France and the Après Guerre, 1918-1924: Illusions and Disillusionment

By Benjamin F. Martin and Benjamin Franklin Martin

Book Overview

Although victorious in the First World War, the French of the Third Republic soon learned the devastating price of success. The grave loss of life and incredibly harsh conditions during and after the war shook survivors to the core. The extraordinary suffering would eventually bring about the collective failure of national nerve in the 1930s that led to the appeasement at Munich and the collapse before German invasion in June 1940. But during the Apr s Guerre--the half decade following World War I--the French held out hope for a return to the ideal conditions of the Belle Epoque, a hope that gradually gave way to disillusionment.

Benjamin Martin's close examination of the aftershocks felt by the French and their world at war's end is a story masterfully told and thoroughly gripping. Using astute analysis and the cultivation of detail to paint a fresco of French society, Martin vividly describes the period's changes, remainders, exultations, fears, lives, deaths, addictions, crimes, figures grand and small, significant and not, remembered or forgotten. Through compelling character sketches of the great politicians of the day, including Georges Clemenceau, Raymond Poincar , and Aristide Briand, Martin reveals the inner workings of French political life and its role in society as political figures sought to make sense of the tumultuous times.

The collective portrait builds to overwhelming sadness. More than 1.3 million Frenchmen had been killed in the war, nearly one in three of those aged eighteen to forty-two. Material damage was estimated to total 55 billion francs. Inflation, hardly known in France during the nineteenth century, soared, while the franc declined disastrously against other currencies. Professionals and rentiers--the social groups that had provided the political and intellectual leadership of the Third Republic before 1914--were struck disproportionately hard by both the war and its aftermath. The new demands of feminism and of changing moral codes, a growing fascination with suicide and drugs, and, above all, the utter strangeness of the postwar world left many in anomie. A devastated France was left to face Germany essentially alone as the United States refused to ratify the Versailles Treaty, Great Britain exhibited early interest in restoring trade with Germany, and one-time ally Russia collapsed into Bolshevism. As Martin shows, French frustration reached a climax in 1923 with the occupation of Germany's Ruhr Valley as a means of compelling the payment of reparations. The failure of this Ruhr incursion meant the end of serious efforts to control Germany.

France and the Apr s Guerre, 1918-1924 shows in convincing detail that the men who had won the war had lost the peace. Their struggle, and that of French society, makes a captivating and moving story.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807125091
• ISBN13: 9780807125090
• Release Date: August 1999
• Publisher: LSU Press
• Length: 278 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

A cleverly-written account of Post World War I France!

Life in France after the First World War just didn't make sense to a country that could have been content to win the war. To wit, a political cabinet change at the beginning of 1922 would be enough to fuel one young woman to take off all her clothes in freezing cold weather one afternoon and voice her mad opinions to a crowd assembled at the Place Pigalle. Other Frenchmen killed themselves and their loved ones, deciding that the postwar period was a bit too overwhelming with its high inflation, soaring crime rate, changing moral codes and addictions, among other things. Over 1.3 Frenchmen died in this war and the destruction was said to be 55 million francs. France stood alone trying to face Germany, as everything around it seemed to be going to hell. If the country were a canvas, then Dadaist mayhem was splashed across it from end to end, evoking a portrait of a country that won a war and, yet lost the peace.Benjamin F. Martin's France and the Apres Guerre 1918-1924: Illusions and Disillusionment is not so much about a country standing as tall and proud in victory as its very own Arc de Triomphe, but about one that found it could no longer embrace the creature comforts and good times it knew in the Belle Epoque. A wonderfully-written roller coaster ride through the politics and political figures of the period, the harsh postwar conditions, widespread changes and society, it uses anecdotes about how the leaders of the day -- Georges Clemenceau, Raymond Poincare, and Aristide Briand -- tried to make sense of the period in the midst of stories of everyday Frenchmen struggling to get to the next day. It is the stories of these everyday Frenchmen that make this such an engaging -- and heartbreaking -- work. For the French, all that was old was not new again or familiar. Women were hired as detectives. Feminine beauty was not about having dangerous curves. It was about vigorous exercise, because "to get fat is to look old." Basketball was the new hot sport on the block...but the French were individualistic and too short to play it. Department stores had fur sales, but few women could afford to buy them still. Martin uses F. Scott Fitzgerald's Dick Diver to explain the sense of disillusionment: "All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love."