France and the Nazi Threat: The Collapse of French Diplomacy 1932-1939 (31 page)

Regarding military discussions—which Italy refused to attend—these turned out to be completely useless.
¹²⁹
General Schweisguth Deputy Chief of Staff of the Army, was representing France. Gamelin had told him, “We need no help to defend the Franco-German border,” and General Maurin said, “To make them understand that we can hold out alone if need be.” However, British soldiers would be necessary to help the Belgians. They settled on a plan to ferry over two British divisions. The British refused to provide any kind of details regarding their deployment. They were “kept closely in check by the Foreign Office…”

As for the Belgians, they played “a rather secondary role.” The outcome of these discussions, said Schweisguth, allowed for the creation of “cordial and very pleasant personal contacts.” But as to the heart of the matter “the results appeared to be quite meager.”
¹³⁰

France just lost more than a buffer zone and the opportunity to defend its allies in the East. Its prestige had plummeted. Scores of cables and dispatches from French representatives all over the world attested to this drastic drop. The government in Vienna was the most affected of all: Who would now prevent the Anschluss?
¹³¹
The Czechoslovaks were frightened at the thought of becoming a German satellite. Beneš was “discouraged.”
¹³²
The same was true for Yugoslavia
¹³³
and Romania.
¹³⁴
In Poland Colonel Beck felt strengthened in his bid for rapprochement with Germany. As early as May, Italy began to drift away from France and look to Hitler with greater interest. François-Poncet concluded that the incredibly passive German masses “allowed themselves to be molded like soft putty.”
¹³⁵
“Their criteria is based on success. Hitler is a great man because he’s bold and events prove that he is right.”
¹³⁶

We shall end the account of this awful event with three quotations from the period. It is too easy today to reconstruct history and hand out a series of bad marks to the protagonists, as Charles Serre did in the report he culled from the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry.
¹³⁷
We have shown that the French people wanted no part whatsoever of any brutal action, and was therefore the main culprit. This cannot be held against it since it is very hard for a democracy, which had been bled dry on top of it, to consider a preventive war even though it may be justified.

Those countries that were friendly toward France, as Greek Minister Politis said, were “worried about a type of thinking that appears to be pervasive in France itself. Their representatives in France, in contact with
different segments of the population in the various regions were struck by the kind of
pacifist depression
¹³⁸
surfacing in many circles. They appear to want to keep the peace at any cost, barricaded behind what was called “the Maginot wall,” letting events on the outside unfold as they may, without seeing that a people engaged in such policy…could no longer lay claim to being called a great power.”
¹³⁹

To this farsighted opinion we may add that of the Minister of Marine, François Piétri. At a meeting of the military ministers and the chiefs of staff on April 4, 1936, Prime Minister Sarraut pompously opened the discussion: “France cannot accept that Germany build fortifications in the former demilitarized zone. We would be prevented from providing useful assistance to our Eastern allies.” This was correct and accurately described the worst consequence of Hitler’s brutal move. But what could be done? Two and a half hours of debate on the absence of an attack unit, about the theories of Major de Gaulle—that Gamelin rejected—on the naval blockade, came to no conclusion. Upon returning to the Ministry of Marine with Admiral Abrial, François Piétri made the following comment, which we find essential to underscore:
“Some people persist in refusing to accept the fact that in facing a strong country the only type of coercion is war.”
¹⁴⁰

Finally, Pope Pius XI provides us with the third quote. On March 16 he received French Ambassador Charles-Roux and told him straight away, “Had you ordered the immediate advance of 200,000 men into the zone the Germans had reoccupied you would have done everyone a very great favor.”
¹⁴¹

Chapter VI

T
HE
A
TMOSPHERE

T
he preceding exposition is part of a larger picture. We shall call “atmosphere” the components that make up the psychological environment. Without extensive definitive works
¹
we can examine only a number of key problems. We will not focus on the changing moods of public opinion, which we have observed and shall keep on monitoring at significant moments, but will rather examine the deeper trends.

1.

T
HE
S
TATUS OF
F
RENCH
P
ATRIOTISM

Rather than being triumphant and victorious, France in the 1930s was a nation wounded in its flesh, its land and its spirit. The wound ran deep enough to require more than one generation to heal. France was the country of Europe that had lost the greatest number of human lives with respect to its population, the death of young people that destabilized the nation and deprived it forever of material and creative forces. The biggest battles in the war took place on the French front. It was there that
the people’s works, the fruits of their labor, their houses, factories, cultivated land, roads, bridges, canals, and mines had been ravaged by shelling or systematic destruction by the enemy. All human works are destined to ruin; war, however, caused that ruin to take place several decades, if not several centuries, before its time.

Following the great consensus of the
Union sacrée
and the wave of enthusiasm of November 11, France came out of the war more lacerated than ever before. The working class wanted its reward for the sacrifices it made. If that reward was delayed too long, the proletariat would become more than ever an “alien body” within the nation. National values, praised by some people, were fading among large groups of the population and replaced by other values such as pacifism, internationalism or, more often, by a selfish demand for immediate enjoyment at any cost. The “good bourgeoisie” that had been savaged in its flesh was now facing a new and transient world of “war profiteers” and “nouveaux riches.”

France was also more isolated in the world than many people realized. It was fashionable to admire the victors of the Marne and Verdun, to invite French military missions and successful cultural missions that were temporarily able to mask the inexorable progress of English as the universal language. But jealousy, hatred or even loathing towards a France that “had died in the field of honor” were dominant. The Germans hated the French, whom they felt were behind the harshness of the Treaty. The British, as Lloyd George was said to have told Clemenceau, now considered the strongest military power on the continent to be an enemy. The Laborites condemned its militarism; the Conservatives, in the wake of the
Times
(owned by Lord and Lady Astor and edited by Geoffrey Dawson), remembered the colonial rivalries more vividly than the Entente Cordiale. The Italians complained that their war effort was not appreciated and their colonial demands had been forgotten. For the Soviets, France was the champion of the interventionists, bent upon destroying the young proletarian state. The Americans, whose only contact in France had been with merchants and fast women, returned home disappointed and spreading the legend that the French in their harshness had “rented the trenches” to the Sammies
*
who had come like brothers to the rescue.

France appeared, sadly, as a country in ruins, ravaged by hatred and social unrest, a tired and suffering nation. The survivors were shouldering the heavy burden of the First World War. All the men born before 1900,
with the exception of those deferred, the ones needed for special tasks and the draft dodgers, took part in the war. Young boys played games consisting of digging trenches and gloriously attacking those of the enemy. Nobody wanted to play the part of the “Boche,” an easy one because fathers and uncles brought back the hated pointed helmets as trophies. The smaller kids were often forced to wear them, knowing the part they were expected to play by howling and playing dead under the blows of the invincible ones. At the end of the school day they would play with rusty old cannon that almost every little town displayed. There were monuments to the war dead, commemorative ceremonies and parades of war veterans almost everywhere. Adult women remembered their anxieties and sorrows. Women outnumbered men in France. Since the 1920s young women and some war widows were competing for the men who had survived.
²
Other widows, dressed in black, were to remain faithful to their memories. According to their disposition the heroes either talked about their experiences or remained stubbornly silent. Some who had become pacifists wouldn’t allow their children to play those horrible games.

Reactions differed, however, starting with the statement “Better Hitler than war!” all the way to the enthusiasm of a new graduate of Saint-Cyr Military Academy or, in a totally different environment, the resolve of the convinced anti-fascist. Everyone sensed that new alignments were taking place. Before 1914 patriotism had its symbols: the flag, the
Marseillaise
, military parades with marching bands, the draped statue of Strasbourg. It all still existed but the statue of Strasbourg was no longer draped; France was “satisfied” and even, to use Bismarck’s words, “saturated.” Patriotism had become defensive and was consequently less exciting. The importance of the old symbols declined without them disappearing.

In the mid-1930s the tricolor banner had a strange fate: on the one hand, it was held up in opposition to the red flag. In the early summer of 1936, in those neighborhoods that voted for moderate candidates, its presence at the windows was a sign of opposition to the Popular Front. Young men were “brawling” a lot (it was the expression used at the time.) Some wore a tricolor on their lapels, others a red ribbon or a flower. That was the way the two “sides” singled themselves out.

At the same time, the left, including the communists, engaged in a sweeping effort to demonstrate that patriotism was not a right-wing
monopoly expressed, for example, in the famous statement read on July 14, 1935, by Jean Perrin at the Buffalo cyclodrome in Montrouge:

“They robbed you of Joan of Arc, a daughter of the people whom the king had abandoned when the popular sweep gave him victory…They tried to grab the flag of 89, that noble tricolor flag of republican victories… They also attempted to take the heroic
Marseillaise
away from us, that fierce revolutionary song that forced every throne in Europe to tremble.”
³

In her excellent study of the July 14 holidays,
⁴
Miss Rosamonde Sanson described the reverse movements coming together at the same time: on the one hand, a “fading away” following the triumphant July 14, 1919; on the other, a “recuperation” by an originally hostile left that first showed indifference and then approval of the “resurrection of the myth.” July 14 once again became a “people’s holiday.”

The left that had invented the May 1st holiday now also adopted the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. It added the red flag to the tricolor and the
Marseillaise
to the
Internationale
. All this was enough to frighten many moderates but also the pacifist left that now felt nostalgic for the good old days. This can best explain the fading of the old symbols rather than a real decline in nationalism, even though the latter changed its myths, shedding the chauvinist and bellicose attitude, increasingly drawn towards those great assemblies of people such as international sports events. We shall discuss the Olympic games of August 1936 in Chapter X. The too few historical studies of the Tour de France
⁵
and the World Soccer Cup indicate a giant wave of passion that cannot be understood without referring to the strong vibrant presence of national feeling. Perhaps there was somewhat less cheering when the troops were on parade but the Tour de France drew the most burning passions. The racers were grouped in national teams. Between 1930 and 1939 the Tour ended in victory six times for the French (André Leducq in 1930 and 1932, Antonin Magne in 1931 and 1934, Georges Speicher in 1933, Roger Lapébie in 1937), three times for the Belgians (1935, 1936, and 1939), and once by the Italian Gino Bartali in 1938. The French victory in 1937 almost created a diplomatic incident. Lapébie, who was from Bordeaux, was second in the general classification, and some of his supporters threw rocks at the Belgian Sylvère Maés, who was leading. The entire Belgian team left the Tour in protest. Needless to say, André Leducq or Antonin Magne
were much better known and more “popular” than any ambassador, general or most cabinet ministers.

In any event, national solidarity is opposed to class solidarity. Once the left co-opted the feelings and symbols of the homeland as its own, it had to accept a new kind of cohesion. The “Union Sacrée” formula did not sit well with the left because it was considered a scam—this did not prevent, on a few short-lived occasions, a wave of unity from sweeping the country, for example on September 2, 1939, in a different form than that of 1914 before the slaughter.

2.

T
HE
F
RENCH
T
RAVELED
V
ERY
L
ITTLE
O
VERSEAS

There is a startling contrast between the French people in 1936 and those today. While they share very little interest in permanent emigration, travel abroad, which is so common today, was practically unknown. Everything conspired to give the Frenchman of 1936 the reputation of being a “homebody.” The average income level, which was much lower than today, made such expenses impossible. The tradition of being rooted to the land was very strong. But the peasants never took vacations; workers and employees had no paid vacations prior to 1936, except for a handful of pioneering businesses. Only the bourgeois, professionals, professors, school teachers and government employees went on vacation. Without going into too much detail, we estimate that over 80 percent of the French people had no opportunity for leisure travel. As for the bourgeois, many owned a castle, a country house or a family home often located close to the city where they lived and where they generally would spend the summer. If ordinary people were able to cross the borders, it was because of exceptional circumstances or a specific professional need.