Thirdly, the largest group consisted of conservative neo-pacifists stretching from the extreme right to a large section of the Radical Party. Their position was based on realism and ideology. Realism meant that France was too diminished— her birth rate too low, her economy too weak, her armaments too limited—to go to war: France could not, said Louis Marin of the Fédération républicaine, afford the luxury of a battle of the Marne every twenty years. As for ideology, peace was viewed as a victory over the Communists who sought to drag France into an ideological war for the Soviet Union: Munich was the price to pay for avoiding a Commune. Those, like Maurras, whose anti-communism had not entirely buried their traditional Germanophobia, did not pretend that Munich was a victory, but saw it as a ‘necessary defeat’, and a triumph over ‘Israel’. Others were so obsessed by domestic hatreds as not to see a defeat at all.
Finally, Munich was supported by the pacifist left which was represented by Paul Faure’s wing of the Socialist Party, by Belin’s supporters in the CGT gathered around the newspaper Syndicats, by certain public-sector unions including postal workers and primary school teachers, and by left-wing dissidents like Gaston Bergery and Marcel Déat. A prominent role was also played by pacifist intellectuals like Alain, Giono, and Victor Margueritte whose detestation of the memory of Poincaré was so intense that they failed to see that Hitler was worse: ‘rather Daladier than Poincaré’ might have been their slogan. They were among the signatories of a telegram to Daladier on 11 September urging peace and the neutralization of Czechoslovakia. André Delmas, leader of the primary school teachers’ union, organized a petition on 25 September proclaiming ‘We do not want war’. In three days he allegedly collected 150,000 signatures.
Most of these left-wing pacifists had been strong supporters of the Popular Front when they had seen fascism as the greatest danger facing France. Now they were more worried by the threat of war and by what they saw as the warmongering of the Communists. This was the most significant realignment brought about by Munich. If the anti-communism of many conservatives had led them to pacifism, the pacifism of many Popular Front leftists had led them to anti-communism.32
After Munich: A New Sweden?
The British journalist Alexander Werth, an acute observer of France, noted that the French press had displayed an almost indecent glee in portraying Munich as a victory, while in Britain there had been a greater sense of guilt.33 Werth’s comment was accurate, but the French mood was uneasier than he allowed. Behind the euphoria and relief that war had been avoided lay nagging questions about France’s future status as a great power. The regularity with which in contemporary France the term ‘Munich’ still functions as a shorthand for abdication and surrender suggests the depth of the trauma which Munich represented.
Once Munich had been approved, however, the debate about its significance began. Was it the end of the road or a new beginning? A final retreat, grudgingly conceded before France returned to a continental role, or the dawn of a new era of Franco-German reconciliation? The boundaries between the four strands of opinion were very fluid. Many Socialists were in the pro-Munich camp only with reluctance—‘cowardly relief’ as Blum described it—and the same was true of many conservatives. Reynaud and Mandel had come close to resigning from the government. An opinion poll showed a less massive approval than might have been expected—57 per cent in favour, 37 per cent opposed—and also a striking majority (70 per cent) in favour of resisting further German demands.34 At the Socialist congress of Montrouge in December 1938 delegates were presented with two entirely contradictory motions on foreign policy. Blum proposed a motion accepting the necessity of war in certain circumstances, Faure proposed a pacifist one. This rift between Faure and Blum finally shattered the axis which had held the party together since 1920. The CGT’s Congress of November 1938 revealed similarly strong disagreements, with the pacifists around Belin and Delmas, pitted against the Communists and some non-Communists like Jouhaux.
On the right, there was a similar sorting out of positions—between those who had long anticipated an abandonment of the Czechs, and those who had accepted this outcome only with reluctance. The two groups have been described respectively as ‘resigned nationalists’ and ‘conditional nationalists’ (conditional on France being able to act). Reynaud resigned from the Alliance démocratique after Flandin sent a telegram of congratulations to all the signatories of Munich, including Hitler. The Congress of the Fédération républicaine in November 1938 rejected any disengagement from Eastern Europe, as did La Rocque’s PSF. For the ‘conditional nationalists’, Munich was a defeat—or a tactical withdrawal— not the prelude to a strategic retreat.35 Quite different was the position of Fabre-Luce who wrote that even if France did again win another war against Germany ‘we would nonetheless continue to slide further down the scale. A military victory that is not prolonged by a permanent effort, by a startling increase in the birth rate, is only an episode.’36
Many pro-Munich conservatives argued that if France could no longer aspire to a major continental role, she must build on her influence in the Mediterranean and develop closer ties with Italy. This idea was often accompanied by another idea which became very popular after Munich: the ‘fall back on the Empire [repli impérial]’. It was argued that France, free of East European commitments, should concentrate upon her imperial role. Flandin had launched the idea in the summer of 1938; Doriot visited North Africa in May, La Rocque in June. After Munich this imperial theme became even more popular. Le Matin declared in October 1938 that French security was not on the Danube or the Vistula but on the Vosges, Alps, Pyrenees, and Atlas Mountains: ‘France has two capitals: Paris and Algiers.’ This became an important theme of Doriot’s PPF, but it was not confined to the extreme right. It was supported by the Alliance démocratique, and by some sections of the Radical Party. As one speaker put it at the Party’s 1938 Congress:
We are accused of being resigned to the abdication of France? … No, as a Western, maritime, African, and colonial nation, the development of our magnificent Empire is of much greater importance to our destiny than the unappealing role of gendarme or banker [of Europe] which in the flush of victory we felt ourselves called upon to play.37
The sudden popularity of the Empire in 1938 was clearly an emotional compensation for the dramatic loss of French influence in Europe which Munich seemed to presage. Few people were able to adopt the cool realism of the industrialist Auguste Detœuf, who wrote in April 1937 that he celebrated France’s ‘happy mediocrity’ and saw Belgium and Sweden as better role models than Germany and America.38 Thus the debate about Munich was not only about the relationship between France and Germany, but about the kind of society that France should aspire to be. In the case of Detœuf, formerly a leading light of Redressement français, the vision of a diminished international role for France was implicitly predicated on the idea that prosperity and modernization were more likely to be achieved through the renunciation of unrealistic diplomatic ambitions. This vision, which had inspired the industrialists who supported Briandism, was also to to be shared by many technocrats at Vichy: for them ‘collaboration’ was the route to modernization.
Quite different were those resigned nationalists who had no time for dreams of international co-operation. Their renunciation of French ambitions was based on pessimism about the realities of French power. Their answer was to turn inward and fall back on the superior qualities of French civilization. Ruralist and anti-modern representations of French identity were accompanied by a downgrading of French ambitions. This was the image of France presented at the International Trade Fairs at New York and San Francisco in 1939. The most popular attraction was the General Motors ‘Futurama’ exhibition and the AT&T Building where people could place long-distance telephone calls. The French Pavilion, which concentrated on French ‘quality’, presented a France attached to rural and provincial tradition.39 In the French section of the catalogue, Raoul Dautry wrote: ‘In France it is the peasant who holds the secr
et of the race. In the harmonious construction called France, the land and its cultivation provide the fundamental economic, social and cultural foundation.’40 The novelist Jean Giraudoux, writing in 1939, took a similar line: ‘France may be superior or inferior to other as regards economic power, wealth, the spread of her language, the size of her Empire. But what distinguishes her is, if I may put it like this, the moral nature of her form of life.’41
This traditionalist vision dovetailed remarkably with the picture of France painted in 1929 by the German journalist Friedrich Sieburg in his essay on France, Gott in Frankreich? Ein Versuch. It appeared in French translation in 1930, and aroused much discussion. Sieburg depicted France as a civilization of moderation and restraint, of quality not quantity, of individualism and the cultivation of private pleasures, and of literature and the celebration of the intellect. He also saw it as frustratingly inefficient and backward: defective telephones, unhygienic toilets, two-hour lunch breaks, a reluctance to take risks. Sieburg was frustrated by France’s lack of European spirit, by her irremediable suspicion of outsiders upon whom she cast the same baleful stare as the concierges from their lodges.
The German essay reflecting on French culture was a fairly well-established genre, and there was nothing particularly original about Sieburg’s contrast between French conservatism and German dynamism, but his book was also entirely in the spirit of the late 1920s. It is a call for the French to ‘collaborate’ in building Europe. He expresses frustration at the way the French are isolated from the world ‘as if in a glass bubble’, but he also celebrates France precisely for these qualities: ‘With her charming disorder, her taste for leisure and distractions … France is today the last solid rampart of Europe against what it is convenient to call Americanism, that is to say the mechanization of life.’ In the end Sieburg admits that ‘I have the weakness to prefer staying in a neglected paradise than in a model universe, shiny, but full of despair.’ In other words, although France should be ready to embrace Germany, she should also remain ‘France’.42 This vision of the Franco-German relationship fitted the resigned nationalism of Munich, and it is not surprising that Sieburg was to be found back in occupied Paris as one of that group of self-proclaimed Francophiles in the German Embassy whose role it was to seduce the French into accepting the place in the New Order which their conquerors had prepared for them.
5
The Daladier Moment: Prelude to Vichy or Republican Revival?
Amonth after Munich, Julien Benda wrote in the NRF: ‘Will the French bourgeoisie push its submission to the Reich so far as to adopt a fascist regime, notably the suppression of freedom of expression, the destruction of the representative system, racism?’ A few weeks later Emmanuel Berl replied in his paper, Pavés de Paris: ‘If M. Benda thinks that latent fascism seems likely, it is because a Popular Front government has in some way prepared the way for fascism in reducing to nothing those liberties to which the petite bourgeoisie and middle classes have been, and remain, so attached.’1
This dialogue between Benda and Berl over Munich shows how deeply Munich had divided the French intelligentsia. In this case the division was especially poignant because both protagonists, although from different generations, shared similar backgrounds as members of the French Jewish bourgeoisie. Both were brilliant polemicists connected to the Gallimard publishing house. Benda (b. 1867) is most famous for his book Treason of the Clerks (1927) often taken to be an assault on intellectuals for becoming involved in politics. In fact Benda did not criticize intellectuals who defended ‘universal’ values—for example, Zola during the Dreyfus Affair—but only those—for example, Barrès, Kipling, Maurras—who became spokesmen of a ‘particular’ cause like nationalism.
During the war Benda had in fact written numerous patriotic articles, but his book was no mea culpa. On the contrary, he criticized the writer Romain Rolland for his wartime pacifism and his stand ‘above the fray’. For Benda, Rolland was as wrong to criticize France in the name of pacifism as Maurras to defend her in the name of nationalism. The only correct position was to have defended France in the war because she incarnated rationalism and universal values. For Benda, the First World War had been a replay of the Dreyfus Affair with France in the victimized role of Dreyfus.
Nothing that happened during the war shook Benda’s conviction about the perfect congruence between France and universalism, between the Republic and Reason.2 This makes Treason of the Clerks a book which could as easily have been written before 1914 as after. For Emmanuel Berl (b. 1892), however, born twenty-five years after Benda, the war was the central experience of his life. He said in 1976: ‘I remain a man of 1914 for whom war is something repugnant which consists in living in a trench while rats run over you.’3 Already before 1914 Berl had admired Caillaux, but he succumbed temporarily to war fever and went to the front in September 1914. He emerged from this experience as a lifelong pacifist, abhorring the memory of Poincaré. Berl made his reputation with Mort de la pensée bourgeoise (1930) which argued that contemporary literature was redundant because it had nothing to say about the world as it had been changed by the war. Although ostensibly about literature, the book’s origins lay in Berl’s rage at Poincaré’s return to power in 1926. Unlike Treason of the Clerks, which strives for Olympian timelessness, Berl’s book was the cri de cœur of a generation. Between 1932 and 1937, Berl ran the politico-literary review Marianne whose political raison d’être was the defence of the Briandist heritage.
At this stage both Berl and Benda could have been described as figures of the left, but the threat of war pushed them in radically different directions, Benda denouncing appeasement in the NRF, Berl remaining committed to pacifism. Benda was eventually to become a Communist fellow-traveller, while Berl in 1940 helped write some early speeches of Pétain. His trajectory demonstrates the extent to which a certain style of pre-1914 Republican patriotism had been corroded by pacifism—although he quickly realized that Vichy’s National Revolution had no room for people like him. Both he and Benda ended the Occupation hiding out in the countryside.
After Munich: Anti-Communism and Imperialism
Where Benda and Berl agreed in 1938 was in seeing Munich as a crucial moment not only for French foreign policy, but also for French domestic politics. It represented not only the avoidance of war, but also an internal victory over the ‘warmongers’, notably the Communist Party. Doriot saw the chance to eliminate the ‘foreign army’ of Communists encamped on French soil; Action française called for bullets for Blum, Reynaud, and Mandel.
Munich finished off the Popular Front. When Daladier came to power in April 1938, the Popular Front was on its last legs: Daladier’s was the first government since 1936 to contain members of the Right. But the Communists held back from opposing him as long as there was still a possibility he would repudiate appeasement. This meant that, while his government was not a Popular Front one, it was not an anti-Popular Front one either. After Munich, there was no more ambiguity. By voting against the agreement, the Communists released the Radicals from any lingering attachment to the Popular Front alliance. The Radical Congress of October 1938 buried the Popular Front; those who tried to defend it were shouted down with cries of ‘To Moscow’.
This new political configuration allowed Daladier to take on the powerful labour movement which remained the most significant legacy of 1936. He accomplished this by announcing the necessity to end the forty-hour week on the grounds that it was hindering rearmament. There was some truth in this, but Daladier’s main objective was to pick a fight with the unions and win. The CGT fell into the trap by calling a general strike on 30 November 1938. This was a failure: strikers were sacked and occupied factories were evacuated by force. The trade-union movement was broken: the CGT had 4 million members in 1937; it had about 2.5 million at the start of 1939 with numbers falling fast.
The man who had pushed most vigorously for the end of the forty-hour week was the new conservative Finance Minister, Paul Reynaud, the domina
nt figure in the government after Daladier. The breaking of the labour movement restored financial confidence in the government, and led to a reversal of the capital flight which had plagued France since 1936, allowing Reynaud to fund rearmament without too much difficulty. There was even a recovery in economic activity. Reynaud surrounded himself with a dynamic team of young advisers, including the demographer and statistician Alfred Sauvy, a former member of X-Crise, and the conseiller d’État Michel Debré. This was part of a general trend in the Daladier government to recruit supposedly apolitical experts or technocrats to remedy the alleged failings of professional politicians. There was the engineer Jean Berthelot, brought in to the Ministry of Public Works, and most strikingly of all, there was Raoul Dautry, the technocrat par excellence, appointed to the new post of Armaments Minister. Dautry himself gave posts to such figures as Jean Jardin, a member of Ordre nouveau; Jean Bichelonne, a brilliant graduate of the École polytechnique; and François Lehideux, a manager in the Renault firm. What is interesting about these names is that many of them were to play a prominent role in the Vichy regime.4
In April 1940, Dautry was responsible for the so-called Majestic Accords— named after the building where his ministry was located—in which some trade-unionist and employers’ leaders signed a general declaration of goodwill. This document was in no way binding, but it was presented by Dautry as an important moment of class reconciliation, and showed that there were industrialists ready, now that the labour movement had been emasculated, to consider a policy of class collaboration. In the aftermath of the general strike, Belin’s anti-Communist wing of the CGT also started to rethink its vision of the role of trade-unionism. Belin began to argue for a ‘constructive syndicalism’ replacing class conflict with class co-operation.
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