B006NTJT4U EBOK

by Jackson, Julian

  Belin became involved in the journal Nouveaux cahiers set up by a group of modernizing industrialists, many from X-Crise. Its leading lights were Auguste Detœuf and the banker Jacques Barnaud. Their premiss was that liberal capitalism had failed, and that the future lay in planning, class reconciliation, or some variety of corporatism or even the Social-Democratic Swedish model.5 Whether industrialists or trade unionists, they believed that parliamentary democracy was redundant. Belin wrote in April 1938: ‘what one cannot defend is the regime itself. Good citizens ask themselves … if the parliamentary regime, which one frequently confuses with democracy, is really worth fighting for.’6 Although French syndicalists had traditionally no predilection for parliamentary democracy, such words, from a former participant in the Popular Front, reveal the ideological shift which had occurred within some sections of the left under the impact of anti-communism.

  In theory, anti-communism also implied rapprochement with Germany. Bonnet signed a Franco-German declaration of friendship on 6 December 1938, but this agreement avoided hard questions about the future concessions France might be willing to offer in the pursuit of German goodwill. Many diplomatic and military figures were now ready for France to water down her Polish alliance, the last remaining commitment in Eastern Europe.7 As for the Soviet pact, it had been effectively moribund since 1937, and there was no eagerness for reviving it.8 Bonnet himself wanted a total disengagement from Eastern Europe, including a break with the Soviets.

  The Franco-German declaration produced no concrete results despite some desultory negotiations on economic co-operation. Hopes of a durable rapprochement with Germany were dashed when Hitler breached the Munich agreement by occupying Prague on 15 March 1939. Although Bonnet remained Foreign Minister, the appeasers in the French government were now sidelined. On 31 March, the French and British offered Poland a security guarantee.

  The loss of influence by the appeasers also affected policy towards Italy. After Munich, France had tried to court Mussolini, but this policy was torpedoed on 30 November when deputies in the Italian parliament rose to their feet clamouring ‘Tunisia, Corsica, Nice’. This was the signal for an orchestrated campaign against France. Although it is unlikely that Mussolini harboured serious designs on Nice or Corsica, he did covet parts of the French Empire in Africa. This was embarrassing to those in France, like Flandin and Bonnet, whose advocacy of a repli impérial had gone hand in hand with a pro-Italian policy. Daladier was undecided about Italian policy. He was under pressure from the British to be conciliatory in the hope of detaching Mussolini from Hitler. But by the spring, Daladier had set his mind firmly against concessions to Mussolini, and the British had to acquiesce. This readiness to stand up to Britain was a sign of new French confidence: Lord Halifax worried that Daladier was becoming another Poincaré.9

  The government’s firmness towards the fascist powers was mirrored by a change in French public opinion. Asked in July 1939 if a German operation against Danzig should be resisted by force if necessary, 76 per cent replied affirmatively, 17 per cent negatively; 45 per cent thought that war would occur before the end of the year. By June 1939 even Action française could write: ‘If in the discussion of the Moscow-Berlin alternatives we lose sight of the fact that Berlin is the more menacing, then it must be said everyone is lost.’ Such sentiments were a response to Hitler’s occupation of Prague, but also to the defeat of the Popular Front: the Communist Party seemed less frightening.10 On the left also, pacifism was thrown on to the defensive. At a Socialist congress in December 1938, Blum’s line narrowly prevailed over Faure’s. It was symptomatic of the new mood that when in May 1939 Déat wrote an article entitled ‘Die for Danzig?’ (expecting the answer no), he was an isolated voice.

  Ironically enough, given that the advocates of the repli impérial had envisaged their policy as the pendant to a policy of rapprochement with Germany, the main cause of the new aggressiveness towards Germany was the outrage caused by Mussolini’s sabre-rattling about the Empire. A visit by Daladier to North Africa in January 1939 was extensively covered in cinema newsreels. The Empire was suddenly a burning issue of national prestige. References to ‘la Grande France’ abounded in the press; Paris-Soir ran a series on ‘The Epic of the Builders of the French Empire’; even the Communist leader Thorez visited Algeria. The evolution of opinion was also visible in opinion polls. When the post-Munich poll had asked whether colonies should be given to Germany, 59 per cent replied affirmatively; two months later (December 1938) 70 per cent replied no to the same question (although they were probably thinking of Italy).11

  There was a flurry of films about the Empire, several of them featuring the film star Charles Vanel. In Les Pirates du Rail, he brought railways to Indochina; in SOS Sahara and Légions d’honneur, he imposed order on Saharan tribes. Most popular of all was Trois de Saint-Cyr (1939) which received a gala première in the presence of Daladier. The film celebrated a group of officers defending a colonial outpost against Arab attack until the cavalry arrive to relieve them—but not in time to save the heroic leader who dies enfolded in a tricolour. This was the time that Édith Piaf turned the song ‘Mon légionnaire’ into a popular hit. Such films and songs rehabilitated military values after the popularity of pacifist films such as La Grande Illusion (1937). These imperial films depicted a world of simple patriotism and honest masculinity. As Vanel says in Légions d’honneur: ‘the outback unites, women divide’.12

  Daladier: The Authoritarian Republic

  The main beneficiary of this new mood was Daladier. Being a man of few words, he had long projected an image of quiet strength which was belied by congenital indecisiveness. Now, for the first time, Daladier started to believe in his own image, and a strain of authoritarianism in his personality came to the fore. His confidence surged as a result of the extraordinary popularity he enjoyed after Munich. His reputation crystallized around two images: the saviour of peace in September 1938 and the defender of Empire in November. He was popular precisely because he reflected the ambivalence of the population: he was neither a convinced pacifist like Bonnet, nor a committed anti-appeaser like Reynaud. Daladier was also a consummate radio performer addressing his audience without any assumption of superiority, like Baldwin in Great Britain. All this combined to make him the most popular politician since Clemenceau; and like Clemenceau in wartime he governed increasingly like a dictator.

  Daladier was helped by a widespread feeling that the Republic was in need of a dose of authority. For the pro-Munich conservatives this meant attacking the Communists, but similar themes were even taken up by anti-Munich conservatives like Pertinax who called for an ‘authoritarian republic’ or de Kérillis who wanted a government of national safety presided over by a general.13 Capitalizing upon such sentiments, Daladier bypassed parliament. For much of the time he governed by decree powers. These became almost a permanent system of government which Daladier used with little respect for legal niceties. On 27 July 1939, he issued a decree proroguing parliament and suspending by-elections until June 1942, a measure unprecedented in peacetime.

  There was remarkably little opposition to the authoritarianism of Daladier’s government which was so at odds with the traditions of the Republic. The Radical Party was largely quiescent. Its executive committee, supposed to meet every month, only met once between January and September 1939. The Socialists were reduced to impotence as the Faure and Blum factions fought over their attitude to the possibility of war. Nor did Daladier face much of a threat from the extreme right. Election results after Munich suggested that the PSF, which had looked so threatening in 1937, was not heading for the electoral break-through that once seemed possible. As for the PPF, it entered a major crisis after Munich. Some members were unhappy about Doriot’s support for Munich; others felt that the party no longer had a raison d’être after the defeat of the left; others had lost confidence in Doriot’s capacity to become the French Führer. The prominent figures that left the PPF at this time included Pierre Pucheu, who had
been a major source of funding, and intellectuals like Drieu La Rochelle and Fabre-Luce.

  One reason for the weakness of the right was the new resoluteness of the Daladier government. Another was that the Radical Party had sharply shifted to the right, disputing the same ideological terrain as the PSF. This was not the first time that a left-wing parliament had swung to the right, but never before had the shift been presided over by a Radical not a conservative: this time the Radicals were leaders, not prisoners, of a conservative government. The Radicals of 1939 were so different from what they had been three years earlier that historians talk of the emergence of neo-Radicalism at this time. In 1939, some Radicals in parliament signed a motion calling for the revision of the Secular Laws whose existence had once been the raison d’être of the party. Even Radicals were now ready to view the Church as a bulwark of social order.14

  Daladier projected his government as carrying out a national and moral regeneration. In March 1939, Cardinal Verdier of Paris publicly assured Daladier of the Church’s support for his ‘work of national renewal’. The Church was also encouraged by the government’s family policy. Concern about dénatalité had intensified during the so-called ‘hollow years’ of the 1930s when the number of eligible conscripts dipped because of the gap in births which had occurred during the war. Even the Communists, who had once opposed anti-contraception and anti-abortion laws, abandoned this position in 1936. Thorez called for the ‘protection of the family and childhood’.15 In February 1939, the government set up a population committee (Haut Comité de la Population) to examine the demographic problem. Its members included Boverat whose indefatigable pronatalist propaganda had continued throughout the inter-war years. In 1939 he published his book Le Massacre des innocents, an attack on abortion. Another member of the Population Committee was Georges Pernot, a Catholic senator and president of the Federation of Associations of Large Families. In February 1938, Pernot had intervened in parliament to modify a bill ending the civil incapacity of women. After much debate the bill was passed, but Pernot succeeded in getting two amendments voted, one specifying that the husband remained the head of the family, and the other allowing a husband to veto the exercise of a profession by his wife.

  In July 1939, the recommendations of the Population Committee were implemented in a series of decrees known collectively as the Family Code. These measures included financial incentives for large families—family allowances had been introduced in 1932, but now they were generous enough to double the income of a family with six children—a tightening up of the campaign against abortion, loans for young couples in the countryside, the teaching of demography in schools, and the repression of pornography. No government had ever come nearer to implementing the full programme of the natalist lobby.

  Foreigners and Jews

  The Daladier government is open to contradictory interpretations. On one hand, it seemed to portend a reassertion of national self-confidence and a rehabilitation of political institutions: the Republic seemed to be working again. In other respects—the Daladier personality cult, political authoritarianism, the influence of technocrats, anti-communism and the crushing of labour, celebration of Empire, family policy, the rhetoric of national renewal, the rapprochement between Church and State—it seems to prefigure Vichy. Nothing more strikingly anticipated Vichy, however, than the intensity of French xenophobia and anti-Semitism in 1938–9.

  The roots of this xenophobia went back to the 1920s when a combination of the demographic deficit and economic growth had given France one of the largest rates of immigration in the world. By 1931, France’s immigrant population was 3 million: 7 per cent of the total population as opposed to 2.8 per cent in 1911. On the whole, this influx had caused little controversy, despite sporadic outbreaks of xenophobia. Naturalization procedures were relaxed in 1927 and many immigrants became French citizens: 112,337 between 1923 and 1926, 269,872 between 1927 and 1930.16

  The Depression transformed this tolerant atmosphere overnight—foreigners were accused of taking French jobs—just at the moment France was also admitting Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. By the end of 1933, 25,000 German refugees had arrived, 85 per cent of them Jews. The backlash against foreigners started in August 1932 with a law, passed by a left-wing parliament, limiting the number of foreigners allowed in certain professions. From July 1934, recently naturalized French citizens had to wait ten years before being entitled to practise at the bar or hold public office. This was the first time in the history of the French Republic that a two-tier system of citizenship had been imposed for the acquisition of professional status. Similar restrictions were applied to medicine in 1935, after a strike of medical students protesting against competition from foreigners.17

  This discriminatory legislation was tightened significantly by the Daladier government. In April 1938 Albert Sarraut, the Interior Minister, ordered ‘methodical, energetic and prompt action to rid our country of the too numerous undesirable elements’. A decree in November made it easier to denaturalize naturalized citizens who were deemed to have proved themselves unworthy of French nationality, and made it possible to refuse nationality to children born in France of foreign parents if those parents were in trouble with the law. This was another blow to the principle of equal citizenship;18 a decree of 12 November 1938 authorized the internment of ‘undesirables’ when public security required it. An internment centre was set up at Rieucros in the Lozère in February 1939. It was to be the first of many. Anti-immigrant feeling intensified at the start of 1939 when the end of the Spanish civil war sparked off a new influx of refugees. Between February and May 1939, about half a million Spanish refugees, depicted in the conservative press as criminals and reds, streamed across the Pyrenees. As an emergency measure, the government opened more internment camps in the south-west at Argelès, Saint-Cyprien, Gurs, and Le Vernet. Vichy was to find its concentration camps already in existence. Through the 1930s, more and more police time was devoted to the surveillance of foreigners. The Paris Prefecture of Police set up a special section for this purpose in 1933. André Tulard who masterminded the creation under Vichy of a detailed register of Jews—French and foreign—had honed his methods categorizing and monitoring foreigners for the prefecture in the inter-war years. There was nothing the Germans could teach him in this respect.19

  The xenophobia of the 1930s rekindled a tradition of anti-Semitism that had been semi-dormant in the 1920s.20 The fact that many Jews died defending their country in the First World War made it less plausible to accuse Jews of a lack of patriotism after 1918. The famous anti-Semitic newspaper La Libre Parole collapsed in 1924, having once sold 300,000 copies. Maurras never changed his views on the Jews, but, as a result of the war, another former anti-Dreyfusard nationalist, Maurice Barrès, included the Jews in his celebration of the ‘spiritual families’ of France.

  This tolerance disappeared in the 1930s. The fact that the Popular Front was headed by a Jew provided an easy target for right-wing anti-Semites. ‘One thing that is dead’, wrote Maurras in March 1936, ‘is the spirit of semi-tolerance accorded to the Jewish State since the war … A formidable “down with the Jews” smoulders in every breast and will pour forth from every heart.’21 Allegations that the government was stuffed with Jews—in fact, apart from Blum, there were only two—led to an outpouring of anti-Semitic venom against Blum himself. When he appeared before parliament for the first time after the 1936 election victory, the conservative deputy Xavier Vallat caused a scandal by lamenting that ‘this old Gallo-Roman country will be governed by a Jew’. Another parliamentary incident occurred in 1938 when, replying to taunts against Blum, the Socialist minister Marx Dormoy riposted that a Jew could be as French as a Breton. Since Bretons were seen by many as the epitome of the rooted French peasantry, this remark led to outrage on the right. There was a rash of caricatures of Blum in Breton costume. Action française commented: ‘In France a Breton is in his own country. The Jew is only a leech from the Dead Sea.’22

  In 1934,
Paul Morand published his book France la Doulce, a tirade against the alleged Jewish domination of the French film industry. Je suis partout produced two special issues on the Jews in April 1938 and February 1939. On several occasions Maurras called for the murder of Blum—‘in the back’ as he said in 1935—but he was far from the most violent anti-Semitic propagandist. That privilege was reserved for Céline who published two anti-Semitic pamphlets: Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937) and École des cadavres (1938). Their flavour can only be conveyed by direct quotation:

  Racism above all! Ten times! a hundred times racism! Supreme racism! Disinfection! Cleansing! Only one race in France: the Aryan … The Jews, Afro-Asiatic hybrids have no place in this country. They should get out.

  I feel myself very friendly to Hitler, and to all Germans, whom I feel to be my brothers … Our real enemies are Jews and Masons.

  Yids are like bedbugs. Finding one of them in your sack means that there are ten thousand on the floor! … O filthy rabble! I hear you … rooting about in your trash bins.23

  These pamphlets were so delirious that many critics did not know how to respond. Gide suggested that Bagatelles was a sort of Swiftian satire not intended to be taken literally, and certainly Céline’s list of ‘Jews’ is so eccentric— Stendhal, Racine, Picasso, Roosevelt, the Pope, Neville Chamberlain—that the designation seems to have become a free floating term attached to everything Céline hated. One critic wondered if Céline had been paid by the Jews to discredit anti-Semitism.