Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T19:22:07.008Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The European Crisis and the Downfall of the French Republic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Yves R. Simon
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Numerous books and articles dealing with the disaster of France have already been published in this country. Most of them are not limited to the recording of facts; their main concern is to explain this bewildering event: the sudden collapse, after so brief a struggle, of such a power as the French Republic. Although the explanations differ largely from one another, on the ground of a diversity of experiences, sources, political preferences and prejudices, most writers have commonly a tendency to emphasize the part played, in France's defeat, by the individual mistakes of military chiefs and political leaders.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , January 1941 , pp. 32 - 64
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1941

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. On betrayal and defeatism in France during the World War I, see Brogan, D. W., France under the Republic. The Development of modern France. 1870–1939. Harper and Brothers, 1940, p. 535 ffGoogle Scholar.

2. To be noted: although powerful and noisy, this support was far from being universal. The whole Right Wing, the whole Center and the right wing of the Parti Radical approved the occupation of the Ruhr district. The other political groups were opposed to it, some of them violently.

3. See thereabout Information on the Problem of Security, by Wheeler-Bennett, J. W. and Langermann, F. E., Allen and Unwin, London, 1927, pp. 20 ffGoogle Scholar.

4. Instead of the territorial management contemplated by Foch, Premier Clémenceau and President Poincaré, President Wilson offered the French a pledge of immediate assistance in the case of unprovoked aggression by Germany. This plan materialized in a Triple Pact of Guarantee ratified by the British and the French in October and November, 1919. “The American Treaty was not even discussed in the Senate, but was automatically denied ratification by the adverse vote against the Treaty of Versailles on March 19, 1920”. J. W. Wheeler-Bennett and F. E. Langermann, p. 30. In consequence of the American refusal, the Franco-British agreement was considered as void.

5 For reliable information (free from party spirit), see Brogan, D. W., Op. cit., p. 527 ffGoogle Scholar.

6. The French Socialists who took part in the international meetings at Zimmerwald (September, 1915) and Kienthal (August, 1916) were formally disavowed by the executive of their party. They formed the nucleus of an extreme left group which voted consistently against war credits. At the socialist congress of Bordeaux in 1912, the same minority group “succeeded in getting a motion passed authorizing the sending of delegrates to the International Socialist Conference at Stockholm, where the German and Austrian parties were to be represented”. (Fraser, G. and Natanson, Th., Léon Blum, London, 1937, p. 133)Google Scholar. The French delegates to Stockholm were refused their passports by the government of Ribot.

7. Let it be noted that the French word radical is not felicitously translated by the English word radical. The Parti Radical has always been an essentially bourgeois party, occasionally allied with Socialists against the Church, but always ready to cooperate with the Right Wing when capitalistic privileges seemed seriously threatened.

In the last few years the policy of the Parti Radical became more and more ambiguous. Many of its member joined the worst elements of the Right in their pro-Fascist intrigues. After the dissolution of the People's Front coalition in 1938, the Parti Radical could no longer be considered in any way as a leftist organization. No great party is to be blamed more than the Parti Radical for the appeasement policy, the betrayal, of democracy, the deficiencies of armament-production, the breakdown of popular energies, the defeatist propaganda and finally the surrender of the Republic.

8 See Rosenberg, Arthur, A History of the German Republic, p. 15 ffGoogle Scholar.

9. Because of the emphasis laid upon the hostility met, in large sections of French opinion, by the policy of international cooperation and understanding with Germany, the reader may wonder how the Briand policy was possible at all. Three facts are to be pointed out: first, the liberal and socialist majority which supported Briand at the Parliament owed its success to an ensemble of factors a part of which was relevant to internal policy; second, Briand always proved exceptionally skillful in the handling of parliamentary assemblies; finally, considering the prestige he enjoyed abroad, even adversaries were not far from viewing him as an irreplaceable man.

10. Such was the resentment of the German people against the actual demarcation of Germany's eastern boundaries that no German statesman would have been permitted to speak of a definitive recognition of those boundaries. Only Hitler was powerful enough to decide, in his famous agreement with the Polish government, that the question of the Corridor should not be raised for a period of ten years.

11. See Italy's Foreign and Colonial Policy, by Macartney, M. H. H. and Cremona, P., p. 296 ffGoogle Scholar.

12. See thereabout my booklet La Campagne d' Ethiopie et la Pensée Politique Française, Desclée De Brouwer, Paris, 1936Google Scholar.

13. Significantly enough, those who complained so bitterly about the dismemberment of the Hapsburg Empire and treated inimically the young Slav nations, did not appar-entlty find any wrong in the annexation, by Italy, of extensive territories which had belonged to Austria for centuries. Italy, the first totalitarian state in Western Europe, and one of the very first states, in post-War Europe, to adopt a resolutely hostile attitude towards France, was granted by the French Nationalists a treatment that Czechoslovakia, a true ally of France, was refused by the same people.

14. At the Conference of Genoa, 1922, where representatives of the Allied Powers met, for the first time, representatives of Moscow, M. Barthou led the opposition to any understanding with Soviet Russia.

15. For this period see the two books of Werth, Alexander, France in Fermeni and Which Way France? Harper, New York and LondonGoogle Scholar. Speaking of the compaign to which we are referring, the author says that it was “equal in savagery only to the anti-Semitic ravings of the nazi Sturmer”.

16. In fact, only a small minority of French Communists left the Communist Party when Soviet Russia started her new policy of friendly cooperation with the Nazis. The French Communist Party supported cynically Hitler's peace moves in September 1939. Throughout the War, a number of members of the outlawed party carried on a treacherous propaganda in favor of a peace on Hitler's terms.

17. About the Munich Agreement, see H. F. Armstrong, Where There is no Peace; A. Werth, France and Munich; A. Simone, J'Accuse. The Men Who Betrayed France (reviewed in this issue of the REVIEW OF POLITICS).

18. Party-minded people are accustomed to thrust upon a single group or party, v.g. the group or party that they dislike most, the whole responsibility for public misfortunes. According to a ceitain propaganda, whose origin is easily recognizable, the military unpreparedness of France in 1938, 1939 and 1940 was entirely due to the mischief wrought by the People's Front administration (June 1936-April 1938). In so far as it intends to exonerate the political adversaries of the People's Front, such an explanation is not worth being discussed. It is evident, indeed, that enormous mistakes and criminal negligences have been committed, in regard to military preparation, before and after the period when the People's Front was in power.

It being understood that all political groups (to say nothing of the general staff) are to be blamed for the amazing inadequacy of French military forces, the case of the People's Front administration, in the present state of our information, can be outlined as follows: (1) The People's Front movement was essentially intended to bring about social reforms and to protect popular liberties against Fascism. Its origin can be traced both to the exceptionally heavy sufferings undergone by the French proletariat during the preceding years and to the menace of a fascist revolution. By the very fact that it was essentially the expression of social aspirations, the People's Front movement created, all over the nation, a frame of mind which distracted the French from concentrating their energies on national defense. Throughout the history of modern societies we notice, indeed, the permanent possibility of a conflict between the requirements of national preservation and those of social progress: this conflict, in the particular case we are dealing with, worked to the detriment of national preservation.

(2) It has been often said that the social laws passed under the administration of M. Blum were excellent in themselves. I should not even go that far. Let us better say that they were good in their principle. But something was wrong with them. v.g. their uniformity. Had it been advisable to cut the labor-day, it would still have been a fantastic blunder to impose the same time-limitation upon large scale industrial plants and upon many small enterprises which play such a considerable part in the economic and social life of France. Roughly enforced, the law establishing the 40-hour week was a fatal blow to small employers and caused in the lower middle-class a dreadful resentment against the People's Front. Now, even if they had been entirely good in themselves, those social laws could not be passed all at once as they were, without causing a good deal of distu.bance and cutting down the industrial output for a good while. On the eve of a war, the moment was as badly chosen as possible.

(3) As to the strikes which, in all likelihood, caused much more harm than the overhasty enforcement of the social reforms, it seems that a distinction should be made between those which took place before the passing of the new laws and those which took place later. The former were clearly intended to create such pressure as to forbid the parliament to stop the reformist movement; their meaning was plain and they were, on the whole, carried on with some kind of order. Most of the latter, on the contrary, looked chaotic, unreasonable, unexplainable, meaningless. From about the Autumn of 1936 until the complete liquidation of the People's Front in 1938, it might be guessed that some people in key positions were doing their best to create, in France's industrial life, a state of disorder, confusion, restlessness and anxiety. Who were those people? In all likelihood several influences were at work, without it being possible to determine to what extent their converging action was consciously unified. Although the Communist Party is undoubtedly to be blamed for a good part of the evil done, it seems difficult to charge the Communists with having systematically organized, at that time, the sabotage of French production. This hypothesis would imply, indeed, that the Soviet government had, as early as 1936, given up its policy of resistance to Nazi Germany, which is unlikely. Trotzkyites and free-lance revolutionists were often mentioned as possible authors of disorders which looked particularly strange and absurd. It becomes more and more likely that a great deal of sabotage was carried on by sympathizers, or paid agents, of the Fascist and Nazi powers. Finally, it seems that some employers cut down purposely the output of their factories, in order to precipitate the fall of the People's Front government. Many indications point to the conclusion that this sabotage by the employers did not end with the liquidation of the People Front, but remained effective up to the liquidation of the French Republic.

19. See Gurian, W., Future of Bolshevism, Sheed and Ward, 1936Google Scholar, and Halévy, Elie, L'Ere des Tyrannies, Gallimard, Paris, 1938Google Scholar.

20. See Brogan, D. W., Op cit., p. 529Google Scholar. “Behind the facade of Marxism a deeper French revolutionary tradition was hidden, and it was the spirit of 1793, of Blanqui and the Commune of 1871, that now sprang to life”. “The mobilization not only took place with technical but with spiritual smoothness; for a moment there were only Frenchmen”.