The Coffin Catches The Bone: France’s Diplomatic Headache
French diplomats had spent much of 1939 pulling their hair out in frustration. In a matter of months both of their central european policies had fallen apart. First the partition of Czechoslovakia made the Little Entente a dead letter. Worse, Poland was increasingly willing to break bread with Germany, and was seemingly pulling Romania along with it.
Nonetheless, France had accepted Poland’s invitation to observe the Lwow Wargames. The French, having some prior knowledge of Polish defence planning noted that practicing an elastic defense and mobile counter attack in Southeastern Poland was only a little different from their earlier plans to maintain that region as a national redoubt in event of an invasion. Their naval attaches were also keen to observe that much of what the Poles practiced at sea could be applied against the Kriegsmarine[1] just as easily as against the Soviet Baltic Fleet. Further, Poland’s efforts to get Romania and Hungary to work together strongly indicated that Poland’s recent erratic diplomacy was just the most recent iteration of the Intermarium Scheme.[2] Accordingly France was left with the troubling conclusion that Poland wasn’t necessarily abandoning them in favour of Germany, but that Poland was still no longer considering France’s interests in its diplomatic maneuvering.
Elsewhere, French diplomats fared little better. Efforts to secure Italian non-aggression continued to meander along in no discernable direction. France initially accepted Siam’s name change, then tried to reverse the matter when Britain and China rejected it, but found that undoing something is much harder than not doing it in the first place.
The one apparent success was the extent to which ambassador Petain impressed Spain’s new government.
In early July the French diplomatic corps was finally thrown a bone; the Soviets had finally gotten past their post-Munich hissyfit. On the 12th of July ambassador Paul-Émile Naggiar was summoned to the Kremlin. There he met with minister Molotov, Chief of Staff Boris Shaposhnikov, and the mustached Marxist himself, Stalin. That evening he cabled Paris to report that the Soviets sought to regain their alliance with France. However, they seemed intent that France needed to come to them with an offer, as they were evidently too proud to be the ones to admit that breaking ties over Munich had been a mistake.
The next day minister Georges-Étienne Bonnet summoned Ambassador Surits to confirm. Surits for his part had a well memorized presentation of Kremlin-coached talking points. The failure of appeasement, the absence of the UK from Europe, and Polish perfidy were once more rubbed in the exhausted foriegn minister’s wounds. Having confirmed that the Soviets were expecting an offer of alliance, Bonnet dismissed Surits without voicing any opinion on the matter.
While this was the sort of diplomatic breakthrough he’d been hoping for, it was also a complex matter that would no doubt ignite old divisions within the ministry and wider government. Not to mention that as the public face of France’s policy at Munich, he was disappointed to find himself strong-armed into walking it back.
In addition to the usual division between the pro-Soviet and anti-Soviet camps there was another aspect. France had previously had no issues maintaining separate alliances with the UK and USSR. Yet allying with a state provisioning Japan with war materials, while the UK was at war with Japan would be harder to swing.
There was also the suspicious matter of how quickly the French Communist Party changed its tune and began trying to reestablish the popular front government. Evidently some members of the PCF also found this unusually sudden; that month’s issue of
Esprit contained an exposé by a PCF defector confirming that the snap change was the result of direct orders from Moscow. An understandable amount of press hysteria about Soviet meddling in France’s domestic politics followed, firmly tying the hands of the Foriegn Ministry for the time.
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[1] In fact, Germany’s Scharnhorst-class ships were assigned to the Green Force and served as stand ins for two Gangut class battleships.
[2] A diplomatic project to create a Polish-led power block in Eastern Europe stretching from the Baltic to the Black. It’s usual stumbling block, Czechoslovakia, no longer existed.
A/N:
Why is it that every time I mention battleships I end up having to do major revisions?
Maybe I should hasten the rise of carriers so as to minimize this curse…
In any case, the Third Republic's political dysfunction is on full display, and
I’ve revised the section on the Lwow Wargames in the least disruptive way I could. Familiarize yourself as you see fit.