[3] In the second book Les Formes du gouvernement 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, but in Germany, what small elements of democracy that had existed in 1914 had been swept away by military dictatorship by 1916, headed by Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff.
[4] Renouvin described his work in 1929 as: Tens of thousands of diplomatic documents to read, the testimony of hundreds of thousands of witnesses to be sought out and criticized, a maze of controversy and debate to be traversed in quest of some occasional revelation of importance-this is the task of the historian who undertakes to attack as a whole the great problem of the origins of the World War[4]During the 1920s, one of the most popular historians on the subject of the July Crisis was the American Barnes, who was closely associated with and funded by the Centre for the Study of the Causes of the War in Berlin headed by the prominent völkisch activist Major Alfred von Wegerer, a pseudohistorical research institute secretly funded by the German government, who had emerged as the world's leading advocate of the thesis that First World War was indeed Poincaré-la-guerre.
After publishing his book The Genesis of the World War in 1926, Barnes was invited by the former German Emperor Wilhelm II to visit him in his Dutch exile to thank him personally.
An awestruck Barnes wrote back to describe his meeting with the former Kaiser: "His Imperial Majesty was happy to know that I did not blame him for starting the war in 1914....
He held that the villains of 1914 were the International Jews and Free Masons, who, he alleged, desired to destroy national states and the Christian religion".
[8] Renouvin noted that 8 August 1918 was the "black day of the German Army", as it marked the successful beginning of the Battle of Amiens, with the Canadian Corps of the British Expeditionary Force smashing through the German lines, leading to the Hundreds Days' Offensive with the French, British Commonwealth and American forces steadily advancing through Northern France and into Belgium.
By October 1918, the Ottoman Empire had surrendered, Austria-Hungary had collapsed as a state following a French-led offensive in the Balkans under the command of Marshal Louis Franchet d'Espèrey and America's enormous industrial capacity and manpower meant that Germany had no hope of victory in the long run even if it had somehow managed to stabilise the situation to its advantage in the fall of 1918.
[8] In the midst of the disastrous situation for the Reich, the Kiel mutiny broke out when the sailors of the High Seas Fleet refused to set out on a "death cruise" against the British Navy.
[9] Renouvin wrote that the mutiny forecast a social revolution which the elites feared more than they did their foreign enemies, and that as a result they had no reason to support a continuation of the war.
Renouvin wrote that "Wilson did not know Europe" by ignoring the wishes of the Allies and American public opinion, which did not want any halfway measures that might allow Germany to fight again.
[8] Renouvin argued that Wilson had no masterplan for the peace, improvised his diplomacy in response to events and vastly overrated his personal powers of persuasion when it came to dealing with both friends and foes.
[8] To resolve the dilemma, Renouvin wrote that Wilson had agreed to the Anglo-French demand for a harsh armistice but at the same time promised the Germans that the Fourteen Points, a set of vague and idealistic war aims that he had introduced earlier in 1918, would be the basis of peace.
British leaders were worried that the November Revolution, which had toppled the German monarchy, might be the beginning of a broader revolutionary that would sweep over and bring communism to all over Europe.
Once the fighting stopped on 11 November 1918, the pressure of public opinion, which did not want to see the war resumed, meant that the Allied leaders had to make a peace that the Germans would not reject out of hand.
[8] Renouvin wrote of all the contradictions of the armistice, which created facts on the ground that were difficult to change and how the very differing interests of the powers became the basis of the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919.