Abstract
France's Eastern policy after the First World War had two essential objectives: the possession of Syria and the preservation of its material interests. After three years of hesitation, it appeared that neither could be achieved without an agreement with the Turkish nationalists, who were insurgents that the French army had begun to fight, notably in Cilicia. The Angora Agreement of October 21, 1921 had confirmed the French reversal in their favor, but they were not fooled. The fraternization did not last and the Treaty of Lausanne only disillusioned France and brought them a loss of international prestige.
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Notes
- 1.
Franchet d'Espèrey, commander-in-chief of the Eastern forces, defeated the Bulgarians on the Macedonian front. It was the only European front of the First World War to have been broken through by the Allies. His victory opened the road to the Danube and Constantinople. As much as the defeats in Palestine against the British, it precipitated the Ottoman request for an armistice.
- 2.
“We probably did not have a clear idea of what we were going to do in the Levant when we claimed our place there in 1918-1919. But we had the feeling of a great past and a great living influence to defend and we could not admit to being excluded from a domain where we had for centuries a predominant situation by the very effect of a victory which had demanded much more sacrifices from us than from any of our allies and of which we were then fully aware” (Robert de Caix, “Les conditions politiques du traité franco-syrien et l'affaire d'Alexandrette, Politique étrangère, 2-1, 1937, p.68).
- 3.
The French historian Henry Leurens points out that the British made sure that the agreement was named “Sykes-Picot” rather than “Cambon-Grey” or “Grey-Cambon”, in order to give it less importance…
- 4.
The Société Française d'Héraclée, an Ottoman joint stock company with a capital of 10,000,000 Frs, was founded in 1896 to “build and operate the port of Zonguldak and the coal mines of the basin known as Héraclée” (French name for the nearby town of Ereğli). The company was modified in 1909 and liquidated in 1937, after the buyout agreement signed with the Turkish government on November 28, 1936.
- 5.
Evacuated by the Ottoman Army on November 15, 1918, Mosul had been immediately occupied by the troops of General Marshall, commander of the British Army in Mesopotamia. He did not tolerate any French agent, not even a consul.
- 6.
Clause VII: “The Allies to have the right to occupy any strategic points in the event of any situation arising which threatens the security of the Allies.”
- 7.
Paul de Rémuzat, alias Paul du Véou, an eyewitness of the conquest and then the withdrawal of Cilicia, is a passionate and obstinate detractor of the Middle-Eastern policy of France.
- 8.
Shortly after the Allies entered Beirut, the Legion d'Orient was split into the Syrian Legion and the Armenian Legion.
- 9.
“Un monstre de souplesse”: The expression appears in a 1911 public letter from Maurice Barrès, influential French writer and politician.
- 10.
Préface to the book by Pierre Redan, La Cilicie et le problème ottoman, 1921.
- 11.
The ethnic data is highly contradictory and biased by all parties involved.
- 12.
Armenia has no clearly defined territorial base. Its original territory was located in the mountainous massif that stretches from the Upper Euphrates to the Caspian Sea. Cilicia has sometimes been called “Little Armenia”, because short-lived Armenian kingdoms were established there in the twelfth century, but they did not prosper. The Catholicossat of Sis, an autocephalous jurisdiction of the Armenian Apostolic Church, remains from this past.
- 13.
Later, in memory of their roles in the resistance to the French occupier Marach will be renamed Kahramanmaraş (“Maras the heroic”), Aintab will become Gaziantep (“Antep the victorious”) and Urfa will get the adjective Şanlı (“glorious”) added to its name becoming Şanlıurfa.
- 14.
In Upper Silesia, where German and Polish populations clashed, in 1920, French troops participated in an international interposition force.
- 15.
The journalist Berthe George-Gaulis is very representative of the Anglophobe and Turcophile current within the French right in the early 1920s. In addition to her numerous articles, see her books: Le nationalisme turc, and Angora. Constantinople. London. Moustafa Kémal et la politique anglaise en Orient. In the same vein: Pierre Loti, La mort de notre chère France en Orient.
- 16.
During the First World War, in the context of quasi-civil war in Greece, King Constantine was forced into exile in Switzerland. Brother-in-law of Kaiser Wilhelm II, he was incriminated of having ties with Germany. Prince Alexander, his youngest son, replaced him on the throne and allowed Prime Minister Venizelos to pursue a policy favorable to the interests of France and Great Britain. On October 25, 1920, the accidental death of Alexander, had allowed the unexpected return to power of his father.
- 17.
Ahmet Tevfik Pasha (Ahmet Tevfik Okday, after the law on family names of 1934), having been Ambassador in London, was known in Paris as an Anglophile.
- 18.
As a journalist, Henry Franklin-Bouillon discovered Turkey during the short Greek-Ottoman war of 1897, known as the “Thirty Days’ War”. Afterwards, he became involved in politics and was a radical-socialist deputy in 1910. He volunteered during the First World War and briefly became Minister of State in 1917.
- 19.
Before that, more or less unofficial contacts had taken place. As early as 1921, François Georges-Picot (1870-1951) had been sent to Sivas to speak with Mustafa Kemal; but the discussions had not been successful.
- 20.
At the request of the French ambassador of the time, Ernest Constant, in November 1901, to force Sultan Abdülhamid II to grant the claims of two French creditors, French warships carried out a “naval demonstration” in front of Metelin (Mytilene).
- 21.
In May 1922, Louis Mougin – who had already visited Turkey several times and knew Mustafa Kemal, with whom he sympathized – was appointed representative in Angora of the High Commissioner in Syria and Lebanon. In principle, he was in charge of settling border and customs issues. In reality, for nearly two years, he acted as an intelligence agent and a sort of unofficial representative of France to the Kemalist government.
- 22.
Camille Barrère (1851-1940), ambassador in Rome and head of the delegation did not get along with Maurice Bompard (1854-1934), French Ambassador in Constantinople from 1909 to 1914, who was part of the delegation in Lausanne. Finally, in February 1923, Paris entrusted the task of leading the delegation to General Maurice Pellé (1863-1924), High Commissioner of the French Republic in the East with the rank of ambassador. It was too late for this most competent officer to straighten out the situation.
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Monnier, F. (2022). France and Turkey (1918–1939): Disillusion and Disappointment. In: Denizeau, A., Örmeci, O. (eds) Turkish-French Relations. Contributions to International Relations. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07988-7_2
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