French contraband list

At the beginning of January 1915 the French official gazette, the “Journal officiel”, published a notice on contraband of war. On the basis of article 2 of the decree of 6 November 1914, which allowed the contraband lists to be changed by simple notice, the French government replaced the existing lists with new ones. Later French notices refer to the issue of the gazette of 2–3 January, and American diplomatic documents describe the list as published on 3 January.

The new French lists repeated the British lists announced on 23 December. On 4 January the US consul general in Paris sent their text to Washington, and the following day Ambassador William Graves Sharp reported that, according to the British embassy, the lists of the two countries “now fully coincide”. The list of absolute contraband, which could be seized whenever it was bound for the enemy, even via a neutral port, therefore included an expanded range of explosive ingredients, glycerine and sulphur, as well as turpentine, rosin, tungsten, molybdenum and other metals needed for steelmaking, rubber and rubber goods. The much shorter list of conditional contraband was left with chiefly foodstuffs, fodder, clothing, gold and silver, and railway materials.

This was the culmination of several months of convergence between the French and British regulations. France had announced its first contraband lists on 11 August 1914 and then amended them several times, usually following London’s lead. Identical lists had practical significance. A neutral ship stopped by a French or British warship was subject to the same rules, and merchants and shipowners could not exploit differences between the regulations of the two allies.

The Allies were also tightening their cooperation in other ways at this time. On 26 December the British and French ministers at The Hague, with the verbal support of the Russian minister, gave an assurance that they would not detain contraband consigned to the Netherlands Overseas Trust, nor food of no military significance sent to Dutch merchants, provided they were not acting on behalf of the enemy. The control of neutral trade thus rested increasingly not only on lists of goods but also on guarantees that cargoes would not reach Germany.

The January list was not the last. In March 1915 France announced further additions and changes to the lists, and in the same month decided, together with Britain, to stop all goods bound to or from Germany. From then on the fate of cargoes bound for Europe was no longer decided by the contraband lists alone.