La grande illusion: Comment la France a perdu la paix, 1914-1920.

• Author: Gottfried, Paul
• Position: Book review

La grande illusion: Comment la France a perdu la paix, 1914-1920

By Georges-Henri Soutou

Paris: Tallandier, 2015.

Pp. 382. 10 [euro] paperback.

In La grande illusion, Georges-Henri Soutou, a distinguished diplomatic historian and professor emeritus at the Sorbonne, sets out to show, as his subtitle indicates, "how France lost the peace, 1914-1920." What makes this study particularly persuasive is that the author has little sympathy for France's enemies in the First World War. His interpretation of German actions leading up to the war comes primarily through unsympathetic interpreters of the German kaiser and his general staff, such as Fritz Fischer and John Rohl. Indeed, in reading Soutou's relevant statements, I thought he might have looked at more balanced material on Germany--for example, Christopher Clark's readily accessible and thoroughly researched biography of Kaiser Wilhelm. Soutou's examination of Franco-Russian relations in the decade before the outbreak of the war, moreover, seems disproportionately critical of the Russians. This view undoubtedly reflects the influence of Sean McMeekin, who in The Russian Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011) explores czarist Russia's efforts to incite war in the Balkans. This effort was undertaken, according to McMeekin, in order to allow Russia to grab the Straits and Istanbul.

In Iswolski und der Weltkrieg (Berlin: Verlagsgesellschaft fur Politik und Geschichte, 1924), German diplomatie historian Friedrich Stieve documents the remarkably revealing correspondence between French foreign minister Raymond Poincare and his Russian counterpart Alexander Izvolsky. Stieve's study seems to prove beyond a doubt that the French government was provoking the Russians to go to war against Germany as soon as France did. The French cleverly managed to turn the focus of Russia's war planning from its Austro-Hungarian rival in the Balkans to the German Empire. The French also subsidized a railroad line that would carry Russian troops into East Prussia once war broke out in the West. If Izvolsky said when the shooting started, "C'est ma guerre!" then French president Poincare might have said the same with equal conviction.

There are only fleeting references in Soutou's work to the British starvation blockade, which caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of German civilians, in particular children. The German use of submarine warfare, which served as an occasion to...