Waiting for Monsieur Bergson: Nicholas Murray Butler, James T. Shotwell, and the French Sage

This analysis follows upon an article that previously was published in Diplomacy and Statecraft (2010) on Norman Angell's relationship with French thinking and political life. These two papers suggest international historians should look much more widely for our sources of understanding the policy options of the Powers in the early twentieth century than the habitual diplomatic documents and the like. They also aim to explore how ideas become policies, seen through the eyes of particular key actors. This analysis looks at the relations between the French philosopher, Henri Bergson, and a contemporary major American intellectual, Nicholas Murray Butler, between 1913 and 1932 using their letters as a basis. Bergson's fraught relationship with Butler sheds some light on Franco–American relations during the turbulent decades they knew each other. The article also looks at the thinking of James T. Shotwell, a long-time collaborator with Butler and, more generally, at the approaches to the contemporary international relations of their day that underpin and mark out American and French differences about how to construct a global order after the First World War.