Pierre Renouvin

Early life and education

He was born in Paris and attended Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where he was awarded his aggrégation in 1912. Renouvin spent 1912-1914 traveling in Germany and Russia. Renouvin married Marie-Therese Gabalda (1894-1982) and worked as teacher between 1918 and 1920 at Lycée d’Orleans.

Career

Renouvin served as the director of the War History Library at the Sorbonne between 1920 and 1922, as lecturer at the Sorbonne between 1922 and 1933 and as a professor at the Sorbonne between 1933 and 1964. He also taught at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po) from 1938 to 1970.

Military service

Renouvin served as an infantryman in World War I and was badly wounded in action in April 1917, losing his left arm and the use of his right hand.

Shows German guilt in World War I

Renouvin began his historical career specializing on the origins of the French Revolution, especially the Assembly of Notables of 1787 for which he was awarded his PhD. After World War I, he turned to the study of the origins of World War I. As a veteran whose body had been scarred by the war, Renouvin was very interested in knowing why the war had begun. In the interwar period, the question of responsibility of the war had immense political implications because the German government kept on insisting that because of the Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles was the "war guilt clause", the entire treaty rested upon Article 231, and if it could be proven that Germany was not responsible for the war, the moral basis of Versailles would be undermined. As such, the Auswärtiges Amt had a War Guilt Section, devoted solely to proving that the Reich was not responsible for the war of 1914, and funded the work of Americans like historian Harry Elmer Barnes who likewise was determined that it was the allies who were the aggressors of 1914.

In 1925, Renouvin published two books, described as “definitive” by historian David Robin Watson in The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing about World War I. In the first book, Les Origines immédiates de la guerre (28 juin-4 août 1914), Renouvin showed that Germany was responsible for the First World War, and France had not started the war. In Les Origines immédiates de la guerre, Renouvin wrote about the origins of the war:

Germany and Austria did not agree to accept any other solution other than the resort to force; they decided on their plan deliberately and after coolly considering all the possible consequences. With regard to the immediate origins of the conflict, this is the fact that dominates all the others

American historian Jay Winter and French historian Antoine Prost wrote in 2005 about Renouvin: "We have come back full circle to his position, published only seven years after the end of the conflict. One can only admire how scholarly and cautious he was, and how well his conclusions have stood the test of time". In the second book Les Formes du gouvernement de guerre, Renouvin offered a comparative political history of Germany and France in the First World War, describing how France was able under the strain of war to preserve her democracy, but in Germany, what small elements of democracy that had existed in 1914 had been swept away by military dictatorship by 1916, headed by Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff.

Forces profondes

In addition, Renouvin expanded his historical work to feature broader studies of international relations. In 1946, Renouvin published La Question d'Extrême Orient, 1840-1940 (The Question of the Far East, 1840-1940), which was followed by Histoire des relations internationales between 1953 and 1958, which covered international history from the Middle Ages to 1945. In 1964, Renouvin published, with French historian Jean-Baptiste Duroselle (1917-1994), Introduction à l'histoire des relations internationales (Introduction to the History of International Relations).

As a historian, Renouvin came to be more and more concerned with the broader social forces that influenced diplomatic history. Together with protégés Duroselle and Maurice Baumont (1892-1981), he started a new type of international history that included taking into what Renouvin called forces profondes (profound forces) like the influence of domestic politics on foreign policy. In many ways, Renouvin's work with forces profondes was the diplomatic historians' equivalent to the Annales school.

L'Armistice de Rethondes

In his 1968 book L'Armistice de Rethondes (The Armistice of Rethondes), Renouvin examined how World War I ended in November 1918. Renouvin argued that the armistice that ended the war on 11 November 1918 was a product of not only the military situation but also public opinion in the Allied nations and that the armistice predetermined many aspects of the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919, thus ensuring that US President Woodrow Wilson had less room for manoeuvre during the Paris peace conference than was often presumed. Renouvin maintained that after the failure of the Kaiserschlacht ("Emperor's Battle"), the "final offensive" that intended to win the war for Germany in the spring of 1918, the Allies had turned the tide and that from the summer of 1918, the Allies were, slowly but surely, pushing the Germans out of France.

Renouvin noted that 8 August 1918 was the "black day of the German Army", as it marked the successful beginning of the Battle of Amiens, with the Canadian Corps of the British Expeditionary Force smashing through the German lines, leading to the Hundreds Days' Offensive with the French, British Commonwealth and American forces steadily advancing through Northern France and into Belgium. By October 1918, the Ottoman Empire had surrendered, Austria-Hungary had collapsed as a state following a French-led offensive in the Balkans under the command of Marshal Louis Franchet d'Espèrey and America's enormous industrial capacity and manpower meant that Germany had no hope of victory in the long run even if it had somehow managed to stabilise the situation to its advantage in the fall of 1918.

In October 1918, American forces had broken through at Verdun, leading to the much-feared "rupture" on the Western Front through which the Allies could advance. Renouvin argued that given the direction that the war had been taken by late 1918, "Plan 1919", Marshal Ferdinand Foch's plan for an offensive in the spring of 1919 to take the Allies straight to Berlin, would certainly have succeeded if it had been launched.

In the midst of the disastrous situation for the Reich, the Kiel mutiny broke out when the sailors of the High Seas Fleet refused to set out on a "death cruise" against the British Navy. For the admirals who ordered the assault without the knowledge of the German government, it was an attempt to save their honour and that of the German Navy, with no regard as to whether they won or lost. Renouvin wrote that the mutiny forecast a social revolution which the elites feared more than they did their foreign enemies, and that as a result they had no reason to support a continuation of the war.

Works

Les formes du gouvernement de guerre, 1925.

Les Origines immédiates de la guerre (28 juin-4 août 1914), 1925.

La Crise europenne et la grande guerre, 1904-1918, 1934.

La Question d'Extrême Orient, 1840-1940, 1946.

Les Crises du XXe Siècle de 1929-1945, 1958.

Co-written with Jean-Baptiste Duroselle: Introduction à l'histoire des relations internationales, Colin: Paris 1964.