Seven Ages of Paris (58 page)

It was perhaps hardly surprising that the post–Armistice Day cry in Paris was “Plus jamais ça!”

EIGHTEEN

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The Phoney Peace

Paris is a bitch and … one should not become infatuated with bitches, particularly when they have wit, imagination, experience and tradition behind their ruthlessness.

ROBERT MCALMON

PEACEMAKING

“My work is finished,” observed an exhausted but triumphant Marshal Foch to Clemenceau on Armistice Day 1918; “… your work is beginning.” It was the understatement of the epoch; the work of drawing up a reasonable peace treaty with the crushed Germans would defeat all those involved in it, not least the old Tiger. Following the convergence on Paris of the swarms of diplomats and officialdom from all twenty-seven Allied countries, the serious work of drafting the treaty began in January 1919—pointedly, with a meeting in the French Foreign Minister’s private office in the Quai d’Orsay; pointedly because from beginning to end it was the French who would endeavour to direct and manipulate the negotiations. “I never wanted to hold the Conference in his bloody capital,” Lloyd George complained later of his wartime ally, and—albeit in the gentler language of the campus—Woodrow Wilson would come to share roughly the same opinion. Lloyd George and Wilson’s powerful adviser Colonel House would have preferred to stage the vital conference in a neutral city, such as Geneva, “but the old man wept and protested so much that we gave way.” And, anyway, where else? After all it was France which had suffered most from the war, and had the greatest call for punishment of the enemy.

Passers-by gaped as Arabs in “picturesque costume,” Indian rajahs in British khaki “but with flowing native turbans,” Japanese and Chinese, “looking wise and saying nothing,” all debouched on to the Concorde. But as the talks dragged on from week to week, month to month, Parisians’ goodwill towards their former allies understandably evaporated. The new invaders were seen to commandeer scarce food and accommodation, and the best women. One French officer was soon telling Haig’s liaison officer, General Spears, that “he could not wait for the British and the Americans to get out of Paris so it could be a French city again.” On the other hand, Spears recorded U.S. General Tasker Howard Bliss as grumbling that British policy seemed to be “to bolster up for ever the decadent races [that is, the French] against the most efficient race in Europe [the Germans].” Doubtless the outspoken General would not have kept such robust views to himself. Young Harold Nicolson, on the British Foreign Office team, “gathered a vivid impression of the growing hatred of the French for the Americans. The latter have without doubt annoyed the Parisians …” The U.S. authorities, according to Nicolson, were finding it prudent to import their own military police: “There have been some rough incidents.” As delegates would spend their weekends on tourist trips to the lunar landscape of the Somme battlefields, a bitter new song, “Qui a gagné la guerre?,” began to make the rounds.

The discouragingly swift turnaround in Pariso-American relations was not entirely surprising when one recalls how the most prominent figure of the moment was that of Thomas Woodrow Wilson, the name most inextricably bound up with the Treaty of Versailles, and consequently with its disastrous failure. The ascetic, unworldly Princeton professor from a stern Presbyterian background, who (France felt) never really understood the French (or maybe he understood them too well?), was indeed curiously out of sync with la ville lumière. His tendency to lecture from the height of a college podium was not well received by either of his peers, Clemenceau and Lloyd George, who both had a view that their nations too had been involved in a war to make the world safe for democracy. When it came to imposing the sweeping aphorisms of his “Fourteen Points,” Wilson was swiftly made to realize that it was rather easier to impart than to apply instruction. He was certainly no Talleyrand, nor was there any thought of inviting the Germans, as the Congress of Vienna had invited the defeated French, to attend the peace conference before the terms had been drawn up. His arrival in Paris on the morning of 14 December 1918, had been the greatest triumphal progress anyone had ever made there. The alarmingly dense crowds had pushed out into the street the files of troops lining the route taken by him and Clemenceau, so that at various points the presidential carriage could force its way through only with great difficulty.

The inequalities which war had imposed upon the peacemakers were apparent both within and without the Quai d’Orsay as winter slithered into spring. France had the biggest army in the world, but no money; the U.S. had the money, but no accessible military force; Britain was somewhere in between, but increasingly anxious to withdraw back across the Channel again as soon as possible. While Germany was quite intact, the shattered skeletons of broken towns across the northern countryside of France glared reproachfully at the peace delegates. As they sojourned in Paris, leading the good life, the 1.4 million French dead breathed icily down the backs of their necks. Regular visits conveyed them to the ruins of Saint-Gervais, to be reminded of the outrage of that Good Friday of less than a year before. Paris and the Parisians would simply not allow their foreign guests to forget what France had suffered and lost. She had to have security, lasting security: frontiers in the ethnically German Rhineland, such as Louis le Grand had sought two and a half centuries previously, and Napoleon after him. The chant of “Que l’Allemagne paye …” was constantly in the background.

By April 1919 none of the delegates meeting at the Quai d’Orsay was a happy man. For all France’s desperate pursuit of security at any price, Clemenceau—the man of ’71—had failed to gain for her a permanent frontier on the Rhine (instead he got a fifteen-year tenancy, which Adolf Hitler would promptly terminate) or annexation of the coal-rich Saar (though, throughout its entire history, the German-speaking Saar had been French for only twenty-three years). The Parisian press, as rabid as it had been in the run-up to war, launched savage and unrelenting personal attacks on Wilson and Lloyd George. As the wrangling dragged on and the Allies went on demobilizing, it began to look as if soon the war would have to be fought again. Clemenceau stepped up the pressure to produce a treaty, any treaty. Whatever happened, it had to be signed and sealed by the Germans before the triumphal parade planned for the quatorze juillet.

Finally, and at the last minute, it was ready. The scene shifted from the Quai d’Orsay to Versailles. Why Versailles? Clemenceau, with his bitter recollections as mayor of Montmartre in 1871, claimed to believe that if the Germans were to appear in force in Paris, there would be riot and revolution. Moreover, all the administrative machinery of the Allied Supreme War Council had been out there since the war years. But, of far greater historical significance, was the pleasing congruence of making the enemy sign at the scene of his erstwhile great triumph, and France’s appalling humiliation of that January of forty-eight winters previously. On 28 April the German delegation set off from Berlin to receive the terms that were to be imposed on them, headed by Count von Brockdorff-Rantzau from the Foreign Office. As their train reached the battlefields of northern France, the French cheminots—determined that the Germans should have the clearest view of the devastation the war had caused and be fully apprised of the hatred which awaited them—slowed it down to fifteen kilometres an hour. With icy correctness, a French colonel conducted them to the Hôtel des Reservoirs, selected because, in 1871, it was where the dejected French peace commission had resided while suing for peace with Bismarck.

On the evening of 7 May, when they read the terms set out in the 200-page document, with its 440 separate articles and 75,000 words, the Germans were rendered speechless. It was far worse than anything they had dreamed possible; the reparations alone would ruin their country, while most of her coal mines, Germany’s principal underlying wealth, had been distributed among the Poles and the French. For the first time they began to speak of a Diktat: no German government could possibly accept it. Reactions among some of the Allied delegates echoed their sentiments. Young William C. Bullitt, who would return as U.S. ambassador, resigned from the American delegation; in his note of resignation he declared forthrightly that he was “going to lie on the sands of the Riviera and watch the world go to hell.” In Berlin, the Scheidemann government resigned. Foch ordered the remobilization of the French army, and fighting threatened to break out anew. In the joyous spring weather Paris was beset with depression, resignations and nervous breakdowns. Then the Germans, under their new Chancellor, Gustav Bauer, crumbled, as the Allies poised to march on Berlin.

On 28 June, a Saturday, the great hall in the Palace of Versailles was ready for the occasion it had been awaiting, like a sleeping princess, since Bismarck’s triumphant Prussians had desecrated it by daring to crown an enemy emperor there. At the centre of the Galerie des Glaces, a horseshoe table had been set up for the plenipotentiaries; in front of it, “like a guillotine,” a small table for the signatures. In a “harshly penetrating” voice, Clemenceau called out, “Faîtes entrer les Allemands!” Once more the huge mirrors had Germans reflected in them; this time, in place of the triumphant princes and grandees of Prussia, they were two very ordinary little men in frock coats, Dr. Müller and Dr. Bell, “isolated and pitiful.” From outside there came a crash of guns, announcing to Paris that the Second Treaty of Versailles—as Clemenceau dubbed it—had been signed. “La séance est levée,” rasped Clemenceau, not a word more or less.

Whatever pity might have been felt for those two German delegates that day, historians would reflect that, had Britain and France lost, their punishment would have been no less harsh; the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk imposed by Germany on a prostrate Russia demonstrated that. To tidy and unforgetting French minds, Versailles 1919 may have represented a full circle from 1871; but in fact history would soon prove it to be only a half-circle, with the remainder to come twenty-one summers later. Wrote Winston Churchill, “Victory was to be bought so dear as to be almost indistinguishable from defeat.”

CELEBRATIONS

This was, however, not how Parisians saw it in the immediate aftermath of Versailles. On the eve of the 14 July procession, an estimated 100,000 took up positions along the Champs-Elysées, their tone one of restrained jubilation. A temporary cenotaph occupied most of the huge vault of the Arc de Triomphe, its four sides each guarded by a figure of Victory, their wings made from the fabric of warplanes. On its plinth was the inscription “Aux Morts pour la Patrie.” Throughout the night soldiers of the French army kept vigil with rifles reversed. As the dawn broke, spectators fortunate enough to have a place on the balconies high up on buildings flanking the Champs-Elysées could see, down the green line of the Avenue de la Grande Armée and all the way along the eight kilometres of the processional route, the fluttering flags and pennants of the Allied nations from a dense forest of white masts. On either side of the Rond-Point was piled a small hill of captured German guns, crowned on one side by the Gallic cock of 1914, preening himself for the fight, and on the other by the victorious cock of 1918, crowing to the world.

Soon, for the first time since Bismarck’s Prussians had paraded through it, military figures appeared under the Arc de Triomphe (the cenotaph had been moved aside at midnight). They were three young soldiers, dreadfully maimed by war, and trundled by nurses in invalid carriages. They were followed by more grands mutilés of all ranks, almost all with an eye or a limb missing. At a hobbling pace the column moved down the Champs-Elysées to the stands specially reserved for them, a party of 150 young Alsatian girls raining flowers down upon them.

After a lengthy pause in the procession, “as if to permit us to breathe—or to dry our tears,” there came la Gloire itself: a squadron of the splendid Gardes Républicaines rode through the sacred arch, and just forty metres behind them appeared Joffre and Foch. Then it was the Allies’ turn. First, in alphabetical order, the Americans led by General Pershing. Next came the Belgians, then the British with Sir Douglas Haig at their head, and all the rest marching on the carpet of blossoms that had been flung before them. But, understandably, it was the weighty French contingent bringing up the rear of the parade for which the spectators had reserved their greatest enthusiasm. His austere face paler than ever, the Commander-in-Chief, Marshal Pétain, rode on a white horse ahead of wave after wave of poilus. For over an hour the French contingent marched past. Finally, nine of France’s new assault tanks roared through the Arc de Triomphe. As the silence returned and the gilded cenotaph was hauled back under the arch, one onlooker reflected that “a sight like this will never be seen again. Because there will never again be a war.”

LEFT-WING DISSENT

Throughout the night of 14 July 1919, revellers danced in the streets of a brightly lit Paris, so that it seemed to The Times like “one vast ballroom.” But Americans who took part in these celebrations noticed that many women were dancing together, a symptom of France’s shattering losses of manpower. Parisians that night must have hoped that peace would somehow return them to la vie douce of the pre-1914 Belle Epoque. Yet there was a spectre at the feast, called Communism. On the very day of the signature of the Peace Treaty, a Communist-led Métro and bus strike had paralysed the city. The government was being tough with these left-wing demonstrators, but its toughness was only making matters worse.

Meanwhile, worrying rumours were emanating from Washington that President Wilson might not be able to persuade the American Congress to ratify the Peace Treaty which was supposed to guarantee France, once and for all, against the German threat. Four months later the rumours became reality.

For Parisians, however, it was the political constellation of the far left—Communists, Internationalists and extreme Socialists—that was attracting the most attention. In none other of the victorious nations had Russia’s October Revolution aroused more fervent sympathy than among the workers of Paris—the home of revolution itself. The foundation in March 1919 of the Third International in Moscow had prompted the spiritual heirs of the martyred Communards to fan the flames of revolt—for which there was already abundant fuel on the French economic and social scene.