The Treaty of Neuilly

On the morning of 27 November 1919, in the town hall of Neuilly-sur-Seine outside Paris, the Bulgarian prime minister Aleksandar Stamboliyski signed a peace treaty with the Allied and Associated Powers. It was the third of the treaties of the Paris Peace Conference, after the Treaty of Versailles with Germany and the Treaty of Saint-Germain with Austria. Bulgaria, which had entered the war in 1915 in order to win Macedonia, gained nothing and lost still more. It renounced Western Thrace, and with it its only outlet to the Aegean Sea; it ceded to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes four border districts including Tsaribrod, Bosilegrad and Strumica; and southern Dobruja, which it had taken from Romania during the war, reverted to the 1914 border. The army was cut to 20,000 volunteers, and reparations were set at 2.25 billion gold francs. Bulgarians still call the treaty their second national catastrophe. It was signed by a man who had spent the whole war in prison for opposing it.

It is often said that the treaty “gave Greece Thrace, which Bulgaria had won in the First Balkan War in 1913”. This is not accurate. Western Thrace had never before belonged to Greece: until 1912 it was part of the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria acquired it after the Balkan Wars, finally under the Peace of Bucharest of August 1913. At Neuilly Bulgaria did not cede it to Greece but renounced it in favour of the Principal Allied Powers, which handed it over to the Greeks only in 1920.

Two wars for Macedonia

Bulgaria emerged from the First Balkan War as a victor, but in 1913 it attacked its former allies, Serbia and Greece, in order to win Macedonia. The Second Balkan War ended in defeat. At Bucharest Bulgaria had to cede southern Dobruja to Romania, and most of Macedonia went to Serbia and Greece. It kept only a sliver of Macedonia on the Struma, the area around Strumica and Western Thrace with the port of Dedeagach, today’s Alexandroupolis (PL). Bulgarians called that peace the first national catastrophe.

The Great War offered revenge. Tsar Ferdinand I and the government of Prime Minister Vasil Radoslavov bargained with both sides, and in September 1915, when the Central Powers promised all of Vardar Macedonia and the Serbian lands east of the Morava, they concluded an alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary. On 14 October 1915 Bulgaria declared war on Serbia and took part in its conquest. For three years its army held the Macedonian front against Allied forces advancing from Salonika, and in 1916, together with the Germans, it defeated Romania. The Peace of Bucharest of May 1918 returned southern Dobruja to Bulgaria, and in September 1918 the Central Powers agreed to give it the northern part of the region as well.

The country, however, was exhausted. By various estimates some hundred thousand soldiers had been killed or died, the towns were short of bread, and the army in the trenches was starving. On 15 September 1918 Serbian and French troops broke through the front at Dobro Pole. The Bulgarian army began to disintegrate, and mutinous soldiers marched on Sofia and proclaimed a republic at Radomir. On 29 September at Salonika Bulgarian delegates signed an armistice with General Louis Franchet d’Espèrey: Bulgaria would withdraw from occupied Greek and Serbian territory, demobilise its army and allow the Allies to cross its territory. It was the first of the Central Powers to lay down its arms. On 3 October 1918 Ferdinand abdicated in favour of his son, who reigned as Boris III until 1943.

A delegation under supervision

The Bulgarians, like the Germans and Austrians before them, were invited to Paris only once the victors had agreed the terms among themselves. The delegation, led by Prime Minister Teodor Teodorov, arrived at the end of July 1919. It included ministers from several parties, among them Stamboliyski, leader of the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union and a minister in the coalition government since the beginning of the year. The delegates were lodged in the Château de Madrid hotel in Neuilly under police supervision. They could go out only with a pass and, like the Germans at Versailles, communicated with the Allies in writing.

They waited almost two months for the terms, because the powers were arguing over the Balkan borders. The hardest question was Western Thrace. The Greek prime minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, demanded the whole of it for his country, arguing that Greeks and Muslims, not Bulgarians, formed the majority there. The Americans long resisted cutting Bulgaria off from the sea and proposed leaving it at least part of the coast or placing the region under international administration. But President Woodrow Wilson was already back in America, and his principle of self-determination proved of little use in the Balkans, where every village had a different ethnic map depending on who drew it. The outcome was a compromise that postponed the decision: Bulgaria was to renounce Thrace in favour of the powers, which would decide its fate later.

On 19 September 1919 Georges Clemenceau, president of the conference, handed the Bulgarians the draft treaty and gave them 25 days to submit written observations. The delegation replied with extensive objections, invoking the principle of nationality and arguing that responsibility for the war lay with the deposed tsar and his government, not with the nation. The Allies made only minor changes and at the beginning of November demanded a signature by a set deadline.

Meanwhile the government in Bulgaria had changed. In the elections of 17 August 1919 Stamboliyski’s Agrarians won the most votes, with the Communists second. On 6 October Stamboliyski became head of a coalition government. Teodorov, who had given up the premiership, refused to put his name to such a peace. According to Bulgarian accounts, Stamboliyski still tried to talk to the Entente leaders but was not allowed to see anyone who could have changed anything. He concluded that refusal would bring only the occupation of the country and even harsher terms, and decided to sign alone.

The signing at the town hall

The ceremony at the Neuilly town hall on Thursday 27 November was brief and cold. Stamboliyski alone represented Bulgaria. Among the plenipotentiaries of the victors were Clemenceau and other French ministers; the Americans Frank Polk, Henry White and General Tasker Bliss; representatives of the British Empire and its dominions, Italy and Japan; and, from the Balkan states, Venizelos and Nikola Pašić, head of the delegation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. In all, seventeen Allied states were parties to the treaty. Romania, then at odds with the powers over the minorities treaty and the occupation of Hungary, did not sign that day; an additional protocol left it time to accede later, which it did in December. Bulgarian legend has it that Stamboliyski broke his pen after signing. This cannot be confirmed, but the story captures the mood in the country well.

On the same day Greece and Bulgaria signed a separate convention at Neuilly on the voluntary and reciprocal emigration of minorities. It was one of the first agreements in which two states tried to resolve national disputes by moving populations. Over the following years, under the supervision of a mixed commission, several tens of thousands of Bulgarians left Greece for Bulgaria, and several tens of thousands of Greeks moved the other way. Disputes over compensation for abandoned property dragged on until the end of the 1920s.

The terms of peace

Like all the Paris treaties, it opened with the Covenant of the League of Nations. Its most important provisions concerned borders, the army and money.

Borders. In the west Bulgaria ceded about 2,500 square kilometres to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes: the districts around Tsaribrod (today Dimitrovgrad in Serbia), Bosilegrad and Strumica, as well as a few villages on the Timok. These lands were inhabited mostly by Bulgarians, but the Serbs demanded them for strategic reasons. The new border came down from the mountain ridges onto the Bulgarian side, exposed Sofia and gave the Serbs the advantage in any future war. In the north the border with Romania of 1 August 1914 – that is, the border of the 1913 Peace of Bucharest – was restored: southern Dobruja went back to Romania. In the south, in Article 48, Bulgaria renounced Western Thrace in favour of the Principal Powers, which undertook to ensure it “economic outlets” to the Aegean. In all the country lost about 11,000 square kilometres, not counting Dobruja, which it had held only during the war.

Army. Bulgaria had to abolish universal military service. The army could number at most 20,000 men, officers included, and soldiers could be recruited only as volunteers enlisting for at least twelve years. Alongside the army, up to 10,000 armed gendarmes and 3,000 border guards were permitted. The navy was limited to four torpedo boats and six motor boats, none of them carrying torpedoes. Military aviation, submarines and guns of a calibre above 105 millimetres outside fortresses were forbidden, and weapons could be produced in only one state factory. An inter-Allied commission supervised the implementation of these provisions.

Reparations. Article 121 imposed on Bulgaria 2.25 billion gold francs, payable over 37 years from 1921, with interest. For a poor agricultural country this was an enormous sum: according to Bulgarian calculations it exceeded a fifth of the entire national wealth. Collection was supervised in Sofia by an inter-Allied commission with British, French and Italian members. Bulgaria also had to give its neighbours thousands of cows, horses, oxen and sheep in place of animals taken during the occupation, and to deliver to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes 50,000 tonnes of coal a year for five years from the mines at Pernik.

Minorities. Like the other defeated and new states, Bulgaria undertook to treat its citizens equally regardless of race, language and religion, and these provisions were placed under the guarantee of the League of Nations.

The treaty came into force on 9 August 1920. The United States, which had signed it, never ratified it, any more than it ratified the Treaty of Versailles. From October 1919 Western Thrace was governed by an inter-Allied administration under the French General Charpy. At the San Remo Conference in April 1920 the powers decided to hand it to Greece; Greek troops and officials moved in in May, and the Sèvres agreement of August 1920 gave this the form of a treaty. The outlet to the sea promised to Bulgaria never materialised: Sofia rejected the limited arrangements later offered, such as a free zone in the port of Alexandroupolis.

The second national catastrophe

The Treaty of Neuilly was felt most keenly not on the map but in human terms. Hundreds of thousands of refugees from Macedonia, Thrace and Dobruja poured into the truncated Bulgaria; by Bulgarian estimates there were more than 200,000 of them in 1912–1925. Many joined the ranks of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation (IMRO), which waged an armed struggle in Yugoslav and Greek Macedonia from the Bulgarian side of the border and became a state within a state in Bulgaria itself.

Stamboliyski tried to pursue a policy new to Bulgaria. He believed the country had lost three wars because its elites had dreamed of a Greater Bulgaria instead of building rural prosperity. He carried out the treaty’s provisions in good faith; in 1920 he made Bulgaria, together with Austria, the first of the defeated states to join the League of Nations; and he sought an understanding with Belgrade. In March 1923, at Niš, he undertook to suppress the Macedonian bands operating from Bulgarian territory. To nationalists, officers discharged from the army and IMRO this was treason. On 9 June 1923 the army overthrew his government, and five days later IMRO fighters murdered him in his home village.

The reparations proved impossible to pay. In 1923 the powers divided the debt into a part payable immediately and a much larger part deferred for thirty years; at the Hague Conference in 1930 the sum was sharply reduced, and after the Great Depression and the Hoover Moratorium of 1931 payments effectively ceased. Throughout the interwar period Bulgaria tried in various ways to circumvent the military provisions, training hidden reserves.

The long shadow of Neuilly

Revision of the Treaty of Neuilly became for Bulgaria what revision of Versailles was for Germany and of Trianon for Hungary. All the interwar governments, however much they differed on almost everything else, agreed that the country had been wronged. For this reason Bulgaria was the only state in the region not to join the Balkan Entente, concluded in 1934 by Greece, Yugoslavia, Romania and Turkey to defend the existing borders. The first step came on 31 July 1938, when in the Salonika Agreement the Balkan Entente states agreed to lift the arms restrictions imposed on Bulgaria at Neuilly and allowed it to occupy the demilitarised zones on its borders with Greece and Turkey. The country began to rearm, largely with German credits and German weapons.

The second step came in 1940. After the fall of France, Romania lost its support, and under pressure from Germany and the Soviet Union it ceded southern Dobruja to Bulgaria in the Treaty of Craiova in September 1940. This was the only territorial gain of Bulgarian revisionism to survive the war. On 1 March 1941 Bulgaria joined the Tripartite Pact and admitted German troops to its territory, which a month later struck at Yugoslavia and Greece. As a reward Adolf Hitler allowed the Bulgarians to occupy, in April 1941, Western Thrace, most of Yugoslav Macedonia and Greek Eastern Macedonia, as well as the districts in the west lost in 1919. The Bulgarian occupation of these lands was brutal. In March 1943 the Bulgarian authorities handed over to the Germans more than 11,000 Jews from occupied Thrace and Macedonia, who were murdered in the Treblinka extermination camp, even though at the same time, under pressure from public opinion and part of parliament, the Jews of Bulgaria proper were saved.

When the Red Army entered Bulgaria in 1944 and the new government went over to the Allies, the gains of 1941 had to be given up. The peace concluded in Paris in 1947 restored the borders of 1 January 1941: Western Thrace and the western lands remained outside Bulgaria, and southern Dobruja within it. The borders drawn at Neuilly, with that one change, have lasted to this day.