Jacques Pierre Bainville ([ʒak bɛ̃.vil]; 9 February 1879 – 9 February 1936) was a French historian and journalist. A geopolitical theorist, concerned by Franco-German relations, he was a leading figure in the monarchist Action française. As fascinated as he was worried by Germany which continuously grew stronger, he intensely advocated against democracy, the French Revolution, internationalism and liberalism.
A plaza is named after him at the heart of the 7th arrondissement of Paris.
Political career
Bainville is best known for his criticisms of the Treaty of Versailles in Les Conséquences Politiques de la Paix (The Political Consequences of Peace, 1920). Raymond Aron retrospectively endorsed Bainville's judgment that the "Versailles Treaty was too harsh in its mild features, too mild in its harsh aspects": provoking Germany to seek vengeance without restraining it from doing so, and won the praise of the Left Wing National Socialist Otto Strasser. Bainville argued that the treaty's debts bound German states closer to Prussia and weakened neighbors to the South and East (principally Austria-Hungary) that might be willing and able to contain it. By consolidating Germany, he warned that the treaty established an untenable situation whereby "40 million Frenchmen have as debtors 60 million Germans, whose debt cannot be liquidated for 30 years". He castigated Woodrow Wilson and David Lloyd George for what he perceived as naïve moralism that dangerously neglected geopolitical imperatives. Intended as a complement to John Maynard Keynes' critique of the treaty, it was eventually translated into German in Nazi Germany by some, alleging that France had a mission for German destruction.
