The Elysée Treaty, signed on January 22, 1963 between De Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer is the basis of the 'French-German friendship . Whether for the signing of a cooperation treaty, exchange programs or commemorations, France and Germany have not lacked opportunities to renew this promise of peaceful understanding. Since then, the “Franco-German couple” constitutes the “backbone” of the European Union. Yet this strong friendship between these two countries was not natural. On the contrary, the road of these two nations in no way foreshadowed peace.
Tensions and Wars:two enemy nations
Since the German unification dated 1870, France and Germany have developed a ferocious hatred towards each other which will lead to human, material and social disasters. world. Three wars will forever mark the destiny of these two nations, 1870, 1914 and 1940. Three times, these nations wanted to demonstrate their superiority with a hegemonic objective over Europe. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 was lost by France, which brought about the fall of the Second Empire and with it, Emperor Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte.
This war greatly contributed to the unification not only territorial but also political and social of Germany. The German company was born. The Franco-German rivalries will then be accentuated on the political ground first of all with the Dreyfus affair which divided France at the dawn of the 20th century between Dreyfusard and Antidreyfusard. Dreyfus is then considered by some to be a spy for Germany. Then in the field of colonial issues, the situation at the end of the 19th century was very favorable to France, which had a real colonial empire, unlike Germany, which had only a few colonies. The German appetite grew for the possession of colonies and it chose Morocco, a French protectorate, which led to two crises, the crisis of Tangier in 1905 and the crisis of Agadir in 1911. Two phases of tension which nearly started a war.
And in 1914, the paroxysm of rivalry, the First World War broke out through the infernal spiral of an alliance system destined to lead Europe towards War. We then enter what historian Eric Hobsbawm calls “the era of disasters”. This war will cause the death of 1.5 million French and 2.2 million Germans. This war was to be the last, "the Der des ders". Yet six months after the armistice of November 11, 1918, the victorious countries met to draw up the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919. These are the 14 points Wilson, named after the President of the United States at the time, which marks the beginnings of American power on the international scene.
The Treaty of Versailles will impose extremely harsh or even impossible conditions on Germany in terms of compensation destruction and especially the exploitation of the rich mining region of the Ruhr by France. President Wilson had clearly mentioned the fact that the victorious countries and in particular France were going much too far in the sanctions. He was not listened to. Shortly after, Marshal Foch will say about the Treaty of Versailles that it's not a peace, it's a twenty-year armistice. (1920).
This treaty, this "diktat" under German eyes, which was intended to prevent Germany from being reborn already carries within it the seeds of a new war and the rise of Fascism in the 1920s shows this very clearly. In Germany, one of the main battles of fascism focuses on the Treaty of Versailles, a way of mobilizing the population and stirring up the hatred and resentment of the Germans vis-à-vis the French.
This is why amputating a country, dividing it or annexing it against its will; enslave an entire people for ideological, religious, economic reasons...:so many political decisions that lead irremediably to confrontation. It is impossible to prevent a river from following its course. We can channel it, build dams. But if the pressure is too strong, it growls until it blows up everything in its path.
That's why history sometimes tends to ramble on, that's what happened in Germany. The living conditions of the Germans are then deplorable and the economic crisis of 1929 will be added to already very difficult conditions. In this deleterious climate, a man, Hitler, will pose as the savior of Germany and the Germans will follow him in the hope of better living conditions. In the 1930s, Germany broke several points of the Treaty of Versailles, including that of rearmament. Germany reconstitutes its forces and France but also other countries do not react. The League of Nations, the League of Nations, is powerless.
Then came the Munich conference of September 1938. The Munich agreements were signed between Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Italy represented respectively by Adolf Hitler , Edouard Daladier, Neville Chamberlain and Benito Mussolini. These agreements were intended to end the Sudetenland crisis but, indirectly, they sealed the death of Czechoslovakia as an independent state, by allowing Hitler to annex the German-speaking regions of Czechoslovakia.
France and England showed total blindness, paralyzed by a pacifism that could not resist in the face of Hitler's bellicose enterprises. Moreover, at that time, there were few politicians who really understood the very dangerous situation for Europe and grasped the nature of totalitarianism. Thus, a year later, Hitler invaded Poland and unleashed the Second World War, the most terrible and dramatic war known to humanity until then.
Peace:The new Franco-German daily newspaper
On May 8, 1945 in Europe and September 2, 1945 in Asia, the Second World War ended. And at the time of the balance sheet, Europe is destroyed and everything has to be redone with a view to resuscitating societies hard hit by war, misery; the human toll, and the consequences of acts which still mark the spirits of our time, .... With the war a new configuration of peace in the world is born marked by the establishment of the UN (Organization of Nations United) which succeeds the League of Nations. After 1945, the doors of the temple of Janus were closed, God of war who, on the eve of the fall of the Roman republic, symbolized war by his open doors, but closed peace. The Cold War and the resulting ideological issues split Germany into two distinct parts, a split made from the occupation of Germany by France, the United States, the United Kingdom in the West, and the USSR in the East.
Therefore, the Franco-German friendship will be held largely between France and the FRG, which is emerging in 1949. The entry into this phase of prosperity and apogee of capitalism that constituted the post-war boom period prodigiously boosted the economies of European countries, a new impetus given by the Marshall Plan from the United States in June 1947 which aimed to help the reconstruction of Europe, but this plan also had an ideological aim, because the United States feared that Western Europe would fall into the hands of the Communist parties and therefore of Moscow, strong in their prestige according to War. Economic aid plan which is at the origin of the relaunch and reconstruction of the FRG, this is what has been called "the German economic miracle".
After a phase of democratic transition and the so-called "5 D" policy, Germany must be Democratized, Demilitarized, Denazified, Decentralized, Decartelized. It should also be noted the importance in the political reconstruction of Germany of two political parties:The Christian Democratic Party with Konrad Adenauer as its leader and the SPD (the German Social Democratic Party). In the continuity and sustainability of the political reconstruction of Germany, German society establishes a compromise between the elites and the population with two objectives:to break with Nazism (new democratic law put in place:federalism, separation of powers, the presence of the Constitutional Court, Karlsruhe). The second objective is to avoid the importance of the executive. (Weakness of the Weimar Republic, more power is then given to the Chancellor). Everything will be done so that Germany becomes a democratic, free and capitalist country, making Germany an American product like the other countries of Western Europe.
As for France, the period after 1945 was painful and extremely complicated. France is experiencing a civil war and plunges into settling scores to punish the collaborators of Nazi Germany, a form of expiation for a nation ravaged by war, seeking to turn a dark page in its history. After a provisional government that tried to bring the country together, the Fourth Republic and its parliamentary system was born in 1946, a regime that ended in 1958, giving way to a regime that we still know today, the Fifth Republic and its presidentialism.
To avoid another war and end revanchism, efforts at rapprochement had to be made. It is for this reason that the FRG will participate from its beginnings in the European construction of capital importance since the Franco-German friendship was welded in parallel with this construction, this link becoming the heart of Europe. The Franco-German couple has always been a driving force in European construction. And in this budding friendship, a founding event binds his two countries forever, it is the Elysée Treaty.
In 1963, President Charles de Gaulle and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer signed the Élysée Treaty to make Franco-German cooperation a daily reality. Since then, many towns, schools, regions and universities have been twinned and the Franco-German Youth Office (OFAJ) offers millions of young people the chance to take part in exchanges. Since 1999, and according to the Weimar agreement, signed in 1997, the Franco-German University (UFA) has supported partnerships between French and German higher education establishments. It thus enables students from both countries to follow courses shared between France and Germany, and researchers to pool their knowledge. And the post-treaty links of the Elysée will not cease to intensify, among the best-known binational activities, the common television channel, Arte, but also the preparation of a common Franco-German history manual. In the economic field, companies such as Airbus are born, the leader of airlines today in Europe.
Franco-German friendship, a driving force for Europe
Subsequently, an innovative project was born during the 1990s and 2000s, it is the Lamy-Verheugen plan which aims at political coordination between France and Increased Germany even advancing the idea of a Franco-German confederation. According to their plan, this union would have a common army, would share its embassies and would make the knowledge of both languages compulsory for the officials of the two states. A project which was not followed up but which is still topical today when the establishment of "a two-speed Europe" was mentioned, between France and Germany on the one hand and on the other, European countries gravitating around the United Kingdom.
Despite past achievements and the importance of biannual bilateral summits, the Franco-German relationship has for some years been at a standstill. the search for a new meaning. We can speak of routine, even of relative wear and tear. With the exception of a few economic sectors such as space, aeronautics and armaments, the large French and German groups often favor alliances in the space-world. The Franco-German relationship is also established through international issues where the two countries very often form a common front, for example, Germany found itself with France to oppose the war in Iraq in 2003, opposition founded since it was admitted that the American intervention was based on a lie, that Iraq possessed the nuclear bomb.
But in the couple, it is still France that speaks the loudest on the international scene, thanks to its permanent seat on the UN Security Council and its right of veto, and it was she who suffered the wrath of the United States for threatening to veto the UN Security Council. But it is important to emphasize that this situation was made possible by the desire to speak with one voice on the international scene, particularly in organizations such as the WTO. This does not preclude differences. France is thus much more sensitive to African problems, as we saw in Mali in 2013 and in the Central African Republic more recently, and Germany wishes to maintain a special relationship with Israel, while France has always had a relatively "neutral" diplomacy. on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Which has been questioned very recently.
A final aspect of this Franco-German friendship emerges from the commemorations of the centenary of the First World War and it is enough for that to evoke the commemoration of Sunday August 3, 2014 on the site Hartmannswillerkopf (Haut-Rhin), in the presence of the French and German presidents, François Hollande and Joachim Gauck. "One hundred years to the day after Germany's declaration of war on France, Hollande and Gauck recalled the sacrifice of some 30,000 men from both countries who were killed in the fighting between them on this rocky outcrop and just as much celebrated Franco-German friendship and the construction of a peaceful Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War. » .
To conclude, let's mention the quote from a former German soldier who fought during the Second World War on the heights of Stone, a hamlet located in the Ardennes a few kilometers north of South of Sedan, passed in a few days of May 1940, a landscape filled with greenery which under the fire of the shells became a real hell. This man surrounded by veterans, whether French or German, declared "Unity and Franco-German friendship will always be the bronze rock on which is firmly founded the union of European peoples and the peace that we we all want. (Speech of May 25, 1975 to Stone).
Bibliography
- Corine Defrance, Ulrich Pfeil (Hg.), France, Germany and the Élysée Treaty, 1963–2013, CNRS Éditions, 2012.
- Europe against Franco-German friendship:From misunderstandings to discord, by Edouard Husson. Guibert, 1998.
- History of the construction of Europe since 1945, by Sylvain Kahn. PUF, 2018