France Makes Up Her Mind
I
IN the gray days of an exceptionally cold July, when Parisians shivered as they went about the task of making everything ready for another September crisis, there was a sharp awareness of life, such as men experience when they are about to die. Routine events — a trip to the country, a game with children, a well-cooked meal — assumed peculiar importance, since they might never be experienced again. Outwardly, life went on as usual. But below the surface one felt the controlled tension of people who had no illusions about Europe’s immediate future.
Yet Paris was far more calm, less susceptible to panic, than Wall Street. Not because the people were unaware of the dangers that surrounded them, but, on the contrary, because they had lived so long in the midst of danger that they had come to regard it as normal. In a country whose army was still rated by military experts as the best in the world, it was difficult to detect signs of military preparations. There were hardly any soldiers in the streets, no military parades such as had become familiar in totalitarian states, few surface ripples to indicate the tremendous effort accomplished since Munich by 40,000,000 people to ward off a possible blow from hostile neighbors with a combined population of over 100,000,000.
Roused to action, France was seething with new activities and ideas. While journalists, in Cassandra tones, prophesied the evils which must flow from a period of ‘no peace, no war,’ the young generation, after displaying siriking discipline in the September mobilization, were hardening themselves for future emergencies through various sports for which the French had previously shown little enthusiasm. While minor bureaucrats in France and the colonies expressed apprehension regarding the rise of the working class against the bourgeoisie, bankers with Front Populaire sympathies pleaded for fundamental reforms of the capitalist system as the best way of averting revolution. While society reactionaries advocated establishment of a strong-arm government, capable of holding the workers in check, liberal Catholics who had criticized bombing of open towns by General Franco urged moral regeneration through voluntary acceptance by the individual of his responsibility toward the state, and by the nation of its responsibility toward international society. While Mandel— ‘qui fait un peu Empire,’ as one of his admirers remarked — was energetically reorganizing France’s overseas possessions on more modern lines, Paul Reynaud’s youthful brain trust at the Ministry of Finance worked night and day to liberate French economy from restrictions imposed by successive governments which had been overeager to placate private interests.
New personalities were emerging in political life, a whole new generation of men and women ‘less than forty,’ bridging the terrible gap in France’s leadership left by the decimation of the World War. Much as they differed in their political opinions, ranging all the way from Right to Left, this younger group of France’s future leaders had one thing in common: familiar with war and post-war problems, they looked at life without illusion and without prejudice. They were all critical of the political corruption, economic irresponsibility, and shortsighted bureaucratism which had marred France’s post-war politics, and all felt a sense of responsibility for national and international reconstruction which in an earlier generation would have been regarded as nothing short of revolutionary. There was nothing static, and much that was movingly idealistic, about these young financiers at work on schemes for economic reform; these young Catholics highly critical of Vatican opportunism and determined to effect a spiritual revival on an egalitarian basis; these young Socialists, like Georges Monnet, Minister of Agriculture in the Blum cabinet, who could speak of farmers’ coöperatives with a poignant eloquence formerly reserved in France for soapbox oratory; these young Communists who, for all their advocacy of international revolution, were fiercely devoted to the interests of France. Under the dead leaves of France’s long winter of lassitude and discontent, fresh shoots of thought and action were pushing up, heralding another spring, another one of France’s many renaissances.
Terrible as were the effects of Munich on Central and Eastern Europe, it. had the salutary result of forcing France to reëxamine her position in world affairs without any of the illusions created by her World War victory. In this harsh light the French suddenly saw that their country, which in 1919 appeared to be the dominant power on the continent, had sunk to the position of a second-rate power, whose resistance could be contemptuously discounted in advance not only by Germany but even by Italy. This realization, which might have plunged a less elastic people into bitter humiliation and social discord, suddenly released the latent energies of the French, held in check for twenty years by the vain hope that Versailles had marked the final milestone of German expansion.
What Munich — which, like France’s defeat at Sedan in 1870, temporarily diverted the country’s attention from Europe to overseas colonics — had begun was clinched by Italy’s colonial demands in November 1938 and the simultaneous failure of the general strike, which sealed the fate of the Popular Front. With that capacity for complete reversals of policy characteristic of its history, the French people turned overnight from socialism to Manchesterian liberalism, from defeatism to resistance, from skepticism regarding its political destiny to renewed faith in its traditional ideals. This profound, indeed revolutionary, change was effected with a minimum of conflict and friction, and with a display of voluntary enterprise and abnegation which may surpass the effort extracted from other peoples by totalitarian dictatorships.
To the foreigner unfamiliar with the temper of the French people, this change in the political climate appeared to be a move in the direction of Fascism. It is true that the cabinet of M. Daladier, entrusted with pleins pouvoirs, was governing under a series of decree laws which it adopted without prior reference to Parliament. It is true that the Chamber of Deputies — which in recent years had displayed growing inability to subordinate private interests to those of society as a whole — had been relegated to the background, although by no means muzzled. It is true that the government’s decision to prolong the life of the present Parliament until 1942 cut short preelection manipulations which the French so aptly describe as cuisine politique. But from the Daladier government, whose control of power was generally regarded as justified by the dangers of the international situation, to a Fascist dictatorship, France still had a long road to travel.
M. Daladier, whatever his faults or virtues, is by character not an unscrupulous dictator, but a flexible and astute politician, who keeps his ear to the ground and has an unusual comprehension of the vagaries of public opinion. Son of a baker, he understands the masses far better than cosmopolitan intellectuals like Reynaud or Mandel, is far closer to their interests than the financial circles represented by Bonnet. It was this capacity for reflecting the dominant mood of the French people which permitted Daladier — who in September 1938 received floods of letters from people in all walks of life pleading for peace — to yield, although reluctantly, at Munich, and two months later to reject Italy’s colonial demands. He is not a man who arouses the enthusiasm of élites, like Briand or Herriot; but he can gain the confidence of the masses, because they see in him a symbol of their own strength as well as their own weakness.
II
As Minister of War, Daladier had displayed energy and organizing ability which won him the respect of military leaders. But as Premier he did not so much guide events as allow himself to be carried along by the tide. His real achievement after Munich was to sense the change in the mood of the French people; to recognize that, whatever their political labels, men and women had grown weary of half-hearted social experimentation, economic decline, humiliating diplomatic retreats, and were eager to support the one cause which has never failed to stir the French — defense and consolidation of France; and to make it possible for experts like Reynaud, who have no popular following, to remodel the country’s internal situation in accordance with its external needs. Even the retention in the cabinet of M. Bonnet, denounced by his critics as an act of cowardice, was due primarily to astute political considerations. Daladier was aware of the unpopularity of his Foreign Minister — with whom he in any case shared responsibility for what happened at Munich; but he needed the parliamentary votes controlled by Bonnet to hold his narrow margin of power. And while Bonnet, after Munich, and especially after Germany’s absorption of Czechoslovakia, had become a mere figurehead at the Quai d’Orsay, whose policies were directly dictated by the Premier, it was not until after the outbreak of war, when there was no more danger that the cabinet might be overthrown, that M. Daladier openly assumed the Foreign Affairs portfolio, transferring M. Bonnet to the Ministry of Justice.
It is obvious that the régime of pleins pouvoirs, in the hands of unscrupulous leaders, might be transformed into a brutal dictatorship patterned on that of Hitler or Mussolini. But on the eve of war Daladier’s severest critics, although freely characterizing him as cochon and salaud in accordance with the best traditions of French republicanism, scouted the suggestion that he might have the ambition of becoming Führer of France. The limits of his powers are imposed not by constitutional restrictions — which might be easily overruled — but by the political maturity of the French people. The French are already so familiar with the entire gamut of political life, they have already experienced so many Führers, from Napoleon to General Boulanger, they have already rejected so many aberrations, like the antiSemitism of the Dreyfus affair, that they are in a sense inoculated against the ideological epidemics of Fascism and Communism to which less mature peoples have proved vulnerable. For the period of emergency the French were ready to hold in abeyance the sacred rights of party politics, as they had done in 1914-1918. But these rights have not been destroyed, and they are bound to reappear if and when Europe is freed of international tension.
While the parties of the Right were undoubtedly satisfied with the work of the Daladier cabinet, especially in the economic and financial field, it would be difficult to demonstrate that the cabinet was exclusively at the service of Right interests — especially since the Communists, before their dissolution as a party, had expressed satisfaction with its efforts on behalf of national defense. It was equally difficult to reconcile the argument that Daladier, who after Munich seemed determined to present a firm front abroad, was the tool of Right parties with the accusation made in September 1938 that it was the Right which had instigated concessions to Germany. The most searching criticisms of the cabinet came neither from the extreme Right nor from the extreme Left, but from the Socialists who, after having pleaded for aid to Czechoslovakia in September, had begun to fear that the government would become so intransigent as to reject a negotiated settlement with that ‘other Germany’ which, according to Blum, still existed, even under Nazi rule. Political diagnosticians believe that, if elections had been held on the eve of war, the returns would have corresponded more or less to the existing setup, and would have revealed a prevailing sentiment somewhat left of centre, registering losses both for the Communists and for discredited groups of the extreme Right, like that of Doriot.
III
The conclusion of the Soviet-German pact on August 24, followed by Russian invasion of Poland, further disrupted the opposition parties by completing the rift which had long been developing between Socialists and Communists. While Communist newspapers were trying to work out a formula which would explain the pact as an attempt by Stalin to circumvent Hitler, and thus eventually aid the Allied cause, individual members resigned from the Communist Party, which, after its suppression on September 26, was reorganized into a party of farmers and workers. The government’s decision to ban the Communist Party and suppress its organs undoubtedly gave personal satisfaction to some of its more conservative members, and reassured the section of public opinion which had long prophesied that France was drifting toward Communism. But at a time when Europe is swept by a tide of revolution it might have been more politic to allow the Communist Party to disintegrate unmolested — especially since it was feared by liberals that the suppression of the Communist Party and the arrest of its leaders might mark the beginning of a drive against the working class as a whole. Such a policy could hardly prove popular in a country where the struggle for the liberty of the individual has overshadowed the struggle for class interests.
M. Daladier sought to dispel this fear on October 10, when he denounced the Communists — who had regarded themselves as ‘new Jacobins’ and had demanded war against Hitler only to plead for peace after conclusion of the SovietGerman pact — but drew a sharp distinction between ‘the workers of France, whatever may be their political opinion,’ and ‘men who wanted to abuse and betray them.’ What injured the Communists most in French opinion was not their political and economic ideology, much as it was resented by a nation of small properly owners, but the fact that they took their orders from a foreign government. This, especially in time of war, seemed nothing short of treason.
As a matter of fact, the spearhead of Left attacks on the Daladier government had been directed not against its course in domestic politics or its foreign policy, but against its economic program, on the ground that, it marked a retreat from Popular Front reforms back to untrammeled old-fashioned capitalism. To all such attacks Reynaud and his young collaborators — who have for him the same devotion and loyalty lavished on President Roosevelt by his brain trust in the heyday of the New Deal — answered that the proof of the pudding was in the eating, and that up to the outbreak of war they had succeeded in doing all the things their opponents had said could not be done. Symbolic of the importance which economic affairs had assumed in the ‘white war’ of the past summer, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs seemed like a provincial backwater compared to the Ministry of Finance, where all was bustle, excitement, and energy, and where even the sedate huissiers ran so fast on important errands that the clank of their silver collar chains echoed through the corridors. Here was the nerve centre of French recovery; here was the group of brilliant young men, all under forty, who seconded Reynaud in his task of modernizing the French economic system without resort to totalitarian controls; here was the supreme test of a democracy’s ability to solve intricate economic and financial problems with a minimum sacrifice of individual liberty.
Unlike the Nazis and Communists, Reynaud was trying to restore French economy, not by multiplying controls and restrictions, but by abolishing them as fast as possible; not by expanding state intervention, but by reverting to a form of Manchesterian liberalism; not by attempting to discourage private profit and enterprise, but by giving them full scope within the framework imposed by intensive preparations for national defense. The results accomplished in ten months, during the most threatening period for France since 1919, were nothing short of miraculous. But the Reynaud brain trust modestly disclaimed miracles, and insisted that their success was due entirely to the removal of the ‘corset’ of government restrictions which had hampered the normal breathing of the body politic. Broadly speaking, the 40-hour week — whose introduction had so plagued the Blum régime — had been abandoned in many industries, beginning with those working for national defense, with the result that, by June 1939, 92 per cent of the workers worked at least 40 hours, and of these 39 per cent worked more than 40; unemployment had been materially reduced; the cost of living had increased by about 6 per cent, but had been counterbalanced up to that time by a 3 per cent increase in wages, and by additional grants to large families; production had been greatly increased in most industries, permitting expansion of exports over 1938 and a reduction in imports, notably coal. The fact that production had risen not only in industries working for national defense — metallurgy, chemicals — but also in building trades, textiles, automobile production for civilian needs, and so forth, was cited by Reynaud in support of his contention that recovery in one sector of production would be reflected throughout the country’s economic life. The most disturbing factor in this optimistic picture was the rise in the price of foodstuffs. This, however, M. Reynaud was planning on the eve of war to check by increasing quotas for imports of meat, butter, and the like, and by decreasing state subsidies to products of which France has an excess, such as wheat and wine.
The improvement in French production effected in 1938-1939 had served most of all to increase the military power of the country, without materially raising its standard of living — although it was already regarded as a cause for selfcongratulation that vastly increased armament expenditures had not produced a decline in living standards. Public confidence in Reynaud’s economic program had been demonstrated not only by the return of ‘gold in flight,’ but also by the gradual expansion of private investment in industries not directly connected with national defense. Reynaud and his collaborators believed that France, whose reserves of productivity had not been fully utilized in recent years, was in a position for some time to come — always short of war — to maintain a liberal economic system while perfecting the most ambitious armament program since 1918. For the same reason, they were not greatly troubled by the problem of effecting a transfer from wartime to peacetime economy, believing that, once international tension was relaxed, France would experience an unprecedented boom in consumption industries which would more than offset the reduction in armament production, and that the most constructive thing was to prepare for this eventuality by restoring the elasticity of the economic system.
The Ministry of Finance received hundreds of letters after each of M. Reynaud’s reasoned, dispassionate radio broadcasts on financial and economic matters, in which he made no concession whatever to the public’s lack of acquaintance with the technicalities of the subject. Some of these letters attacked his policy, others praised it. But the most interesting letters poured in after the promulgation of the tax on bachelors, which applied to men and women alike, a measure of equality which Frenchmen deplored as unchivalrous. Old maids wrote that they would like nothing better than to enter the happy state of matrimony, but that they had never met the right man; hard-bitten bachelors complained that they were too shy to approach women, and asked the Minister for advice. With true French capacity to enjoy a joke even in the midst of a critical emergency, young attachés at lhe Ministry of Finance had begun to discuss the possibility of establishing . a matrimonial bureau to cope with this unexpected problem.
All parties, no matter how much they differed on other matters, were agreed that the best way to prevent further chantage by Hitler was to show that France was ready for war, if necessary. In a country where elections are fought on questions of domestic and most often of local or personal politics, foreign policy plays a far smaller role than might be imagined from conversations in Parisian cafes. The French peasant, who constitutes a majority of the population, is interested not in fighting wars abroad, no matter for what ideals, but in preserving his ancestral bit of land against foreign invasion. That is why it was possible for so many Frenchmen to accept Munich, even if shamefacedly, but impossible to acquiesce in Italy’s demands, which directly affected French territory. On the eve of war the French masses were not bellicose, they felt no hatred for the Germans, but they were fed up with continual crises which prevented them from living in peace and enjoying life. Their attitude was best expressed by the phrase heard on all sides: ' Its nous engueulentl Nous en avons assez! ‘
This new determination to have things out with Hitler once and for all was in no sense due to a desire for French conquests on the continent. France’s period of expansion is over. In contrast to 1914-1918, when she planned to reconquer Alsace-Lorraine and, in addition, obtained a share of Germany’s African colonies as well as a mandate over Syria, France had no territorial war aims in 1939. M. Daladier, in his radio broadcast of October 10 answering Hitler’s Reichstag peace offer, expressed the sentiments of a majority of his countrymen when he said, ‘Neither France nor Britain entered the war to support a sort of ideological crusade. Neither France nor Britain entered the war any more with a spirit of conquest than that they were obliged to fight because Germany wanted to impose on them her domination over Europe.’
Like every French government since the foundation of the German Empire in 1870, M. Daladier voiced France’s passionate desire for security against renewed German aggression. This security France has tried to achieve in various ways: by building up a strong national state and forming alliances with Britain and Russia before 1914; by unsuccessfully attempting to obtain guarantees of her territorial integrity from Britain and the United States in 1919; by establishing in eastern and southeastern Europe a group of states hostile to Germany which were to replace pre-war Russia as a barrier to German expansion; by seeking reconciliation with Germany through the League of Nations; by using the League to maintain the territorial status quo over German protests; by renewing her collaboration with Russia after Hitler’s rise to power; and, when the League had collapsed and Russia had been excluded from Europe’s councils at Munich, by returning to a full-fledged alliance with Britain. None of these methods has been entirely successful. Neither intransigence nor reconciliation has proved a remedy for Franco-German problems — although the post-war generation on both sides of the border had shown an inclination to let bygones be bygones until Hitler once more stirred the embers of old fears and old prejudices.
The French public, rightly or wrongly, were convinced that, if war came, France could defeat Germany — provided her industry was not paralyzed at the outset by mass air raids. They were more realistic than the British about the necessity of obtaining the support of the Soviet Union if the Allied guarantee to Poland was to be anything more than a pious wish, but felt no enthusiasm for the Soviet alliance, doubting both the efficacy of Russia’s armed force and the validity of her pledged word. No one, not even the most penetrating critics of the Soviet Government, anticipated the possibility of a Soviet-German political deal, which caught Western Europe napping. Yet, when it happened, there was a certain sense of relief that the situation had been clarified, and that French Communists could no longer demand France’s coöperation with Soviet ‘democracy’ against Fascism. The French were just beginning to realize that they had lost their post-war influence in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, at least for the time being, and were turning over in their minds the idea that perhaps their principal rôle in Europe was not to seek political hegemony — difficult to maintain for a country with a declining population — but to exercise that intellectual radiation which again and again has drawn other peoples into France’s orbit, and has moved men of many nations to fight for French civilization when all other values seemed to have gone by the board. This idea, necessarily obscured by the outbreak of war, may yet prove a clue to France’s future — provided that Naziism and Communism do not succeed in blotting out Western Europe.
France, as in a microcosm, symbolizes all the problems which have so deeply troubled twentieth-century Europe. This country, where the rising bourgeoisie won its first major victory against the ancien régime, is now confronted abroad by the revolution of the lower middle class and the proletariat against the bourgeoisie; and, simultaneously, by the revolt of countries rich in man power but poor in raw materials and lacking in political maturity against the rule of the older democratic communities. Europe is once more in one of those periods of convulsion when it desperately seeks to achieve unification — as in the religious wars of the sixteenth century, when it was torn between Protestantism and Catholicism, and the Napoleonic era, when it was torn between the French Revolution and the forces of reaction. Today a new revolution is wrestling with Western democracy for domination of the continent. In this struggle France may yet provide a synthesis of Europe’s profound antitheses by reconciling individualism with responsibility to society, respect for religion with freedom of thought, family morality with the development of individual talents, private initiative with social reform, and thus point the road others may follow, as she did in 1789.