Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne conference

On 19 April 1917, at the railway station of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne, a small Alpine town in Savoy on the road to the Fréjus tunnel under the Mont-Cenis pass, the heads of government of the three Entente great powers met. The British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, the French Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Alexandre Ribot and the Italian Prime Minister Paolo Boselli with the Foreign Minister Sidney Sonnino conferred in a railway carriage drawn up at the platform. Lloyd George remembered that the snows in the valley had not yet melted. Officially they discussed Italian acquisitions in Asia Minor and Greece. The most important matter, the Austrian emperor’s secret peace offer, could not be called by its name.

An Italian zone in Asia Minor

Italy had entered the war on the basis of the Treaty of London of 1915. Its ninth article promised her a “just share” in the region of Adalia, that is Antalya, in the event of a partition of the Ottoman Empire, but it set no boundaries. Meanwhile in 1916 Britain, France and Russia had divided the Sultan’s Asian possessions among themselves in the Sykes–Picot Agreement and the accompanying arrangements, without asking the Italians’ opinion. Rome now demanded compensation.

In the carriage they haggled over the map. According to the minutes, Ribot objected to giving Italy Mersina and Adana, which France regarded as its own. It was agreed that the Italian zone would begin at a point to be fixed west of Mersina, and that the Italians would be given facilities for trade through that port. Sonnino demanded that the Italian zone of occupation should include everything marked on the map of the British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, and in addition the northern part of the vilayet of Smyrna (İzmir). Lloyd George and Ribot promised to put this demand to their governments. It was also agreed that the interests of other powers in the zones would be respected but would not be used for political action.

Everyone knew that the Turks still held these lands and that their partition depended on the outcome of the war. Lloyd George therefore proposed a formula, which was adopted: if at the conclusion of peace any of the powers could not obtain in full the territories allotted to it in the agreements on the partition of the Ottoman Empire, the interests of those concerned would be “equitably taken into consideration afresh”. The ministers undertook to recommend these arrangements to their governments. The arrangements also had to be agreed with Russia, a party to the earlier agreements on the partition of Turkey. On 21 April Ribot instructed the French ambassador in Petrograd to communicate their content to the Foreign Minister of the Provisional Government, Pavel Milyukov.

A conversation about Austria

Lloyd George came to Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne carrying a secret. On 11 April at Folkestone Ribot had shown him the letter of Emperor Karl I, in which the monarch promised to support the French claims to Alsace-Lorraine. The letter said nothing about Italy. Prince Sixtus of Bourbon-Parma, who had brought it, would not agree to the Italians being let into the secret. On 18 April in Paris Lloyd George talked with him at length and asked to be allowed to tell Sonnino and Boselli everything, but the prince refused. It was agreed that Ribot would raise the matter by referring to the public statements of the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister Ottokar Czernin about Austria’s desire for peace, and Lloyd George proposed that they should also speak of the peace talks conducted in Switzerland by the former Austro-Hungarian ambassador in London, Count Albert Mensdorff.

In the carriage Lloyd George argued that, according to the British Admiralty and General Staff, eliminating Austria-Hungary from the war would bring the Allies great advantages, provided that Vienna made peace with all of them and not only with Russia. He also suggested that Italy, freed from the war with Austria, could concentrate her forces on achieving her aims in Turkey. Sonnino would not hear of it. He believed that the Central Powers were trying to draw the Allies into negotiations in order to divide them, and that after a peace with Austria it would be hard to persuade the Italians to go on fighting. According to Lloyd George’s memoirs, Sonnino said that Italy had entered the war to recover the “unredeemed lands” and could not make a peace that did not give them to her. A government that proposed it would not survive a day, and the people would overthrow the king. On Ribot’s initiative a formula was adopted that entering into talks on a separate peace would at present be “particularly dangerous” and would threaten to weaken Allied unity.

Lloyd George wrote later that disclosing the letter would have changed nothing. A letter in which Italy was not even mentioned would only have angered the hot-tempered Sonnino, and Austria was not ready for concessions that even the most reasonable Italian politician would accept. He did not know then that a week earlier the Italian headquarters had supposedly sounded out, on its own initiative, in Switzerland the possibility of peace in exchange for the Trentino alone. That at least was what emerged from information that Emperor Karl later passed to Sixtus. On 20 April, on his way back, Lloyd George told Sixtus in Paris that the Italians would demand at least the Trentino, Dalmatia and the Adriatic islands. On 22 April the French diplomat Jules Cambon conveyed to the prince the French government’s answer: no Austrian proposal could be considered without taking Italy’s position into account, and the talks at Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne showed that Rome would not give up any of the conditions on which it had entered the war. The Sixtus Affair stalled.

Salonika

At Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne there was also talk of the Macedonian front. The British government, encouraged by the spring offensives in France, at Arras and on the Aisne, by the capture of Baghdad and by the Second Battle of Gaza then in progress, pressed the French for General Maurice Sarrail to strike in Macedonia as soon as possible. At the same time, as the British official history records, Lloyd George warned Ribot that if this time there was no clear success, Britain would have to reduce her forces at Salonika, because she was short of ships. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General William Robertson, had long considered the Salonika expedition a mistake.

What came next

On 25 April the British War Cabinet conditionally accepted the arrangements of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne, and on 10 May the French government did likewise. Disputes over the details went on all summer. The final text, granting Italy south-western Anatolia with Smyrna, Konya and Adalia, was agreed in August, and the Allies approved it between 18 August and 26 September 1917. Russia’s consent was never obtained, and in November the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 the British invoked the lack of Russian consent to declare the agreement void, which angered the Italians. Smyrna was occupied by the Greeks in May 1919. In May Emperor Karl handed Sixtus a second letter, but after Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne the Austrian efforts towards a separate peace no longer had any real chance.