ABSTRACT

The First World War cast a long shadow over the Third Republic, right up to its demise during the summer of 1940. In domestic political terms the war seemed to be a triumph of the Right: during it the Radical Party had become more conservative; and the Radical Clemenceau had headed the centre-right coalition government that had led France to victory and from which the socialists had excluded themselves. The victory celebrations, and the commemoration of the war dead, tended to take a right-wing form, being dominated by conservative government and official figures and by the traditional right-wing institutions: the army and the Roman Catholic Church. The French army could rightly claim its enormous contribution to the Allied victory over Germany and could present figures such as the newly promoted marshals Joffre, Foch and Pétain as national heroes. At the same time, the Roman Catholic Church, so often a source of division and conflict in French history, could present itself as a national institution, having supported France’s war effort, participated prominently in all the commemoration ceremonies for the First World War, and played a major role in the construction of ossuaries to house the remains of the unidentified dead at Douaumont and elsewhere. In contrast, by the end of the First World War the French Left was often identified with pacifism, anti-militarism and industrial disputes; and in 1920 it split, with the founding of the French Communist Party, a development that helped to keep the Left out of power for most of the inter-war period. The Treaty of Versailles, similarly, could be portrayed as a triumph of right-wing war aims: France regained German-occupied Alsace-Lorraine; Germany was disarmed and burdened with reparations; and, through the acquisition of colonial territory from Germany as League of Nations mandates, the French colonial empire achieved its greatest territorial extent.