Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [125]
Klotz, described by Clemenceau as “the only Jew I knew who knew nothing of finance,” is supposed to have said in answer to all questions about France’s future, “Germany will pay.” (In fact, he warned that German reparations should not be expected to pay for everything.) Clemenceau treated him contemptuously, as he did so many of his colleagues. Lloyd George found him merciless: “His mind and heart were so stuffed with bonds that he had no room left for the humanities.” Even Wilson was moved to a little joke about Klotz on the brain. Keynes has left a characteristically cruel sketch: “a short, plump, heavy-moustached Jew, well groomed, well kept, but with an unsteady, roving eye, and his shoulders a little bent in an instinctive deprecation” who tried to hold up food shipments to a starving Germany. Whatever Klotz did, though, he did as Clemenceau’s subordinate. If Klotz stood publicly for high reparations, that kept the French right from attacking Clemenceau for not being tough enough on Germany. In private, Clemenceau admitted that France would never get what it hoped for and he sent Louis Loucheur, his most trusted economic adviser, to talk to the Americans in confidence about more moderate terms. In their conversations, Loucheur made it clear that he personally saw no long-term advantage for France in driving Germany into bankruptcy.29
Like Lloyd George, Clemenceau had to worry about public opinion. Most French took a straightforward view. Germany had invaded Belgium, violating its own solemn undertaking to protect its neutrality, and France, not the other way around. And almost all the fighting had been on Belgian and French soil. “Who Ought to Be Ruined?” asked a headline in the conservative Le Matin, “France or Germany?” 30 Surely the aggressor and not the victim should pay for setting the damage right. The Americans might talk of the new diplomacy without indemnities or fines, but the old traditions where the loser customarily paid still ran strong. France had paid up in 1815, when Napoleon was finally defeated, and it had done so again after 1871. Both times Germany had collected; now it was going to pay out.
France, and Belgium, had argued from the start that claims for direct damage should receive priority in any distribution of reparations. Belgium had been picked clean. In the heavily industrialized north of France, the Germans had shipped out what they wanted for their own use and destroyed much of the rest. Even as German forces were retreating in 1918, they found time to blow up France’s most important coal mines. As Clemenceau said bitterly: “The barbarians of whom history spoke took all that they found in the territories invaded by them, but destroyed nothing; they settled down to share the common existence. Now, however, the enemy had systematically destroyed everything that came in his way.” Judging by captured German documents, it looked as though the Germans intended to cripple French industry and leave a clear field for their own.31
France and Belgium had hoped to include war costs in the final tally of reparations. Here Belgium, for once, was on firm ground: Wilson had made it clear that when he talked of Belgian restoration he meant all the harm done by Germany’s initial, and illegal, invasion in August 1914. The French case was weaker. Clemenceau, who did not want to antagonize the Americans when he needed their support on the other issues so crucial to France’s security, chose not to push this. He realized, although he did not say so publicly, that there was a limit to how much Germany could pay. Klotz admitted to the Foreign Affairs Commission of the French Chamber of Deputies that war costs would have produced a figure that even novelists in their wildest dreams would not come up with.32
The French also realized that, since Britain had spent more on the war than France, including war costs would