CANR
WORK TITLE: THE BELL OF TREASON
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WEBSITE: https://pecaquet.com/
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PERSONAL
Born c. 1968, in France.
EDUCATION:Cambridge University, Ph.D., 2015.
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CAREER
Historian, author. Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge, associate; former entrpreneur and corporate financier, Prague, Czech Republic.
WRITINGS
Also contributor to journals, including International History Review, Histsorical Journal, and Middle Eastern Studies.
SIDELIGHTS
P.E. Caquet is a senior member of Hughes Hall, Cambridge. He is the author of two books, The Orient, the Liberal Movement, and the Eastern Crisis of 1839-41, which is a publication of his doctoral thesis, and The Bell of Treason: The 1938 Munich Agreement in Czechoslovakia, published 2019.
Caquet, French born, came to academia after a successful career in business and finance. Before studying as a historian at Cambridge, he worked for JP Morgan in London, and after taking private Czech lessons, he moved to Prague in 1996 and became a partner in a private equity firm. Eventually, Caquet left finance for history, earning his doctorate at Cambridge in 2015.
In The Bill of Treason, Caquet relates the oft-told story of the Munich Agreement, which gave Hitler the red light to carve up Czechoslovakia and which was one of the major turning points on the path to World War II. However, Caquet looks at the Munich Agreement from the viewpoint of the Czechs and also of immigrants from other parts of Europe who had taken refuge in that country. Caquet mined the Czechoslovakian press, private journals, memoirs, radio and film broadcasts, as well as military plans and government records to provide a new perspective on this shameful event in world history. Caquet also argues that Germany’s might before Munich was highly overrated and that there was, in fact, no need for appeasement.
A Kirkus Reviews critic had praise for The Bill of Treason, noting: “With access to new material, the author delivers what is likely the definitive history of a disgraceful event. A book both insightful and painful to read.” A Publishers Weekly Online reviewer similarly termed this an “accessible and well-written history,” as well as an “intelligent and valuable addition to WWII history.” And writing in the online Theartsdesk, Jasper Rees dubbed The Bill of Treason “gripping history.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews July 1, 2019, review of The Bell of Treason: The 1938 Munich Agreement in Czechoslovakia.
ONLINE
Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/ (August 9, 2002), “Young French Executives Go Overseas for Success.”
P.E. Caquet, https://pecaquet.com (August 19, 2019).
Publishers Weekly, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (June 21, 2019), review of The Bell of Treason.
Theartsdesk, https://theartsdesk.com/ (August 26, 2018), Jasper Rees, review of The Bell of Treason.
I am an international historian of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
My books mix social and cultural history with diplomacy. Departing from classical formulas, they question what motives or conceits drive decision-makers. They also pay attention to the human element and ordinary people’s experiences.
I am a member of the University of Cambridge, where I studied and wrote my PhD.
P.E. Caquet is a senior member of Hughes Hall, Cambridge. His PhD was published as The Orient, the Liberal Movement, and the Eastern Crisis of 1838-41. Before studying as an historian at Cambridge, he lived for ten years in Prague. He is fluent in Czech, Slovak, French, and German.
Young French executives go overseas for success
Fri, Aug 9, 2002, 01:00
Frustrated by restrictions, many young French executives are emigrating - the so-called expatriation of competence - to further their careers, and Ireland is on their flight path. Lara Marlowe reports.
Gerald Baton and Pierre Caquet are from different social and educational backgrounds but they have one thing in common. Both are successful French businessmen who have never worked in their home country.
Mr Baton (32) has been in charge of new business and alliances at Eircom in Dublin since October 2001. Mr Caquet (34) is preparing to move back to France this autumn, after 13 years in corporate finance in London and Prague.
Expatriate French executives used to be middle-aged men persuaded by lavish perks to drag their families abroad for a few years. The term "expatriation" has gone out of fashion - replaced by "international mobility".
Most "internationally mobile" Frenchmen are now under the age of 30 and single. They organise their own move, find their own housing and, when married, rarely seek assistance for their spouses.
Although salaries are often higher abroad - and subject to lower taxes and social charges - that is not the main motivation. "For a Frenchman, going abroad is the best way to advance in a career," Mr Baton says. "In France, you must have grey hair to be given responsibility."
Mr Caquet agrees. He started a company in Prague with two partners at the age of 28. "In France, you cannot get backing from a big real estate company or bank before your mid-30s."
A study by the French Senate on "the expatriation of competence" last year found that 68,000 French people - most of them young - emigrated to England between 1997 and 2001, and 245,000 to the US. That represented a 33 per cent increase to Britain, and a 20.7 per cent increase to the US. The French "brain drain" to New York and Silicon Valley was especially high.
Mr Caquet estimates a third of his class at Hautes Études Commerciales, one of the top three French business schools, now work in New York or the City of London.
"It's not so much because of taxes, though that's a factor," he says. "It is that these places are where it happens."
Mr Baton constantly receives letters from students at his alma mater, the École de Commerce de Grenoble, seeking employment in Dublin.
Mr Baton entered business school "through the side door", by studying mathematics at the state-run University of Paris and then making a lateral move into the Grenoble business school, which has close links with Schneider Electric and Hewlett-Packard. HEC, the elite school where Mr Caquet studied, and its rivals ESSEC and ESCP, all require two years of intensive prep school. That wasn't an option for Mr Baton, who began working at the age of 16 to finance his studies.
By the time Mr Baton won one of eight posts (out of 300) reserved for candidates from mainstream universities at Grenoble business school, he had already been the head of a sales department at the Décathlon sporting goods chain for three years.
"At the interview, it wasn't my maths degree but the work experience that impressed them."
Mr Baton continued to do odd jobs, and had to borrow €15,000 to finance his studies. His first internship was on a Rossignol ski factory assembly line, putting plastic into hot ovens on the night shift with North African workers. His second was setting up stands for small businesses in trade fairs.
For his third internship, he took advantage of the twinning of Grenoble and Oxford to do comparative research on technology transfer, venture capital and business angles in France and Britain.
At HEC, Mr Caquet fulfilled his internship requirements with "industrial" experience as a guide for Hennessy Cognac, worked for the French bank CCF in Manhattan, and the MATIF French financial futures exchange.
Prep school at Louis Le Grand Lycée had been hellish, he says, with classes from 8 a.m. until 6 p.m. daily, studying through lunchtime and until after midnight.
But when Mr Caquet sat the entrance exam for HEC, he came in 35th out of 3,000. "The hardest part was over," he says. "The business school system has huge advantages over university; you're very integrated in the business world. They recruit on campus and a lot of the teachers come from big French companies. I was taught finance by Paribas bankers."
Although they have never met, both Frenchmen were able to fulfil the requirement for French military service (since abolished) as financial advisers in Britain.
Mr Baton then received permission from Grenoble to complete his degree at Aston Business School in Birmingham, where he began freelancing as an adviser to start-ups.
"I worked with technology risk capital companies that didn't get involved with the dotcoms. They knew it was just a bubble with no core technologies or competitive advantage," he says.
"Most of the start-ups I found investment for between 1993 and 1997 are still quoted on the stock exchange."
From 1998 until last year, Mr Baton worked for the German company Bauer and Partners, setting up their British operation, and developing information systems for banks in London, including Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank, Kleinwort Benson, JP Morgan and UBS Warburg. He was recruited by head-hunters for Eircom last year and now helps Irish companies and foreign companies in the Republic to manage their information technology infrastructure. He finds Irish business culture similar to the French, with an emphasis on human relations and the "système D" or improvisation. "Irish craíc is like French joie de vivre," he says.
Mr Caquet joined the corporate finance department of JP Morgan in London in 1992. He had taken the previous year off to travel around south-east Asia and eastern Europe.
"The Berlin Wall had just fallen. There were historic changes. I had an idea I might do something there professionally."
While working full time as an analyst in London, he took private Czech lessons for three years.
"Everything was state-owned in eastern Europe and it was all getting privatised. I wanted to be part of it."
Mr Caquet's break came when JP Morgan assigned him to the first corporate international bond issue of the former Soviet bloc, for Czech electricity company CEZ in 1994.
"My current business partner was advising the issuer, and when he saw I spoke Czech, he suggested I come and work with him."
Mr Caquet moved to Prague in 1996, and found himself one of three partners in Benson Oak, which has raised more than $5 billion (€5.1 billion) in capital, mainly for big Czech and Slovak companies as they made the transition to capitalism.
One of Mr Caquet's most satisfying deals was a major international syndicated loan, which coincided with the Russian financial crisis in August 1998.
"The financial press talked about our 'questionable sense of timing'," he recalls. "We structured the deal in a way that took advantage of specific market conditions. We went to see nearly 30 banks, one by one, and at the end of the day it was oversubscribed. We brought in 280 million deutschmarks [€143 million\], and we were only looking for DM250 million. The same publication that made fun of us, Euroweek in London, awarded us its 'Emerging Markets Syndicated Loan of the Year' award for 1998."
Mr Caquet will return to Paris this autumn with his Ukrainian bride Irèna. "I want to be closer to my parents, and we want to raise children. It's good not to be totally cut off from your roots, and it's a lot easier to start fresh at 35 than at 40."
He's not sure whether he will work in international development for a French bank, private equity or venture capital, but there is no question of settling into a purely Franco-French operation.
Ernst & Young's annual study on The Attractiveness of France, published in June 2002, found that "France's international attractiveness is below its economic weight, with a ratio of French-based companies to GDP three times inferior to Ireland's". Forty-three per cent of US businesses in France - the biggest foreign investors - planned to move some or all of their activities elsewhere.
A centre-right government has since come to power, promising to reform the French economy radically.
"It very much remains to be seen," Mr Caquet says. "[Prime Minister\] Raffarin is talking about changing the 35-hour week regime - that will have an impact."
President Chirac promises to reduce income tax by 30 per cent over five years. "It's not so much the income tax as the social charges (65 per cent over and above salary) that kill you," Mr Caquet says.
"For the income tax, you've got to bite the bullet. It's a discouragement, but I've made the choice to come back."
Like the eastern Europeans a decade ago, the French government is planning a privatisation binge. Mr Caquet's experience might prove useful.
QUOTE:
With access to new material, the author delivers what is likely the definitive history of a disgraceful event. A book both insightful and painful to read.
Caquet, P.E. THE BELL OF TREASON Other Press (Adult Nonfiction) $27.99 9, 24 ISBN: 978-1-59051-050-6
An account of Britain and France's betrayal of Czechoslovakia to Hitler.
A Cambridge graduate and Czech scholar, Caquet (The Orient, the Liberal Movement, and the Eastern Crisis of 1839-41, 2016)--who speaks Czech, Slovak, French, and German--writes that Czechoslovakia, formed after the 1918 breakup of Austria-Hungary, was a vibrant, prosperous democracy. It contained several non-Czech ethnic groups, including German-speakers (Sudetens), about 20 percent of the population. Though never part of Germany proper, Sudetens participated in the government and were not persecuted. When Hitler came to power, he proclaimed that all Germans yearned to join the Reich. With Nazi backing, a Sudeten quasi-Nazi party formed, and its violent tactics soon made it the dominant political force. With Nazi media full of purely fictional accounts of atrocities against Sudetens and Hitler demanding self-determination, Britain and France realized that there was a "Sudeten problem" and offered to negotiate a solution. No one at the time knew that Hitler had ordered Sudeten leaders to make impossible demands. In September 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew for his first meeting with Hitler, coming away full of praise for his statesmanship. Returning after dragooning the reluctant French and even more reluctant Czechs to agree to cede lands with more than 50 percent German-speakers, he was flabbergasted when Hitler refused. War seemed imminent, which, Caquet emphasizes, might have been a good thing. The Czechs had a fortified frontier and a formidable army, Germany's generals believed the Wermacht was not prepared, and the Soviet Union declared its support for the Czechs (it became a German ally a year later). Sadly, Chamberlain was indefatigable, warning French leaders that Britain would not support them in any war. Eagerly accepting Mussolini's offer to help, he returned a few days later and gave Hitler everything he wanted. With access to new material, the author delivers what is likely the definitive history of a disgraceful event.
A book both insightful and painful to read.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Caquet, P.E.: THE BELL OF TREASON." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2019. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A591278979/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=abbd9f16. Accessed 12 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A591278979
QUOTE:
gripping history
P.E.Caquet: The Bell of Treason review - the sacrifice of Czechoslovakia
1938 revisited through the eyes of the Munich Agreement's victims
by Jasper ReesSunday, 26 August 2018
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The Wehrmacht enters the gates of Prague Castle in 1939
It was 80 years ago next month that Neville Chamberlain returned with the good news of peace in our time. The Munich Agreement was greeted as a triumph for the appeasers. The price Britain had to pay was a minor stain on its conscience: the decimation of Czechoslovakia. The country was only 20 years old, but the borders of Bohemia and Moravia had been defined many centuries earlier. The British people – and the French – were able to make this bargain with themselves because the question of the Sudetenland was, according to Chamberlain’s other famous phrase, “a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing”. He wasn’t alone: in The Winter’s Tale Shakespeare referred to the coast of Utopia, a mythical seaboard which would give its name to Tom Stoppard’s trilogy.
And perhaps that lacuna prevails to this day. Precisely who the Czechs and the Slovaks - plus the Ruthenians and the Sudeten Germans - were, and the ordeal they underwent in 1938, is the subject of The Bell of Treason, in which the historian P.E. Caquet (pictured below) looks at the crisis which culminated in the Munich Agreement through the other end of the telescope. Not long loosed from the Hapsburg yoke, the young country was, he explains, at once a Mittel-European Ruritania and at the same time “one of the most advanced countries in the world”. His opening chapter, a tour of Czech culture and its flourishing but pacific nationalism enshrined in the gymnastic organisation Sokol, persuasively sets the scene.
Then in February 1938 Hitler vowed to protect the 10 million Germans domiciled in neighbouring territories. The Anschluss followed in mid-March. Czechoslovakia, rather than cower, drew comfort from its treaty with France assuring mutual protection, and the considerable strength of its own military defences. France, meanwhile, hoped and assumed that it would find moral and strategic support from a Britain which had no standing army to speak of. The drama played out in a series of plans for the accommodation of Sudeten German needs. Henlein, the Sudetenland’s little Hitler, rattled sabres and screeched demands including a clause which insisted that Sudeten Germans be given the complete freedom to adhere to the “German world outlook”, by which he meant a Nazi Weltanschauung. The Reich’s bellicosity also found a voice in Goebbels, who charmingly referred to exiles fleeing south into Czechoslovakia as “corpses on holiday”.
As Caquet carefully explains, the concept of ethnic and cultural purity among Sudeten Germans was a chimera. The grouping had acquired its name only in the early part of the 20th century. Languages intermingled, and so did their speakers. Uncoupling them, reckoned one politician, “is not for the politician to solve any more, but for the psychiatrist”. But if it came to a fight, Czechoslovakia, with a fired-up army backed by Britain and France, would have been a match for German forces which had yet to reach peak military strength. But the allies didn’t fancy war, and were easily bullied by a ranting Hitler.
The story that unfolds is one of desperate diplomacy, appalling betrayal and quite staggering naivety. The British were especially eager to pull the wool over their own eyes. "He is, I am sure, an absolutely honest fellow," mused the British diplomat Frank Ashton-Gwatkin of Henlein. Chamberlain was similarly doveish about Hitler: “Here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word,” he concluded on visiting Germany. And after he went back: “Hitler had certain standards… he would not deliberately deceive a man whom he respected.” One Czech diplomat called Chamberlain “the errand boy of gangsters”.
Munich, at least to the Czechoslovaks, was not an inevitable outcome. Hope sprang eternal: the night before the conference the newspapers confidently assumed that Britain and France would not forsake them. In fact only two envoys were allowed to travel to Munich, and then only to be confined to their hotel room and told the bad news.
This section of the story was imaginatively told in Robert Harris’s most recent thriller Munich, but even he found little room to accommodate the Czechs in his pages. Caquet reports the chilling words of Ashton-Gwatkin to the envoy Hubert Masaryk: “if you do not accept, you will find yourselves facing Germany alone. The French may sugar this with fine phrases but, believe me, they are of the same view and have lost interest in your fate.” Masaryk coolly observed Chamberlain’s intoxication with “the idea for having prevented war” as the French premier Daladier blushed and sweated in silent shame at his country’s failure to honour its treaty with Czechoslovakia. The other enjoy, Mastny, burst into tears. So did all Prague the following day. (There is a lot of public weeping in this story)
In the summer of 1938, when it saw the way the wind was blowing, the newspaper Přítomnost predicted that “future historians … will be tempted to rate the policy of these big democracies as dreadful”. Caquet, the latest of those future historians, describes the sacrifice of Czechoslovakia with proper attention to every minute twist and turn, without ever taking his eye off the human story. There could be more on the subplot of Jewish anxiety. A more outright absence is cartographical: no history of a territorial dispute could have a greater need of maps, but there are none. And alas the only illustration is the jacket image (pictured) which shows the Wehrmacht marching through the gates of Prague castle, the outcome of everything this gripping history leads up to.
Let us leave the last prophetic words to a chorus of writers issued to newspapers across the world. “We invite you to explain to the publics of your countries that if a small and peaceful nation such as ours… is forced to fight, we will fight not just for ourselves, but for you and for the common moral and spiritual property of the free and peace-loving peoples of the world.” One of the signatories was Karel Čapek, the great Czech novelist and playwright who, aged 48, had perhaps the good fortune to die on Christmas Day 1938, three months before the German invasion against which Czechoslovakia was denied the chance to defend herself.
The Bell of Treason: The 1938 Munich Agreement in Czechoslovakia by P.E. Caquet (Profile Books, £20)
Read more book reviews on theartsdesk
QUOTE:
accessible and well-written history," as well as an "intelligent and valuable addition to WWII history
The Bell of Treason: The 1938 Munich Agreement in Czechoslovakia
P.E. Caquet. Other Press, $27.99 (304p) ISBN 978-1-59051-050-6
In this accessible and well-written history, Caquet (The Orient, the Liberal Movement, and the Eastern Crisis of 1839–41) analyzes the 1938 Munich Pact, which ceded the Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia to Germany, from the perspective of Czechoslovakia. Caquet posits that, for the Czechoslovakians, “the tragedy of Munich... rested ultimately in an inability to communicate the right message, an almost nightmarish powerlessness” to explain their understanding of the situation. He follows Czechoslovakian political figures, including president Edvard Beneš, premier Milan Hodža, and foreign minister Kamil Krofta, during the months preceding the pact, through the failed diplomatic attempts to convince Britain and France to support a Czechoslovakian armed defense against any Nazi territorial grab, and then their floundering as Britain, France, and Germany determined the nation’s fate. Along with vividly explaining the political climate, diplomatic negotiations, and the pact’s immediate aftermath, Caquet argues against long-held justifications, for example that the pact provided “the Allies valuable time to rearm.” He also posits that an earlier Allied mobilization to protect Czechoslovakian soldiers and munitions manufacturers could have reduced the Reich’s overall destructive capabilities. Caquet translates original Czechoslovakian sources along with drawing on English-language histories, giving the book fresh perspectives and person-on-the-street recollections. This is an intelligent and valuable addition to WWII history. (June)
DETAILS
Reviewed on : 06/21/2019
Release date: 09/24/2019
Genre: Nonfiction
Ebook - 978-1-59051-052-0