France and the Nazi Threat: The Collapse of French Diplomacy 1932-1939 (12 page)

There were many issues facing public opinion during the first months of Hitlerism. The many open questions can be summarized as follows:
Was Hitlerism a threat to France? Could it be viewed as a “model” to be followed? What was Hitler’s program?

The French public did not immediately perceive the new kinds of threats posed by Hitlerism. Without a doubt Hitler was a rousing tribune, a mass leader, but was he capable of being a statesman?
Le Temps
, a newspaper connected to the Quai d’Orsay, voiced its doubts: “The new Chancellor will probably quickly fail at this game, and his popularity will not survive the demise of his reputation as a miracle maker.”
¹²
Hitler was “a demagogue,” “a house painter,” “a General Boulanger,” nothing but a pawn in the hands of more powerful, and indeed more dangerous forces, such as the Reichswehr, and the old Prussian elite, both of them hereditary enemies of France. “The Reichswehr…, like a mysterious force, stands face to face with the triumphant militias of German Fascism.”
¹³
And there were other forces, such as the socialists and even the communists.
L’Humanité
, after the burning of the Reichstag and following the elections and the infamous ceremony at the Garrison church in Potsdam, on March 21, still proudly declared that, “the organization of our party in Germany has remained intact.” And then there were other parties within the government. “In a coalition government Hitler has less power than Hitler as dictator.”
¹⁴

Still, clouds were gathering. Hitler was holding out, eliminating his opponents one by one, and naming his flunkies to all the key posts. This was dictatorship; this was fascism, the bogeyman of the left. This was revanchist Germany, hated by the right. The well-known shift of the extreme antidemocratic anti-German nationalist factions over to neutralism and pacifism, based on anti-communism and anti-Semitism, was barely visible in 1933.
¹⁵
Only two journalists known for their eccentric outbursts, Gustave Hervé, in
La Victoire
and Marcel Bucard pretended to rejoice, “Oh! Happy Germany… its suffering is at long last over… It has been saved, saved by Hitler, as Italy was saved by Mussolini, after the long red wave that sought to engulf it after the war”… It was “proof that, even in the teeth of a collectivist and communist revolution, a great people can rise up and quickly overcome.”
¹⁶
Other right-wing newspapers, such as
L’Echo de Paris
, saw some good in the German regime at a time when France was moving in the opposite direction. But what was good for Germany was bad for France. France must recover: “Against the Third Reich it was urgent that France erect the Fourth Republic.”
¹⁷
One could quote many instances of this kind of
thinking, but it is more effective to ask what the French people
knew
about Hitlerism as a system.

This can be measured by one fairly obvious criterion. In 1925 Hitler wrote
Mein Kampf
. In that shapeless, repetitious and rambling book, amid a mass of peremptory statements, Hitler did reveal his program—to correct the wrong visited by the Diktat of Versailles upon the superior race of the tall Aryan blond-haired dolichocephals, whose purest representatives could be found in Germany; to create a “Greater Germany” that would include all the Germans torn from the motherland; and to conquer a vital
Lebensraum
in the East, without pity for the degenerate race of the Slavs, in order to give Germany breathing space and to provide access to the resources she lacked. Since France (not England) was Germany’s “hereditary foe,” these goals could only be reached once France was crushed.

All this was clearly spelled out. Historians, and especially German historians, wonder how far Hitler considered
Mein Kampf
to be a
ne varietur
program, or whether, independently of tactics, he was largely an opportunist.
¹⁸
“Did the dictator believe in his manifesto or was he a disciple of Machiavelli?”
¹⁹

Our goal in these pages is to understand the French attitude. Whatever the objective reality was, knowledge of
Mein Kampf
was essential. Goebbels would later say, “In 1933, a French prime minister should have said (and if I had been in his place I would have said), ‘This new Reichs chancellor, he’s the man who wrote
Mein Kampf
… We cannot afford to have such a man on our doorstep. He must disappear or we must declare war against him.’”
²⁰

The problem of
Mein Kampf
for the history of French foreign policy is twofold: first, there is the issue of whether it was read in France. Second, was it was taken seriously? After all, people in France were used to electoral programs never being implemented after the election had been won and accepted in practice that there was a difference between the demagogic utopia of dreams and the constraints of reality.

The fact is that the first edition of
Mein Kampf
in French, translated by J. Gaudefroy-Demombynes and A. Calmettes, was not published before 1934 and that few people in France could read German.

Let’s take the case of a first-rate German scholar such as Ambassador François-Poncet. He had indeed read
Mein Kampf
. But did he give it the importance it deserved? He had an
agrégation
in German, was an eminent
journalist and had chosen to become a career diplomat on September 23, 1931, as ambassador to Berlin, precisely in order to “insure that the government received more accurate information about what was happening on the other side of the Rhine.” Immediately following Hitler’s rise to power, he acquired exceptional standing in the capital.

According to François Seydoux, who worked with him, “The position he enjoyed in Germany inside the diplomatic corps was unparalleled. After Hitler, there were Göring, Goebbels, Rudolf Hess, Baldur von Schirach, and then came François-Poncet. He was saluted in the Tiergarten when he took a walk. His witticisms were famous. He was considered to be an expert on the real Germany.”
²¹

“His work, his profession, and the need to write filled his life.” He remained “deeply influenced by his many years working as a journalist and as press chief. Just like a newspaper or even a news agency correspondent, he wanted to keep Paris informed on an on-going basis.”
²²

His dedication and honesty were beyond question. In 1936, after he had just sent several dispatches where he discounted the possibility of a rapprochement between Germany and Italy,
²³
one of his aides, Captain Stehlin, discovered by chance that an ultra secret mission of Italian aviators was in Berlin.
²⁴
Stehlin warned the ambassador; François-Poncet at first accused him of having too much imagination. Then, impressed by the young man’s conviction, immediately wrote a telegram where he disavowed his previous position.
²⁵

François-Poncet had a penetrating mind, was very well informed and clearly provided an enormous amount of information about Germany, most of it extremely relevant. Still, he harbored a relative
optimism
as to the future of relations between the two countries.

First, François-Poncet didn’t appear to take
Mein Kampf
very seriously, not seeing in it the “plan,” which, as subsequent events were to demonstrate, Hitler would follow to the letter. Based solely on the year 1936, for example, written documents show that he mentioned the Nazi “Bible” only five times (the mention appears even less frequently in later years). He didn’t allude to it at all in the brilliant general report he sent to the department on March 9, 1936.
²⁶

Furthermore, when he quoted
Mein Kampf
, the ambassador hesitated between two interpretations. Sometimes he saw it as the actual source of Hitler’s thinking; for example on racism, as it replaced pre-war pan-Germanism. “Some pages of
Mein Kampf
actually do shed a very troubling
light on the sincerity of his intentions.”
²⁷
He felt the same way about the issue of
Lebensraum
: Hitler didn’t seek it in the colonies, but in Eastern Europe (
Drang nach Osten, Boden und Raum
). François-Poncet wrote, “It would be wrong to think that because Hitler wrote these pages ten years ago, they are no longer relevant and don’t inspire the Führer’s current feelings. On the contrary, this program is being ‘carried out systematically.’”
²⁸
This was true also of Hitler’s hope in an alliance with England,
²⁹
and of the question of the Anschluss, of Danzig and the Corridor.
³⁰

More often, though, François-Poncet thought that Hitler had “changed since the time he was writing
Mein Kampf
,” especially regarding the “colonial idea,” to which Schacht supposedly had won him over.
³¹

He reported a “curious piece of information” given him by the Romanian (ambassador) Comnène. According to Comnène, “Hitler loves this book like a first-born. He will never change a word of it. But he is preparing a second book. After three years in power and with the experience and responsibilities of government, he will unveil his new ideas, his new doctrines and this second book will put many doubts and fears to rest.”
³²
Often, after meeting with the Führer, François-Poncet was inclined to think “how much the Führer has progressed since the time he was writing
Mein Kampf
.”
³³

Paul Reynaud would later say that French politicians had not read Hitler’s book. “Every chapter of the war was there in black and white. Hitler wrote
Mein Kampf
during his years in prison, and the entire history of the Second World War is in
Mein Kampf
… The Soviets, contrary to most of the French public, had indeed read
Mein Kampf
.”
³⁴

The same was true for the French press. In a detailed study of the press at the beginning of the Nazi regime, the German historian Kimmel also referred to that fact.
³⁵
In the end it appears that only a handful of specialists had read the book closely and, even then, probably relatively late. Among those was Henri Jordan, director of the French Academic House in Berlin
³⁶
and a few officers of the
Deuxième Bureau
. General Gauché, head of the
Deuxième Bureau
, wrote that his service “always considered
Mein Kampf
a document of capital importance, fundamental and absolutely relevant, which, once the hyperbole and the passionate outbursts were cleared away, held the key to Hitler’s future actions.”
³⁷

2.

A T
OTAL
F
AILURE
: D
ISARMAMENT AND THE
F
RANCO
-G
ERMAN
R
APPROCHEMENT

Paul-Boncour was probably not among those who spent much time mulling over
Mein Kampf
.
³⁸
But, being true to the League of Nations, and like everyone else in France who was uncertain as to what Hitler had in store, it was normal that he should try through disarmament to include the new Germany in the search for peace. In fact, contrary to what he was to do in the case of Italy, as we shall see later on, he didn’t launch any great initiatives.

Before Hitler came to power, the idea of a long-term rapprochement between France and Germany had inspired a few generous souls, and some realistic businessmen in both countries.

First, some approaches were made by a small group of Catholics, whose most famous member was Marc Sangnier, the founder of the
Sillon
and of
Jeune République
. The majority of Catholics, by contrast, together with the National Catholic Federation, presided over by General de Castelnau, vigorously pursued traditional anti-German nationalism. So did Louis Marin’s
Fédération Républicaine
, along with
L’Écho de Paris
and
L’Action française
. Wasn’t one justified, given the rise of Nazism, to mistrust what German scholar Robert d’Harcourt, a professor at the Catholic Institute, termed the “cowardice” of the German Catholic Center?
³⁹
Those in favor of a rapprochement were generally “left-wing” Catholics, and pacifists like Georges Bidault, Louis Terrenoire, Francisque Gay, Georges Hoog, Maurice Vaussard, the Catholic labor leader Gaston Tessier; the founder of
Esprit
, Emmanuel Mounier; writers such as François Mauriac and Count de Pange, who was originally from Lorraine; and journalists such as Vladimir d’Ormesson and Father Merklen. The newspaper
La Croix
expressed the hope that “the peace-loving elites of both countries would get to know each other.”
⁴⁰

For these men, Hitler’s rise to power came as a surprise and caused a sense of disillusionment. “All the promising endeavors I believed in,” wrote Jean de Pange, “the Rhineland policy, the Saar policy, the Alsatian policy, and finally the rapprochement between the intellectual elites of both countries, it all failed miserably.”
⁴¹

The attempts made by the CFAID (
Comité Franco-Allemand d’information et de documentation
), created in 1926, were very different. The
Comité’s
main
movers were a large industrialist from Luxemburg, Emil Mayrisch and his wife, a writer, a friend of André Gide and an active member of the “
decades
” organized by Paul Desjardins in Pontigny.
⁴²
In 1926 Mayrisch had pushed through a very important economic initiative, the international steel entente, between France, the Saar, Belgium, and Luxemburg.
⁴³
Mayrisch died accidentally in 1928, and Pierre Viénot, who had become his son-in-law, carried on until December 1929. In 1936 Viénot would become a socialist deputy and undersecretary of state for Foreign Affairs in the Popular Front cabinet.