B006NTJT4U EBOK

by Jackson, Julian

  All this helps to explain the paradox that while the republican consensus had never seemed wider than after 1919, the early 1920s represented the apogee of influence of Action française.14 Because Action française was not a conventional electoral movement, it is difficult to quantify its influence, but undoubtedly Maurras’s prestige had never been higher. His nationalistic Germanophobia had fitted into the wartime ‘Sacred Union’. During and after the war Maurras enjoyed a friendly correspondence with the respectable conservative politician Poincaré; André Malraux in 1923 called Maurras ‘one of the great intellectual forces of today’. In the mid-1920s, the paper’s circulation was about 100,000, and Action française historians like Pierre Gaxotte and Jacques Bainville were best-selling authors. Action française was well represented in the Académie française to which Maurras himself was elected in 1938. Maurras’s defence of classicism chimed in with the post-war classical revival. In his book Défense de l’occident (1927) the young Maurrassian Henri Massis extended this into a defence not just of French values but of the entire tradition of western civilization. The writer Jacques Laurent, who joined Action française in the 1920s, wrote subsequently that he was not just joining a party but opting for civilization itself. One of Massis’s favourite targets was André Gide and the literary individualism of the NRF.15

  It is generally argued that Action française’s influence began to decline after 1926 when it was condemned by the Vatican as part of a papal policy to reconcile Catholicism with democracy in France. The Vatican decision affected Action française’s readership in conservative Catholic circles. At the same time, younger members of the movement felt that Maurras was more talk than action—‘Inaction française’ was their term—and they started to look to more radical movements of the right. But the long-term effects of Maurras’s post-war influence should not be underestimated for two reasons. First, the Maurrassian counter-culture, comparable in its influence on the right to that of communism on the left thirty years later, inoculated many young right-wing intellectuals against the attraction of republicanism. Action française was often the apprenticeship in a journey towards different varieties of extremist politics, fascism in some cases (Robert Brasillach, Lucien Rebatet), communism in others (Claude Roy, Claude Morgan, and Roger Vailland). As one commentator wrote in 1935: ‘beyond its real, visible and measurable strength, Action française also disposes of the strength provided by all those who have left it’.16 When Claude Roy joined the Communist Party during the Occupation he was struck by how many former Action française intellectuals he encountered.17

  Secondly, the new ‘respectability’ which drove Maurras’s younger disciples to more exciting shores made him more acceptable to elements of the Republican centre. Although Maurras was a counter-revolutionary and reactionary thinker, Maurrassianism spread like a stain through French liberal conservatism after 1919: 1940 was not so much the victory of ‘reaction’ over liberal conservatism as proof of how much the latter had already conceded to the former.

  This was true of Charles Benoist who announced his conversion to Action française in 1925, and became the tutor of the Royalist pretender, the Comte de Paris. Benoist did not live to participate in the Vichy regime. Someone who did was Lucien Romier who joined the government in 1941 to become one of the ministers most trusted by Pétain. In the inter-war years, Romier was one of the pillars of liberal bourgeois opinion. He was both a popular historian specializing in the wars of religion and a leading journalist who contributed regularly to Le Figaro and Le Temps, the two leading papers of moderate conservatism. Romier was alarmed at many aspects of post-war French society: depopulation, the new woman, artistic anarchy. Although seeing himself as a liberal Republican, in 1924 he wrote a pamphlet calling for an aristocracy of fonctionnaires to save the Republic from its crisis of authority. His book Explication de notre temps (1925) noted with approval that Maurras’s ideas had an audience which went beyond Action française.18

  Another liberal conservative who ended up at Vichy was Joseph Barthélemy who served as Minister of Justice from 1941 to 1943. Like Romier, Barthélemy was a regular contributor to Le Temps in the inter-war years. He was a highly respected jurist who wrote prolifically on constitutional matters. In 1918 his book Le Problème de la compétence dans la démocratie (The Problem of Competence in Democracy) confronted what many liberal conservatives believed to be the fundamental issue facing the Republic. Barthélemy had been elected to parliament on a centre-right ticket in 1918, but he was defeated in 1924, and all subsequent attempts at re-election were unsuccessful. Like Romier he was increasingly unhappy about mass culture. ‘Democracy’, he wrote in 1934, ‘involves the advent of new social groups [nouvelles couches] … It is another world. It is the end of the notables.’ Nonetheless until 1940 Barthélemy remained committed to Republican institutions, wanting only to rationalize them. In his memoirs written in 1944 he commented on the ‘contradictory destiny of a man who has all his life defended liberty and then makes his ministerial debut in an authoritarian regime in which liberty suffers the most complete eclipse that it had known for centuries’. This may have been a ‘contradiction’, but it had a logic, and did not involve a radical discontinuity with the position which Barthélemy had adopted in the inter-war years.19

  1919–1928: Missed Opportunities?

  The trajectories of such people as Romier, Barthélemy, and Benoist were all different in detail, but one step in their progressive disillusion with the Republic was the belief that an opportunity for reform had been missed after the war.

  It is often suggested that the mood of politics after 1919 was nostalgia for the golden age of the belle époque. But in many circles the war had fuelled the call for reform. On the centre-right, several organizations were founded after 1918 to promote reform: the National Association for the Organization of Democracy (ANOD); the League for a New Democracy; the Republican Party of National Reorganization otherwise known as the IVth Republic Movement.20 These groups shared various keywords: organization, modernization, institutional reform (a stronger executive), efficiency, technical competence. Arguing that France must apply the lessons learnt from the war, they cited the examples of Walter Rathenau who had organized the German war economy; F. W. Taylor, the American proponent of the scientific organization of labour; and the Lloyd George war cabinet.

  Although the impact of these reforming groups must not be exaggerated, they attracted some bright young political figures: ANOD claimed to have the support of ninety-two députés. Nonetheless, little came of their hopes. The 1919 Parliament was dominated by a massive right-wing majority—the Bloc national—more interested in increasing the influence of the Church than in institutional reforms. Governments were absorbed by the intractable problems of reconstruction, reparations, inflation, and budget deficits. The reformers also lacked a charismatic leader. The only major politician to take up their ideas was the Socialist turned conservative Alexandre Millerand. But having been elected president of the Republic in 1920 he lost interest. When Millerand returned to the idea of constitutional reform in 1923, proposing a strengthening of the power of the presidency, it was because the left seemed likely to win the forthcoming elections. This gave Millerand’s advocacy of constitutional reform a partisan hue, and he was forced to resign when the left returned to power in 1924.

  Reforming themes were also popular on the left after 1919. The future Socialist leader Léon Blum had written during the war on the need to streamline the working of government; the Radical leader Édouard Herriot published two massive tomes on the need for reform. The left in general took up the ideas of the Compagnons de l’université nouvelle, a group of young intellectuals who had served on Pétain’s staff in 1917. They too were preoccupied by the inadequacies of France’s governing elites, but their solution centred on education not institutional reform. They proposed breaking down the barriers between the education of bourgeois children and the rest by creating an école unique where all children would receive a common edu
cation until the age of 13.21

  Another source of reforming ideas on the left was the CGT. Here the emphasis was not on institutional, political, or educational reforms, but on a restructuring of the political economy. Trade-union experience of co-operation with government and employers in organizing war production had accelerated the CGT’s drift from revolutionary syndicalism. In 1918, under the influence of its leader Léon Jouhaux, the CGT produced a ‘minimum programme’ which demanded the nationalization of key industries and the creation of a national economic council composed of representatives of unions, consumers, employers, and the State. This new reformism was not a conversion to British labourism. The CGT remained committed to the syndicalist conception of the primacy of economics over politics. The nationalized industries were not to be run by the State, but by producers (workers, technicians, managers) in co-operation with consumers and representatives of the State; the National Economic Council was to represent an integration of economic forces into decision making. The change from the pre-war period was that syndicalists now incorporated employers into their vision of reform and were ready to achieve it by gradualist means. The suspicion of politics remained.22

  The left-wing reformers were as unsuccessful in achieving their aims as those on the centre-right. The elections of 1924 were won by the left Cartel coalition of Radicals and Socialists, headed by Herriot, but its reforming ambitions quickly foundered. There were squabbles between the coalition partners: the Socialists, although supporting Herriot’s government, would not join it because this represented too sharp a break with Marxist orthodoxy. The government wasted much time antagonizing the Church. Its main problem was the chronic financial crises which had dogged its predecessors. The Cartel coalition broke up in 1926, and the Radicals deserted the Socialists to ally with the right. The Cartel’s failure was a terrible blow to left-wing opinion: it had aroused as many expectations as the Popular Front was to do twelve years later.

  As for the CGT’s ideas, these had little chance of being accepted after the failure of massive strikes that occurred in 1919 and 1920. The CGT leadership had not wanted the strikes, but it was forced to back them. After they collapsed, the CGT’s political influence was negligible for the rest of the decade, killing Jouhaux’s hopes of being recognized as a partner by the government. In 1925, the Cartel did set up a national economic council, representing various economic interests, but this body was given only a limited consultative role, and paid only lip-service to syndicalist ideas.23

  The ‘Jeunes Équipes’: 1928–1930

  The reforming themes returned to prominence towards the end of the decade. After 1926, financial stability was restored and the economy was booming. It seemed possible to look beyond the immediate horizon of the next financial crisis. One centre of reforming ideas was the organization Redressement français, set up by the businessman Edmond Mercier in 1925.24 As a leading figure in France’s electricity industry, Mercier represented the most dynamic sector of the French economy. Impressed by a visit to America in 1925, he founded Redressement français to propagate the gospel of modernization. The organization included mainly businessmen, but also journalists and publicists, one of the most active of whom was Lucien Romier. The dominant idea was the need for economic rationalization to increase production. French businessmen were urged to renounce their congenital individualism. Modernization was essential if France was to remain a first-rank power.

  The Redressement never became more than an elite pressure group but its neo-Saint-Simonian rhetoric enjoyed considerable vogue. Its politics were less clear. Its slogan was ‘Enough politics, we want results’, but funds were distributed to sympathetic candidates at the 1928 elections. The Redressement’s study of constitutional reform was the work of Raphaël Alibert, an Action française sympathizer, but his ideas were not universally shared in the organization. Mercier himself was a Protestant, married to a niece of Dreyfus, and not drawn to traditional conservatism. Nonetheless his vision of politics was essentially elitist: government by engineers and experts.

  Mercier’s politics consisted of a pious hope that disinterested men of goodwill would unite around his ideas. He was encouraged by the fact that the Redressement’s call to modernize France’s economy coincided with an intense debate within the rising political generations about modernizing her political alignments after the post-war failures of the right and left. Such views were articulated by the journalist Jean Luchaire, whose newspaper Notre temps, founded in 1927, became the mouthpiece of what came to be called the ‘Jeunes Équipes’. In 1928, Luchaire published a manifesto for his generation which he called Une génération réaliste (A Realist Generation). For Luchaire his generation was born on 2 August 1914. Disappointed by the failure of the returning veterans to prevent a ‘return to the old world’, the generation was freethinking but not anticlerical, believing that religion was no longer a political issue; it was convinced that laissez-faire was over and that France needed a more efficient state; it was Republican but believed that the existing institutions needed reform.25

  Some of the Jeunes Équipes joined the Radical Party where they became known as the ‘Young Radicals’. They included the brightest political figures of their generation—Pierre Mendès France, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Pierre Cot, and Jacques Kayser. They adopted the Party’s rising star, Édouard Daladier, as their figurehead. But the Young Radicals shared no common view. Some wanted to recentre the Party by aligning it with centre-right. This was Luchaire’s objective although he did not formally join the Party himself. Others, like Kayser, Cot, and de Jouvenel wanted the Party to reassert its left-wing identity, align itself durably with moderate elements within the Socialist Party, and become a progressive, non-Marxist party of the left. This was the route favoured at this stage by Daladier.26

  Equally intense debates were occurring among the Socialists who interpreted the failure of the Cartel in various ways. Those Marxists who had not wished to participate in Herriot’s government, felt vindicated by the subsequent drift of the Radicals to the right; those who had wished to participate argued that a Socialist presence in the government would have anchored Herriot on the left. For some younger Socialists, these tactical questions were the starting point of a fundamental reconsideration of the Party’s commitment to Marxism. They were influenced by the writing of the Belgian socialist Henri de Man whose 1926 book The Psychology of Socialism was translated into French under the revealing title Au-delà du Marxisme (1927; Beyond Marxism). De Man argued that Marxism failed to provide a valid account of the working of modern capitalism. By rooting socialism in materialism, it no longer offered the prospect of radical politics because modern capitalism was capable of fulfilling the working class’s material needs.

  Within the French Socialist Party, the most vigorous exponent of revisionism was the Party’s rising star, Marcel Déat. In Perspectives socialistes (1930), Déat argued Socialists should look beyond the proletariat and build an alliance of anti-capitalist forces including the petite bourgeoisie. The political corollary was that the Socialists should abandon the commitment to Marxist purity that prevented them participating in Radical governments.27 This offered some common ground with the left-wing Young Radicals. A forum for dialogue between these left-wing reformers was offered by Georges Valois. Having left Action française, Valois had in 1924 tried founding his own political movement, the Faisceau, inspired by Mussolini. After 1926, Valois moved to the left, and he was in search of signs that the political structures were breaking up on the centre and left. Between 1928 and 1930 he published several books by members of the younger political generation including Déat’s Perspectives socialistes, Luchaire’s Une génération réaliste, and L’Économie dirigée (1928) by the Young Radical Bertrand de Jouvenel.28 All these writers believed that liberalism had failed and that the productive forces of the economy needed to be integrated into a reformed State.

  The Tardieu Moment: 1930

  The prospects for change were defined by the responses of the lead
ers of the political parties. In October 1929, Daladier tried to tempt the Socialists into government with the offer of four ministries. For the first time, a substantial majority of the Socialist parliamentary party voted to accept, but the Party’s National Committee overturned the decision. This blocked any realignment on the left and opened up a possibility on the right for the centre-right politician André Tardieu who formed a government after Daladier’s failure to do so.

  Tardieu, born in 1876, was one of the most flamboyantly brilliant politicians of his generation. This was an older generation than the Jeunes Équipes, and in 1919 Tardieu had not been associated with the reforming groups. But as the first war veteran to hold the premiership, Tardieu was symbolically appropriate to represent the post-war generation. Instead of the usual platitudes, his ministerial declaration of November 1929 offered a programme of economic modernization, a politique de prospérité. In subsequent speeches he proclaimed the end of laissez-faire and announced the need for an interventionist and technically competent State. This was in the spirit of the Redressement français with which Tardieu had links, but he also drew eclectically on the ideas of Benoist, the 1919 reformers, and the Jeunes Équipes.29