To Lose a Battle Read online

  So often in history when the unpleasantness of external reality induces a state of emotional confusion, societies become irresistibly tempted to bury themselves in all manner of imaginary pleasure and internal distractions. The louder the barbarians outside hammered at the walls of Rome, the wilder grew the public diversions in the Colosseum and the private orgies within the walls. At many levels of French life during the late 1920s and 1930s, escapism reveals itself as the ruling factor. Dadaism and surrealism in art are matched by the fantaisiste, fairy-tale world of Cocteau and Giraudoux. The frenzy of the fox-trot dansomanie of the 1920s marches with the stage extravaganzas of Diaghilev; the Ballet Russe, the Ballet Suédois; Josephine Baker, the Revue Nègre. Anything for ‘spectacle’. The circus is rediscovered. Then France suddenly finds she can play tennis and rugger; to be able to beat England provides a welcome sop to the Quai d’Orsay’s growing dependence upon the Foreign Office. The sporting pages of Paris-Soir make it overnight the journalistic success story of the decade. Bicycling is all the rage; for the masses, the Tour de France supplies the nearest emotional equivalent to Germany’s Nuremberg Rallies. In the cabarets, even the sacred fetishes of pre-1914 can be made mock of, with bearded ladies from Alsace chanting melodramatically:

  No, no, a thousand times no! My breast is French,

  I shall never give suck to a German child…

  In literature, the passion for romantic travel, so powerful in the 1920s, gives way to an equal fascination in the personal ‘heroic quest’ of the agonizing man of action, as represented by such adventures as Saint-Exupéry and Malraux.

  Despite its philosophy of ‘engagement’, no form of literature demonstrated a greater revolt away from reality than the existentialism of young Jean-Paul Sartre and his fellow inmates of the Café Flore in the latter 1930s. In her autobiography, Sartre’s mistress, Simone de Beauvoir, furnishes a revealingly honest chronicle of the attitude of French left-wing intellectuals. The autumn of 1929 had made her feel she was living in a new ‘Golden Age’: ‘Peace seemed finally assured; the expansion of the German Nazi Party was a mere fringe phenomenon, without any serious significance… It would not be long before colonialism folded up.’ Of Hitler’s coming to power in 1933, she writes: ‘…like everyone else on the French Left, we watched these developments quite calmly’, and in the same breath that she records, in passing, Einstein’s flight from Germany, she deplores the closing-down of the German ‘Institute of Sexology’. Still, ‘there was no threat to peace; the only danger was the panic that the Right was attempting to spread in France, with the aim of dragging us into war’. To the ‘elders’ of the Left, as to so many of that generation, ‘the memory of the 1914–18 was stuck in their throats… In 1914 the whole of the intellectual élite, Socialists, writers and all – no wonder Jaurès was assassinated – toed a wholly chauvinistic line… Our elders, then, forbade us to envisage the very possibility of a war…’ In their filmgoing, this dread of war led Sartre and Beauvoir to miss Renoir’s classic, La Grande Illusion, by preference seeking escapism in such American farces as My Man Godfrey and Mr Deeds Goes to Town.

  Political Scandals

  At the important elections of 1936, after Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland, Sartre had refused to vote: ‘The political aspirations of left-wing intellectuals made him shrug his shoulders.’ Yet while regarding the French political scene with ‘disengaged’ aversion, and finding nothing ‘to stir my interest’ in the assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia and the French Foreign Minister, Barthou, Simone de Beauvoir concedes at the same time that ‘both Sartre and I read every word’ of the latest turn in the Stavisky scandal. This duality of attitudes extended far beyond the narrow circle of the Café Flore. Upon the futility of the Third Republic’s political jungle had now become superimposed (though perhaps ‘grafted’ is the better word) a miasma of corruption cases. The first big shock came in 1928 with the arrest of Klotz, the former Minister of Finance about whom Clemenceau had been so scathing, on charges of issuing dud cheques. Two years later there followed the Oustric scandal. Oustric had built up a bogus banking empire largely propped up on vast loans somehow obtained from the Bank of France; when his empire crashed, the involvement of the second Tardieu Government was sufficient to bring about its fall too.

  But the greatest furore was caused by Serge Stavisky, the son of a Ukrainian-Jewish dentist, a seductive young man with an apparently limitless number of useful contacts in politics, the Press and the judiciary. Already by 1933 his financial operations had come under official scrutiny, but he appeared to be immune from police interference and a criminal case against him had actually been postponed nineteen times. It so happened that the public prosecutor who was failing to bring Stavisky to justice was the brother-in-law of the current Prime Minister, Camille Chautemps. Then suddenly, on 30 December, a major fraud, concerning the issue of millions of francs based on the assets of a municipal pawnshop in the small town of Bayonne, was pinned on Stavisky. The Mayor of Bayonne, Garat, who was also a Radical Deputy, was arrested, but the indications were that much bigger game was involved. How else had Stavisky managed to pull off such swindles, and how had he evaded justice for so long? Before any answers could be provided, the police found Stavisky dead in a house in Chamonix where he had been hiding with his mistress. Suicide was alleged, but it was widely believed that he had been shot by a policeman – conveniently, it seemed, for Chautemps. Overnight Stavisky became the best-known name in France since Dreyfus. Crowds appeared outside the National Assembly, shouting ‘Down with the thieves!’ and spitting on Deputies. On 27 January 1934, the Chautemps Government fell – after an innings of just two months and four days.

  In common with Sartre and Beauvoir, the great mass of Frenchmen indulged themselves heartily in the spectacle of political scandals as part of the nation’s pursuit of escapism. Hand in hand with this indulgence went a deep disgust and disillusion with politicians and government, which was about to create a grave split in France just at the moment when the Nazi jackboots were striding out in mounting unison. By 1934 the reputation of politicians in France had sunk to a record low; but it was to sink still lower, and with it all efficacy of government. Constantly there was some new scandal and, however distantly, some Minister in what the cynics dubbed ‘the Republic of Pals’ always seemed to be implicated. As Pertinax pungently observed, French politicians had assumed the habit of ‘dealing with their country as if it were a commercial company going into liquidation’. Recounting a typical scene of the Third Republic, Élie Bois describes how at a lunch party Georges Bonnet and Camille Chautemps ‘vied with one another to succeed a Premier whose ministry had just fallen: “It’s my turn!” “No, Georges, it’s mine…” ’ Dizzier and dizzier became the game of musical chairs played by the little men unaware of the proportions of the tragedy moving in on them. In the eighteen months preceding 1934, there had been five different governments but with virtually the same faces in each; from mid 1932 to the outbreak of war in 1939, France’s score of governments was to total nineteen, including eleven different Premiers, eight Ministers of Finance, seven Ministers of Foreign Affairs, and eight Ministers of War. A favourite insult with Parisian taxi-drivers became ‘Espèce de député’!’ The populace loathed the politicians; the politicians loathed each other.

  Beginnings of Civil War

  On 6 February 1934, passions overflowed. This was the date marking the beginning of what approximated to civil war in France, which was to have so insidious and powerful an influence on the events of 1940 that its background needs to be carefully understood. Since Armistice Day 1918, two major ideological streams, distinct and opposing, had flowed through the political life of France. One was revolutionary, the other patriotic; or, simplified in terms of the two historic events which supplied each with its most potent, fundamental inspiration, they might well be called, respectively, the streams of the Commune and of Verdun. The revolutionary, Commune stream may trace its original source back to the Great Revolution
of 1789, whose spiritual heirs fought against the Establishment on the barricades in 1830 and 1848; while, as has already been suggested, its main motivating force in the post-1918 world was derived from the Russian Revolution. But it was the Paris Commune of 1871 in which resided the numen of France’s Left wing, and especially of that important section comprised by the Parisian proletariat. It was the Commune which, though unsuccessful, had first pointed the way to the possibility of a Government of the proletariat, based on revolution and the destruction of the bourgeois monopoly; moreover, it was upon the achievements and errors of the Commune (as interpreted by Karl Marx) that Lenin had based his own triumphant revolution of 1917. Above all, in France it was the savage memories of the 20,000 Communards so brutally massacred by Thiers’s forces of order which kept alight the flame of revolution, making the gulf between bourgeois and proletarian wider and more unbridgeable than in any other nation of the Western world. The link with the Commune has never been severed; in the 1930s (and still today), every Whitsun the leaders of France’s Left wing made a solemn pilgrimage to the Mur des Fédérés at Père Lachaise Cemetery, to commemorate the summary execution there on 28 May 1871 of 147 Communards. The Internationale was their marching song, but the wall was the shrine to which they marched.

  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.