The World’s Fair had not yet ended when, in November, Hitler laid out to key ministers and military brass his plan for the conquest of Europe. It survives as “the Hossbach Memorandum,” named after the colonel who took minutes. Lebensraum was its theme—living space. Eighty-five million Germans needed more of it, and everything that soil provides, to preserve the integrity of the race. Colonies were not the answer, only neighbors, he declared, explaining why Czechoslovakia and Austria could be annexed without interference from France, which, with England, would remain aloof until they themselves were ripe for the picking.18 He wanted this memorandum to be his last will and testament, should he die an untimely death.
1In Marguerite Duras’s brief description of him at a literary salon during the occupation, he is the opposite of glib but nonetheless hollow: “Clearly suffering from pride, he scarcely deigned to speak, and when he did it was as if his voice was dubbed, his words translated, stiff.” Guests encountered a similar absentee at Colette Jéramec’s receptions during their brief, unhappy marriage.
2Doriot was of course familiar with the Nazi slogan: “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer.”
3Nicknamed the “Vel’ d’Hiv’,” it became infamous during the German occupation as the warehouse for thirteen thousand Jews rounded up in July 1942 and subsequently transported to death camps.
4In an unofficial capacity, Jean Giraudoux, the minister of information in 1939, against whom Drieu fulminated for representing a government that censored Gilles, shared his anti-Semitism. Giraudoux described Jews seeking asylum from Nazism in France as “a horde that manages to get stripped of its national rights, to invite expulsion, and whose frail and abnormal constitutions land them in our hospitals, monopolizing wards.” He was known to be in favor of establishing a “ministry of race.”
5“In no country have I seen so many barricades, barbed-wire fences, ‘no entry’ signs, special passes, guards and sentry-huts,” Herbart noted.
6In 1924, Gide had published a famous apology of homosexuality, Corydon.
7The freedom to form political parties, for example, is irrelevant: “We Bolsheviks regard the matter from a different point of view. There are different political parties and the freedom to form them only where there are classes whose interests are hostile and antagonistic.”
8In an excerpt published by Le Figaro, “perversity” is translated as “perversion.”
9In 1936, Léo Lagrange, the undersecretary, a square-jawed young Socialist, helped organize the People’s Olympiad in Barcelona to counter the official Olympiad in Nazi Berlin.
10It should be noted that the student quarter was not exclusively left-wing. The law and medical schools leaned far enough to the right to justify the conviction of the Camelots du Roi that the Boulevard Saint-Michel was their turf.
11Maurice Thorez, leader of the French Communist Party, also addressed crowds. Neither he nor his comrades were members of the government, which his party agreed to support, but in which it refused to participate.
12Freud quotes Rolland’s letter at the beginning of Civilization and Its Discontents (1930).
13The canvas pictured Fascism as a giant with the head of a predatory bird supporting the bestial, moribund body of capitalism while recoiling from the raised arm of a young guardian spirit wreathed in stars.
14By November, Blum had every reason to know that Germany had sent several thousand troops, panzer tanks, tons of bombs, and planes and had placed submarines at the service of the insurgents. He himself was doing as much as he could to bulk up the French military.
15The conservative daily Le Temps reported that the left-wing extremists were armed and had shot up the automobile of Marx Dormoy, Salengro’s successor as minister of the interior; Dormoy had been summoned to the scene. “We have too often reproached the cabinet presided over by Léon Blum for its dilatoriness in defending republican law against the transgressions and violence of partisans of direct action not to acknowledge that in this instance the police, over which it has supreme control, accomplished its duty impeccably.” The Communist leader Maurice Thorez denounced Blum as an “assassin of workers.”
16Gréber was known in the United States for his design of Philadelphia’s Fairmount Parkway.
17Châteaubriant’s glorification of Hitler and Nazism, La Gerbe des Forces, published at the time of the 1937 exposition, made a believer out of Cardinal Baudrillart, rector of the Institut Catholique in Paris. According to Henri de Kérillis, a prominent journalist, the novel, in which Châteaubriant championed the idea of “a European salvation through the Teutonic renaissance, since civilization with roots in the late Roman Empire was dead,” found an enthusiastic readership in student circles.
18“The Fuhrer believes personally that in all probability England and perhaps also France have already silently written off Czechoslovakia, and that they have grown used to the idea that this question would one day be cleaned up by Germany. The difficulties in the British Empire and the possibility of being entangled in another long-drawn-out European war were decisive factors in the non-participation of England in a war against Germany. England’s attitude would certainly not remain without influence on France’s. An attack on Germany without British support is not probable.”
CHAPTER 12
The Hero of Verdun
Camille Chautemps, the Radical ex-premier, succeeded Léon Blum on June 22, 1937, and held office for eight months, presiding over a cabinet in which Radicals susceptible to overtures from the Right outnumbered Socialists sworn to the social and economic agenda of the Popular Front. It would appear that Chautemps regarded himself as an understudy appointed to go through the motions of government until Édouard Daladier came onstage. He governed during that critical period by cunctation: little was done when decisiveness was most needed. The image of a progressive nation projected at the World’s Fair belied France’s economic futility. The franc tumbled but not enough to make French exports competitive. Factories closed. The budget deficit reached 28 billion francs. Labor strikes reduced government revenue, and military expenditures, inadequate though they were in light of German rearmament, tithed every other program. With France’s currency bound to the gold standard and her gold reserves dwindling, the finance minister, Georges Bonnet, an advocate of austerity, arms reduction, and appeasement, could not expand the money supply as Roosevelt had done in the United States, even if he had been disposed to recommend it.1
Strikes, which required government arbitration, were the bane of a waffling premier’s existence. Reluctant, on the one hand, to rule in favor of management lest labor prevail upon Socialists and Communists to end their marriage of convenience with his own Radical Party and fearful, on the other, of ruling in favor of labor lest he alienate the entrepreneurial class, he ruled this way and that. Conciliation was seen as the strategy of an invertebrate born to slither under fences, alternating between Bonnet’s orthodox prescriptions on one side and reform on the other. In January 1938, Chautemps, exasperated by strikes, resigned from office after clashing with Communists. One week later he formed a new cabinet, almost entirely Radical (which is to say, centrist) in composition, assuring his left-wing colleagues that he remained loyal to the Popular Front. “No man can possibly pretend to direct other men solely on the basis of the law of property applicable to things,” he declared. “A captain of industry must have his authority respected; but he must endeavor every day to merit the position of director conferred upon him by chance.” (Conservative deputies loudly objected to the words “by chance,” according to Le Populaire.) Chautemps continued: “I am not appealing to a new majority. What I would like, much more than tactical votes, is heartfelt allegiance. Those are the words Léon Blum used, and the phrase was a step toward national reconciliation.… It is said that this ministry can only be a ministry of transition. Well, if I were one day overtaken by events and trampled in the victory of companions to whom I showed the way, I would be very proud indeed.”2 France wanted “normal and peaceful relations” wi
th all states and hoped to find common ground “by an effort of mutual comprehension.” Chautemps was trampled in the victory parade not of companions but of German soldiers marching down the Champs-Élysées.
Looking back, he might have wondered whether bombs exploding in Paris during the World’s Fair only weeks after he became premier had been the clearest portent of all that overtook him. On a Saturday evening in September 1937, two office buildings situated near the Place de l’Étoile had been wrecked by devices powerful enough to hurl masonry across the street. Since both buildings housed manufacturers’ associations, Le Temps lost no time blaming “foreign revolutionaries” adept at “a form of terrorism that is not native to us.” The paper felt certain that those revolutionaries came from “milieux in which the ‘capitalist’ is seen as a public enemy against whom every ‘proletarian’ worthy of the name must consider himself permanently at war.” L’Humanité agreed that foreigners were no doubt responsible for the destruction, but it blamed Fascist agents, citing as a precedent the Reichstag fire of 1933, which the Nazis, who may have been the arsonists, pinned on Bolsheviks to excite public indignation and justify mass arrests. L’Humanité’s editor, Paul Vaillant-Couturier, ridiculed Le Temps. How could a terrorist act benefit the Communist Party in September 1937, when the Popular Front was cohesive and triumphant? he asked. It was a false-flag operation. “There are people inside and outside France who have a vested interest in creating a state of havoc unfavorable to production, dangerous for freedom, fatal to tourism, subversive of peace. The recent history of Spain, to mention only that, offers sufficient evidence of Hitlerian interference in the affairs of neighboring countries.… The guilty parties will be found along the Rome-Paris-Berlin axis.”
On September 17 newspapers reported the footprints of a secret society—not foreign but French, and not Communist but right of right-wing—called La Cagoule, or “the Hood.” At that point its existence was better known to L’Action Française than to the Bureau of Criminal Investigation, for it had been founded in 1935 or 1936 by men, mostly renegade Camelots, bent on making France ungovernable with strategically compelling acts of terror. Soon the name became common knowledge. Le Populaire identified Cagoulards in custody and two traffickers through whom the terrorists purchased German and Italian arms. But a much fuller exposure of their activities awaited the progress of a police investigation. Months passed. Then, in November 1937, a “Fascist plot” began to make daily headlines in the left-wing press, which furnished details of an elaborately organized mafia, its code of honor, its initiation rite, its murders, its impressive arsenals, its staff. On November 23, the Ministry of the Interior condemned the Cagoule as a subversive brotherhood whose structure was, according to documents found in a police raid, patterned after the army’s. It included a high command, internal and external military intelligence agencies, safe houses, and a medical service with nurses and doctors on call. A communiqué from the minister of the interior, Marx Dormoy, noted that the grouping of its members into divisions, brigades, regiments, battalions, and so on pointed to their intention of waging civil war.
Seized documents establish the fact that the guilty had assigned themselves the goal of replacing the freely chosen Republic with a dictatorial regime before proceeding to the restoration of a monarchy.… Discovered in the course of house searches were equipment for counterfeiting identity papers, instructions for the conveyance of arms, precise details about the military guard at political venues in departments neighboring Paris, the weaponry of regiments, detailed maps of Paris’s sewer system with itineraries leading to the Parliament building, the floor plans of left-wing newspapers and of flats belonging to deputies, a facsimile of the signatures of certain ministers, a list of ministers and legislators to be arrested as soon as the signal was given.
The police apprehended the society’s administrative officer, Eugène Deloncle, a naval engineer by training and the wealthy director of large corporate firms. Only later did it come to light that financial support for the Cagoule had been provided by Eugène Schueller, the founder and owner of L’Oréal cosmetics, who offered employment in his Spanish subsidiary to fugitives from French justice.
Right-wing papers made light of incontrovertible evidence and dismissed the false-flag argument as an “odious burlesque” staged by Dormoy to distract attention from Communist intrigue. L’Écho de Paris claimed that Dormoy, who had indulged the Popular Front’s many transgressions since succeeding Salengro, saw arsenals and plots in a few rifles exhumed from the cellars of peaceable Frenchmen who feared, as well they might, the prospect of red revolution.
The Cagoule was disbanded before it mobilized, but not before it reinforced the army of hobgoblins undermining confidence in a Republic seemingly unable to govern. “A dirty stream of undifferentiated hate distorted human and social realities,” writes one historian. “Myths of pervading evil turned superficial disagreements into haunting fears and political differences into vendettas, and the French body politic became incapable of any kind of unity because all foundation for mutual trust had been shattered during these ruthless and bitter fights, which no one carried on with more asperity than the Right. Serious or childish, the plots of the Cagoule helped to convince both sides that all such plots were real.” People old enough to remember were put in mind of the paranoia and messianism of the Dreyfus years. Where evil was pervasive, so was talk of salvation. And where salvation entered political discourse, heroes, saints, and despots were summoned to shame parliamentarians flailing about in a republican morass. Le Figaro declared that France needed a “committee of public safety” to restore order. On May 9, 1938, it devoted much of its issue to Saint Joan, whom it glorified as the brightest of the stellar figures illuminating France’s past. “Can one find in Napoleon’s tomb that which is found in the cradle at Domrémy and on the hard, enchanted road that leads to the stake at Rouen? The festival of July 14, though purified by the blood of martyred soldiers, has repugnant origins. The Maid’s festival is incomparably splendid. Fidelity, political wisdom, military heroism, and holiness are the immaculate spray of virtues offered to us by the fifteenth century; it perfumes all the ages, and arms the generations in their defense of the country.”
Charles Maurras may have been too tired to march with his colleagues in the traditional procession. He had spent a week in Spain as a guest of the insurgent regime, being fêted at Saragossa and at Franco’s headquarters in Burgos, and raising a glass to men who exemplified what he called “the natural advantages of organization, intelligence, science, all the moral and mental levers of civilization over the numerically superior forces of Disorder.”
In 1889, royalists, Bonapartists, and ultranationalist revanchists had placed their hopes for overturning the Third Republic in General Georges Boulanger, dubbed “the providential man.” Half a century later, that title was dusted off by exasperated anti-parliamentarians and conferred upon Philippe Pétain, the marshal glorified for his command at the Battle of Verdun.3 Age had not dulled his luster. Pétain turned eighty-three in 1939, the year Premier Édouard Daladier appointed him ambassador to Spain, where Franco’s army entered Madrid on March 28, ending a civil war that had cost the country half-a-million lives.
The last remnants of the Popular Front disappeared with the confirmation of Daladier as premier in April 1938. Remembered today as a signatory of the infamous Munich pact of September 1938, endorsing Hitler’s annexation of a Czech province, the Sudetenland, Daladier, unlike Chamberlain, did not believe that one more slab of Europe thrown to the beast would definitively sate its appetite for Lebensraum. He believed quite the opposite: that war lay ahead but that France needed time to modernize her air force and study the proper deployment of her tanks. What he believed mattered less, however, than what he did and didn’t do. Chamberlain’s cravenness, the daunting prospect of going it alone against Germany (with whose military might he was well acquainted), his own divided party, and a poll that showed 78 percent of the French electorate favoring a
ppeasement all combined to make Daladier Chamberlain’s fellow fool without persuading him in his tortured self-abasement that the betrayal of a democratic ally had purchased “peace in our time.” A nation still mourning the dead of 1914–18 cheered him when he returned from Munich, only to find itself placed belatedly on a war footing.4 (Daladier’s response to the cheering was an aside to his aide Alexis Léger: “Ah, the imbeciles [les cons]! If they only knew what they are acclaiming.” Winston Churchill voiced the same sentiment rather more eloquently in the House of Commons: “England has been offered a choice between war and shame. She has chosen shame, and will get war.”)
Intense rearmament required greater productivity, and Daladier overrode the law that crowned Popular Front legislation—the forty-hour work week. On August 21, 1938, he asserted in a radio broadcast that France alone among industrialized countries allowed its plants to idle two days a week. “As long as the international situation remains so delicate, one must be able to work more than forty hours, and up to forty-eight in enterprises that affect National Defense. Every enterprise needing a longer work week for its operation should be spared useless formalities and interminable discussions.” Conservatives were pleased not only by the measure but by the final dismantling of the Popular Front. A general strike in November fizzled after a day. Having stood it down—for that purpose he had nerve—Daladier carried on as head of government without support from Communists and Socialists.
The Embrace of Unreason Page 32