Read France and the Nazi Threat: The Collapse of French Diplomacy 1932-1939 Online
Authors: Jean-Baptiste Duroselle
Tags: #History, #Europe, #France
3.
Toward the “Grand Alliance”—The Preliminary Negotiations
5.
The Failure of the Military Negotiations
6.
On the Periphery—The Near East
2.
The Air Force from Munich to the War
XV.
Toward the Inescapable Conclusion (August 22-September 3, 1939)
1.
France Remains Passive (August 23-31, 1939)
2.
The Last Three Days (September 1-3, 1939)
Glossary of terms and abbreviations
by
Anthony Adamthwaite
B
ooks that get rave reviews often quickly fade. Not so Jean-Baptiste Duroselle’s
France and the Nazi Threat
(
La Décadence
). Acclaimed on publication in 1979 as a groundbreaking tour de force, it remains the classic study of France’s response to the Nazi threat in the 1930s. Duroselle (1917-1994), despite doing much to foster American studies in France, is not well known in the United States. Yet he deserves to be much better known because, with his mentor Pierre Renouvin, professor of contemporary history at the Sorbonne (1933-1964), he helped pioneer a new approach to the study of international history, an approach superbly encapsulated in his investigation of France’s eclipse as a great power. His reputation, however, rests on much more than one book. A substantial output addressed several major themes: American foreign relations in the first half of the twentieth century, the history of Europe, migration, the Trieste conflict, the theory and practice of international relations, the career of Georges Clemenceau, the impact of the two world wars on French society, the foreign policy of Marshal Petain’s Vichy regime.
1
Born in Paris on November 17, 1917, ten days after the Bolshevik Revolution and on the day that Clemenceau became war premier, he taught at the Paris Institut d’études politiques, thereafter at the Sorbonne. Tall, with a commanding physical presence, Duroselle was a superb teacher, offering new ideas and insights, continually pushing out the boundaries
of history by engaging with other disciplines, notably sociology and psychology. Endowed with an encyclopedic memory, he wore his learning lightly, sprinkling anecdotes and personal memories, captivating audiences in the classroom and on television with warmth, wit and openness. His accessibility and empathy were a blessing for young researchers like myself seeking advice on dissertation topics. At his office in the rue Saint-Guillaume he seemed too large for a small room bursting with books. In excellent English he signposted my way and then talked enthusiastically of plans to teach for a year in Mexico. A keen sense of humor inoculated him against the occasional tediousness of academic discourse. Asked at a colloquium how he was enjoying the presentations he complained of having caught colloquitis. Long afternoon sessions can sedate rather than stimulate. Duroselle power-napped while subconsciously absorbing the text; as soon as a speaker concluded he would be on his feet firing salient questions. Gifted with exceptional energy he thought nothing of a weekly Paris-Bologna commute for a seminar at the John Hopkins Center at a time when European air and rail links were less developed than they are today. Fanaticism of any kind repelled him. A founding spirit of the new post-1968 Paris VIII Vincennes campus he envisaged it as an opportunity for renewal of the academy but shocked by the rancor and assertiveness of colleagues and some students chose to stay at the Sorbonne.
Duroselle was not one of those who from the age of seven know their vocation. The École Polytechnique, France’s top-ranking school for engineers attracted him, as did a military career. Entering the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), rue d’Ulm, a nursery for the intellectual and literary elite, he hesitated until the last moment between history and philosophy. At the ENS geography fascinated him and the subject of his first scholarly article was the Gulf of Morbihan on the Breton coast. In 1940 he fought in the Battle of France, luckily without being taken prisoner. After demobilization came marriage and teaching in high school in order to support a young family. Entry to the higher levels of the teaching profession in France is by competitive examination. The most prestigious of these is the aggrégation and normally only agrégés are appointed to university posts. In the aggrégation of 1943 he took first place in history and geography. For his doctoral dissertation he chose a theme in religious history: “The beginnings of social Catholicism in France, 1822-1870.” It was a natural choice, given a staunch Catholic family background
and popular post-Liberation expectations of a revived Catholicism leavening a new France. These were the years of the worker-priest movement and the Abbé Pierre’s rag pickers of Emmaus. Since the state and universities did not offer funding packages graduate students worked full or part time while researching. Consequently, completing a dissertation often took ten years; Duroselle finished in record time- four years. The educational system of the day with its emphasis on learning by rote might have produced closed and unimaginative minds. Fortunately, a broad historical and general culture underpinned it. As well as knowing their chosen fields apprentice historians were expected to read in all major areas. The knowledge gained enabled Duroselle to navigate confidently across the centuries.
After short spells of teaching at the universities of Saarbrücken and Lille he went to the Paris Institut d’études politiques. Then from 1958-1964 he directed the Center for the Study of International Relations at the Fondation nationale des sciences politiques. Why the switch from religious to international history? International history had fired Duroselle before he started researching social Catholicism but in the mid-1940s Renouvin, doyen of France’s international historians, was reluctant to accept graduate students. Accordingly, Duroselle turned to another professor, Charles Pouthas, who proposed a topic in religious history. Nevertheless, he stayed close to Renouvin, acting as his teaching assistant from 1945-1949. Then chance took a hand. Lured by an attractive fee he contributed a chapter on the contemporary world for a collective history of the Second World War. Next came an invitation to write an international relations text.
Diplomatic History from 1919 to the Present
(
Histoire diplomatique de 1919 à nos jours
) published in 1953 launched him as an international historian. Shortly afterwards Renouvin, who had been elected dean at the Sorbonne, wished to lighten his commitments and invited Duroselle to take over responsibility for the teaching of international history at the Institut d’études politiques. Thus in 1964 he was a natural successor to Renouvin in the chair of contemporary history at Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne (1964-1983).
International history for Duroselle signified much more than the study of France’s external relations. Instead of Francocentricism came engagement with other countries and cultures, for example the vigorous promotion of North American studies. This may not now seem especially newsworthy yet in mid-twentieth century it constituted a remarkable venture.
Historians nowadays live in the “small world” described by David Lodge. They travel the globe from one conference to the next; specialists know each other and they even read each other’s books when they have the time. In the 1950s they traveled rarely and knew little about one another. To be sure, specialists kept up with the scholarship of foreign colleagues but there was no great institutional intimacy. Today’s extensive, ever burgeoning, networks of research institutes, conferences, colloquia, workshops, journals and fellowships did not exist. Only a minority participated in the big event of the professional calendar, the quinquennial World Congress of Historical Sciences. No regular meetings of European historians paralleled the annual London Conference of Anglo-American Historians. National history ruled the roost, leaving precious little room for anything else. Until the 1960s there was no specialist teaching of American history at the Sorbonne. Moreover, international contacts did not mobilize French historians, partly because foreign language skills were comparatively rare, partly because funding was exiguous.
Duroselle, one of the first historians to visit the United States—visiting professors from France were usually literature specialists—taught at several campuses, including Harvard and Notre Dame, Indiana. The resulting contacts with American historians and political scientists generated in 1964 the first colloquium on Franco-American history. A study of American foreign relations,
From Wilson to Roosevelt: Foreign Policy of the United States 1913-1945
(1960), quickly established itself as a standard text. It utilized public opinion polls—a brave initiative at the time since many historians dismissed them as political science tools of dubious validity. Director from 1963 of the French Fulbright Committee for the promotion of cultural and educational exchanges Duroselle persuaded the government to share funding with the United States. Thus the Fulbright became the Franco-American Committee for university and cultural exchanges. Publication in 1978 of
France and the United States: From the Beginnings to the Present
, hot on the heels of the French edition of 1976, further enhanced a lead role in North American studies. His graduate students in American history enjoyed distinguished academic careers, notably André Kaspi, Yves-Henri Nouhailhat, and Pierre Mélandri. However, Duroselle’s international interests were not confined to the United States. He initiated academic rapprochements with Italy and Switzerland, institutionalized in regular conferences and the creation of a new journal,
Relations internationales
.
In the United States and Britain of the 1950s and 1960s an unreconstructed diplomatic history still ruled; in France it was dead and buried. Together Renouvin and Duroselle redefined the field, giving French historiography a strong lead over the Anglo-Saxon academy. Duroselle’s study of France’s descent from power in the 1930s has to be read in the context of this rethinking, which was a response to the challenge of the new history, La nouvelle histoire, chiefly represented by the work of the group associated with the review founded in 1929 and usually known as Annales. The new history in France, dominated by the trinity Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch and Fernand Braudel, has been the most innovative of the twentieth century. Two of the leading ideas Annales advocated were a problem-centered analytical history for a conventional history of events, l’histoire évènementielle; secondly, the opening-up of the totality of human experience in place of a largely political history about kings, ministers, battles and treaties.
As a result, diplomatic and political history was in the doghouse. Conceived as the study of relations between governments and unfairly disparaged as “What one clerk said to another,” diplomatic history traditionally occupied top place in Clio’s hierarchy.
2
Certainly diplomatic historians had a case to answer. They assumed that the past could be cut into neat and separable slices of political, economic, social and religious history. Virtually no attempt was made to relate foreign policy to underlying societal structures: geographic conditions, demographics, economic and financial interests, ideologies and public opinion. Preoccupied with the reconstruction of bilateral and multilateral negotiations researchers followed a paper chase of official documents. This nose to the ground methodology confined consideration of wider forces and issues to assessments of national interests and aspirations defined in terms of power, prestige and security. Unsurprisingly, arguments about the future of diplomatic history, often acrimonious, rumbled through the 1930s and 1940s. Renouvin’s reluctance to take on board graduate students in the mid-1940s reflected a desire for space in which to reconsider the field.
The Annales school recruited many of Duroselle’s peers. Marc Bloch, one of its founders, taught him in 1938-39. Why did he stick with old-fashioned diplomatic? Annales raised two barriers: one personal; the other intellectual. In 1946 in an outburst of furor academicus Lucien Febvre, second person of the Annales trinity, attacked the work of Duroselle’s dissertation director, Charles Pouthas. The vehemence and injustice of
the attack, recalled Duroselle, was such that “I never wanted to write a line in Annales.”
3
Although recognizing and admiring the school’s positive achievements, the blanket trashing of political and diplomatic history, biography and traditional narrative angered and alienated him.
Happily, the new history did the old a good turn. In the early 1950s Renouvin rebaptised diplomatic as international relations, giving it a new remit. This was the fruit of lengthy reflection, not a hasty make over. Indeed from the early 1930s he had censured colleagues for neglecting structural forces and for assuming that the diplomatic record alone sufficed for the understanding of international relations. In 1935 he created at the Sorbonne the Institute for the Study of Contemporary International Relations. Resisting the temptation to borrow political science clothes and theoretical baggage Renouvin opted for deepening and enlarging the field as part of mainstream history. He sought to make sense of international political change by highlighting the interplay between on the one hand, global and domestic dynamics, and on the other, people, events and day-to-day decision-making.