French Reaction
The Naval Pact was signed in London on June 18, 1935, without the British government consulting with France and Italy, or later, to inform them of the secret agreements which stipulated that the Germans could build in certain categories more powerful warships than any of the three Western nations then possessed. The French regarded this as treachery. They saw it as a further appeasement of Hitler, whose appetite grew on concessions. And they resented the British agreeing, for what they thought a private gain, to scrap further the peace treaty and thus add to the growing overall military power of Nazi Germany. Great Britain, as the French contended, had no legal right to absolve Germany from respecting the naval clauses of the Versailles Treaty.
Read more about this topic: Anglo-German Naval Agreement
Famous quotes containing the words french and/or reaction:
“The French are a logical people, which is one reason the English dislike them so intensely. The other is that they own France, a country which we have always judged to be much too good for them.”
—Robert Morley (b. 1908)
“The excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in the opposite direction.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)