1929–1935 - The Crisis

Through the profound destabilisation it caused, the crisis of 1929 reshuffled the cards of history. The post-war period was thought to be over, inflation finally tamed, the thorny question of reparations settled by the Young Plan, peace definitively guaranteed by the League of Nations and the Briand-Kellogg Pact. And yet within a few years all these fine promises evaporated. The responses to the crisis — protectionism, devaluation, austerity, even autarky — served only to contract trade. Unemployment exploded, democracies wavered, authoritarianism gained strength. As early as 1931, Japan chose the path of expansionism by invading Manchuria. In 1935, it was Italy's turn to embark on the conquest of Ethiopia. By exploiting the crisis, Chancellor Brüning rid Germany of reparations and began demanding its rearmament. To prevent this, Great Britain put pressure on France. Even after Hitler's rise to power, Prime Minister MacDonald wrote in his diary that "France is the enemy." It is hard to be more wilfully blind.

All the peaceful efforts of the 1920s were suddenly ruined. The League of Nations was in its death throes, the United States had turned its back definitively on Europe, Great Britain embraced appeasement and France retreated in dread behind the Maginot Line, which it believed to be impregnable. Continuing his brilliant panorama of the twentieth century, challenging clichés and received ideas, Jean-Yves Le Naour returns in detail to those few years when everything shifted and the post-war era transformed itself into a new pre-war.