1919 Парис буюу дэлхийг өөрчилсан 6 сар 1-р хэсэг

comfortably under Prussian rule. But were they ready to throw themselves into the arms of France? The mayor of the great Rhine city of Cologne, a cautious and devious politician, spoke for the moderates. Konrad Adenauer toyed with separatism but gave it up as a lost cause by the spring.376 The diehard separatists remained a small minority.

Clemenceau chose not to know what his military was up to.

Nor did he directly forbid it from intriguing with the separatists. He himself did not care so much how the Rhineland was managed, as long as it did not become, yet again, a platform for attacks on France. He wanted the Allied occupation to continue; indeed, he wanted it extended to the eastern side of the Rhine to protect the bridgeheads. If he could get this guarantee for France’s security, he was prepared to back down on other French demands, such as reparations. He urged his allies to keep the peace terms together as a package. As he told Balfour in February, he did not want the disarmament terms, even though nearly ready, to be given to the Germans because they would feel that they had nothing left to bargain with and so be difficult on everything else.377 Clemenceau had to move carefully on the Rhineland: his critics at home were watching him closely. From the Elysée Palace, Poincaré warned: “The enemy is picking herself up and if we do not remain united and firm, everything is to be feared.” Poincaré’s view that France should have direct control of the Rhineland had much support in France. While the government had been careful during the war, for propaganda reasons, not to talk publicly about annexing parts of Germany, private French citizens had set up committees and rushed into print with their aspirations (without the censors making any effort to stop them). The river had always been the boundary between Western civilization and something darker, more primitive. France had civilized the Rhineland, they wrote. Charlemagne’s capital had been there; Louis XIV had conquered it; and French revolutionary armies had conquered it again. (The much longer periods when the Rhineland was ruled by German-speaking princes were skipped over hastily.) The people of the Rhine were really French in their genes and their hearts. Their love of good wine, their joie de vivre, their Catholicism (as even