Franco-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance

The Franco-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance was a bilateral treaty between the two countries with the aim of enveloping Nazi Germany in 1935 in order to reduce the threat from central Europe. It was pursued by Louis Barthou, the French foreign minister, but he was assassinated before negotiations were finished. His successor, Pierre Laval, was skeptical of both the desirability and the value of an alliance with the Soviet Union. However, after the declaration of German rearmament in March 1935 the French government forced the reluctant foreign minister to complete the arrangements with Moscow that Barthou had begun. The pact was concluded in Paris on May 2, 1935 and ratified by the French government in February 1936. Ratifications were exchanged in Moscow on March 27, 1936, and the pact went into effect on the same day. It was registered in League of Nations Treaty Series on April 18, 1936.

On May 2, 1935, France and the USSR concluded the pact of mutual assistance. Laval had taken the precaution of ensuring that the bilateral treaty agreement was strictly compatible with the multilateral provisions of the League of Nations Covenant and Locarno Treaties. What this meant in practice was that military assistance could be rendered by one signatory to the other only after an allegation of unprovoked aggression had been submitted to the League and only after prior approval of the other signatories of the Locarno pact (the United Kingdom, Italy and Belgium) had been attained. The effectiveness of this pact was undermined even further by the French government's insistent refusal to accept a military convention stipulating the way in which the two armies would coordinate actions in the event of war with Germany.

The pact was no longer what Louis Barthou had originally planned, but it remained to serve the purpose of acting as a hollow diplomatic threat of war on two fronts for Germany, should Germany pursue an aggressive foreign policy. Most of the Locarno powers felt that it would only act as a means of dragging them into a suicidal war with Germany for Russia's benefit. It marked a large scale shift in Soviet policy in the Seventh Congress of the Comintern from a pro-revisionist stance against the Treaty of Versailles to a more western-oriented foreign policy as championed by Maxim Litvinov. Adolf Hitler justified the remilitarization of the Rhineland by the ratification of the treaty in the French parliament, claiming that he felt threatened by the pact. Some have regarded this justification as insincere. Former World War I Liberal British Prime Minister David Lloyd George stated in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom that Hitler's actions in the wake of this pact were fully justified, and he would have been a traitor to Germany if he had not protected his country.

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