by Philipp Blom
Reconstructing this devastated region was not just a question of national pride but also one of economic necessity. Resources were scarce, however, and the demands gigantic. As in all countries primarily involved in the fighting, the war had depleted the national coffers, drained the supply of raw materials and labor, and created a lopsided wartime economy that now needed to be reoriented to peacetime needs. Just as in Austria, the country’s character, civilization, and future—its soul, as it were—were contested in a series of battles fought in newspapers, debating chambers, and the streets.
A country with highly industrialized regions, especially around Paris and in the north, and with a strong revolutionary tradition, France was home to a vigorous communist and socialist movement that had emerged from the war with renewed force. During the early 1920s, in a situation dominated by social unrest, economic hardship, and large-scale strikes, the atmosphere had become so poisonous that France had appeared to stand on the brink of a new revolution. Looking toward the Soviet Union, radical members of the socialist movement had dreamed of overthrowing the government, which appeared too weak and too conservative to address the problems of the nation effectively.
Despite several violent general strikes, bloody confrontations between workers and police, and the foundation of short-lived “workers’ soviets” in Paris factories, the revolution had not occurred, but the climate of visceral distrust between left and right had persisted, even after the government had succeeded in stabilizing the plummeting franc at one-fifth of its prewar value. Opposing the socialists, communists, and trade unions was a vigorous monarchist movement seeking to return France to its former grandeur by installing a new Bourbon king, along with militant Catholics and fascist admirers of Mussolini—the latter three overlapping in various constellations and associations. It was, as often in recent French history, a struggle of identities between the Catholic emblem Jeanne d’Arc and the republican symbol Marianne.
The towering figure of ultraconservative France was a man with a perfect intellectual pedigree for this position: Charles Maurras, the son of a tax collector and a deeply devout mother. Born in 1863 and educated by his mother, Maurras had lost his faith early on, but he had maintained a strong attachment to the Catholic Church, which he regarded as one of the great pillars of order and morality. France, he believed, had reached its apogee in the seventeenth century under the Sun King, Louis XIV, when its pure, Latinate culture had flourished. Afterward it had fallen prey to the evil influence of Germanic Romanticism and had lost its way; its infatuation with egalitarianism, democracy, and other “foreign” ideas had led, in Maurras’s view, to the catastrophe of the Revolution of 1789, a conspiracy of Germans, Jews, and Freemasons against all that was glorious about France.
In his newspaper, L’Action Française, Maurras fulminated against everything he despised, and as his hatred was all-encompassing and easily incurred, he had much to write about. This was never more apparent than in the case of Léon Blum, the Jewish leader of the Socialist Party (also known as the French Section of the Workers’ International). Blum was a gentle-tempered man, a former literary critic who had been moved to go into politics because he wanted to make a contribution to his country’s war effort (his myopia had prevented him from serving in uniform), and he was now working for a reconciliation between the party’s revolutionary radical wing, which was seeking a dictatorship of the proletariat, and its more moderate members, whose commitment to social justice without political violence he shared. For Maurras, Blum was the perfect hate object; in the pages of L’Action Française he was described as “the circumcised [deputy] of Narbonne” and “the belligerent Hebrew.”
Maurras did not hesitate to insult. In 1935 he was to write of Blum: “He is a monster of the democratic republic. He is a mirage of the dialectic of the ‘heimatlos’ [without homeland]. Human garbage and to be treated as such . . . He is a man who must be shot, but in the back.”2 In February of the following year, when fanatical members of the Camelots du Roi (the King’s Hucksters—an appellation coined by a scornful journalist), a rightist youth organization originally founded to hawk L‘Action Française on the streets and to spread its message, would drag Léon Blum from a car and beat him almost to death, Maurras would express no regrets. When Blum became prime minister in 1936, Maurras vented his feelings once again: “It is as a Jew that we must see, comprehend, understand, fight, and kill this Blum.”3 Indicted for incitement to murder, Maurras was given eight months in prison.
Antidemocratic, nationalist, and anti-Semitic as he was, Maurras was nonetheless no friend of fascism, mainly because he distrusted its totalitarian impulses. He wanted to turn back the clock to a time before the 1789 revolution, before democracy, individualism, and liberalism had sullied what he regarded as the French genius. His dream was a revival of a French monarchy, supplanting the Third Republic and restoring a sense of greatness and moral purpose to the nation. To this end, he needed the Catholic Church (in whose doctrines he did not believe) as a guarantor of stability and to encourage a sense of sacrifice in the population, just as he wished for an aristocratic elite willing to fight and a social order inspired by the estates of the Middle Ages.
This muddled and to some extent contradictory vision (though a rabid anti-Semite, Maurras despised other kinds of racism, regarding them as too German) exerted a considerable intellectual pull, not only on French thinkers of the right but also on conservatives as diverse as Charles de Gaulle, Spain’s Francisco Franco, King Albert of Belgium, the Portuguese dictator António Salazar, and even the Anglo-American poet T. S. Eliot.
While Maurras was idiosyncratic in his generous hatred of modernity and everything associated with it, some other intellectuals in France were more immediately in step with the grand fascist march toward a brighter, cleaner future. Writers such as Pierre Drieu La Rochelle went from a flirtation with the left (and a close friendship with the surrealists around André Breton) to propagating a socialist fascism that would lead ever closer to Hitler; Robert Brasillach became editor in chief of the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout (I Am Everywhere).
Incendiary books and newspaper articles from left and right whipped up hatred and were instrumental in creating an atmosphere of crisis, much as they did in Germany and Austria, in Ireland, Belgium, and Spain, and elsewhere in Europe. Real power, however, appeared to need a strong arm, and even in France, armed militias began to be a factor in daily politics. Maurras, L’Action Française, and the Camelots du Roi were already an established force belonging to the Catholic and royalist wing. In 1927, the Croix-de-Feu (Fiery Cross), originally a veterans’ association, also entered the fray, as did the Ligue des Patriotes (Patriots’ League, financed by Champagne producer Pierre Taittinger), the overtly fascist Ligue des Jeunesses Patriotes (Young Patriots’ League), and the Faisceau (Sheaf), which openly imitated Mussolini’s Fascist rituals. All of these right-wing organizations marched in uniform; several had access to firearms, and many waited for an opportunity to use them against the hated socialists.
Beautiful Sacha
THAT MOMENT WOULD ARRIVE in 1934, after the suspicious death of Serge Stavisky, “Beautiful Sacha,” a French con man of Ukrainian Jewish origin, who had used his excellent connections within the government to organize a Ponzi scheme fronted by the bank Crédit Communal, which allowed him to steal two hundred million francs from small investors. Pursued by the police, Stavisky had gone underground and had finally been tracked down at his Alpine chalet near Chamonix, France. According to police testimony, two shots were fired when the agents entered the building; they found the suspect dead, killed by his own hand. Soon, however, doubts were raised about this version of events. It was difficult for even the most determined man, critics remarked, to kill himself with two shots to the head.
When the left-liberal government refused to set up a parliamentary commission to look into the involvement of politicians in Stavisky’s death, both right-wing and communist associations called for their me
mbers to take to the streets. After a chaotic January, during which more than two thousand policemen were injured in clashes with demonstrators, the government was forced to resign.
But the troubles were not over. As the full consequences of the Stavisky affair became known, and Édouard Daladier, the designated prime minister, clumsily attempted to limit the political fallout, bills appeared on the streets of Paris calling for rival demonstrations on February 6, the day of the swearing-in of the new government. The largest demonstration was planned at the Place de la Concorde, directly across the Seine from the Chamber of Deputies at the Palais-Bourbon.
In the small hours of this freezing February day, the demonstrators assembled like members of an army. L’Action Française had urged its readers to participate, and Croix-de-Feu, Jeunesses Patriotes, Union Nationale des Combattants (a veterans’ association), and Union des Contribuables (a taxpayers’ association) had all mobilized their members, as had the Communist Party and its militant wing, the Association Républicaine des Anciens Combattants, which was hostile to the assembled rightist groups. Some thirty thousand determined and embittered demonstrators braved the cold at the Place de la Concorde alone.
While some of the demonstrators had come merely to voice their outrage, others planned to prevent the government from being formed by storming the Palais-Bourbon. But the commander of the Croix-de-Feu shied away from taking the poorly defended heart of French democracy by force. With this hesitation, the militant wing of the demonstrators lost their impetus, and soon what had begun as an orderly march degenerated into a series of pitched battles between rightists, communists, Catholics, socialists, and police, who had erected barricades on the bridge linking the Place de la Concorde and the Palais-Bourbon and who were now fighting off angry and determined but uncoordinated demonstrators armed with sticks, stones, and some small firearms.
The battle for the Solférino Bridge continued throughout the night. As the demonstrators attacked time and again, policemen were ordered to fire into the crowd. As dawn broke over the smoking barricades, revealing burned-out buses and cars and smashed shop windows, the harvest of battle became obvious. Among the police and other defenders of the Palais—firemen, gendarmes, republican guards—one soldier was mortally wounded, while 1,664 had sustained lighter injuries. Among the attackers, sixteen men had been killed and 657 wounded.
A Dream Besieged
ACROSS THE EUROPEAN CONTINENT, ideologically opposing factions were engulfed in bloody clashes about ideology, and more specifically about the role modernity was to play in their societies. This simmering state of war was gripping almost all European countries, with the possible exception of Britain, where Oswald Mosley’s fascist Blackshirts, at a self-declared (and contested) peak of some fifty thousand members, never rose to become a genuine popular movement.
In Austria, where the 1927 burning of the Palace of Justice had become a symbol of the country’s desperate and increasingly deadly battle for a new identity, events would not stop at a single bloody riot, as they had done in France. In 1934, only two weeks after the siege of the Palais-Bourbon that had cost seventeen lives, the tensions in Vienna erupted into a civil war.
The confrontation was almost inevitable. By 1934, Austria was no longer a democracy. After his election in 1929, the conservative Catholic chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss had taken advantage of a hitch in the democratic protocol—one after another, all three presidents of the parliament had resigned for procedural reasons, leaving that body technically unable to vote—to simply declare that the assembly had “rendered itself defunct.” Not willing to wait until members of parliament could elect three new presidents and assume their normal duties, Dollfuss had the police stop the next parliamentary sessions by force; he then simply assumed power and proceeded to govern by decree.
The front lines in the Austrian struggle for nationhood were drawn mainly between socialists and conservative Catholics, between visions of a modern workers’ paradise and a rigid, rightist autocracy of national virtue. With Dollfuss, the latter had won by what amounted to a coup d’état.
A new, dictatorial Austria rapidly took shape. Dollfuss introduced censorship of the press, prohibited political assemblies, and outlawed the paramilitary wing of the socialist party, the Republikanischer Schutzbund. Political opponents were arrested and sent to prison camps, and the death penalty was reintroduced for even usually non-capital offenses, including “public violence and malicious damage to foreign property.”
From the very beginning of his dictatorship, Dollfuss was particularly concerned to reverse the secular reforms of previous governments and to make his homeland into an obedient daughter of the Catholic Church. By official decree, posts in higher education were to be filled with “men of Christian principles” as well as good patriots; religion became a compulsory subject at school, and in a particularly spectacular piece of legislation, anyone wishing to leave the Catholic Church had to be examined by a neurologist at the state’s behest. The bishops showed themselves appreciative. In a letter to the faithful they purred: “The year 1933 has brought rich blessings to all of Christianity, and has brought special joys to our fatherland Austria.”4
Not all Austrians were grateful for these blessings. By early 1934, thousands of socialists were interned in camps or prisons for political reasons, and members of the now-illegal Schutzbund were stockpiling weapons. When on February 12 one of their arsenals in Linz was raided by police as part of a campaign to disarm all socialist and social-democrat organizations, the local Schutzbund commander refused to hand in his cache and gave orders to fire.
News of the incident quickly proved to be the spark that ignited an already highly volatile situation. As police and army units tried to move in, in a series of preventive strikes, they encountered stiff resistance, and soon fighting had spread through the country, though it did not reach all provinces: some social democratic leaders preferred to resign from their party rather than risk bloodshed, and rural areas were almost unaffected by the violence.
In Vienna, pitched battles between government forces and Schutzbund militias were intense. Resistance was focused on the great showcase project of socialist utopian living, the splendid Karl-Marx-Hof to the north of the city, while people in the cafés and offices in the center were all but oblivious to the fighting and simply continued their lives, as the writer Stefan Zweig would remember. Meanwhile, the army brought in artillery and was shelling the Karl-Marx-Hof, which socialist workers had transformed into an improvised fortress.
Faced with overwhelming force and unable to mobilize a larger rebellion, the Schutzbund capitulated after three days of fighting, on February 15. More than two hundred of them had been killed and hundreds more injured, while government forces had lost 128 men. For the government, this moment of triumph was also a chance to dismantle the socialist leadership. Nine Schutzbund commanders were condemned to death and executed at the garrote, with one of them, who had been badly wounded, carried to the place of execution on a stretcher. Members of the civilian leadership of the Social Democratic Party did not wait to be arrested; they fled to neighboring Czechoslovakia.
The writing on the wall in 1927 had spelled out bitter conflicts. Only seven years later, the battle in Austria between a secular, social democratic, and progressive vision and one that was Catholic, corporate, and rural had been fought, and won decisively by the latter. Fueled by a real conflict of social visions and cultural identities, Europe’s political map was rapidly changing.
·1928·
Boop-Boop-a-Doop!
To the woman of the period thus set forth, restless, seductive, greedy, discontented, craving sensation, unrestrained, a little morbid, more than a little selfish, slack of mind as she is trim of body, neurotic and vigorous, a worshiper of tinsel gods at perfumed altars, fit mate for the hurried, reckless and cynical man of the age, predestined mother of—what manner of being?
—Walter Fabian (Samuel Hopkins Adams), Flaming Youth, 1923
HELEN KA
NE WAS AN UNLIKELY BROADWAY STAR. SHORT AND PLUMP, a curvaceous and self-confident girl from the Bronx, she did not conform to the boyish, languid flapper figure that was then fashionable. A seemingly ungovernable mop of brown hair gave her a precious few more inches of height. But then there was her voice: cute, sexy, with an almost cartoonish New York twang. Outlined in black, her huge eyes appeared to wink at every man in the audience; her puckered crimson lips were a heart-shaped promise.
When Kane came onstage in 1928 in Oscar Hammerstein’s revue Good Boy, she peered out into the audience and launched into her newest number, “I Wanna Be Loved by You” (later famously resurrected by Marilyn Monroe), and she was. Her fans waited almost breathlessly as she worked toward her trademark line, a coy afterthought to the lyrics, a barely sung boop-boop-a-doop.
Oh so cute: Betty Boop became an ironic symbol of femininity during the Great Depression.
While never a great singer or actress, Helen Kane commanded immense attention and even greater fees. There were Helen Kane look-alike contests, dolls, and eventually a cartoon that would immortalize her, taking her catchphrase as the character’s name: Betty Boop. To a young generation of Americans, the ingénue glamourpuss was a symbol of their own determination to get out, get away from their parents, and enjoy life.
