France and the Apres Guerre 1918-1924 (review)

France and the Après Guerre 1918-1924. By Benjamin F. Martin (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1999) 278 pp. $49.95 cloth $22.50 paper.

In Schuker's now classic phrase, the years immediately following World War I marked "the end of French predominance in Europe."¹ Economic and financial weakness, combined with diplomatic ineptitude, accelerated a French retreat from military and diplomatic preeminence in Europe to second-rank status as a limping, once-great power. The opening of government archives for the interwar period fostered a series of penetrating studies of French interwar decline during the 1970s; the immediate postwar years in France have been rather neglected since then. Martin returns to this terrain with a history of progressive French disillusionment from the war's end in 1918 to the election of the Cartel des gauches in 1924. His narrative provides an engaging account of domestic politics during the Bloc National parliament of 1919 to 1924. He depicts the key politicians, particularly Georges Clemenceau, Raymond Poincaré, and Aristide Briand, with unusual sympathy. Martin draws mainly from the contemporary press and the Journal officiel. He is at his best in using these sources to illuminate the character of the politicians and the details of shifting party politics in the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. French politicians make the best of a bad hand in his account, pushed reluctantly but inevitably to alter their strategy from policies of confrontation in seeking to preserve the Versailles peace settlement to policies of conciliation and forbearance.

French domestic politics are Martin's preference; the book's approach is not interdisciplinary. The underlying financial difficulties and diplomatic complexities that did so much to weaken France at this time and to complicate political decision making receive attention based on secondary sources. Martin's one innovation is to offer the "small change" of events from everyday life at street level, drawn from faits divers in the daily press, as counterpoint to the "large-denomination bills" of major political events. This strategy yields two interesting chapters retelling the stories of suicides, murders, and petty crimes that colored the local news in the Paris dailies. But these events represent only one layer, gritty and at times sensational, of everyday experience that possessed greater depth, variety, and positive achievement than newspapers chose to report. How these "faits divers of petty meanness and despair" connect with the large denomination events is not established clearly (10); the connections are, no doubt, tenuous at best.

The use of monetary metaphors is hazardous for this postwar era of depreciating currencies and hyperinflation. Money illusion--the mistaken belief that monetary amounts represent stable values in an era of changing prices--renders Martin's imagery as problematic as it rendered French debate about economic management during the period he describes. His claim that the large bills of French history--among which he included the war in 1914, the Armistice in 1918, and the peace conference in 1919--were "counterfeit" provides a lame conclusion to an otherwise useful study of how the Bloc National struggled to come to terms with "the limits of the possible" after the war (256).

Kenneth Mouré
University of California, Santa Barbara

Note

1. Stephen A. Schuker, The End of French Predominance in Europe: The Financial Crisis of 1924 and the Adoption of the Dawes Plan (Chapel Hill, 1976).

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