Europe in an Age of Dictatorship, 1919–39563dle classes and the peasantry away from the alternatives
proposed by nationalists or communists. Many Ger-
mans were alienated, however, by the economic ca-
tastrophes of the early 1920s. The imperial government
had destroyed the value of the mark by its vast borrow-
ing and the reckless printing of money. Territorial
losses and reparations payments compounded the prob-
lem. The inflation of 1922–23 destroyed the savings,
pensions, and income of millions of Germans. Conse-
quently, the German middle class, especially the lower
middle class, never developed fond ties to the Weimar
government.
The German republic did recover and prosper after
- A coalition of moderate socialists, democrats, and
the Catholic Party (the Zentrum) brought stability to the
government. An international agreement, the Dawes
Plan (1924), readjusted reparations and created a stable
currency. Industrial production rose. A strong and capa-
ble foreign minister, Gustav Stresemann, risked the ire
of nationalists by pursuing conciliatory policies. Strese-
mann, the brilliant son of an innkeeper, had risen in
politics as Ludendorff’s protégé and had been an ardent
nationalist and imperialist, but he reconsidered his
beliefs during the right-wing violence of the early
1920s, especially after the murders of Erzberger and
Rathenau. His cooperation with the French foreign
minister Aristide Briand restored normal peacetime
conditions. Briand had risen in French politics as a so-
cialist ally of Jean Jaurès, but socialists expelled him
from the party for accepting a cabinet post in a bour-
geois government, and he began a long career as a cen-
trist. Between 1906 and 1932 he held twenty-six
cabinet appointments. As the leading voice of postwar
French foreign policy, Briand twice (1924 and 1929)
agreed to ease reparations payments. Briand and Strese-
mann negotiated the Locarno Treaty (1925), reaffirm-
ing the Franco-German frontier drawn in the Versailles
Treaty. Stresemann led Germany into the League of
Nations (1926) as the equal of Britain and France. In
short, peace and prosperity seemed possible when Stre-
semann and Briand shared the 1926 Nobel Peace Prize
for creating the “spirit of Locarno.”
Postwar Recovery in Britain and France
The older democracies also experienced difficult times
in recovering stability. Britain and France struggled with
economic problems, faced social unrest, and turned to
conservative governments for most of the 1920s.
At the end of the war, the British government had
addressed two of its greatest prewar problems: women’s
rights and the government of Ireland. Lloyd George’s
Representation of the People Act (1918) gave women
the vote at age thirty, and the Equal Franchise Act
(1928) finally granted women suffrage on the same basis
as men. In 1919 the American-born Lady Nancy Astor
became the first woman to sit in the House of Com-
mons; by 1929 there were 69 women candidates and 14
women M.P.s (of 615 seats). British women won other
important rights in the Sex Disqualification Act of 1919
(which abolished gender barriers to universities, the
professions, and public positions) and the Law of Prop-
erty of 1926 (which gave all women the right to hold
and dispose of property on the same terms as men). Im-
portant as this legislation was, it fell short of full equality
for women, as dismissed war workers learned. Even
those women who kept their jobs in the 1920s and
1930s still worked for less than half of a man’s wages,
and that situation was not improving. Working women’s
percentage of men’s earnings was 48.2 percent in 1924
and 48.1 percent in 1935.
The British addressed the Irish question with mixed
success. Three years after the Easter Rebellion of 1916,
Irish nationalists again rebelled against British rule. In a
treaty of 1921, twenty-six (largely Catholic) counties of
Ireland gained independence as the Irish Free State, al-
though six other counties (with a large Protestant pop-
ulation) in the northern region of Ulster remained a
part of the United Kingdom. This agreement precipi-
tated an Irish civil war between protreaty and antitreaty
forces; protreaty forces that accepted the border divid-
ing Ireland won. (The continuing acceptance of this
treaty and this border led to the reopening of the Irish
question in 1969 when a militant minority of the Irish
Republican Army (IRA), known as the Provos, began a
terrorist campaign intended to end the union of Britain
and Northern Ireland and to reunite the north with the
south.)
The most severe problem that interwar Britain
faced was neither the woman question nor the Irish
question. It was economics. Prewar unemployment had
been 3.3 percent, and it remained low until soldiers and
women workers were demobilized. Unemployment hit
14.8 percent in 1921 and stayed above 10 percent for
the remainder of the decade. Productivity stood at a
fraction of prewar levels, many of which (such as coal
production) were never reached again. The cost of liv-
ing in 1921 had risen to four times the level of 1914. By
1922 marches of the unemployed and hungry had be-
come a common feature of British daily life. And the
home of capitalist free trade orthodoxy watched as its
imports doubled its exports.