Editor's Note

This issue of the journal begins with a lively exchange of views on French policy toward Germany in the first decade of the Cold War. Until recently, the general view among scholars was that France wanted to impose a harsher settlement on Germany in the late 1940s and early 1950s than either the United States or Great Britain was willing to accept. French leaders, according to this view, were aware of the dangers posed by Soviet expansion in Central Europe, but they were far more concerned about the possibility of a renewed threat from Germany. Hence, French policy, the argument goes, was aimed at "keeping Germany down." Only when U.S. and British leaders insisted on building up and rearming West Germany and integrating it into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) did French officials grudgingly alter their policy on the German question.

This view has come under serious challenge over the past decade. Drawing on newly declassified materials in France, Britain, the United States, and Germany, "revisionist" scholars such as Cyril Buffet, William Hitchcock, Dietmar Hüser, John Young, and Irwin Wall have argued that French policy in the late 1940s and early 1950s was much more nuanced than the traditional historiography suggests. The latest installment in this "new" history of French policy on the German question, by Michael Creswell and Marc Trachtenberg, is the main segment in our series of contributions on the subject. Creswell and Trachtenberg aver that French officials, far from having been "obsessed" with the German threat in the late 1940s and early 1950s, actually saw a good deal of merit in the U.S.-British strategy of building up West Germany and firmly integrating it into Western security structures. According to Creswell and Trachtenberg, French leaders came to view the Anglo-American strategy as the one best suited for France's own interests, and they did not have to be coerced into accepting it; quite the contrary. Creswell and Trachtenberg readily acknowledge that French officials' public rhetoric during this period emphasized a hard line on the German question, but they contend that these public statements should not be taken at face value. The rhetoric, they argue, was intended mainly to cope with domestic political circumstances that prevented French leaders from expressing their real (i.e., more conciliatory) views in public. Only during private conversations with their U.S. and British counterparts could they reveal what they really thought. Creswell and Trachtenberg draw heavily on declassified records of these secret conversations to buttress their case that the French government was much more flexible and accommodating on the German question than was previously believed.

Three experts on French policy during the early Cold War—Charles Cogan, William Hitchcock, and Mark Sheetz—offer commentaries on the Creswell and Trachtenberg article from disparate perspectives. Cogan and Hitchcock largely agree with the argument put forth by Creswell and Trachtenberg, but they express reservations about certain matters. Hitchcock, in particular, wonders whether Creswell and Trachtenberg have really added much to the existing "revisionist" historiography, and he maintains that they have not gone far enough in their recasting of French policy. As he sees it, they should have emphasized the extent to which France was able to get its way on key matters and to persuade the United States to conform to French preferences, rather than the other way around. Sheetz, unlike Cogan and Hitchcock, takes sharp issue with Creswell's and Trachtenberg's interpretation. He believes that their account "stretches the evidence beyond its tensile strength." Sheetz seeks to defend the traditional conception of French policy on the German question, and he claims that declassified materials not cited by Creswell and Trachtenberg, especially the records of confidential debates and discussions within the French government, are more reliable to use when assessing the nature of French policy.

Creswell and Trachtenberg offer a point-by-point reply, arguing in response to Hitchcock that their analysis goes beyond the initial revisionist literature in undercutting the traditional notion of French policy. By suggesting that...