The Franco-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance was a bilateral treaty between France and the Soviet Union with the aim of enveloping Nazi Germany in 1935 in order to reduce the threat from central Europe. It was pursued by Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet foreign minister, and Louis Barthou, the French foreign minister, who was assassinated in October 1934, before negotiations were finished. His successor, Pierre Laval, was skeptical of both the desirability and the value of an alliance with the Soviet Union. However, after the declaration of German rearmament in March 1935 the French government forced the reluctant foreign minister to complete the arrangements with Moscow that Barthou had begun. The pact was concluded in Paris on May 2, 1935 and ratified by the French government in February 1936. Ratifications were exchanged in Moscow on March 27, 1936, and the pact went into effect on the same day. It was registered in League of NationsTreaty Series on April 18, 1936. On May 16, 1935 the Czechoslovak–Soviet Treaty of Alliance was signed between the two states as the consequence of Soviet treaty with France. On May 2, 1935, France and the USSR concluded the pact of mutual assistance. Laval had taken the precaution of ensuring that the bilateral treaty agreement was strictly compatible with the multilateral provisions of the League of Nations Covenant and Locarno Treaties. What this meant in practice was that military assistance could be rendered by one signatory to the other only after an allegation of unprovoked aggression had been submitted to the League and only after prior approval of the other signatories of the Locarno pact had been attained. The pact was no longer what Louis Barthou had originally planned, but it remained to serve the purpose of acting as a hollow diplomatic threat of war on two fronts for Germany, should Germany pursue an aggressive foreign policy. Most of the Locarno powers felt that it would only act as a means of dragging them into a suicidal war with Germany for Russia's benefit. It marked a large scale shift in Soviet policy in the Seventh Congress of the Comintern from a pro-revisionist stance against the Treaty of Versailles to a more western-oriented foreign policy as championed by Maxim Litvinov. Adolf Hitler justified the remilitarization of the Rhineland by the ratification of the treaty in the French parliament, claiming that he felt threatened by the pact. Pro-German David Lloyd George stated in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom that Hitler's actions in the wake of this pact were fully justified, and he would have been a traitor to Germany if he had not protected his country. The military provisions were practically useless because of multiple conditions and the requirement that Britain and Italy approve any action. The effectiveness was undermined even further by the French government's insistent refusal to accept a military convention stipulating the way in which the two armies would coordinate actions in the event of war with Germany. The result was a symbolic pact of friendship and mutual assistance of little consequence other than raising the prestige of both parties. However after 1936, the French lost interest, and all parties in Europe realized the treaty was a dead letter. By 1938 the appeasement policies implemented by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French premier Édouard Daladier ended collective security and further encouraged Nazi aggression. In 1939 French and British diplomats tried to form a military alliance with Moscow, but the Germans offered much better terms. The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 indicated Moscow's decisive break with Paris, as it became an economic ally of Germany.
