Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [64]
A man of great learning and cultivation, Bourgeois was an expert in the law, a student of Sanskrit and a connoisseur of music, as well as a passable sculptor and caricaturist. After entering politics as a liberal, he had risen rapidly to the top: minister of the interior, of education, of justice, foreign minister, prime minister. His interest in international order dated back long before the war; he had represented France at the Hague peace conferences, which tried, without success, to put limits on war. When Wilson outlined his hopes for the League, Bourgeois wept for joy. In 1919, however, he was old and tired. His eyesight was failing and he suffered terribly from the cold.21
He labored, moreover, under considerable handicaps. Many French officials persisted in seeing the League as a continuation of the wartime alliance, still directed against Germany. Clemenceau made no secret that he thought Bourgeois a fool. When House asked why Bourgeois had ever been prime minister, Clemenceau replied, “When I was unmaking Cabinets, the material ran out, and they took Bourgeois.” The British and the Americans regarded him as something of a joke with his prolix speeches in mellifluous French which, on occasion, put them to sleep. Wilson took a positive dislike to him, in part because he had heard that Clemenceau had given him instructions to delay proceedings as much as possible. This was probably true. Bourgeois did very little without consulting Clemenceau, who was hoping to squeeze concessions out of Wilson over the German peace terms. “Let yourselves be beaten,” he told Bourgeois and Larnaude. “It doesn’t matter. Your setbacks will help me to demand extra guarantees on the Rhine.” Bourgeois was bitter but resigned. “In other words,” he told Poincaré, “he asks me simply to get myself killed in the trenches, while he fights elsewhere.” 22
In the League commission meetings, the French representatives fought against both the British and the Americans to give the League teeth, something, after all, Wilson had once said he wanted. Bourgeois argued that the League should operate like the justice system in any modern democratic state, with the power to intervene where there were breaches of the peace and forcibly restore order. In other words, if there were disputes among League members, these would automatically be submitted to compulsory arbitration. If a state refused to accept the League’s decision, then the next step would be sanctions, economic, even military. He advocated strict disarmament under a League body with sweeping powers of inspection and an international force drawn from League members.23 The British and the Americans suspected that such proposals were merely another French device to build a permanent armed coalition against Germany. In any case, they were quite out of the question politically. The U.S. Congress, which had enough trouble sharing the control of foreign policy with the president, was certainly not going to let other nations decide when and where the United States would fight. The Conservatives in Lloyd George’s government, the army and the navy and much of the Foreign Office preferred to put their faith in the old, sure ways of defending Britain. The League, said Churchill, is “no substitute for the British fleet.” It was all “rubbish” and “futile nonsense,” said Henry Wilson, chief of the Imperial General Staff. Britain could be dragged into conflicts on the Continent or farther afield in which it had no interest.24
British reservations were echoed by several of the dominion delegates in Paris, something Lloyd George and his colleagues could not easily ignore. Alight with malice like a small imp, Billy Hughes was predictably vehement. He liked the French and hated the Americans, not least because