Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (29 page)

Hence the success of
Action Française
, the newspaper of the nationalist ultras. It began in 1899 among a small group of intellectuals who met on the Boulevard Saint-Germain at the Café Flore – which was, in 1944, to be ‘liberated’ by the Existentialists – and flourished on the talents of Charles Maurras. He publicized the idea of a multiple conspiracy:
‘Quatres états confédérés: Juifs, Protestants, franc-masons, métêques’
(aliens). This was not very different from the official Vatican line during the Dreyfus case, though it substituted ‘atheists’ for ‘aliens’. In fact though both Maurras and
Action Française
were themselves atheistic, many of their views were strongly approved of by the Catholic Church. Pius x, the last of the great reactionary popes, told Maurras’ mother, ‘I bless his work’, and though he signed a Holy Office decree condemning his books he refused to allow it to be enforced – they were
Damnabiles, non damnandus.
²⁵
Vatican condemnation did come in the end, on 20 December 1926, because Pius xi had by then experience of fascism in power. But there were plenty of related groups to which faithful Catholics could belong and the nationalist movement never lost its respectability among the middle and upper classes.
Action Française
, edited by Léon Daudet, was brilliantly written and widely read: that was why Proust, though a Jew, took it, finding it ‘a cure by elevation of the mind’.
²⁶
Many leading writers were close to the movement. They included, for instance, France’s leading popular historian, Jacques Bainville, whose
Histoire de France
(1924) sold over 300,000 copies, and whose
Napoléon
(1931) and
La Troisième République
were also best-sellers.

Indeed the weakness of French nationalism was that it was too intellectual. It lacked a leader with the will to power. At the end of 1933, with fascism triumphant in most of Europe, the Stavisky scandal in France gave the ultras precisely the revelation of republican corruption which they needed to justify a
coup.
Some kind of proto-fascist state would almost certainly have come into existence on 6 February 1934 had Maurras given the signal for action. But he was then sixty-six, very deaf and by temperament a sedentary word-spinner: he spent the critical day writing an editorial instead. Precisely the gifts which made him so dangerous in stirring the passions of educated Frenchmen incapacitated him from leading them into battle. There was thus no focus around which a united fascist movement could gather. Instead there was a proliferation of groups, each with a slightly different ideology and a varying degree of tolerance towards violence. They presented the mirror-image of the despised
régime des partis
in the Chambre des Deputés. Bourbon factions like
Les Camelots du Roi
jostled the Bonapartist
Jeunesses Patriotes
, the atheist
Etudiants d’Action Française
and ‘pure’ fascist groups such as the
Parti Populaire Français, Le Faisceau
and the
Phalanges Universitaires
, and more traditional movements like the
Croix de Feu.
Nazi-type adventurers, many of whom were later to flourish under Vichy, shopped around these mushroom growths, looking for the best bargain. It took an external catastrophe to bring them to power.

Yet Maurras and his supporters undoubtedly made this catastrophe more likely. The Third Republic had more friends in France than Weimar had in Germany. Maurras revealed that it had a host of enemies too. His favourite quotation was from the stuffy Academician and Nobel Prizewinner Anatole France:
‘La République n’est pas destructible, elle est la destruction. Elle est la dispersion, elle est la discontinuité, elle est la diversité, elle est le mal.’
²⁷
The Republic, he wrote, was a woman, lacking ‘the male principle of initiative and action’. ‘There is only one way to improve democracy: destroy it.’ ‘Democracy is evil, democracy is death.’ ‘Democracy is forgetting.’ His fundamental law was ‘Those people who are governed by their men of action and their military leaders defeat those peoples who are governed by their lawyers and professors.’ If republicanism was death, how could it be worth dying for? The Versailles Treaty was the creation of ‘a combination of Anglo-Saxon finance and Judeo-German finance’. The conspiracy theory could be reformulated – anarchism, Germans, Jews: ‘The barbarians from the depths, the barbarians from the East, our
Demos
flanked by its two friends, the German and the Jew.’
²⁸
The ultra-nationalists, though jealous of French interests as they conceived them, were thus unwilling either to
preserve the Europe of Versailles or to curb fascist aggression. Bainville’s diaries show that he welcomed the fascist successes in Italy and Germany.
²⁹
Maurras applauded the invasion of Ethiopia by Mussolini as the struggle of civilization against barbarism.
³⁰
‘What can you do for Poland?’ he asked his readers, a cry echoed by Marcel Déat’s devastating
‘Mourir pour Dantzig?’

In effect, then, both the strains of nationalism in France, the Jacobin and the anti-republican, had reservations about the sacrifices they would be prepared to make. It was not a case of my country right or wrong, or my country Left or Right, but a case of whose country – mine or theirs? The division within France was already apparent by the early 1920s and the infirmity of will it produced soon affected actual policy. France’s post-war defence posture was based on absolute military supremacy west of the Rhine, containing Germany on one side, and a military alliance of new states, to contain her on the other. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia all had complicated military arrangements with France down to the supply of weapons and the training of technicians. Poincaré’s occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 saw the western arm of the policy in action. But it did such damage to French interests in Britain and America that it appeared to many French politicians to be unrepeatable; and the 1924 American solution to the reparations mess, the Dawes Plan, removed much of the excuse for a further resort to force. The Germans now proposed that the Franco—German frontier should be guaranteed, and Britain backed their request. The French replied that, in that case, Britain must also agree to guarantee the frontiers of Germany in the east with France’s allies, Poland and Czechoslovakia. But the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Austen Chamberlain, refused, writing to the head of the Foreign Office, Sir Eyre Crowe, (16 February 1925) that Britain could not possibly guarantee the Polish Corridor ‘for which no British government ever will or ever can risk the bones of a British grenadier’.
³¹
No
mourir pour Dantzig
there, either!

Hence the Treaty of Locarno (1925), while effectively denying France the right to contain Germany by force, failed to underwrite her system of defensive alliances either. All it did was to demilitarize the Rhineland and give Britain and France the right to intervene by force if Germany sought to restore her full sovereignty there. This, however, was bluff. Though Chamberlain boasted to the 1926 Imperial Conference that ‘the true defence of our country … is now no longer the Channel … but upon the Rhine’, the British Chiefs of Staff privately pointed out that they did not possess the military means to back up the guarantee.
³²
Two years later the Chief of the Imperial General Staff produced a cabinet memorandum pointing
out that Germany’s total strength, including reserves, was not the 100,000 army allowed by Versailles but a force of 2 million.
³³
The French War Office made the same kind of estimate. By 1928 Poincaré had dropped the ‘forward’ notion of a strategic frontier on the Rhine and had reverted to a purely defensive policy: experts were already working on the project to be known as the Maginot Line.

What, then, of Poincaré’s ‘country of 100 million’, the imperial vision which H.G.Wells termed ‘the development of “Black France”’?
³⁴
Could the empire be invoked to redress the balance of France’s weakness in Europe? Maurice Barrès, the intellectual who helped to put together the right-wing coalition which swept to victory in the 1919 elections, wrote: ‘One is almost tempted to thank the Germans for opening the eyes of the world to colonial questions.’ The 1919 parliament was known as the
‘Chambre bleu horizon’
, after the colour of the army uniforms and its imperialist aspirations. Albert Sarraut, the – Minister for the Colonies, produced a grandiose plan in April 1921 to turn
France d’Outre-mer
into the economic underpinning of
la Mère-patrie.
³⁵
But to realize this vision there were one, or possibly two, prerequisites. The first and most important was money for investment. The French had hoped to get it, under the Sykes—Picot secret agreement, from the spoils of war: a ‘Greater Syria’ including the Mosul oilfields. But in the scramble after the end of the war she was denied this by Britain and her Hashemite Arab protégés. All France got was the Lebanon, where she was the traditional protector of the Christian Maronite community, and western Syria, where there was no oil and a lot of ferocious Arab nationalists. She would have been better off with just the Lebanon. In Syria the mandate was a total failure, provoking full-scale rebellion, put down at enormous military expense, and culminating in 1925 with the French High Commissioner shelling Damascus with heavy artillery.
³⁶
The Middle East carve-up remained a festering source of discord between France and her chief ally, Britain, leading to actual fighting between them in 1940–1. France never made a franc profit out of the area.

As a result, there was no money for Sarraut’s plan. France’s black African colonies had been acquired after 1870 for prestige not economic reasons, to keep the army employed and to paint the map blue. A law of 1900 said that each colony must pay for its own upkeep. Federations were organized in West (1904) and Equatorial (1910) Africa, but the combined population of both these vast areas was less than that of Britain’s Nigeria. To make economic sense, everyone agreed, they had to be linked to France’s North African territories. In 1923 the Quai d’Orsay and the Ministries of War and Colonies agreed that the building of a Trans-Sahara railway was
absolutely ‘indispensable’. But there was no money. Even a technical survey was not made until 1928. The railway was never built. More money in fact did go into France’s overseas territories; investments increased fourfold between 1914–40, the empire’s share of total French investment rising from 9 to 45 per cent. But nearly all of this went to France’s Arab territories, Algeria getting the lion’s share. In 1937 foreign trade of the Franco-Arab lands was over 15 milliard francs, four times that of West and Equatorial Africa.
³⁷

The second prerequisite was some kind of devolution of power, so that the inhabitants of the ‘country of 100 million’ enjoyed equal rights. But there was no chance of this. In 1919 at the Paris Treaty talks, Ho Chi Minh presented, on behalf of the Annamites of Indo-China, an eight-point programme; not, indeed, of self-determination but of civil rights, as enjoyed by metropolitan France and expatriates. He got nowhere. Indo-China had one of the worst forced-labour systems in the world and its oppressive system of native taxation included the old
gabelle
or salt-tax. As Ho Chi Minh put it, France had brought to Indo-China not progress but medievalism, which the
gabelle
symbolized: ‘Taxes, forced labour, exploitation,’ he said in 1924, ‘that is the summing up of your civilization.’
³⁸
There were as many (5,000) French officials in Indo-China as in the whole of British India, with fifteen times the population, and they worked closely with the French
colon
planters. Neither would tolerate devolution or reforms. When in 1927 a progressive French governor-general, Alexandre Varenne, tried to end the
corvée
, they ganged up to get him recalled. In 1930, in Indo-China alone, there were nearly 700 summary executions. If Gandhi had tried his passive resistance there, Ho Chi Minh wrote, ‘he would long since have ascended into heaven’.
³⁹

In North Africa it was no better, in some ways worse. Algeria was in theory run like metropolitan France but in fact it had separate electoral colleges for French and Arabs. This wrecked Clemenceau’s post-war reforms in 1919 and indeed all subsequent ones. The French settlers sent deputies to the parliament in Paris and this gave them a leverage unknown in the British Empire. In 1936 the
colon
deputies killed a Popular Front bill which would have given full citizenship to 20,000 Muslims. Marshal Lyautey, the great French Governor-General of Morocco, described the
colons
as ‘every bit as bad as the
Boches
, imbued with the same belief in inferior races whose destiny is to be exploited’.
⁴⁰
In Morocco he did his best to keep them out. But this was difficult. In Morocco a French farmer could enjoy the same living standards as one in the American Mid-West. All Europeans there had real incomes a third above that of France, and eight times higher than the Muslims. Moreover,
Lyautey’s benevolent despotism, which was designed to protect the Muslims from French corruption, in fact exposed them to native corruption at its worst. He ruled through caids who bought their tax-inspectorates and judgeships, getting into debt thereby and being obliged to squeeze their subjects to pay the interest. The system degenerated swiftly after Lyautey’s death in 1934. The greatest of the caids, the notorious El Glawi, Pasha of Marrakesh, ran a mountain-and-desert empire of rackets and monopolies, including control of Marrakesh’s 27,000 prostitutes who catered for the needs of the entire Western Sahara.
⁴¹
On the front that mattered most, education, little progress was made. There were far too many French officials: 15,000 of them, three times as many as the Indian administration, all anxious to perpetuate and if possible hereditarize their jobs. In 1940, accordingly, there were still only 3 per cent of Moroccans who went to school, and even in 1958 only 1,500 received a secondary education. In 1952 there were only twenty-five Moroccan doctors, fourteen of them from the Jewish community.