B006NTJT4U EBOK

by Jackson, Julian

  With all these connections to the wider world, the nonconformists’ importance was not confined to Parisian dining circles. They drew upon many traditions—the Saint-Simonian cult of the modernizing elite, syndicalist dissatisfaction with the idea of abstract citizenship, Catholic rejection of liberal individualism, de Man’s Socialist revisionism—and mixed them in different ways. They were subsequently to follow different political journeys, many of them ending up at Vichy. They were a political generation bereft of political anchors, able to pass from surrealism to communism (Aragon), reformist socialism to fascism (Déat), radicalism to fascism (Bergery), Action française to communism (Roy) with intermediate stages on the way. They all shared a suspicion, even visceral rejection, of liberal democracy. The spirit of this generation was well described by one of its members in 1932:

  We passed our adolescence in the antechamber of death. After the war, we were naked before a new world … without prejudice, without loyalties, without a fixed situation … We had hoped that a great movement of renovation would come out of the war, a new definition of the world. And we saw old men who had known neither how to avoid the killing nor make the peace take power again having learnt nothing or forgotten everything.58

  The nonconformists claimed to transcend the traditional political divisions: ‘we are neither right nor left’ declared Aron and Dandieu in the preface to La Révolution nécessaire. There were political nuances between them. The Jeune Droite had emerged out of the orbit of Action française, Esprit out of left Catholicism. Ordre nouveau was more unqualified in its critique of democracy than Esprit, which targeted its contempt on parliamentary democracy.59 On a left–right spectrum, Maxence should be classified on the right and Mounier on the left, with Ordre nouveau in between, but before 1934 the similarities were more evident than the differences. They shared a sense of themselves as a generation, and a generation that took itself seriously: Mounier hailed Dandieu’s La Révolution nécessaire as the first work in French to challenge Das Kapital.60

  From 1934, French politics became increasingly polarized. Even those wishing to reject political labels could no longer do so. In January 1934 Esprit criticized Ordre nouveau for being too sympathetic to fascism, and in April 1934 announced it was abandoning the line ‘neither left nor right’; later it offered a ‘fraternal salute’ to the emerging Popular Front.61 Mounier supported the Republicans in the Spanish civil war, Maxence the Nationalists. Maxence’s Revue française folded in 1933, and its mantle was later assumed by the journal Combat, founded in January 1936 and edited by Thierry Maulnier. Combat was a formative experience for many young right-wing intellectuals of the period—Claude Roy, Jacques Laurent, Maurice Blanchot—and its tone was more violent than that of its predecessor.

  If, however, it was difficult to be ‘neither left nor right’ after 1934, some ambiguity remained. In 1935 Mounier saw nothing reprehensible in accepting an invitation from the Institute of Fascist Culture in Rome. In 1938, in what was otherwise a very anti-Nazi article, he wrote of fascism that it was not ‘absolute evil:’ ‘its action of harsh purification cleanses a worm-eaten structure which we have not ceased to combat in the name of other values’.62 At the end of the decade, Maxence, who had chosen the other side, was able to write sympathetically of the aspirations represented by the Popular Front.63 Nonetheless, in the second half of the decade, the sense of generational fraternity was only nostalgia: French politics had acquired the bitterness of a civil war, and political choices were unavoidable.

  3

  Class War/Civil War

  In 1940, during the Phoney War, the French fascist writer Robert Brasillach published an autobiographical memoir, Notre avant-guerre. Its post-face is dated ‘6 February Year VII. National Revolution’. It was not only in retrospect that 6 February appeared to be a turning point. In 1934 itself, soon after the events of February, Jean-Pierre Maxence and Thierry Maulnier published a book dedicated to the ‘dead of 6 February, first witnesses of the next Revolution’.1

  The date 6 February 1934 marked the beginning of a French civil war lasting until 1944. The truth about that night was that a demonstration had turned ugly and the police had panicked. But since civil wars require the enemy to be demonized, the left interpreted the events of 6 February as an abortive fascist coup, the right as a massacre of fifteen innocent patriots by the Republic. The left also had its martyrs when six people were killed in a Communist counter-demonstration three days later in the place de la République: this was the bloodiest week in French politics since the Commune.

  The 1920s: Defending the Bourgeois Republic

  The civil war was first and foremost a class war. Its context was the Depression, but its origins went back to the First World War which had dealt a blow to the self-confidence of the French bourgeoisie. A book published in 1932 was alarmingly entitled ‘The end of the rentier’.2 Although rentier incomes were hit by wartime and post-war inflation—it has been estimated that 1,913 fortunes had halved in real value by 19293—the book’s title was too apocalyptic. But bourgeois civilization was about more than the defence of property. In La Barrière et le niveau, published in 1925, Edmond Goblot defined the bourgeoisie in terms of a style of life which involved distinguishing oneself from other classes by erecting cultural barriers. A bourgeois salon was furnished with heavy furniture in which to receive visitors; there must be servants. The bourgeoisie preserved its separateness when it travelled (there were three classes on trains), in the way it dressed, in the education of its children.4

  Education was the most effective barrier, dividing those who attended the free primary school until the age of 14, from those who went to the fee-paying lycées which had their own primary classes. The left’s advocacy of the école unique— amalgamating the two systems and making education free for everyone—was a fundamental assault on bourgeois privilege. The content of the syllabus was another contested issue. Traditionally the study of the classics had distinguished secondary school pupils from the others until the creation in 1902 of a modern section in the lycée which did not require Latin. Under the Bloc national government this reform was reversed by the Léon Bérard Law of 1923; a year later the Bérard Law was itself repealed by the Cartel. This was a debate about the defence of social capital, and it was no coincidence that in 1940 Vichy’s second education minister, Georges Ripert, again abolished the modern section.

  Post-war bourgeois anxiety focused on the spectre of communism.5 At the 1919 elections, the Bolshevik threat was depicted on a notorious poster showing a hirsute brigand with a knife between his teeth. The French Communist Party (PCF) was founded in 1920, and in the next year the trade-union movement split. The new Communist union, the CGTU, abandoned the syndicalist tradition of remaining independent of politics, and created a new unionism subordinate to the Party.

  In the 1920s, the Communists had little influence except in the industrial suburbs of Paris. These suburbs, which developed at the end of the nineteenth century, grew massively during the war when large-scale engineering plants burgeoned around the capital. The Renault factory at Boulogne-Billancourt had 110 workers in 1900, 4,400 by 1914, 14,600 by 1919, 20,000 by 1929.6 What had been hardly more than villages—Saint-Ouen, Courbevoie, Puteaux, Ivry—became large agglomerations.7 Bobigny to the north-east had a population of 3,660 in 1911, 11,412 in 1926, 17,370 in 1931. The département of the Seine-et-Oise (Paris’s far suburb) grew by 48 per cent between 1921 and 1931, making the area around Paris one of the largest concentrations of workers in Europe.

  This rapid urbanization was entirely uncontrolled. Housing conditions were appalling and public services non-existent: the Paris suburbs were the last of Céline’s circles of hell. They were a tinderbox of social discontents which the Communist exploited effectively. At the elections of 1924, the Party, despite performing badly at national level, received about 25 per cent of the vote in the Seine département (Paris’s near suburbs). The myth of the Red Belt was born, and it was on its way to becoming a reality.8 Catholi
cs called for the rechristianization of the suburbs; Halévy in his Pays parisiens (1932) described them as a negation of life, a black void in which Revolution lurked.9

  Usually the workers of the suburbs were feared without being seen, but when in 1924 the Cartel government decided to transfer the ashes of the Socialist Jean Jaurès to the Panthéon, the Communists organized a separate cortège. The panic this caused in conservative circles testifies to the nervousness of the French bourgeoisie at this time. The Communist marchers, mainly from the suburbs, were depicted as alien invaders of the city like their Communard forebears descending into Paris in 1871. One observer, who was a boy at the time, never forgot the fear on people’s faces as metal blinds were pulled down to protect against revolution.10

  In defending their social interests, conservatives were hampered by divisions in the French right dating back to the Dreyfus Affair. On the one hand, there was the centre-right Alliance démocratique, which had originally comprised those conservatives who believed that the danger to the Republic required an alliance with the anticlerical left, and on the other hand, the more right-wing Fédération républicaine which did not want the Dreyfus Affair to disrupt the defence of conservative social interests. The Fédération was not originally a confessional party, but believed that Catholics should not be penalized by discriminatory laws. In the inter-war years, however, its Catholic identity became more pronounced, as it filled the void created by the disappearance of the Action libérale populaire, a confessional party which had existed before 1914. This made it even harder to create a durable entente between the Alliance and the Fédération. Even Raymond Poincaré, the epitome of conservative moderation, a member of the Alliance, described the Fédération in the 1920s as ‘men of the 16 May 1877’: by this he meant that they could not be considered as true Republicans.11 In theory, the Alliance might instead have allied with the Radical Party, and this is what many Alliance leaders wanted. The problem was that the Radicals preferred to ally with the Socialists although the petit-bourgeois nature of the Radical electorate pulled the Party to the right. Thus the Radicals tended to ally with the Socialists at elections, only to fall into the arms of the right at the first whiff of a financial crisis. This political schizophrenia contributed to political instability—although it also defused conflict by allowing the right to recover power relatively painlessly.

  In addition to religious conflicts, the tension between large and small producers—the other fault-line running through the right—was exacerbated by the war which accelerated the expansion of concentrated industrial sectors like engineering, electricity, and chemicals. Some on the right were coming to see small producers as an obstacle to growth while others wished to court them as a bulwark against communism. Even the modernizing Redressement français was divided about how to treat them. In political terms the Alliance was seen as representing more modernizing business interests; the Fédération had links to industries with higher labour costs like mining, metallurgical, and textiles; and the Radicals were pre-eminently the party of small producers. But these divisions were approximate, and no party could afford to neglect small producers entirely.12

  Conservative politics was so fragmented that after the left won the elections of 1924 many conservatives believed their traditional parties were inadequate to defend their interests. The year 1924 saw the emergence of a number of extra-parliamentary movements calling themselves leagues. These leagues—the Jeunesses Patriotes of Pierre Taittinger, the Légion of Antoine Rédier—were inspired by a French plebiscitary tradition which went back to Boulangism and by the example of Mussolini who had taken power two years earlier.13 Conservatives were also mobilized by the National Catholic Federation (FNC) which organized Catholic opposition to the anticlericalism of the Cartel. The FNC held large public meetings all over the country, and claimed two million members by the end of 1926. Ostensibly above politics and devoted exclusively to the defence of Catholic interests, its leaders were clearly identified with the right.14

  This polarization of politics was accentuated by the financial instability of the early 1920s. In July 1926, the financial crisis became so acute that the Radicals panicked, and supported the return to power of the right under Raymond Poincaré. This was sufficient to restore financial confidence, and the political crisis dissipated as quickly as it had blown up. The leagues fizzled out in 1927; and the FNC was on the decline from 1929.

  Fragile Consensus: 1926–1932

  The extra-parliamentary bubble burst so easily because the underlying economic situation was healthy. Indeed the financial crises, by depreciating the currency, had boosted French exports. This background of economic growth explained the emergence of the Redressement français. The assumption was that growth would solve the social problem: Ford would render Marx redundant. Between 1928 and 1932, governments voted a number of important social reforms: a Social Insurance Act in 1928; the introduction of free schooling in the lower classes of secondary schools; a Family Allowance Act in 1932. Many of these reforms were introduced by Tardieu who was the politician most associated with the idea of absorbing social conflict through economic modernization.

  Political polarization was also reduced by the relaxation of tension between Church and State. The conflict of 1924 had interrupted the Vatican’s long-term ambition of overcoming the division between the Church and the Republic. It was the pursuit of this ‘Second Ralliement’ which caused the condemnation of Action française in 1926.15 While Maurras had insisted on the ‘primacy of politics’, the Vatican now promoted social Catholicism, encouraging Catholics to leave the political arena and concentrate on the rechristianization of society.

  The consensus of the late 1920s must not, however, be exaggerated. Tensions between small producers and large-scale industry remained acute. The Social Insurance Law, which was funded by contributions from employers and workers, alarmed small employers and reopened conflicts of interest between rationalized industrial sectors like electricity and those with higher labour costs. The Taxpayers’ Federation (Fédération des contribuables) mobilized shopkeepers and small businessmen against the law. Social insurance also caused alarm in the countryside. It was in mobilizing peasant anger against it that the rural agitator Henri Dorgères leapt to prominence in 1928.16

  Religious conflict also remained important even if the development of social Catholicism meant that the problem receded from the forefront of politics. The implications of social Catholicism for politics were complex because social Catholicism was not itself homogeneous. One strand was paternalistic and conservative, inspired by Lyautey’s ideas on the social duties of elites. Among Lyautey’s disciples was Robert Garric, founder in 1919 of the Équipes sociales, which aimed to prolong the fraternity of the trenches by promoting contacts between bourgeois Catholics and workers. Lyautey was also an inspiration for the Catholic scouting movement. The Dominican Marcel-Denys Forestier, founder of the Catholic ‘Rover scouts’ believed that scouting would combat individualism, secularism, and urban rootlessness. He edited, jointly with Garric, a Catholic periodical, La Revue des jeunes, which focused on social problems affecting the young. The Catholic scouting movements had 100,000 members by 1939.

  A different strand of social Catholicism was represented by the Catholic Action organizations with their specialized branches for workers, peasants, and students. In contrast to the more conservative version of social Catholicism, Catholic Action aimed to generate new Catholic elites from all social classes. It infused inter-war Catholicism with extraordinary dynamism, especially among the young, but also exacerbated the fissiparousness of conservative politics: social Catholic activists were ready to challenge the authority of traditional conservative elites. This did not place Catholic Action on the ‘left’. Social Catholics rejected overt links with political parties. Working through apostleship within their particular social milieu, they were open-minded about political structures. Rejecting political anti-republicanism was not equivalent to embracing the individualist values o
f the Republic. Although in practice many social Catholic leaders were sympathetic to the small Christian democratic party, the PDP, founded in 1924, this was not always true of the rank and file. Social Catholics claimed to stand above class divisions, advocating a third way between socialism and capitalism. In the crisis of liberal democracy in the 1930s this did not predispose them to support Republican individualism.17

  Shifting the centre of preoccupation from politics to society also increased the potential for secular–religious conflict as Catholics competed with lay organizations throughout society—in education, scouting, youth hostelling, leisure activities. Conservatives may have formally accepted the Republic, but they concentrated their hostility on the instituteurs, the State primary school teachers who were depicted as fermenters of disorder—godless, Masonic, and quasi-Communist. Instituteurs were also hated by Dorgères who blamed them for instilling urban ideas into impressionable young peasants.18 The emergence of Dorgères at the end of the 1920s was a sign of the fragility of the consensus which had been reached in French politics. When the Depression arrived that consensus exploded.

  The Depression

  The Depression reached France later than elsewhere, but lasted longer: in 1939 industrial production was still below its 1929 levels. The Depression was prolonged in France because French governments throttled their economy with an overvalued currency by refusing to devalue the franc after the devaluations of sterling (1931) and the dollar (1933). The value of French exports fell by two-thirds between 1928 and 1933: businesses could only export by selling at un-competitive prices.