Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

by Liaquat Ahamed

If Britain was the most responsible of the belligerents, its ally France balanced it out by choosing to be the most feckless. The French government spent a total of $30 billion on its war effort. Few nations resisted paying their taxes more vigorously than the people of France—they seemed to view even the slightest official inquiry as to their financial circumstances as an unjustified intrusion by the state “into the most holy recesses of private life” and an infringement of their fundamental rights as citizens. As a result, at least for the first two years of the war, the government balked at raising taxes, not reversing itself until 1916 when it seemed on the verge of financial collapse. In total, France paid for less than 5 percent of its war expenditures out of higher taxation.