From Pragmatist to Dove: Freiburg-im-Breisgau, 1923

Abstract

In 1922 the activism of the Democratic International was put on a European footing after its foundation in Paris in December 1921. These civic contacts between Catholics, democrats and pacifists developed against the strained background of the reparations disputes between the victorious powers and Germany and Austria. This troubled political context and atmosphere of latent conflict was a continuation of wartime enmity. Such political and cultural obstacles were clear to Sangnier from his visit to Germany in May 1922 and his two visits to impecunious and hungry Austria in 1922, especially his second visit, in September, for the Second International Democratic Congress, which had convened in Vienna for a week. That had also been the juncture at which the annual gatherings were formally rebranded as the International Democratic Peace Congresses, merely making official the focus on peace that had been present from the moment of their inception. More generally, the issue of whether Germany could and should pay France war-related compensation, and in what way it should be paid, was a divisive question, akin to a fetid wound on European diplomacy in 1922–3; it infected both countries with anxiety, recrimination and fear for the future. In 1923 strain gave way to full frontal confrontation between France and Germany over the Ruhr invasion begun by France in January 1923.