Reconsidera Tions

THE SPIRIT OF LOCARNO: ILLUSIONS OF PACTOMANIA

FOR five years between 1925 and 1929, a certain portion of mankind, like those parched travelers in the desert who think they have glimpsed the oasis which will save them, believed the gate to lasting peace was at hand. This, as we now know, was only a mirage. But such a mirage had never before existed. People had never believed so fervently in the blessings of peace, or hoped so passionately that peace would be perpetual. Optimism rose to new heights. "Away with cannon and machineguns: instead, conciliation, arbitration, and peace!" At the meeting of the League of Nations on September 10, 1926, when Germany, recently defeated, was received as a member, the French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand touched a new intensity of emotion with these celebrated words.

We have not yet reached the fiftieth anniversary of that ephemeral period of hope. The last of its principal actors, the French statesman Joseph Paul- Boncour died in March 1972 at the age of 99 years; but the period might well belong to another century, or another planet. International historiography has long since taken possession of the subject. The release of the German, British and American archives, the approaching release of the French and the Italian, and the release of the archives of the League of Nations (which we owe in particular to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace), in addition to hundreds of memoirs and personal accounts, offer an inexhaustible source of material which constellations of young historians are currently attacking. However, the essential outline of the whole is clear. The reader will, I hope, allow me to aim at a general view of the period, pointing out its essential characteristics: noble illusions and grave errors.

II