Europe's Golden Twenties: Weimar Germany and the Années Folles

The Weimar Republic, established in Germany after the November 1918 revolution and formalized by the 1919 Weimar Constitution, combined a progressive democratic charter -- with universal suffrage including women -- with a proportional-representation system that fostered chronic parliamentary fragmentation, and it faced early coup attempts from both extremes, including the left-wing Spartacist uprising of January 1919 and the far-right Kapp Putsch of March 1920. The Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr region in January 1923, launched after Germany defaulted on reparations, triggered a German policy of passive resistance financed by printing money, which collapsed the mark's value from roughly 4.2 to the dollar in 1914 to an astronomical 4.2 trillion to the dollar by November 1923, destroying the savings of the German middle class in a hyperinflation that also created the social conditions for Adolf Hitler's failed Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923.