Stresa Front

• 1. Introduction

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  The Stresa Front was signed on the 14th of April 1935, in the Italian lakeside town of Stresa, on the banks of Lake Maggiore. French Prime Minister Pierre-Étienne Flandin, accompanied by Pierre Laval, sat with British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini. Their formal document, called the Final Declaration of the Stresa Conference, had two aims. The first was to reaffirm the Locarno Treaties. The second was to declare that Austrian independence 'would continue to inspire their common policy.'

  Germany had moved first. In March 1935, Berlin announced plans to build an air force, raise its army to 36 divisions of 500,000 men, and reintroduce conscription. All three announcements violated the Treaty of Versailles. Versailles had capped German ground forces at 100,000 men, forbidden conscription, and prohibited a German air force entirely. The signatories at Stresa also pledged to resist any future German effort to rewrite that treaty. The practical meaning was clear: France, Britain, and Italy would stand together against Nazi expansion.

  The Front would not survive the year.

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• 2. The Architect

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  Sir Robert Vansittart, of the British diplomatic corps, was the driving force behind the Stresa Conference. He arranged the four-day meeting, starting on the 11th of April 1935, and saw Italy as the indispensable partner. Vansittart opposed appeasement and believed keeping Italy aligned with Britain and France was essential, even if that meant conceding Italian ambitions elsewhere.

  The July Putsch of 1934 formed the core of Vansittart's argument for Italy's strategic value. During that attempted Nazi seizure of Austria, Mussolini had sent four divisions to the Italian-Austrian border to block the coup. With Italy as an ally, Germany would be forced to split its forces. Its lines along the French and Belgian borders would be weakened by the need to guard the south. Italy had also signaled its orientation in 1933, when it signed the Italo-Soviet Pact, an agreement directed against Germany.

  British Foreign Secretary Sir John Simon had met with German officials in Berlin just days before the Stresa Conference, alarming both Italy and France. They worried Britain might be seeking a private accommodation with the Nazis. Vansittart spent considerable effort calming those concerns, sharing diplomatic intelligence gathered during Simon's Berlin visit. Italy's ambitions in Abyssinia would be the question that his careful diplomacy had not resolved.

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• 3. The Silence Over Abyssinia

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  Italy had asked Britain to bring an expert on Abyssinia to the Stresa Conference, and Britain complied. What happened with that expertise is where the historical accounts diverge. The official conference records contain no mention of Abyssinia. Anecdotal reports, which may have originated with Mussolini himself, suggest he tried to restrict the Front's scope to Europe. That restriction would have left him free to act in Africa.

  British officials appear to have reached the opposite conclusion. They believed it had been made clear that Abyssinia was off limits for Italian expansion. The two sides had not communicated with enough precision, and neither pressed for a definitive answer. Italy came away from Stresa believing it had freedom to act in Ethiopia. Britain came away believing no such freedom had been granted. The gap between the two parties' understandings went unexamined.

  In 1895, Italian forces suffered a humiliating defeat in the First Italo-Ethiopian War, a loss that Mussolini had never allowed his country to forget. He saw Abyssinia as unfinished imperial business. Events in June 1935 would change his calculation about when to act.

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• 4. The Naval Breach

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  Britain signed the Anglo-German Naval Agreement in June 1935, just two months after the Stresa Conference. The agreement permitted Germany to expand the size of its navy. Mussolini learned about it after the fact. He was enraged.

  Mussolini's anger had a strategic root. He had restrained himself on Abyssinia because France and Britain were partners he could not afford to alienate. Ethiopia bordered French Somaliland and British Somaliland, making any move there a diplomatic minefield. He had played the careful partner. Britain's unilateral deal with Germany struck him as proof that the alliance meant nothing to London. He concluded that the Naval Agreement violated the Stresa Front itself, and decided there was no longer any reason to delay.

  Italy's move would come in October 1935, and with it, the final accounting for what the three partners had built at Stresa.

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• 5. Fiasco

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  Italy's invasion of Abyssinia in October 1935 ended the Stresa Front. Mussolini moved quickly to reshape what he saw as a new European alignment. On the 6th of January 1936, Mussolini told German Ambassador Ulrich von Hassell he would not oppose Germany absorbing Austria as a satellite state. He added that Austrian independence had to be nominally preserved. On the 22nd of February 1936, Mussolini agreed to Hitler's remilitarization of the Rhineland. He told von Hassell that Italy would not honor the Locarno Treaty if that step proceeded.

  Vansittart called the Stresa conference a British 'fiasco' and left the most damning summary on record. 'With this fiasco we lost Abyssinia, we lost Austria, we created the Axis, and we made the coming war with Germany inevitable.' The Front he had built to prevent that outcome had, in trying to contain Germany, left Britain and France appeasing Italy instead. The Axis that Vansittart said he and his partners had created would define the balance of European power for the decade that followed.

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