Seven Ages of Paris (61 page)

THE RIGHT-WING LEAGUES

Soon after Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland in 1936, there were important elections in Paris. Jean-Paul Sartre for one refused to vote. “The political aspirations of left-wing intellectuals made him shrug his shoulders,” Simone de Beauvoir explained. Yet, while regarding the French political scene with “disengaged” aversion, de Beauvoir concedes at the same time that “Sartre and I read every word” of the latest turn in what was known as the Stavisky scandal. This dichotomy characterized the attitudes of others far beyond the arid little circle of the Café Flore. The Third Republic was now shaken by a slew of corruption cases. First, in 1928, came the shocking arrest of Klotz, the former Minister of Finance whom Clemenceau had so despised, on charges of issuing dud cheques. The greatest outrage, however, was provoked by Serge Stavisky, the son of a Ukrainian Jewish dentist with extensive contacts among politicians, journalists and the judiciary. By 1933 his financial activities were being investigated, but a criminal case against him was postponed nineteen times. It so happened that the public prosecutor who was allowing Stavisky to remain free was the brother-in-law of the current Prime Minister, Camille Chautemps. All of a sudden Stavisky was found dead in a house in Chamonix where he had gone to ground with his mistress. Suicide was alleged, but he was popularly believed to have been shot by an eager flic—opportunely for Chautemps. Overnight Stavisky became the best-known name since Dreyfus—and once again there were ugly undertones of anti-Semitism.

On 27 January 1934, the Chautemps government fell, after an innings of just two months and four days. Over the previous eighteen months, there had been five different governments, but with virtually the same faces in each. From mid-1932 up to the outbreak of war in 1939 France’s governments would total nineteen, including eleven different Premiers and eight Ministers of Finance. Just when the threat from Hitler’s new Third Reich was reaching its peak, France lacked continuity in the direction of her affairs, her leaders regarded with increasing contempt by both ends of the political spectrum. A favourite insult hurled from Parisian taxis became “Espèce de député!” The populace loathed the politicians, as did a progressively demoralized army; the politicians loathed each other. On 6 February 1934, passions overflowed in Paris—the start of something close to civil war in France. A group of right-wing, nationalist factions, which still clung to many of the illusions left over from the quatorze juillet of 1919 and were sickened by France’s subsequent retreat from grandeur, united to march on the Chamber of Deputies.

Among the various right-wing “leagues” were the Camelots du Roi, shocktroops of the monarchist, Catholic and anti-Semitic Action Française journal of Charles Maurras, which had spearheaded the campaign against Stavisky and his allies in the Radical Party. There were the violently anti-Communist Jeunesses Patriotes, who had taken on the role of Paul Déroulède’s Ligue des Patriotes, set up to avenge the defeat of 1870; and there was Solidarité Française, funded by the perfumier François Coty, its members parading in a paramilitary uniform of black beret and blue shirt and chanting their slogan “La France aux Français!”

The most articulate of the leagues was the Croix de Feu, founded in 1928 as an association of ex-soldiers decorated for bravery. Its leader, Colonel Casimir de la Rocque, had now dedicated himself to cleaning up the corrupt institutions of the Third Republic, and as a result the Croix de Feu acquired a political character, calling for “Honesty” and “Order” in public affairs. Although it was not strictly fascist (unlike some of the other leagues), it admired the efficiency and energy that Mussolini had instilled in Italian youth—and, as the scandals proliferated, it became more robustly anti-Republican.

Disgusted by the Stavisky scandal, de la Rocque combined with leaders of the other leagues to organize a march on the Assembly itself. On the morning of the 6th, Action Française appeared with inflammatory headlines: “The thieves are barricading themselves in their cave. Against this abject regime, everyone in front of the Chamber of Deputies this evening.” That evening at about six o’clock the first shocktroops tried to break through police barriers erected on the Pont de la Concorde, throwing stones, bottles and lengths of lead piping; when mounted police charged them, they slashed the hocks of their horses with razors attached to walking-sticks. Inside the Chamber the new government, led by Edouard Daladier, was desperately manoeuvring to get a vote of confidence. By 7:30, the police were losing ground, and after three warnings had been given to the crowd they received the order to fire. Seven demonstrators were killed and many wounded. Though forced back as far as the Opéra, the crowd fought their way back on to the Concorde, whereupon the police opened fire a second time. It was midnight before the Deputies concluded that they were safe from a repetition of September 1870.

Of some 40,000 demonstrators, sixteen had been killed and more than 650 wounded; well over a thousand policemen had been injured. From his secret battle headquarters the following day Colonel de la Rocque declared, “The Croix de Feu has surrounded the Chamber and forced the Deputies to flee.” This hardly accorded with the facts, but given the prevailing tensions it suddenly seemed—at least to the left—as if a new General Boulanger had emerged. Daladier now unexpectedly resigned. The former President Gaston Doumergue, aged seventy, took his place at the head of a national government and—to appease the anciens combattants of the right-wing leagues—the seventy-seven-year-old Marshal Pétain, Hero of Verdun, was appointed Minister of National Defence. It was the first time since 1871 that a Paris mob had brought about the collapse of a French government.

THE FRONT POPULAIRE

Shocked by the fall of Daladier, the entire left began to fear a right-wing coup d’état led by Colonel de la Rocque. On the morning of 9 February, the Communist L’Humanité summoned a mass meeting for that evening in the Place de la République, to demand the dissolution of both the Chamber and its opportunist allies, the right-wing leagues. That night two rival columns came towards each other near the République, one of Communists, the other of Jeunesses Socialistes, representing the two main left-wing parties, which had been at daggers drawn since falling out in 1920–1. At first a fight seemed inevitable. However, as the cry went up, “We’re not clashing, we’re fraternizing … we’re all here to defend the Republic,” the two groups mingled and shook hands, then marched onward together chanting “Unity of action!” Three days later, the CGT trades union called a general strike in protest against the “fascist peril,” and, for the first time since it had broken away thirteen years before, the Communist CGTU collaborated fully. That day the new pact was sealed in blood when, among the old Communard strongholds of eastern Paris, three-cornered confrontations between strikers, right-wing trouble-makers and the police led to four deaths.

These developments did nothing for national unity. After 6 February a right-wing coup d’état ceased to be a realistic possibility, while the left combined still more closely to put together a “common front against fascism.” That July, the Socialist leader, Léon Blum, and the Communist Maurice Thorez signed a pact of unity, and by October L’Humanité was debating the advantages of a “Front populaire contre le fascisme.” Meanwhile, France’s economic plight was further enhancing the attractions of left-wing solidarity. On the quatorze juillet 1935, de la Rocque’s Croix de Feu paraded smartly down the Champs-Elysées, but it was the left which got the upper hand. More than half a million Parisians gathered on the Bastille beneath giant red banners proclaiming “Paix, Pain, Liberté!,” and the Front Populaire was officially launched. Less than a year later, in May 1936, France went to the polls and the Front Populaire was swept into power. The Communists won seventy-two seats, having previously held only ten, but the Socialists, who gained another forty-nine seats, were the largest party, so it was Blum who formed a government. On 24 May some 400,000 Parisians congregated at the Mur des Fédérés to give thanks, amid cries of “Vive le Front Populaire! Vive la Commune!” The left had achieved its greatest victory since 1871, but with Germany becoming ever more menacing, it was not at all clear what the new government should do.

For the workers of France the answer was increased pay, a forty-hour week with wages for forty-eight hours (or better) and holidays with pay. Otherwise they would strike. Three weeks after Blum’s election, the Lavalette factory in north-west Paris and the Nieuport aircraft works at Issy in the south-west—building aeroplanes urgently needed by the French air force—were paralysed by strikes. These assumed a new form, grèves sur le tas, or sit-in strikes. The workers settled in, playing cards or boules, singing and dancing in an atmosphere reminiscent of the first heady days of the Commune. The whole of France was seized by this mood of mass escapism. Similar strikes paralysed the Farman aircraft works and the factories of Citroën, Renault, Gnome et Rhône, and Simca in the Paris area, almost all of them essential to the French armaments industry. By the beginning of June the number of strikers had reached 800,000 (eventually they were estimated to total two million), involving over 12,000 enterprises. Parisians started walking out to the factories on Sundays to watch the workers enjoying themselves among the idle machine-tools.

Events, by now thoroughly out of control, alarmed Blum. For him they represented a “social explosion which slapped the government in the face,” and he lost no time in preparing reforming legislation. Prices on the Bourse nosedived, and some employers transferred their money abroad. In Paris, anti-Semitic emotions reawoken by Stavisky now focused on Blum himself, exacerbated by the influx of thousands of German and Austrian Jews fleeing Hitler. The ugly slogan “Plutôt Hitler que Blum” began to make the rounds. Although at shop-floor level there were Communist agitators at work in the factories, the Front Populaire leaders seem to have been taken completely by surprise. Then on 8 June Blum signed the famous Matignon Agreement, granting French workers compulsory collective bargaining, annual paid holidays, a forty-hour week and an immediate general rise in wages of 7 to 15 per cent. Despite these extraordinary concessions, the strikes continued, until on the 11th Thorez intervened to admonish Parisian Communists, “You must know when to end a strike!” Two days later, the workers abandoned their sit-in at Renault. That quatorze juillet the left celebrated its triumph in a mass meeting at the Bastille.

The Matignon Agreement, so Simone de Beauvoir recorded, “filled us with joy.” Thanks to the fifteen days of paid holiday and the forty-hour week, “couples on tandem bicycles could now be seen pedalling out of Paris every Saturday morning; they came back on Sunday evening with bunches of flowers and foliage tied to their handlebars.” Arcadian photographs appeared of workers thronging the beaches, picnicking and camping in the hitherto unfrequented countryside. “Leisure! Leisure!” one newspaper rejoiced. Overnight life for hundreds of thousands of Parisians changed miraculously. A dramatic new interest in sports, notably football and cycling, took hold. Charles Trenet sang in “La Route enchantée”:

Paris! Viens avec nous—tu verras

Les joyeux matins et les grands chemins

Où l’on marche à l’aventure

Hiver comme été, toujours la nature, la route enchantée.

For the workers of Paris, underpaid and under-privileged for so long, it looked like paradise gained—all the unachieved dreams of the revolutions of the nineteenth century at last fulfilled. But could France afford it, with Hitler about to invade Austria and Czechoslovakia, and rearming at terrifying speed? Movingly, Léon Blum remarked, “I had the feeling, in spite of everything, of having brought a lull, a vista, into their dark difficult lives … we had given them hope.”

Yet the truth was that he had made the future of France more hopeless, as French industry continued to stagnate. Continuing to deceive herself militarily, France found the illusion of security behind her costly and theoretically impressive Maginot Line. When the Berlin-based American correspondent William L. Shirer visited Paris in October 1938 he found it:

a frightful place, completely surrendered to defeatism with no inkling of what has happened to France … Even the waiters, taxi-drivers, who used to be sound, are gushing about how wonderful it is that war has been avoided, that it would have been a crime, that they fought in one war and that was enough.

That, Shirer thought, “would be okay if the Germans, who also fought in one war, felt the same way, but they don’t.”

ON THE BRINK AGAIN

By 1939 the Front Populaire had brought the franc tumbling. Foreign crises were proliferating, effecting all sorts of contradictions in Paris. Closing the stable door after Hitler had completed his devouring of Czechoslovakia, in March Britain gave Poland a guarantee of her national integrity. After Mussolini had grabbed Albania, France joined Chamberlain in extending similar guarantees to Romania and Greece; but the Quai d’Orsay under the defeatist Georges Bonnet threatened to take the Nouvelle Revue Française to court the moment it attacked either Hitler or Mussolini. In May the pro-German pacifist Marcel Déat (who would come into his own the following year) published a powerful article entitled “Do We Have to Die for Danzig?”—and mourir pour Danzig entered the Parisian vernacular. The previous summer the state visit to Paris by King George VI, patently an attempt to repeat the success of his grandfather and to bolster the entente cordiale—and French backbones—had been a notable success, largely through the irresistible charm of his francophone Queen. But still theatre audiences were heard to growl with disapproval when a stage character referred to the idea of the British and the French supporting each other, and by 1939 many a Parisian would freely admit to finding little to choose between British and Germans.

The 150th anniversary of the Great Revolution came and went with minimum fuss; certainly gazes were discreetly averted from any reference to the menaced liberté and égalité of the Czechs or Poles. There was much more interest in the thirty-second Tour de France, boycotted though it was by German and Italian riders. Even more in the forefront of the news, however, was the public guillotining on 17 June of a German serial killer, the handsome Eugene Weidmann. Affecting high moral disapproval, papers like Paris-Match and Le Petit Journal revelled in accounts of the “filthy spree” which had attended the decapitation at Versailles, with crowds—as in the times of Philippe le Bel—perched in trees and on rooftops with high expectation all through the preceding night—anything to escape from the nasty realities of the outside world of 1939. Within the fortnight a decree abolished public executions.