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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!’
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.
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.
Norman Ingram
Montréal, June 2018
of Abbreviations
2. War Origins: The Debate Begins 17
3. The Ramifications of the War Origins Debate: War Aims and Ending the War 46
II. A LA RECHERCHE D’UNE GUERRE GAGNEE
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
III. LES FLEURS DU MAL
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
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,
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.
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.
War Guilt and the Ligue des droits de l’homme 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.
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.
War Guilt and the Ligue des droits de l’homme 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: 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. 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.
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
War Guilt and the Ligue des droits de l’homme
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
The goal of this book is therefore to examine first and foremost how that quintessentially 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.
War Guilt and the Ligue des droits de l’homme 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.’
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.
War Guilt and the Ligue des droits de l’homme 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.
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.
