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The first president of the republic was Ebert. The new constitution was written by the parties of the Weimar Coalition.

In the early 1920 elections, the majority support of Germany's voting public for the Coalition was ephemeral.

Until the Nazi takeover in January 1933, ruling coalitions included parties further to the right, and they were often half-hearted supporters of the republic. The leader of the center-right German People's Party, Gustav Stresemann, came to be regarded as the Savior of the republic. He was chancellor in 1923, the year of crisis, and then as foreign minister in eight succeeding cabinets. He was the leader of a coalition of four major parties that helped to get the economy back on its feet after the revolts of the Communists and Nazis in 1923. He worked to change Germany's previous policy of passive resistance to the terms of the Versailles Treaty to one of "fulfillment", which involved revising the treaty in more realistic directions. He and the French leader, Aristide Briand, were awarded the peace prize.

Stresemann had been kicked out of the left-center Democratic Party for being too right-wing, and his initial reaction to the formation of the Weimar Republic was negative. He thought the republic was a lesser evil than the racist right wing and the antirepublican nationalists. On the eve of the Great Depression, his sudden death of a stroke at age fifty-one took on a retrospective symbolism. Germany lost its most effective leader. He remarked to a British diplomat that "We have lost German youth to the Nazis and Communists, which could have been won for peace and reconstruction."

The cabinet headed by the Social Democrat Hermann Muller was not able to address the economic crisis of late 1929 or other combinations of parties and new chancellors.

The German parliamentary government ceased to function in the spring of 1930. It was replaced by presidential rule, which was allowed under the constitution in emergencies. In early 1933, the Nazis were invited to lead a coalition as described in Chapter 18.

The fortunes of the French Third Republic in the 1920s and 1930s had a lot to do with political traditions. The country's antirepublican right remained a constant threat despite France being a republic with universal male suffrage. The patriotic record of the French socialists did little to protect them from the right-wing resurgence of the postwar period, even though they had rallied to what was termed the "Sacred Union" of all parties in defense of the fatherland. The SFIO was trounced in the parliamentary elections of October 1919. The pro-Communist group won the support of the majority of the party when it split in December 1920.

The policies of France after the Peace Conference were responsible for the confrontation with Germany. It indicated an attachment to the French Jacobin tradition of non-socialist democracy. The main tenets of Jacobinism were achieved by the turn of the century. Property rights and state action were issues where the Radical Party and the SFIO differed. The small producer was sacred to the Radicals and they resisted using the state's taxing power to achieve social equality.

The left wing of the Radical Party and the right wing of the SFIO have had differences of opinion since the second half of the 19th century. The loss of the left wing of the SFIO allowed the party to pursue a gradualist path to socialism.

The leaders were not ready to abandon the rhetoric of revolution or disown the Marxist origins of the party. In May 1924, the SFIO's leaders agreed to join an electoral alliance with the Radical Party, but refused to accept any cabinet posts in abourgeois government. A coalition of Socialists and Radicals to preserve the republic was acceptable, but "real" or fundamental change, involving the socialization of the means of production, could not be expected of such a coalition.

There were important foreign-policy implica tions in a left-wing parliamentary coalition in France. The Labour Party took over in January 1924. This government proclaimed a conciliatory foreign policy, further opening options for France's left to try a different path in what came to be called "the years of international conciliation," in contrast to the previous "years of coercion," thus also opening options for Stresemann. The League of Nations admitted Germany in the late 19th century. Britain and France established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.

The Gordian knot moved toward resolution by an international commission headed by Charles C. Dawes, an American who would become vice-president of the United States under Calvin Coolidge. In 1924, Germany's payments were put on an economically more realistic foundation, which meant an initial respite in payments so that the German economy could recover, followed by a slow increase to 2 billion marks per year by 1928-9.