HISTORY 369: THE WORLD SINCE 1914

Lecture Notes on England and France in the Interwar Period

• I. Introduction. In the interwar period (1918-1939) the leading nations of Europe were the parliamentary democracies of Great Britain and France. Although the strains of total war had produced the collapse or defeat of the autocratic empires of Russia, Turkey, Austria Hungary and Germany, these centers of parliamentary government in Europe were among the victorious Allies. Nevertheless, governments had manipulated natural and human resources in an uncompromising fashion during the four years of struggle; understandably, the resulting impressions proved indelible. There were prominent advocates in all countries who contended that the exasperated domestic problems could best be solved by continuing war socialism during peacetime. Liberal values in the West were further affected by the rise of totalitarian and dictatorial regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. Initially, the most well-known totalitarian answers to liberal democracy were Italian fascism and Russian communism. In spite of these internal and external problems, the major parliamentary states muddled though and survived. However part of the reason for their weak response to Axis aggression before and in the early stages of World War to can be explained by their interwar development
• II. Economic and Social Problems. Britain and France confronted significant dilemmas over the conversion from wartime to a peacetime economy.
  • A) Demobilization. Demobilized veterans had to be integrated into civilian life.
  • B) Disruption of Trade. During the war, normal trade had been disrupted; and England and France found it difficult to again trade manufactured goods to pre-war customers. The Americans and the Japanese had taken over many of their international commerce.
  • C) Indebtedness. Both the British and French governments and economies were deeply in debt at the end of the war. Both expected that war reparations would alleviate this problem, but they fell short of being effective.
  • D) Depression. A postwar recession and depression in caused widespread unemployment. With the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930's, these problems became even more serious.
  • III. England's Interwar problems. The flush of victory brought about an illusionary prosperity in England in 1919, but late 1920, overproduction led to depression and chronic unemployment. Joblessness would be chronic throughout the twenties, and led to widespread strikes and labor disturbances. One reason for the economic problems was the loss of foreign trade. During the war, the British business lost much of their commerce in Europe, China, India, and Latin America to the American and Japanese businesses. Increased use of oil and electricity both in and out of greatly affected the coal industry, the traditional backbone of . Large debts owed the United States and the growing social welfare segment of government also greatly affected the performance of the British economy.
  • A) Unemployment. The earlier "National Insurance Act" of 1911 provided benefits to unemployed workers during the depression of 1920-1922, when unemployment rose to over 2 million out of a population of 42 million and remained about there for most of the 1920's.
  • B) Trade solutions. To arrest the decline in overseas trade, Britain made trade agreements with the Soviet Union (1924, 1927) and made special treaties with the British Dominions and colonies, who were organized into a voluntary international organization known by the late 1920's as the British Commonwealth. Britain had been an champion of free trade, but the strains of depression were leading it toward protective tariffs. The Great Depression made many countries build tariff barriers and further lessened British export sales. Thus Britain was forced to end the gold standard and free trade and establish protective customs taxes.
  • C) Strikes. Strikes and labor disturbances were frequent in the 1920's, the most significant being the Great Coal Strike of 1926, that led to a general strike in the same year. These never led, however, to political revolution.
  • D) The Problem of Ireland. The Irish problem was probably Britain's closest and most complex imperial problem of the 20th century, having its roots in religious and ethnic differences going back centuries. Ireland was considered part of Great Britain and was ruled by English landlords. By the late nineteenth century, nationalism had developed among Ireland's Catholic which developed into a movement for home rule and national. At 1918, the Irish rebelled against broken promises of home rule and the strains of war (about 25% of the British army was made up of Irish). The Irish "Home Rule" Bill was promulgated in 1914, but its implementation suspended for the duration war. For over a year, rebellion persisted between the underground Irish Republican Army and Imperial British forces. The Irish as represented by the Sinn Fein ("We Ourselves") party, abandoned the compromise of home rule and autonomy within the British Empire, and instead demanded total independence and separation from Britain. While attempts were made in the 1920's to co-opt the Irish independence movement with new home rule bills, dominion status and other deals. The Irish insisted on complete separation and became the Irish republic with no ties to Britain by the 1930's.
  • E) From Empire to Commonwealth. The British Empire grew and changed transformed during the interwar period. Britain continued to control its older colonies and protectorates, added to them League of Nations mandates in the Middle East (Trans-Jordan, Iraq and Palestine) and Africa (Tanganyika and Namibia). Overall Britain directly or indirectly controlled 25% of the world's people. The relationship between GB and its dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa continued to change. By 1914 these settler colonies became autonomous in their domestic government. A Wartime Imperial meeting declared that the self-governing be considered autonomous nations within an association know as the British Commonwealth. At another imperial conference in 1926 and in a law known as the Statute of Westminster in 1931, England and its dominions became members of a trade and defensive association known as the British Commonwealth of Nations. Each dominion had the right to choose chose its own government and promulgate its own laws. Dominions could accept or reject laws passed by the British government. In spite of virtual independence, the economic, political, and historical bonds between England and the dominions continued within the commonwealth through recognition by the dominions of the sovereignty of the British Crown.
  • F) Political Changes. While economic problem plagued Britain through most of the interwar period, nonetheless political change did occur.
    • 1) Universal manhood suffrage was finally completed with the final few percent of disenfranchised Englishmen were given their political rights in Britain in 1918, received the franchise in l928.
    • 2) The most important political change was the decline of the Liberal Party and the rise of the Labor Party as the major opponent to the Conservative party in British Politics.
  • G) Governments and Coalitions. The Conservative party formed most of the governments in British politics during the 1920s. The decline of the Liberal Party and the immaturity of Labour meant that conservatives were in the helm. Conservatives became the largest bloc in Parliament at the end of World War I and maintained a wartime coalition with the weakened Liberals until 1922 and formed most governments between then and 1929 under Stanley Baldwin. For a brief time in 1924. Labor formed a government under Ramsay Macdonald with the support of some of the Liberals. This government was short-lived because of an accusation of collusion with Communists in the recognition of the Soviet government.
    • 1) The British Conservatives, like the Republicans in the United States, lost their supremacy with the onset of the depression. Elections in 1929 saw the Conservatives lost over 150 seats in Parliament, while Labour nearly doubled its representation were most keenly felt by the British public, Ramsay Macdonald, the Labour Party leader, became Prime Minister with a Liberal-Labour coalition cabinet. With the support of some Liberal M.P.'s, Ramsay MacDonald formed Labour's second government in a Labour dominated coalition.
    • 2) the worsening of the depression led to the formation of a broad based coalition government which included ministers from all three parties in 1932 known as the ""National Government. The Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald was its prime minister until Conservative Stanley Baldwin took over in 1935. Baldwin retired in 1937 and was replaced by Neville Chamberlain, who served as Prime Minster of the National Government Coalition until 1940 when he was replaced by Winston Churchill as wartime Prime Minister.
  • H) Effect on Foreign Policy. British domestic concern with economic problems, particularly the affects of the depression upon unemployment and foreign trade, gravely affected and weakened British response to the aggressive policies of Germany, Japan and Italy in the 1930's.
• IV. French Interwar problems. France occupied a more impressive position on the world stage following World War I than it had during the prewar period. Like Great Britain, France expanded it overseas possessions to include the League of Nations mandates over the former Ottoman province of Syria (and Lebanon) in the Middle East, as well, as the former German colonies of Togo and Cameroon in Africa. France also became the main guarantor power of the treaties signed at the Paris Peace Conference. As such maintained the largest armed forces in Europe in the Interwar Period and formulated an intricate system of bilateral and multilateral alliances with the new states of East Central Europe in order to maintain the status quo of the Paris conference. While France suffered more human and material losses during the war than any other of the surviving allied powers, it seemed to have made a phenomenal recovery. Much of northern and eastern France had been devastated by four years of trench warfare. This necessitated a massive reconstruction campaign, financed by reparation payments and loans. The reconstruction entailed the retooling of damaged industries with the most advanced technologies and machinery. While this reconstruction was remarkable, it was superficial in that much of the French nation was damaged psychologically, demographically, and spiritually. The French not only confronted many of the same trade and employment problems that plagued the English, but also had to conduct reconstruction programs in whole provinces destroyed by the war.
  • A) War Casualties and Damages. French losses during the war included.
    • 1) 5,000,000 killed and wounded. One of out of every ten Frenchmen was killed in the war.
    • 2) Nearly 800,000 residences were destroyed.
    • 3) 20,000 factories, as well as innumerable shops were destroyed
    • 4) over 2000 railway bridges were destroyed.
    • 5) Much of the productive farmland of northern and eastern France was rendered into moonscapes and took years to re cultivate to prewar production levels..
    • 6) Over 1000 towns were leveled by the fighting.
  • B) Reconstruction and Reparations. These catastrophic losses compelled the French to concern themselves with material reconstruction and security against another invasion.
    • 1) The French government took the responsibility for reconstruction of war-torn areas and for, compensating the war losses of its citizens. It organized bond drives to procure loans from its citizens which would be repaid by expected moneys received from German reparations. These loans and those of made during the war left France with a tremendous national debt in the interwar period.
    • 2) The French plan to use German reparations payments to eventually pay the costs of reconstruction never came to fruition.
    • 3) The new German government, even more of a basket case than France soon fell in arrears of its reparation payments, and the French together with the Belgians occupied the Ruhr industrial to extract payment in kind. This occupation, which lasted nearly two years cost more than the raw materials that were confiscated.
    • 4) The United States, though its representative Charles G. Dawes, formulated a new plan for German reparations known as the Dawes Plan. American money would be lent to and invested in Germany; Germany in turn would pay reparations at a rate lesser than foreseen by the Versailles treaty; and finally both the French and British were to make pay their war debts to the United States and a lesser rate as well.
    • 5) The Dawes Plan and later Young Plan came to naught as a result of the great depression. France financed reconstruction itself through the issuance of bonds.
  • C. Security, alliances, and Defense. The other Preoccupation of the French government in the interwar period was the defence and security of France from a future attack by a revived Germany.
    • 1) Since neither Britain nor the United States fulfilled their promises regarding the security of Europe following Paris Peace, the French took it upon themselves to develop a security system based upon alliances with the smaller powers of Europe who had benefited by the demise of the central powers, these included: Belgium (1920), Poland (1921), Czechoslovakia (1924), Romania (1926) and Yugoslavia (1927).
    • 2) In addition it sponsored the formation of multilateral defence agreements known as the Little Entente (Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia) and the Balkan Entente (Greece, Romania, Turkey, Yugoslavia).
    • 3) Thus the French depended upon a collection of alliances, membership in the League of Nations and maintenance of the largest army in Europe to maintain its peace and security.
    • 4) However the French military prepared for a. stalemated stationary war-a la World War I, and thus spent much of its time, money and energy in constructing a massive and complex system of fortifications along the German Frontier known as the Maginot Line. When push came to shove with Nazi aggression in the late 1930's the French alliance system withered away, chiefly because the French chose not to honor it at Munich. While the French army was frittering away its time and money constructing the Maginot line, other powers, notably Germany, developed military tactics and strategies (Blitzkrieg) using air, armor and mechanized forces which rendered the Maginot Line obsolete.
  • D) Social/Economic Strains. The Economic and material expenditure for reconstruction and security stagnated other segments of economy and society and left French living standards low and slowed the overall economic recovery of France.
    • 1) the tensions brought about by these problems of economy and society in turn brought about political tensions and fragmentation. The French center and right opposed social an d economic reforms while the left (socialists and communists) sought to bring about significant social and economic changes (nationalization, socialization).
    • 2) This basic ideological impasse and France's multi-party system led to much political infighting and the frequent rise and fall of parliamentary coalition government and cabinets in the interwar period.
  • E) Recovery and depression. By end of the 1920's, France had achieve a good measure of recovery in agriculture, industry, and commerce and its currency was stabilized.
    • 1) The initial impact of the great depression did not make itself felt in France until 1932 perhaps due to France's well integrated agriculture and industrial segments of the economy. However there after, protective tariffs of other countries bought about a decline in French exports and a resultant fall in prices, unemployment and depression.
  • F) Governments and Coalitions. As mentioned above, France had a multi-party, parliamentary system, which depended on coalition, rather than single parties to form governments. Because of the economic and social problems that France confronted in the interwar period, political alliances and coalitions were capricious and mercurial in nature. Cabinets and governments rose an fell with alarming frequency, with a turnover of right and left coalitions. Like in Britain, the left parties began to play a more important role in French government in the interwar period.
    • 1) A coalition of Right and centrist parties known as the Bloc National dominated French politics between 1919 and 1924. with the well known leaders. The Bloc's most prominent spokesmen were Georges Clemenceau, Raymond Poincare, and Aristide Briand. The Bloc National called stabilization of French economy and a hard line vis-a vis Germany. They formulated the policies of reconstruction and security as hallmarks of French government in the interwar period. Their conservative and moderate policies were opposed by a growing and fragmented left, consisting of Socialists, Communists, and Anarchosyndicalists. opposed to the radical programs advanced by the Radical, Socialist and Communist parties.
    • 2) In part as a result of the financial difficulties and wrangling over reparations, the Bloc National broke up and in elections of 1924, a left-wing coalition of Socialists and Radicals won a majority and formed the Cartel des Gauches. This government only lasted 16 months when growing inflation, as well as personality and policy differences led to its demise. Six government rose and fell in rapid succession until a Radical/Moderate government for three years
    • 3) The Great depression and its effect on France brought about the growth of a Left coalition known as the Popular front. The left and center left parties formed a coalition known as the Popular Front. The socialist leaders Leon Blum, became premier; and the coalition also had the support of the French Communist Party. Blum's Popular Front government instituted a number of reforms, including forty hour work week, stabilization and regulation of agricultural prices and production, and efforts to restructure the national bank. Blum's moderate reforms were hindered by labor unrest by unions and parties within the coalition which more radical reforms. To deal with strikes and fiscal problems Blum attempted to procure emergency from the French upper house, the Senate. When the Senate rebuffed his request, and Blum resigned and the coalition fell apart..
    • 4) From 1938 until the Fall of France in 1940, a coalition of center parties formed the government. This coalition, led by Edouard Daladier, was besieged by problems of meeting the threat of Nazi Germany with failed alliance system and a misconceived defensive strategy; products of the mistaken policies of previous French governments,
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