To carry out his programme Tardieu envisaged a political realignment around a modern centre-right incorporating elements of the Radical Party. This ambition failed because the Radical Party rejected Tardieu’s invitation to join his government despite strong lobbying from Luchaire. Nevertheless Tardieu’s style of government represented a sharp break with tradition. He tried to speak directly to the population over the head of parliament. Unprecedentedly he had his ministerial declaration stuck up throughout France, and he was the first politician to use the radio. All this came to nothing. Tardieu’s legislative programme was whittled away by sniping in parliament: a year after it was announced, the modernization bill had not been voted. Tardieu himself aroused massive personal antagonism until he was brought down by a financial scandal at the end of 1930.
One must be sceptical about the wilder claims made for Tardieu. Far from being an FDR manqué or a proto-Keynesian, he was as economically illiterate as most French politicians, and, as the Depression later demonstrated, his economic ideas were orthodox. He conceived his generous spending plans in 1929 only because of the existence of large treasury surpluses. It was largely Tardieu’s style that was new. What kind of political transformation did he envisage? He has been described as a French Disraeli, stealing the ideas of his opponents to modernize the appeal of conservatism. But although Tardieu hoped to split the Radicals, he was not interested in building a French conservative party. He wanted to rally support around his personality; his model was less the Anglo-Saxon two-party model than a personalized government like Clemenceau’s wartime administration.
Given that the Depression was about to change the presuppositions upon which Tardieu’s politics was based, it is not true that 1930 was a turning point when politics failed to turn. The Tardieu moment testified to the existence of reforming currents within French Republicanism, but also to the blockages of French politics. In 1933, Tardieu, embittered by his failure and by the subsequent defeat of the right at the 1932 elections, launched a crusade for constitutional revision. He now believed that political realignments were not enough: the system itself required change. He wanted to introduce referenda and make it easier to dissolve parliament. Most of Tardieu’s ideas (except for the referendum) had been proposed by Benoist forty years earlier and Benoist’s Les Maladies de la démocratie was one of the texts he used.
At first Tardieu was a lone voice calling for constitutional reform. But from 1932, when the Depression hit France, politics moved into a period of great turbulence. The left won the elections of 1932, but again the Socialists refused to participate in a Radical government. Two years of ministerial instability between 1932 and 1934 led to riots in February 1934 and the arrival in power of a right-wing Government of National Unity under Gaston Doumergue. Constitutional reform was briefly at the forefront of the political agenda. Tardieu joined Doumergue’s government as a minister of State. Parliament set up a commission to examine constitutional reform and decided in March 1934 to propose a simplification of the procedures to dissolve parliament. The senator Jacques Bardoux, who had been involved in some of the post-war reforming groups like ANOD, set up a Committee on the Reform of the State, whose members included Mercier and Barthélemy. But when in the autumn Doumergue submitted his own constitutional reform proposals, he was defeated. Having failed to act immediately after February 1934 when his prestige was high, Doumergue allowed the left to depict constitutional reform as a reincarnation of Bonapartism. Doumergue fell in the autumn of 1934, and Tardieu retired from politics in disgust.
The Nonconformists: Liberalism Contested 1932–1934
For Tardieu, Benoist, Bardoux, Barthélemy, and Romier on the centre-right, for Luchaire, Déat, de Jouvenel, and Valois on the centre-left, the assumption was that the nature of France’s problems was essentially political or institutional and could be resolved by adjustments which were compatible with a Republican framework. But the early 1930s also saw the emergence of a generation of young intellectuals, subsequently labelled the ‘nonconformists of the 1930s’, whose disillusion with the Republic went deeper. Sceptical about any remedies which politics could provide, they challenged the entire philosophical presuppositions of liberal democracy.30
The first collective manifestation of the nonconformists occurred in December 1932 when the NRF, always eager to be in the vanguard, published eleven short articles defining the ‘common cause of French youth … the first outlines of a new French Revolution’.31 The contributors included Emmanuel Mounier (b. 1905), Robert Aron (b. 1898), Philippe Lamour (b. 1903), Georges Izard (b. 1903), Armand Dandieu (b. 1897), and Thierry Maulnier (b. 1909). They signed in the name of little-known reviews and organizations like ‘Ordre Nouveau’, Esprit, Réaction, and Plans. Despite significant differences between them, one can detect a common tone, and a sense of generational identity.
The term ‘generation’ loosely describes those people born between about 1895 and 1905, but within this cohort there was a division between those who had been old enough to fight in the war and those who had not: this was the abyss of four years separating Louis Aragon (b. 1897) from André Malraux (b. 1901).32 They were a generation whose defining experience was the war or its aftermath, not the Dreyfus Affair. Some of them had been influenced by Maurras, but whereas for Maurras it still mattered to believe that Dreyfus had been guilty, for this generation it no longer did.33
Many right-wing intellectuals were helped to free themselves from Maurras by the neo-Thomist Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain who had in the 1920s been close to Action française. After the papal condemnation of 1926 Maritain broke with Maurras, and his book Primauté du spirituel (1927) was a direct riposte to Maurras’s assertion of the centrality of politics (‘politique d’abord’).34 For Maritain, this was the beginning of a journey to the left that culminated in the celebrated defence of democracy he wrote in America during the war. But if Maritain’s new emphasis on the ‘primacy of the spiritual’ liberated many young Catholic intellectuals, it did not necessarily lead them to the left. It freed them from the sterile dichotomy between support for the Republic or opposition to it, opening the way to even more radical alternatives to liberalism than those offered by Maurras.
One young intellectual influenced by Maritain was Jean-Pierre Maxence (b. 1906) who had moved from Action française towards a spiritual critique of a ‘world without mystique’, rejecting the materialism of both capitalism and socialism.35 Maxence became the leading light of the ‘Jeune Droite’ which consisted mainly of dissidents from Action française. In 1931, he took over Revue française, a rather fusty conservative paper, and opened it up to young right-wing intellectuals like Thierry Maulnier and the future fascist Robert Brasillach. They believed themselves to be living through a crisis of civilization which went deeper than politics. Maulnier entitled one of his books La Crise est dans l’homme (1932; The Crisis is in Mankind).
Equally concerned with spiritual crisis, but to the left of Maxence, was Emmanuel Mounier, founder in October 1932 of the journal Esprit.36 Mounier, who came from a modest background, had been a brilliant student, taking his philosophy agrégation in the same year as Sartre and Raymond Aron, and coming second overall. Nonetheless Mounier never lost the sense of being an outsider in the Parisian intellectual world, and this gives his writing a tone of moralistic self-righteousness. Perhaps it helps also to explain why he so identified with Péguy, another outsider. Mounier’s ambition was to separate Catholicism from conservatism and develop a radical critique of the status quo—what he called the ‘established disorder’—whether capitalist or Socialist.
Esprit attracted intellectuals of diverse origins, including several Action française dissidents. Their common link was a Catholic background of some sort; Maritain was an early sponsor of the journal. Georges Izard, a member of the group, founded a movement called the ‘Third Force’ to provide a political forum to defend Esprit ’s ideas, but the association with Esprit was soon severed owing to Mounier’s distrust of politics.
/> More intellectually eclectic than Esprit was the Ordre nouveau group whose members had backgrounds varying from Barthian Protestantism to Maurrassianism, Russian orthodoxy to Judaism.37 The group included Robert Aron, who had previously flirted with surrealism, and his school friend Armand Dandieu, who died prematurely in 1933. In 1931 Aron and Dandieu produced two books which proclaimed the guiding themes of their group. Décadence de la nation française denounced France’s cult of rationalism and abstraction; Le Cancer américain used America to lambast an obsession with productivism and a neglect of the spiritual. Ordre nouveau had a strongly technocratic bent, aspiring in a mystical and Saint-Simonian way towards the rational organization of economic life.
Ordre nouveau’s preoccupations overlapped with the group around the journal Plans founded by Philippe Lamour. The editorial board of Plans included the architect Le Corbusier and the syndicalist intellectual Hubert Lagardelle. Plans provided a mouthpiece for Ordre nouveau until the group founded its own journal in 1933. The link between technocracy and syndicalism was the idea that individualistic liberal capitalism was incapable of developing a rationally organized society.
The common element of all these groups was not so much that they opposed the Republic as that intellectually they no longer accepted it as a frame of reference. Ordre nouveau’s manifesto of March 1931 declared: ‘the spiritual first, and then the economic and political at its service’; the first issue of Esprit called for ‘primacy of the spiritual’. Mounier’s repugnance for politics was almost physical.38 ‘Rottenness’, ‘disgust’, ‘decadence’, ‘nausea’, ‘revulsion’: these words recur repeatedly to describe Third Republic politics. The Republic was viewed as formalistic, cut off from ‘real’ life, a screen for the defence of materialism and individualism. Socialism and capitalism, Stalin and Ford, were rejected as two sides of the same coin, ‘philosophically linked to the system of mechanistic oppression from which man suffers in the modern age’.39
The root of the problem was the tradition of Republican individualism which viewed man only as an abstract citizen, crushing human diversity and uprooting the individual from natural communities: ‘The ideology which we combat’, wrote Mounier, ‘is the ideology of 1789 … the individual emptied of all substance and cut off from his roots … equality conceived as a void between neutral and interchangeable individuals.’40 It was necessary to rediscover human beings in all their wholeness, l’homme réel or l’homme concret. The first editorial of Plans defined its aims as ‘The expression of the real man [l’homme réel] … The blossoming of a more humane civilisation where man, dominating the tyranny of the machine created for his own good, would retrieve his place in the universe.’ L’Homme réel was also the title of a short-lived journal of syndicalist inspiration founded in 1934 (again with the involvement of Le Corbusier). Both Esprit and Ordre nouveau described their doctrine as ‘personalism’.41 They sought communitarian alternatives to Republican anomie.42
A central inspiration of this generation was Péguy. Maxence devoted an issue of the Cahiers to him in 1930; he was the subject of Mounier’s first book.43 The Péguy they celebrated was the angry prophet of a more spiritual politics: ‘the revolution will be moral or it will not be’ was a favourite phrase.44 Other influences were Maritain, Proudhon, Sorel, Bergson, and the Russian orthodox thinker Nicholas Berdyaev. There was also a serious revival of interest in Nietzsche.45 To such familiar critics of individualism and rationalism was added the influence of the German phenomenologists—Heidegger, Husserl, and Jaspers—whose work percolated into France in this period and offered a powerful weapon against the traditional teaching of the French universities.46 In the words of Raymond Aron, an early French student of these German thinkers: ‘In studying phenomenology, I experienced a sort of liberation in relation to my neo-Kantian training.’47 But Aron never succumbed to the anti-liberalism of the nonconformists and had little respect for the intellectual sophistication of Robert Aron, Dandieu, or Mounier. He also questioned whether they mattered ‘outside the dining circles of the Parisian intelligentsia’.48
On this point Aron is probably too dismissive. Quite apart from the leading roles many of the nonconformists played in French cultural life over the next decades, there are several reasons for ascribing importance to them. First, they articulated a malaise which extended beyond the tiny readerships of their often ephemeral journals. There is an affinity between their ‘disgust’ and the ‘nausea’ in 1938 of Sartre’s Roquentin, between their dissatisfaction with the ‘established disorder’ and the Nietzschean quest for adventure by the heroes of Malraux’s early novels.49 Malraux, viewed as a sort of French T. E. Lawrence, was very much a tutelary figure for this generation, a fellow ‘brother in Nietzsche and Dostoevsky’, as Drieu La Rochelle called him.50 In Malraux’s first two novels, ostensibly about the Chinese revolution, action has a metaphysical purpose not a political one: his protagonists seek not to change the world, but to transcend their sense of the futility of existence.51 Maxence remarked that France’s leaders failed to offer adventure or excitement, and ran the country like an insurance company.
Secondly, there were links between the nonconformists and a number of technocratic reform groups that sprang up in the 1930s.52 The most famous of these was the Centre polytechnicien d’études économiques, better known as X-Crise, a circle of polytechniciens set up in 1931 to discuss the problems posed by the economic crisis. X-Crise included laissez-faire liberals and socialists, but they all agreed on one thing: it was for experts to provide answers. Its leading light was the business manager Jean Coutrot. Restlessly curious and indefatigably energetic, Coutrot, who kept up an international correspondence with intellectuals like Aldous Huxley, was a mixture of sage and crank driven by a mystical faith in the capacity of the experts to solve the problems of the world. He set up the Centre for the Study of Human Problems whose aim was to synthesize the most recent advances in the human and social sciences, harnessing them to the quest for a modern humanism. Through the study of economics, psychology, psychobiology, eugenics, and so on it would be possible to transform man’s relationship to technology and modern productive forces. The ultimate aim was to create a ‘new man’.53
Another participant in X-Crise was the electricity industrialist Auguste Detœuf who had been a leading member of Redressement français. Some members of X-Crise—Robert Loustau (b. 1899), Robert Gibrat (b. 1904)—were in Ordre nouveau. Another link between Ordre nouveau and the wider world was Jean Jardin (b. 1904) who was an aide to Raoul Dautry, one of the great proto-technocrats of the period. Dautry (b. 1880) was a polytechnicien whose success in modernizing the French railways led French governments frequently to call upon his administrative expertise. In 1939, he was brought in to oversee French rearmament after the Munich agreement.
Dautry had been in the circle of the former imperial proconsul Marshal Lyautey, famous for his 1891 article on the ‘Social Role of the Officer’. The leadership role that Lyautey ascribed to the army, Dautry conferred on public-spirited administrators dedicated to the ideals of service and efficiency. Lyautey’s ideas also influenced Mercier who believed that businessmen should be the new elite. After Lyautey died in 1934, Dautry took on something of his mantle. Celebrating the leadership role of elites sidestepped politics. Lyautey’s own preferences had been monarchist, and Dautry’s were perhaps revealed by the fact that his 1937 hymn to the idea of leadership, Métier d’homme (ghosted by Jardin) was dedicated to Salazar.54
Finally, for all their suspicion of politics, there were affinities and connections between the nonconformists and the young dissidents in the Radical and Socialist parties. In the Radical Party there were two significant defections. One was Gaston Bergery who was close in spirit to the Young Radicals although himself somewhat older (b. 1892). Bergery had been an adviser to Herriot in 1924, and from that experience he concluded that the Radicals had to align with the Socialists. He resigned from the Party in March 1933 and formed the Front commun to rally progressive left op
inion. In November 1934, the Front commun fused with Izard’s Third Force to become the Front social.55 The second Radical dissident was Bertrand de Jouvenel who resigned from the Party after February 1934 and started a short-lived paper called La Lutte des jeunes which aimed to be the mouthpiece of the new generations: its contributors included Mounier, Izard, Luchaire, and Robert Aron.56
In the Socialist Party, there was a split in October 1933 when twenty-eight députés rebelled against the Party’s refusal to co-operate with the Radicals. They were expelled, and set up a breakaway party. The neo-Socialists, as they came to be called, included old right-wing Socialists who merely wished to break the taboo against participating in government, but also younger revisionists like Marcel Déat. The revisionism of de Man and Déat had been conceived during the economic growth of the 1920s, but the arrival of the economic crisis only intensified their conviction that socialism must break with Marxism. The orthodox Socialist answer to the Depression was that it represented the crisis of capitalism, which freed Socialists from responsibility for devising solutions. Arguing that such an abdication of responsibility would allow fascism to develop, de Man advocated a ‘Plan’ of structural economic reform whose centrepiece was the nationalization of credit and key industries. In effect, he was proposing that the Socialists postpone socialism in favour of the mixed economy.
De Man’s planisme enjoyed a considerable vogue in 1934. It was taken up by the neo-Socialists, and given publicity by Esprit and Ordre nouveau.57 The Socialist Party itself rejected planisme in 1934 as a heretical deviation from Marxism, but some younger Socialists, like Georges Lefranc, continued to argue for it from within the Party. De Man’s Plan, which bore some resemblance to the CGT minimum programme of 1918, was also taken up by the CGT in 1934–5.
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