The Embrace of Unreason

by Frederick Brown

  M. Malvy is a traitor. For the last three years, with the complicity of M. Leymarie [his principal private secretary] and several others, he has betrayed the national defense. The proofs of this treason are overwhelming. It would take too long to state them.… M. Malvy has caused Germany to be exactly informed of all our military and diplomatic projects, particularly by the spy gang of the Bonnet Rouge and his friend Vigo … and by a certain Soutters, director of Maggi-Kub. This is how, to cite only one example, the German high command learned point by point the plan of attack on the Chemin des Dames … as soon as M. Malvy was admitted to the [cabinet’s] War Committee.… Documents of indisputable authenticity also show the hand of Malvy and that of the Sûreté in the military mutinies and the tragic events of June 1917.… The only way to destroy the German plan is … to refer to a military tribunal the miserable creature by whom France has been handed over, bit by bit, to the enemy.

  The government launched a criminal investigation. When Malvy demanded to know the charges against him, Premier Paul Painlevé—a brilliant mathematician but a premier sadly deficient in common sense—read Daudet’s diatribe before the Chamber of Deputies. In the uproar that followed, France was seen at its most fissiparous, with Right and Left making a mockery of the “sacred union.” Debate lasted for hours. “In this overexcited hall,” one legislator complained, “we have argued on a question brought up by Léon Daudet. On one side a calumniator, a professional defamer, on the other the Chamber and the whole country. What is this person who can thus occupy the country’s representatives for six hours? What is his importance? What is his power? I cannot find an explanation consistent with the dignity of this Assembly!”

  While the High Court dismissed charges of treason against Malvy, it agreed that the former interior minister’s lenient treatment of pacifists represented “forfaiture”—negligence or dereliction of duty—and exiled him from France for five years. Swept up in the purge was Joseph Caillaux, as outspoken as ever, who had repeatedly mounted the rostrum of the chamber to plead for armistice negotiations. He found himself stripped of parliamentary immunity at the request of the military governor of Paris, judged by the same tribunal that banished Malvy, and in February 1920, fifteen months after the war, sentenced to three years in prison.6 Vigo’s death did not call the hounds off Le Bonnet Rouge. Accused of treason for having a large, unexplained check in his possession at the Swiss border, Émile Duval was executed by a firing squad.

  In the twilight of 1917, with missiles pulverizing huge armies at Passchendaele and Lenin’s Bolsheviks seizing power in Petrograd, shadows fell everywhere. L’Action Française itself came under suspicion, not of treasonable relations with the enemy but of plotting a monarchist coup. Its newspaper was suspended for a week and its offices in five cities raided on October 27. Police searched the homes of Maurras, Daudet, Marius Plateau, and others. They harvested fifty guns, 250 loaded canes, enough brass knuckles and blackjacks to arm a squad of Camelots du Roi, files in which Plateau kept old plans for insurrection, and letters of allegiance to the movement from officers stationed near Paris in 1917. A left-wing commentator observed that union leaders caught with much less incriminating paraphernalia would have been jailed. Maurras, Daudet, and Plateau suffered no legal consequences.7 Charges proferred against them were dismissed, as if the idea of a royalist coup were risible. Royalists didn’t laugh, but even they could hardly deny that the “sacred union,” for all its cracks, held together, like the shell of a religion to which dissident parties still paid lip service, under the high priesthood of Painlevé’s successor, Georges Clemenceau.

  Charles Maurras hewed to the belief that France would win the war only when she won the peace with a treaty dismembering Germany. Germans could not learn from defeat, he wrote. They are what they are—a people who had broken the moral bond that tied them to the rest of the civilized world, who sought a culture all their own and found their way to it in the glorification of their nature.8 It behooved L’Action Française, which had disdained electoral politics, to constitute itself as a party and rally opinion against the spirit of clemency informing President Woodrow Wilson’s speeches. To Charles Maurras, the League of Nations was a snare.

  By the time its candidates ran in the elections of November 1919, the Versailles Peace Conference had, as Maurras’s close associate Jacques Bainville put it, organized the perfect setup for eternal war. Declining an invitation to join the conservative coalition Bloc National, a coalition of conservative parties held together by fear of a Bolshevik revolution, L’Action Française drafted a platform that featured diplomatic recognition of the Vatican (which it helped achieve), measures to curb the immigration of all foreigners, greater incentives for the procreation of French babies, and smaller government.

  L’Action Française won only one seat from Paris. But its Paris seat was filled by the voluminous Léon Daudet, who spoke louder than anyone else, interrupted his left-wing colleagues with peremptory accusations of treason, bullied the Bloc National, and in other ways as well exercised disproportionate influence on the chamber. Rumor had it that prefects were made and unmade at his behest. Ambitious functionaries enrolled their sons in the royalist party. With industry crippled by strikes in key sectors of the economy, conservatives who may have had nothing invested in the ideal of monarchy saw L’Action Française as a bulwark against revolution. To large cheering crowds (there were eight thousand present at the Salle Wagram in January 1922) Daudet railed indiscriminately against Bolshevism and “Anglo-German-Jewish” capital. Le Temps stated what had become quite obvious by 1922: “One can criticize, detest, or admire M. Daudet, but no one can deny that he is a power.” When he and Maurras, marching under a large L’Action Française banner, led some hundreds of Camelots du Roi from the Place Saint-Augustin to the Place des Pyramides on Joan of Arc’s civil feast day, they were gratified to hear themselves hailed by spectators along the route.

  Daudet’s maneuvers helped to tilt the chamber against Aristide Briand in a confidence vote that abruptly ended his premiership in January 1922. Briand, the cofounder of L’Humanité with Jean Jaurès, had been one of the blacker beasts in the royalist bestiary even before tarring himself in 1921 by his willingness to reduce the sum total of Germany’s indemnity.9 L’Action Française wanted every punitive measure enforced sine misericordia. Maurras and Daudet rejoiced over Briand’s fall and then again over the appointment of Raymond Poincaré as his successor—Poincaré being hospitable to their views in the realm of foreign policy. Reparations were a burning issue. The Weimar Republic, whose economy was stricken, had defaulted in its payments. No agreement could be reached by the Western Allies on an appropriate response. England and America favored a moratorium, while France and Belgium proposed to tighten the noose with sanctions. “Judging others by themselves, the English, who are blinded by their loyalty, have always thought that the Germans did not abide by their pledges inscribed in the Versailles Treaty because they had not frankly agreed to them,” Poincaré wrote to the French ambassador in London. “We, on the contrary, believe that Germany, far from making the slightest effort to honor the peace treaty—has, indeed, always tried to escape her obligations—the reason being that she has not been convinced of her defeat.… We are also certain that Germany, as a nation, resigns herself to its pledge only under duress.”

  By “duress,” Poincaré had in mind a military occupation of the industrial Rhineland, from which France could extract the mandated shipments of coal that Germany had failed to deliver. This would severely strain France’s relations with England, but something of their historical antagonism had already begun to cloud the memory of wartime camaraderie. In the Chamber of Deputies, Léon Daudet cheered on Poincaré (who, four years earlier, had proposed that the Rhineland be wrested from Germany and placed under Allied military control). “Occupying the Ruhr valley certainly involves risks,” he declared on December 15, 1922, “but so does every other option. There are risks in doing nothing, in granting a perpetual moratorium
. M. Poincaré has no intention of granting one anyway, which is why my friends and I shall vote for him, should it come to a vote. We are indeed grateful to him for keeping his promises, for not calling up a class of recruits gratuitously, and for honoring the most important part of the Treaty of Versailles.”

  Aristide Briand, 1862–1932, premier under Poincaré’s presidency and coauthor, with Frank Kellogg, of a pact outlawing war as an instrument of national policy, for which both were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

  Daudet’s speech was followed twelve days later by his lead article in L’Action Française: “We will know in a few hours or days whether the Poincaré government plans to occupy the Ruhr, a decision that will mark the present cabinet’s collapse (if it decides against) or its victory and the victory of France (if for). We remind you that the question of the Ruhr was raised by L’Action Française right after the absurd Treaty of Versailles, as soon as it became perfectly clear that Germany did not intend to pay anything and, sooner or later, to take its revenge.” Poincaré and Maurras had had a cordial correspondence since 1919, when Maurras, aware though he was that presidents under the Third Republic were little more than figureheads, urged him to protest Woodrow Wilson’s presence at the Versailles Peace Conference and to represent France in place of Clemenceau.10

  French troops marched on January 11, 1923, seizing as much of the Rhineland as was not already occupied, and most of its industrial wealth. They enforced reparations, but the blow to Germany, while it profited France materially, told against her in world opinion, all the more after March 31, when French soldiers gunned down resisting workers in the Krupp factory at Essen.11 Sympathy began to shift toward the Weimar Republic, whose economy crumbled in a whirlwind of hyperinflation. National outrage united Germans in a “national unity front” reminiscent of the Burgfrieden, or civil truce, that had briefly effaced party lines in 1914. In Munich Adolf Hitler exploited the crisis to denounce left-wingers whose uprising in November 1918 had been, as he put it, the “stab in the back” that led to Germany’s surrender and the establishment of the Weimar Republic. “The German rebirth is externally only possible when the criminals are faced with their responsibility and delivered to their just fate,” he shouted to a packed audience of Nazi Party members at the cavernous Circus Krone in Munich on the day the French marched into the Ruhr. The real enemy was not France but compatriots who had rendered Germany defenseless before the onslaught of Marxism, democracy, parliamentarism, internationalism, and Jewish power.

  L’Action Française had never enjoyed such prominence, both in and out of the National Assembly. It rented spacious quarters at 14 Rue de Rome, near the Gare Saint-Lazare. It had three hundred chapters distributed within ten zones, and thirty thousand dues-paying members. The circulation of L’Action Française hovered at one hundred thousand, but provincial papers eager to reprint Maurras, Daudet, and Bainville amplified its voice. Associated with it was a student bimonthly, L’Étudiant Français, whose contributors included young intellectuals destined to make their mark as scholars, men of letters, or traitors: Philippe Ariès, Claude Roy, Pierre Gaxotte, Raoul Girardet, and Robert Brasillach. A rural edition of the paper, L’Action Française Agricole, conveyed its message to farms and bistros in la France profonde. The movement sponsored a women’s club for young royalist ladies. It organized lectures at its own institute and, of course, stood foursquare behind the Camelots du Roi, whose brawls with opponents of Poincaré’s militarism made news in January 1923. Caning Communist demonstrators (who generally gave as good as they got) increased the royalists’ popularity that month, when the chamber was preparing to strip Marcel Cachin, a Communist deputy and party founder, of his parliamentary immunity and try him for plotting to overthrow the government.12

  January 1923 did not end until it proved to be even more ominously eventful, and by that time L’Action Française had begun its descent from the forum to the streets, reconceiving itself more as a movement animated by the vigilantism of its goons than as a party committed to the rough-and-tumble of republican politics. What took place at the headquarters of L’Action Française in the afternoon of January 22 quickened its descent. The day before, on January 21, a young woman had called on Léon Daudet at his home, claiming to have secrets from the terrorist underground. She was referred by Daudet’s servant to his secretary on the Rue de Rome. She telephoned the latter and conferred with him that evening in the presence of Marius Plateau, secretary-general of the Camelots du Roi. Her alleged information concerned plots being hatched by militant anarchists who had summarily expelled her from their cell. At home, under lock and key, she said, were documents that corroborated her story. She agreed to bring them the next day, and she showed up in the afternoon of January 22 at the appointed hour, empty-handed. (Daudet and Maurras, whom she had stalked that morning, were at a mass commemorating the 130th anniversary of Louis XVI’s execution). After twenty minutes of conversation, Plateau led her to the door. Before he opened it, she pulled a revolver from her raincoat, shot him three times, and herself once. He died; she survived.

  Questioned by detectives, the assassin identified herself as Germaine Berton, twenty years old, unemployed and supported by fellow anarchists. She would have preferred to assassinate Daudet, but Plateau served the purpose. Why Daudet? “I consider that he bore the heaviest burden of responsibility for the new war in the Ruhr. He is a man who has spent his life fighting the working class. I also hold him responsible for concocting the plots against Jaurès and, above all, Almereyda, leader of the young guard. I have done my duty.” Le Temps reported that Germaine Berton had spent time in prison for assault and was thought to have been implicated in the delivery of a package bomb to the American ambassador one year earlier.

  L’Action Française ran the headline “A German Bullet Killed Marius Plateau.” It declared that the murder was the work of “Germano-Bolsheviks” infuriated by the French occupation of the Ruhr. The wheel had turned full circle. Grievously wounded at Vaux-sous-Fontenoy in 1914 and awarded the Croix de Guerre for heroic action, Plateau had now succumbed to the same enemy. The Great War was over, but Armaggedon remained to be fought. All “patriots” were invited to sign up at the offices of the paper and demonstrate with Camelots du Roi against agents of “Germany, the Soviet Union, and international finance.” That night, at least seven Camelots—those who were caught—forcibly entered two left-wing newspapers and trashed everything, including the linotype machines. From then on, mounted police officers patrolled the newspaper district of lower Montmartre.

  Four days later, on Paris’s other bank, streets near the Champs de Mars swarmed with police marshaling the crowd that had gathered at the Église Saint-Pierre du Gros Caillou for Marius Plateau’s funeral. Gathered inside the church was European aristocracy: the Duc de Luynes, representing the Duc d’Orléans, pretender to the throne; the Comte de Bourqueney, representing Queen Amélie of Portugal; Baron Tristan Lambert, representing the Duc de Vendôme; a pride of other titled lions. Behind them sat Plateau’s colleagues and royalists in the National Assembly. Generals abounded. Journalists, students from the “grandes écoles,” and wounded veterans spilled onto the Rue Saint-Dominique, where horses harnessed to carts piled high with wreaths awaited the funeral procession. Eulogizing Plateau at the Vaugirard cemetery, Bernard de Vesins, president of the Ligue de l’Action Française, called him the heart and soul of the Camelots du Roi. “In the street, in the dock, in prison, he set everyone an example by his energy, his abnegation, his good humor.” The slender thesis that Plateau had been selected for martyrdom in the criminal underground of German agents who chose and armed Germaine Berton was padded with religio-patriotic verbiage reminiscent of the eulogies for Colonel Hubert Henry during the Dreyfus Affair. “They fingered him as a useful victim and armed the hand that assassinated him. The fact that he was killed for having served France confers a more sacred character upon our grief: our tears swear us to accomplish what Marius would have done if one of us had fallen in his plac
e.… Miraculously saved during the war, he was destined by Providence to shed more blood for France. God claims the best among us, because the best have merited His eternal reward before the rest of us.”

  What Marius Plateau would certainly have done if one of them had fallen in his place was unleash the Camelots du Roi against those who hadn’t shed tears, and, in fact, deputies of the Left were periodically mugged in the spring and summer of 1923. On May 31, they assaulted three well-known politicians scheduled to address fellow republicans protesting Poincaré’s German policy. The three were beaten bloody and spattered with coal tar and printer’s ink. A packet of dung was sent to a fourth. In scurrilous language, L’Action Française described the assaults as justice served in a nation whose dilatory courts had not yet tried Germaine Berton. Daudet explained that they were merely “warnings” or “moderate reprisals.” They did not rise to the level of condign punishment. Cries of “French Fascism” in the chamber left him unphased.