Robert Zaretsky teaches on the College of Houstonand Girls’s Institute of Houston. His newest ebook is “Victories By no means Final: Studying and Caregiving in a Time of Plague.”

Little lower than a yr in the past, French President Emmanuel Macron flew to Moscow to fulfill along with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. He had requested the assembly, decided to dissuade Putin — who had massed troops on Russia’s borders with Ukraine — from invading its neighbor. It was a essential second with international implications.

Sadly, till Macron publishes his memoirs or Putin testifies at a conflict crimes tribunal, the general public won’t ever know the small print of those marathon conversations, held at reverse ends of a desk longer than the barrel of a Russian howitzer. However we do know that Putin spent hours, in line with one supply, “rewriting historical past from 1997 on.”

Had Macron taken Putin additional into the previous, nevertheless — the French previous, to be precise — he might need opened the Russian chief’s eyes to the potential penalties of launching an invasion of Ukraine. In truth, this week marks the centenary of the French invasion and tried occupation of the Ruhr — an occasion with cataclysmic penalties that uncannily resembles Russia’s invasion and tried occupation of Ukraine.

On January 11, 1923, one cavalry and two infantry divisions from France superior into Germany’s Ruhr valley and, with out firing a single shot, occupied the cities of Essen and Coblenz. Additionally accompanied by Belgian forces, this French invasion had lengthy been anticipated. Led by Raymond Poincaré, for months the French authorities had sought — with out success — the help of the USA and the UK to power Germany to satisfy the punishing reparations agreed upon within the Treaty of Versailles.

But, this was way more than the restricted navy operation that Poincaré portrayed it as.

Partly, Poincaré believed that his navy occupation would power the seemingly recalcitrant Germany into supplying the required coal and — extra importantly — coke shipments to French industries. However, newly out there archival paperwork reveal that his authorities additionally had ambitions that prolonged far past the clauses of the Treaty of Versailles. And by late 1922, in search of to use the separatist claims of Rhenish nationalists, officers from the Ministry of International Affairs hatched a plot to create a number of autonomous states within the Ruhr, cementing French affect alongside the Rhine.

Nevertheless, because of Poincaré’s ambivalence, in addition to a shambolic coup try in Aachen by Rhenish nationalists, the plan was a lifeless letter, and the occupation turned from a cakewalk right into a quagmire.

Surprisingly, Germany didn’t reply militarily however acts of passive resistance, at first scattered and spontaneous, shortly turned the the order of the day, and miners stopped mining, rail employees stopped working and native directors stopped administering. Inevitably, this public passivity gave technique to underground exercise as rail strains had been sabotaged, authorities information disappeared and employees went on strike.

As such, somewhat than reinforcing France’s safety and lengthening its affect, the occupation had the alternative impact, growing the fragility of its jap border and blackening its status. It hardly helped issues that over 100 German civilians had been killed through the unrest. And by Could 1924, when Poincaré’s authorities was voted out of workplace, his successor Édouard Herriot determined to chop France’s losses and concede the Ruhr’s territorial integrity.

As historian Walter McDougall concluded, “The French had chosen battle, however the scale and nature — even the goals — of the battle that they had chosen had been hidden from them.”

Amongst these hidden penalties that subsequently turned all too clear had been the eventual collapse of the German Papiermark and the arrival of hyperinflation in Germany. No much less necessary, France’s ham-handed effort to “disorganize” Germany — the final hurrah of French revanchism — succeeded all too effectively, including kerosene to the fires of German ethnonationalism. And by the top of the yr, Hitler’s Nationwide Socialist Occasion had grown from a fringe motion to an area energy in Bavaria, whereas terrorist organizations turned more and more lively throughout the nation.

Moreover, one remaining consequence — which brings us again to Russia’s tried occupation of Ukraine in the present day — was that France’s failed try spelled the top of its hopes, or illusions, to stay la grande nation. What started as an effort to disguise its decline ended up diminishing it even additional.

There are, in fact, apparent however important variations between these two occupations. Not like up to date Russia, French authorities on the time didn’t search to annex or soak up the territory at first, and — aside from the hassle to quell the botched coup — it by no means employed arms to keep up occupation. Additionally, not like Russia in the present day, France was pushed by geopolitical concerns, not ideological and racial ones.

But, the parallels are telling.

Neither France on the time nor Russia in the present day anticipated critical resistance to their respective invasions nor international condemnation. In truth, they each anticipated worldwide acquiescence on the very least — if not worldwide recognition. And simply as there have been fringe Russian separatist teams lively within the Donbas lengthy earlier than the invasion, so too did Rhenish separatist actions — each Catholic and conservative — agitate within the area lengthy earlier than the arrival of French troops.

Ultimately, France’s revanchist spirit, born in 1871 and left unhappy after World Battle I, died within the streets and mines of the Rhineland in 1923. And because it didn’t “make Europe,” France satirically turned the means for galvanizing German nationalism. Equally, as Putin’s Russia now discovers it lacks the means to “make jap Europe” a full century later, it has however succeeded in forging a brand new nationalism amongst Ukrainians.

Ought to Macron ever return to Putin’s sublimely ridiculous desk, he would possibly think about sharing this lesson along with his host sitting on the reverse finish.