Journal de Genève
- The Prince de Ligne
- The Roman "diatribe"
- The great German banks and their policy
This Geneva front page mixed literary portraiture, classical scholarship and economic reporting. Edouard Chapuisat's column on the Prince de Ligne presented the soldier-prince as an advocate of Anglo-French reconciliation, of disarmament and of a single union of nations kept by a police force rather than an army, and cited his biographer in calling him a godfather of the League of Nations. A column signed J. Ds. introduced the diatribe, the popular and practical moralizing philosophy that ran from Antisthenes to Bion. A correspondent's report explained how Germany's big banks came through the mark stabilization crisis under the Reichsbank's credit restrictions, while industry, short of working capital and shut out of the domestic market, turned to foreign lenders.
Translation
The Prince de Ligne
He called for an end to the prejudices surrounding "hereditary enemies" and proposed, for example, reconciling the interests of England and France. He even advocated grouping all nations into a single one, "with no army other than a police force"; this soldier aimed at disarmament and reflected on the psychology of the vanquished, reflections which, according to his biographer, allow us to see in him one of the godfathers of the League of Nations.
The Roman "diatribe"
Alongside the great philosophical systems, whose names and general tendencies are known to everyone, there existed in Greece, from the 4th century B.C. onward, a current of philosophy of an essentially popular and practical character: the diatribe. This "popular moralizing literature" begins with Antisthenes, the disciple of Socrates and spiritual father of "Cynicism," and its chief representative appears to have been Bion, who lived in the 3rd century.
The great German banks and their policy
The great establishments of German high finance have all withstood the shocks that shook even the most powerful industrial trusts during the crisis brought about by the stabilization of the mark. They benefited from the wise financial policy of which the Reichsbank set the example at that time, and which it advocated with a view to building up reserves intended to consolidate the monetary system, by restricting the loans hitherto granted by the big banks. This measure produced the expected effect. But on the other hand, it had a second effect, which threatened in the long run to neutralize the first. It will be recalled in this connection that German industry found itself without working capital after the conversion of the paper mark into the gold mark. And since the domestic financial market was closed to it as a result of the restrictive policy put into practice by the Reichsbank and the big banking establishments, and also because German capitalists, having grown cautious, preferred the fixed and safe interest of bonds to the variable and uncertain returns of the shares issued by industrial enterprises, these enterprises sought abroad the funds they needed.
Context
Marthe Oulié, the biographer behind the League of Nations claim
Chapuisat does not make the League of Nations comparison himself; he attributes it to Ligne's "biographe", a feminine noun in French. Elsewhere in the column Chapuisat names her as Mlle Marthe Oulié, a French archaeologist and writer born in 1901, who in 1926 wrote her thesis on Le Cosmopolitisme du prince de Ligne, 1735–1814 and received a doctorate in letters from the Sorbonne. A study organized around cosmopolitanism matches the column's emphasis on Ligne's ideas of Anglo-French reconciliation, disarmament and a union of nations. Oulié was an unusual scholar of an eighteenth-century field marshal. She had graduated from the École du Louvre in archaeology, and in 1925 she had sailed the Mediterranean from Marseille to Athens in an engineless boat with an all-female crew to take part in excavations in Crete.
The Dawes Plan, the gold mark and the reorganized Reichsbank
The correspondent's account of the post-stabilization credit squeeze belongs to the period shaped by the Dawes Plan of 1924. The plan combined reform measures for the German economy, including new taxes and the introduction of the gold standard to stabilize currency values, with a reorganization and modernization of the Reichsbank carried out with British and American assistance. It also opened the way for large loans to Germany: the first, of 800 million marks, was directed at restoring production, and half of it was provided by American bankers. The article explains the big banks' lending restrictions as Reichsbank policy aimed at building reserves to consolidate the currency, which is consistent with the stabilization goals of the Dawes reforms. The industrial firms the correspondent saw turning abroad for funds were acting after the plan had already opened a channel for American capital into Germany.
Foreign borrowing 1924–1929 and the Reichsbank's later resistance
In November 1926 the correspondent was observing an early stage of a much larger movement. Later research found that between 1924 and 1929 the Weimar Republic was a massive net importer of foreign capital, and that the influx fuelled a domestic boom and a large trade deficit. The economic historian Albrecht Ritschl argued in a study reviewed by Adam Tooze in 2004 that the Dawes regime's transfer-protection provisions gave Germany strong incentives to keep borrowing abroad. The Reichsbank did not share that enthusiasm for long: from 1927 its president Hjalmar Schacht did all he could to discourage the inflow of American funds. Between 1928 and 1929 large-scale private lending dried up, and the common judgment of historians is that the German economy had become too reliant on foreign money, capital and trade. The article's worry that the credit restriction's second effect might eventually neutralize the first was the correspondent's own 1926 assessment; the consequences of dependence on foreign capital became clear only when the lending stopped several years later.
Original
Le prince de Ligne
Il demandait la disparition des préjugés concernant les «ennemis de race» et proposait, par exemple, la conciliation des intérêts de l'Angleterre et de la France. Il préconisa même le groupement de toutes les nations en une seule, «sans autre armée qu'une police»; ce soldat visait au désarmement et fit des réflexions sur la psychologie des vaincus, lesquelles, selon sa biographe, permettent de voir en lui un des parrains de la Société des nations.
La ,,diatribe* romaine
A côté des grands systèmes philosophiques, dont les noms et les tendances générales sont connus de chacun, il y eut en Grèce, depuis le IVe siècle avant J. - C., un courant de philosophie de caractère essentiellement populaire et pratique, la diatribe. Cette «littérature moralisante populaire» commence avec Antisthène, le disciple de Socrate et le père spirituel du «cynisme», et le principal représentant en paraît avoir été Bion, qui vécut au IIIe siècle.
Les grandes banques allemandes et leur politique
Les grands établissements de la haute finance allemande ont tous résisté aux secousses qui ont ébranlé même les plus puissants trusts de l'industrie pendant la crise produite par la stabilisation du mark. Ils ont bénéficié de la sage politique financière dont la Reichsbank donna l'exemple à cette époque et qu'elle préconisa en vue de former des réserves destinées à consolider le système monétaire, en restreignant les prêts consentis jusque-là par les grandes banques. Cette mesure produisit l'effet attendu. Mais d'autre part, elle en eut un second qui menaçait à la longue de neutraliser le premier. On se rappelle, à ce propos, que l'industrie allemande se trouva sans fonds de roulement après la conversion du mark-papier en mark-or Et comme le marché financier intérieur lui était fermé par suite de la politique restrictive mise en pratique par la Reichsbank et les grands établissements bancaires, - par suite aussi du fait que les capitalistes allemands, devenus prudents, préféraient les intérêts fixes. et sûrs des obligations à ceux, variables et incertains, des actions émises par les entreprises industrielles, celles-ci demandèrent à l'étranger les fonds dont elles avaient besoin.