The Road to the Second World War and France

International History in the Interwar Period

Abstract

In the middle of the 1980s, we reached the stage in which most questions about French diplomacy in the 1930s could be answered, thanks to the declassification of documents on the eve of the Second World War. This paper aims to survey recent researches on French appeasement policy and to examine how and to what extent important topics have been analyzed.
In traditional studies historians tended to point out that the following factors lay behind the French appeasement policy: the French “immobilism”, the economic-industrial slump since 1931, the unpreparedness in rearmament and the inefficiency of the decision-making process. It was asserted that these factors accentuated France's sense of inferiority and pessimism and intensified the domestic strife.
There was some anticipation that the newly opened records might reveal unknown facts which would lead to the revision of such “negative” views about the French foreign policy. But, in my view, we failed to offer “revisionist” accounts regarding French appeasement. Without any significant paradigmatic breakthrough, historians try to give detailed accounts about the facts and the new findings, to attempt to relativize the authorized historical interpretations, and to integrate and structuralize the known historical facts.
In this paper I will focus on several works which attempted to relativize the authorized interpretations about the scale of French rearmament and the nature of French-German economic relations.
It is well known that French arms were neither numerous nor efficient enough in 1939, and it is also clear that rearmament became a great strain on France's limited budgets and resources. However, according to Robert Frank's new meticulous research, the defense expenditure from 1936 was higher than that on the eve of the First World War. Even though the French rearmament budget in nominal terms was reduced from 1931 to 1935, France in fact succeeded in spending stable amounts of money on armaments.
As for French-German economic relations S. Shirmann conducted detailed research on the period from 1932 to 1939, asking whether France could deter German expansonism by means of economic appeasement. As a whole, French-German relations did not really become reciprocal and mutual. Since Schacht planned to complete state exchange controls France was forced to be subject to German demands for autarky.