Heinrich Brüning served as German chancellor from March 1930 to May 1932 during traumatic months of economic misery and political upheaval. His efforts to balance public finances through the termination of reparations, cuts in welfare benefits, and reduced public salaries were and remain controversial, his determination to govern through emergency decrees equally so. Characterized by critics as the grave digger of Weimar democracy but by supporters as the last credible bulwark against National Socialism, his French contemporaries also struggled to get the measure of the man and the turbulent country he struggled to govern. Here, Franziska Brüning has produced a monumental and near-comprehensive study of French perceptions of her namesake (no relationship) at a time when Paris equivocated over how far, if at all, to support its struggling neighbor. The stakes were high for, as Robert Frank argues in his succinct foreword to this book, a tough French line contributed to the collapse of the German Republic and to the rise of the Nazis, whom Paris did eventually appease.

Franziska Brüning begins with a broad historical survey of the reception of Germany in France, beginning with its idealization in the early-nineteenth century, by Madame de Staёl among others, as a land of philosophers, thinkers, and composers. This good Germany of the French imagination could even serve as a second spiritual homeland. The rise of Prussian military power and its victory over France in 1870, however, revived a thoroughly negative and more powerful counterpoint, which was intensified by the experiences of World War I. The resulting notion of two Germanies, the “good” and the “bad,” did much to complicate perceptions in interwar France and ultimately, Brüning argues, threatened to reduce policy making to a state of near paralysis. Perceptions of Heinrich Brüning, however, were equally informed by contemporary political, economic, and cultural relationships, which as often as not created opportunities for detente before, the author argues, the economic and political misery of the depression years undermined the gains of the Stresemann years and rekindled old suspicions.

The heart of her book then turns to examine French perceptions of Brüning in intimate detail, from a myriad of perspectives under six main headings, among them Brüning, the economic and financial politician; Brüning, destroyer or defender of democracy; Brüning, a nationalist; and Brüning the Catholic. The author then addresses each of these themes from various French perspectives: the world of learning, the press, parliament, and diplomatic circles, looking at perceptions of the two Brüning cabinets in turn and also conceptual issues, such as Brüning's honesty or lack of it, his independence from wider German institutional and intellectual forces, the importance of his strong Catholic principles, and so on. Encyclopedic in nature, this approach wants for little in its thoroughness, but it is only in the final, and engaging, section of the book that Franziska Brüning pulls the many disparate variables together to reach broader conclusions. Here she argues that different actors in France were thrown back on the gaggle of perceptions of Brüning and the country he led for want of any coherent, overarching strategy to engage with Germany. Sometimes instrumentalized, sometimes actually believed, these disparate perceptions were symptomatic of French cluelessness regarding the Germans and Brüning himself.

One could quibble with this interpretation, which seems a little harsh when it comes to the underlying strategies of French foreign policy making. Franziska Brüning draws on a wide range of published work, most of which, understandably, focuses on the main points of contention in Franco-German relations, such as frontier revision, reparations, and disarmament. Given the collapse of Weimar and the subsequent return to war in 1939, none of this is surprising, but hindsight can impose a pattern and emphasis on past events that contemporaries need not have shared. She observes, for example, that key actors in France did not expect Brüning ultimately to fail, still less that a Nazi takeover would follow just months later. This may have betrayed a lack of foresight, but equally convinced the French Foreign Office that they could do business with Brüning's Germany. Similarly, the author relates the tensions in Franco-German economic relations, but says much less about the success of the 1927 Franco-German Trade Treaty and of the myriad private business cartels that were meshing together the two countries' economies. And when the French Foreign Minister, Aristide Briand, proposed a European Union in 1930, the German Foreign Office, contrary to received wisdom, reacted positively, on condition that France prioritize economic over political integration. Officials at the Quai d'Orsay swiftly agreed to do so. The French and Germans subsequently consulted privately to establish common positions before plenary meetings of the League of Nations subcommittee established to examine Briand's plan. More generally, both countries collaborated to create a twin-track strategy that separated the many and important points of contention from the areas where rapprochement seemed realistic. Accord in these (primarily economic) areas would, it was hoped, render the fractious legacy of the Great War and the peace settlement less and less relevant. Seen in this context, Franziska Brüning's study emerges as all the more valuable and fascinating, for the diversity of opinion and perception she describes informed not one French strategy toward Germany, but the conscious effort to pursue two.

Because the book displays many strengths and will serve widely as a reference work, it is a shame that it lacks an index of any kind, making the task of reconstructing any individual's or institution's views more time-consuming than it might have been. The views of the veteran French politician, Raymond Poincaré, for example, are addressed in a variety of contexts, with his perception of Brüning sometimes surprisingly positive. Brüning's uncompromising adherence to Christian principles reassured Poincaré, despite the latter's well-rehearsed doubts regarding Germany's bona fides. But it would be wrong to conclude on a pettifogging note. This is a fine book that will be widely and gratefully exploited. For non-German speakers there is the added bonus of a French edition, published by the Universities of Dijon in 2010.