The Embrace of Unreason

by Frederick Brown

  16In 1934 she enjoyed a brief stage career, playing a part in Stravinsky’s Perséphone (with a libretto by André Gide) at the Teatro Colón and in Rio de Janeiro. Many years later she confessed that it was her most painful memory. “I say painful because I would have wished to continue doing these performances, which were the best thing I have done in my life.”

  17Louis Malle’s film The Fire Within is based on Drieu’s novel.

  18In the late 1930s, Granville Hicks, among other literary critics in England and America, accused Lawrence of Fascistic thinking. Christopher Caudwell, the author of a book entitled Studies in a Dying Culture, denounced him for turning backward “to old primitive values, to mythology, to racialism, nationalism, hero-worship, and participation mystique. This Fascist art is like the regression of the neurotic to a previous level of adaptation.”

  CHAPTER 9

  The Stavisky Affair

  The stock market crash of 1929 shook Europe and affected the political fortunes of France’s coalition, the “Union Nationale,” which had been elected in 1926 to right a foundering ship and succeeded in doing so under the second premiership of Raymond Poincaré. In 1926, bankruptcy had became a very real prospect. Poincaré, chairing a cabinet that included six former premiers, prevailed upon the Assembly to increase revenue with higher taxes on income and property. As a result of more rigorous fiscal policing, devaluation of the overvalued franc, and German reparations payments, investors expecting bankruptcy felt reassured. Capital returned from abroad. In his person, Poincaré—whom one historian likened to an upright, unimaginative, industrious, and intelligent village notary—rallied middle-class spirits. Industrial production increased, markets opened for cheaper French goods, and unemployment fell to unprecedented levels, despite the influx of Italians and Eastern Europeans, many of whom were diverted from the United States by the American anti-immigration law of 1924. Aristide Briand, serving Poincaré as foreign minister, effected a rapprochement with the Weimar Republic (whose economic woes were alleviated in the late 1920s, thanks in large part to large loans from American banks and the financial acumen of Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, president of the Reichsbank). Briand and the German foreign minister Gustav Stresemann shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1926.

  With Poincaré’s retirement in 1929, after a long-lived premiership of two years and three months, deputies who had mustered behind him on bipartisan ground retreated to their factional camps. The Union Nationale collapsed. A technocrat of the Center Right, André Tardieu rose to power and fell from it three times in two years while implementing reforms championed by social progressives—a free secondary school education, social security, a Ministry of Health, rural electrification, the retooling of industry. He couldn’t count on favor outside his own party. Radicals inveighed against him for violating the separation of church and state and conferring benefits on the worker and wage earner at the expense of small entrepreneurs. The extreme Right vehemently complained that France’s security was put at risk by a government that scanted the military. When André Maginot, the minister of war, addressed the Assembly, L’Action Française declared that Tardieu’s government had learned nothing from the bloodiest war in history. “This government devoid of memory, devoid of conscience, devoid of reason, this inhuman government exposes us today to the prospect of waging again what M. Maginot called the war of bare chests, exactly as in 1914, after fifteen years of credits for new matériel being sabotaged, according to the dictates of the Dreyfus party!” Funds were voted to build a line of fortifications along the German border, the so-called Maginot Line.

  By 1932 everything was scarce as the world financial crisis visited increasing misery upon France. England’s renunciation of the gold standard in 1931 dealt a severe blow to the French economy, which had been buffered from the initial effects of the Depression by its enormous gold reserves and budget surplus. Prices plunged, and the agricultural sector suffered from the collapse even more grievously than the industrial. Hundreds of thousands were thrown out of work. Government revenue fell by a third. In Parliament, Left and Right ganged up on the ruling center, which retained control, but with a shaky hand. Between November 1929 and May 1932, eight governments lost confidence votes. None lasted more than a few months. Tardieu and Pierre Laval served as premier three times each, while in Germany, where over four million were unemployed, Hitler moved inexorably toward the chancellorship.1

  Each served for the last time in 1932, before the general elections returned a majority of left-wing candidates, divided, as in the previous decade, between minority Socialists and majority Radicals. Their failure to deal with the economic crisis soon became apparent. Men and women staged hunger marches all over France. Radicals wanting civil servants to accept a cut in salary despite protests, and Socialists exciting the Radicals’ fear of big government by demanding the nationalization of major industries were two of the bones they worried. Reparation payments ceased for good when Hitler came to power and deficits soared. With parliamentary democracy at its most dysfunctional, premiers rose and fell, pursuing no line of policy, and cabinet ministers shuffled around in the same game of musical chairs played by their conservative brethren.2 These cabinets were sometimes dubbed “corpse cabinets” by the disillusioned public, consisting as they did of men revived from a fallen administration.

  Word spread of German rearmament, but the French budget expressed no urgent need to modernize the army. Nor was Germany called to account. “The history of Europe and of European confabulations in recent weeks may be resumed with three points,” wrote Charles Maurras in the October 13, 1932, issue of L’Action Française. “Firstly, it is admitted that Germany has rearmed. This is a truth … to which no one can raise the least objection, not even our good friends the English, who claim to be as well informed as the French, with their classified and unclassified dossiers. Secondly, no one in Europe can deny that German rearmament flouts treaty law. Thirdly, since no one wishes or dares to repress this violation, we concluded that everyone is of the opinion that the law should be changed. Whenever something similar occurs in the civil domain, one calls it an encouragement of crime.… We recommend that the professor of literature Herriot, who … knows Pascal inside out, consider his famous reflections about the might that makes right and the might that serves justice. It will furnish him with the theme for yet another oratorical topos. As far as action is concerned, the book on him is closed.”3 Maurras made much of this admonition in a 120-page plea at his trial for treason in 1945. It was outweighed on the scales of justice in postwar France by his multitude of tirades against Jews and the Republic.

  Maurras’s trenchant article did not sit well with Herriot, who lost the premiership two months later, but reprimands in L’Action Française did not speak as loudly in 1932 as they had a decade earlier. The favor that Maurras, his movement, and his paper had officially enjoyed in Vatican circles did not extend beyond Pius X’s papacy.4 Pius’s successors, who strove to promote world peace, distanced themselves from an ideology whose basic premise was that ends justified means and that all means should be employed to the ultimate end of restoring a monarchy. Maurras’s nationalisme intégral, which regarded the nation as the sovereign to which individual scruples rendered obeisance and as a higher moral authority than the Holy See, appalled Pius XI. It had also lost the hold it had once had over the French episcopate when, during the Dreyfus Affair, many of its prelates had succumbed to the passion that made bedfellows of the church and the anti-republican Right. In August 1926, Cardinal Andrieu, archbishop of Bordeaux, reproached L’Action Française for being Catholic by design rather than conviction and for bending Catholicism to its political agenda instead of serving the church’s mission on earth. Cardinal Andrieu’s article and further admonitions in the official Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, heralded an apostolic decree. It came in December, when seven of Maurras’s works and L’Action Française (guilty of defending itself against ecclesiastical opprobrium in vitriolic articles signed by Maurras
and Daudet) were placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Penalties followed. On March 8, 1927, the Apostolic Penitentiary declared that seminarians loyal to L’Action Française would be deemed unfit for the priesthood; that priests guilty of the same offense would be prohibited from exercising their sacerdotal functions; and that parishioners who continued to read L’Action Française would be stigmatized as public sinners and denied the sacraments. To a French Catholic novelist named Henry Bordeaux, Pius XI said of Maurras, “He is one of the best brains of our times; no one knows that better than I. But he is only a brain.… Reason does not suffice and never has. Christ is foreign to him. He sees the church from the outside, not from within.” L’Action Française refuted the papal decree in an article entitled “Non Possumus.” “The reigning pope,” it stated, “is not invulnerable to human error where political questions are concerned, and though the church has the power to promise eternal life, men of the church—all of history proves it—can be led astray by dishonest parties, can engage in harmful enterprises. L’Action Française is not a Catholic paper. It was not founded by any specifically Catholic authority; it founded itself.”

  The papal decree hurt the movement, although a distinguished Catholic thinker, Jacques Maritain, could still note early in 1927 that “without having a single one of its members in Parliament, L’Action Française enjoys among many the prestige of a virtual public authority or principate of opinion.” Soon thereafter, circulation of the newspaper began to fall. Many provincial chapters languished. Moving its headquarters in Paris from the Rue de Rome to a building on the elegant Avenue Montaigne belied the fact that its coffers were empty, or would have been if not for patronage from rich aristocratic families.

  The number of Camelots du Roi, for whom the sacraments were a trifling consideration, may not have dwindled significantly, but under the conservative governments of 1926–32 they tended to make their presence felt with pranks rather than acts of brutal incivility. The most sensational event took place in May 1927 and involved Léon Daudet, who barricaded himself inside the offices of L’Action Française, behind barbed wire and barred gates, when summoned to serve the prison term imposed on him two years earlier for slandering the cab driver in whose taxi his son Philippe had shot himself. The siege lasted three days. Jean Chiappe, a prefect of police known for his right-wing sympathies, finally prevailed upon Daudet to surrender. He emerged with his praetorian guard of Camelots and was driven in Chiappe’s limousine to the Santé Prison, where he endured several weeks of comfortable internment. On June 25, a colleague impersonating an official of the Ministry of the Interior informed the warden that the government, in a gesture of conciliation to extremist parties, wanted Daudet and a Communist leader released immediately. The gullible warden complied. Daudet walked, and slipped across the border into Belgium. He was eventually pardoned by President Gaston Doumergue.

  The Camelots du Roi truly sprang to life with demonstrations in February 1931, when the Ambigu theater staged the French adaptation of a German play about the Dreyfus Affair. Intent on shutting it down, they disrupted performances with stink bombs and challenged patrons entering the theater with their heavy canes. Scuffles on the Boulevard Saint-Martin became bloody riots. Shouts of “Long live the army” and “Down with the Jews” revived memories of the furious reaction to Zola’s “J’accuse” in 1898. Havoc reigned nightly between the Porte Saint-Denis and the Place de la République for almost three weeks, until performances of L’Affaire Dreyfus were suspended by Chiappe, who acceded to a request by the directors of a veterans’ association called the Ligue des Croix de Feu that an end be put to the “lamentable exhibition” in whatever way his “professional conscience” dictated.5 L’Action Française published the letter and added, “All good Frenchmen will congratulate the Croix de Feu for having expressed, with the dignity befitting an association that incorporates glorious veterans of every opinion, its indignation at a national spectacle that has lasted too long. We know that other associations of veterans are preparing to intervene.”6 It characterized L’Affaire Dreyfus as a piece of “German and anti-French propaganda” whose audiences in Berlin mocked the French uniform. Le Populaire, a daily, compared the success of the Camelots du Roi and the Croix de Feu in suppressing a play about Dreyfus to that of the “Hitlerians” in having the film adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front withdrawn from German cinemas. “In both countries, the same individuals, animated by the same spirit, pursuing the same goals by the same means, terrorize assemblies and the streets with organized bands. The League of the Rights of Man insists that republican opinion accustom itself to the danger of this nascent Fascism, which is all the graver for going unopposed by the feeble powers that be.”

  Although the rioters on this occasion were mainly Camelots du Roi, Paris abounded in right-wing “leagues” with paramilitary contingents always ready to parade and brawl. Their numbers increased exponentially in the early 1930s, when the Cartel des Gauches, resuming its fractious career, implemented deflationary measures that made a weak economy weaker. Most numerous were the Union Fédérale des Combattants and the Union Nationale des Combattants. Best known was the aforementioned Croix de Feu, an association of decorated veterans whose membership included general volunteers pledged to the movement’s central tenet, that the “spirit of the trenches” should engender “national reconciliation.” Its motto was “Travail, famille, patrie” (later adopted by the Vichy regime). Everything that caused division, above all class conflict, was objectionable to its leader, Colonel François de La Rocque, who, if judged only by the movement’s torchlight parades and military maneuvers, might have passed for a Gallic Hitler. An older generation may also have been reminded of General Georges Boulanger. The colonel did indeed express his repugnance for party politics and internationalist creeds, but, whatever his nebulous language may have shrouded, nothing in it suggests a Fascist alternative to the Republic. Nor did anti-Semitism strongly color his understanding of France’s fall from grace.

  The same cannot be said of many among his four hundred thousand followers. And passionate anti-Semites had a choice of aggressively bigoted organizations. One of the largest in the early 1930s was Solidarité Française. Financed by the vastly rich perfume manufacturer François Coty, who acquired Le Figaro after the war, it proposed to exorcize the demons of parliamentarianism, of rampant bureaucracy, of hospitality to foreigners, of modern art, of Bolshevism, and of the “anonymous, irresponsible, vagabond capitalism” more or less synonymous with international Jewry. Like other such groups, notably “Les Francistes,” whose model was Mussolini, it conferred honor and pride upon its members. Also modeled after Mussolini’s Blackshirts were the Jeunesses Patriotes, largely recruited from among university students and financed by Pierre Taittinger of the Taittinger champagne house. They wore berets and blue raincoats. They gave Roman salutes.7

  What sparked this explosion early in 1934 against the Third Republic was a scandal involving financial skulduggery and political corruption called the Stavisky Affair.

  Alexandre Stavisky was the son of Emmanuel Stavisky, a Russian Jewish immigrant. Alexandre received his formal education at the Lycée Condorcet, but by 1912, at twenty-six, he was well on his way to establishing himself as an inveterate swindler. That year, he rented the Folies-Marigny Theater for a summer, staged a play that closed after two weeks, and failed to repay concessionaires their surety deposits. He was brought to book but never tried, thanks to the outbreak of World War I. The war also saved him from prosecution for swindling the munitions firm Darracq de Suresnes of 416,000 francs in the sale of twenty thousand bombs to the Italian government.

  Amnestied in 1918, Stavisky took up where he had left off, with ever more ingenious scams, for one of which he served seventeen months in prison. He was by no means alone in robbing French investors during the 1920s. Almost as infamous as he, were Marthe Hanau and her former spouse, Lazare Bloch, who founded a financial journal that drummed up business for shell companies it promote
d and fraudulent short-term bonds promising high rates of interest. Brokers drove a thriving trade until banks, at the instigation of a rival financial news agency, looked into the matter more closely. Hanau distributed bribes to quash rumors. But in December 1928, police arrested her, Bloch, and their business partners. Investors had lost millions. Hanau delayed the trial by staging a hunger strike, rappelling down a hospital wall on a rope of sheets to escape being forcibly fed, and resorting to other extremities. When the trial finally took place, in February 1932, she revealed the names of complicit politicians. Freed from prison after nine months, she published an article about the shady side of the financial markets, quoting classified material leaked to her by an employee in the Ministry of Finance. For this indiscretion she went back to prison. She escaped, was recaptured, and, at her wits’ end, committed suicide. “The founder of the Gazette du Franc, who could take pride in her exalted and useful republican collaborations,” L’Action Française gloated, “was 49 years old, which is to say that she was barely 40 when she conceived one of the most formidable hoaxes of our time.”8

  No less devious was Stavisky, who entered the 1930s in the shadow of a trial adjourned nineteen times, but mingling prominently in café society, gambling for high stakes, and sporting the accouterments of wealth.9 He and his glamorous wife occupied rooms at the Hôtel Claridge. A compulsive illusionist whose main act was the Ponzi scheme (performed under the alias Serge Alexandre or Monsieur Alexandre), he owned two newspapers (of opposite political persuasions), a theater, an advertising agency, a stable of racehorses, and a sty for enablers feeding at his trough. The latter were highly placed policemen, rogue politicians, disgruntled civil servants, crooked lawyers, publicists, and influential journalists. In 1931, undeterred by omens, Stavisky launched the operation that eventually made him the titular villain of an “affair.” For quite some time he had had an eye fixed on municipal pawnshops, or crédits municipaux, which were in fact lending institutions recognized by the government as “publicly useful” and authorized to issue tax-free bonds, with the understanding that profits derived therefrom would benefit the municipality. In a fateful meeting at Biarritz, Stavisky inveigled the mayor of Bayonne, who was also a well-connected legislator, into securing the approval of the relevant ministry for a crédit municipal. It served their purpose that Bayonne lies twenty-five miles from the Spanish border. “The month Spain lost its king, April 1931, Bayonne gained its crédit municipal,” writes the historian Paul Jankowski. “Revolution in Madrid had come just in time for Stavisky and his hirelings, and had made plausible their fable—of jewels from Alfonso XIII and the royal family, from Countess San Carlo, from rich Antonio Valenti of Barcelona, and from frightened Spaniards reported crossing the border to seek safe haven for themselves or their valuables. Rumors of plunder and flight justified by their proximity to the town’s new crédit municipal, launched with a budget that would have been extravagant even in a teeming metropolis.” This ur-fable laid a foundation for every subsequent ruse, the success of which depended upon connivance, nonchalance, false assumptions, a double set of books, and the flight of common sense. How Bayonne’s crédit municipal could afford to pay high interest rates in a depressed economy and for what purpose it needed huge sums were questions that bondholders didn’t pose insistently enough, or at all. It swelled like the frog with delusions of grandeur bloating itself in La Fontaine’s fable. Large insurance companies flattered the frog’s wish to pass for an ox. La Confiance, L’Avenir Familial, and others poured millions into Stavisky’s magic show.10 Stavisky himself pocketed 160 million francs.