The Embrace of Unreason

by Frederick Brown

  Retour de l’URSS generated a multitude of hate mail, but L’Humanité refrained from commenting on it for several weeks. During the interval, it published in extenso Stalin’s speech on the new constitution of the USSR delivered at the Eighth Extraordinary Congress of Soviets, in which many of Gide’s observations were implicitly held to be the criticism of a benighted Westerner.7 Likewise, L’Humanité countered Gide’s depiction of the collective farm, or “kolkhoz,” as a microcosm of the larger dystopia with its own portrait of a collective abounding in pride, camaraderie, and produce.

  L’Humanité let more than a month go by before addressing Retour de l’URSS directly, and, when enough time had passed to demonstrate its contempt, published not its own review but Pravda’s long denunciation of the book and its author. Gide, Pravda declared, was a character straight out of his novel The Counterfeiters, which is to say, a writer who knew whereof he wrote for being himself a prime specimen of the decadent bourgeois intelligentsia. Pravda charged:

  Throughout his literary life, he has kept his distance from the great social ideas, the great social ideals.… He is an individualist who delights in his own games. He is one of the “wittiest” French authors and finds perversity irresistibly attractive.8

  “Bourgeois” summarized the multitude of Gide’s imperfections. It was predictable that Soviet fare would taste insipid to a bourgeois palate dulled by exotic sweetmeats and that Soviet boasting would disconcert an anoxic “bourgeois soul” dying of refinement. “Our society liberated from exploiting classes seemed to his bourgeois soul too ‘simple’ and ‘uniform’ ” the review posited. “He prefers a society crawling like a swamp with all of the human types spawned by the bourgeoisie. He felt an outsider in a country from which the promiscuous horde of parasites and freaks has disappeared.”

  The Kremlin organized a campaign against Gide, beginning with Sergei Eisenstein and Boris Pasternak, who were invited to denounce him as “Fascist and Trotskyite.” Ilya Ehrenburg followed suit. L’Humanité received and published what purported to be the deathbed letter of Nikolai Ostrovsky, a blind, bedridden Soviet writer famous in Communist circles for a realist novel entitled How the Steel Was Tempered, whom Gide had visited during his tour. “You have surely read the article in Pravda about André Gide’s betrayal,” he wrote to his mother. “How he betrayed our hearts! Who would have thought that he could act so basely. Shame on this old man. It wasn’t just us he betrayed, but our valiant people. Now all the enemies of Socialism will use this book against the working class.” Invoking the Synoptic Gospels whenever they served a Soviet purpose, Pravda compared the parting kiss that Gide planted on Ostrovky’s face to the kiss of Judas.

  Retour de l’URSS received favorable notice in Le Populaire. What Gide observed of depersonalization in the USSR came as no surprise to the reviewer, who agreed that only malign spirits of the Right would insist on confusing Socialism with Stalin’s sinister perversion of it. Socialism doesn’t enslave, it liberates, he asserted. The idea of a regime in which the cult of liberty did not flourish was “an absurdity.”

  These contradictory responses boded ill, and, indeed, the Popular Front, behind which Communists and Socialists masked their differences, proved to be an edifice as short-lived as the national pavilions built for Paris’s World’s Fairs. It had one season of glory, then deteriorated under pressure from within and without.

  Social and economic reforms enacted by the Popular Front during its golden summer induced a bipolar state of euphoria and fear, with one class welcoming the dawn and others brooding over nightfall. For workers, it was a new order; for the bourgeoisie, “petite” and “haute” alike, who regarded Blum as Lenin’s Kerensky, Red October lay at hand.

  Blum’s cabinet had been sitting for less than a fortnight when Parliament passed laws mandating the forty-hour week at undiminished wages, with two weeks’ paid vacation, in the hope that workers would live and labor more productively under humane conditions, that industry would be compelled to create additional shifts, that more money thus put in circulation would stimulate the economy. America’s WPA inspired a program of large public works. To bolster this legislation, the government appointed an undersecretary of state for sport and the organization of leisure.9 But the new dispensation, as it appeared to be, provided for the common man’s cultural enrichment as well as his material welfare. “Parallel to the great political and social movement … a vast cultural movement is unfolding,” Jacques Soustelle wrote in the weekly Vendredi. “Its motto could be: ‘Let us open the doors of culture. Let us level the wall surrounding it and enter a beautiful park hitherto forbidden to poor people, a culture reserved for an elite.’ ” Adult education courses proliferated. Amateur theater groups sprang up in Paris and provincial cities. The Théâtre National Populaire, which had been inaugurated after World War I at the Arc de Triomphe in a ceremony honoring the Unknown Soldier, rivaled the Comédie Française.

  With the Popular Front, France became once again a country “on the march.” The year 1936 was marked not only by legislation that offered the laboring class greater security but by rituals that mobilized Frenchmen en masse. Young people set out in far greater numbers than ever before on treks around France, as youth hostels multiplied under the aegis of a government whose undersecretary for sports and leisure declared, evangelically, that youth hostels were one aspect of an experiment to transform the human condition. The fortnight’s paid vacation called for special trains that conveyed workers at reduced fares to seaside villages where party guides hailed them with close-fisted salutes (this exodus inspiring a counterexodus of bourgeois fleeing the plague sent upon their summer nation).

  Even more significant than the movement away from cities was the swarming that took place within them, and particularly within Paris, whenever Communist and Socialist leaders exhorted the faithful to assemble for a show of strength. “France of the Popular Front was, first and foremost, the cortège of militants in all its diversity and anonymity,” wrote one historian. The “cortège of militants” resembled nothing so much as a general mobilization for war, with tens of thousands of workers from the banlieue jubilantly converging on the capital by metro, by bus, by car, by van, on foot. Several days before a march, L’Humanité and Le Populaire would have begun to diagram it in detail—its order, the composition of its eight or ten major groups, the site at which each formed up, the roster of leaders—lest chaos ensue, though chaos was there as an ever-present threat. Wherever marchers marched they made themselves heard, singing songs that evoked the revolutionary past and the utopian future. “From the minute we set out to the minute we dispersed (many hours later for those among us who brought up the rear), we would shout and sing ourselves hoarse,” wrote Henri Noguères. Mingling with Soviet songs widely heard on Chant du Monde records (“Komintern,” “The Partisans,” “Long Live Life”) were songs of the French Revolution—“La Carmagnole” and “Ça Ira”—in topical variations.

  Which direction the crowd took was dictated by circumstances, or by the nature of the event that summoned it. A demonstration against L’Action Française mobilized the Latin Quarter.10 Mourning Henri Barbusse, the novelist who had died in Russia, Communists followed his casket up Ménilmontant to Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Commemorating the assassination of Jean Jaurès, Socialists assembled at the Panthéon. Asserting solidarity with Spain’s Frente Popular, leftists generally took the royal road of popular vociferation, which led from the Place de la Nation to the Place de la Bastille. But in any event, the crowd beheld itself as a virtuous army and Paris as the Champs de Mars. “As others reminisce about their campaigns, the veterans among us—who were not necessarily the oldest—would learnedly compare a demonstration which had just taken place with its predecessors, evaluating the number of marchers, enumerating the ‘stars’ they had seen, appraising the behavior of police (both police in uniform and police in civilian clothes).” Not since 1793 and 1794 had such multitudes gathered on so many occasions. Indeed, one mass demonstrati
on was held to commemorate another as the mass become increasingly self-absorbed and the cortège an end in itself, transcending its pretexts. Demonstrations pullulated, like the logos or acronyms that all by themselves tell the sociopolitical story of France during the leftist coalition’s heyday.

  Many Parisians remembered that heyday as a radical departure from workaday life, with students roaming the streets, workers occupying factories, Socialists holding rallies in Luna Park, converts to Bolshevism meeting conspiratorially, and everyone marching. It was on an official holiday that Paris of the Popular Front displayed itself at its most exuberant. On July 14, 1936, people were swept up by the passion that informed a million voices singing the “The Internationale” as loudly as the “La Marseillaise” and invoked the names of revolutionaries whose roster dismayed everyone with visions of France revisited by the Terror: Marat, Saint-Just, Robespierre. “We marched, we sang with our comrades,” three prominent writers reported. “Marching in one row between two human hedges, underneath windows from which flags were waving, we looked at the faces. And if we are so joyous this evening, we owe our joy to the fraternal spirit borne home by the smiles of unknown men and women.… Saint-Just used to say that happiness was a new idea. Today we have breathed, in the air of Paris, the newness and youth of that idea.”

  Le Populaire described a sea of humanity billowing down the boulevards and submerging the Place de la Nation, where Blum and the Radical leader Édouard Daladier shared a podium.11 L’Humanité drew upon the same fund of images: “immense swells,” “a sea of banners.” Romain Rolland, who rejoiced with his fellow Socialists, might have used the word “oceanic,” as he had done several years earlier to describe his experience of religious rapture in his correspondence with Sigmund Freud.12 Rolland’s play Le Quatorze Juillet—written during the Dreyfus Affair, performed once, and consigned to oblivion—was revived that evening at the Alhambra for crowds who flowed into the huge hall after milling on the streets. With a cast of two hundred, Quatorze Juillet featured a march composed by Arthur Honegger and an enormous curtain painted by Picasso.13 It played to an ecstatic mob, crowning the old age of the Nobelist whose supreme ambition was—had long been—to replace theater with civic festivities, to make the populace the cast, and its revolutionary history the play. In that self-celebratory state, which presented a utopian model for the life of society, there would be no more acting. Gone would be the division between audience and stage. The inner person would marry the outside world. The individual would have united with his god.

  In July and August, hearts were gladdened by the abolition of paramilitary leagues and the passage of more egalitarian legislation, notably a law designed to free the country’s central bank from the grasp of an oligarchy called “the two hundred families.” But before long, trouble besieged the government from every side, as if to demonstrate that no good deed goes unpunished. Predictably, the extreme Right answered the euphoria of the Left with campaigns of slander. In a relatively mild editorial written soon after Blum announced his cabinet, Charles Maurras declared that the appointment of the Jew Jean Zay as minister of education was a crime against the fatherland, Zay having insulted the French flag twelve years earlier, at age twenty, by calling it a symbol of the perfervid nationalism to which a million and a half young lives had been uselessly sacrificed. “What insolence!” Maurras wrote. “What madness! What a challenge to the fatherland, to the honor and memory of the dead, our protectors and saviors! After an ascent to the summit, the Jewish neurosis has flared up; in thin air, the imprudent climbers have lost their minds.” L’Action Française reported that Bastille Day 1936 was celebrated by a tenth as many people as left-wing papers claimed and hailed with ten times as many red banners as tricolor. Maurras quoted an observation of “the learned Bertillon” (the inventor of the mug shot and a self-proclaimed graphologist whose ludicrous testimony had helped convict Dreyfus at his court-martial in 1894) that “one never knows what is taking place in the head of a Jew.” Treason came naturally to creatures opaque by nature, with heads for hiding their true allegiances.

  On the other hand, it was not thought that Jews enjoyed an absolute monopoly of treasonable secrets. During the summer and fall of 1936, L’Action Française and Gringoire, its partner in calumny, took turns accusing Blum’s minister of the interior, Roger Salengro, of having crossed enemy lines in 1915, as a uniformed bicycle messenger, and surrendered military intelligence to the Germans. Solid evidence had satisfied a court-martial that he had been captured while trying to retrieve the body of a dead comrade, but his prosecutors, who invoked the testimony of anonymous veterans, were relentless. After studying the dossier, a commission appointed by Blum and chaired by the chief of staff, General Maurice Gamelin, found no substance in the charge of desertion. Its report fell on deaf ears. Two days after the eighteenth anniversary of the Armistice, Henri Becquart, a deputy of the Far Right, and Xavier Vallat, who had distinguished himself five months earlier by questioning the appropriateness of a Jew holding sway over a Gallo-Roman nation, declared that Salengro’s record was still suspect. Blum rebutted their argument in exquisite detail, without laboring under the misapprehension that any amount of evidence could change minds in the Chamber of Deputies, and not before a violent scuffle had interrupted parliamentary proceedings. He then called upon the chamber to declare the charges against Salengro groundless, which it did by a large majority.

  Four days later, on November 17, Salengro, whose wife had recently died, committed suicide. He could no longer endure the smears, he wrote to Blum, and hoped that “if they hadn’t succeeded in dishonoring me, they would bear the responsibility for my death.” Sad to say, he was bargaining for posthumous disappointment. Politics had become mortal combat. In L’Écho de Paris, a paper to which readers of L’Action Française and Gringoire might have subscribed, Henri de Kérillis laid the blame at Blum’s doorstep, asserting that Salengro would still be alive if the arrogant premier hadn’t appointed him minister of the interior and thus put a compromised man in the line of fire. “Roger Salengro’s death turned a page in French political history,” writes the historian Serge Berstein. “On the French Far Right, the will to destroy one’s political adversary at all costs and by all means had replaced the conflict of ideas, the debate over different ways of resolving national problems.” No doubt, other events had turned the page several years earlier, only now there was a ministerial corpse to be reckoned with. That the church—no friend of Socialists and suicides—denounced the campaign as unchristian provides a measure of its violence. “Politics does not justify everything,” declared Cardinal Liénart of Lille, Salengro’s hometown. According to the cardinal, who spoke ex cathedra, a press “specializing in defamation and slander” found no favor in the eyes of God. Le Croix disseminated his pronouncement throughout France.

  In substantive matters, papers of the Radical Right echoed the conservative press (Le Figaro, Le Temps, Le Journal des Débats), whose fierce opposition to the Popular Front was rooted in its fear of a Communist revolution. Behind Blum loomed Stalin, and economic woes enlarged that specter. A steep rise in the cost of living soon compromised the benefits legislated in June. People bought less, production declined, and capital fled to safe havens abroad when investment was most needed at home. France became an even poorer country, burdened with debt. Its dwindling gold reserves forced Blum, despite promises he had made, to devalue the franc. Then there was the so-called wall of money in the form of France’s Banque de France—the bank of issue—which remained the preserve of rich regents bent on bringing Blum to his knees. Inflation bred widespread disenchantment. In turn, disenchantment polarized workers who had chanted for solidarity on Bastille Day. Many were drawn to Jacques Doriot’s PPF and to the political reincarnation of Colonel de La Rocque’s dissolved Ligue des Croix de Feu (the PSF, or Parti Social Français). Others drifted leftward, from the party to militant Communism, widening the rift within the Popular Front. Widening it still further was the desertion of a middle
class that normally voted Radical but felt neglected by Blum and harnessed to a coalition that might, under Soviet influence, drive France across the Pyrenees for what was seen to be a gladiatorial contest pitting Hitler and Mussolini against Stalin. They didn’t want entanglements. They didn’t want war. And the Frente Popular was itself an imbroglio.

  Internal dissension over the Spanish Civil War may have done more to scuttle the Popular Front than the economic doldrums and the Far Right’s campaign of vilification. War broke out on July 18, 1936, when, assisted by Mussolini, rebel troops stationed in Spanish Morocco invaded the mainland. At the behest of Spanish republicans, Blum undertook to supply the besieged government with arms and matériel, but he encountered vehement opposition from all quarters of the Right and from Radicals inside his own coalition. On July 31, the foreign minister, Yvon Delbos appeared before the Chamber of Deputies and denied that the Spanish Republic had requested arms, though it would have been entirely within its rights to do so: “It did not for reasons of doctrine and humanity, lest it furnish those who wish to help the insurgents with a pretext.” Le Figaro’s commentator quoted this assertion with winks insinuating that the legitimacy of the Spanish Republic might be considered questionable, and the uprising against it lawful.

  Colonel François de La Rocque, leader of the Croix de Feu, which, after the banishment of paramilitary leagues, legitimized itself as a political party, the French Social Party.

  In Spain, a republic had been established in 1931, after the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera. Republicans and Socialists drafted a constitution that inspired securalizing reforms and legislation calculated to improve the lot of workers and farmers. The Depression hampered their efforts. Popular enthusiasm waned and a conservative government nullified many of the reforms. Left-wing parties narrowly regained power in 1936, amid fears of a military coup on the one hand and a Communist revolution on the other. Violent clashes became commonplace, undermining confidence in the republic’s ability to effect economic and social change peaceably. In July 1936 the Spanish Army of Africa invaded the mainland under the command of Francisco Franco, who characterized the civil war that ensued as a struggle between the “red hordes” and “Christian civilization.”