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T H E WA R G U I LT P RO B L E M A N D T H E L I G U E
D E S D RO I T S D E L’ H O M M E , 1914 – 1944
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1
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1
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Acknowledgements
This has been, as the French would say, un travail de longue haleine. I began work
on the Ligue des droits de l’homme in 1991 while still a Canada Research Fellow
at the University of Alberta. My book on interwar French pacifism had just come
out and I was eager to follow up leads on the origins of what I called ‘historical
dissent’. This dissent over the origins of the Great War became one of the progenitors
of the new-style pacifism that emerged in France in the interwar period. In 1991,
there were no Ligue archives to speak of. The Ligue’s papers had been seized by the
Nazis in June 1940, shortly after their arrival in Paris following the defeat of France,
and were presumed lost. Madeleine Rebérioux, the Ligue’s first woman president
and an eminent historian of the early Third Republic, confidently told me that the
Nazis had burned the Ligue’s papers. I found this a questionable assumption and,
sure enough, the Ligue’s papers were returned to France in 2001 from the former
Soviet Union where they had languished as war booty since 1945. The papers were
opened to historians in 2002 and I began working on them the following year. Alone
among historians of the Ligue, I have followed the archival trail to Germany in an
attempt to find out what the Nazis were doing with these papers.
I have incurred many debts to institutions, colleagues, students, and friends
while working on this book. I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada for providing me with a research grant from 2004 to
2008 which enabled me to do much of the primary research for this book in Paris
and Berlin. I am deeply thankful to the archivists and librarians at the following
institutions: the Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine,
Nanterre; the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris; the Archives Nationales,
Paris; the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris; the Archives de la Préfecture
de Police in Paris; the Archives du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères; the Archives
départementales du Gard, Nîmes; the Bibliothèque Municipale de Nîmes; the
Institut d’Histoire Sociale, Paris; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Magdalen
College Library, Oxford; the University of Edinburgh Library; the University of
St Andrews Library; the Hoover Institution for War and Peace at Stanford; the
Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, Paris; the Wiener Library, London;
the Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes, Berlin; the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin;
and the Bundesarchiv in Berlin-Lichterfelde.
I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Sonia Combe, then the director of
archives at the Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine,
who allowed my research assistant and me to digitally photograph large parts of the
archives of the Ligue des droits de l’homme—to the point where another archivist
at the BDIC floating by the Reserve room one morning was heard to exclaim,
more than a little ironically, given the context, ‘Monsieur le Canadien est en train
de piller nos archives!’
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vi Acknowledgements
At critical junctures, I was blessed with fellowships at three great universities,
which enormously facilitated the writing process. In 2009, I was the inaugural
fellow in the Centre for French History and Culture of the School of History at
the University of St Andrews, to whose then director, Professor Guy Rowlands,
I am particularly grateful. During Hilary Term 2017, I was elected to a Visiting
Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, which was a tremendously stimulating
place to work; I am grateful to the President and Fellows of Magdalen for provision
of this fellowship. From April to June 2017, I was elected to a Visiting Research
Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University
of Edinburgh; my office overlooking the Meadows with a view south to the Pentlands
was a marvellous place to work and I am very thankful for the fellowship.
I have been blessed with four truly exceptional PhD students at Concordia
(Andrea Levy, Marie-Eve Chagnon, Sebastian Döderlein, and Audrey Mallet), and
two more at McGill (Cylvie Claveau and Emmanuelle Carle), of whom I am very
proud; they have all challenged me in varying ways and I record my thanks to them
here. One of our honours students, Denis Robichaud, worked two summers for
me in Paris, digitizing documents; his work was invaluable. In the early 1990s, three
research assistants, Pierre Cenerelli, Christian Roy, and above all, Cylvie Claveau,
worked under my direction preparing a huge analytical database of the contents of
the Cahiers des droits de l’homme from 1920 to 1940. The heart of this database is
the ‘subjects’ rubric for everything that was ever published in the Cahiers; it is not
merely a listing of names, organizations, and places but far more importantly an
analytical rendering of the topics covered in the 7,270 articles and other entries,
long and short, contained in the Cahiers.
I am also very thankful to a host of colleagues and friends who have listened
patiently to my thoughts about the Ligue des droits de l’homme. In Canada, they are
Ken Mouré, Pat Prestwich, John Cairns, Jo Vellacott, Talbot Imlay, Robert Tittler,
Fred Bode, Linda Derksen, Travis Huckell, and Michael and Elva Jones. Andrew
Barros, both a good friend and a valued colleague, read the entire manuscript and
offered many helpful suggestions. In Germany, Peter Grupp at the Auswärtiges Amt
and Jana Blum at the Bundesarchiv were particularly helpful. In the United
Kingdom, many friends and colleagues have either heard me give papers about the
Ligue or have discussed the project with me. I record here my thanks to Jeremy
Crang, Jill Stephenson, Martin Ceadel, John Horne, Daryl Green, Ged Martin, John
Keiger, Guy Rowlands, Nick Stargardt, Sudhir Hazareesingh, Peter Jackson, and
Margaret MacMillan. In France, my thanks are due to Emmanuel Naquet, with
whom I disagree on many points of interpretation, but whose knowledge of
the Ligue is encyclopaedic, to Antoine Prost, the late Jacques Bariéty, Nicolas
Offenstadt, Matthias Steinle, and especially to Maurice Vaïsse, who has always
been most encouraging and supportive. I am also greatly in the debt of dear friends
in Paris. John and Claudia Moore and Charlie and Heather Tatham have all been
faithful friends over the years. I am thankful to the anonymous readers of Oxford
University Press for their helpful comments. The manuscript was expertly copy-
edited by Phil Dines. My editor at OUP, Cathryn Steele, has been wonderful.
It goes without saying that any errors in the text that follows are my fault alone.
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Acknowledgements vii
Contents
List of Abbreviations xi
1. Introduction 1
I . T H E G R E AT WA R A N D A L L T H AT
2. War Origins: The Debate Begins 17
3. The Ramifications of the War Origins Debate: War Aims and
Ending the War 46
I I . A L A R E C H E RC H E D ’ U N E G U E R R E G A G N E E . . .
4. The Wounds of War (1919–24): Challenges to Orthodoxy on
the War Guilt Question 75
5. Bridge over the Abyss? Talking to the Germans 108
6. Turning the Page? The War Guilt Problem in the Era of Locarno 137
Bibliography 269
Index 285
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List of Abbreviations
1
Introduction
This is not a book about the origins of the Great War, a topic on which oceans of
historical ink have been spilt.1 Nor is it meant to engage with the substantial schol-
arship on French policies and European crises from one war to the next.2 Rather,
its purpose is to examine the impact of the debate about the origins of the Great
War on the Ligue des droits de l’homme (LDH), an organization which lay at the
heart of French Republicanism in the period of the two world wars. The war guilt/
war origins debate occasioned the decline and fall of the Ligue, which, even though it
lives on today, has been an institution much diminished in size, stature, and political
influence in France since the Second World War.3 While it is a commonplace that
the war guilt question was one of the factors leading to the demise of the Weimar
Republic and the rise of Nazism, virtually no attention has been given to the political
ramifications of the war guilt debate across the Rhine in France. What John Maynard
Keynes famously called the ‘Carthaginian peace’ had enormous political ramifica-
tions in France as well, not least around the issue of German war guilt.4
The war origins debate also lies at the heart of the dissenting new-style pacifism
which emerged from the belly of the LDH towards the end of the 1920s after a long
gestation period running all the way back to 1914.5 Furthermore, it is a debate that
1 A far from exhaustive list of recent scholarship on the origins question in English includes:
Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (New York: Harper Collins,
2013); Sean McMeekin, The Russian Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 2011); McMeekin, July 1914: Countdown to War (New York: Basic
Books, 2013); Dominic Lieven, Towards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia (London:
Penguin Books, 2016); William Mulligan, The Origins of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010); and Margaret MacMillan, The War that Ended Peace: The Road to 1914
(London: Penguin, 2013).
2 There is a massive historiography on French and European international relations during the
interwar period. See, among many others, Sally Marks, The Ebbing of European Ascendancy: An
International History of the World, 1914–1945 (London: Arnold, 2002); Zara Steiner, The Lights that
Failed: European International History, 1919–1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Peter
Jackson, Beyond the Balance of Power: France and the Politics of National Security in the Era of the First
World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
3 On the impact of the Second World War on the Ligue’s fortunes, see William D. Irvine, Between
Justice and Politics: The Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1898–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2007), pp. 213–24.
4 See John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace
and Howe, 1920).
5 For the distinction between old- and new-style pacifism, see Norman Ingram, The Politics of
Dissent: Pacifism in France, 1919–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991 and 2011), pp. 1–16, 19–22,
and 121–33. Old-style pacifism was a heritage of the nineteenth century. It was bourgeois, liberal,
internationalist, and collaborative in orientation towards French political society. New-style pacifism,
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links the moral dilemmas of one war with the choices of the next. For if the war guilt
debate caused the implosion of the Ligue and the emergence of new-style pacifism
in France, both of these phenomena had, as collateral damage, the development of
pro-Vichy sentiment. This 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 last, Great War had been fought by France under false pretences. The tragedy
was that when the barbarians really were at the gates in 1940, the LDH had ceased
to be of much importance. By 1938–39, the Ligue was increasingly a spent force
in French political life, a victim of the war origins debate which began in 1914 and
gradually consumed it. The German invasion of France put an end to that debate
for the Ligue; the Nazis arrived in France thinking they would have to extirpate an
entire Weltanschauung, but to their surprise, the LDH was already in extremis.6
The glory days of the LDH were thus over by the end of the 1930s, before the
Nazi invasion of France in May 1940. This is not a comforting thought to present-
day Ligueurs or indeed to some historians of the Ligue.7 There is something oddly
discomfiting about the notion that a great French Republican institution might
have succumbed to self-inflicted wounds rather than to the undoubted violence of
the Nazi occupation of France. Such is the uncomfortable truth, however. The
paradox is that the political positions taken by the Ligue in the First World War
effectively emasculated it by the time of the Second. This is not to say that the
Germans did not play a pivotal role in the unravelling of the Ligue des droits
de l’homme, or indeed in its final death throes. They did. This was achieved at one
remove and it was the Great War, not the Second World War, which spelled
the death knell of the Ligue less than twenty years after its birth. It was the Ligue’s
inability to square the circle of its commitment to human rights with a doctrinaire
Republican political engagement that led to its ultimate undoing. The human rights
legacy, of which the LDH could rightfully be so proud, became overlaid during the
post-First World War years with a political agenda, which was more than a little
tinged with a certain Republican parti pris. William Irvine, most notably, has com-
mented extensively on the ways in which a particular view of the Third Republic
clouded the Ligue’s human rights vision on several key domestic political issues,
including that of the rights of women.8 But while the various domestic political
positions of the LDH arguably weakened its claim to be defending human rights
which emerged from it by the end of the 1920s, was on the other hand radical, absolute, often socialist
or even anarchist, and sectarian in orientation.
6 See Norman Ingram, ‘Selbstmord or Euthanasia? Who Killed the Ligue des droits de l’homme?’,
in French History 22, 3 (September 2008), pp. 337–57; Ingram, ‘La Ligue des droits de l’homme et le
problème allemand’, Revue d’histoire diplomatique 124, 2 (June 2010), pp. 119–31.
7 See Norman Ingram, ‘Qui a tué la Ligue des droits de l’homme? La Ligue, les nazis et la chute de
la France en 1940’, in Être Dreyfusard, hier et aujourd’hui, edited by Gilles Manceron and Emmanuel
Naquet (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009), pp. 397–402. This paper, together with two
by Cylvie Claveau and Simon Epstein, given at the eponymous conference at the Ecole Militaire in
December 2006, elicited a spirited rejoinder from Manceron and Naquet that was longer than the
published version. See Manceron and Naquet, ‘Le Péril et la riposte’, Être Dreyfusard, pp. 315–22.
8 See Irvine, Between Justice and Politics, and Irvine, ‘Politics of Human Rights: A Dilemma for the
Ligue des Droits de l’Homme’, in Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 20, 1 (Winter 1994),
pp. 5–28.
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Introduction 3
in an entirely impartial, disinterested manner, it was the issue of the origins of the
Great War that laid bare the Ligue’s internal contradictions and occasioned the
bitter, internecine strife which ultimately dealt the organization the body blow
from which it has never recovered.
Why study the Ligue des droits de l’homme? The Ligue viewed itself as the
conscience of democracy, as the defender of all things republican in Third Republic
France. In many ways, this was a correct perception. The LDH was instrumental
in defending a huge number of people, groups, and causes which might otherwise
have had no voice in early twentieth-century France.
The Ligue was founded in 1898 at the height of the Dreyfus Affair to defend the
rights of the individual—at its origin, those of one individual, Alfred Dreyfus—
against the all-encompassing claims of a raison d’état gone mad. By 1914 and the
advent of the Great War, the LDH was already an important voice in French
politics, with members sitting as deputies and senators, representing an enormous
moral authority in French political culture. It is difficult to overemphasize the
importance and centrality of the Ligue in the political culture of the second half of
the Third Republic. Hardly a government was formed from 1914 to 1940 without
the significant, and often massive, participation of Ligue members. The list of Ligue
ministers and présidents du conseil is lengthy, and includes names such as Herriot,
Blum, and Painlevé; indeed, fully eighty-five per cent of Léon Blum’s Popular
Front cabinet were Ligue members.9 Moreover, as William Irvine points out, the
Popular Front itself ‘might never have been formed’ were it not for the ‘energetic
activity and pleas for unity’ of the president of the Ligue, Victor Basch, in the face
of the perception of a domestic fascist threat.10
Like French pacifism, at first glance the Ligue might appear a lost cause, one of
the losers of history, a grand idea whose time has come and gone. Even in 1914, on
the eve of the Great War, the Ligue’s secretary-general, Henri Guernut, noted that
some members and former members of the LDH wondered if it had lost its reason
for being following its success in the Dreyfus Affair.11 As with French pacifism, the
Ligue has suffered from an almost total amnesia on the part of historians of France,
as it also has from historians of human rights.12 Even a French historian of the
stature of Lynn Hunt seems not to be aware of the Ligue des droits de l’homme,
despite writing an influential book on the history of human rights. The same can
also be said of the works of some of the other prominent historians of human
9 Irvine, Between Justice and Politics, p. 164, n. 10. See also Emmanuel Naquet, ‘La Ligue des
droits de l’homme: une association en politique (1898–1940)’, Thèse de doctorat, Institut d’Etudes
Politiques de Paris, 2005, iv, Annexe 20 ‘Liste des Ligueurs parlementaires sous la Troisième
République’, pp. 1076–107, and Annexe 21 ‘Liste des Ligueurs ministres sous la Troisième République’,
pp. 1108–31.
10 Irvine, ‘Politics of human rights’, p. 11.
11 See Henri Guernut, ‘Rapport Moral: Le Congrès de 1914’, in Bulletin 14, 10 (15 May 1914),
p. 595. Guernut completely rejected this notion, which he used as the foil for his rapport moral.
12 John Sweets, the American historian of Vichy France, in his comment on a paper I gave about
the Ligue des droits de l’homme at the Stanford meeting of the Society for French Historical Studies
in 2005, said he did not mind admitting that he had never heard of the Ligue.
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rights in which the Ligue des droits de l’homme gets at best a walk-on part.13 This
is strange, to say the very least, given the Ligue’s sustained engagement with the
problems of both individual and collective rights. The cloud of oubli has begun to
lift, however. Recent years have seen a spate of studies, long and short, on the Ligue,
culminating in two significant works. The first is William Irvine’s iconoclastic
study of the Ligue which was published in 2007 by Stanford University Press, and the
second is Emmanuel Naquet’s massive 2005 doctoral thesis on the Ligue at Sciences
Po, published in book form in 2014.14 These studies take diametrically opposite
views of the meaning of the Ligue. For Naquet, the centrality and importance of
the Ligue is without doubt. His thoroughly researched thesis and book demon-
strate how very much the LDH became virtually synonymous with republicanism
in the second half of the Third Republic. By French standards it was also a numerically
huge organization with some 180,000 members at its peak in the early 1930s.
Even by 1914, just sixteen years after its birth at the height of the Dreyfus Affair,
the Ligue was a political force to be reckoned with. According to Naquet, that
political power and influence only increased in the interwar period, culminating in
the formation of the Popular Front at whose birth the Ligue was the midwife.
For Irvine, on the other hand, the Ligue was above all a huge patronage machine,
greasing the wheels of political life in the Third Republic, especially at the small-
town level. He argues that the Ligue was less about high-flown ideals than it was
about politics. Human rights, the rights of man, were consistently given a back seat
to the more pressing demands of a political stance that put the Ligue squarely on
the side of a centre-left view of French politics. His argument has much to com-
mend it; it is far more analytical than that of Naquet, and is critical of the Ligue
and its heritage in a way that is perhaps impossible for a French historian writing
the first study of the LDH to achieve.
The Ligue des droits de l’homme was a very broad cloth. Not only did it embrace
virtually all public opinion of the non-communist republican political spectrum,
but its interests were also extremely wide.15 On one thing Irvine and Naquet are in
complete agreement, though: the centrality and importance of the Ligue des droits
de l’homme in the political life of the Third Republic. As Irvine reminds us, by the
early 1930s, it ‘may well have been larger than all of France’s left-wing parties
combined’.16 With its vast network of local sections, the Ligue brought the Republic
13 Lynn Hunt, Defending Human Rights: A History (New York: W W Norton, 2007). Cf. Samuel
Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2010); and Moyn, Human Rights and the Uses of History (London: Verso, 2014).
Moyn writes in Last Utopia (p. 3) that ‘The drama of human rights, then, is that they emerged in the
1970s seemingly from nowhere’. More recently still, Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann has argued that ‘we can
first speak of individual human rights as a basic concept (Grundbegriff ), that is, a contested, irreplaceable
and consequential concept of global politics, only in the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War’. See
Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ‘Human Rights and History’, Past and Present 232 (August 2016), p. 282.
14 See Emmanuel Naquet, ‘Ligue des droits de l’homme’. This thesis has now been published in
book form. See Emmanuel Naquet, Pour l’Humanité: La Ligue des droits de l’homme de l’affaire Dreyfus à
la défaite de 1940 (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2014). Cf. Irvine, Between Justice and Politics.
15 Irvine is very good on the social and political origins of Ligue members. See Irvine, Between
Justice and Politics, pp. 5–19.
16 Ibid., p. 6.
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Introduction 5
to the village.17 In many cases, this meant that it became a ‘lieu de sociabilité’
where Republicans could meet with like-minded individuals, enjoy a glass of wine
together, and discuss the great issues of the day, leading Irvine to liken it to ‘the
French equivalent of a Rotary club’.18 Under its aegis, a number of sociopolitical
‘families’ came together—Jews, Freemasons, Protestants, Socialists, disaffected
Communists, Radicals, and Republicans of all sorts.
One issue dominated the Ligue’s discussions and publications over the entire
interwar period. Fully 1,884 of the 7,268 articles (some 25.9 per cent), long and
short, in the Cahiers des droits de l’homme from 1920 to 1940 dealt in one way or
another with Germany. No other single issue, no other single nation, came close
to playing so central a role in the Ligue’s deliberations or concerns. By way of
comparison, the Cahiers mentioned the Dreyfus Affair—the Ligue’s événement
dateur—only 390 times during this twenty-year period, and England or anything
English only 642 times.19 This ought to come as no surprise: relations with Germany
were at the centre of French preoccupations during the interwar period.
The interest was reciprocal. There was close collaboration between the LDH and
its German counterpart, the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte (DLfM), but the
LDH and the writings and speeches of many of its important members also
attracted the attention of the German Foreign Office, and in particular of the
Kriegsschuldreferat (War Guilt Section), albeit in a much more negative sense. It
is no surprise, then, that almost immediately after the German arrival in Paris in
June 1940, the Gestapo should descend on the Ligue’s headquarters at 27, rue Jean
Dolent, in the fourteenth arrondissement and seize its archives and papers at the
behest of the Hauptarbeitsgruppe Frankreich (HAG Frankreich) of the Einsatzstab
Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR).20 At some point, most likely in early 1941, the
papers of the LDH were transferred to Berlin for analysis by the ERR. They
remained there until the carpet bombing of the German capital by the Allies in
1943 occasioned their move yet again, probably in September or October of that
17 This metaphor is certainly not original with me, although its application to the Ligue and the
twentieth century perhaps is. See Maurice Agulhon, The Republic in the Village: The People of the Var
from the French Revolution to the Second Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Cf.
Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1976).
18 Irvine, Between Justice and Politics, p. 4.
19 These statistics are extracted from a huge analytical and chronological inventory of the contents
of the Cahiers from 1920 to 1940 which three research assistants (Drs Cylvie Claveau, Christian Roy,
and Pierre Cenerelli) created under my direction in the mid-1990s.
20 On the ERR, see Ernst Piper, Alfred Rosenberg: Hitlers Chefideologe (Munich: Karl Blessing
Verlag, 2005), pp. 486–508. Piper writes that the ERR opened its very first office in France, although
according to him the focus of its activity was on the seizure of art more than anything else (Piper,
pp. 489 ff ). Yet Rosenberg clearly saw his remit as extending far beyond that, as indeed the full title of
his position (‘Beauftragten des Führers für die Überwachung der gesammten geistigen und weltan-
chaulichen Schulung und Erziehung der NSDAP’) within the Nazi hierarchy indicates. In a memo
from February 1941, Rosenberg wrote that he had ‘in den besetzten westlichen Gebieten einen
Einsatzstab errichtet, der die Aufgabe hat, die Interessen der NSDAP im Kampf gegen weltanschauli-
che Gegner wahrzunehmen, insbesondere mir für die künftige Arbeit wichtig erscheinendes Buch-,
Archiv- und Schriftenmaterial zu beschlagnehmen und ins Reich zu überführen.’ See Alfred Rosenberg,
‘Bestätigung’, Berlin, 25 February 1941, in Centre de documentation juive contemporaine [CDJC],
Osobyi Archive RG-11.001M, reel 131.
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year, to the village of Ratibor in Upper Silesia where the ERR set up camp and
continued its work. It was in Ratibor in the spring of 1945 that they fell into the hands
of the advancing Red Army and were transported back to Moscow as war booty, there
to remain until their repatriation to France at the end of 2001.21 Alone among
historians of the Ligue des droits de l’homme, I have followed the archival trail to
Berlin in an attempt to understand what the reactions of Germans under three succes-
sive regimes—Imperial Germany, the Weimar Republic, and the Nazi State—were to
the ‘rights of man’ as represented and articulated by the LDH. Of absolute centrality
to this German interest in the Ligue des droits de l’homme was the war guilt debate.
In 1914, Victor Basch, then vice-president of the Ligue des droits de l’homme,
was at the forefront of those who condemned the German aggression against
Belgium, and who preached the Union Sacrée to expel the German invader from
French soil.22 Somewhat paradoxically, by October 1933, nine months after the
arrival of the Nazis in power, and just before the German withdrawal from the
Geneva Disarmament Conference and from the League of Nations itself, Basch
proclaimed in a speech that France had to sign the disarmament convention, ‘even
if Germany does not want it’, and ‘make the maximum number of concessions in
order for it to succeed’.23 1933 thus marks the high-water point in the Ligue’s calls
for reconciliation with Germany, a reconciliation based on the increasingly strong
perception on the French Republican left that 1919 and the Treaty of Versailles
were morally and politically flawed. The irony, if not the tragedy, of the Ligue des
droits de l’homme’s engagement with Germany from one world war to the next is
encapsulated in this 1933 call by Basch: in demanding French concessions in the
face of the new Nazi regime in Berlin, Basch was asking for too little too late, or
rather, given the realities of Nazism, too much at the wrong time.
Less than two years later, on Bastille Day 1935, Basch walked arm in arm with
Léon Blum and Léon Jouhaux at the head of a huge procession of the left as the
Popular Front gathered steam in preparation for its electoral victory in the spring
of 1936. One of the cardinal characteristics of the Popular Front was its opposition
to fascism, both domestic and foreign. By mid-1937, the LDH had foundered on
the shoals of how best to defend both democracy and peace, unable to find the via
media between resistance to Hitler and a desire for peace born largely of the Great
War experience.
21 On the peregrinations of the Ligue’s papers, see Sonia Combe, ‘Paris-Moscou, aller-retour:
istorique d’une spoliation et d’une restitution’, in Retour de Moscou: les archives de la Ligue des droits
h
de l’homme, 1898–1940, edited by Sonia Combe and Grégory Cingal (Paris: La Découverte, 2004),
pp. 17–26. Combe writes that it is ‘generally’ thought that the archives were transported to Berlin only
at the end of the Occupation, but that makes little sense since they were found in Ratibor in Upper
Silesia in the spring of 1945, and given Rosenberg’s directive in the note above. The 1942 annual
report of the ‘Analysis Department’ of the Einsatzstab Rosenberg indicates that it began work in late
1941 on the crates of material that had arrived in Berlin from the West; this material included the
library of Victor Basch. See IV/Dr Wu.[under] Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg für die besetzten
Gebiete. Stabsführung, Abteilung Auswertung, ‘Jahresbericht der Abteilung Auswertung für das Jahr
1942’, Berlin, 26 January 1943 in Bundesarchiv NS 30/17.
22 See Victor Basch, La Guerre de 1914 et le droit (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1915).
23 ‘Réunion organisée par la ‘Ligue des Droits de l’Homme’, Salle des Sociétés Savantes, 8 rue
Danton, le 11 octobre’, P.P. [Préfecture de Police], 12 October 1933, in Ministère des Affaires étrangères
[hereafter MAE], Série SDN/IC/Vol. 231.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/12/18, SPi
Introduction 7
September 1939 saw the beginning of the Phoney War in the West, but it was not
to last. Four and a half years later, in January 1944, Victor Basch, the eighty-year-old
president of the Ligue des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, and his wife Ilona, were
brutally murdered by the Milice in Lyon.24
How do we get from 1914 to 1944?
Along the way down to that horrible night in Lyon, Basch and the Ligue seem
never to have wavered in their condemnation of Germany. Or at least, that is the
view that a certain reading of the Ligue’s history would have one take. The Ligue
was thus, in the words of Madeleine Rebérioux, ‘one hundred per cent patriotic’;
there was ‘no hint of pacifism in the Ligue’,25 and by inference at least, the Ligue
had never wavered from its clear-sighted appreciation of the danger posed to
France by a militaristic, chauvinistic Germany in the multiple and successive guises
of Empire, Republic, and Nazi Third Reich. The German ‘Other’, to use Cylvie
Claveau’s analysis,26 was essentially unchanging, always dangerous, and forever
threatening to France.
Leaving aside for a moment Rebérioux’s misapprehension of what constitutes
pacifism in any meaningful sense of the word,27 her comments betray a static
understanding both of Germany—an eternal Germany—and, perhaps even more
importantly, of Republican France. France and Germany are rendered along a
simplistic axis setting up a binary proposition: good France versus bad Germany.
In this comfortable view, the undoubted crimes and atrocities of the Second World
War are almost preordained by the events of the Great War and the political—
indeed, moral—turpitude which followed it in the twenty-year inter-bellum. In
this static and unchanging universe, the heroes are those who understood the
immutable nature of the German menace; they are those who connected (and con-
nect) the dots from 1914 to 1940. The villains are, of course, none other than the
Germans. The paradox of this is that some of the very people who would like to
demonstrate that German history is a long continuum are also very quick to argue
that Vichy represents an exception to an otherwise acceptable French history.28
The Germans are essentially German, but Vichy is only exceptionally French.
24 See Françoise Basch, Victor Basch: de l’affaire Dreyfus au crime de la Milice (Paris, 1994), esp.
Chapter 8 (‘Le temps des assassins, 1939–1944’).
25 Interview with the author at the Ligue’s headquarters, 27, rue Jean Dolent, Paris, on 19 June
1991. Rebérioux’s comments are redolent of a rather strange and typically French conflation of paci-
fism with anti-patriotism.
26 Cylvie Claveau, ‘L’Autre dans les Cahiers des droits de l’homme, 1920–1940: une sélection univer-
saliste de l’altérité à la Ligue des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen en France’ (PhD thesis, McGill
University, 2000).
27 See Ingram, The Politics of Dissent, esp. pp. 1–16 and 121–33 on the origins of the new pacifism.
28 There are many examples in French history of issues which have called forth a particularly ‘French’
interpretation, which has had to be modified by subsequent scholarship—often by Anglo-American
historians, who have pointed out inconvenient truths. A clear example of this is the ‘Paxtonian
Revolution’ which changed the comfortable way in which Vichy had been seen. See Robert Paxton,
Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York: Knopf, 1972), and Robert
Paxton and Michael Marrus, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1981). Cf. Robert Aron,
Histoire de Vichy, 1940–1944 (Paris: Fayard, 1954). There are other examples, too, such as the huge
debate between the representatives of the ‘consensus’ school on French fascism versus those who argue
that there was indeed such a thing as a French variant of fascism. See Michel Dobry, ed., Le Mythe
de l’allergie française au fascisme (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003) as well as the thought-provoking essays
Another random document with
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In besieging a fortress, the object is to erect batteries on particular points as near as
possible to the place, and to render the communications to and between them safe.
For these purposes, a ditch is commenced at a distance from the fortress, and is
carried on in a slanting direction towards it, the laborers being protected by the earth
thrown up on the side next the place. When these approaches have been carried as
near as requisite, another ditch called a parallel is dug in front or even around the
fortress, batteries being constructed on its line where necessary. Sometimes another
parallel is made within the outer one. Along these ditches the cannon, ammunition,
troops, &c. are conveyed in comparative safety to the different batteries.
All things being ready, at three o'clock on the morning of the 14th of
June, the first brigade of the first division under General Berthezéne,
consisting of six thousand men, with eight pieces of artillery were on
their way to the shore, in boats towed by three steamers. They were
soon perceived by the Algerines, who commenced a fire on them
from their batteries; it however produced little or no effect, and was
soon silenced by the heavier shot from the steamers and brigs in the
eastern bay. At four the whole brigade was safely landed, and drawn
up on the south side of the peninsula near the shore battery, which
was instantly seized. In a few minutes more, the white flag of France
floated over the Torreta Chica; a guard was however placed at the
door of the Marabout, in order to show from the commencement, that
the religion of the inhabitants would be respected by the invaders.
By six o'clock the whole of the first and second divisions were landed
together with all the field artillery, and the Commander-in-chief of the
expedition was established in his head quarters near the Marabout,
from which he could overlook the scene of operations. General
Valazé had already traced a line of works across the neck of the
peninsula, and the men were laboring at the entrenchments; they
were however occasionally annoyed by shots from the batteries, and
it was determined immediately to commence the offensive. General
Poret de Morvan accordingly advanced from the peninsula at the
head of the first brigade, and having without difficulty turned the left
of the batteries, their defenders were driven from them at the point of
the bayonet; they were then pursued towards the encampment,
which was also after a short struggle abandoned, the whole African
force retreating in disorder towards the city.
This success cost the French about sixty men in killed and wounded;
two or three of their soldiers had been taken prisoners, but they were
found headless and horribly mutilated near the field of battle. The
loss of the Algerines is unknown, as those who fell were according to
the custom of the Arab warfare carried off. Nine pieces of artillery
and two small howitzers by which the batteries were defended, being
merely fixed on frames without wheels, remained in the hands of the
invaders.
While the first brigade was thus employed, the disembarkation of the
troops was prosecuted with increased activity, and as no farther
interruption was offered, the whole army and a considerable portion
of the artillery, ammunition and provisions were conveyed on shore
before night. It was not however the intention of the commanding
general immediately to advance upon Algiers; his object was to take
the city, and he was not disposed to lose the advantage of the
extraordinary preparations, which had been made in order to insure
its accomplishment. The third division of the fleet containing the
horses and heavy artillery had not arrived; unprotected by cavalry his
men would have been on their march exposed at each moment to
the sudden and impetuous attacks of the Arabs, and it would have
been needless to present himself before the fortresses which
surround the city, while unprovided with the means of reducing them.
He therefore determined to await the arrival of the vessels from
Palma, and in the mean time to devote all his efforts to the
fortification of the peninsula, so that it might serve as the depository
of his materiel during the advance of the army, and as a place of
retreat in case of unforeseen disaster. The first and second divisions
under Berthezéne and Loverdo were accordingly stationed on the
heights in front of the neck of the peninsula, from which the
Algerines had been expelled in the morning; in this position they
were secured by temporary batteries and by chevaux de frise of a
peculiar construction, capable of being easily transported and
speedily arranged for use. The third division under the Duke
D'Escars remained as a corps of reserve at Sidi Ferruch, where the
engineers, the general staff and the greater part of the non-
combatants of the expedition were also established. Some difficulties
were at first experienced from the limited supply of water, but they
were soon removed as it was found in abundance at the depth of a
few feet below the surface.
On the 15th, it was perceived that the Algerines had established their
camp about three miles in front of the advanced positions of the
French, at a place designated by the guides of the expedition as Sidi
Khalef; between the two armies lay an uninhabited tract, crossed by
small ravines, and overgrown with bushes, under cover of which the
Africans were enabled to approach the outposts of the invaders, and
thus to annoy them by desultory attacks. Each Arab horseman
brought behind him a foot soldier, armed with a long gun, in the use
of which those troops had been rendered very dexterous by constant
exercise; when they came near to the French lines, the sharp
shooter jumped from the horse and stationed himself behind some
bush, where he quietly awaited the opportunity of exercising his skill
upon the first unfortunate sentinel or straggler who should appear
within reach of his shot. In this manner a number of the French were
wounded, often mortally by their unseen foes; those who left the
lines in search of water or from other motives were frequently found
by their companions, without their heads and shockingly mangled.
As the Arabs were well acquainted with the paths, pursuit would
have been vain as well as dangerous, and the only effectual means
of checking their audacity was by a liberal employment of the
artillery.
On the 17th and 18th, some of the vessels arrived from Palma
bringing a few horses and pieces of heavy artillery, but not enough to
warrant an advance of the army. On the 18th, four Arab Scheicks
appeared at the outposts, and having been conducted to the
commander of the expedition, they informed him that the Algerines
had received large reinforcements, and were about to attack him on
the succeeding day. Bourmont however paid no attention to their
declarations, and gave no orders in consequence of them, although
it was evident from the increase in the number of their tents that a
considerable addition had been made to the force of his enemies.
On the day after the French had effected their landing, all the
Algerine troops except those which were necessary to guard the city
and the fortifications in its vicinity, were collected under the Aga's
immediate command, at his camp of Sidi Khalef; on the morning of
the 18th, the contingent of Oran also arrived, accompanied by a
number of Arabs who had joined them on the way. Thus
strengthened, and encouraged by the inactivity of the French, which
he attributed probably to want of resolution, Ibrahim determined to
make a desperate attack upon their lines, calculating that if he could
succeed in throwing them into confusion, it would afterwards be easy
to destroy them in detail. For this purpose he divided his army into
two columns, which are supposed to have consisted of about twenty
thousand men each; the right column under Achmet Bey of
Constantina was destined to attack Loverdo's division, which
occupied the left or northern side of the French position; the other
column was to be led by Ibrahim in person, with Abderrahman Bey of
Tittery as his lieutenant, against the right division of the invaders,
under Berthezéne.
The results of this action were highly important to the French, and
indeed it rendered their success certain. The Arabs began to
disappear, and the Turkish and Moorish soldiers retreated to the city,
from which it was not easy to bring them again to the field;
symptoms of insurrection among the populace also manifested
themselves. In this situation, it has been considered possible that
had Bourmont advanced immediately upon Algiers, the Dey would
have found it necessary to capitulate; there was however no reason
to believe that the disaffection would extend to the garrisons of the
fortresses, and the city could not have been reduced while they held
out.
On the 23d the vessels from Palma began to come in; the horses
were immediately landed, and two small corps of cavalry were added
to the troops encamped at Sidi Khalef. The fortifications of the
peninsula were also by this time completed, a line of works fifteen
hundred yards in length, having been drawn across the neck, and
armed with twenty-four pieces of cannon; by this means the whole of
the land forces were rendered disposable, as two thousand men
principally taken from the equipage de ligne3 of the fleet, were
considered sufficient for the security of the place. The provisions, &c.
were all landed, and placed within the lines, in temporary buildings
which had been brought in detached pieces from France;
comfortable hospitals were likewise established there, together with
bakeries, butcheries, and even a printing office, from which the
Estafette d' Alger, a semi-official newspaper, was regularly issued.
The communications between Sidi Ferruch and the camp, were
facilitated by the construction of a military road, defended by
redoubts and blockhouses placed at short intervals on the way.
3 A certain number of young men are annually chosen by lot in France, for the supply
of the army and navy, in which they are required to serve eight years. Those intended
for the navy, are sent to the dockyards, where they are drilled as soldiers, and
instructed in marine exercises for some time before they are sent to sea. The crew of
each public vessel must contain a certain proportion of those soldier sailors, who are
termed the equipage de ligne.
While this combat was going on, the remainder of the vessels from
Palma, nearly three hundred in number, entered the bay of Sidi
Ferruch. Their arrival determined Bourmont not to retire to his camp
at Sidi Khalef, but to establish his first and second divisions five
miles in advance of that spot, in the valley of Backshé-dere, so that
the road might be completed, and the heavy artillery be brought as
soon as landed to the immediate vicinity of the position on which it
was to be employed. The third division was distributed between the
main body and Sidi Ferruch, in order to protect the communications.
This advantage was however dearly purchased; for during the four
days passed in this situation, the French suffered greatly from the
Algerine sharp-shooters, posted above them on the heights, and
from two batteries which had been established on a point
commanding the camp. In this way Bourmont acknowledges that
seven hundred of his men were rendered unfit for duty within that
period; he does not say how many were killed.
The necessary arrangements having been completed, and several
battering pieces brought up to the rear of the French camp,
Bourmont put his forces in motion before day on the 29th of June.
Two brigades of d'Escar's division which had hitherto been little
employed, were ordered to advance to the left and turn the positions
of the Algerines on that side; on the right the same duty was to be
performed by a part of Berthezéne's division, while Loverdo was to
attack the enemy in the centre. They proceeded in silence, and
having gained the summits of the first eminences unperceived,
directed a terrible fire of artillery upon the Algerines, who having only
small arms to oppose to it were soon thrown into confusion and put
to flight. The Moors and Turks took refuge in the city and the
surrounding fortifications, while the Arabs and Kabyles escaped
along the seashore on the southeast, towards the interior of the
country.
The French had now only to choose their positions from investing
Algiers, which with all its defences lay before them. Besides the
Casauba and batteries of the city, they had to encounter four
fortresses. On the southeastern side near the sea, half a mile from
the walls was Fort Babazon, westward of which, and one mile
southward from the Casauba, was the Emperor's castle, presenting
the most formidable impediment to the approach of the invaders.
This castle was a mass of irregular brick buildings, disposed nearly
in a square, the circumference of which was about five hundred
yards. From the unevenness of the ground on which it was built, its
walls were in some places sixty feet high, in others not more than
twenty; they were six feet in thickness, and flanked by towers at the
angles, but unprotected by a ditch or any outworks, except a few
batteries which had been hastily thrown up on the side next the
enemy. In the centre rose a large round tower of great height and
strength, forming the keep or citadel, under which were the vaults
containing the powder. On its ramparts were mounted one hundred
and twenty large cannon, besides mortars and howitzers, and it was
defended by fifteen hundred Turks well acquainted with the use of
artillery, under the command of the Hasnagee or Treasurer who had
promised to die rather than surrender. As it overlooked the Casauba
and the whole city, it was clear that an enemy in possession of this
spot and provided with artillery, could soon reduce the place to dust;
but it was itself commanded in a like manner, by several heights
within the distance of a thousand yards, which were in the hands of
the French. The next fortress was the Sittit Akoleit or Fort of twenty-
four hours, half a mile north of the city; and lastly a work called the
English fort was erected on the seashore near Point Pescada, a
headland about one-third of the way between Algiers and Cape
Caxine. The object of the French was to reduce the Emperor's castle
as soon as possible, and in the mean time to confine the Algerines
within their walls as well as to prevent them from receiving succors.
For the latter purposes, it was necessary to extend their lines much
more than would have been compatible with safety, in presence of a
foe well acquainted with military science; trusting however to the
ignorance and fears of his enemies, Bourmont did not hesitate to
spread out his forces, even at the risk of having one of his wings cut
off by a sudden sortie. Loverdo in consequence established his
division on a height within five hundred yards of the Emperor's
castle; Berthezéne changed his position from the right to the centre,
occupying the sides of mount Boujereah the heights immediately
west of the city; while d'Escars on the extreme left, overlooked the
Sittit Akoleit, and the English fort. These positions were all taken
before two o'clock in the day.
The night of the 29th passed without any attack on the lines of the
French. Before morning the engineers under Valazé had opened a
trench within five hundred yards of the Emperor's castle, and various
country houses situated in the vicinity of that fortress, were armed
with heavy pieces and converted into batteries. As soon as this was
perceived from the castle, a fire was opened upon the laborers; but
they were already too well protected by the works which had been
thrown up, and few of the balls took effect. A sortie was next made
by the garrison, and for a moment they succeeded in occupying the
house of the Swedish Consul, in which a French corps had been
stationed; they were however immediately driven out, and forced to
retire to their own walls.
The high character for courage and skill which Admiral Duperré has
acquired by his long and distinguished services, precludes the
possibility of imagining that there could have been any want of either
of those qualities on his part in this affair. Indeed he would have
been most blameable had he exposed his ships and men to the fire
of the fortresses which extend in front of Algiers, at a period when
the success of the expedition was certain. The "moral effect" of
which the Admiral speaks in his despatch, might have been
produced to an equal or greater extent, by the mere display of the
forces in the bay; the only physical result of the cannonade, was the
abandonment of some batteries, on Point Pescada, which were in
consequence occupied by d'Escar's forces. The whole attack if it
may be so termed, was probably only intended to repress any
feelings of jealousy which may have arisen in the minds of the naval
officers and men, by thus affording them at least an ostensible right
to share with the army the glory of reducing Algiers.
BAI.
Bai was the Egyptian term for the branch of the Palm-tree. Homer
says that one of Diomede's horses, Phœnix, was of a palm-color,
which is a bright red. It is therefore not improbable that our word bay
as applied to the color of horses, may boast as remote an origin as
the Egyptian Bai.
THE CLASSICS.