On January 22, 2023, Berlin and Paris celebrate the 60th anniversary of their friendship treaty. The occasion for commemorations, but also to catch up with the Franco-German Council of Ministers, postponed to October. The founding text of 1963 has gone down in history and is often perceived, wrongly, as the starting date of Franco-German reconciliation.
Paris, January 22, 1963, Elysée Palace: the images are in black and white, two elderly men, Charles de Gaulle, 72, and Konrad Adenauer, 86, sign “the treaty between the Federal Republic of Germany and the French Republic on German-French Cooperation”, better known as the “Elysée Treaty”. After the official signature of the document by the two men, de Gaulle surprises his host with a warm embrace.
An agreed statement precedes the text of the treaty itself. He evokes “the reconciliation of the German people and the French people which puts an end to a centuries-old rivalry and constitutes a historic event”, “the youth who have become aware of this solidarity are called upon to play a determining role in the consolidation of friendship Franco-German”. A somewhat grandiloquent declaration for a bilateral cooperation treaty which provides for regular Franco-German consultations and covers three chapters, foreign affairs, defence, education and youth.
Upstream, the rapprochement obtained a popular anointing with the trips of each official, de Gaulle and Adenauer, to the neighboring country. The French president was enthusiastically received in Germany in 1962 where he gave speeches in German learned by heart. The joint visit of the two men to Reims brings this rapprochement to the baptismal font in the cathedral where the French kings were crowned, but also in a city which suffered from German bombardments during the First World War.
Reconciliation
This symbolism contributes to creating the myth of Franco-German reconciliation that the Élysée Treaty would come to found, forgetting the merits of the pioneers who, immediately after the war, despite the deep wounds, had launched the first exchanges with the Germany or the audacity of the founders of the European project like Maurice Schumann and Jean Monnet, to cite just two examples.
The Élysée Treaty later became a Franco-German place of memory like the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles or Verdun. It was too quickly forgotten that the 1963 text was based on foundations established under the Fourth Republic before De Gaulle returned to power.
The hug between the French president, the first of the resistance fighters during the Second World War, and the German chancellor Adenauer, who had not made a pact with the Nazis, came to enrich the Franco-German iconography. But this accolade makes us forget, despite the strong symbol, that the Elysée Treaty is also the fruit of pragmatic negotiations. The project of political union of Europe on an intergovernmental basis, launched by de Gaulle in 1960, had failed. The other countries did not want to call into question the first achievements of the European Community, created in 1957. Franco-German cooperation constitutes a ersatz for de Gaulle. The exact form of the text has also been fluctuating. Paris instead wanted a less formal protocol; Adenauer offers a formal treaty. He knows his unstable majority. Some in Bonn support strengthening the Franco-German relationship; for the Atlanticists, relations with the United States and the United Kingdom remain privileged. De Gaulle’s reluctance towards NATO and his rejection of Britain’s entry into the EEC irritated Germany. And then the departure of Adenauer from power is expected a few months later. For the Chancellor, a treaty must allow the text to be permanent.
Such a text requires ratification by Parliament. The Atlanticists impose on the Bundestag a preamble emphasizing the importance of the transatlantic relationship and their hope of seeing Great Britain soon join the European Community. De Gaulle is furious. He confided to Adenauer: Treaties are like young girls and like roses: it lasts what it lasts. Adenauer then replied with the metaphor of rosebush that will always bear buds and flowers “.
mythical symbol
The Élysée Treaty, a mythical symbol of Franco-German reconciliation, was, shortly after it was signed, a stillborn project. The cooperation turns out to be complicated, the projects diverge; if de Gaulle respected, even admired Adenauer, the current does not pass with the new team in power in Bonn. Paradoxically, it will be necessary to wait for the post-de Gaulle period, and above all the concomitant coming to power of the Helmut Schmidt/Valéry Giscard d’Estaing duo in 1974, for the Franco-German relationship, joint projects and European initiatives to finally be the agenda.
Before that, it was above all one of the three chapters of the treaty, that on education and youth, which proved to be the most fruitful. Exchanges were organized after the war, twinnings developed. Six months after the Elysée Treaty, the Franco-German Office for Youth (Ofaj) was founded. In six decades, nearly ten million young people from both countries have participated in exchanges supported by this organization, the means of which have been reassessed during the last decade. The Ofaj has also served as a model for bringing together the younger generations from countries with a conflicting common past such as between Germany and Poland or the FRG and Greece. Despite these successes, one of the ambitions displayed in the 1960s remained a failure, that of maintaining, or even developing, learning the neighbor’s language, which is declining in both countries. Mutual understanding remains modest, especially on the French side.
The courage to work together after 1945
Sixty years later, the Élysée Treaty appears, despite a difficult start, in the Franco-German pantheon. Other iconic moments have come to join him. In the 1980s, François Mitterrand’s speech to the Bundestag in support of Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s defense and security policy. A year later, in 1984, the handshake of the two men in Verdun, symbol of the Franco-German butchery of 1914-1918, went down in history. Ten years later, Bundeswehr tanks take part in the July 14 parade in Paris.
On the fortieth anniversary of the treaty, celebrated twenty years ago in Versailles where the Bismarckian Reich was founded and signed the treaty after the defeat in Berlin in 1918, January 22 becomes a Franco-German day. This symbolic moment remains central. But the pioneers on both sides of the Rhine, who had the courage to work together after 1945, should not be forgotten.
