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Interwar France covers the political, economic, diplomatic, cultural and social history of France from 1918 to 1939. France suffered heavily during World War I in terms of lives lost, disabled veterans and ruined agricultural and industrial areas occupied by Germany as well as heavy borrowing from the United States, Britain, and the French people.
By the spring of 1918, ten thousand U.S. soldiers a month were arriving in France. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of March 1918 had taken Russia out of the war; Germany moved its armies west and launched a huge new offensive against France, hoping to end the war quickly before the Americans could change the balance of the war.
Demonstration against the Treaty in front of the Reichstag building. After the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on 28 June 1919, between Germany on the one side and France, Italy, Britain and other minor allied powers on the other, officially ended war between those countries.
The decisive factors were twofold, Britain felt a sense of obligation to defend France, and the Liberal Government realized that unless it did so, it would collapse either into a coalition, or yield control to the more militaristic Conservative Party. Either option would likely ruin the Liberal Party.
The nationalists won out, and in April 1915, the Italian government secretly agreed to the London Pact in which Britain and France promised that if Italy would declare war on Austria, it would receive its territorial rewards. The Italian army of 875,000 men was poorly led and lacked heavy artillery and machine guns.
[54] [55] France's military alliance with Czechoslovakia was sacrificed at Hitler's demand when France and Britain agreed to his terms at Munich in 1938. [56] [57] The Blum government joined Britain in establishing an arms embargo during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Blum rejected support for the Spanish Republicans because of his fear ...
3 August – Germany declares war on France. 9 August – Battle of Mulhouse begins, the opening attack of World War I by the French army against Germany. 26 August – Allies withdraw from Le Cateau to Saint-Quentin, after Battle of Le Cateau. 29 August – French Fifth Army attack St. Quentin. 30 August – French Fifth Army retreat from St ...
Germany and Italy got very little trade or raw materials from their empires. France did slightly better. The Congo Free State was notoriously profitable when it was a capitalistic rubber plantation owned and operated by King Leopold II of Belgium as a private enterprise.