France and the Nazi Threat: The Collapse of French Diplomacy 1932-1939 (5 page)

In the course of negotiations of the peace treaty in 1919, two issues preoccupied the French people: security and reparations—“Germany will pay!” As we will see, reparations were to be cancelled in the summer of 1932. Unrealistic even in times of relative prosperity, they would be absurd with the world economic crisis. As for security, however, it seemed to be, at least in 1932, guaranteed by the overwhelming superiority of the French army both in weapons and manpower. But would this situation last? Since February 1932 the disarmament conference was in full swing. The Treaty of Versailles presented Germany’s disarmament as the first step toward world disarmament. What better opportunity for Germany either to induce France to undertake a massive reduction in its own armaments, as some well-intentioned Frenchmen and most Anglo-Saxon countries were requesting, or seize on French unwillingness to disarm to justify a massive rearmament of its own, which was the only course the German military and their natural ally, Adolf Hitler, were contemplating!

At the moment in time when we begin our study, the vast political, economic and psychological entity called France, with its enormous empire around the world, found itself in a very worrisome situation. France, like any other state, depended simultaneously on external forces—which she could deal with using dubious devices such as persuasion, bargaining, threats or the use of violence—and its internal capacity to find the indispensable answers.

In that respect France was indeed very poorly equipped. Apart from a social structure that fostered internally, more than elsewhere, those “dispersive tendencies” later identified by General de Gaulle,
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where the class struggle was far from being the only element, France was poorly governed from a structural standpoint. Specifically, the pleasant and easy-going
form of government France had opted for in 1875 and whose tradition had been set in 1877 was predicated upon the greatest distrust of power itself. Excluding the Communist far-left and a noisy but ineffectual anti-democratic far-right, the French people for the most part backed—without actually joining the parties they voted for—a few large political groups with a democratic internal structure where the rank and file played a significant role. This was the case in the SFIO Socialist, party founded on the principle of the majority openly setting its policies at party conventions. This also applied to the Radical Socialists that originated from a myriad of committees and were surrounded by a constellation of independent Radicals. The Moderate Right, heir to the former opportunists and closely wedded to economic interests rather than any ideology upheld, the same principles. It was also the case of the vast Catholic Right, which had reconciled itself with the Republic and came from committees similar to the Radicals except for the fact that they originated in the castle and the rectory or, as André Siegfried put it, often in the rectories and against the castle, rather than relying upon masonic lodges or various lay and anti-clerical organizations.

Such a built-in structure, we can state straightaway, was the most effective form of protection France possessed against fascism, which, as we shall see later, appeared to be more frightening than it was as an actual threat. But the structure worked only in a politically divided situation, mitigated by temporary alliances and unstable combinations. Haunted by the fear of a Bonapartist dictatorship and its disastrous outcome in the defeat of 1871 and the Paris Commune, the founders attributed the basic political power to Parliament. The Third Republic was actually a caricature of parliamentary government and essentially functioned as a regime dominated by an assembly. The result was an amazing inability of the French people to let themselves be governed, combined with an incredible incapacity to engage in any kind of reform, be it social, economic, fiscal or even constitutional. All this can easily be summed up in a simple statement: the structural instability of executive power in France,
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an instability that increased naturally with the disputes tied to the economic crisis, the same crisis that brought an awesome dictatorship to power in Germany, and sparked a conservative tidal wave in Great Britain with pacifist and Gallophobic Tory governments coming to power ready to launch appeasement. This would later provoke the anger of many British historians and journalists, such as Harold Nicolson, who contrasted the “extraordinary force of personality” of a Winston Churchill to “this confused
and timid gang.”
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The world crisis further accelerated the disintegration of the executive branch in France. Between June 1932 and March 1940 there were sixteen different governments, each one lasting five months and twenty-four days on average. From September 1931 to May 1940, Great Britain had only three governments lasting four, two and three years, respectively. French instability affected both left- and right-wing governments.

The worst of it was that that there appeared to be no solution. Some cabinets undoubtedly resorted to obtaining full powers and issue legal decrees that were submitted retroactively to parliamentary approval, but these were the full powers and legal decrees of unstable governments. Furthermore, any type of reform of the Constitution appeared impossible. Between 1932 and 1939 the only identifiable attempt can be attributed to the so-called National Unity government of Doumergue in September 1934. He wanted to give exclusively to the president of the republic and the president of the council (the prime minister) the right to dissolve the Chamber of Deputies, subject to the Senate’s approval according to the Constitution of 1875. However, even though the executive committee of the Radical Socialist party had voted on June 13 in favor of a motion for authority of the State, the reform of the executive branch and government stability,
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it was its president Edouard Herriot who scuttled a project he viewed as “breaking with tradition” and harboring the dark dangers of dictatorship.
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The Socialist party also opposed it and thus everything remained unchanged as before. In a short book written in 1941 while he was a political prisoner, socialist leader Léon Blum did not clearly favor constitutional reform when he wrote: “Governmental mobility in the Third Republic was basically caused by disorder, lack of discipline and the powerlessness to make those thick and homogeneous political parties that provide the necessary basis for a representative system last.”
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This instability had serious consequences during times of difficulties abroad. On the one hand, it didn’t encourage diligence on the part of the leadership; on the other, it stifled any kind of master plan.

When one’s activity is primarily focused on survival, fundamental issues are overshadowed by the need to overcome parliamentary hurdles. Furthermore, the interplay of political deal-making becomes all-important in the appointment of a cabinet minister more than the actual competence of the man. With a few exceptions (Louis Barthou, Léon Blum, Yvon Delbos, Edouard Daladier and—whether we like his politics or not—
Georges Bonnet), the men in charge of France’s foreign affairs often appear to be amazingly “irresponsible.” According to Jacques Bariéty’s
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definitive study, Edouard Herriot conducted the difficult 1924 negotiations without having thoroughly studied the background reports. As we shall see, this would happen once again in 1932. Armand Bérard, chief of staff and later an ambassador, wrote that his boss Joseph Paul-Boncour required no more than a three-line summary for each dispatch—which was customary—and that he annotated these in an illegible handwriting; but at least he made the effort to write his own notes. However, the author adds: “Internal politics took up most of the minister’s time; as does his eloquence in which he often indulged at length and took up still more time… The support staff, his cabinet and his nephew did everything else.”
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There were even worse cases than Herriot and Paul-Boncour. Ambassador Léon Noël, who became general secretary to the Presidency of the Council,
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provides some rather scathing descriptions on the subject. Laval summoned him around New Year’s Day 1935, along with the general secretary of the foreign ministry, Alexis Léger, his cabinet director Rochat and political affairs director Bargeton to prepare for his upcoming visit to Mussolini: “The meeting wasn’t serious—it resembled most of the other meetings I attended at the time. The issues the two government leaders were to discuss were never mentioned. Time was spent telling anecdotes and cracking jokes.”
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One month later Laval was getting ready to travel to London with Prime Minister Pierre-Etienne Flandin. Both men had their offices at the Quai d’Orsay. “I was getting them together to prepare for the trip. It was a miserable failure. Never for one minute did they discuss what they would tell their British colleagues. They only talked about the kind of transportation they were going to use.”
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They finally traveled by ship despite the fact that Flandin was very much fond of airplanes; at Dover they found Ambassador Charles Corbin waiting to welcome them both. “I witnessed the conversation all three were having in the train to London; it was the vaguest and most general of conversations. Laval and Flandin actually came to the conference without any prior preparation of any kind. I often found the lack of seriousness in most French politicians of that time shocking and revolting.”
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Finally, we will quote the deputy foreign minister of Poland, Count Szembek. His minister, Josef Beck, told him an anecdote he heard from
a foreign diplomat (the many levels of hearsay make the story sound a bit suspicious but worth relating in any case). The diplomat overheard a conversation between Pierre Laval and Marshal Pétain who had traveled to Warsaw to attend the funeral of Polish Marshal Pilsudski. “When they saw a unit of sailors one of them said: How about that, do they also have a navy? The other answered: But where do they have a port? The first one replied: It must be Danzig. Ambassador Laroche, after hearing this exchange, went up to them and explained that it was Gdynia.”
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Sadly, such opinions dovetail with general perceptions: as Pertinax (Henri Géraud)
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wrote of Pierre Laval, “Short on ideas and of abysmal ignorance.” Léon Blum’s conclusion was, “Weakness and precariousness of cabinets without a solid base nor having any time, and lacking imagination and daring.”
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There was also a lingering colossal ignorance of economic issues in the background. Alfred Sauvy attributed that weakness to the poor quality of the courses offered by law schools on the subject; these were followed by the École libre des sciences politiques where large debates on major issues were organized by the alumni association.
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In its public finance section the École libre produced “competent senior Treasury officials,” none of whom would be in charge of the nation’s finances during that time.
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Few among the politicians included in our study were to venture beyond a kind of frightened management of public finances. “Apart from financial issues that were handled at the rue de Rivoli at the strictest arithmetical level, there were obviously issues concerning other parts of government administration but the ministry of Commerce only took care of customs tariffs and Agriculture was mostly interested in the kind of protectionism inherited from Méline.”
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Germain Martin,
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Henry Chéron, Marcel Régnier, and Paul Marchandeau managed the rue de Rivoli for the greater part of this period; these orthodox financiers appeared to be rather colorless as they faced the monumental challenges of their time. Those who stand out were Raymond Patenôtre, a longtime undersecretary of state for the economy, the radical Georges Bonnet, and the socialist Vincent Auriol. But two men above all who played a brief role, Pierre Mendès-France as undersecretary of the Treasury in Léon Blum’s second cabinet (March to April 1938) who showed an early interest in John Maynard Keynes; and the liberal economist Paul Reynaud who replaced Marchandeau as minister of Finance on November 1, 1938. Aside from Léon Blum, the other prime ministers were totally ignorant when it came to economic issues.

Considering the absence of any kind of broader plan, the picture then becomes complete. In a country where no party could command a majority on its own, no lasting partisan foreign policy was possible even though internal political quarrels did include foreign policy issues. Even better than long-term partisan policies, there could be the grand designs or what General de Gaulle referred to as great undertakings that could have overcome the internal divisions among the French people. With the exception of Barthou, who attempted in 1934 to create strong alliances for France by displaying a capacity for daring and initiative in taking necessary risks, the various French governments never engaged in any broad policies. When energies are focused on day-to-day disputes that clearly could not be resolved, the only remaining possibility is to dilute them by not taking a position and to do nothing. As we shall see in greater detail, this approach was very similar between the radical governments of 1932-1933, the moderate cabinets of Flandin and Laval in 1935 and the “transition” cabinet of Albert Sarraut in 1936, as well as those of the Popular Front and the government that Daladier formed in April 1938.

Is it possible to blame the general inability to take action and the hesitation toward any undertaking on the existing structures? Could French national character be the reason? Was it the fault of the ruling class, of the bourgeoisie?

Historians find the concept of national character rather vague. Neither cultural anthropologists of the Ruth Benedict school nor social psychologists like Inkeles or Otto Klineberg have come to a satisfying answer on this issue. The great intuitive descriptions by an André Siegfried, a Kayserling, or a Miguel de Unamuno reach some clear conclusions regarding the soul of a people. However, quite often we catch ourselves thinking that the opposite could be just as true and that the exception is almost as important as the rule. Let us examine a passage by Jules Romains, considered at the time to be the guiding light of youth,