more agreeable watering holes on Lake Geneva or one of the Italian lakes. A notable high
point of the decade was the signing of the Locarno Pact in 1925, which seemed to bury
for ever the prospect of war between France and Germany. The popular ecstasy with
which it was greeted, especially in Britain, was not seriously reduced by what should
have been regarded as the disturbing point that Streseman declined to match frontier
guarantees in the West with any like agreement for the East. In other words, Weimar
Germany did not consider its eastern frontiers to be finished business.
Three years after Locarno, statesmen delighted the credulous among their publics with
the drafting and signing of the International Treaty for the Renunciation of War as an
Instrument of National Policy, to be known to contemporaries and posterity alike as the
Kellogg–Briand Pact. Frank Kellogg was America’s Secretary of State, while Aristide
Briand was the President of France. No fewer than fifty-one countries were pleased to
sign up and declare thereby that they were against war. It is both easy and appropriate
to be scornful of this vacuous document, but Sally Marks notes the historical novelty,
and possibly even the significance, of the pact. She writes that it ‘constituted the first
formal renunciation ever of war as an instrument of national policy and the first step
toward the slowly spreading view that war is immoral’ (Marks, 2003: 109). The strategic
historian, not to mention the cunning German Foreign Minister of the day, may regard
the pact with an amused cynicism, but millions of people who constituted the force of
public opinion were all too willing to take it at face value. Only ten years on from the
catastrophe of 1914–1 8 , it is difficult to be other than sympathetic to their pitiful naïvety.
After all, in Britain alone, 37,7 8 0 war memorials were erected in the 1920s in a
historically unique memorialization of national grief.
The 1920s were a time of hope and, on balance, a time when considerable progress
seemed to be made towards repairing the damage wrought by the war to international
order. Germany was slowly accepted as a responsible international player and, as a reward
for its cooperative behaviour, many of the burdens of Versailles were eased or lifted.
However, one humiliating burden against which Streseman struggled in vain until his
premature death was the continued French military occupation of the Rhineland. That
insult to Germany, so comforting to France in its strategic meaning, was finally removed
in 1930.
The basic reason why the 1920s were a period of progress in international comity, real
or illusory, was that the balance of power was loaded unchallengeably in favour of the
new status quo established, or recorded, by Versailles. The treaty reflected the strategic
context of 1919. As long as those who were motivated strongly to revise the peace
settlement were unable to act upon their dissatisfaction, it would endure, at least in its
essentials. Alone among the victors of 1914–1 8 , France appreciated that it had not really
won the war strategically. The Allied victory of 191 8 , with its consequent settlement,
translated into a potentially disastrous strategic context for France. Before 1914 the
country had secured a powerful ally in Russia that posed Germany both the nightmarish
dilemma of a war on two fronts and the prospect of defeat because of the seriously
adverse imbalance in resources between the rival alliances. In the war itself, France had
acquired Britain as an ally of the first rank and, in 1915, Italy as an ally of the second.
When Russia left the war in 1917, the United States took its place. The French need for
allies had been amply met. However, France was acutely aware that in the vital matter of
allies it had needed the assistance of them all in order to beat Germany.
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