Papers written by Curzon on the Near and Middle East [‎125r] (249/348)

THE
[This Document is the Property ox His Britannic Majesty s Government.]
EASTERN (Ti ukuv).
[January 30.]
CONFIDENTIAL.
Section 2.
[E 1122/5/44] No. 1.
Thfi Marquess Curzon of Kedleston to Lord Hardinge (Paris).
(No. 314.)
My Lord, Foreign Office, January 30, 1932.
ON Thursday last his Excellency the French Ambassador, in the course of
a conversation with me on other points, indicated his intention to send to the Foreign
Office on the following day the statement of the views of the French Government with
regard to the impending conference on the affairs of the East, which M. Poincare had
promised me in Paris. It did not arrive till this morning, and the Cabinet have
accordingly not had the time or the opportunity to give to it the consideration which
it demands. In these circumstances it would, in any case, have been well-nigh
impossible for me to proceed to Paris to-morrow, as hitherto arranged, in older to
commence the discussion with the French and Italian Foreign Ministers on \\ ednesday
morning. There would have been no time to give more than a cursory examination
in advance to the detailed proposals for the revision of the Treaty of Sevres, put
forward by the French Government.
A perusal, however, of these proposals, and still more of the covering letter from
the French Ambassador, demonstrated that the French Government were approaching
the Paris discussion from a point of vievr so widely divergent from the British, and
that they regarded the work which it is expected to accomplish in so different a light,
that there could be small prospect of an agreement until these misconceptions were
removed.
I will proceed to state their nature.
The French Ambassador commences with the statement that as the British
memorandum sent by me to Paris and to Rome as a basis of discussion some weeks ago
takes account of the Greek attitude, as revealed by M. Gounaris in his long interviews
with myself, so the French document takes account of the Turkish attitude, with which
the French Government have had, as they justly remark, peculiar opportunities of
becoming acquainted. In other words, as my memorandum is to be regarded a brief of
the Greek case, it is incumbent upon the French to state and to espouse the Turkish
case m the impending conference.
Such an interpretation of the British attitude has no foundation in fact. The
suggestion that His Majesty’s Government have taken sides on behalf of Greece against
Turkey in the memorandum submitted by myself, or were about to take sides at the
Paris meeting, must cause His Majesty’s Government the greatest surprise, and
demands the most prompt and emphatic repudiation. It would in any case he rendered
in the highest degree improbable by the facts that Great Britain is herself the greatest
Mahommedan Power in the world, that her Mahommedan subjeers rendered her
invaluable service in the war, for which she will ever remain grateful, and that it is a
British quite as much as if not more than an international interest that the Eastern
question should be settled with due regard to Turkish sentiment and the future of the
Turkish nation. The last object, therefore, that His Majesty’s Government had in view
was to take sides for one party or the other. Their object is to see justice done to both,
for if Britain is a great Mahommedan Power, equally is she a great Christian Power,
and equally must she remember that Greece was her ally, and also the ally of the French,
in the latter stages 6f the war, and in that capacity rendered conspicuous service
to both.
But the French assumption meets with an even more conclusive negative in the
history of the case. So far from the terms suggested by me as a basis of discussion at
Paris being the result of my long interviews with M. Gounaris, or representing his ideas,
they were never discussed with him at all during my conversations in London, my
object being confined exclusively to obtaining the assent of the Greek Government—in
which 1 was fortunately successful—to place themselves in the hands, not of Great
Britain, but of the Allied Powers as a whole. In so acting, I thought that I was acting
in the interests, not so much of Greece, or of Great Britain, as of the Allies as a whole
and of peace. It was therefore with extreme surprise that I learned from his Excellency
the French Ambassador that my memorandum, containing as it did proposals, many of
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