Pierre Renouvin

Who was Pierre Renouvin?

Pierre Renouvin was a French diplomatic historian. Renouvin was born in Paris and attended the Lycée-Louis-le-Grand, where he was rewarded his aggrégation in 1912. Renouvin spent the years 1912-1914 travelling in Germany and Russia. Renouvin served as an infantryman in World War I, where he was badly wounded, losing his left arm and the use of his right hand in April 1917. Renouvin married Marie-Therese Gatialda and worked as teacher between 1918-20 at the Lycée d’Orleans. Renouvin served as the war of the War History Library at the Sorbonne between 1920–22, and then worked as lecturer at the Sorbonne between 1922–33 and as a professor between 1933-64.

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, but after World War I, he turned to the study of the origins of World War I. In 1925, Renouvin published two books described as “definitive” by The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing about World War I. In the first book, Les Origines immédiates de la guerre Renouvin demolished German claims of non-responsibility for the First World War. In the second, Les Form du gouverment de guerre, Renouvin offered a comparative political history of Germany and France in the First World War, describing how France was able under the strain of war to preserve her democracy whereas in Germany what small elements of democracy that had existed in 1914 had been swept away by military dictatorship by 1916. Both books involved Renouvin in a polemical debate with the French Left, German historians and German apologists like Harry Elmer Barnes who claimed that it was France together with Russia that were the aggressors in the July Crisis of 1914. During the 1920s, it was often claimed that in the years 1912-14, there had been a strategy of Poincaré-la-guerre, whereas the French President Raymond Poincaré had supposedly in conjunction with Russia planned an aggressive war to dismember Germany. Through a close study of the documents then available in the 1920s, Renouvin was able to rebut the charges of Poincaré-la-guerre and of Germany as a victim of Franco-Russian aggression, and subsequent research since then has confirmed Renouvin’s initial conclusions. Through Renouvin's work was funded by the French government to rebut the claims of the War Guilt Section of the German Foreign Ministry, and the French leftists attacked Renouvin for being an "official" historian, Renouvin was critical of aspects of French pre-war policy, and he was the first historian to expose the French Yellow Book of 1914 for containing forgeries. Renouvin described his work in 1929 as: