To Lose a Battle (13 page)

The Verdun stream, on the other hand, drew its main impetus from the middle-class, conservative forces which had repressed the Commune. It believed in the fundamental, indestructible
grandeur
of France (a generation later, it might be rated as essentially Gaullist); it hankered after
la gloire
as embodied by the military triumphs of Louis XIV and Napoleon. While the heirs of the Commune marched to the Mur des Fédérés, it was to the tragic glories of Verdun that this second stream turned for its (even more immediate) inspiration. It felt that France should not renounce the benefit from all the blood gloriously shed in her numerous wars, especially in this last and most terrible; though it was torn when, like the Left wing, it reflected upon the realities on the reverse of the Verdun coin. Still clinging to many of the illusions left over from that
Quatorze Juillet
of 1919, it was sickened by France’s subsequent retreat from
grandeur
, sickened by the corrupt ineptness of her politicians. At the same time, it too had its memories of the Commune, which the new strength infused into the French Left by the Russian Revolution had revivified. The spectre of Bolshevism, teeth clamped upon a bloody knife, was constantly breathing down its neck.

By the 1930s, the most vocal and extreme of those Frenchmen borne along in the Verdun stream had banded themselves together in various Right-wing ‘leagues’. There were the
Camelots du Roi
, shock-troops of the monarchist, Catholic and anti-semitic
Action Française
of Charles Maurras,
⁶
which had led the assault on Stavisky and his highly placed ‘pals’ in the Radical Party. Then there were the
Jeunesses Patriotes
, nationalist and violently anti-Communist, who had assumed the mantle of the fire-eating Paul Déroulède’s
Ligue des Patriotes
founded to avenge the defeat of 1870. But now, with the grievance of Alsace-Lorraine eradicated, the patriotism of the
Jeunesses
was as defensive as that of any other section of the country for whom the Maginot Line had become a way of life, and their energies were directed largely towards the protection of private property against real or imagined threats of ‘Bolshevism’. In 1932, the
Solidarité Française
was created by funds from the perfumery fortune of François Coty, its members wearing a para-military uniform of black beret and blue shirt. Their motto was ‘
La France aux Français!
’ – ‘France for
the French’ – and a newspaper also founded by M. Coty,
L’Ami du Peuple
, bore at its masthead the slogan ‘With Hitler against Bolshevism’. In 1933 the
Francistes
were formed, adopting a uniform not dissimilar to that of the Nazi stormtroopers.

Less extreme politically, though still well right of centre, were various veterans’ associations, whose members came largely from the
petite bourgeoisie.
But the most activist and significant of the ‘Leagues’ was the
Croix de Feu
, originally founded in 1928 as an association of ex-soldiers decorated for bravery. Its leader, Colonel Casimir de la Rocque, who had served on the staffs of both Foch and Lyautey, was now dedicated to the purgation of all that was corrupt in the institutions of the Third Republic. Under his impulse the
Croix de Feu
assumed a distinct political orientation. ‘Honesty’ and ‘Order’ were its twin battle-cries, and though it could not strictly be described as Fascist – unlike some of the more right-wing leagues – it shared their admiration for the vigour and efficiency that Mussolini had succeeded in instilling into Italian youth; in addition, as the scandals multiplied, the
Croix de Feu
had adopted a more blatantly anti-Republican attitude. The patrician colonel himself was certainly no rabble-rouser like Hitler. A British journalist says of him: ‘His head was too narrow and unimpressive, his voice was too high, his diction too elaborate for mass appeal. His gestures were those of a romantic actor, not a tribune. He was too genteel.’ Nevertheless, to the Left wing in France Colonel de la Rocque had come to epitomize everything that it understood, loathed and feared in the meaning of the word Fascism.

During the week that followed the fall of the Chautemps Government on 27 January 1934, tension had been rising in Paris. Enraged by the revelations of the Stavisky case, de la Rocque met with leaders of the other right-wing leagues to co-ordinate a march upon the Assembly. On 5 February there were demonstrations and various collisions with the police. The next morning,
L’Action Française
carried the most provocative headlines: ‘The thieves are barricading themselves in their cave. Against this abject régime, everyone in front of the Chambre des Députés this evening.’ At about 6 p.m. the first
shock-troops, consisting largely of the
Camelots du Roi
and with a number of
grands mutilés
veterans placed conspicuously to the fore, attempted to force their way through police barriers drawn up on the Pont de la Concorde. They hurled bottles, stones and sections of lead piping at the police, and when the mounted police charged, the hocks of their horses were slashed with razors tied to sticks. Meanwhile, inside the Chamber the new Government, headed by Édouard Daladier, was still struggling to get a vote of confidence. By 7.30, the police were becoming increasingly hard-pressed, and, after three warnings, they received the order to fire. Seven demonstrators were killed outright, and a large number wounded. Though driven back as far as the Opéra, a counter-attack brought them once more to the Concorde. The police opened fire a second time, but it was not until midnight that the Deputies could reckon they were safe from a repetition of 3 September 1870, when the Palais Bourbon had been stormed and the Government overthrown by a Paris mob outraged by the news of Louis-Napoleon’s defeat at Sedan. Out of 40,000 demonstrators, 16 had been killed and at least 655 known to be wounded; well over 1,000 policemen received injuries.

Nevertheless, the next day Colonel de la Rocque proclaimed from his secret battle H.Q.: ‘The
Croix de Feu
has surrounded the Chamber and forced the Deputies to flee.’ The proclamation infuriated the leaders of the other leagues, who considered that de la Rocque’s men had played only the most prudent of parts in the battle. But the impact that the Colonel’s braggadocio had upon the Left wing was even more dramatic. Suddenly, in the heated atmosphere of the moment, it seemed as if a new General Boulanger had arisen. Fears were greatly exacerbated on the afternoon of the 7th when, with extreme precipitance, Daladier resigned. Ex-President Gaston Doumergue, now aged seventy, took his place at the head of a ‘National Government’ with – as a special sop to the
anciens combattants
of the Right-wing leagues – seventy-seven-year-old Marshal Pétain, the ‘Hero of Verdun’, as its Minister of Defence. It was the first time since 1870 that the mob had brought about the fall of a French government, but, alas, not
the last time that a disastrous display of weakness by Daladier would bely his nickname, ‘the bull of Vaucluse’. Of his resignation, Daladier explained feebly: ‘otherwise we should have had to shoot’.

On 6 February the Communists, sharing de la Rocque’s detestation of corrupt Republican politicians, had also taken up cudgels against the Government. One eye-witness actually saw a
Camelot du Roi
and a Communist, each recognizable by his badge, jointly pulling down a lamp-post – just about the last occasion in time of peace, before de Gaulle, that the two extremes of French political life would be able to find common cause. But now, with the powerful shock administered by the fall of the Daladier Government, the entire Left wing thought in terror that it saw an imminent right-wing
coup d’état
, along the lines taken in Germany and Italy, with Colonel de la Rocque playing the role of Louis-Napoleon – or Mussolini. Abruptly it reversed its position. On the morning of 9 February, the Communist
L’Humanité
called a mass meeting for that evening in the Place de la République, to demand the dissolution both of the Chamber and of their ephemeral allies, the right-wing leagues. That night an event of major importance occurred. Near the République, two rival columns approached each other, one of Communists, the other of
Jeunesses Socialistes
, representing the two principal left-wing parties which had hardly been on speaking terms ever since the great schism of 1920–21. At first it looked as if there would be conflict. However, amid cries of ‘We’re not clashing, we’re fraternizing… we’re all here to defend the Republic’, the heads of the two columns mingled and clasped hands, then marched together chanting ‘Unity of action!’ On 12 February the C.G.T. called a general strike in protest against the ‘Fascist peril’, and for the first time since its breakaway thirteen years ago the Communist C.G.T.U. collaborated fully. In the course of that day the new pact was sealed in blood when, amid the old Communard strongholds of eastern Paris, three-cornered mêlées between strikers, right-wing layabouts and the police resulted in four deaths. ‘United as at the front!’ had been on the lips of Colonel de la Rocque’s
anciens combattants
on 6 February; ‘Unity of
action!’ was the slogan of the heirs to the Commune three days later. But in fact both would only lead disastrously to the greater disunity of the French nation.

After 6 February, whatever chance the Right wing had of pulling off a
coup d’état
vanished forever, but the protest march against the ‘corrupt politicians’ drew a mass of new, young recruits to de la Rocque’s standard. In response the left closed ranks more tightly to form a ‘common anti-Fascist front’. That July, Blum the Socialist leader and Thorez the Communist signed a pact of unity; by October 1934,
L’Humanité
was beginning to talk about a ‘Popular Front against Fascism’. Meanwhile, other factors were lending further cohesive force to this new display of left-wing solidarity. France found herself still plunged deep into economic darkness by the world slump, while Britain and America were already emerging from the tunnel; between 1928 and 1934 French industrial production dropped by 17 per cent, between 1929 and 1936 average incomes fell by 30 per cent, and by the end of 1935 over 800,000 were unemployed. Fearful of the ‘Bolshevist’ threat to private property and never quite forgetting the Commune, the steely-faced managers of French industry – the
patrons
– had taken full advantage of the past splits between the Socialist and Communist trade unions to put the brake on essential social reforms. Now (although from mid 1935 onwards the economy did begin to show an upturn), the plight of the workers in many French industries was genuinely appalling.

On 14 July 1935, the
Croix de Feu
marched with smart military precision down the Champs-Élysées; de la Rocque was seen paying homage at the Arc de Triomphe. But the day belonged to the Left, demonstrating at the other end of Paris. Down from Belleville and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine they flooded to the Place de la Bastille in their thousands; some papers estimated that well over half a million turned out that day. At a mass meeting on the Bastille, beneath great red banners proclaiming ‘Peace, Bread, Liberty!’, the Popular Front was officially launched. That afternoon, a vast column processed from the Bastille to Vincennes. Daladier, the Radical-Socialist ex-Prime Minister whose downfall the Communists had helped
bring about the previous year, marched alongside Marty, the revolutionary who had organized the post-war mutinies in France’s Black Sea Fleet; arm in arm, like blood brothers, went Blum and Thorez, Herriot and Barbusse and Duclos. Such scenes of left-wing solidarity and elation had not been seen since the heyday of the Commune sixty-four years earlier. But, as Herriot grudgingly remarked later on, it did seem rather as if the Communists had dominated the proceedings.

At their congress that October, the French Radicals decided to throw in their lot with the Popular Front. Then, in March 1936, came Hitler’s reoccupation of the Rhineland. On 3 May France went to the polls and the Popular Front was swept into power. Formerly with only 10 seats, the Communists now emerged with no less than 72; the Socialists, gaining another 49 seats, became the strongest party, and accordingly it fell to Léon Blum to form a government. In a frenzy of thanksgiving, some 400,000 Parisians marched on 24 May to do homage at the Mur des Fédérés, amid cries of ‘
Vive le Front Populaire! Vive la Commune!
’, while a contingent of soldiers from Versailles bore a banner proclaiming ‘The Versailles soldiery of 1871 assassinated the Commune. The soldiers of Versailles in 1936 will avenge it.’ The Left had scored its greatest triumph since 1871; but how, with the clouds growing more and more sombre beyond the Rhine, was it going to exploit this victory?

Chapter 4

Palinurus Nods

Lost was the nation’s sense, nor could be found,
While the long solemn unison went round;
Wide and more wide, it spread o’er all the realm;
Even Palinurus nodded at the helm.

ALEXANDER POPE,
The Dunciaa

In tragic life, God wot,
No villain need be! Passions spin the plot:
We are betrayed by what is false within.

GEORGE MEREDITH,
Modern Love

France on Strike

Almost from the moment of his accession, things went badly for Léon Blum. The difficulties of agreeing a programme meant that subtle negotiations between the disparate members of the Popular Front coalition dragged on all through May 1936. The French proletariat, buoyed up with the exhilaration of victory, now watched with extreme impatience for palpable efforts to implement the Front’s electoral promises and alleviate their hardships. Within a week of the election, strikes broke out at the Bréguet aircraft factory at Le Havre. At a meeting of the Communist Party on 25 May, militants began calling for the Party to break with the dilatory Blum. Thorez urged restraint, but at the same time demanded immediate economic action from the Government. The next day the Lavalette factory in the north-west suburbs of Paris and the Nieuport aircraft works at Issy in the south-west were paralysed by strikes. These assumed a new form, later to become known as
grêves sur le tas
– sit-in strikes. The workers presented their demands to the management, which rejected them. They then sent the women home and simply occupied the factory. Friends outside provided them with food, cigarettes and bedding, and they settled down for the night, arguing, playing cards or
boules
, singing and
dancing. Alcohol was banned, but the general tone was one of
en fête
, again evoking memories of the first jubilant days after the Commune seized Paris in 1871, but also related to the mood of mass escapism then gripping France. Day by day the bizarre situation renewed itself, the factory-owners being told, forcefully, that if they attempted to break the strike their plants would simply be burnt down.