| L'Écho de Paris 20 juillet 1923 (art. page une) |
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Inter-allied debts and French claims A precedent to invoke (1823-1923) For the observer who follows, in its development, the question of inter-allied accounts, the speech delivered on June 26, in Salt Lake City, by President Harding to recommend to the debtor nations of the old world to imitate England by having their debts, gives full meaning to the arrival, announced in London, of the extremely wealthy Mr. Mellon, Secretary of the American Treasury. This trip is a further step in the search for a definitive settlement of these accounts through an agreement between the two main creditors. We know that the British Prime Minister, Sir Stanley Baldwin, since the liquidation of the English debt, the terms of which he established in Washington, has omitted no opportunity to celebrate this contract as a precedent which dominates the entire problem. France, in particular, must understand, according to him, that it must either pay its debt, as England has just done, or accept a new abandonment of its debt on Germany, in exchange for the English discharge. Two of these wars, the Anglo-German war and the German-American war, having continued on French soil, the result is for our country the right to oppose the claims of its former allies and associates, without repudiating them, of course, a counterclaim debt likely to absorb them. Indeed, when the United States, in turn, entered the struggle, in the third year of the conflict, the commercial debts contracted by England with them, since the start of hostilities, had already reached £700-800 million. From this moment, when the debts increased, no territorial counterpart was registered due to the American association, with the English assets. In France, on the contrary, this counterpart, emerging from our first ruins, grows with the credit of our British ally, and continues to round out with it until around the armistice. This is because the United States did not wage its war on the soil of England, its debtor, but in France, and that, for its part, England waged its own, to an immense extent, not in England, nor in Germany, but in France as well, that is to say in the territory of a debtor who finds herself as a creditor of her creditors. There is a fact which must be taken into great account: it is that the participation of the American flags in the great melee, alongside ours, does not constitute the entire American war. Nearly an entire year passed between the declaration of war of the United States (April 6, 1917) and the appearance of their first divisions on the line of fire. This preliminary phase, while quivering America multiplied its preparations, Germany, from the first moment, multiplied its blows. Precipitous destruction of Imperial Russia, liberation of 50 German divisions on the eastern lines, desperate rushes with this reinforcement to the west, against the Franco-English rampart (450 kilometers for British troops, 450 kilometers for French troops). This is how Germany fought its new adversary on a front from which, despite itself, it was absent. These French debts, which could be called "patrimonial", because they reflect the damage inflicted on the heritage par excellence, the land, would be set up by a parliamentary commission whose investigation would be based on the archives of our states. -majors and on the files of our disaster-stricken regions, with possible recourse to the League of Nations. Nothing would be more normal, even now, than to open such a procedure. No one, in fact, whether a people or an individual, is supposed to renounce their right. We can therefore be surprised by the affirmative tone which animates Sir Stanley Baldwin's comments on the Anglo-American settlement, as if this were an unanswerable precedent. This example cannot be used as authority against us. There is, however, a precedent in British accounting, not against us, but for us, and to which we have a fortiori the right to refer. PAUL LEFAIVRE Minister Plenipotentiary |
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