Franco-German Reconciliation

What are the chances of Germany and France effectively forgiving each other in a CP victory scenario without knocking the shit out of each other in round 2?

France and Germany IOTL did do quite well when it came to reconciliation, at least when the French weren't reoccupying the Rhineland. So would a pragmatic German government be willing to come to terms with what will be an unpredictable and unstable France for the the first few years after the war?
 
No France would only be a client state in case of german victory.

Nah, more like an embittered regional (not Great) power that slowly is forced into economic dependency on Germany over the course of a few decades. In the immeadiate aftermath of the CP victory, there will still be plenty of ill will against the Germans.
 
No France would only be a client state in case of german victory.

Depends on the victory surely. A victory by 1916 means France gets spayed with large loss of territory. After 1917 however with the Brest-Litovsk Germany will be more focused on holding down the eastern territories and are more likely to be more lenient to France in negotiations.
 
I honestly fail to see a Franco-German reconciliation followed by a lot of cooperation and 'building together' happening in the case of a German victory in say 1914 or 1918.

If France becomes a client state of Germany, one could say that the Franco-German relationship will become better but time, but it will also be a fundamentally unequal relationship where Germany holds the all cards and the sticks and it likely won't even allow France to become her "second in command" in Europe.

If France does not become a client state of Germany, but suffers territorial losses, such as the Briey-Longwy area, Belfort and bits of pieces of Lorraine in addition to its colonies in Equatorial Africa and along the Guinea Gulf. My opinion is that France would turn inwards and try to maintain her alliance with Britain at all costs if this is indeed possible. A rematch would be hard to mount on the part of France chiefly because of the massive impact the loss the Lorraine Iron ore fields would have on French industry especially iron and steel-making (it was geared for a long time towards using Lorrainian Minette and not much else). The only way I would see a reconciliation happen is if Germany somehow decides to relinquish some of its gains in a bid to appease France and draw it to its sphere. The alliance would still be an unequal one though.

What a lot of people don't always realise is that the Franco-German 'European Axis' was a very circumstantial thing that had a lot to do with necessity in the shape of needing a strategic partner rathen than anything else. What French diplomats overwhelmingly desired post war and well into the fifties, was a Franco-British strategic alliance and a lot of efforts were made towards this during the late forties. These efforts failed for various reasons, partly because Britain did not realise that the world had changed a lot post war, and partly because there was a strong pro-European undercurrent in French politics at the time animated by the likes of Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman for example. Germany had something that France desired at the time and that something was coal and a market for French agricultural exports.

Until the German reunification, France and Germany were roughly of equal size population wise and while the German economy was larger than the French one. The difference was not as significant as it now is and France was on a massive upswing until the seventies, indeed some confidently predicted that by the nineties the French economy would become the largest one in Europe and the third in the world just behind Japan!

Post German reunification it is worth remembering that there have been significant disagreements between France and Germany on various subjects.
 
No France would only be a client state in case of german victory.

I tend to disagree, reparations payments and territorial loss mostly colonies are more likely. The German Empire OTOH will want some buffer states between them and Russia though.
 
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