Keiger on the Fischer Controversy (2013)

Of all the great powers of 1914, it might have been thought that France would be most interested by the Fischer controversy. First, because in the ebb and flow of revisionist and counter-revisionist interpretations of the causes of the First World War and war guilt since the 1920s, France still retained target status as the alter native culprit, at least in some quarters in the early 1960s.1 That Fischer had  insisted in Griff nach der Weltmacht in 1961 that Germany willed a Balkan war and risked a general European one potentially relieved France of some blame; a cause for some interest in France, at least amongst historians. J.F.V. Keiger, The Fischer Controversy, the War Origins Debate and France: A Non-History. Source: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 48, No. 2, Special Issue: The Fischer Controversy after 50 Years (APRIL 2013), pp. 363-375

…the early years of the Fifth Republic were marked by ever-closer formal relations between Paris and Berlin, notably in the youth and educational arenas, with President Charles de Gaulle exhorting the two states to be brothers. This culminated in the Franco-German Friendship Treaty of 22 January 1963. Fischer’s interpretation had the potential to trouble that harmony and revive old French fears about Germany by its suggestion of continuity in German history.J.F.V. Keiger, The Fischer Controversy, the War Origins Debate and France: A Non-History. Source: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 48, No. 2, Special Issue: The Fischer Controversy after 50 Years (APRIL 2013), pp. 363-375

Significantly, it was Renouvin who had represented France at the Franco German historians’ meeting in Mainz in October 1951, which had been assembled to make recommendations about how school textbooks in both countries could eliminate nationalistic interpretations of the outbreak of the First World War. Renouvin’s counterpart at that meeting was Professor Gerhard Ritter ( 1888 — 1967) of Freiburg University, doyen of German historians, a future fierce and formidable opponent of Fischer’s arguments on methodological and factual grounds. Even though both national delegations stuck to their interwar positions about responsibility a compromise was reached. That compromise, as mentioned above, was one of no fault on either side, even if the German delegation gave ground by admitting that there was more of a predisposition to risk war in Germany than France, because of the greater importance of the army in German society. Fischer’s thesis starkly contradicted the 1951 Franco-German Commission’s report which stated unambiguously: ‘German policy in 1914 did not aim to provoke a European war.’11 One wonders whether Renouvin’s severe position on Fischer’s work may in some part also be due to his working relationship with Gerhard Ritter and to Fischer’s overturning of Ritter and Renouvin’s ‘official’ work and hard-won compromise on the Franco-German committee 10 years earlier. J.F.V. Keiger, The Fischer Controversy, the War Origins Debate and France: A Non-History. Source: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 48, No. 2, Special Issue: The Fischer Controversy after 50 Years (APRIL 2013), pp. 363-375