500.A12/53½
Memorandum of a Conversation Between the Secretary of State and the French Ambassador (Daeschner), March 26, 1925
The French Ambassador called and said he was not requested to come by his Government but he came privately on his own account. He, however, read to me a message, apparently from his Government, which stated in substance that France considered security, disarmament and arbitration as inseparable, that in spite of England’s attitude on the Geneva Protocol, they did not in France consider it dead but that it would come up for discussion at the next meeting of the Council of the League of Nations in September; that in view of the situation, France did not consider disarmament now practical and even if the Washington Government considered calling a naval disarmament [conference], France felt as though, in view of her colonies, in the event of a war with Germany, further agreement for naval disarmament was not possible. I asked him if this was intended as a statement that France would not attend such a conference. He said no, he was not authorized to make any such statement and the statement he had read me did not go that far. He was reading it to me for my private information, not of course private from the President.
I informed him that there was nothing new on the subject, that of course if the President concluded to call a conference, he would first communicate with the Governments interested but he evidently came to see me with a view of discouraging any such move.
I asked him if he thought they were going to make a settlement of the security question. He said he did not know. He thought there would be no difficulty about getting proper guarantees as to the Western Boundary but the difficulty was the Eastern Boundary—the Danzig Corridor and Silesia, especially the Danzig Corridor, [Page 11] which separated East Prussia from West Prussia and which also gave Poland a port.