The War Guilt Problem and The Ligue Des Droits de Lhomme Norman Ingram All Chapter

The War Guilt Problem and the Ligue
Des Droits de l'Homme Norman Ingram

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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
The War Guilt Problem

and the Ligue des droits
de l’homme, 1914–1944
NORMAN INGRAM
1
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!’
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.
Acknowledgements vii
One person is especially deserving of my thanks. He is William Irvine, emeritus

professor of history at York University in Toronto. I first met Bill in 1989 at the
annual meeting of the Western Society for French History in New Orleans,
Louisiana. This was my first ever North American scholarly conference after my
PhD at the University of Edinburgh. The organizers had put my paper on French
pacifism together with two papers on fascism given by Bill and Bob Soucy, perhaps
under the assumption that politics makes strange bedfellows. Whatever the case,
I became fast friends with Bill and his wife, Marion Lane. He has been a constant
and tireless support ever since. His refreshingly iconoclastic and analytical book,
Between Justice and Politics: the Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1898–1945, has been
an inspiration when I have doubted myself.
Three other couples deserve special mention. My aunt and uncle, Janet and
Norman Patten, have been a constant presence in my life since I was five years old.
Just about every year since 1982, I have repaired to their wonderful house, ‘Tamarack’,
in Guernsey for a much-needed and restorative vacation. To Christopher and
Caroline Herbert, I express my heartfelt thanks. I was best man at their wedding and
they are my dearest friends in France. On every research trip to Paris, extending over
many years, they have hosted me almost every weekend at their home. My sister and
brother-in-law, Bernice and Curtis Hobbs, have also been wonderfully supportive
and generous. Bernice was disappointed not to be mentioned in my first book;
I hope that this goes some way to repairing the inadvertent damage and to under-
lining the esteem of an older brother for a much-loved younger sister.
Finally, this book is dedicated to the memory of my parents, to whom I owe so
much, and to my partner, Matthew Skelton, who is a far more gifted writer than
I shall ever be, and whose steadfast love has urged me on towards the prize.
Norman Ingram
Montréal,
June 2018
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
III. LES FLEURS DU MAL . . .

7. In the Shadow of the Swastika 181
8. 1937, or the Aventine Secession 217
9. Once More with Feeling? The Ligue des droits de l’homme and
the Slide into War 239
10. When All Is Said and Done . . . En guise de conclusion 265
Bibliography 269
Index 285
List of Abbreviations
ADG Archives départementales du Gard

ALDH Archives de la Ligue des droits de l’homme
APD Association de la paix par le droit
APP Archives de la Préfecture de police, Paris
BA Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde
BDIC Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine, Nanterre
BHVP Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris
BMN Bibliothèque municipale de Nîmes
BnF Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris
CC Comité Central
CDJC Centre de documentation juive contemporaine, Paris
DLfM Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte
KPD Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands
LDH Ligue des droits de l’homme
MAE Archives du Ministère des Affaires étrangères de France
PA/AA Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes, Berlin
SEDCG Société d’études documentaires et critiques sur la guerre
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,
2 War Guilt and the Ligue des droits de l’homme
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
All of this poses problems for the early twenty-first-century historian who would
seek to understand the tragic events of the last century. However unpalatable it
may seem to some, there was a case to be made against the imputation of unique
German responsibility in the outbreak of the Great War. The analysis that follows
revolves around this crucial debate which consumed writers, historians, politicians,
and human rights activists on both sides of the Rhine from virtually the outbreak
of war in 1914 down to the final expulsion of the Germans from France in 1944.29
Many of the people discussed in this book were known at the time as ‘revision-
ists’, that is to say, people who believed that the Treaty of Versailles needed to be
revised, and the assigning of unique war guilt to Germany (and its allies) thrown
out. ‘Revisionism’ has become a dirty political word over the course of the last fifty
years. Today it often means people who deny the Holocaust. Deborah Lipstadt, a
scholar who certainly knows revisionism in this latter sense when she sees it, has
argued that there is only a tenuous connection between the original First World
War revisionists and the post-Second World War variety; it is found in the person
of the American historian of the Great War, Harry Elmer Barnes, who, after 1945,
devolved in the direction of Holocaust denial. Lipstadt’s opinion of most post-First
World War revisionists is that their views on Versailles, war guilt, and Germany
were right. She writes,
In fact, much of the revisionist argument was historically quite sound. Germany was
not solely culpable for the war. The Versailles Treaty contained harsh and vindictive
elements that placed so onerous a financial burden on Germany as to virtually guar-
antee the collapse of the Weimar regime. The French did have ulterior motives.30
Some might argue, as indeed Victor Basch and Emile Kahn were to do in the
1920s, that these early revisionists were either untrained, not to be taken seriously,
or downright dangerous.31 Luigi Albertini, of whom Hew Strachan has written
that it was on his ‘shoulders [that] all subsequent historians have stood and whose
interpretation of events has not been substantively overthrown’, clearly did not
agree.32 In fact, Albertini drew heavily on the works of the revisionists in his three-
volume work on The Origins of the War of 1914, despite chastising them for being
occasionally too polemical and one-sided in their approach.33
in Sam Kalman and Sean Kennedy, eds., The French Right between the Wars: Political and Intellectual
Movements from Conservatism to Fascism (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2014).
29 See Clark, Sleepwalkers and Mulligan, Origins.
30 Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York,
Toronto: The Free Press, 1993), p. 33. Her comments on Barnes are on p. 34. Of course, there are
plenty of other historians who do not take such a sanguine view of the Germans and post-First World
War revisionism. See, for example, among many others, the insightful essay by Gerhard Weinberg,
‘The Defeat of Germany in 1918 and the European Balance of Power’, in Gerhard L. Weinberg,
Germany, Hitler and World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 11–22.
31 Pierre Renouvin told John Cairns rather emphatically (and disdainfully) in 1950, with regard to
Georges Michon, ‘Méfiez-vous de ça!’. John Cairns to the author, 3 November 2017.
32 Hew Strachan, ‘Review Article: The Origins of the First World War’, International Affairs 90, 2
(2014), p. 434.
33 Luigi Albertini drew substantially on the work of Georges Demartial, Georges Michon, Mathias
Morhardt, René Gerin, and Armand Charpentier, among others, in his three-volume work, The Origins
Introduction 9
The goal of this book is therefore to examine first and foremost how that
q uintessentially Republican institution, the Ligue des droits de l’homme, came
close to being destroyed by the war guilt debate. That debate began in the earliest
days of the Great War and spread over the next twenty-five years under three
successive German regimes. It was not just a Franco-French quarrel, although that
is certainly the primary concern of this book, but also one with several distinct
German interlocutors, ranging from the German Foreign Office through German
public opinion and on to the Ligue’s German counterpart, the Deutsche Liga für
Menschenrechte. Indeed, one might say that the latter organization filtered and
articulated a particular view of Germany to the LDH which prevented a deeper
understanding of the extent to which French policy on Germany, supported in
several key areas by the LDH, was actually inimical to the resolution of the war
guilt problem. This book also considers the extent to which the death of the LDH
can be blamed on the Second World War and its effects. The evidence shows that
it was not the German invasion of France which killed the LDH, but rather the
Ligue’s own internal contradictions which in turn flowed out of its paralysis over the
war guilt problem—a paralysis which had its origins in the Great War and which
spread, rather than receded, in the great decade of what might have been, the 1920s.
In a broader sense, it is the thesis of this book that there would have been no
‘German problem’ for the Ligue des droits de l’homme had it not been for the Great
War. There might have been discussion of Alsace-Lorraine, of German militarism,
of strained relations between France and Germany, of political developments
across the Rhine, and so on, but these would never have assumed the proportions
of a ‘problem’ had it not been for the war. Moreover, the war could never have
produced such a fixation on Germany had it not been for the way in which it ended,
with an armistice rather than a surrender, and with a victors’ peace that was essen-
tially imposed on a semi-vanquished Germany in 1919. If one can argue that the
seeds of Nazism and the Second World War were planted during the Great War, one
can equally make the case that the eventual demise of the Ligue des droits de l’homme
(and, indeed, of the Third Republic) also began in 1914 with the Union sacrée.
Ferdinand Buisson, the highly respected president of the Ligue, underlined the
importance of the Great War in the first number of the Ligue’s new journal, the
Cahiers des droits de l’homme, in January 1920. He explained to his readership that
the Ligue believed it could present itself to the broader public as more than a single-
issue group. He saw three successive stages in the LDH’s history, beginning with
the heroic phase of the Dreyfus Affair, and moving through what he called the
‘thousands of instances’ where the administrative machinery of France had pro-
duced analogous situations. The third era in the Ligue’s history, however, was that
of the Great War: ‘Events of enormous significance made us see the Rights of Man
of the War of 1914, translated by Isabella M. Massey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952). See
Vol. III. The Epilogue of the Crisis of July 1914: The Declarations of War and of Neutrality, p. 142 in the
reprint edition for the comment about the polemical nature of the revisionists’ approach (New York:
Enigma Books, 2014). Demartial continues to be cited. See Jean Stengers, ‘1914: The Safety of Ciphers
and the Outbreak of the First World War’, in Intelligence and International Relations, 1900–1945,
edited by Christopher Andrew and Jeremy Noakes (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1987), p. 41.
no longer in their individual form, but as involving large human collectivities.’

These could be nations demanding independence, minorities protesting against
oppression, or the victims of secular persecution, but what he called the ‘supreme
question for all of humanity’ was the need to substitute the rule of law for that of
force. That rule of law had to be guaranteed by the League of Nations. This change
in the Ligue’s orientation, away from the defence of individual rights towards an
essentially political engagement in support of collective rights, is fundamental to
an understanding of the Ligue’s role in French politics from the Great War down
to the debacle of 1940. Buisson understood this paradigmatic shift in the Ligue’s
orientation. He wrote in January 1920 that ‘with still more ardour than it had
brought to the defence of the rights of man and citizen, the Ligue has thrown itself
into the struggle in favour of the right of humanity to realise peace through inter-
national justice’.34 By way of comparison, it is interesting to note that the Bund
Neues Vaterland, which was to become the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte in
1922, emerged from the war convinced that its work had a deep domestic focus.
The first point in its programme, elaborated at the end of 1918, was the work
for international reconciliation, but the three remaining points were all squarely in
the domestic sphere.35 This evolution away from the individual on the part of the
LDH, however politicized that concept might be, towards an engagement with
the collective, in the form of international politics, ran diametrically counter
to the development of the BNV in Germany, which had been primarily concerned
with international affairs during the Great War, but evolved after 1918 in the direc-
tion of the defence of individual rights under the Weimar Republic. Nonetheless,
the LDH continued right through the interwar period to be deeply engaged with
individual rights issues, too, and the DLfM remained intimately involved in
debates over international affairs.
The dialogue between the Ligue des droits de l’homme and Germany in its several
guises often dealt with subjects which might seem at first glance to have little to do
with the issue of German war guilt. Two of these, emerging during the Great War
and continuing to influence the perception of Germany during the interwar years,
are paradoxically the problem posed by France’s convoluted relationship, first with
34 Ferdinand Buisson, ‘Notre programme: droits de l’homme, droits du citoyen, droits des peuples’,
Cahiers New Series no. 1 (5 January 1920), p. 3. The idea was not new in 1920. Buisson had already
enunciated it just after the war’s end. See Ferdinand Buisson, ‘Discours de M. Ferdinand Buisson’, in
Le Congrès de 1918 de la Ligue des droits de l’homme. Compte-rendu sténographique du 27 au 29 décembre
1918. (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1919), p. 90.
35 The three remaining points in the programme were ‘2. Kampf für die Abschaffung jeder Gewalt-
und Klassenherrschaft, Kampf für Menschenrechte und soziale Gerechtigkeit; 3. Mitarbeit an der
Verwirklichung des Sozialismus; 4. Kultur der Persönlichkeit’. The commitment to socialism was
specifically construed as socialism of the Fabian variety and not Marxism. See Otto Lehmann-Russbüldt,
Der Kampf der Deutschen Liga für Menschenrechte, vormals Bund Neues Vaterland, für den Weltfrieden,
1914–1927 (Berlin: Hensel & Co. Verlag, 1927), p. 92. The German Liga took inspiration from both
British and French sources: see Programm und Aufnahmebedingungen (Berlin: Deutsche Liga für
Menschenrechte, n.d.) in which the Liga proclaimed the need for a ‘spiritual revolution’ (eine geistige
Revolution): ‘Wir wollen für Deutschland diese geistige Revolution wecken, wie sie in England in der
Mitte des vorigen Jahrhunderts vor sich ging, und in Frankreich durch die Dreyfusaffäre Ende des
Jahrhunderts. Aus der Betreibung der Dreyfusaffäre entwickelte sich unsere französische Schwesterliga,
die heute 120 000 Mitglieder in 1200 Ortsgruppen umfaßt.’
Introduction 11
Tsarist Russia, and ultimately with the Soviet Union. The second issue which had
an impact on the war guilt problem was the question of nationalities.
There is much reading across the grain in what follows. This is necessary because
a superficial analysis of the Ligue’s publications would lead one to the conclusion
that the Ligue held true to a logically consistent view of the German threat from
one world war to the next. There is much in the Ligue’s published and unpublished
papers which dovetails nicely with the usual narrative of good France eventually
triumphing over bad Germany. This is only half the story, however. A deeper
analysis leads to contradictions, at times to a yawning gulf between republican
Dichtung (Poetry) and republican Wahrheit (Truth).36 It is necessary in approaching
the Ligue des droits de l’homme to be sensitive not only to what was said, but also
to what was not said, but which a too cursory reading of the record tends to overlook
or quite simply write out of the narrative. The silences speak volumes, but so, too,
do statements and writings of both the majority and the minority within the Ligue
which, in the case of the former, many seem prepared simply to overlook, and which,
in the case of the latter, a posterity forever transfixed by the Second World War too
quickly consigns to the rubbish heap. It is not accurate to suggest that the Ligue
des droits de l’homme always understood the German menace; nor is it true to
suggest that the Ligue represented a logically consistent Republicanism in this
period. Both changed a great deal.
The sometimes arcane and complex debates over the origins of the Great War
had very tangible and concrete political ramifications. It was inevitable that the
fallout from the war would take a long time to digest. An entire generation of
French men and women had been filled with hatred for the ‘Other’. One well-
known French pacifist, not a member of the Ligue des droits de l’homme but very
close to people who were, wrote early in the interwar period that he refused ‘sud-
denly, on command, [to] love en bloc a people whom I regret not having better
killed when I was a soldier’.37 The problem of the Versailles Treaty and the need for
European reconciliation, the tensions occasioned by the occupation of the Ruhr,
the hopes engendered by the Locarno Treaty of 1925, German entry into the League
of Nations, the failure of the 1932 Geneva Disarmament Conference, the rise of
Nazism, and then the slide into war just six years later were all events read through
the lens of the war guilt/war origins debate.
This book also speaks to the aetiology of pacifism in an important way. The doyen
of historians of British pacifism, Martin Ceadel, sees the Great War as the catalyst
which produced what he calls the ‘humanitarian’ inspiration for pacifism, the idea
that no war could possibly be worth the slaughter and suffering that it would
cause.38 The horror of the 1914–18 war was the element, therefore, which brought
36 The expression comes from the title of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s autobiography, Aus
meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit, published between 1811 and 1833; it conveys nicely the
tension between ‘poetry’ and ‘truth’ that I am trying to get at.
37 Jules-L Puech, ‘Chronique: La Paix avec l’Allemagne’, La Paix par le droit 30, 1–2 (January–
February 1920), p. 27.
38 See Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain: The Defining of a Faith (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1980), pp. 9–17.
into being the strong pacifist movement in interwar Britain. France undoubtedly
shared this visceral reaction to the trauma of the Great War, but unlike the British
case France also had to deal not merely with a ‘humanitarian’ reaction to the heca-
tomb, but also with an historical dissent which had its own dynamic and called
into question the very bona fides of all that was dear to the Republican tradition in
France.39 The human fallout from the war, the sense that a civilizational break had
occurred because of 1914, a humanitarian catastrophe of unparalleled proportions,
were tropes shared with British interwar pacifism. But the French also faced another,
deeper challenge caused by the war: the emergence of a profoundly dissenting view
of their own history, of the republican history of the Great War, which cut to the
core of the Republican self-image. Unlike pacifism in Britain, the French variant
brought into question, in an almost ontological way, the essence of what it was to
be French after 1918. While the British dealt with the demons and memories of
the trenches, the French did all that, too, but then added a moral layer, a volitional
interpretation of the events of the Great War. The trench experience had been
appalling enough, but the idea that it all could have been avoided, that the Third
Republic was somehow complicit in the bloodbath, added a dimension to the
‘inspirations’ for pacifism that quite simply did not exist in Britain. This is far from
the situation that Ceadel argues obtained in Britain where ‘that most futile of
modern wars, the First World War,’ did much to ‘generate the broad yet harmo-
nious Peace Movement’ of the interwar period.40 There was very little harmony
within the French peace movement of the interwar years. The locus of that devel-
opment and debate within France was the Ligue des droits de l’homme, and it was
that debate which eventually hobbled the Ligue by the time the Nazis were at the
gates in the spring of 1940.41 What is of fundamental importance here is the fact
that this new-style, absolute pacifism lay at the centre of French republican political
culture in the Ligue des droits de l’homme and not on the ethereal syndicalist
or anarchist fringes; in this sense, French pacifism was every bit as ‘legitimate’ as its
British cousin.42
In my study of French interwar pacifism, I argued very schematically that his-
torical dissent over the origins of the Great War was one of the elements which
combined to produce the emergence of a new form of pacifism—pacifisme nouveau
style—in the early 1930s.43 This historical dissent had its origin within the Ligue des
39 ‘Historical dissent’, largely about the origins of the Great War, was one of the constitutive
elements of the new-style, integral pacifism which emerged in France towards the end of the 1920s. See
Ingram, Politics of Dissent, pp. 121–33.
40 Martin Ceadel, ‘The Peace Movement between the Wars: Problems of Definition’, in Campaigns
for Peace: British Peace Movements in the Twentieth Century, edited by Richard Taylor and Nigel Young
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), p. 75.
41 On the early emergence of this debate and its importance in the evolution of pacifist thought in
France, see Norman Ingram, ‘The Crucible of War: The Ligue des Droits de l’Homme and the Debate
on the “Conditions for a Lasting Peace” in 1916’, French Historical Studies, 39, 2 (April 2016), pp.
347–71. See also Ingram, ‘A la Recherche d’une guerre gagnée: The Ligue des droits de l’homme and
the War Guilt Question (1918–1922)’, French History 24, 2 (June 2010), pp. 218–35.
42 Cf. Martin Ceadel, ‘A Legitimate Peace Movement: The Case of Britain, 1918–1945’, in
Challenge to Mars: Essays on Pacifism from 1918 to 1945, edited by Peter Brock and Thomas P. Socknat
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), pp. 134–48.
43 See Ingram, Politics of Dissent, pp. 122–5.
Introduction 13
droits de l’homme in the form of the Société d’études documentaires et critiques

sur la guerre (SEDCG), one of whose mainsprings was the former secretary-
general of the Ligue, Mathias Morhardt. The SEDCG was never officially recognized
as a constituent part of the Ligue, despite repeated attempts by Morhardt to effect
such a recognition, but it was like a Greek chorus chanting softly in the background
of all of the LDH’s deliberations on war origins and responsibilities. The war guilt
debate lay at the centre of the malaise which gradually overtook the Ligue during
the twenty-year inter-bellum. Does this mean that it was pacifism which killed the
Ligue des droits de l’homme?44 Not at all. It is, however, to suggest that the moral
ambivalence and equivocations implied by the wartime Union sacrée, as well as by
the post-war Versailles Treaty, meant that the Ligue had lost the untrammelled
moral high ground in French politics by 1919. That situation only worsened as the
shadows lengthened towards 1939.
Part of the problem, as William Irvine points out, is that from early on the Ligue
had seen itself engaged in partisan politics. This meant that the original principled
position of simple defence of human rights became overlaid rather quickly with
a political agenda which had as its goal the shoring up of the republican regime
against all comers.45 However, if one were to compare Imperial and Weimar Germany
with Third Republic France, one would clearly see the same profound insecurities
and collective neuroses in both political cultures.46 Perfervid nationalism and an
attendant militarism are evident on both sides of the Rhine. In the case of Germany,
a sense of external insecurity and a fear of encirclement undoubtedly begat an
extreme nationalism and militarism that were inimical to détente in the international
arena, much less to pacifism. In France, on the other hand, the insecurities were
largely domestic and internal: the demographic crisis, its attendant foreign policy
ramifications, the rise of a domestic fascism, and lurking behind it all, the increas-
ingly open suspicion that perhaps 1914 had been fought under false pretences.
For the Germans, the insecurity was resolved in large measure externally, through
44 This is Simon Epstein’s argument. See Simon Epstein, Les Dreyfusards sous l’occupation (Paris:
Albin Michel, 2001).
45 Even Victor Basch was moved occasionally to decry this tendency towards the political within
the Ligue. For example, in 1926, at the time of the Rif War in Morocco, he said at a meeting of the
Comité Central: ‘Si elle s’est abstenue de toute action, c’est qu’elle se laisse atteindre de plus en plus
par le “virus politique”. Il faut bien le reconnaître, nous faisons de la politique, nous avons effectivement
participé aux élections de 1924 en menant une ardente campagne en faveur de l’idée du cartel. Ce sont
nos amis qui, aujourd’hui, occupent le pouvoir et ce fait paralyse l’action de la Ligue dont le rôle
naturel est d’être dans l’opposition.’ See Comité Central, ‘Extraits’, Cahiers 26, 9 (30 April 1926),
pp. 206–9. More usual was the sort of statement such as that by Emile Kahn at the 1918 Ligue
Congress, where he baldly stated that ‘Nous sommes une assemblée politique, qui doit décider son
action sur une situation de fait’. See ‘Discours de M. Emile Kahn’, in Congrès de 1918 de la Ligue des
droits de l’homme, p. 59. The debate was a leitmotiv for the Ligue, however. Still later in the interwar
period, Henri Guernut said at a 1932 meeting of the Comité Central that ‘Les ligueurs commencent
à s’étonner de voir le Comité central se superposer à toutes les conférences internationales et consacrer
la majorité de ses séances à reconstruire l’Europe. Le Comité ne discute plus que des questions de
politique extérieure, il a cependant d’autres tâches’. See ‘Comité Central, Séance du 3 mars 1932’ in
Cahiers, 32, 8 (20 March 1932), p. 182.
46 In general terms, my thinking on the importance of political culture in the peace/war debate has
been informed by the suggestive chapter on ‘The Determinants of the Debate’, in Martin Ceadel,
Thinking about Peace and War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 166–89.
a deeply revisionist foreign policy, and later under the Nazis, an increasingly overt
bellicosity directed partially against France. For France, on the other hand, the repli
sur soi-même was virtually complete. The demons and insecurities were internal,
domestic, and French, but they had an external focus, and that focus was Germany.
By the time the German invasion occurred in May 1940, the Ligue des droits de
l’homme was half dead by its own hand, destroyed by a political legacy rendered
equivocal and doubtful by the fallout from the Great War.
It would be too facile to say that in the case of France this political evolution can
be blamed on pacifism. The Great War, with its appalling bloodletting, the result
of what the British historian of France, James McMillan, has called the ‘criminally
insane delusions of callous and ambitious generals’,47 would undoubtedly have
produced a new form of pacifism in France regardless of the nature of the historical
debate. That certainly was the case in Britain. In France, however, the fear of what
a new war might bring—common to virtually all interwar pacifists—was overlaid
by a profound sense that the Great War had been fought under false pretences, that
France was hardly blameless in its outbreak, and that what had been wreaked
upon Germany at Versailles was a deeply flawed treaty and a morally unjustified
imputation of war guilt. The fact that this had been effected by a French Republican
regime only made the sting more painful. As Mathias Morhardt, secretary-general
of the Ligue from virtually its foundation in 1898 down to 1911, wrote in March
1936 to his friend and fellow Ligueur, Georges Demartial,
For the past twenty-two years, you and I have suffered an unspeakable moral and
intellectual martyrdom . . . because we are expiating the honour of belonging to a class
of Frenchmen that is far too small. We are those, in effect, who suffer more from an
injustice committed by France than from an injustice committed against her.48
The decline and fall of the Ligue des droits de l’homme is therefore intimately
linked to the pacifist debate in France, but was not caused by it. Rather, the demise
of the Ligue was a function of its political position during the Great War and its
ongoing, festering, unresolved twenty-year crisis with Germany—the engagement
with the ‘war guilt problem’—which led incrementally and ineluctably to the total
eclipse of the LDH by the time the Nazis rolled through northern France in May
1940. Ultimately, politics destroyed the Ligue des droits de l’homme, the politics
of the ‘war guilt problem’, which began in 1914 and were finally settled only
thirty-one years later. By that time, of course, the Ligue had long since ceased to be
of much political or human rights importance.49
47 James F. McMillan, Twentieth Century France: Politics and Society, 1898–1991 (London: Edward
Arnold, 1992), p. 67.
48 Mathias Morhardt to Georges Demartial, Capbreton, 19 March 1936, in BDIC/ALDH/
Correspondance Morhardt F∆Rés 798/7. The letter was also published in Le Barrage 91 (26 March
1936), p. 3. Cited in Ingram, Politics of Dissent, p. 122.
49 A case in point is that of René Cassin, the (self-proclaimed) father of the United Nations
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, who, despite his post-1945 career as the champion of human
rights and winner of the 1968 Nobel Peace Prize, seems to have had virtually nothing to do with the
Ligue des droits de l’homme—in his case, admittedly, either before or after the Second World War. See
the excellent biography of Cassin by Jay Winter and Antoine Prost, René Cassin and Human Rights:
From the Great War to the Universal Declaration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
PA RT 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
The advent of the Great War caused a profound evolution in the activity and
orientation of the Ligue des droits de l’homme. Its focus shifted almost overnight
from domestic to international affairs, and it quickly found itself supporting the
Union sacrée and justifying a neo-Jacobin crusade against Prussian militarism. This
change in orientation did not go unchallenged, however. Much as Victor Basch
was at the forefront of those who supported the French war effort against Germany,
other voices soon arose within the LDH which called into question the bona fides
of the Union sacrée and Basch’s influential and articulate defence of it. Thus began
a debate on war origins and war guilt that was to divide the Ligue down to the next
war—and ultimately to hobble it.
The year 1914 had opened for the Ligue des droits de l’homme like many o thers.
For the Ligue’s president, Francis de Pressensé, the great issues facing the LDH
were essentially domestic and internal. The Republican tradition and the heritage
of 1789 were threatened by a reactionary tendency in French politics that went all
the way back to the Second Empire. Only in a fleeting mention of the danger
posed by what he called a ‘panic militarism’ could one construe any reference to
events to come outside France. Instead, the real danger was ‘the incredible campaign
of sophistry and of lies by which one attempts to substitute for the Frenchman of
the twentieth century the ignominious cult of hideous idols, of a religion without
faith, an imbecilic royalism, a cæsarism without Caesar for the worship of reason,
freedom, and the law’ which was the essence, according to de Pressensé, of what it
meant to be French. Clearly, this was an attack on the Action française, that other
offspring of the Dreyfus Affair. De Pressensé called Ligueurs to resist this ‘attempt
at intellectual and moral counter-revolution’ with all their might.1
The enemy at the beginning of 1914 was therefore not specifically German, even
if, as will become apparent, there was considerable anxiety about Alsace-Lorraine
and, increasingly, Germany. According to Henri Guernut later in the war, in the
last months of his life de Pressensé feared that war was approaching, to the point
that Guernut called it an ‘obsession’. But de Pressensé apparently did not think
that Germany would be the power to break the peace. Often, he thought it would
1 Francis de Pressensé, ‘A nos Ligueurs’, Bulletin officiel de la Ligue des droits de l’homme (hereafter
cited simply as Bulletin), 14, 1 (1 January 1914), pp. 1–2. The best analysis of the Action française is
still Eugen Weber, Action française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-Century France (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1962).
be Austria-Hungary, sometimes he feared Russia, and, according to Guernut, at

times he even wondered if France would be the culprit.2 Jean Jaurès, speaking at de
Pressensé’s funeral in January 1914, claimed that France, England, and Germany
were forces for peace; they were the ‘tripod on which civilization and world peace
rests, a force for peace which could rapidly become a force for justice’. Indeed,
Jaurès went farther and said that the problem of Alsace-Lorraine had essentially
been resolved: ‘At the hour Francis de Pressensé died, the Alsace-Lorraine problem
had taken precisely the direction he had hoped and which he had forecast. It will not
be, fundamentally, the kernel of new bloody and reckless conflicts between France
and Germany’.3 The Ligue seemed far more concerned with issues like alcoholism,4
reform of the police, prostitution and sexual hygiene, and the innumerable claims
made on its time and resources by French people who had fallen foul of the admin-
istrative law.
The German problem was thus merely one among many. That said, it was on the
horizon. The Ardennes federation of the Ligue, in its meeting of 16 November
1913, and perhaps largely under the impetus of Jeanne Mélin who was to have an
important career as a pacifist militant in the interwar period,5 passed a motion
protesting in the strongest possible terms ‘the chauvinist excitations which, on
both sides of the border, threaten to aggravate the antagonism of the two countries’,
an antagonism which the motion considered disastrous not only for France and
Germany, but civilization in its entirety. It demanded a Franco-German rap-
prochement, which it saw as the only means of equitably resolving the festering
Alsace-Lorraine question.6 The interesting thing, given what was to follow, was the
insistence on a shared problem, that of chauvinist excitement on both sides of the
frontier. Chauvinism was certainly not exclusively German. In sentiments which were
to be echoed after the war by some German pacifists in the pages of Die Weltbühne,
a journal closely allied to the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte (DLfM), militarism
and super-heated nationalism were seen as a common Franco-German problem
and not the province of Germany alone.7 Jean Jaurès, speaking at the funeral of
Francis de Pressensé in January 1914, stressed the extent to which France itself
2 Henri Guernut, ‘La Ligue des droits de l’homme, la guerre et la paix’, Bulletin 17, 22 (1 December
1917), p. 722.
3 Jean Jaurès, ‘A la Mémoire de Francis de Pressensé, Obsèques’, Bulletin 14, 3 (1 February 1914),
p. 173.
4 The emphasis on domestic issues even extended to the first meetings of the Société d’études docu-
mentaires et critiques sur la guerre (SEDCG), where Michel Alexandre read a letter of regret from a
certain Paul Bureau, ‘s’excusant de ne pouvoir venir traiter à la Société un sujet déterminé, en raison
d’un surcroît de travail et indiquant qu’à son avis les deux seules questions essentielles de l’heure actuelle
[emphasis added] étaient la lutte contre l’alcoolisme et celle contre le néo-malthusianisme’. See unsigned
Blanc des Renseignements Généraux, 20 March 1916, in Archives de la Préfecture de Police (APP)
BA. 1775 ‘Société d’Etudes Documentaires et Critiques sur la Guerre.
5 See Norman Ingram, The Politics of Dissent: Pacifism in France, 1919–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1991), p. 88. See also Christine Bard, Les Filles de Marianne: histoire des féminismes, 1914–1940
(Paris: Fayard, 1995). Mélin’s papers are available at the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris
where they form part of the Fonds Bouglé.
6 Anonymous, ‘Communications des fédérations’, Bulletin 14, 1 (1 January 1914), p. 50.
7 See, for example, Heinrich Ströbel, ‘Zwischen zwei Militarismen’, in Die Weltbühne XVI, 16
(15 April 1920), pp. 417–21. On Die Weltbühne, see the excellent book by Istvan Deak, Weimar Germany’s
War Origins: The Debate Begins 19
was infected by the anti-intellectual virus of intuition, as opposed to reason, and

called French youth and the Ligue to arms to ‘counter the ignominy of the inferior
forces of barbarism which claim, with an unheard-of insolence, to be the guardians
of French civilization’.8
In fact, during the first few months of 1914, before Europe spiralled into war,
one could quite easily make the case that the Ligue’s gaze was directed inwards, and
that in much of the rhetoric of its speakers and in the motions passed by many of
its sections, the great danger continued to be the perceived unholy domestic alliance
of church and military. No less a person than Henri Guernut, the secretary-general
of the Ligue, argued in a speech on the ‘crisis of the Republic’ given at Chauny in
the Aisne on 1 February 1914 that the danger came from the ‘militarist and clerical
reaction’.9 Many were the sections, too, that continued to pass motions condemning
the three-year military service law of 1913, and the often harsh sentences meted
out to young soldiers of the previous class who protested the sudden extension of their
two-year period of service to three.10 The initial reaction to the events at Sarajevo
was anything but alarmist; it comprised a few lines contained in the economic
forecast at the end of the 1 July 1914 number of the Bulletin. The anonymous
writer noted that ‘the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand has created
still more tension in Austro-Serbian relations’, but he hoped that the situation
would calm down. According to the Bulletin, the Archduke was not very well known
in France, where he was seen by most newspapers as ‘an enemy of France and an
inveterate friend of German power’; in the Ligue’s view, this was an erroneous view,
but the writer concluded that ‘if nothing comes along to shake up the world during
the vacation, the months of August and September will see a . . . veritable improve-
ment in the financial and economic situation’.11 All things considered, there did
not seem to be much to worry about.
By the end of the month, things had changed. As the July crisis reached its par-
oxysm, the Comité Central, still hoping for peace, passed the following resolution
proposed by Dr Sicard de Plauzoles on 30 July 1914:
The Comité Central of the Ligue française pour la défense des Droits de l’Homme
hopes that reason will triumph over folly and barbarism, and will ensure the mainten-
ance of peace; but in the presence of the possibility of a European war into which
France will be dragged by events independent of its will, it counts on all members of
the Ligue to give the example of calm, respect for the law, civic devotion, and to preserve,
as the heritage of the Revolution and the hope of a better world, the Republic and the
France of the Rights of Man. It remains convinced that we will maintain alive our
faith in the ideal of peace and of international arbitration.12
Left-Wing Intellectuals: A Political History of the Weltbühne and Its Circle (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1968).
8 Speech by Jaurès in ‘A la Mémoire de Francis de Pressensé’, p. 176.
9 Anonymous, ‘Communications des Sections’, Bulletin, 14, 8 (15 April 1914), p. 506.
10 For a flavour of the resistance to the three-year army law, see ‘Communications des Sections’,
Bulletin 14, 1 (1 January 1914), pp. 50–7.
11 Anonymous, ‘Causerie financière’, Bulletin, 14, 13 (1 July 1914), no pagination.
12 See ‘Comité Central, Séance du 30 juillet 1914’, Bulletin 15, 1 (1 January–1 April 1915), p. 18.
T H E J U LY C R I S I S , T H E L I G U E , A N D A N E W
I D E A O F T H E S TAT E
The fixation on domestic political issues before the July Crisis is perhaps not that
surprising. After all, the Ligue’s avowed purpose was the defence of the individual
against the unjustifiable, exaggerated claims of the State. The Ligue des droits
de l’homme was supposed to be above all about human rights. The fact that it
had interfered, almost from its inception, in domestic political questions meant
that with the advent of world war, it was a relatively easy step to involve itself in
foreign affairs. The evolution seemed natural, but it was not. It required a complete
re-thinking of the Ligue’s position in French and now international politics. It
necessitated the anthropomorphizing of the French state, of the French nation, so
that the nation-state became an individual whose rights had to be protected against
the attack of the German nation-state, the latter also reduced to a two-dimensional,
anthropomorphized individual. Vir republicanus francus now squared off against
vir imperialis teutonicus.
The Bulletin was not published from the beginning of July 1914 until April
1915.13 The July Crisis intervened and the Ligue rallied around the Union sacrée.
When the silence was finally broken, it was the voice of its new president, Ferdinand
Buisson, which defined the position of the Ligue in both internal affairs and foreign
policy.14 Looking back in 1940, at the beginning of a second world conflagration,
Victor Basch claimed that Buisson had thought in 1914 that ‘the Ligue must dis-
appear in the face of the national danger’, but Basch and the Ligue’s secretary-general,
Henri Guernut, convinced him that the LDH must re-enter the fray.15 In 1915,
Buisson reminded Ligueurs that France was under siege as a consequence of the
German invasion, and that as a result the Ligue would in no way contribute to
disharmony or division within the country. The same held true for discussion of
foreign policy and the attendant question of the origins of the war. Here, too,
Buisson took the line that the events spoke for themselves, and that in any case, the
Ligue could contribute nothing of note to the discussion because the diplomatic
documents were inaccessible. Instead, ‘it seems preferable’, wrote Buisson, ‘that the
Ligue limit itself, for the present, to recording the essential facts which are not
debatable and to putting them before the public conscience for judgement without
commentary’.16 Those essential facts were as follows, according to Buisson: the
violation of Belgian neutrality in order to attack France; the punishment through
acts of collective and individual ‘organized savagery’ of the Belgian people who had
had the temerity to resist the German aggression; and the methodical application
by the Germans to France of a ‘barbarity magnified by science’.17 He condemned
German ‘crimes against humanity’, made all the worse by the official approval of
13 The first number of the Bulletin in 1915 covered the period 1 January to 1 April 1915.
14 Ferdinand Buisson, ‘La Ligue des droits de l’homme et la guerre’, Bulletin 15, 1 (1 January–1 April
1915), pp. 5–10.
15 See manuscript draft minutes for a meeting of the CC and the federation presidents on 14 April
1940 in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés 798/3 Folder 1, Comité Central 1940, p. 1.
16 Buisson, ‘La Ligue des droits de l’homme et la guerre’, p. 7. 17 Ibid.
the German intellectual community, and excoriated the German violation of

international agreements, what one German minister had famously called ‘scraps
[sic] of paper’.18
With a rhetorical flourish, Buisson re-integrated the Ligue’s ideals into those of
the nation, those of the collectivity. Despite the opposition of Ligue sections a
scant few months earlier to the three-year military service law, to say nothing of the
fact that the Ligue’s origins were firmly on the side of opposition to statist demands,
the LDH had suddenly become an integral part of the pre-war nationalist revival.
According to Buisson, the cataclysm convulsing Europe was in no way a ‘sinister
denial of the doctrines of liberty, of the hopes in progress and of the desire for
peace that had always inspired the Ligue’. Far from it. Buisson was convinced that
the Ligue had actually contributed to this ‘magnificent élan affirming the national
community’. After all, was it not the Ligue which for the past fifteen years had
familiarized people with the notion that ‘an injustice done to the humblest among
us cannot leave the Nation indifferent, and that no injustice done to the Nation
can leave a single Frenchman unmoved’?19 Clearly, this was something different in
Ligue discourse. The first part of Buisson’s phrase defined the very essence of the
Ligue. The great struggle of the Affair had been to validate the rights of the individual
over those of the State, and yet, here in the first year of the Great War, the Ligue’s
president was arguing the case, in time of war, for the rights of the State. In many
ways, this was a logical extension of the Ligue’s not-so-latent Jacobin Republicanism,
but on another level, it was a new departure—in tone, if not in substance. Thus,
for the Ligue, the First World War was a ‘democratic crusade of deliverance’—
deliverance first of all of Belgium, secondly of all countries ‘annexed by force and
oppressed’, and lastly, in a clear reference to the perceived danger posed by German
militarism, deliverance of ‘Europe, which is compelled, if it wishes to live in peace,
to extinguish by floods of blood the hearth of perpetual fire’. Buisson ended by
reminding his readers that it was France which had taken this ‘generous and redoubt-
able initiative’, and that as a consequence, its very existence was at stake.20 Buisson
had already said as much in a circular to section presidents in November 1914; a
handwritten postscript to the draft, which did not make it into the final printed
version but nevertheless betrayed his thinking, read, ‘This crusade, is it not the Ligue’s,
that which for the past fifteen years Ligueurs have expended all of their energy?’21
18 Ibid., p. 8. Buisson erroneously rendered the expression in the plural. For an analysis of the history
of the ‘scrap of paper’ (in the singular) story, see T. G. Otte, ‘A “German Paperchase”: The “Scrap of
Paper” Controversy and the Problem of Myth and Memory in International History’ in Diplomacy
and Statecraft 18, 1 (2007), pp. 53–87. From a convalescent hospital at Asnières-lès-Bourges in the
Cher, Henri Guernut wrote to André-Ferdinand Hérold, a Central Committee member, enjoining
him to put pressure on Buisson or Basch to respond to the ‘Aufruf an die Kulturwelt’, because, as
he put it, ‘A tort ou à raison, nous passons en France pour le parti intellectuel’. See Henri Guernut
to A.-F. Hérold, Asnières-lès-Bourges (Cher), 31 October 1914, in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés. 798/6
Correspondance Henri Guernut.
19 Buisson, ‘La Ligue des droits de l’homme et la guerre’, p. 8. 20 Ibid., p. 10.
21 See ‘Le Président’ (Ferdinand Buisson), Circular to Section Presidents, 13 November 1914
(draft) and 14 November 1914 (final version), in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés 798/6 Correspondance Henri
Guernut. This was published as Ferdinand Buisson, ‘Les Ligueurs et la guerre’, Bulletin 15, 1 (1 January–1
April 1915), p. 11.
A large part of the Comité Central was called up in the mobilization order of
2 August 1914, and perhaps as a result of the lack of manpower, no minutes seem to
have been taken at the meetings of August, September, and October even though
the CC continued to meet every Monday at 4:30 p.m.22
The ideological nature of the conflict was quickly in evidence. The important
Fédération de la Gironde seemed particularly active in the first few months of the
war. It subscribed to the Union sacrée, but seemed suspicious of the ‘manoeuvres
attempted by our adversaries’, and gave notice that as the ‘Guardian of the Rights
of Man, [the federation] did not intend to allow, in the exceptional circumstances
before which our patriotism voluntarily inclines itself, that excuses be created to
harm today and destroy tomorrow these sacred rights which are the heritage of our
Revolution’.23 The federation seemed to conceive of the war in terms reminiscent
of 1793, as a sort of liberating crusade; one of its first goals had been to reach out
to German prisoners of war held in French camps and to convince them of ‘the
truth about the war, of its causes, of the governments which had unleashed the
terrible scourge’. They also wanted to explain to the German POWs ‘the ideal
which drives our soldiers, and which is none other than the ideal which guided our
forefathers of 1793: the freeing of oppressed peoples, and the defence of the rights
of nations’. Accordingly, an ‘Appeal to the German People’ was drafted by Théodore
Ruyssen, professor at the University of Bordeaux, and also the President of the
Association de la paix par le droit (APD), the prime example of the old-style paci-
fism in France.24 While the Jacobinism of the Gironde federation is clearly in
evidence and dominant, the curious reference to ‘governments’—in the plural—
unleashing the scourge of war is indicative of at least some scepticism about the
nature of the Great War.
The most important Ligue statement on the war was a series of articles by Victor
Basch, which originally appeared in the Bulletin in May 1915, but was published
as a book later that year. Originally entitled ‘La Ligue des droits de l’homme et la
guerre’,25 it served as the point of departure for all Ligue debates on war origins
and pacifism right through to the Ligue’s collapse in 1940.
Basch began with the notion that the right to life was the most important right
of all, one not mentioned by the Déclaration des droits de l’homme because it was
22 See ‘Comité Central, Séance du 30 juillet 1914’, pp. 18–19. Members mobilized with the
secretary-general, Henri Guernut, were Célestin Bouglé, Emile Glay, Sicard de Plauzoles, Georges
Bourdon, Félicien Challaye, Alcide Delmont, Dr Doizy, Henri Gamard, Dr J. Héricourt, Emile Kahn,
Léon Martinet, Louis Oustry, Amédée Rouquès, Henri Schmidt, and Daniel Vincent. Letters from
the front from some of the Ligue’s leading lights are contained in the Ligue’s archives. See, for example,
letters from Henri Guernut, written from the front in September 1914, in BDIC/ALDH/F∆Rés
798/6 Correspondance Henri Guernut.
23 Cited from an extract from a November 1914 meeting of the Gironde Federation in Léon
Baylet, ‘Une Fédération pendant la guerre: la fédération de la Gironde’, Bulletin 15, 1 (1 January–
1 April 1915), p. 53.
24 Cited in ibid., p. 54. On Ruyssen and old-style pacifism, see Ingram, Politics of Dissent,
pp. 19–118.
25 Victor Basch, ‘La Ligue des droits de l’homme et la guerre’ (hereafter cited as ‘La Ligue et la guerre’),
Bulletin 15, 2 (1 May 1915), pp. 65–175. The book version had a slightly amended title. See Victor
Basch, La Guerre de 1914 et le droit (Paris: Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1915).
so self-evident. Extrapolating from this ‘primordial’ right, Basch argued that

Ligueurs had ‘to make war on war and participate in all efforts tending to the
establishment of the reign of peace through law’.26 Such a position did not at all
imply abdication or passive resignation in the face of aggression, but according to
Basch, it did require a commitment not to solve one crime by perpetrating another;
not ‘to fill the abyss dug between two nations with the slaughter of new innocents’.27
It was the sacred duty of all Frenchmen to respond to the unprovoked German aggres-
sion by defending their native soil, ‘by inflicting on the aggressor the chastisement that
he deserves’, but without—and the distinction was extremely important for what was
to come—‘making an entire nation responsible for the crimes of its leaders’.28
The essential question was to know which nation was the aggressor, and whether
France for its part had done everything in its power to avoid war and preserve
peace. This was the question which Basch set out to answer by a close reading of
the coloured books published by the various powers on the origins of the war.29
Basch recognized, as indeed have virtually all historians since, that the causes of the
Great War were many, some near, some distant, some visible, still others invisible.
He admitted that it was impossible to know with certainty which precise elements
had led to the war, but he insisted nevertheless on the need to explain how he and
those around him saw the origins of the war.30
So, who was responsible for the outbreak of the war? According to Basch, after
carefully reading the documents, ‘no doubt can persist as to the series of events that
led to war or to the fixing of responsibilities’.31 Basch concluded that, in the first
instance, ‘before any negotiations, Austrian diplomacy believed war with Serbia to
be inevitable’. Secondly, in Basch’s view, it was incontrovertible that Germany was
prepared to support the Dual Monarchy in what it viewed as the latter’s righteous
demands. Thus, while the Entente powers, with the addition of Italy, sought a
pacific solution to the crisis, only Germany was in favour of merely localizing it.32
He went through the various stages of the July Crisis minutely, and came to the
conclusion that Germany was the main culprit because it alone of the great powers
seemed to refuse the possibility of conciliation, particularly after the Russian general
mobilization of 31 July. While Austria appeared prepared to consider measures
aimed at defusing the crisis, the German position actually hardened, according to
Basch.33 The violation of Belgian neutrality by the Germans, which Niall Ferguson
claims the British were prepared to do as well,34 set the tinder ablaze.
26 Basch, ‘La Ligue et la guerre’, p. 66. 27 Ibid., p. 67.

28 Ibid. The last important phrase in this paragraph reads in the original: ‘ . . . sans jamais pourtant
faire supporter à une nation la responsabilité des crimes de ses gouvernants . . . ’.
29 Basch had carefully gone through the Livre Jaune français, Das deutsche Weissbuch, Correspondence
and Statements in Parliament: Correspondance du gouvernement britannique relative à la crise européenne,
the Österreichisch-ungarisches Rotbuch, the Livre orange russe, the Livre gris belge, the Livre Bleu serbe, as
well as two analyses, the first by Emile Durkheim and Ernest Denis, Qui a voulu la guerre?: les origines
de la guerre d’après les documents diplomatiques (Paris: A. Colin, 1915), and E. Denis, La Guerre: causes
immédiates et lointaines, l’intoxication d’un peuple, le traité (Paris: Delagrave, 1915).
30 Basch, ‘La Ligue et la guerre’, p. 69. 31 Ibid.
32 Ibid., pp. 72–4. 33 Ibid., pp. 91–2.
34 Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War: Explaining World War I (New York: Basic Books, 1999), p. 443.
It was clear, therefore, to Basch at least, that Germany and Austria were responsible
for starting the war: Austria because it had declared war on Serbia initially, a war it
knew would lead to a European conflagration, and Germany because it did not
rein in its Austrian ally.35 Where Basch seemed to go over the line into speculation
was in his assertion that the Austrians wanted not only to chastize Serbia, but also
to humiliate Russia.36 Basch charged Germany with duplicity, with having spoken
in favour of peace, but having acted to provoke war; Germany had been ‘less intransi-
gent’ than Austria, and it had made all the right noises about peace and conciliation,
but Basch argued that its actions had not been consonant with its language. Basch
concluded that ‘It is the unconditional approval given to Austrian intransigence
[and] it is by its own irreducible intransigence, even after Austria had backed down,
that Germany unleashed the war. Because of that, together with Austria, it bears
the responsibility for the horrifying catastrophe that has befallen the world’.37
What stupefied Basch was not that the German government should try to protest
its innocence in the outbreak of war, but that this should be seconded by the German
academic elite, the artists, scientists, and writers, in effect ‘the entire German people
which has solemnly declared, before the world, that the facts we have denounced
are false, and that it was pacific Germany which was drawn into the war’.38 In the
heat of the moment in 1915, the problem was thus all Germans, and not just their
government or the academic elite. Making clear reference to the ninety-three
German intellectuals who had signed the Aufruf an die Kulturwelt of the previous
autumn, which defended the German position in a war which the manifesto
claimed had been forced upon an unwilling Germany, Basch wrote that he simply
could not comprehend how these men of science could be so wrong. Presaging the
difficulties to come in the interwar period, Basch wondered how it was ever going
to be possible to deal with these people again.39 This sense of betrayal, of bonds in
the international academic community having been irreparably broken, lay at the
core of much of what was to come.
Basch was not of the opinion, however, that these scientists and academics were
the servile servants of their government; he continued to believe that most of them
were of good faith, a position consonant with Chagnon’s analysis above. He even
went so far as to say that he thought it at least possible that the Kaiser and his
government sincerely believed that they were representing the noble ideas of peace.
The problem, in his view, was that there was a great veil over the eyes of Germany
which prevented Germans from seeing the light of reality.40
35 Basch, ‘La Ligue et la guerre’, pp. 97–101. 36 Ibid., p. 97. 37 Ibid., p. 104.
38 Ibid., p. 105. This is a clear attack on the Aufruf an die Kulturwelt, often known as the Manifesto
of the Ninety-three, which declared the belief of the most eminent of the German intellectual elite
that Germany was fighting a defensive war. For a profoundly revisionist take on this manifesto, see
Marie-Eve Chagnon, ‘Nationalisme et internationalisme dans les sciences au XXe siècle: l’exemple des
scientifiques et des humanistes français et allemands dans la communauté scientifique internationale,
1890–1933’ (PhD thesis, Concordia University, Montreal, 2012). See also Chagnon, ‘Le Manifeste
des 93: La mobilisation des académies françaises et allemandes au déclenchement de la Première
Guerre mondiale (1914–1915)’, French Historical Studies 35, 1 (Winter 2012), pp. 123–47.
39 Basch, ‘La Ligue et la guerre’, p. 106. 40 Ibid.
On the basis of this, Basch set out to examine the claims of the German
g overnment, press, and writers that war had been forced on Germany, that it had
not violated Belgium, nor that the Germany army had committed any ‘acts contrary
to morality or humanity’.41 He distilled six theses from official German sources as
well as from commentary by German journalists and intellectuals:
1. That the war was provoked not by Austria, but by Serbia;
2. That Russia was to blame for a localized conflict becoming a generalized war;
3. That England was to blame;
4. That France was to blame because of its desire for revenge and its alliances;
5. That war was inevitable because of the alliances and ententes between Russia,
France, and Britain; Sarajevo was merely the tragic catalyst;
6. That the entire world hated Germany and was jealous of it.42
With regard to the first thesis, Basch did not deny that the Sarajevo assassination
must be punished.
As to whether Russia should be blamed or not, Basch believed that it ‘incarnated
the cause of justice, and that it had defended justice with moderation and an obvious
desire for peace’.43 He recognized that the Russian regime was distasteful to some,
but argued that it was ‘incontestable’ that during the July Crisis it had ‘shown pru-
dence, energy, initiative, and a sincere and clear-sighted love of peace’.44 Neither
the German White Book, nor the Austrian Red Book, weakened this view of Russia.
Instead, the Germans laid great emphasis on the timing and extent of the Russian
mobilization, arguing that it had made war inevitable. Throughout his entire analysis
of the Russian position in July 1914, Basch remained convinced that Russia had
gone the extra mile, that it was imbued with irenic intentions, and that the German
Empire was clearly at fault in the fatal events that seemed to lead ineluctably to war.
As he wrote in the concluding paragraph of his analysis of the charges against Russia,
‘Whatever prejudice one might have against the Russian government, I believe that
an impartial history will decide that, in the bloody conflict that is tearing Europe
apart, Russia bears no responsibility other than that resulting from its situation in
the Balkans, a situation which was known to and accepted by all of Europe. Given
this situation, it exhibited a decidedly pacific position.’45 As will become clear
below, it was precisely the question of Russian guilt in the outbreak of war which
exercised the minds of many early critics of Basch’s ‘orthodox’ and very French
consensus view.
After Russia, Germany accused England of having essentially conspired to
produce this war, out of jealousy of German military and naval might, to say nothing
41 Ibid., p. 107. 42 Ibid., pp. 107–11. 43 Ibid., p. 115. 44 Ibid., p. 116.

45 Ibid., p. 128. Some recent historians argue that the Serbian problem was not really that central
to Russian foreign policy thinking. Sean McMeekin, for example, writes that ‘To assume that Russia
really went to war on behalf of Serbia in 1914 is naive. Great powers do not usually mobilize armies
of millions to protect the territorial integrity of minor client states’. See Sean McMeekin, The Russian
Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
2011), p. 27.
of the growing rivalry in the industrial and commercial spheres. Basch believed this
to be patent nonsense. He demonstrated how even-handed Sir Edward Grey’s
foreign policy during the July Crisis had been, how neither the Liberal Party, nor
its supporter, the Labour Party, were in any way Germanophobic. Quoting the
German White Book, Basch noted that ‘Sir E. Grey’s propaganda in favour of peace
had been so ardent, so ingenious, so patient’ that the Germans themselves had been
forced to recognize that England ‘had worked shoulder to shoulder with Germany
in search of mediation’.46
So, what had gone wrong? How was it that, once war was declared, German
antipathy towards Britain quickly became so deep, with the Germans believing that
England had betrayed them and had provoked the war? The German view, according
to Basch, was that England had laid a trap for them. If the British had made clear
right from the start that they would defend Belgian neutrality and had come out on
the side of France and Russia, there would have been no war. The Germans believed
that, at bottom, ‘England knew that Germany, driven into war by Russia, was
obliged to violate Belgian territory’.47 Britain treacherously allowed the European
situation to develop to the point of no return, where Germany was faced with
defending itself against two assailants, at which juncture the British stabbed Germany
in the back.
Basch admitted that he was perplexed by the British reticence on the Belgian
question until the very last hours of the crisis. More than once he had been tempted
by the conclusion that Britain had joined the fight to rid Europe of Germany’s
‘unbearable tyranny’ only when it became clear just how far German pride would go.
He claimed to have rejected this analysis, going on to demonstrate how Sir Edward
Grey had not been able to declare himself ready to defend Belgium and to oppose
Germany because he did not yet have the country or Parliament behind him.48
This seemed, in some respects, close to the thesis which Basch professed to reject,
but it allowed him to conclude that neither Britain nor Russia was responsible
for the outbreak of war. How, then, could Germany, both officially and through the
mouths and pens of its intellectuals, writers, and people, still persist in believing
that it had not wanted war, but rather peace? Paradoxically, Basch believed that the
Germans were sincere in their error. The Austrians undoubtedly believed that their
bluff would succeed, as it had done during the Balkan wars. Both Austrian and
German diplomats, ‘incomprehensibly blind’, were convinced that neither Russia
nor Britain ‘would march’. But clearly, given what Basch had just written with regard
to the delicate British political situation, this was not an implausible inference.
Nevertheless, Basch persisted in claiming that if the Germans were sincere in their
desire for peace, it was a very conditional Germanic peace, one that presupposed
the capitulation of the other powers.49 The opening German gambit was the local-
ization of the conflict between Serbia and Austria; when that failed, Berlin opted
for a broader, but still localized, conflict between Germany and Austria on the one
hand, and Serbia and Russia on the other. Germany attempted to use the British
46 Basch, ‘La Ligue et la guerre’, p. 130. 47 Ibid., p. 131. 48 Ibid., pp. 133–8.
49 Ibid., pp. 140–1.
to secure French neutrality, but when that failed, it hoped ‘desperately’ that the
British themselves would stay out of the growing conflagration. Lost in all of
this was Basch’s (and the Entente Powers’) admission that Serbia needed to be
‘chastised’ roundly for its role in the Sarajevo assassination. How this might have
been achieved without ‘humiliating’ Russia, given the line in the sand drawn by
the Tsar, is hard to conceive, and yet a large part of Basch’s argument seemed to
revolve around this very point. Serbia needed to be punished, but Russia must not
feel humiliated, despite the fact that Austria had stated that it respected the terri-
torial integrity of Serbia. Austria had a right to demand redress, but was wrong to
declare war on Serbia. And Germany was just plain wrong on virtually all levels. So
the argument went.
Basch’s fourth question was whether there was any substance to the German
charge that they had been deceived by the French, too. French motives and actions
were so pure during the July Crisis that Basch wrote that Germany had not dared
to make this claim. Since the outbreak of war, the tone had changed somewhat,
and now the Germans were accusing France of having enthusiastically accepted
the war, ostensibly because this had allowed the desire for revenge for the loss of
Alsace-Lorraine in 1871 to resurface. But this argument had not received much
play among German intellectuals, according to Basch. The real problem was the
association of Republican, democratic France with what he termed ‘barbaric Russian
autocracy’.50 The sudden German ‘tenderness’ for the cause of democracy was
nevertheless highly suspect because Berlin, certainly in the person of the Kaiser,
continued to cultivate ‘the most cordial relations’ with the Tsar, even after the for-
mation of the Franco-Russian alliance of 1894. With somewhat convoluted logic,
Basch insisted that despite the apparent antitheses separating the Russian and
French political systems, it was a very good thing that France had entered into the
Franco-Russian alliance because it certainly needed it in 1914. To the German retort
that France would not have been dragged into the war were it not for this very alli-
ance, Basch replied that this assumed that Germany held no ulterior designs against
France, which the Schnaebele affair, to say nothing of Tangiers and Agadir, seemed
to put the lie to.51 This was an important point because on it hinged much of the
debate between Basch, and with him the majority view in the Ligue, and the rep-
resentatives of the historical dissent which was to emerge very shortly and have
such debilitating long-term effects on the Ligue.
To the probable German counter-argument that this was all a pipe-dream, so
much political paranoia, and that Germany would never have attacked France with
which it desired only to live in peace, Basch professed to be receptive. Certainly,
until the Treaty of Fez of 4 November 1911 Germany had borne no hatred for
France. But the question for Basch was, in fact, even larger than the Franco-Russian
alliance. He charged that there was a civilizational underpinning to it. Germany
saw France as decadent, even if there continued to be great admiration for French
art and letters in Germany. But Basch believed that, mixed in with this admiration,
there was an increasing element of disdain on the part of the Germans. They
50 Ibid., p. 144. 51 Ibid., p. 145.

considered France to be in decline, to be in the twilight phase of a once great

civilization. France was destined to go the way of the other great Latin civilizations.
Without mentioning the problem of dénatalité as such, Basch nevertheless spoke
of France becoming, in German eyes at least, ‘too feeble or too cowardly to be able
to multiply itself’.52 He believed that the Germans thought of France as just another
‘sort of Belgium’, and they could not understand why the French would not simply
resign themselves to this role.53
Finally, Basch dealt with the fear of encirclement in Germany, and the belief of
many Germans that the ‘satanic diplomacy’ of Germany’s adversaries had prepared
and provoked the war. There was a grain of truth in the encirclement theory, accord-
ing to Basch, but did this give Germany the right to respond to the perceived
threat of encirclement by war? Preventive war was morally reprehensible, and the
only reason one could argue encirclement had occurred at all was because Germany
had attacked first. It had lain within Germany’s power to break the encirclement it
so feared, but that would have required an Anglo-German rapprochement, together
with a Franco-German détente. It was above all the latter that would have saved
the peace, according to Basch, because despite what he had argued earlier about
there being no reason for France to be at all interested in Balkan affairs, he now
argued that ‘only a Franco-German rapprochement would have permitted an
amicable resolution of the formidable Balkan problem’. This rapprochement was
possible, but under one condition: that Germany ‘accord to Alsace-Lorraine a full
and complete autonomy’. Many people were ready to envisage such a solution,
even in Alsace, but Germany remained obdurately opposed. For Berlin there
simply was no Alsace-Lorraine question. The irony, of course, was that by 1918,
Germany had come round to supporting Alsatian autonomy and also the use of a
plebiscite to decide the future of the two provinces, but by that point, the French
were squarely opposed to any suggestion that Alsace and Lorraine were not com-
pletely French.54 In Basch’s 1914 analysis, the world war had suddenly become the
result of 1871, and if only the Germans had not been so short-sighted, the world
might have been spared the horrors of the Great War: ‘Germany’s crime is in not
having made a world war impossible by refusing such a small concession’.55 The
flight of logic required to make of Alsace-Lorraine the necessary spark, the inevitable
and justifiable cause of the outbreak of the war, is remarkable, but that is precisely
what Basch argued.
52 Ibid., p. 146. French fears about the future of the race and the link with French foreign and military
policy have been excellently analysed by Karen Offen in ‘Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism
in Fin-de-siècle France’, American Historical Review, 89, 3 (June 1984), pp. 648–76; cf. Richard
Tomlinson, ‘The “Disappearance of France”, 1896–1940: French Politics and the Birth Rate’,
The Historical Journal 28, 2 (1985), pp. 5–15. Other historians see in pre-1914 French history a
kind of crisis of masculinity. See Robert Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honour in Modern
France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Nye, ‘Honor, Impotence and Male Sexuality
in Nineteenth-Century French Medicine’, French Historical Studies 16, 1 (Spring 1989), pp. 48–71.
53 Basch, ‘La Ligue et la guerre’, p. 146.
54 The latest word on this is Sebastian Döderlein, ‘Un pivot de l’histoire? La société alsacienne-
lorraine et les sorties ambiguës de la Première Guerre mondiale (1918–1919)’ (PhD thesis, Concordia
University, Montreal, 2016).
55 Basch, ‘La Ligue et la guerre’, pp. 150–1.
In the sixth and final section of his analysis of war origins, Basch expanded his
attack on German pride, and singled out German paranoia, the feeling of many in
Germany that their country was hated by the whole world. Not entirely untrue,
wrote Basch. ‘The monstrous pride, the aggressive infatuation, the frenetic
megalomania, those are the things against which the international community
rebelled’.56 This German ‘intoxication’ was not the result of some vague furor teu-
tonicus of old, nor was it the result of German philosophy or German literature,
both of which he exculpated from any responsibility for the ‘pan-Germanist
folly’.57 No, the heart of darkness lay in history, not in philosophy, it lay in the
absorption of Germany by Prussia after the Franco-Prussian War. In profoundly
gendered language, he wrote that Prussia played the male role in this union, while
the rest of Germany was ‘soft, malleable, open to all influences, modest, sentimen-
tal, idealistic, mystical, poetic, philosophical and musical’.58 This feminized
Germany had vague memories of its glorious past, though, and after the demo-
cratic miscarriage of 1848, it lay open to what Basch called its Prussian ‘ravisher’.
It was the historians von Treitschke and Bernhardi who elaborated this doctrine to
its logical and full conclusion. War became the ‘providential’ instrument. Basch
quoted von Treitschke as saying: ‘It is to the Germanic nation, the war-like nation
par excellence which has accomplished all of the decisive acts of European history,
that world hegemony must belong’.59 The nation of idealism, of dreamers, of
philosophers had transmuted the world of the Spirit onto the Army and the Navy;
‘brutal force had been proclaimed the highest manifestation of the Idea’. In Basch’s
mind, mixed in with this new form of brutal idealism was a strong measure of posi-
tivism and materialism. In his view, and it is a strange one for a positivist Frenchman
like Basch, Germany ought not to be permitted its positivism and materialism
because as a result of its idealism it pushed materialism to absurd conclusions.
Even von Treitschke was afraid that, under the influence of socialism, Germany
would become ‘Americanized’—a non sequitur, if ever there was one—and would
succumb to a sort of Kulturbarbarei.60
It would be wrong to suppose that Basch thought that all Germans were infected
by the militarist, imperialist virus, for such was not the case. There were many
forces struggling against pan-Germanism and imperialism, although the latter
had more friends than the former, certainly since the last Balkan crisis. Even here,
though, Basch believed that most Germans were inclined towards peace. This
made the total capitulation of the Socialist Party (SPD) before the sirens of war
all the stranger. Moreover, since the outbreak of war, the leaders of the SPD had
expressed even greater solidarity with the Kaiser’s policies. How to explain this?
Basch believed it was not for lack of courage on the part of the Socialist leadership,
nor because the party had been swept along by a great wave of patriotic fervour.
No, the answer lay in the fact that German socialism had no large democratic base
under it, it had not emerged as the enlargement of a great liberal political party; it
was, in effect, an artificial creation with shallow roots.61 Betraying a neo-Marxist
view of political history, Basch wrote that ‘revolution cannot be made on the cheap’;
56 Ibid., p. 153. 57 Ibid., p. 154. 58 Ibid., pp. 154–5.

59 Cited in ibid., p. 156. 60 Ibid., p. 157. 61 Ibid., p. 160.
in other words, a people could not simply skip the preordained stages of historical
development.62 Presaging the modernization theorists of the second half of the
twentieth century who see in Germany’s ostensibly retarded political development
one of the origins of Nazism, Basch wrote that ‘politically, Germany is more than a
century behind the liberal nations of the West’: ‘If Germany had been a democracy
and not an autocracy, offensive war would have been just as impossible as in France
or in England. Germany today, on the one hand militaristic, imperialistic, autocratic,
and on the other industrial, commercial, and scientific, constitutes an unbalanced
organism, odd and hardly viable.’63
Turning to the argument that the Great War had its origins in shared responsi-
bilities, that no single nation could be said to be the cause of the hecatomb, Basch
was categorical. He laid the blame for the outbreak of war squarely at the feet of
Austria and Germany; even in a deterministic world, individual will and individual
responsibility had to be recognized. He took particular exception to the reasoning
of the noted theologian, Professor Adolf von Harnack, who had written that the
violation of Belgian neutrality was a ‘moral duty’ (devoir moral ) for Germany. If
this were the case, wrote Basch, it would ‘render all hopes of civil society between
nations impossible, and all international law inoperative’.64 The invasion of
Belgium had therefore not been a moral duty; it had been unnecessary and designed
only to ‘assuage Germany’s morbid thirst for domination’.65 Having destroyed
Belgium militarily, the Germans had then proceeded to commit atrocities on the
Belgian people, destroying monuments, taking entire villages into captivity, shooting
‘hundreds of men’ indiscriminately; and the same ‘frenetic rage’ had accompanied
the invasion of France.66 Basch had initially been sceptical about the charges of
atrocities levelled at the Germans, but having read much of the French and Belgian
documentation, he had come around to believing the stories. There was just too
much evidence that these things had actually occurred.67
In the final section of his book, Basch addressed the question of what position
the Ligue des droits de l’homme ought to take during the war. Against those who
might think that men of good will ought to throw themselves between the competing
armies and cry ‘Enough!’, to say that ‘it was finally time to have the holy flower of
peace bloom once again on this earth saturated with cadavers’, Basch replied ‘no’.
‘We do not have the right to call for this’, he wrote; ‘whatever it costs, we are
obliged to hope that we will go on right to the end, and that we do not conclude,
either by sheer lassitude, or even out of human tenderness, a hasty peace that will
be necessarily precarious and pregnant with future wars’.68 Prussian militarism and
imperialism had to be broken, and the only way to do that was a war to end all wars.
He made of the war a moral and political crusade, writing that two ‘completely
different conceptions of law’ were at stake. The immediate cause was the ‘mon-
strous ultimatum’ addressed by Austria to Serbia. It is curious that here, at the end
62 Ibid., p. 161. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid., p. 165.

65 Ibid., p. 166. 66 Ibid.
67 See the excellent analysis of this by John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914:
A History of Denial (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001).
68 Basch, ‘La Ligue et la guerre’, p. 169.
of his book, Basch seemed to express doubt that there was anything at all behind
the Austrian belief in Serbian involvement in the Sarajevo assassination, despite his
stated belief at the outset that Serbia needed to be punished. Instead, what seemed
now more important was the fact that a bigger nation had threatened to flatten
(écraser) a smaller one, and this the Ligue could not tolerate. The second reason for
the war was the violation of Belgian neutrality, the German belief in the ‘law of
necessity’, and the fight against this meant a ‘struggle for the very principles which
are the honour of our Ligue’.69
Given the fact that France was fighting with the Russian Empire, which could
hardly be considered a respecter of the rights of minorities and nationalities, and
alongside the British whose policies in Ireland Basch and the Ligue seemed to dis-
like, Basch nevertheless proclaimed that blood would not have been spilled in vain
if the nationality problem could be resolved. Betraying the belief of the majority in
the Ligue in France’s ‘civilizing mission’, he wrote that the war demonstrated the
profound attachment of the indigenous peoples of the colonies to the ‘motherland’.
He cited approvingly the words of Charles Gide, professor of law at the Université
de Paris, who had written in the pages of La Paix par le droit that p eoples who had
entered the war as subjects would emerge as fellow citizens.70 The Great War had
thus to be seen as a liberating catalyst, according to Basch, an interpretation made
all the stranger by the Ligue’s majority’s fulsome defence of France’s colonial empire
after 1918.71
The Great War, for Basch and the Ligue, was nothing less, then, than a saintly
crusade for the principles of the French Revolution, a battle joined because France
had been forced into it. At stake were two different visions of international law: the
first German, believing that States were not subject to the same rules as i ndividuals,
and the second French, based on the Enlightenment and on ‘the greatest German
philosopher’, Immanuel Kant, which believed that the highest ideal towards which
humanity could strive was the establishment of a reign of law for both individuals
and States.
Despite the official line on war origins and responsibilities, and the crusading
tone of Basch’s writings, it is clear that the Ligue was not completely immune to a
rather existential feeling of bad faith. In July 1915 Victor Basch and Henri Guernut
published a lengthy ‘examen de conscience de la Ligue’, in the form of a report
which sought to deal with the niggling doubts held by some Ligueurs about the
LDH’s position on the war. Basch and Guernut reported on a forum of some 200
delegates of sections in the Seine département which had been held on 9 May 1915,
69 Ibid., p. 171. The hoary belief in official Serbian innocence in the assassination at Sarajevo has
long been put to rest. See two recent examples: Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went
to War in 1914 (New York: HarperCollins, 2013); and Sean McMeekin, July 1914: Countdown to War
(New York: Basic Books, 2013).
70 Basch, ‘La Ligue et la guerre’, pp. 171–2. Gide was a member of the Société d’études critiques
sur les origines de la guerre, about which more below.
71 On the problems posed by the Empire for French liberal thinking, see Alice Conklin, A Mission
to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1997); and Conklin, ‘Colonialism and Human Rights, a Contradiction in Terms?
The Case of France and West Africa, 1895–1914’, The American Historical Review 103, 2 (April 1998),
pp. 419–42.
and which had as its purpose a discussion of what the Ligue’s position should be
during the war.72 Guernut noted that in the initial shock following the outbreak of
war, the Ligue had been very circumspect, but with the return of the nation to
what he called ‘normal breathing’,73 the Ligue had begun to reclaim its public role.
Guernut defined that role in wartime as first, ‘to ensure that in the civilian conduct
of the war, care for the rights of man not be totally neglected’; and secondly, ‘to
leave our imprint, our democratic spirit, as far as is possible, on the new law which
the war will call forth’.74 One of the Ligue’s preoccupations seems to have been, in
good republican fashion, to see that military service be equitably distributed across
the nation, but also that the older soldiers be either returned to their homes or else
used in the rear rather than at the front. It was ‘the men of the youngest classes’
who had to be sent to the front lines.75 With regard to the Union sacrée, Guernut
said that not all parties had observed it. The LDH had been accused of being
‘bleating pacifists’, of having ‘weakened the arm of France’.76 To this he responded
that ‘We will defend our ideal of peace: it was never a blind one. We will defend our
conceptions of the nation in arms: they are triumphant. We will defend Parliament,
the supervision of which is our safeguard. We will defend the supremacy of the
civilian power and of the right to free thought.’ Guernut claimed that the Ligue
was ‘the repository of the true traditions of France’.77
Much of the Ligue’s activity during the first year of the war had thus been directed
towards internal French debates and to the maintenance of a truly ‘republican’ way
of fighting the war. Guernut defined freedom and the fatherland as being equally dear
to the Ligue; indeed, he added, ‘the one is inconceivable without the other’.78
Basch, for his part, elaborated on what it was that the Ligue stood for. ‘Before
all else’, he said, ‘the Ligue has been pacifist’.79 This is more than a little surprising
because it was a categorization that the Ligue was to deny explicitly in a letter to the
high-profile anti-militarist turned super-heated patriot, Gustave Hervé, the following
year; in 1916, at least, the LDH rejected the notion that it could in any sense be
considered ‘pacifist’, ‘a tendency’ as it defined it, ‘in favour of peace at any price’.80
It was clear, though, that the pacifism of which he spoke in 1915 was above all a
rendering of the old-style pacifism, the belief in a juridical, internationalist concep-
tion of peace through arbitration. He conflated the defence of the right of the
individual to life with that of the nation to life. In Basch’s mind, pacifism was thus
not primarily an individual doctrine, but rather one which elided into a fairly Jacobin
conception of the State and the individual’s role in it. This is all the more surprising
given the individualist origins of the LDH and its ongoing self-perception as the
defender of the individual against raison d’état. In words which would come back
to haunt him, Basch argued that ‘This propaganda in favour of peace through law
[he actually used the expression ‘la paix par le droit’, which was the name of the
72 Victor Basch and Henri Guernut, ‘L’examen de conscience de la Ligue’, Bulletin 15, 2 (1 July
1915), pp. 194–208.
73 Ibid., p. 196. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid., p. 197. 76 Ibid., p. 198. 77 Ibid.
78 Ibid., p. 199. 79 Ibid., p. 200.
80 See ‘Comité Central (Extraits), Séance du 6 mars 1916’, Bulletin 16, 7–8 (July–August 1916),
pp. 399–400.
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Title: Anarchy
Author: Robert LeFevre
Release date: November 1, 2023 [eBook #72001]
Language: English
Original publication: Colorado Springs: The Freedom School, 1959
Credits: Bob Taylor, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was
produced from images made available by the HathiTrust
Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANARCHY

***
ANARCHY
by Robert LeFevre
Copyright 1959, by Robert LeFevre
Permission to reprint in whole or in part

granted without special request.
PRINTED IN COLORADO SPRINGS, U.S.A.
Published June, 1959
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number:

59-13480
THE FREEDOM SCHOOL

P.O. Box 165
Colorado Springs, Colorado
EDITOR’S NOTE
Robert LeFevre, president and founder of the Freedom School, has
also served as the editorial writer for the Gazette Telegraph in
Colorado Springs, since 1954. In addition to several thousand
editorials, he has written numerous articles for the Freeman
Magazine, including: “The Straight Line,” “Jim Leadbetter’s
Discovery,” “Shades of Hammurabi,” “Grasshoppers and Widows,”
and “Coercion at the Local Level.”
His article “Even the Girl Scouts” (Human Events, 1953) led to a
recall of the Handbook of this organization and extensive revisions.
His book, “The Nature of Man and His Government,” has recently
been published by Caxton Printers, Caldwell, Idaho.
ANARCHY
A RATIONAL BEING, intent upon learning the nature of liberty or

freedom, is confronted almost at once with innumerable
instances of governmental predation against liberty.
As the subject of liberty is pursued, the more frequently and the
more persistently the fact emerges that governments have been one
of the principal opponents if not the only principal opponent to liberty.
Invariably, this discovery leads the perspiring seeker after truth to
a fork in the road. Is it possible, the aspirant to libertarian certainty
asks himself, to pursue the end of the rainbow of liberty into a
miasma of quicksand and uncertainty?
Might I not end at a place where I would advocate the cessation of
all government? And if I reached such a conclusion, would I not find
myself aligned with the very forces I sought to oppose in the
beginning, namely, the forces of lawlessness, chaos and anarchy?
At this fork in the road, libertarians hesitate, some briefly and
some for lengthy periods of time. The choice to be made is a difficult
one. To abandon liberty at this juncture and to endorse minimal
governments as devices which might prevent license, could cause
the devotee of liberty to endorse the active enemy of liberty, albeit in
small doses. On the other hand, to pursue liberty to its logical
conclusions might end in an endorsement of license, The very
antonym of liberty.
It is at this juncture that the word “anarchy” rears its dreadful
visage. It becomes incumbent upon sincere seekers after liberty to
grapple with this word and to seek to understand its implications.
Anarchy has very ancient roots. It is not wholly essential to probe
to the last hidden tendril altho such a probe can be highly instructive.
What does appear to be a necessary minimal effort, however, is to
explore at least the principal authors of anarchistic thought with the
view to discovering what it was that motivated these men.
We can begin with William Godwin of England. Godwin is
noteworthy as the “father of anarchistic communism” (Encyclopaedia
Britannica).
In 1793 he published the first of several works on this subject
entitled, “Inquiry Concerning Political Justice.” He is probably most
famous as the author of an anarchistic novel which he named,
“Caleb Williams.”
It was Godwin’s thesis that governments are instruments of eternal
bickering and war; that wars are fought over property; that the
ownership of property privately is the greatest curse ever to beset
the human race. As a specific example of tyranny in its worst form,
Godwin suggests marriage.
Before we lay the soubriquet “crackpot” behind his name, let us
look at the England of Godwin’s time to try to find an explanation for
his radical conclusions.
In Godwin’s day (1756-1836) with only a few minor exceptions, all
property was owned by the nobility, which is to say by the persons
favored by government. The common people owned little save the
shirts on their backs. As for marriage, women were chattels, given by
a male parent to another male, during a governmentally approved
ceremony. The idea of one person actually owning and controlling
another, which we would call slavery, and which Godwin saw as the
marriage state, was repellent to him. He insisted that females were
human beings and as such had as much right to individuality as
males.
To cure the malady, which Godwin saw as ownership of property,
the early Briton recommended an abolition of governments. It was
the government which sanctified and protected property rights, even
in marriage. To return to a state of nature (see Rousseau)
governments would have to be abolished.
Be it noted to Godwin’s credit that he despised violence. And in
this position he is far removed from both the true communist and the
anarchists of action who followed him.
The next anarchist to be examined is Pierre Joseph Proudhon of
Bexancon, France (1809-1865). Proudhon drank deeply from
Godwin’s well and came forward with certain modifications and
extensions of the Godwin doctrine.
Proudhon acknowledged a debt of gratitude to both Plato and
Thomas More, a pair of dedicated socialists (see Plato’s “Republic”
and More’s “Utopia”) and busied himself with some practical means
for implementing the socialist dream.
Like his precursors, he was fundamentally opposed to property
ownership. His most famous work, “Qu’est-ce que La Propriete?”
(“What Is Property?”), got him into immediate difficulties with the
government. Proudhon, in this opus, declared that “property is
robbery” and set about outlining a social order in which no property
could be privately owned.
The Encyclopedia Americana says that Proudhon was the “first to
formulate the doctrines of philosophic anarchism.”
It is probably true that there are no better writings extant extolling
individualism as opposed to collectivism than Proudhon’s early
essays. Yet, it should be recalled that Proudhon’s aim, in addition to
a society free of governmental coercion, was a state in which
property as a private device was abolished.
It is also interesting to recall that Karl Marx was deeply moved by
Proudhon’s arguments. The first of Proudhon’s writings appeared in
print in 1840 and formed the basis of Marx’s first expostulations
which appeared in 1842. Shortly thereafter, Marx veered away from
Proudhon’s individualism and contrived his concept of collectivism as
the natural and the inevitable course of history.
Marx, however, was never an anarchist, despite the well-known
phrase frequently attributed to him that in time the government of the
proletariat would simply “wither away.” This phrase should properly
be attributed to Lenin.
However, it is known that Marx did make an attempt to lure the
anarchists of France into the first “Internationale” and was hooted
down for his pains. The anarchists of that time were shrewd enough
to sense that the enlargement of government into a general holding
company for all property, would never result in the abolition of private
ownership of property. Rather, it would result in the perpetuation of a
privileged class of persons who would have possession of the
property to the exclusion of all others, the very contingency the
anarchists sought to avoid. And since the aim of the anarchists was
to eliminate exclusive ownership, they could not agree to the Marxist
arguments respecting the usefulness of a government as the
repository of all property.
We pass from Proudhon to another noteworthy anarchist, the
Russian Prince Peter Alexeivich Kropotkin (1842-1921). In his
hands, the doctrine of anarchism took on an international aspect. In
point of fact he added little to either Godwin or Proudhon, except the
more grandiose concept of a world order. He suggested that ALL
governments must be overthrown either peacefully or in any other
manner after which “the present system of class privilege and unjust
distribution of the wealth produced by labor that creates and fosters
crime” would be abolished.
It was Kropotkin who endeavored to preserve the ideals of a
property-less society after the most exciting and destructive of all the
anarchists had done his work. This was Michael Bakunin (1814-
1876). Bakunin took his ideology both from Proudhon and from Marx
and endeavored to unite the objectives of the former with the
methods of the latter.
Bakunin despaired of bringing about a state of universal property-
less-ness by means of education and propaganda. So did Marx.
Marx declared that those who owned property would never give it up
without a struggle. This idea entranced Bakunin. He devised what
was to be called “propaganda of action.”
It was Bakunin’s contribution to anarchistic methods that persons
who held governmental offices should be assassinated while they
held office. Such assassination, he argued, would have a persuasive
effect upon future politicians. If the offices could be made sufficiently
dangerous and risky, there would be few who would care to hazard
their necks in such unrewarding positions. The answer to the force of
government, according to Bakunin, was the force of non-
government. As an educational device, a thrown bomb was
considered to be the final argument.
It is unnecessary to embroider the result. The peaceful arguments
of Proudhon and Godwin went by the boards as anarchists rallied to
Bakunin’s banner. Beginning in 1878 there was a series of
assassinations and attempted assassinations against the heads of
governments.
Germany’s Emperor William had a narrow escape and so did the
German princes in 1883. In 1886 in Chicago, a bomb explosion in
the Haymarket killed a number of persons. In the resulting hysteria,
seven arrests were made, all of persons known to be teaching
anarchy. Four were hanged, two drew life sentences, and one was
imprisoned for 15 years. No one to this day is certain who threw the
bomb.
Anarchists were pictured in cartoons as bearded radicals carrying
smoking bombs. President Carnot of France was assassinated in
1894. The Empress Elizabeth of Austria was assassinated in 1898.
King Humber of Italy was assassinated in 1900. President McKinley
was assassinated in 1901.
But Bakunin’s enthusiasm wrecked the anarchist movement
despite all Kropotkin could do to save the fragments. These
excesses, which have even been repeated in modern times, have
had the effect of uniting public opinion against anything that smacks
of anarchy.
There were, of course, other anarchists. Some have credited
Rousseau, and some even Zeno with the actual birth of the idea of a
property-less society. But the four men briefly reviewed here, with
the possible additions of Elisee Reclus and the American, Benjamin
R. Tucker, made the major contributions to anarchist doctrine. There
is no serious cleavage in anarchist ranks.
It is these thoughts which must confront the libertarian as he seeks
to understand the meaning of individualism, liberty, property, and so
on.
But in complete candor, the sincere libertarian cannot be called an
anarchist whichever fork of the road he elects to pursue. It must be
recalled that without exception, anarchists wished to do away with
private ownership of property. Some advocated peaceful means
ending the abolition of government. Some advocated violent means
by destroying politicians in government. But by any yardstick
employed, and whether we are speaking of “philosophic anarchists”
or “anarchistic communists,” the central aim of the anarchist
movement was to eliminate private ownership. The reduction of the
government to zero was simply, to them, a necessary first step.
In contrast, the libertarian is a better economist. From first to last
he is in favor of private ownership. It is, in fact, the abuses of private
ownership inflicted by government which arouse the most ardent
libertarians.
If we take the “communist” anarchists, we are confronted with
violence as a means to abolish private ownership with the abolition
of government as the first step. If we take the “philosophic”
anarchists, we are confronted with essays on individualism and the
desire to do away with private ownership by means of the elimination
of government.
The aim of the anarchist is to eliminate private ownership. The
libertarian is dedicated to the perpetuation and the full enjoyment of
private ownership.
Never could two doctrines be more in opposition.
The most constructive of the anarchists were, socially speaking,
individualists, peaceful and harmless. The least constructive, socially
speaking, were dedicated to the overthrow of force by counter force.
But without exception, in the realm of economics, every anarchist
comes unglazed.
In brief, let us define the anarchist as a political individualist and
an economic socialist. In contrast, the libertarian can be defined as
an individualist, both politically and economically.
As the libertarian approaches or hesitates at the fork in the road,
one direction seems to him to indicate anarchy and the other, an
advocacy of coercion in minor doses. But, on careful analysis, the
branch which seems to carry the banner “anarchy” does no such
thing.
The libertarian, however he mulls over this dilemma to his
progress, is not concerned with government. His concern is with
liberty. He is not opposed to government. He favors freedom. The
libertarian wishes to preserve all human rights, among which and
predominantly among them is the right to own property privately and
to enjoy it fully.
The libertarian is a champion of individualism. He is an advocate
of tools which can perform certain functions for him. He has no
objection to the formation of any kind of tool that will assist him to
protect his rights or his property. But he cannot brook the forceful
compulsive tool which he is compelled to pay for when he has no
use for it.
He has no objection to policemen whose function is solely that of
protection. But he resists the supposition that others know better
than he, how much protection he needs or can afford.
He sees in government a tool of man’s devising. He has no
objection to this tool so long as it is totally responsive to the man
who hires the tool and pays for its use. He does object to the
employment of this tool by some against others in an aggressive
manner, since he is primarily concerned with human liberty and the
preservation of it for all individuals.
But it is destructive of libertarian aims and objectives to label a
seeker after total freedom with the opprobrium of “anarchist.”
Economically speaking, all anarchists are, socialists, however they
may coalesce to the political spectrum. Economically speaking, the
libertarian is an individualist, believing in and supporting the concept
of private ownership, individual responsibility and self-government.
Information about the Freedom School
will be sent on request.
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The War Guilt Problem and The Ligue Des Droits de Lhomme Norman Ingram All Chapter

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The War Guilt Problem and the Ligue

Des Droits de l'Homme Norman Ingram

The War Guilt Problem

One person is especially deserving of my thanks. He is William Irvine, emeritus

III. LES FLEURS DU MAL . . .

ADG Archives départementales du Gard

2 War Guilt and the Ligue des droits de l’homme

4 War Guilt and the Ligue des droits de l’homme

6 War Guilt and the Ligue des droits de l’homme

8 War Guilt and the Ligue des droits de l’homme

10 War Guilt and the Ligue des droits de l’homme

no longer in their individual form, but as involving large human collectivities.’

12 War Guilt and the Ligue des droits de l’homme

droits de l’homme in the form of the Société d’études documentaires et critiques

14 War Guilt and the Ligue des droits de l’homme

18 War Guilt and the Ligue des droits de l’homme

be Austria-Hungary, sometimes he feared Russia, and, according to Guernut, at

War Origins: The Debate Begins 19

was infected by the anti-intellectual virus of intuition, as opposed to reason, and

20 War Guilt and the Ligue des droits de l’homme

War Origins: The Debate Begins 21

the German intellectual community, and excoriated the German violation of

22 War Guilt and the Ligue des droits de l’homme

War Origins: The Debate Begins 23

so self-evident. Extrapolating from this ‘primordial’ right, Basch argued that

26 Basch, ‘La Ligue et la guerre’, p. 66. 27 Ibid., p. 67.

24 War Guilt and the Ligue des droits de l’homme

War Origins: The Debate Begins 25

41 Ibid., p. 107. 42 Ibid., pp. 107–11. 43 Ibid., p. 115. 44 Ibid., p. 116.

26 War Guilt and the Ligue des droits de l’homme

War Origins: The Debate Begins 27

50 Ibid., p. 144. 51 Ibid., p. 145.

28 War Guilt and the Ligue des droits de l’homme

considered France to be in decline, to be in the twilight phase of a once great

War Origins: The Debate Begins 29

56 Ibid., p. 153. 57 Ibid., p. 154. 58 Ibid., pp. 154–5.

30 War Guilt and the Ligue des droits de l’homme

62 Ibid., p. 161. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid., p. 165.

War Origins: The Debate Begins 31

32 War Guilt and the Ligue des droits de l’homme

Author: Robert LeFevre

Release date: November 1, 2023 [eBook #72001]

Original publication: Colorado Springs: The Freedom School, 1959

Credits: Bob Taylor, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANARCHY

Permission to reprint in whole or in part

PRINTED IN COLORADO SPRINGS, U.S.A.

Published June, 1959

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number:

THE FREEDOM SCHOOL

A RATIONAL BEING, intent upon learning the nature of liberty or

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

START: FULL LICENSE

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1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other

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1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this

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