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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.
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.
World War I also had the effect of bringing political transformation to most of the principal parties involved in the conflict, transforming them into electoral democracies by bringing near-universal suffrage for the first time in history, as in Germany (1919 German federal election), Great Britain (1918 United Kingdom general election), and ...
In 1914 the war was so unexpected that no one had formulated long-term goals. An ad-hoc meeting of the French and British ambassadors with the Russian Foreign Minister in early September led to a statement of war aims that was not official, but did represent ideas circulating among diplomats in St. Petersburg, Paris, and London, as well as the secondary allies of Belgium, Serbia, and Montenegro.
[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 ...
Most of the war's major battles occurred in France and Belgium, with both the French countryside and Belgian countryside being heavily scarred in the fighting. Furthermore, in 1918 during the German retreat, German troops devastated France's most industrialized region in the north-east (Nord-Pas de Calais Mining Basin) as well as Belgium.
The government fell less than a year after the outbreak of World War II, when Nazi forces occupied much of France, and was replaced by the rival governments of Charles de Gaulle's Free France (La France libre) and Philippe Pétain's French State (L'État français).