France: The World Wars

The World Wars

In World War I, France bore the brunt of the ground fighting in the west. Clemenceau was France's outstanding leader. At the Paris Peace Conference (see Versailles, Treaty of) France obtained heavy German reparations and the right to occupy the left bank of the Rhine for 15 years. When reparations payments were defaulted, France occupied the Ruhr (1923–25).

Outstanding among French political figures of the 1920s were Poincaré, Herriot, and Briand. By the middle of the decade relations with Germany had improved (see Locarno Pact). The depression of the 1930s was aggravated by the immobile economic policies of the government, and political complacency was rocked by the Stavisky Affair (1934). The Popular Front, a coalition led by Léon Blum, of Socialists, Radical Socialists, and Communists, won the elections of 1936; Popular Front governments (1936–38) enacted important social and labor reforms before being overturned by conservative opposition.

After Blum's fall, Édouard Daladier assented to the appeasement policy toward Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Spain favored by Britain and made France a party to the Munich Pact (1938). After the outbreak (1939) of World War II he was replaced by Paul Reynaud. In May–June, 1940, France was ignominiously defeated by Germany. Marshal Pétain became head of the Vichy government (see under Vichy) of unoccupied France (other Vichy leaders were Laval and Darlan), which became a German tool, while Gen. Charles de Gaulle proclaimed, from London, the continued resistance of the “Free French.” The Allied invasion (Nov., 1942) of North Africa resulted (1943) in the establishment of a provisional Free French government at Algiers and in the complete German occupation of metropolitan France. De Gaulle's government moved to Paris after the city was liberated (Aug., 1944).

By the end of 1944 the Allies, with heroic aid from the French resistance, had expelled the Germans from France. German occupation had been costly and oppressive. Thousands had been executed and hundreds of thousands made slave laborers in Germany. The liberation campaign itself caused much destruction. Although reduced in power and prestige, France became one of the five great powers in the United Nations and shared in the occupation of Germany. De Gaulle became provisional president.

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