B006NTJT4U EBOK

by Jackson, Julian

  Conservatives were wrong to believe, as many did, that June 1936 heralded a Moscow-inspired revolution, but they were correct to believe that they were living through a fundamental social transformation. The outbreak of the Spanish civil war in July fuelled their nightmares of revolution and anarchy: Spain, where the ‘reds’ were allegedly burning churches and massacring patriots, seemed an ominous sign of what the future held for France. Within France, the Popular Front was experienced by conservatives as an assault on bourgeois society in all its forms, the destruction of those barriers defining bourgeois distinctiveness: ‘break down the barriers’ was one of the slogans of the Popular Front. The massive demonstrations were an invasion of urban space by the proletarian suburbs on a scale beyond the worst nightmares of 1924; the participation of women in the strikes revived fears that traditional gender relations had been entirely destabilized, and the conservative press alleged that orgies had occurred in occupied factories; the proletarian invasion of beaches during the first paid holidays presaged an era when no social space would be sacrosanct.

  In fact the Popular Front had no radical ideas on the family, and few workers could afford to go to the beaches, but the fear was what mattered. The historian Marc Bloch was not exaggerating when he wrote to Lucien Febvre in May 1940 about the impact of the Popular Front on the French bourgeoisie: ‘We have not fully realized … the unbelievably strong, tenacious and unanimous reaction which the Popular Front provoked among such people. One must retain this date, almost equal to June [1848] as one of the great moments of the history of France.’30

  The radicalization of the right manifested itself in many ways. The most extreme was the famous Secret Committee of Revolutionary Action (CSAR), nicknamed the Cagoule (the Hood), founded by Eugène Deloncle, a naval engineer and former member of Action française. Its aim was to fight Communism by any means. Arms caches were prepared throughout the country and terrorist attacks carried out in 1937. The numbers in the Cagoule were small, but some money was provided by industry, and there were attempts to build links to the army. The organization’s significance lay less in its size than in the dramatic radicalization which it represented, and the undoubted complicities from which it benefited. Several Cagoulard leaders were arrested in 1937, only to resur-face after 1940.31

  Ostensibly La Rocque moved in a less radical direction after 1936 when he founded the PSF. By 1937, the new party had possibly as many as one and a half million members, making it easily the largest political force in France. Because this expansion occurred after La Rocque had turned to electoral politics, it has been read as a sign of the immunity of French politics to extremism. But although La Rocque had renounced street violence and paramilitarism, he remained far from committed to democracy. His movement was still an authoritarian-populist force whose extraordinary success testifies to the dramatic polarization of politics after 1936.

  Some of La Rocque’s followers did believe he had become too moderate. They turned either to the Cagoule or to the new Parti populaire français (PPF), formed in June 1936 by Jacques Doriot. In the 1920s, Doriot was one of the rising stars of French communism when he acquired a reputation as a fearless street fighter. Increasingly frustrated by the sectarian policies of the Communist leadership, Doriot was expelled from the Party in 1934. Ironically, the very policy which Doriot had opposed was jettisoned by the Party only weeks after his expulsion. Although Doriot continued to call himself a Communist for the next two years, this became increasingly implausible. Doriot formed the PPF with the backing of the banker Gabriel Leroy-Ladurie. The industrialist Pierre Pucheu became one of the Party’s leading figures and helped attract funds from business interests who saw Doriot as a populist figure capable of draining support from the left.

  By 1937, Doriot had become violently anti-Communist. He was in favour of corporatism and an entente with Nazi Germany. The PPF adopted the fascist salute and placed a lot of emphasis on symbols such as the party flag. It also made much of its readiness to use street violence although it did not have a paramilitary section. Estimates of its membership are variable, but it probably peaked at about 70,000 in 1937.32 It also succeeded in attracting several prominent intellectuals like the novelist Drieu la Rochelle, the critic Ramon Fernandez, and the journalist Alfred Fabre-Luce. Doriot’s image of heroic, working-class virility made him attractive to self-hating middle-class fascist intellectuals. Until he became rather fat, Doriot looked the part of the fascist leader (except for his glasses).

  The political engagement of these right-wing intellectuals was part of a general political radicalization of intellectuals in the late 1930s. Symptomatic of this tendency was the evolution of a group of young Maurrassian intellectuals who wrote for the weekly review Je suis partout. Run by Maurras’s former secretary Pierre Gaxotte, the other contributors included Robert Brasillach and Lucien Rebatet who had both started their literary careers in Action française. This group became increasingly fascinated with Nazism, and moved away from Maurras: Brasillach stopped writing for Action française in 1939. Je suis partout used the rhetoric of civil war: ‘when Blum and Cot [the Popular Front Air Minister] have been shot … by a national government no tears will be shed over those two excrements, but champagne will be drunk by French families’.33Je suis partout ’s circulation was never above 100,000, but a similar tone and similar themes were also to be found in two mass circulation right-wing papers: Gringoire with a circulation of 640,000 in May 1936 and Candide which sold about 460,000.

  Perhaps the most striking illustration of political polarization was less the violence of the extremes than the blurring of the boundaries between the parliamentary right, and the extreme right. The Fédération républicaine had shifted sharply to the right, partly because conservative Catholics like Xavier Vallat and Philippe Henriot had joined it because as Catholics they felt uneasy with Action française after the papal condemnation. Both of them had been star orators of the FNC. Vallat, who had dabbled in most parties of the extreme right, did not have a republican bone in his body: he attended a Mass every 21 January in memory of Louis XVI. With such figures playing a prominent role in the Fédération, it bore little relation to the party of conservative republicanism it had been in the 1920s.34

  That the Popular Front radicalized the right is perhaps not surprising. Less predictable was the way it caused a recomposition of the left, and paved the way for an entirely new political constellation determined by anti-Communism. Those Radicals who entered the Popular Front with misgivings felt vindicated by the grande peur of June 1936, and their audience in the Party increased. Radicals who had rallied to the Popular Front because they feared the threat to order posed by the right—fascism—now perceived a greater threat from the left—communism. The Radical congress of October 1936 witnessed angry opposition to the Communists; pro-Popular Front speakers were heckled, and sometimes arms were raised in what seemed like a fascist salute. If the Radical Party was not yet ready to break with the Popular Front, it had already begun the process of distancing itself from it. This journey from left to right was almost a tradition for the Radicals, but whereas it had previously occurred in parliament under the duress of financial crisis, this time it was underpinned by a formidable wave of anti-communism from the base of the Party.

  Even more startling was the evolution towards anti-communism by many Socialists and trade unionists. There had never been any love lost between the Socialists and Communists. The Popular Front was a marriage of convenience, a negative alliance against fascism. Within the CGT, the former confédérés were alarmed at the degree to which the Communists were profiting from the influx of new members. René Belin, second in command of the CGT during the 1930s, founded the newspaper Syndicats in October 1936 to organize resistance to this alleged Communist colonization. This fault-line developing within the Popular Front ran not only between the Communists and their allies, but also through the middle of the Socialists, the former confédérés, and the Radicals. It crystallized not so much around domestic p
olitics as foreign policy. So deep did it become that by 1938 Radicals and Socialists, who had in 1936 believed fascism to be the enemy, now saw the Communists as no less dangerous—if not indeed worse.

  4

  The German Problem

  On 22 October 1940, Pierre Laval met Adolf Hitler at the railway station of the small town of Montoire-sur-le-Loir near Tours. The Montoire meeting, followed two days later by one between Hitler and Pétain, was one of the symbolic moments of Franco-German collaboration. For that policy of ‘intelligence with the enemy’, as it was described in 1945, Laval was executed after the war. At Montoire, however, Laval certainly did not see himself as a traitor. He was respecting one of the guiding principles of his life: the pursuit of peace. If Laval had any precedent in mind, it might well have been the meeting fourteen years earlier, on 17 September 1926, between his mentor Aristide Briand and the German Chancellor Gustav Stresemann, at another out-of-the-way location, the village of Thoiry in the Jura. At Thoiry the two men had tried to resolve the outstanding differences between France and Germany. In the end, neither meeting fulfilled the expectations aroused, but symbolically they were important moments in the twentieth-century Franco-German relationship.

  Thoiry reminds us that if Franco-German ‘collaboration’ was above all a response to the Occupation, it drew on a longer tradition of Franco-German reconciliation, a tradition grounded both in pragmatism and idealism. In 1942, the journalist Alfred Fabre-Luce, one of the most intelligent advocates of collaboration, produced an anthology demonstrating its long pedigree in French culture.1 The book is a rather specious piece of special pleading, but it was the genuine reflection of a lifetime commitment to Franco-German reconciliation.

  One does not have to accept Fabre-Luce’s annexation of even Pascal to the collaboration cause, to recognize that the road to Montoire runs back from 1940 through Munich (1938), Thoiry (1926), and Locarno (1925), even to Agadir in 1911. In that year, the Premier Joseph Caillaux had defused a dangerous crisis in Franco-German relations by negotiating an agreement giving France a sphere of influence in Morocco in return for French concessions to Germany in the Congo. Caillaux declared: ‘I have saved the peace of the world.’ His policy was one of rational accommodation with Germany—the beginning of what might be called the pragmatic tradition in twentieth-century French foreign policy. It was no coincidence that Fabre-Luce devoted an admiring biography to Caillaux in 1933.2

  From Caillautism to Briandism: The Pragmatic Tradition

  A myth developed that Caillaux might have prevented war in 1914, but during the July crisis he was excluded from political influence owing to a scandal involving his wife. Once Caillaux’s reputation had recovered, he became the unofficial leader of a peace party in parliament. The year 1917 was one of political instability and war-weariness which boosted Caillaux’s influence until the peace option was finally rejected in November when President Poincaré designated Georges Clemenceau as premier. Clemenceau was committed to war until victory; Caillaux was arrested and put on trial.

  In 1918, Caillaux’s voice of reconciliation was drowned by the celebrations of victory, but soon the fragility of that victory became only too apparent. During the 1920s, the rivalry between Clemenceau and Caillaux was continued by that between Poincaré and Briand. In the demonology of the left in the 1920s, Poincaré was the incarnation of narrow nationalism: as president in 1914 he had supposedly inflamed the war crisis and as premier in 1923 he had ordered the occupation of the Ruhr. He was the target of Fabre-Luce’s book La Victoire (1924), which argued that Germany did not bear exclusive responsibility for the outbreak of war in 1914. Poincaré, who had once been photographed squinting against the light when entering a war cemetery, was dubbed by the Communists ‘the man who laughs in cemeteries’. He was the villain of Jean Giraudoux’s novel Bella, where he appears as Rebendart, a politician who takes a grim delight in the inauguration of war memorials.3

  French policy toward Germany after Versailles was in fact nothing like the caricature portrayed by anti-Poincaré polemicists.4 Inspired more by fear than revenge, it was muddled and inconsistent. The French were well aware that the long-term demographic and economic balance of power was favourable to Germany. Even Poincaré was more prudent than his reputation allowed, and only after considerable hesitation did he send troops into the Ruhr. Once the Germans had abandoned passive resistance and the German Chancellor Strese-mann was at his mercy, Poincaré resisted the temptation to impose terms on Germany unilaterally. Instead he accepted the American proposal of a committee of experts to review reparations. In the wake of its report, an international conference was called in London in May 1924 to discuss reparations.

  Poincaré’s assumption that the Ruhr occupation would allow him to negotiate from strength was shattered by a financial crisis which broke at the end of 1923 when foreign investors lost confidence in the franc. This made the French government dependent on American loans, and at the London conference France was in a weaker position than had seemed likely a few months earlier. Poincaré had been defeated at the elections of May 1924, and it fell to his successor, Herriot, to put France’s case. Herriot was a sentimental centre-left politician, full of internationalist pieties and naively trustful of Britain. But he had the misfortune to be dealing with a new Labour government sympathetic to Germany’s plight. Poincaré had dealt Herriot a weak hand, and he played it badly. He capitulated all along the line, agreeing to evacuate the Ruhr within a year and renouncing future unilateral action even if Germany defaulted on reparations.5

  The London Conference was the turning point in inter-war international relations. The French had failed to consolidate their dominance, and a change of policy was required. The rest of the decade was a period of Franco-German reconciliation inaugurated by the Locarno Treaty of 1925 when the Germans for the first time recognized their post-Versailles borders with France.6 Locarno was followed by the Thoiry meeting in 1926 and by a Franco-German commercial agreement in 1927.

  The incarnation of the new French policy was Aristide Briand, continuously French foreign minister from 1925 to 1932. Just as it is too simple to see Poincaré as an inveterate warmonger, so it would be wrong to view Briand as a lifelong ‘pilgrim of peace’. Immediately after the war, he had entirely shared the prevailing anti-German consensus, but his great quality was adaptability. Having started his career on the extreme left, Briand had become a politician so perfectly poised at the centre of the political spectrum that there was not a government into which he could not fit. The natural bent of his personality was conciliation. All his life Briand had excelled at sniffing out a Zeitgeist and giving it eloquent expression. Now the Zeitgeist coincided perfectly with his own personality: ‘Briandism’ was the coming together of a temperament, a moment, and a policy. The League of Nations at Geneva was the ideal forum for Briand’s spellbinding lyricism; his oratory could reduce cynical diplomats to tears. The high point of Briandism was the Briand-Kellogg Pact of 1928 when fifteen countries, including France and Germany, agreed that they would never resort to war to settle their differences.

  From Franco-German reconciliation, Briand moved to the idea of a European federation about which he submitted a detailed proposal to the League in May 1930. Briand’s European idea never came to anything, and its failure was the beginning of the end of his influence. In fact one should not exaggerate the harmony even of the Locarno years; suspicion lay behind the smiles at the Geneva tea parties. When Briand talked of peace he meant French security; ‘Europe’ was a way of taming Germany. He was always a pragmatist: ‘I pursue the policy imposed by our birth rate.’ The optimistic rhetoric of Briandism only thinly disguised the pessimism of a country exhausted by the war, and unwilling ever to envisage such a sacrifice again. By 1928, conscription had been reduced to one year, having stood at three years at the start of the decade. In the same year, construction commenced on the defensive Maginot Line.

  Briandism became the ideological frame of reference for an entire generation,
apart from some carping voices on the nationalist right. Social and economic interests underpinned the idealistic rhetoric.7 In the second half of the 1920s, Germany overtook Britain as France’s first trading partner.8 France had originally hoped that the Versailles Treaty would enable her steel industry to challenge Germany’s. The treaty contained a clause opening the German market to French steel producers up to 1925. But France had not been able to supplant the German steel industry by that date, and now French steel manufacturers were keen to reach cartel arrangements with their German opposite numbers. This resulted in the forming of the Franco-German steel cartel in September 1926. Briandism was also supported by the modernizing businessmen of Redressement français who were internationalist and committed to Franco-German reconciliation.

  There was also an anti-American agenda behind the pro-German theme. Quite apart from fearing American cultural influence, the French resented American intransigence on war debts. At Thoiry, Briand had suggested that Franco-German reconciliation would be a ‘precondition for the possibility of avoiding American monetary supremacy’.9 When Poincaré met Stresemann in August 1928 he talked eloquently about the cultural threat of America, and the need for Franco-German co-operation to combat it.10

  One area where Franco-German economic co-operation overlapped with ‘European’ cultural defence was the film industry where international Franco-German co-productions came to dominate French cinematic output. The German company Tobis opened studios in Paris and the first film it financed was the quintessentially French Sous les toits de Paris (1930). This co-operation continued throughout the 1930s. In the middle of the decade, the German company UFA started to make French films in Berlin. Most French film stars of the period worked regularly in Berlin where there was a sort of French film colony: the cinematic ‘collaboration’ of the Occupation also had a pedigree.11