Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (28 page)

In fact all Poincaré’s policy produced was a gigantic German resentment, certain to come into the open the second French power waned, and a strengthening of the very forces in Germany determined on military revival. And of course the image of a fighting-cock France, resuming the dominant role in Europe it had occupied from the time of Louis xiv to Napoleon I, was an illusion. Versailles had not broken up Bismarck’s Germany. It was inevitably the only superpower in Europe, now that Russia had virtually ceased – if only temporarily – to be a European power. Sooner or later that German superiority, in numbers, industrial strength, organization and national spirit, was bound to declare itself again. The only question was whether it would do so in generous or hostile fashion.

By comparison the French were weak. Equally important, they felt they were even weaker than they actually were. The consciousness of debility, marked in the Twenties – Poincaré’s bluster was an attempt to conceal it – became obsessional in the Thirties. In the seventeenth century the French population had been nearly twice as big as any other in Europe. The next largest, significantly enough, had been that of Poland.
⁷
The French had a melancholy awareness of the decline of their new Eastern ally, which they hoped to make great again to balance their own decline. It was engraven on French hearts that, even as late as 1800, they were still the most numerous race in Europe, Russia alone excepted. Since then they had suffered an alarming relative decline, reflected in scores of worried demographic tracts which had been appearing since the 1840s. They were overtaken by the Austrians in 1860, the Germans in 1870, the British in 1900, and the Italians were to follow in 1933, making France a mere fifth in Europe. Between 1800, when it was 28 million, and 1940, the French population increased by only 50 per cent, while Germany’s quadrupled and Britain’s tripled.
⁸

The Great War, which (as the French saw it) Germany had willed on France in order to destroy her utterly as a major power, had tragically increased France’s demographic weakness. They had had 1,400,000 men killed – 17.6 per cent of the army, 10.5 per cent of the entire active male population. Even with Alsace and Lorraine back in the fold, the French population had fallen in consequence, from 39.6 million to 39.12 million, while Britain’s, for instance, had risen 2.5 million during the war years. Some 1.1 million Frenchmen had become
mutilés de guerre
, permanently disabled. The Germans had killed 673,000 peasants, seriously wounded half a million more,
occupied ten
départements
with a population of 6.5 million, turned a quarter of them into refugees, wrecked farm-buildings, slaughtered livestock and removed machinery when they withdrew, as well as turning Frenchmen into slave-labourers in the factories of Ludendorff’s ‘War Socialism’, where death-rates were nearly as high as the 10 per cent a year they reached under the Nazis in the Second World War. The French brooded on these appalling figures, which were made to seem even more terrible by the brilliance of their own war-propaganda.
⁹

Those French who suffered war-damage were well compensated afterwards but the manner in which this was financed, despite all Poincaré’s efforts, produced a progressive inflation which, while less spectacular than Germany’s in 1923, lasted much longer and was ultimately more corrosive of national morale. Between 1912 and 1948, wholesale prices in France multiplied 105 times and the price of gold 174 times. Against the dollar, the franc in 1939 was only one-seventieth of its 1913 value.
¹⁰
For American and British tourists and expatriates, France between the wars was a bargain-basement paradise, but it was hard on the French who treated the steady erosion of their
rentes
and savings as an additional reason for having fewer children. Between 1906 and 1931 the number of French families with three or more children fell drastically and during the Thirties one-child families were commoner than any other. By 1936 France had a larger proportion of people over sixty than any other country – 147 per thousand, compared to 129 in Britain, 119 in Germany, 91 in the US and 74 in Japan.
¹¹

France had hoped to strengthen herself by recovering Alsace and Lorraine, the latter with a large industrial belt. But of course the economy of the two provinces had been integrated with the Ruhr and it was badly damaged by the separation. In heavily Catholic Alsace the French alienated the clergy by attacking German, the language of religious instruction. They tended to make the same mistake as the Germans and behave like colonizers. In fact they had less to offer, for French social security was much inferior to Germany’s.
¹²
France was a poor market for industry, albeit a protected one. Strict rent controls, imposed in 1914 and never lifted, killed France’s housing market. Housing stock, 9.5 million before the war, was still only 9.75 million in 1939, with nearly a third declared unfit for human habitation. Agriculture was appallingly backward. In the 1930s there were still three million horses on the farms, the same number as in 1850. France, like Italy, was a semi-industrialized country and her pre-war rate of progress was not fully sustained in the 1920s, still less in the 1930s when industrial production never returned to the 1929 levels. Between 1890 and 1904 France was the world’s biggest car
manufacturer. In the 1920s she still made more cars than Italy or Germany. But she failed to produce a cheap car for mass-sale. By the mid-1930s 68 per cent of cars sold in France were second-hand and there were still 1,352,000 horse-carriages on the streets, exactly as many as in 1891.
¹³

The root of the problem was low investment. Here again inflation was to blame. The state was a poor substitute for the private investor. It was the biggest employer even before 1914 and the war gave the state sector new impetus. Etienne Clementel, Minister of Commerce 1915–19, wanted a national plan and an economic union of Western Europe; among his protégés were Jean Monnet and other future ‘Eurocrats’. But nothing came of these ideas at the time. The state bought into railways, shipping, electricity, oil and gas to keep things going and preserve jobs, but little money was available for investment.
¹⁴
French industrialists had plenty of ideas but were frustrated by the lack of big opportunities and spent much of their time feuding with each other – thus, Ernest Mercier, head of the electricity and petrol industries, fought a bitter war with François de Wendel, the big iron-steel boss.
¹⁵
For clever men lower down the ladder the lack of opportunities was even worse (for women they were non-existent). Between the wars real wages of engineers in France fell by a third. Higher education, especially on the technical side, was tragically inadequate, bedevilled by sectarian rows and lack of funds. Most of the money went to the famous but old-fashioned
‘Grandes Ecoles’
in Paris: Herriot called the Polytechnique, which produced the technocrats, ‘the only theology faculty which has not been abolished’. A
Centre National de la Récherche Scientifique
did emerge, but on an exiguous budget. The new Paris Medical Faculty building, ordered in the 1920s, was not finished till the 1950s (France had no Health Ministry until 1922), and by 1939 it had only two doctors on its staff. One striking statistic sums it up: in 1927 France spent less on higher education than on feeding cavalry horses.
¹⁶

Moreover, in its own way France was as divided as Germany. There was no clash between civilization and culture. Quite the contrary. The French were agreed about civilization: they owned it. They were most reluctant, at Versailles, to admit English as an alternative official language. They regarded France as the originator, home and custodian of civilization – a word they themselves had coined in 1766. They envied, disliked and despised the Anglo-Saxons. Their best young novelist, François Mauriac, wrote in 1937: ‘I do not understand and I do not like the English except when they are dead.’ Among the popular books of the period were Henri Beraud’s
Faut-il reduire l’Angleterre en esclavage?
(1935) and Robert
Aron and André Dandieu’s
Le Cancer Americain
(1931). The Germans, oddly enough, were more acceptable. In the 1930s, young novelists like Malraux and Camus read Nietzsche and young philosophers like Sartre were attracted to Heidegger. But the official model for France was Descartes, whose methodology dominated the school philosophy classes which were the most striking feature of the French education system.
¹⁷
They were designed to produce a highly intelligent national leadership. What they did produce was intellectuals; not quite the same thing. And the intellectuals were divided not merely in their views but on their function. The most influential of the philosophy teachers, Emile Chartier (’Alain’), preached ‘commitment’. But the best-read tract for the times, Julien Benda’s
La Trahison des Clercs
(1927), preached detachment.
¹⁸
There was something to be said for keeping French intellectuals above the fray: they hated each other too much. Marx had assumed, in the
Communist Manifesto
, that ‘intellectuals’ were a section of the bourgeoisie which identified itself with the interests of the working class. This analysis appeared to be confirmed during the early stages of the Dreyfus case (the Jewish officer falsely convicted of treason), when the newly fashionable term ‘intelligentsia’ was identified with the anti-clerical Left. But the long Dreyfus struggle itself brought into existence an entirely new category of right-wing French intellectuals, who declared a reluctant cease-fire in 1914 but emerged foaming with rage in 1918 and helped the political Right, the next year, to win its first general election victory in a generation. Except in 1924–5, 1930–1 and 1936–8, the French Right and Centre dominated the Chambre des Deputés (and the Senate throughout), and the Right intellectuals held the initiative in the salons and on the boulevards.

There was agreement about civilization; where the French fought was over culture. Was it secular or confessional, positivist or a matter of metaphysics? The battle was bitter and destructive, savagely dividing the education system, business, local government, society. The freemasons, the militant arm of secularity, were still increasing their numbers, from 40,000 in 1928 to 60,000 in 1936.
¹⁹
Their junior arm was composed of the despised, underpaid state primary teachers, pro-republican, pacifist, anti-clerical, who fought the
curé
in every village. They used a completely different set of textbooks, especially in history, to the Catholic ‘free’ schools. But the Catholics were gaining in the schools. Between the wars, state secondary schools dropped from 561 to 552; Catholic ones more than doubled, from 632 in 1920 to 1,420 in 1936. The
Anciens élèves
(Old Boys) associations of these Catholic colleges were exceptionally well organized and militant, thirsting to reverse the verdict of the Dreyfus years.
²⁰
The bifurcation in the French schools tended to produce two distinct races of Frenchmen,
who had different historical heroes (and villains), different political vocabularies, different fundamental assumptions about politics and, not least, two completely different images of France.

In fact in France there were two rival types of nationalism. The secularists and republicans, who rejected the fatherhood of God and the king, had coined the term
la patrie
in the eighteenth century to denote their higher allegiance to their country. When Dr Johnson declared, at this time, that ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel’ he was denouncing a species of subversive demagoguery. French patriotism acquired a Jacobin flavour under the Revolution and this type of progressive nationalism was perpetuated by Gambetta and Clemenceau. It could be just as chauvinistic and ruthless as any other kind – more, perhaps, since it tended to admit no higher law than the interest of the Republic, thought to incarnate virtue – but it tended to evaporate into defeatism and pacifism the moment France was thought to be in the control of men who did not serve the aims of
la patrie.
In particular, it regarded the regular army, which was overwhelmingly Catholic and partly royalist, with suspicion, even hostility.

As opposed to ‘patriotic France’ there was ‘nationalist France’. It was the Gallic equivalent of the division between Westerners and Easterners in Germany. It is a mistake to describe the inter-war French nationalists as fascists – though some of them became fascists of the most gruesome kind – because the tradition was much older. It went back to the émigrés of the Revolutionary epoch, the cultural reaction to the Enlightenment of Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot, and it first acquired an intellectual content in the writings of Joseph de Maistre, whose masterpiece,
Les Soirées de Saint-Petersbourg
, was published in 1821. He offered a combination of irrationalism, romanticism and a Jansenist stress on original sin. Human reason is a ‘trembling light’, too weak to discipline a disorderly race: ‘That which our miserable century calls superstition, fanaticism, intolerance etc. was a necessary ingredient of French greatness.’ ‘Man is too wicked to be free.’ He is ‘a monstrous centaur … the result of some unknown offence, some abominable miscegenation’.
²¹
To this de Maistre added the important notion of a vast conspiracy which, with the ostensible object of ‘freeing’ man, would in fact unleash the devil in him.

In the two decades leading up to the Dreyfus case in the 1890s, conspiracy theory became the stock-in-trade of French anti-Semites like Edouard Drumont, whose
La France juive
(1886) grossly exaggerated the power, influence and above all the numbers of Jews living in France. In fact when Drumont wrote there were only about 35,000 Jews in France. But their numbers were increasing: there
were over 100,000 by 1920. Other ‘aliens’ poured in. France under the Third Republic, and especially between the wars, was the most agreeable country in the world in which to live, and in many ways the most tolerant of foreigners provided they did not cause trouble.
²²
Between 1889 and 1940 nearly 2,300,000 foreigners received French citizenship and there were, in addition, a further 2,613,000 foreign residents in 1931, a figure which increased rapidly as refugees from Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and the Spanish war arrived.
²³
The French were not racist in the German sense, since a certain cosmopolitanism was a corollary of their proprietory rights over civilization. But they were extraordinarily susceptible to weird racial theories, which they produced in abundance. Thus in 1915 Dr Edgar Bérillon ‘discovered’ that Germans had intestines nine feet longer than other humans, which made them prone to ‘polychesia’ and bromidrosis (excessive defecation and body-smells).
²⁴
If Paris was the world capital of Cartesian reason, it was also the capital of astrology, fringe-medicine and pseudo-scientific religiosity. There was (indeed still is) a strong anti-rationalist culture in France.