ABSTRACT
René Massigli (1888-1988) was among the three or four most important officials in the French ministry of foreign affairs in the inter-war period. He spent World War I studying the German press in order to report to the Quai d’Orsay what was happening and being said behind the enemy’s lines. During World War II, when the principal enemy was again Germany, he became responsible for the foreign policy of Free France under General de Gaulle. Between these two conflicts France’s external policy was virtually fixated upon the ‘German problem’: how to re-establish peaceful relations with Germany, how to integrate this rough-edged neighbour into a stable system, how to create the conditions for French and European security. In the two decades 1919-39 this was the central question for France and the one on which everything turned-from reparations to western and eastern alliances, from the Ruhr occupation to the Sudetenland crisis, from the era of Versailles to that of Locarno and of Hitler.
