France and the Nazi Threat: The Collapse of French Diplomacy 1932-1939 (34 page)

Another very important “cliché” should also be noted with respect to Germany and fascist Italy, which compares France as an “old” country to the “young” countries.

France was in effect a country with low birth rates: the excess of births over deaths disappeared in the 1930s and a small increase in deaths over births was recorded. But was this a
French
characteristic or a western one? Actually, the French birth rate was higher than that of England in 1936. Hitler’s natalist policies gave Germany a slight edge, while Mussolini was unable to counter a steady decline in Italy that had been higher to begin with. During the years 1926–1930 France’s net reproduction rate was higher than that of England, Germany, and Sweden. It is true that France, due no doubt to the backward conditions of family farming and the awful accommodations available to the working class, had a higher mortality rate than neighboring countries.
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It mattered little that Western countries were in roughly the same situation and that France wasn’t worse off. A kind of orchestrated or unconscious thinking placed it among the “old” and therefore decadent countries. She was being compared to “young” and “dynamic” countries such as pre-Hitler Germany, and even more with Hitler in power, and to Mussolini’s Italy.

The worst book on the subject was certainly the one by Friedrich Sieburg,
Dieu est-il Français?
*
The first French translation was published in 1940, the first German edition in 1929. We say “the worst” because Sieburg, who was the Paris correspondent of the
Frankfurter Zeitung
since 1923, enjoyed showing an emotional affection toward France. The future Nazi that he was forgave nothing as he wrote long segments on the easy life one could live there.

“France hanging on to the coattails of humanity is slowing down a race that can either lead the world toward the stars or into the abyss.” “An island in a changing universe, the rationalistic France with the blood of civilization flowing through its veins is beginning to fear progress while a romantic Germany with its faith in destiny has turned progress into its…religion.”
⁴⁹
Every intellectual group attempting to promote Franco-German understanding prior to Hitler’s rise to power got bogged down by this false issue. For example, a conference of Catholic professors in July 1931 at Cologne and in December of the same year at Juvisy centered its debate on the issue of France’s “old age.” The book published as a result was entitled
Dynamisme et statisme
.
⁵⁰
Reverend Delos, a Dominican, saw in German dynamism “the mystique of race.” Oddly, his German counterpart, Professor Hermann Platz of Bonn University, advised caution in
accepting such a “technical” opposition and instead praised the “boiling over” of French dynamism, and rather wisely concluded that great defeats aroused nations more than victories.

On the other hand, Pierre Viénot, who would be part of the Léon Blum government, also extolled German dynamism, using very reasonable words after spending six years in Berlin and the Rhineland. “It’s the forward movement encouraged by anxiety.” Was it because many young people joined the National Socialist Party that energy was equated with youth? “Strange youth…especially when compared to France’s apparent aging. Where does it come from? Why and how does Germany get to be younger than France? The empire of Charlemagne had both countries as one.”
⁵¹

We should also quote the young Raymond Aron who was a lecturer at the University of Cologne after graduating from the École Normale. From December 1930 to June 1931 the group
L’Union pour la vérité
, founded by Paul Desjardins, organized “free discussions” on “Franco-German problems after the war.”
⁵²
Among those participating were well-known historians such as Camille Bloch and Jules Isaac; the writers André Chamson, Ramon Fernandez, Jean Guéhenno, Vladimir d’Ormesson, and Jean de Pange; German scholars and philosophers also took part. While agreeing that there was “a truly admirable energy within the German people,” Raymond Aron offered a clear explanation: “Dynamism-Stagnation”—”Let’s understand the circumstances first…During the Boulanger affair we were thought to be the agitated, unstable nation always searching while the Germans were sure of themselves and of their destiny. Let us not forget the inevitable conservatism of the victor and the inevitable revolutionary bent of the vanquished.”

The insidious confusion of the desire for peace and the wish to keep the status quo with old age, and the desire for change and bellicose spirit with youth, was a favorite myth of the dictators. To go and get oneself killed for the salvation and glory of the homeland requires both enthusiasm and obedience. Then it’s not just peace that looks “old” but democracy as well. Rather than seeing in those internal tensions a rich source of change, the fascist regimes take them as a negative scattering of energies. To accept France’s “old age” is in some ways, even though one may be against it, equivalent to justifying the so-called will to “be young.” Italy, which at times felt unjustly despised by French arrogance, was whipped up to a frenzy that sought to justify the paramilitary organization of its youth. “Youth and war are two concepts joined by a tradition that is recognizable and now verified by experience.”
⁵³

Jules Romains wrote, “A people may become intoxicated by the idea of old age. It is a morbid idea… Old age for a people is first of all a state of mind…that is to say something tied to the spirit and the will.”
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While Germany remained the hereditary enemy, England was the country of the “Entente cordiale.” But what a disappointment! Almost every Frenchman felt it to be an unreliable ally and in some parts of the world, such as the Middle East, or in the colonies it would turn into an implacable adversary, and an underhanded enemy, the “Perfidious Albion.” There were some hated symbols of the unfriendly attitude, such as Lloyd George, who sabotaged the Versailles Treaty, and most of all T.E. Lawrence, the author of
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, who with the help of the Syrian Bedouins fought the Turks and occupied Damascus. In an excellent thesis Michel Larès proved that Lawrence was favorable to France on the one hand, and that on the other after 1921 he had ceased all political activity and joined the Royal Air Force as a private leading the life of a recluse.
⁵⁵
It made no difference; the French were convinced that Lawrence, up until his death in a motorcycle accident in 1935, was an agent of the intelligence service and had not stopped getting the Arabs in the Near East riled up against the French.

The degree of misunderstanding we have seen in the two countries at almost every page of our first five chapters was actually reciprocated. The Frenchmen able to understand the “gentleman” were very few—Abel Hermant, André Maurois, Francis de Croisset, Paul Morand.
⁵⁶
The conservative majority leadership of Great Britain from 1931 to 1940 was deeply “Gallophobic.” Lord and Lady Astor—the latter was an American while he was a member of Parliament in the House of Commons owned the
Times
of London—and the editor Geoffrey Dawson were engaged in a daily anti-French offensive that was favorable to Germany even though it was Nazi. The Astors eagerly invited Nazi politicians to their estate at Cliveden first and foremost Joachim von Ribbentrop. Part of British aristocracy followed their lead. Three prime ministers in a row—Macdonald, the repentant Laborite, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, were influenced by this Gallophobic atmosphere, as were even the heads of the Foreign Office—Sir John Simon, Sir Samuel Hoare, and Lord Halifax, the only exception being Anthony Eden who was forced to resign on February 27, 1938. The same would happen to the permanent secretary of the Foreign Office, Vansittart, who had been deprived of any real power in 1937 by being “promoted” to diplomatic councilor to the government. As for France’s other friends,
Winston Churchill, Leo Amery, and Harold Nicolson, they had all been carefully removed from power.
⁵⁷

Apparently the reason for this fundamental misunderstanding was the absence of personal ties of friendship between French and British political leaders after 1931. A careful reading of the memoirs and biographies on both sides will be convincing enough. While a Clemenceau had enjoyed warm and enduring friendships in England and later Jean Monnet would base his influence on his connections to many British and American leaders, in the 1931–1940 period there seems to be a large void. When the British—Eden, Duff Cooper, and Nicholson—go to the Riviera on vacation, it was to meet other British friends. A “professional” Francophile like Major-General Sir Edward Spears, former liaison officer, conservative MP, and president of the Franco-British parliamentary committee was proud of his many friendships in France. In reading his recollections of his meetings in 1939 with the owners of châteaux in Dordogne, the Lot, or Normandy, one gathers the impression that he picked the “gens du monde”—he uses the French expression—that were influenced by the defeatism of
L’Action Française
and who were a poor sampling of France’s elected officials.
⁵⁸

Conversely, we find no trace of any deep friendships of French political leaders with the British. Daladier had an English brother-in-law but didn’t go much further in his personal relations with the British. These relations were certainly courteous but not at all personal. Perhaps this absence of closeness may be explained by social differences. The conservative leadership, as Harold Nicolson points out,
⁵⁹
comes from the aristocracy, the gentry, people of a different era, “asleep in their hereditary comforts” as Ambassador Corbin says.
⁶⁰
The French leaders—Herriot, Laval, and Daladier—came from the petty bourgeoisie that felt out of place with the Tories. Nicolson, recalling Daladier at a dinner at the French embassy, admits that he was “not greatly impressed.” “…[C]ompared to our own ministers, who were resplendent in stars and ribbons, he looked like some Iberian merchant visiting the Roman Senate.”
⁶¹

There were relationships, for example between Lord Halifax and the philosopher from Grenoble, Jacques Chevalier, who later was to become a minister in the Vichy government, or between the member of parliament Jacques Bardoux, a highly respected specialist of England, and his former Oxford classmates Sir John Simon—the Appeaser—and Leo Amery—the Francophile. But Bardoux wasn’t playing a star role.
⁶²

It should also be pointed out that among high-level French officials, many had never traveled to England. Léon Noël, after switching from being head of the Sûreté to the diplomatic service, went there for the first time at age 48;
⁶³
General Giraud was over 65 in 1943.
⁶⁴

“Perfidious or cordial Albion?” in the eyes of French writers. The great “comparatist” Marius-François Guyard answered the question by saying that it was an uneven struggle. England’s friends were liberals and moderates, while its opponents were violent and extremist types who made much more noise than the others.
⁶⁵
But this remained limited to narrow circles. The masses were probably indifferent.

6.

T
HE
I
NFLUENCE OF
F
OREIGN
P
ROPAGANDA ON
P
UBLIC
O
PINION

“The manipulated, incoherent and fanatical press was most certainly a very imperfect reflection of the country’s image,” wrote Georges Bidault in 1938.
⁶⁶
Actually, everything seems to indicate that beyond the support coming from business circles, a large number of French newspapers received financial contributions from foreign countries.
⁶⁷
A few top newsmen said as much, for instance Pierre Lazareff in his 1943 book
Dernière Édition
or, better still, Pertinax (Henri Géraud) in
Les fossoyeurs
which he wrote in New York. According to Daladier’s testimony to the commission of inquiry looking into the Stavisky case on April 18, 1934, four-fifths of the newspapers were being financed by contributions.
⁶⁸

For the period 1932–1939 a few facts are known among a mass of others that remained hidden because that type of relationship necessarily took place covertly. One should also be cautious because it is easy to engage in calumny and because the amounts of money a government hands over to one of its agents to purchase the friendship of a newspaper or a journalist don’t always reach the intended beneficiary.

In studying the archives of the Italian Ministry of Popular Culture (“Minculpop”), Max Gallo used the letters of the Commendatore Amedeo Landini, an Italian consular agent of the in Paris handling contacts with the press between 1922 and 1940.
⁶⁹
There are even letters from Mussolini himself that are quite contemptuous of the French newspapers. Landini and his deputy Pettinati financed the pro-fascist newspapers
Le Franciste
of Marcel Bucard (900,000 francs from May 1934 to September 1935) and
L’Emancipation Nationale
of Jacques Doriot’s Parti Populaire Français. They had complete control of the
Revue Hebdomadaire
and bought, or attempted to buy,
L’Ami du Peuple
, the former newspaper belonging to François Coty in 1935 that was failing miserably in any case. They owned the Agence Transalpine and financed several others. According to Gallo, they even managed to tone down in this manner the anti-Italian sentiments of radical newspapers.
La Dépêche de Toulouse
, owned by Maurice Sarraut, was awarded “advertising contracts” and then it attacked the sanctions policy against Italy. The radical deputy Léon Archambaud was said to have received 3 million francs in 1935 to put pressure on his friends and for his newspaper
L’Éclaireur de Nice
.
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