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The years immediately following the signature of the Locarno treaties in October 1925 are usually seen as an era of détente in European, particularly Franco-German, politics. There seemed to be a lull in the Ligue’s fixation on the problem of war origins, but it was only an appearance. Other issues briefly took centre stage, but even they were discussed in terms redolent of concerns from the Great War. Some members of the minority began to publish in a new journal, Evolution. An event of signal importance was the publication of a book by René Gerin and Raymond Poincaré on war responsibilities. There was huge debate over the Pierre Renouvin/Camille Bloch thesis which sought to limit the importance of Article 231. On the eve of the Nazi seizure of power, the Ligue devoted its 1932 Congress to the controversy over the peace treaties of 1919. It was too little, too late.

The beginning of the interwar period brought an intensification of the war guilt debate within the Ligue des droits de l’homme. There was vigorous discussion of the question of the Russian general mobilization in 1914. Repeated attempts by the Ligue’s minority to extract a commitment to seek revision of the Versailles Treaty failed. The most that the majority would concede was that the Treaty was legally flawed because it had been forced on Germany, but it continued to believe that the Treaty expressed a valid moral and historical point. The Ligue demanded—unsuccessfully—the publication of French documents relating to the outbreak of the war. The majority continued to argue that there was no point in opening a debate on war origins, although by the end of 1924 it is clear that it was much less confident in the rectitude of its position.

The Ligue des droits de l’homme had several German interlocutors in the 1920s, ranging from the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte (DLfM) to the German Foreign Office to German public opinion. The leadership of the DLfM cosseted French republican opinion in the belief that all of Germany wanted to pay reparations for the destruction of northern France during the Great War, but there was hardly unanimity even within the German republican left on the issue of war guilt and reparations. The tangible political ramifications of the war guilt debate are to be seen, above all, in the fallout from the Ruhr Occupation of 1923 which could have destroyed the burgeoning relationship of the LDH and DLfM, but did not. It did, however, change the way France and the Ligue were viewed in Germany.

This chapter sets up three main arguments that are developed in the book: first, that the debate on war origins and war guilt in the First World War nearly destroyed the Ligue des droits de l’homme well before the Second World War; secondly, that this debate lay at the heart of a dissenting, new style of pacifism which emerged in France near the end of the 1920s; and thirdly, that both of these phenomena catalysed the emergence of pro-Vichy sentiments during the Second World War. This latter development was not the result of philo-fascism but rather of an overriding commitment to peace which had its origin in the belief that the Great War had been fought by France under false pretences.

The Nazi seizure of power in January 1933 caught the Ligue des droits de l’homme by surprise. The Ligue debate on how to respond to Nazism breathed new life into the war guilt debate. Increasingly, the Ligue’s gaze was directed forward to how to deal with Nazism, rather than backwards to a debate on the Great War, but its political analysis continued to be inspired by a reading of the meaning of the Great War. Both minority and majority initially failed to understand the sea change that Nazism represented, but the minority was transfixed by the idea that resistance to Nazism was going to require a new Union sacrée and the division of Europe into antagonistic blocs. Much of the minority’s opposition to this was the belief that France was complicit in the rise of Nazism. The threat of domestic French fascism was also a major preoccupation.

In the period of the First World War and of the peace settlement and conferences of 1919–20, there were several indications of the development of increased sensitivity on the part of states to the use of force. The penalties clauses and reparations arrangements in the Versailles and other peace treaties made a significant literature on war guilt and the question of personal responsibility for acts of national policy. The question of responsibility for unjustified resort to war had become an issue which concerned ministries and statesmen; it was no longer the preserve of pacifists and idealists.

This book has been about the decline and fall of a great French republican institution, the Ligue des droits de l’homme (LDH). The LDH was torn apart by the war guilt question over the course of the entire period from 1914 to the fall of France in 1940. This debate was the catalyst for the emergence of a new style of pacifism in France which was hardly like its ‘placid’ interwar British cousin. The war guilt question was also the progenitor of a uniquely French suspicion, first of Russian, and ultimately of Soviet intentions. This led under Vichy to the appearance of collaboration and philo-fascism, but it was more a case of peace becoming an ‘ethic of ultimate ends’ for the minority within the LDH.