L'or et le sang: Les buts de guerre économiques de la Première Guerre mondiale

"I saw Georges-Henri recently and introduced him at a panel in France. I said, ‘This is one of the best books on World War I published in the last 50 years.’ And he promptly said, ‘It’s not exactly an accessible read.’ Which is true. It is 1000 pages, near enough. It’s the equivalent of his ‘habilitation’ in German terms, his ‘doctorat d’état.’ So it represents a very long period of sustained research. I think it is, yes. It does so many things to what was then the prevailing orthodoxy on World War I, that I find it extraordinary that there hasn’t been a translation into English. It is hard work, undoubtedly. Not hard work because it’s badly written but just because it is scholarly and detailed and full. It’s dealing with the relationships across all the major allied belligerents. That, in itself, produces a very complex story. There are two big things that matter that come out of it. First of all, the notion of German war guilt, particularly as propagated by Fritz Fischer in the 1960s, seems to be absolutely unsustainable. What Soutou is doing in the book is saying, ‘Look at Germany in 1914. It is the most successful, economically, of any European power, second only to the United States in terms of its productive capacity. Its goods are successfully penetrating world markets. It does not need war to establish German domination of Europe, or indeed of a wider set of markets.’ So the notion that Fritz Fischer built up in his account of German war aims in World War I , which was published in 1967—that Germany goes to war to establish a central European economic bloc—is simply crazy because it can have a European economic bloc without going to war. And who would want to be confined, if you were Germany as it was before 1914, simply to central Europe, when you have the capacity to conquer a great many of the world’s markets simply by the power of free trade? I was already persuaded that the idea of ‘Mitteleuropa’—a central European, German-dominated, bloc—was a consequence of the war’s outbreak, not a cause of it. Soutou really provides chapter and verse to show that. It’s only once Germany has been squeezed out of wider markets that it has to think, as it does during the war, about how best to make use of the resources of what it does have. “The notion of German war guilt, as propagated by Fritz Fischer in the 1960s, seems to be absolutely unsustainable” And here you come to the other side of the story, which is of two countries, specifically Britain and France, who are not competing well with Germany before 1914, and know it. In Britain, there are growing arguments for tariff reform. It’s very hard, of course, for Britain to move away from the principles of free trade when the split over the Corn Laws had redefined party politics in 1846. It produced a Brexit-like split in the Conservative party. As a result, those Conservatives who had ended up in the Liberal party belonged to a group that had been founded on the principles of free trade and the benefit of free trade for international relations. Which made perfectly good sense in the 19th century, when Britain was the leading economic power in the world—and rather less sense in 1914, when Britain was no longer the leading economic power in the world. So in 1914, not only have you therefore got an opportunity for the tariff reformers to get some sort of leverage, but they’re in alliance with France, which has spent the whole 40 years since 1871 thinking about how to deal with this increasingly mighty power to the east. And so the British and French—particularly at a conference in 1916, convened by Étienne Clémentel in Paris—think how they’re going to keep Germany down after the war, at least to the point where they can get a head start in their own economic recovery over Germany. For me, it is not only an important argument about why the war breaks out, but also an important argument about how the war is sustained and the role of economic factors—which have been extraordinarily neglected in terms of alliance relations and how the war is conducted—as well as its profound implications for the settlement afterwards and the way that’s handled. So when I talked earlier about the need to think comparatively across countries, L’Or et le Sang does that. It uses this really sustained and original and important scholarship to make points that really affect almost every stage of World War I. The problem with the curriculum is that it’s very hard to change. In 2003, I did a 10-part television series on World War I for Channel 4. In Scotland, one of the funders behind Wark Clements, the production company that made it, said he would distribute free copies to every school in Scotland. They had a launch for this free distribution in Glasgow City Chambers, which I went to. The teachers there said, ‘We loved your series, but it’s very hard for us to teach because you’re not saying what we’re told to say in the curriculum. There’s too much challenging of the orthodoxy.’ It’s a pretty desperate situation when that’s the case. You find that you’re not using history as a medium for debate, but as a medium for delivering received wisdom. That may reflect, a bit, the level at which you’re teaching it. If we’re talking about GCSE level, of course there’s an element of content you have to deliver. But you would hope, by the time you get to A-level or higher, that you’d be able to have a discussion. But if you speak to any history teacher they will say that it’s very difficult. My son—who was at a Scottish independent school—came back one day and said, ‘I’ve got to write an essay on the Schlieffen Plan.’ The presumption was that the Schlieffen Plan was the plan that Germany put into operation in 1914. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I said, ‘Well, the big problem is that Schlieffen was dead by then. Was there such a thing as the Schlieffen Plan? Why was what we now call the Schlieffen Plan found in his family’s archive and not in the Prussian military archives? And if there was a Schlieffen Plan, it was, in any case, very much revised.’ And this sort of thing. And of course all I did was confuse him. He had an excellent history teacher. He wrote his essay and the history teacher said to him, ‘It’s a pity he’s been talking to his father. The examiners will not have had the same privilege. There are certain things he’s got to get in to tick the box.’ Of course if people come from that grounding and then you say things that are different, you have to say them again and again and again. It takes a long time before it penetrates, but eventually the penny can begin to drop. And of course it does mean that for the student who’s been through that process of, essentially, learning by rote, when they do realise, ‘Ah! The question’s more open and less shut than I thought,’ then of course it becomes exciting."