Pichon on France's war aims

On 28 December 1917 the French Foreign Minister, Stéphen Pichon, delivered in the Chamber of Deputies his first major speech since he had taken office in the Clemenceau government six weeks earlier. This date is given by the American monthly Current History, which reprinted extensive extracts from the speech, and by the British chronology of the war. According to some accounts the debate on interpellations on foreign policy had begun the day before, on 27 December. The debate concerned the negotiations that Bolshevik Russia was conducting with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk. It was opened by the socialists of the French Section of the Workers’ International, some of whom wanted the Allies to recognise the Bolshevik government. Pichon refused. France did not intend to recognise anyone until a legal government had been formed in Russia.

Russia and Brest

Pichon said that the actions of the Bolsheviks had left Russia completely disorganised, and that in seeking to avoid war with a foreign state it was going through an even more dangerous internal storm. Germany, in his view, wanted to complete the destruction of Russia’s armed strength, separate Russia from its allies, seize its wealth, break it into pieces, recover its own prisoners of war, and later bring about the restoration of autocracy under Prussian hegemony. France was not interfering in Russia’s internal affairs and did not seek its break-up, but it had to maintain contact with all the “sound elements”, whether socialists, liberals or revolutionaries, and protect its considerable interests in a country to which it had been bound by an alliance for a quarter of a century. He gave assurances that France had not lost hope in its former ally and was ready to return to the old relations.

He replied most sharply to the attempts to draw France into the negotiations. At Brest a peace conference had been under way since 22 December, and the Central Powers had agreed to accept the Russian formula of a peace without annexations or indemnities on condition that all the belligerent states joined it. Pichon asked whether, after such terrible losses and such heroism of its soldiers, France could agree to a peace that would preserve the pre-war territorial and economic status quo. In the silence that fell over the chamber he declared: “If there is a single deputy who thinks this possible, let him say so.” The Chamber responded with applause. An indirect peace proposal did not, in his opinion, deserve consideration. If the Central Powers presented their terms directly, France would consider them together with its allies. The Russian negotiations would end either in Russia’s capitulation or in a breakdown, and in either case the war would go on. The absence of Russia was a great success for Germany, but in place of one ally another had come, the United States, with all its strength.

War aims

France’s war aims, Pichon said, were known from earlier declarations of ministers, resolutions of parliament and speeches of the Allied leaders. The first was victory. Next came the return of the provinces torn from France by force, that is, the restoration of Alsace and Lorraine, a guarantee of lasting peace, and a general organisation of the world within a league of nations. He invoked President Woodrow Wilson, who in his address of 4 December had announced that the war would be considered won only when Germany declared through its legitimate representatives that it was ready to accept a peace based on justice and reparation for wrongs. He gave assurances that France had never thought of annexing populations by right of conquest. The question of Alsace and Lorraine was, in his view, not merely a French question but a question for the whole world and a symbol of right. Nothing would be more false than the claim that France was prolonging the war for selfish motives. The quoted extracts from the speech made no mention of the left bank of the Rhine, about which questions had been asked in the British House of Commons a few weeks earlier.

Pichon also spoke of other nations. The Allies were acting not only on behalf of Serbia and Belgium but also of Poland, and wanted a Poland independent and indivisible, with every guarantee of free economic and military development. The Armenians, the Syrians and all nations under a foreign yoke deserved sympathy. He contrasted this with the position of the Central Powers, whose representative at Brest, Count Ottokar Czernin, had declared the right of nations to self-determination to be an internal matter for each state. He called the capture of Jerusalem a victory not for France or Britain but for the whole civilised world, one that would bring Palestine an international regime of justice and freedom. He ended his speech with the words of the former President of the United States Theodore Roosevelt, that France would save the soul of the world.

The speech was an answer to the questions that the Brest negotiations were putting to all the Allies: what they were still fighting for and why they refused to talk about peace. At the beginning of January 1918 the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, set out his war aims, and a few days later President Wilson announced the Fourteen Points.