to the sanctions list was "through logical, but not practical", and that allowing Italy to import finished steel would damage the Italian economy by forcing the Italian government to use up its foreign exchange than by adding steel to the sanctions list. Ambassador in Moscow Mission to the Kremlin In 1936, he was appointed the French ambassador to the Soviet Union. The Quai d'Orsay was one of the most prestigious branches of the French state, and ambassadors were an elite group within the Quai d'Orsay, having the right to be addressed as "your excellency", to wear a ceremonial embodied uniform that was meant to impress and since ambassadors represented the president of the republic, in theory ambassadors outranked the foreign minister in protocol. Between 1932-39, only 30 diplomats were promoted up to the rank of ambassador, making Coulondre part of a very select group. Coulondre went to Moscow with two guiding principles with the first being that Nazi Germany was a menace that had to be stopped and the second being that the best way to do that was an alliance with the Soviet Union. Coulondre was chosen as the ambassador to Moscow by the Popular Front government of Léon Blum, who felt that an experienced diplomat well known for calling for closer ties to Moscow was the ideal man to represent France to the Kremlin. Coulondre later wrote that the Quai d'Orsay's information about the Soviet Union was almost non-existent as discovered looking through the files "that relations with the USSR, established in 1924, had been neither very close nor very well cultivated since then, notwithstanding the pacts". Coulondre described his superior, the Foreign Minister, Yvon Delbos, as being paranoid about the Soviets and fearful that the alliance that France had signed with the Soviets in 1935 was merely a device which Joseph Stalin might use to "push" France into a war with Germany. Delbos in giving his instructions to Coluondre openly wondered aloud "...whether they [the Soviets] were not looking to push us into a conflict with Germany". Delbos further stated that if war with came with Germany, France was destined to lose because: "If defeated it [France] would be Nazified. If victorious, it must, due to the destruction of German power, submit, with the rest of Europe, to the overwhelming weight of the Slavic world, armed with the communist flamethrower". Coulondre recalled in his 1950 memoirs De