B006NTJT4U EBOK

by Jackson, Julian

  Various organizations promoting Franco-German entente were founded after 1925. The most famous of these was the Franco-German Information and Documentation Committee set up in 1926 by one of the promoters of the steel cartel, the Luxembourg industrialist Émile Mayrisch. This committee tapped into a tradition, submerged during the early 1920s, of French cultural admiration for Germany. The young Charles de Gaulle was entirely typical of the pre-1914 generation in being more steeped in German than British culture (he never learnt to speak English while his German was quite respectable); Jaurès had written his thesis on Kant and Hegel. Before the war, Romain Rolland had written a long novel cycle Jean Christophe, whose eponymous hero represents the Germany of Beethoven not Prussian militarism.12 There were many French only too happy to believe that the real Germany was Madame de Staël’s land of poets and dreamers.

  Politically Briandism enjoyed a broad constituency, especially among Christian Democrats, Socialists, and Radicals, in particular the Young Radicals. Luchaire, mouthpiece of the Young Radicals, was a direct link between ‘Caillautism’ and Briandism since Caillaux was one of his political patrons. Émile Roche, a close collaborator of Caillaux, had helped him found his newspaper Notre temps. Luchaire was the promoter of the Sohlberg circle which encouraged cultural exchanges between the youth of France and Germany. His opposite number was a young German art teacher, Otto Abetz. The two men became very close, Abetz marrying Luchaire’s French secretary in 1932.13

  In the 1930s, Franco-German relations entered a less harmonious phase. Stresemann died in 1929 and Briand in 1932, the steel cartel collapsed in 1929 with the onset of the Depression, the Nazis broke through at the elections of 1930, and the German government in 1931 alarmed France by attempting a customs union with Austria. But if the economic, political, and diplomatic conditions underpinning Briandism began to fracture after 1930, its spirit was kept alive much longer by the pacifism that had taken hold of French society in the 1920s.

  The Pacifist Consensus

  Pacifism could mean many things. There was a difference between integral pacifists, for whom war was never justifiable, and people whose visceral horror of war did not rule it out in all circumstances. Until the mid-1930s, however, the two positions were to all intents and purposes identical. For most people pacifism was not an ideology, but an instinct that nothing could be worse than what they had experienced in, or heard about, the war of 1914–18.14

  The shadow of that war was everywhere—in the hundreds of thousands of war cripples, the war widows, the ruined cities of northern France, the war memorials of every town and village of France. These memorials still have the power to move today, but this was immeasurably more true when, as the historian Raoul Girardet writes of his childhood, the monuments to the dead were still new: ‘the dead remained strangely present’.15

  Much has been written about the iconography of the war memorials, but only the most tentative conclusions can be drawn since each community’s choice of memorial was subject to many influences, not least of them financial. The disputes over the memorials were more frequently inspired by long-standing Church–State conflicts—where should the memorial be situated, should it contain ostensibly religious symbolism?—than by the messages to be conveyed. The commonest memorial was a simple stele, but there were often allegorical representations (a rooster, a winged victory) or statues of poilus, sometimes in patriotic mode (brandishing a wreath, wielding a bayonet). Representations of mourning—a dying soldier, a grieving woman—were less common, and overtly pacifist memorials almost non-existent. But since the memorials had been mostly constructed by 1922, to the extent that they can be ‘read’ as a reflection of a mood, it is that of the immediate post-war period.16

  Although the war was always present in people’s minds, there was reticence in discussing it. In the preface to his 1923 novel Les Éparges, Maurice Genevoix noted that the public was tiring of war novels.17 At the end of the decade this began to change. The memory of the war re-emerged in books and films, as if it was only after an interval that the horror could be faced: in 1929, the Franco-American author Jean Norton Cru published Témoins. Although living in America, Cru had returned to France to fight in 1914, and his book was an attempt to analyse and evaluate the authenticity of all accounts of the war written by participants in it. Of the 302 books discussed by Cru, 188 had appeared during the war itself and the remaining 114 after it. Of these post-war books, two-thirds appeared between 1919 and 1921, and then output had tailed off, falling to only two books in 1928.18 The periodization is interesting, and confirms Genevoix’s observation about the declining market for war literature. The appearance of Cru’s book was a sign that the floodgates of memory were opening. In the first months of 1930, nine books on the war appeared. A critic in the NRF noted the new vogue for war books depicting the experience of the soldiers in the most desperate terms.19

  The impossibility of forgetting was an insistent theme of the anti-war writing of Jean Giono. Already a novelist celebrated for his writing about Provence (which fitted into the post-war regionalist mode), Giono first confronted the war in his 1931 novel Le Grand Troupeau. The book did not exorcize the memory. In 1934 he wrote:

  I cannot forget the war. I would like to. I might pass two or three days without thinking of it and then suddenly I see it again, I feel it again, I undergo it again. And I feel frightened … In the war I was afraid, I am still afraid, I tremble, I shit in my pants … I prefer to think about my own happiness. I do not want to sacrifice myself.

  Giono, who had been gassed and almost lost his sight at Mount Kemmel in 1918, rejected war unconditionally: ‘there is no glory in being French. There is only one glory: to be alive.’ In 1937 he published a collection of pieces, Refus d’obéissance, which advocated desertion in the event of war. Arguing that war was the consequence of industrial civilization, Giono combined his pacifism with a cult of the peasantry which he saw as the main victim of the Great War.20

  Giono inverted the notion of the soldier-peasant, turning the peasantry into the redemptive class of peace. Even if the peasantry did not conform to Giono’s idealized picture of it, pacifism was widespread in the countryside. Peasant organizations and the peasant press were among the most vociferous supporters of the Munich agreement.21 They argued that the peasants had suffered more in the war than the workers who were cosily protected in the arms factories. Pacifism was also strong among the public-sector unions, especially the 100,000 members of the primary school teachers’ union the SNI.22 Among those who wrote in its paper was Léon Emery who was probably the first person, but not the last, to utter the notorious phrase: ‘rather servitude than war’.

  Emery was a friend of the philosopher Émile Chartier, better known by his pseudonym Alain, whose Mars ou la guerre jugée (1921) was a classic anti-militarist statement. Alain’s writing centred on his defence of individualism and suspicion of power. Armies were the most extreme manifestation of arbitrary power: one could not be a free man in uniform. Alain execrated Poincaré. His influence derived not only from his journalism, but also his position as teacher of philosophy in the khâgne class (preparation for the École normale supérieure) at one of the most prestigious Parisian lycées (his last class in 1933 was attended by the Minister of Education in person). This made Alain the formative influence on many inter-war generations of students at the École normale.23

  Jean-François Sirinelli’s study of the normaliens of the 1920s—what he calls the ‘generation of 1905’—shows that pacifism was their dominant ideological position.24 These were people too young to have fought in the war, but if anything they were more pacifist than those who had. Many veterans, however visceral their hatred of war, felt a grim pride in the terrible experience they had lived through: the horror had its nobility. The next generation had assimilated the horror, but mocked the honour. Indeed the moralism of the veterans was often a cause of irritation. In the words of Sartre’s contemporary, the philosopher Henri Lefebvre: ‘Our hatred of the war veteran
s knew no limits.’25

  Rethinking Pacifism: The Impact of Hitler

  It is difficult to say when pacifism acquired its greatest influence. Hitler’s arrival in power certainly destroyed many Briandist illusions, but if anything the increasing likelihood of another war increased pacifist sentiment. The Nazi regime skilfully exploited the idealism that had attracted so many French intellectuals towards Franco-German rapprochement. The image of the ‘good German’ remained resilient despite Hitler. Abetz, not previously a Nazi, put his contacts at the service of the new regime. He was recruited by Ribbentrop’s personal office, the Dienststelle Ribbentrop, which took a special interest in relations with France. In 1934, Abetz organized a meeting between Hitler and two French war veteran leaders, Jean Goy and Henri Pichot; in 1935 he was instrumental in setting up a Franco-German Committee (CFA) which published a review, Cahiers franco-allemands, and organized cultural and youth exchanges. The head of the CFA on the French side was the journalist Fernand de Brinon, author of the book France–Allemagne 1918–1934, and the first French journalist to be granted an interview with Hitler in November 1933. Luchaire’s Notre temps continued its propaganda for reconciliation, and became effectively a mouthpiece of the CFA.26

  In the 1930s, however, pacifists on the left started to review their position in the face of Hitler. The Popular Front had the misfortune to come to power when the internationalism of its programme began to seem threadbare. Two months before Blum took office Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland. Responding to Hitler became the most important issue facing the Popular Front. Having viewed war and fascism as equally pernicious, and seeing it as axiomatic that fascism engendered war, the Popular Front was confronted with the paradox that resisting fascism might require war. For the Communists, in their new ultra-patriotic incarnation, there was no dilemma: if war alone would stop Hitler, war there must be. For the ultra-pacifists, there was no dilemma either: even against Hitler war was unacceptable. But for most Socialists, Radicals, and trade unionists, the answers were not so easy. This was a period of agonizing reappraisals.

  For no one were they more agonizing than Blum, who was deeply committed to peace, disarmament, and collective security. Once in power, Blum had not abandoned the prospect of reconciliation with Germany, but in September 1936 his government also initiated a major rearmament programme, although previously the Socialists had refused to vote military budgets. In 1937, Paul Faure, who had been the Party’s second in command throughout the inter-war years, set up a newspaper, Le Socialiste, to put the pacifist case. It would be premature to describe this as the emergence of a Faurist faction within the Party, since Blum’s position remained sufficiently ambiguous for Faure not to seem to be diverging from it, but there was already a difference of emphasis between the two men.

  A dress rehearsal of the future conflicts on the left occurred over the Spanish civil war. Should France intervene to help the beleaguered Spanish Republic? The line between pro- and anti-interventionists passed not between the right and the left, but through the left itself: between the Communists, some Socialists, and a few Radicals favouring intervention, and many Socialists (including Faure) and most Radicals who opposed any action which might lead to European war. Blum was caught in between, his heart for intervention, his head against. In this case his head won out.27

  From 1938, the choice between war and peace, anti-fascism and pacifism threatened to explode into open conflict on the left. It was clear that Hitler would soon move against France’s ally Czechoslovakia. Blum now believed the Nazi threat to be so alarming that the Popular Front no longer corresponded to the situation, and when Chautemps’s government fell in March 1938, he proposed a National Unity government stretching from the Communists to the right. This idea stood no chance of succeeding, partly because the right was now as divided as the left over foreign policy.

  From Anti-Communism to Conservative Neo-Pacifism

  The right’s divisions were a symptom of the degree to which ideology was now overriding traditional foreign-policy alignments, and creating new configurations which anticipated 1940. Although the Briandist consensus had blurred the distinction between left and right over foreign policy, the right had remained more suspicious of Germany. When Doumergue came to power in 1934, his Foreign Minister, Louis Barthou, ended disarmament talks, and started to explore rapprochement with the Soviet Union. This was a traditional conservative policy: to recruit allies irrespective of ideology like Republican France in her pre-1914 alliance with Tsarist Russia. Barthou was assassinated by Croatian terrorists in October 1934, and his successor, Laval, inherited the preparations for a Franco-Soviet pact. Laval would probably not have initiated such a policy himself, but he did sign the pact in May 1935. However, when it came up for parliamentary ratification in January 1936, 164 conservative deputies voted against it, their fear of Germany now outweighed by suspicion of the Soviet Union and alarm about communism within France.

  Fear of communism was exacerbated by the strikes of 1936 and the Communist campaign for intervention in Spain. Conservatives alleged that the Communists were planning to drag France into an anti-German crusade for the benefit of the Soviet Union. The evolution of conservative attitudes was demonstrated by the case of Flandin, a representative of the moderate right (Alliance démocratique), who had defended the Franco-Soviet pact in 1936. During the next two years, Flandin emerged as the most articulate spokesman of the view that Germany should be given a free hand in the east. In a major parliamentary debate on foreign policy in February 1938, shortly before the Anschluss, Flandin argued that France could no longer be the ‘solitary gendarme’ of Europe; the Germans needed an outlet for their ‘over-industrialization and overpopulation’, and France should work out with them ‘new conditions’ for European international relations, and not allow herself to become, as the Communists wanted, the ‘soldiers of a mystique’.28

  Flandin played a leading role in sabotaging Blum’s attempt to form a National Unity government. There were some conservatives, like Paul Reynaud and Georges Mandel, whose fear of Germany outweighed their hostility to the left, but they were becoming more isolated. Blum in the end resigned himself to forming another Popular Front government, knowing that it could not survive long. This short-lived government was the last one which showed any serious signs of being ready to defend Czechoslovakia, against which the extreme right-wing press—Je suis partout, Candide, Gringoire—now unleashed a violent campaign. The anti-Czech camp acquired a powerful new ally in April 1938 with a sensational article by Joseph Barthélemy in Le Temps. Besides putting the prudential case against French involvement—no cause was worth the ‘suicide’ of France—he presented legal arguments supposedly demonstrating that France had no obligations to Prague.

  After the fall of Blum’s short-lived second government, it fell to the new government formed by Édouard Daladier to find a solution to the Czech problem. Foreign policy was entrusted to Georges Bonnet about whom historians have had almost no good to say. He is usually depicted as shifty, ambitious, and cynical. His memoirs, mercilessly dissected by Lewis Namier after the war, were a masterpiece of mendacity. A. J. P. Taylor claimed that Bonnet was incapable even of resolution in surrender. In fact, in a government paralysed by indecision about Czechoslovakia, Bonnet was rare in knowing exactly what he wanted: to detach France from her commitments to Prague, and avoid war at any cost. Because this was not the government’s official policy, Bonnet’s methods were bound to be underhand (although this came naturally to him): he doctored despatches, distorted conversations, and generally used any means to achieve his ends.

  What is interesting about Bonnet is that he incarnated in his person all three strands of opinion towards the German problem which have been identified in this chapter. As a member of the Caillautist wing of the Radical Party in the 1920s, he was a believer in Briandist pragmatism. As a veteran who had written a book on the psychology of the soldier,29 he had a visceral hatred of war. As a conservative Radical who had never liked the Pop
ular Front, he was strongly anti-Communist, and worried that rearmament would undermine financial stability and pave the way for revolution.

  On 29 September 1938, Daladier flew to Munich and, jointly with Neville Chamberlain, signed an agreement giving Hitler most of what he had wanted in Czechoslovakia.30 Daladier had fewer illusions than Chamberlain that he had brought ‘peace for our time’, but in view of the state of French rearmament, he felt that he had no choice. As his plane, returning from Munich, approached the airport of Le Bourget, Daladier saw a crowd waiting for him. He was convinced that they had come to boo. When he saw that they were there to cheer, he remarked to an aide: ‘the fools’. In parliament, the Munich agreement was supported by a massive majority: 537 in favour and 75 against (the 73 Communists, the conservative Henri de Kérillis, and 1 Socialist).

  Despite this seeming unanimity, many of those who voted for Munich had reservations about it. French opinion fell into four camps. In a distinct minority was the nationalist right, represented in the press by Émile Buré on L’Ordre, Henri de Kérillis in L’Époque, Pertinax (André Géraud) in L’Europe nouvelle. In parliament, although de Kérillis was the only conservative to vote against Munich, there were others, like Paul Reynaud and Georges Mandel, who shared similar views. As de Kérillis expressed their position: ‘the regime of the Soviet Union is as repugnant to me as to all of you. But I do not allow the bourgeois in me to speak louder than the patriot.’31

  Secondly, also opposed to Munich, was the anti-fascist left represented primarily by the Communist Party. Although the Communists were isolated on the left in voting against Munich, their views were shared by some in the Socialist Party (Jean Zyromski), some Radicals (Jean Zay, Cot), and some non-Communist trade unionists (Léon Jouhaux).