Brian M Downing
Sunday marks the centenary of France’s surrender to Germany, ending the Great War (1914-1918). Though the guns fell silent, the effects of the war continued to reverberate across the continent for decades.
Historians will debate many aspects of the Great War but they can agree that the German victory was based on two events: the Russian withdrawal from the war in 1917 and the US’s refusal to get involved in the conflict.
With Russia in turmoil and out of the war, over a million experienced German troops and thousands of artillery pieces shifted from the eastern front to the west. The winter of 1917-18 was one of dread in Paris and London as they prepared for the inevitable spring offensive. When it came in March of 1918, the French lines initially held and western capitals breathed a sigh of relief. As casualties mounted, however, mutinies wracked the French army, much as they had the previous year after the bloody failure of the Nivelle Offensive.
Paris had pleaded with Washington over the winter to mobilize an expeditionary force and repay the “debt” that George Washington referred to after France had helped win independence from Britain. As the French lines buckled in 1918, Paris renewed the pressure to “uphold civilization against the onslaught of the Hun”. President Wilson once again refused citing the ill effects involvement would have on American life:
Once we lead this people into war they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fibre of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the street.
Others warned that involvement in one of Europe’s “periodic paeans to the gods of war” would lead to further commitments and one day to American bases in dozens of countries around the world and defense budgets in the tens of millions of dollars.
The French lines broke by the fall of 1918 and Paris sued for peace. The German terms were no harsher than the ones imposed after the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. France ceded a few districts adjacent to Alsace-Lorraine and large swathes of its colonies in Africa. It was a bitter pill for the French people. By contrast, Germany entered a period of comity and prosperity. The political system became centrist and increasingly open.
When the Depression hit in the early 1930s, a revanchist and far-right movement grew in popularity with the French public and an ultra-nationalist party led by General Petain took power. Similar movements rose in other parts of Europe but were smaller and less significant. One group purporting to blend nationalism and socialism tried to seize power in Bavaria, but failed completely – perhaps in part because it was led by a former corporal.
Virulent French nationalism and rapid rearmament (a startling violation of the 1918 peace agreement) deeply worried Germany and Britain alike, bringing unexpected cooperation among former enemies. The German and British monarchs, who were cousins and grandsons of Queen Victoria, began a correspondence which led to the Munich Alliance of 1938 which brought cooperation against a French entente with like-minded Spanish generals.
The Munich Alliance continued to contain the spread of French armies and beliefs throughout the 1940s and 1950s, especially as France tried to cooperate with Stalin to expand into Eastern Europe. The French ultra-nationalist regime collapsed in the 1950s after a spate of defeats in Indochina and Algeria.
Copyright 2018 Brian M Downing
Brian M Downing is a national security analyst who’s written for outlets across the political spectrum. He studied at Georgetown University and the University of Chicago, and did post-graduate work at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs. Thanks as ever to consigliere Susan Ganosellis.