It was inappropriate, humiliating, even unethical for many critics that the leader of a great Western democracy should work hard to woo Europe’s most aggressive autocratic state. Maybe I mean President Emmanuel Macron. Or to President Charles de Gaulle. Or really President Sadie Carnot (1887-94).
All political action has a mixture of motives, and Macron’s approach to Putin is attributed to vanity, insistence that the EU must play a leading role, domestic policy and fear of nuclear escalation. No doubt they are all present. But politicians also follow a scenario often written long before. They do what one historian called “unspoken assumptions” – ideas about the world that are taken for granted in their political culture.
While every Western politician must share Macron’s concerns about escalation and economic damage, his unique persistence in trying to contact Putin follows a typical French script, the first drafts of which were written in the late 19th century. This scenario has deeply affected European history. He can do it again. It’s worth trying to figure it out.
It began with the traumatic defeat of France by Prussia in 1870-71, which created the Second German Reich. France has lost wars before, but always by a coalition of great powers, never before by any. His armies were defeated, his capital besieged and hungry for capitulation.
The effect on France was profound. The defeat inspired a major national revival effort, including the adoption of republican democracy, a cult of militarism (including military exercises for children), aggressive imperialism, the introduction of English-style games in schools to instill a “taste for struggle,” attacks on ” women’s Catholicism, encouraging more children (unsuccessfully, but still shaping French social policy) and angry nationalism, which some consider to be the origins of fascism.
But none of this could change the fact that the new Germany was ahead of France in industrial power and fertility. This is where Russia came in. What do Europe’s greatest democracy have in common with its most powerful autocracy? Only one thing, but the most important: fear of Germany. They signed a military alliance, which was the basis of their common security. In 1896, Tsar Nicholas II visited France and was greeted by applauding crowds, including many who had hitherto considered Russia an enemy and a threat. France, a rich country, is investing much of its savings in developing Russia, especially the railways, to transport Russian armies quickly to the west. This helped create a fear of “surroundings” in Germany.
His answer was Schlieffen’s plan to win a quick victory by invading France through Belgium while Russia was unprepared. The Franco-Russian alliance responded by speeding up its military mobilization plans to prevent Germany. Then, in July 1914, the catastrophe occurred – the Schlieffen Plan caused a global conflict.
French troops thrown against the German border to help Russia suffered the heaviest casualties of the war. The Russian Steam Roller rolled hard to the west, but was quickly stopped. Four years of exhaustion brought massacres, famines, revolutions, civil wars and a century of horrors.
But Franco-Russian relations have revived. Still fearing Germany and unable to rely on Britain or America, France recognized the Soviet Union in 1924, and French Republicans and Bolshevik revolutionaries signed a non-aggression pact as early as 1931. Moscow was initially unhappy when Hitler came to power in 1933, because Marxist theory states that he will soon be overthrown by a proletarian revolution.
When that did not happen, Moscow and Paris again sought mutual assistance. A pact was signed in 1935 and the two countries assisted the government of the Popular Front in Spain.
The French are trying to draw the Soviet Union against Hitler. Chamberlain and Halifax dragged on, unwilling to trust Stalin. But the French may have been right that Soviet self-interest could lead to a common position that would stop Hitler and possibly overthrow him. World War II, at least in the form it took, could have been prevented or delayed. Instead, repulsed, the Soviets changed countries, signed a pact with Hitler, and war came.
World War II still inevitably marks the entire West and its collective memory, but in a different way. Although Britain supported the French resistance all the time and France was liberated mainly from America and Britain, the subsequent memory was shaped by Charles de Gaulle, France’s main national screenwriter.
De Gaulle outraged his Anglo-Saxon attitude, a concept he introduced into modern political vocabulary, and in 1942 considered relocating his headquarters to Moscow. In 1944 he signed an alliance with the USSR. After he left power, the highly Atlanticist Fourth Republic co-founded NATO.
But when de Gaulle returned in 1958 and established the presidential Fifth Republic, his resentment among the Anglo-Saxons did not diminish. He cultivated the Russians again, ending in 1966 with a state visit to Moscow, the withdrawal of France from the structure of NATO’s military command and the departure of more than 60,000 American troops from French soil.
In the background was still Germany, divided and occupied, but reviving and potentially powerful. De Gaulle’s response – imitated by all his successors – was to make extravagant gestures of reconciliation and friendship. This became France’s new “special relationship” and the basis of its constant ambition to create an independent European great power.
But relations with Germany, despite efforts on both sides, have never been really warm. France’s constant attempt to wrap Germany in a close embrace through EU integration is not without suspicion and concern. So maintaining relations with Soviet Russia and then with the Russian Federation has always been part of the picture. During the break-up of Yugoslavia, the French, including the army, tended to sympathize with the Serbs, Russia’s protégés.
So how does this affect Macron’s approach to Putin today? At least after de Gaulle – and indeed after Carnot – the French rulers took a realistic view of geopolitics. For de Gaulle, nations were historical entities, regardless of their political regimes or the weaknesses of their temporary rulers. In his eyes and in the eyes of his successors, Russia has always been Russia, necessary for the security of Europe, and hence of France. The Americans cannot be trusted, and in any case they are likely to leave Europe. The British, as de Gaulle noted, will always choose the “open sea” over the continent – a view confirmed by Brexit.
Germany is big and unmanageable. Russia, Macron said, must become part of a European security structure: it cannot be allowed to become a permanent enemy and ally of China again. In addition, France, like the United States and Britain, wants to focus more on growing Asia-Pacific development. Thanks to its stubborn retention of scattered fragments of the empire (tactically renamed “overseas departments” or “overseas territories” and thus in some cases within the EU), France is the rightful owner of 11 million square kilometers of resource-rich ocean. – twice as much as Britain has. Macron said that as the continent struggles for power in the 20th century, the key to the 21st century will be the sea.
So there is much more to Macron’s long and fruitless talks with Putin than the dignity that the French public approves. Marin Le Pen on the right and Jean-Luc Melenchon on the left are even more pro-Russian.
The “unspoken assumptions” are that Russia must somehow behave within the European balance of power, with France, as in the past, being its interlocutor and, ideally, its leader. So Macron must find the minimum that would satisfy Putin and try to reach an acceptable compromise to end a devastating war. Otherwise, the Anglo-Saxons – and the despised Boris Johnson – will be ready to fight to the last Ukrainian, while the Germans will roll over in the name of gas and oil.
You may ask where this will leave France’s ambitions for the EU? But if Russia can be forced to accept an agreement – that was the goal of the Minsk agreements – Macron can continue its relentless efforts to make “sovereign Europe” a world power, with France as its leading member and global representative.
French diplomacy is playing a long game, with national interests first. That is why France – unlike Britain or America – does not want Russia to be humiliated.
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