France and the Nazi Threat: The Collapse of French Diplomacy 1932-1939 (48 page)

They may have tried to avoid alarming them, but not to minimize the acquired German strength. Once General Didelet, replaced Renondeau
in December 1938 the opposite was to happen. Didelet who didn’t understand German well enough, offered the idea of a “German bluff” for a long time and the fact that it would be impossible for Hitler to wage war in the west before 1942. Didelet was a deeply honest man but also stubborn and self-assured, managing at times to convince his ambassador, Gamelin and the government that his views were correct. In this sense the mistaken analysis—which the
Deuxième Bureau
attempted to correct as best it could—may have influenced the course of events.
⁴⁶

The best information about countries far removed often originated with the military attaché. Colonel Lombard in the United States was carefully following the issues of aircraft purchases
⁴⁷
and the revisions to the Neutrality Act.
⁴⁸
He felt that “public opinion in general supported the sale of arms and ordnance to the democratic countries.”
⁴⁹
In Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Peru, military attachés were closely following German political, cultural, ideological and economic penetration.
⁵⁰
Faced with Axis propaganda, a naval officer requested some strong action: “Don’t just always send us Cécile Sorel.”
⁵¹

The adjunct military attaché Lieutenant Guillermaz, a future Chinese specialist, provided very precise information from China. He offered the best explanation about the interruption in Japanese offensive operations in 1938, the failure of Japanese negotiations with Chiang Kai-Shek, the Kuomintang’s terrorism, the beginnings of the attempt to form a pro-Japanese government by Wang Chin-Wei, and the importance of the Burma Road, opened in December 1938.
⁵²

We shall also mention the effectiveness and reliability of the information provided by men like Colonel Mendras, and even more by General Palasse
⁵³
in Moscow or like General d’Arbonneau and his successor General Musse in Poland, on who was in constant contact with General Stashiewicz, the chief of staff, and often with General Smigly-Rydz; Musse would play an important role with Léon Noël in August 1939.
⁵⁴
He was very much opposed to the Soviets and felt that “for many Poles the Russian threat was greater than the one from Germany.” “In the USSR today there is no energy…anyone with any authority who stands out is eliminated.”
⁵⁵
The air force attaché in Moscow, Luguet, felt on the contrary that the regime was “entirely solid,” the army “very strong” and that the economic potential was “very great.” But he said, “The USSR will probably attempt to avoid a land war.”
⁵⁶
General Palasse was pessimistic about the Red Army in April 1938
⁵⁷
and on June 13, 1939, sent an important report analyzing Russia’s war potential where
he confirmed his conclusions but felt that the weakness due to the purge was only temporary. His impression was that of “a well led army, disciplined and well trained… I therefore think that the USSR can play a key role in the balance of peaceful forces we are trying to put together in Europe.”
⁵⁸

* * * *

In attempting a rapid assessment of the work done by the “diplomatic machine” we reach the following conclusions:

1. There is no real evidence of serious “human errors” as such. The personnel of the department and the embassies did not attempt to alter what they felt was the truth to please anyone. Not only were there no serious mistakes but French observers, whether diplomats or attachés, were mostly well informed and objective. If they made mistakes they were willing to admit to them;

2. The behavior of the diplomatic corps, staffed mostly with high society “notables,” did enjoy a relatively luxurious social life, but this did not prevent them from attributing a lot of importance to the reactions of other social classes and groups in the population at large. Even though most of them were “on the right” or moderate radicals, the diplomats did not alter either their reporting methods or their assessments when the government was “left-wing.” They acted as servants of the state and applied the policies of the government in power;

3. Yet the system often broke down. Communications between the department and overseas posts, and the ceaseless flow of dispatches and cables was often poorly managed. Who was reading the various documents? Who was responsible when an ambassador in a foreign country was not informed about negotiations that concerned him? Since there wasn’t a single service at the Quai d’Orsay similar to the
Deuxième Bureau
of the Army General Staff to classify incoming information and reach a conclusion, wasn’t there a sense of drift? One gathers the impression that communication among some offices and the minister’s cabinet was far from perfect;

4. In the end, however, the biggest shortcoming of the system was the lack of liaison between diplomacy and the army. We have already seen as did Paul Reynaud or General Beaufre, that there was a discrepancy between the alliance system and defensive strategy. Why wasn’t this discussed more? Why didn’t the matter receive greater attention
when ambassadors and military men expressed their concern? Actually, besides occasional meetings, liaison took place either at too high a level—within the cabinet—or too low—since the summer of 1936 during the weekly meeting at the Quai d’Orsay or too rarely—at the High Military Committee and later the Permanent Committee of National Defense.

Establishing better coordination was a government matter related to parliamentary oversight. But, after all, the French people had the government and parliament they had chosen.

Chapter X

T
HE
P
OPULAR
F
RONT

1936-1937

T
he elections of April 26 and May 3, 1936, returned a strong majority of the alliance of the Communists (72 deputies), the SFIO Socialists (146 deputies) and the Radical-Socialists (115 deputies), with a few additional smaller groups—USR, Jeune République—and a smaller minority of independent Radicals (45 deputies.) There were therefore 378 deputies belonging to the Front versus 236 from the moderate opposition.
¹

The major unrest taking place at election time, with strikes and workers occupying the factories from the elections until June 12, 1936, along with expectations of deep social reforms, contributed to driving France inward and overshadowed foreign policy for a time. The situation was serious, however: the Rhineland was now under German control, Italy was victorious in Ethiopia, and both events had undermined France’s prestige. “The landscape was littered with ruins,” as Pierre Renouvin was to write.
²

Events—such as the civil war in Spain—were to quickly awaken the attention of a public opinion that was, for the time being, completely absorbed with its own affairs.

The June 23 foreign policy debate would not give way to a reappraisal. “Commitment to peace,” “collective security,” “limitation of armaments,” “there is nothing in this program that is any different from the usual ideas.”
³

Yet the new man in charge, Léon Blum, was anything but an ordinary politician. He was 64 years old, like Édouard Herriot, highly cultured and similarly moved by strong passions. The resemblance, however, stops there. Herriot liked to appear as a crumpled bon vivant, something that Léon Blum, who dressed with quiet elegance and had a touch of the artist about him—Lavallière tie and large brimmed hats—found distasteful. Herriot was always a crowd pleaser who spoke from the heart. Léon Blum was no less deeply passionate but kept his feelings under tighter control. His low voice prevented him from being an orator like Briand. But the audience listened intently and everything he said sounded impressive. His written speeches are far better than those of the more “eloquent” orators.

Only right-wing extremists and—depending upon the tactical moment—the Communists denied that he was intelligent, generous and honest.

Above all, he was simultaneously competent and a visionary. As André Blumel, his cabinet chief, said, “Léon Blum was not just a politician, he was also a writer, a novelist, a journalist, a short story writer, a literary critic and a civil law jurist.”
⁴
We should also add that he had a great awareness of economic issues compared to his contemporaries. His economic policy was not, as Jean Marcel Jeanneney wrote, “the result of improvisations nor due to circumstance but rather the application of a doctrine that had been thought through over a long period of time.”
⁵
He would change his views “while the left in 1936 knew very little about crisis therapy.”
⁶
During the second Blum cabinet, March–April 1938, thanks to Georges Boris, he had become acquainted with the thinking of John Maynard Keynes.
⁷

Like Doumergue in 1934, Léon Blum was prime minister without holding any other additional ministry. “He was a man,” wrote Blumel, “who was used to working alone very quickly and he would seek out many opinions and ask for a lot of advice but then reached his own decisions.”
⁸
André Blumel, Jules Moch, the secretary general in the prime minister’s office (later replaced by Yves Chataigneau), the historian Jean Maurain, Oreste Rosenfeld, the editor-in-chief of
Le Populaire
, the historian Charles-André Julien, and a few others helped “spare him a number of unnecessary meetings.”
⁹

This made it possible for him to focus on the issues. Ch.-A. Julien said, “He was very authoritative,” possessing great “enthusiasm” and the “need to act…to create…to work,” but he was also “full of scruples.” “He would never have done anything he felt was contrary to the law and to rectitude.”
¹⁰

These memoirs of his close aides, appropriately collected in the volume
Léon Blum chef de gouvernement
,
¹¹
makes our search for other more distant and doubtful testimony unnecessary.

Yet in many areas, but especially in foreign policy, the Popular Front experience produced rather meager results. No doubt terrible events will defeat the best of men but the historian must examine all the facets of the issue, including personal circumstances.

There was a weakness in Léon Blum. The visionary doesn’t appear to have displayed sound judgment. We have already quoted several writings concerning Hitler’s probable rise to power, the need for unilateral disarmament, the illusion that Germany could be given “equal rights” and thus prevent it—without the use of force—from actually reaching parity in armaments, and others that make it doubtful he could overcome his own illusions. The “dreamer” was much more attractive than the cynic but he did make some dangerous mistakes.

Blum undoubtedly wished to put Herriot in charge of the Quai d’Orsay. He met with him on May 19 but Herriot turned down the offer, preferring his position as President of the Chamber of Deputies; in any case, Herriot was not enthusiastic about the Popular Front. Paul-Boncour, as a dissident of the Socialist Party, could not be considered—nor Daladier, Chautemps or Georges Bonnet (who was to be appointed ambassador to Washington in January 1937) were to Blum’s liking. The balancing of the cabinet required a Radical. Blum finally decided on Yvon Delbos, a less experienced man but with strong opinions, one of his friends and a neighbor (they both lived in the same building on the Île Saint-Louis), a man whose docility he could predict, elected to Parliament from the Dordogne, and a graduate of the École Normale Superieure with an advanced degree in literature.
¹²
Pierre Viénot, a former leader of Franco-German rapprochement became Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, particularly in charge of the protectorates and the Middle East mandates.

Delbos was a hard working loyalist, certainly no imaginative visionary. In examining his dedication or the limits of his imagination, two contradictory and converging conclusions may be reached—that of
Armand Bérard, who was on Pierre Viénot’s staff, and that of Delbos himself: “diligent worker, devoid of any prejudice, dispassionate, except when it came to republican principles, he was nevertheless capable of great obstinacy…” “A loyal partner, Léon Blum seeking to control French policy and our initiatives overseas found in him a loyal collaborator, and an associate who would not undertake anything important without consulting him.”
¹³

This is what Léon Noël had to say: “A mediocre personality, a good man but without character and lacking authority who remained at Foreign Affairs for two years. An old-fashioned Radical, somewhat a sectarian ideologue, who furthermore acquiesced with docility to the recommendations of Alexis Léger…”
¹⁴

We shall allow events themselves to draw the conclusions to these descriptions.

1.

A T
IMID
B
EGINNING

Public opinion understood during the first few weeks of the new government that it should not expect any spectacular changes.

With a socialist at the helm, a member of the party that was more resolutely opposed to Mussolini, one could have expected that France’s position toward Italy would have stiffened. Italy had just completed its conquest of Ethiopia, at least in principle, and the king of Italy was proclaimed emperor of Ethiopia on May 9. Clearly “annexation didn’t automatically resolve all of Italy’s problems. She had to station several hundreds of thousands of men in Ethiopia and its financial and economic problems were just beginning.”
¹⁵
But the coincidence of that “dizzying” success and the victory of the Popular Front in France prompted the coming together of Italy and Germany, resulting in October in the formation of the Rome-Berlin Axis. The air force attaché in Berlin, Captain Stehlin, was the first to discover this rapprochement when by chance he met an Italian general, who was head of operations of the air force, wearing civilian clothes in the lobby of the Eden Hotel in the company of several officers and Major von Donat, head of the French section of the Luftwaffe intelligence branch. We have already mentioned that incident,
¹⁶
indicating how sincere and objective Ambassador
François-Poncet was in his analysis. Stehlin places that meeting at the end of April. It actually took place on May 28,
¹⁷
just a few days before the announced formation of the Léon Blum government. François-Poncet wrote on May 16: “The collaboration of those two fascisms is more likely now than their opposition to one another.” He felt the chance event of May 28 to be “troubling.” According to the political section as of May 11 and 12, Mussolini was still telling Count Coudenhove-Kalergi of “his preference for a policy of open and frank collaboration with France.”
¹⁸
Everything changed in the middle of May. Ambassador de Chambrun, in Rome, noted on June 5 “the possibility of a German-Italian combination was becoming likely.” Journalist Bertrand de Jouvenel also met with Mussolini on June 3 and, while the Duce praised the merits of a Franco-Italian understanding he no longer believed that it could be achieved. “The head of the Italian government feels that the new French government is made up of men who are his adversaries. On the other hand under the present circumstances he doubts French power. The recent factory occupations in particular had made a strong impression on him.” In other words, de Jouvenel was “pessimistic.”
¹⁹