FRANCE FACES 1939
By D. R. GILLIE
WHETHER it be due to M. Daladier, to M. Paul Reynaud, to Signor Mussolini or simply to the innate vitality of the French, France enters the New Year in a condition which is a great deal more encouraging to her friends than could have been expected three months ago. The political situation is, indeed, still extremely confused ; the most important decisions are probably still to be taken. The Italian demands, however, have had an admirable tonic effect on the nation, even though they have as yet brought only partial clarification of ideas. M. Daladier is now being cheered in Corsica and Tunisia as the personification of resistance to arrogance and insult ; three months ago it was for having brought back peace at the enemy's price. The Prime Minister himself is certainly the first man to appreciate the difference. The response to the Italian challenge appears even to have diminished for the time being the appeal of anti-Semitism, a poison the steady spread of which is arousing growing disquiet amongst all intelligent Frenchmen.
The external stimulus, provided so obligingly by Signor Mussolini, has been applied at the very moment when the first largely-conceived attempt to restore France's finances had been undertaken. For the first time for three years the forward rate on the franc has discounted an improvement, not a deterioration, of the currency. This has given a new reality to the budget debates, even though these were carried through at a speed which surpassed all previous records. The defeat of the general strike may perhaps have left a legacy of class bitterness for the future, but in the immediate present its effect has been to restore much healthier standards of the permissible and the possible. Many trade union leaders will find in this a very real compensation for the severe defeat they have suffered. The idea of the State and of law which were in danger of becoming very misty have been given sharp—and for most citizens comforting—outlines again.
These achievements are all the more remarkable because of the profound and bitter differences of opinion which divide the members of the Government. A French journalist observed recently that the prospects of M. Daladier's Govern- ment enduring were quite good, if the Cabinet did not meet too often. It is notorious that because of his views on foreign policy M. Paul Reynaud has as much to fear from intrigue on the Right as from the open opposition of the Left. During the budget debate that eminent bourgeois politician, M. Pietri, seemed to have mounted the tribune expressly in order to provide the Left with ammunition to use against the man who was trying to make the French Capitalist system work again. The Communist surprise attack on the budget just before Christmas was warded off by the narrow majority of seven because nearly a score of Right wing deputies had seen fit to abstain, thereby bringing down the State rentes on the Stock Exchange several points. This the nationalist Jour considered perfectly justified, although a few days later it delivered a long sermon to the radicals who had behaved likewise on the same occasion.
The difference in outlook on foreign policy, which can still roughly be summed up as pro-Munich and anti-Munich, is much the most real issue in French political life at present, but is not to be understood in terms of rational argument. The pro-Munich view embodies the feelings of all those prudent, husbanding French men and women whose deepest instincts were outraged by the carelessness of the morrow which marked the political atmosphere during the hey-day of the Front Populaire. For these people the critics of Munich and of M. Bonnet's policy are all lumped together, whatever their attitude was to the Front Populaire, as spendthrifts of life and treasure, whose policy would lead to the break-up of the well- established French world. Theirs is the spirit of La Fontaine's Fourmi. This emphatic reversion of a large section of the Paris.
French nation to a mood which is always an element in the national make-up is the key to the position, otherwise very difficult to understand, taken up by many politicians and newspapers.
How often has the Temps rebuked M. Blum in the past for advocating disarmament ? On Boxing Day M. Blum risked splitting his party by declaring that France was in danger, that she must rearm and cling to all her allies, because there was only hope of a satisfactory outcome to negotiations with the totalitarian States if they had reason to fear the consequences of a quarrel. The Temps severely rebuked M. Blum as a fire-brand whose policy would plunge all Europe in war, and evidently preferred the attitude of M. Blum's antagonist M. Paul Faure, whose doctrine was a modified form of the French Socialist Party's traditional pacifism.
The hope of the Munich-minded that it would be possible to negotiate a new and this time more enduring Laval- Mussolini agreement, once a French Ambassador had been appointed to Rome, has only been given up—if it has been altogether given up—very grudgingly. M. Bonnet is evidently clinging to the last vestiges of it. His Ministry gives the impression of turning over each provocative piece of news from Rome before the public gets hold of it, in the hope of finding some aspect of it which will present an opening for negotiation on decent terms. There seems even to have been an attempt to minimise if not suppress the reports of the first anti-French demonstration in the moribund Italian Chamber. The news of the Italian repudiation of the 1935 agreement, like the information that Italian troops had been on the soil of French Somaliland since January, 1938, were both made public by the Opposition newspaper L'Ordre, which forced the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to confirm them. In the latter case it would seem that it was M. Mandel, the Minister of Colonies, who gave L'Ordre the facts which pointed to the possibility of a threat to Djibuti, in order to strengthen his insistence that reinforcements should be sent there. At all events, he was sharply attacked for having done so by one of the newspapers supporting M. Bonnet. It was evident when M. Bonnet had to face a Socialist questioner in the Chamber the other day on the subject of the Italian repudiation of the 1935 agreement that his persistence in refusing to destroy bridges about which the Italians were showing themselves so indifferent was gravely weakening his position.
It is not least with regard to Spain that the effect of Italian provocations have been evident. People who have hitherto affected indifference as to the political consequences for France of General Franco's victory, on the ground that he would take the first opportunity to free himself from the predominating influence of his Italian and German allies, are evidently now watching the fighting in Catalonia with much keener interest. The attitude of many French Catholics is becoming modified, for, as religious tolerance is gradually restored in Government Spain, the relations between the Fascist Government and the Vatican are steadily becoming worse. Catholic democrats therefore feel in- creasingly at liberty to give their sympathy to the Spanish Republic—an attitude with which the French hierarchy shows no inclination to interfere. Other Frenchmen, such as the Right wing Radical M. Emile Roche, have come out frankly in favour of supporting the Spanish Government on the ground that General Franco's victory would add intolerably to Signor Mussolini's insolence. It is probably not uncon- nected with this change of feeling that the new French Ambassador arrived last week in Barcelona, where France had been represented for over two months by a Chargé d'Affaires. But though his speech was noticeably cordial, it was also a reaffirmation of the policy of non-intervention.
Previous page
