Faced with choices every one of which threatened the Popular Front, Blum hoped to find support for intervention from Whitehall but was advised that Britain would neither intervene nor come to France’s aid if she went it alone and found herself invaded by Fascist troops. It led him to blindfold himself; in August, he circulated among the European powers a pact of nonintervention in Spain, which was accepted but no sooner signed by all than cynically ignored by Germany and Italy. Soviet tanks and planes arrived later, at the end of October.
On November 6, 1936, amid the amusement rides of Luna Park, outside Paris, where the Federation of the Seine was celebrating the anniversary of the Third Republic (with Josephine Baker and Marianne Oswald entertaining the crowd between ministerial harangues), Blum offered his anguished explanation of what many in the audience understood to be a betrayal of the anti-Fascist cause. European nations engaging in an arms race on Spanish soil could only spell disaster, he declared. The pact prohibiting it was the only solution he could contemplate.
I would that these words did not weigh heavily on the Spanish people. We thought that securing general neutrality and thus avoiding international complications of an obviously grave nature would be best for them as well.… Now all the powers have signed on to our proposal and promulgated appropriate measures. There is no solid basis for presuming that these measures have been violated.14
Factory delegates had demanded that he reverse his position. Three hundred thousand workers in the Paris region staged a strike against the blockade, to no avail.
How can we tear up a document we have asked others to sign, when their ink is still wet on it and no violations have occurred.… In my view, it is impossible at the present time to act otherwise without provoking a crisis whose consequences are unforeseeable.
He persevered above jeers and delivered a Jaurrasian peroration evoking July 1914 and his passionate commitment to peace:
I must tell you what I shall do and what I shall refuse to do so long as I remain in power. We have friends who consider that our conduct is a concession to foreign powers. They tell us that we must exalt national pride, that peace can best be preserved by the development of patriotic sentiment. This language has a familiar ring. I heard it twenty-four years ago. I am a Frenchman as proud as anyone of his country and its history, despite my race. I shall spare no effort to ensure the security of France. One of the elements of French national honor is a will to keep the peace. Have we forgotten that? I shall never admit that war is inevitable. Until I draw my last breath, I shall do everything to prevent it. War is fatal only when one considers it such.
I had an almost visceral need to talk to you today. For almost three months I have been asking myself whether I have the stuff of a leader. There are times when I am not perfectly sure of myself.
It was reported on the same page of Le Figaro that Germany’s ambassador to Spain had left Alicante for Berlin, announcing before his departure that he could no longer represent the Reich in a country run by “irresponsible Marxists.”
Self-doubt did not visit Maurice Thorez, the French Communist leader, who made a show of allegiance to the Popular Front while expressing his repugnance for the neutrality pact before and after Blum’s speech at Luna Park: “Shame mingles with anguish when we receive word of blood flowing in Bedajos and Irun, of heroic combatants being crushed because they lack arms to fight an enemy well provided with airplanes, cannons, machine guns, and ammunition by Fascist dictators.” Arguments, pretexts, cavils, and slurs hurled at the Communist Party all bounced off the iron-clad conscience of “good proletarians.” Summoning the ghost of Jean Jaurès to seal his message, as Blum had done to justify neutrality, he asserted that it was imperative to end the arms blockade: “Twenty-three years ago, the working class learned from his flown spirit that the struggle for peace is the most necessary of wars.” Eighty thousand party faithful heard him lament the “grave error” of nonintervention at a suburban stadium on October 4, three days after the insurgents proclaimed General Francisco Franco head of state at Burgos.
Thorez addressed another huge assembly in the Vélodrome d’Hiver on November 22, when word of the Luftwaffe bombing Madrid in a raid that anticipated Guernica was reaching Paris. “For the purposes of a politics that leads, alas! to war, we republicans, anti-Fascists, and sincere pacifists are mendaciously accused of wanting war. It was this calumny that made Jaurès, an apostle of peace, the first of the world war’s myriad victims. By calumny, the enemies of the people endeavor to sow division. But the masses of the Popular Front won’t allow themselves to become a house divided.” Not all the blame for nonintervention could be laid at the doorstep of London’s financial elite, of Anthony Eden, of France’s two hundred families (who did, in fact, retain control of the Banque de France), of the munitions dealer Sir Basil Zaharoff. As we have noted, there was opposition from within. The Popular Front became a threadbare garment in which three contentious parties continued to wrap themselves, tearing at the fabric even as they proclaimed its integrity. An editor of L’Humanité, Lucien Sampaix, asked how “our comrade Léon Blum,” could ignore the fact that trucks laden with cotton and glycerine for the manufacture of explosives were crossing the Pyrenees to Fascist-held Basque country. L’Humanité ran other such comminatory editorials. But unity remained their watchword.
Almost a year after Blum introduced the neutrality pact, L’Humanité’s editor in chief, Paul Vaillant-Couturier, declared in a kind of ritual incantation that the bond between Socialists and Communists had never been so tight. How, he asked, could one seriously imagine a divorce between two parties pledged to advance the program of the Popular Front, to dissolve paramilitary leagues, to “save the peace with Spain”? One who could easily imagine a divorce was George Orwell. “Anyone who has given the subject a glance knows that the Communist tactic of dealing with political opponents by means of trumped‑up accusations is nothing new,” he noted in Homage to Catalonia:
Today the key word is Trotsky-Fascist; yesterday it was Social-Fascist. It is only six or seven years since the Russian State trials “proved” that the leaders of the Second International, including, for example, Léon Blum and prominent members of the British Labor Party, were hatching a huge plot for the military invasion of the U.S.S.R. Yet today the French Communists are glad enough to accept Blum as a leader and the English Communists are raising heaven and earth to get inside the Labour Party.
Another who could imagine it was Pierre Drieu La Rochelle. In 1937, he spent two weeks observing the war from Franco’s side of the lines and wrote patronizing letters to Victoria Ocampo, whose pro-republicanism he dismissed as a temporary loss of reason.
The death knell of Blum’s premiership, and to all intents and purposes of the Popular Front, which lived in name only until October 1938, was sounded not by the Communist Party but by Radical legislators convinced after the summer of 1936 that a New Deal for the proletariat slighted the interests of their own middle-class constituency. Édouard Daladier, their leader and the minister of war, prevailed upon Blum to suspend his program of economic reform and ramp up the manufacture of armaments. France could hardly afford both butter and bullets. By March 1937, when the flight of capital was emptying the treasury and crippling production, malaise had become a full-blown revolt. Radical youth groups organized large demonstrations in the provinces, at one of which Daladier distanced himself from his premier, speaking as a possible successor with an agenda friendlier to entrepreneurs with enough savoir faire to maintain order where chaos threatened. Everyone knew what chaos meant. On March 16, 1937, Communist and Socialist militants had disrupted a rally of the PSF at Clichy. Unable to clear the square, police had opened fire, killing five of the militants and wounding as many as three hundred.15
Early in June, Blum’s minister of finance, Vincent Auriol, drafted a bill requesting that Parliament grant the administration plenary financial powers until June 31, to deal as it saw fit with the nation’s economic problems. What it considered “fit”
went unexplained, and Radical legislators, fearful of measures even more abhorrent than tax increases, chafed at the proposal, which passed through the lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, but twice failed to gain a majority in the Senate. On June 22, Blum, having concluded that he could no longer govern effectively, resigned the premiership. He was succeeded by a Radical we have already encountered in the premier’s office, Camille Chautemps.
There were several grotesque ironies bound up in the Paris World’s Fair of 1937, officially known as the International Exposition of Arts and Technics in Modern Life, which opened on May 24, 1937, after five years in the planning. Blum, who had been an adolescent when the Eiffel Tower began to rise above Paris for the hundredth-anniversary celebration of the French Revolution at the 1889 World’s Fair, foresaw that his government could use the 1937 fair to present itself as the torchbearer of progress and modernity. He applauded President Albert Lebrun’s inaugural speech expressing the hope that “this great assembly would teach mankind yet again that there is no dignity of life but in mutual comprehension of peoples’ needs, aspirations, and genius; no prosperity but in an ever more intense exchange of products and ideas.” He stood tall beside Lebrun for a military fanfare between the colonnaded wings of the newly built Palais de Chaillot, where Hitler was to have himself photographed three years later looking triumphantly at the Eiffel Tower. He and Lebrun led a cortège across the Trocadéro Gardens toward the dense cluster of pavilions on the Champs de Mars and along the Seine. At the Pont d’Iéna they boarded launches to view the exposition from a riverine perspective. Crowds along the quays were reported in newspapers to have shouted, “Vive Blum! Vive Lebrun!,” though not in L’Action Française, which acknowledged Blum’s presence only once, and then by way of noting his “unsightly Semitic profile.” Unsightly as well were the construction sites all over the unfinished fairground. Right-wing journalists cited them as evidence of workers malingering and of trade unions promoting their delinquency. Le Populaire, on the other hand, pronounced the fair a brilliant success. Day after day it reported attendance figures on its first page and the completion of new pavilions.
Two pavilions standing opposite each other and dwarfing all the rest competed for visitors walking down the main avenue between the Palais de Chaillot and the Eiffel Tower. They were stone monoliths in which Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany had invested sums out of all proportion to the buildings’ brief life span but commensurate with their symbolic value. Both had frontal towers. The Soviet’s served as a pedestal for two heroic figures seventy-five feet tall: a male and female worker, he stripped to the waist, she in a swirling peasant dress, thrusting the hammer and sickle skyward like conquistadors setting foot on a new continent and claiming it for the crown and the cross. They might have claimed world supremacy had Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, not obtained their blueprints from a sympathetic French commissioner and subsequently designed a taller, bulkier tower surmounted by a twenty-foot eagle, as imperturbable as the Soviet couple was dynamic, with its wings spread like Dracula’s mantle.
It was not widely commented upon that in the Spanish pavilion, a short walk from the German, Picasso’s Guernica pictured the destruction rained on a Spanish town by the Condor Legion of German bombers.
That Germany had the most prominent pavilion in the exposition’s most conspicuous quarter—that it had any pavilion at all—was the result of what Karen Fiss, who has written brilliantly on the subject, calls “the grand illusion.” Anticipating Munich 1938, French authorities, duped by Hitler, bought into the idea that Germany’s full participation in the World’s Fair reflected her desire to be a good neighbor in the community of nations. Lest she withdraw, as she had withdrawn from the League of Nations in October 1933, they met all her demands, however egregious. It seemed to be assumed that European peace itself depended on her staying, and she milked that illusion for all its worth. Jacques Gréber, chief architect of the fair, agreed to buy—among much else—German pumps and projectors for the light displays, German scientific instruments for the Pavillon de la Découverte, and a German planetarium for the Parc des Attractions.16 Gréber dropped his stipulation that Germany plan a more modest frontal tower. When the Paris-based German exile newspaper Das Neue Tage-Buch alarmed German diplomats by suggesting in an open letter to Thomas Mann that Jewish and German left-wing refugees build a pavilion of their own, French organizers assured them that it was absolutely out of the question.
The Paris exposition of 1937 viewed from the terrace of the Palais de Chaillot, the German pavilion (left) and the Soviet (right), flanking the Eiffel Tower, which had been erected to commemorate the centenary of the French Revolution at the 1889 exposition.
There was more than politics in the magical thinking that characterized France’s obsequious courtship. There was also awe of the regime whose rousing pageants transformed its population into a convulsive organism. We have heard from Drieu La Rochelle, but Drieu had equally zealous company. To French visitors overwhelmed by the Nazi Party congress at Nuremberg, who felt that they had experienced a fullness of being unattainable in their republican homeland, the Rhine marked an existential divide rather than a geographical boundary. Crossing it, one left the parched land of French reason and entered a green world of primitive vitality where reason counted for little. The Right Bank offered a new dispensation, beyond the self. “For the French, alas, the synchronized marching of 120,000 men under blazing flags is nothing but the disguised dance of war,” wrote Alphonse de Châteaubriant, a novelist and old-line aristocrat who collaborated with the Nazis during the occupation. In his view, the French, being “logicians,” could not understand that the marching steps of Germans corresponded to a “metaphysical” feeling. “Frenchmen are reasoners, while Germans are rhythmicians, and it is through the cooperation of each person in unanimous self-effacement that the religion of this rhythm is established, with each consciousness … touching the eternal depths.”17 The French ambassador to Berlin in 1937, André François-Poncet, observed that the Third Reich attributed a social and civic value of the highest order to festivals, for which it obviously had a sinister genius.
The highlight of all these festivals was the Nuremberg Congress.… For eight days, Nuremberg was a city of jubilation, a city gone mad, and practically a city of convulsionaries. This ambience, combined with the beauty of the spectacles presented and the luxury of the hospitality offered, exerted a strong influence on the spirit of the foreigners whom the Nazi government made sure to invite to its annual meetings. The displays were contagious, and the visitors could not resist them; they returned home seduced and conquered, ripe for collaboration, without perceiving the sinister realities hidden behind the deceptive pomp of these prodigious parades.
Presiding over the world’s kermesse with a cracked voice, mindful of Nuremberg, beset by feelings of inferiority, and placing hope of salvation in the “fête nationale,” the French government devoted an entire pavilion to the “Art of Festivals.” Its director, Jacques Viénot, bemoaned the fact that France—the pageant master under Bourbon kings, revolutionary terrorists, and Napoleon—had lost purchase in Europe. “Rome, Moscow, Berlin … all know perfectly how to organize gigantic human maneuvers with an imposing flair for decoration, stagecraft, and propaganda. We must therefore revive the past for the future by reclaiming a glorious tradition and renewing it.”
Viénot urged that the government sponsor research into the art of the festival and that it establish for that purpose an institution to be called the Academy of Joy—a name probably inspired by the Third Reich’s state-controlled leisure organization Kraft durch Freude. Contemporary humanity had to “relearn joy,” he asserted. “Let there be no doubt that henceforth France wants to endow its national demonstrations and popular festivals with new dignity.” The general commissioner of the World’s Fair, Edmond Labbé, concurred, and in a speech inaugurating the Art de Fêtes pavilion told his sympathetic audience that bored youths who had recourse to “Negro-American music”
and “Apache rhythms” for excitement needed a patriotic intoxicant. Wise governments offered their people festivals.
Labbé didn’t stop there. The World’s Fair commission launched a nationwide competition to revive “les fêtes françaises,” with publicity flyers citing the Nuremberg rallies and Mussolini’s maneuvers in the Forum as examples of great civic theater. Contestants were given various themes for embellishment: torchlight parades, Armistice Day commemorations, Olympic marches, funeral processions. It was, indeed, the plan for a state funeral that won first prize. “The pageant featured an immense catafalque in the form of a pyramid, which would be carried by two hundred men,” writes Karen Fiss. “The Arc de Triomphe, draped in crepe, would be encompassed by a circle of vertical searchlights forming ‘a luminous funerary chapel.’ The description of these illuminated elements … suggests that the French designers were aware of Speer’s Lichtdom or ‘cathedral of light.’ Speer used a ring of 130 powerful searchlights at the 1934 Nuremberg party rallies, which shot eight kilometers into the dark sky, to form a translucent dome.” No great man qualified for this extravaganza, but the plan for a Bastille Day pageant came to fruition in July 1937, three weeks after Blum resigned from office. Immense tricolor banners hung vertically, often three together, at every major square, like carpet runners measured for the Hall of Mirrors. Fifteen thousand torchbearers imitated the nocturnal lava flow of Nuremberg across seven miles of Paris. One newspaper announced “the birth of a tradition.” L’Action Française noted that “a savage horde” of several hundred Bolsheviks shuffled after the military review, spoiling an otherwise impressive spectacle.
The Embrace of Unreason Page 31