1917
February–March: The Russian Revolution erupts in Petrograd, where imperial regiments disobey orders to fire on crowds protesting the dire conditions created by war. A provisional government is formed. Nicholas II, held captive in the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, is forced to abdicate.
April 6: The United States enters the war.
April 16–25: The French army under General Robert Nivelle attempts to dislodge German troops entrenched along a ridge overlooking the Aisne valley in Champagne. The assault fails, and the name of the ridge road, the Chemin des Dames, becomes a byword for carnage.
April–June: An estimated 40,000 troops mutiny, of whom 49 are executed.
November (October 25 in the old-style Julian calendar): The Bolsheviks seize power in Russia.
November: Georges Clemenceau becomes premier.
1918
January 8: President Woodrow Wilson delivers the “Fourteen Points” address to Congress; it will become the basis for terms of the German surrender and the disposition of international relations after World War I.
March 3: Germany and Russia sign separate peace agreements at Brest-Litovsk.
March-July: Germany launches five major offensives, prompting an exodus of Parisians.
November: The German emperor abdicates and a republic is proclaimed, with its capital in Weimar.
November 11: Germany signs an armistice agreement at Rethondes, a small village north of Paris, near Compiègne.
The Spanish influenza pandemic claims the lives of 30,000 French soldiers and as many as 250,000 civilians.
1919
March: Foundation of the Third International, or Comintern, the central body of world Communism.
June: A peace treaty is signed at Versailles, imposing harsh reparations on Germany, a buffer territory in the Rhineland, and the cession of Alsace-Lorraine to France.
July 14: Allied troops parade down the Champs-Élysées.
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Between 1919 and 1927, Gallimard publishes the remaining volumes of Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a bogus document drafted earlier in the century by the czarist police, purporting to reveal a Jewish plot to gain world domination, circulates in various translations. Henry Ford funds the printing of 500,000 copies in the United States.
1920
January 10: The League of Nations is created.
May: Joan of Arc is canonized.
December: The congress of the SFIO (Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière) is held at Tours. A majority votes to join the Third International and founds the French Communist Party (PCF). The minority maintains itself as the SFIO.
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Tristan Tzara arrives in Paris, joins the literary group assembled around André Breton, and, with Francis Picabia, orchestrates events that publicize the Dada movement in Paris. Dada had originated among young expatriate writers in 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich.
The first results of automatic writing appear in Breton and Soupault’s Les Champs Magnétiques.
1922
January: Premier and foreign minister Aristide Briand is forced to resign his offices for showing Germany a conciliatory face. He is replaced by Poincaré.
July: Germany requests a moratorium of four years for the payment of war reparations. The request is denied by England and France.
October: Mussolini seizes power in Rome.
1923
January: French and Belgian troops occupy the industrial Ruhr by way of holding Germany hostage for the defaulted reparations and exacting payment in shipments of coal.
January 22: The young anarchist Germaine Berton assassinates Marius Plateau, a colleague of Charles Maurras’s at L’Action Française.
October: Poincaré agrees to abide by the recommendation of a committee of experts, known as the Dawes Commission, appointed to settle the vexed issue of reparations.
November: Adolf Hitler becomes a nationally recognized name after his failed putsch in Munich.
1924
April: France accepts the recommendation of the Dawes Commission.
May: The Left (Radicals and Socialists) gain a majority in parliamentary elections. Édouard Herriot, the Radical leader, becomes premier.
Right-wing leagues are founded or revived, notably the Ligue des Patriotes.
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The first issue of La Révolution Surréaliste appears in December.
André Breton publishes the “Surrealist Manifesto.”
1925
February: Establishment of the Fédération Nationale Catholique, an anti-republican movement.
April–October: The Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes enshrines the aesthetic of “Art Deco.”
April 23: An uprising in Morocco led by Abd el-Krim is crushed by French colonial troops under the command of Pétain.
July: Belgian and French troops evacuate the Ruhr.
July: Hitler publishes the first volume of Mein Kampf, written during his internment at Landsberg Prison for an attempted putsch in 1923. The second volume will be published in 1926 and a French translation in 1934.
October: At the Locarno Conference, France’s boundaries with Germany are guaranteed and the Rhineland, which had been designated a demilitarized zone in the Treaty of 1919, is reaffirmed as such.
1926
May–July: Speculation; financial panic; the fall of the franc; the parade of several liberal governments and Poincaré’s return to power. France’s economy is stabilized with the passage of a draconian finance law.
September: The pope condemns L’Action Française.
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Abel Bonnard—novelist, future member of the Académie Française, and Nazi collaborator—publishes Éloge de l’Ignorance (In Praise of Ignorance).
1927
In Paris, major demonstrations are held in support of Sacco and Vanzetti, two anarchists accused of murder and brought to trial in a Massachussetts court. They will be executed on August 23.
May: The Third International endorses open warfare against the bourgeoisie, “class against class.”
October: Daladier is elected chairman of the Radical Party, replacing Édouard Herriot.
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Julien Benda publishes La Trahison des Clercs (The Treason of the Intellectuals).
1928
April: Moderate conservatives gain a majority in parliamentary elections.
August: The Kellogg-Briand Pact is signed by forty-one nations, outlawing military aggression as a means of settling international disputes. The following decades will make a mockery of it, but its terms will be reiterated in the United Nations Charter.
December: Marthe Hanau, publisher of La Gazette du Franc, is found guilty of defrauding French financial markets. The fact that she is Jewish provides grist for the mill for anti-Semites.
1929
June: French Communists are under attack. André Tardieu, minister of the interior, initiates legal action against L’Humanité.
July: Poincaré resigns in poor health and is replaced by Aristide Briand, who sits as premier for the fifth time in his long career.
August: The Young Plan definitively establishes the amount of reparations and a schedule for payments.
Allied troops evacuate the Rhineland.
October: The Wall Street crash shakes European financial markets.
December: A decision is made to construct fortifications along the border with Germany—the ill-fated Maginot Line.
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Ullstein publishes Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front.
1930
February: Vietnamese soldiers in the French colonial army mutiny.
November: The banker Albert Oustric joins Marthe Hanau in the postwar rogue’s gallery of swindlers. Prominent politici
ans are compromised.
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The book publisher Arthème Fayard launches a weekly paper, Je Suis Partout, which will become infamous during the German occupation as a prominent organ of the collaborationist press.
1931
May: Having celebrated the centenary of the conquest of Algeria a year earlier and quelled a revolt of nationalist soldiers in its Vietnamese army, the state opens the Museum of Colonies in conjunction with its Colonial Exposition.
June: Gravely affected by the world economic crisis, Germany ceases to pay reparations. This deals another severe blow to the French economy.
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Pierre Drieu La Rochelle publishes Le Feu Follet, his novel about the unraveling and suicide of an ex-Surrealist, based on the life of Jacques Rigaut.
1932
May: The president of the Republic, Paul Doumer, is assassinated. He is succeeded by Albert Lebrun.
June: Reparations are officially abandoned at the Lausanne Conference. Germany had paid most of her reparations with money borrowed from the United States. She will repudiate those loans.
August: A Congress for Peace is held in Amsterdam on the initiative of the Third International.
December: Germany secures arms equality with the former Allied powers.
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Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au Bout de la Nuit (Journey to the End of the Night), published by Éditions Denoël, is a literary sensation.
1933
January: Hitler is appointed chancellor by President Paul von Hindenburg.
June: A Congress for Peace is held at the Salle Pleyel in Paris.
August: Hitler names Nuremberg the “City of Reich Party Congresses.” Torchlight parades will be held there annually, in September.
October: Germany withdraws from the League of Nations.
Two leagues are founded that will play a significant role in the rise of right-wing extremism during the 1930s: the Francisques and La Solidarité Française Patronnée.
Alexandre Stavisky’s Ponzi scheme is exposed, with enormous repercussions in the political world. Much is made in the anti-Semitic press of his being a Russian Jewish immigrant.
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Gallimard publishes André Malraux’s novel La Condition Humaine (Man’s Fate).
1934
The Tribunal de Commerce rules in favor of a suit to allow a French translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
January: Alexandre Stavisky commits suicide. L’Action Française and other right-wing papers assert that he was murdered by the police at the behest of politicians who would have been compromised in a Stavisky trial.
February 6: At least fifteen people die in right-wing rioting over the Stavisky Affair while Daladier is seeking legislative confirmation of his appointment to the premiership. Camelots du Roi in the front rank of rioters suffer numerous casualties.
Lacking support, Daladier resigns and is replaced by Gaston Doumergue, leading a conservative coalition, which grants him extensive financial powers.
February 9: The French Communist Party and a major union stage a counterdemonstration, in which six demonstrators are killed.
February 12: The major confederation of trade unions, the CGT, calls a general strike “against Fascism.”
April: The conservative Parliament grants the premier the power to issue “decree laws.”
September: The USSR enters the League of Nations.
October: Alexander I of Yugoslavia and the French foreign minister, Louis Barthou, are assassinated by a Bulgarian nationalist in Marseille.
The Radicals split from Doumergue, ending his premiership.
After the riots of February 6, intellectuals exasperated by the ineptitude of parliamentary government and repelled by dictatorships of the Right and Left spawn a profusion of ideas for a society based on technocratic principles. “Planification,” as they are collectively known, harks back to the ur-text of modern technocracy, Auguste Comte’s Discours sur l’Esprit Positif.
1935
May: France and the USSR sign a mutual assistance pact.
June: The conservative premier, Pierre Laval, who will hold that position in the Vichy government, is granted virtually unrestricted power over French finances in the depressed economy, to no avail.
June 21–25: The International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, chaired by Malraux and Gide and attended by literary luminaries from the USSR, England, Europe, and America, takes place at the Mutualité conference hall on the Left Bank. It is sponsored by the Comintern.
July 14: A republican anti-Fascist rally in Paris draws 500,000 demonstrators.
October: Italy attacks Ethiopia with its greatly superior arsenal of weapons. The following June, Emperor Haile Selassie, speaking at the League of Nations, which had stood by impotently, will declare, “It is us today; it will be you tomorrow.”
November: The shifting Radical Party, recently allied with Doumergue’s conservatives, decides to form a coalition with Communists and Socialists in what comes to be known as the Popular Front.
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Gallimard publishes Louis Guilloux’s novel Le Sang Noir (Bitter Victory), one of the most eloquent and scathing condemnations of militarism to emerge in the gathering storm of World War II. Guilloux, an active Socialist, will accompany Gide to the Soviet Union in 1936.
1936
February: L’Action Française descends to the nadir of its incivility when members attack the leader Léon Blum in the street and beat him savagely. As many people as had celebrated Bastille Day gather to express their outrage.
February: The Franco-Soviet Mutual Assistance Pact, initiated by Louis Barthou before his assassination, is finally ratified by the National Assembly, its purpose being to counter the increasingly bellicose temper of Nazi Germany. It is toothless, but it furnishes Hitler with a pretext to occupy and militarize the Rhineland. This he does in flagrant violation of the Locarno Treaty and with no interference from its signatories.
April–May: The Popular Front wins a majority of seats in legislative elections. Socialists outnumber Radicals. Communists, the least numerous party in the coalition, have six times as many seats as after the previous election.
June: Léon Blum assumes the premiership. He is received at his inaugural appearance in the chamber with an anti-Semitic speech by the right-wing deputy Xavier Vallat, whose sentiments are echoed in L’Action Française, Gringoire, L’Écho de Paris, and other dailies.
June: Jacques Doriot founds the French Fascist Party, the Parti Populaire Francais (PPF).
June–July: Parliament passes many of the laws for which the Popular Front achieves lasting fame, if not long life, as the agent of a new dispensation in the lives of the working class: paid vacations, the forty-hour week, and so on. In addition, paramilitary leagues, notably the Croix de Feu, consisting mainly of World War I veterans, are disbanded.
July: Insurgents occupy Spanish Morocco and obtain a foothold on the Iberian Peninsula at Seville, launching the Spanish Civil War.
August: In Moscow, the purge of old-time Bolsheviks begins with the Trial of the Sixteen, including Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, charged with plotting to assassinate Stalin, to dismantle the Soviet Union, and to introduce capitalism. False confessions are extracted from them. They and their relatives will be shot. Other “show” trials and executions will soon follow.
August: Discouraged by England from helping the Spanish republicans militarily, the Blum government opts for a policy of nonintervention.
August–September: The Blum government nationalizes the armaments industry and greatly increases its budget. The franc is devalued, to the chagrin of Blum’s radical allies. The Popular Front fares poorly at the Radical Party congress in October.
November: Roger Salengro, the minister of the interior, who had been taken prisoner during the war, commits suicide after repeated accusations by L�
��Action Française of having surreptitiously crossed enemy lines to surrender.
November: Italy and Germany recognize Franco as Spain’s ruler.
November: On his return from the USSR, where he was treated with great deference, André Gide publishes an open-eyed account of the Stalinist tyranny, Retour de l’URSS, which runs through many editions.
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Denoël publishes Céline’s second major novel, Mort à Crédit (Death on the Installment Plan).
1937
March: In a riot at Clichy, six Socialists and Communists confronting a demonstration of members of the former Croix de Feu (now transformed from a paramilitary legion into a political party) are killed by police.
May: The World’s Fair, notable for the immense Soviet and Nazi pavilions framing the Eiffel Tower, opens on May 25, a month after the bombing of Guernica by Germany’s Condor Legion. It will stay open for six months, beyond Léon Blum’s first premiership, the show trial in Moscow of Red Army generals, and the disastrous defeat of Spanish republicans in the Battle of Brunete.
Picasso’s painting Guernica is displayed in the Spanish pavilion, having been commissioned by the Spanish republican government. It will go on a world tour to publicize the brutality of the insurgents and their German allies.
June: Blum is unseated and replaced by the radical Chautemps, during whose premiership the French railroad system is nationalized (SNCF) and the franc devalued a second time as capital flees the country.
September: An organization of former Camelots du Roi, the Cagoule, launches a terrorist campaign by bombing two buildings that house a major employers’ association. Their strategy is inspired by the Nazis’ burning of the Reichstag in Berlin and framing of German Communists.
November 5: At a meeting in the Reich Chancellery, the so-called Hossbach conference, Hitler reveals his plans for European conquest.
The Embrace of Unreason Page 39