In the Shadow of the Swastika

The Nazi seizure of power in January 1933 caught the Ligue des droits de l’homme by surprise. The Ligue debate on how to respond to Nazism breathed new life into the war guilt debate. Increasingly, the Ligue’s gaze was directed forward to how to deal with Nazism, rather than backwards to a debate on the Great War, but its political analysis continued to be inspired by a reading of the meaning of the Great War. Both minority and majority initially failed to understand the sea change that Nazism represented, but the minority was transfixed by the idea that resistance to Nazism was going to require a new Union sacrée and the division of Europe into antagonistic blocs. Much of the minority’s opposition to this was the belief that France was complicit in the rise of Nazism. The threat of domestic French fascism was also a major preoccupation.

The Ramifications of the War Origins Debate

The debate on war origins had immediate political repercussions for the Ligue des droits de l’homme. The Ligue’s first wartime Congress (November 1916) debated the ‘conditions for a lasting peace’. The debate revolved around two issues: France’s relationship with its autocratic, undemocratic ally, imperial Russia, and in particular how to square support for all that the League stood for with Russia’s treatment of its oppressed minorities, especially the Poles; and secondly, calls for a negotiated end to the war. The debate showed how the LDH was divided between a majority which believed that arbitration could only be applied in times of peace and a minority which demanded an immediate end to the carnage. It also underlined the minority’s deep suspicion of Russia, which was to have deleterious effects twenty years later. The divisions between minority and majority had solidified by the end of the war.

Turning the Page?

The years immediately following the signature of the Locarno treaties in October 1925 are usually seen as an era of détente in European, particularly Franco-German, politics. There seemed to be a lull in the Ligue’s fixation on the problem of war origins, but it was only an appearance. Other issues briefly took centre stage, but even they were discussed in terms redolent of concerns from the Great War. Some members of the minority began to publish in a new journal, Evolution. An event of signal importance was the publication of a book by René Gerin and Raymond Poincaré on war responsibilities. There was huge debate over the Pierre Renouvin/Camille Bloch thesis which sought to limit the importance of Article 231. On the eve of the Nazi seizure of power, the Ligue devoted its 1932 Congress to the controversy over the peace treaties of 1919. It was too little, too late.

The Wounds of War (1919–24)

The beginning of the interwar period brought an intensification of the war guilt debate within the Ligue des droits de l’homme. There was vigorous discussion of the question of the Russian general mobilization in 1914. Repeated attempts by the Ligue’s minority to extract a commitment to seek revision of the Versailles Treaty failed. The most that the majority would concede was that the Treaty was legally flawed because it had been forced on Germany, but it continued to believe that the Treaty expressed a valid moral and historical point. The Ligue demanded—unsuccessfully—the publication of French documents relating to the outbreak of the war. The majority continued to argue that there was no point in opening a debate on war origins, although by the end of 1924 it is clear that it was much less confident in the rectitude of its position.

War Origins

The outbreak of the Great War in August 1914 surprised the Ligue des droits de l’homme which quickly adopted the position of virtually all French people of support for the Union sacrée. Despite the fact that the Ligue’s origins in the Dreyfus Affair lay in a rejection of the military ethos in French society, it reverted almost instantly to a neo-Jacobin crusading posture based on a deep antipathy to Germany. The case for German war guilt made by the Ligue’s vice-president, Victor Basch, was challenged by 1915, however, by a minority group within the Ligue which founded the ‘Société d’études documentaires et critiques sur la guerre’ (SEDCG). Central to the SEDCG’s concerns was the issue of French and Russian war guilt in the outbreak of war; in other words, of shared responsibility for the Great War.

Introduction

This chapter sets up three main arguments that are developed in the book: first, that the debate on war origins and war guilt in the First World War nearly destroyed the Ligue des droits de l’homme well before the Second World War; secondly, that this debate lay at the heart of a dissenting, new style of pacifism which emerged in France near the end of the 1920s; and thirdly, that both of these phenomena catalysed the emergence of pro-Vichy sentiments during the Second World War. This latter 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 Great War had been fought by France under false pretences.

When All Is Said and Done …

This book has been about the decline and fall of a great French republican institution, the Ligue des droits de l’homme (LDH). The LDH was torn apart by the war guilt question over the course of the entire period from 1914 to the fall of France in 1940. This debate was the catalyst for the emergence of a new style of pacifism in France which was hardly like its ‘placid’ interwar British cousin. The war guilt question was also the progenitor of a uniquely French suspicion, first of Russian, and ultimately of Soviet intentions. This led under Vichy to the appearance of collaboration and philo-fascism, but it was more a case of peace becoming an ‘ethic of ultimate ends’ for the minority within the LDH.

Once More with Feeling?

The Ligue des droits de l’homme went into freefall after 1937. It was not the Nazis who killed the Ligue, but rather the crisis which came to a head in 1937. In 1938 and 1939, the Ligue underwent a financial and membership crisis. The last two pre-war Congresses were rather tired affairs. The Munich crisis, the invasion of Prague, the question of Danzig, and the fall of France did not change the political/historical analysis of the minority which continued to explain the crises of 1938–40 through the lens of the Great War. The collaboration of some members of the minority during the Second World War was due to their dissenting position on the origins of the Great War. The Ligue’s papers were seized by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg shortly after the Germans reached Paris in June 1940, eventually to be transported back to Berlin for analysis.

Bridge over the Abyss?

The Ligue des droits de l’homme had several German interlocutors in the 1920s, ranging from the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte (DLfM) to the German Foreign Office to German public opinion. The leadership of the DLfM cosseted French republican opinion in the belief that all of Germany wanted to pay reparations for the destruction of northern France during the Great War, but there was hardly unanimity even within the German republican left on the issue of war guilt and reparations. The tangible political ramifications of the war guilt debate are to be seen, above all, in the fallout from the Ruhr Occupation of 1923 which could have destroyed the burgeoning relationship of the LDH and DLfM, but did not. It did, however, change the way France and the Ligue were viewed in Germany.

1937, or the Aventine Secession

The 1937 Tours Congress, the theme of which was ‘How to Defend Both Democracy and Peace’, brought schism to the Ligue des droits de l’homme. The issues of contention were the Moscow Purge Trials, the Spanish Civil War, and the refusal to countenance mediation of the latter. The minority charged that the Ligue’s majority was refusing to admit the atrocities being committed in the Soviet Union in order to shore up the Popular Front in France. Refusal of mediation in the Spanish conflict was a replay of the refusal of mediation during the Great War. The link between the origins of the Great War and the European situation in 1937 was explicitly made. The latter was the misbegotten progeny of the former and the minority steadfastly refused to countenance another Union sacrée.