Yesterday morning, the British Prime Minister travelled to Paris at the invitation of the French President to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe. Sir Keir Starmer was the first UK leader to attend an Armistice Day ceremony in Paris since Winston Churchill did so alongside General de Gaulle in 1944.
Yet there is a degree of irony in these displays of Franco-British unity marking the war’s end. Despite having fought side-by-side for the conflict’s duration, and notwithstanding the integration of their economies to an unprecedented degree, at the war’s end the two countries reverted to traditional rivalry. One of the areas where friction manifested itself was over how to deal with post-war Germany, which unfortunately coincided with France becoming the scapegoat in the war guilt debate.
Old frictions resurfaced, with London now warning unfairly that France sought European supremacy
In the wake of the Versailles Treaty, by fair means and foul, Berlin successfully contested the legitimacy of Article 231, which laid responsibility for the war’s outbreak with Germany and the central powers. But the other power craving a say in the war guilt debate was the new Soviet regime established in the wake of the 1917 Russian revolution. It sought to discredit its Tsarist predecessor to bolster its own legitimacy and popularity both internally and externally. If it could show that the autocratic Tsarist regime, in collaboration with the ‘bourgeois’ president of France, Raymond Poincaré, were together responsible for the outbreak of the Great War through the Franco-Russian alliance, the Soviets could kill two birds with one stone: discredit Tsarist Russia and justify not repaying to France massive pre-war loans.
The pragmatic Soviet approach found ideological support in Lenin’s 1916 interpretation of the Great War, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, which resonated with the European Left. His description of war as the natural consequence of the great powers’ competition for colonies and investment markets logically implied that the central powers were not alone in shouldering responsibility for the war.
With Germany successfully eschewing blame and the USSR pointing the finger at its predecessor, responsibility shifted to France. The stakes in the war guilt question were morally and financially high. France was a credible scapegoat given loss of the provinces of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany in 1871. Added to this was the fact that France’s effective leader in the two years preceding the war, Raymond Poincaré, had followed resolute policies intent on strengthening France’s links with her allies, especially Russia, and was a Lorrainer to boot. German and Soviet propaganda claimed that Poincaré had plotted a war of revanche against Germany to retrieve the lost provinces. The war guilt debate became even more impassioned because following the war Poincaré returned to power and pursued strict enforcement of the Versailles treaty and payment of reparations.
The German and Soviet campaigns found support in French domestic politics. The French Left, notably the newly formed French Communist party, sought to overturn Poincaré’s governments by tarring him with war responsibility and labelling him ‘Poincaré-la-guerre’. French responsibility in the war guilt debate gained credence, bolstered by American president Woodrow Wilson’s view that the pre-war alliance systems and secret treaties were responsible for the war, including the Franco-Russian alliance. Meanwhile, in Britain growing pacifism dovetailed with prime minister David Lloyd George’s gradual shift to the view that German war responsibility should be put aside to allow the country to be rebuilt and open for trade.
The zeitgeist penalised France. International leniency to Germany caused Marshal Foch to warn that Versailles would merely be ‘a 20-year truce’, while Clemenceau and Poincarè insisted to the Anglo-Americans that Germany must pay reparations on the scale it had imposed on France after the Franco-Prussian War. Gradually, the gap between London and Paris widened. Old frictions resurfaced, with London now warning unfairly that France, not Germany, sought European supremacy.
By 1922, British air staff considered war with France ‘the greatest menace to this country’ given her possession of the largest airforce in the world. Such fears put paid to the Channel tunnel project in 1920 after the Foreign Office warned the cabinet: ‘The Foreign Office conclusion is that our relations with France never have been, are not, probably never will be, sufficiently stable and friendly to justify the construction of a Channel tunnel’.
Differences were not only imagined. Britain and France clashed over Germany, but also over Eastern Europe and the Middle East. From brothers in arms, France and Britain were rivals again.
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