The Paris street riots of February 1934.
Unworthy of the name French were Jews. It went without saying (but was said anyway, repeatedly, in the pages of L’Action Française, whose circulation soared) that one Jew had devised the scheme corrupting government and that another Jew, Léon Blum, had contrived to draw attention away from it by drowning protesters in blood.14 Had the Stavisky Affair not been born of the Dreyfus Affair? Had one plot not descended from the other? Daudet declared as much in lectures on “the Jewish question.” Like the earlier scandal, the recent one threatened the strength and integrity of France, in which one hundred thousand Germans, many of them Jews, had found refuge from the Third Reich. “I want to draw the attention of our innumerable readers … to another aspect of the conspiracy, which ended in a bloodbath,” he wrote. “The fact that Daladier appointed Joseph Paul-Boncour [formerly minister of foreign affairs and allegedly Arlette Simon Stavisky’s lover] minister of war has great symbolic weight.15 For it is certain that Lieutenant Colonel Barthe, who organized the butchery, could not have done so without the authorization of his superior, Paul-Boncour. Léon Blum himself admitted that he told Daladier to ‘resist’—in other words, to accelerate the massacre—on Wednesday morning, the 7th. But for several weeks, Blum, the real head of the Cartel, had been hectoring Paul-Boncour to disarm, in spite of Germany arming herself to the teeth with the obvious goal of seeking revenge.” What amounted to treason, in Daudet’s view, was opposed only by extraparliamentary patriotic organizations such as the Croix de Feu, his own Camelots du Roi, students, and the Jeunesses Patriotes. He noted that the protection Stavisky purchased in Parliament coincided with the “shady designs” of Blum and Paul-Boncour, hampering France’s ability to defend herself against Germany.
After February 6, 1934, France provided L’Action Française and kindred movements a resonant sounding board for the drumroll of xenophobia. In March, Bernard Lecache, the founder of the Ligue Internationale Contre l’Antisémitisme (LICA), observed that hatred of Jews was flagrant. A report approved by Paris’s chamber of commerce on the situation of foreigners in France welcomed immigrants “who bring us their money” but urged that those bred in “ghettos” and “unworthy of living under the sky of France” be deported forthwith. Chamber of commerce reports about the “foreign menace” led to the passage of laws requiring artisans to obtain an identity card and street peddlers to reside in France for five years before plying their trade. In 1935, French physicians would prevail upon the government to pass a law making the practice of medicine by foreigners—especially Jews fleeing Nazi Germany (where, in April 1933, Jewish physicians had been denied government insurance reimbursement for their services)—all but impossible. Even so, the journal of the French medical society would, three years later, denounce “the scandal of excessive naturalizations.”
On February 7, 1934, amid violent counterdemonstrations in which eight more people died, Daladier and then his cabinet members, submitted their resignations after only one week in office. L’Action Française commented that his regime would preserve from its short and sinister career only the shame of having, for the first time since the war, caused French hands to shed blood. That day, Albert Lebrun, president of the Republic, asked a septuagenarian deputy known for his conservatism and amiability, Gaston Doumergue, to form a “government of national salvation.” It was much to ask of him. Doumergue had been in office for less than a week when left-wing parties called for a general strike and a protest rally. The police expected another riot, but on February 12 demonstrators in the hundreds of thousands gathered at the Place de la Nation—Socialists and Communists coming from opposite directions—to hear Léon Blum and Jacques Duclos address them from separate tribunes. “Feburary 12 will henceforth be a historic date,” Blum declared. “With dignity and calm you have exhibited to fellow Parisians the strength of democracy. We will reserve that strength for the defense of the Republic.”
A demonstration of the Vigilance Committee of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals, organized in March 1934 in response to the right-wing riots of February. Marching in the front row is André Malraux, who had recently published La Condition Humaine.
Doumergue appointed a commission to investigate the Stavisky Affair and got down to business as best he could with a liberal majority in the Chamber and a cabinet that included Pierre Laval and Marshal Philippe Pétain, who was already being hailed in a widely distributed pamphlet entitled C’est Pétain Qu’il Nous Faut! as the man chosen by Providence to lead an autocratic state. One solution to the task of reconciling the irreconcilable was to unyoke the executive from the team of factional horses pulling the legislature apart and issue executive decrees, which Doumergue regularly did during his nine-month tenure, shaping an agenda rather like Tardieu’s.
For the militant leagues, business as usual was a sobering outcome.16 The blood they had shed brought them nothing of the new order they envisioned, only regrets that they had not coordinated their maneuvers and the hope that a truly tactical effort the next time might rouse public opinion to better effect against the “parliamentary and individualist Republic that divides and corrupts.” As a result, the Jeunesses Patriotes and Solidarité Française, with the blessings of L’Action Française, announced the formation of a “national front” on May 7, 1935.17 They stated that its mission was to marshal all the forces of the nation against the “anti-French red front” and to make common cause should any one of its constituents be threatened or come under attack. “The royalist and Fascist shock troops have experienced their strength, and their audacity will grow,” warned Léon Blum, little suspecting that a year later, shortly before he became premier, their audacity would lead right-wing louts to drag him from his car and beat him bloody.
In January 1934, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle spent a week in Berlin, under the auspices of a Nazi youth group eager to promote Franco-German friendship. With uniformed members of the Sturmabteilung and the Schutzstaffel guiding him around the city, he looked like a Parisian swan attended by brown cygnets. The tour proved to be immensely seductive. Reawakened in him was nostalgia for the camaraderie of the trenches, according to Bertrand de Jouvenel, his friend and traveling companion.18 He put Jouvenel in mind of Alfred de Vigny’s post-Napoleonic officers marking time in desultory love affairs while longing for mortal combat. He knew what Robert Graves meant by “Death was young again,” in the poem “Recalling War”:
Natural infirmities were out of mode,
For Death was young again: patron alone
Of healthy dying, premature fate-spasm.
Fear made fine bed-fellows. Sick with delight
At life’s discovered transitoriness,
Our youth became all-flesh and waived the mind.
Jouvenel had the impression that war and Fascism were all that brought light to Drieu’s pale blue eyes. The previous year Drieu had written a play called Le Chef, one of whose protagonists declares, “When one kills freedom, it did not have much life left in it. There are seasons—a season for freedom, a season for authority.”
Drieu would not have sought in Berlin an answer to his longings for release from the curse of self-doubt and the anguish of solitude if he had not already found it or concluded that the key was totalitarian authority. On February 6, at the Place de la Concorde, he witnessed what he took to be a spontaneous explosion of French instinct, ardor, and pride. It was la furia francese at its most impressively brutish, and brutishness had always entranced him. In a memoir he wrote, “The rugby scrums and boxing matches I saw during my student days at Shrewsbury utterly disconcerted me, but didn’t change my fixed habit of only dreaming about sports. I dreamed of the roughest ones, of rugby scrums and boxing matches.… I continued to shy away from the thing I knew to be essential, which was that I become a brute capable of holding my own against brutes.”19 Until February 6 he had been a mere observer, he wrote. His was the “fallen state that gives birth to novelists.” Now he decided to join the scrum but, as with everything in life,
still debated with himself which colors to wear. Should he follow the examples of Malraux, Gide, and Aragon and turn left instead of right and look to Moscow for salvation rather than Berlin? Did one direction hold greater promise than the other of making him “a new man”?
The spectacle staged by the Nazis at their party congress in Nuremberg in 1935 (and projected beyond Germany in Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will) seemed to be a decisive event for Drieu. He attended the congress and came away exuberant. “I have never felt such artistic emotion since the Ballets Russes. This nation is intoxicated by music and dance.” It was with the same exuberance that he had marched to war in 1914 carrying Nietzsche in his knapsack. “I should only believe in a god who would know how to dance,” says Zarathustra. “And when I saw my devil I found him serious, thorough, profound, and solemn: he was the spirit of gravity—through him all things fall.”20
The emotional logic that enabled Drieu to reconcile ballet and brutishness was at play in October of that same year, when he and sixty-four compatriots issued the “Manifesto of French Intellectuals for the Defense of the West,” justifying Italy’s war against “an amalgam of uncivilized tribes” in Ethiopia. Signatories of the manifesto, who eventually numbered a thousand or more, protested that the League of Nations had condemned the invasion and imposed sanctions on Italy in accordance with a fallacious creed of “legal universalism” making no distinction between the superior and the inferior, between the civilized and the barbaric. The slaughter of four hundred thousand Ethiopians had been accomplished in a “civilizing spirit,” they insisted. Colonial conquest bespoke Europe’s “vitality.”
1Laval is chiefly remembered as Pétain’s premier during the Vichy regime; he was tried and executed after the war for “intelligence with the enemy.”
2In a comprehensive view of postwar France, two French historians, Jean-Pierre Azéma and Michel Winock, observe that the public ethos was generally hostile to change. “New” was as feared in France as it was glorified in the Soviet Union, and the myth of the “belle époque,” cultivated after 1918, bore witness to this nostalgia for a lost golden age. “The springs of the republican regime, already worn before 1914, lost even more resilience during the war. When the time came to modernize, the spirit of innovation was lacking. After years of hemming and hawing, the gold-backed franc was restored, albeit at one-fifth of its previous value. But more difficult to restore was the republican spirit, which had suffered comparable depreciation. In retrospect, the twenties appear to have been a quagmire.”
3Édouard Herriot, leader of the Radical Party, twice premier, and perennial président de la Chambre (Speaker of the House), was a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure. He taught advanced classes in literature and rhetoric at lycées in Nancy and Lyon and was awarded a prize by the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques for a work on Philo and the Alexandrian school. Among his thirty books are a life of Beethoven and a history of French literature. He entered politics during the Dreyfus Affair, as a Dreyfusard.
4Pius X died in 1914. He was succeeded by Benedict XV and Benedict by Pius XI in 1922.
5Chiappe also forbade Felix Weingartner’s appearances as conductor of the Pasdeloup Orchestra. It is worth noting that Dreyfus himself was still alive to observe the longevity of the myth that bore his name. He died in 1935.
6The Jewish News Archive of March 7 reported that Jewish circles were much concerned by the demonstration of anti-Semitic strength in France. “The anti-Semitic passions which ran high during the Dreyfus Affair have been found by this new affair to be still alive in France, the royalist and military circles who contended that the Jew Dreyfus was guilty of appearing to have a strong following still, despite the verdict of history, even to the extent of a woman publicly proclaiming herself Esterhazy’s daughter and making an attack in the theater on M. Richepin [the French adapter of the play] because it depicted Esterhazy as the traitor.”
7In 1928 Coty bid for working-class support with a newspaper named after Marat’s paper of the revolutionary period, L’Ami du Peuple. Among other articles of commentary published in it was one entitled “France d’Abord! Avec Hitler Contre le Bolshévisme!”
8Janet Flanner published several long articles about Marthe Hanau in the New Yorker in the 1930s.
9Stavisky’s father had committed suicide several years earlier, after trying to save him from another financial embarrassment.
10Lloyd’s of France had invested 5 percent of its total assets in the crédit municipal.
11Marinus van der Lubbe, the alleged arsonist, was active in the unemployed workers’ movement in Holland. He moved to Germany in 1933 and joined the Communist underground. The Sturmabteilung, the SA, had been committing particularly brutal murders in a reign of terror since the summer of 1932. The most widely publicized took place in the Silesian town of Potempa on August 10, when SA thugs trampled to death a Communist miner in the presence of his mother and brother.
12A number of men in high public office, representing the moderate Left, belonged to the French Masonic Lodge called the Grand Orient de France. To Solidarité and other elements of the Far Right, Masonry signified devotion to the ideals of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.
13Badgered by young Communists en route, they paraded under a banner that read, “We want France to live in order and propriety.”
14Not wanting to bear the same given name as Léon Blum, Léon Daudet took to calling him Béla Blum, with Béla Kun in mind. Kun, born Kohn, led the Hungarian Revolution of 1919 and presided over the Hungarian Soviet Republic.
15Daladier had appointed Paul-Boncour minister of war only two days before the riots of February 6.
16It was not altogether business as usual. During the parliamentary session preceding the confidence vote for Doumergue, one deputy, Xavier Vallat—a one-eyed, one-legged veteran who later became the Vichy government’s first commissioner of Jewish affairs—proclaimed that he was happy to be hearing the voice of France after having heard “those of Israel and of Moscow.”
17Thirty-seven years later, Jean-Marie Le Pen founded the Front National in its second incarnation.
18Bertrand de Jouvenel was ten years Drieu’s junior. The son of an old-line aristocrat and a Jewish heiress, he had written several books on economics, most recently La Crise du Capitalisme Américain. His love life, which seems to have rivaled Drieu’s, included an affair with his stepmother, the novelist Colette (whom he called Phaedra) and, at the time of his voyage to Berlin, with the American journalist Martha Gellhorn, a staunch anti-Fascist, who became an eminent war correspondent and, in 1940, Ernest Hemingway’s third wife.
19“In the street I was at the mercy of anyone who crossed my path,” he continued in this memoir. “During skirmishes in the student quarter, I took advantage of the mayhem and of the chance to dodge blows that would have destroyed me.… I became furtive, elusive, ironical. Erotism served as a compensation, a substitute.”
20After Nuremberg, Drieu visited Berlin, where he struck up a friendship with the novelist Ernst von Salomon, who had been a member of the postwar paramilitary organization Das Freikorps, had been imprisoned for his role in the assassination of Walther Rathenau, Jewish foreign minister of the Weimar Republic, and had written sympathetically about the social estrangement of many German solidiers after 1918, as in this passage: “They constituted seats of discontent in their companies. The war still inhabited them. It had formed them; it had awakened their most secret penchants; it had given meaning to their lives … They were rough beings, untamed men cast out of the world, alien to bourgeois norms, scattered about, who assembled in small bands to make some sense of their combat experience.”
CHAPTER 10
The Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture
In May 1935, Pierre Laval, France’s conservative minister of foreign affairs and future premier, signed a mutual assistance pact with the Soviet Union designed to protect its signatories against German aggression.1 Two months earlier
, on March 13, Hitler, in flagrant violation of the Versailles Treaty, had decided to reintroduce conscription and increase the size of the German army fivefold. Crowds rejoiced in front of the Reich Chancellery. Newspapers declared that the first great measure had been taken to “liquidate Versailles.” On March 17, a day known thenceforth as “Heroes’ Memorial Day,” General Werner von Blomberg, Hitler’s servile minister of defense, told a uniformed audience at Berlin’s State Opera House that Germany would again take the place she deserved among the nations. “We pledge ourselves to a Germany which will never surrender and never again sign a treaty which cannot be fulfilled,” he declared, with nods of approbation from Hitler sitting in the royal box.
The ink had not yet dried on the Franco-Soviet mutual assistance pact when Ilya Ehrenburg—a prolific novelist and Izvestia’s correspondent in Paris—organized the Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture. Moscow had decided to repudiate pacifist principles and march with Socialists and Radicals against the common foe. Between June 21 and June 25, crowds ebbed and flowed into the Mutualité conference hall on Paris’s Left Bank for three daily sessions that addressed topics such as “cultural heritage,” “the “role of the writer in society,” “the individual,” “humanism,” “nature and culture,” and “the problems of creation and the dignity of thought.” Writers came from Germany, the USSR, America, England, Turkey, China, and Holland. Among those who spoke were André Gide, André Malraux, Louis Aragon, E. M. Forster, Isaac Babel, Waldo Frank, Max Brod, Aldous Huxley, Julien Benda, James Strachey, Bertolt Brecht, Robert Musil, Heinrich Mann, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Henri Barbusse, Paul Nizan, Lion Feuchtwanger, Boris Pasternak. Their shades of opinion ran from liberal to Stalinist.
The Embrace of Unreason Page 25