Reconstruction in France

Contents

CHAPTEK PAGI

Introductory Note vii

I The Theater of Invasion 1

Chapter I

An order of the Minister of the Liberated Regions issued on August 12, 1919, defined the limits of the devastated area of France as including:

1. All the territory invaded and temporarily occupied in force by the enemy for a period long enough to give it over to pillage and destruction, from the first advance of the Germans in 1914 to their last offensive in 1918.

2. The regions close to the front which had to be evacuated by the civil population under the pressure of war, and in which enemy bombardment, defensive measures, and conditions due to military operations resulted in the destruction of real or personal property or in other losses of any kind.

3. The regions adjoining those just mentioned which, without having been invaded or evacuated, nevertheless suffered in a general way from the operations of the war.

Laid down on the map, the invaded area thus defined comprises all the territory of France east or north of a line which, beginning with the coast line of the departments of the Nord, the Pas-de-Calais, and the Somme, follows thence the southern boundary of the Somme, the western and southern boundaries of the department of the Oise and of the arrondissements of

Meaux, Coulommiers, and Provins in the department of Seine-et-Marne, the southern boundary of the department of the Marne and the communes of Semoine, Mailly-le-Camp, and Poivres in the department of the Aube, the southern boundary of the department of the Meuse, the southern and western boundaries of the department of Meurthe-et-Moselle, the southern and western boundaries of the arrondissements of Epinal and Remiremont in the department of the Vosges, and the southern and western boundaries of the territory of Belfort to the Swiss border.

The area included within the terms of the official definition, embracing twelve departments in whole or in part and the territory of Belfort, is considerably greater than the actual area of German occupation. To the west, the extreme limit of the German advance in 1918 extended only a short distance west of the narrow "peninsula of Armentieres" which connects the two parts of the department of the Nord, and embraced about one-fourth of the department of the Pas-de-Calais and less than half of the department of the Somme. In the first German advance, in 1914, less than half of the departments of the Oise and Seine-et- Marne was occupied, and the department of the Aube was barely entered. The southern third and the extreme northern portion of the department of the Meuse escaped German occupation, as did all but the northeastern edge of the department of Meurthe-et- Moselle and the larger part of the department of the Vosges. The departments of the Seine, Seine-et-Oise, Seine-et-Loire, Seine-Inferieure, Haute-Saone, Haute- Marne, and Doubs, in all of which the government has been called upon to evaluate war damages/ also fall outside the invaded area as ofl&cially defined.

The order of August 12 offers no explanation of this discrepancy. What it does is to set apart for the administrative purposes of reconstruction a longer and compact area comprising twelve departments in whole or in part besides the territory of Belfort, which was not only given over as a whole to military occupation, either by the Germans or by the French and the Allies, but in which also the civil life was more or less completely suspended. The larger part of the Nord, the Pas-de-Calais, the Somme, and the Oise, for example, was in general completely disorganized by the war, notwithstanding the fact that scores of communes in those departments never saw a German soldier except as a prisoner and did not suffer from German guns. If confusion is to be avoided, however, the distinction between the official invaded area and the area which is popularly spoken of as devastated myst constantly be kept in mind.^

The total area of the liberated regions as defined in the ministerial order of August 12 is upwards of 25,000 square miles, or somewhat less than one-eighth of the

' The order of August 12, 1919, was issued for the purpose of defining the territorial limits within which the law of April 17, 1919, relating to war damages, should be applied. The statement of limits in the law of April 17 is vague. A law of August 9, 1920, relating to the supply of bread for the country, defined the devastated regions as "those which, between January 1, 1915, and November 11, 1918, were occupied in a permanent or temporary way by the enemy, or which formed part of the fighting zone, or which, being situated in the immediate vicinity of the front, were evacuated under the pressure of war conditions." The Aube department is not generally regarded as forming part of the so-called liberated regions.

total area of France. The total area which at the close of the war required restoration to normal condition was 3,337,000 hectares, in English measure 8,245,- 727 acres or about 12,884 square miles. This latter area is somewhat larger than that of Holland, larger by nearly fifteen hundred square miles than that of Belgium, and a trifle greater than the combined areas of Massachusetts and Connecticut. At the date of the armistice, November 11, 1918, about one-half of this area was in a condition demanding little more than a comparatively simple clearing away of military equipment and debris; the remainder required extensive work, while for 116,640 hectares the estimated cost of restoration exceeded the value of the land.

The invasion of France in 1914-1918 differed radically in character and results from that which attended the Franco- Prussian war of 1870-1871. In 1870-1871 the German armies, entering France from the east and northeast, encountered no serious obstacle except at Metz, and moved rapidly across the country to the siege of Paris. The fighting was of short duration, there was no general evacuation of the civil population, the destruction of public and private property of various kinds was small, and there was no serious injury to the soil, to means of transport, or to industry. In 1914-1918, on the other hand, the battle front traversed practically the entire breadth of northern France from the Channel to the Swiss border, advancing and receding over larger areas as one side or the other gained or lost; a considerable part of the invaded area was for more than four years in German hands, at the same time that the remainder was the scene of military operations on an unprecedented scale by tlae French and the Allies; far the larger part of the civil population was either held within the German lines or evacuated to other parts of France; while to the inevitable losses of war was added a colossal weight of pillage and destruction deliberately aimed at the devastation of the country and the prostration of industry. Not since modern history began has Europe seen such widespread and comprehensive desolation as a result of war. The only comparable illustrations, and those on a small scale, are the ravages of the Thirty Years' war in Germany and the destruction which attended Sherman's march to the sea in the American Civil War.

Certain physiographical characteristics of the invaded departments, which determined to a considerable extent the course of the German invasion and the Allied defense, affected also the extent and character of the devastation wrought. The prompt action of the French in taking the offensive at the beginning of the war for the recovery of Alsace closed the Bourgogne gateway between the Vosges and the Jura mountains which gives access from the Rhine to the valleys of the Saone, the Meurthe, and the Moselle, at the same time that the close proximity of Switzerland rendered difficult a large German military operation in that quarter. The German advance, accordingly, at its greatest extension in 1918, penetrated only a little way beyond the eastern border of FVance and failed to reach the important cities of Luneville and Nancy. On the other hand, the physical difficulties presented by the relatively high altitude and heavy forests of the Vosges mountains impeded direct access to France at that point, and in consequence saved the forests themselves as a whole from serious injury. Only at a few points hotly contested were the trees shot to pieces as was so generally the case in the Argonne. Wherever the barrier which protected the valley of the Meuse could be penetrated, however, as at Pont-a-Mousson and thence to St. Mihiel, a succession of ruined towns and devastated country marked the progress of the conflict.

The strategic position of Verdun, at the center of the long range of hills and valleys known collectively as the Hauts-de-Meuse, marked that city and its defenses as a point about which was to be waged one of the most stubborn and bitter struggles of the war. The position of the German line, which in 1914 swept around Verdun on the east, the north, and the west like an inverted U, with the Meuse occupying the center, naturally meant the devastation of the narrow intervening area. Nowhere in France is there now to be seen a more vivid combination of rugged country dotted with the remains of forts and artillery emplacements, of soil torn by trenches, shell holes, and mine craters, and of forests shattered by shell fire and cities and villages in ruins. From whatever quarter one approaches Verdun, the ravages of war stand out on every hand.

A line drawn from Troyes, in the department of the Aube, northward through Reims to Valenciennes, marks roughly the division between the hilly wooded country of eastern France and the rolling hills and broad plains of the west. The Haute-Marne plateau west of the Vosges is connected with the broken region of the Ardennes by the rough and wooded Argonne, and both the Argonne and the Ardennes saw some of the hardest fighting of the war.

Further north the physical configuration of the country offered no obstacles to invasion from the Belgian side, and it was through this wide northern gateway that the German armies poured in the greatest numbers and the most powerful streams into the Aisne, the Somme, the Oise, and the Marne. By September, 1914, the German advance had reached Meaux, thirty miles from Paris, and extended eastward from Meaux toward Chalons-sur-Marne and the Argonne and westward toward Senlis and Beauvais. The battle of the Marne, which forced the entire German line back beyond the river, was followed by a series of operations which turned the whole region west of the Argonne and south of the Belgian frontier as far as Arras and Amiens, and thence south to Compiegne and Chateau- Thierry, into one vast battlefield, at the same time that the resistance at Verdun was being maintained.

The Marne battle was followed in 1915 by the battle of Champagne, in the region immediately west of the Argonne and north of Chalons-sur-Marne. The battle of the Somme, east of Amiens, in 1916 was followed in 1917 by the battle of the Aisne in the region north of Chateau-Thierry. In 1918 the German front, which in consequence of these various operations had been pushed back beyond the river Aisne, regained for a time a large part of what had been lost, only to be checked in its advance and pressed steadily backward again until the armistice of November brought a suspension of hostilities.

The first months of the war witnessed also the German occupation of more than half of the department of the Nord and a considerable portion of the Pas-de- Calais. The region of which Arras was the center saw the three Artois battles of 1916, and was again the scene of hard fighting the following year. The German front, which in 1915 ran south from Ypres through Armentieres and La Bassee to Arras, reached in 1918 almost to Hazebrouck, and the Armentieres peninsula remained a "red zone" throughout the war.

It is in the broad area west of the Haute-Marne, the Argonne, the Ardemies, and the Belgian border, and north of Meaux and the Marne to Armentieres, that the destruction wrought by the war is still to be seen at its greatest extent and in its most appalling dreariness. The advances and recessions of a battle line more than two hundred miles long, the thrusts and counter-thrusts of invaders and defenders, the struggles for the control of rivers, railways, and highways, the fierce fighting over strategic positions and the stubborn defense of every city or village where a stand could be made, were of themselves enough, without the added weight of a deliberate destruction, to turn large parts of the country into a desert and to leave of civilization only a memory and a name. If the war made familiar to the world the names of Armentieres, Lens, Arras, Peronne, St. Quentin, Soissons, Reims, and St. Menehould, it is also true that because these communities, like hundreds of others of lesser fame, were long in the thickest of the fighting they were all but completely ruined. Not all of the destruction, of course, was the work of the enemy, save as responsibility attaches to the enemy as the aggressor; for what one army did not overrun had often to suffer from the operations of the other, and it was as disastrous to a town or a farmhouse to dislodge an invader as it was to resist an attack.

The broken and wooded region of northeastern France, physiographically a part of the same area to which Alsace and Lorraine belong, is often strikingly picturesque. The western part of the invaded area, on the other hand, while by no means wanting in physiographical interest, lacks picturesqueness. It is a region of broad valleys only slightly elevated above the sea, separated by long rolling hills over which the plain sweeps easily in a succession of low waves. In the Nord and the Pas-de-Calais, where the hills flatten out, the broad expanses of level country bear a striking resemblance to the grain areas of the United States and western Canada. The river basin of the Seine, which includes those of the Marne, the Gise, and the Aisne, comprises more than 30,000 square miles of territory, and is the most important network of navigable rivers in France. An extensive system of canals, connecting and in some cases paralleling the rivers, gives access from the sea to practically the whole interior.

The total population of the departments included in the ministerial order of August 12, 1919, was in 1911 about 7,000,000, or more than one-seventh of the total population of France. The , estimated population in 1914 of the region actually invaded or devastated was 4,690,183, or about one-eighth of the total population of France in 1911 and three-fifths of the total population of the invaded departments. With the exception of Nancy, which had in 1911 a population of 119,949, and Reims, whose population at the same date numbered 115,178, the largest centers of population were to be found in the industrial and mining regions of the north and west, where Lille, the largest city in the invaded area, had 217,807, the neighboring cities of Roubaix and Tourcoing 122,723 and 82,644 respectively, Valenciennes 34,766, Douai 36,314, Armentieres 28,625, Lens. 31,812, Arras 20,080, and Amiens 93,207. Three large maritime cities — Calais with 72,322 inhabitants, Dunkerque with 38,891, and Boulogne-sur- Mer with 53,128 — lie outside the zone of land operations. Elsewhere the cities were small. With the exception of Reims, the only cities whose population exceeded 20,000 in 1911 were St. Quentin with 55,571, Chalons-sur-Mame with 31,367, Maubeuge with 23,- 209, Charleville with 22,654, Epernay with 21,811, and Verdun with 21,701. Of the 3,524 communes occupied .by the Germans, 95 per cent, were communities of a few hundred or one or two thousand inhabitants each. Everywhere, even in the industrial and mining centers, the population was overwhelmingly French in origin, speech^ and allegiance.

The predominant industry of the invaded departments was agriculture. Of the 3,337,000 hectares in the devastated zone, 2,164,727 hectares were under cultivation in 1914 and 406,330 hectares were in pasturage. Even in the immediate vicinity of the industrial or mining towns the arable land was put to use, and the fertile valleys of the eastern departments were everyivhere in crops or in pasturage. The coal region of the north has been likened to a great city whose quarters were separated by well-cultivated fields.

This agricultural development was a natural consequence of physiographical conditions. Throughout the plain and rolling country of the center, the north, and the west the soil is generally fertile and the climate moist and moderately warm. Most of the grains of the temperate zone — wheat, barley, rye, oats, etc. — thrive throughout the region, and northwestern France in particular was a granary which skillful and intensive cultivation had developed to the utmost. Before the war France was second only to Russia among European countries in the production of wheat, nearly one-half of the cereal acreage being devoted to that crop, while of the remaining acreage about one-half was devoted to oats. To the production of grain was also added a considerable production of hay, flax, hemp, and hops. In the Nord, the Pas-de-Calais, the Somme, the Oise, and the Aisne the production of sugar beets was an industry of prime importance, and the wines of Champagne had an established reputation. The development of market gardening, on the other hand, in spite of the presence of industrial cities and the proximity of Paris, had not attained large dimensions, and fruit growing for market was mainly confined to the northwest.

It should be remembered, however, that large scale farming is not the predominant characteristic of French agriculture. Even in the grain-growing regions of the Nord, where the wheat fields extend for miles on either hand, farms of more than fifty hectares are rare and farms of ten hectares or less are the rule. It is this system of small farms, cultivated in the great majority of cases by their owners and subject to further and repeated subdivisions under the operation of the French law of inheritance, which predominates throughout the invaded area. With such a system the production of staples in large quantities by individual proprietors is impossible, hand labor holds its own against elaborate and expensive machinery, crop areas are small even to diminutiveness, and the farm tends to become and to remain a little self-supporting unit upon which the larger part of what is produced is consumed. The variety of products is considerable, but the quantity of each product is small and comparatively little is raised primarily for sale.

It is this predominance of small farms with intensive cultivation and a varied production which explains in large part the peculiar attachment of the French peasant and small proprietor to his land, the deep sense of loss which is felt when buildings, orchards, or fields are injured even as a result of war, and the ineradicable desire to return even when everything above ground has been destroyed and the soil itself for the time being put out of use. It was less because the farm was, in any ordinary financial sense, a business or a source of profit than because it was his home, the home of his ancestors and the property which he would leave to his children, that the farmer whom the war drove out refused in most cases even to think of beginning life again elsewhere, and set himself resolutely to make good, with government aid or without it, the loss which he had sustained. There is no understanding of the problem of reconstruction in France unless one takes into account at the outset the invincible attachment of the farmer to his land.

Approximately one-eighth of the devastated area was in forests, including in this classification the woodland privately owned as well as the forests owned and cultivated by the state or by local communities. Of the latter, those of Compiegne, St. Gobain, west of Laon, and Reims, between that city and Epernay, were the most important in the south, and those of the Argonne and the Vosges in the east. The region south of Soissons, between Villers-Cotterets, Chateau- Thierry, and Epernay — between the German fronts of 1915 and 1917 to the north and the extreme limit of the German advance of 1918 to the south — is also extensively wooded. The northern and western regions, on the other hand, possess few forests of special consequence except those of the Avesnes area, in the extreme eastern portion of the department of the Nord.

The developed mineral wealth of devastated France consisted principally of coal and iron. The coal basin of the north, in the department of the Nord and the Pas-de-Calais, extends from Valenciennes westward to Denain, Douai, Lens, and Bethune. Of the various concessions under which the mines are worked that of Anzin, near Valenciennes, is the largest. About 55 per cent, of the total annual coal production of France was furnished by the invaded departments. The iron deposits are in the east. Before the loss of Lorraine, in 1871, the mines of the then department of the Moselle occupied the first place in the production of iron ore; and in spite of the territorial losses which were sustained, the present department of Meurthe-et-Moselle, representing what was left to France of the former departments of the Meurthe and the Moselle, furnished before the war more than nine-tenths of the total ore production of France, and is in fact one of the chief ore-producing regions of the world. The production of roofing slates, mainly in the Ardennes, was surpassed in value only by that of Great Britain.

In 1914 there were, in the devastated zone, 20,539 industrial establishments of all kinds. About 70 per cent, of the plants were to be found in the Nord, the Pas-de-Calais, and the Somme, 10 per cent, in the Aisne, and somewhat less than 10 per cent, in the Ardennes, the Meuse, Meurthe-et-Moselle, and the Vosges. Besides coal and iron ore, the zone is estimated to have produced before the war 94 per cent, of the total annual production in France 'of woolen goods, 90 per cent, of the linen thread, 80 per cent, of the pig iron, 70 per cent, of the sugar, and 60 per cent, of the cotton goods. It also generated 45 per cent, of the electric power.^ Included in the varied list of manufactures which had attained substantial development were hats, paper, pipes, biscuits, furniture, cement, bricks, tiles, pottery, glass, and chemicals. The Nord had also an important brewing industry.

The transport needs of the region were met by a network of railways, canals, and highways. The main lines of railway, grouped chiefly in two systems, those of the Nord and the Est companies, and radiating from Paris to the frontiers of Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany, were supplemented not only by branch lines and by numerous short lines of private companies but also by hundreds of kilometres of local narrow-gauge lines. All of the larger cities had electric-tramway systems and suburban and interurban service was

* A. Tardieu, The Truth about the Treaty, 378.

growing. The extent of the transport system may be gathered from the fact that 2,404 kilometres of railway main lines and branches, 906 kilometres of local lines, 1^036 kilometres of navigable waterways, and 52,734 kilometres of highways were in need of reconstruction or repair at the close of the war.^

The briefest survey of the departments upon which in August, 1914, the great war descended in all its frightfulness would be incomplete if it failed to take note of the wealth of historical and artistic interest which the region held. The ancient province of Champagne, united finally to the kingdom of France in 1361, was in general coextensive with the present departments of the Marne, Haute-Marne, and Aube, the eastern part of the Seine-et-Marne, and various small portions of the Meuse and the Aisne. By 1789 it had

'Numerous estimates of the injury done to the devastated departments have been published. The following data, prepared by "the head of one of the great French banks" and published is the circular of the National City Bank of New York for August^ 1920, may be compared with the figures given in this chapter. According to this authority the invaded part of France paid in WIS a revenue of 800,000,000 francs, out of a total revenue of 5,100,000,000 francs collected by the government. The same territory also ^presented 14 per cent, of the total French production of wheat, 47 per cent, of the sugar, 55 per cent, of the flax, 74 per cent, of the coal, 92 per cent, of the iron ore, 81 per cent, of the iron, 60 per cent, of the steel, 20 per cent, of the tools, machinery, etc., 80 per cent, of the woolen products, 70 per cent, of the cotton products, and 20 per cent, ef the export trade. The considerable differences, often irreconcilable, between these various estimates may perhaps be explained by the faot that the figures for the same year are not necessarily those of the same date within the year, or by the habit of making exhibits in round numbers rather than in exact figures, or by the mixing of official and unofficial estimates, or by basing the calculation at one time upon the entire area under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of the Liberated Regions and at another time upon the smaller area actually invaded. Even the official estimates, including those apparently based upon detailed enumeration, show a good many variations in detail which cannot easily be explained.

come to include also the department of the Ardennes. Conquered by the Romans, traces of whose occupation survived at Reims, Laon, and elsewhere, and Christianized in the latter half of the third century, it suffered from the invasions of the Vandals and the Huns, and upon the withdrawal of the Roman authority came under the rule of Clovis, the chief of the Franks, who embraced Christianity and was baptized at Reims in 496. Numerous partitions of the province, attended with frequent wars, followed. In 814 Louis "the Debonnaire" was crowned at Reims ; Charles the Simple was made prisoner at St. Quentin and imprisoned at Chateau-Thierry and later at Peronne, where he died in 929. Reims, one of the most prosperous cities of Roman Gaul, was also from the time of the Capetians the place at which all but two of the early kings of France were crowned. The emancipation of the communes of Champagne from feudal control began at the end of the twelfth century, the charter of Beauraenten-Argonne, granted by the archbishop of Reims, serving as a model.

The Hundred Years' war between England and France (1327-1453) was disastrous for Champagne. English troops under the Prince of Wales ravaged the country from Epernay to Vitry and Chalons-sur- Mame in 1368, and the attacks were repeated in 1370 and 1373. Meaux was sacked by the English, after an heroic defense, in 1421. The tide turned in 1429 when Jeanne d'Arc, a native of Champagne, having inspired the French to free Orleans, led Charles VII to Reims, where he was consecrated. The peace of 1453, which ended a struggle in which the English lost all the territory claimed by them in France except Calais, was followed by ninety years of much needed quiet. Then, in 1544, in the war between Francis I of France and Charles V of Spain, Vitry was burned by the Spanish forces, Epernay taken, and Chateau-Thierry pillaged. Peace was concluded the same year at Crepy, near Laon, and a new Vitry-le-FranQois was built by the king to replace the Vitry which had been destroyed. The country was again ravaged in the religious wars of the sixteenth century.

There is hardly an important city in the whole invaded area whose origin, like that of the cities of Champagne, does not lie far back in the centuries in which what ultimately became the kingdom of France was being formed, while more than one had witnessed the struggles of the Napoleonic wars or the entrance of German troops in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870- 1871. Soissons, which became in 511 the capital of the kingdom of Neustria and "the cradle of the Frankish monarchy," was bombarded by the Germans for four days in 1870 before it surrendered. Laon, an ancient Roman city and later the seat of the last Carolingian kings, was held by the English from 1410 to 1429, and blew up its powder magazine in the citadel when the Germans entered in 1870. Reims was an ecclesiastical as well as a political center, no less than four church councils, those of 1049, 1119, 1131, and 1148, having assembled there. At Verdun, another Roman city, was concluded the agreement or treaty of 843 by which Charles the Great divided his empire between his three sons, Lothaire, Louis, and Charles. In the treaty of Westphalia., in 1648, which ended the Thirty Years'

war, Austria renounced in favor of France its claim to the three ancient bishoprics of Verdun, Toul, and Metz. Verdun was bombarded by the Germans in 1870 and surrendered only with the honors of war. Metz was besieged and taken by the Germans in 1870 a few weeks after the surrender of Napoleon III at Sedan. By the peace of Luneville, in 1801, between France, Germany, and Austria, the boundary of France was extended to the Rhine, where it remained until the Franco-Prussian war gave Alsace and Lorraine, including Metz, to Germany.

Of equal interest historically are the cities of the Oise, the Somme, the Pas-de-Calais, and the Nord. Compiegne, long a favorite residence of the French kings, was also the place at which Jeanne d'Arc, in 1430, was made prisoner by the Bourgondians, who turned her over to the English. Noyon was a Roman city, later the scene of the consecration of Charles the Great in 768 and of the election of Hugh Capet in 987. The history of St. Quentin goes back to the latter part of the first century. It was occupied by the Spanish in 1557, and was the scene of an important French defeat in 1871. The latter year witnessed also the defeat of a French army at Bapaume. Lille, the ancient capital of French Flanders, was ceded to France definitely by the treaty of Utrecht, in 1713, after having been besieged and taken by Louis XIV in 1667 and retaken by the armies of Prince Eugene of Savoy and the Duke of Marlborough in 1708. Valenciennes, whose beginnings tradition ascribes to the Roman emperor Valentinian, was taken by Louis XIV in 1677, and suffered bombardment and capture by the allied British and Prussians in 1815. Amiens, a Gaulish city which Caesar reduced to subjection and later the capital of the ancient province of Picardy, was occupied at different periods by the Normans, the Spanish, the English, and the French before Henry IV of France, in 1597, incorporated it finally in his kingdom. In 1802, by the peace of Amiens, England ceased for the time being its war with revolutionary France and Bonaparte, and recognized the territorial changes that had been made.