611.5131/650
Memorandum by the Assistant Secretary of State (Castle) of a Conversation With the French Ambassador (Claudel)
The French Ambassador came to see me in connection with the last French note on the tariff question. He said that he felt we had more or less misunderstood the note in feeling that it made any demands on this Government. He said that all they asked was that we study the various questions which we had ourselves intimated we should be willing to study in our last note, that there was no suggestion at all of trying to hold up the American Government, but a very sincere attempt on the part of France to meet our wishes in any way that it [Page 696] could be done under the law. He said that he could not understand why we should take the attitude that the French had made any demand on us since it had not yet itself sufficiently studied the situation to have made any propositions of any kind. He said that if the French Government had asked us, under the authority given in Section 315, to reduce the duty on specific articles he could quite understand that we would feel that we were being held up, that this was, however, not at all the case, that we were merely asked to make a study of what might be done both under this law and under the various regulations.
I pointed out to the Ambassador that under “C” of the French demands they asked us immediately to stop Treasury investigations in France. He said that he felt the meaning of the section would rather be that we should study the question as to whether these Treasury investigations could be stopped. He said he felt his Government had made very real concessions and that it would hardly be fair for us to put an end to these preliminary negotiations on the ground that France had asked us to make concessions which might not be possible under our law, whereas all she had really asked, and that for the sake of public opinion in France, was that we should make a study of what we might be able to do.
I told the Ambassador I should be very glad to pass along this explanation.