The League of Nations
Immediately after the results of the plebiscites in Savoy and Corsica, Napoleon IV called a Christmas summit of the members of the Catholic League. And, while he had no authority to do this, the lead nations of the Catholic League officially being Spain and Italy, the French Empire’s position as the largest economic and naval power within the League guaranteed that the Emperor’s call would be heeded.
On the day of the opening of the summit in Marseille, Napoleon IV, accompanied by De Gaulle, met personally with Emperor Otto I of Austria, King Xavier I of Spain, Pope Julian IV of the Italian Federation and General Carmona, leader of the Portuguese junta. While no minutes were taken at the meeting, the correspondence and writings of the attendees all make it clear that Napoleon IV stunned his guests by proposing a radical restructuring of their alliance.
The proposals outlined by Napoleon IV, with details provided by De Gaulle as the architect of the scheme, were for the renaming of the alliance to the League of Nations, closer integration of the militaries of the alliance, the abolition of tariffs between League members and the establishment of a League Council to act as a permanent forum for joint decision making by the members with each nation wielding a veto.
The French motives for the proposals were primarily a desire to usurp leadership of the alliance from Xavier I - who had little interest in trying to regain French lands from the German Empire - as well as to change the religious nature of the alliance to a more secular one so as to avoid religious unrest in the territories of the French Empire and the Pan-Arabic Federation where the majority of the populace were not Catholic.
Napoleon IV was fully supported in this by Otto I whose motives were very similar to that of the French. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was multi-ethnic and multi-religious and being forced into a Catholic alliance had caused considerable unrest in many portions of the empire(particularly among the Muslim Bosniaks) which would only grow worse the longer the League remained, in name, a Catholic alliance, In addition, Otto I also felt that Spanish leadership of the League was unwarranted given the much larger economic and military contributions made to the alliance by the Austro-Hungarians.
As a result of these aligned interests, Otto I and Napoleon IV had met secretly on several occasions months prior to the summit where the French proposals had been presented to Otto I who had enthusiastically welcomed them as being much better for Austro-Hungarian interests.
Therefore, no sooner had Napoleon IV finished outlining the French proposals than Otto I gave his vocal endorsement of them.
While both Xavier I appear to have been reluctant to accept the proposals, they found themselves outnumbered when General Carmona sided with the French and the Austrians, seeing the proposals as a means of safeguarding Portugal from Spanish dominance.
The meeting would last three hours and, on two occasions, shouting was purportedly heard from the room. But when the five leaders left the room, all of them had accepted, with varying degrees of enthusiasm the French proposals.
The true purpose of the summit then became clear as the various national diplomatic staff attending found themselves suddenly tasked with drawing up a charter for the newly announced League of Nations, as well as designing its structure, before the new year.
Diplomats at the Marseille Summit frequently held all-night meetings in order to meet the deadline
In broad terms they were to succeed with the League’s official languages being decided as French and Italian, and the SDN (the abbreviation of the League’s name in its official languages) being provided with both a Permanent Secretariat to be based in Marseille and a League Council where the League nations would meet to make decisions and authorise joint military actions.
The structure of the Council itself was crucial to French plans as decisions would be made by a majority vote of all member nations. However, the members of the Council would be limited to the primary members of the League - France, Spain, Italy, Austria and Portugal - with other member nations (such as the French puppet state of Persia) being represented in the Council through their imperial masters wielding an extra vote on their behalf. Given the extensive empires of both France and Austria, this meant that those two nations alone could command a majority in the Council due to Austria wielding two votes and the French three.
This gave France and Austria a built-in majority in the Council, guaranteeing that the leadership of the SDN would ultimately fall to France, fulfilling Napoleon IV and De Gaulle’s goal of converting the Catholic League to a tool for the furthering of the French national interest against Germany.
The only fly in the ointment was the insistence of Spain and Italy that each nation in the Council hold a power of veto over any military resolutions brought before it. While Napoleon IV apparently thought nothing of agreeing to this at the time, the true consequences of the veto power would rapidly become apparent with the rapidly impending breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The map of Europe at the time the League of Nations was announced