France and the Nazi Threat: The Collapse of French Diplomacy 1932-1939 (6 page)

Our people with its propensity for ready criticism, irony, spirit of contradiction, its fear of being duped and lack of innocence as well as the inevitable disenchantments that come with being a mature nation, is perhaps, among the great peoples, the one least likely to overestimate its opportunities… It is less prone to spontaneous optimism than many others. This is good at preventing mistakes. It doesn’t work as well when it stifles the gathering and galvanizing of its energies.
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In 1941 Léon Blum clearly asked the question, “Is this a specifically French trait or rather the characteristic of today’s French bourgeoisie?”
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With the nuances that his exceptional mind brought to such fundamental questions, Léon Blum concluded that the bourgeoisie carried a major responsibility, at least that segment of the bourgeoisie controlling business and government administration. It should be pointed out that in 1976 France produced 285,000 high school graduates,
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while in 1913 there were only 8,000 and in 1935 15,000.
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The latter number is not indicative of any social improvement from pre-World War I levels, but merely shows that young women of the bourgeoisie had also entered the fray. Obviously in 1935, as in 1913, there were graduates from lower income families, but could they avoid becoming bourgeois themselves? The country’s top leaders, the politicians, businessmen, intellectuals, and administrators almost all came exclusively from the bourgeoisie, even within the Socialist Party. Only the Communist Party and the labor leadership—including the Catholic unions—were not controlled in such an exclusive manner by the bourgeois class. The gates would open wide during the Popular Front. Only after the Second World War did mass education replace that of an elite. Insofar as the main responsibility falls on the leadership class, Léon Blum was right in equating decadence with the bourgeoisie.

But then again there were various gradations; the universal right to vote was also responsible to a certain degree and implied a general outlook on the part of the popular masses and the petty bourgeois. How else can one explain the pacifist depression
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that lasted such a long time, blinding so many people of good will to the extent and imminence of a German and Nazi threat that was both national and ideological! How can one characterize the excessive opposition to overtime, even when it became vitally important to build weapons for survival! Léon Blum honestly accepted these facts and agreed with economist Alfred Sauvy. In other words, and without seeking an explanation through the doubtful concept of national character, our conclusion is that in France in the 1930s the inability to prevent disaster came from some form of collective responsibility where the leadership class was, by definition, playing the top role.

A fundamental issue still needs to be addressed: beyond governmental instability, was there not also continuity? It cannot be denied that a solid administration did exist and would prove itself in 1940. But the administration’s role is to manage and not to initiate important decisions.

It becomes necessary to reach up to the higher levels to find the men who, while cabinets filed in and out, remained close to the top and could, because of their very permanence, wield exceptional authority. A careful probe leads us to conclude that three such men occupied those key positions: Marshal Philippe Pétain, the General Secretary of the Quai d’Orsay, Alexis Léger, and General Maurice Gamelin. It may appear surprising that we do not include Albert Lebrun, President of the Republic, who was elected in May 1932 and reelected on April 5, 1939. Yet there is a simple enough explanation: never before in the history of the French Republic had there been such an abysmal void. We cannot find a single initative taken by Albert Lebrun at any time, even during the most dramatic events. Rather than accumulate the quotations where those taking part in that tragedy politely describe this total absence, we offer one significant piece of evidence. In the course of the seven years and two months covered by this book, some seventeen volumes of diplomatic documents (including military documents and personal letters) covering four years and ten months have been published. The very careful choices made by Pierre Renouvin and the team mentioned in the Preface collected 8,267 documents. Lebrun is mentioned in only seven documents and always in a “passive” role; in eight volumes out of the seventeen he does not appear a single time. We must conclude that a Loubet, a Poincaré or a Millerand would have played a very different role.

Two cabinet ministers with opposite viewpoints, Jean Zay and Anatole de Monzie, kept “diaries” in 1938-1939. These include descriptions of cabinet meetings. During the period leading up to the war, Jean Zay mentions that the president spoke on three occasions in extremely vague terms. Monzie only mentions his reelection on April 5, 1939, using the occasion to give a description of the man.
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His main shortcoming was that he was “impeccable.”

More constitutional than Mr. Raymond Poincaré, he doesn’t even use his right to express an opinion on foreign policy of which he keeps diligently informed… By steadfastly cutting everyone down to size, the regime has succeeded in creating its masterpiece of innocent neutrality.

Albert Lebrun picked the presidents of the council according to the rules, he attended the funeral of King Albert I of Belgium and paid a
visit to King George VI of England. That was the extent of his involvement in French foreign policy.

Marshal Philippe Pétain is too well known for us to provide a full description here. In 1932 the “Victor of Verdun” was still among the most prestigious of Frenchmen. Foch had died in 1929 and Joffre in 1931. Lyautey, who would die in 1934 and had conquered Morocco, had been minister of war but was never in command at the front in France. He disliked Pétain, who had been sent to replace him to win the “war in the Rif.” Among the other Marchhals, Fayolle had died in 1928 and Franchet d’Esperey would survive until 1942 but was in poor health, soon to be confined to a wheelchair.
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His dreamy radical right-wing ideas and close ties to the Cagoule and other military plots made him look suspicious. Loustanau-Lacau, who was appointed to Pétain’s personal staff in 1935, wrote,

Foch looked like a civil servant, Joffre like a grandfather, Lyautey like a horseman, Franchet d’Esperey like a wild boar, Fayolle like a musician but he [Pétain] who is still in shape, really does look like a Marchhal of France.
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Pétain therefore played a more important role than the others. As early as 1920-1921, despite Foch’s opposition, he managed to get the principle of the integrity of the territory passed. He remained vice-president of the Supreme War Council until 1930 when he was nearly seventy-five, before handing over the vice presidency to Weygand. However, he continued to serve on the council where his authority invariably prevailed at key points in time. He was minister of war in the Doumergue cabinet of 1934 and was appointed ambassador to Spain in 1939 to establish relations with Franco as he approached victory. Pétain never hesitated to voice his opinions. He went from long, impressive periods of silence in public life—that can no doubt be attributed to his own “wait-and-see” attitude—to publishing newsworthy articles, such as the one in the Revue des Deux Mondes on March 1, 1935, entitled “France’s security during the low birth-rate years,” in which he rejected the principle of a professional army and therefore the theories of Major de Gaulle, and again in his introduction to a book by General Chauvineau, published in 1939, Is an Invasion Still Possible? Could he have harbored political ambitions? Some far-right writers would periodically refer to him as the next savior of France. “Pétain is the man we need,” said Gustave Hervé, a former anti-militarist
who had become an ultra-nationalist.
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We shall see Pétain’s long shadow contantly reappearing and, at times, we can measure his role in decisions that were made.

It is far more difficult to accurately judge the part played by that strange diplomat, Alexis Léger.
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Just as strange as the poet Saint-John Perse, the 1960 Nobel prizewinner for literature. The fact that both of these identities belonged to the same person would not be so odd in a country where literature and diplomacy mixed happily together had the two faces of this Janus not been so completely separated from one another.
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Léger was a Créole, born in 1887 on the island of Guadeloupe, the son of a lawyer who returned to his native French city of Pau in 1899. He passed the foreign ministry entrance exam in 1914, one year after Paul Morand. Like Paul Claudel, the other great poet in the diplomatic service, he had spent many years in China. He met Claudel through another poet, Francis Jammes, and Claudel then introduced him to Berthelot.
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Like Berthelot, Léger was a regular at the Café Procope and moved in avant-garde literary circles with other writer-diplomats like Jean Giraudoux, Paul Morand, and Jean Cocteau.
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During the war, before going to China, he had already played a role in the Delcassé cabinet where he provided press analysis to the future ambassador, Charles Corbin.
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As a young diplomat he enjoyed a low-key but already widespread reputation. They said that during his posting in Peking he had been deeply immersed in the study of life in China. His reports were beautifully written. Berthelot had singled him out, just like Briand, more recently during the Washington conference (1921).
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Paul Morand wrote:

I admire his modesty, his broad sweeping views, his elevated and active mind, his playful imagination and his mature wisdom like that of an elderly man, his selflessness, his secret life, his unfurnished apartments filled with trunks and his nomadic childhood.
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Jean Chauvel wrote that he would appear

[w]earing a narrow black tie, with a pasty face, a veiled look in his eyes, using elegant and refined language in a low voice.
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Briand picked Léger to head his cabinet, and that was the beginning of his unstoppable rise. In March 1933 he replaced Berthelot as secretary general, the highest position in the Quai d’Orsay. The “Briandist” policies would therefore continue, for a long time to come, to relentless attacks on the secretary general from the far right, specifically from the Action Française.

While Berthelot was a very hard worker with an in-depth knowledge of the issues, Léger appears to have dedicated a much smaller amount of time to diplomatic communication. Fabre-Luce wrote that he was “an easy-going poet.”
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According to Massigli
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Léger never did any writing, which is confirmed by the files. Only Georges Bonnet mentions his “endless capacity for work.”
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He would come to the Quai at 11 a.m., leave for lunch and return around 4 p.m. staying late into the evenings, mainly to attend meetings. “He would often have long meetings with a small number of visitors, always the same ones, who came often.” Among them were Elie Bois of the
Le Petit Parisien
and André de Fels, the secretary general of the Alliance Démocratique.
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According to Chauvel, Léger paid no attention to current events even when it came to his specialty, namely the Far East and preferred discussing Chinese psychology. While he often met with the director of political affairs, he wasn’t easily accessible to his subordinates of a lower rank. That at least was Chauvel’s view when he was deputy director for the Far East in 1939:

I would tell him that our public opinion wasn’t prepared for the tragic events that could come… Léger would dismiss my fears. He didn’t believe that there would be any tragic events in the future.”
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Other eyewitnesses provide a much more favorable description. These were often journalists
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like Pertinax, for instance, who received a much warmer welcome than the civil servants of the Quai:

I went to see him regularly in the early fall of 1935 except for the many instances when I was quarreling with his minister. [He] had a deep feeling for the dignity of France, something shared by all the great servants of the State. [He was a man] of absolute moral and intellectual integrity… Contrary to the accusations that are being leveled, Alexis Léger never took the liberty of trying to impose…his own views.

Having to deal with ministers who often disliked him (Laval, Flandin, and Bonnet in particular),

[h]e saw it as part of the functions of his position…to dispel their self-deceptions, point out their mistakes even though later on he would loyally accept their position.
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Pertinax summed up his policies this way:

Of paramount importance was the understanding and collaboration with Great Britain, the need to uphold the Polish and Czechoslovak alliances, to encourage the Soviet Union to move further away from Germany, in times of danger to transform the League of Nations into a military and economic organization supportive of the western powers.
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Wasn’t this pure Briand? The problem was to check whether Briand’s wishes of the 1920s still warranted ironclad support in the 1930s.

In reading a speech he gave at New York University in 1942 regarding his great chief
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we notice that Léger was attempting to defend a policy established in the 1920s rather than modify French diplomacy to new circumstances. Perhaps he believed too strongly in collective security, something that had become an illusion; a kind of melancholy alignment on a rather disappointing British policy. Léger never was an appeaser. He firmly believed in “pact-making,” in complicated treaties that were replete with escape clauses. He was not a man ready to consider “realistic” alliances with the only powers that could help France stop Nazi Germany, namely fascist Italy and communist Russia. Just like his friend, Czech president Beneš, he remained a man of the moderate and optimistic left who refused to accept the fact that Hitler would go all the way. However, since he didn’t assert himself, his role is difficult to assess. We shall attempt to do so in the course of this book. Léger probably could not, or did not wish to, play a larger personal role out of loyalty toward his superiors. As Anthony Eden, the British cabinet member who knew him well, said: