Did the French have to pay reparation after the Napoleonic Wars?
No reparations were required for one main reason: the main allied countries wanted to see the return of the Bourbon monarchy. The revolutionary and the Bonapartist governments were viewed as war-mongering usurpers, so that the Bourbons were actually assisted to re-establish their regime by gifts and loans. They’d been rulers in exile for over 20 years. The situation at the end of the Great War in 1918 was a little different. The Hohenzollern regime that started the war had been everyone’s “good neighbour” since 1870, and there was no clear alternative government in exile that others wished to support. Also, the French were still smarting from their defeat in 1871, and the loss of Alsace. They were not in a forgiving mood at Versailles – they’d forgotten the magnanimity of the Allies in 1815. As regards the civil service, the French view of their senior officers after about 1805 was quite different from before the Revolution. A professional paid (not already wealthy and landed) civil se
