Pierre Renouvin

Pierre Renouvin (January 9, 1893 – December 7, 1974) was a French historian of international relations. Renouvin was born in Paris and attended Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where he was rewarded his aggrégation in 1912. Renouvin spent 1912-1914 traveling in Germany and Russia. Renouvin served as an infantryman in World War I, and he was badly wounded in action in April 1917 by losing his left arm and the use of his right hand. Renouvin married Marie-Therese Gabalda (1894-1982) and worked as teacher between 1918 and 1920 at Lycée d’Orleans. 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.

Renouvin began his historical career specializing on the origins of the French Revolution, especially the Assembly of Notables of 1787 for which he was rewarded 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 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 the 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:

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