France and the Nazi Threat: The Collapse of French Diplomacy 1932-1939 (32 page)

Specific needs? War. The soldiers of the Army of the Orient, those sent to Italy as reinforcements, the prisoners in Germany, those who were part of the occupying armies, the sailors sent to the Russian ports of the Black Sea—all of them experienced the great change of scenery. In some rare cases military service could take place in “mobile forces” (70,000 in July 1932 out of a total 358,000 in metropolitan France). These “mobile forces” may occasionally be deployed in “colonial” operations
such as Syria and Morocco in 1926–1927. The army in North Africa and the colonial troops themselves included, besides career officers and non-commissioned officers,
⁶
small numbers of volunteers from France but no draftees.

Exceptional professions? Of course, a few tens of thousands of sailors engaged in long distance fishing, commerce or the navy travel to foreign lands, stopping at a few rare ports of call. There were also a few thousand civil servants or agents of the various colonies or protectorates. There was a larger group of officers and non-commissioned officers of the colonial and North African troops. The career of an officer serving outside France meant being stationed during two- and three-year assignments to AOF, AEF, Madagascar, and Indochina. These colonial postings were also interspersed with trips back to France.

The missionaries made up another more stable category. At the beginning of the twentieth century, half the Catholic missionaries in the world were French. In 1930, out of 8,993 missionary priests, there were 3,000 French nationals, or 33 percent. If the same proportion is applied to the nuns and friars, there were some 1,000 friars out of 2,886 and 9,500 French nuns out of a total of 28,099,
⁷
or some 14,500 French nationals scattered around the world but mostly within the Empire.

France, on the other hand, was at the time a country little versed in export activity, with only a very small number of commercial agents abroad. Few French engineers were ready to leave for extended periods even though they could be found in those countries with large French investments: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Spain. However, when the USSR was recruiting foreign specialists for its capital projects, it turned mostly to Americans and Germans. According to the chemist Jules Cotte, who spent part of his life in the USSR, out of some 10,000 foreign technicians and engineers working there during the mid-1930s, there were only about 50 French nationals, a tiny number compared to the pre-war period.
⁸
As Cotte wrote in 1938, “only close technical collaboration can make the Franco-Soviet Pact fully effective.”
⁹
He concludes, “Alas in the USSR we were represented by our past glories”; since 1917 some 3000 French titles had been translated into Russian representing 50 million copies.
¹⁰

Among French citizens working overseas there were the professors and schoolteachers at the high schools or schools managed by the
Service des Œuvres
of the Quai d’Orsay or the French Lay Mission. There were
several hundred
Alliance Française
in the world, especially in Central Europe and South America. But contrary to the vast numbers of “cooperation” teachers today, there were few persons apart from members of religious congregations involved in a career outside France.

Today’s “exchanges” of professors and students were practically nonexistent. It was by chance that high-level French intellectuals were called to teach at American universities, for example. People such as historian Gilbert Chinard at Johns Hopkins and literary historian Henri Peyre at Yale were to have an enormous influence but their numbers were very small. An example from the official records: in 1932–1933 only four professors, most of them in literature, were officially invited for short periods by American universities. In 1928 there were 117 French students in the United States (out of a total 8,932 foreigners) and 528 Americans in France (out of 14,368 foreigners.)
¹¹
A few very high level students were admitted at the French school in Athens, in Rome, at the Casa Velasquez in Madrid,
¹²
or for artists to the Villa Medici in Rome. These were for the most part archeologists and medievalists and their exposure to contemporary situations remained superficial.

The Havas agency and a few rare newspapers had foreign correspondents. Marcel Dunan for
Le Temps
in Vienna and Camille Lemercier in Berlin were highly knowledgeable of the local scene. There was only one correspondent, Fransalès, from
Paris-Midi
in New York in 1938.

Beyond these few strokes there was occasional tourism that was, as we indicated, the exclusive domain of the bourgeoisie. It could start with the stay of the future high school graduate in an English family, very rarely in Germany or Austria, sometimes in Italy or Spain. The economic crisis, the inhospitable nature of the fascist regime, the mounting unrest in Spain after 1931 and the coming to power of National Socialism did not encourage tourism either by students or adults.
¹³
The tradition of the honeymoon at the great Italian lakes faded with the decline of the bourgeoisie. The “nouveaux riches” did not share those genteel ways. There were associations of university professors, such as the Guillaume-Budé association, that organized low-cost travel to Greece or Italy. There no longer were any “massive” pilgrimages to Rome and those to the Holy Land stopped in 1936 with the civil war in Palestine.

We therefore find that: 1) The number of French citizens traveling outside France was significantly less than today and even more so for French women. Except for North Africa, permanent emigration was
minimal; 2) Deep knowledge of foreign countries was limited only to a tiny elite of diplomats, officers, government officials, intellectuals and missionaries, which was totally inadequate to have any broad influence in those societies; 3) Most people leaving France did not go to foreign countries but to visit the Empire that could satisfy those in search of the exotic; 4) Therefore, there was very little knowledge of other countries, allowing for slogans and stereotypes to be readily accepted; 5) But the worst part was the “lack of curiosity” about foreign countries, “a kind of withdrawal unto ourselves and our past.”
¹⁴

3.

F
OREIGN
T
OURISTS IN
F
RANCE

Apart from a small number of very specialized professionals during the 1930s, the French people were, for the most part, entrenched homebodies. They knew close to nothing about foreign countries and how those countries viewed the French.

Foreign tourists didn’t provide much information. Besides the language barrier, contacts were rare except with hotel professionals. The French didn’t have a reputation for being particularly welcoming in their homes. In 1929 France was the first country for foreign tourists in the world with two million visitors. The economic crisis had a large impact, especially on French prices, which remained very high until 1935 because of the “gold-block.” By 1938 France had only one million visitors and was in fifth place behind Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria.
¹⁵

Among the motivations of foreign tourists during the 1930s we can point to the tours by veterans visiting the battlefields and visits to spas
¹⁶
—citizens from fifty countries visited Vichy in 1938. Conventions were very often held in France, as well as a few exceptional events such as the
Exposition Coloniale
of 1931 and the
Exposition Universelle
of 1937. Pilgrimages, to Lourdes in particular, also played an important part. But one must not forget the existence of the
old tourism
of the great hotels developed by the Swiss César Ritz, to whom André Siegfried dedicated one of his most brilliant essays.
¹⁷
A great number of the British aristocracy, which provided the leadership of the Conservative Party and governed England from 1931 to 1940, preferred to vacation in France at Deauville, La Baule and the Riviera. But this did not mean that those
men—which included Churchill, Halifax, Eden, Duff Cooper, Spears, Nicolson, and hundreds of others—met with the “locals.” They often kept to themselves or visited other English speakers, such as Somerset Maugham.

4.

I
MMIGRATION
: A D
ILUTED
F
ORM OF
F
OREIGN
I
NFLUENCE

Did immigration play a significant part as a factor in French foreign policy? Immigration appears to be a spontaneous phenomenon, or, less frequently, a kind of slow organized movement that may at some point tragically change public attitudes. Immigration is inevitable in an underpopulated country (but what does “underpopulated” mean?) and has not been studied from the point of view of international relations. We shall limit ourselves to a temporary set of conclusions based on the figures provided by the works of Jean-Charles Bonnet and Ralph Schor.
¹⁸

The number of foreigners recorded in France during the 1911 census was 1,150,000. In 1921 it was 1,631,000 and in 1932, 2,890,000, a figure that clearly did not reflect the true situation due to the high number of illegal persons present. In other words, 7 percent of the population in France included foreigners versus 2.8 percent in 1911.
¹⁹
The increase was constant and rapid up until 1931. The demographic needs of France, which had been bled dry, the manpower requirements for reconstruction and increasingly for the hard labor the French no longer wished to perform, encouraged the government and most of all private companies to hire foreign workers. These were 1.6 million in 1931 out of a total of 3 million in the active population.
²⁰
The economic crisis brought higher unemployment (and encouraged many to leave voluntarily), fewer arrivals and, at least up to 1936, tighter controls, denials of entry and expulsions. At that time the type of immigration changed: the mainly “economic” type was replaced, in part at least, by “political” immigrants in the form of often massive arrivals of refugees.

Between 1921 and 1939 about 1 million foreigners were naturalized.
²¹

At its highest point the breakdown by nationality was as follows: 800,000 Italians, 508,000 Poles, 352,000 Spaniards, 254,000 Belgians, 98,000 Swiss; Russians, Germans and Africans were slightly below
100,000. Even though there were fewer women than men (except for the Germans), they came in large numbers. Only the African workers were almost exclusively male.

About half of the immigrant workers are employed in the processing industries. Many Poles were working in the mining industry—these were half of all the miners in France—and in agriculture, the Italians in agriculture and trade, the Spaniards in agriculture, etc.
²²

Immigrants caused many problems for the social and internal policies of the country, which worried the ministers of the Interior and Labor—from January to March 1938 the Chautemps cabinet even created an undersecretary for immigration under a young Catholic attorney, Philippe Serre, who was part of the
Jeune République
movement. Serre was elected to Parliament as a deputy from Briey in 1933 in the department of Meurthe-et-Moselle, following in the footsteps of the great ironworks industrialist François de Wendel whom he failed to defeat in 1932 and became a senator.
²³
As head of his cabinet, Serre had appointed one of his friends, Professor Edouard Dolléans, who specialized in social issues.

These internal issues go beyond our subject but we must attempt to gauge the “weight” of immigration in its entirety and according to the nationalities concerned.

A rejectionist movement, similar to “nativism” in the United States in the 1920s, developed in France during the 1930s in the wake of the economic crisis and unemployment. “Undesirable competitors,” “bothersome guests,” wrote Jean-Charles Bonnet in describing these reactions. Leading a movement with some clearly racist attitudes, we find the right-wing nationalists who had always been anti-Semitic. Few were the days when the “foreigners” and the “odd balls” were not being insulted by
L’Action Française
or
L’Ami du Peuple
. Every political party, with many noticeable differences in approach, was concerned with the issue (79 members of Parliament out of 610 mentioned the issue in their electoral programs of 1932). Only the PCF took a stand as “the party of immigrant and colonial workers.”
²⁴
The issue of “national work” had always been popular because it completely omitted the fact that French excluded themselves from certain kinds of jobs. On the other hand, the presence of foreigners within the professions (doctors) or in business caused some very loud protest. However, the communists were not alone in refusing arbitrary limitations. Oddly, they found themselves, and for completely different reasons, within the same “internationalist” camp as top management
circles: chambers of commerce, committee for coal mines, committee for ironworks and its newspaper,
Le Temps
, were opposed to “filtering” or to “sending back.”
^25
.
This was also the case of Paul Reynaud, proving his very broad outlook.

Xenophobia coincides with the “defense of national work.” We shall quote, along with J.C. Bonnet,
²⁶
a few noteworthy statements: “a swarming mob of outlaws” (Colonel de la Rocque); “France to the Frenchmen” (rallying cry of February 6, 1934); “First we must clean the home front” (Pierre Gaxotte); “useless mouths,” “parasites,” “vermin” (
Le Jour, Le Matin, Gringoire
).

The murder of the president of the Republic, Paul Doumer by the Russian Gorguloff (May 6, 1932) and that of Louis Barthou by the Croatian Ustashi under Mussolini’s protection (October 9, 1934) only helped sharpen that tendency. A statement by Joseph Denais, a moderate right-wing member of Parliament, sums it up: “France can well ensure the well-being of all its sons only if it isn’t forced to be the world’s innkeeper where the undesirables from the entire world seek refuge.”
²⁷