France and the Nazi Threat: The Collapse of French Diplomacy 1932-1939 (33 page)

Only a few more generous minorities, aware of the overwhelming human tragedy implied by any kind of immigration, clearly opted for a welcoming attitude. The
Ligue des droits de l’homme
[League for Human Rights], some Catholic circles (Monsignor Chaptal, the deputy Bishop of Paris) the
Ligue internationale contre l’antisémitisme
[International League Against Anti-Semitism] the
Secours rouge international
[Red Aid, a communist organization], the reunited CGT and many committees strenuously came to the defense of the dignity and status of foreigners. That was also the role played only too briefly by Undersecretary of State Philippe Serre, a precursor of the Christian Democrats.

In examining the groups of foreigners one after the other some specific issues emerge.

The political refugees of the First World War did not cause major problems. The 67,000 White Russians included in the 1926 census certainly did not cause any pro-Soviet feelings. The policy of suspicion toward the USSR could be explained by other, more important, reasons. The 26,000 Armenians in France, according to the count, did not stop France from seeking the friendship and later, after 1936, an alliance with Turkey, their mortal enemy. The same was true for the Hungarians who had fled the Horthy regime and the first Italian anti-fascists.
²⁸

Among the larger groups the Belgians and the Poles were the ones causing the least problems. The Polish government, however, was not
in favor of emigration. It made an effort to preserve the nationality of its citizens by creating schools, newspapers and sending priests. Perhaps this issue prompted Colonel Beck’s demand for colonies for Poland, especially after 1936. In any case no significant diplomatic incidents can be seen.

The huge Italian contingent was the oldest and that become more easily assimilated, blending slowly into the French population, especially when it purchased abandoned farms in southwestern France and went into farming. It nevertheless played a particular role because of fascist activity. Mussolini hated emigration, which he considered a loss of Italian life forces. He therefore tried to maintain among Italians overseas the nationalist faith and the fascist spirit when possible. He pulled out all the stops through schools, action by the consuls, the organization of children’s vacation camps in Italy, and conscription for military service. It is worth mentioning that “very often the sons of foreigners born in France refused to be naturalized to avoid being subjected to the same military obligations as the French.”
²⁹

Did the Duce succeed in his efforts? Everything indicates on the contrary that the bulk of Italian workers backed anti-fascism. Some of them joined the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War and the dialog on the front at Guadalajara from one line to the other is well known: “Noi siamo Italiani” (We are Italians), cried out Mussolini’s “volunteers.” “E noi siamo gli Italiani di Garibaldi” (And we are Garibald’s Italians), was the Republican answer.

Most of the time, contrary to what took place at the end of the nineteenth century, relations between French and foreign workers were generally good. The labor unions were making sure this was the case, even though they noticed the way immigrant workers were “under-unionized.”

For the Spaniards the issue was mostly a passive one. With the fall of Barcelona (January 26, 1939), huge columns of refugees—over 400,000—marched north toward France through the hills and the mountains, egged on by misery and fear.
³⁰
A negotiation took place in January 1939 between the Spanish Republican government and France that we shall examine further ahead.

Events, however, moved faster than the talks. There was a debate in the Chamber of Deputies on March 10, 14, and 16, 1939, regarding the welcome that couldn’t be denied to these poor people. The deputy from the Basses-Pyrénées, Ybarnegaray, and right-hand man to Colonel de
La Rocque, refused that “crushing burden.” The minister of the interior, Albert Sarraut, defended his improvised welcome of the refugees. An organization was created and camps were set up with 170,000 refugees divided into 77 departments. A few very large camps held loyalist soldiers and militiamen. This tidal wave amounted to an estimated total of 450,000 people. The French government in agreement with the Franco government, only wished to keep those who were compromised; only 200,000 agreed to return to Spain. Mexico and some Latin American countries welcomed a few tens of thousands.
³¹

German refugees were far fewer than the Spaniards and entered France gradually. There were communists, socialists, Catholics, and, most of all, Jews—all of whom were completely destitute. Following the Anschluss on March 28, 1938, President Roosevelt tried to organize a “non-political” system to rescue these unfortunate people. France agreed for a committee to meet at Evian, assembling thirty-two countries that began its work on July 6 under the honorary chairmanship of Henry Bérenger, president of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Senate. Germany and the USSR had not been invited nor had Poland, a country of emigration. By that time 150,000 out of 600,000 German Jews had emigrated, and France had welcomed 10,000. Except for the Dominican Republic, every country found excuses to avoid making any promises in providing shelter. On October 4, after Munich, the French, American and British ambassadors took an initiative towards Ribbentrop for the Jews to be allowed to take their possessions with them. He simply replied that Germany’s goal was to be rid of the Jews.
^32
.

American Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles discussed the issue with Bonnet and Daladier, as well as the possibility of sending some Jews to selected French colonies.
³³
At a meeting between Chamberlain, Halifax, Daladier, and Bonnet in Paris on November 24, French and British colonies were discussed once again.
³⁴
Bonnet said there were 40,000 German Jews in France and that “our country is saturated with foreigners.” In the end, only short-term solutions were considered. Many of these unfortunate people were to become victims of one of the worst clauses in the June 1940 armistice, which allowed them to be handed over to Nazi Germany.

5

F
OREIGN
C
OUNTRIES AS
S
EEN IN
L
ITERATURE

For most Frenchmen the outside world appeared only through movies and books. Films certainly had a considerable impact but they magnified only existing stereotypes. The supremacy of American films showed the French an artificial society created by Hollywood or the monotony of the “westerns.” What can one say about Flanders as they appear in
La Kermesse Héroïque
? Articles and books had some influence on very different levels.

The French have a strong tradition of long distance exploration and reading travel stories is something they enjoy. Since “unexplored lands” were dwindling, the adventurer’s travels replaced exploration (Henri de Monfried in the Red Sea) or the sportsman (Alain Gerbault in his solo crossing of the Atlantic) or those of anthropologists, geologists or geographers. In the 1930s, a large series in twenty volumes called
La géographie universelle
, edited by Paul Vidal de La Blache and Lucien Gallois, and later by Emmanuel de Martonne and Albert Demangeon, was published. The prestigious geographers who were Vidal de La Blache’s disciples (de Martonne was his son-in-law), such as Henri Baulig, Jules Sion, Max Sorre, Augustin Bernard, and other eminent specialists, worked on this giant undertaking. The French school of geography was at its best sending young researchers to Japan (Francis Ruellan), Brazil (Pierre Monbeig), Southeast Asia (Pierre Gourou), North Africa (Jean Dresh), and many other locations. André Siegfried, who was more of a “sociologist” and a “humanist,” published books about the United States and Canada with a wide readership like those by Demangeon on the British Empire. The young ethnologist Jacques Soustelle was among the pioneers of pre-Colombian studies in Mexico. Raoul Blanchard for the Alpine areas and Daniel Faucher for the Mediterranean regions and the Pyrenees were also part of this prestigious group.

These were scientific works aimed at a small elite. The audience for travel stories by great journalists and writers was much wider. As Albert Thibaudet wrote, “From the war to the economic crisis, if a writer didn’t spend part of the year traveling the world on a mission, giving lectures or being a reporter, he would stand out.”
³⁵
There were many books about the French Empire,
³⁶
the United States (Georges Duhamel, Jules Romains), the USSR (André Gide, Edouard Herriot); India and Ceylon (André
Chevrillon, Francis de Goisset), China and Tibet (the “Croisière Jaune” sponsored by Citroën, André Malraux), England (Paul Morand) and books resulting from long reporting pieces by Albert Londres, Henri Béraud, etc.

Fiction, even more than travel literature, indulged in the exotic. Thibaudet finds “the adventure novels” by Pierre MacOrlan and Pierre Benoit different from the “planetary novel,” that is, more literary. There were even “Quai d’Orsay” writers encouraged by the mandarin Philippe Berthelot,
³⁷
Paul Claudel,
³⁸
Paul Morand, and Jean Giraudoux.
³⁹

Translations of works of fiction were once more on the increase. The “Feux Croisés” series, created by Plon in 1927, was edited by Charles Du Bos and Gabriel Marcel; the “Du monde entier” series issued by Gallimard in 1931 gave Anglo-Saxon titles a dominant position, D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Rosamond Lehman, Charles Morgan, and Elizabeth Goudge were at the top of the list, followed by the enormous success of
Gone With the Wind
by Margaret Mitchell. In 1935 11 percent of the books published in France were translations (compared to 2 percent in Germany and in England). The chart below shows
⁴⁰
the primacy of the English language, although the statistics do not break out the American part.

Without presuming to provide a complete description of such an enormous issue, we shall attempt, using as an example, France’s main partners to draw the picture created by traveling writers for the benefit of the armchair travelers.

Germany was first among France’s worries. Since few people traveled there, very little was known about the country and few Germans came to France; besides feelings, foreign exchange controls set up in 1932 made any kind of foreign travel virtually impossible. Germany was also the target of lingering passions and stereotypes based on hatred.

Few French writers knew contemporary Germany
⁴¹
except for a few German specialists like Edmond Vermeil and Robert d’Harcourt,
and some rare historians like Pierre Benaërts or Maurice Baumont. Jean Giraudoux played an important role among the writers, and the image he created was that of an idyllic Germany until 1937. At that time he was still referring to the Hitler regime as a “public safety regime.”
⁴²
The writer who stood out was Romain Rolland.
⁴³
Few Frenchmen had as many German friends as he did before the war. While completely separated from nationalism, the author of
Au dessus de la mêlée
was one of those rare writers who had not forgotten the importance of the enemy’s culture. He turned to the USSR at the beginning of the 1930s, but never became a card-carrying communist. He returned to France after an extended exile and from 1937 on lived in Vezelay. His new intellectual position led him to shed “non-violence” and condemn Nazi Germany. Anti-fascism now became more important and in 1933 he solemnly refused the “Goethe medal.”

Since 1930 the fear of war had reappeared. Ladislas Mysyrowicz showed how French literature stopped producing flamboyant war novels after 1930. With the economic crisis and the rise of Nazism the German ghost reappeared. As Giono admitted in
Europe
in 1934, “I can’t forget the war. I would like to. At times I go for two or three days without thinking about it then suddenly I see it, I feel and hear it…and I’m afraid.”
⁴⁴
And Jean Guéhenno in
Journal d’un homme de quarante ans
: “War is on the rise and I can feel the same fear, the same crushing fatigue. We weren’t born for this.”
⁴⁵

Rolland, Giono, and Guéhenno were men of the left with pacifist tendencies. A “period piece,”
La guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu
, a play by Jean Giraudoux, opened in 1935 and belonged to the same school of thought. However, it was impossible not to notice a right-wing pacifism displaying an identical weariness.
⁴⁶
While the former was deep seated, modified and affected by hatred of fascism, the latter—at least among the extremists—originated in a virulent form of nationalism that was chauvinist and “fundamentalist” as well as attracted to fascist “order,” the only one capable of stopping the Bolshevik threat. Among these right-wing pacifists attracted to Germany we can cite Louis-Ferdinand Céline in
Voyage au bout de la nuit
(1932) and
Bagatelles pour un massacre
(1937), a virtual “justification of desertion and cowardice,”
⁴⁷
and also
La Comédie de Charleroi
(1934) by Drieu La Rochelle. Céline and Drieu both had one thing in common with Hitler: anti-Semitism.