)’, Thèse de doctorat, Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, 2005, iv, Annexe 20 ‘Liste des Ligueurs parlementaires sous la Troisième République’, pp. 1076–107, and Annexe 21 ‘Liste des Ligueurs ministres sous la Troisième République’, pp. 1108–31. 10  Irvine, ‘Politics of human rights’, p. 11. 11  See Henri Guernut, ‘Rapport Moral: Le Congrès de 1914’, in Bulletin 14, 10 (15 May 1914), p. 595. Guernut completely rejected this notion, which he used as the foil for his rapport moral. 12  John Sweets, the American historian of Vichy France, in his comment on a paper I gave about the Ligue des droits de l’homme at the Stanford meeting of the Society for French Historical Studies in 2005, said he did not mind admitting that he had never heard of the Ligue.

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rights in which the Ligue des droits de l’homme gets at best a walk-on part.13 This is strange, to say the very least, given the Ligue’s sustained engagement with the problems of both individual and collective rights. The cloud of oubli has begun to lift, however. Recent years have seen a spate of studies, long and short, on the Ligue, culminating in two significant works. The first is William Irvine’s iconoclastic study of the Ligue which was published in 2007 by Stanford University Press, and the second is Emmanuel Naquet’s massive 2005 doctoral thesis on the Ligue at Sciences Po, published in book form in 2014.14 These studies take diametrically opposite views of the meaning of the Ligue. For Naquet, the centrality and importance of the Ligue is without doubt. His thoroughly researched thesis and book demonstrate how very much the LDH became virtually synonymous with republicanism in the second half of the Third Republic. By French standards it was also a numerically huge organization with some 180,000 members at its peak in the early 1930s. Even by 1914, just sixteen years after its birth at the height of the Dreyfus Affair, the Ligue was a political force to be reckoned with. According to Naquet, that political power and influence only increased in the interwar period, culminating in the formation of the Popular Front at whose birth the Ligue was the midwife. For Irvine, on the other hand, the Ligue was above all a huge patronage machine, greasing the wheels of political life in the Third Republic, especially at the smalltown level. He argues that the Ligue was less about high-flown ideals than it was about politics. Human rights, the rights of man, were consistently given a back seat to the more pressing demands of a political stance that put the Ligue squarely on the side of a centre-left view of French politics. His argument has much to commend it; it is far more analytical than that of Naquet, and is critical of the Ligue and its heritage in a way that is perhaps impossible for a French historian writing the first study of the LDH to achieve. The Ligue des droits de l’homme was a very broad cloth. Not only did it embrace virtually all public opinion of the non-communist republican political spectrum, but its interests were also extremely wide.15 On one thing Irvine and Naquet are in complete agreement, though: the centrality and importance of the Ligue des droits de l’homme in the political life of the Third Republic. As Irvine reminds us, by the early 1930s, it ‘may well have been larger than all of France’s left-wing parties combined’.16 With its vast network of local sections, the Ligue brought the Republic 13  Lynn Hunt, Defending Human Rights: A History (New York: W W Norton, 2007). Cf. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010); and Moyn, Human Rights and the Uses of History (London: Verso, 2014). Moyn writes in Last Utopia (p. 3) that ‘The drama of human rights, then, is that they emerged in the 1970s seemingly from nowhere’. More recently still, Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann has argued that ‘we can first speak of individual human rights as a basic concept (Grundbegriff ), that is, a contested, irreplaceable and consequential concept of global politics, only in the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War’. See Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ‘Human Rights and History’, Past and Present 232 (August 2016), p. 282. 14  See Emmanuel Naquet, ‘Ligue des droits de l’homme’. This thesis has now been published in book form. See Emmanuel Naquet, Pour l’Humanité: La Ligue des droits de l’homme de l’affaire Dreyfus à la défaite de 1940 (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2014). Cf. Irvine, Between Justice and Politics. 15  Irvine is very good on the social and political origins of Ligue members. See Irvine, Between Justice and Politics, pp. 5–19. 16  Ibid., p. 6.

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Introduction 5 to the village.17 In many cases, this meant that it became a ‘lieu de sociabilité’ where Republicans could meet with like-minded individuals, enjoy a glass of wine together, and discuss the great issues of the day, leading Irvine to liken it to ‘the French equivalent of a Rotary club’.18 Under its aegis, a number of sociopolitical ‘families’ came together—Jews, Freemasons, Protestants, Socialists, disaffected Communists, Radicals, and Republicans of all sorts. One issue dominated the Ligue’s discussions and publications over the entire interwar period. Fully 1,884 of the 7,268 articles (some 25.9 per cent), long and short, in the Cahiers des droits de l’homme from 1920 to 1940 dealt in one way or another with Germany. No other single issue, no other single nation, came close to playing so central a role in the Ligue’s deliberations or concerns. By way of comparison, the Cahiers mentioned the Dreyfus Affair—the Ligue’s événement dateur—only 390 times during this twenty-year period, and England or anything English only 642 times.19 This ought to come as no surprise: relations with Germany were at the centre of French preoccupations during the interwar period. The interest was reciprocal. There was close collaboration between the LDH and its German counterpart, the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte (DLfM), but the LDH and the writings and speeches of many of its important members also attracted the attention of the German Foreign Office, and in particular of the Kriegsschuldreferat (War Guilt Section), albeit in a much more negative sense. It is no surprise, then, that almost immediately after the German arrival in Paris in June 1940, the Gestapo should descend on the Ligue’s headquarters at 27, rue Jean Dolent, in the fourteenth arrondissement and seize its archives and papers at the behest of the Hauptarbeitsgruppe Frankreich (HAG Frankreich) of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR).20 At some point, most likely in early 1941, the papers of the LDH were transferred to Berlin for analysis by the ERR. They remained there until the carpet bombing of the German capital by the Allies in 1943 occasioned their move yet again, probably in September or October of that 17  This metaphor is certainly not original with me, although its application to the Ligue and the twentieth century perhaps is. See Maurice Agulhon, The Republic in the Village: The People of the Var from the French Revolution to the Second Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Cf. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976). 18 Irvine, Between Justice and Politics, p. 4. 19  These statistics are extracted from a huge analytical and chronological inventory of the contents of the Cahiers from 1920 to 1940 which three research assistants (Drs Cylvie Claveau, Christian Roy, and Pierre Cenerelli) created under my direction in the mid-1990s. 20 On the ERR, see Ernst Piper, Alfred Rosenberg: Hitlers Chefideologe (Munich: Karl Blessing Verlag, 2005), pp. 486–508. Piper writes that the ERR opened its very first office in France, although according to him the focus of its activity was on the seizure of art more than anything else (Piper, pp. 489 ff ). Yet Rosenberg clearly saw his remit as extending far beyond that, as indeed the full title of his position (‘Beauftragten des Führers für die Überwachung der gesammten geistigen und weltanchaulichen Schulung und Erziehung der NSDAP’) within the Nazi hierarchy indicates. In a memo from February 1941, Rosenberg wrote that he had ‘in den besetzten westlichen Gebieten einen Einsatzstab errichtet, der die Aufgabe hat, die Interessen der NSDAP im Kampf gegen weltanschauliche Gegner wahrzunehmen, insbesondere mir für die künftige Arbeit wichtig erscheinendes Buch-, Archiv- und Schriftenmaterial zu beschlagnehmen und ins Reich zu überführen.’ See Alfred Rosenberg, ‘Bestätigung’, Berlin, 25 February 1941, in Centre de documentation juive contemporaine [CDJC], Osobyi Archive RG-11.001M, reel 131.

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year, to the village of Ratibor in Upper Silesia where the ERR set up camp and continued its work. It was in Ratibor in the spring of 1945 that they fell into the hands of the advancing Red Army and were transported back to Moscow as war booty, there to remain until their repatriation to France at the end of 2001.21 Alone among historians of the Ligue des droits de l’homme, I have followed the archival trail to Berlin in an attempt to understand what the reactions of Germans under three successive regimes—Imperial Germany, the Weimar Republic, and the Nazi State—were to the ‘rights of man’ as represented and articulated by the LDH. Of absolute centrality to this German interest in the Ligue des droits de l’homme was the war guilt debate. In 1914, Victor Basch, then vice-president of the Ligue des droits de l’homme, was at the forefront of those who condemned the German aggression against Belgium, and who preached the Union Sacrée to expel the German invader from French soil.22 Somewhat paradoxically, by October 1933, nine months after the arrival of the Nazis in power, and just before the German withdrawal from the Geneva Disarmament Conference and from the League of Nations itself, Basch proclaimed in a speech that France had to sign the disarmament convention, ‘even if Germany does not want it’, and ‘make the maximum number of concessions in order for it to succeed’.23 1933 thus marks the high-water point in the Ligue’s calls for reconciliation with Germany, a reconciliation based on the increasingly strong perception on the French Republican left that 1919 and the Treaty of Versailles were morally and politically flawed. The irony, if not the tragedy, of the Ligue des droits de l’homme’s engagement with Germany from one world war to the next is encapsulated in this 1933 call by Basch: in demanding French concessions in the face of the new Nazi regime in Berlin, Basch was asking for too little too late, or rather, given the realities of Nazism, too much at the wrong time. Less than two years later, on Bastille Day 1935, Basch walked arm in arm with Léon Blum and Léon Jouhaux at the head of a huge procession of the left as the Popular Front gathered steam in preparation for its electoral victory in the spring of 1936. One of the cardinal characteristics of the Popular Front was its opposition to fascism, both domestic and foreign. By mid-1937, the LDH had foundered on the shoals of how best to defend both democracy and peace, unable to find the via media between resistance to Hitler and a desire for peace born largely of the Great War experience. 21 On the peregrinations of the Ligue’s papers, see Sonia Combe, ‘Paris-Moscou, aller-retour: ­ istorique d’une spoliation et d’une restitution’, in Retour de Moscou: les archives de la Ligue des droits h de l’homme, 1898–1940, edited by Sonia Combe and Grégory Cingal (Paris: La Découverte, 2004), pp. 17–26. Combe writes that it is ‘generally’ thought that the archives were transported to Berlin only at the end of the Occupation, but that makes little sense since they were found in Ratibor in Upper Silesia in the spring of 1945, and given Rosenberg’s directive in the note above. The 1942 annual report of the ‘Analysis Department’ of the Einsatzstab Rosenberg indicates that it began work in late 1941 on the crates of material that had arrived in Berlin from the West; this material included the library of Victor Basch. See IV/Dr Wu.[under] Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg für die besetzten Gebiete. Stabsführung, Abteilung Auswertung, ‘Jahresbericht der Abteilung Auswertung für das Jahr 1942’, Berlin, 26 January 1943 in Bundesarchiv NS 30/17. 22  See Victor Basch, La Guerre de 1914 et le droit (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1915). 23  ‘Réunion organisée par la ‘Ligue des Droits de l’Homme’, Salle des Sociétés Savantes, 8 rue Danton, le 11 octobre’, P.P. [Préfecture de Police], 12 October 1933, in Ministère des Affaires étrangères [hereafter MAE], Série SDN/IC/Vol. 231.

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Introduction 7 September 1939 saw the beginning of the Phoney War in the West, but it was not to last. Four and a half years later, in January 1944, Victor Basch, the eighty-year-old president of the Ligue des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, and his wife Ilona, were brutally murdered by the Milice in Lyon.24 How do we get from 1914 to 1944? Along the way down to that horrible night in Lyon, Basch and the Ligue seem never to have wavered in their condemnation of Germany. Or at least, that is the view that a certain reading of the Ligue’s history would have one take. The Ligue was thus, in the words of Madeleine Rebérioux, ‘one hundred per cent patriotic’; there was ‘no hint of pacifism in the Ligue’,25 and by inference at least, the Ligue had never wavered from its clear-sighted appreciation of the danger posed to France by a militaristic, chauvinistic Germany in the multiple and successive guises of Empire, Republic, and Nazi Third Reich. The German ‘Other’, to use Cylvie Claveau’s analysis,26 was essentially unchanging, always dangerous, and forever threatening to France. Leaving aside for a moment Rebérioux’s misapprehension of what constitutes pacifism in any meaningful sense of the word,27 her comments betray a static understanding both of Germany—an eternal Germany—and, perhaps even more importantly, of Republican France. France and Germany are rendered along a simplistic axis setting up a binary proposition: good France versus bad Germany. In this comfortable view, the undoubted crimes and atrocities of the Second World War are almost preordained by the events of the Great War and the political— indeed, moral—turpitude which followed it in the twenty-year inter-bellum. In this static and unchanging universe, the heroes are those who understood the immutable nature of the German menace; they are those who connected (and connect) the dots from 1914 to 1940. The villains are, of course, none other than the Germans. The paradox of this is that some of the very people who would like to demonstrate that German history is a long continuum are also very quick to argue that Vichy represents an exception to an otherwise acceptable French history.28 The Germans are essentially German, but Vichy is only exceptionally French. 24  See Françoise Basch, Victor Basch: de l’affaire Dreyfus au crime de la Milice (Paris, 1994), esp. Chapter 8 (‘Le temps des assassins, 1939–1944’). 25  Interview with the author at the Ligue’s headquarters, 27, rue Jean Dolent, Paris, on 19 June 1991. Rebérioux’s comments are redolent of a rather strange and typically French conflation of pacifism with anti-patriotism. 26  Cylvie Claveau, ‘L’Autre dans les Cahiers des droits de l’homme, 1920–1940: une sélection universaliste de l’altérité à la Ligue des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen en France’ (PhD thesis, McGill University, 2000). 27  See Ingram, The Politics of Dissent, esp. pp. 1–16 and 121–33 on the origins of the new pacifism. 28  There are many examples in French history of issues which have called forth a particularly ‘French’ interpretation, which has had to be modified by subsequent scholarship—often by Anglo-American historians, who have pointed out inconvenient truths. A clear example of this is the ‘Paxtonian Revolution’ which changed the comfortable way in which Vichy had been seen. See Robert Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York: Knopf, 1972), and Robert Paxton and Michael Marrus, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1981). Cf. Robert Aron, Histoire de Vichy, 1940–1944 (Paris: Fayard, 1954). There are other examples, too, such as the huge debate between the representatives of the ‘consensus’ school on French fascism versus those who argue that there was indeed such a thing as a French variant of fascism. See Michel Dobry, ed., Le Mythe de l’allergie française au fascisme (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003) as well as the thought-provoking essays

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All of this poses problems for the early twenty-first-century historian who would seek to understand the tragic events of the last century. However unpalatable it may seem to some, there was a case to be made against the imputation of unique German responsibility in the outbreak of the Great War. The analysis that follows revolves around this crucial debate which consumed writers, historians, politicians, and human rights activists on both sides of the Rhine from virtually the outbreak of war in 1914 down to the final expulsion of the Germans from France in 1944.29 Many of the people discussed in this book were known at the time as ‘revisionists’, that is to say, people who believed that the Treaty of Versailles needed to be revised, and the assigning of unique war guilt to Germany (and its allies) thrown out. ‘Revisionism’ has become a dirty political word over the course of the last fifty years. Today it often means people who deny the Holocaust. Deborah Lipstadt, a scholar who certainly knows revisionism in this latter sense when she sees it, has argued that there is only a tenuous connection between the original First World War revisionists and the post-Second World War variety; it is found in the person of the American historian of the Great War, Harry Elmer Barnes, who, after 1945, devolved in the direction of Holocaust denial. Lipstadt’s opinion of most post-First World War revisionists is that their views on Versailles, war guilt, and Germany were right. She writes, In fact, much of the revisionist argument was historically quite sound. Germany was not solely culpable for the war. The Versailles Treaty contained harsh and vindictive elements that placed so onerous a financial burden on Germany as to virtually guarantee the collapse of the Weimar regime. The French did have ulterior motives.30

Some might argue, as indeed Victor Basch and Emile Kahn were to do in the 1920s, that these early revisionists were either untrained, not to be taken seriously, or downright dangerous.31 Luigi Albertini, of whom Hew Strachan has written that it was on his ‘shoulders [that] all subsequent historians have stood and whose interpretation of events has not been substantively overthrown’, clearly did not agree.32 In fact, Albertini drew heavily on the works of the revisionists in his threevolume work on The Origins of the War of 1914, despite chastising them for being occasionally too polemical and one-sided in their approach.33 in Sam Kalman and Sean Kennedy, eds., The French Right between the Wars: Political and Intellectual Movements from Conservatism to Fascism (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2014). 29  See Clark, Sleepwalkers and Mulligan, Origins. 30  Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York, Toronto: The Free Press, 1993), p. 33. Her comments on Barnes are on p. 34. Of course, there are plenty of other historians who do not take such a sanguine view of the Germans and post-First World War revisionism. See, for example, among many others, the insightful essay by Gerhard Weinberg, ‘The Defeat of Germany in 1918 and the European Balance of Power’, in Gerhard  L.  Weinberg, Germany, Hitler and World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 11–22. 31  Pierre Renouvin told John Cairns rather emphatically (and disdainfully) in 1950, with regard to Georges Michon, ‘Méfiez-vous de ça!’. John Cairns to the author, 3 November 2017. 32  Hew Strachan, ‘Review Article: The Origins of the First World War’, International Affairs 90, 2 (2014), p. 434. 33  Luigi Albertini drew substantially on the work of Georges Demartial, Georges Michon, Mathias Morhardt, René Gerin, and Armand Charpentier, among others, in his three-volume work, The Origins

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Introduction 9 The goal of this book is therefore to examine first and foremost how that q­ uintessentially Republican institution, the Ligue des droits de l’homme, came close to being destroyed by the war guilt debate. That debate began in the earliest days of the Great War and spread over the next twenty-five years under three successive German regimes. It was not just a Franco-French quarrel, although that is certainly the primary concern of this book, but also one with several distinct German interlocutors, ranging from the German Foreign Office through German public opinion and on to the Ligue’s German counterpart, the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte. Indeed, one might say that the latter organization filtered and articulated a particular view of Germany to the LDH which prevented a deeper understanding of the extent to which French policy on Germany, supported in several key areas by the LDH, was actually inimical to the resolution of the war guilt problem. This book also considers the extent to which the death of the LDH can be blamed on the Second World War and its effects. The evidence shows that it was not the German invasion of France which killed the LDH, but rather the Ligue’s own internal contradictions which in turn flowed out of its paralysis over the war guilt problem—a paralysis which had its origins in the Great War and which spread, rather than receded, in the great decade of what might have been, the 1920s. In a broader sense, it is the thesis of this book that there would have been no ‘German problem’ for the Ligue des droits de l’homme had it not been for the Great War. There might have been discussion of Alsace-Lorraine, of German militarism, of strained relations between France and Germany, of political developments across the Rhine, and so on, but these would never have assumed the proportions of a ‘problem’ had it not been for the war. Moreover, the war could never have produced such a fixation on Germany had it not been for the way in which it ended, with an armistice rather than a surrender, and with a victors’ peace that was essentially imposed on a semi-vanquished Germany in 1919. If one can argue that the seeds of Nazism and the Second World War were planted during the Great War, one can equally make the case that the eventual demise of the Ligue des droits de l’homme (and, indeed, of the Third Republic) also began in 1914 with the Union sacrée. Ferdinand Buisson, the highly respected president of the Ligue, underlined the importance of the Great War in the first number of the Ligue’s new journal, the Cahiers des droits de l’homme, in January 1920. He explained to his readership that the Ligue believed it could present itself to the broader public as more than a singleissue group. He saw three successive stages in the LDH’s history, beginning with the heroic phase of the Dreyfus Affair, and moving through what he called the ‘thousands of instances’ where the administrative machinery of France had produced analogous situations. The third era in the Ligue’s history, however, was that of the Great War: ‘Events of enormous significance made us see the Rights of Man of the War of 1914, translated by Isabella M. Massey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952). See Vol. III. The Epilogue of the Crisis of July 1914: The Declarations of War and of Neutrality, p. 142 in the reprint edition for the comment about the polemical nature of the revisionists’ approach (New York: Enigma Books, 2014). Demartial continues to be cited. See Jean Stengers, ‘1914: The Safety of Ciphers and the Outbreak of the First World War’, in Intelligence and International Relations, 1900–1945, edited by Christopher Andrew and Jeremy Noakes (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1987), p. 41.

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no longer in their individual form, but as involving large human collectivities.’ These could be nations demanding independence, minorities protesting against oppression, or the victims of secular persecution, but what he called the ‘supreme question for all of humanity’ was the need to substitute the rule of law for that of force. That rule of law had to be guaranteed by the League of Nations. This change in the Ligue’s orientation, away from the defence of individual rights towards an essentially political engagement in support of collective rights, is fundamental to an understanding of the Ligue’s role in French politics from the Great War down to the debacle of 1940. Buisson understood this paradigmatic shift in the Ligue’s orientation. He wrote in January 1920 that ‘with still more ardour than it had brought to the defence of the rights of man and citizen, the Ligue has thrown itself into the struggle in favour of the right of humanity to realise peace through international justice’.34 By way of comparison, it is interesting to note that the Bund Neues Vaterland, which was to become the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte in 1922, emerged from the war convinced that its work had a deep domestic focus. The first point in its programme, elaborated at the end of 1918, was the work for international reconciliation, but the three remaining points were all squarely in the domestic sphere.35 This evolution away from the individual on the part of the LDH, however politicized that concept might be, towards an engagement with the collective, in the form of international politics, ran diametrically counter to the development of the BNV in Germany, which had been primarily concerned with international affairs during the Great War, but evolved after 1918 in the direction of the defence of individual rights under the Weimar Republic. Nonetheless, the LDH continued right through the interwar period to be deeply engaged with individual rights issues, too, and the DLfM remained intimately involved in debates over international affairs. The dialogue between the Ligue des droits de l’homme and Germany in its several guises often dealt with subjects which might seem at first glance to have little to do with the issue of German war guilt. Two of these, emerging during the Great War and continuing to influence the perception of Germany during the interwar years, are paradoxically the problem posed by France’s convoluted relationship, first with 34  Ferdinand Buisson, ‘Notre programme: droits de l’homme, droits du citoyen, droits des peuples’, Cahiers New Series no. 1 (5 January 1920), p. 3. The idea was not new in 1920. Buisson had already enunciated it just after the war’s end. See Ferdinand Buisson, ‘Discours de M. Ferdinand Buisson’, in Le Congrès de 1918 de la Ligue des droits de l’homme. Compte-rendu sténographique du 27 au 29 décembre 1918. (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1919), p. 90. 35  The three remaining points in the programme were ‘2. Kampf für die Abschaffung jeder Gewaltund Klassenherrschaft, Kampf für Menschenrechte und soziale Gerechtigkeit; 3. Mitarbeit an der Verwirklichung des Sozialismus; 4. Kultur der Persönlichkeit’. The commitment to socialism was specifically construed as socialism of the Fabian variety and not Marxism. See Otto Lehmann-Russbüldt, Der Kampf der Deutschen Liga für Menschenrechte, vormals Bund Neues Vaterland, für den Weltfrieden, 1914–1927 (Berlin: Hensel & Co. Verlag, 1927), p. 92. The German Liga took inspiration from both British and French sources: see Programm und Aufnahmebedingungen (Berlin: Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte, n.d.) in which the Liga proclaimed the need for a ‘spiritual revolution’ (eine geistige Revolution): ‘Wir wollen für Deutschland diese geistige Revolution wecken, wie sie in England in der Mitte des vorigen Jahrhunderts vor sich ging, und in Frankreich durch die Dreyfusaffäre Ende des Jahrhunderts. Aus der Betreibung der Dreyfusaffäre entwickelte sich unsere französische Schwesterliga, die heute 120 000 Mitglieder in 1200 Ortsgruppen umfaßt.’

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Introduction 11 Tsarist Russia, and ultimately with the Soviet Union. The second issue which had an impact on the war guilt problem was the question of nationalities. There is much reading across the grain in what follows. This is necessary because a superficial analysis of the Ligue’s publications would lead one to the conclusion that the Ligue held true to a logically consistent view of the German threat from one world war to the next. There is much in the Ligue’s published and unpublished papers which dovetails nicely with the usual narrative of good France eventually triumphing over bad Germany. This is only half the story, however. A deeper ­analysis leads to contradictions, at times to a yawning gulf between republican Dichtung (Poetry) and republican Wahrheit (Truth).36 It is necessary in approaching the Ligue des droits de l’homme to be sensitive not only to what was said, but also to what was not said, but which a too cursory reading of the record tends to overlook or quite simply write out of the narrative. The silences speak volumes, but so, too, do statements and writings of both the majority and the minority within the Ligue which, in the case of the former, many seem prepared simply to overlook, and which, in the case of the latter, a posterity forever transfixed by the Second World War too quickly consigns to the rubbish heap. It is not accurate to suggest that the Ligue des droits de l’homme always understood the German menace; nor is it true to suggest that the Ligue represented a logically consistent Republicanism in this period. Both changed a great deal. The sometimes arcane and complex debates over the origins of the Great War had very tangible and concrete political ramifications. It was inevitable that the fallout from the war would take a long time to digest. An entire generation of French men and women had been filled with hatred for the ‘Other’. One wellknown French pacifist, not a member of the Ligue des droits de l’homme but very close to people who were, wrote early in the interwar period that he refused ‘suddenly, on command, [to] love en bloc a people whom I regret not having better killed when I was a soldier’.37 The problem of the Versailles Treaty and the need for European reconciliation, the tensions occasioned by the occupation of the Ruhr, the hopes engendered by the Locarno Treaty of 1925, German entry into the League of Nations, the failure of the 1932 Geneva Disarmament Conference, the rise of Nazism, and then the slide into war just six years later were all events read through the lens of the war guilt/war origins debate. This book also speaks to the aetiology of pacifism in an important way. The doyen of historians of British pacifism, Martin Ceadel, sees the Great War as the catalyst which produced what he calls the ‘humanitarian’ inspiration for pacifism, the idea that no war could possibly be worth the slaughter and suffering that it would cause.38 The horror of the 1914–18 war was the element, therefore, which brought 36  The expression comes from the title of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s autobiography, Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit, published between 1811 and 1833; it conveys nicely the tension between ‘poetry’ and ‘truth’ that I am trying to get at. 37  Jules-L Puech, ‘Chronique: La Paix avec l’Allemagne’, La Paix par le droit 30, 1–2 (January– February 1920), p. 27. 38  See Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain: The Defining of a Faith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 9–17.

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into being the strong pacifist movement in interwar Britain. France undoubtedly shared this visceral reaction to the trauma of the Great War, but unlike the British case France also had to deal not merely with a ‘humanitarian’ reaction to the hecatomb, but also with an historical dissent which had its own dynamic and called into question the very bona fides of all that was dear to the Republican tradition in France.39 The human fallout from the war, the sense that a civilizational break had occurred because of 1914, a humanitarian catastrophe of unparalleled proportions, were tropes shared with British interwar pacifism. But the French also faced another, deeper challenge caused by the war: the emergence of a profoundly dissenting view of their own history, of the republican history of the Great War, which cut to the core of the Republican self-image. Unlike pacifism in Britain, the French variant brought into question, in an almost ontological way, the essence of what it was to be French after 1918. While the British dealt with the demons and memories of the trenches, the French did all that, too, but then added a moral layer, a volitional interpretation of the events of the Great War. The trench experience had been appalling enough, but the idea that it all could have been avoided, that the Third Republic was somehow complicit in the bloodbath, added a dimension to the ‘inspirations’ for pacifism that quite simply did not exist in Britain. This is far from the situation that Ceadel argues obtained in Britain where ‘that most futile of modern wars, the First World War,’ did much to ‘generate the broad yet harmonious Peace Movement’ of the interwar period.40 There was very little harmony within the French peace movement of the interwar years. The locus of that development and debate within France was the Ligue des droits de l’homme, and it was that debate which eventually hobbled the Ligue by the time the Nazis were at the gates in the spring of 1940.41 What is of fundamental importance here is the fact that this new-style, absolute pacifism lay at the centre of French republican political culture in the Ligue des droits de l’homme and not on the ethereal syndicalist or anarchist fringes; in this sense, French pacifism was every bit as ‘legitimate’ as its British cousin.42 In my study of French interwar pacifism, I argued very schematically that historical dissent over the origins of the Great War was one of the elements which combined to produce the emergence of a new form of pacifism—pacifisme nouveau style—in the early 1930s.43 This historical dissent had its origin within the Ligue des 39  ‘Historical dissent’, largely about the origins of the Great War, was one of the constitutive elements of the new-style, integral pacifism which emerged in France towards the end of the 1920s. See Ingram, Politics of Dissent, pp. 121–33. 40  Martin Ceadel, ‘The Peace Movement between the Wars: Problems of Definition’, in Campaigns for Peace: British Peace Movements in the Twentieth Century, edited by Richard Taylor and Nigel Young (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), p. 75. 41  On the early emergence of this debate and its importance in the evolution of pacifist thought in France, see Norman Ingram, ‘The Crucible of War: The Ligue des Droits de l’Homme and the Debate on the “Conditions for a Lasting Peace” in 1916’, French Historical Studies, 39, 2 (April 2016), pp. 347–71. See also Ingram, ‘A la Recherche d’une guerre gagnée: The Ligue des droits de l’homme and the War Guilt Question (1918–1922)’, French History 24, 2 (June 2010), pp. 218–35. 42 Cf. Martin Ceadel, ‘A Legitimate Peace Movement: The Case of Britain, 1918–1945’, in Challenge to Mars: Essays on Pacifism from 1918 to 1945, edited by Peter Brock and Thomas P. Socknat (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), pp. 134–48. 43  See Ingram, Politics of Dissent, pp. 122–5.

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Introduction 13 droits de l’homme in the form of the Société d’études documentaires et critiques sur la guerre (SEDCG), one of whose mainsprings was the former secretarygeneral of the Ligue, Mathias Morhardt. The SEDCG was never officially recognized as a constituent part of the Ligue, despite repeated attempts by Morhardt to effect such a recognition, but it was like a Greek chorus chanting softly in the background of all of the LDH’s deliberations on war origins and responsibilities. The war guilt debate lay at the centre of the malaise which ­gradually overtook the Ligue during the twenty-year inter-bellum. Does this mean that it was pacifism which killed the Ligue des droits de l’homme?44 Not at all. It is, however, to suggest that the moral ambivalence and equivocations implied by the wartime Union sacrée, as well as by the post-war Versailles Treaty, meant that the Ligue had lost the untrammelled moral high ground in French politics by 1919. That situation only worsened as the shadows lengthened towards 1939. Part of the problem, as William Irvine points out, is that from early on the Ligue had seen itself engaged in partisan politics. This meant that the original principled position of simple defence of human rights became overlaid rather quickly with a political agenda which had as its goal the shoring up of the republican regime against all comers.45 However, if one were to compare Imperial and Weimar Germany with Third Republic France, one would clearly see the same profound insecurities and collective neuroses in both political cultures.46 Perfervid nationalism and an attendant militarism are evident on both sides of the Rhine. In the case of Germany, a sense of external insecurity and a fear of encirclement undoubtedly begat an extreme nationalism and militarism that were inimical to détente in the international arena, much less to pacifism. In France, on the other hand, the insecurities were largely domestic and internal: the demographic crisis, its attendant foreign policy ramifications, the rise of a domestic fascism, and lurking behind it all, the increasingly open suspicion that perhaps 1914 had been fought under false pretences. For the Germans, the insecurity was resolved in large measure externally, through 44  This is Simon Epstein’s argument. See Simon Epstein, Les Dreyfusards sous l’occupation (Paris: Albin Michel, 2001). 45  Even Victor Basch was moved occasionally to decry this tendency towards the political within the Ligue. For example, in 1926, at the time of the Rif War in Morocco, he said at a meeting of the Comité Central: ‘Si elle s’est abstenue de toute action, c’est qu’elle se laisse atteindre de plus en plus par le “virus politique”. Il faut bien le reconnaître, nous faisons de la politique, nous avons effectivement participé aux élections de 1924 en menant une ardente campagne en faveur de l’idée du cartel. Ce sont nos amis qui, aujourd’hui, occupent le pouvoir et ce fait paralyse l’action de la Ligue dont le rôle naturel est d’être dans l’opposition.’ See Comité Central, ‘Extraits’, Cahiers 26, 9 (30 April 1926), pp.  206–9. More usual was the sort of statement such as that by Emile Kahn at the 1918 Ligue Congress, where he baldly stated that ‘Nous sommes une assemblée politique, qui doit décider son action sur une situation de fait’. See ‘Discours de M. Emile Kahn’, in Congrès de 1918 de la Ligue des droits de l’homme, p. 59. The debate was a leitmotiv for the Ligue, however. Still later in the interwar period, Henri Guernut said at a 1932 meeting of the Comité Central that ‘Les ligueurs commencent à s’étonner de voir le Comité central se superposer à toutes les conférences internationales et consacrer la majorité de ses séances à reconstruire l’Europe. Le Comité ne discute plus que des questions de politique extérieure, il a cependant d’autres tâches’. See ‘Comité Central, Séance du 3 mars 1932’ in Cahiers, 32, 8 (20 March 1932), p. 182. 46  In general terms, my thinking on the importance of political culture in the peace/war debate has been informed by the suggestive chapter on ‘The Determinants of the Debate’, in Martin Ceadel, Thinking about Peace and War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 166–89.

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a deeply revisionist foreign policy, and later under the Nazis, an increasingly overt bellicosity directed partially against France. For France, on the other hand, the repli sur soi-même was virtually complete. The demons and insecurities were internal, domestic, and French, but they had an external focus, and that focus was Germany. By the time the German invasion occurred in May 1940, the Ligue des droits de l’homme was half dead by its own hand, destroyed by a political legacy rendered equivocal and doubtful by the fallout from the Great War. It would be too facile to say that in the case of France this political evolution can be blamed on pacifism. The Great War, with its appalling bloodletting, the result of what the British historian of France, James McMillan, has called the ‘criminally insane delusions of callous and ambitious generals’,47 would undoubtedly have produced a new form of pacifism in France regardless of the nature of the historical debate. That certainly was the case in Britain. In France, however, the fear of what a new war might bring—common to virtually all interwar pacifists—was overlaid by a profound sense that the Great War had been fought under false pretences, that France was hardly blameless in its outbreak, and that what had been wreaked upon  Germany at Versailles was a deeply flawed treaty and a morally unjustified ­imputation of war guilt. The fact that this had been effected by a French Republican regime only made the sting more painful. As Mathias Morhardt, secretary-general of the Ligue from virtually its foundation in 1898 down to 1911, wrote in March 1936 to his friend and fellow Ligueur, Georges Demartial, For the past twenty-two years, you and I have suffered an unspeakable moral and intellectual martyrdom . . . because we are expiating the honour of belonging to a class of Frenchmen that is far too small. We are those, in effect, who suffer more from an injustice committed by France than from an injustice committed against her.48

The decline and fall of the Ligue des droits de l’homme is therefore intimately linked to the pacifist debate in France, but was not caused by it. Rather, the demise of the Ligue was a function of its political position during the Great War and its ongoing, festering, unresolved twenty-year crisis with Germany—the engagement with the ‘war guilt problem’—which led incrementally and ineluctably to the total eclipse of the LDH by the time the Nazis rolled through northern France in May 1940. Ultimately, politics destroyed the Ligue des droits de l’homme, the politics of the ‘war guilt problem’, which began in 1914 and were finally settled only thirty-one years later. By that time, of course, the Ligue had long since ceased to be of much political or human rights importance.49 47 James F. McMillan, Twentieth Century France: Politics and Society, 1898–1991 (London: Edward Arnold, 1992), p. 67. 48 Mathias Morhardt to Georges Demartial, Capbreton, 19 March 1936, in BDIC/ALDH/ Correspondance Morhardt F∆Rés 798/7. The letter was also published in Le Barrage 91 (26 March 1936), p. 3. Cited in Ingram, Politics of Dissent, p. 122. 49 A case in point is that of René Cassin, the (self-proclaimed) father of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, who, despite his post-1945 career as the champion of human rights and winner of the 1968 Nobel Peace Prize, seems to have had virtually nothing to do with the Ligue des droits de l’homme—in his case, admittedly, either before or after the Second World War. See the excellent biography of Cassin by Jay Winter and Antoine Prost, René Cassin and Human Rights: From the Great War to the Universal Declaration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

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PA RT I T H E G R E AT WA R A N D A L L T H AT

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2 War Origins The Debate Begins The advent of the Great War caused a profound evolution in the activity and ­orientation of the Ligue des droits de l’homme. Its focus shifted almost overnight from domestic to international affairs, and it quickly found itself supporting the Union sacrée and justifying a neo-Jacobin crusade against Prussian militarism. This change in orientation did not go unchallenged, however. Much as Victor Basch was at the forefront of those who supported the French war effort against Germany, other voices soon arose within the LDH which called into question the bona fides of the Union sacrée and Basch’s influential and articulate defence of it. Thus began a debate on war origins and war guilt that was to divide the Ligue down to the next war—and ultimately to hobble it. The year 1914 had opened for the Ligue des droits de l’homme like many o­ thers. For the Ligue’s president, Francis de Pressensé, the great issues facing the LDH were essentially domestic and internal. The Republican tradition and the heritage of 1789 were threatened by a reactionary tendency in French politics that went all the way back to the Second Empire. Only in a fleeting mention of the danger posed by what he called a ‘panic militarism’ could one construe any reference to events to come outside France. Instead, the real danger was ‘the incredible campaign of sophistry and of lies by which one attempts to substitute for the Frenchman of the twentieth century the ignominious cult of hideous idols, of a religion without faith, an imbecilic royalism, a cæsarism without Caesar for the worship of reason, freedom, and the law’ which was the essence, according to de Pressensé, of what it meant to be French. Clearly, this was an attack on the Action française, that other offspring of the Dreyfus Affair. De Pressensé called Ligueurs to resist this ‘attempt at intellectual and moral counter-revolution’ with all their might.1 The enemy at the beginning of 1914 was therefore not specifically German, even if, as will become apparent, there was considerable anxiety about Alsace-Lorraine and, increasingly, Germany. According to Henri Guernut later in the war, in the last months of his life de Pressensé feared that war was approaching, to the point that Guernut called it an ‘obsession’. But de Pressensé apparently did not think that Germany would be the power to break the peace. Often, he thought it would 1  Francis de Pressensé, ‘A nos Ligueurs’, Bulletin officiel de la Ligue des droits de l’homme (hereafter cited simply as Bulletin), 14, 1 (1 January 1914), pp. 1–2. The best analysis of the Action française is still Eugen Weber, Action française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962).

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be Austria-Hungary, sometimes he feared Russia, and, according to Guernut, at times he even wondered if France would be the culprit.2 Jean Jaurès, speaking at de Pressensé’s funeral in January 1914, claimed that France, England, and Germany were forces for peace; they were the ‘tripod on which civilization and world peace rests, a force for peace which could rapidly become a force for justice’. Indeed, Jaurès went farther and said that the problem of Alsace-Lorraine had essentially been resolved: ‘At the hour Francis de Pressensé died, the Alsace-Lorraine problem had taken precisely the direction he had hoped and which he had forecast. It will not be, fundamentally, the kernel of new bloody and reckless conflicts between France and Germany’.3 The Ligue seemed far more concerned with issues like alcoholism,4 reform of the police, prostitution and sexual hygiene, and the innumerable claims made on its time and resources by French people who had fallen foul of the administrative law. The German problem was thus merely one among many. That said, it was on the horizon. The Ardennes federation of the Ligue, in its meeting of 16 November 1913, and perhaps largely under the impetus of Jeanne Mélin who was to have an important career as a pacifist militant in the interwar period,5 passed a motion protesting in the strongest possible terms ‘the chauvinist excitations which, on both sides of the border, threaten to aggravate the antagonism of the two countries’, an antagonism which the motion considered disastrous not only for France and Germany, but civilization in its entirety. It demanded a Franco-German rapprochement, which it saw as the only means of equitably resolving the festering Alsace-Lorraine question.6 The interesting thing, given what was to follow, was the insistence on a shared problem, that of chauvinist excitement on both sides of the frontier. Chauvinism was certainly not exclusively German. In sentiments which were to be echoed after the war by some German pacifists in the pages of Die Weltbühne, a journal closely allied to the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte (DLfM), militarism and super-heated nationalism were seen as a common Franco-German problem and not the province of Germany alone.7 Jean Jaurès, speaking at the funeral of Francis de Pressensé in January 1914, stressed the extent to which France itself 2  Henri Guernut, ‘La Ligue des droits de l’homme, la guerre et la paix’, Bulletin 17, 22 (1 December 1917), p. 722. 3  Jean Jaurès, ‘A la Mémoire de Francis de Pressensé, Obsèques’, Bulletin 14, 3 (1 February 1914), p. 173. 4  The emphasis on domestic issues even extended to the first meetings of the Société d’études documentaires et critiques sur la guerre (SEDCG), where Michel Alexandre read a letter of regret from a certain Paul Bureau, ‘s’excusant de ne pouvoir venir traiter à la Société un sujet déterminé, en raison d’un surcroît de travail et indiquant qu’à son avis les deux seules questions essentielles de l’heure actuelle [emphasis added] étaient la lutte contre l’alcoolisme et celle contre le néo-malthusianisme’. See unsigned Blanc des Renseignements Généraux, 20 March 1916, in Archives de la Préfecture de Police (APP) BA. 1775 ‘Société d’Etudes Documentaires et Critiques sur la Guerre. 5  See Norman Ingram, The Politics of Dissent: Pacifism in France, 1919–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 88. See also Christine Bard, Les Filles de Marianne: histoire des féminismes, 1914–1940 (Paris: Fayard, 1995). Mélin’s papers are available at the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris where they form part of the Fonds Bouglé. 6  Anonymous, ‘Communications des fédérations’, Bulletin 14, 1 (1 January 1914), p. 50. 7  See, for example, Heinrich Ströbel, ‘Zwischen zwei Militarismen’, in Die Weltbühne XVI, 16 (15 April 1920), pp. 417–21. On Die Weltbühne, see the excellent book by Istvan Deak, Weimar Germany’s

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was infected by the anti-intellectual virus of intuition, as opposed to reason, and called French youth and the Ligue to arms to ‘counter the ignominy of the inferior forces of barbarism which claim, with an unheard-of insolence, to be the guardians of French civilization’.8 In fact, during the first few months of 1914, before Europe spiralled into war, one could quite easily make the case that the Ligue’s gaze was directed inwards, and that in much of the rhetoric of its speakers and in the motions passed by many of its sections, the great danger continued to be the perceived unholy domestic alliance of church and military. No less a person than Henri Guernut, the secretary-general of the Ligue, argued in a speech on the ‘crisis of the Republic’ given at Chauny in the Aisne on 1 February 1914 that the danger came from the ‘militarist and clerical reaction’.9 Many were the sections, too, that continued to pass motions condemning the three-year military service law of 1913, and the often harsh sentences meted out to young soldiers of the previous class who protested the sudden extension of their two-year period of service to three.10 The initial reaction to the events at Sarajevo was anything but alarmist; it comprised a few lines contained in the economic forecast at the end of the 1 July 1914 number of the Bulletin. The anonymous writer noted that ‘the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand has created still more tension in Austro-Serbian relations’, but he hoped that the situation would calm down. According to the Bulletin, the Archduke was not very well known in France, where he was seen by most newspapers as ‘an enemy of France and an inveterate friend of German power’; in the Ligue’s view, this was an erroneous view, but the writer concluded that ‘if nothing comes along to shake up the world during the vacation, the months of August and September will see a . . . veritable improvement in the financial and economic situation’.11 All things considered, there did not seem to be much to worry about. By the end of the month, things had changed. As the July crisis reached its paroxysm, the Comité Central, still hoping for peace, passed the following resolution proposed by Dr Sicard de Plauzoles on 30 July 1914: The Comité Central of the Ligue française pour la défense des Droits de l’Homme hopes that reason will triumph over folly and barbarism, and will ensure the maintenance of peace; but in the presence of the possibility of a European war into which France will be dragged by events independent of its will, it counts on all members of the Ligue to give the example of calm, respect for the law, civic devotion, and to preserve, as the heritage of the Revolution and the hope of a better world, the Republic and the France of the Rights of Man. It remains convinced that we will maintain alive our faith in the ideal of peace and of international arbitration.12 Left-Wing Intellectuals: A Political History of the Weltbühne and Its Circle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). 8  Speech by Jaurès in ‘A la Mémoire de Francis de Pressensé’, p. 176. 9  Anonymous, ‘Communications des Sections’, Bulletin, 14, 8 (15 April 1914), p. 506. 10  For a flavour of the resistance to the three-year army law, see ‘Communications des Sections’, Bulletin 14, 1 (1 January 1914), pp. 50–7. 11  Anonymous, ‘Causerie financière’, Bulletin, 14, 13 (1 July 1914), no pagination. 12  See ‘Comité Central, Séance du 30 juillet 1914’, Bulletin 15, 1 (1 January–1 April 1915), p. 18.

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War Guilt and the Ligue des droits de l’homme T H E J U LY C R I S I S , T H E L I G U E , A N D A N E W I D E A O F T H E S TAT E

The fixation on domestic political issues before the July Crisis is perhaps not that surprising. After all, the Ligue’s avowed purpose was the defence of the individual against the unjustifiable, exaggerated claims of the State. The Ligue des droits de l’homme was supposed to be above all about human rights. The fact that it had interfered, almost from its inception, in domestic political questions meant that with the advent of world war, it was a relatively easy step to involve itself in foreign affairs. The evolution seemed natural, but it was not. It required a complete re-thinking of the Ligue’s position in French and now international politics. It necessitated the anthropomorphizing of the French state, of the French nation, so that the nation-state became an individual whose rights had to be protected against the attack of the German nation-state, the latter also reduced to a two-dimensional, anthropomorphized individual. Vir republicanus francus now squared off against vir imperialis teutonicus. The Bulletin was not published from the beginning of July 1914 until April 1915.13 The July Crisis intervened and the Ligue rallied around the Union sacrée. When the silence was finally broken, it was the voice of its new president, Ferdinand Buisson, which defined the position of the Ligue in both internal affairs and foreign policy.14 Looking back in 1940, at the beginning of a second world conflagration, Victor Basch claimed that Buisson had thought in 1914 that ‘the Ligue must disappear in the face of the national danger’, but Basch and the Ligue’s secretary-general, Henri Guernut, convinced him that the LDH must re-enter the fray.15 In 1915, Buisson reminded Ligueurs that France was under siege as a consequence of the German invasion, and that as a result the Ligue would in no way contribute to disharmony or division within the country. The same held true for discussion of foreign policy and the attendant question of the origins of the war. Here, too, Buisson took the line that the events spoke for themselves, and that in any case, the Ligue could contribute nothing of note to the discussion because the diplomatic documents were inaccessible. Instead, ‘it seems preferable’, wrote Buisson, ‘that the Ligue limit itself, for the present, to recording the essential facts which are not debatable and to putting them before the public conscience for judgement without commentary’.16 Those essential facts were as follows, according to Buisson: the violation of Belgian neutrality in order to attack France; the punishment through acts of collective and individual ‘organized savagery’ of the Belgian people who had had the temerity to resist the German aggression; and the methodical application by the Germans to France of a ‘barbarity magnified by science’.17 He condemned German ‘crimes against humanity’, made all the worse by the official approval of 13  The first number of the Bulletin in 1915 covered the period 1 January to 1 April 1915. 14  Ferdinand Buisson, ‘La Ligue des droits de l’homme et la guerre’, Bulletin 15, 1 (1 January–1 April 1915), pp. 5–10. 15  See manuscript draft minutes for a meeting of the CC and the federation presidents on 14 April 1940 in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés 798/3 Folder 1, Comité Central 1940, p. 1. 16  Buisson, ‘La Ligue des droits de l’homme et la guerre’, p. 7. 17 Ibid.

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the German intellectual community, and excoriated the German violation of international agreements, what one German minister had famously called ‘scraps [sic] of paper’.18 With a rhetorical flourish, Buisson re-integrated the Ligue’s ideals into those of the nation, those of the collectivity. Despite the opposition of Ligue sections a scant few months earlier to the three-year military service law, to say nothing of the fact that the Ligue’s origins were firmly on the side of opposition to statist demands, the LDH had suddenly become an integral part of the pre-war nationalist revival. According to Buisson, the cataclysm convulsing Europe was in no way a ‘sinister denial of the doctrines of liberty, of the hopes in progress and of the desire for peace that had always inspired the Ligue’. Far from it. Buisson was convinced that the Ligue had actually contributed to this ‘magnificent élan affirming the national community’. After all, was it not the Ligue which for the past fifteen years had familiarized people with the notion that ‘an injustice done to the humblest among us cannot leave the Nation indifferent, and that no injustice done to the Nation can leave a single Frenchman unmoved’?19 Clearly, this was something different in Ligue discourse. The first part of Buisson’s phrase defined the very essence of the Ligue. The great struggle of the Affair had been to validate the rights of the individual over those of the State, and yet, here in the first year of the Great War, the Ligue’s president was arguing the case, in time of war, for the rights of the State. In many ways, this was a logical extension of the Ligue’s not-so-latent Jacobin Republicanism, but on another level, it was a new departure—in tone, if not in substance. Thus, for the Ligue, the First World War was a ‘democratic crusade of deliverance’— deliverance first of all of Belgium, secondly of all countries ‘annexed by force and oppressed’, and lastly, in a clear reference to the perceived danger posed by German militarism, deliverance of ‘Europe, which is compelled, if it wishes to live in peace, to extinguish by floods of blood the hearth of perpetual fire’. Buisson ended by reminding his readers that it was France which had taken this ‘generous and redoubtable initiative’, and that as a consequence, its very existence was at stake.20 Buisson had already said as much in a circular to section presidents in November 1914; a handwritten postscript to the draft, which did not make it into the final printed version but nevertheless betrayed his thinking, read, ‘This crusade, is it not the Ligue’s, that which for the past fifteen years Ligueurs have expended all of their energy?’21 18  Ibid., p. 8. Buisson erroneously rendered the expression in the plural. For an analysis of the history of the ‘scrap of paper’ (in the singular) story, see T. G. Otte, ‘A “German Paperchase”: The “Scrap of Paper” Controversy and the Problem of Myth and Memory in International History’ in Diplomacy and Statecraft 18, 1 (2007), pp. 53–87. From a convalescent hospital at Asnières-lès-Bourges in the Cher, Henri Guernut wrote to André-Ferdinand Hérold, a Central Committee member, enjoining him to put pressure on Buisson or Basch to respond to the ‘Aufruf an die Kulturwelt’, because, as he put it, ‘A tort ou à raison, nous passons en France pour le parti intellectuel’. See Henri Guernut to  A.-F.  Hérold, Asnières-lès-Bourges (Cher), 31 October 1914, in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés. 798/6 Correspondance Henri Guernut. 19  Buisson, ‘La Ligue des droits de l’homme et la guerre’, p. 8. 20  Ibid., p. 10. 21 See ‘Le Président’ (Ferdinand Buisson), Circular to Section Presidents, 13 November 1914 (draft) and 14 November 1914 (final version), in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés 798/6 Correspondance Henri Guernut. This was published as Ferdinand Buisson, ‘Les Ligueurs et la guerre’, Bulletin 15, 1 (1 January–1 April 1915), p. 11.

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A large part of the Comité Central was called up in the mobilization order of 2 August 1914, and perhaps as a result of the lack of manpower, no minutes seem to have been taken at the meetings of August, September, and October even though the CC continued to meet every Monday at 4:30 p.m.22 The ideological nature of the conflict was quickly in evidence. The important Fédération de la Gironde seemed particularly active in the first few months of the war. It subscribed to the Union sacrée, but seemed suspicious of the ‘manoeuvres attempted by our adversaries’, and gave notice that as the ‘Guardian of the Rights of Man, [the federation] did not intend to allow, in the exceptional circumstances before which our patriotism voluntarily inclines itself, that excuses be created to harm today and destroy tomorrow these sacred rights which are the heritage of our Revolution’.23 The federation seemed to conceive of the war in terms reminiscent of 1793, as a sort of liberating crusade; one of its first goals had been to reach out to German prisoners of war held in French camps and to convince them of ‘the truth about the war, of its causes, of the governments which had unleashed the terrible scourge’. They also wanted to explain to the German POWs ‘the ideal which drives our soldiers, and which is none other than the ideal which guided our forefathers of 1793: the freeing of oppressed peoples, and the defence of the rights of nations’. Accordingly, an ‘Appeal to the German People’ was drafted by Théodore Ruyssen, professor at the University of Bordeaux, and also the President of the Association de la paix par le droit (APD), the prime example of the old-style pacifism in France.24 While the Jacobinism of the Gironde federation is clearly in evidence and dominant, the curious reference to ‘governments’—in the plural— unleashing the scourge of war is indicative of at least some scepticism about the nature of the Great War. The most important Ligue statement on the war was a series of articles by Victor Basch, which originally appeared in the Bulletin in May 1915, but was published as a book later that year. Originally entitled ‘La Ligue des droits de l’homme et la guerre’,25 it served as the point of departure for all Ligue debates on war origins and pacifism right through to the Ligue’s collapse in 1940. Basch began with the notion that the right to life was the most important right of all, one not mentioned by the Déclaration des droits de l’homme because it was 22  See ‘Comité Central, Séance du 30 juillet 1914’, pp. 18–19. Members mobilized with the secretary-general, Henri Guernut, were Célestin Bouglé, Emile Glay, Sicard de Plauzoles, Georges Bourdon, Félicien Challaye, Alcide Delmont, Dr Doizy, Henri Gamard, Dr J. Héricourt, Emile Kahn, Léon Martinet, Louis Oustry, Amédée Rouquès, Henri Schmidt, and Daniel Vincent. Letters from the front from some of the Ligue’s leading lights are contained in the Ligue’s archives. See, for example, letters from Henri Guernut, written from the front in September 1914, in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés 798/6 Correspondance Henri Guernut. 23  Cited from an extract from a November 1914 meeting of the Gironde Federation in Léon Baylet, ‘Une Fédération pendant la guerre: la fédération de la Gironde’, Bulletin 15, 1 (1 January– 1 April 1915), p. 53. 24  Cited in ibid., p. 54. On Ruyssen and old-style pacifism, see Ingram, Politics of Dissent, pp. 19–118. 25  Victor Basch, ‘La Ligue des droits de l’homme et la guerre’ (hereafter cited as ‘La Ligue et la guerre’), Bulletin 15, 2 (1 May 1915), pp. 65–175. The book version had a slightly amended title. See Victor Basch, La Guerre de 1914 et le droit (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1915).

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so self-evident. Extrapolating from this ‘primordial’ right, Basch argued that Ligueurs had ‘to make war on war and participate in all efforts tending to the establishment of the reign of peace through law’.26 Such a position did not at all imply abdication or passive resignation in the face of aggression, but according to Basch, it did require a commitment not to solve one crime by perpetrating another; not ‘to fill the abyss dug between two nations with the slaughter of new innocents’.27 It was the sacred duty of all Frenchmen to respond to the unprovoked German aggression by defending their native soil, ‘by inflicting on the aggressor the chastisement that he deserves’, but without—and the distinction was extremely important for what was to come—‘making an entire nation responsible for the crimes of its leaders’.28 The essential question was to know which nation was the aggressor, and whether France for its part had done everything in its power to avoid war and preserve peace. This was the question which Basch set out to answer by a close reading of the coloured books published by the various powers on the origins of the war.29 Basch recognized, as indeed have virtually all historians since, that the causes of the Great War were many, some near, some distant, some visible, still others invisible. He admitted that it was impossible to know with certainty which precise elements had led to the war, but he insisted nevertheless on the need to explain how he and those around him saw the origins of the war.30 So, who was responsible for the outbreak of the war? According to Basch, after carefully reading the documents, ‘no doubt can persist as to the series of events that led to war or to the fixing of responsibilities’.31 Basch concluded that, in the first instance, ‘before any negotiations, Austrian diplomacy believed war with Serbia to be inevitable’. Secondly, in Basch’s view, it was incontrovertible that Germany was prepared to support the Dual Monarchy in what it viewed as the latter’s righteous demands. Thus, while the Entente powers, with the addition of Italy, sought a pacific solution to the crisis, only Germany was in favour of merely localizing it.32 He went through the various stages of the July Crisis minutely, and came to the conclusion that Germany was the main culprit because it alone of the great powers seemed to refuse the possibility of conciliation, particularly after the Russian general mobilization of 31 July. While Austria appeared prepared to consider measures aimed at defusing the crisis, the German position actually hardened, according to Basch.33 The violation of Belgian neutrality by the Germans, which Niall Ferguson claims the British were prepared to do as well,34 set the tinder ablaze. 26  Basch, ‘La Ligue et la guerre’, p. 66. 27  Ibid., p. 67. 28  Ibid. The last important phrase in this paragraph reads in the original: ‘ . . . sans jamais pourtant faire supporter à une nation la responsabilité des crimes de ses gouvernants . . . ’. 29  Basch had carefully gone through the Livre Jaune français, Das deutsche Weissbuch, Correspondence and Statements in Parliament: Correspondance du gouvernement britannique relative à la crise européenne, the Österreichisch-ungarisches Rotbuch, the Livre orange russe, the Livre gris belge, the Livre Bleu serbe, as well as two analyses, the first by Emile Durkheim and Ernest Denis, Qui a voulu la guerre?: les origines de la guerre d’après les documents diplomatiques (Paris: A. Colin, 1915), and E. Denis, La Guerre: causes immédiates et lointaines, l’intoxication d’un peuple, le traité (Paris: Delagrave, 1915). 30  Basch, ‘La Ligue et la guerre’, p. 69. 31 Ibid. 32  Ibid., pp. 72–4. 33  Ibid., pp. 91–2. 34  Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War: Explaining World War I (New York: Basic Books, 1999), p. 443.

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It was clear, therefore, to Basch at least, that Germany and Austria were responsible for starting the war: Austria because it had declared war on Serbia initially, a war it knew would lead to a European conflagration, and Germany because it did not rein in its Austrian ally.35 Where Basch seemed to go over the line into speculation was in his assertion that the Austrians wanted not only to chastize Serbia, but also to humiliate Russia.36 Basch charged Germany with duplicity, with having spoken in favour of peace, but having acted to provoke war; Germany had been ‘less intransigent’ than Austria, and it had made all the right noises about peace and conciliation, but Basch argued that its actions had not been consonant with its language. Basch concluded that ‘It is the unconditional approval given to Austrian intransigence [and] it is by its own irreducible intransigence, even after Austria had backed down, that Germany unleashed the war. Because of that, together with Austria, it bears the responsibility for the horrifying catastrophe that has befallen the world’.37 What stupefied Basch was not that the German government should try to protest its innocence in the outbreak of war, but that this should be seconded by the German academic elite, the artists, scientists, and writers, in effect ‘the entire German people which has solemnly declared, before the world, that the facts we have denounced are false, and that it was pacific Germany which was drawn into the war’.38 In the heat of the moment in 1915, the problem was thus all Germans, and not just their government or the academic elite. Making clear reference to the ninety-three German intellectuals who had signed the Aufruf an die Kulturwelt of the previous autumn, which defended the German position in a war which the manifesto claimed had been forced upon an unwilling Germany, Basch wrote that he simply could not comprehend how these men of science could be so wrong. Presaging the difficulties to come in the interwar period, Basch wondered how it was ever going to be possible to deal with these people again.39 This sense of betrayal, of bonds in the international academic community having been ­irreparably broken, lay at the core of much of what was to come. Basch was not of the opinion, however, that these scientists and academics were the servile servants of their government; he continued to believe that most of them were of good faith, a position consonant with Chagnon’s analysis above. He even went so far as to say that he thought it at least possible that the Kaiser and his government sincerely believed that they were representing the noble ideas of peace. The problem, in his view, was that there was a great veil over the eyes of Germany which prevented Germans from seeing the light of reality.40

35  Basch, ‘La Ligue et la guerre’, pp. 97–101. 36  Ibid., p. 97. 37  Ibid., p. 104. 38  Ibid., p. 105. This is a clear attack on the Aufruf an die Kulturwelt, often known as the Manifesto of the Ninety-three, which declared the belief of the most eminent of the German intellectual elite that Germany was fighting a defensive war. For a profoundly revisionist take on this manifesto, see Marie-Eve Chagnon, ‘Nationalisme et internationalisme dans les sciences au XXe siècle: l’exemple des scientifiques et des humanistes français et allemands dans la communauté scientifique internationale, 1890–1933’ (PhD thesis, Concordia University, Montreal, 2012). See also Chagnon, ‘Le Manifeste des 93: La mobilisation des académies françaises et allemandes au déclenchement de la Première Guerre mondiale (1914–1915)’, French Historical Studies 35, 1 (Winter 2012), pp. 123–47. 39  Basch, ‘La Ligue et la guerre’, p. 106. 40 Ibid.

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On the basis of this, Basch set out to examine the claims of the German g­ overnment, press, and writers that war had been forced on Germany, that it had not violated Belgium, nor that the Germany army had committed any ‘acts contrary to morality or humanity’.41 He distilled six theses from official German sources as well as from commentary by German journalists and intellectuals:

1. That the war was provoked not by Austria, but by Serbia; 2. That Russia was to blame for a localized conflict becoming a generalized war; 3. That England was to blame; 4. That France was to blame because of its desire for revenge and its alliances; 5. That war was inevitable because of the alliances and ententes between Russia, France, and Britain; Sarajevo was merely the tragic catalyst; 6. That the entire world hated Germany and was jealous of it.42 With regard to the first thesis, Basch did not deny that the Sarajevo assassination must be punished. As to whether Russia should be blamed or not, Basch believed that it ‘incarnated the cause of justice, and that it had defended justice with moderation and an obvious desire for peace’.43 He recognized that the Russian regime was distasteful to some, but argued that it was ‘incontestable’ that during the July Crisis it had ‘shown prudence, energy, initiative, and a sincere and clear-sighted love of peace’.44 Neither the German White Book, nor the Austrian Red Book, weakened this view of Russia. Instead, the Germans laid great emphasis on the timing and extent of the Russian mobilization, arguing that it had made war inevitable. Throughout his entire analysis of the Russian position in July 1914, Basch remained convinced that Russia had gone the extra mile, that it was imbued with irenic intentions, and that the German Empire was clearly at fault in the fatal events that seemed to lead ineluctably to war. As he wrote in the concluding paragraph of his analysis of the charges against Russia, ‘Whatever prejudice one might have against the Russian government, I believe that an impartial history will decide that, in the bloody conflict that is tearing Europe apart, Russia bears no responsibility other than that resulting from its situation in the Balkans, a situation which was known to and accepted by all of Europe. Given this situation, it exhibited a decidedly pacific position.’45 As will become clear below, it was precisely the question of Russian guilt in the outbreak of war which exercised the minds of many early critics of Basch’s ‘orthodox’ and very French consensus view. After Russia, Germany accused England of having essentially conspired to ­produce this war, out of jealousy of German military and naval might, to say nothing 41  Ibid., p. 107. 42  Ibid., pp. 107–11. 43  Ibid., p. 115. 44  Ibid., p. 116. 45  Ibid., p. 128. Some recent historians argue that the Serbian problem was not really that central to Russian foreign policy thinking. Sean McMeekin, for example, writes that ‘To assume that Russia really went to war on behalf of Serbia in 1914 is naive. Great powers do not usually mobilize armies of millions to protect the territorial integrity of minor client states’. See Sean McMeekin, The Russian Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 27.

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of the growing rivalry in the industrial and commercial spheres. Basch believed this to be patent nonsense. He demonstrated how even-handed Sir Edward Grey’s foreign policy during the July Crisis had been, how neither the Liberal Party, nor its supporter, the Labour Party, were in any way Germanophobic. Quoting the German White Book, Basch noted that ‘Sir E. Grey’s propaganda in favour of peace had been so ardent, so ingenious, so patient’ that the Germans themselves had been forced to recognize that England ‘had worked shoulder to shoulder with Germany in search of mediation’.46 So, what had gone wrong? How was it that, once war was declared, German antipathy towards Britain quickly became so deep, with the Germans believing that England had betrayed them and had provoked the war? The German view, according to Basch, was that England had laid a trap for them. If the British had made clear right from the start that they would defend Belgian neutrality and had come out on the side of France and Russia, there would have been no war. The Germans believed that, at bottom, ‘England knew that Germany, driven into war by Russia, was obliged to violate Belgian territory’.47 Britain treacherously allowed the European situation to develop to the point of no return, where Germany was faced with defending itself against two assailants, at which juncture the British stabbed Germany in the back. Basch admitted that he was perplexed by the British reticence on the Belgian question until the very last hours of the crisis. More than once he had been tempted by the conclusion that Britain had joined the fight to rid Europe of Germany’s ‘unbearable tyranny’ only when it became clear just how far German pride would go. He claimed to have rejected this analysis, going on to demonstrate how Sir Edward Grey had not been able to declare himself ready to defend Belgium and to oppose Germany because he did not yet have the country or Parliament behind him.48 This seemed, in some respects, close to the thesis which Basch professed to reject, but it allowed him to conclude that neither Britain nor Russia was responsible for the outbreak of war. How, then, could Germany, both officially and through the mouths and pens of its intellectuals, writers, and people, still persist in believing that it had not wanted war, but rather peace? Paradoxically, Basch believed that the Germans were sincere in their error. The Austrians undoubtedly believed that their bluff would succeed, as it had done during the Balkan wars. Both Austrian and German diplomats, ‘incomprehensibly blind’, were convinced that neither Russia nor Britain ‘would march’. But clearly, given what Basch had just written with regard to the delicate British political situation, this was not an implausible inference. Nevertheless, Basch persisted in claiming that if the Germans were sincere in their desire for peace, it was a very conditional Germanic peace, one that presupposed the capitulation of the other powers.49 The opening German gambit was the localization of the conflict between Serbia and Austria; when that failed, Berlin opted for a broader, but still localized, conflict between Germany and Austria on the one hand, and Serbia and Russia on the other. Germany attempted to use the British 46  Basch, ‘La Ligue et la guerre’, p. 130. 49  Ibid., pp. 140–1.

47  Ibid., p. 131.

48  Ibid., pp. 133–8.

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to secure French neutrality, but when that failed, it hoped ‘desperately’ that the British themselves would stay out of the growing conflagration. Lost in all of this was Basch’s (and the Entente Powers’) admission that Serbia needed to be ‘chastised’ roundly for its role in the Sarajevo assassination. How this might have been achieved without ‘humiliating’ Russia, given the line in the sand drawn by the Tsar, is hard to conceive, and yet a large part of Basch’s argument seemed to revolve around this very point. Serbia needed to be punished, but Russia must not feel humiliated, despite the fact that Austria had stated that it respected the territorial integrity of Serbia. Austria had a right to demand redress, but was wrong to declare war on Serbia. And Germany was just plain wrong on virtually all levels. So the argument went. Basch’s fourth question was whether there was any substance to the German charge that they had been deceived by the French, too. French motives and actions were so pure during the July Crisis that Basch wrote that Germany had not dared to make this claim. Since the outbreak of war, the tone had changed somewhat, and now the Germans were accusing France of having enthusiastically accepted the war, ostensibly because this had allowed the desire for revenge for the loss of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871 to resurface. But this argument had not received much play among German intellectuals, according to Basch. The real problem was the association of Republican, democratic France with what he termed ‘barbaric Russian autocracy’.50 The sudden German ‘tenderness’ for the cause of democracy was ­nevertheless highly suspect because Berlin, certainly in the person of the Kaiser, continued to cultivate ‘the most cordial relations’ with the Tsar, even after the formation of the Franco-Russian alliance of 1894. With somewhat convoluted logic, Basch insisted that despite the apparent antitheses separating the Russian and French political systems, it was a very good thing that France had entered into the Franco-Russian alliance because it certainly needed it in 1914. To the German retort that France would not have been dragged into the war were it not for this very alliance, Basch replied that this assumed that Germany held no ulterior designs against France, which the Schnaebele affair, to say nothing of Tangiers and Agadir, seemed to put the lie to.51 This was an important point because on it hinged much of the debate between Basch, and with him the majority view in the Ligue, and the representatives of the historical dissent which was to emerge very shortly and have such debilitating long-term effects on the Ligue. To the probable German counter-argument that this was all a pipe-dream, so much political paranoia, and that Germany would never have attacked France with which it desired only to live in peace, Basch professed to be receptive. Certainly, until the Treaty of Fez of 4 November 1911 Germany had borne no hatred for France. But the question for Basch was, in fact, even larger than the Franco-Russian alliance. He charged that there was a civilizational underpinning to it. Germany saw France as decadent, even if there continued to be great admiration for French art and letters in Germany. But Basch believed that, mixed in with this admiration, there was an increasing element of disdain on the part of the Germans. They 50  Ibid., p. 144.

51  Ibid., p. 145.

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considered France to be in decline, to be in the twilight phase of a once great civilization. France was destined to go the way of the other great Latin civilizations. Without mentioning the problem of dénatalité as such, Basch nevertheless spoke of France becoming, in German eyes at least, ‘too feeble or too cowardly to be able to multiply itself’.52 He believed that the Germans thought of France as just another ‘sort of Belgium’, and they could not understand why the French would not simply resign themselves to this role.53 Finally, Basch dealt with the fear of encirclement in Germany, and the belief of many Germans that the ‘satanic diplomacy’ of Germany’s adversaries had prepared and provoked the war. There was a grain of truth in the encirclement theory, according to Basch, but did this give Germany the right to respond to the perceived threat of encirclement by war? Preventive war was morally reprehensible, and the only reason one could argue encirclement had occurred at all was because Germany had attacked first. It had lain within Germany’s power to break the ­encirclement it so feared, but that would have required an Anglo-German rapprochement, together with a Franco-German détente. It was above all the latter that would have saved the peace, according to Basch, because despite what he had argued earlier about there being no reason for France to be at all interested in Balkan affairs, he now argued that ‘only a Franco-German rapprochement would have permitted an amicable resolution of the formidable Balkan problem’. This rapprochement was possible, but under one condition: that Germany ‘accord to Alsace-Lorraine a full and complete autonomy’. Many people were ready to envisage such a solution, even in Alsace, but Germany remained obdurately opposed. For Berlin there simply was no Alsace-Lorraine question. The irony, of course, was that by 1918, Germany had come round to supporting Alsatian autonomy and also the use of a plebiscite to decide the future of the two provinces, but by that point, the French were squarely opposed to any suggestion that Alsace and Lorraine were not completely French.54 In Basch’s 1914 analysis, the world war had suddenly become the result of 1871, and if only the Germans had not been so short-sighted, the world might have been spared the horrors of the Great War: ‘Germany’s crime is in not having made a world war impossible by refusing such a small concession’.55 The flight of logic required to make of Alsace-Lorraine the necessary spark, the inevitable and justifiable cause of the outbreak of the war, is remarkable, but that is precisely what Basch argued. 52  Ibid., p. 146. French fears about the future of the race and the link with French foreign and military policy have been excellently analysed by Karen Offen in ‘Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in Fin-de-siècle France’, American Historical Review, 89, 3 (June 1984), pp. 648–76; cf. Richard Tomlinson, ‘The “Disappearance of France”, 1896–1940: French Politics and the Birth Rate’, The Historical Journal 28, 2 (1985), pp. 5–15. Other historians see in pre-1914 French history a kind of crisis of masculinity. See Robert Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honour in Modern France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Nye, ‘Honor, Impotence and Male Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century French Medicine’, French Historical Studies 16, 1 (Spring 1989), pp. 48–71. 53  Basch, ‘La Ligue et la guerre’, p. 146. 54  The latest word on this is Sebastian Döderlein, ‘Un pivot de l’histoire? La société alsaciennelorraine et les sorties ambiguës de la Première Guerre mondiale (1918–1919)’ (PhD thesis, Concordia University, Montreal, 2016). 55  Basch, ‘La Ligue et la guerre’, pp. 150–1.

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In the sixth and final section of his analysis of war origins, Basch expanded his attack on German pride, and singled out German paranoia, the feeling of many in Germany that their country was hated by the whole world. Not entirely untrue, wrote Basch. ‘The monstrous pride, the aggressive infatuation, the frenetic ­megalomania, those are the things against which the international community rebelled’.56 This German ‘intoxication’ was not the result of some vague furor teutonicus of old, nor was it the result of German philosophy or German literature, both of which he exculpated from any responsibility for the ‘pan-Germanist folly’.57 No, the heart of darkness lay in history, not in philosophy, it lay in the absorption of Germany by Prussia after the Franco-Prussian War. In profoundly gendered language, he wrote that Prussia played the male role in this union, while the rest of Germany was ‘soft, malleable, open to all influences, modest, sentimental, idealistic, mystical, poetic, philosophical and musical’.58 This feminized Germany had vague memories of its glorious past, though, and after the democratic miscarriage of 1848, it lay open to what Basch called its Prussian ‘ravisher’. It was the historians von Treitschke and Bernhardi who elaborated this doctrine to its logical and full conclusion. War became the ‘providential’ instrument. Basch quoted von Treitschke as saying: ‘It is to the Germanic nation, the war-like nation par excellence which has accomplished all of the decisive acts of European history, that world hegemony must belong’.59 The nation of idealism, of dreamers, of ­philosophers had transmuted the world of the Spirit onto the Army and the Navy; ‘brutal force had been proclaimed the highest manifestation of the Idea’. In Basch’s mind, mixed in with this new form of brutal idealism was a strong measure of positivism and materialism. In his view, and it is a strange one for a positivist Frenchman like Basch, Germany ought not to be permitted its positivism and materialism because as a result of its idealism it pushed materialism to absurd conclusions. Even von Treitschke was afraid that, under the influence of socialism, Germany would become ‘Americanized’—a non sequitur, if ever there was one—and would succumb to a sort of Kulturbarbarei.60 It would be wrong to suppose that Basch thought that all Germans were infected by the militarist, imperialist virus, for such was not the case. There were many forces struggling against pan-Germanism and imperialism, although the latter had more friends than the former, certainly since the last Balkan crisis. Even here, though, Basch believed that most Germans were inclined towards peace. This made the total capitulation of the Socialist Party (SPD) before the sirens of war all the stranger. Moreover, since the outbreak of war, the leaders of the SPD had expressed even greater solidarity with the Kaiser’s policies. How to explain this? Basch believed it was not for lack of courage on the part of the Socialist leadership, nor because the party had been swept along by a great wave of patriotic fervour. No, the answer lay in the fact that German socialism had no large democratic base under it, it had not emerged as the enlargement of a great liberal political party; it was, in effect, an artificial creation with shallow roots.61 Betraying a neo-Marxist view of political history, Basch wrote that ‘revolution cannot be made on the cheap’; 56  Ibid., p. 153. 57  Ibid., p. 154. 58  Ibid., pp. 154–5. 59  Cited in ibid., p. 156. 60  Ibid., p. 157. 61  Ibid., p. 160.

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in other words, a people could not simply skip the preordained stages of historical development.62 Presaging the modernization theorists of the second half of the twentieth century who see in Germany’s ostensibly retarded political development one of the origins of Nazism, Basch wrote that ‘politically, Germany is more than a century behind the liberal nations of the West’: ‘If Germany had been a democracy and not an autocracy, offensive war would have been just as impossible as in France or in England. Germany today, on the one hand militaristic, imperialistic, autocratic, and on the other industrial, commercial, and scientific, constitutes an unbalanced organism, odd and hardly viable.’63 Turning to the argument that the Great War had its origins in shared responsibilities, that no single nation could be said to be the cause of the hecatomb, Basch was categorical. He laid the blame for the outbreak of war squarely at the feet of Austria and Germany; even in a deterministic world, individual will and individual responsibility had to be recognized. He took particular exception to the reasoning of the noted theologian, Professor Adolf von Harnack, who had written that the violation of Belgian neutrality was a ‘moral duty’ (devoir moral ) for Germany. If this were the case, wrote Basch, it would ‘render all hopes of civil society between nations impossible, and all international law inoperative’.64 The invasion of Belgium had therefore not been a moral duty; it had been unnecessary and designed only to ‘assuage Germany’s morbid thirst for domination’.65 Having destroyed Belgium militarily, the Germans had then proceeded to commit atrocities on the Belgian people, destroying monuments, taking entire villages into captivity, shooting ‘hundreds of men’ indiscriminately; and the same ‘frenetic rage’ had ­accompanied the invasion of France.66 Basch had initially been sceptical about the charges of atrocities levelled at the Germans, but having read much of the French and Belgian documentation, he had come around to believing the stories. There was just too much evidence that these things had actually occurred.67 In the final section of his book, Basch addressed the question of what position the Ligue des droits de l’homme ought to take during the war. Against those who might think that men of good will ought to throw themselves between the competing armies and cry ‘Enough!’, to say that ‘it was finally time to have the holy flower of peace bloom once again on this earth saturated with cadavers’, Basch replied ‘no’. ‘We do not have the right to call for this’, he wrote; ‘whatever it costs, we are obliged to hope that we will go on right to the end, and that we do not conclude, either by sheer lassitude, or even out of human tenderness, a hasty peace that will be necessarily precarious and pregnant with future wars’.68 Prussian militarism and imperialism had to be broken, and the only way to do that was a war to end all wars. He made of the war a moral and political crusade, writing that two ‘completely different conceptions of law’ were at stake. The immediate cause was the ‘monstrous ultimatum’ addressed by Austria to Serbia. It is curious that here, at the end 62  Ibid., p. 161. 63 Ibid. 64  Ibid., p. 165. 65  Ibid., p. 166. 66 Ibid. 67  See the excellent analysis of this by John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001). 68  Basch, ‘La Ligue et la guerre’, p. 169.

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of his book, Basch seemed to express doubt that there was anything at all behind the Austrian belief in Serbian involvement in the Sarajevo assassination, despite his stated belief at the outset that Serbia needed to be punished. Instead, what seemed now more important was the fact that a bigger nation had threatened to flatten (écraser) a smaller one, and this the Ligue could not tolerate. The second reason for the war was the violation of Belgian neutrality, the German belief in the ‘law of necessity’, and the fight against this meant a ‘struggle for the very principles which are the honour of our Ligue’.69 Given the fact that France was fighting with the Russian Empire, which could hardly be considered a respecter of the rights of minorities and nationalities, and alongside the British whose policies in Ireland Basch and the Ligue seemed to dislike, Basch nevertheless proclaimed that blood would not have been spilled in vain if the nationality problem could be resolved. Betraying the belief of the majority in the Ligue in France’s ‘civilizing mission’, he wrote that the war demonstrated the profound attachment of the indigenous peoples of the colonies to the ‘motherland’. He cited approvingly the words of Charles Gide, professor of law at the Université de Paris, who had written in the pages of La Paix par le droit that p ­ eoples who had entered the war as subjects would emerge as fellow citizens.70 The Great War had thus to be seen as a liberating catalyst, according to Basch, an interpretation made all the stranger by the Ligue’s majority’s fulsome defence of France’s colonial empire after 1918.71 The Great War, for Basch and the Ligue, was nothing less, then, than a saintly crusade for the principles of the French Revolution, a battle joined because France had been forced into it. At stake were two different visions of international law: the first German, believing that States were not subject to the same rules as i­ ndividuals, and the second French, based on the Enlightenment and on ‘the greatest German philosopher’, Immanuel Kant, which believed that the highest ideal towards which humanity could strive was the establishment of a reign of law for both individuals and States. Despite the official line on war origins and responsibilities, and the crusading tone of Basch’s writings, it is clear that the Ligue was not completely immune to a rather existential feeling of bad faith. In July 1915 Victor Basch and Henri Guernut published a lengthy ‘examen de conscience de la Ligue’, in the form of a report which sought to deal with the niggling doubts held by some Ligueurs about the LDH’s position on the war. Basch and Guernut reported on a forum of some 200 delegates of sections in the Seine département which had been held on 9 May 1915, 69  Ibid., p. 171. The hoary belief in official Serbian innocence in the assassination at Sarajevo has long been put to rest. See two recent examples: Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (New York: HarperCollins, 2013); and Sean McMeekin, July 1914: Countdown to War (New York: Basic Books, 2013). 70  Basch, ‘La Ligue et la guerre’, pp. 171–2. Gide was a member of the Société d’études critiques sur les origines de la guerre, about which more below. 71  On the problems posed by the Empire for French liberal thinking, see Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); and Conklin, ‘Colonialism and Human Rights, a Contradiction in Terms? The Case of France and West Africa, 1895–1914’, The American Historical Review 103, 2 (April 1998), pp. 419–42.

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and which had as its purpose a discussion of what the Ligue’s position should be during the war.72 Guernut noted that in the initial shock following the outbreak of war, the Ligue had been very circumspect, but with the return of the nation to what he called ‘normal breathing’,73 the Ligue had begun to reclaim its public role. Guernut defined that role in wartime as first, ‘to ensure that in the civilian conduct of the war, care for the rights of man not be totally neglected’; and secondly, ‘to leave our imprint, our democratic spirit, as far as is possible, on the new law which the war will call forth’.74 One of the Ligue’s preoccupations seems to have been, in good republican fashion, to see that military service be equitably distributed across the nation, but also that the older soldiers be either returned to their homes or else used in the rear rather than at the front. It was ‘the men of the youngest classes’ who had to be sent to the front lines.75 With regard to the Union sacrée, Guernut said that not all parties had observed it. The LDH had been accused of being ‘bleating pacifists’, of having ‘weakened the arm of France’.76 To this he responded that ‘We will defend our ideal of peace: it was never a blind one. We will defend our conceptions of the nation in arms: they are triumphant. We will defend Parliament, the supervision of which is our safeguard. We will defend the supremacy of the civilian power and of the right to free thought.’ Guernut claimed that the Ligue was ‘the repository of the true traditions of France’.77 Much of the Ligue’s activity during the first year of the war had thus been directed towards internal French debates and to the maintenance of a truly ‘republican’ way of fighting the war. Guernut defined freedom and the fatherland as being equally dear to the Ligue; indeed, he added, ‘the one is inconceivable without the other’.78 Basch, for his part, elaborated on what it was that the Ligue stood for. ‘Before all else’, he said, ‘the Ligue has been pacifist’.79 This is more than a little surprising because it was a categorization that the Ligue was to deny explicitly in a letter to the high-profile anti-militarist turned super-heated patriot, Gustave Hervé, the following year; in 1916, at least, the LDH rejected the notion that it could in any sense be considered ‘pacifist’, ‘a tendency’ as it defined it, ‘in favour of peace at any price’.80 It was clear, though, that the pacifism of which he spoke in 1915 was above all a rendering of the old-style pacifism, the belief in a juridical, internationalist conception of peace through arbitration. He conflated the defence of the right of the individual to life with that of the nation to life. In Basch’s mind, pacifism was thus not primarily an individual doctrine, but rather one which elided into a fairly Jacobin conception of the State and the individual’s role in it. This is all the more surprising given the individualist origins of the LDH and its ongoing self-perception as the defender of the individual against raison d’état. In words which would come back to haunt him, Basch argued that ‘This propaganda in favour of peace through law [he actually used the expression ‘la paix par le droit’, which was the name of the 72  Victor Basch and Henri Guernut, ‘L’examen de conscience de la Ligue’, Bulletin 15, 2 (1 July 1915), pp. 194–208. 73  Ibid., p. 196. 74 Ibid. 75  Ibid., p. 197. 76  Ibid., p. 198. 77 Ibid. 78  Ibid., p. 199. 79  Ibid., p. 200. 80  See ‘Comité Central (Extraits), Séance du 6 mars 1916’, Bulletin 16, 7–8 (July–August 1916), pp. 399–400.

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association best representing old-style pacifism in 1914] did not imply in our thinking either abdication or resignation. But it did say that old ­injustices could not be resolved by creating new ones’.81 Secondly, the Ligue was anti-militarist, but it had never preached what Basch called the ‘criminal folly’ of a unilaterally disarmed France in a Europe of over-armed states. Thirdly, the LDH had been anticlerical, not in the sense of being anti-religious, but rather in the belief that all faiths must be accorded equal respect in a secular state. Fourthly, the Ligue saw itself as the great defender of the ­principles of the French Revolution: separation of powers, primacy of the legislative branch over the others, and the belief that nations, as much as individual citizens, had the right to self-determination. Finally, Basch spoke of ‘civilization’ as the link between nations that had been ‘freely constituted’.82 How had the war affected these goals and what was the role of Germany in all of this? The war was the greatest calamity to befall civilization, but in order for French consciences to be clear, it was necessary to decide if France was fighting a defensive war. Here there was no doubt in Basch’s mind. France was completely innocent of the ‘unpardonable sin’ of having ‘unleashed the cataclysm’. Instead, he pointed the finger directly at Germany and Austria-Hungary, saying that the Central Powers had forced the Entente into deciding between a peace without honour or war. In Basch’s view, the Entente could not but choose war, and having chosen it, it now fell to it to fight the war to the bitter end, no matter what the cost. What he called ‘Prussian militarism and imperialism’ had to be eradicated from Europe. The Great War was thus a crusade for Basch; it was a ‘war against war’, a ‘war for peace’. Only when the crusade had been won would the Ligue be able to return to working towards the ‘great work of disarmament and of international arbitration’.83 There were other inconvenient inconsistencies in Basch’s analysis, too. He insisted that the Ligue had ‘proclaimed the independence of both nations and individuals’.84 One wonders what he was thinking, though, when he said that the ‘allied armies will liberate [. . .] all of the nationalities who, from the Alsatians to the Poles, from the inhabitants of Schleswig to the Armenians, have been ­incorporated against their will into states which, to punish their loyalty to their national ideal, have unpityingly crushed them.’85 Presumably, this meant liberating the Poles of German and Austro-Hungarian Poland, but not those of Russian Poland. After all, as Théodore Ruyssen was to write a scant six months later in the pages of the Bulletin, the Russian Empire was a liberal force for good.86 While the Ligue may well have ‘hated with all [its] energy’ German militarism, imperialism, and doctrines of hatred, Basch nevertheless argued that the LDH was in no way in favour of the annihilation of Germany, or of its dismemberment, or indeed of those who argued that German science and the arts were somehow implicated in the crimes of German soldiers. He was also opposed to the idea that 81  Basch and Guernut, ‘L’examen de conscience de la Ligue’, p. 200. 82  Ibid., pp. 200–2. 83  Ibid., p. 203. 84  Ibid., p. 205. 85 Ibid. 86 Théodore Ruyssen, ‘Le Problème des nationalités I.  La Guerre mondiale et le principe des nationalités’, Bulletin 16, 1 (January 1916), pp. 1–64.

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Germans individually should be made to ‘expiate [. . .] the error of having been led into war, like sheep to the slaughter, by the folly of a government of prey’. Despite the attempt, one breath earlier, to distinguish between the German government and German arts and science, he inveighed against ‘German intellectuals, crazed with haughtiness and fatuity’, but ended by saying that he hoped Germany would be transformed from a military autocracy to a free democracy. Against this present danger, the Ligue had helped prepare, in Basch’s view, the Union sacrée. He warned that the LDH was not prepared to sacrifice to this union ‘a single essential ­principle of the Republic or of democracy’.87 The Ligue’s position was thus essentially bicephalous. It was opposed to German aggression and militarism, and for this reason had supported the Union sacrée, but at the same time it continued to cast an uneasy eye over its shoulder at the forces of reaction omnipresent in French society. The Ligue therefore faced two enemies during the Great War: one tangible and real (Germany), and the second potential and for the moment hidden within the folds of the Union sacrée (reactionary, French anti-republicanism). In a series of open letters written to the soldiers of France, Ferdinand Buisson emphasized the republican nature of the war and how soldiers knew what they were fighting for, unlike in previous conflicts: ‘You are no longer professionals in the service of France: you are France itself ’.88 The defensive war France was fighting was a ‘duel of two ideas, of two civilizations’.89 He charged that Germany was trying to be for Europe what Prussia had been for Germany, and that France and its allies were fighting against the idea that might makes right.90 In his fourth letter, he defined the war as a crusade for human rights, a universalist crusade which represented the very essence of what the Ligue des droits de l’homme was: ‘Thus, the rights of man, the rights of peoples, this is no longer only a French concept, it is the rallying cry of the Crusade. I mean: the Crusade of all democracies, large or small, monarchical or republican, against the Austro-Turkish-German military autocracy’.91 Buisson’s advice to French soldiers was simple: know how to suffer and how to laugh. These were the two halves of courage, according to him.92 Small comfort for those stuck in muddy, rat-infested trenches in northern France. Buisson spoke of the ‘body’ of the patrie as being the ‘long, long line that we call the “front” [. . .] this is the sacred body of France for which you make a rampart with your chests’. The idealization went even farther, with Buisson waxing lyrical about the ‘soul of France [. . .] of which no one could ignore the radiance’. The 87  Basch and Guernut, ‘L’examen de conscience de la Ligue’, pp. 206–7. 88  Ferdinand Buisson, ‘Aux Troupiers de France. Paroles d’un vétéran’, Bulletin 15, 4 (1 September 1915), p. 259. 89  Ibid., p. 260. 90  Ibid., pp. 261–2. 91  Ibid., p. 266. Many of these ideas were also articulated in a letter on behalf of the Comité Central sent by Buisson to the section presidents. The just war being waged by France was in complete accord with the Ligue’s ideals and Buisson wrote that ‘Quand viendra l’heure de parler des conditions de la paix, nous sommes sûrs que, dans le concert des nations alliées, la France tiendra le langage que la Révolution lui a enseigné, que la Patrie des Droits de l’Homme fera prévaloir le respect du droit des peuples et les garanties d’une paix durable par la juste application du principe des nationalités.’ See Ferdinand Buisson, ‘Pour l’action. Appel aux Ligueurs’, Bulletin 15, 4 (1 September 1915), pp. 274–8. 92  Buisson, ‘Aux Troupiers’, pp. 269–71.

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implication, of course, was that the essential France was definitely something worth dying for: ‘Everything–our language, genius, social system, our way of understanding life and of conceiving of the ideal, the marvellous heritage of feelings, thoughts, memories and hopes that are ours alone, our laws, mores, institutions–all of these things, positive and negative combined, constitute the French spirit’.93 There was certainly nothing negative in the list which Buisson enumerated, despite what he said, and the entire idealized rendering of supposedly national characteristics was predicated on the assumption that ‘others’ were not quite like ‘us’. The issue that was never addressed was how the notion of a just war to defend French values could be squared with the demands of the Franco-Russian Alliance. The problems posed by the alliance with Russia, together with the questions of democracy and nationalities, are issues which were to dog the Ligue until the next war. THE BEGINNING OF DISSENT The lengthy examination of Basch’s wartime analysis of the question of war origins and responsibilities, and of the Ligue’s position on the same, is important because around these ideas revolved much of the debate for the rest of the interwar period. In fact, that debate began during the First World War itself in the meetings of a small group of intellectuals and interested public figures grouped together in something called the Société d’Etudes Documentaires et Critiques sur la Guerre (SEDCG). The Société has received relatively little attention from historians. Emmanuel Naquet sees it, quite correctly, as the origin of the dissident minority within the Ligue. Its importance goes far beyond that, however. It is really the point of departure for the entire historical tradition upon which the new-style pacifism of the 1930s was ultimately to be based.94 The SEDCG was formed at the end of 1915 to examine precisely the already convoluted question of war origins.95 In late January 1916, a police report noted that the ‘pacifists’ attached great importance to the Société’s meetings. Victor Basch spoke at several meetings of the SEDCG in 1916, but disagreed fundamentally with its growing dissident line on the origins of the Great War.96 By 1917, he 93  Ibid., pp. 265–6. 94  See Emmanuel Naquet, ‘La Société d’études documentaires et critiques sur la guerre: Ou la naissance d’une minorité pacifiste au sein de la Ligue des droits de l’homme’ in Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps 30 (January–March 1993), pp. 6–10. See also Norman Ingram, ‘Le Pacifisme de guerre: refus de l’Union sacrée et de la synthèse républicaine?’, in La Grande Guerre: pratiques et expériences, edited by Rémy Cazals, Emmanuelle Picard, and Denis Rolland (Toulouse: Privat, 2005), pp. 77–89; Ingram, ‘Repressed Memory Syndrome: Interwar French Pacifism and the Attempt to Recover France’s Pacifist Past’, French History 18, 3 (September 2004), pp. 315–30. 95  On the formation of the Société, see Mathias Morhardt to Michel Alexandre, 29 December 1915, in BDIC Dossiers Alexandre, G F∆Rés 102/1. 96  Even at an early meeting of the SEDCG, Basch ‘s’indigne de la sensibilité et du parti pris préventif de beaucoup de membres de cette société. Il juge leur état d’esprit irraisonné, irraisonnable et incapable de juste discussion.’ See Blanc des Renseignements généraux, Paris, 1 May 1916 in Archives de la Préfecture de Police (hereafter APP) BA. 1775. Later in the war, Charles Gide also expressed deep reservations about the developing political line of the SEDCG. At its annual general meeting in early March 1918, the police informant noted that Gide underlined ‘quel fut le but original de la Société

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wanted nothing more to do with the SEDCG, but he excoriated the Clemenceau government for its ‘politique de basse police’ in banning the meetings of the Société which were supposed to be entirely private affairs.97 At the outset, the SEDCG saw its purpose as merely ‘mutual education’; as its Statutes put it, it was to be completely non-partisan politically and concerned ‘only with the search for the truth’.98 Mindful of potential charges of working for the enemy, the SEDCG also took pains to emphasize that all its active members were French nationals; foreigners could only be ‘corresponding members’.99 Membership fees were high, set at twenty francs per annum for active and corresponding members; this compares with membership in the Ligue during the war which was three francs per annum, or a subscription to the Bulletin officiel de la Ligue des droits de l’homme which was only three francs per annum in 1917.100 The Société was also legally registered with the French state in conformity with the 1901 law on associations, so the authorities knew about its existence right from the start. Perhaps because of this, there exists a very full record of the SEDCG’s debates and activity in the Paris police archives. Despite attempts by the Société to keep its meetings and deliberations private, this was successful only initially, and even then, only partially.101 Very quickly, however, the police were able to infiltrate it and not a decision appears to have been taken that the police were not aware of the very next day. At the outset, the SEDCG seemed to be divided between more and less patriotic elements. Some members, in early 1916 even, seemed to support the idea that France was engaged in a kind of crusade to make the world safe for democracy.102 The first executive committee of the Société was composed of Professors Charles Gide and Seignebos, representing the more conventional, nationalist position, opposed by Mathias Morhardt, Jeanne Halbwachs, and her future husband, Michel Alexandre.103 At this stage, too, the police were interested by the participation in qui s’interdisait toute propagande pacifiste, toute critique de front contre les actions gouvernementales ou nationales pour l’effort des belligérants. Elle poursuit une oeuvre de science historique, de publications documentaires, de critique générale impersonnelle. Mais les réunions de la société, ajoute-t-il, ont singulièrement dévié de cette ligne de conduite, et je me suis cru, par moment, embarqué dans une galère défaitiste’. See unsigned police report on the annual general meeting of the SEDCG, dated 3 March 1918 in APP BA. 1775 97  For the benefit of the Ligue, Basch seemed to take a more positive position vis-à-vis the SEDCG than one might have supposed from his unvarnished comments in the police reports. He fulminated against the police measures directed against the Société, saying that its programme was ‘purement scientifique’, which is not quite the position he seems to have taken at the SEDCG’s meetings. See Comité Central, ‘Extraits. Séance du 20 août 1917’, Bulletin 17, 23–4 (15 December 1917), p. 830. 98  In APP BA. 1775, Article 1 of the Statutes of the Société d’études documentaires et critiques sur la guerre, n.d. 99  Ibid., article 2. 100  Ibid., article 3. 101  See, for example, ‘Le Chef du Service des Renseignements généraux’ to Monsieur le Préfet de Police, Paris, 21 February 1916, APP BA 1775, on a meeting of the SEDCG which had taken place the previous day. The police had not had anyone present in the meeting itself, but they observed who attended. 102  Blanc des Renseignements Généraux, 6 February 1915, on a meeting of the SEDCG held the previous evening. In APP BA 1775. 103 The first report on the SEDCG is a Blanc des Renseignements Généraux, dated Paris, 27 January 1916 in APP BA 1775. It reports on an organizational meeting of the Société which had been

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the meetings of both women (Jeanne Halbwachs, Marcelle Capy, Marie Schappler, Ethel Sidgwick, Marthe Bigot, Hélène Brion, and Madeleine Rolland) as well as several military personnel.104 By 19 March 1916, the police had worked their way into the ostensibly private meetings and henceforth were able to report on what was actually being discussed within the SEDCG.105 Initially, there seems to have been no consensus within the Société on the question of war origins and responsibilities. Early on, three members in particular, Georges Demartial, Mathias Morhardt, and Michel Alexandre, set themselves off from the rest of the group with their strident, uncompromising critique of France’s and Britain’s role in the outbreak of war. Opposing them were Charles Gide, Charles Seignebos, and Victor Basch of the Ligue des droits de l’homme, until the latter wearied of the SEDCG and took his leave. Seignebos, for example, argued that Germany had a ‘more effective and direct responsibility’ in the outbreak of war than did either France or Britain, but the ‘passionate discussion’ which followed the presentation of his ideas led the report writer to conclude that most of the members who spoke at this meeting considered such a position ‘stained by partiality and chauvinism’.106 As for Gide, he declared that he could not accept the Demartial thesis of British culpability, arguing instead that the violation of Belgian neutrality was ‘a colossal gaffe committed by Germany’. Most of those present, including Demartial, agreed with this latter statement.107 The anti-British sentiment appeared very early on, even if it was accompanied by the belief that the British were more open to dissent than the French.108 It was perhaps fed by the link between the Union of Democratic Control in Britain under the leadership of E.D. Morel;109 Morel promised Michel Alexandre in March 1916 that he would arrange for copies of the UDC’s journal—what the police report writer referred to as ‘a Germanophile newspaper’—to reach him in France. The SEDCG also received held the previous Sunday, 23 January, at the Hôtel des Sociétés Savantes. It is interesting that Gide was perceived by the police as being on the right wing of the SEDCG, because when Gide died in 1932, Victor Basch eulogized him at the LDH’s Paris Congress that year as ‘d’une part, à l’extrême gauche de la Ligue, pendant la guerre et après la guerre, pour tout ce qui concernait la paix, et que, d’autre part, dans beaucoup de problèmes, il se plaçait à la droite du Comité Central. Si bien que, lorsqu’une question difficile était soulevée, on ne savait jamais quelle serait la réaction de Gide . . .’. See Victor Basch, ‘Rapport Moral’, in Le Congrès national de 1932. Compte-rendu sténographique. Paris, 26–28 Décembre 1932 (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1933), p. 22. 104  Chef du Service des Renseignements généraux to Monsieur le Préfet de Police, Paris, 21 February 1916. The police reported the presence of five military men at a meeting of about sixty people. It was thought that the most senior was M. Leclerc de Pulligny, ingénieur en chef des Ponts et Chaussées, commander of an engineering battalion. 105  Blanc des Renseignements Généraux, 20 March 1916, on a meeting held the previous day, in APP BA 1775. 106  Minutes from 5 March 1916 read at a meeting on 2 April 1916. In Blanc des Renseignements Généraux, 3 April 1916, in APP BA 1775. 107  Blanc des Renseignements Généraux, 20 March 1916 in APP BA 1775. 108 The socialist deputy and Karl Marx’s grandson, Jean Longuet, said that ‘Les préjugés monarchiques pèsent encore sur la France, et la démocratie anglaise a un sens traditionnel de la liberté que ne connaît pas la démocratie française’. See APP BA 1775, Blanc des Renseignements Généraux, SEDCG meeting, 20 March 1916. 109 For the history of the Union of Democratic Control, see Marvin Swartz, The Union of Democratic Control in British Politics during the First World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).

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a French translation of Morel’s report as secretary to the first annual meeting of the UDC held in London on 29 October 1915.110 The battle lines for the next twenty-five years were already being inexorably drawn in late 1915 and 1916. On the one side were those, like Victor Basch, who argued that Germany and Austria were, all things considered, guilty of having started the war in 1914. On the other was an eclectic crew of critics, some of whom blamed French duplicity and Russian designs under the cover of the Franco-Russian Alliance as the progenitor of the war. For still others, a malevolent eye was cast in the direction of perfidious Albion, and it was British foreign policy and the economic demands of the City of London which were held to be responsible for the slide into war. Victor Basch attended the meeting of the Société on 16 April 1916 at the invitation of Georges Demartial. The occasion was a critique by Demartial of recent French publications on the origins of the war.111 Of the four works that he analysed, he recognized in Basch’s the ‘more sincere effort to discover the truth’. Demartial’s thesis was that France entered the war not because it had been ‘traitorously and odiously attacked by Germany’, but rather because it was bound to Russian interests and policies.112 He distinguished between what he called the ‘strategic offensive’ in which Germany had been obliged to take the initiative, and the ‘political offensive’ which was the work of France, Russia, and Britain. Demartial had five main arguments. First, he declared that Germany had not premeditated war against France in 1914 because it made no sense; there had been other, much more auspicious moments since 1871 for Germany to make war if it had wanted to.113 Secondly, he argued that the German government had made sincere efforts in favour of peace during the July Crisis; the telegram from the Kaiser to the Tsar was the best proof of this. Thirdly, he asked if France would simply have stood by if Germany had only attacked Russia; his answer was clearly negative, and added strength to his argument. Fourthly, he claimed that the violation of Belgian and Luxembourg neutrality was not the decisive event it was claimed to be; looking at past European wars, he found examples of occasions when both Britain and France had used the same argument the Germans had used in 1914, namely that of the ‘law of necessity’. He underscored that he was not arguing that Germany had not violated Belgian neutrality, but rather that, in his view, the principle under which international treaties retained their standing was rebus sic stantibus.114 In other words, if the situation changed or warranted it, provisions of a treaty could well be ignored. This latter argument implied a level of anarchy in international 110  See Le Chef du Service des Renseignements Généraux to Monsieur le Préfet de Police, Paris, 23 March 1916, and also the French translation of Morel’s ‘Rapport du Secrétaire’ in APP BA 1775. 111  The works which Demartial analysed were La Responsabilité de l’Allemagne dans la guerre actuelle by Emile Durkheim and Ernest Denis, La Guerre by Ernest Denis, La Guerre de 1914 et le droit by Victor Basch, and La Violation des neutralités belge et luxembourgeoise by the professor of international law, Weyss. 112  Blanc des Renseignements Généraux, Paris, 17 April 1916 in APP BA 1775. 113  He cited the Schnaebele Affair of 1887 and the Fashoda Crisis as the two most obvious. 114  Rebus sic stantibus means ‘things thus standing’, and therefore effectively provides an escape clause in international law. It is the legal doctrine in public international law which allows a treaty to be set aside if a fundamental change of circumstances has occurred.

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relations which the European peace movement had been trying to address for almost thirty years.115 The bottom line of this fourth argument was that if the Germans had not violated Belgian neutrality, the British probably would have.116 Accordingly, the only people who had a real right to be upset, who had a reason for going to war, were the Belgians themselves. Demartial’s fifth and final argument was that all of the books he had examined contained gross and tendentious exaggerations of atrocities allegedly committed by the German army in the West. Modern warfare was responsible for this, and he believed that the French army would probably have committed the same ‘depredations’.117 The real cause of the First World War, in Demartial’s view, had been the Russian general mobilization which had set the tinder ablaze. He concluded by saying that he had read recently in La Paix par le droit that certain people in Britain and Germany were attempting to buck the trend of the official version of events in 1914. This was, he believed, the ‘modest task’ that the SEDCG had set out to accomplish, and he noted that the Ligue des droits de l’homme was singularly opposed to such a venture for fear, as he put it, of ‘putting its future in peril’.118 Basch had listened to Demartial’s analysis with some difficulty, interrupting him several times and showing other signs of his disagreement with what Demartial was saying. Because of the lateness of the hour, Basch elected to limit himself to a few general remarks. Like Demartial, he said that he had begun his analysis of the origins of the war with two ideas in his head: first, that the war was an English war, and secondly, that the Russian general mobilization was the immediate cause of the war. Having said that, there were immediate and long-term origins of the war. He argued that Demartial had ‘diabolically’ asked the question ‘Why is France at war?’ It would be more honest, he said, first to ask what one thought of the Franco-Russian alliance. But given that France was at war, it made sense to ask who had wanted the war. In his view, the various diplomatic books made it abundantly clear that France had not wanted war, that Russia had given in—‘shamefully’—only at the very end, that even Austria had backed down at the last moment, and that it was only Germany which had ‘imposed’ war on its Austrian ally. It was German bullying that had prevented English, Russian, and French efforts for peace on 29 July 1914 from having any success. He did not blame the Kaiser or Bethmann-Hollweg or von Jagow, or even German big business, for wanting the war. Rather, it was the pan-Germanists, with the Crown Prince at their head, who had fomented the war and ‘exploited . . . Austria’s deep hatred of Serbia’.119

115  See Ingram, Politics of Dissent; Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and a World Without War: The Peace Movement and German Society, 1892–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Verdiana Grossi, Le Pacifisme européen, 1889–1914 (Brussels: Bruylant, 1994); Sandi  E.  Cooper, Patriotic Pacifism: Waging War on War in Europe, 1815–1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Cooper, ‘Pacifism in France, 1889–1914: International Peace as a Human Right’, French Historical Studies 17, 2 (Autumn 1991), pp. 359–86; and Martin Ceadel, Thinking about Peace and War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 116  This argument has, of course, taken on a new afterlife. See Ferguson, Pity of War, p. 443. 117  Blanc des Renseignements Généraux, Paris, 17 April 1916 in APP BA 1775. 118 Ibid. 119 Ibid.

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France had not sought war, but in Basch’s view Germany had ‘wanted, prepared, and declared the present war’. The time had not yet come to discuss long-term causes because that would entail judging all of European politics. First and foremost, that meant condemning the Franco-Russian alliance, but that subject went far beyond the bounds of the discussion that evening in April 1916, which was solely to consider which nation had wanted the war and which had declared it.120 Despite this injunction on Basch’s part, subsequent meetings of the SEDCG continued to run up against the brick wall of the Franco-Russian alliance. Basch con­tinued to make the case121 that Germany bore the greatest responsibility for the outbreak of war. Demartial, for his part, continued to argue that France was engaged in an offensive war precisely because of its commitments under the alliance with Russia. According to Basch, it was the war party in Germany—600,000 men at most—who had pushed that country into a war which even the Kaiser (whom he called ‘pacifist’) did not want. In his view, the Germans understood very well that France was fighting a war of revenge for 1871, but their real ire was directed at Russia and, above all, England.122 The revolutionary syndicalist, Alphonse Merrheim, claimed that until hours before his assassination Jaurès had believed that war would not break out. In the late afternoon of 31 July, he had an interview at the Quai d’Orsay with the UnderSecretary of State, Abel Ferry. He came out of this meeting, and said, according to Merrheim, ‘It is finished’, meaning that war was now inevitable. He was planning, according to Merrheim, to write an article for the next day’s L’Humanité ­denouncing the Franco-Russian Alliance. Basch reacted vehemently to this insinuation, claiming that his friend, Jaurès, would never have written a ‘J’accuse’ of this sort.123 Michel Alexandre took the broader view that militarism was a pan-European phenomenon, and that a military caste had dominated France as much as Russia or Germany. In his view, the three-year army service law of 1913 was an act of premobilization, which rather begged the question of what the French were responding to with this law. That question was never asked, however.124 In words which would echo from other mouths as well over the two decades that followed, Basch attacked Merrheim for insinuating that the Ligue des droits de l’homme was not interested in the question of war origins and responsibilities: In meetings, in books, you would know it if you cared to inform yourself, we have repeatedly asked ourselves if we had the right to nurse hatred, and we have clearly responded “no”. But in rendering innocent the German people, we have the right to pursue German militarism in the question of responsibilities. Your impatience is noxious, Merrheim. Calm down. When victory comes so will the end of this horrible war, and we will take care of French militarism. By your impatience you destroy the terrible action of tomorrow.125 120 Ibid. 121  See his comments in Blanc des Renseignements Généraux, Paris, 1 May 1916 in APP BA 1775. 122 Ibid. 123  Ibid. Cf. Harvey Goldberg, The Life of Jean Jaurès (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962), p. 471, who says exactly the opposite. 124  Blanc des Renseignements Généraux, Paris, 1 May 1916 in APP BA 1775. 125 Ibid.

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The debate between Basch and the SEDCG was thus a kind of dialogue of the deaf. Basch seemed to recognize that there were deep roots to the conflict, that the Franco-Russian alliance was somehow implicated, that there was such a thing as a French militarism, but he could not divorce himself from his strongly held belief that the outcome of the July Crisis was entirely the fault of Germany. The real problem for Basch was the general attitude of the members of the SEDCG. He judged ‘their state of mind irrational, unreasonable, and incapable of an honest discussion’.126 The SEDCG returned to the debate a fortnight later with a session devoted entirely to the question of the Russian mobilization. Or rather, it was supposed to be dedicated to an analysis of the Russian mobilization, but as was often the case with meetings of the SEDCG, it was sidetracked into a discussion of other, ancillary questions as well. Once again, Basch presented the main report, followed by a critique from Demartial. Basch erroneously thought, as he put it, that compared to the previous meeting which had dealt with ‘insoluble questions’, the matter of who mobilized when was relatively straightforward; it was a ‘purely chronological question’ that ‘could be resolved by the diplomatic books’ published to that date.127 How wrong Basch was. His first point was incontestable, to wit that Austria had begun the mobilization process with its partial mobilization against Serbia. The second argument was more debatable. It was difficult to determine with absolute precision who had mobilized first, but Basch concluded that the Austrian partial mobilization had preceded the Russian, but that the Russian general mobilization had come before the Austrian general mobilization. The difficult question was why the Russians had ordered general mobilization which inevitably brought Germany into the picture. In mobilizing not only against the Galician frontier, but also against East Prussia and Prussian Poland, Russia had clearly taken a step pregnant with meaning, but he argued still that it was the German response to this measure which was the ‘geste de folie’ which pushed everyone into the abyss.128 While the more than seventy persons in attendance had listened quietly enough to Basch, they vigorously applauded Demartial who attempted to rebut Basch’s points. He admitted that Germany had made a huge mistake, but argued that Russia could have resolved the crisis by halting its mobilization. Instead, the Russians went ahead with mobilization. Had they consulted their allies? Leaving aside Britain, he claimed that when Prime Minister Viviani had a formal meeting with German ambassador von Schoen at 7:00 p.m. on 31 July, he had not known that Russia had mobilized. Russia had thus ‘committed this outrage of throwing us into war without consulting us’, according to Demartial. At this point, the police informer writes, the audience ‘jumped with joy’, since Demartial was expressing what they obviously believed. Things only got worse when Merrheim added that ‘Above Viviani someone said to Russia: “You can mobilize”’. When Demartial reminded 126 Ibid. 127  Blanc des Renseignements Généraux, Paris, 15 May 1916 in APP BA 1775. 128  Ibid. On the timing of mobilizations, see Jean Stengers, ‘1914: The Safety of Ciphers and the Outbreak of the First World War’, in Intelligence and International Relations, 1900–1945, edited by Christopher Andrew and Jeremy Noakes (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1987), pp. 29–48.

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the audience of the words of Jean Longuet, député for the Seine, at the last meeting, to the effect that a minister not sitting in the present government had told him that President Poincaré complained during the July Crisis that the Tsar was not being firm enough,129 Henri Guernut130 retorted that he had spoken to the two ministers who could have been the source of Longuet’s information, and one could not remember the incident, while the other declared that it had not happened.131 In any event, Demartial said that the incident was of little importance because in none of the diplomatic books could one find evidence that France had been consulted beforehand by Russia. It would have been better, said Demartial, if France had taken Italy’s position and simply stayed out of the war. He complained that the French government was unwilling to confess the truth about the origins of the war. According to Demartial, ‘We went to war for better reasons than Russian cupidity or English mercantilism, but our patriotism is being supported by despicable means’.132 Thus, in Demartial’s mind, honesty demanded that the French government admit that it was fighting the war for reasons other than those officially articulated: ‘I do not say that the government is wrong, but I do say that one cannot claim that we are fighting a defensive war’.133 There was a domestic political angle to Demartial’s analysis, too. He had come to the conclusion that the present government composed half of ‘Gambettistes and revolutionary republicans had as its doctrine that freedom was not made for wartime’. Instead, the French people were told to be ‘dumb, deaf, blind’. He could not accept that. He said he was ‘one of those bourgeois who had given to the people the right to make peace or war’. Demartial was careful to say that for the soldier the duty was to ‘fight jusqu’au bout’, but for the non-combatant, ‘our job is to inspect the Government’s actions and to ensure that the war not last any longer than national necessity demands’.134 This was no declaration of pacifism, this was no irreducible opposition to war as such; rather it was a demand for transparency and honesty in French politics. The audience apparently fully approved of what Demartial had said; even Charles Gide was seen to nod his head approvingly. What is important is that this kernel of historical dissent would become pacifism by the end of the 1920s. Basch responded to Demartial’s argument by insisting once again that Germany bore the largest responsibility because it had pushed Austria into war after the latter had seemed ready to accept the British proposal for mediation. Things got very heated, to the point that the police informer wrote that ‘the already confused discussion became obscure’. When things had calmed down a bit, though, Basch enunciated the position of the Ligue des droits de l’homme, saying that 129  Blanc des Renseignements Généraux, Paris, 1 May 1916 in APP BA 1775. 130  The person cited in the police report is a ‘M.  Guernu’, but it is likely that this was Henri Guernut, secretary-general of the LDH, who was probably present to support Basch. 131  The police report writer noted that after the meeting members of the audience were heard to say that the person who had made the comment to Longuet must be ‘Fallières’. Presumably, this was a reference to Armand Fallières, Poincaré’s predecessor as President of the Republic. 132  Blanc des Renseignements Généraux, Paris, 15 May 1916 in APP BA 1775. 133 Ibid. 134 Ibid.

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I am for freedom of the press, freedom of opinion. I do not approve of Zimmerwald, I do not approve of Kienthal, but those that go there do what they wish, and I cannot blame them. I am with you against censorship. I am with you in the search for the truth, but I differ from you in that I believe that public demonstrations are ill-advised. The time has not come. For the moment, you should limit your work to preparing to be ready for when the time comes.135

Emmanuel Naquet has written that the SEDCG marked the ‘birth of the pacifist minority’ within the Ligue des droits de l’homme.136 It seems clear, though, that the importance of the Société d’études extends far beyond the LDH in the creation of a dissenting historical tradition that eventually became one of the components behind the emergence of the new-style pacifism of the late 1920s.137 Morhardt and the SEDCG did not see themselves in that light, however—at least not in 1916. Despite the fact that there were clearly members of the SEDCG who did hold pacifist sympathies, and despite Morhardt’s meetings with Romain Rolland in Switzerland earlier in 1916, nevertheless the SEDCG sought to portray itself as a patriotic association. In a meeting of the Société which he chaired on 28 May 1916, Morhardt reminded everyone that ‘the Société is not a pacifist group. It has only one goal, only one high ideal of truth and justice. It seeks only a conscientious historical examination of the origins of and responsibilities for the present war and does not intend to stray from this narrow programme. It will also not forget that France has been invaded, and as a consequence will try not to create any problems for the government’.138 The activities of the Société were banned in the summer of 1916, at least according to an oblique reference by the head of the Renseignements Généraux at the beginning of September that year.139 The problem of police informers within the SEDCG seemed to have become acute; in fact, it seemed to be a problem for the Ligue des droits de l’homme in general. A reserve officer by the name of Le Troquer reported a personal incident to the SEDCG that had actually occurred in a meeting of the section of the Ligue des droits de l’homme in the fourteenth arrondissement in Paris. He said he had been asked, presumably by his superior officers, to explain views he had expressed in a meeting of the LDH section. He had stated unambiguously that he was exercising his rights as a citizen and that the meeting had been strictly private. As a consequence of this, though, he had realized how closely certain groups were being monitored and he suggested that the SEDCG spend less time

135 Ibid. 136  Naquet, ‘Société d’études’. 137 Ingram, Politics of Dissent, pp. 121–33. 138  Morhardt and the SEDCG seem to have been completely aware that the proceedings of their meetings were being reported back to the government because Morhardt ironically enjoined the ‘Government representative’ to do a good job and to ‘give an accurate report of his words and thoughts’. Blanc des Renseignments Généraux, 29 May 1916, in APP BA 1775. 139  See the oblique reference in the Report of the Chef du Service des Renseignements Généraux to the Préfet de Police, Paris, 7 September 1916, in APP BA 1775. The interdiction came from further up the chain of command. An anonymous letter, perhaps from the Prefect of Police to the Ministre de l’Intérieur (Cabinet du Ministre), dated 7 November 1916, indicates that the reason for the banning was the ‘esprit de pacifisme outrancier’ of certain members which had been given free rein at the June meeting.

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monitoring its own meetings than being more circumspect in its admission of members and emphasizing its private character.140 One wonders how much more circumspect the Société could have been, though. Demartial and Morhardt both said, in response to Le Troquer’s comments, that to become a member one needed to be sponsored by two people who were already members. The problem was real, however. Morhardt went on to tell members that two members of the Société, Oscar Bloch and Alphonse Merrheim, had been victims of ‘ostracism’, Bloch in not being re-elected a member of the federal council of the socialist party’s section in the Latin Quarter, and Merrheim in being the object of police harassment.141 The question of France’s state of preparedness for the war was one which brought the two sides within the SEDCG closer together. Using a variety of different analytical models, Charles Gide examined the financial commitment to war made by the various belligerent powers, and concluded that ‘France prepared for war’.142 By November 1916 the Ministry of the Interior seems to have been confusing the motives of the different members of the SEDCG; Gide and Basch were lumped together with the more iconoclastic members of the society and all were termed to be part of the ‘pacifist intellectual milieu’.143 No doubt the SEDCG was playing with fire. Morhardt, for example, had stated at a meeting on 29 October 1916 that the review Demain, which was banned in France, would nevertheless ‘penetrate France and be delivered to subscribers by means of a safe intermediary’.144 The link with the LDH also manifested itself more clearly, with Morhardt reading to the SEDCG the declaration that Michel Alexandre was going to present to the Ligue’s first wartime Congress on 1 November 1916.145 This declaration called for arbitration to begin between the warring sides, without, necessarily, an immediate cessation of hostilities. Morhardt asked all SEDCG members who were also Ligue members to sign it.146 All of this led the correspondent of the Minister of the Interior (probably the Prefect of Police) to conclude that the meetings of the Société should be banned outright.147

140  Blanc des Renseignements Généraux, 25 September 1916, in APP BA 1775. 141 Ibid. 142  ‘Rapport’, Le Chef du Service des Renseignements Généraux to Monsieur le Préfet de Police, in APP BA 1775. See Gide’s report, ‘Résumé statistique de l’Exposé de M. Ch. Gide sur les dépenses militaires des belligérants avant la guerre’, dated 28 May 1916 in APP BA 1775. 143  Anonymous to Ministre de l’Intérieur (Cabinet du Ministre), Paris, 7 November 1916, in APP BA 1775. 144  Blanc des Renseignements Généraux, 30 October 1916, in APP BA 1775. 145  Alexandre read the declaration at the beginning of the discussion on ‘Les Conditions d’une paix durable’ at the Ligue’s November 1916 Congress. See Le Congrès de 1916 de la Ligue des droits de l’homme. Compte-rendu sténographique. 1er et 2 Novembre 1916 (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1917), pp. 46–9. See Norman Ingram, ‘The Crucible of War: The Ligue des droits de l’homme and the Debate on the “Conditions for a Lasting Peace” in 1916’, French Historical Studies 39, 2 (April 2016), pp. 347–71. 146  Blanc des Renseignements Généraux, 30 October 1916, in APP BA 1775. 147  Anonymous to Ministre de l’Intérieur (Cabinet du Ministre), Paris, 7 November 1916, in APP BA 1775.

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The sense that something might be rotten, or at least not quite right, in the state of Denmark thus seems to have infiltrated the Ligue from at least 1915 onwards with the advent of the Société d’études. At stake were the fundamental issues of the political and moral validity of the Union sacrée, the question of German responsibility for the outbreak of war, the thorny problem of the Franco-Russian alliance, and the entire political orientation of the Ligue as it shifted from a domestic to an international focus.

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3 The Ramifications of the War Origins Debate War Aims and Ending the War The first two years of the war saw the formation of political positions within the Ligue des droits de l’homme that were pregnant with consequences for the future. By the time of the Ligue’s first wartime Congress in November 1916 in Paris, the division between minority and majority on the question of war origins was already firmly in place. The debate over war origins had very tangible political ramifications for the Ligue des droits de l’homme. The most important of these were a deep scepticism about French war aims and the war guilt thesis eventually enshrined in Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty, a profound suspicion of the Franco-Russian alliance and all that it entailed, and finally, the historical dissent over the origins of the Great War which catalysed the emergence over a decade later of a new style of French pacifism. WA R A I M S , O R W H AT WA S T H E P O I N T O F I T A L L ? As Chapter  2 has demonstrated, the Ligue des droits de l’homme believed that France was engaged in an entirely righteous crusade against Germany during the Great War. Together with Russia and Great Britain, France was blameless in the struggle that pitted the Entente against the Central Powers. The point of the massive blood-letting the country was engaged in was quite simply to right this wrong, an end that could only be achieved by means of a fight to the finish. This was clearly a political position with which not all members of the LDH agreed. For an increasingly strident minority, the blood-drenched fields of northern France were in themselves reason enough to seek ways of ending the carnage; for still others, the increasingly certain belief that France was not entirely blameless in the outbreak of the war only added a further moral layer to the revulsion felt by some about what was happening in the trenches. Nineteen sixteen was a pivotal year for the French in the Great War. It marked the halfway point in the slaughter. By the end of that year, well over half of all French casualties and deaths of the war had occurred. It was the year of the horrendous Battle of Verdun, which cost the French 300,000 men. It was also the year of the equally horrific Battle of the Somme, with over a million casualties on both sides of the conflict. Romain Rolland had written in September 1914 of the war as the ‘ruin’

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of European civilization, but by 1916 that ‘ruin’ seemed exponentially magnified.1 The epic of the Marne lay in the past whereas the calamitous winter of 1914–15 had seen the war of attrition take root in the Western Front’s trench system. To some, Verdun and the Somme over a year later brought home just how pointless the slaughter had become. It was against this backdrop that the Ligue des droits de l’homme held its first wartime congress at the beginning of November 1916 in Paris, and it was precisely the ‘conditions for a lasting peace’ which were the main focus of the debates at the two-day Congress. Two diametrically opposite conceptions of what was at stake confronted one another within the LDH. For the majority, peace was contingent on an Allied victory against German aggression and the imposition of the rule of law in international affairs. It was therefore an eventual consequence of the war and a way to avoid any repetition of the catastrophe, but it was not a means of ending it. For an emerging minority, however, seeking peace was actually a way of ending the war, as well as a programme for what came after. Two themes emerged in the first two years of the war that heralded this division. The first was the debate over democratic, Republican France’s alliance with the autocratic Russian Empire. The second concerned the possibility of a negotiated peace that would end the blood-letting. Although conceptually distinct, these two issues became conflated and intertwined in the debates on the ‘conditions for a lasting peace’ at the Ligue’s 1916 Congress. Both of these themes were a direct result of the war origins debate. Relatively early on in the conflict, the LDH began to consider the issue of peace.2 At some point before February 1915, the Comité Central (CC) decided to create a commission to examine the basis of a permanent peace. Pierre-Georges La Chesnais3 proposed that it consider three questions: first, nationalities; secondly, pacifism as it was understood by the French in 1915 (disarmament, neutrality of certain countries, and arbitration as proposed at the two peace conferences held at The Hague in 1899 and 1907);4 and finally, war indemnities (how these might be established and then paid). 1  See Romain Rolland, ‘Lettre ouverte à Gerhart Hauptmann’, Journal de Genève (2 September 1914), in Romain Rolland, Au-dessus de la mêlée (Paris: Petite Bibliothèque Payot, 2013), p. 48. 2  See, for example, Ferdinand Buisson, ‘Pour l’action: appel aux Ligueurs’, Bulletin officiel de la Ligue des droits de l’homme (hereafter cited as Bulletin) 15, 4 (1 September 1915), pp. 274–8 in which he argued that universal Ligue principles needed to be applied to the resolution of the present conflict. The conditions for a lasting peace included the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France and respect for the rights of nationalities. The Comité Central also discussed the parameters of a just peace at its meetings of 22 February and 1 March 1915. See ‘Comité central. Séance du 22 février 1915’, Bulletin 15, 4 (1 September 1915), pp. 281–3, and ‘Comité central. Séance du 1er mars 1915’ in ibid., pp. 283–4. The Ligue conducted the same exercise, with rather less point, shortly before the fall of France in 1940. See Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine [BDIC], Archives de la Ligue des droits de l’homme [ALDH], F∆Rés 798/9bis/Commission de la Paix future. 3  La Chesnais is mentioned in the ‘Memento Bibliographique’ at the end of the 1 September 1915 number of the Bulletin as the author of Le Groupe socialiste du Reichstag et la Déclaration de la Guerre (Paris: Armand Colin, 1915), which condemned the German socialists for having abandoned their principles on 31 July 1914 and having voted for war credits as good pan-Germanists. 4  The origin of the two Hague conferences was a manifesto in favour of disarmament issued by Tsar Nicholas II on 24 August 1898. The first conference took place between 18 May and 29 July 1899, and the second from 15 June to 18 October 1907.

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As early as 1915, certain parts of the Ligue had also begun to think about the shape of a future peace with Germany and Austria-Hungary. One of these was the Fédération de la Gironde, which passed a motion on 25 March 1915 outlining what it saw as the conditions for a lasting peace. The Gironde Federation was one of the most important in the Ligue and counted among its members Théodore Ruyssen, a professor at the University of Bordeaux and president of the Association de la paix par le droit (APD). It felt that a lasting peace was only possible if two traps could be avoided. The first trap ‘would be to content ourselves with a simple truce or a compromise, either through weariness or exhaustion’. In the Gironde’s view, the Allies had to fight on to complete victory in order ‘to make possible the establishment of a just peace’. The minimum conditions for such a peace were the integral restoration of Belgium and Luxemburg, the freeing of all French and Russian territory, and the payment of a large enough indemnity to cover the cost of the damages caused by the war. The second trap, however, was that the rights of nationalities would be trampled under foot in the future peace by excessive Allied force. The Federation demanded that no territorial changes be effected without prior consultation with the populations concerned. How this could be reconciled with a war of coalition fought with an imperial Russian ally was not explained. The Federation also demanded that the treaty that ended the war be followed immediately by the convocation of a general conference of all of the nations which had signed the Hague conventions (including Germany, one assumes) with a view to the ‘juridical’ organization of the peace, the creation of binding universal arbitration, the collective guarantee of the sovereignty of neutral states, and the general reduction insofar as was possible of major armaments.5 In short, the world was to be made safe against future war even though the current conflict could not be brought to a premature end. The issue of Poland provides an excellent example of the extent to which the Ligue’s views on the rights of nationalities and the Franco-Russian alliance were ambiguous and in conflict with each other. Well before the November 1916 Congress, Gabriel Séailles’ thoughts about the future of Poland had attracted the attention of ‘Anastasia’s scissors’ (nickname of the French censor) because of their potential damage to the Allied cause. Séailles, professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne, argued that Poland was a nation and deserved its independence, and that, moreover, Polish nationhood would actually benefit France’s ally, Russia. It is not difficult to understand how his conclusion that ‘the restoration of Poland is necessary to the realization of the goals that the Allied Powers are pursuing in this war’ could make the French censor jittery.6 The Comité Central clearly shared Séailles’ views on the future of Poland. At its meeting on 21 February 1916, André-Ferdinand Hérold, another of the Ligue’s vice-presidents and a literary critic, reminded the committee of the Grand Duke Nicholas’s promise to give autonomy to the Poles under Russian suzerainty. He expressed concern that the Russians had never followed through on this promise, while the German government had already 5  Comité Central, ‘Séance du 29 mars 1915’, Bulletin 15, 6 and 7 (1–15 December 1915), p. 451. 6  Gabriel Séailles, ‘La Pologne’, Bulletin 16, 6 (June 1916), p. 346.

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moved in the direction of granting autonomy to its Polish subjects. He suggested that the Ligue should consider drawing the attention of the Russian government to the dangers inherent in not responding positively to Polish demands.7 Strangely, though, the position taken by Séailles and the Comité Central in February seems not to have been translated into the CC motion on the ‘conditions for a lasting peace’ at the November Congress. Jules Cahen, a delegate from the Seine-et-Oise Federation, attacked this obvious omission. Putting his finger squarely on the problem, he said: I do not wish to think that it is because of the suggestion of someone higher up that you have removed the word ‘Poland’ from your motion, but that is certainly possible. If that is the case, the Ligue will be perceived to have wanted to avoid ruffling the feathers of an ally of our glorious France.8

Séailles rather unconvincingly replied that the CC’s motion enumerated broad principles and could not engage with ‘details’ and ‘arguments’.9 The Comité Central also refused to countenance talk of a negotiated peace, and rejected the insinuation that the Ligue could in any way be considered ‘pacifist’. This conflict over what exactly peace meant and particularly over its significance in time of war lay at the heart of the debate within the LDH at its November 1916 Congress. As we have noted in Chapter 2, Gustave Hervé, sometime anti-militarist turned super-heated patriot, had accused the Ligue in the pages of his paper La Victoire of ‘pacifism’, which the CC understood to mean ‘a tendency in favour of peace at any price’. Somewhat disingenuously they rejected the accusation, saying that neither in the 800 Ligue sections, nor in the Comité Central, could the slightest ‘trace of the thinking which you condemn’ be found. The CC referred Hervé and his readers back to Victor Basch’s La Guerre de 1914 et le droit, which rapidly became the Ligue’s vade mecum on the war.10 The question of what the future peace might look like was the central issue at the November 1916 Congress in Paris, which was the first of only two Congresses held by the LDH during the war.11 Gabriel Séailles opened the debate by presenting the report on ‘The Conditions for a Lasting Peace’. It is a document which contained much that was clear-sighted but equally expressed the views of a certain French Republican tradition.12 The latter was especially evident in Séailles’ equation of the 7  Comité Central, ‘Séance du 21 février 1916’, Bulletin 16, 6 (June 1916), pp. 369–70. 8  See Cahen’s comments in the debate on the report ‘Les conditions d’une paix durable’ in Le Congrès de 1916 de la Ligue des droits de l’homme. Compte rendu sténographique. 1er et 2me Novembre 1916 (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1917), p. 198. Hereafter cited as Congrès de 1916. 9 See Congrès de 1916, pp. 202–3. 10  Anonymous, ‘Comité Central (Extraits), Séance du 6 mars 1916’, Bulletin 16, 7–8 (July–August 1916), pp. 399–400. Cf. Basch, ‘La Ligue des droits de l’homme et la guerre VII’, Bulletin 15, 2 (1 May 1915), p. 169. 11  The other was held in 1917. The 1918 Congress took place in December 1918 immediately after the Armistice. 12  Gabriel Séailles, ‘Les Conditions d’une paix durable’, Bulletin 16, 10 (October 1916), pp. 515–37. Interestingly, the Service de la Propagande declined to circulate Séailles’ work when it was subsequently published as a brochure by the Ligue. See ‘Comité Central (Extraits). Séance du 4 décembre 1916’, Bulletin 17, 7–8 (1–15 April 1917), p. 309. For an insightful analysis of the French republican

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French situation in 1814–15 at the end of the Napoleonic Wars with that of 1916. In both cases, according to Séailles, France was in danger of becoming the ‘hunting ground’ for Junkers from Brandenburg and Pomerania.13 But it had clearly not been just Junkers who defeated France in 1814 and 1815, but also the British and the Russians, France’s allies in 1916. Also absent from his discussion was the fact that the end of the Napoleonic Wars brought peace to Europe after nearly a quarter century of conflict triggered by the French Revolution. To suggest that the motives of the Convention in 1793 were entirely pure is to ignore how much the revolutionary project bore the seeds of war within it, including the militarism of Napoleon. Séailles’ report on the conditions for a lasting peace gave explicit expression to the anthropomorphization of the nation, a phenomenon also seen in Théodore Ruyssen’s essay on the principle of nationalities which had been published at the beginning of 1916.14 In fact, Séailles saw the ‘rights of peoples’ as the natural complement, the end result, of the ‘rights of man’. ‘We are completing the rights of man by the rights of peoples’, he wrote; ‘We think that a nationality which has achieved self-consciousness, which has its language, its traditions, its history, is a legal person (une personne morale).’15 The emphasis on shared language, ­tradition, and history seems redolent of the German view of the nation, an equation with which undoubtedly Séailles and the other Ligue leaders would have been very uncomfortable. To give him his due, he also distinguished between a ‘nationality’ and the ‘State’, something with which Heinrich von Treitschke, for example, would have disagreed. To be sure, Séailles commented that Russia’s refusal to grant the Finns the constitution, which a treaty had guaranteed, could be lumped together with German expropriation of Polish property for German colonists and Austria’s persecution of the Czechs, Italians, and Slovenes, to say nothing of Hungarian repression of the Romanians and Serbo-Croatians. Yet his criticism of the Russian ally was extremely muted. His analysis said nothing about the Russian yoke on Poland; he did not directly confront the uncomfortable fact of France’s ally’s treatment of the Poles.16 No doubt there were good political reasons for remaining silent about Poland, but it was an uncomfortable silence to say the very least, and one that elicited much heated debate when the Ligue’s 1916 Congress discussed the ­conditions for a lasting peace. At that Congress, it was left to the venerated left’s engagement with the problem of war, see Sergio Luzzato, L’Impôt du sang: la gauche française à l’épreuve de la guerre mondiale, 1900–1945 (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1996). 13  Séailles, ‘Conditions’, pp. 517–18 especially. 14  See Théodore Ruyssen, ‘Le Problème des nationalités I. La Guerre mondiale et le principe des nationalités’, Bulletin 16, 1 (January 1916), pp. 1–64. 15  Séailles, ‘Conditions’, pp. 519–20. The Ligue’s president, Ferdinand Buisson, emphasized this transition in the Ligue’s self-perception immediately following the war when he wrote that there were three successive stages in the Ligue’s history. The third and final era was that of the Great War in which the Ligue had had to address international issues. See Ferdinand Buisson, ‘Notre programme: droits de l’homme, droits du citoyen, droits des peuples’, Cahiers des droits de l’homme (hereafter cited as Cahiers) 20, 1 (5 January 1920), pp. 3–4. 16  Séalles, ‘Conditions’, p. 520.

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feminist ­journalist, Séverine, to say that she would vote for the text of the CC’s motion by holding her nose: Today, finger to the lips, prudence says: ‘Shhh!’ with regard to Ireland; ‘Shhh!’ with regard to Finland. If we do otherwise, the censor intervenes. As for Poland, better still. It is divided between three masters [Germany, AustriaHungary and Russia] . . . Open season to attack two of them; interdiction even to pronounce the name of the third. It doesn’t exist; we must ignore it! Perhaps that is diplomacy. It is certainly politics—but it is contrary to correctness and fairness! It is better therefore to keep quiet, to use only general formulas, to avoid specifying. Silence at least has the merit of ambiguity, of refusing to approve servitude: it suffers but does not accept. Remove—for the time being!—the name of Poland.17

The problem was Prussian militarism. It was clear to Séailles that an unwanted war had been imposed on France, something that even Germany did ‘not contest’. The intense enmity in which it resulted minimized, if it did not distort, all other international considerations, and it was this that made the debate over peace as a means (or not) of ending the war the key issue. More than two years into the blood-letting, Séailles argued against what he called a ‘premature peace’ which could only have as its effect an ‘armed peace’ that would ‘weigh heavily on Europe’. Merely taking the initiative in favour of a negotiated peace would make Germany seem ‘unbeaten and invincible’, thus ‘humiliat[ing] democracy before a triumphant militarism’.18 Before the debate proper on Séailles’ report had even begun, the Ligue’s president, Ferdinand Buisson, had made some interesting claims about what this future, lasting peace must entail. It needed to be a ‘humane and definitive peace that no imperialism will be able to break’.19 This insistence that France was fighting a war against imperialism calls for further reflection and comment. What was understood by ‘imperialism’? Was it a word emptied of any meaning in Republican political discourse? Or was it another way of saying ‘Prussian militarism’? The latter seems to have been the case, because neither Buisson nor any of the other leaders of the Ligue can be accused of stupidity. The German Empire, which Bismarck had had the gall to declare in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, was the obvious target of Buisson’s attack. And yet, as in the question of nationalities discussed above, there was a profound intellectual and moral ambiguity at the core of this political invective. Whatever one might say of the German Empire—and there was certainly much that was negative about it from the point of view of a French Republican—it remains a fact that the two biggest imperial entities in 1916 were the British and 17  Comments by Séverine in the debate on the report ‘Les conditions d’une paix durable’, Congrès de 1916, pp. 214–15. Ellipsis in the original. Séverine was the pen name of the anarchist, socialist, and feminist journalist, Caroline Rémy de Guebhard (1855–1929). For some measure of Séverine’s influence, see Christine Bard, Les Filles de Marianne: Histoire des féminismes, 1914–1940 (Paris: Fayard, 1995). Fernand Corcos called Séverine at her funeral ‘l’animatrice des droits de la femme, qui fut, parmi les féministes, la plus vertueuse, la plus intelligible, la plus humaine, la plus féministe’. See Fernand Corcos, ‘Séverine, lumière incorruptible’, Cahiers 29, 12 (30 April 1929), p. 270. A portrait of Séverine by Pierre-Auguste Renoir from 1885 hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. 18  Séailles, ‘Conditions’, p. 515. 19  ‘Allocution de M. Ferdinand Buisson’ in Congrès de 1916, p. 4.

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French empires, that Russia was itself a huge empire of highly disparate peoples, and that Belgium, the little country over which many righteous tears had been shed in 1914, was the perpetrator of imperialist atrocities in the Congo. This appeared not to matter. The future peace would be built on an anti-imperial—and here one must understand, anti-German—foundation. In 1916, looking uncertainly at the shape of this future peace, Buisson intoned that humanity would only be saved from another slide into barbarism if there was a victor in the Great War, a victor moreover ‘who would begin by vanquishing himself, a victor who will use his victory, not for himself and his people, but for the good of humanity’.20 He called on France and the Ligue itself to take the higher road. He compared the position that France would have to take after the war with its generous position at the two Hague peace conferences, where, he reminded his listeners, it had been Germany and the Central Powers that had aborted The Hague peace project with its emphasis on compulsory arbitration; it was up to the Allies now to impose on Germany that which it had rejected at The Hague.21 The advance publication of Gabriel Séailles’ report in the LDH Bulletin had allowed Ligue members to arrive at the Congress with arguments well prepared. This was especially the case for a group of dissidents around Michel Alexandre. Alexandre was an agrégé in philosophy. This group had honed its arguments in a rather particular setting, the Société d’études documentaires et critiques sur la guerre (SEDCG), and arrived at the Congress with a fully fleshed-out counter motion. While containing within its ranks many important names, the SEDCG remained for the duration of the war a private group with a very limited following. Most meetings were attended by fewer than seventy people. The LDH was another matter entirely. With its large membership and very public persona, it was of special concern to the government. Its debates had far more public resonance than those of the SEDCG, which is one of the reasons why the 1916 congress debate on the ‘conditions for a lasting peace’ was so important. It gave the dissenters of the SEDCG a truly public platform, especially since Alexandre’s counterproposal launched the real debate. He began by questioning the notion that France could not conceivably engage in negotiation or arbitration which might lead to a peaceful settlement of the war. He roundly attacked what he saw as the illogicality of the majority position in the Ligue, to wit ‘Yesterday, arbitration above all else. Tomorrow, arbitration above all else. But today, while millions of peace-loving men butcher one another, above all else: violence. Arbitration is held in reserve for better times.’22 He rejected completely the idea, pace Aristide Briand, that a negotiated peace would be an ‘outrage to the memory of so many heroes fallen for the Patrie’. In Alexandre’s prophetic analysis, there would never be a ‘lasting peace, there will never be a real peace, other than that founded on an incontestable judgement, and thus, of necessity, on arbitration. Only arbitration is capable at the 20  Ibid., p. 5. 21  Ibid., p. 6. Cf. Jost Dülffer, Regeln gegen den Krieg? Die Haager Friedenskonferenzen von 1899 und 1907 in der internationalen Politik (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1981). 22  Michel Alexandre in the debate on the report ‘Les conditions d’une paix durable’, Congrès de 1916, p. 46.

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present time of genuinely pacifying Europe and of saving it from ruin. We must have a peace of integrity for a war of heroes’.23 Alexandre called for ‘a paix par le Droit, that is to say, through arbitration’. This was an interesting choice of words, betraying the fact that the men and women around Alexandre did not at this point conceive of peace as anything more than a juridical proposition. The motion Alexandre presented on behalf of Séverine, Oscar Bloch, Louis Guétant, Alphonse Merrheim, and Mathias Morhardt stated clearly that they were ‘convinced that only the rigorously juridical procedure of arbitration can resolve the terrifying conflict that has caused the death of several millions of men and which threatens to bring in its wake the total ruin of European civilisation’.24 The position of the men and women grouped around Michel Alexandre incarnated a view of peace that was in essence based on international law. In this sense, both the majority and the minority spoke the same language; they each subscribed to a notion of a positive peace which lay fully in the Kantian, Enlightenment tradition of reason applied to human affairs. The Great War was an affront to that Reason, but could, so the minority believed, be resolved peaceably by it in the here and now, as an alternative to military force. Also of great importance was the explicit reference to civilizational suicide and a declaration that the Ligue must be true to the principles on which it had been founded in 1898.25 First to respond to Alexandre’s motion was Ruyssen, the president of the APD, who presented a counter-resolution in the name of the Fédération de la Gironde. Ruyssen cloaked his argument in the rhetoric of Revolution. He laid claim to a very specific Revolutionary tradition, that between the end of the first, bourgeois phase of the Revolution from 1789 to 1792, and the beginning of the Terror. This was the glorious Revolution of 1792, the cannonade at Valmy, the first year of the Convention before everything span out of control into the Terror: ‘And in the middle of war, while our soil is being trampled underfoot by this enemy with which the Convention already said that France must never treat, you want us to propose arbitration!’ Unlike Alexandre and his friends, it was simply unthinkable to Ruyssen that one could seriously contemplate arbitration in time of war; arbitration was possible only ‘when peace is threatened and when, the pathway to violence remaining blocked, the difference can be resolved on the level of legality’.26 Ruyssen argued that ‘we are touching here the nub of the problem: it is the absence of a regular, codified and generally-agreed upon law, backed up by effective sanctions, that is the permanent cause of this anarchy, and, hence, of war between nations’. He believed that the Germans were hell-bent on domination—of Mitteleuropa at any rate—and that German imperialism was a completely different species of political ideology and regime from French Republicanism. Two types of international society could emerge from the desire to create a genuine community of nations. The first he likened to the Pax Romana, which was a ‘peace imposed by an imperialism on humiliated nations which would accept the hegemony of a powerful military State’. 23  Ibid., p. 48. 24  Ibid., p. 49. 25  See the text of Alexandre’s motion, ibid. 26  Théodore Ruyssen, ‘Discours de M. Th. Ruyssen’, in the debate on the report ‘Les conditions d’une paix durable’, Congrès de 1916, p. 51.

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This was precisely what pan-Germanism was all about; Ruyssen saw pan-German conceptions of ‘Mitteleuropa’ as a ‘kind of internal peace, the peace of tombstones and prisons’. The only international organization that Ruyssen wished to see was that of a ‘liberal International of law’.27 Ruyssen’s conception of a ‘liberal international’ seemed strategically selective. Ten months earlier, in January 1916, he had argued that it was right and fitting that France should be tied by alliance to Tsarist Russia. In a lengthy essay on the problem of nationalities, he had suggested that ‘all things considered, the group of Allied Powers represents, in their struggle against the empires of force, the continuity of the liberal tradition to which the newly-enfranchised nationalities owed their liberation in the course of the nineteenth century’, and that ‘there is hardly a national movement to which, separately or together, France, England and Russia have not lent the support either of their political influence or of their arms.’28 In effect, only months before the first Russian Revolution of March 1917, Ruyssen seemingly excluded Russia from his argument, directed against Germany, that ‘certain’ dynastic, non-democratic regimes in which rulers could declare war at will remained a persistent threat to world peace. Perhaps it was the primordial role played by the Tsarist regime in 1899 and 1907 at the two Hague Conferences that allowed him to do so. The establishment of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague was a signal event, and he maintained that it was entirely ‘thanks to the initiative of Russia [that] there exists already a juridical institution, the concrete expression of this new law which is being created’.29 Ruyssen’s speech was an amalgam of helpful and at the same time potentially divisive ideas. On the one hand, he argued for a generous approach to the enemy from whose own tyrannical government it was the Allies’ purpose to free it; on the other hand, it is clear that his conception of what needed to be achieved was unilateral, to be imposed on Germany by France. On the one hand he feared an indefinite cycle of wars of revenge coming out of the Great War, while on the other he believed that the Revolution was not yet over and that France needed to bring ‘justice and liberty [. . .] in the folds of its flag’ to the foreigner who was ‘trampling the sacred soil of the patrie’.30 Ruyssen and the other members of the majority simply could not see that, in the words of Robespierre, ‘no one likes armed missionaries.’31 At the heart of their cause remained a democratic crusade.32 27  Ibid., pp. 57–8. 28  Théodore Ruyssen, ‘Le Problème des nationalités’, p. 6. 29  ‘Discours de M. Th. Ruyssen’, in the debate on the report ‘Les conditions d’une paix durable’, Congrès de 1916, p. 60. Ruyssen’s strange wartime myopia was not unique to him. Edouard Herriot also argued in 1916 that ‘La France et la Russie représentent ce qu’il y a de plus ardemment généreux dans l’humanité’. See Edouard Herriot, L’Effort russe (Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1916), cited in Georges Michon, L’Alliance franco-russe, 1891–1917. Contributions nouvelles (Paris: Rivière, 1931), p. 47. 30  ‘Discours de M. Th. Ruyssen’, in the debate on the report ‘Les conditions d’une paix durable’, Congrès de 1916, pp. 63–4. 31  Robespierre’s speech of 2 January 1792 had a long shelf-life. See Georges Michon, ‘Robespierre et la guerre révolutionnaire’, in Annales révolutionnaires (Organe de la société des Etudes robespierristes), 12 (1920), p. 280, and the ‘Manifeste du congrès d’Arras’ of the Ligue internationale des combattants de la paix, in Le Barrage, 127 (28 April 1938), p. 1. 32  On ‘crusading’ as an ideal-type position in the peace/war debate, see Martin Ceadel, Thinking about Peace and War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 43–71.

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Georges Demartial, another member of the nascent minority within the Ligue, responded to Ruyssen’s speech and reminded LDH members that Germany had experienced a change of heart on the question of compulsory arbitration between the first Hague Conference of 1899 and the second in 1907. In 1899, Germany had been opposed to any form of obligatory arbitration, but he believed that it realized shortly afterward that it had made a mistake. The march of history seemed to be in the direction of arbitration of one sort or another. The British and the French had signed a treaty in 1903 agreeing to submit future differences to arbitration, and so the following year Germany signed a similar agreement with Britain. By the time of the second Hague Conference, Germany was prepared to sign on to a proposition of binding arbitration, under the condition that this arbitration not interfere with ‘vital interests’ or the honour and independence of the parties concerned, each state maintaining the right to decide whether this was the case or not. Germany had no objection to such a treaty, but pointed out logically enough, according to Demartial, that it would be of little use because of the exceptional clauses attached to it. Of far greater impact, according to the Germans, would be bilateral treaties between individual states rather than a treaty based on this uniform model with all of the possible exceptions that it entailed. Here again, according to Demartial, Germany had been wrong because progress in international law necessarily was the incremental result of small measures; in Demartial’s view, Germany ought to have given ‘proof of its goodwill’.33 What was important, however, given the subsequent opprobrium heaped on Germany during the Great War, was the fact that it had not been alone in its ­opposition to a world treaty. Other European powers, admittedly minor ones such as Romania, Belgium, and Switzerland, had also been opposed to it. And, in fact, Germany had availed itself of the International Court at The Hague after the second Hague conference when it went to the court with France on the question of deserters from the Foreign Legion in Morocco—a crisis, Demartial claimed, that could have led to war. Because of all of this, Demartial said that it was completely false and inappropriate for the Ligue, which ‘put justice and truth above everything’, to claim that Germany was the ‘unique cause’ of the failure of arbitration and that without Germany, Europe would now be enjoying ‘the golden age of arbitration’. On the contrary, Demartial saw nothing but moral hypocrisy in the actions of the other powers. If the latter really wanted to enshrine arbitration, nothing prevented them from using it to resolve their own conflicts. They could renounce war themselves and, by their sterling example, shame Germany and the other ‘recalcitrant’ powers into accepting it or else facing what he called ‘a kind of moral leprosy’. But no, Britain had refused to allow the Transvaal to attend the first Hague Conference because of the looming Boer War. The other powers turned a convenient blind eye to British moral equivocation and Holland was quite prepared to prevent its ‘blood brothers’ from attending the conference held on its soil. He then went on to enumerate the wars which had followed 1899 and for which arbitration was conspicuous 33  Georges Demartial, ‘Discours de M. Georges Demartial’, in the debate on the report ‘Les conditions d’une paix durable’, Congrès de 1916, pp. 65–6.

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by its absence: the Boer War, the European response to the Boxer Rebellion, the Russo-Japanese War, the Italo-Turkish War, and the two Balkan wars.34 At this point in the debate, someone shouted from the floor, ‘And Morocco?’ Demartial, who had been a civil servant in the ministry of colonies, quickly responded by pointing out that during times of pre-war tension, the Great Powers ‘gave each other presents, in order to maintain their friendship, of countries that did not belong to them: Egypt, Morocco, Persia’.35 Austria-Hungary had annexed BosniaHerzegovina, while Italy had forcibly taken Tripoli. All of this took place in the fifteen years following the first Hague conference, but the only war in which Germany had participated was that suppressing the Boxer Rebellion in China. It was nonsense, therefore, to claim that Germany was ‘solely guilty’ for the failure of arbitration. Pushing his argument further, with specific reference to the July Crisis, he asked if anyone seriously thought that Britain or Russia would have acted differently from Austria-Hungary if the Prince and Princess of Wales had been assassinated by Boer extremists, or the Tsarevitch by Persian fanatics. Even if binding arbitration had been agreed upon in 1907 at The Hague, it seemed to him abundantly clear that Austria-Hungary would have used the ‘vital interests’ escape clause in 1914. Instead, he blamed Britain and France, as the powers supposedly most interested in promoting arbitration, for not having clearly declared during the July Crisis that they did not want war and for not agreeing to submit all future disagreements any power might have with them to arbitration. If Austria-Hungary and Germany had refused, then Demartial agreed with several interjections from the floor that war would have been an appropriate response.36 His conclusion was: If we had used this language, if Serbia and Russia, instead of commencing mobilization, had associated themselves with this approach, the war would not have taken place. And, if it had taken place, we could say in truth that we are fighting a war against war in order that this war be the last war ever. I agree with my friend, Alexandre, that there is still time to use this language. I did not think, for personal reasons, that I would sign his proposal: I hereby give him my complete approval, however. In passing this motion, you will prove that you want arbitration, not only with your lips, but with your heart.37

Making responsibility for starting the war relative and plural refocused attention on the possible ‘guilt’ of France and especially its Russian ally, long suspect to the French left. Yet other Ligue members continued to maintain (if only by their silence) that the Russian connection was simply not an issue. They managed to engage the debate on subject peoples without once mentioning the Tsarist Empire—or Britain or France for that matter. Thus, for example, in the debate immediately following Demartial’s intervention, Victor Bérard, director of the Ecole pratique des Hautes Etudes, completely ignored the problem posed by France’s alliance with Russia. Bérard argued that even the possibility of arbitration was unthinkable because the Central Powers were all militaristic and dominated ‘enslaved’ peoples: 34  Ibid., p. 66.

35 Ibid.

36  Ibid., pp. 68–9.

37  Ibid., p. 69.

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You admit that in this arbitration there will be free nations who will represent themselves, and that on the other hand the military empires will turn up with their flock of enslaved peoples [Applause]. You will give Turkey the right to speak for its Armenians, Germany for its Alsatians, Lorrainers, Danes and Poles, Austria for its Czechs, Italians and Yugoslavs. That is clearly an opinion that is contrary to all that we represent here.

Bérard divided the world into peace-loving, free nations and ‘military empires which live, and what is worse, can only live by enslaving their neighbours’. To this Demartial retorted, ‘That is exactly the case with Serbia and Russia, which are very militarist powers. If one had asked them to submit to arbitration, what would they have responded?’38 Charles Richet, president of the Société française pour l’arbitrage entre nations and winner of the 1913 Nobel Prize in medicine, came close to mentioning the Russian problem in his contribution. Yet despite the provocative shout from the floor in the middle of his speech, ‘But the Tsar does not want it [Polish independence]’, Richet never actually pronounced the word ‘Russia’. Despite this, he concluded that ‘our’ peace—that is, the peace that he hoped the LDH wanted—was built on two fundamental propositions: the principle of nationalities and that of obligatory arbitration.39 Oscar Bloch, a barrister at the Cour d’Appel and a member of the MonnaieOdéon section in the sixth arrondissement in Paris, which was home to several of the most important minority members, took an iconoclastic position. He argued that there were three solutions to the German problem: annihilate the country entirely, destroy German militarism, or destroy the German economy. None of the options seemed easily realizable. All of them would bring in their train the renewal of hostilities in the short or long term. He concluded that the only possible ­resolution to the German problem was rapprochement between France and Germany. Bloch’s speech provoked a strong reaction among delegates, many of whom could not believe their ears. There was a certain logic to Bloch’s analysis, however. He argued that France had no obvious differences with Austria-Hungary or Turkey, and certainly was not involved in the struggle for European economic hegemony in which Britain and Germany were engaged. There was only one major issue between France and Germany: Alsace-Lorraine.40 This, not surprisingly, provoked a torrent of objections from the floor. Victor Bérard took Bloch to task for speaking of a German militarism, while on the contrary the real problem was Prussian militarism under whose jackboot all of Germany suffered. In Bérard’s view, France and the Allies sought the end of Prussian militarism; ‘the day on which you liberate Germany, you will have a nation with which you can live in peace under the regime of arbitration’. Bloch replied, logically 38  See ‘Discours de M. Victor Bérard’ and interjection from Demartial in the debate on the report ‘Les conditions d’une paix durable’, Congrès de 1916, pp. 70–1. 39  See ‘Discours de M. Charles Richet’ with interjections from the floor in the debate on the report ‘Les conditions d’une paix durable’, Congrès de 1916, pp. 72–9. 40 ‘Discours d’Oscar Bloch’, in the debate on the report ‘Les conditions d’une paix durable’, Congrès de 1916, pp. 79–84.

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(and humorously) enough, that this view of Germans and Prussians made him think of Molière’s Le Médecin malgré lui: did the Ligue s­ eriously think that France could interpose itself between the Prussian husband and the Germanic wife?41 In fact, this was a trope that the majority in the Ligue clung to tenaciously. They stubbornly insisted that the problem was Prussia and not Germany, but it was impossible to separate the two concepts, and in fact it is clear that most of the time the Ligue was preoccupied with the German problem tout court. Bloch’s proposal, then, was for rapprochement, for arbitration between France and Germany, and for a policy of no annexations. Of course, it is clear that for France ‘no annexations’ did not exclude the return of Alsace-Lorraine to the French fold, but Bloch insisted that the fate of the lost provinces had to be decided by the people of Alsace-Lorraine themselves. Daniel Blumenthal, representing the Ligue section of Ancy-le-Franc in the Yonne, and a former member of the Reichstag to boot, took Bloch to task for envisaging anything but a total victory over Germany. He was convinced that France and its allies would triumph, and that this would bring about ‘the most perfect peace, that is to say the peace which we will impose on those who have broken it’.42 Blumenthal believed that France could not waste its time waiting for the establishment and development of the international jurisdiction of a body capable of imposing obligatory arbitration. Instead, France had to act now, it had to impose by force a respect for Law and thus prevent a return of what he called the ‘criminal aggression’.43 He embodied the dominant position that saw peace as a consequence of the war, not a way to end it. The fact that he was an ex-German, someone who had been a member of the Reichstag, seems to have lent his views even more authority. As for Bloch’s argument that Alsace-Lorraine was the only reason behind the conflict between Germany and France, Blumenthal rejected this, too. He believed that, even without the festering question of the former provinces, war with Germany would have broken out for completely separate and distinct reasons. The essential point, now that the war had begun and the people of Alsace-Lorraine could begin to think about the possibility of returning to the French fold, was that Alsatians and Lorrainers were neither nation, nor nationality, but rather ‘a portion of the French nation’.44 This seemed to fly in the face of what he had just said about the extent to which there was diversity of political opinion among the inhabitants of Alsace-Lorraine. Despite a view of what constituted a ‘nation’ that owed much to Republican thinking and to Ernest Renan, it is clear that there was a kind of ethnic essentialism in Blumenthal’s analysis. Alsace-Lorrainers were French because they wanted to be. It was not necessary to test this assertion with a referendum, however, because they allegedly wanted to be French. And so the circular argument went. An added danger was what he called an invasion by ‘many Germans’, that is, the German settlers in the two provinces since 1870, which meant that any thought 41  Interjection by Victor Bérard in ‘Discours d’Oscar Bloch’, in the debate on the report ‘Les conditions d’une paix durable’, Congrès de 1916, p. 85. 42  ‘Discours de M. Blumenthal’, in the debate on the report ‘Les conditions d’une paix durable’, Congrès de 1916, p. 92. 43 Ibid. 44  Ibid., p. 94.

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of giving a voice ‘to those who have been our torturers for forty-four years’ was absolutely out of the question.45 This was an understandable position to take, perhaps, but it was clearly a political one. On the one hand, an indivisible Republican France could not run the risk of political dissent, but at the same time, the indivisible French nation, as much as the German nation, seemed to be based on ethnic assumptions. The uneasy stand-off in the minds of many Ligue members between political and ethnic nationalism put the lie to the point made by Renan in his famous essay, namely that nationality was a subjective matter decided anew by a ‘daily plebiscite’ of acceptance.46 Blumenthal underlined the importance of the question with regard to the peace conference following the Allied victory that was already assumed to be, if not imminent, at least in the long run a dead certainty: ‘Let us not forget that our allies, that others, who will be present at the Peace Conference, will attach great importance to this question of fact. You cannot come and say: we’ll go and ask them [the Alsatians and Lorrainers]. It wouldn’t be taken seriously’.47 The debate on the conditions for a lasting peace therefore raised questions of fundamental importance for the Ligue. There was a profound sense in the 1916 debate that the Ligue was entering a new phase in its existence. Georges Mauranges, a lawyer and a representative of the Petit-Rouge-Santé-Montparnasse section in Paris, pointed out just how fundamental the challenge was of applying the belief to the resolution of the war itself. He declared that the ‘present discussion puts the very foundation of the ideas of the Ligue in peril if we bring a solution that is rigorously loyal to our principles to the problem that has been posed’. He went on to underline that, just as in ‘pure theology’, there could only be one answer. Everyone in the Ligue was in agreement, according to him, that the conditions for a lasting peace were only achievable through arbitration, but the irony was that the most strident pacifists from the pre-war period were no longer in favour of peace during the war, and the most convinced internationalists were no longer internationalists.48 Mauranges took up the challenge posed by Maria Vérone, a lawyer at the Cour d’Appel, that no one could suggest practical means to arrive at arbitration. Despite repeated interruptions, he argued that France needed to propose arbitration to the Central Powers and effectively to take the moral high ground. Arbitration implied the rule of law, and he was sure that France would prevail. He warned the Ligue that the implications of not accepting the idea of arbitration during the war would have long-lasting effects: ‘It is in this surprising attitude that I see the danger for our ideas. For if we accept that our ideas have no influence on the peace, if we do not affirm our will to obtain the victory of law instead of the victory of force, we will sign our own death warrant.’49 45  Ibid., p. 95. 46  See Ernest Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? Conférence faite en Sorbonne, le 11 mars 1882 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2nd edition, 1882), p. 27. 47  ‘Discours de M. Blumenthal’, in the debate on the report ‘Les conditions d’une paix durable’, Congrès de 1916, p. 95. 48  ‘Discours de M. Georges Mauranges’, in the debate on the report ‘Les conditions d’une paix durable’, Congrès de 1916, p. 117. 49  Ibid., p. 122.

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Other speakers were completely opposed to this view that the war should be ended through arbitration. One of them, Jean Raynal, a lawyer at the Cour de Cassation and a member of the Comité Central, argued that it could not be applied once a war had begun because it implied a compromise settlement which was not possible in wartime. He concluded that he refused ‘to place the fate of France and of all oppressed nations in the hands of President Wilson or the Pope’, a statement which was greeted with wild applause.50 Gabriel Séailles used his remarks at the Congress to enlarge on what he had already said in his written report, as well as to rebut those who opposed the ­position of the CC on the matter.51 Clearly, the main target was Michel Alexandre. Despite having been one of Séailles’ best students and then a friend, Alexandre’s ideas, as Séailles firmly pointed out, contradicted the principles of the Ligue as he understood these. It is worth noting, however, that while Séailles had criticized the Russian Empire as much as Germany and Austria-Hungary in the written version of his report for its mistreatment of national minorities within its borders, in his remarks to the Congress, Russia once again seemed to disappear from the ranks of imperial oppressors. Instead, Séailles argued: ‘If war rages today it is because, for the reasons which you all know, by virtue of their imperialism the Central Power empires have desired to create one more oppressed nation by destroying the independence of Serbia.’52 Not only was the argument for arbitration specious, because impossible to apply, but Séailles also rejected any thought of a return to the status quo ante. There had been too many atrocities for that to be possible; he asked the Ligue if it could seriously suggest that the ‘reparation of war damages [should] fall on the very populations who had been their victim’.53 For Séailles and the Comité Central, it was clear that arbitration was a long-term goal that could only be achieved after the successful completion of the war. He argued that the first condition of a lasting peace must be the ‘constitution of a League of Nations and, in order to link the goal with the facts, thus rendering its realization possible, we demand that the Entente powers, united in the struggle against Germanic imperialism, begin this League by covenanting to submit to arbitration all conflicts which might arise between them in the future’.54 Compulsory arbitration, then, was to be the result of the war, not a means of ending it. Ferdinand Buisson lent his considerable authority and prestige within the Ligue to the majority side in the debate. He dissected Alexandre’s motion piece by piece, beginning with what he claimed was the latter’s first argument, that the Allies were not open to a resolution of the conflict other than by force. Buisson asked what other response could logically have been forthcoming from France and Belgium in 50  See ‘Discours de M. Jean Raynal’, in the debate on ‘Les Conditions d’une paix durable’, Congrès de 1916, p. 128. There was also some intellectual incoherence in the debate. One speaker believed that economic rivalries were the cause of the Great War, and presented a motion from the section of the ninth arrondissement in Paris condemning both protectionism and free trade as being inimical to peace. See M. Boutarel, in the debate on ‘Les Conditions d’une paix durable’, Congrès de 1916, pp. 128–9. 51  ‘Discours de M. Gabriel Séailles’, in the debate on ‘Les Conditions d’une paix durable’, Congrès de 1916, pp. 143–9. 52  Ibid., p. 145. 53  Ibid., p. 146. 54  Ibid., p. 147.

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August 1914. They had been attacked and invaded. Did Alexandre and his friends seriously think that France did not have the right to defend itself ? So, with regard to the events of August 1914, Buisson was clear: ‘That does not mean that the Belgian and French people declared that they wanted only to resolve the conflict by force. It means that they did not want to begin by being crushed.’ Making reference to the French Revolutionary tradition, Buisson claimed that the Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme had made resistance to aggression a ‘sacred right’.55 Presumably, the right Buisson was referring to was that enshrined in Article 2 of the Déclaration, which enumerated rights to liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression. Michel Alexandre responded to Buisson’s speech by issuing a direct challenge to those like Théodore Ruyssen, whom he named, who claimed to want international arbitration. Alexandre pointed out that international arbitration had been studied for twenty years or more by people such as Ruyssen. Why, he asked, wait until the peace treaty to implement it? If the French government were sincere, it would immediately propose a system of arbitration to which it would submit the horrible conflict being played out in northern France. He challenged the Ligue to decide between two options, what he called ‘two great theses’: either to say clearly that arbitration was impossible and undesirable before the complete extermination of Germany, or on the other hand, to recognize that it was ‘unjust and vain’ to attempt to ‘chastise, or to break by force, any people’. For him and his colleagues, the choice was clear and simple: ‘we move this resolution for those who have found their conscience revolted by the daily massacre, for those who consider it a criminal act to demand still more carnage without trying to organize a pacifying arbitration.’ Something had to be done to stop the ‘stupid blood-letting’.56 Alexandre proposed, therefore, an amendment to the CC’s resolution, which sought to replace the motion of the nascent minority and instead look for a compromise. He tried to find common ground with the CC, taking it at its word that it wanted international arbitration, too. The amendment demanded that the Allied governments declare themselves ready to submit the conflict of the Great War to arbitration immediately, under five conditions: first, that the creation of a League of Nations be made an integral part of the conditions of a lasting peace to be submitted to the Allies; secondly, that the arbitration of the present conflict be made the first instance of the application of these principles; thirdly, that the arbitration panel consist of neutral states; fourthly, that the neutral states, as an earnest of their own impartiality, accept the principles of, and enter into, a League of Nations; and finally, fifthly, should the Central Powers reject arbitration or seek to evade its consequences, the neutral states would agree to break off relations with them and participate in a blockade.57 55  ‘Discours de M. Ferdinand Buisson’ in the debate on the report ‘Les conditions d’une paix durable’, Congrès de 1916, p. 156. 56  ‘Discours de M. Alexandre’, in the debate on the report ‘Les conditions d’une paix durable’, Congrès de 1916, pp. 176–7. 57  Ibid., pp. 181–2.

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The Fédération de la Gironde’s very long motion was, along with that of the minority grouped around Alexandre, the only other complete motion presented to the Congress, and it certainly was not oppositional in nature. Ruyssen, as its architect, called for an end to secret diplomacy and for treaties to be ratified by Parliaments.58 It also warned rather presciently that the future peace must contain ‘no germ of a future war’ and be established with ‘neither dismemberment of States, nor annexations, nor transfers of territory contrary to the interests or the desires of the populations’. There might well be ‘questionable cases’, but these would be resolved through plebiscites containing ‘all guarantees of sincerity’.59 No mention was made of Alsace-Lorraine; it was simply assumed that the territory was French, and indeed this was consonant with Ruyssen’s own thinking as well as with Ligue pronouncements on the subject. It was also assumed that reparations needed to be part of any future treaty, but these must not be accompanied by any other economic measures (boycott, destruction of industrial capacity, seizure of goods) that might render the payment of the ‘huge debt’ any more difficult. In short, the Fédération de la Gironde wanted France and its allies to recoup their monetary losses. Personal responsibility for the outbreak of the war was to be handled by an international court of justice.60 In the event, Ruyssen withdrew the Federation’s motion and then insisted that the Congress adopt ‘wholeheartedly’ the motion of the CC.61 Aside from a plethora of amendments, this left only Alexandre’s counter motion, which he withdrew, believing that the inclusion of an amendment to the CC’s original motion would satisfactorily express the thinking of his colleagues. Ultimately, however, the nascent minority position received very little support from the Congress. The minority’s amendment garnered only thirty votes and so was decisively rejected.62 Alexandre then asked those who had voted for his amendment at the very least to abstain in the vote on the CC’s resolution. Even though he was in favour ‘in principle’ of the idea of international arbitration in the future, he believed that ‘we must not vote for this resolution as if it expressed our thinking on the problem of peace.’63 The CC’s resolution was passed ‘unanimously’ despite two opposing votes and an undefined number of abstentions, according to the rather curious formulation of the Congress minutes.64 58  The Fédération de la Gironde’s motion is spread over several pages in the Congress report, interspersed with comments by Théodore Ruyssen who presented it. See ‘Discours de M. Th. Ruyssen’ in the debate on ‘Les Conditions d’une paix durable’, Congrès de 1916, pp. 49–64. The full text of the resolution may be found on pp. 184–8. 59  Ruyssen in the debate on the report ‘Les conditions d’une paix durable’, Congrès de 1916, p. 184. 60  Ibid., p. 185. 61  Congrès de 1916, pp. 188 and 214. 62  Congrès de 1916, p. 236. This number was perhaps not as insignificant as it might appear, given that there were only 206 delegates present at the Congress. As a percentage of votes cast, it actually exceeds the percentage received by the minority position at the tumultuous 1937 Congress which really sounded the death knell of the Ligue. In 1937, the minority position received just a little over 11 per cent of the votes cast. See Norman Ingram, ‘Defending the Rights of Man: The Ligue des droits de l’homme and the Problem of Peace’, in Challenge to Mars: Essays on Pacifism from 1918 to 1945, edited by Peter Brock and Thomas Socknat (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), p. 125. 63  Congrès de 1916, p. 237. 64  Ibid., p. 239.

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As if to underscore the fragility of the Ligue’s position at this point in the war, at the very end of the Congress, the LDH’s secretary-general, Henri Guernut, announced that the publication of the Ligue’s official communiqué to the news­ papers had been banned by the government. Yet this followed a visit and speech from Paul Painlevé, the Minister of Education and a Ligue member, as well as the congratulatory message of the Ligue’s president, Ferdinand Buisson, who was convinced that the censor would not deny the country news of such a successful Congress. Maria Vérone shouted ‘Vive la Russie!’, to which Guernut replied that he was hardly surprised: ‘nothing astonishes us on the part of a government that is as pusillanimous in the preparation of the peace as it is in the conduct of the war.’65 Thus ended the LDH’s debate on the ‘conditions for a lasting peace’. The 1916 Congress set the stage not just for the remainder of the war but also for the next twenty-four years of the Ligue’s history. The issues raised, albeit timidly, by the nascent minority started to take on a life of their own, as the LDH began to debate in earnest the questions of France’s alliance with imperial Russia and how to stop the blood-letting. Not surprisingly, the revolution of March 1917 transformed the question of Russia since it converted the Tsarist Empire into an apparently democratic state which French Republicans could imagine would unleash the warlike energies of the population as had occurred (at least in Republican myth) in 1792–93. Kerensky would be the new Danton and all the difficult and delicate subjects of the first half of the war—Poland, Finland, and so on—could be openly discussed. Yet within a matter of months a very different revolution had taken place under the Bolsheviks which strained the historical categories of French Republicanism to breaking point and soon took Russia out of the war. To the end of the conflict, the clash persisted over whether peace was important fundamentally as a means of ending the war short of military victory, and thus ending sooner rather than later the appalling bloodshed, or whether it was a vision of the future world that only a French and Allied military victory could achieve. Was it a means and an end, or only an end? At the 1916 Congress, despite pointing out the intellectual anomalies that the Franco-Russian alliance had forced upon France, the debate focused on the conditions of a lasting peace. A growing realization that the methods of the pre-1914 65 Ibid., p. 285. A hint of the government’s position seems perhaps to have been given to the Ligue at the 27 October 1916 meeting of the Comité Central, held just days before the Congress began. The report on the CC meeting elliptically and probably judiciously (in order to avoid the Censor) said that ‘M. Ferdinand Buisson fait au Comité une importante communication du Gouvernement au sujet du Congrès de la Ligue. Le Comité décide unanimement de demander audience pour le lendemain matin au Ministre de l’Intérieur, et, s’il y a lieu, au Ministre des Affaires Etrangères, président du Conseil’. The following day, a Saturday, a Ligue delegation composed of Buisson, Guernut, Alfred Westphal, Jacques Hadamard, Gabriel Séailles, and Maria Vérone, accompanied by the deputy, Marius Moutet, was received at the Ministry of the Interior by Louis Malvy. No information is given regarding the actual content of the discussions, but it would not be unreasonable to infer that the government’s attitude towards the Ligue at this 28 October meeting was perhaps friendlier than the position ultimately taken on 2 November. In any event, it indicates the extent to which the Ligue enjoyed access to the very highest levels of French political society. See ‘Comité Central (Extraits). Séance du 27 octobre 1916’ and ‘Séance du 30 octobre 1915’, Bulletin 17, 2 (15 January 1917), pp. 113–14.

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French peace movement—most notably arbitration—had been weighed and found wanting was the legacy of the 1916 Congress of the LDH. The irony was that the very people—Théodore Ruyssen and Charles Richet foremost among them—who had spent a lifetime developing and refining the theory of binding international arbitration abandoned this idea for the duration of the war. For them, arbitration and the establishment of the rule of law in international affairs were only possible during peacetime. Undoubtedly informed by their Republican defence of the patrie en danger, these men and women never renounced what I have called elsewhere their old-style pacifism—a pacifism that was liberal, bourgeois, juridical, and internationalist in nature.66 They continued to believe in the ultimate validity of their ideas, but in the crucible of war, with the German invader firmly entrenched on French soil, there could be no response other than armed resistance. For the minority, on the other hand, the only fact that mattered was finding a way to end the appalling bloodshed. Arbitration was the only arrow in the pacifist quiver in 1916 and so they sought a negotiated end to the Great War. In this endeavour they failed. Their proto-pacifism was an example of what Martin Ceadel, drawing on Max Weber, has called an ‘ethic of ultimate ends’.67 The important point is that 1916 represents the embryonic emergence of what would go on in the late 1920s to become pacifisme nouveau style. Not yet conscious of its own existence, it was born of historical dissent over the origins of the Great War. Its aetiology is quite unlike anything found in British pacifism and this explains much of its development in the thirties and under Vichy when faced with the challenges of the Nazis. In this sense, it is representative of much more than Ceadel’s ‘ethic of ultimate ends’ as a way of explaining the inspirations of pacifism. It is all that, but also more: the historical dissent of pacifisme nouveau style is what sets it off from its British cousin as well as explaining the evolution away from the old-style French pacifism. That evolution had its genesis in the war origins debate within the Ligue des droits de l’homme. The remaining two years of the war served to bring the divide between minority and majority views within the Ligue des droits de l’homme into sharper focus. As the end of the 1916 Congress demonstrated, both sides chafed under the censorship system imposed by the French government, but the minority drew unfavourable conclusions about the health of French, as opposed to German, democracy as a result, Mathias Morhardt going so far as to qualify French democratic institutions in wartime as worth the equivalent of a ‘rabbit’s fart’.68 He was not alone in his denunciation of the perceived attacks on French democracy. Lucien Le Foyer, a former député for Paris, a prominent old-style pacifist and a member of the Ligue since its inception, attempted in early 1917 to get the LDH to come out in favour of demanding that at the very least the government proceed with the by-elections 66  On the old-style pacifism, see Ingram, Politics of Dissent, pp. 19–118. 67  Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain, 1914–1945: The Defining of a Faith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 5. 68  Mathias Morhardt to ‘Mon cher ami’ (perhaps Oscar Bloch), Capbreton, 6 November 1917 in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés 798/7 Correspondance Morhardt.

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necessary to fill about forty vacant seats in the Chamber. He criticized the law of 24 December 1914 which had suspended legislative, departmental, and communal elections for an indefinite period, noting that both the British and the Germans had allowed by-elections to occur.69 In the event, the CC declined to make the public protestation that Le Foyer desired which led him to allege that the entire Republican edifice was crumbling in the face of the disaster of the war: ‘The Ligue des droits de l’homme has not even noticed this coup d’état: the abuse of authority by the public powers against the nation.’70 This was certainly fallout from the 1916 Congress. At a meeting on 11 December 1916, the Comité Central had debated three possible letters—by Jacques Hadamard, Henri Guernut, and André Gougenheim—to address the government about the perceived crisis that France was going through. Guernut’s was by far the most critical of the drafts, arguing that it was ‘high time’ that something be done. He blamed what he called the ‘atony of public opinion’ on the censorship and a ‘certain organisation of the press’. Much of his analysis was, ironically, censored, but in a telling comment that somehow slipped through he rather elliptically argued that France must not ‘serve as the instrument of foreign ambitions that are little in conformity with our spirit and our interests’. Was this a reference, albeit late in the day, to the uncomfortable demands of the Franco-Russian alliance? Perhaps. In any event, Guernut’s critical comments were shot down, one CC member commenting that ‘the military conduct of the war goes beyond the competency of the Ligue.’71 One week later, the Comité Central discussed the German proposal for peace negotiations and, consistent with the position it had taken at the November 1916 Congress, rejected it. Emile Kahn thought that ‘peace does not seem desirable at the moment’ and the committee passed a resolution asking the Entente powers to specify their war aims, and particularly their intention ‘to obtain the necessary reparations and to establish between the nations a regime of law which would guarantee a lasting peace’.72 The question of war aims was very much on the agenda, however. This became apparent when Woodrow Wilson, the American president, delivered an important speech before the American Senate on 22 January 1917. Of particular interest to the Ligue, given the rejection of the idea of arbitration as a way to end the war a scant two months earlier at the Ligue’s 1916 Congress, was Wilson’s injunction that there needed to be a ‘peace without victory’. Emile Kahn analysed the speech in a long article in the Bulletin and called the ‘peace without victory’ passage 69  Lucien Le Foyer to M. le Président et MM. les Membres du Comité Central de la Ligue Française pour la défense des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen, Paris, 27 December 1916, in BDIC/ALDH/ F∆Rés 798/1 Chemise 2 (1917). 70  Lucien Le Foyer to Monsieur le Secrétaire Général, Paris, 16 Feburary 1917, in BDIC/ALDH/ F∆Rés 798/1 Chemise 2 (1917). 71  ‘Comité Central (Extraits). Séance du 11 décembre 1916’, Bulletin 17, 7–8 (1–15 April 1917), pp. 312–13. 72  ‘Comité Central (Extraits). Séance du 18 décembre 1916’, ibid., pp. 316 and 317.

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‘obscure’. He claimed that Wilson’s ideas did not preclude the possibility of sanctions or reparations since neither was mentioned specifically in the speech. He insisted rather paradoxically that democrats the world over embraced Wilson’s ‘doctrine’, but that for it to succeed Germany would either have to surrender or be defeated.73 The Bulletin approvingly cited a passage from the Progrès de Lyon which believed that Wilson’s ‘peace without victory’ was equivocal and argued that Wilson could not actually have meant that the ‘delinquent and the victim’ should both be ‘dismissed’ before a court of law: ‘M. Wilson is too fine a philosopher and jurist to ignore that a lasting peace must first of all be a just peace, and that it is only just that the guilty party be punished.’74 A ‘just peace’ meant the defeat of Germany in the mind of the Ligue’s leaders. As Ferdinand Buisson said in a speech delivered in the amphitheatre of the Sorbonne on 7 March 1917, in the presence of President Poincaré, members of the government and the diplomatic corps, ‘the moral future of humanity depends on the defeat of the doctrine that “might makes right” in the Empire it represents and the militarism it sanctifies.’75 The divisions between majority and minority views of the war had become acute by 1917. Mathias Morhardt, in the wake of the Ligue’s November Congress, was certain that he would be arrested, and certainly interrogated. He worried about Charles Gide languishing in jail on a cold bed of straw. He railed against Clemenceau who was ‘stupid’, but who at least was clear in wanting the total destruction of Germany, unlike the ‘hypocrisy’ he saw everywhere else around him. Presumably he included the LDH among the hypocrites because he wrote that ‘Clemenceau wants the League of Nations without Germany—like the Ligue des droits de l’homme. Only he actually says it. It’s pluckier!’76 Nineteen seventeen also brought a resolution, albeit temporary, to the Ligue’s unstated, undiscussed problem with Republican France fighting a war alongside Tsarist Russia. The first Russian Revolution of 1917 turned Russia, for the short term at least, into a democracy, and in a statement in July underlining the need to support Russian democracy, the Ligue breathed a collective sigh of relief that it no longer had to perform political gymnastics to support Russia. It was confident that the new Russian democracy’s war aims were the same as those of the French and American democracies (no mention was made of Britain): ‘peace without a­ nnexations but with restitution, peace without punitive damages but with reparation, and the right of peoples to self-determination’. As for comparisons between the old regime and the new, the Ligue commented that it ‘was certain that French people, who had pushed to the limit their accommodation of tsarism, would in no way want to discourage through their suspicions the efforts of the young democracy’.77

73  Emile Kahn, ‘Le Message du Président Wilson (22 janvier 1917)’, Bulletin 17, 2 (15 January 1917), pp. 74 and 79. Clearly, this number of the Bulletin was published much later than 15 January. 74  Le Progrès de Lyon, 25 January 1917, cited in ibid. 75  Ferdinand Buisson, ‘Pour le Droit’, Bulletin 17, 7–8 (1–15 April 1917), p. 274. 76  Mathias Morhardt to anon, Capbreton (Landes), 22 November 1917, in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés 798/7 Correspondance Morhardt. 77  Anonymous, ‘Le Gouvernement russe et la presse’, Bulletin 17, 11–12 (1–15 June 1917), p. 402.

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The other elephant in the room which the first Russian Revolution of 1917 also finally allowed the Ligue to admit the existence of was, of course, the question of Poland, more specifically of that part of Poland which lay under the jackboot of France’s ally, Russia. In a speech delivered to the Union des organisations démocratiques polonaises de Paris, Henri Guernut took as his opening premise the claim that the Ligue was a completely disinterested and objective group of intellectuals operating on a higher plane than mere mortals. ‘Everybody knows’, he said, ‘that the intellectuals of the Ligue des droits de l’homme are dreamers, idealists, or as some fine minds would have it, ideologues. And it is true that we are led, not by the passions of the street or by sordid party interests, but by the interior force of ideas.’ Secondly, and completely disingenuously, however, he went on to claim that the LDH had been consistently and fearlessly in favour of the reconstitution and re-emergence of Poland: ‘despite the censorship and despite the state of siege, in France and across Europe we have launched brochures, in Paris and in the provinces we have held meetings claiming and demanding everywhere the resurrection of Poland in its independence and in its entirety.’ It was true that the Ligue had consistently argued in favour of Polish independence, but it was false to suggest that it had ever made the case for the ‘entirety’ of Poland. The sanctity of the Franco-Russian alliance was too important strategically for that. He alleged that this had been a particularly fraught position for the Ligue to take, because even among the Ligue’s friends it had raised a certain amount of apprehension that it might damage relations with Russia and hence the French war effort. But addressing himself to one of these imaginary friends of the Ligue, he said, ‘If the Russian Government, France’s ally, is tempted to oppress Poland, well then, too bad for Russia! Long live Poland, Monsieur!’ Singing to the choir, Guernut not surprisingly also expressed complete confidence in the liberalism of Poland and bright hopes for its democratic future. Lest one think Guernut was making all this up as he went along, and merely giving his personal views, it should be noted that he underlined to his audience that he ‘had been given the mission’ to say these things.78 The problem was, even if it was perhaps wilfully ignored at the time, that both Russia and Poland were illiberal and anti-Semitic. Always with an eye to protecting the alliance with Russia, the Bulletin had rigorously exercised a self-censorship with regard to Russia. Nothing was said that could be construed as a criticism of the oppression of ethnic and national minorities in the empire of the Tsars. There were often trenchant criticisms of Germany and Austria-Hungary for the treatment of their Polish minorities, but nothing in similar vein about Russia. Equally, the situation of German Jews was often discussed, but nothing on the much more deplorable condition of Russian Jews. It is true that the Comité Central had been interested in the situation of Russian Jews since the beginning of the war, but it always couched its discussions in terms of doing nothing to harm the Entente. For 78  Henri Guernut, ‘La Pologne: Discours de M. Henri Guernut’, Bulletin 17, 11–12 (1–15 June 1917), pp. 435–9; citations are on pp. 436 and 438. In 1928, Guernut was still proclaiming that during the Great War France had been ‘la première, et un moment la seule, pour soutenir contre toutes les timidités la thèse de l’indépendance [polonaise]’. See Henri Guernut, ‘Pour la Pologne. Ce qu’a fait la Ligue pendant la guerre’, Cahiers 28, 21 (30 August 1928), pp. 483–9. Citation is on p. 483.

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example, at a CC meeting of 14 June 1915, Victor Basch suggested ‘the idea of an intervention at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to ask the Minister to convey to the Russian government the danger that would result, not just for Russia but for the Allies as a whole, from the disaffection of the Jews of Russian Poland, if the persecution of which they are victim were to continue.’79 The internal debates of the Comité Central thus do not reflect—even if extracts from these debates were published in the Bulletin—the public face of the Ligue, most notably in the speeches and important articles of its leaders. Thus, in a speech given on 20 February 1916 by Gabriel Séailles ‘in honour of the Jewish volunteers who have died for France’, while admitting that Russia was the ‘great land of tribulation for the Jews’, nevertheless he insisted that ‘Germany is more dangerous to Judaism, to its emancipation than Russia ever was.’80 Four years later, with the war safely over, Victor Basch could publicly pronounce the truth: ‘it was the war, the war, that was for the Jews of Russia a more painful martyrdom than for all the other nationalities of the immense Empire.’81 There was no doubt then that the first Russian Revolution of 1917 made things much easier for the Ligue. There seemed to be a huge collective sigh of relief now that Poland, Finland, Armenia, and the situation of Russian Jews could be discussed openly. Gone was the pretence that Imperial Russia had been a liberal democracy worthy of a place at the Entente table. In a public meeting held in honour of the March Revolution just a month after the fact, Basch waxed lyrical about what it all meant to the Ligue as well as to the Entente and the French war effort. ‘We believe profoundly’, he cried, ‘that the Russian Revolution will provoke the unanimous sympathy of all the democracies, and especially of the great American democracy, which has reproached us, and rightly so, for calling ourselves the champions of Rights and of Justice while all the time heaven cried out against the Tsarist iniquity.’82 As for continued Russian participation in the war on the Entente side, this was taken as a given. Such was the desire to believe in the continuing participation of the new Russia in the war that, when three delegates of the Soviets visited the Ligue on 1 August 1917, the Comité Central seemed prepared to put its liberal beliefs on the back burner. The text of the joint declaration, signed by the members of the Comité Central and the three revolutionaries, read:

79  ‘Comité Central (Extraits), Séance du 14 juin 1915’, Bulletin 16, 2 and 3 (February–March 1916), p. 100. Three months earlier, Basch had already indicated to the Comité Central ‘la lamentable situation des Juifs de Russie depuis la guerre’. See Comité Central, ‘Séance du 22 mars 1915’, Bulletin 15, 6 and 7 (1–15 December 1915), p. 448. 80 Gabriel Séailles, ‘Pour les volontaires juifs’, Bulletin 16, 2 and 3 (February–March 1916), pp. 69–70. One might well ask if Séailles’ words are not an example of the ‘altérité’ discussed by Cylvie Claveau in her thesis. What did Séailles understand by ‘emancipation’? Was it a synonym for ‘assimilation’? In any event, it is difficult to believe that the situation of the Jews in Russia was better than in Germany. 81  Victor Basch, ‘La Tragédie des pogromes’, Cahiers 20, 7 (5 April 1920), p. 3. 82  ‘Discours de M. Victor Basch’, in ‘En l’Honneur de la Révolution Russe: Manifestation de la Ligue des droits de l’homme’, Bulletin 17, 13–14 (1–15 July 1917), p. 482.

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The Comité Central of the Ligue des droits de l’homme, in a special meeting on 1 August 1917, Records with joy the presence at this meeting of three delegates of these Soviets who have been the master key to the liberation of the Russias, And notes that, with regard to war aims and the conditions for peace, the doctrine of the Ligue is in total agreement with that [‘those’ crossed out] which has [‘have’ crossed out] been proclaimed [‘by President Wilson and’ crossed out] by the Russian Revolution.83

Either the Soviet representatives pulled the wool over the eyes of the guileless Ligue leaders or else the Comité Central was passing through a period of willing suspension of disbelief. It is no surprise that the second (Bolshevik) Revolution of 1917 provoked a profound crisis within the Ligue. Only weeks after Ferdinand Buisson had written an open letter to Russian revolutionaries pleading the necessity of Russia’s role in the Entente’s struggle against Germany, expressing solidarity with the new Russian government’s attempts to curtail the activity and influence of the German-funded revolutionaries, and waxing lyrical about the putative similarities between the first Russian Revolution of 1917 and the French Revolution, tragedy struck in Petrograd.84 The ramifications of the Bolshevik Revolution for the Entente were grave, and Buisson pleaded in a second open letter for Russia to remain in the war. The eight-month Russian experiment with democracy had spawned high hopes in the Ligue, if only because it justified the crusading rhetoric that it was so eager to use in justifying France’s war with Germany. According to Buisson, the fall of the Tsar had given the fight its true colours, ‘that of a struggle of the democracies against the crimes of militarism, a fight destined to allow both large and small nations the right of self-determination’.85 The Ligue was under no illusion about what was happening in Russia. The Comité Central condemned unreservedly developments in the new Bolshevik Russia. Guardian of the principles of the French Revolution, it believed it had the right and duty to remind others what they were. In early 1918, the Ligue was clear-sighted, unlike its stance less than twenty years later when faced with the charade of the Moscow Purge Trials. In the former instance, the political and strategic demands of the Entente war effort added a piquancy to the Bolshevik treachery, whereas by 1937, in the warm-up to another war, the politics of the situation demanded a more supple, less condemnatory approach to Soviet perfidy.86

83  Comité Central, ‘Résolution’, Paris, 1 August 1917, in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés 798/1 Comité Central (Chemise 2 1917). 84  Ferdinand Buisson, ‘A nos amis de Russie I: Lettre à Bourtzew’, Bulletin 17, 23–4 (15 December 1917), pp. 814–17. 85  Ferdinand Buisson, ‘A nos amis de Russie II’, Bulletin 17, 23–4 (15 December 1917), pp. 817–20. The Comité Central approved the text of this letter at its meeting on 31 December 1917. 86  See the text of a resolution passed by the Comité Central, ‘Contre la dissolution de la Constituante’, Bulletin 18, 3–4 (1–15 February 1917), pp. 109–11, which denounced ‘La dictature prolétarienne [qui] emprunte à l’autocratie toutes les mesures dont elle s’indignait hier. Elle viole le droit, elle supprime la liberté, elle impose son orthodoxie avec le même fanatisme que les popes [sic] ignares’.

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One year later, at the Ligue’s first post-war Congress in December 1918, the problem of Russia had become even more acute. The Ligue was divided on how to react to Bolshevism, but it was fairly united in condemning the intervention of French (and Western) forces in the growing Russian Civil War. This, despite the secretary-general’s statement that ‘the Comité Central is not, a priori, hostile to the principle of intervention; the Comité Central does not think that a State must, in all circumstances, absolutely abstain from intervening in the affairs of another State.’ Perhaps not surprisingly, this comment provoked ‘exclamations from several rows of seats’, ‘noise’, and ‘prolonged agitation’.87 Guernut seems to have been misunderstood initially, because he went on to argue that intervention, if it were to occur, needed to be left to the League of Nations and not to individual states. At the end of his speech he came out firmly opposed to intervention in Russia, arguing that most Russians would not approve of it, and that in any event it would only serve to strengthen the hand of the Bolsheviks.88 Other speakers, however, perhaps most notably Théodore Ruyssen, were strongly anti-Bolshevik and defended the principle of intervention. Ruyssen based his position on the complete disregard of the Bolsheviks for the Constituent Assembly, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk which he called treason against France and its allies and the cause of the death of tens of thousands of (presumably French) lives, and the radically anti-socialist character of the Revolution. Many Ligueurs were pro-Bolshevik and the reaction to Ruyssen’s speech was far from positive.89 The end of the war seemed to take the lid off the pressure cooker that the Ligue had become, especially in the last two years of the war. The Congress held in Paris at the end of December 1918 had three main themes: the principle of nationalities, the League of Nations, and ‘Republican defence’. The Congress itself was an unruly, truly tempestuous affair, with speakers being shouted down, tumult on the floor, and the chairman’s dais almost physically assaulted on one occasion. Through it all, Buisson as Ligue president chanted the mantra that even if Ligueurs were divided on specifics, they were united on principles. It was hard to see at times. Two women speakers pleaded for Ligue support for women’s suffrage, to no avail; the good men of the Ligue seemed to have other, more ‘important’ things to worry about. In fact, division seemed to be the order of the day. There was sharp disagreement on whether or not Germany and Russia ought to be admitted immediately to the nascent League of Nations. The question of the peace which was to follow the war also provoked deep divisions, particularly on the question of war origins and war guilt, which expressed itself in different ways on the question of the annexation of the Left Bank of the Rhine and reparations. Gabriel Séailles, who had written the 1916 Ligue booklet on the Alsace-Lorraine question, was now the author of the Comité Central report on the nationality principle, which the 1918 Congress debated at some length. Séailles took a ­position 87  ‘Déclarations de M. Henri Guernut’, in Le Congrès de 1918 de la Ligue des droits de l’homme. Compte-rendu sténographique du 27 au 29 décembre 1918 (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1919), p. 50. Hereafter cited as Congrès de 1918. 88  Ibid., p. 52. 89  Théodore Ruyssen, ‘Discours de M. Théodore Ruyssen’, in Congrès de 1918, pp. 52–8.

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which seemed to derive in pure form from Ernest Renan’s famous 1882 lecture on the nation a generation earlier.90 In Séailles’ view, America, the great melting pot, was a good example of the ‘juridical State’ in which ‘contractually [. . .] citizens are freely united in order to live under the same laws’. Even more so, Séailles thought that Switzerland was the quintessential ‘juridical State’ because it was ‘not only the image but also the reality of the United States of Europe’.91 The Séailles conception of the nation (and with it Renan’s as well) was more a defence of democracy, popular self-determination, and opposition to the pretentions of monarchical and oligarchic rule than it was a definition of what constituted a nation or a people. When Séailles said, ‘It is the people having consciousness of itself, of its traditions, of its destinies, which has the right to decide its own fate’, one cannot help but wonder how this was any different for Germans as compared to the French. He went on to cry that the ‘theory of the Ligue des droits de l’homme [. . .] the French theory’ of the fatherland was one of a ‘moral unity, above all psychological, a human fact, and that because of this we believe that a people that has arrived at self-consciousness has the right to self-determination’. This seemed to apply to Germany, but certainly not to the old Russian Empire or to Austria-Hungary.92 Alsace-Lorraine was undoubtedly the problem here, and Séailles may very well have been right. But as the members of the minority argued at the Congress, it behoved the Ligue at least to ask Alsatians and Lorrainers by means of a plebiscite if they actually wanted to re-join the French Republic. There were certainly many aspects of life in Alsace-Lorraine that separated the provinces—by 1918, at least—from the ongoing evolution of the Third Republic, most notably, of course, the question of religion and education. As the minority argued, one ought not to assume that just because the fathers had wanted to remain French in 1871, the sons necessarily wanted to become French again in 1918. To his credit, Séailles foresaw the problems which sadly were to appear after the peace treaties had been signed. The Ligue did not want to see a ‘reverse tyranny’, they did not want to see ‘Czechs oppressing Germans’, and he noted that there were 33,000 Germans in Bohemia. ‘Was the Ligue going to declare’, he asked rhetorically, ‘that the Bohemians had the right to hold them under yoke?’ What this, of course, did not address was the question of the Sudeten Germans, which was to have such a nefarious influence on European politics almost exactly twenty years later. Séailles also recognized the problems inherent in multi-ethnic and multi-racial areas of Europe, and he warned that the Ligue would not countenance a ‘reconstituted Poland’ engaging in pogroms against its Jews, or Romania deciding that Romanian Jews were foreigners, ‘stateless individuals’. On the threshold of a new and better world, unbowed by the as yet still unperceived tragic realities of post-war Europe, Séailles and the Ligue put their trust in the League of Nations, itself still but a glow over the horizon, to be ‘powerful enough to remind us all that the enfranchisement of one people in no way constitutes a right of oppression’.93

90  Gabriel Séailles, ‘Discours de M. Gabriel Séailles’, in Congrès de 1918, pp. 33–9. 91  Ibid., p. 38. 92  Ibid., pp. 35–6. 93  Ibid., pp. 36–7.

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The Ligue had had high hopes for the post-war world. It had believed in the justice of the Allied cause against the Central Powers from the outset, and in particular this was the case in its view of Franco-German relations. The Treaty of Versailles was both a cause for some celebration within the LDH and, at the same time, much more seriously, the focus for much worry about the future for France. It is to that hard light of post-war day that we now turn in Part II.94 94  Parts of this chapter have been published earlier in Norman Ingram, ‘The Crucible of War: The Ligue des Droits de l’Homme and the Debate on the “Conditions for a Lasting Peace” in 1916’, French Historical Studies 39, 2, pp. 347–71. Copyright 2016, Society for French Historical Studies. All rights reserved. Re-published by permission of the copyright holder and Duke University Press. www. dukeupress.edu.

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PA RT I I A L A R E C H E RC H E D ’ U N E G U E R R E G A G N E E   .   .  . 

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4 The Wounds of War (1919–24) Challenges to Orthodoxy on the War Guilt Question The period from the end of the Great War to the beginning of the so-called ‘era of Locarno’ following the signature of the Locarno Treaty of 1925 could well be ­qualified as a continuation of the war by means other than military. There was tremendous rancour within France directed at Germany and this was mirrored, if not outright exceeded, by the hostility directed towards France by virtually all sectors of German public opinion. To call these immediate post-war years ‘fraught’ is an understatement. For the Ligue des droits de l’homme, the entire period represented one of huge frustrations and disappointments. The Versailles Treaty seemed a threat to the future peace of Europe because it was perceived as a victors’ peace. The League of Nations was stillborn, not just because of the American decision not to be part of it, but because it lacked political muscle and the military means to back that up. Inside France, the Ligue viewed the politics of the Bloc National as a veritable danger to peace. And within the Ligue itself the pointed questions and dissenting condemnations of what by this point had become a full-fledged minority meant that the majority, represented by the Comité Central, was forced to fight an ­ongoing rearguard action intra-muros. The criticisms of the minority, through the pens and speeches of Mathias Morhardt, Georges Demartial, and Fernand Gouttenoire de Toury, were incessant and troubling. The early interwar years also marked the beginnings of a twin-tracked direct engagement with Germany. On the one hand, the Ligue developed close relations with the Bund neues Vaterland, which in 1922 became the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte (DLfM). According to German sources, Victor Basch was the prime instigator of this burgeoning Franco-German collaboration which began in the summer of 1921.1 At the same time, the German Foreign Office also became interested in the LDH as a vector of French political opinion which it hoped to be able to influence on the war guilt and reparations issues. The essential problem was that the post-war settlement did not reflect the ideals for which the Ligue thought it had been fighting from 1914 to 1918. As Part I has 1  See Sicherheitsdienst Oberabschnitt Süd to Sicherheitshauptamt Abteilung II/12-2, Munich, 18 January 1937, and attached report entitled ‘“Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte”, früher “Bund neues Vaterland”’, in Bundesarchiv (hereafter BA)/R 58/6264a/Teil 1 ‘Auflösung der Deutschen Liga für Menschenrechte und der Deutschen Friedensgesellschaft.—Berichte, Mitgliederverzeichnisse und beschlagnahmte Unterlagen (ab 1927)’.

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demonstrated, the Ligue believed the Great War to be a tremendous crusade for French Republican and Revolutionary principles. It held that France had gone to war justly in 1914 to defend the sacred soil of France. As the war progressed this initial motif of self-defence gave way to a broader sense that the Ligue and France were engaged in a titanic struggle against German militarism and imperialism, and at the same time, especially during the short-lived Russian Provisional Government of 1917, for democracy. Just as in 1792–93, it was believed that French notions of  democracy and freedom would win the day against politically dangerous ­obscurantism—in this case, the German Empire. The addition of America to the struggle in 1917 gave new breath to this French political crusade. All of this would have made a lot of sense but for two important reasons. First, the Ligue itself, in the form of its vocal, dissenting minority, questioned the bona fides of France’s (and hence of the Ligue’s) crusade against Germany. Already during the war, the minority had begun to excoriate the pre-war French alliance system, especially the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894, as a cause of the war. It furthermore claimed that France had been dragged into the war by virtue of this same alliance with Russia, a war in which it had no vested interest. Secondly, however, external to the Ligue, the Versailles peace treaty, the issue of reparations, and the already nascent failure of the League of Nations idea meant that even in the first post-war years it was apparent to the LDH’s leadership that trouble lay ahead. Nothing much had been resolved by the Great War. The Ligue thus found itself in the invidious position of having to condemn much of what came out of the war, while at the same time having to defend its position during the war. Disappointed from without and torn apart from within, the Ligue began the slow process of unravelling which, while not apparent at first, was virtually complete by 1939. WA R O R I G I N S A G A I N   .   .  .  A N D A G A I N The question of war origins and war responsibilities did not evaporate with the end of the Great War or the signing of the Versailles Treaty. On the contrary: the debate over war guilt was omnipresent in the Ligue’s activity from the very earliest hours of the interwar period. It is the fil conducteur which links one war to the next for the Ligue. The problem of war origins began to be conflated in early 1920 with an analogous, albeit subtly different question, namely that of the conduct of the war, both diplomatic and military. There were points of convergence with the issue of war guilt, but the growing discussion of how France had actually fought the war fed more directly into the great Ligue ‘cause célèbre’ of the mid-twenties, the campaign to rehabilitate the ‘fusillés pour l’exemple’ (the ‘shot-at-dawns’).2 It was easy to confuse the issues, and indeed Alphonse Aulard did just that. In 1920, he had demanded a ‘national enquiry on the conduct of the war’, along the lines of the 2  See Nicolas Offenstadt, Les Fusillés pour l’exemple et la mémoire collective, 1914–1999 (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1999). Cf. André Bach, Les Fusillés pour l’exemple, 1914–1915 (Paris: Editions Tallandier, 2003).

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post-Franco-Prussian War enquiry, a request which Emile Kahn supported at the 31 January 1920 meeting of the CC.3 It took another two months before the Comité Central got around to asking for the enquiry Aulard wanted, and when it did, the resulting motion was a strange mixture of unalloyed belief in the justice of France’s cause in 1914 and at the same time expressions of self-doubt. Aulard’s motion demanded that the relevant diplomatic documents be published in order to determine ‘if a better foreign policy might have avoided or shortened the war’ while at the same time ‘making clear for all to see the irreproachable innocence of the French people’.4 Questions of avoiding or even shortening the war through a ‘better foreign policy’ became uneasily mixed in with the more fundamental need to demonstrate France’s ‘irreproachable innocence’ in the hecatomb. The issues were actually quite distinct. It was easy for the Ligue to embark on a campaign to redress the wrongs done to unfortunate men at the front who had been shot at dawn ‘pour encourager les autres’. This entirely laudable exercise fit nicely into a Republican conception of the prosecution of the war. The ‘fusillés’ could be defended because they were good Republican sons of the ‘patrie’ who had been victims of the most ghastly miscarriage of military justice. All of the elements for a Republican ‘cause célèbre’ were in place; the campaign for their rehabilitation thus inscribed itself within the Republican tradition. The question of war origins was an entirely different matter, however, because if the theses of the minority were accepted, this meant inevitably undercutting the very same Republican tradition. The already hugely important question of the validity of Article 231—the war guilt clause of the Versailles Treaty and hence the validity of the entire war effort—called into question in an almost ontological way the Ligue’s moral claim to existence. The Ligue’s Strasbourg Congress of April 1920 served only to muddy the waters.5 Called upon to critically examine the peace treaties, the Congress ended up directing the Comité Central to undertake a tripartite task: first to look again at the question of war responsibilities, secondly to examine the conduct of military operations during the war, and lastly to weigh France’s diplomatic conduct in the war. Basch made the case that already in 1920 the literature on war origins and responsibilities was so vast that he could not conceive of producing the study that the Congress seemed to want. He proposed a much smaller and more general a­ rticle in the Cahiers that would indicate what he called, somewhat strangely, the ‘doctrine’ of the Comité Central on the question of war responsibilities. Mathias Morhardt took umbrage at this and pointed out that the Société d’études documentaires et critiques sur la guerre already possessed ‘documents, facts and proofs’ which he thought the average Ligueur had a right to know about. Guernut summed up the 3  ‘Séance du 31 janvier 1920’ in ‘Comité Central. Extraits’, Cahiers 20, 7 (5 April 1920), p. 18. 4  Alphonse Aulard, ‘Une enquête sur la conduite de la guerre’, Cahiers 20, 9 (5 May 1920), p. 21. 5  There was no Ligue Congress in 1919. No stenographic record of the 1920 Congress was ever published, apparently because of the rather precarious financial position of the Ligue. Instead, six summaries of the debates by G. Sauvebois were published in the Cahiers. See ‘Congrès de Strasbourg’ in Cahiers 20, 8 (20 April 1920), pp. 16–19; Cahiers 20, 10 (20 May 1920), pp. 11–16; Cahiers 20, 11 (5 June 1920), pp. 16–18; Cahiers 20, 12 (20 June 1920), pp. 17–20; Cahiers 20, 13 (5 July 1920), pp. 17–20; Cahiers, 20, 14 (20 July 1920), pp. 12–17.

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discussion by saying that the CC would try to do everything the Congress had demanded of it; according to the secretary-general, ‘it was self-evident that if a precise question, either about responsibilities or about the conduct of the war (Russian mobilization or the 16 April offensive for example), should arise, we will study it quickly and as a priority.’ Rather defensively, he added, ‘this is moreover what we have always done.’6 But it was the question of war origins, war responsibility, and war guilt which had begun to transfix the Ligue already by 1920. Georges Demartial,7 one of the driving forces behind the creation of the Société d’études documentaires et critiques sur la guerre, argued forcefully in a report prepared for the Ligue’s Fédération de la Seine in June 1920 that it was simply not the case that Germany or the Central Powers were uniquely responsible for the outbreak of war in 1914.8 At the very least, he raised difficult questions concerning the war’s origins. He contended that the Entente Powers outspent the Central Powers in their military budgets by a factor of two to one in the ten years preceding the war; with specific regard to the French case, this reflected the conclusion of Charles Gide (professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Paris, and then professor at the Collège de France from 1921 until 1930, and someone who could hardly be considered a radical), who had argued in a 1916 report that ‘France had prepared itself for war.’9 Basing his argument on Belgian documents seized by the Germans in 1915, and on some of the 6  ‘Comité Central (Extraits), Séance du 16 avril 1920’, Cahiers 20, 11 (5 June 1920), p. 19. 7  Georges Demartial (1861–1945) spent his working life as an official in the French Ministry of Colonies. He was one of the foremost architects of the nascent revisionist position on the question of war guilt in the Great War. See James Friguglietti, ‘Georges Demartial’, in Biographical Dictionary of Modern Peace Leaders, edited by Harold Josephson (Westport, Conn., 1985). See also Félicien Challaye, Georges Demartial: sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris, 1950). 8  International historical scholarship was beginning to reach conclusions that to some extent paralleled those of the Société d’Etudes. Sidney B. Fay, for example, in the pages of the American Historical Review had already laid some of the blame for the outbreak of war at the feet of the Russian militarists, writing that the ‘Willy-Nicky’ correspondence might have ‘succeeded in their friendly intentions had not the militarists in both countries, and particularly in Russia, precipitated matters’. He concluded that ‘Germany’s mobilization, on the other hand, was directly caused by that of Russia.’ But the greater fault still lay with Germany, because ‘If the German government, on July 31, had really desired peace, it would have been possible for it simply to answer Russian mobilization by German mobilization, and stand on the defensive. But the German militarists insisted that mobilization meant war and therefore Bethmann despatched the ultimata to Russia and to France, to which but one answer was possible on their part.’ As for France, despite encouraging the Russian militarists in the months before the July Crisis, ‘there can be no doubt that when the crisis came, she sincerely did her best to avert it.’ See Sidney B. Fay, ‘New Light on the Origins of the War, III. Russia and the Other Powers’, American Historical Review 26, 2 (January 1921), pp. 242, 250–1, and 253. The Germans liked Fay’s approach, too. Later in the decade, Legationsrat Dr Schwendemann wrote ‘daß das beste Werk aus nicht-deutscher Feder über die Kriegsschuldfrage das des Amerikaners Fay “The Origins of the World War”, 2 Bdn-bei Macmillan & Co in New York erschienen, ist. Es stellt eine objective, auf gründlichster Kenntnis des gesamten Materials beruhende, allerdings ziemlich umfangreiche Arbeit dar.’ See Dr Schwendemann, Presseabteilung des Auswärtigen Amtes, to Wilhelm Eisenlohr (Rudersberg, Württemberg), Berlin, 12 December 1929 in PA/AA R 26403 Schriftwechsel mit Vereinen und Privatpersonen. 9 Georges Demartial, ‘De quelques dogmes sur les origines de la Guerre: rapport présenté au Congrès de la Fédération de la Seine (27 juin 1920)’, Cahiers 20, 12 (20 June 1920), p. 13. Cf. a report on a comparative analysis of military budgets presented to the SEDCG by Charles Gide, professor of law at the University of Paris, in ‘Le Chef du Service des Renseignments Généraux à Monsieur le Préfet de Police (Rapport)’, Paris, 7 September 1916, in Archives de la Préfecture de Police (hereafter APP) BA. 1775 ‘Société d’études documentaires et critiques sur la guerre’.

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documentation published by the new Soviet regime, Demartial further maintained that Belgian diplomats had viewed Britain and France as posing a greater danger to their country’s security than Germany.10 As to the idea that Serbia was innocent, Demartial believed that it actually bore a large part of the blame for the outbreak of war—and he showed by citations from two ideologically different British newspapers (the Manchester Guardian and John Bull ) that British public opinion apparently supported this contention.11 To the argument that Wilhelm II was a ‘modern Attila’ and had provoked the war personally in order to gorge his people on war booty, Demartial replied that the documents published by Kautsky after the German revolution put the lie to this.12 One of the biggest bones of contention between this minority view, espoused by Demartial, and the orthodox majority position was the assertion that general mobilization was merely a precaution, devoid of any bellicose intentions, and that in demanding that Russia stop its general mobilization, Germany was merely using this as a pretext to declare war. This was an extremely important point because much of the analysis of the minority hinged on the timing of mobilization and on what mobilization meant to the various powers in 1914. Demartial argued that for both France and Imperial Russia, general mobilization meant war, and that furthermore it was incorrect to suggest that the Russian general mobilization was merely a response to the Austrian general mobilization.13 On 15 September 1917, the Kerensky government had admitted in an official communiqué that the Russian general mobilization order had been issued during the evening of 30 July, and no one had ever claimed that the Austrian order preceded 31 July.14 10  This is consonant with Niall Ferguson’s argument that the British were just as prepared to violate Belgian neutrality as the Germans were. See Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War: Explaining World War I (New York: Basic Books, 1999), p. 443. 11 The Manchester Guardian essentially took the George Bernard Shaw approach to the Balkans (cf. Shaw’s Arms and the Man) and wrote in August 1914 that, ‘If it were physically possible for Servia [sic] to be towed out to sea and sunk there, the air of Europe would at once seem cleaner’. Translated and cited by Demartial, ‘Dogmes’, p. 13. The original article that Demartial quotes from is ‘A Shameless Argument’ in the Manchester Guardian, 3 August 1914, p. 6. The Ligue might have done well to listen to the comments of the British radical and liberal tradition as contained in this leader article: ‘The Russian government regards war with absolute cynicism, and any country of Western Europe which went into war, of its own free will, in league with so tainted an ally would do well to forget the language of morality and of Christianity until that particular association had ceased.’ Christopher Clark’s book, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (New York: HarperCollins, 2013), is particularly good on the Serbian connection. 12  Demartial, ‘Dogmes’, p. 14. Demartial refers the reader especially to Document No. 271 in the Kautsky collection, which is the text (in occasionally grammatically incorrect French) of the Serbian response to the Austrian ultimatum. Presumably what interested Demartial was Kaiser Wilhelm’s marginal notation at the end of the document: ‘Eine brillante Leistung für eine Frist von blos 48 Stunden. Das ist mehr als man erwarten konnte! Ein großer moralischer Erfolg für Wien; aber damit fällt jeder Kriegsgrund fort, und Giesl hätte ruhig in Belgrad bleiben sollen! Daraufhin hätte ich niemals Mobilmachung befohlen!’ See Karl Kautsky, Die deutschen Dokumente zum Kriegsausbruch (Charlottenburg, 1919), Vol. I, p. 264. 13  Demartial quoted from a document which related a discussion between Tsar Nicholas II and General de Boisdeffre on 18 August 1892, in the context of the Franco-Russian alliance, in which both men agreed that general mobilization meant war. Cited in Demartial, ‘Dogmes’, p. 14. 14  Ibid. Cf. Jean Stengers, ‘1914: The safety of ciphers and the outbreak of the First World War’, in Intelligence and International Relations, 1900–1945, edited by Christopher M. Andrew and Jeremy Noakes (Exeter, 1987), pp. 29–48. Stengers is categorical that the Russian general mobilization preceded the Austrian, and the version of events published in the Livre jaune, held to religiously by

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In France, one of the gravest canards according to the minority group was the assertion that the only reason France went to war was to resist German aggression; without this aggression there would have been no war. This was false, according to Demartial. He quoted from Sir Edward Grey’s speech to the Commons on the afternoon of 3 August in which the British Foreign Secretary had declared, ‘I can say it with the most absolute certitude. France is involved in the war because of an obligation of honour resulting from a precise alliance with Russia.’15 Demartial pointed out that Germany declared war on France only that evening; in other words, after these words had been uttered in London. His conclusion: ‘The German declaration of war therefore came after the entry of France into the war; it was the effect, not the cause.’16 In any event, far from being a ‘surprise’ for France or an act of treachery, Demartial argued that everyone knew the ‘life or death necessities’ demanded by the Franco-Russian alliance.17 Demartial’s final argument dealt with the claim that England had entered the war to defend the neutrality of tiny Belgium. It was true, he admitted, that Asquith had said as much in his speech to the Commons on 6 August 1914. Asquith had added, ‘we are not fighting for interests.’ But what Demartial called the ‘famous editorial’ in The Times of 8 March 1915 set about to demonstrate that ‘England would certainly have come in on the side of France and Russia even if Germany had respected Belgian neutrality . . . if it entered the war, it was because its interests were at stake, interests which consisted in defeating Germany, as it had defeated Philip II, Louis XIV and Napoleon I’.18 In all, Demartial made fifteen arguments to counter what he called the ‘dogma’ of the orthodox interpretation of the war’s origins. Much of his argumentation revolved around motive and the French alliance with Russia. His conclusion was simple: ‘above and beyond all of the reasons drawn from conscience and common sense, these are a short introduction to the documentary reasons for which we must refuse to place all of the responsibility for the war on Germany.’ He therefore called on the Ligue to tear back the veil over the truth and likened the issues raised to the Ligue’s foundational struggle to achieve justice for Alfred Dreyfus. In 1920, it was the Ligue’s duty to demand a revision of Article 231, because on it was based the entire peace treaty, and even more importantly, the question of reparations.19 Poincaré and others after the war, was ‘absolutely erroneous’ (p. 30). To a limited degree, however, he lets Poincaré, Viviani, Berthelot, and Paléologue off the hook by arguing that their actions during the July Crisis can be explained by genuine ignorance of what was happening due to the slow arrival in Paris of diplomatic ciphers. Interestingly, the issue of the Kerensky communiqué was never discussed by Basch. Sean McMeekin is not as charitable as Stengers. He writes that ‘General mobilization . . . meant war’. The Russians knew it and the ‘French knew it, too’. ‘The decision for European war’, according to McMeekin, ‘was made by Russia.’ See Sean McMeekin, July 1914: Countdown to War (New York: Basic Books, 2013), p. 398. 15  This is Demartial’s translation. The original wording from Hansard was ‘I can say this with the most absolute confidence—no Government and no country has less desire to be involved in war over a dispute with Austria and Servia [sic] than the Government and the country of France. They are involved in it because of their obligation of honour under a definite alliance with Russia.’ See ‘Statement by Sir Edward Grey’, House of Commons Debates, 3 August 1914, Vol. 65, c. 1814. 16  Demartial, ‘Dogmes’, p. 14. 17  Ibid. Demartial cited two documents from the British Blue Book, nos. 89 and 105. 18  Ibid. See also ‘Why we are at war’ (editorial), The Times, 8 March 1915, p. 9. Asquith’s statement to the Commons may be found in House of Commons Debates, 6 August 1914, Vol. 65, c. 2080. 19 Ibid.

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The question of the timing of the Russian general mobilization, and what importance to ascribe it, lay at the heart of the growing debate. If there continued to be many who insisted that mobilization was not war, and that therefore Germany was the guilty party for having declared war on Russia, there were also those who seemed to lay emphasis on an undeclared state of war. One of these was Théodore Ruyssen, who, despite his undoubted intellectual acuity, mixed apples and oranges in his analysis of Austrian guilt as the justification for the dismemberment of Austria under the Treaty of St Germain. He wrote, ‘As for those who claim that the determining cause of the war was the Russian [general] mobilization which was decided on the evening of 30 July, have they forgotten that the previous night Semlin’s Austro-Hungarian cannons shelled Belgrade across the Danube, thus creating the irreparable?’20 One wonders what was surprising about this Austrian action, given that the Austrians had already declared war on Serbia on 28 July. Ruyssen rather disingenuously did not specify that the Russian decision of 30 July was to expand the initial partial mobilization against the Gallician frontier into the general mobilization which set the tinder ablaze. Despite Victor Basch’s declared intention to write a short article laying down the Comité Central’s ‘doctrine’ on war responsibilities, the end result was highly unsatisfactory. His essay was a rather hectoring piece which took the position that the now officially named minority had no business weighing in on an issue as i­ mportant as war origins and war responsibilities because most of them had, as he wrote in a condescendingly sarcastic tone, ‘the inestimable advantage over us of not knowing German, of not having been able to read the Kautsky documents, which have not been translated, and of knowing nothing of the basic elements of historical method’.21 He promised a thorough examination of the question of war responsibilities in October, but that essay, for whatever reason, never materialized.22 His August 1920 essay did not address any of the questions raised by Demartial’s report to the Fédération de la Seine which had been published a scant six weeks earlier. Instead, Basch seemed to be engaged in a debate with Michel Alexandre, Marcel Martinet, Victor Méric, and Charles Vildrac, two of whom (Alexandre and Méric) were to be particularly active in the ranks of the new-style pacifism of the late 1920s and beyond. His essay ended with a plea to the young not to be seduced by the false arguments of the ‘minoritaires’ (the word was already being used). Basch declared his belief that French President Raymond Poincaré had not prepared for war in 1914 and did not want it when it arrived.23

20  Théodore Ruyssen, ‘Le Traité de Saint-Germain’, Cahiers 20, 13 (5 July 1920), p. 3. 21  Victor Basch, ‘Pro domo nostra: contre la démagogie’, Cahiers 20, 15 (5 August 1920), p. 12. This was a strange assertion given that Demartial had referenced two of the Kautsky documents in his article just two months earlier. 22  In October 1920, Henri Guernut briefly reviewed Demartial’s short book Les Responsabilités de la guerre and once again declared that Victor Basch had contradicted Demartial’s conclusions already more than once, and would do so again in the 20 November 1920 number of the Cahiers. That essay, too, never materialized. See also ‘Activité des Fédérations’, Cahiers 20, 21 (5 November 1920), p. 20, in which yet again Basch promised a study that would take up the arguments and texts that he had used in his presentation to the Congress of the Fédération de la Seine. 23  Basch, ‘Pro domo nostra’, pp. 11–12.

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Basch’s ad hominem attack on the minoritaires provoked a spirited rejoinder from Demartial who was incensed by the tone of Basch’s castigation of ‘Ligueurs who have dared to say that they were disappointed with the conduct of the Ligue during the war.’ He contrasted the courage of the English Union of Democratic Control, which had published translations of many of the pre-war secret treaties, with the alleged pusillanimity of the Ligue. It was Michel Alexandre who took it upon himself to translate and publish at his own expense various of the secret treaties, an act Demartial called ‘heroic’, but which Basch, who could not refrain from responding, downplayed since Alexandre had acted in the ‘strictest and most prudent anonymity’. The tone of Basch’s response, which was tacked on at the end of Demartial’s short article in a kind of editorial prerogative, smacks of the very d ­ emagoguery of which he accused the minority. At the very least, it was disdainful.24 In any event, Basch appears to have benefited from special access to diplomatic files at the Quai d’Orsay in drafting his own defence of Poincaré and the French government. In January 1921, Mathias Morhardt had published an article claiming that on 1 August 1914, an ‘haut fonctionnaire’ at the Quai d’Orsay, in the name of the French government, ‘had made no effort to second a move by Austria to maintain the peace, and that Serbia, kept on a tight leash by our diplomacy, had not even been authorized to reply to the proposal for talks that had been made to it’. Without ever naming him, it was clear that Morhardt was talking about Philippe Berthelot, the senior diplomat in the Quai who had stood in for Pierre de Margerie, the political director, during the latter’s trip accompanying Poincaré and Viviani to St Petersburg in July 1914. According to Morhardt, quoting the Swiss plenipotentiary in Paris, M.  Lardy, who acted as the intermediary between the Austrian ambassador and the Quai, Berthelot dismissed the opening being offered by the Austrians by saying ‘It is too late.’25 Quoting from the originals of the French diplomatic documents, pencilled marginalia and all, Basch demonstrated that Morhardt was wrong on the details of what had happened: It is a lie that the French representative contented himself with listening to the last Austrian peace proposal without following through on it. On the contrary, he immediately informed Vienna and Rome of this proposal, and above all the capital that it was urgent to inform of this change in attitude of the Dual Monarchy, that is Saint Petersburg.

Basch’s visceral dislike of Morhardt and the Société d’études was palpable in his final paragraph: ‘Therefore, before as well as after the story of the so-called Société documentaire et critique, it remains the fact that France did everything possible, even the impossible, to preserve the peace of the world.’26 One has to wonder at the 24  Georges Demartial, ‘A Propos d’une polémique’, Cahiers 20, 18 (20 September 1920), p. 8. Demartial published this on 21 August 1920 in La Vie ouvrière and Clarté. The rejoinder by Basch is signed with his initials at the end. 25  Mathias Morhardt and Victor Basch, ‘A propos des responsabilités de la guerre: l’affaire LardyBerthelot’, Cahiers 21, 2 (25 January 1921), pp. 34 and 35. 26  Ibid., p. 36.

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consistency of Basch’s analysis, however, given that the following year, in a blistering critique of Wilhelm II’s memoirs, he wrote that ‘The truth is, as Bethmann-Hollweg says himself in his Mémoires, that when he decided to intervene on July 29th [to rein in Austrian bellicosity], it was too late: the rock was already rolling downhill, and nothing would henceforth be able to stop it.’27 It is curious that in Basch’s mind it was ‘too late’ on 29 July, but not ‘too late’ on 1 August. It is interesting that although the Quai was not yet prepared to consider publishing its documents on the origins of the war, given the provocation of someone like Morhardt, it was ready to lift the veil slightly so that Victor Basch could act as a kind of hired gun to get across the Quai’s position against the rising tide of criticism from the Société d’études and its ilk. Morhardt had already levelled a similar accusation against the entire Ligue when he wrote in August 1918 in a letter to a friend that ‘the Ligue des droits de l’homme has little by little come to consider itself the indispensable liaison agent for the national defence.’28 Basch, in particular, had become Morhardt’s bête noire, ‘our principal antagonist’, as the latter put it in a letter to Buisson.29 The Comité Central sided with Basch against Morhardt’s interpretation. Jacques Hadamard, a professor at the Collège de France who had lost two sons in the war, criticized Morhardt and the SEDCG for playing into the hands of the German revisionists and the Stinnes press. Would Morhardt have taken the same position in the Lardy-Berthelot affair if he had known what the CC now knew, thanks to Basch’s research at the Quai? Morhardt’s response hearkened back to the Dreyfus Affair as a kind of tactical reference point by which to justify his position; in 1898 he had heard the same refrain, the justification of raison d’état, the suppression of the truth, all because ‘German newspapers’ were abusing what he said and wrote. Ferdinand Buisson intervened to say that the issues were actually quite distinct, and that in the presence of documents which proved the opposite of what Morhardt had alleged, it was up to the latter to admit Philippe Berthelot’s innocence. Morhardt would have none of it, however, and refused categorically to withdraw one iota of what he had written. Kahn remarked that Morhardt ought to have actually named Berthelot in his article because then the latter would have had the right of response under French law.30 In fact, Basch was fed up with Morhardt’s allegations and general modus operandi. His pique was much in evidence in the memorandum he wrote on the face-to-face discussions he had in the summer and early autumn of 1922 with the eminent German historian Hans Delbrück about the question of war origins.31 27  Victor Basch, ‘A propos des responsabilités de la guerre: les mémoires de Guillaume IIe’, Cahiers 22, 23 (25 November 1922), p. 547. 28  Mathias Morhardt to ‘Mon cher ami’ (perhaps Oscar Bloch), Capbreton (Landes), 19 August 1918 in Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine/Archives de la Ligue des droits de l’homme [hereafter BDIC/ALDH]/F∆Rés. 798/7 Correspondance Mathias Morhardt. 29 Mathias Morhardt to Ferdinand Buisson, Paris, 23 January 1921 in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés. 798/9 Commission des Origines de la Guerre, Chemise 2. 30  Comité Central, ‘Extraits’, Cahiers 21, 2 (25 January 1921), pp. 40–1. 31 The Basch–Delbrück conversations of 1922 drew the interest of the Hauptarbeitsgruppe Frankreich (HAG), the arm of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) which seized the papers

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His opening comments were acerbic and directed at the Société d’études ­documentaires et critiques sur la guerre. He clearly did not think that Morhardt and his friends were either polite, respectful, or even intellectually worthy opponents in the debate on war origins. Comparing them implicitly to Delbrück, a man for whom Basch had much esteem, he asked, ‘how does one even discuss with men who, visibly, are moved only by passion, and who lack an elementary preparation for this sort of research?’ It was a ‘waste of time’ to debate this question with men who, with the exception of Demartial, had not even received a secondary education, and he declared that henceforth he would have no further part in it.32 Examining the war origins question with a man as eminent as Hans Delbrück was quite another matter, however, as will become clear momentarily. On the question of intellectual pedigree, it is worth noting that Charles Gide, professor at the Collège de France, published articles in the Cahiers that, while not as iconoclastic as the views of the SEDCG (whose meetings he had attended during the War), nevertheless took a position on war guilt that was not exactly that of the CC. Thus, for example, in 1922, reacting to the vote of the Chamber which overwhelmingly decreed that Germany was responsible for the war, he made the sensible point that such a judgement had to be left to History, not to a political body, to decide. When this judgement finally came, Gide was convinced it would not be ‘too’ ­unfavourable to France. The real culprits in 1914—and here one sees his divergence from the orthodox, majority view in the Ligue—were Austria, Russia, and Germany in that order.33 Despite his dissenting views, Gide was never the target of attacks by the CC. It is certainly true that Morhardt was a strong cup of tea. Basch was completely correct, too, when he criticized Morhardt’s lack of critical historical approach to the documents and willingness to accept just about any source that fit his own view of the war’s origins. In January 1922, the Ligue’s Commission sur les origines de la guerre held its first meeting. The second meeting, over four months later, almost ended in fisticuffs. Ostensibly setting out to discuss the Isvolsky dispatch, a version of which had been published by L’Humanité and seemed to cast doubt either on Maurice Paléologue’s competence as French Ambassador to Russia or on Prime Minister Viviani’s truthfulness in relating his discussion with the German ambassador, von Schoen, the discussion quickly descended to the level of personal attacks. Morhardt, when challenged by Basch about his views on the Isvolsky of the LDH in June 1940 after the defeat of France. The HAG’s leader, Dr Gerd Wunder, wrote: ‘In den Akten des Juden Victor Basch befinden sich auch Papiere und Briefe, die die Diskussion zwischen Victor Basch und Hans Delbrück über die Kriegsschuldfrage am 12.6.1922 betreffen. Die beiderseitigen Niederschriften und die Manuskripte der späteren Veröffentlichungen über die Diskussion liegen dem Material bei. Delbrück gehörte zu jenen “nationalen” Historikern des wilhelminischen Deutschland, die nach dem Umsturz sehr rasch den Anschluss an die liberale Demokratie fanden. In diesem Zusammenhang mag der herzliche Ton seines Briefwechsels mit dem Juden von Interesse sein.’ See Dr Gerd Wunder, ‘Aktennotiz: Betr. Unterredung Basch-Delbrück’, Paris, 17 February 1941, in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés 798/9 Commission des Origines de la Guerre Chemise 2. 32  Victor Basch, ‘Les Responsabilités de la Guerre: Discussion Basch-Delbrück’, p. 3, typescript in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés 798/9 Chemise 1, Commission sur les origines de la guerre. 33  Charles Gide, ‘La Question des responsabilités’, Cahiers 22, 18 (10 September 1922), p. 426.

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dispatch, said he found it strange that Basch continued to put less stock in what a member of the Comité Central said as opposed to what was said by Berthelot in the Quai. Basch and Emile Kahn took Morhardt to task for his lack of historical method, and Basch accused him of ‘fanaticism’. Not for the last time in the Ligue’s history, the response was tinged with more than a hint of anti-Semitism.34 Morhardt retorted that his ‘fanaticism’ was considered acceptable so long as he had been defending a Jewish officer, and that if the question of the war’s origins were called the ‘Goldsky Affair’ the Comité Central would have an entirely different take on it. At one point, what the stenographer called ‘un très vif incident’ took place, with Morhardt telling Kahn to ‘shut up.’ Kahn got up to leave the room, but was persuaded to remain by the others, at which point Morhardt upped the ante by telling Kahn that he had only brought him into the Comité Central out of pity. Needless to say, no conclusions were reached about absolutely anything at this meeting.35 If it is true that Basch and others in the majority had a blind spot concerning the importance of the question of mobilizations, and in particular of the nature of the French relationship to Russia, it must also be said that Morhardt exhibited a bizarre, almost monomaniacal fixation on putative German innocence and French guilt. This spilled over rather easily into almost a paranoid conviction of moral failing in his opponents. Later in 1922, Morhardt baldly stated at the next meeting of the commission that he did not believe in the ‘sincerity’ of the various official coloured books. Kahn and Charles Seignebos36 jumped on him, arguing that all of the Great Powers had used the coloured books as a propaganda tool and that they should therefore not be taken as accurately representing the historical record. Kahn directly asked Morhardt if he thought that it was only the French records that had been doctored, to which the latter replied rather elliptically that he believed that the German publications had not been adulterated. This then led to a discussion between Seignebos and Morhardt in which the latter pushed the envelope even farther, arguing that the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia was not the cause of the war because it had been a perfectly justifiable response to the assassination at Sarejevo. Seignebos claimed to be thunderstruck by this statement, but as Part I has shown, even Basch had allowed in his book on the origins of the war that Serbia needed to be punished somehow.37 In any event, this November 1922 meeting of the Commission sur les origines de la guerre also ended in stalemate with nothing of

34  The anti-Semitism reared its ugly head again at the end of the year. In a letter to Buisson, Morhardt wrote with regard to Basch, ‘Or, je le déclare immédiatement de la manière la plus formelle: citoyen français, je ne permettrai pas à ce juif hongrois, dans les veines duquel il n’y a pas une goutte de notre sang, de se déguiser en patriote pur aux dépens de notre réputation d’intégrité.’ See Mathias Morhardt to Ferdinand Buisson, Paris, 1 December 1922, in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés 798/7 Correspondance Morhardt. 35  Commission sur les origines de la guerre, ‘Séance du 26 mai 1922’ in BDIC/F∆Rés 798/9 Commission des Origines de la Guerre Chemise 1. 36  Charles Seignebos (1854–1942) was professor of history at the Sorbonne and had been a member of the Comité Central since the Ligue’s inception in 1898, a position he held until 1934. 37  Victor Basch, ‘La Ligue des droits de l’homme et la guerre’, Bulletin, 15, 2 (1 May 1915), p. 111.

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substance being accomplished.38 What it had shown was the gulf separating the two sides in their appreciation of the war guilt question. It was also clear that Basch’s attachment to rigorous historical method was selective. At the Ligue’s 1920 Strasbourg Congress, he excitedly declared that the Sukhomlinov trial of 1917 was the smoking gun which proved German duplicity and war guilt. He claimed that the trial had produced an ‘irrefutable document which contains the proof of the absolute responsibility of Germany’. Sukhomlinov, the former Russian War Minister, was guilty of blocking the Tsar’s attempt to countermand his order for general mobilization. Why? Because, as Basch breathlessly informed the Congress, ‘Sukhomlinov was a German agent’!39 It was all a replay of the Ems Despatch. Germany was trying to lumber Russia with the blame for the outbreak of war. Sidney  B.  Fay, a rather more detached and impartial historian, wrote just six months later in the pages of the American Historical Review that because no stenographic record existed of the Sukhomlinov trial, and the newspaper reports were so garbled and self-contradictory, the trial testimony had to be ‘used with the greatest caution’.40 It also bears mentioning that Victor Basch, who insisted on the need for rigorous historical method in the analysis of the question of war guilt, was also much more impressed by the document collections published in Germany than by anything that, by 1922 at least, had been published by the French.41 Indeed, one of the diapasons continually sounded by the Ligue was that France needed to open its archives and publish its documents.42 One of the reasons for this was undoubtedly 38  Commission des origines de la guerre, ‘Séance du 3 novembre 1922’ in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés. 798/9 Commission des Origines de la Guerre, Chemise 1. 39  Victor Basch in ‘Le Congrès de Strasbourg [Suite]’, Cahiers 20, 11 (5 June 1920), p. 18. Italics in the original. 40  Fay, ‘New Light’, p. 226. 41  Basch wrote in 1922: ‘Enfin, il est clair que rien de définitif ne pourra être écrit—si tant est qu’en histoire, il y ait jamais des choses définitives—avant que les Gouvernements français, anglais, italien, serbes, n’ouvrent leurs archives comme l’a fait le Gouvernement révolutionnaire d’Allemagne; avant que les documents des archives russes ne soient publiés, non comme ils l’ont été: comme un instrument de guerre, mais comme l’ont été les documents allemands: par des hommes de métier compétents et impartiaux.’ See Victor Basch, ‘Les Responsabilités de la guerre: Discussion Delbrück-Basch’, p. 2, in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés. 798/9 Commission des Origines de la Guerre, Chemise 1. The publication of Die Grosse Politik der europäischen Kabinette began in 1922, but Basch was referring to the four volumes published by Karl Kautsky in 1919. This positive evaluation of the German publications was echoed in a letter from the Comité Central to Raymond Poincaré, dated 21 October 1922, which stated that ‘La publication des archives de la Wilhelmstrasse passe, à bon droit parmi les érudits, pour un chef-d’oeuvre de précision et de clarté. Chaque dépêche n’est pas seulement reproduite avec toutes les corrections et toutes les annotations qu’elle comporte, mais encore l’heure de l’expédition et l’heure de l’arrivée à destination sont scrupuleusement indiquées. L’absence de ces renseignements rend la lecture de nos Livres jaunes fort difficile et vous avez vu, par une circonstances récente (Dépêche de M. Maurice Paléologue no. 118, Livre jaune de 1914) à quelle grave erreur vous avez été induit vousmême par l’inadvertance de notre service dactylographique’. See ‘Nos interventions: à propos du “Livre Jaune”’, Cahiers 22, 22 (10 November 1922), p. 530. 42  See Archives du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Commission des origines de la guerre de 14–18, Côte: 20–15, Carton 185, chemise 2 ‘Demandes de la Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1924–1928’. The Ligue had been asking for the publication of the French documents even earlier than 1924. The Comité Central passed a motion at its meeting on 28 April 1920 demanding that the French government publish its documents on the origins of the war given that the German and Austrian governments had already published ‘tout ce qu’elles avaient dans leurs archives diplomatiques concernant

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the perceived need to counter the German side of the story, which was beginning to be put most effectively from 1922 onwards by the publication of Die Grosse Politik. The Germans also had an entire section of the Foreign Ministry devoted to the war guilt question.43 But the minority within the Ligue was sowing doubt in people’s minds; it was raising uncomfortable questions about the purity of French purpose in 1914. The leadership of the Ligue also seemed aware that much of the diplomatic record from the French side which had been published during the war had been rather elastic with the truth.44 Despite the fulminations against the minority and the allegations of its incompetence by Basch and others, it is clear that the Ligue took seriously enough the allegations of the minority to ask for clarification from the highest echelons of the French government. And the French government responded, at least in the person of the politically ubiquitous Raymond Poincaré, president of the Republic during the war, prime minister before it, and again in 1922–24 as well as later in the decade. Poincaré seemed eager to set the record straight. In fact, Morhardt acerbically noted that the prime minister responded far quicker to Buisson’s letter on behalf of the Ligue than it had taken Buisson to get around to writing it in the first place.45 On the question of when the French Ambassador to St Petersburg, Maurice Paléologue, had informed his government of the Russian general mobilization, the order for which was issued during the night of 30–1 July, Poincaré was categorical that ‘for reasons I cannot explain’, Paléologue’s telegram, dispatched from St Petersburg at 10.45 a.m., was received at the Quai d’Orsay only at 8.30 p.m. on the 31st.46 What is interesting in this dialogue of the deaf going on within the Ligue des droits de l’homme in 1922 is the extent to which both sides in the debate were clutching at straws. Morhardt and his friends placed great stock in the allegations of Isvolsky, the stories of eleventh-hour refusal to do anything about the crisis in July 1914, and the like. Equally, though, Basch fixated on a few pages of Conrad les origines immédiates de la guerre’. See Comité Central, ‘Quelques ordres du jour: à propos des origines de la guerre’, Cahiers 21, 21 (10 novembre 1921), p. 501. The Ligue did not have much luck persuading Poincaré to open the French archives, and it fared no better after the victory of the Cartel des Gauches in 1924, despite the fact that a Ligueur, Edouard Herriot, was now prime minister. In August 1924, the Ligue joined its voice to that of Le Temps in asking for the opening of the French archives. See ‘Même Le Temps’, Cahiers 24, 16 (25 August 1924), p. 376. The requests to Herriot were repeated several times over the life of the Cartel des Gauches government, but Herriot’s response, like that of the conservative governments that preceded him, was negative. 43  See Holger Herwig, ‘Clio Deceived: Patriotic Self-Censorship in Germany after the Great War’, International Security 12, 2 (Autumn 1987), pp. 5–44. 44  The Ligue was quite right about this. See Andrew Barros and Frédéric Guelton, ‘Les imprévus de l’histoire instrumentalisée: Le Livre Jaune et les Documents Diplomatiques Français sur les origines de la Grande Guerre, 1914–1918’, Revue d’Histoire Diplomatique (2006), pp. 3–22. The Ligue requested clarification from the Président du Conseil as to the exact hour at which dispatch 118 in the Livre Jaune had been sent from St Petersburg and at what time it arrived in Paris. See ‘Nos Communiqués: à propos de la mobilisation russe’, Cahiers 22, 19 (25 September 1922), p. 455. See also ‘Un Communiqué: truquages de documents diplomatiques’, Cahiers 22, 22 (10 November 1922), p. 530. 45  See Morhardt’s comments in ‘Séance du vendredi 3 novembre 1922’ in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés. 798/9 Commission des Origines de la Guerre Chemise 1. 46  Raymond Poincaré to Ferdinand Buisson (copy), Paris, 9 August 1922, in BDIC/F∆Rés. 798/9 Commission des Origines de la Guerre, Chemise 1.

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von Hoetzendorf ’s memoirs which seemed to indicate that as far back as 1909 the Germans and Austro-Hungarians had agreed on the need to flatten Serbia and take on Russia, which inevitably meant fighting France as well.47 In the same way that Morhardt had fastened on to the allegations of the Swiss Minister in Paris to the effect that Viviani seemed fatefully to have accepted the inevitability of war despite being told of Serbia’s apparent readiness to negotiate an end to the crisis on 31 July 1914,48 so, too, did Basch resort essentially to speculation, albeit published in a memoir, that suggested that the decision for war had been taken at an imperial council on 5 July in Berlin.49 What was sauce for the goose was not sauce for the gander, however. Basch criticized Morhardt, as we have seen, for his lack of rigorous historical method. There was probably another reason, too, for the requests for elucidation and clarification. Not only was the demand for the publication of French documents to serve an external purpose—to counteract the corrosive effects of German propaganda on the war guilt subject—but it was also made with the intention of using the information thus gleaned effectively to stifle the arguments being made by the minority. The theses of Morhardt and Company needed to be answered and quashed because, undoubtedly only through a glass darkly in 1922, the leaders of the LDH majority realized that the problem was not simply going to go away. Indeed, it had the potential to destroy the Ligue, and one of the arguments of this book is that it did exactly that by the end of the 1930s. Guernut, Basch, and others understood the importance of the debate, however, and in October 1922, Guernut provided Basch with what he called ‘some interesting texts which will give an idea to our Ligueurs of the historical and impartial quality of the men who [. . .] have examined the origins of the war with a damnable frivolity (une coupable légèreté)’.50 47  See final page of the memorandum by Victor Basch, ‘Discussion Basch-Delbrück’, n.d. (1922) in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés 798/9 Commission des Origines de la Guerre Chemise 1. 48  Eventually it came out that Viviani was, in fact, nowhere to be seen at the Quai. Morhardt had a field day with this, alleging that France’s Foreign Minister had abandoned the helm at the most critical moment in the July Crisis. Viviani finally let it be known that on the fateful night he had been attending a Cabinet meeting and then had gone to pay his respects to the just-assassinated Jaurès. See ‘Note à M. Victor Basch’, 19 October 1921, BDIC/ALDH/798/9 Commission des origines de la guerre Chemise 2. Morhardt would have none of this, however. He rejected the explanations proffered by Viviani via Marius Moutet, writing to Buisson that ‘Ainsi donc, on savait parfaitement au Quai d’Orsay, où se trouvait M. Viviani le 31 juillet à 11hrs 1/4 du soir et rien n’était plus facile  que de lui communiquer la nouvelle de la démarche de l’Autriche-Hongrie, démarche dont l’ambassadeur de Russie et les ministres de Serbie, de Roumanie et de Suisse s’accordaient tous à souligner la grande importance. Pourquoi, dans ces conditions, a-t-on jugé inutile de lui faire part de cette démarche? Pourquoi lui-même n’a-t-il pas songé à se mettre en rapport avec le Quai d’Orsay afin de s’enquérir des événements? C’est à ces questions qu’il faudra bien un jour qu’il réponde.’ See Mathias Morhardt to Ferdinand Buisson, Paris, 16 February 1921 in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés. 798/7 Correspondance Morhardt. 49  For the specific debate between them on the events of 30 July to 1 August 1914, see Mathias Morhardt and Victor Basch, ‘A propos des responsabilités de la guerre: l’affaire Lardy-Berthelot’, Cahiers 21, 2 (25 January 1921), pp. 34–6. 50  Henri Guernut to Victor Basch, 25 October 1922, in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés. 798/9 Commission des Origines de la Guerre Chemise 2. Guernut cites texts by Morhardt, Demartial, and Louis Guétant in an attempt to provide fodder for the argument that these men were stubbornly persisting in their waywardness.

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Guernut was guilty of cherry-picking his examples, however. It is true that Morhardt had accused the Ligue in a letter of 7 September 1918, which Guernut planned to use against him, of ‘affirming and continuing to affirm that “France was attacked”, while not only the factual evidence, but also the concordant statements of MM. Lloyd George, Ribot and Pichon show that if we entered the war, if we made the “supreme sacrifice”, it was to serve the audacious and criminal politics of the empire of the tsars’. What Guernut omitted, however, was the last paragraph of the letter, which explained Morhardt’s moral motivation for his position: The Ligue des droits de l’homme could come to the conclusion, as I myself have done, that it is not appropriate for the moment to denounce the lie publicly. It could wrap its sorrow in the pious cloth of the public interest. But to associate itself with the imposture, and in so doing, to prolong the martyrdom of the peoples and in a way to contribute materially every day to the death of new young men, that is what it will never be forgiven for.51

The nub of the argument lay here. The gradually emerging chrysalis of what would become later in the 1920s the new-style pacifism is apparent; it had begun two years earlier at the Ligue’s 1916 Congress.52 For Morhardt and his colleagues there were three essential points. The first was that Russia had precipitated the world war by its general mobilization. Russia, not Germany, was therefore the guilty party. Secondly, France was morally complicit in this horrendous turn of events because it had not done everything it could to preserve the peace, despite protestations ex post facto to the contrary. And, finally, the Ligue des droits de l’homme, abandoning its original sectarian, critical stance vis-à-vis French political society, had by 1914 been co-opted into the dominant Republican mould. It was only natural that it should uncritically support the Union sacrée because by 1914 the Ligue had become the Republic, or so it liked to see itself. As Morhardt put it in January 1921 in a long letter to Buisson, bringing these three lines of criticism together, millions of young men were killed in the Great War because it ‘suited Russia to constitute itself as the paladin of Serbian independence’ while at the same time visiting abominable treatment on its own minorities, the Finns, the Poles, and the Jews. ‘And when we’, he went on, ‘documents in hand, drew the attention of public opinion to the complicity of our own secret diplomacy, the Ligue des droits de l’homme turned on our modest Société d’études.’ The Société had become the fount of all evil for the Ligue, and Morhardt charged that the LDH demanded nothing less, ‘in the name of raison d’état, than that we renounce our search for the Truth’.53 Morhardt had a point. As Part I demonstrated, one of the strangest 51  Mathias Morhardt to Henri Guernut, Capbreton (Landes), 7 September 1918. Original is in ‘Correspondance Mathias Morhardt’, on letterhead of the Société d’études documentaires et critiques sur la guerre in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés. 798/7. A typescript copy may also be found in ‘Commission des Origines de la Guerre’, in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés. 798/9, Chemise 2. 52  See Norman Ingram, ‘The Crucible of War: The Ligue des droits de l’homme and the Debate on  the “Conditions for a Lasting Peace” in 1916’, French Historical Studies 39, 2 (April 2016), pp. 347–71. 53  Mathias Morhardt to Ferdinand Buisson, Paris, 23 January 1921, p. 14, in BDIC/F∆Rés. 798/9 Commission des Origines de la Guerre, Chemise 1.

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aspects of the Ligue’s support for the Union sacrée was its defence of Russia as a great liberal democracy which had allegedly done much in the nineteenth century to help oppressed peoples make their way towards freedom. In much the same way that later historians argued that Germany had given the Dual Monarchy a ‘blank cheque’ in 1914, so Morhardt argued that France did the same for Russia: ‘It is a cheque’, wrote Morhardt, ‘signed in white that is at the service of [Russia’s] ambitions and which it may put to any use it so desires. It knows that whatever might happen France will pay.’54 Given what was to follow, it is important to underscore that Morhardt and Company seem to have been sincere in their demands for an honest and open Ligue enquiry into the origins of the war, however much they ultimately were certain of their own conclusions. In an article published in May 1921 in the Cahiers, Morhardt was at pains to emphasize that he in no way contested the complete right of France to seek revision of the Treaty of Frankfurt as well as to desire the return of Alsace-Lorraine. It is clear, too, that at this point the historical dissent evidenced by Morhardt had not yet become a pacifist response to the Great War. On the contrary, Morhardt clearly thought he was arguing from a position of disinterested principle. In his eyes, the Treaty of Versailles was a judgement, a judgement moreover rendered in the complete absence of judicial norms and procedures. Germany had been condemned without appeal, and when the Germans attempted to contest the validity of the Versailles verdict by publishing a second White Book, the latter was not authorized even to enter France. Morhardt did not argue that Germany was unjustly condemned, merely that due process had not been followed, and he prophesied that the problem would haunt the Ligue for years to come. On a substantive level, Morhardt argued that France was prepared both morally and materially for war in 1914. The real villains during the July Crisis were imperial Russia and its general mobilization, the Franco-Russian alliance, and Raymond Poincaré.55 The response to Morhardt’s article came a month later from the pen of Emile Kahn, who made some curious allegations. He began by writing that the attacks on the Ligue came from outside the Ligue: a certain press had been alleging that the Ligue was refusing to undertake an ‘impartial and thorough study of war origins’. These unnamed people or newspapers reproached the Ligue ‘for hiding behind the official version’ and ‘denounced what they called its partiality against the Central Powers’.56 This then morphed into Kahn’s contention that these people were also inside the Ligue and that they wanted to see the rehabilitation of the AustroHungarian and German monarchies—an allegation designed to stir the cockles of every Republican heart within the LDH. Revisionists there certainly were within the Ligue, but there is no evidence of any Ligueur demanding the return of the two defunct monarchies. Still, it made a great rhetorical flourish with which to begin an article whose point was the demolition of the minority arguments on the origins of the war. 54  Ibid., p. 15. 55  Mathias Morhardt, ‘Les Origines de la guerre’, Cahiers 21, 10 (25 May 1921), pp. 228–34. 56  Emile Kahn, ‘De quelques paradoxes sur les origines de la guerre’, Cahiers 21, 12 (25 June 1921), p. 275.

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Like Basch before him, Kahn heaped scorn on the ‘neo-historians’ who had the temerity to think they could contribute anything to historical scholarship. History was a subject for professionals, it had its standards and its methods, and for the minority to think it could have anything of importance to say was the ‘initial paradox [which] engenders all of the others’. He reduced the minority’s view of war origins to the following: the fault lay solely with the Allies, the more distant origins were Russian intrigues and Poincaré’s policies, and the immediate causes were the Serb provocation and Russian general mobilization. According to Kahn, the official Ligue view, on the other hand, was that all of the powers of Europe, great and small, bore some of the long-term responsibility for the outbreak of war. But Kahn was completely disingenuous when he wrote that the Ligue had not spared Russia in its criticism of imperialism, ‘before, during, and after the war’.57 As we have seen, the Ligue was completely circumspect in its comments on France’s alliance partner, imperial Russia, during the war. Not a word was said about anything that could possibly be taken as criticism in St Petersburg. In the second half of his attack on the minority, Kahn took on the more precise and circumscribed events of July 1914. He argued that it was highly improbable that Serbia should have tried to provoke war with Austria-Hungary given the difference in size of the two states. He also offered proof of events in the recent past in which Austria had been guilty of fabricating evidence in certain disputes, and he further declared that it was impossible to find any evidence of Serbian involvement in the 28 June assassinations in Sarajevo.58 As for the Russian general mobilization, although he claimed not to have the space needed for an analysis of the timing of the various mobilizations, he nevertheless attempted to prove that Russia had not, in fact, mobilized first, or if it had, that this mobilization could not have been known in Vienna when the Austro-Hungarian mobilization was ordered. Completely bizarrely, Kahn alleged that the Germans had begun their general mobilization on 5 July; he seems to have confused the Potsdam meeting on that day with a decision to order general mobilization.59 And so it went. The real guilt lay in the Austrian and German readiness to risk general European war in Austria’s attempt to deal with the Serbian problem. As for the arguments with the minority, those he called the ‘neo-historians’, he wrote that they were untrained and i­ncapable of handling evidence. Essentially, the neo-historians wanted everyone to accept their arguments on faith. Kahn concluded: We must stop being surprised if they shout at us and demand we accept their faith. The charges against us are charges of heresy. Let us not stop defending the rights of 57  Ibid. My emphasis. Kahn’s rather polemical piece was vigorously contested by Oscar Bloch and Fernand Gouttenoire de Toury, who demanded that a rectification be published in the Cahiers. They had never argued that the Allies bore the entire responsibility for the outbreak of war. Guernut refused to publish their letters in the Cahiers, so the CC heard both men out at its meeting of 10 October 1921. In the end, the CC agreed to let them publish a very specific letter ‘en leur rappelant que cette note ou cette lettre ne devra viser que la phrase de M. Emile Kahn qui les a émue et éviter toute polémique’. See ‘Comité Central. Extraits’, Cahiers 21, 21 (10 November 1921), pp. 499–500. 58  This is an argument that was put out of its misery long ago, but for a recent analysis of Serbian guilt, see Clark, The Sleepwalkers. 59  Emile Kahn, ‘De quelques paradoxes sur les origines de la guerre [suite et fin]’, Cahiers 21, 13 (10 July 1921), pp. 294–5.

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reason against their intolerance. To their paradoxes, let us continue to reply with texts and facts. But let us not flatter ourselves that we will convince them: their starry eyes will never open.60

The paradox is that the minority thought that its approach, too, was an attempt to get at the ‘facts’ of history through the use of ‘texts’. In any event, the genie was already out of the bottle. One of the Ligue sections that from very early on was a hotbed of dissent on the question of war origins was the Monnaie-Odéon section in the sixth arrondissement of Paris. In October 1922, the section passed a motion, in which it laid out what was known about the order of mobilizations during the July Crisis. Referring to Poincaré’s letter to the Ligue in which the section claimed that he had confirmed that Russian general mobilization had indeed taken place on 30 July 1914, it drew the conclusion that Russia ‘had voluntarily unleashed the world conflict’. This was a completely erroneous reading of Poincaré’s letter, in which he had stated clearly that the general mobilization was not actually ordered until sometime during the night of 30–1 July, although it had been decided during the afternoon of the 30th.61 More importantly, the section took aim at Victor Basch, arguing that his 1915 brochure wilfully and wrong-headedly had stated, ‘against the truth and the very evidence’, that the Austrian general mobilization preceded the Russian. This was the beginning of the moral rot according to the Monnaie-Odéon section. It was this ‘initial material error’ which the Comité Central used to ‘trample underfoot the generous principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man’ and in so doing had become a ‘war party’ that ‘contributed with all its power to prolonging the conflict and thus to increasing the ruins which grew by the day and to multiplying ad infinitum the number of victims’.62 With the passage of time, some of Morhardt’s views began to gain traction within the Ligue, despite the continuing rejection of his overall thesis. In 1922, Théodore Ruyssen reviewed Morhardt’s Lettres à la Ligue des droits de l’homme which had been published by the SEDCG. The review was a trenchant and negative criticism of Morhardt’s ideas, but Ruyssen was generous, to a point, in his critique of the book, calling it a ‘patient enquiry’ and the ‘most important’ study yet to be published by the SEDCG. Morhardt’s thesis was that the Russian general mobilization started the Great War because it brought Germany irrevocably into the conflict. French policy, in the form of Raymond Poincaré, was not so much aggressive as insufficiently attached to the cause of peace. Ruyssen called this a ‘grave accusation’, but it did not hold water because it was based on the faulty assumption that mobilization meant war. Ruyssen clearly thought this was nonsense, and argued that the real culprit had to be he who broke off diplomatic relations and ordered an attack. He criticized the lack of logic in Morhardt’s analysis: if, as 60  Ibid., p. 295. 61 Raymond Poincaré to Victor Basch, Paris, 9 August 1922 in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés. 798/9 Chemise 1. 62  ‘Les Responsabilités de la Guerre’, motion adopted by the Monnaie-Odéon section (sixth arrondissement of Paris) on 17 October 1922 in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés. 798/9 Chemise 2. For the response of the Comité Central, see ‘Activité des Sections’, Cahiers 22/23 (25 November 1922), pp. 557–8.

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Morhardt argued, the Russian general mobilization of 30 July 1914 made war ‘irrevocable’, why did he argue that ‘it was not too late’ and that ‘even at this date peace could be maintained’? The biggest problem with the book was that it dealt  only with France and Russia, what Ruyssen called a ‘singular method which ­inevitably leads to the condemnation of France and Russia’ because it says nothing about the policies and actions of ‘the innocent German ewe and the pacific Austrian lamb’.63 The question of the importance of the Russian general mobilization and the role of France in allowing it—whether actively or passively—was in many ways the key question around which the war guilt/war origins debate revolved. Fernand Gouttenoire de Toury, a former army officer who had lost a leg during the war, had come to the conclusion that Russia had been the first to mobilize, followed by Austria-Hungary and then by Germany. The important point, though, according to de Toury, was that France knew what had happened in St Petersburg. Having said that, he was not in the camp of those who blamed only the Entente for the outbreak of war. In that sense, he was closer to Charles Gide, despite the fact that his criticism of French policy was devastating. He wrote that ‘if those responsible in France in these tragic hours acted as they did (falsifying the Livre Jaune) it is because they realized that they had not done their duty in the face of the capital fact of the Russian general mobilization’, and that when this came to light they feared their own responsibility for what happened would be evident. If the Livre Jaune had been falsified, then this completely undercut René Viviani’s (and others’) ‘indignant protestations’ against the cooking of the German White Book. To de Toury’s mind, this only proved that if all governments were guilty of falsifying their publications, then war guilt had to be shared among all. He said that his position on the war guilt debate was neither on the side of the nationalists who always blamed the other side, nor in support of the anti-nationalists who saw guilt only in their own government, but rather in a belief that both the long-term and more immediate causes of the war were shared. He believed it was ‘a folly and a crime’ to have used the question of war responsibilities as ‘the foundation on which has been raised the construction of the Treaty of Versailles’, as Lloyd George had done in his speech at the London Conference on 3 March 1921.64 The Cahiers published a direct response to de Toury’s article in May 1923. It came from the pen of Pierre Renouvin, and argued forcefully that although Russia was the first of the Great Powers to order a general mobilization, it had done so with no aggressive intentions and was still trying to arrive at a peaceful resolution of the crisis.65 It was true that Russia had given a ‘pretext’ for the German response, that it was ‘imprudent’, and that it had served the designs of von Moltke, who was able to use the Russian general mobilization to proclaim the Kriegsgefahrzustand. But in Renouvin’s mind, Russia’s adversaries had been working to create the conditions 63  Théodore Ruyssen, ‘Mémento bibliographique’, Cahiers 22, 5 (1 March 1922), p. 120. Ruyssen’s emphasis. 64  Fernand Gouttenoire de Toury, ‘A propos des origines de la guerre: la mobilisation russe’, Cahiers 23, 2 (25 January 1923), pp. 33–7. 65  Pierre Renouvin, ‘La Mobilisation russe’, Cahiers 23, 9 (10 May 1923), pp. 195–9.

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for conflict since the imperial council at Potsdam on 5 July. At the end of the day, Renouvin believed that the fundamental questions were the Austro-German entente at Potsdam, the drafting of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, and the rejection of the English proposals for mediation.66 The questions of war responsibilities, the peace treaties, and reparations were omnipresent fixtures at Ligue Congresses in the interwar period. The Congress minutes provide an unalloyed, unvarnished view of the way the Ligue as a whole saw the war guilt question. Try as it might, the Ligue could not escape the discussion.67 Henri Guernut had to defend his decision not to talk about the Versailles Treaty in his ‘rapport moral’ to the 1921 Congress by saying that the matter had already been exhaustively discussed the year before at the Strasbourg Congress. This was hugely insufficient, according to Fernand Gouttenoire de Toury, who argued that the Ligue ought to have taken a clear position of opposition to the entire Treaty because it had ‘not been conceived in conformity with the principles which we have claimed to defend throughout the entire war’; it would be impossible, according to de Toury, to ‘bring together the stipulations of the Treaty of Versailles with the 14 points of President Wilson on which the armistice was concluded’.68 Guernut also claimed that the Ligue had been thoroughly consistent in its defence of smaller nations and groups of people during the war. He painted a picture of a heroic Ligue defending with ‘tenacity during the war’ not only (quite naturally) Alsace, but all of the other Alsaces, too—Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and all of the ‘populations that our enemies oppressed’, but also those in a ‘delicate situation’ with ‘our allies and ourselves’. The Ligue ‘had not failed in its duty’ to demand justice for oppressed peoples even from France and her allies.69 As Part I has demonstrated, this was hardly the case. It is interesting, too, to note how much political positions were to change with regard to the Soviet Union. At the 1921 Congress, the Ligue’s secretary-general, Henri Guernut, defended himself and the Comité Central against charges by Oscar Bloch and Fernand Gouttenoire de Toury that the Ligue was not supportive enough of the new Bolshevik regime in Russia. Guernut was categorical about his position: You have asked us to defend Soviet Russia when it is the object of an unjustified aggression: we have done this and will do it again. But as for asking the secretarygeneral of the democratic Ligue des droits de l’homme to make a declaration of love for a government which violates all human rights and puts democracy in peril, no, really, that is asking too much of me.70 66  Ibid., p. 199. 67  Victor Basch wrote in 1922 that the members of the SECDG had managed to get the matter discussed in every Ligue Congress since 1916. See Victor Basch, ‘Les Responsabilités de la guerre: discussion Delbrück-Basch’, in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés. 798/9 Chemise 1, n.d. (1922), p. 2. 68  For de Toury’s critique of Guernut’s report and the latter’s response, see the debate on the ‘rapport moral’ in Le Congrès national de 1921. Compte-rendu sténographique. Paris, 15–17 mai 1921 [hereafter Congrès national de 1921] (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1921), pp. 53–6. 69  Henri Guernut, ‘Rapport Moral’, in Congrès national de 1921, p. 26. 70  Debate on the ‘rapport moral’ in ibid., pp. 54–6.

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Gabriel Séailles, the author of the report on ‘La Crise de la démocratie’, which was the centrepiece of the deliberations of the 1921 Congress, came down squarely against the notion of a dictatorship of the proletariat, saying ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat would not be the dictatorship of the working class, but rather a dictatorship exercised on the workers.’71 By 1923, the Parti communiste français (PCF) was to declare membership of the LDH incompatible with membership in the Communist Party. Ironically, political positions within the Ligue were reversed by the time of the schismatic Tour Congress in 1937. By that point, the majority was staunchly in favour of the Soviet Union and claimed not to see anything aberrant about the Moscow Purge Trials, while the minority had developed into a fully fledged pacifism which saw the Soviet Union as a threat to peace and understood very well what was going on in the trials.72 The Ligue’s position on Imperial Russia during the Great War ultimately coloured its view of the Soviet Union in the runup to the Second World War. The minority used the debate on the crisis of democracy at the 1921 Congress to engage in a discussion of war origins and war guilt. Oscar Bloch presented a motion from the Monnaie-Odéon section of the Ligue in the sixth arrondissement of Paris which took as its point of departure that ‘the crisis of democracy is closely linked to the questions of war origins and responsibilities and that on this question depends the reconciliation of the peoples and the future evolution of humanity.’73 He used the hot button issue, the memory of the Ligue’s founding event, the Dreyfus Affair, to make his case that ‘we are faced with a fact that is infinitely more important than the Dreyfus affair’, arguing that the Ligue needed to seek the publication of all documents related to the outbreak of the war.74 This was what the SEDCG had set out to do most circumspectly during the war. According to Bloch, ‘none of us would have dared affirm at the outset that all of the responsibilities were diffuse or were shared.’75 He laid out for the Congress the aetiology of the SEDCG’s thinking and said that it had all begun with a simple doubt about the official version of the war’s beginning. This had led to two simple questions: first, why would Germany have wanted to involve itself in a war in which it had nothing to gain;76 and secondly, how could it be said that France had no interest in a war, and in fact had made no preparations for one? This had then led the SEDCG 71  ‘Discours de M. Gabriel Séailles’, in Congrès national de 1921, p. 61. 72  See Chapter 8 of this volume. See also Norman Ingram, ‘Defending the Rights of Man: The Ligue des droits de l’homme and the Problem of Peace’ in Challenge to Mars: Essays on Pacifism from 1918 to 1945, edited by Peter Brock and Thomas Socknat (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), pp. 117–33. 73  ‘Discours de M. Oscar Bloch’, in Congrès national de 1921, p. 63. 74  Ibid., p. 76. 75  Ibid., p. 77. 76  Economically, that is certainly one of the arguments made by Georges-Henri Soutou in L’Or et le sang: les buts de guerre économiques de la Première guerre mondiale (Paris: Fayard, 1989). In Hew Strachan’s words, it is ‘a truly magnificent work of scholarship’, which ‘asks why Germany—in 1914 the second-largest industrial power in the world, with increasing access to world markets—would want to restrict itself to a closed Central European economic bloc in the more backward parts of Europe.’ What is strange, according to Strachan, is that no one has yet attempted to answer this question which cuts to the heart of the Fritz Fischer thesis. See Hew Strachan, ‘Review Article: The Origins of the First World War’, International Affairs 90, 2 (2014), pp. 429–39.

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gradually to the belief that not only the long-term origins of the war were shared but also that the immediate responsibilities for the war ‘fall exclusively on no one and are shared more or less equally by all of the belligerents’.77 Lucien Le Foyer, who was not a member of the minority, nevertheless added grist to its mill, when he directly linked the putative ‘crisis of democracy’ with the war. He declared that ‘war is servitude; war is passive obedience.’78 The very nature of war was inimical to democracy and he blamed the LDH in part for the ‘crisis’; the Ligue was reaping what it had sown during the war in refusing to demand by-elections and elections.79 The Ligue’s president responded directly to Le Foyer, asking repeatedly, ‘what could we do?’ and ‘what ought we to have done?’80 Referring back to the fundamentally important debate on the need for immediate arbitration as a way of ending the war at the Ligue’s 1916 Congress, Buisson declared somewhat disingenuously that ‘we were unanimous in saying that arbitration presupposes law. An empirical arbitration left to chance is the very negation of the only respectable arbitration, that which is done according to principles and through a respect for the law which force can never take precedence over.’ The Ligue’s way of combatting the international anarchy represented by what he called the ‘absurd adage’, si vis pacem, para bellum, had been to demand the immediate creation during the war of a League of Nations. As for the duty of the nation in time of war, Buisson made a strange equivalence, putting the obligations of the French, British, and American soldier on the same moral plane as those of the German soldier: ‘It was necessary to fight, because the duty of the soldier, of the citizen, of the Frenchman, as of the German, as of the Englishman, as of the American, is above all else, not to allow himself to be slaughtered when he represents Justice.’81 In the end, Bloch’s counter motion was ‘purely and simply’ rejected by the Congress, receiving only thirty-seven votes, but not before the Central Committee had decided to include a small part of it in its motion on international relations later in the Congress, prefaced by the tendentious comment that it was ‘pursuing, in the spirit of free examination it has always held, the enquiry which it had begun in 1915’.82 This was clearly a dig at the SEDCG because one could quite l­ egitimately question the extent to which the CC had been interested in any ‘free examination’ of the war origins question—in 1915 or at any other time. In a way, though, all of this talk about tolerance and keeping an open mind on the war guilt/war origins issue was just a smokescreen. The Comité Central ­resolution on ‘Les Rapports internationaux’ made it very clear that French democrats needed to collaborate with like-thinking, right-minded German democrats ‘helping them to demonstrate to German public opinion and against all reactionary tendencies, the primordial responsibility of monarchical, militarist and imperialist 77  ‘Discours de M. Oscar Bloch’, in Congrès national de 1921, pp. 78–80. 78  Lucien Le Foyer, ‘Discours de M. Lucien Le Foyer’, in Congrès national de 1921, p. 199. 79  See Chapter 3 for Le Foyer’s wartime demands. 80  Ferdinand Buisson, ‘Discours de M. Ferdinand Buisson’, in Congrès national de 1921, pp. 211 and 212. 81  Ibid., pp. 211 and 214. 82  Debate on the crisis of democracy in Congrès national de 1921, pp. 224–5.

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Germany in the origins and atrocities of the war’.83 France also had to shoulder some of the blame for the situation in Germany, however. Despite an analysis of the failings of German political culture that later in the twentieth century would fit with the Sonderweg thesis, Kahn also criticized French policy, saying that France could have disarmed Germany totally in 1918 but had not, a decision he laid at the feet of Maréchal Foch and Georges Clemenceau. Secondly, and equally tellingly in his mind, France had done nothing to further moral disarmament between the two nations.84 So, for the majority, there could be no doubt as to Germany’s ‘primordial responsibility’—a strange locution that seemed to attenuate ever so slightly the claims of Article 231—in the outbreak of the Great War. At the same time, however, moral disarmament needed to be more vigorously pursued; the incompatibility of that goal with the rejection of war responsibility by a virtually unanimous German public opinion was not addressed by Kahn. Members of the minority noted the contradiction, however. Reminding fellow Ligueurs of the 1916 Congress, Séverine moved that the phrase ‘primordial responsibility of Germany’ be struck from the resolution: ‘If you really want peace, do not humiliate the vanquished any longer. He accepted his responsibility with a knife at his throat. It behoves us to add nothing to that.’85 Ferdinand Buisson spoke out strongly against Séverine’s amendment, though, and it, too, was defeated.86 At the Ligue’s 1922 Congress held in Nantes, de Toury returned to the charge, excoriating the Treaty of Versailles as a ‘crime, a monstrous crime’.87 This time he condemned not only Article 231, the famous ‘war guilt clause’ of the Versailles Treaty, but also Article 228, which mandated the handing over of persons accused of war crimes for trial before Allied tribunals. With Blanche Maupas, the widow of Corporal Maupas, who had been shot at dawn ‘pour encourager les autres’ in 1915, present in the hall, de Toury argued that if war crimes existed on the enemy side, they surely also existed on the French and Allied side as well.88 He juxtaposed Lloyd George’s statement at the 1921 London Conference with the words of Comité Central member, Emile Kahn, whom he congratulated for having ‘made the harshest possible criticism of the Versailles Treaty’ at the Ligue’s 1922 Nantes Congress.89 This might have been well-intentioned irony on the part of Gouttenoire 83  Presentation by Emile Kahn of the Comité Central resolution on ‘Les Rapports internationaux’, in Congrès national de 1921, p. 338. Later on in the debate, Louis Guétant from the Lyon section claimed that not even the Comité Central really believed this ‘lie’. See ‘Discours de M. Guétant’, in ibid., p. 382. 84  Presentation by Emile Kahn of the Comité Central resolution on ‘Les Rapports internationaux’, in Congrès national de 1921, p. 342. 85  ‘Discours de Mme Séverine’, in Congrès national de 1921, pp. 396–7. 86  The text of the final resolution as voted by the Congress is in Congrès national de 1921, pp. 404–6. 87  ‘Discours de M. Gouttenoire de Toury’, in Congrès national de 1922. Compte-rendu sténographique. Nantes, 4–6 Juin 1922 (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1922), p. 17. 88  Ibid., p. 16 and pp. 19–22. 89  Ibid., p. 19. Lloyd George had said that ‘For the Allies, German responsibility for the war is fundamental. It is the basis upon which the structure of the Treaty has been erected, and if that acknowledgement is repudiated or abandoned, the Treaty is destroyed. . . . We wish, therefore, once and for all to make it quite clear that German responsibility for the war must be treated by the Allies as a chose jugée.’ For Lloyd George’s speech at the London conference of 1921, see ‘The Allied Decision.

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de Toury, because Henri Guernut responded to his speech by saying that the Comité Central could not accept his motion, despite wanting to condemn Articles 228 and 231 ‘just as vigorously’ as de Toury, because they were afraid of opening the treaty up to a full-scale revision which would be ‘troublesome and unjust’. The bottom line for Guernut was that while there might be problems with the Versailles Treaty, there was also much that was good in it.90 The final words of de Toury’s speech were prophetic. He foresaw how essential the war guilt/war origins debate was to be to the Ligue’s future when he said: The Ligue is an admirable institution to which I pay homage with all my strength; but it is one which shares the weakness of all human institutions. It can have its apogee, but also its decline. I heartily hope that we have not come to the decline of the Ligue. I hope that it will rediscover the spirit that animated it over twenty years ago.91

The 1922 Nantes Congress saw two other critiques of the Ligue’s official policy regarding the Versailles Treaty and the attendant questions of war origins and guilt, the first from Oscar Bloch and the second from Albert Mathiez, the historian of the French Revolution and Robespierre.92 Bloch was concerned that the commission of enquiry mandated by the 1921 Congress to investigate the war’s origins and press for the publication of the official documents had not really functioned at all.  He demanded an expanded commission which would have added six more members to the five already in place. The fact that the six names he proposed were all members of the minority was fairly obviously an attempt to load the committee, even though later in the debate Albert Mathiez claimed that there had been no concertation, much less an attempt at noyautage.93 When Buisson said that the Comité Central would have to deliberate before giving an answer, this provoked ‘exclamations’ from various points in the hall. Guernut then threatened to read extracts from some of the writings of those proposed as new commission members, which elicited a mixture of applause and protests from the Congress; he was dissuaded from doing so, apparently on the wishes of the Comité Central.94 The ­fixation on war origins also pitted the provinces against Paris. The representative of the Brest section protested that yet again the agenda of the Congress was being hijacked by the minority; the problem reared its head again at the 1923 Congress in Paris.95 Guilt for the War. Mr. Lloyd George’s Indictment’, The Times, Friday, 4 March 1921, p. 6. Victor Basch, later at the same Congress during the debate on ‘La Reconstruction de l’Europe’, called Lloyd George ‘la seule tête pensante et agissante de l’Europe’. See ‘Discours de M. Victor Basch’ in the debate on ‘La Reconstruction de l’Europe’, in Congrès national de 1922, p. 323. 90  ‘Réponse de M. Henri Guernut’, in Congrès national de 1922, pp. 32 and 39. 91  ‘Discours de M. Gouttenoire de Toury’, p. 29. 92  On Mathiez, see James Friguglietti, Albert Mathiez, historien révolutionnaire (1874–1932), translated from the English by Marie-Françoise Pernot (Paris: Société d’études robespierristes, 1974). 93 Bloch proposed adding six more minoritaires (himself, Georges Demartial, Gouttenoire de Toury, Louis Guétant, Albert Mathiez, and Robert Perdon) to the original five members (Basch, Kahn, Challaye, Morhardt, and Gabriel Séailles). See comments in ‘Discours de M. Oscar Bloch’ and ‘Discours de M. Albert Mathiez’, in Congrès national de 1922, pp. 41 and 90. 94  Buisson’s and Guernut’s comments are in ‘Discours de M. Oscar Bloch’, in Congrès national de 1922, pp. 41–2. 95  See the interjection of M. Kerjean from the Brest section in ‘Discours de M. Mathiez’, and the ‘Discours de M. Kerjean’, in Congrès national de 1922, p. 47 and pp. 105–12. In 1923, a group of provincial delegates threatened to leave the hall when Oscar Bloch provoked a discussion of war origins

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Bloch ended up supporting the resolution of the Comité Central, which was passed with fifteen votes against.96 Despite the entreaties of Bloch that he do so too, Gouttenoire de Toury refused, demanding instead that his resolution be voted on; it never made it to a vote because the rules of order used by the Ligue gave priority to a resolution from the CC and once that had been approved, there was no logical point in proceeding with a vote on de Toury’s motion. That did not prevent him from saying to the Congress that Versailles was ‘the heaviest threat which weighs on Europe at the present hour, and I am not the only one who thinks this about the Ligue’s position on the moral level. I believe that other members of the Ligue have the same opinion as me, but from an economic point of view.’97 The following year, the 1923 Congress saw a reprise of the arguments about war origins and war guilt, with the exception that this time, the historical arguments were overlaid by the urgent political question of the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr valley.98 The historical debate was heated and acrimonious, but on the political question there was close to unanimity: the Ligue des droits de l’homme condemned the Ruhr occupation. As usual, the historical debate followed the presentation of the secretary-general’s ‘rapport moral’ to the Congress.99 Yet again, it featured a sustained attack on the Ligue majority position primarily from Oscar Bloch, with Mathias Morhardt playing an important supporting role. Bloch pointed out, rightly enough, that Guernut’s ‘rapport moral’ said nothing of the question of war responsibilities on which the Nantes Congress the year before had requested a report. He criticized the fact that the only Ligue publication on war origins was Basch’s 1915 book which continued to insist that the Austrian mobilization preceded the Russian. This was, in Bloch’s view, an ‘error of incalculable consequences’ because on it was based the notion that the fault for the war lay on only one side. This, in turn, had led to the Versailles Treaty which ‘was not an act of reconciliation, but rather a punitive measure directed at the bad guys; and especially now it is this idea of nonshared responsibilities which has set the French and Germans against one another and prevents any mutual understanding and rapprochement’.100 during Henri Guernut’s ‘rapport moral’. See Le Congrès national de 1923. Compte-rendu sténographique. (1–3 Novembre 1923) (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1924), p. 76. 96  The final resolution read: Les Injustices du Traité de Versailles. Le Congrès, Rappelant les déclarations antérieures de la Ligue sur les injustices du Traité de Versailles, et notamment sur les articles 228 et 231; Mais considérant, d’une part, comme définitives les décisions du traité conformes aux voeux des peuples; Considérant, d’autre part, que la création d’une Société des Nations, encore imparfaite, mais toujours perfectible, offre des garanties nouvelle pour la durée de la paix; Se refuse à condamner en bloc le Traité de Versailles et décide de continuer sa campagne pour le rapprochement des peuples et la reconstruction de l’Europe. See text of the resolution in ‘Discours de M.  Emile Kahn’, in Congrès national de 1922, pp. 104–5. 97  ‘Discours de M. Gouttenoire de Toury’, in Congrès national de 1922, p. 143. 98  The political ramifications of the war guilt debate are discussed in more detail in Chapter 6 below. 99  See Henri Guernut, ‘Rapport moral’, in Congrès national de 1923, pp. 62–81. 100  Comments by Bloch in ibid., pp. 68 and 78.

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Bloch had especially harsh words for Hellmut von Gerlach, who had said that ‘the matter had been decided in Germany, that all of Germany was contrite, that, with the exception of the reactionaries, all of the left-wing parties recognized the unique responsibility of Germany’. Bloch then proceeded to read a letter from Hans Delbrück, professor of history at the University of Berlin, to the Ligue which flatly contradicted von Gerlach. Delbrück claimed that it was not just Hitler and the reactionaries who rejected the war guilt claims of the Versailles Treaty, but rather the vast majority of the German people. This letter had been written on 23 September, but was only published in the Cahiers on 10 November 1923 after the Congress, along with a rejoinder from von Gerlach. The original error of the Comité Central was thus ‘heavy with consequences’ and Bloch regretted that the CC persisted in it and refused to back down: Errare humanum est; perseverare diabolicum, he said. Whatever one might make of the ultimate impact of the Russian general mobilization, Bloch said that it was surely enough to indicate clearly that responsibilities for the outbreak of war were shared and not unilateral.101 At the 1923 Congress, there were other, more important, fish to fry, most ­notably the problem of the Ruhr occupation. Bloch drew a line, therefore, under the war origins debate, saying that it was ‘useless to prolong the controversy at the present time’. ‘Events’ had overtaken the Ligue, and while the historical arguments were ‘interesting’, they had been ‘erased by other responsibilities, by the responsibilities of peace’. In the face of what he called a ‘catastrophic’ crisis, it was necessary to call a truce in the war origins debate and to join hands with the majority ‘to form a chain to snuff out the fire’. In 1923, then, political necessities took precedence over historical debate and what Bloch now called the ‘former minority’ ‘rose as one man against the dangers, against the shame of French imperialism’. Bloch congratulated the Ligue for not falling this time for a replay of the Union sacrée and said that, on the contrary, it had ‘risen spontaneously, resolutely, magnificently’ against the occupation of the Ruhr. He concluded: ‘We are on the right track. Against the threats, against the shame of French imperialism, the Ligue des droits de l’homme must rediscover its unanimity; it must, as in the Dreyfus Affair, safeguard that which it can of our ancient patrimony of truth, of justice and of humanity’.102 Despite this plea for unity in the face of a political threat, Emile Kahn, who was one of the members of the Commission des origines de la guerre, felt moved to respond to Bloch, saying that the reason there was no report was because all of the Ligue’s letters to the président du conseil, Poincaré, demanding publication of the documents, had gone unanswered. This was not strictly speaking true because Poincaré had actually addressed the question of publication, albeit negatively, in a letter to the Ligue discussed at a meeting of the Commission des origines de la 101  Delbrück’s letter is cited in extenso in ibid., pp. 78–80, along with the debate that it elicited. The letter was later published, along with a rejoinder from von Gerlach, in Hans Delbrück and Hellmut von Gerlach, ‘Correspondance: sur les responsabilités de la guerre’, Cahiers 23, 21 (10 November 1923), p. 504. 102  Comments by Bloch in Henri Guernut, ‘Rapport moral’, in Congrès national de 1923, pp. 80–1. See Chapter 5 for a full discussion of the political response of the Ligue to the Ruhr occupation.

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guerre on 19 January 1923.103 He had also sent the Ligue written responses to questions concerning the Livre jaune and Russian mobilization on at least three occasions in 1922 and 1923.104 It is strange that Kahn should have spoken at such length after Bloch’s waving of the historical olive branch in the face of the pressing political crisis occasioned by the Ruhr occupation. There was very bad blood between Kahn and Morhardt, though, so when Kahn took it upon himself to defend the apparent inability of the Comité Central to undertake any enquiry into the origins of the war, Morhardt responded. Things only got much worse when Kahn proceeded to read parts of the minutes of the meetings of the Commission des origines de la guerre which showed Morhardt in a rather anti-Semitic light. He wanted to read a letter Morhardt had written to Buisson, but Basch protested because it mentioned him. Morhardt climbed onto the stage, ripped the letter from Kahn’s hands, and was then censured by the Congress. The debate on war origins then heated up again until finally he left the stage to loud applause. The ‘rapport moral’ was approved with only fourteen votes against, but one has to wonder if unanimity might have been achieved had Kahn not provoked Morhardt.105 Having failed to budge the LDH in the direction of a full examination of the question of war origins, Gouttenoire de Toury took a different tack in 1924, saying that he was not going to repeat the mistakes of 1921 and 1922. Even though he still believed that Articles 228 and 231 were morally and historically wrong, he set his sights in 1924 merely on getting the Ligue to declare that Article 231 was legally void because it had made the victorious Allies both judge and plaintiff in the case against Germany. He also said that he believed that reparations ought to be paid—just not on the basis of the morally, politically, and judiciously specious grounds of Article 231. De Toury argued that politically France was heading down a very dangerous path because all of Germany, from the extreme right to the extreme left, considered Article 231 to be wrong. Yet again, he argued (as did other members of the minority) that this struggle against the iniquity of Article 231 was of exactly the same order as the Ligue’s foundational événement dateur, the Dreyfus Affair; the very same principles were at stake.106 Alphonse Aulard responded on behalf of the Comité Central. He took the ­position that the Ligue had already given satisfaction to Gouttenoire de Toury’s request, first in Emile Kahn’s speech to the 1921 Congress and the following year in the motion passed at the Nantes Congress. The historian of the French Revolution agreed with Gouttenoire de Toury that Article 231 was wrong on legal 103  See Commission des origines de la guerre, ‘Séance du 19 Janvier 1923’, in BDIC/ALDH/ F∆Rés 798/9 Commission des Origines de la Guerre Chemise 1. 104  See Raymond Poincaré to Ferdinand Buisson, Paris, 9 August 1922; Raymond Poincaré to Ferdinand Buisson, Paris, 9 January 1923; and Raymond Poincaré to Ferdinand Buisson, n.d. [but given the context it must have been between 14 and 27 March 1923], in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés 798/9 Commission des Origines de la Guerre Chemise 1. 105  Emile Kahn, ‘Réponse de M. Emile Kahn’, in Congrès national de 1923, pp. 87, 92, 106–10. 106  Fernand Gouttenoire de Toury, ‘La Ligue et le Traité de Versailles’, in Le Congrès national de 1924: Compte-rendu sténographique (27–29 Décembre 1924) (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1925), pp. 24, 26, 32.

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grounds, reminding his listeners that one of the great heritages of the Revolution was that one could not force a victim to confess a crime. This meant that torture was no longer permitted, but he argued that Germany had hardly been the victim of torture at the Paris peace conference; what he called ‘moral pressure’ was about as far as it got. He also made the point that Article 231 was not about Germany alone, but rather about Germany and its allies. This was all well and good, but did not address Gouttenoire de Toury’s argument about the political impact of Article 231 in Germany. What is interesting in Aulard’s speech, however, is his rather sanguinary approach to Article 228. He maintained that it would have been better for all concerned ‘if His Apostolic Majesty, the Emperor of Austria-Hungary, Franz Joseph, had lived longer, [and] if he had been hanged at the same time as the Emperor of Germany’. This would have been an ‘excellent thing’, ‘especially if the Germans had done it’ because it would have uprooted the monarchist idea in Germany as it had done in France with the execution of Louis XVI: ‘one must not think that such a gesture, even if bloody, against someone who himself had caused so much blood to flow would not have been useful in a time of revolution.’107 Aulard’s comments betray yet again the extent to which the Comité Central and the majority within the Ligue, while they might have held pious reservations about the legal niceties of the Versailles Treaty, were essentially of the belief that it was morally on the money. The Germans had started the war and Wilhelm deserved to be hanged. This divergence between fond and forme is what created the Ligue’s bipolar disorder on the political question of Germany. It was to dog the LDH all the way down to the German invasion of 1940. This despite the fact that Victor Basch claimed that Gouttenoire de Toury was tilting at windmills and trying ‘to break down open doors’; Basch believed that the Ligue had been entirely consistent in its opposition to the Versailles Treaty both inside France and even in Germany.108 It is hard not to escape the conclusion that the French government, even when it was led by a Ligueur such as Edouard Herriot, prime minister during the Cartel des Gauches years, was afraid of publishing its diplomatic archives. Despite repeated demands for such a publication, Herriot finally responded to the Ligue in  November 1924 with a letter which sounded awfully like an admission that there might well be something to hide. Despite the stock claim that he and his government would like nothing more than to ‘shed light on the events of the war’, he nevertheless claimed that the time was not opportune because the publication of the archives could ‘provoke controversies which might evoke or inflame national passions’, and he wanted to do everything in his power to avoid any act that might harm the policy of appeasement with Germany that his government was pursuing.109

107  Alphonse Aulard, in the debate on ‘La Ligue et le Traité de Versailles’, in Congrès national de 1924, p. 40. 108  Victor Basch, in the debate on ‘La Ligue et le Traité de Versailles’, in Congrès national de 1924, p. 41. 109  Edouard Herriot, ‘Nos interventions: pour la publication des archives diplomatiques’, Cahiers 24, 26 (20 December 1924), p. 626.

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For all that, despite what the Ligue’s majority thought was a tendentious parti pris in Morhardt’s pronouncements on war origins, Henri Sée gave Morhardt’s book, Les Preuves, a fairly positive review in the Cahiers, even if he had reservations about some of its theses. Sée wrote that, in contradistinction to other reviewers of Morhardt’s work, it seemed to him that ‘people have been unfair towards a worker who is not only impartial, but conscientious, and who has devoted himself to extensive research, who has unearthed many questions, and whose analysis, written with clarity and talent, makes for a good read.’ What was ‘most arguable’, according to Sée, was the entire first section of the book which dealt with the ‘common law crime’, or in other words with the assassination at Sarajevo. He admitted that it was possible that the Serbian government had been actively involved in the plot to kill Franz Ferdinand, but Morhardt had not really demonstrated it beyond any reasonable doubt. He did say, however, that Morhardt had sufficiently demonstrated the falsifications in the Livre Jaune and the Russian Livre Orange to prove that the two governments did not have a ‘perfectly clear conscience’, and that it was ‘right to conclude . . . that there was, at this decisive moment, on the part of the French government, neither protest nor even reservations with regard to the dangerous initiative being taken by the Tsar’s government’. On the other hand, Sée thought that Morhardt’s analysis of British policy was ‘debatable’; he wrote that Morhardt had not succeeded in demonstrating that the British were ‘hypocritical’ or ‘sly’; in Sée’s view they were merely afflicted with ‘inertia and indecision’. The big problem was the one-sidedness of Morhardt’s analysis. Sée wrote that it was like a ‘diptych of which only one panel is painted’. In an indication perhaps of the extent to which the thesis of shared responsibility was making headway, Sée concluded that Morhardt’s major failing—his unwillingness to countenance the responsibility of the Central Powers in the outbreak of war—was just as dangerous from both an historical and political point of view as it would have been to lay all of the blame on ‘our adversaries’.110 The short review of Morhardt’s book is emblematic of subtle changes that were occurring in the mainstream Ligue conception of the war responsibility/war origins debate. The end of the Ruhr occupation, the Dawes Plan, and most i­mportantly, the advent of the Locarno era all contributed to making this possible. The change in attitude of the LDH is perceptible. Thus, for example, in a kind of pre-emptive strike against a notice of an impending formal question from Gouttenoire de Toury, the executive committee underlined that Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty did not condemn Germany alone, but rather Germany and its allies. The committee claimed that the article did not say ‘explicitly’ that Germany was responsible for the war, merely that Germany and its allies had ‘committed an aggression’. The Ligue had never based the ‘duty of Germany to pay reparations on its responsibility for the war, but rather on the fact  that it had materially caused the damages.’ The Ligue had always believed, it claimed, that Article 231 was ‘contrary to justice’ because it had extorted from a  defeated people an admission of guilt. This question was not the province of 110  Henri Sée, ‘Mémento bibliographique’, Cahiers 25, 7 (25 March 1925), p. 168.

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­ olitics, but of history, and the ‘only campaign that the Ligue can undertake, and p which is part of its tradition, is to argue for the publication of the diplomatic archives’.111 As we have seen, however, it was precisely the unwillingness of the French government to publish, or even to open, its diplomatic archives that was part of the problem. By the end of 1924, it is clear that a sea change was occurring in the public expressions of the Ligue’s views on war origins. The French historian Alphonse Aulard wrote in La Dépêche de Toulouse, a newspaper which often served as a mouthpiece for Ligue intellectuals seeking a broad audience, that ‘[the Germans] signed [the Versailles Treaty] only under pressure from the allies . . . in sum, to put it crudely, it was an admission extracted by force.’ In good Republican fashion, Aulard reminded his readers that ever since the Revolution, and especially since the Declaration of the Rights of Man, any admission of guilt extracted under duress or by torture was not valid. His conclusion was simple and applied to Germany: ‘It is the same with a people.’112 Aulard’s position became official Ligue policy in early January 1925, and for the first time since the war if not before, his motion received not just the unanimous support of the rest of the CC, but also that of Mathias Morhardt. The motion reiterated the principle that an admission of guilt could not be extracted under duress and demanded the publication of the French diplomatic archives under the direction of competent historians, following the example of Germany. It is a little surprising that Morhardt voted for this resolution, however, because one of its clauses underlined the Ligue position that whatever the outcome of the debate on war origins and responsibilities might be, Germany had to repair the damages it had caused in northern France.113 Despite all that, there continued to be deep animosity expressed towards Morhardt and his ideas by Basch, Guernut, and Kahn especially. Morhardt ­continued doggedly to make the case that Viviani and Poincaré had either been asleep at the switch at the end of July 1914 or that, in the case of Poincaré at least, he had actually desired a war with Germany. When Herriot and Poincaré wrote to the Ligue confirming yet again that Viviani could not have known about the Russian general mobilization in the early evening of 31 July 1914 when he had his meeting with the German ambassador, von Schoen, Morhardt’s caustic retort was that the letter from Poincaré was ‘impudent’, that there were ‘a thousand ways’ Viviani could have recalled the German ambassador later that evening to inform him of the news from St Petersburg. Morhardt, for his part, continued to believe that Viviani had been informed of the mobilization the evening before by Maurice Paléologue, the French ambassador in St Petersburg. The executive committee of the Ligue seems not to have dismissed Morhardt’s argument out of hand, because Emile Kahn was delegated to investigate further.114 111  Bureau du Comité, ‘Séance du 1er décembre 1924’, Cahiers 25, 2 (20 January 1925), pp. 38–9. 112  Alphonse Aulard, ‘L’Article 231’, Cahiers 25, 3 (30 January 1925), p. 55. The article had first been published in La Dépêche de Toulouse on 31 December 1924. 113  Comité Central, ‘Séance du 5 janvier 1925’, Cahiers 25, 3 (30 January 1925), pp. 63–4. 114  Bureau du Comité, ‘Séance du 23 mars 1925’, Cahiers 25, 10 (10 May 1925), p. 233.

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The problem with both sides in this debate was that each held a priori beliefs about the origins of the war, each had a set of ‘unspoken assumptions’—to use James Joll’s phrase115—which coloured completely the way they viewed the issue. The unspoken assumptions of the Ligue’s majority were seconded by those of the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte. Both assumed that Germany was at fault, and even though the French Ligue professed to be opposed to Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty, it nevertheless fundamentally believed Article 231 expressed the truth about what had happened in 1914. The problem with Article 231 was one of form, not of content. The article was iniquitous because, as Aulard and others had begun to point out, it had been extracted by force from a defeated enemy and was thus contrary to precepts of post-Revolutionary justice. But as for its content, it is clear that the Ligue’s majority believed that it represented the truth. And they were equally convinced that any impartial study by historians, based on all of the ‘facts’ in the form of the diplomatic archives of the belligerent powers, would prove the same. Strangely, however, Basch and Company did not wish to debate the issue with Morhardt and his friends from the Société d’études, despite the express request of three Ligue sections that they do just that.116 The executive committee justified its refusal to entertain the idea of a debate by saying that ‘it believes that in the present state of documentation, the Ligue could not possibly have a well-grounded and serious opinion on the question at hand.’117 This was disingenuous to say the least because the Ligue certainly did have an opinion, or perhaps more accurately, as we have seen, majority and minority opinions. The full committee discussed the request for a debate at its meeting on 25 April 1925. Aulard, at least, was prepared to admit that a study of the archives might reveal that Germany was innocent.118 The others were less convinced. Basch was concerned that any ‘controversy on war responsibilities, far from calming the animus or the hatred, will only, on the contrary, make them worse; in the interest of appeasement and of reconciliation, it would be best not to stir up this question publicly, and leave to history the trouble of resolving it’. As for Poincaré, who was increasingly being vilified in certain quarters, Basch said that if the Ligue were to intervene, it would be more likely to defend M. Poincaré, because the only thing that seems clear today is that M. Poincaré belonged to a generation fed on the idea of revenge, and it was this idea that had inspired his politics: one could not say without error that he had either desired or provoked the war.119 115  See James Joll, 1914: The Unspoken Assumptions. An Inaugural Lecture Delivered 25 April 1968 (London: London School of Economics and Political Science/Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968). 116  The president of the St. Germain-en-Laye section was Armand Charpentier, the secretary of Evolution; St Germain, Aulnoy in the Nord, and the section in the XVIIIème arrondissement in Paris all asked for a speaker from the CC to debate Morhardt. 117  Bureau du Comité, ‘Séance du 6 avril 1925’, Cahiers 25, 11 (25 May 1925), p. 252. 118  ‘La Ligue, déclare M. Aulard, doit demander la lumière; c’est dans cet esprit qu’elle a fait campagne pour que les archives diplomatiques soient publiées; celle publication révélera-t-elle la culpabilité ou l’innocence de l’Allemagne? Peu nous importe, car nous ne voulons que la vérité. Tel a été l’esprit qui a inspiré notre campagne, c’est dans cet esprit que nous avons à continuer.’ See Comité Central, ‘Extraits. Séance du 20 avril 1925’, Cahiers 25, 11 (25 May 1925), p. 251. 119  Basch in ibid.

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By 1925, it is clear that a process of disintegration was slowly occurring in the Ligue majority’s view and its core explanation of the question of origins and responsibility for the Great War. The certainties of the war itself, the hardline ­position of the early post-war period, all seemed to be dissolving gradually as the Ligue approached the watershed event of the Locarno Treaty which was to have such a salubrious effect on Franco-German relations. Henri Sée, the man who, until William Irvine some eighty years later, had published the only history of the Ligue des droits de l’homme, reviewed Alfred Fabre-Luce’s book, La Victoire, in May 1925 in the Cahiers. Sée seemed much more open to a dissenting view on the war’s origins than many of his colleagues in the LDH. He noted that Fabre-Luce came to essentially the same conclusions as Mathias Morhardt on the Russian mobilization, and he agreed with him that the Franco-Russian alliance was ‘one of the determining causes of the catastrophe’ made worse by what he called the ‘deviation’ engineered by Poincaré and Isvolsky to ensure that France would intervene on Russia’s side in any crisis in the Balkans. Fabre-Luce had come up with what Sée called ‘a gripping formula’ to describe what had happened in 1914: ‘Germany and Austria did things that made the war possible; the Triple Entente did those that made it certain.’ Sée thought that this was ‘perhaps too indulgent’ towards the Central Powers, but it did have the advantage of recognizing that not all of the guilt could be assigned to only one of the parties. He did not think that either the French government or Poincaré had wanted the war, but neither had they done enough to prevent it once the July Crisis began. In similar manner, he believed that Wilhelm II became convinced that the Entente wanted to attack him and allowed himself to be won over by the idea of a preventive war. In all of this it is clear that the notion of a shared responsibility for the war was making enormous headway by 1925. Sée underlined how important this was in practical political terms by quoting from a speech made by Robert Kuczynski, an influential member of the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte, in Reims in November 1924, in which he had said that ‘Exaggerated statements such as those that declare Germany alone to be responsible for the outbreak of the war . . . are a windfall for our nationalists and paralyse the efforts of German democrats and pacifists.’120 In the same year that his journal, Evolution, saw the light of day, the novelist and essayist Victor Margueritte congratulated the LDH for finally coming around to demanding changes to Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty, something he claimed was due to the ‘constant pressure’ of Gouttenoire de Toury, Mathias Morhardt, and Oscar Bloch. Emile Kahn took it upon himself to respond by saying that the Ligue had not ‘suddenly’ come around to this position at all, but rather had condemned Article 231 since at least its 1921 Congress and even more so at the 1922 Nantes Congress.121 In June 1925, however, the Ligue’s president, Ferdinand Buisson, expressed the view that the Ligue needed to intervene with the government to seek 120  Henri Sée, ‘Mémento bibliographique’, Cahiers 25, 11 (25 May 1925), p. 264. 121  Kahn’s comments, drawn from a letter of rectification he sent to L’Ere nouvelle, come at the end of an extract from Victor Margueritte’s article, originally published on 24 April 1925 in L’Ere nouvelle. See Victor Margueritte, ‘L’Article 231’, Cahiers 25, 12 (10 June 1925), p. 271.

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clarification on what exactly was understood by Article 231. If it signified that ‘Germany and its Allies were responsible for the war’, then the Ligue would have trouble accepting this ‘hypothesis’ since it was an admission extracted from Germany by force. If, on the other hand, it merely meant that Germany was responsible for the damages it had caused, then everybody needed to know that.122 Buisson argued forcefully that it was the latter. The rest of his colleagues were not so sure. Most members of the CC thought the Ligue needed to continue to condemn Article 231 because they understood it in the larger sense that Germany and its allies were responsible for the war. In the end, the Comité Central declined to send Buisson’s letter to the Président du Conseil. Alphonse Aulard proposed instead that the CC send all of the motions passed at its Congresses condemning the article, and suggested that France make the magnanimous (and condescending) gesture of declaring that it would make no further reference to Germany’s war guilt when the latter was admitted to the League of Nations.123 The Comité Central might no longer have been absolutely certain what Article 231 meant, but the minority entertained no such doubts; it continued to contest the validity of the ‘war guilt clause’ most emphatically. In any event, the CC decided not to approve a letter that Buisson had drafted to the Président du Conseil in this regard, electing instead to remain with the status quo: a condemnation of the legal form of Article 231 but reaffirming nonetheless Germany’s obligation to pay its reparations.124 By the end of 1924 it is clear that changes were afoot in the Ligue’s conception of the war guilt debate. The sustained campaign of the minority against Article 231 was beginning to bear fruit, albeit grudgingly from the majority’s perspective. It is important to remember, though, that the war guilt debate did not occur in a French vacuum. Chapter 5 explores first the impact of the war guilt debate on the Ligue’s relationship with a variety of German interlocutors, and secondly its ­tangible political ramifications through the prism of the Ligue’s response to the Ruhr Occupation of 1923.125

122  Comité Central, ‘Extraits. Séance du 12 juin 1925’, Cahiers 25, 19 (25 September 1925), pp. 448–9. 123 Ibid. 124  Ibid. Later that same year, however, the Cahiers published Buisson’s draft letter. Perhaps this was an end run by Guernut around the decision not to send it to the Président du Conseil. Guernut, despite worrying that Buisson’s letter was too ambiguous, essentially shared the Ligue president’s view of the meaning of Article 231. See Ferdinand Buisson, ‘Le Traité de Versailles’, Cahiers 25, 22 (25 October 1925), pp. 511–12. 125  Parts of this chapter have been previously published in Norman Ingram, ‘A la Recherche d’une guerre gagnée: The Ligue des droits de l’homme and the War Guilt Question’, French History 24, 2 (June 2010), pp. 218–35. I am grateful to the editors of French History for permission to use parts of this article here.

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5 Bridge over the Abyss? Talking to the Germans The Ligue des droits de l’homme developed many German interlocutors during the Great War and the twenties: the German Foreign Office, members of the German peace movement, German intellectuals and professors, as well as, perhaps most importantly, its German counterpart, the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte (DLfM). This chapter sets out above all to examine the relationship between the LDH and the Deutsche Liga from the immediate post-First World War period down to 1924, but also to consider the relationship between the Ligue and other Germans. Of central concern is the way in which the Ligue’s German counterpart dealt with the question of war guilt, especially in light of the increasingly strident demands of the French for fulfilment of the reparations provisions of the Versailles Treaty. The 1922 visit of the French Ligue to Germany was a defining moment in the burgeoning relationship between the French and German sister organizations, but it was a visit fraught with outside political interference as the German Foreign Office sought to manipulate and constrain the direction of the discussions between the two leagues.1 The irony is that the developing transnational connections between the LDH and the Deutsche Liga served only to obfuscate any real understanding by the French of the war guilt issue; far from clarifying French perceptions, the relationship of the LDH and the DLfM actually tended to distort them. This was an unintended and unconscious consequence, but it encouraged the LDH in its attempt to square the circle in criticizing the peace treaties while at the same time arguing for fulfilment of reparations. Key figures in the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte (until early 1922 known as the Bund neues Vaterland) were approvingly published in the Cahiers because their views dovetailed nicely with the dominant view of the origins of the Great War held by the majority within the LDH. Two of these early German voices were those of Professor Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster2 and Hellmut von 1  Otto Lehmann-Russbüldt wrote a pamphlet about this visit from which the title of this chapter is drawn. See Otto Lehmann-Russbüldt, Die Brücke über den Abgrund: Für die Verständigung zwischen Deutschland und Frankreich. Bericht über den Besuch der ‘Französischen Liga für Menschenrechte’ in Berlin und im Ruhrgebiet (Berlin: Verlag Neues Vaterland, 1922). 2  See the entries on Foerster in Harold Josephson, ed., Biographical Dictionary of Modern Peace Leaders (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1985) and in Helmut Donat and Karl Holl, eds., Die Friedensbewegung: Organisierter Pazifismus in Deutschland, Österreich und in der Schweiz (Düsseldorf: ECON Taschenbuch Verlag, 1983).

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Gerlach.3 Together they presented a view of Germany and the German danger that was congenial to many within the Ligue. This became an issue at the LDH’s 1922 Congress when Fernand Gouttenoire de Toury criticized the Ligue’s affiliation with the Bund neues Vaterland, calling it the ‘most extremist’ of the German groups because it ‘laid total responsibility for the war on Germany and the consequence— and this is a fact—is that it has very little influence; it has at best 200 members in all of Germany’. This meant that the LDH’s choice was ‘not a very happy one’ in de Toury’s view.4 Thus, for example, in late 1921, the Cahiers published an extract from the French translation of Foerster’s book, Mes combats: à l’assaut du nationalisme et du militarisme allemand, in which he categorically refuted the thesis of shared responsibility for the outbreak of war. Foerster’s thesis was extremely black and white: he blamed not just the German military caste, but indeed all of German society for the disaster which had befallen the nation. Germany was militarized through and through, and it was this that had created the problem. As Foerster wrote, ‘Without a doubt, the geographical situation of Germany and the vicissitudes of its history pushed it to develop its militarism. But its grave and truly tragic error was to abandon the most tested traditions of German history, to end up with a purely materialist and military conception of politics.’5 Unlike other nations, which recognized the dangers of militarism and sought to control it, according to Foerster, Germany remained convinced that in an anarchical world the ‘law of the fist’ needed to prevail. The international community had tried to regulate the European penchant for military solutions at the two Hague conferences of 1899 and 1907, but the German government would have none of it. It was because of German intransigence at The Hague that the ‘encirclement’ of Germany began. This was not an entirely accurate rendering of what had happened at The Hague, however. As Jost Dülffer makes clear, while it is true that the Germans were truculently antagonistic to the ideas underpinning Tsar Nicholas II’s call, there is little doubt that the French and British

3  See the entries on von Gerlach in Josephson, ed., Biographical Dictionary and in Donat and Holl, eds., Die Friedensbewegung. 4  Fernand Gouttenoire de Toury, ‘Discours de M.  Gouttenoire de Toury’ in debate on Victor Basch’s report on ‘La Reconstruction de l’Europe’, in Le Congrès national de 1922. Compte-rendu sténographique. Nantes, 4–6 Juin 1922 (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1922), pp. 387–8. In the debate on his ‘Rapport moral’ at this same Congress, the Ligue’s secretary-general, Henri Guernut, said that the reason Gouttenoire de Toury did not like Hellmut von Gerlach and the Germans in the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte is because they shared the LDH majority’s appreciation of the war guilt question. See ‘Réponse de M. Henri Guernut’ in Congrès national de 1922, p. 36. Cf. the text of a resolution passed by the Bund neues Vaterland and the Société allemande de la paix, which declared that Austria and Germany were uniquely responsible for the outbreak of war because of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, German support for it, and the decision to block the proposals for arbitration coming from London and St Petersburg, in ‘Un Document suggestif ’, Cahiers 21, 17 (10 September 1921), pp. 396–7. 5  Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster, ‘L’Allemagne coupable’, Cahiers 21, 24 (25 December 1921), p. 565. Foerster’s thesis has found a latter-day echo in Martin Ceadel, Thinking about Peace and War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), esp. Chapter  8 (‘The Determinants of the Debate’). Ceadel, like Foerster before him, lays great emphasis on the development of German political culture, in tandem with the geopolitical situation of Germany, as an explanation for the German antipathy to pacifism.

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were opposed to many of the ideas discussed at the two Hague ­conferences.6 Foerster thus explicitly linked the German position at The Hague with guilt for the Great War. And this guilt covered all of German society because, as Foerster wrote, ‘the peace idea met nowhere, even within the cultivated classes, the same disdain and incomprehension that it has met in Germany since 1870–71.’7 War guilt was therefore not to be assigned to ‘the whole world’, and neither was ‘world capitalism’ or ‘militarism in general’, or any other ‘evil power’ for that matter, the culprit. Anyone who thought that way, according to Foerster, was oblivious to the differences which distinguished one people from another in its way of thinking and in its ‘conception of war’.8 This disastrous idea was also held by the Austrian Germans. Foerster laid the blame for the Russian general mobilization squarely at the feet of German history: When one thinks back to the militarist atmosphere that the faith of the new Germany had placed in violence and the Prussian repugnance for any entente, one sees clearly that the Russian mobilization was nothing but the inevitable result of the menacing attitude of Germany, and not the cause of the outbreak of the world war.9

This German way of thinking was not the province merely of the military caste, but was shared by all of German society, what he called ‘an immense national error,’ which he compared to developments in France where the Dreyfus Affair had ‘definitively defeated the last attempts at a military autocracy.’10 Foerster’s analysis of the Russian general mobilization ran completely counter to the theses of the LDH’s minority which fervently believed that it was the single most important cause of the conflagration in 1914. Two weeks later, the president of the Bund neues Vaterland, Hellmut von Gerlach, also warned Ligueurs of the dangers of the German reaction. He took essentially the same position as Foerster had a few weeks earlier, arguing that the forces of reaction in Germany had been only momentarily dispossessed of power after 9 November 1918; they had quickly reasserted themselves and were now a veritable threat to the new Republic. That said, von Gerlach’s views were less of a jeremiad than Foerster’s. He did not think that the Republic was in imminent danger or that world peace was threatened for two essential reasons. First was the fact that the leadership of the bourgeois parties had become Vernunftrepublikaner (republicans by reason) who, although they might still harbour nostalgia for the monarchy, were afraid to push for its restoration for fear of a civil war. They loved the Fatherland and detested the Versailles Treaty, but also realized that any attempt at treaty revision by violent means would be a disaster. For the bourgeois, the salvation of Germany lay 6  Cf. Jost Dülffer, Regeln gegen den Krieg? Die Haager Friedenskonferenzen von 1899 und 1907 in der internationalen Politik (Bremen: Ullstein Verlag, 1981). Unlike Foerster, Dülffer sees failings in the policies of all of the Great Powers present at The Hague, even if he shares many of the same criticisms of German policy as Foerster. 7  Foerster, ‘L’Allemagne coupable’, p. 566. See also Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and a World Without War: The Peace Movement and German Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), which underscores the frailty of the pre-1914 German peace movement. 8  Foerster, ‘L’Allemagne coupable’, p. 565. 9  Ibid., p. 566. 10  Ibid., p. 567.

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in international rapprochement, which meant supporting the Weimar Republic and the League of Nations idea. He singled out typical representatives of this way of thinking in the eminent historian Hans Delbrück, on the right, and Chancellor Wirth on the left. Secondly, however, the best and firmest guarantee of the Weimar Republic’s pacifist and democratic nature was the German working class. The Great War had cured it of its momentary flirtation with m ­ ilitarism, and it made up 60 per cent of the population. At the end of the day, von Gerlach offered an optimistic view of the German future to his French readers.11 It would be a mistake to think that the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte was unequivocally supportive of the French position on Germany, or even of the views of the majority within the Ligue des droits de l’homme. There were certainly strong voices warning of the dangers facing German democrats under the Weimar Republic, but these were often couched in terms blaming French policy, at least partially, for the situation outre-Rhin. Similarly, there was hardly unanimity, initially at least, among the Germans with regard to the issue of war origins and war guilt. And sometimes it appeared that there was simply incoherence. In the latter category were the ‘impressions’ that Hellmut von Gerlach imparted to readers of Die Weltbühne about his January 1922 trip to Paris. In the space of two sentences, von Gerlach reassured his German readers first that ‘the mass of the [French] people thinks substantially differently from the way they had at the time of the last elections [in 1919]’, and yet secondly that the hardnosed viewpoint of the Chamber was ‘understandable’ given the ‘conviction of all French people that the war had been forced upon them by Germany’.12 Von Gerlach seemed to be oblivious to the inherent contradiction of what he wrote. What is even more interesting is the way in which he phrased this oxymoron: he underlined to his readers that all French people believed the war had been imposed on them by Germany, but he did not tell them that this was his position, too. Implicitly, his wording suggested the contrary. That was something he was prepared to share with French readers, but not German ones, despite claiming in a speech made in Paris in the middle of the Ruhr occupation of 1923 that ‘for a long time’ he had been trying ‘to proclaim and to spread this truth . . . to the population of the Reich’ about the ‘preponderant responsibility’ of Germany and Austria in the explosion of the Great War.13 ‘Preponderant’, of course, did not mean unique. Warnings from across the Rhine were also tempered by criticism by the Bund neues Vaterland of French and Allied policy towards Germany in the immediate post-First World War period. In 1921, for example, Dr Emil Julius Gumbel14 wrote 11  Hellmut von Gerlach, ‘La Réaction allemande’, Cahiers 22, 1 (10 January 1922), pp. 11–13. 12 Hellmut von Gerlach, ‘Pariser Eindrücke’, Die Weltbühne 18, 4 (26 January 1922), p. 83. Comparing the English willingness to move beyond the hostility of the war years to French obduracy, he wrote, ‘In Frankreich sind wir noch nicht so weit. Zwar die Masse des Volkes denkt auch hier jetzt erheblich anders als zur Zeit der letzten Wahlen. Aber die Kammermehrheit vertritt noch “voll und ganz” den nackten Siegerstandpunkt. Ihre Stimmung ist begreiflich, wenn man bedenkt, daß nach der Ueberzeugung aller Franzosen der Krieg ihnen durch Deutschland aufgezwungen worden ist . . . ’ 13  Hellmut von Gerlach, ‘Les Rapports franco-allemands’, Cahiers 23, 14 (10 August 1923), p. 341. 14  Emil Julius Gumbel (1891–1966) was a renowned German mathematician and statistician who taught at the University of Heidelberg until 1932, and from then until 1940 at the Universities of

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of the already yawning gap between the theory of a liberal, progressive Weimar Republic and the harsh reality of life in Germany. In theory, Germany was ‘the most perfect democracy in the world’, but in reality, according to Gumbel, political conditions were akin to those of Russian absolutism. What was perhaps even more damning was his assertion that under the ‘ancien régime, such injustices had not existed’.15 But while Gumbel was very critical of the state of internal German politics, he could not buy into the proposition that there was something inherently, historically wrong with German political culture. Gumbel examined the history of perceptions of German militarism before, during, and after the Great War. Before the war, Germany had been perceived as a militarist nation, but Gumbel wrote that though this was a logical conclusion given Germany’s position at the two Hague peace conferences (1899 and 1907), nevertheless, ‘for the period that preceded the war, this opinion was no truer of Germany than of many other European countries’. As for war origins and war guilt, Gumbel wrote that it was ‘absolutely false’ to believe that in the years before 1914 Germany had simply waited for an opportunity to attack a ‘peaceful and democratic world in order to conquer it’. If German responsibilities were to be discussed, three essential points had to be made. The first was the responsibility of the economic system which made preparation for war such a great business opportunity for the ‘possessing class’. Secondly, there was the fault of German diplomats who, with their ‘absolute confidence in the infallibility of blood and iron’, had rejected pacific solutions and thus rendered the war ‘inevitable’. Thirdly, there was the fault of the German ­people who misguidedly believed war to be a ‘magnificent and exalting thing’. They had originally welcomed the war, but from there to claiming that Germany had desired a war of conquest was an unjust conclusion. The generally held belief in Germany was that it had been fighting a defensive war against a Russian attack, and that moreover Germany had been defending occidental culture against the onslaught of Russian barbarism.16 The way the war ended had been tragic for Germany because it had given rise to the hoary tale of the stab-in-the-back. Gumbel criticized the Weimar government for having crawled into bed from the earliest days of the German revolution with the right and with the very elements in German society that were inimical to any progressive development. But Gumbel also blamed the Entente for not having rid Germany of militarism. He saved his major criticisms, a veritable indictment, for the Versailles Treaty, which he called a ‘dictated peace’ that did ‘more harm to Germany than it profited the Entente’. By its blinkered and wrong-headed approach to Germany, the Entente had ‘helped to realize [in Germany] that which it reproached the most’. The Versailles Treaty had hobbled the liberal evolution of Germany through its ‘imperialist conditions’ which had had as their only consequence the ‘awakening of the nationalist spirit’ and a ‘fortified’ reaction.17 Paris and Lyon. After 1940 he was a German refugee in America, where he was a professor first at the New School of Social Research, and then at Columbia University in New York City. See the entry on Gumbel in Donat and Holl, eds., Die Friedensbewegung, pp. 168–9; see also the entry on Gumbel in Josephson, ed., Biographical Dictionary, pp. 370–1. 15  Emil Julius Gumbel, ‘L’Allemagne et la démocratie’, Cahiers 21, 20 (25 October 1921), p. 460. 16  Ibid., pp. 459–62. 17  Ibid., pp. 463–4.

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Gumbel concluded that the Entente itself was part of the problem, because it essentially supported German militarism. It did this for three reasons. First was the fear of an alleged German Bolshevism against which an army was deemed necessary. Secondly, the well-known theory of the balance of power was once again playing an important role in British policy. And finally, the French military paradoxically needed the continued existence of a German threat, of a Prussian ­militarism, to legitimate its own existence. Without the German danger, the French military would have no raison d’ être. The great tragedy was that it all might have been different. With more far-sighted policies the Entente might have made German democracy a living, viable entity. Instead, ‘three precious and decisive years have passed since 9 November 1918 and nothing has been done. It is not too late, but time is running out’, he wrote.18 Many of Gumbel’s theses were supported by Professor Hans Delbrück in a wide-ranging face-to-face discussion of war origins with Victor Basch in 1922, the first time on 12 June in Berlin, and the second on 5–6 September at Schrunz in the Vorarlberg.19 The encounter between the two academics grew out of a letter that Delbrück had sent the Ligue in March 1922, in which he laid out six theses on the war guilt question. First, Delbrück rejected the claim made in the Entente ultimatum of 16 June 1919 that Germany had intentionally and with forethought unleashed a world war in order to attain world domination. Secondly, insofar as German statesmen supported Austria’s claims against Serbia, they had believed that any resulting conflict would be localized; the spread of the conflagration was possible, but they did not believe it likely. Thirdly, Delbrück believed that the world war broke out when Russia declared general mobilization—at a moment when it looked as if diplomatic talks might succeed in defusing the crisis. Fourthly, he charged that the leaders of Russia and France were fully aware that a Russian general mobilization meant war. His fifth contention was that the French government had not done everything in its power to stop the Russians from mobilizing, and hence bore some of the responsibility for the outbreak of war. And finally, he argued that of the three great Continental powers—Russia, Germany, and France—Germany was the only one which had not armed to the point that its financial and economic power would have permitted. As for Austria-Hungary, it was even farther behind.20 18  Ibid., p. 465. 19  See the records of the Basch–Delbrück debate in BDIC Archives de la Ligue des droits de l’homme (ALDH) F∆Rés. 798/9, Commission sur les origines de la guerre. Delbrück is listed among the ‘first members and sympathizers’ of the Bund neues Vaterland in Otto Lehmann-Russbüldt, Der Kampf der Deutschen Liga für Menschenrechte (vormals Bund neues Vaterland) für den Weltfrieden, 1914–1927 (Berlin: Hensel & Co Verlag, 1927), p. 6. 20  Hans Delbrück to the Ligue des droits de l’homme (copy), Grünewald, 16 March 1922, in BDIC (ALDH) F∆Rés 798/9 Commission des Origines de la Guerre Chemise 1, folio 385. The economist Charles Gide had come to fairly critical conclusions in 1916 about France’s economic preparedness for war. A police report on an analysis by Gide of the war expenses of the belligerents at a meeting of the Société d’études documentaires et critiques sur la guerre notes that ‘La conclusion de M. Charles Gide est la suivante: “. . . il reste que financièrement la France a fait depuis 45 ans autant et plus qu’elle ne pouvait pour la Défense Nationale. La France s’est préparée à la guerre.”’ See Chef du service des renseignements généraux, ‘Rapport à Monsieur le Préfet de Police’, Paris, 7 September 1916 in APP BA. 1775 Société d’études documentaires et critiques sur la guerre. See also ‘Résumé

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We noted in Chapter 4 the extent to which Basch felt disinclined to discuss the question of war origins with people who had no education or training in the ‘scientific’ discipline of history. Debating the issue with Delbrück, who was professor of modern history at the University of Berlin, was an entirely different matter, however. With regard to Delbrück’s position on the war, Basch wrote that ‘convinced as [Delbrück] was that the world, and especially naval, policy of the Empire was worthy of the harshest criticism, nevertheless Germany had been forced into the war at one and the same time by the aggressive and insidious policies of Russia and France.’ Delbrück ‘vibrated in unison’ with the rest of Germany in believing that his country had been fighting a defensive war, but Basch argued that Delbrück had never believed in a German victory, nor had he ‘shared the crazy illusions of the Prussian statesmen and generals’.21 Why had he not protested, then, against the evidence of German atrocities during the war? In Basch’s view, it was so as not to undercut a higher task which would have been compromised by ‘legitimate’ protests. This ‘higher task’ consisted in ‘trying to persuade the government that it needed to conclude a reasonable peace as early as 1917, which M.  Delbrück believed the Entente would not have refused’.22 This was a bit disingenuous of Basch, because not only had the French government been opposed to any negotiated peace in 1917, but so had the Ligue des droits de l’homme.23 In addition to the specific historical arguments contained in Delbrück’s first memorandum, there are some interesting details about the state of mind of the Deutsche Liga on the question of war guilt. Delbrück records that the French Ligue ‘preferred to refuse any discussion [of war responsibilities], given that its representatives had come to Berlin to work towards rapprochement and that a discussion of responsibilities carried the risk of overly exciting the two sides and of distancing them from one another’.24 There was a sort of cognitive dissonance, however, in the LDH’s pronouncements on war guilt and war responsibilities as its engagement with the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte developed. The differences within and between the LDH and the Deutsche Liga on the issue of war guilt took tangible, concrete form in the debate statistique de l’exposé de M.  Ch. Gide sur les dépenses militaires des belligérants avant la guerre’, 28 May 1916 in ibid. Another report on Gide’s May presentation to the SEDCG went further and stated that ‘M. Gide ajoute son impression absolue, c’est que la France s’est préparée, a fait l’effort financier, les sacrifices nécessaires, mais qu’elle est victime d’un manque d’organisation inhérent à la race française.’ See report dated 29 May 1916 in ibid. 21 ‘Les Responsabilités de la Guerre: Discussion Delbrück-Basch’, p. 5 (folio 411) in BDIC (ALDH) F∆Rés 798/9 Commission des Origines de la Guerre Chemise 1. 22 Ibid. 23  See Maurice Halbwachs’ laudatory post-war comments below about the Bund Neues Vaterland’s calls for a paix blanche during the war, a pacifist position which the LDH had specifically condemned when French people had called for it. This lends some weight to the explanation given by Mathias Morhardt to Henri Guernut of the fons et origo of his dissenting position. See Mathias Morhardt to Henri Guernut, Capbreton (Landes), 7 September 1918. Original is in ‘Correspondance Mathias Morhardt’, on letterhead of the Société d’études documentaires et critiques sur la guerre in BDIC/ ALDH/F∆Rés. 798/7. A typescript copy may also be found in ‘Commission des Origines de la Guerre’, in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés. 798/9. 24 ‘Les Responsabilités de la Guerre: Discussion Delbrück-Basch’, p. 8 (folio 413) in BDIC/ ALDH/F∆Rés 798/9 Commission des Origines de la Guerre Chemise 1.

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about reparations and ultimately the bien-fondé of the Ruhr Occupation. There was consensus between the two Ligues on the principle of reparations, but this paradoxically occluded the much more fundamental debate on war origins and war guilt. For some of the Germans, support for the principle of reparations was contingent on the hope that the latter not provide support for French m ­ ilitarism, while for some of the French the issue of reparations had begun to revolve by 1923 around the extent to which sanctions might be used to obtain them. Through all of this, the problem of war guilt and war origins became the elephant in the room, an unspoken assumption for some, a problematic and contested assertion for others, on both sides of the Franco-German frontier. Hellmut von Gerlach, who was to become the LDH’s German poster boy for reconciliation the following year, issued in January 1921 what Théodore Ruyssen called a ‘virulent protestation’ against the reparations decisions of the Paris Conference, which meant in Ruyssen’s mind that the ‘misunderstanding is deep, infinitely more than we feared, even between those whom we believed to be least dominated by German chauvinism and those least suspect of Germanophobia among the Allies’.25 Given Ruyssen’s own participation as a delegate of the Ligue des droits de l’homme in its first post-war visit to Germany in June 1922 and the LDH’s opposition to the Ruhr Occupation the following year, it is somewhat ironic to note that he defended the right of France and its allies to demand what some were already suggesting was an excessive level of reparations, as well as arguing that the Versailles Treaty, far from precluding the use of an occupation of Germany to expedite reparation payments, actually permitted them.26 The point is that until very late 1921, there was much flux, variability, and debate within the Bund neues Vaterland on the issues of war origins, war guilt, and reparations. This paralleled the divisions within the LDH on the same questions, although in the case of the LDH these divisions were to have a much longer and ultimately far more deleterious half-life than in the Deutsche Liga. All of this began to change with the visit of a delegation of the Bund neues Vaterland to the Ligue des droits de l’homme at the beginning of January 1922.27 On the German side, the BnV delegation was composed of the Bund’s president, Hellmut von Gerlach, its secretary-general Otto Lehmann-Russbüldt, and Professor Georg Friedrich Nicolai.28 It was immediately after this visit to the LDH in Paris that the Bund neues Vaterland changed its name to the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte. 25  Théodore Ruyssen, ‘La Rupture avec l’Allemagne’, Cahiers 21, 6 (25 March 1921), p. 125. 26  Ibid., p. 124. 27  The Germans had actually not come to Paris at the behest of the Ligue, but rather to attend the first of the post-war international conferences aimed at reconciliation and organized by the Catholic pacifist Marc Sangnier. While in Paris, the group paid a visit to the Ligue’s headquarters which drew a large number of members of the Comité Central. 28  Nicolai’s position against the Great War occasioned the loss later in 1922 of his chair in physiology and medicine at the University of Berlin, after which he became an itinerant academic, ending his career at the University of Chile. See the entries on Sangnier, Lehmann-Russbüldt, and Nicolai in Josephson, ed., Biographical Dictionary. See also Georg Friedrich Nicolai, Die Biologie des Krieges (Zürich: Füssli, 1919) and Wolf Zuelzer, The Nicolai Case: A Biography (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982).

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The 3 January 1922 meeting at the Ligue’s headquarters began with Hellmut von Gerlach declaring that the ‘primordial question to resolve is that of war responsibilities’, but the discussion quickly evolved into a debate about how this might best be done. Despite the assertion by von Gerlach, seconded by various LDH luminaries, that there needed to be a real inquiry before an impartial committee composed of eminently qualified people from the neutral countries, it was clear that for both the Bund and the Ligue the outcome was foreordained. Henri Guernut waxed lyrical about how good it was to find Germans who agreed with the Ligue’s position; he said that the Bund and the LDH were ‘providentially destined to meet’ because what the Germans were saying about war responsibilities dovetailed exactly with what the Ligue had said all along: ‘On the question of the origins of the war, M. Victor Basch has been in agreement with you since 1915; he believes along with you that the Emperor Wilhelm did not want a world war, but he decided to accept one’. Nicolai, while agreeing with the thesis of German responsibility, nevertheless thought that the proposed international enquiry would not produce the desired results. He believed that Germany had to be left alone to come to the moral conclusion that it was responsible for the Great War; ‘meddling’ by foreigners would not help this happen.29 The joint communiqué, which was the result of the January meeting, was ­nevertheless strangely equivocal on the war guilt question.30 There was no blanket condemnation of Germany, nor was there an unqualified (or even a qualified) acceptance of war guilt. It is true that the first issue both organizations agreed on was the primary importance of reparations; Germany needed to recognize not only as a ‘legal obligation, but also as a moral duty’ the need to repair the damages caused by its invasion of France. This was despite the fact that Guernut in his summary of the discussions of 3 January had made it quite clear that the first question to be resolved was the war guilt question, after which, ‘in second place’, should come a discussion of reparations and disarmament.31 The second argument of the communiqué was that Germany needed to disarm, after which France would begin its own disarmament when it felt secure. Thirdly, the appeal called for the re-establishment not merely of commercial, working-class, and industrial ties, but also of links between French and German intellectuals and artists—essentially a form of moral disarmament. Later on in the document, however, both organizations agreed that all governments must open their archives so that the problem of responsibility for the war could be resolved once and for all. This was certainly no ringing endorsement from the French side of the principle of Article 231, despite the fact that the obligation of reparations must have been based on just that. And finally, the joint appeal called on the peoples of the world to recognize the League of Nations as the ‘veritable basis’ of peace and demanded that Germany be admitted to the Geneva institution. The only person who seemed to have a problem with the 29  ‘Les Allemands à la Ligue: II. La visite des délégués du Bund’, Cahiers 22, 5 (1 March 1922), pp. 111–12. 30  For the text of the communiqué see ‘Aux deux démocraties’, Cahiers 22, 2 (25 January 1922), p. 27. 31  ‘Les Allemands à la Ligue’, p. 114.

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Franco-German text was Mathias Morhardt who, ‘while paying homage to the sentiments that have inspired the joint declaration of the Comité Central of the Ligue des droits de l’homme and the delegates of the Bund Neues Vaterland’, ­nevertheless voted against it, because ‘only the search for the truth about war responsibilities can realize peace between the peoples’.32 One might disagree with Morhardt’s position on war responsibilities, but the general principle of establishing them first before erecting a superstructure of reparations and demands for disarmament made some sense. Maurice Halbwachs produced an article for the Cahiers des droits de l’homme in January 1922 introducing the Bund neues Vaterland to LDH members. Not for the first or last time in Ligue history, the essay was replete with a surprising lack of political consistency and self-awareness. Halbwachs lauded the Bund’s pacifism and its support for a negotiated peace during the war, a paix blanche, both of them positions which the Ligue had been at pains to condemn explicitly in its own membership.33 Four years after the end of the war, however, the Ligue des droits de l’homme was happy to congratulate in the Germans what it had so recently condemned in itself and also domestically in France. The parable of the mote and the beam springs to mind. The German Foreign Office had been closely monitoring the nascent relationship between the two Ligues. Its interest in the LDH began innocently enough in June 1922 just before the visit of a French delegation of the Ligue to Germany—a kind of social call in return for the visit of the German delegation to Paris in January 1922. The speaker of the Reichstag, Paul Löbe, had put the chamber at the disposal of the meeting, and the ubiquitous Hellmut von Gerlach, Harry Graf Kessler, and Professor Paul Österreich were listed as the German speakers. The French were apparently particularly interested in meeting real German workingclass people, in order, as the Foreign Office report writer, Dr von Mutius, put it, ‘to convince themselves of the veracity of the German pacifist claims that the German people . . . in its majority is completely peace-loving, anti-militarist, and averse to any idea of revenge’.34 It was therefore more than a little ironic, as von Mutius confidentially informed the Foreign Office, that the teachers’ union hall had been refused to the pacifist organizers of the meeting, because there was hardly unanimity about the pacifist theses in German society. 32  Comité Central, ‘Extraits: Séance du 6 janvier 1922’, Cahiers 22, 5 (1 March 1922), p. 114. 33  Maurice Halbwachs, ‘Le Bund Neues Vaterland’, Cahiers 22, 1 (10 January 1922), p. 3. As we have noted above, a 1916 letter to Gustave Hervé made a point of underlining that ‘neither in the Comité central, nor in any of the 800 sections of the Ligue, does there exist any trace of the spirit [of pacifism] which you condemn; none of our colleagues has taken, to our knowledge, an initiative which we should be the first to reprove.’ Even this 1916 statement was disingenuous, however, because the bona fides of the LDH’s position was already being contested by a minority group within the Ligue in the form of the Société d’études documentaires et critique sur la guerre. Unlike in later years when the word ‘pacifism’ was thrown around with wild abandon and apparently little understanding of its ramifications, during the Great War the Ligue understood it correctly to be a ‘tendency in favour of peace at any price’. See Comité central, ‘Extraits. Séance du 6 mars 1916’, Bulletin officiel de la Ligue des droits de l’homme, 16, 7–8 (July–August 1916), pp. 399–400. 34  ‘Aufzeichnung’ by Herrn Gesandten von Mutius, Berlin, 3 June 1922 in Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes [hereafter PA/AA] R 70930 Pazifismus Frankreich.

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Von Mutius also discussed the composition of the French delegation, and here it is clear that the Auswärtiges Amt understood better than Halbwachs what pacifism really was. Von Mutius described Victor Basch as ‘no more a pacifist than [Ferdinand] Buisson’, the Ligue’s president and also a member of the delegation. The other three members of the delegation were Pierre Renaudel, Théodore Ruyssen (president of the Association de la Paix par le Droit), and Henri Guernut. Ruyssen was the only genuine pacifist in the group, albeit what I call an old-style pacifist, representing the juridical, internationalist branch of French pacifism with roots which stretched back into the nineteenth century. Guernut, despite calling himself a pacifist at one of the public meetings organized for the LDH speakers,35 was hardly one. In fact, he was one of the LDH Central Committee members most opposed to the theses of the pacifist minority in the 1930s. Von Mutius informed the Foreign Office that given the ‘bitter opposition that the Right-wing parties . . . have given the efforts of the German pacifists, the forthcoming event is not without risk for the hosts and a success is in no way guaranteed.’36 In a meeting with Hellmut von Gerlach, the Foreign Office brought pressure to bear on the German organizers not to discuss domestic politics or ­otherwise to paint the German militarists and monarchists as the real enemies of world peace. Instead, von Mutius counselled reserve, ‘domestic political tact’, and benevolent neutrality; it was simply ‘out of the question’ for the Foreign Ministry to be present in an official capacity at either the Reichstag meeting or at the reception scheduled for the following day.37 A confidential report on the public meeting in the Reichstag indicated that the chamber was full, with many women, students, young people, and artists in attendance. Löbe, the speaker of the Reichstag, declared that ‘the German burger and worker vigilantly watched to ensure that another war not break out.’ Count Kessler claimed that the German population ‘in its overwhelming majority want[ed] peace with France’, and that furthermore ‘the German people want[ed] to fulfil its r­ eparations obligations’,38 which it saw as the ‘fundamental condition for the reconstruction of Europe and the corner stone for the attainable European solidarity’.39 Kessler’s commitment to reparations was contingent, however: he recognized the ‘moral duty’ to pay reparations, but insisted that German ‘good will’ had a ‘certain limit, and that was the point at which we might receive the impression that our payments and our deliveries were not being used to restore European solidarity, but rather for other purposes, namely foreign rearmament and foreign militarism’.40 In Bochum 35  See report by Wachtmeister (Cavalry Sergeant) Lippold, Bochum, 17 June 1922 in PA/AA R 70930 Pazifismus Frankreich. Guernut said in his speech ‘Der Versailler Völkerbund ist unbefriedigend. Er hat bisher in keiner von den grossen Fragen, die den Frieden und die Ruhe der Welt gefährden, wesentliches leisten können.’ 36 ‘Aufzeichnung’ by Herrn Gesandten von Mutius, Berlin, 3 June 1922 in PA/AA R 70930 Pazifismus Frankreich. 37 Ibid. 38  ‘G[eheim]. A[kten].’, n.d., but clearly a report on the visit of the LDH delegation in June 1922, in PA/AA R 70930 Pazifismus Frankreich. 39 Ibid. 40  Cited in Lehmann-Russbüldt, Brücke, p. 9. Von Mutius reported this back to the Foreign Office.

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a few days later, Kessler was more specific: in his speech at the Schützenhof on 16 June before a crowd of some 2,300 people, he declared ‘Fellow citizens! We want to pay reparations, if they are to the benefit of the French people and are not used for militarism.’41 Hellmut von Gerlach introduced Victor Basch as the most hated man in France, at least as far as the reactionary press was concerned. Basch declared that there must be a final reckoning of the reparations questions, not on the basis of ‘force’ and ‘victory’, but rather on the basis of justice. ‘The damage must be repaired by the perpetrators’, he said, and he did not believe that a single German could be found who would not say, after viewing the ruined areas of France, ‘oui, on doit réparer!’ On the question of disarmament, Basch declared that French democracy was not militaristic, and that it only wanted security, having been invaded three times in the last 150 years. This begged the question of exactly why France had been invaded at the end of the Napoleonic period, but Basch blithely assimilated that episode to the invasions of 1870 and 1914. He also believed that Germany must take its place at the table in the League of Nations. The Foreign Office report writer concluded with some general comments on the French: All of them struggled against the unmentioned reproach that France today is imperialistic and militaristic. All of them underscored France’s innocence in the outbreak of the war. All of them demanded reparations of Germany as aggressor and destroyer— without placing any limits on these. Against these French conditions no German counter-demands were made.42

The impressions of Germany garnered by the French were essentially positive, albeit cautiously so. Basch wrote that ‘it truly seems that something has changed in the reciprocal views of yesterday’s enemies and the hour is ripe for words of wisdom and acts of humanity.’43 This did not mean that the visit to Germany had been a love-in during which France simply agreed to forget everything. On the contrary, using Lehmann-Russbüldt’s metaphor, Basch believed that a bridge needed to be built over the abyss, but—and this was the key point—that could only be accomplished if Germany accepted the legal and moral obligation of paying reparations to France and Belgium. Flowing out of this was the need for Germans to understand that France’s continued occupation of parts of Germany had nothing to do with ‘imperialistic designs’ but rather arose solely out of a concern for France’s security.44 Even though the French heard a long list of grievances about the Versailles Treaty, still Basch defended French policy. The options open to France were either to treat the Weimar Republic like a pariah and force concessions from it, or else to see it as a fledgling democracy that needed help and support. Basch claimed that the Ligue was in favour of the second, while the French government was clearly following the first path. This statement required some e­ xplanation of 41  See Lippold, ‘Abschrift’, Bochum, 17 June 1922 in PA/AA R 70930 Pazifismus Frankreich. 42 Ibid. 43  Victor Basch, ‘Notre voyage en Allemagne: les impressions de M. Victor Basch’, Cahiers 22, 17 (25 August 1922), p. 395. 44  Ibid., pp. 395–6.

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his support for Poincaré. He squared the circle by arguing—as he had done during the Great War—that Poincaré had not wanted war in 1914 and did not want it now in 1922. That said, he recognized that Poincaré’s policies in 1922 were ‘dangerous for Europe, for France, and unjust towards Germany’.45 To a nation already afraid of its German neighbour, Basch added envy to the mix, writing that ‘what strikes the traveller, at first glance, is the prosperity of Germany . . . Even Berlin has hardly changed since 1913.’46 The German reply was that this was so much smoke and mirrors, and that the reality was that the German economy was in freefall, the apparent prosperity of the country due only to the fact that the mark was falling in value. Despite the supposed agreement between the LDH and the Deutsche Liga on the need for reparations, nevertheless Basch admitted that the people demanding revision of the Versailles Treaty in Germany included ‘democrats, republicans, pacifists’.47 Above all, Germans felt that they had been betrayed, that France had gone from being a country much admired by German republicans to one that was thoroughly detested. There were also discordant voices in the Ligue’s debates with Germans over the question of war origins and war guilt. Henri Guernut, for example, did not find Count Max von Montgelas’ analysis of the war responsibilities question completely unacceptable. Montgelas argued that the primary fault for the outbreak of war in 1914 lay in the hands of the Russians and the Austrians. In particular, Montgelas was at pains to prove that, contrary to what Clemenceau had said in the French ultimatum of 16 June 1919, Germany had not ‘premeditated war for decades’, and that it had not desired war as a preventive way of escaping encirclement. In Guernut’s mind, Montgelas was right on this point. What Guernut had trouble accepting in Montgelas’ argument was the idea that the German government had done everything in its power to avoid war; he felt that in this regard the texts published by Kautsky ‘remained decisive’. Even Montgelas’ translator, Fernand Gouttenoire de Toury, entertained doubts in this regard, writing that Montgelas had ‘not quite succeeded in escaping the criticism that he had, in places, written an apologia for Germany’.48 The Ligue des droits de l’homme, at least insofar as its majority was concerned, represented the truth about the German problem and the origins of the Great War. It was particularly concerned from the early twenties onwards by the criticisms directed at it from without, but which in fact often had their origin in debates within the Ligue itself. In 1922, for example, an unsigned but obviously inspired article in the Cahiers responded to criticisms from outside the Ligue about its ­position during the Great War and subsequently. The article took it as given that because of its moral probity ‘above any parti-pris’ the Ligue should not be surprised to find itself the object of attack from without. The writer warned, however, that certain colleagues in the Ligue, completely ‘involuntarily’ of course, had contributed to these unfounded criticisms. It was fine to criticize the Comité Central, which 45  Ibid., p. 396. 46  Ibid., p. 397. 47 Ibid. 48  Henri Guernut, ‘Mémento bibliographique’ (short review of Count Max von Montgelas, La Question des Responsabilités [Paris: Société mutuelle d’édition, 1921]), Cahiers 21, 21 (10 November 1921), p. 503.

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was only too happy to accept criticism, but was it too much to ask that Ligueurs use precise and tested arguments in this ‘loyal combat’?49 As has been demonstrated, the CC and the majority were not always happy to accept criticism. In late 1924, it came to the attention of the Comité Central that Mathias Morhardt was publishing or otherwise allowing himself to be published on the war origins question in the nationalist press in Germany. The matter had been brought to the attention of the CC by a member of the Deutsche Liga who took exception to an article by Morhardt published by the Saarbrücker Zeitung in which he apparently had laid the blame for the outbreak of war not so much at the feet of Russia as on Britain and France.50 Emile Kahn said he could not believe that a former secretary-general of the Ligue could write such an article or publish it in such a nationalist newspaper. The CC decided to write to the Saarbrücker Zeitung, ­disavowing the sentiments expressed in the article and pointing out that Morhardt had not been secretary-general of the Ligue for almost fifteen years. Morhardt was, nonetheless, a member of the Comité Central. At its next meeting a fortnight later, the CC debated the question again, this time with Morhardt present, and in the light of a letter from him to Buisson calling the CC’s censure of him something redolent of the ‘Index’. He declared that he collaborated with no German ­newspaper, and that the origin of the article lay in a request from a ‘foreign journalist’ that he provide a résumé of his book, Les Preuves. This he had done, and it was this résumé that had been published in the German press. Emile Kahn said that the article had had a ‘deplorable effect’ in Germany because it ‘paralysed’ the work of the German Liga.51 Never one to shy away from a political cheap shot, Morhardt retorted that that did not really concern him, since he alleged that Paul Painlevé himself had said, ‘there are no more than forty serious people behind the German Ligue’. Needless to say, this provoked a protest from the rest of the CC against these ‘unfriendly words’ directed at ‘our German colleagues’, and Painlevé c­ ategorically denied ever having said anything of the sort.52 What is important here is the fact that the Ligue debate on war origins, war guilt, and war responsibility had now begun to reach an international audience. The critical comments of Morhardt and Company regarding alleged French guilt 49  Anonymous, ‘Une Campagne’, Cahiers 22, 11 (25 May 1922), pp. 252–3. 50  Comité Central, ‘Extraits. Séance du 3 novembre 1924’, Cahiers 24, 24 (30 November 1924), p. 576. 51  ‘La Ligue allemande a informé M. Victor Basch que l’article de M. Mathias Morhardt sur la responsabilité de la guerre, paru dans la Sarrebrücker Zeitung, avait été largement répandu par la presse nationaliste allemande.’ See ‘Bureau du Comité’, Cahiers 24, 25 (10 December 1924), p. 604. Henri Guernut said as much about the impact this book would have in Germany in his short review of it in the Cahiers. He wrote, ‘Les historiens de la maison se sont récusés devant la tâche d’analyser ce livre, alléguant que ce n’est pas un livre d’histoire. Et il est vrai que c’est surtout un livre de passion: passion désintéressée, passion sincère, passion touchante, qui appelle à soi d’infinies ressources de dialectique, mais passion injuste. Et c’est le moindre mot que je veuille employer à l’égard d’un ouvrage qui représente un gros effort et qui, à l’insu de son auteur, sera utilisé contre le droit de la France.’ See Henri Guernut, ‘Mémento bibliographique’, Cahiers 24, 25 (10 December 1924), p. 607. 52  Comité Central, ‘Extraits. Séance du 17 novembre 1924’, Cahiers 24, 25 (10 December 1924), pp. 603–4. Painlevé denied Morhardt’s story unequivocally. See Paul Painlevé, ‘Une Lettre de Paul Painlevé’, Cahiers 24, 25 (10 December 1924), p. 608.

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in the origins of the Great War were only too gladly received by most Germans, with the extremely minor exception of the DLfM, and even there not unanimously. Stymied in their attempt to make their case within the Ligue, the members of the minority began increasingly to turn to venues outside the Ligue which were more congenial and accepting of their dissenting position. One of these was a Berlin journal called Die Kriegsschuldfrage, and the other was a Parisian publication e­ ntitled Evolution. Both Evolution and Die Kriegsschuldfrage were the progeny of the German Foreign Office, in the case of the former through occult subsidies, and in the case of the latter more directly as a dependency of the Auswärtiges Amt’s own war guilt office, called the Kriegsschuldreferat.53 What is important about both journals is the fact that many members of the minority published essays in them. These two journals were not in any way officially affiliated with the Ligue des droits de l’homme, but they provided a mouthpiece for the Ligue’s minority which complained that access to the Cahiers des Droits de l’Homme was denied it. Along the way down to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 and eventually to 1940, the German Foreign Office closely monitored the debates on war guilt within the LDH. R E PA R AT I O N S The link between the sometimes arcane debates within the Ligue des droits de l’homme about the origins of the Great War and the question of German war guilt on the one hand, and real political events on the other, not surprisingly had a very tangible importance. On the one hand, the Ligue majority view was that Germany (and its allies) were without any doubt guilty of unleashing the world war and that reparation of war damages was only natural and necessary. At the same time, however, the majority condemned Article 231 because it had been extorted under duress from the vanquished enemy even though they believed that Germany was, in fact, guilty. The rather tortured reasoning of the majority thus supported the substance but not the form of the Versailles judgement. The minority, on the other hand, believed not only that the form of Versailles was erroneous and dangerous, but that it was all the more so because it was based on an historical lie. This difference in appreciation of the question of war origins, responsibility, and guilt lay at the heart of the differences within the LDH on the German problem and found expression in the debates on French policy towards Germany which beset the Ligue from the earliest days of the interwar period. Reparations constituted the fulcrum on which these debates over war guilt teetered and which gave them concrete political expression in the immediate post-war period. From the very earliest days of the interwar years, the LDH was closely informed about the ability of Germany to pay the reparations demanded of it. A possible occupation of the Ruhr had been a concern of the LDH since 1920. Alphonse Merrheim of the Fédération des métaux reported to the CC on a fact-finding 53  See Patrick de Villepin, ‘Victor Margueritte (1866–1942): le pacifisme au service de l’Allemagne?’, Thèse de doctorat en histoire, Université de Paris-IV-Sorbonne, 1989, four volumes.

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mission he had made to Germany that autumn. He had gone first to the Ruhr because of the rumours of an impending French occupation. He told the Comité Central that he was convinced that Germany was delivering the required quantity of coal but that it was of inferior quality. He also believed that the mine owners in Germany actually wanted a French occupation because it would save their mines from the threat of nationalization. What was most important, however, given what was to follow in 1923, was Merrheim’s warning that it ‘was incontestable that if France militarily occupies the Ruhr, a general strike pregnant with consequences will break out, and that the German miners will refuse all work under the occupation regime’.54 It took another three years, but that is precisely what happened. The legal and especially moral argument buttressing the occupation of the Ruhr, and indeed the entire reparations policy of the French government, was the imputation of war guilt to Germany. As we have seen, however, the validity of the French conception of war guilt was actually hotly contested within the Ligue. That hardly prevented the Ligue from erecting an entire superstructure of justifications for France’s reparations demands against Germany on the foundation of the majority view of the war guilt debate. Thus, in a very long piece which Basch wrote probably sometime in 1921 before the final report of the Reparations Commission, he declared that the question of responsibility for the war was ‘more pressing and more essential’ than it had ever been. The reason for this was, of course, none other than the burning question of reparations—how much to demand from Germany and what to do if it did not pay. In Basch’s view this was a far more important question for France than for any of the other Entente powers, because most of the fighting and destruction had taken place on French soil.55 There were also mildly dissenting views, such as that expressed by the noted economist, Charles Gide, who held a chair at the Collège de France. Gide wrote a favourable review of John Meynard Keynes’ The Economic Consequences of the Peace, in which he decried the tendency of French commentators and public opinion to reject completely Keynes’ conclusions as an attack on France. He defended Keynes, thanking him ‘for having done the French people the honour of believing that there were among them those who would not be offended by his frankness and who would be ready to accept the truth’. He examined Keynes’ calculations and came to the conclusion he was right, that too much was being asked of the Germans. That said, he also believed that it was unreasonable of the Germans to expect French public finances to go into bankruptcy first, ‘whatever opinion one might have on war responsibilities, and even admitting that these might not be exclusively on the side of the Germans’. He did not think Keynes would disagree with him here. The resolution of the problem lay in the cooperation of all of the 54  See Merrheim’s report on his trip to Germany in Comité Central, ‘Extraits: Séance du 19 novembre 1920’, Cahiers 20, 24 (20 December 1920), p. 18. 55  See the very long (56 pp.) untitled draft of an article or brochure in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés. 798/9 Chemise 2. The first page of the draft is missing, and p. 56 is clearly not the last page. Basch’s comments, cited here, are on p. 8.

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nations of Europe in its rebirth, and he seconded Keynes’ call ‘to the new ­generation that has not yet spoken’.56 At virtually the same time that the Reparations Commission delivered its final report in May 1921, the Ligue published the resolutions passed at its recent Paris Congress. The resolution dealing with international relations was the most complex, and dealt successively with German disarmament, reparations, and Franco-German relations. There was no doubt in the Ligue’s collective mind that Germany must pay for the damages it had caused in northern France: ‘justice demands it: he who has committed the damage must repair it.’57 But the Ligue was also at pains to underline that this in no way meant an ‘illusory belief in the efficacy of measures of military coercion’. The 1921 Ligue Congress recognized the central importance of the German problem in a long debate on international relations. The Ligue took it as given that ‘democracy can only develop in peace’ and that ‘at the present hour the recovery of France and the security of the world depend above all on the Franco-German conflict.’58 The signs across the Rhine, even as early as 1921, were not encouraging. French democrats were faced with the ‘simultaneous re-awakening in Germany of the spirit of revenge and the spirit of reaction’. France had erred in 1919: ‘in neglecting to morally and militarily disarm Germany, France has itself worked towards the rebirth of the bellicose spirit in Germany.’ The good news, though, was there were still ‘friends of peace’ in Germany, and French democrats needed to work with them on several fronts. First, French democrats needed to ‘demonstrate to German public opinion’ the ‘primordial responsibility of monarchical, m ­ ilitarist, and imperialist Germany in the origins and atrocities of the war’. Secondly, the French needed to help the two peoples to get to know one another. Interestingly, given what Heinrich Ströbel, a German pacifist and member of the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte, was saying at virtually the same time in the pages of the Weltbühne, there was a perceived need to free both countries from political reaction.59 Ströbel wrote in 1920, with regard to the French occupation of Darmstadt, Frankfurt, and Homburg, that ‘French militarism has appeared as the helpmate of German militarism, if not consciously, at least de facto. Because every nationalist wave lifts militarism up, and the French occupation stimulates nationalist instincts.’60 A year later, General Maurice Sarrail, a member of the Ligue’s Comité Central, seemed to agree, writing in the pages of the Cahiers that the ‘[French] military caste still exists with its special life, its separatist tendencies, its hegemonic aspirations, and its frankly anti-republican mentality.’61 The 1921 Ligue Congress recognized French 56  Charles Gide, ‘Le Livre de M. Keynes et les réparations à attendre de l’Allemagne’, Cahiers 20, 13 (5 July 1920), pp. 14–16. 57  Anon, ‘Au Congrès de la Ligue: les résolutions adoptées’, Cahiers 21, 10 (25 May 1921), p. 221. 58  Preamble of the three-part resolution on ‘Les Rapports internationaux’ in ‘Au Congrès de la Ligue: les résolutions adoptées’, Cahiers 21, 10 (25 May 1921), p. 221. 59  ‘Au Congrès de la Ligue: les résolutions adoptées’, Cahiers 21, 10 (25 May 1921), p. 222. 60  Heinrich Ströbel, ‘Zwischen zwei Militarismen’, Die Weltbühne XVI, 16 (15 April 1920), p. 417. Ströbel was a German SPD pacifist of some renown and an important member of the Bund neues Vaterland which became the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte. 61  Maurice Sarrail, ‘L’armée démocratique’, Cahiers 21, 7 (10 April 1921), p. 152.

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complicity in these unfortunate developments across the Rhine. A resolution on Franco-German relations noted the rebirth of a spirit of reaction and revenge in Germany, but blamed this partly on French policies. The fact that Germany had failed to disarm, either morally or materially, was seen as the fault of France—or at least partially. The resolution called on French democrats to work with democratic forces inside Germany which accepted the necessity and validity of what it called the ‘duty’ of reparations.62 From very early on, then, the Ligue was caught in the somewhat anomalous position of condemning the nefarious effects of the peace treaties on the post-war world, and at the same time calling for the rigorous fulfilment of reparations obligations. But the possibility of sanctions or military measures as a way of resolving the reparations impasse was absolutely out of the question for the Ligue. What Basch called the prospect of a ‘military walkabout in the Ruhr’ would be completely ineffective not only because it would result only in ‘wagon loads of paper marks’, but also because it was the surest way to excite nationalist passions in Germany.63 As early as 1922, Basch recognized that opinion in Germany was massively opposed to reparations. He wrote that virtually all Germans believed it impossible for the country to pay the astronomical sums demanded by France, and they believed that France ought to be prepared to accept reparations in kind as well as volunteer German labour to help repair the devastated areas of northern France. Basch’s response to these German claims indicates the extent to which a kind of doublethink pervaded his reflections on the post-war European situation. While agreeing that ‘French democrats certainly professed no enthusiasm for the way by which the Versailles Treaty had been arrived at’, nevertheless he implied that it could have been much worse, and even justifiably so, given the demands that Germany would have imposed had it been victorious.64 This begged the question of whether Germany was being essentialized in Basch’s mind, so that no difference existed fundamentally between the old imperial Germany which had started the war, and the republican Germany which had signed the armistice. And yet two years later, Basch chastised those Germans, Stresemann among them, who talked about building bridges between the present and the recent past. This was impossible, he believed. There could be no bridge between the Republic and the old Empire, between democracy and militarism. The most there could be was a bridge between the Germany of the early twenties and that of the ‘day before yesterday’, the old Germany; the ‘good Germany’ of Schiller, Hegel, Kant, Goethe, and Beethoven, implied historical gymnastics which it is somewhat surprising Basch seems even to have thought possible.65 It presupposed a forgetting of recent history in favour of the memory of a kind of Arcadian past that might or might not have really existed. 62  ‘Au Congrès de la Ligue: les résolutions adoptées’, Cahiers 21, 10 (25 May 1921), p. 222. 63  ‘Discours de M. Victor Basch’, in debate on ‘La Reconstruction de l’Europe’, in Congrès national de 1922, p. 320. The reference to wagon loads of paper marks was strangely prophetic given what was to follow. 64  Victor Basch, ‘Notre Voyage en Allemagne: les impressions de M. Victor Basch’, Cahiers 22, 17 (25 August 1922), p. 399. 65  Victor Basch, ‘L’Entente franco-allemande’, Cahiers 24, 24 (30 November 1924), p. 574.

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In any event, in 1922 Basch defended Allied policy and the provisions of the Versailles Treaty which the Germans found most execrable, dismissing the demands for a plebiscite in Alsace-Lorraine with the argument that the reception of the French troops and the subsequent election results were the ‘equivalent of the most spectacular of plebiscites’. As for an Anschluss of Austria to Germany, he questioned whether the majority of the Austrian population actually desired this, but seemed disinclined to pose the question in a referendum, arguing instead that Allied fears of a Mitteleuropa more than justified keeping the two countries ­separate. Danzig was ‘without doubt’ German, and it was ‘incontestable’ that Upper Silesia was too, but he believed nevertheless that the principle of nationalities as enunciated by Wilson was not absolute and that the need of the Poles for a port city trumped it. In any event, the division of Upper Silesia was the fault of the League of Nations, and not of France. The referendum results were such that the League of Nations had to try to avoid creating German islands surrounded by Polish populations, and vice versa. But Basch agreed that Memel should have gone to the Reich, and that the Polish Corridor between East and West Prussia ‘could not be maintained’.66 The essential problem was French security.67 France needed to feel certain that the Germans were not bent on revenge, that imperialism and militarism were well and truly dead. This was far from obvious in 1922, according to Basch, with von Gerlach warning that the democratic and republican ideal had never been so threatened, and Philip Scheidemann declaring that the monarchist Army officers charged with defending the Republic were like ‘foxes guarding the henhouse’. And this said nothing at all of the awful assassinations of Walther Rathenau and Matthias Erzberger, and the ‘346 other representatives of the left’ who had been murdered by the forces of reaction. So, as long as these ‘extremely powerful’ actors remained on stage, it was ‘impossible that France not be on its guard’.68 Théodore Ruyssen, a Comité Central member who had also been part of the LDH delegation, took a largely similar view of the German situation, although he was much more sanguine than Basch about the threat Germany might pose to French s­ ecurity. In his view, even though Germany undoubtedly would be able to reactivate its war production capacity in several months, nevertheless, this meant that to all intents and purposes ‘German aggressive force has been reduced to a value close to zero.’69 It is not difficult to see the tragic stalemate that these statements implied for the Ligue: on the one hand recognition of the iniquitous side of the Versailles settlement, and on the other a partially understandable inability to foresee any other solution. 66  Basch, ‘Notre voyage en Allemagne’, p. 400. 67  For an appreciation of the importance of ‘security’ in French thinking, albeit for a slightly later period, see Maurice Vaïsse, Sécurité d’abord: la politique française en matière de désarmement, 9 décembre 1930–17 avril 1934 (Paris: A Pedone, 1981). For the period under discussion here, see Peter Jackson, Beyond the Balance of Power: France and the Politics of National Security in the Era of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 68  Basch, ‘Notre voyage en Allemagne’, p. 396. 69  Théodore Ruyssen, ‘Notre Voyage en Allemagne: les impressions de M.  Théodore Ruyssen’, Cahiers 22, 17 (25 August 1922), p. 402. This article had already been published under the title ‘La Ligue française des droits de l’homme en Allemagne’ in La Paix par le Droit, 32, 7–8 (July–August 1922), pp. 284–91. See Ingram, Politics of Dissent, pp. 47–8.

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There were all sorts of warnings about the dangers of an occupation of the Ruhr. In December 1922, the Comité Central heard from Hellmut von Gerlach and Robert Kuczynski of the dangers of any attempt by France to enforce the collection of reparations through military sanctions. Von Gerlach did not ‘hide the fact that if an occupation were to take place, German public opinion would be empoisoned for a long time’. He said that whoever wanted to see the ‘reconciliation of the two peoples must renounce the use of any new military sanction’. But he seemed much more confident than Kuczynski about the possibility of the German working class being able to force its government to respect Germany’s reparations obligations; Kuczynski was ‘sceptical about the possibility of a government coming to power in Germany that would make its reparation payments without pressure or sanction’. That said, he underlined that there were ‘sanctions and sanctions, pressure and pressure’ and any occupation of the Ruhr would be ‘deplorable’. Célestin Bouglé and Joseph Paul-Boncour seemed almost in favour of military intervention, however. Emile Kahn rushed to reassure the Germans that the idea of collaborating with them on the reparations issue, ‘even among the reactionaries’, had made ‘obvious progress’. The meeting ended with a rather bizarre discussion of a ­resolution proposed by the Commission des réparations which had been formed by delegates from the French and German Ligues. The LDH seemed to be in favour of confiscating 50 per cent of the private wealth of Germany to pay for ­reparations. Strangely, von Gerlach accepted the general thrust of the project, but averred that it might prove difficult to get Germans to agree to the confiscation of half the wealth of the country for the benefit of the Reich and the Entente; as he put it, this proportion seemed ‘brutal and excessive’, which was surely the least one might say. The meeting ended with passage of a motion from Marius Moutet condemning France’s plan to occupy the Left Bank of the Rhine.70 When it finally came, the Ruhr Occupation of 1923 was a shoal on which the burgeoning relationship between the LDH and the Deutsche Liga could have foundered but did not. This was largely due to the willingness of the German Liga’s president, Hellmut von Gerlach, to continue to make the case to his countrymen for the validity of reparations even in the face of the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr valley. The nexus between the war origins debate and its political ramifications was abundantly clear. At the height of the Ruhr crisis, von Gerlach came to Paris, where he gave a speech in the Salles des Sociétés Savantes under the auspices of the LDH. Right from the outset, von Gerlach assured his French listeners that the Deutsche Liga and other ‘German democrats and pacifists’ believed that it was not simply a legal, but also a moral obligation for Germany to make reparation for the devastation of the Great War. He linked the Deutsche Liga’s thinking on this question directly to that of the LDH, saying that the DLfM’s position had always been that the ‘preponderant’ responsibility for the war lay at the feet of the Central Powers. The Versailles Treaty was ‘far from perfect’, but he believed that its revision should be put off to the ‘more or less distant future’. The Ruhr occupation had come along, 70  ‘Comité central. Extraits’, Cahiers 23, 1 (10 January 1923), pp. 14–16.

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however, and upset the apple cart. Deforming the title of a recent book, von Gerlach said he believed in ‘peace despite the Ruhr’, rather than ‘through the Ruhr’. He seemed upset that the tactic of passive resistance had been ‘co-opted’ by the German government. He said that German pacifists and democrats were trying to bring an end to the passive resistance, but he warned the French not to seek an absolute victory in the Ruhr because it would be Pyrrhic. He urged the Ligue to join with its German confrères in working towards a ‘reasonable peace’: ‘Instead of shaking the fist, give us your hand, because the fist destroys and the hand builds up.’ In response to a question from the audience, he said that he supported the ideas of Gustav Stresemann which involved mortgaging one-fifth of property values in Germany in order to raise a loan to pay for the reparations.71 This elicited a spirited rejoinder from Oscar Bloch of the Monnaie-Odéon section of the Ligue in the sixth arrondissement of Paris. Bloch related the entire ­reparations issue to the question of war guilt, war origins, and war responsibilities. Speaking for the minority, he said that responsibility for the war was ‘at the very least shared’, and that he did not recognize the Treaty of Versailles which he wanted to see revised immediately. As for the public finance question which posited that if Germany did not pay, this would entail France’s imminent financial ruin, he claimed that the Ligue did not ‘have the habit of considering what is useful or advantageous, but only what is just’. Linking past and present to the future, he warned that a renascent Germany in the future would not pay in gold but rather with machine guns and cannons: ‘we do not wish to expose the peoples to this new and imminent war, through a policy of demands and claims that will only profit the capitalists, and for which the proletariat will pay.’ For Bloch and the minority, there could be no question of asking for reparations from Germany as long as the issue of war responsibilities had not been resolved.72 But as far as von Gerlach was concerned, the question of war responsibilities had indeed been resolved—a year and a half earlier, when the French and German Ligues had agreed that responsibility for the war was ‘mostly’ Germany’s. He ‘regretted’ Bloch’s words because this Franco-German entente between the LDH and the DLfM could never have been realized on the basis proposed by Bloch. He claimed that Bloch’s thesis was not new; that in fact it was the thesis of Hitler and the parties of revanche in Germany. In a warm-up to Vichy and the Second World War, von Gerlach intoned that if Bloch were to utter these words in Germany, the whole of the German Right would applaud.73 In fact, nothing could have been farther from the truth. The question of war responsibilities had hardly been resolved, and for von Gerlach to cosset his French 71 Hellmut von Gerlach, ‘Les Rapports franco-allemands’, Cahiers 23, 15 (10 August 1923), pp. 341–3. 72  Interjection by Bloch cited in ibid., p. 344. 73  Response by von Gerlach cited in ibid. Von Gerlach’s oft-repeated statement that the majority of Germans—certainly the working class—wanted to pay the reparations to France elicited a sharp rebuke from Bloch a month later in the Cahiers. Bloch wrote that ‘Il peut être commode et réconfortant pour les Français de croire que c’est l’Allemagne qui a eu tous les torts; mais, n’en déplaise à M. de Gerlach, je ne crois pas que tel puisse être le sentiment de la majorité des Allemands.’ See Oscar Bloch, ‘Correspondance’, Cahiers 23, 17 (10 September 1923), p. 407.

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counterparts with the fond hope that all of Germany, or all of Republican Germany, or all of pacifist Germany, or all of the German working class earnestly desired to fulfil the reparations demands of the French was sheer wishful thinking. In the wake of the exchange between von Gerlach and Oscar Bloch, the eminent professor of history at the University of Berlin, Hans Delbrück, for whom Victor Basch had tremendous respect, and with whom the latter had already debated the question of war origins and responsibility, weighed into the debate with a caustic slap at von Gerlach’s pie-in-the-sky imaginings. Delbrück wrote that it was ‘not just an error, but it was an error of pernicious consequences’ to believe that ‘all of the German left accepted the thesis’ of the preponderance of German responsibility for the war, and that the request for ‘a new enquiry’ was the thesis of Hitler and the reactionaries. He reminded the Ligue that the Deutsche Liga had only about ten thousand members and that in ‘no nation on earth’ was pacifism weaker than in Germany, despite the fact that the vast majority of the German people desired a pacifist foreign policy.74 It was certainly possible to regret this state of affairs, but he warned the LDH ‘it will not change as long as the Ligue des droits de l’homme does not take a different position on the question of [war] responsibilities.’ Delbrück underlined that it was not just Hitler and the German reactionaries but also the ‘enormous majority of the German people’ who were ‘convinced that the thesis of the Versailles Peace was not justified . . . and detests any party or politician who will not demand a new enquiry into it’. It was of the utmost importance that the Ligue des droits de l’homme be informed about this and ‘not be fooled by the assertions of M. von Gerlach’.75 Delbrück’s reference to some ‘ten thousand members’ of the DLfM calls for some comment here. The number was surely grossly inflated, although to what end is unclear. In 1922 at the LDH’s Nantes Congress, Fernand Gouttenoire de Toury had claimed that the DLfM’s forerunner, the Bund neues Vaterland, ‘had at most 200 members in all of Germany’.76 He was undoubtedly much closer to the mark. The DLfM itself reported that until 1922 the Bund neues Vaterland had only between 150 and 200 members. This was explained by the fact that the BnV ‘was more a working group, a committee, than a mass organization. It avoided huge membership drives in order to avoid further splintering’. Beginning in 1923, the year of the Ruhr occupation, the membership figures rose to over 1,000 without any change to the ‘organizational character’ of the Bund which had by now become the DLfM.77 Ten years later, a report for the Reichsicherheitshauptamt indicated a 74  On the weakness of the pre-war German peace movement, see Chickering, Imperial Germany and a World Without War. 75  Hans Delbrück and Hellmut von Gerlach, ‘Correspondance: sur les responsabilités de la guerre’, Cahiers 23, 21 (10 November 1923), p. 504. Von Gerlach was also criticized by Kurt Tucholsky in the pages of the Weltbühne for adapting what he said to either French or German audiences. See Peter Panter (Kurt Tucholsky), ‘Deutsche in Paris’, Die Weltbühne, 20, 33 (14 August 1924), pp. 262–5. For von Gerlach’s response, see Hellmut von Gerlach, ‘Soll man nach Paris reisen?’, Die Weltbühne 20, 37 (11 September 1924), p. 373. 76  ‘Discours de M. Gouttenoire de Toury’, in debate on Basch’s report on ‘La Reconstruction de l’Europe’, in Congrès national de 1922, p. 387. 77 Lehmann-Russbüldt, Kampf der Deutschen Liga, p. 127.

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total membership for the Liga of between 1,900 and 2,000 persons. This was after a jump of 200 members in 1932 caused by the controversy over the film All Quiet on the Western Front.78 By way of comparison with Berlin, there was no activity in the Cologne area until the beginning of 1929. The first public meeting of the Cologne group took place on 27 January 1929 with twenty-six people in attendance. The hoped-for increase in membership did not materialize, however. A meeting on 12 April 1929 was attended by only sixteen people. The Berlin headquarters had given the Cologne group until 1 June 1929 before it would have to remit some of the membership fees it collected to the central organization. These were so small, however, that coupled with the apparent inability of Berlin to come to the aid of the fledgling group, the Cologne group wondered if it would not be more advantageous to hitch their wagon to the French LDH directly before opting finally to seek further funding from Berlin. In the context of the Rhineland, despite the fact that the DLfM was ‘completely meaningless from a numerical point of view’, the Cologne police chief nevertheless thought that it carried a certain meaning because of its ‘federalist engagement’ which by way of the destruction of Prussian ­dominance sought to make German Catholics feel that the German ‘Reich’ belonged to them, too.79 To return to the Delbrück/von Gerlach debate, however, von Gerlach’s rather Jesuitical response to Delbrück was that if Bloch had asked for an independent commission of enquiry on war origins, he would have supported it. He claimed to have supported just such a call ever since the end of the war, but it was not clear what possible use such an enquiry might have because von Gerlach already knew the answer: ‘For me the question of war responsibilities has already been decided.’ He claimed that his belief in the guilt of the central powers went all the way back to 3 August 1914 after he read the German White Book. His support for an enquiry was not designed to change his own way of thinking, but rather to convince the German bourgeoisie ‘which has, until now, allowed itself to fall into error through the persevering campaign of M. Delbrück and his friends’. And he fell back on the increasingly tired argument that since the vast majority of the German people were part of the working class, this meant they were in favour of the DLfM’s ­interpretation of war guilt, war responsibilities, and hence of reparations.80 His tune had changed markedly by early November 1923, however, as he measured the political consequences of the Ruhr occupation on German public opinion. An open letter to Poincaré, signed by eight representatives of the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte and the Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft, including von Gerlach, pointed out the obvious: ‘In the face of present events, it is more and more difficult to make the

78 See report ‘Betrifft: Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte’, Berlin, 26 September 1932, in Bundesarchiv R 58/4179 (Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte). Having said that, the report also mentioned that a petition in favour of Carl von Ossietsky had garnered 43,624 signatures, including those of many prominent personalities and even police officials. 79 ‘Bauknecht, der Polizeipräsident, an den Herrn Regierungs-Präsidenten’, Cologne, 17 May 1929, in Bundesarchiv R 58/4179 (Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte). 80  Delbrück and von Gerlach, ‘Correspondance’, Cahiers (10 November 1923), p. 504.

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German people understand the profound direction of historical evolution, to keep alive in it the moral obligation to make reparation.’81 Oscar Bloch claimed that this was all he had been trying to argue in the first place, that it would have been better for all concerned if the Allies had simply availed themselves of what he called the ‘classic definitions of international law’ and exacted an indemnity payment under the law of force. What he objected to was the ‘hypocrisy’ of ‘legitimizing the victory by imposing by the law of violence—the Inquisition did it through torture—an admission of guilt from those who were obliged to endure the law of the strongest’. It was against this ‘­profanation of the idea of justice’ that all ‘honest men’—and, in particular, the LDH—should protest.82 Mathias Morhardt was not content merely to argue against reparations as a matter of principle; he also took on the legality of the Franco-Belgian occupation. Jean Appleton, an honorary member of the CC, made the case at a February 1924 meeting of the committee that the occupation had been entirely legal. He said that the Ligue had consulted various legal advisors, all of whom were in agreement that the Franco-Belgian action was in accordance with international law and the precepts of the Versailles Treaty. Morhardt strongly contested this, arguing that Poincaré had ridden roughshod over the protocols established by the victors in the Treaty. There was nothing in the Treaty that permitted the military occupation of anything other than the Left Bank of the Rhine, and even that provision had been extracted from Lloyd George and Wilson under a certain amount of duress by Clemenceau and Tardieu. Morhardt was clear that ‘the measures taken by M. Raymond Poincaré “to make his debtor pay” are completely foreign to the Treaty of Versailles. There is not a line, not a word that authorizes them.’83 Hardly surprisingly, the occupation of the Ruhr was one of the main topics of debate at the Ligue’s November 1923 Congress held in Paris. Despite the protracted and acrimonious discussion of the ‘Rapport moral’, which for the fourth year running dealt in large measure with the issue of war guilt, pitting minority against majority views within the Ligue, when it came to the discussion of the Ruhr occupation relative calm seemed to prevail. Victor Basch presented the report on the Ruhr occupation in which he said that the LDH must pronounce itself for or against the occupation of the Ruhr, because the Ligue today found itself in opposition not only to the government but also to most of the French nation. He likened the Ruhr occupation to the Dreyfus Affair, saying that ‘it is against virtually the entire country that we have the duty to struggle.’84 Despite the fact that some members of the Comité Central, together 81  Hellmut von Gerlach, et al., ‘Les Relations franco-allemandes: lettre à M. Poincaré’, Cahiers 23, 21 (10 November 1923), pp. 487–8. 82  Oscar Bloch, ‘Correspondance: les responsabilités de la guerre’, Cahiers 23, 22 (25 November 1923), p. 528. 83  Comité Central, ‘Extraits. Séance du 18 février 1924’, Cahiers 24, 5 (10 March 1924), pp. 113–14. 84  Victor Basch, ‘Discours de M. Victor Basch’, in the debate on ‘La Ruhr et les réparations’, in Congrès national de 1923, p. 274.

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with some of the legal opinions solicited by the Ligue, were of the opinion that the Franco-Belgian incursion into the Ruhr was both justified and legal, Basch came out squarely against it. His speech was a veritable indictment of French policy in Germany. In his view, France was acting illegally by unilaterally bypassing the enforcement mechanisms contained in the Versailles Treaty. The Ruhr occupation was not only illegal, it was also ‘inequitable’ because a party to any agreement did not have the right to act as a lonesome cowboy in setting rules and enforcing them. The dispute ought to have been submitted to the international court at The Hague. Furthermore, the Franco-Belgian occupation hurt those least able to defend themselves, the workers of the Ruhr.85 He asked another question: could the Ruhr occupation possibly help the French political position, either with regard to its relationship with Germany, or more broadly with France’s own allies? The answer was clearly negative. The occupation served only to weaken pacifist, democratic, and republican forces in Germany. The immediate effect of French policy in the Ruhr ‘had been to unite into a single vehement and passionate protest movement all of the German political parties. From the extreme right, from the Bavarian combat and assassination organizations right through to the socialists and the communists and on to our pacifist friends, all of the German parties unanimously protest the occupation’.86 The damage went further, too, though because France had lost the sympathy of the British and the Americans. In following a policy of ‘doubtful legality’ and ‘certain iniquity’, France was guilty of pushing Europe to the brink of war.87 Given his harsh condemnation of French actions in the Ruhr debacle, one might have expected Basch to call for an immediate and complete withdrawal of French forces from the Ruhr valley. Instead, Basch poured water into his wine and declared that the primary goal had to be the evacuation of the Ruhr after the beginning of negotiations and after the institution of measures designed to get the reparations payments flowing again.88 This rather bizarre conclusion was the prelude to an examination of the economic questions attendant upon the reparations issue. He asked the Congress to affirm the right of France to reparations while at the same time making the argument that Germany had not shown much goodwill in fulfilling its obligations.89 Louis Guétant took Basch to task for assuming that Germany had been ‘recalcitrant’ in living up to its ‘obligations’. Returning to a theme dear to the hearts of the minority, he asked the Congress how Germany could be considered to ‘owe’ something when there had been neither consent freely given, nor an independent

85  Ibid., pp. 275–7. 86  Ibid., p. 278. 87  Ibid., pp. 281–2. 88  Ibid., p. 284. 89  Ibid., pp. 284–5. The economic side of the reparations question was dealt with more fully in the next presentation to the Congress. See Roger Picard, ‘Discours de M. Roger Picard’, in the debate on ‘La Ruhr et les réparations’, in Congrès national de 1923, pp. 292–307. Picard demonstrated, among other things, how France had sabotaged the principle of reparations in kind.

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judgement of its reparations obligations.90 Returning to themes present in the 1916 Congress which had debated the conditions for a lasting peace, Guétant asked why Germany should be on the hook for French debts, voluntarily contracted during the war, when there had been German offers of peace on the table—a peace which would have ended the carnage and allowed reconciliation. The answer was that shirking behind its barrier of lies, fearing peace more than war and the account it would have to give to the reconciled peoples, the evil heart of our leaders obstinately refused. Something extraordinary was needed, an instrument of oppression, of ­exploitation and of barbarism had to be created, something that the universe had never seen before, and that instrument was the Treaty of Versailles.91

There seems little doubt that the Ruhr occupation altered the way France was perceived, and the way the Ligue viewed the situation in Germany. Ironically, one of Basch’s preoccupations in his questions for Hellmut von Gerlach in April 1924 in the wake of the Ruhr Occupation was the extent to which large sections of German society, especially the working class, could still be considered ‘pacifist’.92 The real answer was perhaps not as extensive as von Gerlach averred, and certainly less than Basch would have liked. Basch wanted to know if the majority socialists were participating in the ‘pacifist’ movement, because the attitude of the party newspaper, Vorwärts, seemed equivocal. Von Gerlach responded by arguing that ‘the attitude of Vorwärts is indeed equivocal; but there exist in Germany more than 80 local socialist newspapers which have much more influence than the official party paper and two thirds of them are pacifist.’93 This was at least debatable, but von Gerlach was trying to put a positive spin on German developments for his French listeners. Essentially, he was the canary in the German mineshaft for the LDH, but the signals he sent to the surface were equivocal and perhaps not ­accurate. In a speech at the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace in Paris in early April 1924, he said that the Ruhr occupation had provoked a shift in allegiances for parts of the working class which were now supporting the German Communist Party (KPD), rather than the ‘reasonable and measured action of the socialist unions’. Of more importance, however, was the impression he conveyed to the LDH that the newspaper articles by Victor Basch, among others, were well received in Germany and actually helped the task of the DLfM. As we have already noted, this was anything but the case, and indeed the situation was only going to worsen with Basch’s visit to Germany in the autumn of 1924. But von Gerlach was right when he ended his speech with the declaration that what was needed more

90  Louis Guétant, ‘Discours de M. Guétant’, in the debate on ‘La Ruhr et les réparations’ in Congrès national de 1923, pp. 329–30. 91  Ibid., p. 335. 92  See Basch’s grilling of von Gerlach in Comité central, ‘Extraits. Séance du 7 Avril 1924’, Cahiers 24, 12 (10 June 1924), pp. 279–80. 93  Ibid., p. 279.

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than ever was a ‘disarmament of the mind, a moral disarmament’.94 In an article published in mid-December of that year, Basch had made it clear that if ‘men imbued with nationalist and revengeful sentiments’ were to be charged with the government of what he perhaps revealingly and certainly anachronistically referred to as the ‘government of the Empire’, then ‘we pacifists, the impenitent partisans of a Franco-German entente’ would have to demand a policy of ‘no concessions’ on the part of the French government. That meant ‘not advancing by one minute the promised evacuation of the occupied territories, refusing any reduction in our military forces and giving the closest attention to our national security which is overtly threatened’. It is difficult to fathom how Basch’s comments were helping the task of the DLfM when even von Gerlach expressed ‘shock’ in private at the tenor of some of his pronouncements; ironically enough, von Gerlach’s ‘shock’ seemed to provide an added inducement for Kahn to publish them in the Cahiers.95 Count Kessler had warned the LDH of just such an eventuality during his December 1921 visit to Paris, underlining that the numerically significant German working class, whether it be communist, socialist, democratic, or Catholic, fully supported both the Weimar Republic and peace; he cautioned the French, however, not to alienate the workers with ‘vexatious measures’.96 By the time Basch returned to Germany in October 1924 his impressions of the country seemed to have changed. He reported to the LDH that feelings against France had hardened perceptibly since his last visit. In the past, Basch said that he had never encountered difficulties in Germany, but not this time. He ascribed the change in public sentiment to the Ruhr occupation, saying ‘In the Ruhr we acted like Germans—no, not like Germans, like Boches’.97 Basch could not see that part of the problem was the festering wound of the war guilt debate. He still ascribed guilt to Austria-Hungary in the first instance, but maintained that Germany was the second most responsible nation.98 In his October 1924 speech in Berlin, Basch struck a tone that resonated down to 1929 and perhaps beyond. He lectured his German audience on the need for Germany to become a real democracy, saying that Germany had to choose between democracy, pacific republicanism, and civilization on the one hand, or a return to the ‘Germany of the Junkers (hobereaux), the militarist Germany’. If it were the latter 94  Hellmut von Gerlach, ‘Un meeting de la Ligue: en Allemagne’, Cahiers 24, 12 (10 June 1924), pp. 276–8. 95  Victor Basch, ‘Avertissement’, Cahiers 25, 1 (10 January 1925), p. 15. This was first published in L’Ere nouvelle on 16 December 1924. Emile Kahn requested a copy of the article, which he said had ‘shocked’ Hellmut von Gerlach, with a view to publishing it in the Cahiers. See Emile Kahn to Victor Basch, Paris, 24 December 1924 in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés 798/4 Correspondance Victor Basch. 96  ‘Les Allemands à la Ligue I: la visite de M. von Kessler’, Cahiers 22, 3 (10 February 1922), p. 65. 97 Hoesch to the Auswärtiges Amt, Paris, 28 October 1924 in PA/AA R 70930 Pazifismus Frankreich. According to Foreign Office Ministerialdirektor Dr Köpke (cited in Hoesch’s report) 800 policemen were needed to provide security for the 200 people who came out to hear Basch. For the text of Basch’s 15 October speech in Potsdam, which does not contain the reference to ‘Boches’, see Victor Basch, ‘L’Entente Franco-Allemande’, Cahiers 24, 24 (30 November 1924), pp. 571–4. Ilde Gorguet says between 2,000 and 4,000 Reichsbanner militants from Berlin, Potsdam, and Babelsberg also turned up to protect Basch, ‘transformant la ville en camp militaire’. See Ilde Gorguet, Les Mouvements pacifistes et la réconciliation franco-allemande dans les années vingt, 1919–1931 (Bern: Peter Lang, 1999), pp. 123–4. 98  Hoesch to the Auswärtiges Amt, Paris, 28 October 1924.

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that Germans chose, then Basch assured his listeners they could ‘count on the countries of the world marching against them as in 1914’.99 The trope of the Great War as a crusade for democracy thus continued to rear its head. Such expressions could not be expected to win Basch and the LDH any friends in Germany. As Ilde Gorguet notes, even a democratic daily newspaper like the Berliner Tageblatt was critical of Basch’s comments; it wrote that they betrayed ‘a mockery, satire and irony interrupted by threatening reminders of a France still suffering from the attitude of Germany’.100 A few months later, Otto Lehmann-Russbüldt was moved to comment in a letter to the pacifist Walther Schücking that Basch’s appearance in Berlin had been ‘disagreeable’.101 Basch also made arguments which seemed more than a little oxymoronic, claiming that the LDH had never accepted Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty because it was imposed on Germany, with France acting as both prosecutor and judge, while at the same time arguing that the obligation to pay reparations was separate from the issue of war guilt. The latter question would only be resolved after years of debate by historians, but in the hic et nunc, reparations seemed to be based on the simple principle that ‘if you break it, you pay for it.’ Not surprisingly, the de-coupling of reparations, or at least of the punitively high level of reparations, from the moral freighting that had been attached to them was precisely what the Germans objected to the most. It also bears pointing out that Basch’s critique of Article 231 and the Versailles process sounded not a little unlike that of Morhardt and Company. In 1929, the right-wing German press was still seething about this 1924 speech.102 Perhaps it was speeches like Basch’s which led Dr Jarres of the Reich Interior Ministry to propose banning all public utterances by foreigners, especially Frenchmen, in Germany.103 Friedrich-Wilhelm Foerster’s admission in 1930 that he had transferred a ‘large sum’ of money from Victor Basch to the DLfM to help in its campaign against Hindenburg’s election to the Reich presidency in 1925 served only to inflame German opinion further.104 In retrospect, it seems clear that the LDH wanted to see certain things in early Weimar Germany, and its German counterpart, the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte, wanted it to see those things. The German Foreign Office, too, 99  Basch, ‘L’Entente Franco-Allemand’, p. 574. 100  Das Berliner Tageblatt, 8 October 1924, cited in Gorguet, Mouvements pacifistes, p. 125. 101  Otto Lehmann-Russbüldt to Walther Schücking, 3 April 1925, cited in ibid. 102  See the press cuttings file in Bundesarchiv R 72/1850 which indicates that, in the right-wing press at least, the memory of Basch’s 1924 visit and speech was very much alive. The Berliner Börsenzeitung, for example, entitled its 28 January 1929 article ‘Basch Provoziert’, and on 19 January 1929 published an article ironically (and rather viciously) entitled ‘Basch als Erzieher’, undoubtedly a reference to the 1890 bestseller of the far-right essayist and art critic, Julius Langbehn, Rembrandt als Erzieher. The memory of Basch’s 1924 visit lasted all the way down to 1933. In an article attacking Basch, Der Tag wrote that he was ‘ein in Frankreich eingebürgerter ungarischer Jud’; ‘Es ist derselbe Basch, der 1924 in Potsdam unter Bedeckung des Reichsbanners und eines von Severing gestellten riesigen Polizeiaufgebots das deutsche Volk und seine Überlieferung zynisch schmähen durfte.’ See Anonymous, ‘Pazifist Basch ohne Larve’ in Der Tag, 31 March 1933. 103  Dr Jarres, Reichsministerium des Innern, to the Prussian Minister des Innern, Prussian Minister Präsident, the Auswärtiges Amt, and the Staatssekretär in the Reichskanzlei, Berlin, 11 October 1924, in PA/AA R 70930 Pazifismus Frankreich. 104 Gorguet, Mouvements pacifistes, pp. 210–11.

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wanted the LDH to see certain things. This meant that, far from understanding the deep resentment against Article 231 and the reparations question for what they were, the LDH was cosseted in a comfortable view of Germany’s contrition which simply did not match reality. This mutually blinkered view contributed to the inability of the LDH to engage in any meaningful dialogue or to propose any practical politique de réconciliation in the European status quo. Emil Julius Gumbel was probably right: precious time had been lost—irrevocably even—since the end of the Great War.

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6 Turning the Page? The War Guilt Problem in the Era of Locarno Locarno seemed to change everything. In November 1925 at the Ligue’s La Rochelle Congress, Henri Guernut, the Ligue’s secretary-general, basking in the glow of Locarno, claimed that ‘It is the doctrine of the Ligue which has triumphed at Locarno’.1 It had been a good couple of years for the Ligue’s ideas, according to him. In 1923, it was the LDH that had spearheaded the opposition to the Ruhr Occupation: ‘let us recognize it without any false modesty. It was the Ligue which carried the country forward and it was the country which carried the government. Today the Ruhr has been evacuated, those who were expelled have been brought back, and the prisoners have been freed’.2 Going back to 1924, he claimed the victory of the Cartel des Gauches was in some measure the Ligue’s doing; even if the LDH was theoretically apolitical, Guernut said that without it there would have been no Cartel victory.3 From 1925 to 1927, the annual Congresses focused much less on the Great War and the question of war guilt. Had the Ligue finally turned the page on the acrimonious debates of the war and post-war periods? Perhaps not. There are several reasons which explain what turned out to be merely a momentary lull in the war guilt debate. First, as we have seen, was the fact that the minority had been unable to convince the Ligue that a full revision of the Versailles Treaty was necessary. The 1924 Congress showed clearly enough that the minority had hit a brick wall in that regard. Paradoxically, however, the Ligue’s position on war origins was beginning to soften a bit; a process of gradual disintegration had begun. Perhaps more ­importantly, the great figures of the first wave of the minority—Mathias Morhardt, Oscar Bloch, Georges Demartial, and Fernand Gouttenoire de Toury foremost among them—while remaining active members of the Ligue, repaired to the greener pastures afforded them by the new journal, Evolution, which published its first number in 1925. Their place was supplemented, beginning at the end of the decade by a second wave of dissenting voices, most notably those of Félicien Challaye, Georges Pioch, Léon Emery, and René Gerin, who took up the cudgels within the Ligue. Finally, a kind of displacement occurred from 1925 to 1927 in which other issues in French politics, which were actually understood through the 1  Henri Guernut, ‘Rapport Moral’, in Le Congrès national de 1925. Compte-rendu sténographique. (1-3 Novembre 1925) (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1925), p. 49. 2  Ibid., p. 46. 3  Ibid., p. 49.

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same dissident lens as the war guilt debate, briefly took centre stage. The issue of war guilt did not go away, but rather was transmuted onto debates about the Rif War, the ‘democratic organization of the peace’, and the problem of AlsaceLorraine. These apparently secondary considerations actually foreshadowed the expanding dimensions of the war guilt debate, which came into full bloom once again with the arrival of the second wave of dissenters beginning in 1927. It would be a mistake to conclude, therefore, that the ‘era of Locarno’ had somehow ended the war guilt debate. In 1925, the focus of the minority’s attention shifted to the French prosecution of a war in the Rif against Abd el-Krim. Both Jean-Marie Caillaud of the Seine Federation and Elie Reynier of the Ardèche Federation, two persons of whom we will hear much more in the 1930s, were primarily concerned about the secrecy and lack of transparency in French actions in Morocco and wanted an immediate peace in the Rif war. Emile Kahn attacked Caillaud, Reynier, and especially the MonnaieOdéon section, in the absence of both Oscar Bloch and Mathias Morhardt, for its alleged philo-communism. One of the representatives of the section responded that the essential issue was not whether opposition to the Rif war was being used by the Parti communiste français (PCF) for its own ends, but rather merely saving the lives of many people on both sides of the conflict. He linked this directly to the still fresh memory of the Great War, asking his ‘old combat comrades’ if they could stomach the idea of twenty-year-old conscripts being killed in the Rif.4 Even when it came to discussion of Théodore Ruyssen’s report on ‘The Democratic Organisation of the Peace’ at the 1925 Congress, a topic which might have been expected to engender vigorous discussion, there was no push-back from the minority. This was despite the fact that Ruyssen frankly admitted that there were things about the Treaties that needed to be fixed and his open recognition that there were ‘in our ranks very fervent, very generous adversaries of the peace treaties’. But, he asked, while respecting their positions, ‘can they make the case that, taken together, the borders of Europe today follow lines that are more just than those of 1914?’ Perhaps it was Ruyssen’s generosity of spirit which caused his speech to be listened to without protests or interruptions; there were even encomia from former students who had studied under him at the Université de Bordeaux before the war. In any event, Ruyssen’s long motion was passed intact, the only amendments being friendly and accepted by the Comité Central.5 Morhardt and Bloch had been absent from the 1925 Congress for health r­ easons, but they did not attend the Congress the following year either. While it is true there was no sustained discussion of war origins or the Versailles Treaty at the 1926 Congress, there was, however, a critique of the Ligue’s policy on Alsace-Lorraine which in the eyes of the minority had been ‘entirely nationalized’; the minority charged that the LDH’s views were refracted through the Treaty of Versailles which 4  ‘Discours de M.  Le Brasseur’, in the debate on the Rapport Moral, in Congrès national de 1925, p. 98. 5  See the debate and vote on the report on ‘L’Organisation démocratique de la paix’, in Congrès national de 1925, pp. 401–14.

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was shot through with ‘profound injustices’.6 It is too facile to accuse the minority of unthinking anti-French sentiment. There was a consistency to their attacks which were based on their critical view of the Versailles Treaty, itself a reflection of the omnipresent dissent on the origins of the Great War. The linkages were sometimes very deep and cut to the heart of what the Ligue’s self-image was. A representative of the dissident Monnaie-Odéon section made the telling argument that it was not up to the Ligue to condemn or approve of autonomist movements in Alsace-Lorraine. From a purely human rights standpoint, there ought to have been no doubt about the right of Alsatians and Lorrainers to support autonomy for the provinces, and the Monnaie-Odéon delegate, Goldschild, criticized the CC motion for its knee-jerk nationalism. Why, he asked, was it ­acceptable for autonomist movements to spring up in Poland, Ireland, Georgia, or Romania, but not in France? ‘Because we are French, do we therefore have privileges over other nations?’, he asked. This spoke to the essence of what the Ligue ought to have been, what it sometimes tried to be, but what it manifestly usually failed to be: an organization dedicated above all to the defence of the rights of man. The Ligue had become infected with what Goldschild called ‘the nationalist virus’; he even likened the phraseology of the CC motion to that of Déroulède and the Ligue des Patriotes, something which was bound to elicit a wounded response from the majority.7 And it did.8 The 1927 Paris Congress was once again free of the acrimonious debates over war origins and guilt as such. For the third year running Mathias Morhardt, Oscar Bloch, and Fernand Gouttenoire de Toury were not present. Their ideas were, however, very much in evidence, albeit transmuted onto other, more immediate subjects. The fight had not gone out of the minority/majority split but had shifted in emphasis from the war itself to what might be viewed as its consequences. The link between war origins and consequences was a strong one. The focus of much of the debate of the Rapport Moral in 1927 was on the Paul-Boncour law which essentially provided for the mobilization of the entire French nation—men, women, children, intellectuals, and, perhaps most tellingly, morale—in time of war. What is perhaps most interesting about this debate was not so much the negative reaction of the nascent new-style pacifists—Georges Pioch, Félicien Challaye, and Armand Charpentier foremost among them—as the manner in which the Central Committee, largely through the speeches of Victor Basch and Emile Kahn, attempted to defend the indefensible. Challaye gave the most cogent criticism of the Comité Central’s support for the Paul-Boncour law, underlining how inimical the law was to the principles of the Ligue. He accused the CC of ‘accepting a sort of psychological preparation for war’, and urged the Congress to ‘redress the error 6 ‘Discours de M.  Goldschild’ in the debate on ‘Les Questions d’Alsace et de Lorraine’, in Le Congrès national de 1926. Compte-rendu sténographique. (25–7 Décembre 1926) (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1927), p. 243. 7  Ibid., pp. 243, 245, and 246. 8  ‘Réponse de M. Grumbach’ in the debate on ‘Les Questions d’Alsace et de Lorraine’, in Congrès national de 1926, pp. 248–53. It is certainly true that Grumbach was a bit of a pitbull in debates. The final vote on the resolution containing none of the amendments proposed by the Monnaie-Odéon section was 1,515 ‘for’ and only forty-eight ‘opposed’. See Congrès national de 1926, p. 313.

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of the Comité Central’ and return the Ligue to its origins, a Ligue for peace, the defence of individual human rights and not a Ligue dedicated to the ‘best organisation of war and the defence of raison d’état’.9 The issue boiled down to one of means, rather than ends, according to Emile Kahn. Neither side was in favour of war, but the CC believed that the League of Nations would resolve international differences and the political problems posed by dictators, and rather less convincingly that the Paul-Boncour Law would deal with the psychological causes of war. Kahn attacked the minority for believing neither in the efficacy of the League of Nations, nor in the positive aspects of the Paul-Boncour Law. Here at the 1927 Congress one can see the issue of pacifism beginning to crystallize, a process which led to outright schism in the Ligue ten years later at the Tours Congress. Kahn argued that one could not separate peace from justice, that peace could never be achieved through abdication to unjust forces. He accused the minority of a ‘new abdication’ (probably a tendentious reference to their position during the Great War) and Michel Alexandre in particular of philo-fascism.10 Alexandre categorically rejected these accusations, saying that the minority’s views of the League of Nations had ‘absolutely nothing to do with the question’, because the Paul-Boncour law referred to the League of Nations only obliquely. He accused Kahn of ‘torturing’ the text of the law which in no way required a government to submit a mobilization decree to the League of Nations for approval. What Alexandre abhorred most was the CC’s abject approval of the Paul-Boncour law. When it came to questions of peace or war, he believed one could not serve two masters. This had nothing to do with conscientious objection or Tolstoyism and everything to do with the awful heritage of the Great War which demanded an ‘energetic, exclusive, inflexible’ response. Alexandre compared the position of the LDH to that of the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte, and found it wanting. The DLfM had joined with several other German societies in a campaign to resist war by refusing military service and engaging in a general strike in the event of war. ‘That is how the German League for the Rights of Man understands the preparation for war at a time when the French League supports the PaulBoncour law for total mobilization and the intensive fortification of our borders’, he said.11 There were issues of principle involved. Félicien Challaye, who counted himself a member of the minority on the Comité Central, underscored this in a debate on 9  See Challaye’s comments in the debate on the rapport moral in Le Congrès national de 1927. Compte-rendu sténographique. (15–17 Juillet 1927) (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1927), p. 124. The Paul-Boncour law was passed on 7 March 1927, four days after being presented to the Chamber, by 500 votes in favour against only thirty-one opposed. It quickly provoked responses from the French intellectual community in the pages of the Libres Propos and Europe, as well as a petition at the Ecole Normale Supérieure signed by fifty-four students, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Aron. See Jean-François Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises: Manifestes et pétitions au XXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1990). See also Sirinelli, Génération intellectuelle: Khâgneux et normaliens dans l’entre-deux-guerres (Paris: Fayard, 1988), pp. 314–43 (Chapter 10, ‘Le pacifisme à l’Ecole normale supérieure’). 10  ‘Discours de M. Emile Kahn’, in the debate on the rapport moral, in Congrès national de 1927, pp. 130–1. 11  Michel Alexandre, ‘Discours de M. Michel Alexandre’, in the debate on the rapport, in Congrès national de 1927, pp. 135, 138–40.

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the Rapport Moral at the 1928 Congress in Toulouse. For Challaye, it was clear that the Ligue was too beholden to the powers that be. He believed that the Ligue’s ‘essential task was the defence of individual liberty’ and that the ‘danger which threatens the Ligue is the politicians’ spirit which concedes too much to raison d’état’. The state had no need of the Ligue’s help, he said. On the contrary, the Ligue needed ‘to come to the rescue of individuals, of free individuals and of groups of free individuals. This is a point we need to insist on: the defence of freedom for individuals, to do anything that does not harm other people.’12 And so, despite the fact that in the past he had been one of those who referred to Poincaré as ‘Poincaréla-guerre’, he believed that one had to give credit where credit was due and lend support in 1928 to Poincaré’s essentially liberal policies in allowing the Alsatians and Lorrainers more control over their own destiny. While he was as much in favour of ‘laïcité’ as the next Ligueur, be believed that it had to be introduced in Alsace-Lorraine by persuasion and not by force; ‘nothing’, he said, ‘will serve the cause of peace better, the cause of rapprochement between France and Germany, than a happy Alsace, which is to say an Alsace doing as it pleases within its borders’.13 The stock answer to this from Alphonse Aulard, on behalf of the CC, was that the Republic was ‘indivisible’; he not a little paradoxically claimed that the entire Ligue wanted decentralization, but it had to be in unity.14 The Locarno era, as it has been called, stretching from 1925 down to 1932 saw the emergence in France of a journal one of whose unstated aims was to provide a forum in which the minority view of the Great War could be given voice. That journal was called Evolution, and its subtitle, Revue mensuelle des questions intéressant l’apaisement international et le rapprochement des peuples, expressed the belief that the time had come for rapprochement in European international affairs. One of the key foci of Evolution was thus the war guilt/war origins debate, and it published many names from the roster of the LDH’s minority. The fact that it was subsidized by the German Foreign Office has led Patrick de Villepin, among ­others, to criticize it roundly as an example of ‘pacifism in the service of Germany’.15 Three factors argue against this simplistic view of Evolution, however. First, the journal appeared at precisely the moment that under Briand and Stresemann Europe seemed to be emerging finally from the miasma of the post-war period; it should thus be seen as representative of this period, and not as an anomaly. Secondly, however, and surely of some importance, is the fact that the Germans stopped subsidizing Evolution almost immediately after the Nazis came to power in 1933. And finally, it ought not to strike one as strange that the German Foreign Office was prepared to invest sizeable sums of money in an international campaign, both scholarly and popular, 12  ‘Discours de M. Challaye’ in debate on the ‘Rapport Moral’, in Le Congrès national de 1928. Compte-rendu sténographique (15–17 Juillet 1928) (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1928), p. 89. 13  Ibid., pp. 89 and 91. 14  ‘Réponse de M. Aulard’, in the debate on the ‘Rapport Moral’, in Congrès national de 1928, p. 92. 15  See Patrick de Villepin, ‘Victor Margueritte (1866–1942): le pacifisme au service de l’Allemagne?’ Thèse pour le doctorat d’Etat, Université de Paris-IV-Sorbonne, 4 vols., 1989. Cf. Holger Herwig, ‘Clio Deceived: Patriotic Self-Censorship in Germany after the Great War’, in International Security, 12 (Fall 1987), pp. 5–44.

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to fight what it viewed as the war guilt lie. That in so doing it was prepared to run roughshod over the norms of historical research is worth noting; the fact that it subsidized groups and journals is less surprising. The caution being counselled by some of the Ligue’s German interlocutors in 192616 certainly did not match the effusive and enthusiastic praise for the Locarno accords from the pen of Jules Prudhommeaux, founding member of the Association de la paix par le droit and secretary-general of the Association française pour la Société des Nations, who published a long analysis of the nine Locarno accords in the Cahiers in December 1925. Already, Prudhommeaux spoke of a ‘spirit of Locarno’ which had almost overnight effected a paradigmatic shift in the relations between Germany and its neighbours to both east and west. Unlike more recent commentators who see Locarno as a triumph for German statecraft at the expense of central Europe,17 Prudhommeaux, on the contrary, proclaimed that the treaty benefited everybody: Poles and Czechoslovaks as much as French and Belgians.18 Locarno appeared to assuage the Ligue’s conscience vis-à-vis the Versailles Treaty, too. Whereas the English Union of Democratic Control seemed to want to overturn Versailles, the Ligue defended it in a long manifesto-cum-letter that it sent to the UDC explaining its different approach to the Treaty.19 Two years after the signing of the Accords, however, the Ligue was once again concerned about the direction of German domestic politics. Linking domestic political repression of German pacifists with the foreign policy ramifications of the Locarno agreements, the Comité Central responded strongly to the arrest of Fritz Röttcher, the editor of Die Menschheit in Wiesbaden, on charges of high treason for having published an article by Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster and Carl Mertens on clandestine German rearmament and preparations for war. The CC motion concluded with the ‘firm hope that the German government will not repudiate, by acts of this nature, the spirit of Locarno which has earned it the right to re-take its place in the great family of European states’.20 At the end of 1927, the Comité Central wondered if it had perhaps not too precipitously agreed with Hellmut von Gerlach’s request that the issue of war responsibilities be submitted to an impartial authority for judgement. This was sparked by President von Hindenburg’s speech at Tannenberg in which he said ‘[t]he accusation that Germany was responsible for this greatest of all wars we hereby 16  See the anonymous essay, ‘L’Allemagne en 1926’, Cahiers 26, 15 (25 July 1926), pp. 339–40, written by ‘Un ligueur allemand’, which provided a rather negative analysis of the German situation post-Locarno. Interestingly, the unnamed German’s conclusions were attacked by Salomon Grumbach at a meeting of the Comité Central, who thought it extremely partial and not representative of what was happening in Germany—the same Grumbach who, a few short years later, was to become such a virulent critic of Germany. See ‘Comité Central. Extraits. Séance du 11 juin 1926’, Cahiers 26, 15 (25 July 1926), pp. 344–5. 17  See, for example, Zara Steiner, The Lights that Failed: European International History, 1919–1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), esp. pp. 397–410. 18  [Jules]-Jean Prudhommeaux, ‘Les Accords de Locarno’, Cahiers 25, 27 (25 December 1925), pp. 627–32. 19  Comité Central, ‘Extraits. Séance du 4 janvier 1926’, Cahiers 26, 3 (10 February 1926), pp. 59–60. 20  Comité Central, ‘Extraits. Séance du 7 novembre 1927’, Cahiers 27, 26 (20–5 December 1927), p. 615.

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repudiate; Germans in every walk of life unanimously reject it. It was in no spirit of envy, hatred, or lust of conquest that we unleashed the sword.’21 The problem, which many members of the committee recognized, was the difficulty of finding an impartial authority to judge the matter. After a very full discussion, they essentially upheld their earlier vote, albeit by an admittedly slim margin.22 The idea, though, that somehow an ‘impartial’ committee of historians could come up with an agreeable decision on war origins, guilt, and responsibilities had a long shelf-life. Looking ahead to 1931, for example, the executive committee discussed a recent speech by General Groener, the German war minister, on the subject of responsibilities. Victor Basch thought it might be an ‘opportune’ moment to reiterate the Ligue’s long-held thesis, shared moreover with the Deutsche Liga, that the debate would only ever be closed after ‘competent and enlightened’ historians ‘established’ responsibilities and whose ‘verdict’ would ‘be imposed on the peoples in question’. Emile Kahn, who was actually an agrégé in history, thought this was a complete flight of fancy. He said it was difficult to ­imagine a tribunal of historians, and in any event, such a tribunal was contrary to the very notion of history. The only effect would be more polemics, and that had to be avoided. Interestingly, Kahn believed that the German pacifists were not doing enough to counter the nationalist campaign in Germany. It was left to the chemist, Paul Langevin, to make the point that the nationalist campaign demanding treaty revision would never really cease ‘as long as Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty continues to exist’. The Bureau then decided that it was ‘preferable not to re-open the discussion on war responsibilities’.23 Back in 1927, the second edition of Pierre Renouvin’s Les Origines immédiates de la guerre was published, an excerpt of which was printed in the Cahiers in an attempt to prove the majority thesis regarding war origins. Renouvin’s piece, coming from the pen of a ‘serious’ historian, was not accompanied by the usual platitudinous disclaimer about the Ligue’s tradition of openness to differing opinions that was found at the beginning of any essay expressing a thesis with which the CC was not comfortable. It was an excellent summary of the last five weeks of peace in 1914. Renouvin argued cogently that Austria and Germany bore the brunt of responsibility for the slide into war, although he was fairly harsh towards the Russians as well. In the case of both Germany and Russia he demonstrated ­particularly well the way in which military preoccupations and strategic demands 21  Cited in Sir John W. Wheeler-Bennett, Hindenburg: The Wooden Titan (London: Macmillan, 1934 and 1967), p. 318. Wheeler-Bennett comments that ‘There is no doubt that the declaration of innocence, delivered in booming tones, which amplifiers intensified and radio carried to the four corners of the country, represented the conviction of the vast majority of the German people, but the effect abroad was anything but favourable. The speech had been made to gratify the demands of the Nationalist Party and had not been intended as the opening of a campaign for repudiation. Consequently, the Foreign Offices and public opinion of the world were completely unprepared for so emphatic a declaration, and at once doubts, never entirely absent from Allied minds, arose as to the honesty of Stresemann’s Policy of Fulfilment.’ A more recent biography of Hindenburg agrees on the symbolic importance of the speech. See Anna von der Goltz, Hindenburg: Power, Myth and the Rise of the Nazis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 126–7. 22  Comité Central, ‘Extraits. Séance du 7 novembre 1927’. 23  Bureau, ‘Extraits. Séance du 13 mars 1931’, Cahiers 31, 9 (30 March 1931), p. 205.

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subordinated political and diplomatic considerations in 1914. But at the end of the day, the fault still lay with Austria and Germany. He argued that blame needed to be situated a little way back from the brink; it was to be found just before the  military decisions took centre stage. The ‘decisive moment of the crisis’, in Renouvin’s way of thinking, was therefore the moment at which the Austrian and German governments ‘could still be masters of their actions’. The declarations of war were thus reduced to mere formalities in his mind. What was necessary was to look at the ‘deliberate acts which created the conditions for the conflict, at the decisions prepared long in advance in the chancelleries’, or in other words at the ‘deep intentions’ of the various actors. The military provocation of July 1914 had been determined by a diplomatic provocation, and the event linking the two was the Austrian declaration of war against Serbia. Renouvin argued that ‘only Germany and Austria wanted this provocation’; they refused to concede anything or to submit the matter to arbitration. The only solution they accepted was ‘the act of force; they had set the agenda with their eyes wide open, after having cold bloodedly envisaged all of the possible consequences of their decision’.24 The German Foreign Office was very interested in Renouvin and his theses on the origins of the Great War. Legationsrat Schwendemann of the press office of the Auswärtiges Amt reported that Renouvin was open to the idea of giving a lecture in Berlin on war origins and holding private discussions with German historians on the issue of war guilt. Apparently, though, his condition for closer relations with the Germans was that they had to ‘drop’ Demartial. Schwendemann seemed to imply to Renouvin that that might be possible, although in his memorandum he wrote that he doubted if the Zentrale zur Erforschung der Kriegsursachen would be positively disposed to the idea. The German Foreign Office was interested in cultivating relations with Renouvin because of his ‘close relations with Poincaré’ and also because he was one of the most important voices in the French diplomatic document publication commission. Schwendemann thought that Renouvin might even be evolving slowly in the direction of German thinking on the war guilt question, and that this would deepen once Poincaré passed away. In any event, the German conclusion about the state of play for France in the war guilt debate in late 1930 is interesting. Schwendemann thought that the French were finally beginning to feel ‘isolated’ and that ‘the war guilt edifice is close to collapse.’25 Félicien Challaye, a philosopher by training, and not an historian, replied to Renouvin’s theses some six months later in an article published by the Cahiers, this time with the usual editorial disclaimer underlining that even though Renouvin had ‘established the responsibilities of the German and Austrian governments’, nevertheless, because of the Ligue’s ‘traditions of impartial objectivity’, the Cahiers had agreed to publish Challaye’s rejoinder so that he could ‘make known his personal 24 Pierre Renouvin, ‘La Question des responsabilités. Les origines immédiates de la guerre (28 juin–4 août 1914)’, Cahiers 28, 10 (20 April 1928), pp. 218–25. 25 L.R.  Schwendemann, ‘Aufzeichnung’ (for Herrn Ministerialdirector Köpke and Herrn Gesandten Meyer), Berlin, 16 December 1930, in PA/AA R 26403 Schriftwechsel mit Vereinen und Privatpersonen.

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opinion’.26 The average Ligue member, whether he was aware of it or not, was thus not so subtly placed before two options, one of which ‘established’ a certain truth, and the other of which was merely the expression of a personal ‘opinion’. None of that prevented Challaye from making a compelling argument and raising disturbing questions. His generation, he wrote, was faced with the ‘great human task’ of ‘organizing a definitive peace’, the first condition of which was Franco-German rapprochement. Everything else was secondary, and even if it could be proved that Germany and Austria were guilty of having started the war, the same essential task would remain. Challaye’s essay was important because it marked a turning away from the mono-causal explanations for the outbreak of war in 1914. Despite the fact that he was extremely critical of French and Russian policy, especially with regard to the ramifications of the Franco-Russian Alliance, he was also even-handed in his approach to the question of war responsibilities. Challaye emphasized that he certainly had no intention of whitewashing the guilt of the Central Powers. Unlike the attacks by Morhardt earlier in the decade, Challaye had no compunction at all in writing that the crowned heads, the ministers, and above all the general staffs of Austria and Germany were guilty. But he argued that ‘the guilt of certain of the belligerents does not necessarily lead to the innocence of their adversaries’; it was quite possible that on both sides ‘certain men’ had actually desired the conflagration and actively pushed the ‘peoples’ into it.27 He criticized Renouvin for having looked only at the deep intentions, the decisions and ways of thinking, of the Austrians and the Germans in the immediate run-up to the war. The ‘deep intentions’ were really therefore not that deep. Renouvin’s analysis was all well and good, but it was only the beginning of the story. Challaye set out to examine the deep thinking, the mental structures of the French and Russians, and came to the conclusion that they, too, were ready and willing to go to war in 1914. Challaye began by unpacking the long-standing French desire for revanche for the loss of Alsace-Lorraine during the Franco-Prussian war. He argued that ‘a certain number of Frenchmen had the desire and maintained the hope of retaking, by force, the lost provinces’, citing the examples of Paul Déroulède, Maréchal Foch, and Raymond Poincaré as examples of influential men who had preached the need for revenge.28 As for the Russians, he argued that since Peter the Great they had wanted to ‘get their hands on Constantinople and the Straits’, and that effectively the Slavic peoples of the Balkans, whom the Russians had helped ‘deliver from the Turkish yoke’, were only instruments towards the greater goal of controlling the Straits.29 Both France and Russia had territorial designs in the period before 1914. The Franco-Russian Alliance was designed, in principle, to maintain the peace, according to Challaye. But it had quickly been seen both by French revanchistes and Russian pan-Slavists as a way of ‘realising their ambitions: the return of Strasbourg 26  Félicien Challaye, ‘A Propos des responsabilités: Les responsabilités françaises et russes’, Cahiers 28, 27 (30 October 1928), pp. 630–8 for the entire article and p. 630, note 1 for the editorial comment. One wonders how ‘objectivity’ could be anything but ‘impartial’, but that is the formulation the Cahiers used. 27  Ibid., p. 631. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid.

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and the take-over of Constantinople’.30 With the arrival of Théophile Delcassé as French Minister of Foreign Affairs, the alliance took on a new character.31 Prior to this it had been a defensive alliance, but Challaye argued—and this was one of the essential points of his essay—that it had become offensive in nature. By 1914, the Franco-Russian Alliance had thus become an instrument to be used in a ‘war of conquest’; for France it was no longer even simply a question of regaining Alsace-Lorraine, but increasingly, Challaye argued, of taking the Left Bank of the Rhine and the Saar basin as well.32 He laid great stock in the fact that Russia was the first of the Great Powers to order a general mobilization, indicating thereby that the animus in the argument about mobilizations had hardly attenuated ten years after the war’s end.33 There was much that was suggestive in Challaye’s essay. He invoked themes which antedated by as much as fifty years the work of h ­ istorians in the second half of the twentieth century which underlined the importance of the nationalist revival in French preparedness for war in 1914.34 Jacques Hadamard, another Comité Central member and a professor at the Collège de France, responded to Challaye’s article in December 1928, writing that ‘War could only have been avoided if Austria had radically changed its attitude . . . or if Germany had declared that it would not support it in its insane claims. And that was never in question, any more on July 30th than on the 23rd.’ War was i­ nevitable after the acts of 23 and 25 July and would have been even without the Russian mobilization. He was completely opposed to the idea of ‘shared responsibilities’, and believed that all right-thinking pacifists should be, too.35 Challaye responded to Hadamard in January 1929, effectively skewering his logic and pointing out the lack of substantive evidence and cogent argument in what had been essentially merely an opinion piece in the full sense of the word.36 Hadamard had written in the original article that he would change his mind ‘the day on which I will be shown a German or Austrian document which speaks of respecting not only the territorial integrity but the independence, the national sovereignty, of Serbia.’ Georges Demartial set out to do exactly this, providing several examples from published Austrian diplomatic documents which demonstrated that Serbian independence and territorial integrity had not been in question in 1914. He sent this to the Cahiers which strangely declined to publish it. At a Comité Central meeting on 13 February 1929, Challaye demanded the insertion of a letter from Georges Demartial regarding Hadamard’s article, but the Bureau 30 Ibid. 31  See Christopher Andrew, Théophile Delcassé and the Making of the Entente Cordiale: A Reappraisal of French Foreign Policy, 1898–1905 (London: Macmillan, 1968). 32  Félicien Challaye, ‘A Propos des responsabilités: Les responsabilités françaises et russes’, pp. 632 and 637. 33  Ibid., p. 636. 34  See Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979); and Eugen Weber, The Nationalist Revival in France, 1905–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). 35  Jacques Hadamard, ‘Les Responsabilités de la guerre’, Cahiers 28, 31 (10 December 1928), p. 732. 36  Félicien Challaye, ‘Correspondance. A propos des responsabilités de la guerre’, Cahiers 29, 1 (10 January 1929), p. 17.

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was of the opinion that the time had come to ‘provisionally close’ the debate.37 In a private letter to the Ligue’s secretary-general, Henri Guernut, Challaye demanded an answer to his twice-repeated question as to whether the Cahiers ‘would ever publish as an interesting document, if necessary in an opinion piece, the fascinating response of M. Demartial to our colleague Hadamard. Tell me yes or no.’38 In the end, after several months attempting to get the short essay published in the Cahiers, it appeared in Evolution.39 The Locarno era brought with it an expansion, rather than a lessening, of the international debate about war origins and guilt; and it is clear that the French orthodox position was ‘losing’ that debate. Thus, for example, Gustave Dupin, an early voice critical of the orthodox interpretation of war origins, published a review of Georges Demartial’s L’Evangile du Quai d’Orsay in the American liberal magazine, The Progressive, which argued that Demartial laid too much blame on Viviani, and in so doing at least partially let Poincaré off the hook for responsibility in the outbreak of war.40 Of particular interest for our purposes here, however, is the anathema hurled at the Ligue des droits de l’homme, and in particular at one of its ‘high priests’, Alphonse Aulard. Demartial had challenged Aulard to refute his arguments, but Dupin acidly commented that nothing could be expected from the Ligue: ‘cowardice will congeal them into a convenient conspiracy of silence.’41 And, in fact, that is pretty much what happened. There is no mention in the Cahiers of the attack on the Ligue and Aulard despite the fact that the Cahiers were normally assiduous in following press reaction to anything the Ligue did or said. Learned American voices were taking up the challenge posed by Demartial, however, and they, too, were coming to conclusions not particularly supportive of the ‘orthodox’ position of the Ligue. A year before the 1929 publication of his Franco-Russian Alliance, the Harvard historian William L. Langer wrote a t­ renchant review of the fourth volume of Raymond Poincaré’s memoirs, L’Union sacrée, in which he witheringly commented that Poincaré painted a picture of a France ‘so pacific that she could not believe in the arrière-pensées of anyone else, but with beautiful candor was always attributing to others her own virtues’.42 Poincaré’s 500-page encomium brought nothing new to the table, other than perhaps his belated admission that the Russian general mobilization preceded everyone else’s. Perhaps 37  See ‘Comité Central. Extraits’, Cahiers 29, 9 (30 March 1929), p. 211. 38  See Félicien Challaye to Henri Guernut, 21 February 1929, in BDIC, ALDH, F∆Rés 798/5 Challaye Correspondence. 39  See Georges Demartial, ‘Polémique’, Evolution 41 (May 1929), pp. 41–3. Despite his opposition to the minority theses on the question of war guilt and war origins, it is interesting to note that Hadamard was one of the members who demanded, in vain, that the Comité Central protest René Gerin’s 1934 expulsion from the Légion d’Honneur on account of his vocal support for conscientious objection. The CC declined to involve itself in a fracas over ‘decorations’. See ‘Comité Central. Extraits’, Cahiers 34, 15 (20 May 1934), p. 347. 40  Gustave Dupin, ‘Poincaré, the Real Villain in 1914: A Critique of Demartial’s L’Evangile du Quai d’Orsay’, The Progressive, 1 June 1927, pp. 373–5. 41  Ibid., p. 373. 42 William  L.  Langer, ‘Two New Apologies’, The New Republic (1 August 1928), p. 284. See Raymond Poincaré, L’Union sacrée, 1914 [vol. 4 of Au Service de la France: neuf années de souvenirs] (Paris: Plon, 1927).

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even more to the point, Langer found no evidence whatsoever that the ‘French government in any way attempted to deter its ally, that it did not actually encourage secret mobilization on the part of Russia or that it disapproved the Russian mobilization at the time’. As for the French statement in 1914 that ­mobilization did not mean war, Langer could only say that any ‘German statesman who neglected to answer a Russian mobilization in 1914 by the opening of hostilities would have been guilty of criminal neglect.’43 Undoubtedly, a signal event in the ongoing debate over war origins, war guilt, and war responsibilities was the publication in 1930 of the exchange between René Gerin and Raymond Poincaré.44 Gerin’s book originated in a discussion he had with Raymond Poincaré, at the latter’s invitation, in June 1929. Gerin was scandalized at the treatment meted out to Georges Demartial, who had been expelled for five years from the Légion d’honneur for having published articles in France and abroad that were contrary to the officially sanctioned French version of the origins of the war.45 Under the agreement between them, however, Gerin could not engage in a debate with Poincaré; he was limited to asking his questions in as detailed and forensic a way possible, but then could not reply to Poincaré’s responses. The result was fourteen questions spread over thirty-four pages of text, as opposed to 144 pages of response from the former president of the Republic. This is why it is ­necessary to read the Gerin/Poincaré book in conjunction with a book written by Gerin the following year which had as its provocative title Comment fut provoquée la guerre de 1914.46 In many ways the latter book was also a reply to Poincaré’s 43  Langer, ‘Two New Apologies’, p. 284. 44  René Gerin and Raymond Poincaré, Les Responsabilités de la Guerre: Quatorze questions par René Gerin, ancien élève de l’Ecole normale supérieure, agrégé des lettres, Quatorze Réponses par Raymond Poincaré de l’Académie Française (Paris: Payot, 1930). My MA supervisor at the University of Toronto, John C. Cairns, noted that this book was still on the reading list at Cornell University, where he took his PhD in the early 1950s. The book was published the following year in Berlin under the title Die Schuld am Kriege: 14 Antworten auf 14 Fragen zur Kriegsschuldfrage gestellt von René Gerin/Raymond Poincaré (Berlin: Kindt & Bucher, 1931). Gerin was a member of the Comité Central from 1936 until 1944, but his activity in the Ligue before the mid-thirties is nebulous, although he did stand for election to the CC in 1934. His primary claim to fame was as one of the most important voices of what I have called ‘pacifisme nouveau style’ in France. See Ingram, Politics of Dissent, Part II ‘Pacifisme nouveau style, or the Politics of Dissent’, pp. 121–245; for the central role played by Gerin in the conscientious objection movement see also Ingram, ‘The Circulaire Chautemps, 1933: The Third Republic Discovers Conscientious Objection’, French Historical Studies 17, 2 (Fall 1991), pp. 387–409. 45  Romain Rolland expressed his ‘sympathie et ma haute estime’ to Demartial in a letter dated 21 May 1928 in Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), Fonds Romain Rolland, ‘Journal de Romain Rolland’, July 1927–May 1928, p. 149. Poincaré was more than a little vexed with Demartial, telling Gerin apparently that he believed Demartial was the ‘man’ of a certain M. C . . . Demartial stated categorically that ‘je n’ai jamais vu le haut personnage en cas, ne lui ai jamais écrit, n’ai jamais eu avec lui aucun rapport même indirect.’ See Georges Demartial, ‘Les Responsabilités de la guerre: les quatorze questions de René Gérin et les quatorze réponses de R. Poincaré’, Evolution 54 (June 1930), p. 27, note 1. This was reprinted the following month with a shortened French title and a translated German text as ‘Les Responsabilités de la guerre’, in Die Berliner Monatshefte für internationale Aufklärung (July 1930), pp. 628–31. Gerin himself was a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur. Four years later he, too, was expelled because of his pacifist activity. See René Gerin, Honneur et patrie. Ou Comment j’ai été exclu de la Légion d’Honneur (Paris: Editions de la LICP, 1934). 46  See René Gerin, Comment fut provoquée la guerre de 1914 (Paris: Rivière, 1931, second edition 1933). Poincaré’s much more anodyne title, Comment fut déclarée la guerre de 1914, was published in 1939 by Flammarion, five years after his death.

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massive memoir, Au Service de la France, as well as to the publication of the lectures he gave on war origins at the Sorbonne in 1921.47 To return to the 1930 Poincaré/Gerin book, however, the anonymous review in the Cahiers indicates that the discussion had finally reached a level which the Ligue could not ignore; the same points which Basch and Co. had so arrogantly dismissed in 1922 because they were raised by men whose education did not match their own could now no longer be discounted and ignored. Gerin was, after all, in terms of his educational attainments ‘one of them’, and Poincaré was none other than the former president of the Republic and a member of the Académie Française. The debate on war responsibilities had thus come of age for the Ligue des droits de l’homme. Significantly, the reviewer noted that Poincaré now recognized ‘that the mobilization of Russian forces, done without the knowledge of the French government on 30 July 1914, could have been an imprudence or an error which explains a certain number of circumstances that have long been commented on’. Nevertheless, as far as France itself was concerned, according to Poincaré there was ‘not the shadow of a fault’.48 As we have seen, the Ligue’s minority energetically contested the validity of French reasons for war in 1914. People like Morhardt preferred more mono-causal explanations which blamed France or Russia or the City of London for the outbreak of war. Gerin, on the other hand, found explanations for the war which laid blame entirely on one side or the other ‘equally inadmissible’. Even though his fourteen questions dealt only with France and the Entente, he made it clear that he in no way wished to whitewash German responsibilities; each side had to admit its own faults and responsibilities.49 This was an important caveat because reading the Poincaré/Gerin text one could quite easily come to the conclusion that Gerin was fully in the minority camp, which was the way the book was interpreted by the Kriegsschuldreferat and by dissident voices in France.50 Having said that, Gerin took as his point of departure the fact that ‘many’ French people, and in particular the Normaliens who would be charged with educating French youth on the subject, no longer subscribed to the official view. Gerin did not believe that Poincaré was personally responsible for the outbreak of the war, but he believed that the former president was the person best qualified to answer questions about what had ­happened in 1914 because of the crucial role he played in French politics. In an interesting admission for someone who had already become a major figure in the new-style pacifism of the thirties, he also said that he was not even sure that ‘crime’ was the right word to describe the action of the various governments in 1914. Over and above all this, however, he claimed that ‘most historians’ outside France had declared the ‘Versailles thesis indefensible’.51 47  See Raymond Poincaré, Au Service de la France, 10 vols (Paris: Plon, 1926–33); Poincaré, Les Origines de la guerre (Paris: Plon, 1921). 48  Anon, ‘Mémento bibliographique’, Cahiers 30, 23 (20 September 1930), p. 551. 49  Gerin in Gerin and Poincaré, Responsabilités, pp. 8–9. 50  See Demartial, ‘Les Responsabilités de la guerre’, Evolution 54 (June 1930), pp. 25–8 and its publication in Die Berliner Monatshefte (July 1930), pp. 628–31. 51 Gerin/Poincaré, Responsabilités, pp. 8–11.

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The thrust of all of Gerin’s questions was the motives of the French and Entente governments in 1914. It is clear from Poincaré’s answers how concerned he was to protect his character from the imputations of historians and others. Certain questions seemed to cut closer to the bone than others, at least judging from the length of Poincare’s responses. For example, Gerin’s third question raised the possibility that France might have given assurances to the Russians that even if they attacked Austria first, nevertheless France would support them. This elicited a twenty-page response from Poincaré in which he claimed that his statement to the Chamber on 6 July 1922 and his lectures the year before at the Sorbonne had been ‘absolutely sincere’ and that ‘moreover, nothing allows you to allege that numerous documents contradict my “assertions”’; ‘Never—I declare to you on my honour, Monsieur— have I ever said a single word that could be construed as allowing such an extension of the Franco-Russian alliance.’52 He said that he told Sazonov clearly and unambiguously that France would fulfil its treaty obligations and no more. Part of the problem was the Russian ambassador in Paris, Alexander Izvolsky, in whom Poincaré did not have full confidence;53 this did not stop the former president from saying, however, that he had ‘never heard a single word from Izvolsky that might have led him to believe that he was not sincerely attached to peace’.54 How did he square the circle? Poincaré suggested in 1930 that it was perhaps either because the text of Izvolsky’s correspondence had been badly translated or because the Soviets had altered it in their Livre noir.55 Clearly, Gerin had touched a raw nerve, but to suggest, as Poincaré did, that no one had the right to question his ‘assertions’ bespeaks a strange misunderstanding both of historical research and of political analysis. Gerin reminded Poincaré that successive Socialist Party Congresses had refused to accept French participation in a war between Russian and Austrian imperialisms, and that the 1875 French Constitution made it very clear that war could only be declared with the approval of Parliament. Was it not the case, he wondered, that the promises made by Poincaré and the French government to the Russians before the war had had the effect of preparing war behind Parliament’s back? Poincaré responded by reiterating that he had promised nothing to Russia beyond a strict compliance with the Franco-Russian treaty and that in any event he would never have done anything without the ‘prior consent of Parliament’.56 Gerin zeroed in on the terms of the Franco-Russian Alliance, however, and asked if France had agreed to support Russia even if the latter mobilized not merely against Austria but also against Germany at the same time.57 Poincaré’s response was revealing. He said that when Izvolsky came to see him on the ‘tragic night’ of the German ­declaration of war, he had told the Russian ambassador that the French government needed a few days to prepare a presentation to the Chamber asking for approval of war; the German declaration of war against France short-circuited this and allowed the 52  Poincaré in Gerin and Poincaré, Responsabilités, pp. 47–8 and 51. 53  Ibid., p. 49. He had also written as much in Raymond Poincaré, Les Balkans en feu, 1912 (vol. 2 of Au Service de la France: neuf années de souvenirs) (Paris: Plon, 1926), p. 128. 54  Poincaré in Gerin and Poincaré, Responsabilités, p. 50. 55  Ibid., pp. 53–4. 56  Ibid., pp. 18 and 70. 57  Ibid., p. 19.

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French government to go to war in defence of France without ever revealing the terms of the Franco-Russian Alliance. Poincaré wrote: ‘If Germany, therefore, had not declared war on us, we would not have considered ourselves authorized, by the terms of the treaty of alliance, to declare it ourselves. We would have, as our most elementary duty, taken the question to the French parliament.’58 Gerin argued that news reports on 26 July 1914 had indicated that Russia had begun ‘important’ war preparations, and that as a consequence, the German government had warned the Russians that their ‘continuation would provoke a German mobilization’. He cited a German document which stated that m ­ obilization meant war, and that it would be engaged against Russia and France at the same time, because the Germans knew what the French obligations to Russia were. The Russians were therefore playing with fire, according to Gerin. Poincaré’s argument in the October 1925 number of Foreign Affairs that Germany could have mobilized without declaring war and have continued to negotiate was specious. Gerin asked Poincaré, ‘If you had been chancellor of Germany, would you have c­ ontinued to negotiate after having mobilized?’59 Poincaré’s answer was to accuse Gerin of wanting to whitewash the Germans, of only looking at documents which seemed to render the Germans innocent, and of ignoring all documentation which showed Germany in a bad light. He believed that the Germans could have continued to negotiate despite the Russian general mobilization and called it an ‘odious calumny’ to suggest that France was quite as prepared as Germany to invade Belgium.60 Another important issue was the extent to which France had allowed its Russian ally to provoke a German mobilization (and hence war); this enabled France to invoke the clauses of the Franco-Russian Alliance by responding to an apprehended declaration of war on the part of Germany, thus avoiding the need to disclose the details of the Franco-Russian alliance to the French parliament. Gerin accused the Tsarist government of ‘impudence and imprudence’ in undertaking preparations for war as early as 26 July, knowing full well how the Germans would react.61 Poincaré took the position that the Germans might well have been exaggerating their opposition to Russian mobilization, and that in any event, Russia acted ‘not only without the knowledge of the French government, but also contrary to the recommendations of M. Viviani’. He admitted that neither he nor his ministers had ever really known at the time or even by the end of the war what had transpired in Russia from 24 to 31 July 1914, and he said this was particularly true of the key date, 30 July.62 This was quite an astonishing admission, and lends credence to the suspicion of Gerin and the minoritaires that France was dragged into the war for occult reasons. Poincaré stuck adamantly to his position, however, that ‘for twenty-two years the foreign policy of France had been happily based on the Franco-Russian Alliance’ 58  Ibid., p. 75. 59 Ibid., p. 27. Cf. Raymond Poincaré, ‘The Responsibility for the War’, Foreign Affairs 4, 1 (October 1925), pp. 1–19. 60 Gerin/Poincaré, Responsabilités, pp. 75–6. Niall Ferguson says in The Pity of War that Britain, at least, was prepared to do just that. See Ferguson, Pity of War, p. 443. 61 Gerin/Poincaré, Responsabilités, p. 24. 62  Ibid., pp. 87–8.

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and that even if the text of the treaty had had to be read before the Chamber, he was confident that a declaration of war against Germany would have been easily obtained. This did not really address Gerin’s question, however, which had argued that the French and German governments followed identical policies in July 1914, each trying to get the other to take the blame for declaring war first.63 Gerin also homed in on the deliberate falsifications contained in the Russian Orange Book and the French Livre Jaune which were doctored to make it appear as if the Russian general mobilization had been in response to the Austrian. He writes that these falsifications were proof that the ‘Russian and French governments in no way were unaware of the gravity of the Russian general mobilization. If they had really believed that mobilization was a guarantee of peace, they would not have stooped to such measures to hide the fact that Russia mobilized first.’ He wondered why, even though these measures were not Poincaré’s fault, he nevertheless continued to cite the false documents in his 1921 lectures on war origins at the Sorbonne.64 Poincaré admitted that the 1919 information published by Pravda was undoubtedly true and that the Soviets were right about this, but he strenuously objected to Gerin’s use of the words ‘false’ and ‘fraudulent’; according to Poincaré, the French government had acted in good faith, genuinely believing that the Austrian general mobilization had preceded the Russian. As for the 1921 lectures at the Sorbonne, he said that it was as a result of questions posed by Ferdinand Buisson on behalf of the Ligue des droits de l’homme that he had come to realize his mistake.65 Gerin was sceptical about the extent to which the German government could be viewed as guilty in the outbreak of war. It seemed to him that there were two mutually exclusive explanations for the war: either the Allies had gone to war to defend themselves against a German aggression, in which case Austria-Hungary was not responsible for the war, or they had gone to war to defend Serbia against Austria, in which case it was not Germany which had attacked the Allies, but vice versa.66 This was an interesting avenue of enquiry which might equally have been directed at Victor Basch, whose 1915 book took the position, as we have seen, that Austria-Hungary bore the primary responsibility for the war, but that Germany was guilty of facilitating it. The following year, Gerin returned to the charge in a monograph which rather tendentiously sought to answer the question of how the 1914 war had been provoked. He argued that the ‘profound causes’ of the war were many but could be divided, broadly speaking, into those reflecting ‘interests’ and those whose origins lay in ‘passions’. Among the former were economic and colonial rivalries, imperialism, and the machinations of arms manufacturers, while among the ‘passions’ which had led to war, he listed first and foremost nationalism (invented, he said 63 Gerin/Poincaré, Responsabilités, pp. 32 and 146. 64 Gerin/Poincaré, Responsabilités, pp. 33–5. Cf Raymond Poincaré, Les Origines de la Guerre (Paris: Plon, 1921), pp. 229–82. 65 Gerin/Poincaré, Responsabilités, pp. 149, 153, 155. Cf. Raymond Poincaré to Ferdinand Buisson, Paris, 9 January 1923, in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés 798/9 Commission des Origines de la Guerre Chemise 1. Poincaré admitted this in L’Union sacrée, p. 455. 66 Gerin/Poincaré, Responsabilités, p. 39.

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later on, by the French Revolution), followed by secret diplomacy, the alliance system, militarism, and the venality of the press (he singled out particularly the Russian and French press for excoriation).67 Gerin’s analysis of the July Crisis is key to understanding his critique of the orthodox French view and is consonant with some recent analyses (Clark, Lieven, and McMeekin, for example) which seek to re-centre the tragedy of 1914 in the Balkans where the crisis began.68 Thus, Gerin argued that through the month of July, Germany and France each gave their loyal ally a ‘blank cheque’. But the blank cheque given by Germany to Austria could—and even perhaps in the mind of Germany should—unleash an Austro-Serbian war; while the blank cheque given by France could—and, given the overly excited minds in Saint Petersburg, should—unleash a European war.69

He made no bones about the indefensibility of the Austrian ultimatum but noted that a good part of the British press approved of it. He was convinced that there were no aggressive intentions on the part of Germany, arguing that what changed everything—what he called the ‘irreparable event’—was the Russian general ­mobilization. This led him to the essential question of responsibilities and the validity of Article 231. Gerin believed that the war guilt clause was of fundamental importance because it underlay not just the justification for reparations payments but also all of the clauses of the Versailles Treaty. But equally, he believed that the judgement it rendered was historically anachronistic. He believed that responsibility for the war was shared, but doubted that one could assign moral or legal guilt to the statesmen of 1914. What was without doubt in his mind was that Article 231 was an ‘egregious error’ for three reasons. First, he believed the article was ‘useless’ because a peace treaty is the last act of a war and not the first of peace; it is thus an act of war itself. Secondly, the article was legally specious because judges could not be plaintiffs. And finally, the war guilt clause was ‘morally monstrous’ because it was founded on incomplete documentation, thrown together in hatred, and in large measure falsified.70 Going through the various belligerents of the July Crisis, he declared that ‘Sazonov and the military men of Saint Petersburg are the most responsible parties of the European (Gerin’s emphasis) war.’ One could still speculate in 1931 about French designs because the French documents had not been fully published, but he believed that France and Germany were on an equal footing with regard to the blank cheques they gave their ally.71 Nevertheless, Gerin argued that while it was completely in France’s interest to march with Russia, it was false to make the claim that France was acting from a higher position of ‘honour’ or that 67  René Gerin, Comment fut provoquée la guerre de 1914 (Paris: Rieder, 1931), pp. 13–31. On the origins of nationalism in the French Revolution, see p. 198. 68  See Sean McMeekin, The Russian Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011); McMeekin, July 1914: Countdown to War (New York: Basic Books, 2013); Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (New York: HarperCollins, 2012); Dominic Lieven, Towards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia (London: Penguin Books, 2016). 69 Gerin, Comment fut provoquée, p. 150. 70  Ibid., pp. 151, 198–9. 71  Ibid., pp. 201–2.

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it was defending ‘law and justice’.72 The only reasonable course was to revise the Treaty of Versailles completely. Gerin in no way whitewashed Germany’s responsibility in the outbreak of war. He wrote that its primary fault had been in annexing Alsace-Lorraine in 1871. Other mistakes had also been made, most notably the Tangiers and Agadir crises and its rejection of an entente with Britain at the turn of the century. But at no point did Germany plan war; the Great War could not be said to have been premeditated on Germany’s part. German leaders did not want to unleash a European war; they made a mistake in giving Austria-Hungary the ‘blank cheque’, but the ‘bellicose policy’ of Austria-Hungary was not entirely groundless given what had happened at Sarajevo. He stated categorically that while Germany and AustriaHungary ‘stubbornly wanted to localize the conflict’, Russia and France were ‘set on Europeanizing it’. His thesis, in a nutshell, was that Germany ‘no more unleashed the war than it has pre-meditated it. It only contributed to making it possible, whereas the Entente—and most especially Russia—made it certain.’ British entry into the war was certainly not based on the principle of defending tiny Belgium, but rather because British ‘interests’ were at stake, although he allowed that British responsibility for the war was far less than that of the other belligerents.73 Gerin came down on the side of shared responsibilities, writing that Responsibilities for the Great War appear therefore, today, to have been shared; to say anything more precise is difficult; it is certainly impossible, in any event, to determine exactly to what extent a particular government was more responsible than another. And behind the pretexts, the real causes of the conflict were, without doubt, diffuse; they were the divergence of interests, nationalist passions, armaments, and the ­international anarchy implicit in the system of secret diplomacy and alliances.74

The question of the origins of the Great War had important repercussions for the world of 1931 in Gerin’s mind. It was incumbent on France for reasons of ‘strict honesty’, for its ‘glory’, ‘justice’, ‘peace’, and the ‘honour of humanity’ to agree to submit Article 231 to an ‘impartial jury’: ‘After all the crimes and tragedies of which the world has borne witness, this would perhaps be the decisive step towards genuine fraternity, by means of a great redemption.’75 The Germans followed the Gerin/Poincaré debate and the controversy surrounding it and the publication of Gerin’s subsequent book with interest. The embassy in Paris was able to get its hands on a copy of Gerin’s 1931 book before it was even published. The embassy counsellor, Dr Kühn, thought that Gerin’s argumentation was ‘concisely’ expressed with an ‘absolute honesty and integrity’ and recommended that the Auswärtiges Amt purchase 500 copies of the book to send out to interested parties.76 72  Ibid., pp. 203–4. We have already noted Sir Edward Grey’s use of this trope in his speech to the House of Commons on the afternoon of 3 August 1914. 73  Ibid., pp. 204, 205, 208. 74  Ibid., p. 208. 75  Ibid., p. 210. 76  Kühn to König (Auswärtiges Amt), Deutsche Botschaft, Paris, 29 May 1931 in PA/AA 26252 Veröffentlichung zur Kriegsschuldfrage (Gerin). Two years later, when Gerin was kidnapped by Camelots du Roi in Algiers the night before he was to give a speech on the war guilt question, the story was relayed from the German Embassy back to Berlin. Kühn underlined that even before Gerin’s

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By 1931, the Kriegsschuldreferat thought that tremendous progress had been made. Reflecting back on ten years of work, Alfred von Wegerer, the director of Die Berliner Monatshefte, wrote that even if the war guilt problem still existed, it had been ‘significantly shaken’ in America, Britain, and even in France. By this point, too, von Wegerer had begun to refer to the war guilt ‘lie’ rather than simply the war guilt ‘question’ as the title of Die Kriegsschuldfrage, the former title of the Berliner Monatshefte, more accurately put it. He singled out the progress which had finally been made in France and pointed to the centrality of the Gerin/Poincaré book in this development. Von Wegerer claimed that ‘suddenly, the French people saw how their country had fallen victim to a swindle.’ According to von Wegerer, ‘it was Russia, supported by France and not restrained by England, that had caused the war.’ The entire fault lay with Russia, which had ordered general mobilization knowing full well that a European war would result.77 This is consonant with some recent commentators. Christopher Clark writes that ‘The Russian general mobilization was one of the most momentous decisions of the July Crisis.’ He notes that it preceded all of the others and ‘came at a moment when the German government had not yet even declared the State of Impending War, the German counterpart to the Russian Period Preparatory to War which had been in force since 26 July. Austria-Hungary, for its part, was still locked into a partial ­mobilization focused on defeating Serbia.’ With considerable understatement he adds that ‘there would later be some discomfort among French and Russian politicians about this sequence of events.’78 The German elections of September 1930 produced a frisson of panic throughout France, including within the Ligue des droits de l’homme. These elections marked the first significant breakthrough of the Nazi Party in German politics, winning them 107 seats in the Reichstag. Victor Basch noted that a ‘wind of panic’ had blown through the French right-wing press because of the German and i­ nternational situation. In particular, the French right had reacted strongly against a speech by one of Chancellor Bruning’s ministers, Gottfried Treviranus of the Volkskonservativen party, who had been Minister for the Occupied Territories. In a campaign speech Treviranus had declared that Germany was ‘unanimous’ in its desire to free itself from the shackles of Versailles. The French right declared Briand’s vision of ‘détente and entente’ dead in the water.79 This makes all the stranger the debate a little less than two years later within the Comité Central about the meaning of Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty. As we have seen in Chapter 4, the Ligue had long held that Article 231 was iniquitous k­ idnapping, the Prefect in Algiers had already banned his public event. See Kühn to Auswärtiges Amt, Deutsche Botschaft, Paris, 1 June 1933 in PA/AA R/26185 (Die Kriegsschuldstellung des Auslandes: Frankreich). 77  Alfred von Wegerer, ‘1931!’, Die Berliner Monatshefte für internationale Aufklärung, IX, 1 (January 1931), p. 2. 78  Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (New York: HarperCollins, 2013), p. 509. 79  Victor Basch, ‘Contre la panique. Lettre aux Sections’, Cahiers 30, 26 (20 October 1930), pp. 603–8.

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because it had cast the Entente powers simultaneously in the role of judge and prosecutor, and had imposed a moral and judicial sentence on the vanquished former foe. Despite this, the majority view in the Ligue was that Germany was guilty of starting the Great War, and this position had been clearly enunciated since at least 1915 by a host of Ligue representatives. The problem with the Versailles Treaty and Article 231 was not so much the substance as the form; the question in the minds of the majority of Ligueurs was not if Germany was guilty—it clearly was as far as they were concerned—but rather whether due process had been observed in the elaboration of the treaties, and they clearly believed it had not. Secondly, it was also understood that Article 231 linked the obligation of reparations to the question of war origins, and the Ligue opposed that linkage, too, all the while somewhat paradoxically believing that the Germans needed to pay to repair the damage their invasion of Belgium and northern France had caused. The Ligue was therefore caught in something of a conundrum: its majority believed that Germany was guilty of starting the war and must repair the damage that its aggression had caused, but at the same time it was opposed to the imposition of Versailles on a defeated Germany and to any linkage between the reparations argument and notions of a ‘criminal’ or ‘moral’ verdict implied by Article 231. The subtlety of the argument caused the Ligue to tie itself in knots attempting to defend the unfathomable. A third paradox was that despite the mantra that the question of war guilt, war origins, and war responsibilities could only be decided by international historical scholarship once all the documents and archives were available to historians, when professional historians argued a case not to the liking of the Ligue the result was almost uniformly negative. Such was the case at the end of 1931. In November 1931, Camille Bloch and Pierre Renouvin, both of them ­historians, published an article in Le Temps, which was reprinted in the 20 June 1932 number of the Cahiers.80 In it, they made the case that the intention of Article 231 was a limited civil law recognition by Germany of its obligation to pay reparations for the damages that had been inflicted on France by virtue of its aggression, and nothing more. According to Bloch and Renouvin, nothing had been farther from the minds of the Allied powers in 1919 than to ‘demand from Germany the avowal of a general responsibility’.81 It was the German delegation at the Peace Conference that had been responsible for the misinterpretation of the intent of the article. Subsequent interpretations of Article 231 in Germany and in France were therefore 80  Camille Bloch and Pierre Renouvin, ‘Libres opinions. A propos des réparations. L’article 231 du Traité de Versailles’, Cahiers 32, 15 (20 June 1932), pp. 339–45. This article was originally published on 15 November 1931 in Le Temps. Paul Mantoux, the interpreter for the Big Four at the Paris Peace Conference, confirmed Bloch and Renouvin’s thesis in an article originally published in Le Temps on 29 November 1931, and then re-published in the Cahiers immediately after Bloch and Renouvin’s article. See Paul Mantoux, ‘Libres opinions. L’opinion d’un témoin’, Cahiers 32, 15 (20 June 1932), pp. 346–7. Mantoux wrote, ‘Le sentiment qui a conduit les hommes responsables de la décision à insérer—à tort ou à raison—cet article dans le traité de paix n’était pas, en effet, le désir de prononcer contre l’ennemi de la veille une sentence historique. C’était avant tout la préoccupation des réactions de l’opinion publique dans leurs pays respectifs, le souci des reproches, auxquels ils devaient s’exposer, d’avoir donné au problème des réparations une solution insuffisante.’ 81  Bloch and Renouvin, ‘L’article 231 du Traité de Versailles’, p. 345.

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a gross misunderstanding of its real import and intent.82 On the basis of this analysis, Henri Guernut proposed a motion at the meeting of the CC on 16 June 1932, which effectively took this position.83 Guernut’s motion elicited a huge debate about Article 231 and the meaning of the Versailles Treaty. Interestingly, at the beginning of the meeting and even before Guernut had introduced his motion, Basch had led off with a jeremiad about the extent to which the Paris peace treaties had been an unmitigated failure: ‘Let us not be afraid to declare that the treaties have failed.’84 Basch’s comments were the opening gambit in a committee discussion of the choice of topics for debate at the Ligue’s 1932 Paris Congress. He thought that the LDH needed to examine the question of what ‘adjustments’ needed to be made to the treaties. Félicien Challaye argued that ‘adjustment’ was too weak a term—a euphemism—and that what was really required was outright treaty revision.85 This was the immediate background, then, to the discussion of Guernut’s motion which received surprisingly little support within the committee. Charles Gide, for example, before his death earlier in the year, had made known his o­ pposition to the Bloch/Renouvin thesis.86 Henri Sée, an honorary member of the CC, also spoke against Guernut’s motion. It was clear to him that even if the new Bloch/Renouvin 82   Bloch and Renouvin wrote in their conclusion, ‘Il est certain que les auteurs du traité, Wilson comme Lloyd George et Clemenceau, croyaient fermement à la culpabilité de l’ancien gouvernement impérial. Mais ils n’avaient pas eu, en rédigeant le traité, l’intention d’exiger de l’Allemagne l’aveu d’une responsabilité générale. Ils n’avaient eu d’autre objet que de faire reconnaître par le Reich la matérialité d’un fait constituant une faute, celui de l’agression commise en juillet-août 1914, génératrice de dommages à compenser en vertu de la législation civile universelle;—de l’agression qui créa cette “responsabilité initiale de la guerre” regardée en 1921 par le tribunal mixte franco-allemand comme le point de départ juridique du traité de Versailles. Aux yeux de ses rédacteurs, l’article 231 n’avait ni une autre signification ni une autre portée. Il est de principe qu’un Etat est responsable des actes de son gouvernement. Le Gouvernement allemand ayant (avec ses alliés) commis l’agression, l’Allemagne en est responsable: voilà ce que proclame l’article 231. C’est la délégation allemande à la conférence qui a tenu à l’interpréter comme une condamnation de toute la politique du Reich avant 1914. Donc, le seul aveu auquel le Gouvernement allemand ait été contraint en 1919, de la part des vainqueurs, est l’aveu limité qu’enregistrent les termes de l’article, expression d’une incontestable vérité de fait. A ceux qui soutiennent que l’Entente a imposé à l’Allemagne la signature d’un acte consacrant ce que la propagande appelle son déshonneur, il suffit d’opposer le traité de Versailles lui-même pour conclure qu’à l’Allemagne on n’a pas demandé cela, et qu’un tel acte n’existe pas.’ Ibid. 83  Guernut’s resolution read: ‘Le Comité Central, Après avoir étudié le texte et les commentaires de l’article 231 du Traité de Versailles;  Estime: Que cet article n’a point le sens qu’on lui donne généralement en Allemagne; Qu’il n’a pas infligé à l’Allemagne l’obligation de se reconnaître responsable et seule responsable de la guerre; Qu’il énonce que l’Allemagne et ses alliés, ayant pris l’initiative d’une agression, ayant ainsi causé des dommages, sont, comme il est juste, tenus de les réparer; Dans l’intérêt de la vérité, le Comité Central émet le voeu que le ministre des Affaires étrangères saisisse une occasion prochaine de rappeler au nom de la France cette interprétation.’ See ‘Comité central. Extraits’, Cahiers 32, 17 (10 July 1932), p. 400. 84  Ibid., p. 399. 85  Ibid. The theme that was finally chosen for the 1932 Congress was ‘La Controverse sur les Traités’. 86  Gide had attacked the Bloch/Renouvin interpretation of Article 231 in two articles published in L’Emancipation in December 1931 and January 1932. See ‘Comité Central. Extraits. Séance du 16 juin 1932’, Cahiers 32, 17 (10 July 1932), p. 400.

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interpretation were correct, nevertheless the article had been drafted in such a way that it quite naturally favoured the interpretation given it by the nationalist right in Germany. Article 231 was therefore ‘very regrettable’ no matter what Bloch and Renouvin might think, and Sée remained completely unconvinced by their argumentation. The CC resolution ought to contain an expression of ‘blame’ directed against the formulators of the Treaty because the article had done a lot of harm.87 The relatively measured response of a Charles Gide or an Henri Sée was as nothing compared to the vitriol heaped on Bloch and Renouvin by the likes of Félicien Challaye and Georges Pioch, both of them important members of the new Ligue internationale des combattants de la paix, the premier example of pacifisme nouveau style in France.88 Challaye expressed ‘extremely strong objections’ to Guernut’s historical analysis, pointing out that right from the very outset in 1919 Article 231 had elicited the virtually unanimous condemnation of all parts of the German political spectrum, and that this ‘new’ thesis was actually just ‘a way of jettisoning some ballast now that research by all impartial historians has established the responsibilities of all of the statesmen leading the peoples in July 1914.’89 He demanded the withdrawal of the motion and said that the Ligue had only to ‘maintain its prior condemnation of Article 231 and of the process by which this avowal of guilt was imposed’.90 Pioch was even more scathing. He thought it indefensible that it had taken twelve years for Bloch and Renouvin to come around to their new position during which time ‘a despicable propaganda has been made in the French press which has borne its fruit’.91 Any resolution now by the Ligue would be too little, too late. It would certainly not be enough to persuade the Germans that the Entente had not sought to lumber them with the responsibility for the war. Why only now were Bloch and Renouvin changing their position when already in 1925 Victor Margueritte’s petition, the ‘Appel aux Consciences’, had garnered support from many French and foreign intellectuals? He roundly attacked Poincaré as one of the people most responsible for the war, and then issued the standard refrain ‘let the historians do the rest’, which rather begged the question of what exactly Bloch and Renouvin were if not historians. The extent to which calls for the serene contemplations of History became a commonplace on both sides merits further comment. Both the majority and the minority were guilty of ostensibly bowing to the conclusions of History, but only when it suited them. Challaye and Pioch did not like what Renouvin and Bloch argued, but then again neither did half of the Comité Central for completely opposite reasons. For the minority, accepting Renouvin and Bloch’s attenuated view of the meaning of Article 231 meant undercutting and jettisoning the minority’s very raison d’être, its eighteen-year campaign against the thesis, broadly construed, of German war guilt. For the majority, the stakes were similar, although the 87 Ibid. 88  On pacifisme nouveau style, see Ingram, Politics of Dissent, Part II, pp. 121–245. 89  ‘Comité central. Extraits’, Cahiers 32, 17 (10 July 1932), p. 401. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid.

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conclusions were different. Basch and Co. rejected the new interpretation because it flew in the face of what they had been arguing for years, namely that the victor could not extort an avowal of guilt from the defeated. The new interpretation undercut, therefore, the LDH’s comfortable position of being able to say that it did not like the treaties. Having said that, the majority believed (as did the Germans in the DLfM) that Germany was guilty of starting the Great War. There was no doubt in their minds in this regard. This meant they could have their cake and eat it, too, because on the one hand they condemned Versailles, but on the other they believed in the rectitude of reparations. For the majority, it was largely a question of form, whereas for the minority, questions of substance were paramount. And in all of this, the claims of nationalism in historical scholarship are clearly to be seen. While Basch was laudatory with regard to the German document publications, as far back as 1921, Emile Kahn, himself trained as an historian, decried the fact that the Versailles Treaty, ‘in linking reparations to the question of war origins, risks leaving the devastated regions in the majesty of their ruins for as long as it will please German historians to muddy the waters of responsibility in order to escape payment’.92 ‘History’, it seemed, could only be French, or at least certainly not German. There were also those who condemned ‘History’ when it seemed too serene, too divorced from daily lived experience and political reality. René Gerin lit into Renouvin and Bloch essentially for being too historical, for being out of touch with political reality in the war guilt debate: Well! When one asks this citizen, this war invalid [he is speaking of Renouvin, who had lost an arm in the Great War] what he thinks of article 231, he responds coldly as a professor of history; he rummages around in the archives, he analyses texts, splits hairs into four, dissects cadavers, and refuses to treat the diseases of the living because it would be ‘doing politics’! I can hardly believe that such indifference is not calculated.93

Historians were damned if they did, and damned if they did not. To return to Guernut’s resolution based on Renouvin/Bloch’s apparently new interpretation of Article 231, both were actually a reprise of that contained in a letter which Ferdinand Buisson had proposed sending on behalf of the CC to the Président du Conseil in June 1925. The origin of Buisson’s letter lay in a question he had raised at the executive committee meeting of 27 April 1925, in which he said that if the understanding of Article 231 was that Germany and its allies were simply responsible for repairing the damages they had caused, rather than responsible in a moral sense for the entire war, then the public needed to know this.94 This might 92  Emile Kahn, ‘A propos du Traité de Versailles: les injustices du Traité’, Cahiers 23, 1 (10 January 1923), p. 11. 93  Emphasis in the original. René Gerin, ‘Les Professeurs de la Sorbonne et l’Article 231 du Traité de Versailles’, Die Berliner Monatshefte für internationale Aufklärung, IX (December 1931), p. 1212. This essay is not attributed to another source, so one wonders if it had been written specially for the Berliner Monatshefte. 94  Bureau du Comité, ‘Séance du 27 avril 1925’, Cahiers 25, 12 (20 June 1925), p. 280. For the text of Buisson’s draft letter, which the CC declined to endorse, but which Henri Guernut, as secretarygeneral and editor of the Cahiers, must have felt strongly enough needed to be published, see Ferdinand

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have been partially in response to a notice of motion given by Fernand Gouttenoire de Toury, which was dealt with in a sort of pre-emptive manner at the 17 December 1924 executive committee meeting. In response to de Toury, the committee underlined that Article 231 was not aimed at Germany alone, but rather at Germany and its allies. Furthermore, the article ‘did not explicitly say that Germany was responsible for the war, but rather that it and its allies had committed an aggression’.95 Given the debate that was to occur in 1932, it seems strange that the Bureau of the Comité Central could declare so emphatically in 1925 that the Ligue ‘has never founded the obligation of Germany to pay reparations on its responsibility in the war, but rather on the fact that it caused material damages’.96 It had ‘always’ believed that Article 231 was ‘contrary to justice’. The Ligue did not believe that it  was up to a treaty ‘to affirm responsibility upon which only History could pronounce’. With regard to History’s role, the Ligue, loyal to its traditions, continued its campaign for the publication of the French diplomatic documents.97 More it could not do. One must wonder then why the Renouvin/Bloch thesis and Guernut’s motion caused such an uproar in 1931, if it was so self-evident to the Ligue in 1925 that the common interpretation of Article 231 was wrong. The answer is that it was not obvious at all in 1925 that the intent of Article 231 had been misunderstood. The Comité Central declined to send Buisson’s 1925 letter to the Président du Conseil, despite the fact that it merely asked for clarification regarding the French government’s understanding of the meaning of Article 231. Guernut’s 1932 motion, on the other hand, went farther and asked the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to seize the next available opportunity to make the ‘new’ interpretation known. In 1925, the CC preferred instead, following a suggestion from Alphonse Aulard, to send the Président du Conseil the Congresses’ motions and request that when Germany was admitted to the League of Nations France make a gesture of generosity and declare that it would make no future reference to German war guilt—hardly a disavowal of the common interpretation of Article 231.98 Yet again, the refrain that one must patiently wait for the conclusions of historians was sung. Guernut duly presented this motion to Aristide Briand in a meeting on 23 December Buisson, ‘Le Traité de Versailles’, Cahiers 25, 22 (25 October 1925), pp. 511–12. The Fédération de la Seine passed a motion approving the ‘attitude de M. Ferdinand Buisson au sujet de la révision de l’article 231 du traité de Versailles et demande que la Ligue se prononce, dans cette affaire, comme elle s’est prononcée dans l’affaire Dreyfus et libère la conscience des ligueurs et de la France.’ The Federation also announced its intention to challenge the attempt of the CC to muzzle Mathias Morhardt from his views on the origins of the war. See ‘Activités des Fédérations’, Cahiers 25, 15 (25 July 1925), p. 357. 95  Bureau du Comité, ‘Séance du 17 décembre 1924’, Cahiers 25, 2 (20 January 1925), pp. 38–9. 96  Ibid., p. 39. 97  Ibid. The Comité Central passed a motion by Alphonse Aulard to this effect at its meeting of 5 January 1925. See ‘Comité Central. Extraits’, Cahiers 25, 3 (30 January 1925), p. 64. Six years later, the problem was still only partially remedied. René Gerin said that one of the reasons he wrote his book, Comment fut provoquée la guerre de 1914 (Paris: Rieder, 1931), was because the publication of the French documents was so ‘tardy’ and had been done with ‘such bad grace’ that he thought it incumbent on him to contribute more to the debate. See Comment fut provoquée, p. 8. 98  Comité Central, ‘Extraits. Séance du 12 juin 1925’, Cahiers 25, 19 (25 September 1925), pp. 448–9.

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1925.99 While certainly not a rejection of Article 231, or a denial of its validity, at least the Ligue had decided that it was no longer appropriate to flog the Germans with it. Despite Briand’s promise to declare to the world when Germany was admitted to Geneva that the ‘Allies had never held the German people in its entirety responsible for the war, that the responsibility in question in Article 231 dealt only with the material damages’, in fact, Briand did nothing, and it was left to the German Foreign Minister, Gustav Stresemann, to make the declaration, albeit in a ‘less happy way’.100 Despite what Basch was to say later in 1932 about how the Ligue had always believed that the sense of Article 231 was limited to a justification for reparation of the damages inflicted on France by the German aggression of 1914, rather than as a moral judgement about general German culpability in the origins of the war, this was precisely the opposite of what he had said at the Comité Central debate in 1932 on Guernut’s motion which was based directly on Renouvin and Bloch’s ‘new’ interpretation. At the 16 June 1932 meeting of the Comité Central, at which his motion and the Renouvin/Bloch interpretation were debated, Guernut had concluded by saying that ‘In short, either Article 231 has the meaning it is t­ raditionally given, and we must continue to protest, or else it has the meaning ascribed to it by MM. Kuczynski, Buisson, Renouvin and Bloch. Of these two interpretations, the French government must say which it holds.’ Basch then replied that the Ligue had on five occasions stated clearly that Article 231 was ‘deeply immoral’; this was the Ligue’s ‘doctrine’, he said, and it ought to maintain it. He reminded the CC that the Ligue had already adopted Challaye’s thesis.101 The Comité Central then decided to remove Guernut’s motion from the agenda. Clearly, the CC was not interested in a new interpretation of Article 231. Yet, later that same year, in his report on the principles guiding the Ligue’s belief that the treaties needed to be revised, Basch seemed to suggest that it was Renouvin and Bloch who had finally come around to the Ligue’s position on Article 231, ‘an interpretation which was ours and which was recently adopted by our colleagues Camille Bloch and Renouvier [sic]’.102 This was hardly the case. Neither in 1925, nor in 1932, did the CC pronounce itself in favour of this interpretation. In fact, in the very next paragraph of his report Basch himself put the lie to the impression that some sort of sea change had occurred in his thinking: ‘We are of those who, contrary to our friend Challaye, firmly believe that Imperial Germany was one of those most responsible for the catastrophe, responsible above all for having blindly followed Austria, the most responsible, and for having applied the brakes only when it was too late.’103 This was consonant with his 1915 book, although the ascription 99  Bureau du Comité, ‘Extraits. Séance du 11 janvier 1926’, Cahiers 26, 5 (10 March 1926), p. 111. 100  Comité Central, ‘Extraits. Séance du 24 septembre 1926’, Cahiers 26, 22 (25 November 1926), p. 517. 101  Comité central, ‘Extraits. Séance du 16 juin 1932’, Cahiers 32, 17 (10 July 1932), pp. 401–2. 102  Victor Basch, ‘Libres opinions. Pour le Congrès de Paris. La controverse sur les traités. Les principes’, Cahiers 32, 25 (10 October 1932), p. 583. 103  Ibid. Challaye protested Basch’s insinuation that he wanted to whitewash German and AustroHungarian war responsibilities. On the contrary, as he wrote in a letter dated 10 October 1932 to Guernut, ‘contrairement à l’interprétation de notre cher président, je crois aussi à la responsabilité des

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of guilt to Germany was somewhat more hesitant in 1932, especially when Basch added that he did not deny that Tsarist Russia was also partly to blame. The minority’s thesis of shared responsibilities seemed to have made some headway. That notwithstanding, and in direct contradiction to what Challaye and the other members of the minority believed, Basch wrote that ‘we have absolute proof that the Austrian general mobilization order was given before the Russian general mobilization order was known in Vienna.’ It was clear to Basch that Austria-Hungary had been bent on the total destruction of Serbia in 1914 at the risk of a general conflagration. But all of this was grist for the historical mill and far beyond the competence of the Ligue or its Congresses. ‘It is enough’, he wrote, ‘to note that if the second interpretation, that which has been officially adopted by us, is the correct one, that is to say that Article 231 denounces Germany as being mainly responsible for the world catastrophe, then this article is flagrantly immoral.’104 There was thus a deep inconsistency in Basch’s pronouncements on Article 231. On the one hand, he held to the traditional view of the article, and on the other he professed to believe that the Ligue had always taken the position now espoused by Renouvin and Bloch. The standard German understanding of Article 231 was essentially the same as the French: it clearly meant that Germany and its allies were guilty of starting the war. In his introduction to the ninth year of publication of Die Berliner Monatshefte für internationale Aufklärung, the house journal of the German Foreign Office’s Kriegsschuldreferat, Alfred von Wegerer, claimed that progress had been made in debunking the ‘war guilt lie’; the revisionist movement in America, Britain, and France was gaining strength and momentum. He connected the dots between the war guilt question and Europe’s increasingly fraught political situation, writing that in the United States especially people had begun to realize that the war guilt question was linked to the ‘present-day political and economic situation’.105 Von Wegerer gave most of his attention to France, however. He underlined how the published debate with René Gerin had put Poincaré on the defensive.106 He claimed that suddenly the French saw that Germany ‘was not the aggressor’, but rather that it was Russia, ‘supported (getrieben) by France and not held back by England’, that had unleashed the war. The real guilt lay with the Russian general mobilization that had forced Germany into a defensive two-front war that was ‘the consequence neither of the Austrian mobilization, nor of the secret German armaments, as the falsified documents alleged’. Moreover, he wrote, Russia had been left in no doubt from the German side what the consequences of its general ­mobilization would be. But, ‘Russia wanted war’ if Austria moved against Serbia, and ‘France also knew this’, dirigeants allemands et austro-hongrois. Mais je juge, en outre, responsables de la catastrophe les dirigeants de la Serbie, de la Russie et de la France.’ See ‘Le Congrès de 1932’, Cahiers 32, 26 (20 October 1932), p. 618. Emphasis in the original. 104  Basch, ‘Pour le Congrès de Paris. La controverse sur les traités’, p. 583. 105  Alfred von Wegerer, ‘1931!’, Die Berliner Monatshefte für internationale Aufkärung, IX (January 1931), p. 1. Von Wegerer wrote: ‘Aber man ist in den Vereinigten Staaten nicht nur beim Revisionismus in der Kriegsschuldfrage stehen geblieben, sondern man ist vielfach schon weiter vorgedrungen und fängt an, die großen Zusammenhänge zu begreifen, die von der Kriegsschuldlüge unmittelbar zu der gegenwärtigen politischen und wirtschaftlichen Lage hinführen.’ 106  See René Gerin and Raymond Poincaré, Quatorze Questions, Quatorze Réponses.

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and so ‘general mobilization was ordered in Petersburg and Paris followed.’ Thus, the war became inevitable.107 If the French masses realized what ‘criminal methods’ had been used to shoulder Germany with the blame for the Great War, von Wegerer wrote that they would react with ‘rage’, in the same way they had reacted decades earlier ‘under the leadership of Emile Zola to the Dreyfus trial’. Point-set-match—in von Wegerer’s mind at least. The reference to Zola and the Dreyfus case was surely meant to goad the French, and perhaps especially the Ligue des droits de l’homme, for whom the Dreyfus Affair was a defining moment for French republicanism.108 It was also consonant with the analyses of some members of the minority; Armand Charpentier, for example, was to use the same example of the putative parallels between the Dreyfus case and the war guilt question in his speech during the debate on principles for treaty revision at the Ligue’s 1932 Congress.109 Not surprisingly, then, von Wegerer sharply contested the theses of Bloch and Renouvin. To his credit, the Berliner Monatshefte published a translation of the Renouvin/Bloch essay from Le Temps,110 but von Wegerer went through the essay paragraph by paragraph and attempted to demolish its central argument that the Allies never intended to lumber Germany with the moral responsibility for the war. He argued, as Pioch and Challaye were to do, that to accept the Renouvin/Bloch thesis meant diluting or weakening the import of Article 231, narrowing its interpretation and denying, as the Germans saw it, the dishonouring of the German people through the Versailles Treaty.111 Von Wegerer’s analysis of the beginning of the war is interesting. He noted that Bloch and Renouvin still claimed that Germany was ‘responsible’ for the attack or the beginning of hostilities. But he argued that it was illogical to contend that war was ‘imposed’ on the allies by virtue of the German attack; on the contrary, he argued that war was a ‘fact’ once the declarations of war had occurred. ‘Whether Germany, or Russia, or France began the military attack is irrelevant’, he wrote. The problem with Article 231 in his mind was that it confused ‘cause and effect’: the attack did not cause the war; rather the war caused the attack.112 Renouvin and Bloch thus passed over Clemenceau’s clear statement in his memorandum of 20 May 1919 that the German people had undertaken a war of aggression. The reason for this seemed obvious to von Wegerer: in weakening the general, moral implications of Article 231, they were trying to shore up its credibility as the limited civil law basis for the reparations demand.113 107  Von Wegerer, ‘1931!’, Berliner Monatshefte, p. 2. 108  Ibid., p. 3. 109  See ‘Discours de M. Charpentier’, in Le Congrès national de 1932. Compte-rendu sténographique. Paris, 26–28 Décembre 1932. (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1933), p. 205. Charpentier said that it was Georges Demartial who had first enunciated this parallel. 110  Pierre Renouvin and Camille Bloch, ‘Die Entstehung und die Bedeutung des Artikels 231 des Versailler Vertrages’, Die Berliner Monatshefte für internationale Aufklärung, IX (December 1931), pp. 1166–87. 111  Alfred von Wegerer, ‘Bemerkungen zu dem Aufsatz im “Le Temps” vom 15. November “Le Traité de Versailles et les Réparations” von Camille Bloch und Pierre Renouvin’, in Die Berliner Monatshefte für internationale Aufklärung, IX (December 1931), p. 1188. The full article ran from p. 1188 to p. 1209 and was thus exactly as long as the translation of the original Renouvin/Bloch article. 112  Ibid., p. 1205. He wrote, ‘Der Krieg war nach Erklärung des Kriegszustandes Tatsache.’ 113  Ibid. Von Wegerer writes: ‘Die Bedeutung des Artikels 231 liegt nach meinem Dafürhalten in den Worten, daß der “Krieg” “ihnen”, d.h. den alliierten und assoziierten Regierungen durch

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Having said all that, the Renouvin/Bloch interpretation of Article 231 was c­ onsistent with the position of the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte. In an essay published by the Liga in 1932 in the context of discussions about the Geneva Disarmament Conference, Otto Lehmann-Russbüldt argued that Germany had in no way been shouldered with unique responsibility for the war. Article 231 spoke only about the damages which Germany and its allies had inflicted on France, and he went on to note positively, referring to the Renouvin/Bloch article, that a ‘semiofficial’ (offiziöse) publication in Le Temps had finally come to the same conclusion: Article 231 had ‘nothing to say regarding the war guilt, unique or not, of Germany’, and Lehmann-Russbüldt added that this had been the formal position of the Deutsche Liga since 1925.114 Lehmann-Russbüldt was right, but despite the best efforts of the Deutsche Liga, it was an interpretation which ran completely against received opinion in Germany, as indeed it did in France, as we have seen. But in a letter to the LDH published in part in the Cahiers in September 1932, LehmannRussbüldt seemed to come to the opposite conclusion, writing that If Article 231 is erased, as M. Victor Margueritte asks, it is to be feared that the nationalists in Germany will say: ‘the injustice done to us has been repaired; it has been recognized that Germany is not guilty of having begun the war. Therefore the guilty ones are the others and above all France.’115

Thus, even as late as 1932—indeed, perhaps especially in 1932—the issue of war guilt and war responsibility remained very much on the agenda. The passage of time had not assuaged the passions elicited by the debate. The Ligue was deeply divided about the meaning to ascribe to Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty, an issue which flowed directly out of the historical debate over war origins. The vectors also pushed in another direction, too. In the early 1920s, the political ramifications of the war guilt debate had been largely linked to the question of reparations. By 1932, that linkage had expanded to include not only the general question of reparations but also the problem of disarmament. On the reparations issue, there was still enough bile in the system for Henri Guernut to write energetically one month after President Hoover of the United States first mooted his idea for a one-year Deutschland und seine Verbündeten “aufgezwungen wurde”. Was unter diesen Worten verstanden werden soll, hat, wie wir bereits gesehen haben, der Präsident der Friedenskommission, Clemenceau, in seinem Schreiben vom 20. Mai dahin erklärt, daß das deutsche Volk einen Angriffskrieg unternommen und auch die Verantwortlichkeit hierfür übernommen habe. Die Verfasser des Tempsartikels schwächen somit die Bedeutung des Artikels 231 gegenüber der Interpretation Clemenceaus ab. Die Verfasser tun dies nicht, um die Auffassung von der Schuld Deutschlands am Kriege zu verringern, die sie in allen ihren Schriften vertreten, sondern sie wollen damit nur beweisen, daß der Artikel 231, alias die Reparationsforderung, nicht auf der Verantwortlichkeit für den Krieg beruht.’ 114  Otto Lehmann-Russbüldt, Denkschrift zum Reparations- und Abrüstungsproblem: Der deutsche Abrüstungsvorschlag und in Konsequenz des Kelloggpaktes die Abschaffung der Angriffswaffen führen zur Löschung der Kriegsschuldenzinsen (Berlin: Verlag Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte, 1932), pp. 27–8. See Otto Lehmann-Russbüldt to Staatssekretär Dr von Schubert, Berlin, 30 September 1925, and Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte, ‘Vorschlag der Deutschen Liga für Menschenrechte zur Behandlung der sogen. Kriegsschuldfrage’, both in PA/AA R 26399 (Schriftwechsel mit Vereinen und Privatpersonen). 115  Otto Lehmann-Russbüldt, ‘L’article 231 du Traité de Versailles’, Cahiers 32, 22 (10 September 1932), p. 524. Emphasis in the original.

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moratorium on war debts that despite what the hard left and the Socialists in France were saying, such a solution was a non-starter for France because it was quite simply ‘not fair’.116 He returned to the adage that ‘he who breaks the tiles must pay for them’, although he allowed that if the Americans and the British were prepared to put a moratorium on the money France owed them, then France could do as much with the portion of the German reparations debt that went straight to the British or Americans. As for the second ‘slice’, Guernut was of the opinion that negotiations were possible, and that France might agree to accept payments in kind, something which had been anathema back in the early 1920s. What is interesting, given the climate in 1932 and the Geneva Disarmament Conference which had opened in  February of that year, is that Guernut linked French economic insecurity to Germany’s ‘attitude’. He blamed the huge annual increases in France’s military budget directly on the Germans: if the Germans would only really disarm, get rid of the ‘irregular formations’ which ‘seethed across the country’, and sign a mutual assistance pact, then France could safely lower its military expenditures.117 The ‘spirit of Locarno’ seemed ultimately not to have penetrated too far.118 By 1932, even Victor Basch had begun to see the need for what he was only prepared to call an ‘adjustment’ of the Versailles Treaty. He preferred this formulation to outright treaty ‘revision’ because, as he wrote in October 1932, there were many good things in the Treaty.119 The ‘adjustment’ that Basch thought necessary lay in the question of the right of Germany to equality or parity in armaments. The former allies could not have it both ways. Either Germany was a full and complete member of the League of Nations, with all of the sovereign rights pertaining thereto, or else it was not, in which case one had to wonder on what basis it had been both admitted to Geneva and given a permanent seat on the League’s council. He said that France sincerely wanted peace, but that it realized that in trying to ‘safeguard peace’, it was ‘perpetuating a Europe that had been modelled by its own victory’. On the German side was a ‘profound’ conviction that the situation created by the treaties was deeply unjust and that no real peace could be arrived at as long as this persisted.120 He claimed that the Ligue had never ceased to argue that the situation imposed on Germany was ‘contradictory’. The only way out of the ‘impasse’ was an adjustment of the Versailles Treaty.121 Félicien Challaye, who had been charged with preparing a report on ‘Disarmament and the Treaty of Versailles’, went right to the nub of the problem and said that all

116  Henri Guernut, ‘Le “coup d’éponge”’, Cahiers 32, 17 (10 July 1932), p. 393. 117  Ibid., p. 394. 118  Contrary to voices from the time and to historiographical consensus since, Conan Fischer has recently vigorously argued that Franco-German détente did not die with Stresemann in October 1929, but rather lived on in political and especially economic terms until 1932. See Conan Fischer, A Vision of Europe: Franco-German Relations during the Great Depression, 1929–1932 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 119  Victor Basch, ‘Le Voyage inutile’, Cahiers 32, 27 (30 October 1932), pp. 629–30. This article had first been published on 16 October 1932 in La Volonté. He did not elaborate on what the ‘good things’ in the Treaty were. 120  Ibid., p. 630. 121 Ibid.

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talk of a simple ‘adjustment’ of the Treaty was too little, too late.122 What was needed was full-scale revision, and he based much of his argument about the need for real, full, and genuine French disarmament precisely on the issue of war guilt and war origins—to the surprise and consternation of Basch and other members of the CC, it must be said.123 Basch and Kahn certainly thought it entirely inappropriate that Challaye should use the opportunity afforded by being asked to make one of the major conference reports effectively to bang the drum for the theses of the minority regarding war origins and war responsibilities. It was in response to Challaye’s tendentious examination of the question that Basch felt compelled to include a long paragraph in the text of his resolution on principles stating clearly why the question of war responsibilities was not on the Congress agenda.124 Basch’s resolution elicited vigorous discussion when it was debated by the Comité Central on 27 October 1932. Guernut could not accept it because it flew in the face of the recent conclusions of Renouvin and Bloch to which he fully subscribed. Basch responded that even in this limited sense, the Ligue could not accept Article 231 because it was an avowal of guilt that had been forced on Germany. The main debate, however, occurred between Félicien Challaye, on the one hand, and Basch and Emile Kahn on the other. Basch said he would never even have raised the issue had it not been for Challaye’s decision to include a long analysis of the question of war responsibilities—‘unexpected and necessarily incomplete’, according to Basch— in his report on disarmament. Kahn went further and essentially accused Challaye of bad faith, saying that the latter had never given any prior indication to the CC that his report would take up the question of war responsibilities, and that the CC had never decided that this question should be brought before the Congress.125 For Challaye, though, the war guilt issue lay squarely at the heart of the ­disarmament problem, and of the ensuing malaise that Europe faced in 1932. He rejected the idea that Germany was ‘eternally guilty’ and must be ‘eternally punished’. He argued that the Versailles Treaty had disarmed Germany; indeed, the speed with 122  Comité Central, ‘Extraits. Séance du 16 juin 1932’, Cahiers 32, 17 (10 July 1932), p. 398. 123  During the debate on Basch’s report at the 1932 Congress, he was at pains to emphasize that the CC ‘a décidé à l’unanimité que, lors de la discussion relative à la revision des traités, le problème des responsabilités de la guerre, ou plutôt le problème des origines de la guerre ne serait pas soulevé.’ This provoked a spirited rejoinder from Challaye, who remarked that it could hardly have been ‘unanimous’, a point somewhat reluctantly conceded by Basch. See ‘Réponse de M. Victor Basch’, in Congrès national de 1932, p. 215. 124  Basch’s paragraph read as follows: ‘La Ligue ne reconnaît, parmi tous ces principes, qu’un seul: la libre disposition des peuples par eux-mêmes. Mais, si elle comprend que ce principe n’ait pu être réalisé, dans toute son étendue, dans tous les cas, si elle regrette même que les alliés n’aient pas tenu compte du principe économique, il en est un parmi ceux auxquels ils ont fait appel, qui lui apparaît comme hautement immoral. Ce principe est celui que nous avons appelé punitif, et d’après lequel l’Allemagne a été obligé, par la force, de s’avouer la principale responsable de la catastrophe mondiale. La Ligue s’est interdit de se prononcer sur les responsabilités du déchaînement de la guerre, estimant que c’est aux seuls historiens qu’il appartient de décider de cette question si difficile et si complexe. Mais elle a estimé de tout temps que d’obliger un peuple par la force de s’avouer coupable était une disposition contraire aux bonnes mœurs internationales, et qui devrait, pour cette raison, être frappée de nullité.’ See Comité Central, ‘Extraits. Séance du 27 Octobre 1932’, Cahiers 32, 29 (20 November 1932), pp. 692–3. 125 Ibid.

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which Germany was disarmed following the Great War meant that the rapid disarmament of other nations was possible, too, provided the political will existed. The fact that clandestine rearmament had been going on in Germany under the aegis of the paramilitary militias indicated merely for Challaye that while Foch had been right in 1927 to declare that Germany was effectively materially disarmed, what was lacking was moral disarmament.126 The French and the Germans were still afraid of one another. He asked if the Germans were essentially a bellicose people, and argued that that was precisely how they saw the French, and with some reason. After all, the campaigns of Louis XIV, the invasion of the Palatinate, the Napoleonic Wars, the wars of Napoleon III, and the numerous colonial wars of the Third Republic all lent some credence to Châteaubriand’s memorable line in his Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe that France was ‘nothing but a great nest of soldiers’. As to the argument that France had been invaded three times in one century, Challaye was quick to point out that 1815 had been the European response to the fact that France had invaded most of Europe at some point during the wars of the Revolution and the Napoleonic period. Eighteen seventy-one was the result of Napoleon III’s ‘bellicose’ policies; if he had simply allowed German unification to occur, the invasion would not have happened. This brought him to 1914, and he argued that the ‘dogma’ of unique German responsibility had been shattered in recent years by the conclusions of ‘impartial historians’ (among whom he listed himself, as well as Harry Elmer Barnes, Georges Demartial, and René Gerin) and that war responsibilities were shared between ‘all the governments of all of the peoples’. Having said that, and in direct contradiction to what Basch had written in his report, it was the Russian general mobilization that set the tinder ablaze, an act Challaye called the ‘practical equivalent’ of beginning the war. It is interesting that he used this particular turn of phrase, because for years the minority had been chanting the mantra that mobilization was war. He wrote that French public opinion had been ‘fooled’ by the falsifications in the Livre jaune, but ‘no one contested’ any longer the fact that Russia had been the first to mobilize, which inevitably meant that an ‘entirely new way of looking at the problem of war responsibilities’ was in order.127 Challaye’s report then took a great leap of faith in the form of an argument strange to read from the pen of a pacifist. He wrote that because recent historiography had shown the ‘innocence of all the peoples and the guilt of all the ruling classes’, therefore, ‘henceforth the essential argument that is given in favour of the disarmament of Germany and its allies’ simply ‘falls apart’.128 This was a dangerous contention to make, because it seemed to suggest that Germany ought to have the right to rearm. Challaye undoubtedly did not intend to draw this conclusion, as the rest of his report makes clear. Versailles had been predicated on the assumption that the disarmament of Germany was meant to be only the first step in a general limitation 126  On moral disarmament in France, see the excellent book by Mona Siegel, The Moral Disarmament of France: Education, Pacifism, and Patriotism, 1914–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 127  See Félicien Challaye, ‘Le Traité de Versailles et le désarmement’, Cahiers 32, 25 (10 October 1932), pp. 586–90. 128  Ibid., p. 590.

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of armaments on the part of all the powers. Instead, France had used the notion of ‘security’ as an excuse not to disarm, preferring instead to put forward the idea of  an international army which was so fraught with logistical and ­theoretical problems that he was certain it would never be realized. An international army was nothing more than a red herring designed to serve the interests of the military caste and the munitions makers. France, he said, was the ‘most heavily armed nation in the world as a function of its population’; how to explain what he called this ‘monstrous militarization’ of a people who, individually, loved peace?129 The answer, once again, lay in fear on all sides. The French were afraid of Germany; this fear was ‘methodically developed’ by the journalists and venal politicians in the pay of the military establishment who, together with the arms manufacturers, caused France to be viewed internationally in a very bad light as a power that struggled to maintain its hegemony no matter what. The counterpart to this French fear was a German fear of France, partly spontaneous and partly manipulated by the reactionary military class in Germany. He cited Wladimir d’Ormesson, who argued that the German masses were completely convinced that their country was totally disarmed but believed they were surrounded by a ‘circle of iron’ composed of the French, who were armed to the teeth, together with the Poles and the French-inspired Little Entente. Seen in this light, it was understandable that German public opinion should view the Geneva Disarmament Conference as an exercise in hypocrisy. The French and German peoples lived in constant fear of one another; this had been one of the causes of the Great War and it still persisted.130 The German demand for parity in armaments, either through radical disarmament of the other powers, or through its own rearmament, could not morally or logically be refused. But he argued strenuously that rearmament of Germany would lead only to an arms race which would have the same fatal outcome as in 1914: war. The ‘only acceptable solution’ to the German demand for parity in one form or another was the disarmament of ‘all the peoples’.131 The Ligue’s 1932 Congress, which met in Paris from 26 to 28 December, and had as its theme ‘The Controversy over the Treaties’, was thus an extremely ­important one. It was the last Ligue Congress before the Nazi seizure of power a month later changed the game forever in European politics. In 1932, the Ligue clearly believed that the time had come for a serious discussion of treaty revision. Revision, or ‘adjustment’ as Basch preferred to call it, meant different things to different people, however. For Basch, Kahn, and the majority, it meant essentially cosmetic changes to the Versailles Treaty in an attempt to make the latter more palatable both to German public opinion, and to the views of French Republicans. With regard to the former, it was much too little, much too late. As for French Republicans, some of them bought the Comité Central line, and others did not. The Ligue’s minority argued that the only way to lance the political boil in Europe was to have a full and frank discussion of war responsibilities and war guilt. No amount of hand-wringing on the part of the majority about how Versailles was iniquitous because, inter alia, it was predicated on an avowal of guilt extracted 129  Ibid., pp. 591–3.

130  Ibid., p. 594.

131  Ibid., p. 596.

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under threat of force in 1919 could resolve the basic problem that Germany did not accept the war guilt thesis. War guilt was thus the bull in the political china shop. Even in 1932, however, Basch and the majority did not want to discuss war guilt. That was a subject, so the line went, best left to the serene contemplations of historians at some future date. And yet, as has been seen with the controversy unleashed by the Renouvin/Bloch reinterpretation of the meaning of Article 231, even when historians weighed in to the debate with historical arguments there was resistance within the Comité Central. For many within the majority, there was a reluctance to embrace even a limited absolution of German war guilt. The majority condemned the form but not the substance of Article 231, but many within the Ligue were unconscious of this distinction at the time. Equally, however, the minority rejected the Renouvin/Bloch thesis because it undercut the entire raison d’être of its opposition to the war guilt thesis: if Article 231 were really only a minor article providing the justification for reparations, then what had been the point of the minority’s opposition to it since 1919? Basch and the Comité Central struggled doggedly to keep the Congress’s eyes focused on tangible, practical issues of adjustment or revision of the treaties, and away from the big question of war guilt and war responsibilities. On the general question of a need for revision there was unanimous agreement at the Congress, but when the representative of the Savoie federation argued that since the Ligue’s 1931 Vichy Congress attempts had been made to ‘dissociate the question of ­disarmament’ from that of war responsibilities, on which, in his opinion, the entire Treaty of Versailles rested, his demand that the Ligue take a ‘clear position’ fell on deaf ears. The chair of the session cut him off, saying bluntly ‘you cannot continue on this subject. Whether Germany is responsible or whether it is not, there is only one question before us: are we or are we not in favour of a revision of the treaties?’132 So, what did the Ligue think needed to be revised? The first of the four resolutions submitted by the Comité Central to the Congress dealt with general ­principles and had been drafted by Victor Basch. The resolution began by stating that the Ligue could support neither those who called for outright abolition of the treaties, nor those who considered them immutable. There were certain aspects of the treaties that were positive, that ‘conformed to law’ and that were ‘useful to peace’. More to the point, abolishing the treaties in a Europe still seething with unbridled nationalism would unleash forces inimical to peace. That said, the resolution went on to say that the maintenance of the treaties as they were was not justified. Article 19 of the League Covenant provided for revision and it needed to be used. The resolution called the treaties which ended the Great War a mixture of the ‘just and the unjust’, essentially because they were the result of compromises between opposing principles, what the resolution called ‘liberating principles’ such as the right of peoples to self-determination, and on the other ‘the barbaric principle of forfeiture of rights inflicted on the defeated’. Following this line of reasoning, the resolution called ‘just’ the freeing of such oppressed peoples as the Alsatians, the Poles, and the Czechoslovaks, as well as the organization of peace through international 132  ‘Discussion et vote de la Résolution’, in Congrès national de 1932, pp. 241–2.

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c­ooperation. ‘Iniquitous’, on the contrary, were those aspects of the treaties which sliced up certain territories, created certain borders, and most importantly, extracted from the German people an ‘admission of guilt’ that was both ‘iniquitous and immoral’ because it was made under threat of force. That admission of guilt was, of course, Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty. In 1919, the treaties had been ‘concluded’—he was careful not to say ‘negotiated’—in a ‘moral state of war’ with Europe divided into two camps: the victors and the vanquished. With the entry of  the defeated nations, especially Germany, into the League of Nations the ‘inequality of rights, imposed by the victors’ had to disappear. This did not mean that Germany should be allowed to rearm, but rather that the rest of the world must disarm, something which ‘could not be avoided any longer’.133 In his speech to the Congress defending the section on ‘principles’, Basch underlined how dangerous the hour was, and how the CC was convinced that ‘touching with a maladroit and brutal hand the unfortunate diplomatic instruments created in 1919, one ran the risk of bringing on catastrophes which would make 1914 look like child’s play.’134 Happily, the Ligue des droits de l’homme had never ‘recoiled before dangers and difficulties’, and he concluded, ‘Convinced in our soul and conscience that numerous aspects of the treaties, imposed on peoples who were yesterday our enemies, without their being given the right to discuss them, must be modified, we have said so and we ask you to say so with us.’135 A long debate on the motion on ‘principles’ ensued. First off the mark was Armand Charpentier, the secretary-general of the review Evolution, which within the year was to be forced to shut its doors after the Nazis cut off the German subsidy that had kept it afloat. For Charpentier, all roads led back to the chronology of mobilizations. Likening the situation to the heyday of the Dreyfus Affair, he claimed that the discovery of ‘new facts’ made a revision of the Versailles Treaty essential. The first of these new facts was the knowledge that the Russian general mobilization had been the first, and that the Tsar had been under no illusions that by ordering it he was unleashing a general war.136 The second new fact was the discovery of the falsification of telegram number 118 in the Livre jaune. Everyone now knew that the telegram had been doctored, Poincaré himself had admitted it, and Charpentier claimed that it was on the basis of this telegram, which had grown from two lines to twenty-five, that Germany had been judged.137 To Basch’s argument that the peace treaties should not be touched insofar as they dealt with responsibilities, Charpentier said that he might take this position ‘through cowardice’ if Europe and the world lived in an uncontested state of general well-being. But such was clearly 133  For the text of the resolution on principles, see ‘Pour le Congrès de Paris. La controverse sur les traités. Une résolution proposée par le Comité central’, Cahiers 32, 29 (20 November 1932), p. 675. Basch’s report, on which the resolution is based, provides a lengthier justification for it. See Victor Basch, ‘Libres opinions. Pour le Congrès de Paris. La controverse sur les traités. Les principes’, Cahiers 32, 25 (10 October 1932), pp. 579–85. 134  Victor Basch, ‘La Contoverse sur les traités: I. Les Principes. Discours de M. Victor Basch’ in Congrès national de 1932, pp. 202–3. 135  Ibid., pp. 204–5. 136  ‘Discours de M. Charpentier’, in Congrès national de 1932, pp. 206–7. 137  Ibid., pp. 208–9.

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not the case. The opposite was, in fact, true. He said that the world was farther from peace and disarmament in 1932 than it had been in 1919—which earned him a round of applause. The treaties had therefore not done what they were supposed to do. Linking the issue of war origins to the ongoing problem of reparations and war debts, he claimed that it was a lie to suppose that the Americans wanted France’s money to repay the war debts. That was only a pretext. In fact, what the Americans were really upset about was that they had come to Europe to wipe out militarism, and yet thirteen years after Versailles, the French had a double hegemony on Europe: militarism and imperialism.138 Basch felt obliged to respond immediately to what Charpentier had said. He reiterated his belief that the Ligue could not usefully contribute to the historical debate, and certainly not in a Congress with some 1,200 delegates present. The question needed to be much more limited, and so he argued yet again that the only thing the Ligue could usefully do was consider whether the four peace treaties were just or whether they contained injustices. The Comité Central’s answer was that they were unjust: ‘having been imposed on defeated nations without their being given the opportunity to discuss the conditions, [they] are stained with a primordial injustice against which the Ligue could only rise up.’139 Once again, it was the process to which Basch and the majority objected, the form and not the substance. This becomes clear when looking at what Charpentier had said by way of comparing the question of the treaties with the Dreyfus Affair. In the Affair, the Ligue had been concerned about the form, but was also convinced that the substance was wrong. In the case of the Great War, the Ligue was convinced that the form was wrong, but secretly, or not so secretly, believed that the Germans were guilty.140 Is it any wonder that the average Ligueur might be confused about the debate on war origins, war guilt, and Article 231? On the one hand, the article was condemned as a ‘flagrant injustice’, but on the other, the Ligue scrupulously, almost religiously, refused to get involved in the debate on war origins. Jacques Kayser, although certainly not one of the minority, hit the nail on the head when he commented that since 1919 ‘we have witnessed the lamentable history of the victorious governments which refused everything to the democratic states and gave all maladroitly to the non-democratic states.’ With reference to Germany, he said that ‘no reasonable concession had been made until 1928 or 1929’ when suddenly the Nazi election breakthrough in 1928 caused France to wake up and begin making ‘grand gestures’ in the direction of Berlin. It would have been

138  Ibid., p. 212. 139  ‘Réponse de M. Victor Basch’, in Congrès national de 1932, p. 216. 140  Basch said as much when referring to Emile Kahn’s report to the Ligue’s 1921 Congress about Article 231: ‘Nous avons dit: Si nous admettons que l’Allemagne et l’Autriche soient coupables et soient les seuls coupables, l’aveu de la culpabilité qui a été arraché à l’Allemagne sous la menace de la reprise des hostilités constitue une injustice flagrante. C’est parce qu’il est injuste que nous nous sommes dressés contre l’article 231. Et nous n’avons pas attendu la séance d’aujourd’hui pour déclarer que la France s’honorerait en prenant l’initiative d’effacer du traité de paix un article qui n’est pas à l’honneur de ceux qui l’ont imposé à l’ennemi vaincu.’ In ibid., p. 216.

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helpful if these same ‘grand gestures’ had been made back in 1919 or 1920 in order to consolidate German democracy.141 The minority position did not have the field to itself, however. Jean Bon, a member of the Comité Central, far from being opposed to the content of Article 231, believed that it ought to have been the first article of the treaty, and not hidden away in the chapter on reparations. For the first time in history, the Paris Peace Treaties had injected a ‘moral question’ into the art of peacemaking. He said there were no independent tribunals in existence in 1919 which could have rendered a judgement, and in any event he argued that the documentation on which such a judgement could be made would hardly have allowed for any other conclusion than the one finally reached.142 What was known by the socialist group in Parliament in July 1914, he asked? Not much. In his view, Jaurès had already given up hope. Bon himself had demanded that the Chamber be recalled to discuss the ‘famous’ Franco-Russian Alliance, whose existence he claimed to have doubted, so that the French could proclaim that ‘we have nothing to do with the threatening conflict.’ According to Bon, Jaurès rejected the motion because he apparently believed in the existence of the treaty.143 Salomon Grumbach, another CC member, thought that Charpentier and the minority were being far too indulgent towards Germany; he rejected the notion that Germany was less responsible than France, saying ‘In talking like that you play right into their [Hugenberg’s and Hitler’s] hands.’144 Various amendments were proposed to the motion on ‘principles’. The fault lines of historical interpretation were clearly to be seen in Fernand Corcos’ amendment to remove the phrase ‘the tracing of certain iniquitous and immoral borders, the avowal of culpability extracted from the German people by force in Article 231’. These words had to be ‘suppressed because they perpetuate an error’ which had a negative impact on Franco-German relations. It was, he said, ‘henceforth an historical fact that, contrary to what M. Charpentier has said, Article 231 does not imply that Germany was declared “responsible for the war” ’. The Renouvin/Bloch analysis was the ‘new fact’ which the Ligue need to take into account; failure to do so would only stoke the fires of both French and German nationalists.145 Victor Basch intervened at this point with maddeningly obtuse comments which only serve to underline just how tortured and convoluted the Ligue’s thinking on Article 231 actually was. He explained why the CC had decided by a majority vote to leave the phrase intact, despite the fact that he claimed to subscribe ­personally to the Renouvin/Bloch interpretation which he also claimed, completely erroneously as we have seen, to have been the interpretation of the Ligue ‘for years’ following the lead of the German Liga. So, why not adopt it officially in 1932? The reason was his conviction that the vast majority of French public opinion believed a) that Article 231 was right, and b) that it was a recognition

141  ‘Discours de M. Jacques Kayser’, in ibid., p. 224. 142  ‘Discours de M. Jean Bon’, in ibid., pp. 233–4. 143  Ibid., p. 234. 144  Interjection by Salomon Grumbach in ibid., p. 237. 145  ‘Discussion et vote de la Résolution’, in ibid., pp. 242–3.

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of guilt by Germany.146 The pretzel-like position of the Ligue’s majority can be clearly seen in his following comments: It is not up to me to pronounce on the question of the responsibilities or of the origins of the war. I do not agree, on this point, with our colleagues Charpentier and Demartial. But it is not about my opinion or about that of colleagues who hold a different one. The incontestable fact is that there is an Article 231 and that this article has been interpreted by our politicians who have used it as an admission of guilt by Germany. That is why we are asking that Article 231 be erased from the treaty.147

Given Basch’s claim that the Renouvin/Bloch interpretation had always been the Ligue’s and was one he supported—both of them misleading statements as has been demonstrated—it is nevertheless surprising to see the Ligue’s president hiding behind fears of what public opinion might say on the matter given the stem-winder conclusion to his speech about ‘principles’ just minutes before in which he had said that the Ligue recoiled before no danger or difficulty. In any event, the ‘rude bon sens’ of the Congress prevailed and Corcos’s amendment was defeated. Just to show how confused the debate was, though, Corcos then moved a second amendment that referred to the ‘iniquitous and immoral interpretation given to Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty by German and French nationalists’; this amendment was passed but was to be the subject of virulent debate at the 1933 Congress.148 Charpentier reminded the Congress that the French right, ‘from Tardieu to Poincaré’, had been saying for ten years that without the admission of guilt by Germany, the entire edifice of the Versailles Treaty ‘crumbled’. Corcos thought this was an argument in favour of his amendment. It was left to the representative of the Marseilles section to point out the logical inconsistency of the Ligue’s new position. On the one hand, the Ligue had ‘condemned Article 231 by which Germany, a knife to its throat, had been declared responsible for all of the damages of the war’. On the other hand, however, Germany was still being obliged to make reparation which was, so he said, a ‘consequence of this article, and which should be called into question from a juridical point of view, once the article was abrogated’. He had a good point. On behalf of the Marseilles section, he said that he was prepared to accept any resolution likely to further the cause of peace, but ‘as long as the question of war responsibilities has not been resolved, we believe that these are measures of pure opportunism and not of absolute justice.’149 ‘Reparations’ was another hot button issue that Basch wanted to steer clear of. He expressed surprise that the topic had even come up since it was nowhere to be seen in the text of his resolution; he reiterated that the Ligue had always considered the question of reparations to be entirely separate from the ‘difficult’ problem of war origins. Once again, he stated that the only question before the Congress was whether the treaties needed to be adjusted.150

146  Basch’s response may be found in ibid., p. 244. 147 Ibid. 148  Ibid., p. 245. See Chapter 7 for a discussion of how this debate was re-opened the following year. 149  Interjection by M. Marestan, Section de Marseille, in ibid., pp. 249–50. 150  Comments by Basch in ibid., pp. 250–1.

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Some Ligueurs rejected the critical tone of Basch’s motion vis-à-vis France. André Gouguenheim, an honorary member of the Comité Central, attempted to get the words ‘barbaric principle of forfeiture of rights inflicted on the defeated’ expunged from the resolution because they were an ‘injustice with regard to the spirit of generosity of France’. These words provoked a negative reaction in the assembly, to which Gouguenheim replied, ‘How can you say about a country which enacted the principles of the Rights of Man, which are precisely our own charter, that one can cast doubt on France’s . . . ’, at which point the howls from the floor caused him to give up and abandon the stage.151 Gouguenheim’s amendment was not passed either. To summarize to this point, then: the 1932 Congress was supposed to discuss adjustments to the treaties without mentioning the issues of war guilt, war origins, war responsibilities, or reparations. Needless to say, this was a difficult remit. The second motion regarding revision or adjustment of the treaties came from the pen of Théodore Ruyssen and dealt with changes to be made to the Covenant of the League of Nations. The ensuing lengthy debate centred almost entirely around the question of what sort of sanctions the League of Nations ought to have at its disposal. Félicien Challaye proposed an amendment which added the phrase ‘to the exclusion of all military sanctions’ to the text calling for the League of Nations to be given ‘the means of effective sanctions’.152 The extent to which the theses of  pacifisme nouveau style had penetrated the discussion of the Ligue is clearly evident in this debate, but the issues at stake had nothing to do with the ongoing debate on war origins and war responsibilities. In any event, Challaye’s amendment was adopted by a very healthy majority.153 The third resolution to be debated under the general rubric of the controversy over the treaties dealt with disarmament. Félicien Challaye had drafted the report on disarmament which served as the basis for the discussion of the resolution. While the resolution itself contained virtually none of the references to war origins and war guilt that are to be found in his original report,154 his presentation was shot through with an analysis of the disarmament question that relied heavily on a dissenting view of the origins of the war. Challaye charged that the ‘problem’ of war responsibilities had become a ‘taboo’ question for the Ligue; it was the ‘forbidden question, the question that must not be raised’.155 In his mind, the question of war origins and guilt was inextricably linked to the disarmament issue; he rejected completely Basch’s argument that the Ligue and its Congresses were not the place 151  Gouguenheim in ibid., pp. 245–7. 152  See ‘II. Le Pacte de la Société des Nations’, in Congrès national de 1932, pp. 253–301. Ruyssen’s introductory comments may be found on pp. 253–8. Challaye’s amendment is on page 258, and the debate then follows. 153  The vote was 756 sections versus 485. See Congrès national de 1932, p. 325. 154  For the text of the motion, see ‘Pour le Congrès de Paris. La controverse sur les traités. Une résolution proposée par le Comité central’, in Cahiers 32, 29 (20 November 1932), p. 676. Challaye’s speech at the Congress and the ensuing debate may be found in Congrès national de 1932, pp. 304–25 and 328–70. 155  ‘Discours de M. F. Challaye’, in ‘La Controverse sur les Traités. III. Le Désarmement’, in Congrès national de 1932, pp. 310–11.

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to debate historical issues. Just as in the Dreyfus Affair, so in the question of war origins, it was essential for the Ligue to take a position. The Ligue had to have confidence in its members, it had to believe they were capable of critically examining historical texts. The question of war origins lay like a dead weight on the Ligue and it would continue to do so until it was resolved. He aspired, he said, to a time when our president will come before a Ligue Congress to ask forgiveness of the thirteen million war dead, the twenty-six million wounded, the tens of millions of mutilated, gassed, and blinded of the war . . . to ask their forgiveness for the error committed by our Ligue in formerly believing in a just war, in formerly believing in a defensive war, in formerly believing in unique German war guilt.156

The discussion on disarmament revealed unspoken assumptions about political culture and the place of the military in national life, too. As we have seen in Part I, one of the aims of the Great War, from the perspective not only of the Ligue, but of Allied propaganda generally, had been to rid the world of ‘Prussian’ militarism. It was with this in mind that the Allies at Versailles had decreed that Germany should be reduced to a 100,000-man professional army composed of long-service soldiers only. Not all pigs were equal, however; the 1932 debate crystallized deep differences between what the Ligue thought right and proper for France, and what it considered appropriate for the Germans. Lucien Le Foyer, a mainstream representative of pacifisme ancien style, condemned the so-called ‘Plan Constructif ’, which was the work, he said, not merely of the French general staff, but also, sadly, of fellow Ligueurs, Joseph Paul-Boncour and Edouard Herriot. The ‘Plan Constructif ’, instead of seeing France and its allies disarm, would have allowed the rearmament of Germany, and with it the re-creation of a conscript German national army. German pacifists were, he said, ‘stupefied’ at this proposal which would have as its inevitable result the remilitarization of German youth as well as the rearmament of Germany.157 France needed to follow the German lead, and not the other way around. He proposed an amendment denouncing the ‘disastrous consequences’ of the ‘Plan Constructif ’ which allowed for ‘the reestablishment of the national army with short term service in continental Europe, most notably in Germany’. Challaye and the CC accepted Le Foyer’s text as a friendly amendment.158 The Ligue liked to think of itself as at the forefront of those in France calling for disarmament and peace. At the Ligue Congress the year before in Vichy, Victor 156  Ibid., p. 312. 157  Le Foyer was right. Ludwig Quidde, the venerable German pacifist, had already sent the Cahiers the text of a resolution passed by the Comité allemand de propagande pour le désarmement, which condemned the reintroduction of conscription in Germany, which was being bandied about as a concession that France might be willing to make. The German resolution read, in part: ‘L’obligation militaire mènerait, en Allemagne, à une militarisation funeste du peuple entier. Cette militarisation, menace pour la paix intérieure, serait sans profit aucun pour le désarmement universel. En perpétuant les armements nationaux, elle maintiendrait, au contraire, l’insécurité internationale.’ See Ludwig Quidde, ‘Contre le service obligatoire en Allemagne’, Cahiers 32, 31 (10 December 1932), p. 729. 158  ‘Discussion et Vote de la résolution sur le Désarmement’, in Congrès national de 1932, pp. 346–8. On the ‘Plan constructif ’ one can do no better than to consult Maurice Vaïsse, Sécurité d’abord: la politique française en matière de désarmement, 9 décembre 1930–17 avril 1934 (Paris: Editions Pédone, 1981), pp. 292–323.

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Basch had made much of the fact that of the 1,222 speaking engagements of members or delegates of the CC from 1 June 1930 to 20 May 1931, fully 999 had dealt ‘uniquely with peace and disarmament’.159 The previous year at the 1930 Biarritz Congress, Georges Michon had directly criticized the CC, though, for failing completely to follow through on its very own motion from the 1929 Rennes Congress that it ‘relentlessly pursue . . . a campaign for disarmament and peace’. Basch had enumerated the list of Ligue petitions and events which Michon said in normal times might have been sufficient. What rendered the Ligue’s action derisory was the fact it had not raised ‘the smallest protest’ against the French government’s position at the London Conference, and that instead, the French position had been based on falsifications about French naval tonnage and budgets. Michon charged that the French position was the principal reason for the failure of the London Naval Conference.160 By 1930, Georges Michon had already emerged as a powerful voice for the dissident minority. His 1927 book on the Franco-Russian alliance had been translated into English and published in New York in 1929. Michon made further additions in a short addendum published in 1931.161 He charged the French middle class with a ‘moral and intellectual decadence’ which had produced the Franco-Russian alliance that had brought France to the ‘edge of the abyss’. Connecting the dots to the present, Michon argued that nothing had been learned from the past because ‘the same story is beginning again, this time with Poland which is backwards, fascist, anti-Semitic, oppressive and plays the same political role for the dominant class [in France] as tsarist Russia used to.’162 The Auswärtiges Amt clearly approved of Michon’s conclusions. An internal review of the original 1927 French edition of the book noted that Michon ‘convincingly demonstrates that after 1899 the Franco-Russian alliance had taken on a distinctly aggressive character and that it was no longer designed to keep the peace but rather to further the military pretensions of the two parties in the case of a disruption to the European balance of power’. The report writer concluded that the evidence adduced provided a distinctly ‘plausible, if not decisive, blow to the war-guilt paragraphs of the Versailles Treaty’.163 The following year, a memorandum underscored again ‘the very great meaning of Michon’s book for the war guilt question’ because of its use of French sources and 159  Victor Basch, ‘Discours de M. Victor Basch’, in Le Congrès national de 1931. Compte rendu sténographique. Vichy, 23–25 Mai 1931 (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1931), p. 19. 160  Georges Michon, ‘Discours de M. Georges Michon’, in Le Congrès national de 1930. Compte rendu sténographique. Biarritz, 7–9 Juin 1930 (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1930), pp. 87–8 and 89–92. Zara Steiner is categorical that ‘There was no meeting of either political or naval minds’ as far as the French were concerned at the London Naval Conference and the French did not sign the pact. See Zara Steiner, The Lights that Failed: European International History, 1919–1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 590. 161  Georges Michon, L’Alliance franco-russe, 1891–1917 (Paris: A Delpeuch, 1927). It was translated by Norman Thomas and published as Georges Michon, The Franco-Russian Alliance, 1891–1917 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1929). See also Georges Michon, L’Alliance franco-russe, 1891–1917. Contributions nouvelles (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1931). 162 Michon, Contributions nouvelles, pp. 58–9. 163  Dr Kurt Pieper, report on ‘Das russisch-französische Bündnis, 1891–1917’, to the Auswärtiges Amt, Charlottenburg, 9 April 1928, in AA/R 26520 (Michon).

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its highlighting of the ‘responsibility of France in the world war through its decades-long financing of Russian armaments’. It recommended that the book be given the ‘widest possible distribution, especially in America’.164 At the end of 1929, the Auswärtiges Amt responded by sending two copies of the English translation of Michon’s book to a large number of German diplomatic posts, some of whom requested more copies.165 To return to the 1932 Congress, however, Georges Pioch, also a CC member, as well as one of the most influential members of the Ligue internationale des combattants de la paix (LICP), went even farther, and argued that obligatory military service was an ‘error of the French Revolution’, that it was also the ‘error of the democracies’, and that it was moreover the ‘error of our great Jaurès, to have wanted this national army and militia’ that ‘just about everywhere’ was being proposed in 1932. This was pretty heady stuff. It went right to the heart of the Ligue’s conception of politics and its pride in the heritage, usually Jacobin, of the Revolution; it also tarnished the Ligue’s view of one of its latter-day heroes, Jean Jaurès. Pioch was a great orator, though, and his speech was greeted by thunderous applause and an ovation at the end.166 Emile Kahn, the Ligue’s secretary-general, intervened to say that he supported the Le Foyer amendment, but could not agree with Pioch’s view that the German system ought to be introduced in France. Why? For the simple republican reason that ‘through all of history, despite what Pioch might claim, the professional army is the army of the coup d’état’, and he warned the Congress that ‘it would be us, guardians of democracy, who would arm the generals and fascists of tomorrow with the instrument that would render impossible—among other things—congresses like this one!’167 This was pure Jacobin demagoguery, but it struck a note with some Ligueurs who greeted it with applause. There were other dissenting voices disagreeing with Challaye’s views on the German situation. A friend of Otto Lehmann-Russbüldt’s, a man called Blavignac from the Ain federation, despite claiming to know Germany well while seeming a little vague on German geography, nevertheless made the salutary point that there was considerable opposition to pacifism in Germany, and that the country was far from being a pacified Shangri-La. Challaye insisted, however, that even though there was a nationalist movement in Germany, an extremely dangerous one existed in France, too, and that moreover there was ‘a very strong opposition in favour of peace in Germany’.168 The latter comment betrayed either a rather stunning misapprehension of German politics or a Panglossian optimism. Salomon Grumbach, Challaye’s nemesis on the Comité Central, said it was an illusion to claim that

164  Dr Schwendemann to Herrn Ministerialdirektor de Haas, Berlin, 9 February 1929 in AA/R 26520 (Michon). Schwendemann was a ‘Legationsrat’ in the Auswärtiges Amt. 165  Herr Ministerialdirektor de Haas to German embassies, missions, and consulates, Auswärtiges Amt, Berlin, 12 December 1929 in AA/R 26520 (Michon). 166  Georges Pioch in Congrès national de 1932, pp. 350–6. 167  Ibid., pp. 356–7. 168  ‘Discussion et Vote de la résolution sur le Désarmement’, in Congrès national de 1932, pp. 334–7. Blavignac confused Challaye’s reference to Weimar with Wiesbaden.

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most Germans wanted disarmament; many of them desired exactly the o­ pposite.169 Having said that, the CC motion on disarmament was passed by the Congress, with the addition of the Le Foyer amendment, and a further amendment from Albert Bayet underlining the distaste the Ligue felt with regard to professional armies.170 Scarcely a month later, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany, putting paid to many of the assumptions of the Ligue and inaugurating a new era in European politics. The Ligue—both the majority, but above all the minority— was slow to recognize how much 30 January 1933 changed the European landscape. Right down to the Second World War, the LDH continued to fight the battles of the Great War, a state of affairs that led slowly, but inexorably, to its undoing by the time of the Nazi invasion of France in May 1940. 169  See Grumbach’s comments in ‘Discussion et Vote de la résolution sur le Désarmement’, in Congrès national de 1932, pp. 358–61. 170  For the text of the entire resolution, see ‘Texte de la résolution’, in Congrès national de 1932, pp. 385–94. For Albert Bayet’s amendment, see ‘Discussion et Vote’, in Congrès national de 1932, pp. 361–2.

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PA RT I I I LES FLEURS DU MAL…

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7 In the Shadow of the Swastika The world changed completely on 30 January 1933, the day President von Hindenburg invited Adolf Hitler to form a government and become Chancellor of Germany. Not everyone recognized this at the time, and even fewer had thought just a month earlier that the Nazis’ star was rising. At the Ligue’s Paris Congress in late December 1932, the representative of the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte, Emil Gumbel, had confidently reassured the LDH that despite the many tribulations facing his country, ‘there is a sort of development that is rather fundamental: this is the fact that the decomposition of the Nazis is beginning.’1 This was not an unfounded assumption in December 1932; Gumbel was hardly alone in believing that the Nazis’ fortunes might be on the wane.2 That desperate hope was much in evidence at the December 1932 LDH Congress but it became a willing suspension of disbelief as 1933 progressed. Having set its eyes on disarmament as one of the prizes to be grasped, the Ligue found it difficult to adjust its thinking to the new realities of Nazi Germany. In October 1933, as we have noted in the introduction, just before the German withdrawal from the Disarmament Conference and from the League of Nations itself, Basch was still proclaiming that France had to accept the disarmament convention ‘even if Germany does not want it, and [we must] make the maximum number of concessions in order for it to succeed’.3 It was all, sadly, too much too late. During the first four years of the Nazi regime, the eyes of the Ligue des droits de l’homme were riveted on developments across the Rhine in Germany, what meaning to ascribe to them, and how best to respond. Both the minority and the majority struggled to make sense of the post-January 1933 world. Revision of the Versailles Treaty seemed to recede into the background slightly, but this evolution was more apparent than real. The significance of 1914 to the interpretation given the events of 1933–36 was of fundamental importance. The Ligue’s gaze might appear to have shifted to the present and the future, away from a fixation on the meaning of 1914, but in reality, it continued to be refracted through the prism of the Great War. The political positions of both majority and minority evolved in response to Hitler. In the case of the majority, the need for treaty revision, as opposed 1  Emil Gumbel, ‘Discours de M.  Gumbel’, in Le Congrès national de 1932. Compte-rendu sténographique. Paris, 26–28 Décembre 1932 (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1933), p. 18. 2  There is no doubting the importance of President von Hindenburg’s decision to appoint Hitler as Chancellor. See Henry Ashby Turner, Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power: January 1933 (London: Bloomsbury, 1996). 3  ‘Réunion organisée par la “Ligue des Droits de l’Homme”, Salle des Sociétés Savantes, 8 rue Danton, le 11 octobre’, P.P. [Préfecture de Police], 12 October 1933, in Archives du Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Série SDN/IC/Vol. 231.

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merely to an ‘adjustment’, came to be accepted by Victor Basch. For the minority, the increasingly strident profession of an absolute pacifism came to be viewed by the majority as an acceptance of some of the claims of fascism; in fact, this apparent evolution needs to be understood as the result of the historical dissent on 1914 and the war guilt issue which underpinned the new pacifism. Both sides supported the Popular Front idea, the majority from the point of view of collective security and the creation of a united front against external and internal threats, the minority from a position of anti-capitalism and pacifism. For both minority and majority, the ghost of 1914 continued to define, explain, and justify political positions down to 1936. N A Z I P E RC E P T I O N S O F T H E L I G U E ( A N D T H U S O F I T S R E L AT I O N S W I T H T H E D L F M ) Despite the fact that most independent German political parties and associations were decapitated by the Nazis soon after the seizure of power in January 1933, the Nazi police and other government agencies continued to produce reports on links between now extinct German organizations and their counterparts elsewhere in Europe. Such was the case with the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte and its French sister organization, the Ligue des droits de l’homme. The continuing interest in the LDH from the Nazi side helps explain why the Ligue’s papers were among the very first to be seized in Paris in June 1940 when the Germans arrived in Paris after the fall of France. It also goes some way to explaining why it was that the Nazis undertook such a huge police operation across occupied France in the autumn of 1940 as they searched for extant remnants of the Ligue des droits de l’homme. A report prepared by the Munich office of the Sicherheitsdienst in early January 1937 indicates that the Nazis considered the French Ligue important. The document details, almost four years after the forced dissolution of the German Liga, the links between the latter and the LDH. The DLfM was suspect on a whole variety of levels: according to the report, it was closely allied to the German Friedenskartell, and thus suspect because of its putative pacifism. Furthermore, it was seen as a largely Jewish organization inspired by Bolshevik ideals.4 The hunt for Jews within the LDH was to be one of the hallmarks of the 1940 Gestapo interrogations of Ligue sections.5 The Nazi seizure of power occasioned the immediate emigration of several of the leading lights of the Deutsche Liga, who quite naturally turned up in Paris where 4  See Sicherheitsdienst Oberabschnitt Süd to Sicherheitshauptamt Abteilung II/12-2, Munich, 18 January 1937 and attached report entitled ‘“Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte”, früher “Bund neues Vaterland”’, in Bundesarchiv [hereafter BA] R 58/6264a/Teil 1 ‘Auflösung der Deutschen Liga für Menschenrechte und der Deutschen Friedensgesellschaft.—Berichte, Mitgliederverzeichnisse und beschlagnahmte Unterlagen (ab 1927)’. 5  For a full analysis of the hunt for Freemasons and Jews in Ligue sections in the occupied départements of France in 1940, see Norman Ingram, ‘Selbstmord or Euthanasia? Who Killed the Ligue des droits de l’homme?’, French History 22, 3 (September 2008), pp. 337–57; and Ingram, ‘La Ligue des droits de l’homme et le problème allemand’, Revue d’histoire diplomatique 124, 2 (June 2010), pp. 119–31.

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they were welcomed warmly by the LDH.6 A report from the German embassy in July 1933 noted that von Gerlach and Emil Gumbel, among others, had been elected to the committee of the Deutsche Liga in exile. Although the Paris group numbered only some twenty members, there was also a group in Strasbourg. The embassy memo referred to Victor Basch as a ‘well-known pacifist’ and underlined his energetic support of the German émigrés. At the LDH’s Amiens Congress in July 1933, von Gerlach made a speech in which he said that France must help Germany to get rid of Hitler. How? Reprising Voltaire’s famous line, he cried, ‘Écrasons l’infâme!’7 Some sections of the DLfM, most notably the Berlin group, seem to have taken the precaution of disposing of membership lists immediately the Nazis took power and before important members fled to France. By July 1933, the Gestapo reported it had been impossible to seize membership rosters, and that what material it did have at its disposal might very well be incomplete.8 By 1 April 1934, the émigré group in Paris had succeeded in establishing an office in the facilities of the Foyer Franco-Allemand in the eleventh arrondissement, but in the following year, the Gestapo seems to have come to the conclusion that there was little to be gained by continuing its surveillance of the DLfM’s postal correspondence; it recommended that the programme of surveillance be ended.9 In the very early years of the Nazi regime, there were limits to the extent to which Gleichschaltung (coordination) of German society could go. The Auswärtiges Amt, for example, clearly did not want to upset the apple cart in the ongoing ­international development of the war guilt debate in the mid-1930s with which it was clearly very pleased. Germany had, in essence, ‘won’ that debate, at least as far as the AA was concerned. An example of the divergence of opinion in Nazi Berlin on what to do about the war guilt debate came with the publication of Camille Bloch’s 1933 book, Les Causes de la guerre mondiale. It was translated into English and published in London by George Allen and Unwin in 1935, at which point it appears there were calls from Nazi true believers in the Interior Ministry to ban the book in Germany. The AA made its opposition to requests for a blanket ban on books like Bloch’s known: ‘our position in the war guilt question is so strong that it cannot be shaken by books like Bloch’s.’ It might also lead to the banning of ‘German enlightenment campaigns’ outside Germany and thereby have a deleterious effect on German propaganda. In any event, what really mattered was the ­critical reception Bloch’s book had received in the pages of the ‘leading organ of German war-guilt 6  Otto Lehmann-Russbüldt almost left it too late. He was arrested on 28 February 1933 in Berlin following the Reichstag fire, and after two episodes in detention, managed to escape to Holland on 30 March 1933. See Otto Lehmann-Russbüldt, ‘Lebenserinnerungen bis zur Jahreswende 1932–1933’, unpublished typescript memoir, Wiener Library, London, pp. 105–18. 7  Dumont, Deutsche Botschaft, Paris, 19 July 1933 to the Auswärtiges Amt, copy in BA R 58/4179 (Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte). 8  Memo dated Berlin, 30 July 1933 from an unknown Hilfspolizeibeamter to Anonymous. In Bundesarchiv R 58/4179 (Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte). 9  A memo from a confidential informant to ‘The Department’ (‘Dem Dezernat’), Berlin, 20 April 1934. See also anon, Geheimes Staatspolizeiamt, ‘Vfg’, Berlin, 30 November 1935, both in Bundesarchiv R 58/4179 (Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte).

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research’, the Berliner Monatshefte. The regime did not have to worry in the slightest that any possible German translation of Bloch would find any traction in the German public.10 THE 1933 LIGUE CONGRESS A N D T H E D E B AT E O N   N A Z I S M The Ligue’s first Congress after the Nazi seizure of power took place in Amiens from 15 to 17 July 1933.11 Not surprisingly, one of the two main themes discussed at the Congress concerned ‘The Ligue and Hitlerism’. Victor Basch called the events of early 1933 a ‘veritable abyss’ which seemed far bigger than the barely seven months which separated the 1933 Congress from the previous one in Paris at Christmas 1932. The world had indeed changed and the ‘essential problem’ ­facing the Ligue was how to deal with the events in Germany.12 First, though, Basch enumerated all of the instances in which the LDH had preached Franco-German reconciliation: how, alone among the ‘great French ­democratic organisations’, the Ligue had had the courage to go to Berlin as early as 1922 and promote the absolute necessity of rapprochement between ‘two great peoples, carriers of civilisation’. The Ligue had repeated those visits in 1923, 1924, and 1928 and had established close ties with the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte, German pacifist groups, and with German democrats. He said the LDH had ‘incessantly struggled’ against the Ruhr occupation and for the early evacuation of the occupied parts of Germany and for general disarmament to the level imposed on Germany.13 All of this was true, but Basch and the Ligue’s majority had also steadfastly refused to countenance revision of the Versailles Treaty since almost the day it was signed because they believed, as we have seen above, particularly with regard to Article 231 and the hugely contentious issue of war guilt, that essentially Versailles was right: the Germans were guilty of starting the Great War. The only reservation the majority of the Ligue had was with how this had been imposed on the Germans. The most the Ligue majority was prepared to concede was that ‘adjustments’ needed to be made to the Treaty and in this they were supported by the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte. As we have noted, however, the DLfM represented no 10  St[aats]S[ekretär] to the ‘Reichs- und Preußische Ministerium des Innern’, Berlin, 10 November 1935, in PA/AA R 26188 (Die Kriegsschuldstellung des Auslandes: Frankreich). The AA kept a close eye on the reception of Bloch’s book. In 1934, Werner Frauendienst, who was to hold the position of director of the Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes briefly in the late 1930s, provided a five-page transcription of an article in the April 1934 number of the Revue d’histoire de la Guerre mondiale which dealt with the critique of Bloch’s book by, among others, Georges Demartial in Europe and August Bach in Die Berliner Monatshefte. See [Dr Werner] Frauendienst, memo and transcription dated Berlin, 23 June 1934, in PA/AA R 26186 (Kriegsstellung Frankreich). Demartial’s piece in Europe was also summarized in ‘Monatsbericht: Frankreich’ in Die Berliner Monatshefte 12, 3 (March 1934), pp. 261–7. 11 See Le Congrès national de 1933. Compte-rendu sténographique. Amiens, 15–17 Juillet 1933 (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1933). 12  ‘Discours de M. Victor Basch’ in the debate on ‘L’Orientation de la Ligue’, in ibid., p. 98. 13  Ibid., p. 99.

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one but itself in the court of German opinion; despite claims to the contrary, the rejection of Article 231 was not merely the province of the extreme right in Germany. That did not stop the Ligue’s majority from claiming yet again at the 1933 Congress that it was only the German and French nationalist right that believed that Article 231 was about the moral guilt of Germany in the origins of the Great War—the former rejecting it as a lie, the latter embracing it as the truth. This was a comfortable yarn, but it bore little relation to reality. In fact, most French people accepted the moral interpretation of Article 231, and the overwhelming majority of Germans from right to left rejected it. Despite claiming to believe that Article 231 was not morally freighted and implied merely a transactional justification for reparations on the principle ‘if you break it, you pay for it’, Basch made the strange admission in his opening remarks to the 1933 Congress that France and its former allies bore a ‘certain responsibility in the explosion of the German fury’. It was also more than a little disingenuous for him to argue that the Ligue had repeatedly ‘affirmed’ that it was counter-productive and wrong to ‘pressure’ Germany by ‘extracting from her billions she did not have and then to punish her for her poverty, thereby reducing her to despair’.14 In fact, as we have seen during the Ruhr crisis, if the Ligue deplored the methods of the French government in trying to force Germany to make its reparations payments, it did not contest its right to do so. Ten years is a long time in politics, though, and by 1933 the Ligue took the comfortable position that it had always been opposed to the harsh economic realities of reparations. This was simply not the case. The LDH might almost be forgiven its myopia with regard to the impact of Article 231 on German public opinion. For years it had listened to the mantra chanted by the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte that Article 231 was merely about the obligation of Germany to pay reparations, something which all Republican Germans, at least according to the DLfM, gladly accepted. The sad thing was that in 1933 the DLfM’s view of the nature of Nazism was about as accurate as its track record on the war guilt question. At the Amiens Congress the recently exiled DLfM president, Hellmut von Gerlach, confidently asserted that anti-Semitism was almost incidental to the essence of Nazism. It would be an ‘error’, he averred, ‘to believe that it is the first cause and the principal goal of the Hitler movement’; the real aim of the Nazis was simply the annihilation of democracy and its replacement with a system of tyranny.15 This was exactly the opposite of what von Gerlach had said to the 1930 Biarritz Congress. In 1930, he did not think that the Nazis would ever triumph, but perhaps more importantly given what he was to say three years later, he saw the Nazis as essentially a racist and anti-Semitic party which made him think of the articles he had read thirty or forty years earlier in Edouard Drumont’s anti-Semitic paper, La Libre parole. ‘They use exactly the same language’, he said then.16 14  Victor Basch, ‘Discours de M. Victor Basch’, in Congrès national de 1933, p. 102. 15  Hellmut von Gerlach, ‘Discours de M. von Gerlach’, in Congrès national de 1933, pp. 11–12. 16  ‘Allocution de M. von Gerlach’, in Le Congrès national de 1930. Compte rendu sténographique. Biarritz, 7–9 Juin 1930 (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1930), p. 13.

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The 1933 Congress breathed new life into the war guilt/war origins debate because, while all sides in the Ligue—minority and majority alike—condemned the Nazi regime in unequivocal terms, the Nazi seizure of power laid bare the essential divisions within the LDH. Fernand Gouttenoire de Toury, who had last attended a Ligue Congress in 1924, reappeared at the express invitation of the Ligue’s secretary-general, Emile Kahn, to comment on the Rapport Moral in 1933. Less than three months earlier, the Comité Central had debated a request from Gouttenoire de Toury that it disavow the change in the resolution voted at the 1932 Paris Congress from its original wording that Article 231 was ‘iniquitous and immoral because it had been extracted under duress from the German people’, to the considerably more controversial statement that it was only French and German nationalists who thought it so. The CC declined to reverse a decision of the Congress even though Kahn said that he, Basch, and other members of the committee preferred the original wording which had been theirs.17 It was left to de Toury to make the case for a reversion to the original wording at the 1933 Congress. Which he did. Responding to what he called Basch’s ‘inflamed eloquence’, de Toury argued that France was partially responsible for the advent of Nazism in Germany. The first level of responsibility for what had happened in Germany lay with the negotiators of the Versailles Treaty, Tardieu and Clemenceau, supported ‘backstage’ by Poincaré and Foch, and then basically everyone since, including the Cartel des Gauches, was at fault because all French leaders had sought to maintain the ‘stipulations of an unclean peace’. Secondly, while agreeing that the response to Nazism had to be ‘horror, contempt and struggle’, he argued that a distinction needed to be made between Nazism and the German people. In de Toury’s mind, the Ligue needed to follow the same line he and the minority had been preaching for years with regard to justice, the treaties, and disarmament—and this despite the change in regime in Berlin. Saying that it was only the nationalists in France and Germany who accepted the ‘iniquitous and immoral’ interpretation of Article 231, albeit for very different political reasons, completely stripped away the enormous and much broader negative impact the article had had on Franco-German relations. Article 231 had ‘paralysed any attempt at reconciliation, fortified nationalist propaganda in all countries, and mightily favoured the advent of the muddy and bloody regime that was Hitlerian fascism.’ The Ligue needed to condemn Article 231 forthrightly and not merely some ‘alleged interpretation’.18 This opening salvo led to an exchange between Fernand Corcos, a lawyer at the court of appeal, and Félicien Challaye, both of them members of the Comité Central. Corcos had moved the last-minute change in the wording of the 1932 resolution essentially because he believed that ‘we have an excellent opportunity to improve Franco-German relations by removing the thorny question of the ­historical and moral responsibility for the war, on which, as M. Basch has said, we are unqualified to express an opinion.’ He said he subscribed fully to the new Bloch and 17  See ‘Comité Central. Extraits. Séance du 27 avril 1933’, Cahiers 33, 14 (20 May 1933), p. 325. 18  Intervention by Fernand Gouttenoire de Toury in the ‘Discussion du rapport moral’, in Congrès national de 1933, pp. 120–2 and 125.

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Renouvin interpretation which said only that Germany needed to pay for the damages it had caused.19 Challaye would have none of it. He likened the Corcos motion, and behind it the Bloch/Renouvin interpretation, to an attempt to make concessions; it was a means of ‘maintaining Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty by modifying its interpretation’.20 Gouttenoire de Toury lashed out at Corcos for seemingly refusing to back up his argument with documentation: it was ‘incontestable’, he said, that ‘all of the statesmen, all of the writers, journalists interpreted Article 231 in the same way, as a moral condemnation of pre-war Germany.’21 When Basch rather plaintively suggested that surely there were more important questions to consider in 1933 than Article 231, Georges Pioch, one of the new-style pacifists who was to noisily resign from the Comité Central after the schismatic Tour Congress of 1937, replied that all of Germany from right to left was opposed to Article 231 because it was understood to mean German war guilt and that for ten years Bloch and Renouvin had been of the same opinion.22 As we have seen in Chapter  6, however, there was considerable debate about the Bloch/Renouvin interpretation. Despite Henri Guernut’s claim at the 1933 Congress that this ‘new’ interpretation was anything but, because he and Ferdinand Buisson had both taken this position, as had leading members of the DLfM ten years e­ arlier, it is clear that the commonly held understanding of the meaning of Article 231 was as Pioch, Challaye, Gouttenoire de Toury, and others averred.23 Did any of this matter, though? It might seem that the Ligue spent more time debating the validity of Article 231 than it did discussing responses to Nazism at its 1933 Congress, but the question of war guilt and what to do about it actually cut to the heart of the Ligue’s response to Nazism. Basch, Corcos, Guernut, and other representatives of the majority believed that the Ligue and France had to make the supreme sacrifice for peace, that even though it stank politically, the Four-Power Pact between France, Britain, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany had to be supported because it was the only chance for peace.24 That sacrifice had to be made with the eyes wide open, however, and Basch made no pretence of his disgust for the Nazi regime. He defended the Ligue’s use of the word ‘atrocities’ to describe what was happening in Germany, said that it would never come to terms with ‘crime’, but also categorically denied the accusation that the Ligue was pro-war.25 The rousing conclusion to Basch’s speech, which brought the Congress to its feet in ‘prolonged 19  Intervention by Fernand Corcos in ibid., p. 126. 20  Intervention by Félicien Challaye in ibid., p. 128. 21  For Gouttenoire de Toury’s comments see ibid., pp. 128–9. 22  See Georges Pioch’s intervention in ibid., pp. 130–5. 23  Intervention by Henri Guernut in ibid., pp. 135–7. 24  Victor Basch, ‘Discours de M. Victor Basch’, in Congrès national de 1933, pp. 106–7. Regarding the Four-Power Pact, Basch admitted that ‘Nous avons longuement et douloureusement réfléchi et, finalement, nous nous sommes vaincus nous-mêmes. Nous avons, dans une résolution dont vous n’avez pas perdu le souvenir, fait le départ entre l’attitude des gouvernements et celle de la Ligue. Nous avons convenu que notre gouvernement était obligé de tenir compte de la réalité et que son devoir était de négocier, même avec des gouvernements dont le régime était à l’opposite du sien et qui lui inspiraient les plus légitimes méfiances, à la condition que ces négociations pussent contribuer à la sauvegarde de la paix.’ 25  Ibid., pp. 99, 108, 104.

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applause’, was couched in rather generational terms. Basch referred to ‘us, les vieux, the guardians of the Ligue ideal’, as resolutely decided to ‘continue the fight for the triple ideal of the Ligue: the struggle against fascism, the realisation of democracy, and the safeguarding and reinforcement of peace’. He hoped that the younger generation would join them.26 The younger generation, or at least those among it who spoke at Ligue Congresses, was not so sure. Berthet, representing the Rhône federation, called himself one of the ‘less than thirty-year olds’ and said that while he would vote to approve the Rapport moral, it would not be without some reservations. He worried that the younger generation was being psychologically prepared for a ‘new crusade of the democracies against dictatorship’. He said that he wanted to arrive at a common understanding of how best to defend both democracy and peace.27 He was concerned that at the recent Congress of the Rhône Federation, an unnamed person representing the Comité Central had surprised everyone by calling him a fascist in a debate on the formation of a ‘democratic bloc’. Already in 1933, Berthet saw the Ligue divided by two theses in opposition to one another: on the one hand, there was the ‘democratic bloc’ idea defended by Victor Basch and others; and on the other, there was the belief that social democracy needed to be achieved and that in order to defend peace one needed to propose a ‘courageous policy of verifiable disarmament and the revision of the treaties’.28 This in itself might have been relatively anodyne, but Berthet’s conclusion presaged the outlines of the minority’s rejection of collective security and hence of armed resistance to the dictators. Berthet linked the Union sacrée of the Great War to the already looming spectre of the Second World War, saying that ‘We are obliged to note with deep bitterness that the men who ask us to participate in this new “crusade” are the same ones who, during the war, participated in the bourrage de crâne and asked us to fight for the defence of law and civilisation.’ He lauded the ‘courageous studies’ of Félicien Challaye, Armand Charpentier, Gouttenoire de Toury, and Demartial, and also singled out for praise Jacques Kayser, Albert Bayet, and even Victor Basch—the latter for his brave campaign against French and German nationalisms—but his concluding adjuration that these men ‘not integrate, in a manner of speaking, whether they intend to or not, the Ligue des droits de l’homme into a nationalist movement’, drew ‘exclamations’.29 Another younger delegate, Lucien Cancouët, from the fourteenth arrondissement in Paris, who had fought in and survived the Great War, also believed that France bore some of the responsibility for the success of the Nazis. He spoke in glowing terms of the ‘King and Country’ debate at the Oxford Union earlier that year, seeing it incorrectly as primarily about the war responsibilities debate.30 Of perhaps greater 26  Ibid., p. 116. 27  Intervention by M. Berthet in ibid., pp. 144–5. This was an interesting turn of phrase because the question of how best to defend both democracy and peace was to be the theme of the fateful schismatic 1937 Tours Congress of the Ligue. 28  Ibid., pp. 145–6. 29  Ibid., p. 148. 30  Intervention de M. Cancouët in ibid., p. 141. Cf. Martin Ceadel, ‘The “King and Country” Debate, 1933: Student Politics, Pacifism, and the Dictators’, Historical Journal 22 (1979), pp. 397–422.

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interest was the stock he put in the analysis of a special number of Le Crapouillot on war origins published in May 1932. In the eyes of the German Foreign Office, the Crapouillot was on the money in a way no other French publication had been.31 The minority analysis of the origins of the Great War was thus being transferred, transposed on to, an appreciation of the meaning of Nazism and how best to respond to it. This was evident in the counter motion presented to the Congress by Georges Pioch who was not only the president of the Ligue internationale des combattants de la paix, but also by this point a member of the Comité Central of the Ligue des droits de l’homme. Pioch’s motion spoke in very negative terms about Nazism, but then laid the blame for ‘Hitlerism and the present chaos’ squarely at the door of the ‘insufficiency of the action taken over the last fifteen years against the injustice and lies of the Versailles Treaty’. The motion ‘declared’ that the ‘first duty’ of the Ligue was never ‘to play the game of nationalism’, and to tolerate no longer that ‘our rulers use fascism and Hitlerism as a pretext to avoid and condemn disarmament and to wipe from the Versailles Treaty the measures which have kept alive for the past fifteen years the animosity between the ­peoples’—and here he singled out Article 231. The motion ended with a call to the Ligue to organize every year a national day of protest asking forgiveness of the dead ‘for the deficiencies of our action during and after the great slaughter’.32 Needless to say, none of these attacks on Ligue policy since the war went over well with Victor Basch or the majority of the Ligue. Basch took umbrage at the notion that the Ligue had ever been in the pocket of the government and, in a presaging of the thèse immunitaire of the 1980s and beyond, rejected as politically impossible the idea that fascism could ever take root in France.33 He also not so subtly 31  Intervention de M. Cancouët in the ‘Discussion du rapport moral’, in Congrès national de 1933, p. 142. See also Jean-Galtier Boissière, Histoire de la Guerre: les origines et les causes secrètes de la guerre mondiale (Paris: Le Crapouillot, May 1932). For the views of the Auswärtiges Amt, see Ges. Rat. Hüffer to Herrn Dg. von Friedberg and Herrn Min. Direktor Köpke, Berlin, 9 May 1932, in which Hüffer writes ‘Die Anliegende Mai-Nummer der französischen Zeitschrift “Le Crapouillot” bringt eine das ganze Heft ausfüllende Darstellung des Ursprunges und der geheimen Ursachen des Weltkrieges. Die von Galtier-Boissière im Verein mit René Lefebvre ausgearbeitete Darstellung nähert sich in vielen Punkten so weit der deutschen These von den Ursachen des Weltkrieges, daß sie sich geradezu als Belastung der französischen Vorkriegspolitik auswirkt. Es dürfte wohl zum 1. Mal sein, daß eine französische Zeitschrift in so weitgehendem Masse den deutschen Standpunkt in der Kriegsschuldfrage vertritt.’ In AA/R 26184 (Kriegsstellung Frankreichs). 32  From the motion by Georges Pioch in the ‘Discussion du rapport moral’, in Congrès national de 1933, p. 158. 33  The ‘thèse immunitaire’ posits that French political culture is immune or allergic to fascism. The original iteration of the thesis goes all the way back to René Rémond’s book La Droite en France de 1815 à nos jours: continuité et diversité d’une tradition politique (Paris: Aubier, 1954) and has continued in what might be called the ‘national(ist)’ school of French history. It began to be seriously challenged in the 1970s and 1980s with two important books by the Israeli historian, Zeev Sternhell, and in different ways in the works of Robert Soucy and William D. Irvine. See Zeev Sternhell, La Droite ­révolutionnaire, 1885–1914: les origines françaises du fascisme (Paris: Seuil, 1978) and Sternhell, Ni droite, ni gauche: l’idéologie fasciste en France (Paris: Seuil, 1983). See also Robert Soucy, French Fascism: The First Wave, 1924–1933 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Soucy, French Fascism: The Second Wave, 1933–1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); William D. Irvine, ‘Fascism in France and the Strange Case of the Croix de Feu’, Journal of Modern History, 63, 1 (June 1991), pp. 271–95; and the instructive essays in Michel Dobry, ed., Le Mythe de l’allergie française au fascisme (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003).

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threatened the Congress with consequences if the Rapport moral were not approved; the annual report was an issue of confidence and if it were not approved, then the Comité Central would resign.34 In a sense, Basch need not have worried because the vote on the Rapport moral produced a comfortable majority for the Comité Central motion, with only some 23.7 per cent of the votes cast in support of the Pioch motion. The CC easily carried the day. Nevertheless, it is clear that even in 1933 in the face of so obvious a threat as the Nazi seizure of power, there was still a groundswell of opposition to mainstream thinking in the Ligue. That opposition was the direct result of a dissenting view of the origins of and responsibility for the Great War. The chickens were now coming home to roost for the Ligue as it sought in the first months of the Nazi tyranny to square the Jesuitical circle of support for an ‘adjustment’ but rejection of ‘revision’ of the Versailles Treaty. THE 1934 CONGRESS The 1934 Ligue Congress was held in Nancy from 19 until 21 May. Its general theme was ‘Defence and Adaptation of the Democratic State’, but as usual, the debate on the ‘Rapport moral’ provided the most pyrotechnics. The Congress came over a year after the Nazi seizure of power in Germany, but before the Night of the Long Knives in June 1934 and the assumption of full powers by Hitler following the death of President Hindenburg in August of that year. It occurred after the events of 6 February 1934, however, which were viewed by the Ligue as an apprehended fascist coup attempt, and the introduction of rule by ‘decree laws’ in their wake. There continued to be division between the majority and the minority within the Ligue, and Germany was the issue around which this division crystallized. Both sides believed that they represented the essence of what the Ligue was supposed to be about. But whereas the majority began to see clearly the danger the Nazi hic et nunc represented, the minority continued to define its politics by reference to the mistakes of the past. Up until 1933, it had been possible for each side in the Ligue to defend its view of Germany through the lens of the Great War, but this became a more difficult proposition to make after January 1933. The majority had been unwilling or unable to imagine the negative impact of its view of the war origins/war guilt debate before 1933 and after 1933 the minority seemed unwilling or unable to see that Hitler had changed everything, that the Nazis were not ‘ordinary Germans’.35 34  ‘Réponse de M. Victor Basch, in ‘Discussion du rapport moral’, in Congrès national de 1933, pp. 189, 192, and 188. Basch said ‘vous aurez à dire tout à l’heure, au moment du vote du rapport moral, si vous estimez que le Comité central n’a pas fait son devoir, qu’il n’a pas agi, qu’il n’est composé que de vieillards sectaires et de vieux « bonzes »—comme écrit courtoisement M. Berthet—vous le direz et croyez bien que nous saurons interpréter votre verdict.’ 35  Using the term ‘ordinary Germans’ leads one into an historiographical quagmire. Suffice it to say that I do not share Daniel Goldhagen’s view. See Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).

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The minority claimed that its voice was not heard in the Ligue, that both the Comité Central and the secretary-general in his capacity as editor of the Cahiers des droits de l’homme systematically snuffed out attempts by the minority to make its case. Basch categorically denied that there was ever any attempt to muzzle the minority and called on Félicien Challaye, the leading minoritaire on the CC, to back him up. Challaye responded that he had never been refused the right to speak, but that it ‘pained him that certain of his colleagues exhibited hostility towards him’.36 For some members of the minority, the fear of fascism inside France was enough to induce them to close ranks with the majority in the fight against the internal fascist foe. One of these was Arthur Goldschild, a long-time member of the dissident Monnaie-Odéon section of the Ligue in Paris who said to the Congress, ‘I will not speak of majority and minority because in the fight against fascism I believe there is neither majority nor minority; there is the Ligue’.37 But if for Goldschild the events of 6 February demanded a common front against the threat of homegrown fascism, the lesson seems not to have been shared with other members of the minority. Instead, there was a great deal of criticism of the way the CC had handled the Ligue’s response to the crisis. The Seine Federation, in the person of Jean-Marie Caillaud, argued that the CC and the Ligue had been slow to react to the events of 6 February, and that instead of the organized, collective response he thought necessary, it had been left to individual Ligue and CC members to decide whether to attend the huge demonstration organized by the Confédération Générale du Travail on 12 February. He also alleged that his demand for a poster campaign across France had gone unanswered, leaving the walls of France quite literally open to the Croix de Feu and the other fascist leagues. He felt that he had been excluded from a Ligue delegation to the prime minister, Gaston Doumergue, and finally that the Ligue had failed abysmally in its condemnation of the Decree Laws; it had taken the Ligue a month to protest, much longer than for other left-wing groups.38 Victor Basch rejected all of Caillaud’s points, some more ably than others. For example, he said that the legal opinion of the Ligue’s own lawyers was that the decree laws were not illegal but certainly against the democratic spirit. What was more telling, though, was his statement that some members of the CC did not want to protest too vehemently against the use of the decree laws because they thought the day might well come when a republican government might have to resort to them.39 While Basch’s personal position of opposition to the decree laws was unambiguously clear, the same could not be said of the rest of the CC, which 36  These charges were made specifically by Jean-Marie Caillaud of the Fédération de la Seine which prompted Justin Sicard de Plauzoles, a CC member, to call him a ‘liar’. See intervention by Caillaud in ‘Discussion du Rapport moral’, in Le Congrès national de 1934. Compte rendu sténographique. Nancy, 19–21 Mai 1934 (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1934), pp. 60–1. For Basch’s response, see ibid., p. 69ff. 37  Intervention by M. Goldschild in ibid., p. 75. 38  Intervention by Caillaud in ibid., pp. 65–8. 39  See ‘Réponse de M. Victor Basch’ to the Intervention by M. Caillaud in ibid., pp. 69–75. The secretary-general, Emile Kahn, also rejected the accusation that the CC had done nothing during the 6 February crisis. See Emile Kahn, ‘Réponse de M. Emile Kahn’ in ibid., pp. 78–87.

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rather belied his claims later in the Congress that the Ligue was entirely apolitical and driven only by principle.40 This was a rather tired refrain which was trotted out when Basch and the CC did not agree with something. There is no doubt that 1934 had been a bad year. Basch said that the ten months since the Amiens Congress ‘count among the most painful that men of my age have ever experienced. We have felt the mortal scent of the fascist plague pass over us for the first time. It is no longer a hidden fascism, this pre-fascism which we have been denouncing for years, but it was the real thing which, in all of its living hideousness, we saw rise before us.’41 Almost a year and a half into the Nazi dictatorship and just a few months after the 6 February 1934 riots in Paris, it is small wonder that Basch and the Ligue felt beleaguered. Not only were the Ligue’s eyes fixed on what was happening across the Rhine, as they had been the year before, but the Ligue was also transfixed by the apprehended fascist coup attempt in France. There seemed to be fascism within and fascism without. The threat of French fascism became a foil in the debate between minority and majority, an internal political lightning rod. While both sides agreed that 6 February was of enormous importance, the minority went one step further and argued that France needed ‘to sweep its own doorstep’ and not get involved in German affairs. This argument had already been made by Georges Pioch at the Amiens Congress the year before. Basch had heaped scorn on it then, calling it ‘unholy, unworthy of those who uttered it’.42 He criticized those he called ‘the young’ for believing that there was only a small degree of difference between French democracy and the dictatorships. But even here, Georges Pioch, the man who had uttered the words in a meeting at the 1933 Congress, refused the criticism and brought the issue back to Article 231 and the question of German war guilt: ‘Alas, the war has passed over our enviable illusion [of great moral victory in the Dreyfus affair] . . . Events follow one another in a paradoxical vertigo.’43 The minority seemed oblivious to the sea change in European politics that Hitler and the Nazis represented. But even the majority took some time to adjust to the new reality of Nazi Germany and what it implied. As we have seen, Basch and the majority continued to hold their noses and argue in favour of disarmament and the ‘adjustment’ of the Versailles Treaty, even as it became increasingly evident that this was not a wise position to take. In that sense, the minority position seemed to have gained some limited traction in the Ligue. Over a year into the 40  He made the claim in a debate later on in the Congress about whether to exclude Edouard Herriot from the Ligue, at the end of which he resigned as president, saying: ‘la Ligue a le devoir strict de se tenir au-dessus de la politique.’ Still later, he returned to the theme, saying ‘Les collègues qui ont soulevé cette question n’ont pas l’air de se douter que, en évoquant ici un problème proprement politique, ils détruisent la Ligue qui, de par sa constitution même, ne peut vivre qu’à la condition de rester en dehors de toutes les querelles, de toutes les abominables querelles politiques.’ See ‘Démission de M. Victor Basch’ in ibid., pp. 161, 163–4. 41  ‘Discours de M. Victor Basch,’ in ‘Rapport Moral: L’Action générale de la Ligue’, in Congrès national de 1934, p. 43. 42  For Basch’s comments see ‘Discours de M. Victor Basch’, in ‘Discussion du rapport moral’, in Congrès national de 1933, p. 10. 43  Georges Pioch in ibid., p. 162.

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Nazi dictatorship and a couple of months after the 6 February crisis, the Ligue seemed more concerned with domestic French events than with what was happening in Germany. There was no doubt that the LDH continued to be gravely concerned about the German situation, but for the moment, its gaze was directed more inward at the danger posed by French fascism. Despite the sage words of Arthur Goldschild above, however, the Ligue’s secretary-general just could not see his way clear to burying the hatchet between minority and majority, even after a question from one of the Algerian delegates as to why the CC seemed unable to unite around a common position.44 All of the old rancour was apparent in the debate between Félicien Challaye, representing the minority, and Salomon Grumbach, who, as we have seen already, was something of a political pitbull. That said, there also seems to have been collusion among the members of the minority to get more time at the podium for their star speakers. Michel Alexandre announced that a delegate who was to have spoken had donated his allotted time to Challaye. Challaye spoke at length about colonialism saying that the Ligue’s approach to what he called ‘colonial barbarism’ had been absolutely ‘insufficient’.45 Challaye, who had a long track record as one of the foremost voices in France against colonialism, suggested that the Ligue had b­ linders on about colonialism and linked this with the LDH’s position on Nazi atrocities. It was all well and good to demand that the Nazi prisons be visited by international observers, but he found it hypocritical that the Ligue was unprepared to demand the same for French prisons in Indochina which he described as ‘atrocious’. This all served as a warm-up for his main argument, however, which was that the Ligue had been insufficiently bold in its demands for international disarmament. He made the great rhetorical point that the Ligue could afford a poster campaign across France decrying German withdrawal from the League of Nations and the Geneva Disarmament Conference, but it could not do the same in the face of the events of 6 February.46 He proposed a motion which declared that the Ligue was ‘hostile to any renewal of the policy of the Union sacrée’ and ‘regretted that the Ligue des droits de l’homme had contributed, with its poster on the withdrawal of Germany from the League of Nations, to supporting the spirit of hostility against Germany’. His motion accused the French government of ending ‘all international efforts for disarmament’ and of ‘orienting the nation and humanity towards a new arms race and actively pushing for the psychological preparation of a new war’.47 He hoped that what he called the ‘government of the riot, the government of preparation for war’ will find in the ‘unanimous Ligue resolute adversaries imbued with an absolute and proud independence’.48 Challaye’s speech thus equated the 44  ‘Réponse de M. Emile Kahn’ in ibid., pp. 78–87. Combaz, the Algerian delegate, interjected that he found the whole thing ‘le cinéma’. He added, ‘Je suis un jeune ligueur et, pour le premier Congrès auquel j’assiste . . . je m’étonne de voir et de constater la façon dont vous vous divisez.’ In ibid., p. 86. 45  ‘Intervention de M.  Félicien Challaye’ in ibid., p. 105. Michel Alexandre announced to the Congress that a delegate from the Versailles section, like Alexandre, would not be speaking and had given his allotted time to Challaye. See ibid., p. 93. 46  ‘Intervention de M. Félicien Challaye’ in ibid., p. 105 and 107ff. 47  For the text of Challaye’s motion, see ibid., p. 112. 48  Ibid., p. 113.

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events of 6 February—the ‘government of the riot’—with a government tepid on the disarmament question, a government allegedly preparing France for a new war, and representing the mainstream views regarding Nazi Germany both within and without the Ligue—the ‘government of preparation for war’. It is surely indicative of the support for the theses of the minority that Challaye’s conclusion was greeted with thunderous applause. Salomon Grumbach’s response to Challaye highlighted the differences between the minority and the majority on the question of Nazi Germany. In a nutshell, the problem was what position to take on Nazism when according to the minority both France and the Ligue were complicit in its advent. Grumbach claimed that Challaye’s view of Franco-German relations was disconnected from reality. He rejected completely the notion that France was in any way responsible for what was happening across the Rhine. The Ligue had always been on the side of right; he said it had opposed the Ruhr occupation, was in favour of Franco-German rapprochement, and had sent speakers to Germany. Grumbach did not engage in the slightest with the debate about the impact of Versailles, Article 231, and r­ eparations on German opinion. But what more could it have done, after all? He asked rhetorically if it was the Ligue’s fault that the German people were not free at the moment. While he believed that Nazi Germany was the gravest threat to world peace, he did not subscribe at all to the idea that a preventive war was in order. Germany had to be brought to its senses and made to bend to international ‘discipline’, but this had to be effected through Geneva and a limitation at least, or a reduction at best, of everybody’s armaments, including Germany’s. ‘This remains our immutable goal’, he said, and he begged Ligueurs to ‘stop believing that those who do not accept a motion such as Challaye’s are against Franco-German rapprochement and are enemies of peace. Neither you nor I are responsible for the advent of Hitlerian Germany.’49 This helps explain why one of the other issues at the 1934 Congress was the attempt by Michel Alexandre and other members of the minority to have Edouard Herriot, former prime minister of France, Mayor of Lyon, and eminent Radical politician, thrown out of the Ligue. Herriot’s crime, as the Mayor of Lyon, was the sanctioning of twenty-two workers at the municipal slaughterhouse for their refusal to participate in air raid exercises. Alexandre’s motion condemned the ‘odious and arbitrary act’; it called on the CC to demand reinstatement of the fired workers and to ‘render public homage to their moral and civic courage’.50 Ostensibly issues separate from the war guilt debate, both Challaye’s motion on disarmament and the move to eject Edouard Herriot from the Ligue were actually part and parcel of a concerted attack on the CC’s position by the minority. Basch certainly understood 49  Salomon Grumbach, response to Challaye in ibid., pp. 114–16 and 122. 50  Alexandre’s motion is in ibid., p. 153. The Ligue had already been here before, in a sense. The Monnaie-Odéon section in the sixth arrondissement in Paris had tried repeatedly to expel the noted mathematician and independent Socialist politician, Paul Painlevé, who also happened to be a founding member of the Ligue. None of these attempts was ultimately successful because the Ligue Congresses repeatedly overturned them, until finally, in 1929, Painlevé himself gave up and left the Ligue. See Irvine, Between Justice and Politics, pp. 67–71.

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this. He made it clear that he viewed the vote on Challaye’s motion a question of confidence because it engaged the entire life of the Ligue; he said nothing of making the Alexandre motion a question of confidence.51 The result of the vote was a heavy blow to Basch. Alexandre’s motion passed by a fairly healthy margin, but even though Challaye’s was rejected in favour of one from the Comité Central, Basch resigned as president, to the great surprise and consternation of the Congress, calling it ‘stupid to sacrifice one’s life’ to such a cause. ‘I’ve had enough’, he said, ‘I’m leaving’, and with that he stepped down from the rostrum.52 The Congress then devolved into a rather surrealist exercise in which business seemed to go on as before. Michel Alexandre tried to repair the damage with a motion at the very end of the debate on the Rapport moral, emphasizing the ‘unanimous affection and veneration’ of the Ligue for Basch, but refusing ‘to admit that the measure meted out to the Mayor of Lyon, Edouard Herriot, for violation of the Rights of Man, could be interpreted as an oblique or political manoeuvre, while instead it is the stunning affirmation of the independence of the Ligue’. The motion was signed by ninety-eight delegates in the name of their sections or federations, but it was not voted on; instead the Rapport moral was passed unanimously minus six votes.53 Thus ended the Sunday morning session of the 1934 Congress: the Ligue no longer had a president. Lunch seemed to have a sobering effect on the Congress, which began the afternoon session by trying to claw its way back onto the precipice off which it had hurtled just a few hours earlier. Michel Alexandre presented his motion again, begging Basch to rescind his resignation, while at the same time refusing to budge on the validity of his original motion regarding Herriot which had passed. He also pointed out that in the debate of the previous afternoon, Basch had given no indication that he considered the Alexandre motion one of confidence. The question of confidence had only been raised with regard to the Challaye motion on disarmament which had then been defeated. The Fédération de Maine-et-Loire entered the  fray with a second motion asking Basch to come back as president, but with the signal difference that they seemed to imply they had been manipulated by Alexandre’s motion, saying that they refused ‘to participate in a manoeuvre of which they formally disapprove’. Albert Bayet presented a third motion, apparently on behalf of Basch, which would have seen the Congress withdraw the castigation of Herriot, demanded that the Lyon employees be given their jobs back, and referred the issue to the CC for further analysis. Perhaps sensing that the Congress was not going to back down in its censure of Herriot, Kahn said that the first two motions to be voted on were Alexandre’s and the Maine-et-Loire motion. Basch was consulted by Kahn and others and indicated that he would only rescind his resignation if the Maine-et-Loire motion were passed, not if the Alexandre 51  ‘Discussion du Rapport moral’, in Congrès national de 1934, p. 155. 52  For the vote results, see ibid. For Basch’s comments see Victor Basch, ‘Démission de M. Victor Basch’, in ibid., pp. 160–6, esp. p. 166. 53  For the text of the Alexandre motion and the vote approving the Rapport moral, see Congrès national de 1934, pp. 227–8.

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motion were. Despite this clear attempt at chantage, the Congress voted only 775 votes to 756 against the Alexandre motion. Basch and the CC had played chicken and won, but it had been very close indeed. It was hardly a ringing endorsement, hardly the expression of ‘confidence’ that Basch seemed to be demanding. While face was saved and Basch could come back as president, the damage done to the Ligue was probably lasting. One sees the same faces front and centre in the debates over how best to defend democracy and peace three years later at the schismatic Tours Congress.54 Despite the fact that the debate on the Rapport moral and the saga of the Lyon slaughterhouse employees took almost a day and a half of the Congress’s time, the main topic of debate at the 1934 Nancy Congress was supposed to have been ‘defence and adaptation of the democratic state’. It was directly inspired by the conviction of most Ligueurs that France had undergone an apprehended fascist coup attempt on 6 February. Léon Emery, president of the Rhône federation and also of the Lyon section, gave an impassioned speech three times the length allowed because Challaye, Michel Alexandre, and Georges Michon had all donated their allotted time to him.55 The minority was certainly becoming adept at the rules of the game in order to get its points across, in much the same way that the majority seemed able to play politics at the Congresses; witness the orchestrated campaign to get Victor Basch to rescind his resignation in 1934. More important still is the fact that pacifism now seemed to be the motivating principle behind the take on fascism of at least some members of the minority. Emery enunciated a position that was to become dear to French new-style pacifists over the course of the 1930s, expressed perhaps best in the title of an article by Henri Jeanson in La Flèche at the time of the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936. Did, as Jeanson’s title would have it, ‘peace trump justice’?56 In 1934, Léon Emery clearly seemed to think it did, declaring in his speech that ‘more than ever, a resolute pacifism remains the condition of the democratic struggle. When it is said “Democracy must be defended in order to save peace”, I say that perhaps the formula can be inverted, with perhaps more value, and that one must above all else save peace in order to defend democracy’. The Congress seemed to agree because Emery’s speech was met with a ‘repeated and long standing ovation’.57 What the 1934 Congress had shown was that there were now two major ­political concerns for the Ligue. The first was what was happening across the Rhine in Nazi Germany, but the second, of almost equal importance it seemed, was the sudden 54  For the negotiations leading to Basch’s return as president, see Congrès national de 1934, pp. 227–71 and 300. 55  Emery’s speech was published after the Congress by the Ligue section in the fourteenth arrondissement in Paris. See Léon Emery, Contre le fascisme: le devoir de la Ligue des droits de l’homme (n.p.[Paris], n.d.[1934]). See the original in Congrès national de 1934, pp. 339–54. 56  See Henri Jeanson, ‘La Paix prime le droit’, La Flèche, 21 March 1936, cited in Charles Rousseau, ‘La dénonciation des Traités de Locarno devant le Droit International’, La Paix par le droit 46, 4 (April 1936), p. 198. 57  Léon Emery, speech on the theme of the Congress, ‘Défense et adaptation de l’état démocratique’, in Congrès national de 1934, pp. 350 and 354.

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discovery of a fascist threat inside France. This meant three things to the long-running war guilt and war origins debate. In the first instance, it seemed to dilute, albeit briefly, the importance of the external debate in favour of a fixation on events in France. Secondly, it allowed the minority to evolve further in the direction of a political analysis inspired by a reading of the pre-1792 Robespierre, and to argue that France needed first and foremost to ‘sweep before its own doorstep’.58 As we have seen above, the fear of a fascist coup in France was enough to cause some members of the minority to propose a truce in the campaign against the majority, but this was effectively rejected by Emile Kahn. Thirdly, however, the argument that France needed to focus on its own internal problems also dovetailed nicely with the belief that France needed to admit its sins of omission and commission in 1914. 1935 HYÈRES CONGRESS After the 1932 debates about treaty ‘adjustment’ or revision, followed in quick succession by the 1933 Congress which attempted to deal with the advent of Nazism on the European scene and the 1934 Congress with its focus on the fallout from the 6 February 1934 events and the fear that France, too, might be headed down the fascist road, it is perhaps no surprise that the 1935 Congress should have dealt with the question of the general orientation of the Ligue. The 1935 Congress was supposed to take place in Toulon, but just three weeks before it was scheduled to begin, the Toulon city council suddenly decided that it would not allow the Ligue to use municipal facilities. Somehow, the Ligue managed to throw together a complete three-day Congress in Hyères with the full support of the municipal council there.59 The Hyères Congress laid bare two divergent approaches to the life of the Ligue. On the one hand, there was the majority view represented by the Comité Central and Victor Basch, who presented the CC’s views in his report to the Congress. Opposing him was Léon Emery, a relative newcomer to the Comité Central, and someone whose speech at the 1934 Congress had elicited rapturous applause. The minority changed tack in its approach to the 1935 Congress. As Léon Emery made clear in a speech on behalf of a much larger group which included Michel Alexandre, Georges Michon, Arthur Goldschild, Maurice Weber, René Château, André Philip, Elie Reynier, Georges Pioch, and Félicien Challaye, it was not going to contest the Rapport moral in any detail as it had always done in the past. In turn, those who had requested speaking time on the Rapport moral, as well as others, simply said that they had nothing further to add. Acting as their spokesman, 58  See Norman Ingram, ‘Repressed Memory Syndrome: Interwar French Pacifism and the Attempt to Recover France’s Pacifist Past’, French History 18, 3 (September 2004), pp. 315–30. 59  See the welcome speech by M. Guigues, the president of the Fédération du Var, in Le Congrès national de 1935. Compte rendu sténographique. Hyères (Var), 8–10 Juin 1935 (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1935), p. 6.

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Emery limited his critique of the Ligue’s activity over the previous year to an enumeration of four points: 1. He contested the right of the CC to overturn the decision of the Nancy Congress to censure Edouard Herriot; 2. He criticized the ‘unpardonable tardiness’ of the CC’s response to the law on passive defence and the attendant risk of militarization of the civilian population which it entailed; 3. Equally, he criticized the slowness with which the CC had decided to join up with other anti-fascist organizations in the Paris area; 4. Somewhat more fully, he criticized the ‘prolonged impotence’ of the CC in ‘defining a really effective peace policy’, the lack of movement on the Paris motions (presumably he meant the motions of the 1932 Congress in Paris) in favour of treaty ‘revision’, and the absence of any ‘energetic’ policy in favour of disarmament. Instead, Emery declared that the problems of the present hour were so ­important that he and his friends wanted to shorten the discussion of the past in favour of a longer debate on the future.60 Victor Basch led off with a long presentation of the CC’s position on the question of the orientation of the Ligue. How was it, he asked, that the Ligue had come to the point of wondering what its orientation was, of wondering if it had become an ‘impotent’ irrelevance in French politics? The debate on orientation was the direct result, according to Basch, of the ‘profound malaise’ afflicting the Ligue whose cause was none other than the allegation that the Comité Central s­ upposedly ‘no longer vibrated to the same diapason’ as the rank-and-file of the Ligue. It was in an attempt to resolve this question once and for all that the CC had decided to dedicate the entire 1935 Congress to the question of the Ligue’s orientation. He said that most Ligueurs simply could not understand what the problem was; most seemed to think there was very little difference between majority and minority. Basch agreed that on one level there was nothing in Emery’s report that distinguished it from the policies of the CC.61 On the other hand, though, there was a world of difference. Without ever coming right out and saying so, it is clear that Basch was convinced that Emery was close to being a proto-fascist. He said that the first point on which they did not agree was the question of the defence of the individual. Basch claimed that for Emery and Co. this was a decidedly ‘inferior’ task. Basch was partially right. He claimed that ‘for us, on the contrary, we affirm that the defence of the rights of the individual, and above all of the humble, is the essential task of the Ligue and must remain at the centre of its efforts.’ He reminded the Congress that it was from the defence of the rights of one person that the Ligue had been born. This was all well and good, 60  See speech by Léon Emery in ‘Discussion du rapport moral’, in Congrès national de 1935, pp. 60–3. 61  Victor Basch, ‘Discours de M. Victor Basch’, debate on ‘L’Orientation de la Ligue’, in Congrès national de 1935, pp. 146–7.

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but it ignored the fact that the Ligue’s efforts since at least 1920, if not well before, had been oriented very much to what Buisson had called in his article in the very first number of the Cahiers in 1920 the defence of the ‘rights of collectivities’.62 Basch disapproved completely of some of Emery’s positions, most notably his staunch opposition to parliamentarianism. He disagreed totally with Emery’s view of French democracy and likened Emery’s ideas to those of André Tardieu, an equation which occasioned ‘gasps’ from the Congress. For Basch, the choice was clear: ‘I opt’, he said, ‘for the parliamentary system because it is still possible to reform and amend it, whereas a dictatorship is essentially immutable and totalitarian. Take care that in provoking the disaffection and disdain of the masses for the parliamentary system, as M. Emery and his friends do, you do not in the final analysis facilitate fascism.’63 One can well imagine the reaction of the Congress to the idea that there were similarities between Emery’s and Tardieu’s ideas. After all, Félicien Challaye had already called Tardieu an ‘apprentice dictator’ in 1930.64 When it came to tactics, Basch challenged Emery’s argument that the Ligue was watering down its efforts too much and needed to concentrate its energies on just two main subjects: anti-capitalism and peace. Yet again, he insinuated that this narrowing of focus was the political method by which ‘fascism and racism had triumphed in Italy and Germany’. In any event, Basch was sure that the Ligue did not want to limit its concerns to just anti-capitalism and peace no matter how important and timely those two subjects were. What about laicity, or the rights of civil servants? he asked. The Ligue had always been anti-capitalist in Basch’s view, but the problem with making this one of only two planks in the LDH’s platform was that it risked alienating some Ligue members who might not be members of the political party that espoused this position, namely the Socialist Party. A sizeable proportion of the Ligue’s membership came from the Radical party which was hardly ‘radical’ in any meaningful sense of the word. All of this made sense as a criticism of Emery’s position, but when Basch went on to argue that the Ligue had already pronounced in favour of treaty ‘revision’ at its 1932 Congress, this was being more than a little elastic with the truth, as we have seen above. The motion passed by the 1932 Congress spoke only and carefully of ‘adjustment’ of the treaties in conformity with the views of Basch and the majority. It was thus verging on the duplicitous for Basch to castigate Emery in 1935 for having ‘forgotten’ that ‘revision’ of the treaties was the principal question at the 1932 Congress. His claim that it was the majority and not the minority that had proposed this theme in 1932, together with his congratulation of the majority for being so open-minded when Hitler’s seizure of power ‘was only hours away’, are a clear case of reading back into the historical record something that did not exist. In December 1932, Basch and the Ligue in general did not think Hitler would ever become Chancellor of Germany, 62  Ibid., p. 147. Cf. Ferdinand Buisson, ‘Notre programme: droits de l’homme, droits du citoyen, droits des peuples’, Cahiers 20, 1 (5 January 1920), pp. 3–4. 63  Victor Basch, ‘Discours de M. Victor Basch’, debate on ‘L’Orientation de la Ligue’, in Congrès national de 1935, pp. 148–9. 64  See Félicien Challaye, Un apprenti-dictateur, André Tardieu (Paris: Editions de la Révolution prolétarienne, 1930).

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which explains their surprise the following year in the wake of the Nazi seizure of power.65 The most serious issues, though, seemed to be the minority’s call to abolish Article 14 of the Ligue’s constitution which prohibited the Ligue and its sections from becoming subordinate parts of other organizations, and especially the proposal to have the annual Congresses elect the members of the Comité Central rather than the local sections. Too much direct democracy at the Congresses was a bad thing in Basch’s view; he feared the CC becoming the pawn of the annual Congresses at which by no means all sections, or sometimes even federations, of the Ligue were fully represented. This smacked of demagogy to Basch and again he used the term ‘fascism’ to describe it.66 The mission of the Ligue was five-fold, according to Basch. First, it was to defend the rights of the individual, and above all of the humblest. Secondly, the Ligue had to work towards the creation of more equitable laws. Thirdly, it must defend democratic freedoms against the encroachments of fascism. Fourthly, it needed not just to defend democracy, but to realize it. And finally, the Ligue had to defend that ‘most supreme of all human values: peace’.67 Interestingly, what ought to have been a rousing conclusion to Basch’s speech elicited only ‘applause’ from the Congress; no wild acclamations or standing ovation here. Emery responded to Basch’s rather inflammatory rhetoric rather irenically, at least in tone. He argued that just as anti-clericalism had been at the centre of the preoccupations of Gambetta when the Third Republic had been founded, so now it was necessary to see opposition to the power of money as the defining characteristic of genuine republicanism. But this opposition to the financial oligarchy could not be separated from other long-cherished concerns of the Ligue such as laicity, pacifism, or the rights of trade unions; without these latter elements, simple anti-capitalism ran the danger of becoming a ‘fascist power grab’.68 That said, he believed that the ‘distinction between the fascist states and the democratic states is no more than one of degree, and not of a fundamental opposition of ideas’.69 Those were certainly portentous words pregnant with consequences for the future, as we shall see. Pacifism was one of the two defining principles that Emery saw as essential. He, like Basch, seemed to be under the dubious impression that the Ligue had finally come out in favour of treaty ‘revision’ in 1932. He had a point, though, when he reminded the Congress that it had taken the Ligue ten years of debate to get to this juncture. He clung to the notion of ‘revision’, however, but said that what was critical was the spirit behind a motion and not just the literal meaning of the words. And here he criticized the Comité Central for having abandoned the concept of treaty revision in favour of support for mutual assistance pacts. In and of themselves there was nothing necessarily wrong with such pacts, but he claimed that it was ‘sufficient’ 65  Victor Basch, ‘Discours de M. Victor Basch’, debate on ‘L’Orientation de la Ligue’, in Congrès national de 1935, pp. 152–4. For the resolution on ‘La Controverse sur les traités’ see Congrès national de 1932, pp. 385–94. 66  Victor Basch, ‘Discours de M. Victor Basch’, debate on ‘L’Orientation de la Ligue’, in Congrès national de 1935, pp. 157–8. 67  Ibid., pp. 160–1. 68  Léon Emery, ‘Discours de M. Léon Emery’ in ibid., pp. 169–70. 69  Ibid., p. 163.

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to read all of the motions passed by the majority of the Comité Central ‘to see that in effect, in the minds of their writers, it is all about parrying a pre-determined situation, characterized by the existence of a unique hotbed of war, or of an essential hotbed of war, Hitlerian Germany, and by the presence around this hotbed of what is commonly called the coalition of peace-loving nations.’ This was, he said, a ‘dangerous and illusory method’; illusory because the so-called coalition of peace-loving nations simply did not exist. How could it, when it included Fascist Italy on the one hand, and Great Britain which was busy trying to negotiate a bilateral pact with Nazi Germany on the other? Secondly, however, he said that it was dangerous because it divided Europe yet again into two rival blocs which would lead inevitably to war.70 The positions articulated in the debate on the orientation of the Ligue revealed a wide and divergent spectrum of ideas. There seemed to be a generational divide expressed in the speeches of some Ligueurs. One representative from Paris accused the Comité Central of being out of touch with the desires and needs of French youth: ‘You were incapable of preventing the war [enthusiastic applause from some seats], you have been incapable of imposing the peace, you have been incapable of resolving what you call the crisis, and today you want us to miss our Revolution?’71 Kahn took umbrage, probably with some reason, at the inflammatory tone of an article that the Paris delegate, Rozner, had published in Le Nouvel Âge a couple of weeks earlier. Rozner had essentially accused the old men in charge of the Ligue of not being up to the ideological task before them. Kahn replied that he and the CC ‘suspected no one at the Congress, neither of a plot nor a manoeuvre of any sort.’ He said that it was a point of honour that they considered their opponents ‘­incapable of plots or manoeuvres’.72 This was more than a little rich given that the year before at the Nancy Congress, Victor Basch had most definitely accused the minority in the person of Michel Alexandre of ‘oblique manoeuvres’.73 Still other delegates accused the Ligue and the CC of having gone soft on revolutionary principles, of having abandoned the Jacobin ethos. For one of these, Gabriel Cudenet from the Seine-et-Oise federation, ‘The Revolution created the abstract citizen; the real citizen remains to be made. The work has moreover been interrupted since Thermidor’. To complete the reference to the Jacobin phase of the Revolution, Cudenet called for the Comité Central to re-cast itself in the form of the Committee of Public Safety.74 The neo-Jacobinism of some parts of the Ligue could hardly have been more explicit. There was confusion, though, about what 1793 and the Jacobin phase of the Revolution actually meant. Several of the speakers indulged, as we have seen above, in a kind of super-heated Jacobin rhetoric which was directed against internal foes, 70  Ibid., pp. 171–2. 71  Discours de M. Jacques Rozner (Section de Paris IXe), in ibid., p. 211. 72  ‘Réponse de M. Emile Kahn’, in ibid., p. 214. 73  See Victor Basch, ‘Démission de M. Victor Basch’, in ‘Discussion du Rapport moral’, in Congrès national de 1934, p. 161. 74  Discours de M. Cudenet (Fédération de Seine-et-Oise), in the debate on ‘L’Orientation de la Ligue’, in Congrès national de 1935, pp. 223–4.

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most notably the powers of money, but which could, one suspects, be turned just as easily against an external enemy. Its focus was on the future. For Michel Alexandre, on the other hand, what had to be rejected above all else was any thought of a return to a Union sacrée, which he said was not the same thing as the national defence. He claimed not to want to ‘recriminate’ about the past, saying that this ‘change in orientation, this recovery of the Ligue, which we believe necessary, is with a view to future action’. Very quickly, though, he lapsed into an ­analysis of the past. He said that ‘if for the last ten or fifteen years, in imposing justice we had prevented German nationalism from galvanising as it has, there would presently be no danger from this side.’ Neither France nor the Ligue had any reason to be proud of its past policies. Now the time had come to take Hitler at his word on disarmament and to ‘shout it from the rooftops’; ‘murmuring was not sufficient.’ He condemned the Ligue’s approach to the problem of Hitlerism. Instead of demanding justice for Germany, disarmament, and a revision of the Versailles Treaty, all the Ligue could do was plaster the walls of France with a poster excoriating the Germans for leaving the League of Nations. He accused the Ligue of holding ‘pseudo-pacifist’ and ‘half-pacifist’ positions for the last fifteen years. This brought him to the second great danger of the present hour which was the idea of a war for justice, a crusade against Nazism. Alexandre called on the Ligue to refuse any sort of Union sacrée.75 The impact of Léon Emery on the Ligue cannot be overstated and it was not necessarily or entirely positive. Whereas until 1933, the Ligue’s minority had argued the case for treaty revision against the reigning orthodoxy of the moral and historical validity of the substance if not the form of Article 231, all this seemed to change with Emery’s arrival on the scene as a Comité Central member after 1934. The minority’s gaze from 1914 all the way down to 1933 had been focused on the past, on the issue of war guilt during the Great War, and on the direct impact that this had on political developments in interwar Europe. In a subtle yet important way, Emery seemed to change that. With the addition of anti-capitalism to the credo of the minority, the argument about peace was transformed from one which had its origins in a fundamentally historical argument, to one essentially beholden to a particular political interpretation. The analysis of war origins and war guilt was also subtly relegated to a second-string position. The heritage of the Great War continued to be the toile de fond against which the Ligue’s debates evolved, but the background seemed increasingly crowded out by a foreground which was defined by the question of whose fascism to resist and how, together with an economic analysis beholden to Marxism. The minority’s position now looked forward perhaps even more than it looked backwards. The transition was effected relatively seamlessly because important members of the minority were definitely on the hard left of the political spectrum; Challaye and Pioch are prime examples of this. Others were on the left because of an increasingly intransigent political position which

75  ‘Discours de M. Michel Alexandre’, in ibid., pp. 237–42.

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owed much to a re-reading of Robespierre; the key figure here was undoubtedly Georges Michon.76 It is nevertheless a fact that despite a considerable amount of political vitriol being thrown around at the 1935 Congress, it finished on an apparent high note of unanimity. Basch managed to get the Congress to agree to a vote on which motion—his or Emery’s—would be used as the basis for a joint resolution around which the entire Congress could unite. The Congress voted by a relatively slim margin—826 to 640 votes—in favour of the Basch resolution. In many ways, this was all smoke and mirrors, however, because 44 per cent of the votes cast at the Congress had been for the original, strongly dissenting Emery resolution. By any stretch of the imagination, that was a huge minority. At this point, a committee composed of Basch as chair, Henri Guernut, Gombault, and Eugène Frot representing the CC majority and the Basch position, and Léon Emery, Gaston Bergery, and André Philip representing the minority and the Emery viewpoint, convened to try to hash out a common resolution. It did not seem too difficult to achieve, despite the verbal pyrotechnics that the earlier debate had occasioned, and after about two hours of deliberation, a very long resolution with something in it for everyone was presented to the Congress.77 The final ­resolution paid suitable obeisance to the Ligue’s glorious past and said enough about the challenges of the present to resonate with the younger generation of Ligueurs. In the former category were the traditional strengths of the Ligue—the struggle for ‘equality and freedom’, by which the Ligue had always understood the fight against ‘inequality, arbitrariness and intolerance’. Having spent several pages defining what it had always done, the motion then went on to discuss the fight against ‘the dangers of war’ and the ‘necessary offensive’ against the powers of money. With regard to the fight against war, the Ligue believed first and foremost in ­disarmament as a tool which had to be demanded of the French government. At the same time, the Ligue pronounced itself in favour of the ‘establishment of a method for the peaceful revision of the treaties’. It rejected categorically the notion that ­disarmament could be linked to mutual assistance pacts, collective security, or the revision of the ‘unjust’ clauses of the treaties. What the Ligue wanted was the negotiation of ‘simultaneous disarmament’ and it was prepared to seek that with Nazi Germany, no matter ‘the horror that the Hitlerian terror inspires’. But despite the dangers threatening both democracy and peace, the Ligue did not believe that it needed to change its methods.78 What are we to make of the results of the 1935 Hyères Congress? The final ­resolution was not passed unanimously. Despite Basch’s herculean efforts to massage 76 See Georges Michon, ‘Robespierre et la guerre révolutionnaire’, in Annales révolutionnaires (Organe de la société des Etudes robespierristes), Vol. 12, 1920, pp. 265–311. This was followed in 1937 by a fuller examination; see Michon, Robespierre et la guerre révolutionnaire 1791–1792 (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1937). Cf. Norman Ingram, ‘Repressed Memory Syndrome’. 77  ‘L’Orientation de la Ligue: Résultat du vote sur la priorité’, in Congrès national de 1935, p. 364. For the final text of the resolution, see ibid., pp. 396–406. 78  Ibid., pp. 383–90 for the defence of the Ligue’s past and its tactics; pp. 390–2 for the Ligue’s position on the danger of war posed by Nazism.

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the motion in such a way as to induce unanimity, seven people voted against and a further fourteen abstained. Not a large number, surely, but enough to pique the frustration of the chair of the Congress session.79 Notwithstanding deep divisions within the Ligue along generational and political lines, unity was almost achieved in 1935. Emery’s resolution had put the questions of peace and democracy squarely on the Ligue’s agenda, and two years later the Ligue was to founder on these same shoals. For the moment, however, partially as a result of Basch’s tremendous ­powers of moral suasion and partially because of the inability of anybody to see clearly yet what Nazism was ultimately to mean for France and Europe, Ligue unity was saved. For our purposes here, what is interesting is the way in which ‘treaty revision’— no longer merely ‘adjustment’—seemed to have become normalized in mainstream Ligue discourse. Even Victor Basch now used the term. One might argue that revision seemed to have been relegated very much to second place in the mind of the Ligue. Even the minority—what might almost be called the new minority even if many of the faces were the same as in 1915 and 1923—now seemed content with calls for disarmament. It would be a mistake, however, to think that the issue of war origins and war guilt had simply disappeared from the Ligue’s preoccupations. It had not. Lurking not far beneath the surface of the 1935 demands for disarmament was the minority’s rock-solid conviction that the ‘causes of the present discontents’ (with apologies to Edmund Burke) went all the way back to 1914.80 T H E L I G U E A N D T H E P O P U L A R F RO N T Nineteen thirty-six was the year of the victory of the Popular Front in the French general elections. It was also the year of the remilitarization of the Rhineland and the abrogation of the Locarno accords by Hitler. Since the Ligue’s last Congress at Hyères, the Italian Fascists had also triumphed over Ethiopia. The League of Nations seemed gravely in peril and it is no surprise that reform of the LoN was one of the two main themes at the 1936 Dijon Congress along with a debate over complementary additions to the Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme.81 In his speech opening the debate on the Rapport moral, Basch began by looking at the internal situation of the Ligue, which he declared healthy despite the loss of a sizeable number of members, a development he ascribed to the fact that he and 79  Ibid., pp. 394–5. 80  Mathias Morhardt, who had just been named an honorary member of the Comité Central, attempted just before the end of the Congress to get a motion passed that would have seen the creation of a small committee comprising him, Georges Demartial, Georges Michon, Félicien Challaye, and only two nominees of the CC. This committee was to be charged with drafting a brochure on the ‘truth’ about the origins of the Great War. The president of the ‘Commission des Voeux’, an integral pacifist from the Calvados by the name of Guillou, was quite happy to entertain the motion, but since all other motions from the floor had been referred to the CC according to the Ligue’s own rules, Emile Kahn insisted that the same be done with the Morhardt motion. See ibid., pp. 454–9. 81  Le Congrès national de 1936. Compte rendu sténographique. Dijon, 19–21 Juillet 1936 (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1936). The two themes were ‘Complément à la Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme’ and ‘Réforme de la Société des Nations’.

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the CC had been so preoccupied by their work in favour of the Rassemblement populaire and then the election of the Popular Front government that they had let things slide a bit for the Ligue. This was a small price to pay, however, and in his overview of the French domestic political situation, he expressed satisfaction at the way the Rassemblement populaire had put the French fascists on the defensive; he reiterated his claim at the 1933 Congress that France was essentially allergic to fascism.82 Most of his speech, however, dealt with the Ligue’s reaction to an increasingly fraught international situation. The Ligue’s position on the events of 1936, as ­articulated by Basch, is interesting. On the one hand, Basch unreservedly condemned and excoriated the atrocities and violence of the Nazi regime; in this he was absolutely consistent with the positions he had always taken. Having said that, he thought it ‘absurd to believe that, eighteen years after the conclusion of the peace, one could keep in submission a nation as exceptional and vigorous as the German nation’. ‘If, as was its right’, Basch said, ‘Germany had asked the League of Nations for permission to re-occupy the demilitarized provinces, we would have advised our government to accept this desire.’ As for the abrogation of Locarno, he noted that the Nazi regime had given ‘rightly or wrongly’ as the justification for this the signing of the Franco-Soviet Pact the year before. He believed that Germany was wrong, but said that it had a ‘plausible’ case which ought to have been taken to the International Court at The Hague for adjudication. The bottom line was that the Ligue did not contest the right of Germany to do these things, but rather the way in which they were done, the methods that were used, and the ‘overt and flagrant violation’ of international treaties they entailed.83 The Anschluss of Austria to Germany was also only a matter of time, and Basch claimed that ‘it would be acceptable, if the right of peoples to self-determination is recognized as valid, to give it to them. And I have always added that it was up to France to take the initiative of what seemed to me then to be an act of justice.’84 The result was fear of another 1914. Basch saw Europe dividing into two opposing blocs. On the one hand were Germany, Italy, and (interestingly) Poland; Poland was clearly a great disappointment to Basch, who spoke about the ‘billions’ of francs that had been poured into arming the country and which would now likely be turned against France. Austria, Hungary, and perhaps Japan would join this bloc. Against it would be arrayed the Little Entente, the USSR, France, and an ‘always hesitating and vacillating’ England. There was great danger in this because ‘if these two blocs are formed and coalesce, we will have the same situation as before 1914, but it will be even more dangerous for us, and it will mean the threat of a generalized war, a butchery that will make 1914 look like child’s play.’85 82  ‘Discours de M. Victor Basch’ in debate on the Rapport moral in ibid., p. 59. Basch said: ‘Le pays des révolutions, le pays où est née la Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme, le pays dans lequel, depuis un siècle et demi l’idée démocratique est enracinée profondément dans les esprits et les cœurs, ne peut être assimilé ni à l’Italie, ni à l’Allemagne. Mais néanmoins des journées périlleuses, et en ce qui concerne la politique intérieure, et en ce qui concerne la politique extérieure, nous attendent.’ 83  ‘Discours de M. Victor Basch’ in ibid., p. 54. 84  Ibid., p. 57. 85 Ibid.

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The shift in orientation away from a backwards-looking gaze, fixated on the question of war origins and war guilt, to a forward-looking preoccupation with the political ramifications of present-day events is again to be seen in Emery’s response to the Rapport Moral and Basch’s speech defending it. Emery said that the Ligue ‘must not hypnotize itself with the past, but rather must plant itself squarely in a resolute future-looking attitude’.86 He approved in general terms of the Ligue’s response to the crisis provoked by Hitler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland on 7 March 1936 but reserved his most caustic criticisms for the way the French government had sown panic with its overheated reaction. Emery condemned the Nazi act as ‘brutal’ and ‘illegal’ but then went on to say that the overwhelming reaction of peasant and working-class audiences he had spoken to fourteen times in the fortnight following the Rhineland re-occupation was ‘after all, these guys have come home’.87 Given what was to happen the following year at the schismatic Tour Congress, it is ironic that Emery seemed to privilege and accept the need for Ligue unity in the face of these difficult decisions. He said it was essential ‘in certain cases, to oppose one’s general conception to that of the majority, but once a decision has been taken, one must not indulge in an eternal war of attrition’.88 It is clear, though, that however much Emery’s concerns were directed at the present political situation, they continued to be filtered through the lens of 1914 and the Great War. The motion that he presented to the Dijon Congress, for ­example, was co-written by Michel Alexandre, who was one of the architects at the Ligue’s 1916 Congress of what went on to become the dissenting minority.89 Other speakers at the 1936 Congress were on the same page. Robert Morel, a newstyle pacifist, while thinking that ‘too much importance’ was attached to Article 231, nevertheless thought that the arrival of the Nazis in power was the result of the ‘accumulated mistakes of our successive governments’. As for Locarno, it was inaccurate to suggest that it had been ‘freely signed’ by Germany; Morel thought it was rather a case of the lesser evil that had caused Germany to sign the treaty. In any event, now that both Versailles and Locarno had been ‘violated’ by Germany, what did the Ligue expect France to do: ‘Go to war against Germany?’ When all was said and done, he said, ‘we must not have a war to impose respect for a treaty that the majority of our people, or at least those among it who are awake, disapprove of.’90

86  Comments by Léon Emery in the ‘Discussion du Rapport moral’, in Congrès national de 1936, p. 75. 87  Comments by Léon Emery in ibid., p. 71. This was much the same reaction as that of Le Canard enchaîné, whose famous headline was ‘L’Allemagne envahit . . . l’Allemagne’. 88  Comments by Léon Emery in the ‘Discussion du Rapport moral’, in Congrès national de 1936, pp. 73–5. 89 The text of the resolution read: ‘Le Congrès, instruit par les événements de mars dernier, demande au Comité Central, en cas de brusque crise internationale, de considérer que son premier devoir, avant même de chercher et de dire le droit, c’est: 1° Vis-à-vis de l’opinion, de s’opposer par tous moyens et à tous risques au mouvement de panique et aux excitations guerrières d’où qu’elles viennent; 2° Vis-à-vis du Gouvernement, de tout faire pour que les chicanes de procédure—ceci pour M. Flandin—et les intransigeances de prestige—ceci pour le tandem Flandin-Sarraut—n’entravent pas l’effort immédiat de négociations pacificatrices’ in ibid., pp. 75–6. 90  Robert Morel in ibid., p. 61.

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Maurice Weber, another new-style pacifist and member of the Ligue i­ nternationale des combattants de la paix, took the argument a step further, arguing that France was at fault for the German remilitarization of the Rhineland, not, interestingly, as a function of Versailles, but rather as a direct result of Locarno. Weber said, ‘We therefore firmly believe that since the signing of the Locarno Treaty down to 1932, and even afterwards, France has not obeyed the spirit of Locarno and that it is primarily responsible for the violation of this treaty’; France had not violated the letter of the treaty, he said, but rather more seriously its ‘spirit’.91 This transition from a primary critique of Versailles inspired by a revisionist analysis of the origins of the Great War to a stance of opposition to Locarno—and hence support of Nazi views of European politics—is one of signal importance. It bears the hallmark of the debates of the spring of 1936 outside the Ligue over Romain Rolland’s seminal essay ‘Pour l’indivisible paix’. Rolland’s essay marked his break with the new-style integral pacifism of the early thirties and his increasingly apparent commitment to the concept of collective security.92 Weber said to the Congress, ‘Indivisible peace by means of collective security through general disarmament? Yes. Indivisible peace by means of collective security through an arms race, a generalized over-armament or even the arming of the League of Nations? No. Because that peace means war.’ Weber’s argument could not ultimately transcend the 1914 problem, however. He ended his speech by demanding the rejection of the moral side of the Versailles Treaty, something he said the Ligue had done but which the French government needed to do also. ‘If the Government will not accept this, we will continue a policy that leads straight to the abyss’, he said.93 The debate on the Rapport moral occasioned some heated exchanges. Not all Ligueurs were happy with the political action proposed by Emery. Henri Guernut delivered a stinging attack on Emery, accusing him of being soft on Hitler and effectively of whitewashing the remilitarization of the Rhineland. Jacques Kayser, while agreeing in large measure with Emery’s motion, nevertheless criticized the way Emery seemed to lay blame on the CC for its position during the crisis, to which Emery emphatically declared, ‘no, no’. More tellingly, however, Kayser wished that Emery had condemned Hitler more forcefully; instead, he had talked about Hitler as a man ‘who had the courage, the audacity, the good fortune to propose a peace plan to the world’.94 Salomon Grumbach, in particular, argued that France ought to have defended Locarno against the Hitlerian pretentions; he wondered ‘if the peace of Europe might not have a more solid base, if on the 7th of March France had mobilized’. This occasioned, as one might well imagine, agitation on the floor of the Congress, but Grumbach stuck to his guns and said he was of those who ‘do not want to be the victims of their own desire for peace’. Did this mean that France should go to war against Germany? Decidedly not. But it did mean, in the words of Léon Blum’s speech at the League of Nations in 91  Maurice Weber in ibid., p. 90. 92 See Romain Rolland, ‘Pour l’indivisible paix’, Vendredi, 24 January 1936. Reprinted in Le Barrage 83 (6 February 1936), p. 2. For a discussion of the effect of Rolland’s essay on integral pacifism in France, see Ingram, Politics of Dissent, pp. 190–3. 93  Maurice Weber in the ‘Discussion du Rapport moral’, in Congrès national de 1936, pp. 90–3. 94  For Henri Guernut’s comments, see ibid., pp. 81–2. See also Jacques Kayser in ibid., pp. 86–7.

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Geneva, cited by Grumbach, that ‘international engagements fail if the Powers that have signed them are not resolved to go to the wall. But going to the wall is to accept the risk of going to war. One must therefore accept the possibility of war in order to save peace. The Covenant imposes this alternative on all of the Powers without distinction.’ Grumbach’s invocation of fellow Ligueur Leon Blum’s position drew wild applause from the Congress.95 It was left to Victor Basch, the great conciliator, to smooth things over. He presented a motion which Emery, Kayser, and Grumbach signed and which sought common ground for the Ligue on these contentious questions. He responded to all of the criticisms of the Ligue’s position during the March 1936 crisis, but he did so with some sleight-of-hand. Thus, for example, he declared that the Ligue had been against Article 231 for over ten years, a statement which was both true and false, as we have seen above. Having said that, Basch’s motion was full of good sense and garnered virtually the unanimous support of the 1936 Congress. It enjoined the Comité Central to oppose the effect of sword-rattling on public opinion and impress upon the government the need to ensure that questions of prestige did not have a negative effect on the more ‘immediate effort of pacifying negotiations’.96 All of this was just a warm-up to the main debate of the Congress on French foreign policy and the League of Nations. There were two rapporteurs for this debate, representing two opposing tendencies within the Ligue: the first was Léon Emery and the second was Jacques Kayser. The clash of their ideas laid bare the essential differences separating the two sides within the Ligue. Emery began by saying that there were only two points on which he had doubts about the Comité Central’s position, two issues that needed ‘indispensable clarification’. The first was what he called the ‘famous formula of respect for the treaties as the foundation of peace’. While agreeing in principle with this, he attenuated his agreement by arguing that not all contracts or treaties are equally respectable. This was an important point, because it was the basis of the calls for treaty revision. As we have seen, this had long been a demand of the Ligue’s minority, but Emery now took the position a step further, appearing to argue that Locarno had not been freely consented to by Germany.97 The second bone of contention for Emery was the question of an ‘international police’ and more specifically of international controls on aviation; he believed that if this could not be achieved, then the entire paragraph in the CC’s motion dealing with it was totally irrelevant. Whatever the Congress ultimately decided, however, Emery contended that the Ligue must move beyond pious motions to calls for concrete action, methods, and conditions by which the League of Nations could actually be ‘renovated’.98 The problem which had to be addressed was how to turn the LoN from something other than ‘merely a means of extending ad infinitum the victors’ coalition’ of

95  Salomon Grumbach in ibid., pp. 96–8. 96  Basch in ibid., pp. 106, 110–11. 97  ‘Discours de M. Emery’, in the debate on ‘La Politique extérieure et la Société des Nations’, in Congrès national de 1936, pp. 308–9. 98  Ibid., pp. 309–10.

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1919. The authority of the LoN had reached a nadir; it more or less did not exist. Some people thought that the way to revivify the LoN was to make economic sanctions work, but Emery thought this was a ‘pious fiction’ because if r­ igorously applied they would lead to war. As for military sanctions, the i­nternational police measures he was so concerned about, they might work if a genuine ­international community actually existed, if it were possible for an international police force to apply a corrective measure to one or two trouble-makers. But the world was clearly not like that, at least not in 1936. Instead of a functioning i­nternational community, Emery saw two massive power blocs, two grand coalitions forming against one another. On the one hand were France, Britain, and Russia, and on the other were Germany into whose orbit Japan was being pulled, Poland, Italy, Austria, and the Balkan states. The end result was a replay of 1914: ‘two coalitions all ready, as in 1914, to bury themselves in the common disaster’, a statement which drew sustained applause from the Congress.99 Given Emery’s post-war trial for collaboration and his support of Marcel Déat’s Rassemblement national populaire (RNP), it is instructive to note that in 1936 he was fully of the belief that ‘peace supposes the disappearance of fascism’ and even, he said, the ‘complete disappearance of nationalism’.100 How are we to square this 1936 statement with later developments? Does Philippe Burrin’s ‘dérive fasciste’ not mean something more than an ideological slide into fascism? Emery’s political positions under Vichy were distasteful, but as the witnesses who came to his defence at his 1945 trial argued, they were the result not of philo-nazism, but rather of a political blindness occasioned by his overarching commitment to peace.101 It was left to Jacques Kayser to present a sort of counter report to the Congress which expressed most clearly the views of the majority on the Comité Central. Clearly, the CC had not felt that it had the sufficient backing of the Ligue as a whole for its position, which explains why Emery was given the podium to make his dissenting views known. This had never happened in the 1920s with the old Morhardt-led minority, but significantly, by 1936 the minority view, by now hardened into a fully fledged pacifist view of French policy, was strong enough that it was given equal billing at the Congress. No longer was it relegated to sniping attacks on the Rapport moral; it was now centre stage. Kayser took the position that, far from being under the thumb of France, Britain, or the Soviet Union, the League of Nations had rather been unconsciously playing the game of the fascist powers. In yet another case of pointing out the obvious, he averred that the creation of the Free City of Danzig under League auspices had ‘perhaps been a mistake’. But given the political realities of the hour, he saw no other option than to protest at what was going on there. If the Ligue had been listened to, according to Kayser, Europe would not be in the parlous position 99  Ibid., pp. 314–15. 100  Ibid., p. 318. 101  See Norman Ingram, ‘Pacifism, the Fascist Temptation, and the Ligue des droits de l’homme’, in The French Right between the Wars: Political and Intellectual Movements from Conservatism to Fascism, edited by Samuel Kalman and Sean Kennedy (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), pp. 81–94. Cf. Philippe Burrin, La Dérive fasciste: Doriot, Déat, Bergery, 1933–1945 (Paris: Seuil, 2014).

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it was in: ‘in the past, we were right, our theories were correct, and if they had been listened to in time, as we demanded in numerous resolutions in all our Congresses, we would not be where we are’, he said.102 As we have seen above, it is not at all clear that the Ligue’s majority understood the effect of French and Entente policy or that they were clear-sighted about the impact of Article 231 and the Versailles Treaty on Germany. Interestingly, Kayser admitted that what might have been possible in the immediate aftermath of the Great War, or even in the fifteen years following it, was no longer. Was this an admission that the theses of the minority ought to have been listened to? In a sense, it was. Kayser obliquely criticized French (and by extension, Ligue) policy on Germany, saying that it had been up to France and the liberal democracies ‘to prevent the advent of Hitler to power’, by a ‘­courageous, daring, loyal and just international policy that would have provoked in Germany, instead of this state of bellicose exaltation, a pacific state of mind that would have permitted the German democracy to collaborate regularly with the other democracies’. That had not happened. He blamed France, the West, and the Ligue, saying, ‘We did not know how to act. We have the right, we have the duty to deplore this.’ The conclusions he drew from this state of affairs were the opposite of Emery’s, though. Whereas Emery believed it was necessary to go to the wall in defence of peace, Kayser argued that the only way forward was through collective security. He was confident that the Ligue would reject Hitler’s peace plan as the basis for discussion. Kayser had some tough questions for Emery. First, he wanted to know what Emery and his friends would do if the totalitarian states rejected the proposals of the democracies for the organization of peace through simultaneous, general, progressive, and controlled disarmament. But perhaps even more essential in his mind was the fact that the Nazi and Fascist regimes did not want any control on armaments. Such a control, though, was the sine qua non of any convention limiting armaments. So, he asked Emery, was he in favour or not of this sort of control? Emery responded immediately, saying that if it could be demonstrated that with all the best will and good faith in the world no accord is possible with the fascists, it will be necessary to conclude quite simply that the situation in Europe is without hope, and I swear for my part that I do not see any solution, except that which is not one, that is to say, war. But that in no way lets us off the hook from trying.

Victor Basch interjected ‘Very good’ at this point and Emery’s response was met with wild applause from the Congress. There was hardly unanimity at the 1936 Congress about the best way forward. Maurice Milhaud, a member of the Comité Central, argued forcefully that the Ligue must not throw the baby out with the bathwater, that the League of Nations had been founded at a very specific historical moment, with an élan of enthusiasm, 102  Jacques Kayser, ‘Discours de M. Jacques Kayser’, in the debate on ‘La Politique extérieure et la Société des Nations’, in Congrès national de 1936, p. 326.

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and that it had done much good. Once the edifice was destroyed, he thought it would be impossible to rebuild. The times had changed too much. The idealism of 1919 had evaporated. He ‘deeply regretted’ the attitude of the French working class which, he said, seemed already to have detached itself from the LoN. And he  expressed ‘astonishment’ at the ‘lack of severity of our comrade Emery for Laval’, roundly criticizing Laval for policies which had weakened the Genevan institution.103 That was one pole in the debate. Moving towards the other extreme in the debate, Maurice Weber called for a radical break from ‘the traditional policies followed by the Quai d’Orsay since time immemorial, and notably since the Treaty of Versailles’. He proposed adding two ‘concrete and symbolical propositions’ to the Emery motion. The first would have returned France to the one-year military service, and the second was a ‘solemn declaration of the abrogation of Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty’. Weber was opposed to military sanctions and to the way the CC motion singled out the dictators for critical treatment. The ghost of 1914 lived on in the 1936 Congress debates because Weber reminded his listeners of Demartial’s argument that the nation which mobilized first was by definition the aggressor, an analysis he wanted included in the final motion. The tragedy of the Ligue des droits de l’homme is clearly to be seen in Weber’s concluding paragraph, which firmly put democracies and dictators on an equal footing, accepting ‘no more the hegemony of the democracies than that of the dictators’. Despite a Marxist analysis which claimed that war would only be averted through social and economic revolution, the moral imperative behind his argument lay not there but rather in the unfinished business of 1914, in the belief that the Great War crusade ‘to make the world safe for democracy’ had been anything but.104 Michel Alexandre claimed that the Ligue was more or less of one mind when it came to a declaration of principle regarding the League of Nations. What was more difficult was imagining a resolution which would contribute ‘immediately to the realisation of the external programme of the Popular Front’.105 Perhaps a little strangely, given that he was one of the original members of the Ligue’s minority, Alexandre argued that Europe needed to ignore or at least transcend the past: ‘the new negotiations must not refer to the past, they must not be made on the basis of the status quo of 1919.’ That might sound like a desire to move beyond the debates about war origins and the Versailles Treaty, but in important ways it was not. So, for example, if the Ligue could indeed protest Nazi muscle-flexing in the Free City  of Danzig, ‘it would be inadmissible . . . to give the impression that we have the slightest doubt about Germany’s rights to Danzig’; the Ligue would not be able to promote peace in a new way if it reverted to such equivocation.106 The ‘past’ he referred to thus seemed to be limited to what had happened at the Paris peace conference in 1919 and not to anything historically earlier, because 103  Intervention by Maurice Milhaud in ibid., pp. 343–7. 104  Intervention by Maurice Weber in ibid., pp. 350–5. 105  Intervention by Michel Alexandre in ibid., p. 361.

106  Ibid., p. 363.

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Alexandre echoed other speakers in seeing in Jacques Kayser’s report a replay of the European situation of 1912–13. The conclusions reached by Alexandre, Weber, and others at the 1936 Congress were consonant with the views of the older, original Ligue minority. At a December 1935 meeting of the CC, Georges Michon had argued much the same case. He thought the Hitler regime was ‘abject’ and that there was no chance of a real alliance with it, but this did not exclude the possibility of some form of rapprochement. Any anti-Hitlerian policy would only be understood, he said, ‘if France had had a different attitude with regard to the Weimar Republic, with which it had never known how to make a genuine peace that could have saved the present one’.107 France and the Ligue were reaping what they had sown in the 1920s. The most extreme position was taken by René Château of the CharenteInférieure Federation who declared that the League of Nations was ‘dead’ and that the LDH must not ‘attach itself, through some sort of posthumous loyalty, to the memory of the dead’.108 He delivered a scathing indictment of the Genevan institution, saying that it had failed on all fronts since 1918 and was merely the ‘regency council of the victorious governments’. It ought to have disarmed, but it had not. It ought to have revised an ‘iniquitous treaty and an unjust division of far-off lands’ (read: colonies and mandates), but it had not. Finally, it ought to have ‘broken with this policy of inequality which is the most dangerous of all’. Making reference to the fall-out from the Congress of Vienna in 1815, he called the League of Nations a ‘kind of resurrected Holy Alliance’, a stinging comment which sought to assimilate the LoN to the dark forces of Metternichian reaction in 1815.109 Justice had to be done, ‘even to the Caesars, tyrants and executioners’, he said, and for that to occur the only means was disarmament—progressive and ‘if you so desire general, simultaneous and controlled’.110 Château’s rather melodramatic conclusion, consenting to death ‘if we are forced’, but demanding that, ‘like the Roman gladiators, we want to address our curses in a tragic salute to those who have betrayed us, and to all those who have dishonoured themselves’, was met with ‘enthusiastic applause and repeated acclamations’ from the Congress.111 Salomon Grumbach responded to all of the criticisms of the CC’s position in a speech which was also greeted with ‘enthusiastic and sustained applause’, indicating how divided the Congress and the Ligue actually were on the question of foreign policy and saving the League of Nations. Grumbach’s main argument was that collective security was the only way forward, that everything needed to be done to

107  Comments by Georges Michon in ‘Comité Central. Extraits’, Séance du 5 décembre 1935, Cahiers 36, 12 (30 April 1936), p. 285. 108  Intervention by René Château in debate on ‘La Politique extérieure et la Société des Nations’, in Congrès national de 1936, p. 372. Château’s comments about the feelings of youth in 1936 were echoed by his opponent, Salomon Grumbach, who said, with reference to his twenty-one-year-old son, that ‘La jeunesse porte en elle l’ombre effroyable de la catastrophe possible de demain.’ See Intervention by Salomon Grumbach, in ibid., p. 387. 109  Intervention by René Château in ibid., pp. 373–4. 110  Ibid., pp. 376–7. 111  Ibid., p. 379.

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make it succeed, but that if it did not, the democracies and the LoN needed to be prepared to use force. ‘War, wherever it breaks out’, he argued, will provoke a generalized war. And it is not, as you dare to say, in organising collective security that one will generalize war. It is in renouncing the organisation of collective security, mutual assistance, the use of force, . . . it is by the renunciation of all resistance that the peace-loving peoples are preparing a generalized war.112

The difference between the two sides could not have been clearer. Emery was the first of the two rapporteurs to respond to the debate. He made no secret of the fact that he was an absolute pacifist, but the issue did not lie there, in his mind. Rather, the essential question was to define a unanimous Ligue position that would be of immediate and practical consequences. He recognized that Grumbach’s speech was the most trenchant attack on his position. In response, he argued that if one accepted that Germany was being psychologically prepared for war and enflamed with a desire for aggressive revenge against France, then it was ludicrous to believe that collective security would be capable of stopping it. ‘All the more reason,’ he said, ‘to attempt to divide its force, to break, insofar as possible, its fury’. That was why negotiations ‘accepting equality of rights, revision of the treaties and disarmament’ seemed the only viable option. Far from under-estimating the ‘Hitlerian danger, as we are sometimes accused of ’, he said, ‘our approach lies in a sharp awareness of the possibility of seeing this danger grow.’113 In no way did he want to undercut the importance of collective security, but this had to be on the understanding that ‘at no price and in no way, will we subordinate d ­ isarmament to the realisation of what is called collective security’, and he reminded his audience that the Ligue had unanimously approved this position the year before at the Hyères Congress.114 Jacques Kayser, the second rapporteur, took the diametrically opposite position, staunchly in favour of collective security and the possibility of sanctions. Kayser saw a huge difference between 1914 and 1936. On the eve of the Great War, Europe had been divided into two great power blocs: the Triple Entente versus the Triple Alliance. In 1936, on the contrary, he claimed that the ‘pact of union’ that ‘we are trying to get up and running’ was open to anyone, and only those who refused to join it were excluded.115 This was certainly an interesting view of the Franco-Soviet alliance of 1935. Interesting, too, was Kayser’s comment on Hitler’s statement in Mein Kampf that ‘everything that has been German must become German again’. 112  Intervention by Salomon Grumbach in ibid., p. 384. This was precisely the same issue on which the League of Nations Union in the United Kingdom almost foundered. A sizeable number of LNU members were shocked to discover in 1936 that collective security might actually mean resort to military sanctions and force. See especially J.A. Thompson, ‘Lord Cecil and the Pacifists in the League of Nations Union’, Historical Journal 20, 4 (1977), pp. 949–59. Cf. Donald  S.  Birn, ‘The League of Nations Union and Collective Security’, Journal of Contemporary History 9, 3 (July 1974), pp. 131–59. 113  Response by Léon Emery to the debate on ‘La Politique extérieure et la Société des Nations’, in Congrès national de 1936, pp. 400 and 402. 114  Ibid., p. 403. 115  Response by Jacques Kayser in ibid., p. 405.

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Far from condemning it completely, Kayser said that he agreed with it ‘to a certain extent’, provided it did not infringe on the freedom of p ­ eoples.116 It is easy to see how such a position could become, for some at least, an acceptance of the Anschluss with Austria in March 1938 and even of the Munich accords of September that year. Couple this with Alexandre’s ruminations earlier in the debate on the essential German-ness of Danzig, and one has a political position that was to prove problematic in the summer of 1939. In fact, it is clear that by 1936, the political conclusions of someone like Léon Emery had become an ‘ethic of ultimate ends’, to borrow Martin Ceadel’s analysis of interwar British pacifism. As Basch and Emery agreed between sessions at the 1936 Congress, Emery’s views had more to say to conscience than to politics.117 There was no escaping the fact that they were political conclusions, though. Grumbach asked Emery point blank what treaty revision could possibly mean in the face of Nazi foreign policy triumphs; there was no longer a Rhineland question, no longer a disarmament question, no longer a reparations question, and Danzig was no longer on the agenda (it seemed). What was left, Grumbach wondered? Perhaps Emery wanted to return Alsace to Germany. Emery agreed that the question of treaty revision had arguably lost some of its ‘importance’, but that was the fault of the French who ought to have addressed the issue much sooner. It now seemed that the question of treaty revision, at least as far as Emery was concerned, came from a different place from the demands of the minority in the pre-1933 period. Whereas Morhardt, Demartial, and Co. had fought a battle for what they saw as the truth about the origins of the Great War, that had now been superseded by the political demands of the mid-1930s. For Emery, what really mattered was ‘the devaluation of borders and . . . the fusion of nationalities into a European order that will absorb them’.118 As we shall see in Chapter 9, this was the origin of Emery’s position under Vichy. What is strange is the way Victor Basch tried to hitch his wagon to the claims of the neo-minority. He claimed that Emery’s and Alexandre’s ideas on creating a ‘peace offensive’ were really his. The only difference between the CC resolution and Emery’s lay in the question of sanctions and what form they might take.119 The Congress decided to strike a small subcommittee, comprising Emery, Alexandre, Kayser, Grumbach, and Basch, to draft a composite resolution. The final r­ esolution was approved just two votes shy of total unanimity, and though it contained references to a ‘military function’ for the League of Nations, this was carefully circumscribed by references to its use only as an ‘extreme necessity’ and by means of an ‘international force’ which could only be realized ‘as a function of general ­disarmament’. This, in turn, implied the ‘total internationalization’ of civil aviation and the creation of an air force reserved for the use of the League of Nations.120 116  Ibid., p. 408. 117  Basch in ibid., p. 412. 118  Emery in ibid., p. 410. 119  Basch in ibid., p. 413. 120  Victor Basch and Jacques Kayser, ‘Adoption de la Résolution et d’une motion d’urgence en faveur de la Société des Nations et la Paix’, in Congrès national de 1936, p. 497. The entire resolution runs from pp. 490–7.

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This latter proposal might sound strange, to say nothing of highly unrealizable, to early twenty-first-century ears, but one of the great fears of the 1930s was the potential destruction of humanity by the ‘bombing aeroplane’ and poison gas.121 In any event, one suspects that Alexandre and Emery might have caved in to the demands of Basch, Kayser, and Co. because the threat of military sanctions was, as we have seen, a very hard pill to swallow. The resolution was, for the most part, fairly mainstream in its fulsome support of the League of Nations idea. For the first time, however, the Ligue pronounced itself in favour of severing the link between the Pact of the League of Nations and the Treaty of Versailles; this was seen as an essential move which would ‘dissipate all confusion between particular agreements, whose clauses are imposed by the victors, and an international contract which, destined to create a new order, must imply the absolute equality of all its signatories’.122 So, if Versailles could not be saved, if the question of war guilt could not be resolved, at least the League of Nations could be defended in the higher interest of peace independently of the war guilt debate. Given the urgency of the hour in the face of the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the 1936 Congress had focused its energies on what to do in the present, how to respond to the dictators, especially to Hitler, and how to save the League of Nations.123 The Ligue des droits de l’homme was fully cognizant of the dangers facing France and Europe, but the methods envisaged to parry the danger varied greatly. And despite the fact that the LDH now, for perhaps the first time, seemed convinced that something—almost anything—needed to be done to slake the wrath of the furor teutonicus, for many of the speakers at the 1936 Congress this continued to be framed in the context of expiating the sins of Versailles and the Great War. It was all too little, too late—or, as has been argued above, too much at the wrong time. To suggest, as Victor Basch did in 1936, that the Ligue had always been opposed to the pariah-like status inflicted on Germany by Versailles was at best disingenuous, and at worst duplicitous.124 As we have had ample occasion to observe, Basch had been at the forefront of those in the Ligue who might well have condemned the form of Versailles and Article 231, but who believed fervently in its moral validity. In the fifteen years from 1918 to 1933, opportunities had been missed for genuine Franco-German reconciliation. In 1936, the Ligue woke up to the fact that the League of Nations was the last great hope in the struggle against Hitler; majority and minority came together in an élan of unity to defend the 121  See Ingram, Politics of Dissent, p. 127. 122  Basch and Kayser, ‘Adoption de la Résolution’, p. 491. 123  Italy clearly bore much of the responsibility for the failure of the League of Nations with its invasion and defeat of Ethiopia. Victor Basch had been squarely behind the Ethiopian people in their fight against Mussolini, but his comments in 1936 betray a certain colonialist mentality; he called Abysinnia ‘un petit pays qu’on a peut-être eu tort de recevoir à la Société des Nations, mais qui est entré grâce à l’Italie et à la France’. Later, in the debate over France’s foreign policy and the League of Nations, Basch said that as long as France had colonies, it made sense that Germany should, too. See Basch’s comments in Congrès national de 1936, pp. 52 and 391. 124  Cf. Basch’s comments in the debate on the Rapport Moral, cited above, from Congrès national de 1936, p. 54.

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Genevan institution, but they did so expecting different outcomes. The unity of 1936, the temporary setting aside of the war guilt/Versailles debate in the final resolution of the Congress, was to last less than a year. By July 1937, when the Ligue convened again for its annual Congress in the city of Tours (famous already for one huge political rupture in 1920), schism resulted. It is to the Congress of Tours, the 1937 version, that we turn now.

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8 1937, or the Aventine Secession The Dijon Congress had ended on a high note of near total unanimity. Peace was going to be defended, the League of Nations supported and renewed, and the Ligue des droits de l’homme itself was going to rise to new heights. In his closing speech in 1936, Victor Basch had proclaimed that the Congress had worked in ‘complete serenity’, and that ‘once again’ unanimity had prevailed in the choice of the way ahead; echoing the slogan of the Popular Front, he cried ‘and unanimous we must remain for Bread, for Peace, for Freedom.’1 Unfortunately, it was not to be. The dust from Dijon did not even have time to settle, such was the accelerating pace of politics in the late 1930s. By the time the LDH convened again in July 1937 in the city of Tours, the European political situation had evolved greatly. The Spanish Civil War was almost a year old, the spectre of the Moscow Purge Trials was transfixing public opinion in France, and the first iteration of the Popular Front government under Léon Blum had collapsed. Tours was about to become synonymous with ‘schism’ for the second time in French politics in less than twenty years. And this time, as will become clear below, Basch was not much interested in achieving unity within the Ligue. In the year between the 1936 and 1937 Congresses, the attitude of the majority of the Comité Central crystallized around the idea of resistance to Nazi Germany— or at least, in the Spanish context. The terrain was being prepared for the showdown at Tours. Thus, for example, when Lucien Le Foyer asked the CC to send its usual representative to the annual Banquet de la Paix that he organized, the Bureau ‘most regretfully’ declined. Why? Because the Banquet was ‘inevitably going to take on the character of a manifestation in favour of mediation’ in Spain, and the CC majority wanted nothing to do with that.2 Three months earlier, it had given the same response to a similar request for collaboration from the Association de la paix par le droit (APD).3 Neither Le Foyer nor the APD could be construed as representing the minority within the Ligue, so one can well imagine the extent to which the real item was rejected. For the Ligue minority, the question of mediation was also extremely important. In a letter to Kahn in April 1937, Challaye underlined the 1  Victor Basch in Le Congrès national de 1936. Compte rendu sténographique. Dijon, 19–21 Juillet 1936 (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1936), p. 519. 2  ‘Bureau: Séance du 8 avril 1937’, in ‘Comité Central. Extraits’, Cahiers 37, 12–13 (15 June–1 July 1937), p. 411. See the full exchange of letters between Le Foyer, Basch, and Kahn in ‘Documents pour le Congrès: Pour et contre la médiation en Espagne’, Cahiers 37, 14 (15 July 1937), pp. 433–7. 3  ‘Bureau: Séance du 25 janvier 1937’, in ‘Comité Central. Extraits’, Cahiers 37, 7 (1 April 1937), p. 214.

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extent to which he subscribed to the position of British pacifists—‘of varying ­political stripes’—who refused to ‘divide the world into two hostile groups’ and believed that the last thing one should do was give the League of Nations ‘more powerful means, sanctions that will cause any local conflict to degenerate into a world war’. Rather, Challaye believed that the LoN must become an ‘­effective instrument of conciliation, capable of resolving international disputes and doing away with the causes of war’. He called this a ‘new conception’ of the League of Nations which he wholeheartedly supported.4 As much in 1937 as in 1914, therefore, the issue of mediation or negotiation seemed to be the stumbling block for the Ligue’s majority. The difference was that the minority in 1937 seemed ­incapable of appreciating the gulf separating Hitler and Wilhelm II, so convinced were they that a replay of 1914 was about to take place with all of the main characters in place: perfidious Albion, duplicitous France, an evil Russian (now Soviet) Empire, against misunderstood and encircled Germany. It is clear, however, that Kahn as secretary-general and editor of the Cahiers categorically refused to publish anything that smacked of mediation, even under the aegis of the League of Nations. He responded to Challaye’s request in a letter of 4 May 1937, saying that he would ‘examine the possibility of publishing this information as well as other views on the subject representing a rather different position’. His real feelings are perhaps contained in a draft written four days earlier in which he had written simply that the Bureau ‘does not think there is any reason to give publicity in the Cahiers to the theses expressed by this manifesto’.5 The debates on Spain and the Moscow Purge Trials at the meetings of the Comité Central provided a warm-up for the head-on collision that was to occur at Tours. Both the Spanish Civil War and the Moscow trials took place within an episteme that was conditioned by memories of the Great War and political lessons drawn from it, and both were emblematic of the Ligue’s response to that war. In the case of Spain, the minority believed it self-evident that mediation must occur; no matter how much one might dislike the fascist rebels, war, slaughter, and suffering had to end. The debate on Spain was therefore not a little unlike the debate on a negotiated end to the blood-letting of the Great War at the Ligue’s 1916 Congress. As for the Moscow Purge Trials, they underlined the extent to which the French cart was being hitched to a Russian (read: Soviet) horse which was the antithesis of everything that the Ligue (and France) presumably stood for. In 1914, France had been yoked to the Russian autocracy under the terms of the Franco-Russian Alliance, no matter how much people like Théodore Ruyssen had sought to convince the Ligue that Imperial Russia was actually a liberal democracy. In 1937, according to the minority, France found itself beholden to the Stalinist dictatorship, all the more so since the Parti communiste français was a constitutive element of the Front Populaire. There was thus an added domestic focus to the foreign policy 4 Félicien Challaye to Emile Kahn, Paris, 18 April 1937 in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés 798/5 Correspondance Challaye. 5  Secrétaire Général (Emile Kahn) to Félicien Challaye, Paris, 4 May and 30 April 1937, in BDIC/ ALDH/F∆Rés 798/5 Correspondance Challaye.

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problem created by the Franco-Soviet pact of 1935. In addition to the debates on Spain and the Moscow trials, however, the CC was also seized in early 1937 by the recrudescence of the war guilt debate, and more especially the debate over the validity of Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty. Spain, Moscow, and Article 231 were thus all facets of the same problem for the Ligue des droits de l’homme, an appreciation shared by both majority and minority alike. In successive meetings of the Comité Central from November 1936 onwards, the minority attempted to wrest any sort of condemnation of the Moscow Purge Trials out of the Ligue des droits de l’homme, all to no avail. At its 30 November 1936 meeting, a scant fortnight after the publication of Ligue legal counsel, Raymond Rosenmark’s, report on the Moscow trials, Comité Central member Magdeleine Paz suggested to the secretary-general, Emile Kahn, that she write a rejoinder to the Rosenmark report. The Bureau decided that since the CC had already tasked a commission, comprising Rosenmark, Basch, and Boris MirkineGuetzévitch, with examining the Moscow trials, it would be ‘inopportune’ to begin a ‘polemic’ in the pages of the Cahiers before the commission had reached any conclusions.6 The strange thing is that Rosenmark’s report, which had already been published two weeks before this Bureau meeting, turned out to be the Ligue’s only official conclusion about the trials; nothing else was ever published, and this despite the fact that the original commission was enlarged by the addition of two members in late October 1936.7 Lest the CC be accused of a political whitewash, however, the Cahiers dutifully reported that it had piously rejected a motion from the Ligue section in the nineteenth arrondissement in Paris to the effect that the LDH would better spend its time worrying about domestic French issues than such things as the Moscow Purge Trials. The Bureau could not accept this idea because the Ligue ‘had always believed that it had the right and the duty to examine all injustices, whatever their victims, and that its activity could never be limited to questions of interest only to France’.8 Somewhere along the line in the second half of November 1936, Rosenmark’s article went from being a ‘libre opinion’ to, in the words of Emile Kahn, ‘not an article, but a report made to the Comité Central, in the name of an entire commission and therefore, according to custom, it had to be published in the Cahiers’.9 Kahn told Mathias Morhardt, one of the prime motivating forces behind the ­original minority, not to overreact when he asked by what right Kahn had refused 6  ‘Comité Central. Extraits: Bureau, Séance du 30 Novembre 1936’, Cahiers 37, 1 (1 January 1937), p. 17. 7  See ‘Comité Central. Extraits: Bureau, Séance du 28 Octobre 1936’, Cahiers 36, 33 (15 December 1936), p. 802. 8  ‘Comité Central. Extraits. Bureau. Séance du 30 Novembre 1936’, Cahiers 37, 1 (1 January 1937), p. 17. 9  ‘Comité Central. Extraits. Séance du 30 Novembre 1936’, Cahiers 37, 4 (15 February 1937), p. 124. This was a refrain later taken up by Rosenmark himself at the Tours Congress; he said there was no such thing as an ‘article Rosenmark’, but rather there was a ‘rapport, fait au nom d’une Commission’. See ‘Réponse de M.  Rosenmark’, in ‘Les Procès de Moscou’ in the debate on the Rapport moral in Le Congrès national de 1937. Compte rendu sténographique. Tours, 17–19 juillet 1937 (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1937), p. 155.

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publication of Paz’s rejoinder since she, after all, was a member of the CC. Félicien Challaye had already walked out of the CC meeting by this point when his similar question had been ruled out of order. Jean-Marie Caillaud of the Seine Federation thought that when an article by a Comité Central member was refused by the Bureau, it ought to be brought before the entire committee; otherwise, he opined, the Bureau was in danger of exercising a ‘veritable dictatorship’ over the Cahiers.10 It was at this point in the discussion that a piece of cognitive dissonance occurred. Kahn said he had not refused an article by Magdeleine Paz, but that he could not accept it until he had read it. That, he said, as editor of the Cahiers, he had not yet done, although clearly the Bureau—of which Kahn was an essential part as secretary-general—had because it had decided not to publish Paz’s article in order to avoid falling into a polemic.11 Why was the Comité Central of the Ligue des droits de l’homme so reluctant to grasp the nettle of criticism of the Soviet Union in the Moscow trials affair? Despite later claims to the contrary, the real reason seems to have been a fear of the potentially negative effects on the Popular Front. Basch, to give him credit, ‘had been very troubled by the information he had been given on the trials: absence of a dossier, confessions of the accused which outbid the severity of the charges against them and which led straight to death’. He consulted his colleagues on the Bureau of the Ligue, mindful of the need ‘to affirm that any attack on the Soviet Republic would constitute a serious blow struck against democracy’. As in 1914, so in 1937 the word ‘democracy’ seemed to have a fairly elastic meaning. The real political motives behind the Bureau’s decision are apparent in the analytical minutes of this early October 1936 meeting which underlined that the Bureau could not accept Basch’s desire for a motion condemning the trials because it believed ‘that a ­resolution of this nature could have created serious dissensions in the heart of the Rassemblement populaire’. It was at this point that the CC decided to create the first commission of enquiry composed of Basch, Rosenmark, and Mirkine-Guetzévitch.12 The suspicion lived on, however. Later in the year at the Tours Congress, Gaston Bergery reiterated the belief of some that the politics of the ‘new Jacobins’, the Communist Party, had infected the Rassemblement populaire. Basch vehemently denounced this line of thinking: M. Bergery has brandished, in effect, a grave accusation against the Comité national of the Rassemblement populaire. He has said that this Committee, under pressure from a ‘certain party’, no longer defends, with the necessary energy and passion, the cause of peace! Against this reproach, I rise with all that is within me.13

In early January 1937, the topic was discussed again at the Comité Central, this time in response to a letter from the president of the Ardèche Federation of the 10  ‘Comité Central. Extraits. Séance du 30 Novembre 1936’, Cahiers 37, 4 (15 February 1937), p. 123. 11 Ibid. 12  ‘Comité Central. Extraits. Séance du 1er octobre 1936’, Cahiers 36, 31 (15 November 1936), p. 755. Gaston Bergery returned to this theme in the debates at the Tours Congress later in the year. 13  ‘Intervention de M.  Victor Basch’ in debate on the theme ‘Comment défendre ensemble la démocratie et la paix?’, in Congrès national de 1937, p. 347.

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Ligue, Elie Reynier, who would go on later in the year to be one of the démissionnaires in the wake of the Tours Congress. Reynier wrote in measured terms that the average Ligueur needed to be aware of what he called the ‘two tones of the bell’ in the Moscow Purge Trials affair. For his part, with the reservation that there were perhaps things he did not know, he said he had listened to the reading of Rosenmark’s report with a ‘surprise bordering on stupefaction’.14 The topic of the trials percolated on through the spring of 1937. Basch accused Challaye of behaving like a jilted lover, spurned by the Soviet Union he had once loved.15 For his part, Basch said he had never been a Stalinist. Given that Challaye was clearly opposed to Stalin, too, it is not clear what rhetorical point Basch was trying to make. As Challaye pointed out at the next CC meeting a fortnight later, it was true he had been a stalwart supporter of the early Soviet Union when the revolution was pure under Lenin, but he execrated the Stalinist dictatorship. It was not Challaye who had changed, but rather ‘the USSR which has become militaristic and on which now weighs a ghastly dictatorship. The Ligue, which was extremely severe with regard to Lenin’s USSR, is today showing an astonishing partiality with regard to Stalin’s USSR.’16 The Moscow trials debate was also intimately linked with the debate on the Spanish Civil War; it was the second panel of the same triptych. Spain was a fault line which had begun to divide French pacifists. For some new-style pacifists within the Ligue des droits de l’homme such as René Gerin, it had become clear that if they had been Spanish, they would have taken up arms against the rebels.17 For the old-style pacifists of the Association de la paix par le droit, whose president (Théodore Ruyssen) and secretary-general ( Jules Prudhommeaux) sat on the Comité Central of the Ligue des droits de l’homme, it was also clear that ­mediation of the Spanish conflict was necessary. But equally, there were those highly visible and long-term members of the Comité Central who drew a direct line between 1914 and 1937. One of these was Félicien Challaye who believed that there ‘had never been a blockade of Spain and as for atrocities, these had been committed by both sides’. What mattered to Challaye was that a ‘war psychosis’ seemed to lie behind the text of a resolution debated by the CC on 11 January 1937 and this constituted the ‘greatest danger of the present hour’.18 One needs to bear in mind that these words came from the mouth of one of the foremost critics of the Moscow Purge Trials. The third panel of the triptych was the vexed question of war guilt and Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty. Much as the Ligue might think it had dealt with this question and that it was safely buried in the past, it reared its head yet again 14  Reynier’s letter cited in ‘Comité Central. Extraits’, Cahiers 37, 3 (1 February 1937), p. 89. 15  Basch’s comments in ‘Comité Central. Extraits. Séance du 3 juin 1937’, Cahiers 37, 14 (15 July 1937), p. 451. 16  Comments by Challaye in ‘Comité Central. Extraits. Séance du 17 juin 1937’, Cahiers 37, 14 (15 July 1937), p. 454. 17  See René Gerin, Pacifisme ‘intégral’ et guerre civile (Paris: Ligue internationale des combattants de la paix, 1937). 18  Félicien Challaye in ‘Comité Central. Extraits’, Cahiers 37, 6 (15 March 1937), p. 185.

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in 1937—largely through the efforts of René Gerin who had been elected to the Comité Central for the first time in 1936. At its meeting on 25 January 1937, the committee debated two motions by René Gerin and Albert Bayet on the question of Article 231. Gerin’s resolution is interesting because it paid homage to the good faith and best intentions of the Ligue des droits de l’homme during the war and shortly thereafter. Whether this was a rhetorical device designed merely to soften up opposition to his motion is a moot point; it was certainly more than the outrage of Morhardt and Demartial had been willing to concede in the 1920s. Whatever the case, Gerin explained the LDH’s early position on war origins as the ‘effect of a reasoned patriotism’ based on ‘documents which it did not want to suspect’. The end result had been the ‘propagation in the public sphere by the Ligue of the thesis of unique responsibility of the Central Powers for the outbreak of war’, a thesis, according to Gerin, that was enshrined in Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty. History ought to have been left to examine the problem, not so much of ‘moral responsibility as simply of the origins of the war’. With the publication of the archives of the main belligerents, it had gradually become obvious that the ‘documents on which the verdict of Article 231 was based were either incomplete, tendentious or even falsified’. Once again, in perhaps a rhetorical gesture of goodwill, he said that the Ligue had ‘suffered’ from the same doubts many people had on this question, but it had waited until the publication of the French documents before rendering an opinion. That publication had now been achieved, and Gerin said that it clearly showed that the doubts people had had for fifteen years were ‘reinforced’ not merely by the published documents themselves, but by the ‘lacunae’ in them. The ineluctable conclusion was that war guilt was shared, albeit in ‘measures that are difficult to determine’. Accordingly, Gerin moved that in light of the international moral pacification, an essential condition of peace, the Comité Central of the Ligue des droits de l’homme demands that the French government begin negotiations with the former allied governments with a view to d ­ enouncing Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty which is regrettable for all sorts of reasons, but chiefly because it does not express an incontestable truth.19

Bayet’s resolution was less forensic than Gerin’s and asked the French government to declare ‘null and void’ Article 231, while at the same time underlining that the historical problem posed by the question of war guilt lay outside its competence; Bayet thus did not go as far as Gerin in his condemnation of Article 231.20 The two resolutions provoked a long debate which ended essentially in a stalemate, leading the chair of the meeting to comment that both Bayet and Gerin had asked the government to make a declaration on Article 231 in which they had both not been supported by a small majority of the committee; he believed, though, that on the question of principle—the condemnation of Article 231—they had won. This was a charitable explanation of what had happened. Far more evident was the 19  See Gerin’s motion in ‘Comité Central. Extraits. Séance du 25 janvier 1937’, Cahiers 37, 7 (1 April 1937), p. 217. 20  See Albert Bayet’s motion in ibid., pp. 217–18.

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pique which the entire discussion engendered in the secretary-general, Emile Kahn, who proposed a motion which tersely stated that the CC, ‘making reference to its former declarations on Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty, moved on to the next topic’. Kahn said that he was ‘astonished’ that the Ligue, faced with the ‘drama of Spain and of Europe’, should have wasted two precious hours in a ‘discussion as irrelevant as it is sterile’.21 What Kahn could not, or would not, see is that for the Ligue minority the Spanish and European dramas were inextricably linked to the question of war guilt in the Great War. Gerin did not give up easily. A fortnight later he returned with a hugely ironic motion mocking the Ligue’s dedication to justice, at least insofar as Article 231 was concerned. This elicited a rather stern ‘we are not amused’ rejoinder from Victor Basch, at which point Gerin presented a second resolution yet again asking the French government to respond to Hitler’s 30 January speech to the Reichstag in which he had said that Germany withdrew its signature from the Versailles Treaty by declaring that it, too, considered Article 231 ‘null and void’. Gerin’s resolution did not come to the vote, Henri Guernut advising the new member of the CC to ‘resign himself ’ to the fact that his opinions were not shared by a majority of his colleagues. Guernut’s interjection also contained a telling admission concerning the alleged longevity of the Ligue’s supposedly unanimous understanding of Article 231. Making reference to the debates of 1925 on the meaning of Article 231, Guernut said that he and Ferdinand Buisson had been ‘more or less’ the only members of the CC who had believed that the article dealt only with the civil damages rather than a moral responsibility for the war.22 It had thus been more than a little disingenuous for Kahn to argue at the previous CC meeting that the Ligue’s ­position on Article 231 had been immutable since at least 1921 and that Gerin, the new boy on the block, was swimming in a pool of ‘profound ignorance’.23 This was the backdrop, then, to the debates on the Moscow Purge Trials and the Spanish Civil War which came to a head at the Tours Congress in July 1937. Even if Gerin ultimately did not share the positions of Challaye, Emery, and the others on the Spanish question, it is clear that 1937 represents a rupture point for the Ligue. Not only did the Tours Congress end in schism, but more importantly, perhaps, one can see the lines of dissent hardening in the face of a worsening international situation. Spain and the Moscow trials were like Siamese twins and the point of convergence was the ongoing debate over war guilt in the First World War. War guilt, the refusal to countenance mediation in an attempt to save lives, and the increasingly deep suspicion of Russian motives were all issues redolent of the Ligue’s first wartime Congress in 1916. The theme of the 1937 Congress was ‘How to Defend Both Democracy and Peace’, but before the Congress had even begun to discuss this question, it was rocked by a raucous debate on the extent to which the decisions taken at Dijon had 21  See Kahn’s motion and comments in ibid., p. 221. 22 See ‘Comité Central. Extraits. Séance du 11 février 1937’, Cahiers 37, 8 (15 April 1937), pp.  250–1. 23  See Kahn’s comments in ‘Comité Central. Extraits. Séance du 25 janvier 1937’, Cahiers 37, 7 (1 April 1937), p. 219.

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actually been applied. The answer for Emery, Alexandre, and others in the minority was: not at all. Alexandre said that he had the ‘feeling, comrades, that for the past year . . . we’ve been brainwashed, and in all senses, with almost as much ­effrontery as during the wretched period which too many of us still remember’.24 The reference to the Great War was all too apparent. He said that in 1937 he was not bothering to present a motion because it was simply not worth it. The Ligue had lost its way; it was no longer, he said, what Basch liked to call ‘the conscience of democracy’. ‘The Ligue has not played this role’, he said, and no number of motions would galvanize it. This was hardly a new problem, he said, because ‘it did not play it during the 1914 war either, and what is worse, it had not played it sufficiently— albeit still better than now—in the period after the war.’25 In a reprise of Lucien Cancouët’s comments at the 1933 Congress, Alexandre thought that the one publication in France that did fight against the brainwashing, and hence was doing a better job than the Cahiers des droits de l’homme, was Jean Galtier-Boissière’s Le Crapouillot, which had published a special number on war origins in 1932.26 Salomon Grumbach responded with a vehement attack on Alexandre’s belief that the Ligue was guilty of sowing panic, what he called ‘confusionisme’, and of having engaged in brainwashing. In Grumbach’s opinion, the LDH needed to fight ‘not against appearances, but against facts, against the dictators, that is to say against those who create the facts we are obliged to denounce. The alarmist words do not come from us but from the dictators.’27 His speech was met with wild applause from the Congress. It was left to Léon Emery and Albert Bayet to provide the most substantive examination of the problem. Emery was no less critical than Alexandre had been and made the point that he and his friends had made considerable sacrifices the year before at the Dijon Congress, doubtless in reference to the extent to which they had shelved some of their pacifist principles in order to achieve unity in the Ligue. He said it was a ‘deformation’ and a ‘lie’ that their policy was one of ‘incessant capitulations’ to the dictators. He claimed that they had never asked the Ligue to renounce its ‘doctrine of the national defence’. He denied that he or his friends had ever brought their ‘particular convictions’, by which he said he meant their integral pacifism, ‘the categorical refusal of all war under any circumstances’, to the table. They had readily accepted the need to work for the organization of collective security and the rebuilding of the League of Nations, but they had envisaged this as the need ‘finally’ to propose a generous and real peace to Germany. It was only in so doing that they were able to quieten their consciences on the pacifist question; had it been otherwise, they would be ‘closing ourselves up in the nationalist tradition, turning it into a redoubt in the prison of Versailles’. That had never been the intent 24  ‘Discours de M. Michel Alexandre’, in ‘L’Application des décisions de Dijon’, in the debate on the Rapport moral in Congrès national de 1937, pp. 95–6. 25  Ibid., p. 100. 26  See Chapter 7 of this volume. See also Jean-Galtier Boissière, Histoire de la Guerre: les origines et les causes secrètes de la guerre mondiale (Paris: Le Crapouillot, May 1932). 27  ‘Réponse de M.  Grumbach’, in ‘L’Application des décisions de Dijon’, in the debate on the Rapport moral in Congrès national de 1937, pp. 101–7. Quotation is from p. 107.

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of the 1936 Dijon motion. On the contrary, the motion was supposed to advance action in favour of the organization of collective security, disarmament, and at least the economic revision of the Versailles Treaty.28 Why had this not occurred? Emery lauded Blum, but without ever naming it as such, he blamed the Parti communiste français (PCF) for the lack of progress on disarmament and commitment to peace.29 Given what was to follow under Vichy, it is worth noting that Emery accepted ‘full responsibility with the Ligue in the work of antifascism, and if necessary, in sacrifice’, but he underscored his total opposition to the Rapport Moral and his ‘sadness to have ended up in a rupture of efforts, in a complete separation.’30 Albert Bayet summed up his condemnation of Emery’s positions as follows: ‘I reproach you, Emery, for having attacked Spain and the Popular Front, just as you similarly attacked the Ligue des droits de l’homme. None of these accusations is well taken and we reject them all.’31 Bayet was particularly incensed by Emery’s criticism of the bombing of the German ship, the Deutschland, in Ibiza harbour. Had the German ship initiated the exchange, or had it returned fire? In an article in the Feuilles libres de la quinzaine, Emery had written it was clear that the aggression had come from the Spanish planes, but even here he was careful to underline that he did not believe the Spanish Republican government had consciously ordered the attack. Linking 1937 with 1914, however, Emery said that all governments contained ‘certain secret services which elude all control, and of which we know from the events of 1914 what they are capable of provoking’.32 Bayet tried to imply that Emery was almost a proto-Nazi because of his views on Spain. He cited Emery’s conclusions on the Deutschland affair from the Feuilles libres to the effect that ‘If there is no question of forgetting the general responsibilities of Germany in the Spanish war, the particular responsibility for the drama, which just about caused the powder to explode, falls on the Government of Valencia.’33 As one might imagine, this drew ‘loud protests’ from the Congress with Grumbach shouting ‘It’s false and it’s abominable!’ The only problem, as Emery pointed out, was that Bayet had failed to quote the very next sentence in his article which read that the German reprisals were ‘barbaric and stupid as all reprisals are’.34 The Spanish Civil War was one of the main themes at the Ligue’s 1937 Tours Congress. The other was the Moscow Purge Trials. The link between them was a deep and growing suspicion of Soviet motives together with the increasing conviction 28  ‘Discours de M. Emery’, in ‘L’Application des décisions de Dijon’, in the debate on the Rapport moral in Congrès national de 1937, pp. 108–9. 29  Ibid., p. 110. He said, ‘Or, nous avons dû constater avec une amertume indicible que l’obstacle à la réalisation de cette politique était maintenu plus que jamais, et dans une très large mesure par la faute de l’opinion, de l’état d’esprit, et de l’action même d’une partie du Front populaire sur lequel il s’appuyait.’ 30  Ibid., p. 112. 31  ‘Réponse de M. Albert Bayet’, in ‘L’Application des décisions de Dijon’, in the debate on the Rapport moral in Congrès national de 1937, p. 119. 32  Emery in ‘L’Application des décisions de Dijon’, in the debate on the Rapport moral in Congrès national de 1937, p. 122. 33  Cited in Bayet’s speech in ‘L’Application des décisions de Dijon’, in the debate on the Rapport moral in Congrès national de 1937, p. 118. 34  Cited in Emery’s reponse to Bayet’s speech in ‘L’Application des décisions de Dijon’, in the debate on the Rapport moral in Congrès national de 1937, p. 123.

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that the Ligue des droits de l’homme and the Popular Front itself had somehow become vassals of Soviet policy. In the minds of the Ligue’s minority, this meant a sinister replay of the pre-1914 period. The Franco-Soviet Pact of 1935 suddenly began to look like the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894. Calls for ­collective security in the late 1930s—in this case the democracies versus the dictators—seemed redolent of the pre-1914 division of Europe into two armed camps. In the minority’s eyes, the Soviet Union was being conveniently turned into a democracy, as Imperial Russia had been during the Great War, and Nazi Germany was being equated with the pre-war Wilhelmine Reich. Lost in all of this was any appreciation of how much Hitler had changed the rules of the game. The 1937 Congress moved on to a discussion of the Moscow Purge Trials, initiated by Félicien Challaye, as part of the debate on the Rapport moral. Challaye spoke only of the first trial in June 1936 and the second in January 1937. His criticism of the Soviet judicial process was trenchant. He went through a litany of things that were ‘improbable’ in the trials but spent most of his time demonstrating how unlikely the confessions extracted from the accused were. He spoke, he said, as an old admirer of Lenin and the Russian Revolution but criticized the turn taken under Stalin because it had created a new class of people and a regime of militarism.35 In his view, the entire purpose of the trials was the ‘defence of dictatorship’. Why had the Ligue des droits de l’homme not protested? The only document that had been published in the Cahiers about the Moscow trials was the article by one of the Ligue’s legal counsels, Me Rosenmark, which the Cahiers had been careful to underline was an opinion piece.36 Challaye criticized the steadfast refusal of the Cahiers to publish an article by Comité Central member, Magdeleine Paz, which cast doubt on the validity of the Moscow verdicts. Faced with the ­obstinacy of the CC, high-profile members of the Ligue established a committee of enquiry outside the Ligue, in which several other important voices participated; the LDH, however, refused to send a delegate.37 There was a link, though, between the Moscow trials and the tragedy unfolding in the Iberian Peninsula. Challaye 35  ‘Discours de M. Félicien Challaye’, in discussion of ‘Les Procès de Moscou’ in the debate on the Rapport moral in Congrès national de 1937, pp. 132–4. 36  Ibid., pp. 135–6. Cf. Raymond Rosenmark, ‘Libres opinions. Le procès de Moscou’, Cahiers 36, 31 (15 November 1936), pp. 743–50. Doubt seemed to be cast on the ‘opinion’ status of Rosenmark’s report at the Bureau meeting of 30 November 1936, at which it was made clear that ‘le Comité Central a confié l’étude de cette affaire à une commission, que les travaux de cette commission sont en cours et qu’il paraît inopportun d’instituer une polémique dans les Cahiers avant que la commission ait déposé ses conclusions. Tous renseignements et documents relatifs à l’affaire peuvent être communiqués à la commission. C’est devant la commission et non devant les ligueurs que le débat est pour le moment ouvert. A l’issue des travaux de la commission, toutes les conclusions, quelles qu’elles soient, seront, suivant l’usage, publiées dans les Cahiers.’ See ‘Comité Central. Extraits. Séance du 30 Novembre 1936. Bureau’, Cahiers 37, 1 (1 January 1937), p. 17. 37  ‘Discours de M. Félicien Challaye’, in discussion of ‘Les Procès de Moscou’ in the debate on the Rapport moral in Congrès national de 1937, p. 139. This seems a little redolent of the Ligue’s attitude towards the Société d’études documentaires et critiques sur les origines de la guerre in the post-war period. If it were ignored, perhaps it would go away. As it happened, at the same CC meeting at which calls for an enquiry into the Moscow trials had been made, a long letter from Mathias Morhardt raising new points about Poincaré’s role in the outbreak of war was effectively put into the round file. See Comité Central, ‘Séance du 1er octobre 1936’, Cahiers 36, 31 (15 November 1936), pp. 753–4.

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charged that not only was the Ligue’s inaction leading to more deaths in the Soviet Union, but the same methods of political assassination were being practised by the Spanish communists against the Spanish anarchists: ‘there, too, through our mix of unilateral action and inaction, we are encouraging deplorable policies and that which concerns Catalonia is doing the greatest harm to Spain at the present hour.’38 For all that Rosenmark’s report was supposed to have been an ‘opinion piece’ when published in the Cahiers, Emile Kahn reacted violently when Arthur Goldschild, a long-standing member of the dissident Ligue section in the sixth arrondissement in Paris, suggested that Rosenmark had been anything but impartial. Goldschild told the Congress that Kahn had said at a meeting of the Fédération de la Seine that ‘the Rosenmark report is impartial, and it is you who are not in taking the side of the accused’ in the Moscow trials. Kahn denied ever having said this, but Goldschild persisted and said he could produce any number of Ligueurs from the Seine to back him up, at which point Kahn went strangely silent.39 The most cogent attack on the CC position on the Moscow trials, however, came from Georges Pioch, who said that if the Ligue had taken the same approach— what he called an ‘atony of the conscience’—forty years earlier during the Dreyfus Affair, it would never have seen the light of day. He likened the Moscow trials to a ‘tribunal of the Inquisition’ and connected the dots between the LDH’s support for the Popular Front and its unwillingness to disagree with Moscow on anything for fear of alienating the Parti communiste français. But in Pioch’s view, the PCF had ‘linked its cause far too much to that of a government which henceforth no more represents the Russian Revolution than Doumergue, Laval or Tardieu represent the French Revolution’.40 The Soviet communists had become latter-day Jacobins and in so doing had betrayed Lenin; this Jacobin spirit, which ‘was blowing across the world, and more especially over our country, is dangerous for peace and moreover anachronistic’.41 Me Raymond Rosenmark, the Ligue’s legal counsel, then delivered a long speech defending his conclusions. Despite the explicit indication that the text of his report was published as an opinion piece—the editor of the Cahiers underlined that it did not represent the views of the Ligue but only of Rosenmark—clearly by the time of the Tours Congress in 1937, Rosenmark’s report had taken on a life of its own and was viewed by the majority as the Gospel truth. Rosenmark himself declared that there was no such thing as a ‘Rosenmark article’; what there was, rather, was a report made in the name of a Ligue commission under his name. He was adamant about the validity of his report’s conclusions, too. He presented himself to the Congress as above all else a ‘technician’. For Rosenmark the technician, the debate on the Moscow trials came down to one’s view of the confessions. Here there was 38  ‘Discours de M. Félicien Challaye’, in discussion of ‘Les Procès de Moscou’ in the debate on the Rapport moral in Congrès national de 1937, p. 141. 39  ‘Discours de M. Goldschild’, in ‘Les Procès de Moscou’ in the debate on the Rapport moral in Congrès national de 1937, pp. 145–6. 40  ‘Discours de M. Georges Pioch’, in ‘Les Procès de Moscou’ in the debate on the Rapport moral in Congrès national de 1937, pp. 147–9. 41  Ibid., p. 151.

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no doubt; ‘My conviction is absolute: the existence of the confessions cannot be contested. The confessions have been made in open court in complete freedom.’42 Rosenmark had already explained to Ligueurs in his report in the Cahiers that when making an omelette, one had to break a few eggs; this was the stuff that ­revolutions were made of.43 Rosenmark’s reference to the French Revolution being a ‘bloc’ was clearly meant to imply that the Russian Revolution was the same, and that if the Jacobins of 1793 had felt obliged to institute the Terror, it was only too understandable that the Russians might feel compelled to do the same. The same rhetorical device was being used by 1936 by Romain Rolland with regard to the peace question. For Rolland, peace was ‘indivisible’, or in other words a ‘bloc’. This was an argument for collective security, which came just a few months before the Moscow Purge Trials and politically had the same goal, the shoring up of the Soviet regime against the threat from the dictators. And in the same way that the LDH minority rejected the idea that the Russian or French revolutions should be considered a bloc, so they rejected the notion that peace was ‘indivisible’.44 What is perhaps even more interesting than Rosenmark’s defence of his report was Basch’s explanation of his own position in the affair. He admitted that he had been ‘deeply troubled’ by the news out of Moscow in 1936, but at Tours he told the Congress that he had accepted the advice of the Bureau of the Ligue not to make a public statement about the trials because the Ligue needed to wait to have more evidence, more documentation at its disposal. This was all framed in heroic terms. The CC had ‘overridden legitimate scruples’ and he was proud to say that it was the ‘only organisation which, loyal to the spirit and genius of the Ligue des droits de l’homme, had decided to search for the truth, without worrying about the grave political consequences that this search, and above all their possible conclusions, might bring’.45 Unfortunately, this is not what the record in the Cahiers said. At its meeting of 28 September 1936, the minutes record that in the wake of Basch’s consultation of Bureau members earlier in the month, ‘a dossier as complete as possible has been constituted’—already.46 More to the point, the decision not to make a statement was made for political reasons, not evidentiary ones. As we have already noted, the minutes from the Comité Central meeting of 1 October 1936 state explicitly that Basch was dissuaded from making a public statement because 42  ‘Réponse de M. Rosenmark’, in ‘Les Procès de Moscou’ in the debate on the Rapport moral in Congrès national de 1937, p. 160. 43  Raymond Rosenmark, ‘Libres opinions. Le procès de Moscou’, Cahiers 36, 31 (15 November 1936), p. 750. Rosenmark wrote: ‘C’est renier la Révolution française qui, selon un mot fameux, est un “bloc”, que de refuser à un peuple le droit de sévir contre les fauteurs de guerre civile, contre les conspirateurs en liaison avec l’étranger. Le respect scrupuleux des principes, le recours aux seuls tribunaux de droit commun, est un devoir en période normale, mais en période de crise, en cas de péril intérieur ou extérieur, en présence de menées terroristes, il faut non pas blâmer mais louer les peuples et les régimes qui ont le courage d’instituer, s’il le faut, un tribunal révolutionnaire.’ 44  See Ingram, Politics of Dissent, pp. 191–3. 45  ‘Intervention de M. Victor Basch’, in ‘Les Procès de Moscou’ in the debate on the Rapport moral in Congrès national de 1937, p. 169. 46  See analytical report on the Bureau meeting of 28 September 1936 in ‘Comité Central. Extraits’, Cahiers 36, 31 (15 November 1936), p. 752.

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the Bureau was afraid of the negative effect on the Rassemblement populaire.47 As in 1914, so in 1937, it seemed that politics trumped a genuine human rights consideration.48 The difference between the 1914 question and the Moscow Purge Trials debate was that at least in the case of the latter the Ligue did something. It opened an enquiry of sorts, which was more than it had been prepared to do on the war origins/war guilt question. The Ligue enquiry was something of a Potemkin façade, however, because the Cahiers continued to refuse publication of Magdeleine Paz’s article and the LDH did not deign to send a delegate to the commission of enquiry established outside the Ligue by the eleven members of the dissident CC minority.49 Félicien Challaye’s minority motion on the Moscow Purge Trials demanded the publication of Magdeleine Paz’s critique of the Rosenmark report, contrasted the ‘heroic’ era of the Russian Revolution with the Stalinist regime, ‘regretted that for ten months the Ligue has abstained from seeking the truth about what many ­people from all countries consider a monstrous parody of justice’, and ended by requesting that the Ligue’s Bureau demand from the Soviet embassy in Paris some sort of guarantee of impartial justice in future trials. The CC motion took a ­position analogous to that taken in 1914 on the war guilt question: the Moscow trials had to be examined with no political axes to grind, with ‘scrupulous impartiality’, something which, the motion averred, had always been the practice of the Ligue des droits de l’homme.50 The Congress evidently agreed with the CC because the Challaye motion received only 18.4 per cent of the 1,399 votes cast. The ‘minority moment’ seemed to be passing. This was even more the case in the debate on the main theme of the Congress, ‘how to defend both democracy and peace’. The rapporteur was Albert Bayet, professor at the Sorbonne and one of the Ligue’s vice-presidents. Bayet began by saying that he and the CC rejected three possible solutions to the problem of Spain: first, what he called the ‘great philosophical solution’, conscientious objection; secondly, the notion that one could be neutral between the aggressor and his victim; and thirdly, the idea that the Spanish conflict could be ‘mediated’.51 This was one more objection than was contained in his original report published a scant six weeks earlier in the Cahiers which had said nothing about rejecting mediation.52 As we shall see, the second and third of this triumvirate of objections were very important 47  See analytical report on the Comité Central meeting of 1 October 1936 in ‘Comité Central. Extraits’, Cahiers 36, 31 (15 November 1936), p. 755. 48  William D. Irvine demonstrates the way the Ligue invariably gave precedence to politics over pure human rights considerations in the 1904 Affaire des fiches, women’s rights, and the Moscow Purge Trials. See William D. Irvine, ‘Politics of Human Rights: A Dilemma for the Ligue des droits de l’homme’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques (Winter 1994), pp. 5–28. 49  See text of resolution presented by Félicien Challaye, ‘Discours de M. Félicien Challaye’, in ‘Les Procès de Moscou’ in the debate on the Rapport moral in Congrès national de 1937, p. 142. 50  Text of Challaye’s motion and the CC motion in ‘Scrutin sur les résolutions relatives au procès de Moscou’, in the debate on the Rapport moral in Congrès national de 1937, pp. 253–4. 51  ‘Rapport de M.  Albert Bayet’, in the debate on the theme ‘Comment défendre ensemble la démocratie et la paix’, in Congrès national de 1937, p. 256. 52 Albert Bayet, ‘Libres opinions. Pour le Congrès de Tours. Comment défendre ensemble la démocratie et la paix’, Cahiers 37, 9 (1 May 1937), p. 260.

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and reverberated right back to the Ligue’s 1916 debate on how to create a lasting peace during the Great War; the first was a shot across the bow of those who had found the Ligue’s position in 1916 wanting and had evolved to a position of absolute pacifism by 1937. The debates of 1916 found their apotheosis—indeed, their parallel—in those of 1937. It is not clear what conscientious objection had to do with Spain. Perhaps it was included in Bayet’s report as a way of making a pre-emptive strike against possible pacifist objections to the CC motion, despite claiming in his written report that he took it as ‘given’ that Ligueurs ‘are not more or less pacifist, but that they are all equally pacifist because they are all absolutely pacifist’.53 Not for the first time in Ligue history, that was playing fast and loose with a term the Ligue knew very well how to define, but it was part and parcel of the LDH’s deluded self-perception.54 While claiming to hold individual conscientious objectors in the highest esteem, provided they were ‘sincere’ and ‘risked their lives for their beliefs’, Bayet went on to denigrate objection in the strongest possible terms.55 It could never be a sensible way to resolve international disputes. Non-resistance to evil was plain wrong; resistance was not only a right but a duty. He said it was the duty of every man to protect his wife, his children, and ‘in a general sense all weak beings of whom he is the natural protector’ as well as ‘freedom which is the property of all’. What is strange is Bayet’s apparent ignorance that the high-profile new-style pacifists on the Comité Central would not have disagreed with this. Félicien Challaye had always maintained his belief in the right, indeed the duty, of the individual to defend himself and his own against attack. He had been saying this since his 1932 essay on what the pacifist position on Hitler should be.56 René Gerin, another CC member and a man who had spent time in prison for conscientious objection, was also of the belief that if he were Spanish he would be fighting on the side of the Republicans.57 To give him his due, Bayet reported that Gerin had said as much when presented with the proposed text of the CC resolution.58 Or was it so strange? Why was Bayet so intent on presenting what Challaye called a ‘caricature’ of integral pacifism to the Congress?59 The answer lies in a big leap backwards. The arguments of Bayet’s 1937 speech and report are virtually 53  Bayet, ‘Pour le Congrès de Tours’, p. 259. 54  The Comité Central seems not to have liked the old-style pacifists much more than the newstyle. At its meeting of 25 January 1937, the Bureau had made clear its opposition to the Association de la Paix par le Droit’s support of mediation between the two sides in Spain as a way of ending the war: ‘Le Bureau estime que la Ligue ne peut mettre sur pied d’égalité les deux parties aujourd’hui aux prises en Espagne’. See ‘Comité Central. Extraits. Séance du 25 janvier 1937. Bureau’, Cahiers 37, 7 (1 April 1937), p. 214. 55  ‘Rapport de M. Albert Bayet’, Congrès national de 1937, p. 256. 56  Félicien Challaye, Pour la paix désarmée, même en face de Hitler (Le Vésinet: chez l’auteur, n.d. [1933]). 57  René Gerin, Pacifisme ‘intégral’ et guerre civile (Paris: Ligue internationale des combattants de la paix, 1937). This small book was published before the 1937 Tours Congress of the LDH. Gerin wrote (p. 94): ‘La guerre civile?—Oui, si ce sont les ennemis de la liberté qui la déclenche.’ 58  ‘Rapport de M. Albert Bayet’, Congrès national de 1937, p. 270. 59 ‘Discours de M.  Challaye’, in the debate on the theme ‘Comment défendre ensemble la démocratie et la paix’, in Congrès national de 1937, p. 308.

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identical to those used by the majority at the Ligue’s 1916 Congress which, it will be remembered, was the first Congress of the Great War and debated the question of how to achieve a lasting peace. In 1916, the majority had inveighed against the notion that the Great War could have been ‘localized’ and even more so against the idea, presented by Michel Alexandre and others, that it ought to end with a negotiated settlement. In the twenty-one years since, the Ligue had debated again and again the validity of that war. It liked to think that it had come down on the side of right, but in fact, its position had not changed much since 1916. It still believed deep down that the war had been started by the perfidy of the Germans, and all the cavilling in the world was not going to change that, even if there was considerable breast-beating in the Ligue after 1933 about how France ought to give to Nazi Germany what it had steadfastly refused to give to Weimar. It is more than a little strange that the Ligue should so resolutely refuse to change its mind in the 1920s on Article 231 and reparations, and yet when faced with unilateral Nazi moves which overturned the Versailles system, seemed prepared to argue that Germany deserved colonial mandates like any other country, along with more access to primary materials.60 How did this play itself out at the 1937 Congress? Exactly as in 1916, the Ligue’s majority argued in 1937 through the voice of Albert Bayet’s report that ‘one does not localize a war. One kills it or else it kills you.’61 In 1914, the Ligue had thrown its lot in with the Union sacrée under the principle that a small nation, Serbia, needed to be defended against the aggression of a bigger country, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. What the Germans hoped would be a short, localized war between Serbia and Austria-Hungary became over the course of the July Crisis a general European war, the likes of which had never been seen before. In 1937, the Ligue was faced with a similar situation in Spain, with the notable difference this time that the conflict had originally been a domestic one, pitting the ­legitimate, elected Spanish Republican government against a band of right-wing, Army rebels. The reaction of the newly elected French Popular Front government had been to sign on in the summer and autumn of 1936 to a policy of non-intervention that had been agreed to by Britain, France, the Soviet Union, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany. Italy and Germany almost immediately began to flout the agreement, sending men and arms to the Spanish rebels. The Soviet Union responded in kind, sending help to the Republican side. Camille Planche, a member of the Chamber of Deputies and president of the Ligue des anciens combattants pacifistes, castigated Bayet for having undertaken a kind of show trial of the viewpoints the CC disagreed with. He said it was ludicrous 60  As late as June 1939, Francis Délaisi was arguing in favour of this. See Francis Délaisi, ‘La Paix économique’, Cahiers 39, 10 (15 May 1939), pp. 317–19; and Délaisi, ‘La Paix économique (suite et fin)’, Cahiers 39, 11 (1 June 1939), pp. 338–44. There was resistance to it, though, from other highprofile members of the Comité Central. At the July 1939 Mulhouse Congress of the Ligue, Maurice Viollette spoke firmly against the idea of giving colonies to the dictators. See Viollette’s comments on his report on ‘La Doctrine des droits de l’homme et la paix’, in which he rejected the idea of an international conference on colonies, in ‘Quatrième Séance. Mardi après-midi, 19 juillet 1939’, pp. 15–16, in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés 798/19 1939 Mulhouse Congress. 61  Bayet, ‘Rapport’, in Congrès de 1937, p. 259.

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to think that the opponents of the CC’s motion wanted to see the abandonment of the Spanish republicans, or that they would accept a fascist victory. Equally, however, he argued that it would have been impossible for the Popular Front government to take any other tack than the one it did in August 1936, ‘because at the end of the day, let us say things as they really are: if we had taken another position, not only would we have cut ourselves off from the democracies, but we would have destroyed the French Popular Front which is a singular way of defending the Spanish Popular Front.’62 Could or should France have taken a different position in 1936? Absolutely not, he said. If France had played the ‘lonesome cowboy’ in 1936 it would have provoked war.63 In a direct reprise of the arguments from the Ligue’s 1916 Congress, Planche trotted out the memory of the much-beloved Séverine who had pleaded then ‘out of pity for the universal anguish, try to get arbitration on the table, intervene as soon as possible.’ In terms almost identical to the arguments of Michel Alexandre in 1916, Planche argued that it was ludicrous to think that mediation put aggressors and victims on an equal footing. If that were the case, how did wars end? Did one side have to completely annihilate the other; was anyone seriously maintaining that one needed ‘to wait until all of the Spaniards who are not behind the republican government have had their throats slit, one after the other’?64 No, wars always ended with some form of mediation, whether one wanted to call it that or not. This was a conceit with a strictly limited shelf life, however. One could certainly make the case that the a­ rmistice of 1918 was nothing more than that; it was going to prove impossible to say the same of 1945 which introduced the concept of total, abject, unconditional surrender into international politics. In 1937, this was still very much in the future, though, and there was very little precedent for what was to come. On the basis of past experience, then, Planche had a point: wars ended in negotiation of one sort or another, not annihilation, which is part of the reason that John Maynard Keynes’ ruminations about a ‘Carthaginian peace’ in The Economic Consequences of the Peace struck such a sensitive nerve. Salomon Grumbach responded to Planche and Emery on behalf of the Comité Central. He claimed that Planche did not disagree ‘fundamentally’ with the CC’s motion as presented by Bayet but then went on to castigate Planche for essentially not agreeing with the majority. What gave Planche the right, asked Grumbach, to call into question the majority’s commitment to peace? Perhaps it was the secretarygeneral, Emile Kahn’s, waspish comment that Planche might do well to ‘respect the will of the Ligue des droits de l’homme’ in the same way that he had told the Populaire that he would do nothing to upset the apple cart after the Marseille Congress of the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO). All things considered, this was rather presumptuous because the Ligue’s Congress was still a long way from voting on the resolution defining its position on the question of how best to defend democracy and peace. How Kahn could claim to know the 62  ‘Discours de M. Camille Planche’, in the debate on the theme ‘Comment défendre ensemble la démocratie et la paix’, in Congrès national de 1937, p. 276. 63  Ibid., p. 277. 64  Ibid., pp. 279–80.

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‘will’ of the Ligue at this point is a good question; equally interesting is the way in which Kahn seemed to imply that the Ligue had a doctrine that was essentially the same as that of a political party. Kahn’s comments on the ‘will’ of the Ligue betray not only the extent to which the political virus had infected the organization, but perhaps even more tellingly the way in which a kind of Rousseau-esque conception of the ‘general will’ seemed to be part and parcel of the Ligue’s approach to political problems generally.65 Félicien Challaye took umbrage at the attempt by Bayet to make mediation seem like something politically sinister by calling it the fruit of the mind of Pierre Laval. That could not have been farther from the truth. ‘Mediation’ or ‘negotiation’ was an idea that Jaurès had elaborated on many times before 1914. During the July Crisis, Challaye contended that Jaurès’ overriding concern was that the ‘conflict remain localized, that the other nations not get involved’. If Jaurès had succeeded, Challaye said, ‘he would not only have saved our people, the German people, the Russian people, but also the Serbian people, because the war was the martyrdom of the Serbian people.’ The Serbs ‘would have suffered far less if the Austrians had occupied Belgrade and there had been a few skirmishes than it ultimately did through the war’.66 Aside from the humanitarian argument against war which drew direct inspiration from the disaster of the Great War, Challaye also addressed the question of how to defend both democracy and peace in a troubled European situation. Here his thinking drew heavily on fellow Comité Central member, Georges Michon’s, latest book on Robespierre and the idea of revolutionary war. It seems counter-intuitive to make of Robespierre, the face of the Terror, an ­inspiration for pacifism in 1937, but that is precisely what Michon and Challaye did. In Michon’s analysis, Robespierre recognized the danger for the Revolution and democracy posed by the Girondins’ promotion of war for essentially domestic reasons. Challaye said that Robespierre’s thesis in 1791—that any war was inimical to democracy because it inevitably brought with it a military dictatorship—ought to have been given prominence at the Ligue’s 1937 Congress.67 It was all for naught, however. Despite an eleventh-hour attempt by Emery to craft a resolution that more explicitly made the minority’s point, the Congress voted overwhelmingly in favour of the Comité Central resolution; only 11.3 per cent of the delegates voted for the minority motion.68 Why this sudden drop? William Irvine contends that the outcome of the debate in 1937 was a ‘crushing blow’ 65  Cf. Jacques Julliard’s suggestive book, La Faute à Rousseau: Essai sur les conséquences historiques de l’idée de souveraineté populaire (Paris: Seuil, 1985). 66  ‘Discours de M. Challaye’ in the debate on the theme ‘Comment défendre ensemble la démocratie et la paix’, in Congrès national de 1937, p. 311. 67  Ibid. See also Georges Michon, Robespierre et la guerre révolutionnaire 1791–1792 (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1937). For an early, more schematic iteration, see Michon, ‘Robespierre et la guerre (1791–1792)’, Annales révolutionnaires (Organe de la société des Etudes robespierristes), Vol. 12 (1920), pp. 265–311. Cf. Norman Ingram, ‘Repressed Memory Syndrome: Interwar French Pacifism and the Attempt to Recover France’s Pacifist Past’, French History 18, 3 (September 2004), pp. 315–30. 68  For the results of the vote, see ‘Reprise du débat’ on the theme ‘Comment défendre ensemble la démocratie et la paix?’, in Congrès national de 1937, p. 379. Emery, Georges Michon, and Gaston Bergery had proposed a new wording of the minority resolution, but it failed to galvanize the Congress. See ibid., pp. 334–7.

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to the minority. ‘For the first time in years’, he writes, they ‘had failed to obtain a significant minority of the votes’. He says that important members of the minority had ‘quietly rallied’ to the majority side in 1937.69 It is certainly the case that the speeches of prominent members of the minority were not met in 1937 with the rapturous applause they had garnered even as late as 1936. Bayet and Victor Basch both seemed either supremely confident of their position, or else fed up with ­trying to paper over the differences in the Ligue, or perhaps so convinced that the hour demanded strong action—or conceivably all three—that they both categorically refused any thought of drafting, as Basch rather disdainfully put it, ‘a unanimous motion that will be denounced a few months later’; the time for what he called ‘horse-trading’ had passed.70 Does this mean that the majority had won the day, that the Ligue was now safely in the hands of those who in an unbroken line thought like Victor Basch and the majority did on the German question? Not really, because the Ligue that voted so overwhelmingly in favour of the majority resolution in 1937 was not even the same Ligue it had been the year before. It is difficult, if not impossible, to qualify the views of those who had left the Ligue after 1936, but it is not difficult, on the contrary, to quantify their numbers. As Chapter 9 demonstrates, those numbers fell dramatically after 1937. To return to 1937, however, the Tours Congress of the Ligue des droits de l’homme ended in schism. Léon Emery, Félicien Challaye, Gaston Bergery, Georges Pioch, and Georges Michon all resigned from the Comité Central because of the events at Tours. Speaking on behalf of the others, Emery said to the Congress that the Ligue had produced nothing but a ‘dilatory’ resolution on the Moscow trials, no conclusions whatsoever on the problem of false news reports and brainwashing, and as for the ‘capital’ problem on which depended the maintenance of peace and freedom, nothing but ‘confused and useless decisions’. In their view, the Ligue had renounced its original mandate, ‘its constitutive mission’, and was ‘hiding in a kind of political opportunism’.71 Basch totally rejected these accusations, saying that while the Ligue was of one mind on the necessity of defending peace and freedom, it was not on the means of achieving this. He believed that the future would show that he and the majority were right.72 To the initial five who had resigned at Tours were added the names of Magdeleine Paz and Elie Reynier in a collective letter of resignation sent to Victor Basch at the end of August 1937. The anger and disappointment directed at the Comité Central centred on three major bones of contention. First, the démissionnaires argued that the Ligue had failed completely in its primary mission, defending the rights of 69 William D. Irvine, Between Justice and Politics, p. 179. He includes Jean-Marie Caillaud, André Leseurre, Gabriel Cudenet, Paul Rivet, and Paul Langevin in this group. In Caillaud’s case, it seems perhaps to have been a tentative conversion. When the Congress seemed unprepared to listen to him late in the proceedings on a rather ancillary topic, he said, ‘Continuez! Je ne tarderai pas à aller rejoindre ceux qui vous ont donné leur démission.’ See Congrès national de 1937, p. 414. 70  See Bayet’s and Basch’s comments, respectively, on pp. 344 and 348 of the debate on the theme ‘Comment défendre ensemble la démocratie et la paix?’, in Congrès national de 1937. 71  ‘Déclaration de M. Emery’, in Congrès national de 1937, p. 390. 72  Ibid., pp. 391–2.

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man. They viewed the Moscow Purge Trials as the moral equivalent of the Dreyfus Affair, the Ligue’s founding moment, and wrote that the CC had ‘extracted’ from the Tours Congress a ‘blank cheque, without even deigning to explain itself either with regard to the biased report of M. Rosenmark, or its obstinate refusal to publish a rectifying article by Magdeleine Paz’. Secondly, they attacked the Ligue for having totally failed to speak out against the false news stories, as much in the left-wing as the right-wing press, which were being used to stoke the fires of war; they called this ‘brain washing’ and said it was leading to a ‘fascistization of minds’. Instead of protesting against this at the Tours Congress, the CC had diverted attention away into a sterile ovation of the Spanish Republic which was not even the issue. Finally, they alleged that the CC had done everything in its power to avoid discussing how best to defend peace. It had refused to respond to direct questions concerning raising the embargo on Spain, the British proposals for verification, and the ‘manifest weakness’ of the League of Nations.73 What did this all mean for the Ligue? The démissionnaires drew a straight line between the Great War and the events of 1937, arguing that the leaders of the late 1930s were those who had ‘blindly enrolled’ the Ligue in the Union sacrée. They had then dragged the Ligue through the ‘worst moral lapses’ of the thirteen years preceding Hitler: the ‘lies of the 1914–1918 war, revision of the Versailles Treaty, equality of rights with the German republic, and disarmament of the victors after that of the vanquished’. They charged that the Ligue had either ‘kept silence or else just whispered’.74 The problem was a political one: the Ligue was a vassal to the politics of the Rassemblement populaire, what they called a ‘precarious cartel of political parties’.75 Victor Basch responded to the various letters of resignation in the Cahiers with his heart at the breaking point. Since becoming president of the Ligue he had always sought conciliation, but that internal peace had been destroyed by the minority; he called their actions at the Tours Congress ‘treason’. What is strange, though, is his purported belief that nothing more than ‘misunderstandings’ afflicted the LDH, that there were no ‘profound divergences dealing with principles’ at stake.76 That is certainly not how the minority saw it in 1937. Nor is it how Basch had seen his own reasons for resigning from the vice-presidency of the Ligue and the Comité Central back in December 1918, despite what he may have averred in 1937. In 1937, Basch declared that he had resigned in 1918 because he ‘refused to be associated with the dupery of the Union sacrée’.77 But as his 1918 letter of resignation to Ferdinand Buisson had made clear, he was a fervent believer 73  Gaston Bergery et al., ‘Déclaration des démissionnaires’, Cahiers 37, 21 (1 November 1937), p. 692. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid. Georges Pioch expressed similar sentiments. He excoriated the neo-Jacobinism of the French Communist Party, denied that he was in any way less anti-fascist than the most dedicated antifascist in the Ligue, and said that the primary reason for his resignation was the LDH’s response to the Moscow trials which he called ‘une Affaire Dreyfus centuplée’. See ‘Libres opinions. Après le Congrès de Tours. III. Lettre de Georges Pioch’, Cahiers 37, 21 (1 November 1937), pp. 693–4. 76  Victor Basch, ‘Libres opinions. Après le Congrès de Tours. I. Mise au point’, Cahiers 37, 21 (1 November 1937), p. 684. 77  Ibid., p. 691.

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in the Union sacrée; he made clear to Buisson that ‘the entire war policy of the Ligue des droits de l’homme—I want to affirm this clearly in order to avoid any misunderstanding—seemed and still seems to me impeccable.’78 That said, as the war lengthened, Basch grew disillusioned with the demands of the Union sacrée and especially after the advent of Clemenceau to power in 1917.79 The real motivation behind Basch’s resignation in 1918, however, seems to have been his growing feeling that he was out of synch with the majority of the Comité Central because of his belief that the Ligue was essentially a political project rather than purely a juridical proposition.80 Basch had tried to resign in 1918 for reasons of principle; the seven members of the minority did the same in 1937. The difference was that, unlike the entreaties of Buisson and the rest of the Comité Central in 1918, in 1937 Basch wrote that it was a pity those who had resigned had not left the Ligue altogether rather than just the CC.81 There was perhaps justification for Basch’s sentiments; the tone of at least one of the resignation letters bordered on the insulting.82 The great ‘battle horse’ of the minority was the Moscow Purge Trials. Basch admitted that he personally had reservations about what had happened in Moscow, but lauded the ‘legal reasoning’ of Raymond Rosenmark which he called ‘impeccable’ from a ‘strictly juridical point of view’.83 Basch underlined, though, that it was more than a little ironic that those who condemned the atrocities of the Stalin regime had accepted similar human rights violations by the Lenin regime ‘with a light heart’.84 He particularly castigated the minority for not having had ‘the same reaction’ as the rest of the Ligue when faced by Hitler; the minority had ‘made excuses’ for Hitler, ‘had treated him like a saint’, had ‘exalted’ the words of a war veteran, and had made him, despite his aggressive foreign policy, an ‘apostle of peace’. The obverse to this was, he claimed, the propensity of the minority to ‘contest the profound pacifism of France’ and to claim that France bore ‘unique responsibility for the European situation’. It was because of these essential points, Basch wrote, that the minority had been repudiated by the rest of the Ligue.85 78  Victor Basch, letter dated 13 December 1918, in ‘Comité Central’, Bulletin officiel de la Ligue des droits de l’homme, 19, 7–8 (1–15 April 1919), p. 314. 79  Ibid., pp. 314–15. Basch wrote that Buisson had even entered into a relationship of ‘coquetterie réglée’ with Maurice Barrès. 80  Ibid., pp. 314–16. 81  See Victor Basch, ‘Après le Congrès de Tours’, p. 685. 82  Challaye referred to the ‘sanglant Comité Central de l’ex-Ligue des Droits de l’Homme’ in his article in the Patrie humaine of 15 October 1937. This was reprinted as Félicien Challaye, ‘Libres opinions. Après le Congrès de Tours. IV. Un article de M. Challaye’, Cahiers 37, 21 (1 November 1937), p. 695. 83  Victor Basch, ‘Après le Congrès de Tours’, p. 686. The fact that Rosenmark had strayed away from the ‘strictly juridical’ in his report on the Moscow trials did not seem to bother Basch. See Raymond Rosenmark, ‘Libres opinions. Le Procès de Moscou’, Cahiers 36, 31 (15 November 1936), p. 750. 84  Victor Basch, ‘Après le Congrès de Tours’, p. 688. In February 1918, the CC passed a motion condemning the excesses of the Bolshevik Revolution; it read, in part, ‘La dictature prolétarienne emprunte à l’autocratie toutes les mesures dont elle s’indignait hier. Elle viole le droit, elle supprime la liberté, elle impose son orthodoxie avec le même fanatisme que les popes [sic] ignares’. See Comité Central, ‘Contre la Dissolution de la Constituante’, Bulletin officiel 18, 3–4 (1–15 February 1918), p. 110. 85  Victor Basch, ‘Après le Congrès de Tours’, p. 690.

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The link between 1914 and 1937 is fundamental to understanding the schism of the 1937 Congress. It was the basis of the sustained critique of Ligue (and French) policy towards Germany that Félicien Challaye published in November 1937. Challaye wrote that the crisis of the Ligue des droits de l’homme had its origin in the Ligue’s position during the Great War. He criticized the Ligue for having supported the ‘Union sacrée against the enemy and a fight to the finish’, based on the erroneous belief that Austria-Hungary had been the first to mobilize and that the war had been ‘imposed on France and its allies by the central powers’. The key moment for the LDH was the 1916 Congress which had pitted Georges Demartial, Séverine, Michel Alexandre, Oscar Bloch, Mathias Morhardt, and ­others against Ferdinand Buisson, Théodore Ruyssen, Gabriel Séailles, and Maria Vérone. Even though the minority motion had garnered only thirty votes, Challaye wrote that the Ligue’s minority was born on that day.86 There followed multiple attempts, as we have seen, to get the Ligue to change its mind on the question of war guilt. None of them was successful. A large part of the reason for this was the LDH’s relationship with the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte. Challaye wrote that the Ligue had the very ‘legitimate desire’ to effect some sort of rapprochement with Germany, but it had chosen as its partner the Bund Neues Vaterland (the forerunner of the DLfM) which was composed entirely of Germans who believed, ‘just as the leaders of the LDH did, in the unique responsibility of their country’ in the outbreak of the Great War. These people in no way represented the vast majority of German public opinion, and thus ‘the attempt to bring the two p ­ eoples together failed.’ The sterility of the Ligue’s approach was in evidence at the time of the Ruhr Occupation of 1923 when the Comité Central, ‘despite the efforts’ of Challaye, Charles Gide, and Mme Ménard-Dorian, had ‘issued only two weak protests in six months’.87 Challaye clearly believed that even Nazi Germany needed to be respected and dealt with in the higher interest of peace. The Nazi seizure of power had not changed the fundamental fact, for Challaye, that the Ligue had ‘always refused to exonerate Germany and its allies of being uniquely responsible for the war’ and that because of this ‘the majority members of the CC had never made a sufficient effort to get alongside the Germans, with the exception of a small number of those who took the same point of view’ as the Ligue. Despite what Basch had written in his ‘Mise au point’ in the Cahiers, Challaye claimed that the majority and the minority within the Ligue were ‘unanimous in condemning the Hitler regime, as indeed all forms of fascism’. ‘But’, he went on, ‘opposition to the domestic regime must not serve as a pretext for cultivating a war psychosis’ and he charged that the majority was instilling in the French people a ‘hatred and fear of Germany’.88 Thus ended the tumultuous year of 1937 for the Ligue des droits de l’homme. The seven leading members of the minority had left the Comité Central in a sort

86  Félicien Challaye, La Crise de la Ligue des droits de l’homme (Paris: Extrait de la Grande Revue, November 1937), pp. 78–9. 87 Ibid. 88  Ibid., p. 85.

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of light version of an Aventine secession, remaining members of the Ligue for the moment, but no longer participating in its leadership. The apparent consensus which had seemed to emerge at the Ligue’s Congresses from 1933 to 1936 cracked apart, laying bare the deep divisions within the Ligue and the profound differences separating the minority from the majority. The great divorce had finally come, and it left the Ligue irreparably weakened on the eve of another world war.

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9 Once More with Feeling? The Ligue des droits de l’homme and the Slide into War It is hard not to escape the impression that the LDH went into freefall after 1937 and that it was already in extremis by the time of the Nazi invasion of May 1940. In the remaining two years of peace before the Phoney War began in September 1939, the Ligue seemed to close in on itself. Its membership numbers shrank and a bad financial situation worsened. Thus, before the beginning of the Second World War, the Ligue had begun to spiral downward towards the oblivion from which it has never really recovered. What happened, then, in 1938 and 1939? First, the Ligue suffered a membership crisis. In his rapport moral for the 1938 Avignon Congress, the Ligue’s secretarygeneral, Emile Kahn, addressed the issue. He argued that what the Ligue was experiencing was normal, insofar as the decline in membership was something he attributed to simple attrition, the natural loss of an ageing population of Ligueurs. He denied that large numbers were disaffected or resigning. The real problem was Ligue members leaving for natural causes and not being replaced; there was a ‘crisis of recruitment’. He spent the next three pages of his report giving lots of advice about how best to organize local section meetings which was, all things considered, a rather sophomoric exercise for the secretary-general of an organization which had been in existence for forty years.1 The following year, Kahn showed a little more awareness of what was really going on, even if he continued to call the ‘discontent of Ligueurs and the increase in the membership fee . . . imaginary causes, or at least highly exaggerated ones’ for the decrease in membership figures. Imaginary or not, there was no doubt that the Ligue was haemorrhaging members. Kahn reported to the 1939 Congress that 1,568 sections of a Ligue total of 2,434 had lost approximately 10 per cent of their members from 1937 to 1938.2 That is a large drop in one year to blame on mere natural attrition. Secondly, by the end of the 1930s, the Ligue’s influence in the corridors of power also seemed to be on the wane. At the 1939 Congress, the legal counsel for the Ligue reported that the success rate for responses to Ligue interventions had fallen from 51.2 per cent in 1936 to 32.8 per cent in 1938. 1  Emile Kahn, ‘Pour le Congrès d’Avignon. Le Rapport moral’, Cahiers 38, 12–13 (15 June–1 July 1938), pp. 348–52. 2  Emile Kahn, ‘Libres Opinions. Pour le Congrès de Mulhouse. Rapport moral’, Cahiers 39, 13 (1 July 1939), pp. 391–2.

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The gross number of responses to Ligue interventions had also fallen, from 1,660 in 1936 to 1,305 in 1938. In other words, the Ligue was being listened to less by government, and when government did deign to reply to Ligue interventions it was increasingly in negative terms. As the report on the Ligue’s legal activity put it succinctly, ‘the number of responses we receive diminishes regularly, the number of successes we obtain goes down even quicker and only the number of rejections increases.’3 There is reason to doubt that the cause of the membership and financial crisis of the Ligue was due primarily to a crisis of recruitment brought on by a change in generations. If one examines the situation of the Aube Federation, for example, it is clear that something catastrophic happened after 1937 that cannot be explained by the demographic argument advanced by Kahn at the 1938 and 1939 Congresses. In 1934, the Aube Federation had had seventeen sections with 2,026 members. By 1937, this had fallen to 1,711 members in the same number of sections. The exsanguination of members really began after the 1937 Congress, though; by 1938, the Federation was down to 1,289 members and the following year, before the 1939 Mulhouse Congress, it had only 396 paid-up members.4 In May 1939, Théophile Joint, the delegate of the Central Committee to the Aube federal Congress, underlined the extreme gravity of the situation for the Ligue. He told the Aube ­federation that across France more than one million francs were in arrears for the financial years 1936–38; things had reached the point where the Ligue’s headquarters had recently had to pay its employees with money advanced to it by friends.5 This is consonant with a statistical table published in the Cahiers in July 1939 which showed that the Ligue had had 127,316 members in 1937 and only 111,319 the following year.6 It was a far cry, though, from the numbers reported at the 1939 Congress by the Ligue’s treasurer, René Georges-Etienne, who said that the number of memberships actually paid for in 1937 was only 97,829 and that this fell to 90,349 the following year.7 Despite all this, for reasons which seem quite opaque, Georges-Etienne made reference to a membership exceeding 140,000 in his 1939 report. Emile Kahn, too, claimed at a meeting of the Comité Central two months before the fall of France in 1940 that the Ligue’s membership had ‘never fallen below 140,000’. Albert Bayet expressed doubt at the veracity of this number and Jean-Marie Caillaud was adamant in his reply to Kahn that the ‘active’ Seine 3  Conseils juridiques de la Ligue, ‘L’Activité juridique de la Ligue en 1938–9’, Cahiers 39, 13 (1 July 1939), p. 395. 4 BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés 798/135 (Fédération de l’Aube), ‘Note au Bureau fédéral’ from Ligue headquarters, n.d. (but from the context, before the July 1939 Mulhouse Congress). The ‘Note’ underlined that ‘La Trésorerie générale est—momentanément, espérons-nous—très gênée (plus de 450.000 frs restent dûs pour 1938).’ 5 BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés 798/134 (Fédération de l’Aube), Procès-verbaux, Féderation des Sections de l’Aube, ‘Comité Fédéral: Réunion d’information’, 7 May 1939. 6  No author, ‘Supplément au rapport financier (statistiques). Tableau comparatif des cotisations reçues par la Trésorerie générale pour 1937 et 1938 (Situation au 30 avril 1938 et au 30 avril 1939’, Cahiers 39, 13 (1 July 1939), p. 415. Still another Ligue document prepared for the 1939 Congress lists the number of members for 1937 across metropolitan France and North Africa as totalling 116,948. See ‘Tableau annexe des circonscriptions électorales’ (n.d. [1939]) in ALDH/BDIC/F∆Rés. 798/19. 7  René Georges-Etienne, ‘Rapport financier’, Cahiers 39, 10 (15 May 1939), pp. 309–14.

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federation had lost a ‘large part of its membership’ and he could not imagine the situation was much different elsewhere. He asked what the Ligue’s financial ­situation was at the beginning of March 1940, and there the minutes tantalizingly end.8 T H E 1 9 3 8 AV I G N O N C O N G R E S S The 1938 Congress of the Ligue des droits de l’homme took place in Avignon from 16 to 18 July 1938. After the tumult at Tours, it was a fairly staid affair. The overall theme of the Congress, ‘The Means of Ensuring the Free Play of Democracy’, was one around which all Ligueurs could unite, even if at least one of the subthemes on international fascism caused some energetic debate, as much for the person who wrote the report on it, Salomon Grumbach, as for the topic itself. But with the other subthemes—the powers of money, clericalism, the problem of the press, and the question of Senate abolition or reform—the Ligue was on sure ground. These were all themes that, while undoubtedly important, could be guaranteed to generate virtual unanimity.9 The Ligue needed some calm after the schism of Tours. Unfortunately, despite the apparent intention to publish the usual stenographic record of the Congress, it never happened, which is yet another indication that the Ligue was facing something of an existential crisis.10 The resignation of seven important members of the Ligue’s minority from the Comité Central the year before had ostensibly occurred over the question of the Ligue’s position on the Moscow Purge Trials and the Spanish Civil War. It is clear, however, that the issue of France’s role in the Great War was the inspiration for the events of 1937 and their echoes in 1938. The only one of the seven to reappear at the 1938 Congress was Georges Pioch. The CC had unanimously asked him to rescind his resignation and rejoin the committee. This he would not do, he said, because he could not accept the responsibility ‘which the Comité Central of the Ligue has assumed, of fomenting a little more deeply every day the national union, the union sacrée.’11 It was a vain hope, he said, that the ‘past might have taught something to the present’. He called on his erstwhile colleagues to remember that they had already, once before, supported such a ‘Union sacrée’: from 1914 to 1919, 8 See Kahn’s claim in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés 798/3 Comité Central, ‘Procès verbal, Comité Central, Séance du 14 Mars 1940’, p. 12; Caillaud’s rejoinder is on p. 17. This is a seventeen-page partial set of minutes. They unfortunately end in the middle of the meeting. 9  ‘Ordre du jour du Congrès’, Cahiers 38, 9 (1 May 1938), p. 245. For the reports presented to the Congress, see Salomon Grumbach, ‘Le fascisme international’, Cahiers 38, 11 (1 June 1938), pp. 313–15; Robert Lacoste, ‘Puissances d’argent’, Cahiers 38, 11 (1 June 1938), pp. 315–19; J. Bernier, ‘Cléricalisme’, Cahiers 38, 11 (1 June 1938), pp. 319–22; Georges Boris, ‘Le Problème de la presse’, Cahiers 38, 11 (1 June 1938), pp. 322–5; Albert Bayet, ‘La Question du Sénat’, Cahiers 38, 11 (1 June 1938), pp. 325–30; Emile Kahn, ‘Pour le Congrès d’Avignon. Le rapport moral’, Cahiers 38, 12–13 (15 June–1 July 1938), pp. 345–52. 10  The occasionally incomplete stenographic record is contained in the Ligue’s papers, brought back from the former Soviet Union. See BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés 798/16 Congrès d’Avignon 1938. 11  Intervention by Georges Pioch in the debate on the Rapport moral, ‘Le Congrès national de 1938’. Unpublished (and incomplete) compte-rendu sténographique, Avignon, 16–18 July 1938, in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés 798/16 Congrès d’Avignon, typescript p. 185.

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he charged that the Ligue had ‘stood surety for all of the statesmen who succeeded one another in power in France’.12 What ‘disgusted’ him, however, was the ‘way in which we have reacted to fascism, which is both detestable and detested’. He charged that the French were ‘fanatically imitating’ fascism, right down to the ‘spectacular rallies’ and ‘submission to a dogma of discipline’. In a sense, Pioch was speaking to the great evolution in the Ligue’s thinking wrought by the Great War, the idea conveyed by Buisson in the very first article in the Cahiers in 1920 that the Ligue was now just as much interested in the ‘rights of collectivities’ as in those of the individual. Pioch said, ‘See where your abdication of the individual has brought us!’13 This might strike one as an ostrich-like position for Pioch to take. Knowing what came after, it is perhaps too easy to assume that there was only one way forward in mid-1938, or that those who took a dissenting position on the war question were blind, stupid—or both. Pioch’s position had a certain intellectual honesty and coherence to it. In effect, he argued that the attainment of peace trumped everything; it had to be the overriding priority. That was why the Moscow Purge Trials were so important to him. They represented everything that he hoped France was not, and yet, since 1935, France had been allied to the Soviet Union. As for the Spanish situation, civil war or not, he called it ‘a million deaths for nothing’. He justified his political position in 1938 through the lens of 1914: And I say that equally for the 51 million men who, from August 1914 to November 1918, exhausted themselves against one another in order finally to leave 12 million cadavers on European soil. How were they rewarded for their enormous sacrifice? When I look at what has become of this Europe twenty years after they slaughtered one another, this Europe for which many of them thought they were giving liberty, law, justice and real peace, I say that they fell to their deaths drunk with the idea that they were serving what they believed to be—and they were right—the highest and clearest virtues. In reality, they died for nothing. . . Yes, died for nothing, since the peoples prove today through their folly and their docility that they do not merit the monstrous sacrifice made for them.14

Albert Bayet drew the opposite conclusion from the tragedy in Spain, also using as his reference point the Great War. To the cry from the floor that he should go and fight if he wanted to defend Spain, he replied that he had already done that in 1914 and only wished that it had been for a cause ‘as certain and as pure as that for which our brothers in Spain are fighting and falling, as we speak’. The formulation was interesting: Bayet implied that the struggle ‘to make the world safe for democracy’ by ridding it of German militarism during the Great War had not been quite as holy as the crusade to save the Spanish Republic was in 1938. The disagreement between majority and minority views of the international situation boiled itself 12  Ibid., typescript p. 201. Later in the Congress, in a rather elliptical reply to what Pioch had said, Gabriel Cudenet challenged the Ligue to show that it was ready ‘à lutter pour l’affirmer [democracy], non pas à lutter par des démonstrations publiques ou des parades militaires, mais en travaillant demain pour sauvegarder l’aquit [sic] du passé’. See his comments on typescript p. 475. 13  Ibid., typescript p. 184. Cf. Ferdinand Buisson, ‘Notre programme: droits de l’homme, droits du citoyen, droits des peuples’, Cahiers 20, 1 (5 January 1920), p. 3. 14  Georges Pioch, ‘Congrès national de 1938’, typescript p. 227.

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down to a fundamental difference of opinion about the bona fides of the Great War and the extent to which the European situation of the late 1930s was the result of it. The majority seemed (finally) to grasp dimly that the Great War had perhaps not been as righteous a struggle as imagined at the time, but the late 1930s had seen the advent of the threat of a new sort of war, based not on imperial rivalries but on profound ideological differences. The minority, on the other hand, had clearly understood since 1915, and certainly since the Paris peace conference of 1919, that the Great War had been anything but a morally pure and intellectually coherent crusade. It had been a Great Power war, a dynastic engagement, a clash of competing economic interests, but despite all of the hand-wringing over Belgium, it had never been a war of principle. The way it ended had, in fact, engendered disorder, rather than order, in European politics. What the minority could not grasp, however, was that the advent of Hitler had rendered that political position nugatory; the minority might very well have been right in the 1920s, but it was wrong—dead wrong—about Hitler, who was no ‘ordinary German’. Not for the first or the last time in French political history, the word ‘pacifism’ was also misused to great theatrical effect. Bayet claimed the mantle of pacifism, saying ‘a pacifist I am and a pacifist I will remain, but for Freedom I will fight, and fascism will not win’, a statement that met with rapturous applause from the Congress.15 THE MUNICH CRISIS There was no doubt that the majority of the Comité Central of the Ligue des droits de l’homme was anti-munichois. In a manifesto dated 6 October 1938, the Ligue declared forthrightly that while it breathed a sigh of relief that the Munich crisis had not ended in war, it was nevertheless under no illusions about the ramifications of the Munich pact which it declared ‘puts peace and the liberal regime in peril’. It thought that France ought to have pursued a policy of ‘firmness’ and warned the ‘totalitarian regimes’ of the risk they ran of facing ‘a coalition analogous to that which the formidable military power of the Central Powers had already succumbed one time before’.16 The phraseology seemed to indicate that the war which had narrowly been avoided in September 1938 was essentially the same as the war of 1914. Putting aside its usual scruple of at least pretending that the ­articles published in the Cahiers reflected nothing more than the opinions of their authors, the Ligue took a very direct and didactic line on the Munich crisis. In a series of articles dealing with the Czech situation, the Ligue underlined what it saw as certain ‘truths to broadcast’. These included the argument that the Czechs had sided with the French since 1870, had protested against the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine by the Germans, and during the Great War, ‘no matter what our opinion might be on the question of responsibilities’, ‘in all corners of the world, wherever one could find a Czechoslovak, he tried to help us.’ The writer claimed that the new state 15  Intervention by Albert Bayet in ‘Congrès national de 1938’, typescript pp. 223–4. 16  ‘Après Munich’, Cahiers 38, 19–20 (1–15 October 1938), pp. 563–4.

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of Czechoslovakia formed by the Treaties of Paris had sought to extend French conceptions of freedom to their Magyar and German compatriots. This had worked well until the western democracies had ‘abandoned the field to the dictators’.17 The other articles in the series all took a similar position. The Munich accord was an unmitigated disaster which had brought nothing but shame on France.18 The debates within the Comité Central on the Munich crisis were not quite so monolithically condemnatory as the Cahiers articles might lead one to believe, although it is certainly the case that the vast majority of those in attendance at these extraordinary meetings in September and October of 1938 were largely opposed to the Munich settlement. This was at least partially because of the schism of the year before which had seen the departure from the CC of the seven high-profile members of the Ligue’s dissident (and by now pacifist) minority. The year before, the idea of mediation in the case of Spain had been anathema to Basch, Kahn, and the Ligue’s majority; in 1938, the majority coalesced around the idea of a policy of ‘firmness’ on the Czech question. When Jules Prudhommeaux presented a motion to the Comité Central in the middle of the Czech crisis congratulating Paris and London for having taken the initiative of resolving the conflict peaceably, ‘as required by the Kellogg-Briand Pact’, and expressing ‘astonishment’ that this could be considered an ‘injustice’ or a ‘dishonour’, it was met with ‘vehement protestations’.19 Prudhommeaux persisted, however, arguing that nine out of ten French people had never heard of the treaty which bound them to Czechoslovakia until three months earlier. He said it was ludicrous to believe that France could come to the aid of Czechoslovakia without making a frontal attack on Nazi Germany across the Rhine; if this were to occur, he said, the French army ‘would not arrive alive in Czechoslovakia’.20 Did this mean that France should lie down in the dust and abandon its principles? Decidedly not, according to Prudhommeaux. What he called the ‘noble sacrifice’ by Czechoslovakia did mean, however, that with peace ‘momentarily saved’, it would be possible finally to ‘tear up the inept clauses of the 1919 treaties and to refashion south-eastern Europe along federalist principles’.21 The majority assumed that Czechoslovakia would come to the aid of France in any 17 Anon., ‘Vérités à répandre sur la question tchécoslovaque. III. France et Tchécoslovaquie’, Cahiers 38, 19–20 (1–15 October 1938), p. 588. 18  One of these pieces was listed as a ‘Libre opinion’ and two were signed articles; the others were simply presented as ‘fact’. See Historicus, ‘Libres opinions. Histoire de la crise internationale’, Cahiers 38, 19–20 (1–15 October 1938), pp. 565–81; Jacques Ancel, ‘Retour de Prague’, Cahiers 38, 19–20 (1–15 October 1938), pp. 581–2; Georges Boris, ‘Vérités à répandre sur la question tchécoslovaque. I- Politique de non-résistance: guerre. Politique de résistance: paix’, Cahiers 38, 19–20 (1–15 October 1938), p. 583; anon., ‘Vérités à répandre sur la question tchécoslovaque. II. Les Sudètes et le droit des peuples’, Cahiers 38, 19–20 (1–15 October 1938), pp. 584–6; anon., ‘Vérités à répandre sur la question tchécoslovaque. III. France et Tchécoslovaquie’, Cahiers 38, 19–20 (1–15 October 1938), pp. 586–9; anon., ‘Vérités à répandre sur la question tchécoslovaque. IV. L’abandon de la Tchécoslovaquie, a-t-il affermi la paix?’, Cahiers 38, 19–20 (1–15 October 1938), pp. 589–90. 19  For the text of Prudhommeaux’s motion, see ‘Le Comité Central pendant la crise. Séance du 22 septembre 1938’, Cahiers 38, 19–20 (1–15 October 1938), pp. 597–8. Prudhommeaux was one of the founders and secretary-general of the Association de la Paix par le Droit as well as secretary-general of the Fédération des Associations françaises pour la SDN, and thus a representative of the old-style pacifism. He had shared little in common with the positions of the minoritaires who resigned in 1937. 20  Ibid.   21  Prudhommeaux in ‘Le Comité Central pendant la crise’, p. 598.

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altercation with Germany; in other words, if France were attacked by Germany. That was the point, from the French perspective, of the Franco-Czech alliance. But clearly the Munich crisis was about the possibility of France remaining true to its treaty obligations to Czechoslovakia; it was the Czechs who were directly threatened by the Germans, not the French. The commentators in the Cahiers seemed to have forgotten this, which rather vitiated the strength of their analyses.22 In that sense, Prudhommeaux’s take on the crisis, while certainly not a comfortable one for the Ligue, was spot on. Once again, it was game-set-match to Hitler. For Léon Emery, Munich represented the ‘victory of the vanquished’: ‘of the treaties of 1919 there remains only debris—German, Polish, Hungarian revisionism having just affirmed themselves victoriously.’ The French system of ‘security’ was ‘definitively abolished’.23 None of this was surprising, he thought. The European troubles of 1938 were the inevitable heritage of the Great War and the treaties that ended it. In 1914, he wrote, ‘the majority of the French believed that the war broke out because Germany had been preparing a plot against Europe and France for some forty years’; now, he said, it was recognized that the war was the result of a crime, ‘prepared by a Serbian colonel who was an important officer in the general staff and had the silent toleration of his government, of tsarist Russian intrigues, the brutal defensive reactions of Austria-Hungary and the lassitude, state of nerves and imprudence of all the nations of Europe’. Everything could have been ‘arranged’, Emery said, until 28 July 1914 when ‘the insane precipitation of the Russian general staff, forcing the mobilisation ukase on the Tsar, set in motion the military machine which then could not be stopped.’ This misbegotten war would ‘spread at least a half-century of disasters over the world’. ‘Whatever one might say’, Emery argued that the ‘essential cause of the danger of war is not Hitler’ but rather the ‘unjust’ Treaty of Versailles and its fallout, which included the advent of Hitler himself. Versailles ‘created, supported and fortified’ Hitler.24 Emery’s answer to this situation, though, was more than a little blinkered. Germany had to be given a colonial empire because even economic and financial c­ ollaboration was no longer enough; Emery thought this ‘the only card we have left to play’.25 What is 22  See, for example, ‘L’Abandon de la Tchécoslovaquie’, p. 590, where the anonymous writer argued that ‘La Tchécoslovaquie contribuait à garantir la sécurité de la France. Hitler savait que, s’il attaquait la France, la Tchécoslovaquie, qui n’a jamais manqué à sa parole, serait à nos côtés. Les avions partis de Prague pouvant atteindre en quelques heures les grandes villes allemandes, toute tentative de bombardement sur Paris aurait provoqué en riposte le bombardement de Berlin: Paris était protégé par Prague. Hitler est délivré de cette préoccupation.’ It was thus assumed by these writers that France would be attacked by Germany and not the other way around; clearly, though, if France were to be true to its alliance obligations with Czechoslovakia, the opposite might obtain, in which case Prudhommeaux’s analysis was correct. 23  Léon Emery, 1918–1938: Panorama de vingt années. La paix qui n’est pas encore faite (Lyon: Syndicat de l’enseignement laïc, 1938). 24  Ibid., p. 3. 25  Ibid., p. 23. The following year, Francis Delaisi was to write of the absolute necessity, even after Prague, of sharing resources with the dictators and their allegedly ‘famished’ peoples. See Francis Delaisi, ‘Projet de résolution’ in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés 798/19 1939 Congrès de Mulhouse, and more importantly, an article he published in two parts: Delaisi, ‘La Paix économique’, Cahiers 39, 10 (15 May 1939), pp. 317–19; and ‘La Paix économique (suite et fin)’, Cahiers 30, 11 (1 June 1939), pp. 338–44. Victor Basch wrote, German statistics in hand, in late July 1939 after the Congress that

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entirely missing from Emery’s analysis was any apparent appreciation of the danger posed by the Nazis inside Germany. Nothing was said about Nazi anti-Semitism or the violence and awful domestic repression of dissent which reigned in Germany. The ‘German problem’ was thus reduced to a kind of diplomatic chess game in which peace was the ultimate end. Others in the minority camp seemed to have no problem accepting Nazi domestic politics. Félicien Challaye spent eight days in Germany in September 1938 as part of a delegation of French educators and came away speaking glowingly of Nazi social policy and seemingly accepting excuses for Nazi treatment of the Jews.26 1939 Munich solved nothing, either for the Ligue or for world politics. It was, in the words of Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, the ‘prologue to tragedy’; Europe now entered ‘the year of living dangerously’ that ended with the beginning of the Second World War in September 1939.27 Before the Czech crisis reached its tragic apotheosis at Prague in mid-March 1939, René Gerin and Albert Bayet engaged in a significant debate in the pages of the Cahiers about the way forward for France and the Ligue. For Gerin, the ­creation of an ‘international entente’ following Munich was of primordial importance. He acknowledged the distaste felt by many about the idea of any agreement with ‘totalitarian’ governments but said that there were ‘still some’ in the Ligue who disagreed with the majority position which he characterized as a ‘policy of intimidation’ directed primarily against Hitler. The ‘policy of intimidation’ would never succeed because 1) ‘intimidation is only good for raising diplomatic tensions’; 2) it was ‘immoral’ to use a method which one condemned the Germans for using; 3) the will to intimidate anyone was completely out of step with the popular will everywhere; 4) intimidation had been demonstrated to be completely inefficacious during the crises of the 1930s; ‘the theses of mutual assistance or collective security, promoted by the League of Nations, have failed derisorily’; and 5) it was i­ mpossible for France to intimidate Germany if only for demographic and economic reasons.28 ‘ce n’est pas l’égoïsme des démocraties qui affame le peuple allemand’, but rather ‘c’est Hitler qui l’affame en consacrant toutes ses ressources à la préparation de la guerre.’ See Victor Basch, ‘Après le Congrès. I—Une belle manifestation de foi démocratique’, Cahiers 39, 15 (1 August 1939), p. 481. 26  See Félicien Challaye, Huit Jours de septembre en Allemagne (Paris: La Grande Revue, 1938). Challaye was to give full rein to his developing anti-Semitism in a post-war novel, deposited like a foundling child at the Bibliothèque nationale. It is available under accession number 4-Y2-4264. Entitled L’Etrange chemin de la paix: romain uchronique (Paris: chez l’auteur, 1952), it borders on the pornographic in places and paints a very negative picture of a character called Moïse Drecklein (i.e. ‘Moses Littleshit’). William Irvine thinks this is a barely veiled reference to Challaye’s nemesis on the CC of the LDH, Salomon Grumbach. See Irvine, Between Justice and Politics, pp. 196–7. 27  Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, Munich: Prologue to Tragedy (London: Macmillan, 1963). The Year of Living Dangerously is the title of the 1982 Peter Weir film that has absolutely nothing to do with the topic of this book. 28  René Gerin, ‘L’Entente internationale’, Cahiers 39, 3 (1 February 1939), pp. 83–4.

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Once again, the inability to distinguish between Hitler and the democracies seemed to be a hallmark of Gerin’s approach. He wrote that France had become just another British dominion, albeit the most important one, and he could see no difference between British and German dominance on the continent: ‘English sovereignty is worth no more than German, and it is just as humiliating to see England make and un-make our governments as it is to see Germany interfere in internal French politics.’29 Gerin rejected what he saw as the false dichotomy of either capitulating to Hitler or going to war against him. There was a third option: an entente with Nazi Germany. He believed that such an entente would be ‘above all economic’, but he added that it would also ‘examine, with an eye to revision, all of the political and economic treaties in force, the colonial question, the issue of primary resources, and the Jewish question, etc.’.30 Gerin never seems to have evinced any anti-Semitism, but it is troubling that he thought there was a ‘Jewish question’ one could possibly discuss with the Nazis; this is perhaps indicative of the extent to which anti-Semitism had become normalized, even within an institution like the Ligue des droits de l’homme. Gerin’s thinking about Hitler’s likely future moves seems to have hinged on a misapprehension of Nazi racism which could not imagine that Hitler wanted anything more than to bring ethnic Germans home to the Reich. In terms which were to be contradicted by events just six weeks later, Gerin wrote that ‘What the Führer has not been able to do and what he would not dream of doing, is annexing or assimilating non-German populations. His very racism forbids it. His territorial and political ambitions end where the German race ends.’31 To do anything more would be suicide for Hitler, according to Gerin, because he could never turn Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, and Ukrainians into Germans. What Gerin admitted Hitler did want was to draw these peoples into an economic sphere of influence, but it was ‘impossible that he should wish to conquer or govern them politically’.32 The link with the war guilt debate was clear. Gerin viewed with deep scepticism the Europe erected at the Paris peace conference of 1919 and believed that the sins of the fathers were visited on the children. The ghost of the Union sacrée of 1914 was alive and well, according to Gerin. The ‘great capitulation, the great shame’ would be ‘stupidly’ to line up with the enemies of peace in favour of a new Union sacrée; equally, he argued, there was no shame at all in trying to understand the German people no matter who their present masters were. ‘Let us try to be logical’, he said: ‘anti-fascism for domestic purposes is the refusal of the Union sacrée; anti-fascism for external usage demands, on the contrary, a Union sacrée. It is ­impossible to get around this contradiction.’33 The title of Albert Bayet’s response to Gerin, ‘La Paix et le droit’, underscored the extent to which peace and justice had become separate propositions by the beginning of 1939.34 A parting of the ways had occurred, although the divorce was 29  Ibid., p. 84. 30 Ibid. 31  Ibid., p. 85. Emphasis in the original. 32  Ibid. Emphasis in the original. 33  Ibid., p. 86. 34  Albert Bayet, ‘La Paix et le droit’, Cahiers 39, 3 (1 February 1939), pp. 87–93. A similar split had occurred at the time of the Munich crisis in 1938 within the Ligue internationale des femmes

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not going to be finalized until after Prague in March 1939. Bayet, for all his ­myopia on the longer-term reasons for the minority’s dissent from Ligue orthodoxy, was on surer ground in his reasons for rejecting Gerin’s arguments in the here and now. He argued that there was a huge difference between ‘intimidation’ and ‘firmness’; the former was the province of the fascist dictators, while the latter was what he hoped the democracies would show in response. The democracies had never practised a policy of intimidation, in his view; the policy of firmness had not failed, simply because it had never been tried. Instead, what France had been party to was a continual ‘policy of concession, of capitulation’. One wonders where Poincaré and the Ruhr occupation would have fit in this schema. That was a long time ago, admittedly, but it had been a military action taken against a fellow democracy and one which the Ligue had condemned, although not necessarily for the reasons it professed to believe. There was an historical consistency to Bayet’s argument, however. He did not mention it—maybe for obvious rhetorically strategic reasons, or perhaps because of the impermeable historical wall which seemed to affect his vision—but his thesis in 1939 that one could not avoid resistance to the dictators for fear of generalizing a conflict was one which had been heard in 1914 and after as a justification for French involvement in the Great War.35 To Gerin’s argument that a generalized war would bring in its train the deaths of untold numbers of people, Bayet replied that a policy of firm loyalty to the League Covenant would have lessened the chances of war, not increased them.36 Interestingly, by the spring of 1939, Bayet was arguing against the long-cherished Ligue dream of general disarmament. He had once believed, he said, ‘in another time, that it was overarming that led the nations to war. I said this in good faith. But after each repeated blow, the facts have conspired to prove that in our era it is the weak who are attacked.’ He asked if Ethiopia or republican Spain or Austria or China had been armed to the teeth.37 It was because they were defenceless that they were attacked. France was guilty of buying a temporary, precarious, ephemeral peace with the blood of others in far-off lands, and he ended with a Jacobin call to arms to defend the heritage of the French Revolution, to defend the world against ‘the brusque abolition of values which give life a sense and a price’.38 It was a stirring defence of all that the Ligue and the republican tradition in France stood for. March 1939 and the invasion of Prague put paid to the assumptions of Gerin and others. Even at this late date, though, the Ligue’s dissident minority continued to make the by now iconoclastic case for treating with Hitler based on arguments that were two political generations old and in no way recognized the sea change wrought in European politics by the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933. The crisis affecting dissident and erstwhile members of the Ligue alike was deep. For Georges Demartial, there was no inherent link between democracy and pacifism; the events of the past twenty-five years had shown that clearly enough. The successive pour la paix et la liberté. Peace and freedom became, for some women at least, different and distinct goals. See Ingram, Politics of Dissent, pp. 282–5. 35  Bayet, ‘Paix et le droit’, pp. 88–9. 36  Ibid., p. 89. 37  Ibid., p. 91. 38  Ibid., p. 93.

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crises faced by Europe in the 1930s as a result of the Nazi seizure of power had not altered Demartial’s view of the reasons for the present discontents, as he made clear in a book which was in press at the time of the invasion of the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. Everything led back to 1914, it seemed, and the notion that democracies were necessarily pacific was nothing but pure ‘legend’.39 As he wrote in 1939, ‘the principal foundation of the legend of the pacific democracies is the lie that Germany alone prepared the war of 1914’ in a brazen attempt to ‘establish its hegemony over Europe and the world . . . War against Germany was presented to the peoples of the coalition, and especially France and England, as a war to save freedom and democracy.’40 That had been a questionable assertion in 1914, undoubtedly, but it was far less the case in 1939 when faced with the reality of Hitler. Demartial could not see that, however. He fought the battles of 1939 with arguments taken from the Great War and the early 1920s. Thus, for example, he argued that ‘any informed citizen would know that Germany is not the sole cause of the present international anarchy’; if France had accepted Chancellor Cuno’s offer in December 1922 to declare war an impossibility between France and Germany for a generation, it might not be faced with the danger of a renascent Germany now. Instead, France had responded with the Ruhr invasion.41 The Munich crisis was the result of the Czechoslovaks being lumbered ‘against their will’, he said, with a whole ‘garland’ of populations that were neither Czech nor Slovak, none of which wanted to be attached to Czechoslovakia. Even the Slovaks, he opined, had only agreed to ‘stay married to the Czechs on condition they occupy separate bedrooms’. Not surprisingly, this had led to the divorce of March 1939 and the establishment of the German ‘protectorate’ over the Czechs.42 The problem was not that Demartial was wrong about the Great War and the 1920s, but rather that he could not see how much had been changed by the events of 1933. In fact, he rejected the idea that there was any fundamental difference between the fascist states and the democracies when it came to the question of peace. During the Great War and again in the late 1930s, French democracy was allied to an autocracy in the form of Tsarist Russia in the first instance and the Soviet Union in the second. In his view, the type of regime had ‘nothing to do with the question of peace and war. In this area, the distinction between fascists and democrats has no connection with reality; it has about as much moral value as the difference in colour of the jerseys in a football match.’43 He quoted Michel Alexandre to the effect that ‘Hitler is the natural son of Poincaré’, which arguably might have been true from an historical perspective, but politically seems nothing short of ill-considered given what was coming down the pipeline later in the year.44 39  See Georges Demartial, La Légende des démocraties pacifiques (Paris: Rieder/Presses universitaires de France, 1939). 40  Ibid., p. 85. 41  Ibid., p. 27. 42  Ibid., p. 29. 43  Ibid., pp. 46 and 56. 44  Cited in ibid., p. 79. This is from a foreword written by Michel Alexandre to a brochure entitled Une Guerre manquée, apparently published by the Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes, which I have been unable to locate, but which is mentioned by Emile Kahn on p. 265 of the draft typescript stenographic record of the 1939 Mulhouse Congress. See BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés 798/19 Congrès de Mulhouse 1939.

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If there is no doubt that people like Demartial were blind to the danger posed by Hitler, it is equally the case, however, that the Ligue des droits de l’homme was guilty of massaging a view of its own past that bore little relation to reality. An examination of the message articulated by the Central Committee to provincial federations and sections is instructive here. A case in point is the Aube Federation. At an information meeting of the Comité Fédéral of the Aube Federation on 7 May 1939, Théophile Joint, the representative of the Comité Central, addressed the criticism made increasingly stridently, both within and outside the Ligue, that it had become too ‘political’. He thought this was a completely normal state of affairs because human rights were essentially a political question, even if, as he said, the Ligue was ‘first of all’ a juridical organization. Far more important was the accusation that the Ligue had crossed the line into war-mongering, an idea Joint rejected as spurious. He claimed that the Ligue had ‘dared’ demand an end to the Great War during the war itself. This was not true. He said that after the war, the Ligue had protested against the ‘injustice’ of the Treaty of Versailles. This was partially true, perhaps, depending on what was understood by ‘injustice’, but his argument that it had been the first to ‘talk of revision of this treaty’ was definitely not true. He was right to say that the Ligue had supported the Weimar Republic, but one would have to agree that the Ligue’s support had been rather attenuated by virtue of its position on the war guilt question, despite what it might like to have believed. And he was correct in saying that the Ligue had never demanded armed intervention in the conflicts of the 1930s, but this, too, was a trifle disingenuous given its willingness by 1937 to draw lines in the sand.45 Almost a month later and two short months before the beginning of the Second World War, the Ligue’s treasurer, René Georges-Etienne, attended the Congress of the Aube Federation as the representative of the Comité Central. In his speech, he asked what possible remedies could be proposed to deal with the fraught ­international situation. There were three possible attitudes, he believed: first, a ‘pure and simple refusal of all claims’ by the dictators; secondly, submission to these claims; and thirdly, negotiation. The Ligue rejected the first two options, but his reasoning in 1939 for refusing to countenance the validity of the dictators’ claims is interesting. Georges-Etienne said that the triumph of Hitler was the direct consequence of the refusal to ‘accord Republican Germany the legitimate satisfaction that it claimed, and it was the abuse of the application of the Treaty of Versailles in this regard’. The brave words of 1938 about how the Sudeten Germans had been more than happy living in Czechoslovakia disappeared in Georges-Etienne’s 1939 speech; he said ‘it was because we did not know how, or did not want, to resolve the Sudeten problem in time that we were forced to sacrifice our Czech friends.’46 45  Théophile Joint in ‘Procès-verbal. Comité Fédéral: réunion d’information’, 7 May 1939, Hôtel de Ville de Troyes, in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés 798/134 (Fédération de l’Aube, Procès verbaux 1923–1939). 46  See ‘Conférence de M.  René Georges-Etienne’, in the minutes of the Congrès fédéral de la LDH, Clairvaux, 4 June 1939, in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés 798/134 (Fédération de l’Aube Procès verbaux 1923–1939). It is strange that Georges-Etienne spoke in favour of negotiation as a possibility, because as we have noted above, the political line taken by the CC in the Spanish case was that negotiation was definitely not an option.

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Given the mistakes of the past and the realities of the present, the only way forward was negotiation, but this had to be from a position of strength. The ‘pacifist states’ of Europe and America had to form ‘a solid barrage’ against the dictators. GeorgesEtienne rather conditionally expressed the desire that ‘public opinion in the totalitarian States will not see this alliance as a threat of encirclement directed against their peoples, but rather a precautionary measure and a safeguard against any new aggression.’47 How this might be achieved was left in the realm of a fond hope. It is paradoxical that ‘mediation’ was out of the question with regard to the Spanish Civil War in 1937, but by 1939, ‘negotiation’ of Hitler’s demands in central Europe seemed acceptable. There was clearly a rich internal dialogue going on inside the Ligue which pitted a long-term amnesia about the ramifications of Ligue positions during the Great War and up to the early 1930s against the more recent memory of Ligue debates since the Nazi seizure of power. The analyses of Georges-Etienne and Joint, made in their speeches to the Aube Federation—in the case of the latter attempting to rewrite aspects of the Ligue’s past positions, and in that of the former apparently even arguing that the Ligue had not fully understood the problems in post-Versailles Czechoslovakia—were not shared by other important members of the Comité Central. Both Georges-Etienne and Joint conceded that mistakes had been made in the more distant past, but the same could not be said of Albert Bayet’s views in 1939. For Bayet, there seemed to be an impermeable memory wall in his analysis of the European situation in March 1939. After the Nazi invasion of the rest of Czechoslovakia, he wrote that he admitted feeling bitterness ‘in thinking that if the world and France had listened to us they would not be where they are today’. For Bayet, though, the appreciation of where things had gone horribly wrong only extended as far back as the Spanish Civil War and the Munich crisis. This is certainly not to argue that he was wrong about the position to take in the spring of 1939. Bayet saw clearly the extent to which the old boundary lines ­separating left from right had become muddied in France. He was right to underline the strangeness of some republicans having more faith in Maurras, Gringoire, and the Cagoule than in Herriot, Basch, Jouhaux, the Ligue des droits de l’homme, and the CGT. He was particularly exercised about the political position of the Lyon section, and wrote that ‘personally, it is hard for me to think that among the secular teachers [of Lyon], with whom and for whom I have always fought, there have been found so many men prepared to follow the Flandins, the Emerys and the Bonnets against us’. Flandin, he said, was ‘Hitler’s man’.48 Lumping the left-wing Emery together with the arch appeasers, Pierre-Etienne Flandin, who was on the centre-right and went on to become one of Pétain’s prime ministers under Vichy, and Georges Bonnet, the Radical foreign minister in 1938–39, was ­rhetorically tendentious. 47 Ibid. 48  Albert Bayet, ‘Le Devoir républicain’, Cahiers 39, 7 (1 April 1939), p. 221. This was reprinted from Le Populaire de Nantes of 24 March 1939. On the extent to which right/left political boundaries had become blurred in late-Third Republic France, see Joseph Folliet, Pacifisme de droite? Bellicisme de gauche? (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1938).

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The Ligue’s 1939 Congress was held in Mulhouse from 16 to 18 July. Given its geographical location just across the Rhine from Germany and with international tensions at a new high, it is perhaps not surprising that the usual number of delegates one might expect at a Ligue Congress failed to materialize at Mulhouse. As late as 5 July, only fifty-four of the delegates had actually registered, leading the Congress organizer to comment that ‘it is absolutely deplorable to note the indifference of our friends. I would go so far as to call their attitude negligent.’49 Earlier in the year, as the local committee began its planning, Kahn had confidently told them to expect about 500 delegates. That never happened. By mid-June, exactly one month before the Congress was to begin, Kahn was saying that perhaps only 300 would turn up.50 In the event, the final number of delegates was 350. Yet again, one has the impression of a Ligue on the ropes. This is confirmed by the tenor of the debates at Mulhouse as well. The single theme of the Congress was ‘The Problem of Peace’.51 There was no doubt that this was the most important issue of the hour by far, but the Ligue seemed to have run out of intellectual steam in dealing with it. Both the rapport moral and the Comité Central report and resolution on the problem of peace were passed ‘unanimously with four votes against’.52 Unity seemed to have descended on the Ligue, but reading the fragmentary Congress reports, the impression one has is of a rump Parliament where unanimity is achieved only because there is no one left to argue with. William Irvine writes that four members of the erstwhile minority turned up at Mulhouse ‘merely to show the flag’.53 The resolution on the problem of peace posited that the freedom-loving democracies needed to coalesce first, after which an international conference would be called to which the fascist powers would be invited. This international conference was predicated on the assumption that there would have to be certain guarantees of success. Albert Bayet and others trumpeted that the Ligue was putting its faith in the League of Nations, which quite frankly was a strange thing to do halfway through 1939 when the Genevan cadaver was barely still warm. He roundly criticized the minority position, reduced by 1939 to four voices (Marc Casati, Camille Planche, Francis Delaisi, and René Château), for

49  R. Masson to Emile Kahn, Mulhouse, 5 July 1939 in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés 798/19 Congrès de Mulhouse 1939. Two days later he remarked in another letter to Kahn that only eighty-two out of a projected 350 delegates had confirmed their attendance. 50  Emile Kahn to R. Masson, Paris, 7 February 1939; Emile Kahn to R. Masson, Paris, 16 June 1939. Masson replied to Kahn that ‘Nous sommes quelque peu désappointés de ce que vous nous écrivez. Nous avions compté sur 500 délégués et les déjeuners engagés ont été basés sur ce chiffre. Près de 600 chambres avaient été retenues.’ BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés 798/19 Congrès de Mulhouse 1939. 51  The report was published beforehand in the Cahiers. See Maurice Viollette, ‘Pour le Congrès de Mulhouse. Le problème de la paix. La doctrine des Droits de l’Homme peut-elle encore servir de règle pour l’organisation de la vie internationale’, Cahiers 39, 10 (15 May 1939), pp. 301–8. 52  See ‘Approbation du rapport moral’ and a report on the Congress by the Aube Federation, dated 9 August 1939, in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés 798/19 Congrès de Mulhouse 1939. Victor Basch wrote in La Lumière of 28 July 1939 that the ‘grande résolution’ on peace was passed with seventeen votes against. See Victor Basch, ‘Après le Congrès I: une belle manifestation de foi démocratique’, Cahiers 39, 15 (1 August 1939), p. 481. 53 Irvine, Between Justice and Politics, p. 191.

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believing still in the possibility of mediation.54 René Gerin, of whom Bayet had written highly only a few months earlier, does not appear to have been at the Congress. Mediation had not worked in Spain and Bayet could not see how it could possibly work in 1939. He neglected to say that he and the CC majority had been totally opposed to it, and in any event, it had never been tried. He was probably right, but it is difficult to see how the League of Nations presented a better alternative. In fact, what Bayet and the Comité Central were calling for was a new Union sacrée against Germany. The tragedy of the situation is that the minority had largely left the Ligue two years earlier at Tours, and, as we shall see, its members continued to view Europe in the age of the dictators through the lens of 1914: they were deeply sceptical of French foreign policy and refused to drink from what they saw as the poisoned chalice of the Russian, now Soviet, connection. As Léon Emery wrote in March 1939 in a letter announcing his departure from the Ligue to the sections in the Fédération du Rhône over which he presided, We are placed before the obvious impossibility of undertaking propaganda for a group in which we no longer believe and inside which we have the impression we are wasting our time. . . We therefore confirm our resolution to leave the Ligue in order to better continue from outside it the fight for peace and freedom to which we remain as attached as ever.55

T H E S E C O N D WO R L D WA R The Second World War began. The Ligue, to its credit, defended the PCF and its newspaper, L’Humanité, on purely human rights grounds from the attacks of the government in September 1939, while at the same time condemning the Communists’ political position following the Nazi–Soviet Pact. Only one number of the Cahiers was published between August 1939 and the fall of France.56 When the Germans arrived in Paris in June 1940, the Hauptarbeitsgruppe (HAG) Frankreich, which was part of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg 54  It is impossible to know for certain if this was the extent of the minority voice in 1939, because the extant draft stenographic report for the Congress is extremely spotty. There is no mention made of anyone else from the minority, however, in the much shorter analytical minutes which exist in the file and seem complete, nor in the report on the Congress by the Aube Federation, cited above. Camille Planche, one of the minoritaires who spoke at the Congress, wrote to Kahn in mid-May 1939 saying that he intended to submit an article to the Cahiers defending the idea of mediation. Whether that article ever materialized is unclear, but it was certainly never published in the Cahiers. See Camille Planche to Emile Kahn, Chambre des Députés, Paris, 23 May 1939 in ALDH BDIC F∆Rés 798/18 Congrès de Mulhouse 1939. 55  Léon Emery and Charles Busseuil to sections in the Rhône Federation, Lyon, 12 March 1939. A copy of this letter made its way to Ligue headquarters on 17 March 1939. See BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés 798/19 Congrès de Mulhouse 1939. 56  Cahiers 40, 1 (1 February 1940). It is clear that even this was a bit of a stretch for the Ligue because this number of the Cahiers was only eight pages long. It is curious that the Ligue des droits de l’homme was only able to publish one number of the Cahiers between August 1939 and the fall of France, whereas the much smaller Association de la paix par le droit was able to maintain something approaching a regular publication schedule at this time.

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(ERR), made a beeline for the Ligue’s headquarters where they found the Ligue’s papers all neatly packed in large cases waiting to be taken elsewhere for safekeeping. Unfortunately, events had overtaken the Ligue and it was the Nazis who profited from the scrupulous care the LDH had taken with its institutional memory. The Hauptarbeitsgruppe Frankreich seized the Ligue’s papers, translated many of them, used them to conduct raids and interviews of Ligue section executive committee members in 171 sections in occupied France, and then transported them back to Berlin for analysis. In September 1943, the papers were moved again, this time to Ratibor, a small farming village in Silesia, to escape the carpet bombing of the German capital by the British and Americans. It was there that they fell into the hands of the advancing Red Army in the spring of 1945, at which point they were transported to Moscow where they remained hidden, forgotten and presumed—by some, at least—to have been burned by the Germans.57 If anything was burned— and it does seem clear that the Ligue’s archives are incomplete—this is likely to have occurred during a bombing raid on Berlin by the RAF in September 1943 when one of the warehouses containing the French booty was hit just before removal of the captured documents to Ratibor; 106 packing cases of documents from France were burned.58 This seems to have been a small part of the total amount of material transported to Silesia, and it is by no means certain that it belonged to the LDH papers. The seizure of the Ligue’s papers (along with a huge amount of other French material) demonstrates the limits of Gleichschaltung as late as the autumn of 1940. Both the Wehrmacht and the German Embassy in Paris expressed doubts about the wisdom of these Gestapo-led actions on behalf of the Einsatzstab Rosenberg, an officer in the Wiesbaden Armistice Commission going so far as to call the seizure of 50,000 books by the ERR in the occupied areas ‘illegal’. This provoked Field Marshal Keitel to order his officers in France to back off because the Einsatzstab

57  For example, the Ligue’s first woman president, the eminent historian Madeleine Rebérioux, confidently asserted in 1991 that the Germans had burned the Ligue’s papers. Then again, Rebérioux also told me that the Ligue was ‘100 per cent patriotic’ and that there was no hint of pacifism in it. Interview with the author at the Ligue’s headquarters, 27, rue Jean Dolent, Paris on 19 June 1991. For an analysis of the Gestapo interrogations of Ligue section presidents and notables in thirteen départements, see Norman Ingram, ‘Selbstmord or Euthanasia? Who Killed the Ligue des droits de l’homme?’, French History 22, 3 (September 2008), pp. 337–57; and Ingram, ‘La Ligue des droits de l’homme et le problème allemand’, Revue d’histoire diplomatique 124, 2 (June 2010), pp. 119–31. 58  Emmanuel Naquet says that ‘sans conteste, le fonds est extrêmement limité’, in Naquet, Pour l’Humanité, p. 30. This is not entirely accurate. It is true that certain things seem to have disappeared from the papers that one would normally expect to be there, but the files also contain many valuable documents. There is also plenty of proof in the files themselves that the Germans were using the material. It is quite likely that some of it was destroyed, ironically enough through Allied bombing raids on Berlin. An ERR report on the removal of the material because of the bombing raids notes that ‘durch den Luftangriff in der Nacht vom 3. zum 4. Sept. 106 Kisten die von der Hauptarbeitsgruppe Frankreich nach Berlin abgeschickt wurden und bei der Spedition Hertling lagerten, verbrannt sind.’ See Obereinsatzführer Ruhbaum, ‘Unterlagen für  den Vierteljahrsbericht.1.7.1943 bis 30.9.1943’ n.d. in Bundesarchiv NS 30/17. A November bombing raid destroyed an even greater number of cases at a second site in Berlin, but much had already been saved by the move to Ratibor. See Haupteinsatzführer Ruhbaum (he was promoted on 1 November 1943), ‘Vierteljahrsbericht für die Zeit vom 1.10.43–31.12.43’, Ratibor, 7 January 1944.

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Rosenberg had Hitler’s express blessing.59 That did not lessen the feeling of unease of German Embassy staff in Paris which continued to be expressed.60 William Irvine has rightly criticized prominent members of the Ligue’s minority for their political positions under Vichy.61 Simon Epstein has done likewise, analysing in some detail the political trajectories of the ‘Dreyfusards under the Occupation’.62 Irvine is careful to point out that ‘the proportion of the Ligue’s leaders in the Resistance as opposed to Vichy (roughly thirty versus about seventeen) is of course an imperfect proxy for the League as a whole because the position taken by the bulk of the militants cannot be known.’63 In fact, Gestapo interrogations of executive committee members of 171 Ligue sections in thirteen occupied departments indicate clearly that 15.8 per cent of the sections interrogated gave up the identities of either Jewish or Freemason members.64 For both Epstein and Irvine, the Ligue des droits de l’homme was a victim of pacifism; it was pacifism which killed the LDH. Irvine adds a second element: anti-capitalism. But surely there were as many ‘anti-capitalists’ in the majority as in the minority. One is left with pacifism as an explanation for the demise of the Ligue des droits de l’homme. On one level this is plausible, but as this book has argued, lurking behind the pacifist question and providing its inspiration long before it ever became identified as pacifism was a profoundly dissenting view of the origins of the Great War and of war guilt. It was this historical dissent, going all the way back to 1915, which was the origin both of the new-style pacifism of the thirties and of the decline and fall of the Ligue des droits de l’homme. Historical dissent on the war guilt question provided the impetus for the ultimately pacifist suspicion of any new Union sacrée and at the same time a deep and abiding suspicion of any connection to Russia— be it Soviet or Imperial. Thus, for example, the defeat of France in 1940 did not change Demartial’s position one iota; if anything, his views found justification in the ‘strange defeat’. As he wrote in the introduction to La Guerre de l’imposture, published in 1941, the book ‘could have appeared ten months earlier. It was therefore not inspired by the defeat. If the war had been victorious, it would have appeared exactly as it is.’ ‘Victory’, he wrote, ‘purifies nothing. It was in October 1919, in the headiness of 59 See ‘Notiz Betreffend Einsatzstab Rosenberg in Paris’, received 11 October 1940 from the Referat Kultur Wissenschaft, n.p. See Keitel’s order in Field Marshal Keitel to the Oberbefehlshaber des Heeres für die Militärverwaltung im besetzen Frankreich, n.p., n.d. Both documents are in AA/R 60600 Kult. W Akten betreffend Geheime Verschlusssachen des Ref. Kult. W.  (1940–1941). A photograph of the original, signed by Keitel, may be found in PA/AA Botschaft Paris 1.321 Akten betreffend: Einsatzstab Rosenberg. Beschlagnahme von Kulturgütern, Bibliotheken und Archiven. 60  Thus, for example, similar reservations were expressed the following year by the embassy about the seizure of Henri Hauser’s library by the ERR. See Dr Bremer, ‘Aufzeichnung für den Herrn Botschafter. Betrifft: Beschlagnahme der Bibliothek des Geschichtsprofessors Henri Hauser durch den Einsatzstab Rosenberg’, Paris, 7 March 1941 in PA/AA Botschaft Paris 1.321. Bremer wrote, ‘Es handelt sich hier wiederum um eine Sonderaktion des Stabes Rosenberg auf eigene Faust, die übrigens der Linie unserer Kulturpolitik durchaus widerspricht. Mit solchen Methoden wird die Professorenschaft der Sorbonne leider und völlig überflüssigerweise gegen uns aufgeputscht.’ 61 Irvine, Between Justice and Politics, pp. 184–212. 62 Epstein, Dreyfusards sous l’Occupation. 63 Irvine, Between Justice and Politics, p. 195. 64  Ingram, ‘Selbstmord’ and Ingram, ‘La Ligue des droits de l’homme et le problème allemand’.

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our triumph, that I began to denounce the alliance of patriotism and lies.’65 Demartial argued that the ‘Czechoslovakian question’ had been of ‘capital’ i­ mportance in the outbreak of war in 1939. In his view, Austria-Hungary ought never to have been dismembered after the Great War. He called it a ‘pillar of European equilibrium’ and wrote that the old imperial regime ought to have been replaced with a federal one. The fact that it had not been was due entirely to French strategic desires to see something, anything, replace the old Franco-Russian alliance now that the Bolshevik revolution had removed the possibility of the Russian connection.66 Looking at Demartial’s last two books, the first written just before the Second World War began, and the second after the defeat of France, it is clear there was no moral difference in his mind between the democracies and the dictators. Both were just as likely to break the peace and both were prone to lying to justify their policies and actions. The difference was that the democracies seemed genuinely to believe that they were operating on a higher moral plane. Demartial rejected this assumption entirely, writing after the defeat of France that for twenty years he and others of an ‘independent mind’ had struggled to separate the concepts of ‘patriotism’ and ‘lies’.67 Peace had become the political imperative and its realization trumped all other considerations.68 It had become an ‘ethic of ultimate ends’, to borrow Martin Ceadel’s explanatory model for British interwar pacifism, but it was an ethic which presented itself in entirely political terms.69 It was denuded of ethical content, however. Demartial was fully aware of the depths plumbed by Nazi anti-Semitism, and yet he wrote that Munich was ‘nothing but an illusion’ because ‘the powerful parties which in France and England, whether because of a democratic ideology, or nationalism, or to avenge persecuted Israelites, or to obey orders from Moscow, wanted war with Germany, had not disarmed and called Munich a capitulation.’70 When Germany took over the rest of Czechoslovakia the following March, ostensibly at the invitation of both the Czechs and the Slovaks to restore civil order, Demartial wrote, ‘Where is the crime?’ Hungary and Poland had already had a nibble of Czechoslovakia and Demartial thought it the rankest hypocrisy for Britain and France to protest the creation of a German protectorate over Czechoslovakia given their track record outside Europe. He called them ‘cannibals calling crime without precedent the fact of eating human flesh’.71 The real culprit in the international crises of the late 1930s, though, was none other than the Treaty of Versailles. Demartial alleged that France and Britain were upset about Prague because they were ‘imperialist powers’ who called themselves ‘pacific’ but wanted peace only on their own terms. Czechoslovakia represented for them, he said, their own ‘hegemony and prestige in central Europe’; in other words, ‘the maintenance 65  Georges Demartial, 1939: La Guerre de l’imposture (Paris: Editions Jean Flory, 1941), p. 5. 66  Ibid., pp. 15–16. 67  Ibid., p. 5. 68  See, for example, the title of an article by Henri Jeanson, ‘La Paix prime le droit’, La Flèche (21 March 1936), cited in Charles Rousseau, ‘La Dénonciation des Traités de Locarno devant le droit international’, La Paix par le droit 46, 4 (April 1936), p. 198. 69  On the idea of an ‘ethic of ultimate ends’, derived from Max Weber’s philosophy of religion, see Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain: The Defining of a Faith, 1914–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). 70 Demartial, Guerre de l’imposture, p. 18. 71  Ibid., p. 25.

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of the Versailles Treaty’. In his view, the ‘first cause of the monstrous war of 1939 is there and nowhere else’ and the ‘Danzig question’ was going to provide the two western democracies with the reason they needed to begin a war.72 Thus, for Demartial, Danzig became a ruse, an excuse for the war against Hitler. The redrawing of the European political map had almost been achieved without recourse to war—the only thing that remained was the Danzig question, according to Demartial—when ‘just as twenty-five years previously in the case of Serbia, France and England interposed themselves.’ It was not enough that they were ‘gorged with territories and riches’; under the ‘mask of pacifism’ they sought to ‘impose their law on a Central Europe where they had no right to be’. So, ‘Hitler took up the challenge’, and Demartial asked if he could be considered ‘the only responsible party, or even the principal responsible party’ in the outbreak of war.73 Danzig was always going to be a friction point, but the answer was not to declare war, but rather to convene a European conference to ‘pacifically revise the Versailles Treaty’. He rejected the Allied notion that in order to ‘remake Europe on the bases of justice and cooperation’ it was necessary to go to war, ‘a war which is nothing but the exact replay of the one they promised their miserable peoples would be the last’.74 As in the Great War, so in the Second World War the issue of Russian ‘treason’ was important to Demartial’s vision. The Nazi–Soviet Pact of August 1939 was certainly an unpleasant surprise for the West, but it was hardly without precedent; Italy and Romania had changed sides, after all, during the Great War. According to Demartial, Russia had done no more than any other state would have done: it had acted according to its interests. Once again, the problem had its origins at Versailles where Russia had ‘lost Poland, the Baltic states and Finland.’ Demartial asked ‘why would Russia ally itself to the authors of the treaty of Versailles against the state that was fighting to abolish it?’ What was ‘most beautiful’, he wrote, was the way Russia was accused of having started the 1939 war because it was held to be its ‘fault that Germany had not capitulated on the question of Danzig’. He found this not a little ironic, given that Russia had carved up Poland with Nazi Germany, and yet the Anglo-French alliance had not declared war on Russia but only on Germany. In Demartial’s view, it was ‘certain’ that ‘if the French and the British had honestly held back from an affair which was of no concern to them, there would have been no Russo-German collusion, nor a new partition of Poland, nor any of the things that have happened since September 1939.’75 When Germany signed a treaty with the Soviet Union, ‘it was therefore not with a view to starting a war against England or France, but rather in the hope that this would lead them to renounce war’.76 The entire problem was Anglo-French ‘imperialism’ in Europe; the Great War had begun in Demartial’s view not because of a blank cheque given to the Austrians by the Germans, but rather because the Russians, aided and abetted by the French and the British, had told the Serbs to refuse any cooperation with the Austrians in 72  Ibid., p. 26. 73  Ibid., p. 36. Demartial took the narrative all the way back to the first partition of Poland in 1772 and argued that the British, in particular, were guilty of duplicity in their position on Polish independence. See pp. 27–35. 74  Ibid., p. 38. 75  Ibid., pp. 40–2. 76  Ibid., p. 44.

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the search for those responsible for the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Exactly the same thing happened in 1939. Britain and France were guilty of indiscriminately backing the Poles and the result was the same as in 1914: ‘Europe was again on fire.’77 Demartial’s depiction of European politics at the end of the 1930s is a film negative reversal of the narrative we are accustomed to reading; black becomes white and white becomes black. This is not to say that all of his arguments were a denial of facts. They were not that. What they were was a profoundly disturbing and dissenting reading of a dominant historical narrative. Thus, for example, he argued that both 1914 and 1939 were justified to French public opinion as wars whose ‘supreme goal was the defence of democracy’.78 There is some truth to that assertion, particularly as it applies to 1914 and the logical contortions demanded by France’s war effort in the Great War. The conclusions Demartial came to, in the context of the Second World War, were quite frankly illiberal, however. He claimed that the lies by which the French government had twice led France into war against Germany needed to be countered by government control of the press when it came to questions of foreign policy and a popular referendum on any declaration of war. Why the government should be trusted with control of the press was a non-sequitur, given all that he had said here and before, but it was not addressed.79 Absent from all of this was any awareness of how much 1939 differed from 1914. The caesura separating two political worlds was 1933, but the sea change that occurred when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany was not recognized. For Demartial, the issues were the same. The higher goal was peace. As he wrote in his conclusion, Let us wish for one thing. In 1815, France, more humiliated than now because it had fallen farther, was able to make peace and contribute side by side with the victors in the reconstruction of Europe which ensured general peace for a century. May the France of today, forced into a mystique of ruin, find it in itself to do as much!80

Given sentiments like the foregoing, it is hardly surprising that members of the erstwhile minority of the Ligue des droits de l’homme should have faced hard scrutiny, trial before the courts, and in some cases prison sentences after the Liberation of France. But here, too, paradoxes abound. According to William Irvine, roughly a third of the pre-war Comité Central members of the Ligue des droits de l’homme ended up on the wrong side of the political bedclothes under Vichy.81 This even included people like Théodore Ruyssen, the long-serving president of the Association de la paix par le droit, who can hardly be considered a member of the dissident minority, but who wrote a 77  Ibid., p. 49. 78  Ibid., p. 79. 79  Ibid., p. 88. Cf. Demartial’s earlier works: L’Evangile du Quai d’Orsay (Paris: André Delpeuch, 1926), La Guerre de 1914: comment on mobilisa les consciences (Paris: Editions des Cahiers Internationaux, 1922; 2nd edition Paris: Rieder, 1927), Les Responsabilités de la guerre: Histoire d’un mensonge (Paris: Rivière, s.d. [1931]), La Haine de la Vérité (Paris: Rieder, 1939), Le Mythe des guerres de légitime défense (Paris: Rivière, 1931), and La Légende des démocraties pacifiques (Paris: Rieder/ Presses universitaires de France, 1939). 80 Demartial, Guerre de l’imposture, p. 89. 81 Irvine, Between Justice and Politics, p. 195.

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number of articles in the collaborationist press which created problems for the APD at the Liberation, to say nothing of Ruyssen’s exclusion from the CC of the Ligue after the war.82 Jules Prudhommeaux prided himself on ‘not having even once written or spoken to a German since the end of 1939’, but Ruyssen was in serious trouble with ‘the leaders of the Ligue des droits de l’homme, the Emile Kahn’s, Gombault’s, Sicard de Plauzoles’, etc., who, frothing at the mouth to have a “purge” at any price’, had ‘villainously attacked Ruyssen’.83 What are we to make of this? Had Ruyssen and others like him devolved into supporters of Vichy? Others, such as Emery, Gerin, and Challaye, went farther, writing extensively in the collaborationist press. Did they do this out of philofascism or because they were anti-Semitic? The question must be asked and the answer is difficult. René Gerin wrote a regular literary column in Marcel Déat’s L’Œuvre; unsurprisingly, it became increasingly apolitical as the Liberation approached. His early ruminations after the fall of France were hardly anodyne. At his trial in 1945, Gerin claimed that he worked at L’Œuvre merely in order to earn his crust of bread, that he certainly did not follow Déat’s political line, and that in any event, he had only been responsible for a weekly literary column.84 He also claimed that he had refused a German request that he restart publication of the pacifist ­newspaper Le Barrage, of which he had been the editor. But if his journalistic production at L’Œuvre is examined carefully, it is clear that in the salad days of the beginning of the Vichy period Gerin was far more openly political than he was in 1944 as the Nazi enterprise in France wound down in the face of the impending Allied victory. In his first article, a review of Georges Demartial’s La Légende des démocraties pacifiques published in October 1940, Gerin wrote that it was already too late in the summer of 1939, when Légende had been published, for the democracies to change their course. A miracle would have been needed, and since there was no miracle, ‘the Democracies got what was coming to them.’85 Gerin called the book an ‘avenging book’, taking a ‘bitter satisfaction’ in noting that Demartial and his ilk were not only right, but also the best and most far-sighted servants of the ‘real’ Patrie. He recommended that all French people who had the honesty to examine 82  See Théodore Ruyssen, ‘La Justice en marche’, L’Effort 1, 37 (9 September 1940), p. 1; and Ruyssen, ‘Révolution et tradition’, L’Effort 1, 72 (14 October 1940), p. 1. I am indebted to Nicolas Offenstadt for drawing these articles to my attention. On L’Effort see Yves Bongarçon, ‘Un Vichysme de gauche? Les débuts de L’Effort, quotidien socialiste lyonnais (1940)’, Cahiers d’histoire 32, 2 (1987), pp. 123–46. Ruyssen was certainly aware that his activity under Vichy created problems in the post-war period for the APD. In a letter probably to Jules Prudhommeaux in June 1945, he wrote that ‘En ce qui concerne la Résistance, vous pouvez dire, en effet, que j’ai . . . fourni des fonds à la Résistance et, en outre, que, pendant toute l’occupation allemande, j’ai abrité chez moi, non sans risques, une dizaine de malheureux traqués par la milice ou la Gestapo, la plupart Juifs: Polonais, Roumains, Hongrois, Allemands, etc. Pour l’activité politique, dire que notre Association et ses dirigeants se sont toujours élevés à un plan supérieur à la politique des partis.’ Théodore Ruyssen to anon., Grenoble, 9 June 1946 in Archives départementales du Gard (hereafter ADG) 5J8. 83  Jules Prudhommeaux to August Laune, Versailles, Tuesday, 18 June 1946 in ADG/5J8. 84  René Gerin, Un Procès de la Libération (Paris: Editions des Cahiers de Contre-Courant, 1954). 85 René Gerin, Review of Georges Demartial, La Légende des démocraties pacifiques, L’Œuvre, Monday, 14 October 1940, p. 2.

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their conscience should read Légende, which he rather ominously concluded ‘will help them fulfil their duties’.86 In December 1940, he argued that the pacifist analysis had not been heeded and hence Europe had suffered an unnecessary war; ‘only collaboration of all the peoples of Europe will recreate a world in which you can exist again.’87 In January 1941, he was even more direct, calling the Second World War ‘the most idiotic and most odious of the wars fought by the French people’.88 The tone of these and other review articles by Gerin in the early months of the Vichy regime contrasts starkly with the limp and circumspect approach of his ­articles in 1944. Of the thirty-one reviews published between 8 January and 17 August 1944, when L’Œuvre stopped publication, only three were of the slightest interest politically, even in a veiled sense. In any event, with the Liberation of Paris, Gerin quickly found himself in trouble with the authorities. In mid-November 1944, the police questioned him about his activities during the Occupation. According to the police report, he admitted he had written literary criticism for newspapers he could not remember the names of, and had allegedly been arrested twice during the Occupation, once by the Gestapo and once by German officers. He also told police that he had never received Germans at his apartment in the period 1940–44.89 In July 1945, however, Gerin was sentenced to eight years of hard labour, ten years of banishment (interdiction de séjour), and ‘national indignity’ for life. This was eventually reduced to one year of imprisonment and national degradation for life.90 René Gerin spent the rest of his days until his death in 1957 trying to clear himself of the conviction for collaboration.91 As for Challaye, there is no doubt he had said and written ‘some stupid things’ under Vichy, as Michel Alexandre wrote after the war.92 In December 1941, Challaye had written of the ‘duty’ to collaborate with the Germans, and had called the Second World War ‘the most absurd of wars’ and an ‘abominable blow against the security of France’. The link with the Great War and its aftermath was still of primordial importance; the essential problem continued to be the ‘idiotic treaty of Versailles’. He praised Marshal Pétain who had ‘saved the country by imposing the Armistice’ and by having the ‘courage to go to Montoire’ for the infamous meeting

86 Ibid. 87 René Gerin, ‘Doléances romantiques sur la fin d’un monde’ [Review of Pierre Mac Orlan, Chronique de la fin d’un monde (Editions Emile-Paul Frères), André Gide, Feuillets (December 1940 issue of the Nouvelle Revue Française), Alfred Fabre-Luce, Lettre à un Américain (also in the December 1940 issue of the Nouvelle Revue Française)], L’Œuvre, Friday, 20 December 1940, p. 2. 88  René Gerin, ‘Documents et témoignages sur la guerre du mensonge’, L’Œuvre, Thursday, 2 and Friday, 3 January 1941, p. 2. 89  ‘Rapport C[ommissai]re Police Salpétrière transmis à Petit Parquet, le 15-11-44’ in René Gerin papers in the private possession of Mr Daniel Lérault, conservateur at the Bibliothèque nationale. 90  See Gerin, Procès, pp. 41–2. See also Gérard Vidal, ‘Discours de Gérard Vidal (France) à la Conférence Préparatoire W.R.I., Cambridge, 30 décembre 1946’, in War Resisters International archives, International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam. 91  See Gerin, Procès. 92  Undated handwritten note by Alexandre on the Challaye trial, but certainly written before it, in Bibliothèque municipale de Nîmes (hereafter BMN), Ms. 801/VII.1.

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with Hitler.93 Challaye was part of the group of dissenting pacifists who wrote many of the articles in the short-lived newspaper, Germinal, which published its first number just six weeks before the Allied invasion of Normandy. Some of these voices had been part of the LDH minority during the 1920s or later: Challaye, Armand Charpentier, and Léon Emery. A month after the D-Day invasion, Germinal was calling for outright collaboration with the Nazis. Thanks to the Allies, French soil was once again a battlefield and ‘thousands of French people have perished’.94 The case of Léon Emery under the Occupation is problematic. In June 1942, he gave a speech at Bordeaux for Marcel Déat’s Rassemblement national populaire, an avowedly collaborationist group.95 In the speech, he attempted to explain the events which led, as he saw it, from Munich to Montoire, the meeting between Marshal Philippe Pétain and Hitler. The speech was a reprise of some of the ideas already enunciated in his 1938 pamphlet examined above.96 The European crisis had its origins in the ‘problems created by the Treaty of Versailles’, and he had hoped that the Munich accords would lead to their ‘liquidation’ and to a general and mutual disarmament. The Nazi–Soviet Pact was nothing short of ‘sensational’, but it ought to have caused the ‘insane of London and Paris’ to halt their rush to the precipice. Emery called the Franco-British policy of support for Poland one of ‘encirclement of Germany’; the second pillar of this policy was to have been an alliance with the Soviet Union, but without it, Poland was ‘as manifestly isolated and lost as Czechoslovakia had been the year before’.97 The Phoney War ensued, with its months of waiting ‘in the night, in ignorance and in lies’, but the defeat of June 1940 meant that France had to decide to ‘attempt as the vanquished what it had always refused to do before the war when it could have discussed things equal to equal’. ‘The problem is the same’, he said: ‘we all know it is that of FrancoGerman collaboration for the creation of peace and the organisation of Europe.’98 Peace was the overarching concern, the supreme goal: ‘this certainty, strengthened by the memory of the enormous errors of the past, is the only way we can arm our thinking, and help ourselves to search bitterly for all of the ways to save what can still be saved for the people of France and of Europe.’99 Even as late as the spring of 1944, the theses of the Ligue des droits de l’homme minority linking one war with the next could be found in the writing of Léon Emery. Emery roundly criticized France for having ‘blindly tied itself to tsarist Russia and then to Stalinist Russia which was even more imperialist’. Twice, he said, France had been dragged into wars ‘whose causes did not in the slightest bear 93  Félicien Challaye, preface in Raoul-Albert Bodinter, Vérités d’avant-paix (Paris: Les Editions de ‘Mon Pays’, n.d. [1942]), pp. 17–21. 94  Germinal, ‘Soyons les Combattants de la paix’, Germinal 11 (7 July 1944), p. 2. The paper said ‘Plus personne n’ignore que travailler à forger des armes ici ou en Allemagne, c’est travailler à notre défense personnelle, c’est travailler à la victoire européenne qui amènera la vraie libération.’ 95  Léon Emery, ‘De Munich à Montoire: Conférence faite à Bordeaux sous les auspices du R.N.P. le 27 juin 1942’, typescript in Dossier ‘Ecrits de la 2e guerre mondiale’, Archives Léon Emery, Institut d’histoire sociale. 96  See Emery, Panorama. 97  Emery, ‘Munich à Montoire’, pp. 3 and 7. 98  Ibid., p. 7. 99 Ibid.

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on its vital interests’. ‘No doubt people will ask with increasing disbelief how it was important to the French people to prevent Austrian reprisals against a Serbian government guilty or complicit in a political crime in 1914.’ Emery saw the origins of the Second World War through the same lens. ‘What did it matter to France’, he asked, ‘that a German city on the Baltic Sea be returned to Germany when everybody agreed that its return was both inevitable and logical?’100 Absent from all of these analyses was the question of Nazi anti-Semitism, together with any appreciation of how much Hitler had changed the rules of the political game. The former Action Française writer, Dominique Sordet, criticized Emery for not dealing with the ‘Jewish question’ in his wartime book, La Troisième République. Emery’s rather lame response was that he did not know the answer to the ‘terrible problem’ and that ‘in order not to be unjust or summary, I take the provisional position of leaving aside an obvious lacuna from which there is nothing to conclude but my intellectual and moral scruples.’101 An important name from the minority was missing from this group: that of Michel Alexandre, and with good reason. As Alexandre, an assimilated French Jew, wrote in a letter to one of his former students, Jean Nersessian, in early 1940 and well before the fall of France, ‘We are heading towards the monasteries.’102 Four years of silence and a continual search for a safe haven were about to begin for Alexandre, but his faith in the rectitude of the minority’s theses does not appear to have been broken by his experiences under Vichy. Nor did the ties of friendship and respect binding him to Challaye and Emery seem to have been tarnished by their collaborationism. As Alexandre wrote to the examining magistrate in 1945 in a letter defending Challaye: Hunted and more or less on the run, I saw very little of Challaye in the years 1940–44. I only read in a piecemeal fashion the articles that he published in this period, but in which I always found his ideas of yesteryear. . . All persecution—and especially racial— horrified him. At the most critical moments he did not cease to offer me sanctuary in his home103

Alexandre’s defence of Emery was in a similar vein. He wrote that the Second World War was ‘the final blow which he [Emery] could not overcome. Lost in his despair, seeing before us only chaos and irremediable decadence, this man who was normally so lucid, thought a quick end to the conflict possible as early as 1940’. In Alexandre’s view, Emery had ‘resigned himself ’ to Vichy as to a lesser evil, nothing more, and ‘thus, the purest pacifism found itself the source and the unique source of the errors of attitude which he has committed during the past three years.’104 100  Léon Emery, ‘Conditions de vie d’un régime’, Germinal 5 (26 May 1944), p. 1. 101  Léon Emery to Dominique Sordet, Allevard, 3 October 1943 in Léon Emery, La Troisième République (Paris: 1943), pp. 207–8. Sordet’s criticism is contained in his ‘Avant-propos’, pp. 13–14. 102  Michel Alexandre to Jean Nersessian, Clermont-Ferrand, n.d. [early 1940], in BMN Ms. 801.V5. 103  Michel Alexandre à Monsieur le Président, Limoges, 12 July 1945. Typescript in Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine (BDIC), Nanterre, Dossiers Jeanne et Michel Alexandre F∆Rés. 348. 104  ‘Témoignage de M.A. pour Emery: Notes Justificatives’, n.d. in BDIC Dossier Jeanne et Michel Alexandre, F∆Rés. 348. Alexandre’s emphasis.

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The fact, though, that both Emery and Challaye published articles in a newspaper which called not just for support of the Vichy regime (by 1944 more of a fiction than a reality), but for outright collaboration with the Nazis in the hope of a German victory in the Second World War beggars the imagination.105 How does one explain this? For people like Challaye, Emery, and Demartial, there were at least four reasons for their political positions under Vichy, all of which were ultimately a function of the Great War: a deeply dissenting view on war origins and war guilt which went all the way back to 1914; a belief by the end of the 1930s in the irremediably corrupt nature of the Third Republic; a visceral anti-communism which drew life from a negative view of the Russian connection which had its origins once again in 1914; and finally, ties of friendship which seemed to trump everything.106 The fundamental issue was the question of war guilt and the origins of the Great War, however. As Emery said in his final statement to the court of appeal, following his initial conviction in late 1945, ‘the continuity of my political attitude . . . cannot therefore have been determined by the defeat and the occupation. I am of those who for twenty years have tried to deflect the catastrophe which we saw returning’. He underlined that this in no sense meant an acceptance of fascism, Nazism, or racism.107 But as Alexandre wrote of Challaye in words that applied to all of them, ‘stupid things’ had indeed been written and spoken from 1940 to 1944. Georges Michon, to give him credit, seems not to have followed Challaye, Emery, and Demartial into outright ­collaboration, preferring instead what might be called an ‘innere Auswanderung’ in the direction of ‘purely’ historical studies on the French Revolution.108 The extent to which History can ever be totally divorced from the society around it is doubtful, however. Georges Albertini, reviewing ‘our friend’ Georges Michon’s 1941 book on the role of the press on the eve of the wars of the French Revolution, clearly understood this. Albertini wrote, ‘Reading this book is entrancing for French people who wish not only to know about the origins of the revolutionary war of 1792, but also to understand those of the war of 1939.’ He drew a direct comparison between public opinion in 1791, ‘intoxicated by the press, to the point of believing that the kings [of Europe] wanted to go to war against France which was not at all the case’, and the second half of the 1930s when 105  See, for example, Paul Rives’ article more than a fortnight after the D-Day landings, ‘Pour la France et pour l’Europe’, Germinal 9 (23 June 1944), p. 1. 106  See Ingram, ‘“Nous allons vers les monastères”: French Pacifism and the Crisis of the Second World War’, in Crisis and Renewal in Twentieth-Century France, edited by Martin S. Alexander and Kenneth Mouré (New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2002), esp. pp. 139–45. 107  Léon Emery, ‘Déclaration finale’ in Institut d’Histoire Sociale, Archives Léon Emery, Dossier ‘Léon Emery. Son Procès’. 108  This is Irvine’s view. See Irvine, Between Justice and Politics, p. 215. One can see this same process at work after the war in the man responsible for the seizure of the Ligue’s papers on behalf of the Hauptarbeitsgruppe Frankreich (part of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg or ERR), Dr Gerd Wunder. Wunder retreated to the much safer remove of the sixteenth century on which he wrote a number of learned books while at the same time working as a Gymnasium teacher. There was even a Festschrift and ten years later a collection of his essays published in his honour. See Festschrift für Gerd Wunder. Württembergisch Franken: Jahrbuch Band 58 (Schwäbisch Hall: Historischer Verein für Württembergischen Franken, 1974). See also Gerd Wunder, Bauer, Bürger, Edelmann: Ausgewählte Aufsätze zur Sozialgeschichte von Gerd Wunder. Festgabe zu seinem 75. Geburtstag, edited by Kuno Ulshöfer (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1984).

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journalists of both left and right argued in favour of a ‘policy of firmness’ and what he called ‘other strategic anticipations’.109 Death spared other members of the Ligue’s minority the indignities of legal proceedings after the Liberation. Mathias Morhardt died in April 1939 and thus escaped the Second World War entirely. Both Michon and Demartial died within a few months of the end of the war, in July and October 1945 respectively. Morhardt, Michon, Alexandre, and Demartial were the key figures in the dissenting historical tradition which began in the earliest days of the Great War and ­ultimately hobbled the Ligue des droits de l’homme. As the sun set on the 1920s, the decade of things that might have been, and the shadows lengthened in the 1930s, the original dissenters were seconded by Félicien Challaye, Léon Emery, and René Gerin. For all of these men, witnesses or survivors of the hecatomb, the Great War was the defining moment of their political lives, the reference point they could never transcend. They could not comprehend how much Hitler had changed everything. Nor could they understand that if the historical arguments remained valid, the political and moral context in which these arguments existed had, by the late 1930s, changed completely. For the Ligue des droits de l’homme, the question of war origins and war guilt lay at the centre of its existence from 1914 onwards; it, too, was a reference point that could never be transcended. The Ligue was not killed by the Second World War or the Nazis. The death spiral began much earlier, during the Great War. By the time the Nazis rolled into Paris in June 1940, choices had been made, sides had been taken, and interpretations arrived at. The Nazis found the Ligue des droits de l’homme half-dead by its own hand.

109 Georges Albertini, Review of Georges Michon, Le Rôle de la presse en 1791–1792 (Paris: Editions de la T.E.P.A.C., 1941) in L’Atelier, 15 November 1941, p. 6.

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10 When All Is Said and Done . . . En guise de conclusion This book is not meant to be a contribution to the huge literature concerning the origins of the Great War. Its goal has been simpler and yet deeper. It has sought to analyse the impact of the war origins debate on an important French cross-party Republican political grouping, the Ligue des droits de l’homme. Equally, it has tried to explain how this debate within the LDH catalysed the emergence of a new style of pacifism in France from about 1930 onwards. It was a pacifism begotten not of the ‘placid’ conditions of its British counterpart, but rather of sustained, vigorous, indeed acrimonious debate on the question of war origins and war guilt. The LDH was the progenitor of this new pacifism; it was the debates within the Ligue which caused the emergence of the new pacifism, not, as usually assumed, Romain Rolland’s 1914 article, ‘Au-dessus de la mêlée’. That said, pacifism did not kill the Ligue des droits de l’homme, but rather it was the war guilt debate that did so. The Ligue was fixated on the war guilt question; the emergence of the new pacifism was merely an ancillary, albeit very important, result of this larger debate. Combined with this was a suspicion of (Soviet) Russian motives as deep in 1939 as it had been in 1914. This antipathy to Russia constitutes one of the elements which explains the slide of some members and erstwhile members of the LDH into support for Vichy during the Second World War. The circle was thus closed, but it would be a mistake to conclude from this that the men and women who moved in this direction did so primarily as a result of anti-Semitism or philo-Nazism. On the contrary, for most of these quintessential non-conformists, their political engagement in 1939 was an expression above all of their attachment to peace and the conviction that the Second World War was the bitter fruit of the First. The Ligue des droits de l’homme was mortally weakened long before the beginning of the Second World War. The war guilt problem lay at the centre of its concerns for the entire length of the interwar period. During the Great War itself, a minority of men and women took shape that would eventually provoke the schism of the Ligue in 1937. The debate between minority and majority quickly became one about the bona fides of France’s war effort during the Great War and coloured all discussion of French foreign policy and politics thereafter. The tipping point, the point of no return, for the Ligue was the Tours Congress of July 1937 and not the fall of France in the spring of 1940.

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The initial division within the Ligue, which saw the emergence of the dissident minority during the Great War, had tremendous ramifications for the future as well as tangible political effects at the time. The relationship with Germany was the single most important question for the Ligue des droits de l’homme after 1914. The Ligue’s view of Germany and the German situation was defined, though, if not outright deformed, by its relationship with a very particular kind of German, notably in its links with Hellmut von Gerlach and some members of the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte. These people articulated a view of Germany that was at variance with left-wing views within their own country, most notably on the issue of Article 231 and the Versailles Treaty. The debate on war guilt saturated the LDH’s view of Germany right down to the Second World War. It had real political ramifications. Whether it was the debates on war origins during the Great War itself and the peace conference that ended it, or the discussion of the ramifications of this debate through the 1920s and on into the Second World War—reparations, the Ruhr Occupation, Locarno, disarmament, the Ligue’s reaction to the rise of the Nazis, the view of the Third Reich, the multiple international crises of the 1930s, the slide into war in 1938–39, and the French relationship to (Soviet) Russia—all of these discussions for the Ligue des droits de l’homme were filtered through the haunting memory of the Great War and the deep suspicion that it had been fought by France under false pretences. Robert Gerwarth argues that the Great War did not really end in 1918 but rather continued on in various forms into the early 1920s, at least for the ‘vanquished’.1 There is much to commend this insightful thesis, but in many respects the Great War was never really over for the French—either in 1923 or even during the Second World War. Its lingering after-effects continued to be felt right through the interwar period and on into Vichy. This brings us to the fraught question of 1940 and Vichy. Does all of the foregoing suggest that France was politically and morally ‘decadent’ in 1940? Were these the ‘hollow years’ in the sense meant by Eugen Weber? What do we make of the indictment of Marc Bloch which for decades has hovered over the debate about the reasons for France’s ‘strange defeat’? The answer is complex. According to Philip Nord, 1940 was above all a military defeat, itself the result of a whole constellation of factors ranging from French bad luck to Guderian’s insubordination and the tactical brilliance of the Manstein Plan. It is a mistake, in his view, to erect an entire superstructure of teleological assumptions based on what happened militarily in 1940, and in this he is surely right.2 Part of the problem with the debate on the 1940 question is that it inevitably gets bogged down in a discussion about when and how the French began to respond to Nazism, which itself is closely

1  Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917–1923 (London: Allen Lane, 2016). 2  Philip Nord, France, 1940: Defending the Republic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). Cf. Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940 (London: Oxford University Press, 1949); Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, La Décadence, 1932–1939 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1979); Eugen Weber, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s (New York: Norton, 1994).

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linked to the hoary debate about French ‘decadence’. As Nord argues, the French were no more or less ‘decadent’ than anybody else in 1939.3 Rarely have historians asked the larger and more important question, namely to what extent France was complicit—admittedly unconsciously and inadvertently so—in the rise of Hitler, which is what necessitated the French arms build-up of the end of the 1930s in the first place. In other words, the question is mal posée. It ought to be ‘why did the Nazi menace exist in the first place?’, rather than ‘why did France not respond to it sooner?’ A criticism of this book might well be that it provides a French answer to a German question, but that is to dodge the issue of the impact of the Great War and the thorny question of war origins on European political developments twenty-five years later at the end of the 1930s. The Ur question remains and cannot be avoided: it is simply to what extent France (and its Allies) might well have won the Great War, but lost the peace thereafter. The answer to that question is not the usual stock response given by the proponents of the ‘strange defeat’ or ‘decadence’ thesis, but rather simply that the possibility of 1940 was created by France’s inability to imagine the impact of the war guilt debate on European politics. France went to war in 1939 and was defeated in 1940 because the chickens of 1914 had come home to roost. This is in no way to argue that France ought not to have gone to war, allied with Britain, against the bloodthirsty Nazi menace in 1939. Not to have done so would have led ineluctably to a ‘peace of the tombstones’, to use a phrase from the previous war.4 Hitler had to be stopped. It is, however, to suggest that the origins of that menace were at least partially of France’s own making. This was not a function of ‘decadence’ but more the result of the unintended consequence of the way the Great War ended. Without Article 231 there would have been no Second World War. The ‘unspoken assumptions’ of 1914—admittedly somewhat different from James Joll’s—continued to wreak their malignant effect in 1939. The Ligue des droits de l’homme and the debates within it on the origins of the Great War are thus essential to any understanding of interwar France. The LDH was the locus in quo for the emergence of a new form of pacifism in France, a pacifism whose development was catalysed by the debate on the origins of the war. That debate was pregnant with consequences for the future because it was predicated on the belief that France bore a heavy responsibility for the outbreak of war in August 1914 and that this was largely a result of its military alliance with Imperial Russia. This meant that when French foreign policy began to cast around for a closer relationship with Moscow in the 1930s, the by now genuine pacifists of the Ligue’s minority steadfastly refused to countenance the malignancy of the Russian connection. There was an unrelenting, implacable logic to the minority position. If the Great War had been fought under false pretences, if the Germans were not uniquely responsible for it, if the Franco-Russian alliance shared some of the responsibility 3 Nord, France, 1940, esp. pp. 133–66. Cf. Robert Frank, Le Prix du réarmement français, 1935–1939 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1982). 4  Théodore Ruyssen, in Le Congrès de 1916 de la Ligue des droits de l’homme. Compte-rendu ­sténographique. 1er et 2me Novembre 1916 (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1917), p. 58.

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for its outbreak, then 1.4 million young Frenchmen had died in vain, to say nothing of the millions of combatants from the other belligerent nations. That, in turn, explains the evolution towards pacifism and the increasingly entrenched opinion of the minority which refused to brook the idea of a new crusade against Nazi Germany. Fixated as they were on the sins of the fathers, they could not see that the sons faced a new foe who was to wreak unspeakable horrors on Europe.

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Bibliography P R I M A RY A RC H I VA L S O U RC E S Archives départementales du Gard (ADG) Série 5J8 Archives de la Préfecture de Police (APP) BA 1775 Société d’études documentaires et critiques sur la guerre Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris (BHVP) Jeanne Mélin papers in the Fonds Bouglé Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) Fonds Romain Rolland Félicien Challaye, L’Etrange Chemin de la paix: roman uchronique (Paris: mimeographed typescript, 1952), accession no. 4-Y2-4264. Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde NS 30/17 R 58/4179 (Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte) R 58/6264a/Teil 1 ‘Auflösung der Deutschen Liga für Menschenrechte und der Deutschen Friedensgesellschaft. – Berichte, Mitgliederverzeichnisse und beschlagnahmte Unterlagen (ab 1927)’ R 72/1850 Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes (PA/AA), Berlin Botschaft Paris 1.321 Akten betreffend: Einsatzstab Rosenberg. Beschlagnahme von Kulturgütern, Bibliotheken und Archiven R 26184 (Die Kriegsschuldstellung des Auslandes: Frankreich) R 26185 (Die Kriegsschuldstellung des Auslandes: Frankreich) R 26186 (Die Kriegsschuldstellung des Auslandes: Frankreich) R 26188 (Die Kriegsschuldstellung des Auslandes: Frankreich) R 26252 (Gerin) R 26399 (Schriftwechsel mit Vereinen und Privatpersonen) R 26403 (Schriftwechsel mit Vereinen und Privatpersonen) R 26520 (Michon) R 60600 (Kult. W.  Akten betreffend Geheime Verschlusssachen des Ref. Kult. W. [1940–1941]) R 70930 (Pazifismus Frankreich) Centre de documentation juive contemporaine (CDJC), Paris Archive Osobyi, RG-11.001M International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam Archives of the War Resisters’ International

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270 Bibliography Bibliothèque municipale de Nîmes Archives Jeanne et Michel Alexandre Archives René Gerin Papers in the private possession of Mr. Daniel Lérault, ancien conservateur à la Bibliothèque nationale Institut d’histoire sociale, Paris Archives Léon Emery Wiener Library, London Lehmann-Russbüldt, Otto. ‘Lebenserinnerungen bis zur Jahreswende 1932–1933’, unpublished typescript memoir. Archives du Ministère des Affaires étrangères (MAE), Paris Série SDN/IC/Vol. 231 Commission des origines de la guerre de 14–18 Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine (BDIC), Nanterre Dossiers Jeanne et Michel Alexandre G F∆Rés 102/1 F∆Rés 348 Archives de la Ligue des droits de l’homme: F∆Rés 798/1 Comité Central Chemise 2 (1917) F∆Rés 798/134 (Fédération de l’Aube) F∆Rés 798/135 (Fédération de l’Aube) F∆Rés 798/16 Congrès d’Avignon 1938 F∆Rés 798/18 Congrès de Mulhouse 1939 F∆Rés 798/19 Congrès de Mulhouse 1939 F∆Rés 798/3 Comité Central F∆Rés 798/4 Correspondance Victor Basch F∆Rés 798/5 Correspondance Félicien Challaye F∆Rés 798/6 Correspondance Henri Guernut F∆Rés 798/7 Correspondance Mathias Morhardt F∆Rés 798/9 Commission sur les origines de la Guerre, Chemise 1 F∆Rés 798/9 Commission sur les origines de la Guerre, Chemise 2 F∆Rés 798/9bis/Commission de la Paix future P R I M A RY P R I N T E D S O U RC E S Newspapers and Journals Die Berliner Monatshefte für internationale Auf klärung Die Kriegsschuldfrage Die Weltbühne Evolution Foreign Affairs Germinal L’Atelier L’Effort

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Bibliography 271 L’Œuvre La Flèche La Paix par le droit Le Barrage Le Crapouillot The Manchester Guardian The Progressive The Times Vendredi House of Commons, London Hansard (House of Commons Debates) Publications of the Ligue des droits de l’homme Le Bulletin officiel de la Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1914–1919 Les Cahiers des droits de l’homme, 1920–1940 Congresses of the Ligue des droits de l’homme Le Congrès de 1916 de la Ligue des droits de l’homme. Compte-rendu sténographique. 1er et 2 Novembre 1916 (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1917). Le Congrès de 1918 de la Ligue des droits de l’homme. Compte-rendu sténographique du 27 au 29 décembre 1918 (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1919). Le Congrès national de 1921. Compte-rendu sténographique. Paris, 15–17 mai 1921 (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1921). Le Congrès national de 1922. Compte-rendu sténographique. Nantes, 4–6 Juin 1922 (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1922). Le Congrès national de 1923. Compte-rendu sténographique. (1–3 Novembre 1923) (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1924). Le Congrès national de 1924. Compte-rendu sténographique. (27–29 Décembre 1924) (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1925). Le Congrès national de 1925. Compte-rendu sténographique. (1–3 Novembre 1925) (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1925). Le Congrès national de 1926. Compte-rendu sténographique. (25–27 Décembre 1926) (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1927). Le Congrès national de 1927. Compte-rendu sténographique. (15–17 Juillet 1927) (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1927). Le Congrès national de 1928. Compte-rendu sténographique. (15–17 Juillet 1928) (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1928). Le Congrès national de 1929. Compte-rendu sténographique. (31 mars–1er et 2 avril 1929) (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1929). Le Congrès national de 1930. Compte-rendu sténographique. Biarritz, 7–9 Juin 1930 (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1930). Le Congrès national de 1931. Compte-rendu sténographique. Vichy, 23–25 Mai 1931 (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1931). Le Congrès national de 1932. Compte-rendu sténographique. Paris, 26–28 Décembre 1932 (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1933). Le Congrès national de 1933. Compte-rendu sténographique. Amiens, 15–17 Juillet 1933 (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1933).

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272 Bibliography Le Congrès national de 1934. Compte-rendu sténographique. Nancy, 19–21 Mai 1934 (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1934). Le Congrès national de 1935. Compte-rendu sténographique. Hyères (Var), 8–10 Juin 1935 (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1935). Le Congrès national de 1936. Compte-rendu sténographique. Dijon, 19–21 Juillet 1936 (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1936). Le Congrès national de 1937. Compte-rendu sténographique. Tours, 17–19 juillet 1937 (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1937). Books and Articles ‘A Shameless Argument’, The Manchester Guardian, 3 August 1914, p. 6. ‘Après Munich’, Cahiers 38, 19–20 (1–15 October 1938), pp. 563–4. ‘Au Congrès de la Ligue: les résolutions adoptées’, Cahiers 22, 13 (25 June 1922), pp. 291–4. ‘Aux deux démocraties’, Cahiers 22, 2 (25 January 1922), p. 27. ‘Documents pour le Congrès: Pour et contre la médiation en Espagne’, Cahiers 37, 14 (15 July 1937), pp. 433–7. ‘Les Allemands à la Ligue I: la visite de M. von Kessler’, Cahiers 22, 3 (10 February 1922), pp. 63–6. ‘Les Allemands à la Ligue: II. La visite des délégués du Bund’, Cahiers 22, 5 (1 March 1922), pp. 111–14. ‘Manifeste du congrès d’Arras’ [of the Ligue internationale des combattants de la paix], Le Barrage, 127 (28 April 1938), p. 1. ‘Même Le Temps’, Cahiers 24, 16 (25 August 1924), p. 376. ‘Monatsbericht: Frankreich’, Die Berliner Monatshefte 12, 3 (March 1934), pp. 261–7. ‘Nos Communiqués: à propos de la mobilisation russe’, Cahiers 22, 19 (25 September 1922), p. 455. ‘Nos interventions: à propos du “Livre Jaune”’, Cahiers 22, 22 (10 November 1922), p. 530. ‘Ordre du jour du Congrès’, Cahiers 38, 9 (1 May 1938), p. 245. ‘Pour le Congrès de Paris. La controverse sur les traités. Une résolution proposée par le Comité central’, Cahiers 32, 29 (20 November 1932), pp. 675–7. ‘Supplément au rapport financier (statistiques). Tableau comparatif des cotisations reçues par la Trésorerie générale pour 1937 et 1938 (Situation au 30 avril 1938 et au 30 avril 1939’, Cahiers 39, 13 (1 July 1939), p. 415. ‘The Allied Decision. Guilt for the War. Mr. Lloyd George’s Indictment’, The Times, Friday, 4 March 1921, p. 6. ‘Un Communiqué: truquages de documents diplomatiques’, Cahiers 22, 22 (10 November 1922), p. 530. ‘Un Document suggestif ’, Cahiers 21, 17 (10 September 1921), pp. 396–7. ‘Un ligueur allemand’. ‘L’Allemagne en 1926’, Cahiers 26, 15 (25 July 1926), pp. 339–40. ‘Why we are at war’, The Times, 8 March 1915, p. 9. Albertini, Georges. Review of Georges Michon, Le Rôle de la presse en 1791–1792 (Paris: Editions de la T.E.P.A.C., 1941), L’Atelier, 15 November 1941, p. 6. Ancel, Jacques. ‘Retour de Prague’, Cahiers 38, 19–20 (1–15 October 1938), pp. 581–2. Anon. ‘Au Congrès de la Ligue: les résolutions adoptées’, Cahiers 21, 10 (25 May 1921), pp. 219–23. Anon. ‘Le Gouvernement russe et la presse’, Bulletin 17, 11–12 (1–15 June 1917), p. 402. Anon. ‘Mémento bibliographique’, Cahiers 30, 23 (20 September 1930), p. 551. Anon. ‘Une Campagne’, Cahiers 22, 11 (25 May 1922), pp. 252–3.

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274 Bibliography Bloch, Oscar. ‘Correspondance: les responsabilités de la guerre’, Cahiers 23, 22 (25 November 1923), p. 528. Boissière, Jean-Galtier. Histoire de la Guerre: les origines et les causes secrètes de la guerre mondiale (Paris: Le Crapouillot, May 1932). Boris, Georges. ‘Le Problème de la presse’, Cahiers 38, 11 (1 June 1938), pp. 322–5. Boris, Georges. ‘Vérités à répandre sur la question tchécoslovaque. I.  Politique de nonrésistance: guerre. Politique de résistance: paix’, Cahiers 38, 19–20 (1–15 October 1938), p. 583. Buisson, Ferdinand. ‘La Ligue des droits de l’homme et la guerre’, Bulletin 15, 1 (1 January–1 April 1915), pp. 5–10. Buisson, Ferdinand. ‘Les Ligueurs et la guerre’, Bulletin 15, 1 (1 January–1 April 1915), p. 11. Buisson, Ferdinand. ‘Aux Troupiers de France. Paroles d’un vétéran’, Bulletin 15, 4 (1 September 1915), pp. 258–73. Buisson, Ferdinand. ‘Pour l’action. Appel aux Ligueurs’, Bulletin 15, 4 (1 September 1915), pp. 274–8. Buisson, Ferdinand. ‘Pour le Droit’, Bulletin 17, 7–8 (1–15 April 1917), pp. 273–4. Buisson, Ferdinand. ‘A nos amis de Russie I: Lettre à Bourtzew’, Bulletin 17, 23–24 (15 December 1917), pp. 814–7. Buisson, Ferdinand. ‘A nos amis de Russie II’, Bulletin 17, 23–24 (15 December 1917), pp. 817–20. Buisson, Ferdinand. ‘Notre programme: droits de l’homme, droits du citoyen, droits des peuples’, Cahiers New Series 1 (5 January 1920), pp. 3–4. Buisson, Ferdinand. ‘Le Traité de Versailles’, Cahiers 25, 22 (25 October 1925), pp. 511–12. Challaye, Félicien. ‘A Propos des responsabilités: Les responsabilités françaises et russes’, Cahiers 28, 27 (30 October 1928), pp. 630–8. Challaye, Félicien. ‘Correspondance. A propos des responsabilités de la guerre’, Cahiers 29, 1 (10 January 1929), p. 17. Challaye, Félicien. Un apprenti-dictateur, André Tardieu (Paris: Editions de la Révolution prolétarienne, 1930). Challaye, Félicien. ‘Le Traité de Versailles et le désarmement’, Cahiers 32, 25 (10 October 1932), pp. 586–98. Challaye, Félicien. Pour la paix désarmée, même en face de Hitler (Le Vésinet: chez l’auteur, n.d. [1933]). Challaye, Félicien. La Crise de la Ligue des droits de l’homme (Paris: Extrait de La Grande Revue, November 1937). Challaye, Félicien. ‘Libres opinions. Après le Congrès de Tours. IV. Un article de M. Challaye’, Cahiers 37, 21 (1 November 1937), pp. 694–5. Challaye, Félicien. Huit Jours de septembre en Allemagne (Paris: La Grande Revue, 1938). Challaye, Félicien. Preface in Raoul-Albert Bodinter, Vérités d’avant-paix (Paris: Les Editions de ‘Mon Pays’, n.d. [1942]). Challaye, Challaye. Georges Demartial: sa vie, son œuvre (Paris: 1950). Comité Central. ‘Contre la dissolution de la Constituante’, Bulletin 18, 3–4 (1–15 February 1918), pp. 109–11. Comité Central. ‘Quelques ordres du jour: à propos des origines de la guerre’, Cahiers 21, 21 (10 November 1921), p. 501. Conseils juridiques de la Ligue. ‘L’Activité juridique de la Ligue en 1938–1939’, Cahiers 39, 13 (1 July 1939), pp. 395–414. Corcos, Fernand. ‘Séverine, lumière incorruptible’, Cahiers 29, 12 (30 April 1929), pp. 269–70.

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280 Bibliography Barros, Andrew and Frédéric Guelton. ‘Les imprévus de l’histoire instrumentalisée: Le Livre Jaune et les Documents Diplomatiques Français sur les origines de la Grande Guerre, 1914–1918’, Revue d’Histoire Diplomatique (2006), pp. 3–22. Basch, Françoise. Victor Basch: de l’affaire Dreyfus au crime de la Milice (Paris, 1994). Birn, Donald  S. ‘The League of Nations Union and Collective Security’, Journal of Contemporary History 9, 3 (July 1974), pp. 131–59. Bongarçon, Yves. ‘Un Vichysme de gauche? Les débuts de L’Effort, quotidien socialiste lyonnais (1940)’, Cahiers d’histoire 32, 2 (1987), pp. 123–46. Burrin, Philippe. La Dérive fasciste: Doriot, Déat, Bergery, 1933–1945 (Paris: Seuil, 2014). Ceadel, Martin. ‘The “King and Country” Debate, 1933: Student Politics, Pacifism, and the Dictators’, Historical Journal 22 (1979), pp. 397–422. Ceadel, Martin. Pacifism in Britain: The Defining of a Faith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). Ceadel, Martin. ‘The Peace Movement between the Wars: Problems of Definition’, in Campaigns for Peace: British Peace Movements in the Twentieth Century , edited by Richard Taylor and Nigel Young (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 73–99. Ceadel, Martin. Thinking about Peace and War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Ceadel, Martin. ‘A Legitimate Peace Movement: The Case of Britain, 1918–1945’, in Challenge to Mars: Essays on Pacifism from 1918 to 1945, edited by Peter Brock and Thomas P. Socknat (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), pp. 134–48. Chagnon, Marie-Eve. ‘Le Manifeste des 93: La mobilisation des académies françaises et allemandes au déclenchement de la Première Guerre mondiale (1914–1915)’, French Historical Studies 35, 1 (Winter 2012), pp. 123–47. Chagnon, Marie-Eve. ‘Nationalisme et internationalisme dans les sciences au XXe siècle: l’exemple des scientifiques et des humanistes français et allemands dans la communauté scientifique internationale (1890–1933)’, PhD thesis, Concordia University, Montreal, 2012. Chickering, Roger. Imperial Germany and a World Without War: The Peace Movement and German Society, 1892–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). Clark, Christopher. The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (New York: Harper Collins, 2013). Claveau, Cylvie. ‘L’Autre dans les Cahiers des droits de l’homme, 1920–1940: une sélection universaliste de l’altérité à la Ligue des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen en France’, PhD thesis, McGill University, Montreal, 2000. Combe, Sonia. ‘Paris-Moscou, aller-retour: historique d’une spoliation et d’une restitution’, in Retour de Moscou: les archives de la Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1898–1940, edited by Sonia Combe and Grégory Cingal (Paris: La Découverte, 2004), pp. 17–26. Conklin, Alice. ‘Colonialism and Human Rights, a Contradiction in Terms? The Case of France and West Africa, 1895–1914’, The American Historical Review 103, 2 (April 1998), pp. 419–42. Conklin, Alice. A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). Cooper, Sandi E. ‘Pacifism in France, 1889–1914: International Peace as a Human Right’, French Historical Studies 17, 2 (Autumn 1991), pp. 359–86. Cooper, Sandi E. Patriotic Pacifism: Waging War on War in Europe, 1815–1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Déak, Istvan. Weimar Germany’s Left-Wing Intellectuals: A Political History of the Weltbühne and Its Circle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). Dobry, Michel, ed., Le Mythe de l’allergie française au fascisme (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003).

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282 Bibliography Ingram, Norman. ‘Repressed Memory Syndrome: Interwar French Pacifism and the Attempt to Recover France’s Pacifist Past’, French History 18, 3 (September 2004), pp. 315–30. Ingram, Norman. ‘Le Pacifisme de guerre: refus de l’Union sacrée et de la synthèse républicaine?’, in La Grande Guerre: pratiques et expériences, edited by Rémy Cazals, Emmanuelle Picard, and Denis Rolland (Toulouse: Privat, 2005), pp. 77–89. Ingram, Norman. ‘Selbstmord or Euthanasia? Who Killed the Ligue des droits de l’homme?’, French History 22, 3 (September 2008), pp. 337–57. Ingram, Norman. ‘Qui a tué la Ligue des droits de l’homme? La Ligue, les nazis et la chute de la France en 1940’, in Être Dreyfusard, hier et aujourd’hui, edited by Gilles Manceron and Emmanuel Naquet (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009), pp. 397–402. Ingram, Norman. ‘A la Recherche d’une guerre gagnée: The Ligue des droits de l’homme and the War Guilt Question (1918–1922)’, French History 24, 2 (June 2010), pp. 218–35. Ingram, Norman. ‘La Ligue des droits de l’homme et le problème allemand’, Revue d’histoire diplomatique 124, 2 (June 2010), pp. 119–31. Ingram, Norman. ‘Pacifism, the Fascist Temptation, and the Ligue des droits de l’homme’, in The French Right between the Wars: Political and Intellectual Movements from Conservatism to Fascism, edited by Samuel Kalman and Sean Kennedy (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), pp. 81–94. Ingram, Norman. ‘The Crucible of War: The Ligue des Droits de l’Homme and the Debate on the “Conditions for a Lasting Peace” in 1916’, French Historical Studies 39, 2 (April 2016), pp. 347–71. Irvine, William D. ‘Fascism in France and the Strange Case of the Croix de Feu’, Journal of Modern History 63, 1 (June 1991), pp. 271–95. Irvine, William  D. ‘Politics of Human Rights: A Dilemma for the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 20, 1 (Winter 1994), pp. 5–28. Irvine, William D. Between Justice and Politics: The Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1898–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). Jackson, Peter. Beyond the Balance of Power: France and the Politics of National Security in the Era of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Joll, James. 1914: The Unspoken Assumptions. An Inaugural Lecture delivered 25 April 1968 (London: London School of Economics and Political Science/Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968). Josephson, Harold, ed. Biographical Dictionary of Modern Peace Leaders (Westport, Conn., 1985). Julliard, Jacques. La Faute à Rousseau: Essai sur les conséquences historiques de l’idée de souveraineté populaire (Paris: Seuil, 1985). Kalman, Samuel and Sean Kennedy, eds. The French Right between the Wars: Political and Intellectual Movements from Conservatism to Fascism (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2014). Lieven, Dominic. Towards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia (London: Penguin Books, 2016). Lipstadt, Deborah. Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York, Toronto: The Free Press, 1993). Luzzato, Sergio. L’Impôt du sang: la gauche française à l’épreuve de la guerre mondiale, 1900–1945 (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1996). MacMillan, Margaret. The War that Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (London: Penguin, 2013). Manceron, Gilles and Emmanuel Naquet. ‘Le Péril et la riposte’, in Être Dreyfusard, hier et aujourd’hui, edited by Gilles Manceron and Emmanuel Naquet (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009), pp. 315–22.

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Bibliography 283 Marks, Sally. The Ebbing of European Ascendancy: An International History of the World, 1914–1945 (London: Arnold, 2002). McMeekin, Sean. The Russian Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011). McMeekin, Sean. July 1914: Countdown to War (New York: Basic Books, 2013). McMillan, James  F. Twentieth Century France: Politics and Society, 1898–1991 (London: Edward Arnold, 1992). Moyn, Samuel. The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010). Moyn, Samuel. Human Rights and the Uses of History (London: Verso, 2014). Mulligan, William. The Origins of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Naquet, Emmanuel. ‘La Société d’études documentaires et critiques sur la guerre: Ou la naissance d’une minorité pacifiste au sein de la Ligue des droits de l’homme’, Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps 30 (January–March 1993), pp. 6–10. Naquet, Emmanuel. ‘La Ligue des droits de l’homme: une association en politique (1898–1940)’, Thèse de doctorat, Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, 2005, 5 vols. Naquet, Emmanuel. Pour l’Humanité: La Ligue des droits de l’homme de l’affaire Dreyfus à la défaite de 1940 (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2014). Nord, Philip. France, 1940: Defending the Republic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). Nye, Robert. ‘Honor, Impotence and Male Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century French Medicine’, French Historical Studies 16, 1 (Spring 1989), pp. 48–71. Nye, Robert. Masculinity and Male Codes of Honour in Modern France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Offen, Karen. ‘Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in Fin-de-siècle France’, American Historical Review, 89, 3 (June 1984), pp. 648–76. Offenstadt, Nicolas. Les Fusillés pour l’exemple et la mémoire collective (1914–1999) (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1999). Otte, T.G. ‘A “German Paperchase”: The “Scrap of Paper” Controversy and the Problem of Myth and Memory in International History’, Diplomacy and Statecraft 18, 1 (2007), pp. 53–87. Paxton, Robert. Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York: Knopf, 1972). Paxton, Robert and Michael Marrus. Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1981). Piper, Ernst. Alfred Rosenberg: Hitlers Chefideologe (Munich: Karl Blessing Verlag, 2005). Rémond, René. La Droite en France de 1815 à nos jours: continuité et diversité d’une tradition politique (Paris: Aubier, 1954). Siegel, Mona  L. The Moral Disarmament of France: Education, Pacifism, and Patriotism, 1914–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Sirinelli, Jean-François. Génération intellectuelle: Khâgneux et normaliens dans l’entre-deuxguerres (Paris: Fayard, 1988). Sirinelli, Jean-François. Intellectuels et passions françaises: Manifestes et pétitions au XXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1990). Soucy, Robert. French Fascism: The First Wave, 1924–1933 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). Soucy, Robert. French Fascism: The Second Wave, 1933–1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). Soutou, Georges-Henri. L’Or et le sang: les buts de guerre économiques de la Première guerre mondiale (Paris: Fayard, 1989).

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284 Bibliography Steiner, Zara. The Lights that Failed: European International History, 1919–1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Stengers, Jean. ‘1914: The Safety of Ciphers and the Outbreak of the First World War’, in Intelligence and International Relations, 1900–1945, edited by Christopher Andrew and Jeremy Noakes (Exeter: University of Exeter, 1987), pp. 29–48. Sternhell, Zeev. La Droite révolutionnaire, 1885–1914: les origines françaises du fascisme (Paris: Seuil, 1978). Sternhell, Zeev. Ni droite, ni gauche: l’idéologie fasciste en France (Paris: Seuil, 1983). Strachan, Hew. ‘Review Article: The Origins of the First World War’, International Affairs 90, 2 (2014), pp. 429–39. Swartz, Marvin. The Union of Democratic Control in British Politics during the First World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). Thompson, J.A. ‘Lord Cecil and the Pacifists in the League of Nations Union’, The Historical Journal 20, 4 (1977), pp. 949–59. Tomlinson, Richard. ‘The “Disappearance of France”, 1896–1940: French Politics and the Birth Rate’, The Historical Journal 28, 2 (l985), pp. 5–15. Turner, Henry Ashby, Jr. Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power: January 1933 (London: Bloomsbury, 1996). Vaïsse, Maurice. Sécurité d’abord: la politique française en matière de désarmement, 9 décembre 1930–17 avril 1934 (Paris: Editions Pédone, 1981). Villepin, Patrick de. ‘Victor Margueritte (1866–1942): le pacifisme au service de l’Allemagne?’, Thèse de doctorat en histoire, Université de Paris-IV-Sorbonne, 1989, 4 vols. Weber, Eugen. Action française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962). Weber, Eugen. The Nationalist Revival in France, 1905–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). Weber, Eugen. Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976). Weber, Eugen. The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s (New York: Norton, 1994). Weinberg, Gerhard. ‘The Defeat of Germany in 1918 and the European Balance of Power’, in Germany, Hitler and World War II, edited by Gerhard  L.  Weinberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 11–22. Wheeler-Bennett, Sir John W. Hindenburg: The Wooden Titan (London: Macmillan, 1934 and 1967). Wheeler-Bennett, Sir John. Munich: Prologue to Tragedy (London: Macmillan, 1963). Winter, Jay and Antoine Prost. René Cassin and Human Rights: From the Great War to the Universal Declaration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Wohl, Robert. The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979). Wunder, Gerd. Bauer, Bürger, Edelmann: Ausgewählte Aufsätze zur Sozialgeschichte von Gerd Wunder. Festgabe zu seinem 75. Geburtstag, edited by Kuno Ulshöfer (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1984). Zuelzer, Wolf. The Nicolai Case: A Biography (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982).

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Index Action française  17, 262 Agadir  27, 154 Albertini, Georges  263–4 Albertini, Luigi  8 Alexandre, Michel  36–8, 40, 44, 52–3, 56, 60–2, 81–2, 140, 193–8, 201–2, 206, 211–15, 223–5, 230–2, 237, 249, 260–4 role in Société d’Etudes Documentaires et Critiques sur la Guerre (SEDCG)  36–8 Alsace-Lorraine  9, 17–19, 27–8, 47n.2, 57–9, 62, 70–1, 90, 126, 137–41, 145–6, 154, 243–4 revenge for loss in 1871 as reason for war in 1914 32–3 solution to Franco-German problem  28 Alsatians  33, 57, 70–1, 138–41, 169–70, 234 Anschluss, of Austria to Germany  126, 205, 213–14 Anticlericalism of LDH  33, 200 Antifascism  224–5, 237, 247 Anti-militarism of LDH  33 Arbitration and The Hague Conferences (1899 and 1907)  47–8, 52, 54–6, 109–12 Arbitration, international, as one of the principles of the LDH  33 Armenia (Armenians)  33, 57, 68 Article 228 (Versailles Treaty)  97–8, 99n.96, 101–2 Article 231 (Versailles Treaty)  46, 77, 80, 96–8, 101–7, 116–17, 122, 135–6, 143, 153–66, 157nn.82–3, 168–73, 171n.140, 184–9, 192, 194, 202–3, 206, 208–11, 215–16, 219, 221–3, 230–1, 266–7 1932 Congress debate over  168–74 Comité Central debate on meaning of  155–62 Renouvin/Bloch interpretation thereof consistent with that of DLfM  164 the Ligue’s understanding thereof  106–7 Asquith, Herbert  80 Association de la paix par le droit (APD)  22, 32–3, 48, 53, 118, 142, 217–18, 221, 230n.54, 244n.19, 253n.56, 258–9, 259n.82 Aufruf an die Kulturwelt  21n.18, 24 Aulard, Alphonse  76–7, 101–2, 104–7, 140–1, 147, 160–1, 160n.97 Austria-Hungary  17–18, 23–7, 30–1, 33, 38–9, 41–2, 48, 50–1, 56–7, 60, 67–8, 70–1, 79, 79nn.12, 14, 80n.15, 81–6, 86n.42, 91–4, 99, 101–2, 106, 109–11, 109n.4, 113, 120, 126, 134–5, 143–7, 150–5, 161–3, 231, 233, 237, 245–8, 255–8, 261–2

relations with Serbia  17–19 responsibility for the outbreak of war  23 Austria, Republic of  205, 208–9, 213–14 Auswärtiges Amt see also German Foreign Office 5–6 Barnes, Harry Elmer  8, 167–8 Basch, Victor  3, 6–8, 17, 20–44, 49, 67–8, 75, 77–8, 81–9, 91–2, 101–2, 104–5, 113–14, 116, 118–20, 123, 125–6, 128–9, 131–5, 139–40, 143, 149, 152, 155–9, 161–2, 165–76, 181–01, 203–6, 208, 210, 214–17, 219–21, 223–4, 228–9, 233–7, 244–5, 251 Alsace-Lorraine as the reason for war in 1914 28 analysis of English motives during the July Crisis 25–6 analysis of French motives during July Crisis 27 analysis of war origins  22–31 and the Société d’Etudes Documentaires et Critiques sur la Guerre (SEDCG) 35–8 assassination of  7 claim that the LDH was pacifist  32–3 criticism of German idea of peace  26–7 debate with Georges Demartial on war origins (1916)  39 German atrocities in Belgium  30 La Guerre de 1914 et le droit, importance of 22 LDH principles and the war  30–1 localization of conflict in July 1914  26–7 need for Serbia to be punished  25 on alleged French decadence in July Crisis 27–8 on France fighting a defensive war in 1914  33, 40 on German fears of encirclement  28 on German guilt in the July Crisis  41 on order of mobilizations in July Crisis, 1914 41 on rights of minorities and nationalities  31 opposition to annihilation of Germany  33–4 opposition to reactionary, French anti-republicanism 33–4 question of Russian blame for the outbreak of war 25 rejection of idea of shared responsibilities for the outbreak of war  30 role in formation of Popular Front  3, 6 role in Union Sacrée  6, 17 view of Germany  7

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286 Index Bayet, Albert  178, 188, 195–6, 221–5, 229–34, 240–3, 246–8, 251–3 temporal limits to his understanding of the European crisis in 1939  251 Belgium (Belgian)  6, 20–1, 23, 25–8, 30–1, 37–9, 48–9, 51–2, 55–6, 60–1, 78–80, 99, 119–20, 127, 131–2, 142, 151, 154–6, 242–3 Bérard, Victor  56–8 Bergery, Gaston  203, 220, 234, 234n.68 Berliner Monatshefte, Die  148n.45, 149n.50, 155, 159n.93, 162–3, 183–4, 184n.10, see also Kriegsschuldfrage, Die Berliner Tageblatt, Das 134–5 Bernhardi, Friedrich von  29 Berthelot, Philippe  79n.14, 82–5 Bethmann-Hollweg, Theobald von  39, 78n.8, 82–3 Bigot, Marthe  36–7 Bloc national  75 Bloch, Camille  156–6, 157n.82, 168–9, 172–3, 183–4, 184n.10, 186–7 Bloch, Marc  266–7 Bloch, Oscar  44, 52–3, 57–9, 91n.57, 94–6, 98–101, 106–7, 128–31, 137–40, 237 on Hellmut von Gerlach  100 on punitive nature of Versailles Treaty  99 and the impact of the Ruhr Occupation on Ligue debates  100 Blum, Léon  3, 6, 207–8, 217, 224–5 Blumenthal, Daniel  58–9 Bon, Jean  172 Bonnet, Georges  251 Bouglé, Célestin  22n.22, 127 Briand, Aristide  52–3, 141–2, 155, 160–1 Brion, Hélène  36–7 Buisson, Ferdinand  9–10, 20–1, 34–5, 34n.91, 47n.2, 50n.15, 51–2, 60–1, 63, 63n.65, 65–6, 69–70, 83, 87, 88n.48, 89–90, 96–8, 101, 106–7, 118, 121, 152, 159–61, 159n.94, 186–7, 198–9, 223, 235–7, 241–2 on conditions for a lasting peace  47n.2 on defensive war idea  34–5 Bund Neues Vaterland (BNV)  9–10, 75, 108–12, 109n.4, 114n.23, 115–17, 117n.33, 129–30, 237 visit to Paris (1922)  111, 115–17 Burrin, Philippe  209 Cagoule 251 Cahen, Jules  48–9 Caillaud, Jean-Marie  138, 191–2, 191n.36, 219–20, 234n.69, 240–1 Cairns, John  8n.31, 148n.44 Cancouët, Lucien  188–9, 223–4 Capy, Marcelle  36–7 Cartel des Gauches  86n.42, 102, 137, 186

Cassin, René  14n.49 Ceadel, Martin  11–12, 13n.46, 64, 109n.5, 214, 256–7 Censor(ship)  43, 48–9, 51, 63–5, 63n.65, 67–8 Challaye, Félicien  22n.22, 98n.93, 137–41, 144–7, 156–9, 161–3, 165–8, 174–5, 177–8, 186–8, 191, 193–9, 202–3, 204n.80, 217–21, 223, 226–7, 229–31, 233–4, 236n.82, 237, 246, 246n.26, 259–64 anti-Semitism of  246n.26 criticism of link between Ligue des droits de l’homme and the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte 237 Charpentier, Armand  8n.33, 105n.116, 139–40, 162–3, 170–3, 188, 260–1 Château, René  197–8, 212, 252–3 Clark, Christopher  31n.69, 152–3, 155 Claveau, Cylvie  7, 68n.80 Clemenceau, Georges  35–6, 66, 96–7, 120, 131, 157n.82, 163, 164n.113, 186, 235–6 Collective security  181–2, 188, 203, 207, 209–10, 212–14, 213n.112, 224–6, 228, 246 Comité Central, members mobilized in August 1914 22n.22 Communists, German  131–5, see also Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD) Communists, Soviet  227 Communists, Spanish  226–7 Conscientious Objection  140, 147n.39, 148n.44, 229–30 Convention (French Revolutionary)  49–50 Corcos, Fernand  51n.17, 172–3, 181–8 Crapouillot, Le  188–9, 189n.31, 223–4 Crusade, Great War as  17, 21–2, 30–1, 33 Crusading idea  34–5 Cudenet, Gabriel  201, 234n.69, 242n.12 Czechoslovakia (Czechs)  50, 57, 71, 94, 142, 169–70, 243–51, 255–7, 261 Danton, Georges  63 Danzig  126, 209–14, 256–8 Dawes Plan  103 Déat, Marcel  209, 259, 261 Decadence thesis  266–7 Delaisi, Francis  231n.60, 245n.25, 252–3 Delbrück, Hans  83–4, 83n.31, 86n.41, 100, 100n.101, 110–11, 113–14, 113n.19, 128–31 attack on von Gerlach’s views and his response 128–31 discussion with Victor Basch of war origins 113–14 Delcassé, Théophile  145–6 Demain 44

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Index Demartial, Georges  8n.33, 14, 37–42, 44, 55–7, 75, 78–84, 78n.7, 81n.21, 98n.93, 137–8, 144, 146–9, 148n.45, 166–7, 173, 188, 204n.80, 211, 214, 221–2, 237, 248–50, 255–60, 263–4 on Russian general mobilization  39 analysis of reasons for the ‘strange defeat’ 255–8 five arguments on war origins (1916)  38–9 Déroulède, Paul  138–9, 145 Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte (DLfM)  5–6, 9–10, 10n.35, 25, 75, 105–6, 108–9, 109n.4, 111, 114–15, 120–2, 124–5, 127–31, 130n.78, 133–6, 140, 143, 158–9, 164, 164n.114, 172–3, 181–7, 237, 266 programme of  9–10, 10n.35 reaction to Nazi seizure of power  182–4 size of  129–30 Deutschland, bombing of in Ibiza harbour  225 Dictatorship of the proletariat, Gabriel Séailles on 95 Disarmament  6, 33, 47n.4, 48, 96–7, 116–17, 119, 124, 164–71, 174–8, 181, 184, 186, 188–9, 192–6, 198, 201–4, 207, 210, 212–15, 224–5, 234–5, 247–8, 261, 266 and the Ligue des droits de l’homme  33 moral  133–4, 166–7 Dissent, historical beginnings of  35–5 first wave  137–8 second wave  137–8 Doumergue, Gaston  191–2, 227 Dreyfus Affair  3–5, 9–10, 10n.35, 17, 83, 95–6, 100–1, 110, 131–2, 159n.94, 162–3, 170–1, 174–5, 192, 227, 234–5 Dreyfus, Alfred  3, 5, 80 Dupin, Gustave  147 Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR)  5–6, 83n.31, 253–5, 263n.108 Emery, Léon  137–8, 196–204, 206–11, 213–15, 223–5, 232–4, 245–6, 251–3, 259–64 accused of proto-Nazism  225 impact of on the Ligue  202–3 on Munich Crisis  245–6 England (English)  5, 17–18, 25–6, 30, 39–40, 54, 82, 93–4, 111n.12, 142, 176–7, 205, 247–9, see also Great Britain (British) Epstein, Simon  2n.7, 13n.44, 255 Epuration 258–62 defence of Gerin, Challaye, and Emery by Michel Alexandre  262–4 Félicien Challaye in the Second World War 260–1 Léon Emery in the Second World War  261–2

287

René Gerin in the Second World War 259–60 Théodore Ruyssen in the Second World War 258–9 Evolution  106–7, 121–2, 137–8, 141–2, 146–7, 148n.45, 170–1 Fabre-Luce, Alfred  106 Fascism  6, 13–14, 181–2, 186–93, 196, 199–200, 202–5, 209, 241–3, 263–4, see also antifascism and philo-fascism French fascism and the ‘consensus school’ 7n.28 French fascism and the ‘thèse immunitaire’ 189n.33 Fay, Sidney B.  78nn.8–9, 85–6 Ferguson, Niall on violation of Belgian neutrality 23 Ferry, Abel  40 Fez, Treaty of (1911)  27–8 Flandin, Pierre-Etienne  206n.89, 251 Foch, Maréchal Ferdinand  96–7, 145, 166–7, 186 Foerster, Friedrich Wilhelm  108–11, 109n.5, 110n.6, 135, 142 views on origins of Great War  108–10 Four-Power Pact  187–8, 187n.24 France‘civilizing mission’ idea  31 France, defensive war  33 Franco-Russian Alliance (1894)  27–8, 34–5, 39–41, 45, 47–9, 63–5, 67, 76, 79n.13, 80, 90, 106, 145–8, 150–2, 172, 176–7, 219, 225–6, 231, 267–8 Franco-Soviet Pact (1935)  205, 213–14, 218–19, 225–6 Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria-Hungary  19, 103, 257–8 Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria-Hungary 101–2 French Revolution as reference point in debate on ‘conditions for a lasting peace’  53 impact on Ligue’s thinking  31 LDH and principles thereof  33 French state, anthropomorphization of  20 Frot, Eugène  203 Fusillés pour l’exemple, les  76–7 Gendered analyses of French history  28n.52 Gendered analysis of German history  29 Geneva Disarmament Conference  6, 11, 164–5, 167–8, 181, 193–4 Georges-Etienne, René  240–1, 250–1 Gerin, René  137–8, 147n.39, 148–55, 159, 160n.97, 162–3, 166–7, 221–3, 230, 246–8, 252–3, 259–60, 264 debate with Raymond Poincaré on war origins 148–52

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288 Index Gerin, René (cont.) interest of German Foreign Office in Gerin/Poincaré debate  154 kidnapping by Camelots du Roi in Algiers 154n.76 perception of Gerin/Poincaré debate in Germany 162–3 Gerlach, Hellmut von  100, 108–11, 109n.4, 111n.12, 115–19, 126–31, 128n.73, 129n.75, 133–4, 134n.95, 142–3, 182–3, 185, 266 and criticism of Hans Delbrück  110–11 dangers of an occupation of the Ruhr  127 on primordial question of war responsibilities (1922) 116 on the German working class  133–4 position on reparations in January 1921  115 German Foreign Office  5–6 (see also Auswärtiges Amt) interest in Gerin/Poincaré debate  154 interest in Pierre Renouvin  144 interest in the LDH  75 monitoring of LDH visit to Berlin (1922) 117–19 German Social Democratic Party (SPD)  29–30 Gerwarth, Robert  266 Gestapo  5–6, 182–3, 253–5, 254n.57, 259n.82, 260 Gide, Charles  31, 42, 44, 66, 78–9, 83–4, 93, 113n.20, 123–4, 157–8, 237 comments by Victor Basch on  37n.103 role of in Société d’Etudes Documentaires et Critiques sur la Guerre (SEDCG)  36–8, 36n.96, 37n.103, 42, 44 Girondins 233 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  11n.36 Goldschild, Arthur  138–9, 191–3, 197–8, 227 Gorguet, Ilde  134–5 Gougenheim, André  65 Great Britain (British)  10n.35, 11–12, 14, 23, 25–7, 31, 37–9, 41–2, 46, 49–52, 55–7, 64–6, 78–80, 79nn.10–11, 96, 103, 109–10, 113, 121, 131–2, 153–5, 162–5, 187–8, 200–1, 208–10, 214, 217–18, 231, 234–5, 247, 253–8, 257n.73, 261–2, 265, 267, see also England (English) Great War ideological nature of  22 origins of  1n.1 Grey, Sir Edward  25–6, 80, 80n.15, 154n.72 Gringoire 251 Groener, General Wilhelm  143 Grumbach, Salomon  139n.8, 142n.16, 163n.108, 172, 177–8, 193–4, 207–8, 212–15, 224–5, 232–3, 241 Félicien Challaye’s animosity towards 246n.26

Guernut, Henri  3–4, 13n.45, 17–21, 21n.18, 22n.22, 31–2, 41–2, 63, 63n.65, 65, 67, 67n.78, 70, 78–9, 81n.22, 88–9, 91n.57, 94, 97–9, 104, 107n.124, 109n.4, 114n.23, 116–18, 120, 121n.51, 137, 146–7, 156–61, 157n.83, 159n.94, 164–6, 186–8, 203, 207–8, 223 on Bolshevik Revolution and the new Soviet Union 94 and July Crisis  20–1 Guétant, Louis  52–3, 132–3 Gumbel, Emil Julius  111–13, 135–6, 181–3 and criticism of French policy toward Germany 111–13 Hadamard, Jacques  63n.65, 65, 83, 146–7, 147n.39 Hague, The, Peace Conferences (1899 and 1907)  47–8, 52, 54–6, 109–12 Halbwachs, Jeanne, role in Société d’Etudes Documentaires et Critiques sur la Guerre (SEDCG)  36–7 Halbwachs, Maurice on the Bund neues Vaterland and pacifism  117–18 Harnack, Adolf von  30 Hauptarbeitsgruppe Frankreich (HAG)  5–6, 83n.31, 253–5, 254n.58 Hauser, Henri  255n.60 Herriot, Edouard  3, 54n.29, 86n.42, 102, 104, 175, 192n.40, 194–6, 198, 251 Hervé, Gustave  32–3, 49, 117n.33 Hindenburg, Paul von  135, 142–3, 181, 190 History, critique of essentialism in, continuity versus discontinuity  7 Hitler, Adolf  6, 100, 128–9, 172, 178, 181–3, 190, 192–3, 199–202, 204, 206–10, 212–18, 223, 225–6, 230, 234–7, 242–51, 245nn.22, 25, 253–5, 257–8, 260–2, 264, 267 Hoetzendorf, Conrad von  87–8 Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig  4n.13 Hollow years  266–7 Holocaust denial  8 Hoover Moratorium  164–5 Human rights, history thereof  3–4, 4n.13 Hunt, Lynn  3–4 Imperialism  29–31, 33–4, 51–4, 60, 75–6, 91, 100, 126, 150–3, 170–1, 257–8 Imperialism, Prussian  17, 33 International relations, European, history of 1n.2 Ireland, British policy in  31 Irvine, William  2–5, 13–14, 106, 189n.33, 229n.48, 233–4, 246n.26, 252–3, 255, 258–9 Isvolsky, Alexander  84–5, 87–8, 106

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Index Jacobin heritage of French Revolution  22, 177, 201–2, 228, 247–8 Jagow, Gottlieb von  39 Jaurès, Jean  17–19, 40, 88n.48, 172, 177, 233 Jeanson, Henri  196 Joint, Théophile  240, 250–1 Jouhaux, Léon  6, 251 July Crisis (1914)  19–22 July Crisis (1914), localizing the conflict  23 Kahn, Emile  8, 13n.45, 22n.22, 65–6, 76–7, 83–6, 90–2, 91n.57, 96–8, 98n.93, 100–2, 104, 106–7, 121, 127, 133–4, 138–40, 143, 158–9, 165–6, 168–9, 171n.140, 177, 186, 195–7, 201, 204n.80, 217–20, 222–3, 227, 232–3, 239–41, 244–5, 249n.44, 252, 253n.54, 258–9 Kant, Immanuel  31 and impact of his ideas on LDH minority 52–3 Kautsky, Karl  78–9, 81, 86n.41, 120 Kayser, Jacques  171–2, 188, 207–15 Keitel, Field Marshal  253–5, 255n.59 Kerensky, Alexander  63 Kessler, Harry Graf  117–19, 134–5 Keynes, John Maynard  1, 123–4, 231–2 Kienthal 43 Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD) 133–4 Kriegsschuldfrage, Die  121–2, 155, see also Berliner Monatshefte, Die Kriegsschuldreferat  5–6, 25 Kuczynski, Robert  106, 127, 161 La Chesnais, Pierre-Georges  47 Langer, William L.  147–8 Langevin, Paul  143, 234n.69 Laval, Pierre  210–11, 227, 233 Le Foyer, Lucien  64–5, 96, 175, 177–8, 217–18 League of Nations  6, 9–11, 60–1, 66, 70–1, 75–6, 96, 106–7, 110–11, 116–17, 119, 126, 140, 160–1, 165, 169–70, 174, 181, 193–4, 201–2, 204–5, 207–18, 215n.123, 224–5, 234–5, 246, 252–3 Ethiopia and failure of  204, 215n.123, 247–8 League of Nations Union  213n.112 Lehmann-Russbüldt, Otto  10n.34, 115, 119–20, 134–5, 164, 164n.114, 177–8, 183n.6 Ligue des droits de l’homme (LDH) and demands for publication of French diplomatic documents  86–9 and England  5 and origins of new-style pacifism  1–2 and politics  13–14 and pre-war political concerns in 1914  17–19 catalyst for emergence of new-style pacifism 265

289

centrality of in French political culture  3–5 change in view of human rights  9–10 debate on the ‘conditions for a lasting peace’ (1916), Franco-Russian Alliance  47 debate on the ‘conditions for a lasting peace’ (1916), negotiated peace  47 development of relationship with Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte  75 disappointment in post-war world  75–6 discussion of peace during Great War  47–8 disintegration of majority view of war origins begins 106 dissent within on war origins question  31–2 history 3 history of the archives thereof  5–6, 6n.21 impact of Great War on  9 importance of German question to  5 issue of nationalities  47–50 membership crisis (1937–39)  240–1 minority  11, 35, 43, 46–7, 52–3, 55, 57, 61–6, 70–1, 75–7, 79–82, 86–92, 95–8, 100–1, 105, 107, 110, 117n.33, 118, 121–2, 128, 131–3, 137–42, 149, 158–9, 162–3, 165–9, 171–2, 176–8, 181–2, 186, 188–204, 206, 208–12, 214–20, 222–6, 228–9, 233–8, 241–8, 252–3, 253n.54, 255, 258–62, 264–8 Munich Crisis  213–14, 243–6, 248–9 fallout from  246, 247n.34, 251, 256–7, 261 pacifism as understood in 1915  47 pacifism in wartime  32–3 pacifism, rejection of in 1916  49 Poland and incongruities of Franco-Russian Alliance 48–9 question of war guilt an omnipresent fixture at Ligue congresses  94, 94n.67, 137–8 size of  3–4 visit to Germany (1922)  108, 117–20 war indemnities  47 Ligue des droits de l’homme federations Ain Federation  177–8 Ardèche Federation  138, 220–1 Ardennes Federation  18–19 Aube Federation  240, 250–1, 252n.52, 253n.54 Charente-Inférieure Federation  212 Gironde Federation  22, 48, 53, 62 Maine-et-Loire Federation  195–6 Savoie Federation  162–3 Seine Federation  31–2, 41–2, 78–9, 81, 138, 159n.94, 191–2, 191n.36, 219–20, 227, 240–1 Seine-et-Oise Federation  48–9, 201 Var Federation  197n.59 Ligue des droits de l’homme sections Ancy-le-Franc section  58 Aulnoy (Nord)  105n.116

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290 Index Ligue des droits de l’homme sections (cont.) Brest section  98 eighteenth arrondissement in Paris  105n.116 fourteenth arrondissement in Paris  43–4, 196n.55 Lyon section  97n.83, 192, 196 Marseille section  174 Monnaie-Odéon (sixth arrondissement) section  57, 92, 95–6, 128, 138, 191–2, 194n.50, 227 on ‘initial material error’ of the Comité Central 92 nineteenth arrondissement in Paris  219 ninth arrondissement in Paris  60n.50 Petit-Rouge-Santé-Montparnasse (Paris)  59 St German-en-Laye section  105n.116 Versailles section  193n.45 Ligue des droits de l’homme, Congresses 1916 Congress (Paris)  44, 46–7 fallout from  65, 89–90, 237 debate on the ‘conditions for a lasting peace’ (1916)  46–7, 49–64 opposing conceptions of peace  46–7 1918 Congress (Paris)  70–1 1920 Congress (Strasbourg)  77–8, 85–6 1921 Congress (Paris)  94–7, 124–5, 171n.140 crisis of democracy  95–6 debate on international relations  124–5 1922 Congress (Nantes)  97–9, 108–9, 129–30 1923 Congress (Paris)  99–101, 131–3, 137–8 debate on the occupation of the Ruhr 131–3 1924 Congress (Marseille)  101–2 1925 Congress (La Rochelle)  137–9 1926 Congress (Metz)  138–9 1927 Congress (Paris)  139–40 presaging of schism in 1937  140 1928 Congress (Toulouse)  140–1 1929 Congress (Rennes)  175–6 1930 Congress (Biarritz)  175–6, 185 1931 Congress (Vichy)  169, 175–6 at the forefront of calls for disarmament and peace  175–6 1932 Congress (Paris)  156–7, 162–3, 165–6, 166n.123, 168–8, 181, 186 1933 Congress (Amiens)  182–90 debate on Nazism  184–90 intervention by M. Berthet (Rhône Federation) 188 intervention by Lucien Cancouët (Paris) 188–9 1934 Congress (Nancy)  190–7 and Geneva Disarmament Conference 193–4

different responses to Nazism  194 impact of events of 6 February 1934  191–4, 196–7 move to expel Edouard Herriot from Ligue and resignation of Basch  194–6 1935 Congress (Hyères)  197–204 attack by Basch on Emery’s ideas  199–200 Basch on the five-fold mission of the Ligue 200 debate on importance of rights of the individual 198–200 debate on the Ligue’s orientation  198–204 debate on the parliamentary system  199 impact of Léon Emery on Ligue  202–3 Jacobinism 201–2 1936 Congress (Dijon)  204–17 Basch on abrogation of Locarno  205 Basch on division of Europe into two blocs 205 Basch on remilitarization of Rhineland 205 debate on French foreign policy and the League of Nations  208–16 Emery on division of Europe into two blocs 208–9 Emery on Locarno  208 Emery on the need for Ligue unity  206 fall in membership numbers  204–5 Jacques Kayser’s criticism of post-war French foreign policy  209–10 1937 (Tours) Congress  186–7, 188n.27, 217, 220, 223–38, 240–2, 265 claim by minority that Dijon Congress decisions not implemented  223–5 comparison of 1937 debate with debate at 1916 Congress  230–2, 234–5, 237 comparison of French and Russian Revolutions by Me Rosenmark  228 criticism of Ligue position on Moscow Trials by Georges Pioch  227 debate on how to defend both democracy and peace  223–4, 229–34 debate on Moscow Purge Trials  223, 225–9, 226n.37, 234–6 debate on Spanish Civil War  217, 223, 225–7, 229–31, 234–5 schism 233–6 1938 Congress (Avignon)  239–43 Albert Bayet’s conclusions on meaning of Spanish situation  242–3 Georges Pioch’s appearance at  241–2 membership crisis  239–40 1939 Congress (Mulhouse)  239–41, 240n.6, 249n.44, 252–3 conference theme: The Problem of Peace, debates thereon  252–3 membership crisis  240–1

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Index organizational difficulties and sparse attendance 252 Ligue internationale des combattants de la paix (LICP)  54n.31, 158, 177, 189, 207 Lipstadt, Deborah  8 Little Entente  167–8, 205 Livre jaune comparison with Die Grosse Politik der europäischen Kabinette 86n.41 falsifications in  86–7, 86n.42 Lloyd George, David  88–9, 93, 97–8, 97n.89, 131, 157n.82 Locarno (Treaty of, spirit of )  11, 75, 103, 106, 137–8, 141–2, 142n.16, 147, 165, 204–8, 266 as the triumph of Ligue ideals  137 Malvy, Louis  63n.65 Manchester Guardian  78–9, 79n.11 Margueritte, Victor  106–7, 122n.53, 158, 164 Marne, Battle of the  46–7 Mathiez, Albert  98, 98n.93 Mauranges, Georges  59 Maurras, Charles  251 McMeekin, Sean  25n.45, 31n.69, 79n.14, 152–3 McMillan, James F.  14 Mélin, Jeanne  18–19 Memel 126 Ménard-Dorian, Aline  237 Menschheit, Die 142 Merrheim, Alphonse  40, 44, 52–3, 57–8 Mertens, Carl  142 Michon, Georges  8n.31, 8n.33, 175–7, 196–8, 202–3, 204n.80, 212, 233–4, 234n.68, 263–4 L’Alliance Franco-Russe, 1891–1917, and German reaction to  176–7 Milhaud, Maurice  210–11 Military service and republican principles  31–2 obligatory, as heritage of French Revolution 177 republican idea of and defence by Kahn  177 Minorities, rights of  31 Mirkine-Guezévitch, Boris  219–20 Mitteleuropa, likened to Pax romana 53–4 Mobilizations Austro-Hungarian  41, 79, 91–2, 99, 152, 155, 161–3 debates on within the SEDCG  41–2 German  41, 78n.8, 79, 91, 93–4, 151 meaning of  78n.8, 79, 81, 92–3, 147–8, 151, 166–7, 79nn.13–14 Russian general  23, 25, 39, 41–2, 56, 78–9, 78n.8, 79n.14, 81, 85–7, 89–94, 100–1, 104, 106, 109–10, 113, 145–9, 151–5, 161–3, 166–7, 170–1

291

key question for the war guilt debate  93 Russian partial  81 Serbian 56 Montgelas, Max von  120 Morel, E.D. (Edmund Dene)  37–8 Morel, Robert  206 Morhardt, Mathias  8n.33, 12–14, 36–8, 43–4, 52–3, 64–6, 75, 77–8, 82–90, 92–3, 98n.93, 99, 101, 103–7, 116–17, 121–2, 131, 135, 137–40, 145, 149, 159n.94, 204n.80, 209, 214, 219–22, 226n.37, 237, 264 animosity of Basch, Guernut, and Kahn towards 104 anti-Semitic comments by  85n.34 on Viviani’s absence from the Quai d’Orsay on the night of Jaurès’ assassination 88n.48 role in Société d’Etudes Documentaires et Critiques sur la Guerre (SEDCG) 36–8 Moscow Purge Trials  69, 95, 217–21, 223–9, 226n.37, 234–6, 241–2 as moral equivalent of the Dreyfus Affair  234–5, 235n.75 Moutet, Marius  63n.65, 88n.48, 127 Moyn, Samuel  4n.13 Munich Crisis (1938)  213–14, 243–6, 248–9 fallout from  246, 247n.34, 251, 256–7, 261 Napoleonic Wars  49–50 Naquet, Emmanuel  3–5, 35, 43 Nationalities (principle, question, rights of )  10–11, 31, 33–5, 47–52, 47n.2, 54, 57–9, 68, 70–1, 126, 214 Nazi-Soviet Pact (1939)  253, 257–8, 261 Nazi(s)  1–3, 5–7, 5n.20, 11–14, 64–5, 121–2, 141–2, 155, 168–72, 178, 181–90, 192–4, 196–7, 199–201, 203, 205–7, 210–12, 214, 217–18, 225–6, 231, 237, 239, 244–9, 251, 253–5, 257–64, 266–8 anti-Semitism  256–7, 262 perceptions of the Ligue  182–4 seizure of power, initial inability of Ligue to recognize significance of  181 Nazism  1, 6, 9, 11, 29–30, 186–9, 194, 197, 201–4, 203n.78, 263–4, 266–7 rise of and war guilt question  1 New Republic, The 147n.42 Niall Ferguson  23 Nord, Philip  266–7 Ormesson, Wladimir d’  167–8 Österreich, Paul  117 Oxford Union ‘King and Country’ Debate, 1933 188–9

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292 Index Pacifism (pacifist)  1–4, 7, 11–14, 18–19, 22, 31–3, 35–6, 40, 42–4, 46–7, 49, 59, 63–5, 81, 89–90, 95, 106, 110–11, 114n.23, 115n.27, 117–18, 117n.33, 120, 124–5, 127–9, 131–5, 139–43, 146, 148nn.44–5, 149, 158, 167–8, 174–5, 175n.157, 177–8, 181–4, 186–7, 196, 200–2, 204n.80, 206–7, 209, 213–14, 217–18, 221, 224–5, 229–33, 236, 243–5, 248–51, 254n.57, 255–7, 259–63, 265, 267–8 aetiology of  11–13 distinction between old and new-style  1n.5 French compared to British  11–12, 14 new-style and historical dissent  12n.39, 35 Painlevé, Paul  3–4, 63, 121, 194n.50 Paix par le Droit, La  31, 39 Paléologue, Maurice  79n.14, 84–5, 86n.41, 87, 104 Parti communiste français (PCF)  95, 138, 218–20, 224–5, 227, 253 and incompatibility of membership in LDH 95 excoriation of neo-Jacobinism of  235n.75 Paul-Boncour Law (1927)  139–40, 140n.9 Paul-Boncour, Joseph  127, 175 Paz, Magdeleine  219–20, 226–9, 234–5 Permanent Court of International Justice, The Hague  131–2, 205 Permanent International Court of Arbitration, The Hague  54 Philip, André  197–8, 203 Philo-fascism Michel Alexander accused of  140 not an explanation for support for Vichy regime 259–64 not an inspiration for pacifism  1–2 Philo-Nazism 265 Emery’s alleged  209 Phoney War  7, 239, 261 Pioch, Georges  137–40, 158–9, 163, 177, 186–7, 189–90, 192, 197–8, 202–3, 227, 234, 235n.75, 241–2, 242n.12 Plan Constructif  175, 176n.158 Planche, Camille  231–3, 252–3, 253n.54 Plauzoles, Dr Justin Sicard de  19, 22n.22, 191n.36, 258–9 Poincaré, Raymond  41–2, 65–6, 79n.14, 81–2, 86n.41, 86n.42, 87, 90–3, 100–1, 104–6, 119–20, 130–1, 140–1, 144–5, 147–52, 154–5, 158, 162–3, 170–1, 173, 186, 226n.37, 247–9 debate with René Gerin on war origins  148–52 interest of German Foreign Office in Gerin/ Poincaré debate  154 Poland (Poles)  33, 41, 48–51, 57, 63, 67–8, 71, 89–90, 94, 126, 138–9, 142, 167–70, 176–7, 205, 208–9, 247, 256–8, 257n.73, 261

Political culture, place of pacifism in it  11–12 French and German political cultures compared 13–14 Popular Front  3–4, 6, 181–2, 204–12, 217–20, 225–7, 231–2 Pravda 152 Pressensé, Francis de  17–19 Preventive war  28 Progressive, The 147 Prudhommeaux, Jules  142, 244–5, 258–9 on the Munich Crisis  244–5 Prussian militarism  17, 30–1, 33, 51–2, 57–8, 113, 175 Quidde, Ludwig  175n.157 Rassemblement national populaire (RNP)  209, 261 Ratibor (Upper Silesia)  5–6, 253–5 Raynal, Jean  60 Rebérioux, Madeleine  7, 254n.57 Rebus sic stantibus 38–9 Renan, Ernest  58–9, 70–1 Renouvin, Pierre  8n.31, 93–4, 143–5, 156, 157n.82, 157n.86, 168–9, 172–3, 186–7 Reparations  62, 65–6, 70, 75–6, 80, 94, 101, 103–4, 107–8, 114–20, 122–5, 127–33, 128n.73, 135–6, 153–61, 163–5, 164n.113, 168–74, 184–5, 194, 214, 230–1, 266 Reparations Commission Final Report (1921) 124 Revisionism, historical  8 Reynier, Elie  138, 197–8, 220–1, 234–5 Rhineland question  214 Rhineland, remilitarization of  196, 204, 206–8, 215–16 Richet, Charles  57, 63–4 Rif War  13n.45, 137–8 Robespierre, Maximilien  54, 98, 196–7, 202–3, 233 as an inspiration for pacifism  233 Rolland, Madeleine  36–7 Rolland, Romain  43, 46–7, 148n.45, 207, 228, 265 Rosenberg, Alfred  5n.20, 83n.31, 253–5, 255n.59, 263n.108 Rosenmark, Raymond  219–21, 219n.9, 226–9, 226n.36, 228n.43, 234–6, 236n.83 Röttcher, Fritz  142 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, and the ‘general will’ 232–3 Rozner, Jacques  201 Ruhr, occupation of (1923)  11, 99–101, 103, 107, 108n.1, 111, 114–15, 127–35, 137, 184–5, 194, 237, 247–9, 266 effect on Franco-German perceptions of each other 133–4

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Index Ruhr, possible occupation of (1920–22)  122–3, 125, 127 Russia (Russian)  10–11, 17–18, 23–8, 31, 33–5, 38–42, 46, 48–9, 51–2, 54, 56–7, 60, 63, 66–70, 76, 78n.8, 79–81, 79n.14, 83–95, 113–14, 121, 143–55, 161–3, 167–8, 176–7, 208–9, 218–19, 225–6, 249, 255, 257–8, 261–2, 265–8 as liberal democracy  54 Civil War  70 Empire 31 Tsarist 10–11 Russian Revolution (Bolshevik or November)  69, 226–9 condemnation of by Comité Central  69 Russian Revolution (March 1917)  54, 66–9 meaning for the Ligue  68 Ruyssen, Théodore  22, 33–4, 48, 50, 53–5, 61–4, 70, 81, 92–3, 115, 118, 126, 138, 174, 218–19, 221, 237, 258–9, 259n.82 on Mathias Morhardt’s Lettres à la Ligue des droits de l’homme 92–3 on principle of nationalities  20n.14 on Russian Empire as liberal force  33 Saarbrücker Zeitung and Mathias Morhardt  121 Sanctions  53–4, 65–6, 115, 125, 174, 213–15, 217–18 economic 208–9 military  125, 127, 168–9, 174, 211, 213–15, 213n.112 Sangnier, Marc  115n.27 Sarajevo assassination  19, 25–7, 30–1, 31n.69, 91, 103, 154 Sarrail, General Maurice  124–5 Sazonov, Sergei  150, 153–4 Schappler, Marie  36–7 Scheidemann, Philip  95 Schleswig 33 Schnaebele Affair  27 Schoen, Leopold von  41–2, 84–5, 104 Schücking, Walther  134–5 Schwendemann, Karl  78n.8, 144 Séailles, Gabriel  48–52, 49n.12, 60, 63n.65, 68, 70–1, 95, 98n.93, 237 Second World War  7, 253–8 Gestapo interrogations of 171 Ligue section executive committee members  253–5 Ligue defends PCF and L’Humanité 253 seizure of Ligue archives by the Hauptarbeitsgruppe Frankreich and their peregrinations  253–5 transfer of Ligue archives to Ratibor  253–5 Sée, Henri  103, 106, 157–8 Seignebos, Charles  85–6 role in Société d’Etudes Documentaires et Critiques sur la Guerre (SEDCG)  36–8

293

Serbia (Serb)  19, 23–7, 25n.45, 30–1, 31n.69, 39, 41, 50, 56–7, 60, 78–9, 79n.12, 81–2, 85–91, 88n.48, 93–4, 103, 109n.4, 113, 143–4, 146–7, 152–3, 155, 161–3, 231, 233, 245–6, 257–8, 261–2 Séverine (Caroline Rémy)  50–3, 96–7, 231–2, 237 Sidgwick, Ethel  36–7 Société d’Etudes Documentaires et Critiques sur la Guerre (SEDCG)  12–13, 17–18, 35–5, 52, 77–9, 82–4, 89–90, 105, 113n.20, 117n.33, 227 as not a pacifist group  43 debate on the Franco-Russian Alliance  40 formation of  35–6 importance in creation of new-style pacifism 43 links with Union of Democratic Control  37–8 non-partisan nature of  36 police infiltration of  36 war origins  37–8 Somme, Battle of the  46–7 Sordet, Dominique  262 Soviet Union  10–11, 69, 78–9, 94–5, 209–10, 218–21, 225–9, 231, 242, 249, 252–3, 255, 257–8, 261, 265–6 Spanish Civil War  217–19, 221, 223, 225–6, 241–2, 250–1 Strachan, Hew  8 Strange defeat  255–6, 267 Stresemann, Gustav  125, 127–8, 141–2, 143n.21, 160–1 Ströbel, Heinrich  18n.7, 124–5 Sudeten question  71, 250–1 Sweets, John  3n.12 Tangiers  27, 154 Tardieu, André  131, 173, 186, 199, 227 Three-Year Military Service Law  19, 21, 40 Times, The 80 Toury, Fernand Gouttenoire de  75, 91n.57, 93–4, 97–9, 98n.93, 101–4, 106–9, 109n.4, 120, 129–30, 137–40, 159–60, 186–8 on threat posed to Europe by Versailles Treaty 99 Treitschke, Heinrich von  29, 50 Treviranus, Gottfried  155 Turkey (Turkish)  34–5, 55–7, 145 Union of Democratic Control  37–8, 82, 142 Union Sacrée  6, 9, 12–13, 17, 20–2, 31–4, 45, 89–90, 100, 188, 193–4, 201–2, 231, 234–7, 241–2 debate on calls for at 1939 Congress  252–3 Georges Pioch’s fears of in 1938  241–2 pacifist suspicion of in 1939  255 René Gerin’s fears of in 1939  247

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294 Index Union Sacrée, L’ (Raymond Poincaré’s memoirs)  147–8, 152n.65 Unspoken assumptions and war origins 105 Verdun, Battle of  46–7 Vérone, Maria  59, 63, 63n.65, 237 Versailles Treaty (1919)  6, 8, 11–14, 46, 51–2, 72, 75–7, 90, 93–4, 97–100, 99n.96, 102–8, 110–12, 115, 119–20, 122, 125–9, 131–3, 135, 137–9, 142–3, 149, 153–9, 156n.80, 157nn.82–3, 159n.94, 163–71, 173, 175–7, 181–2, 184–7, 189–90, 192–4, 201–2, 206–7, 209–12, 215–16, 218–19, 221–5, 230–1, 234–5, 245–6, 250–1, 256–8, 260–1, 266 dangers of German revisionism  110–11, 127–8 debates on revision of within Ligue des droits de l’homme  80, 90, 97–8, 132–3, 137–8, 157–8, 159n.94, 165–6, 168–74, 181–2, 184–5, 188, 190, 197–204, 207–8, 213–14, 224–5, 234–5, 247, 250–1

left-wing German demands for  120, 143 Nazi violent revision of  245–6 Vichy regime  1–2, 7, 7n.28, 64, 128, 209, 214, 224–5, 251, 255, 258–67, 259n.82 Vichy, origins of pro-Vichy sentiments  1–2 Victoire, La 49 Villepin, Patrick de  141–2 Viviani, René  41–2, 79n.14, 82, 84–5, 87–8, 88n.48, 93–4, 104, 147, 151 Vorwärts 133–4 Weber, Eugen  266–7 Weber, Maurice  197–8, 207, 211–12 Weimar Republic  1, 5–6, 9–10, 110–12, 119–20, 134–5, 212, 250 and war guilt question  1 Weltbühne, Die  18–19, 111, 124–5 Wilhelm II, Kaiser  78–9, 82–3, 102, 106, 217–18 Wilson, Woodrow  60, 65–6, 69, 94, 126, 131, 157n.82 and ‘peace without victory’ idea  65–6 Wunder, Dr Gerd  6n.21, 83n.31, 263n.108 Zimmerwald 43