To Lose a Battle

by Alistair Horne

  After 6 February, whatever chance the Right wing had of pulling off a coup d’état vanished forever, but the protest march against the ‘corrupt politicians’ drew a mass of new, young recruits to de la Rocque’s standard. In response the left closed ranks more tightly to form a ‘common anti-Fascist front’. That July, Blum the Socialist leader and Thorez the Communist signed a pact of unity; by October 1934, L’Humanité was beginning to talk about a ‘Popular Front against Fascism’. Meanwhile, other factors were lending further cohesive force to this new display of left-wing solidarity. France found herself still plunged deep into economic darkness by the world slump, while Britain and America were already emerging from the tunnel; between 1928 and 1934 French industrial production dropped by 17 per cent, between 1929 and 1936 average incomes fell by 30 per cent, and by the end of 1935 over 800,000 were unemployed. Fearful of the ‘Bolshevist’ threat to private property and never quite forgetting the Commune, the steely-faced managers of French industry – the patrons – had taken full advantage of the past splits between the Socialist and Communist trade unions to put the brake on essential social reforms. Now (although from mid 1935 onwards the economy did begin to show an upturn), the plight of the workers in many French industries was genuinely appalling.

  On 14 July 1935, the Croix de Feu marched with smart military precision down the Champs-Élysées; de la Rocque was seen paying homage at the Arc de Triomphe. But the day belonged to the Left, demonstrating at the other end of Paris. Down from Belleville and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine they flooded to the Place de la Bastille in their thousands; some papers estimated that well over half a million turned out that day. At a mass meeting on the Bastille, beneath great red banners proclaiming ‘Peace, Bread, Liberty!’, the Popular Front was officially launched. That afternoon, a vast column processed from the Bastille to Vincennes. Daladier, the Radical-Socialist ex-Prime Minister whose downfall the Communists had helped bring about the previous year, marched alongside Marty, the revolutionary who had organized the post-war mutinies in France’s Black Sea Fleet; arm in arm, like blood brothers, went Blum and Thorez, Herriot and Barbusse and Duclos. Such scenes of left-wing solidarity and elation had not been seen since the heyday of the Commune sixty-four years earlier. But, as Herriot grudgingly remarked later on, it did seem rather as if the Communists had dominated the proceedings.

  At their congress that October, the French Radicals decided to throw in their lot with the Popular Front. Then, in March 1936, came Hitler’s reoccupation of the Rhineland. On 3 May France went to the polls and the Popular Front was swept into power. Formerly with only 10 seats, the Communists now emerged with no less than 72; the Socialists, gaining another 49 seats, became the strongest party, and accordingly it fell to Léon Blum to form a government. In a frenzy of thanksgiving, some 400,000 Parisians marched on 24 May to do homage at the Mur des Fédérés, amid cries of ‘Vive le Front Populaire! Vive la Commune!’, while a contingent of soldiers from Versailles bore a banner proclaiming ‘The Versailles soldiery of 1871 assassinated the Commune. The soldiers of Versailles in 1936 will avenge it.’ The Left had scored its greatest triumph since 1871; but how, with the clouds growing more and more sombre beyond the Rhine, was it going to exploit this victory?

  Chapter 4

  Palinurus Nods

  Lost was the nation’s sense, nor could be found,

  While the long solemn unison went round;

  Wide and more wide, it spread o’er all the realm;

  Even Palinurus nodded at the helm.

  ALEXANDER POPE, The Dunciaa

  In tragic life, God wot,

  No villain need be! Passions spin the plot:

  We are betrayed by what is false within.

  GEORGE MEREDITH, Modern Love

  France on Strike

  Almost from the moment of his accession, things went badly for Léon Blum. The difficulties of agreeing a programme meant that subtle negotiations between the disparate members of the Popular Front coalition dragged on all through May 1936. The French proletariat, buoyed up with the exhilaration of victory, now watched with extreme impatience for palpable efforts to implement the Front’s electoral promises and alleviate their hardships. Within a week of the election, strikes broke out at the Bréguet aircraft factory at Le Havre. At a meeting of the Communist Party on 25 May, militants began calling for the Party to break with the dilatory Blum. Thorez urged restraint, but at the same time demanded immediate economic action from the Government. The next day the Lavalette factory in the north-west suburbs of Paris and the Nieuport aircraft works at Issy in the south-west were paralysed by strikes. These assumed a new form, later to become known as grêves sur le tas – sit-in strikes. The workers presented their demands to the management, which rejected them. They then sent the women home and simply occupied the factory. Friends outside provided them with food, cigarettes and bedding, and they settled down for the night, arguing, playing cards or boules, singing and dancing. Alcohol was banned, but the general tone was one of en fête, again evoking memories of the first jubilant days after the Commune seized Paris in 1871, but also related to the mood of mass escapism then gripping France. Day by day the bizarre situation renewed itself, the factory-owners being told, forcefully, that if they attempted to break the strike their plants would simply be burnt down.

  At first the stoppages appear to have been anarchic and spontaneous; Simone Weil explains that as soon as the ‘pressure’ of management had been felt to weaken with the coming of the Popular Front, ‘immediately all the suffering, the humiliations, the rancour, the bitterness silently built up over the years created a force sufficient to break all restraint’. Gradually, however, the unions assumed control. Over the 27th and 28th, similar strikes smoothly took over the Farman aircraft works and the factories of Citroën, Renault, Gnome et Rhône, and Simca in the Paris area (virtually all these plants, it should be noted in passing, happened to be vital to the French armaments industry). By the beginning of June the number of strikers reached 500,000 (eventually they were estimated to total 2 million), affecting more than 12,000 enterprises. Parisians began to take their Sunday promenades out to the factories to gaze at the workers laughing and entertaining themselves among the dead machinery.

  Blum became thoroughly alarmed by events, which he later described as ‘this social explosion which slapped the Government in the face’, and began hastily to prepare reformist legislation. Prices on the Bourse plunged, and some patrons transferred their money abroad. Although at shop-floor level there were Communist agitators at work, the Party leaders seemed to have been taken by surprise by events – just as they were during the Paris riots of May 1968. Then at 1 a.m. on 8 June, Blum signed the famous ‘Matignon Agreement’, named after his new official residence. Under what was undoubtedly their greatest single advance in the history of French industrial relations, the workers were guaranteed compulsory collective bargaining and annual paid holidays, a forty-hour week, and an immediate general rise in wages of 7 to 15 per cent. Yet still the strikes continued, until on the 11th Thorez was forced to intervene by appealing to Parisian Communists: ‘You must know when to end a strike!’ On 13 June the workers evacuated Renault. That Quatorze Juillet – at what was both the high point and the swansong of the Popular Front – the entire Left celebrated its great triumph, linking arms once again around the Bastille.

  Simone de Beauvoir describes how the Matignon Agreement ‘filled us with joy’. Thanks to 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’, and Léon Blum movingly remarks: ‘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 in fact he had rendered the future for France as a whole more hopeless. A week after the Assembly ratified the Matignon Agreement, the Spanish Civil War broke out; in Germany, Hitler’s rearmament was picking up tempo at an
alarming speed. Necessary and long overdue as were Blum’s reforms, they could not have come at a worse time for France. Far from producing a magical panacea for all her economic ills, if anything they aggravated them. One reasonable estimate puts the immediate additional cost of the Agreement to French employers at between 64 and 107 per cent, which in turn pushed up the cost of living by 50 per cent by the end of 1937. Finding their new gains thus whittled away, the workers at once saw the hand of the employers attempting to neutralize the new laws, and throughout 1937 another series of wild-cat strikes was sparked off. The sharply increased costs meant that French exports became less competitive abroad, with the result that, in September 1936, Blum was forced to devalue the franc (once again) by 25 per cent – to the fury of the Communists.

  French industry continued to stagnate. Because they assumed it created unemployment, the Front opposed the introduction of the assembly line, which meant that much of France’s badly needed new military equipment would continue to be turned out laboriously by manual processes. Most insidious of all was the impact that the forty-hour week had on French rearmament, at a time when the Germans were toiling away in Hitler’s munitions industries for an average of fifty-two hours a week. By the autumn of 1938, while German production was 30 per cent higher than it had been in 1930, Pertinax reckoned that French industrial production was probably as much as 25 per cent lower; Paul Reynaud considered that the forty-hour week ‘was equivalent to destroying one-sixth of French plant’. Another injurious legacy from the stay-in strikes of 1936 which contributed to the enduring stagnation of French industry was the loss of power and prestige of works foremen; less visible beneath this lay a newly acquired instinct for disobedience, a disdain for authority of all forms, whether of Government, management or union, which was certainly to bear moral fruit in 1940.

  France Rearms – Reynaud, de Gaulle and Pétain: 1936–9

  Amid all this political and economic turmoil, France, in alarm at the rise of Hitler and his reoccupation of the Rhineland, had begun to make tentative efforts to refurbish her armed forces. In March 1935 the period of military service had been extended to two years (though at the time the official Socialist organ, Le Populaire, complained that ‘as in 1913, the Chamber had capitulated to the generals’). In September 1936 a mechanization programme was laid down providing for the creation of 3 D.L.M.s (light mechanized divisions) and two armoured divisions, but it was desperately slow in getting off the ground. Work began on the prototypes of some impressive new weapons, all of which were to prove actually superior on various points to their German counterparts in 1940. In 1935 came the first heavy ‘B’ tank; in 1936 the fast, hard-hitting medium ‘Somua’; and in 1937 the 47-mm. anti-tank gun. But hesitancy on the part of the High Command, lack of co-ordination between the Army and the arms manufacturers, added to the inbuilt hostility of the Popular Front towards rearmament of any kind, plus the consequences of the strikes and the forty-hour week, resulted in the first orders for even the necessary machine-tools not being given until the year after the launching of the new armament programme. Whereas even during 1936, 120 tanks had been leaving the factories each month, by January 1937 the number fell to 19. The arms budget, which in 1936 amounted to 1,492 million francs, rose to 2,938 million in 1937 and 5,152 million in 1938, but much of it was pointlessly frittered away. In 1937, the Government decided to construct a line of unconnected light pill-boxes along the now unguarded northern frontier; the Press immediately assumed this meant the prolongation of the Maginot Line proper, and the Government wholeheartedly encouraged it in this act of self-deception.

  As early as February 1935, the French Deuxième Bureau had notified the High Command of the appearance of the first Panzer division in Germany, and given a reasonably accurate account of its intended role. But from the leaders of government right down to the patrician French cavalry officers, with their conservative shibboleth ‘Oil is dirty, dung is not’, the nation in general was disinclined to believe that any combination of tanks and aircraft could alter the existing balance of warfare. Chief among the ‘rebels’ who dared fight against the current was that political maverick Paul Reynaud, who as early as 1924 had been calling for a mobile and offensive Army as constituting the sole means of deterring German aggression. Later he found a useful ally in an Army major, Charles de Gaulle, who had first come to notice by pleading the case of the armoured division in a review article published in 1933. Two years later de Gaulle expanded his ideas into a slender book, Vers l’Armée de Métier.1 For this audacity, de Gaulle was struck from the 1936 promotion list, just as his earlier idol and patron, Marshal Pétain, had suffered before 1914 for his unorthodox views on firepower.

  In assessing de Gaulle’s contribution one has to exercise extreme caution. The events of the war and the Vichy era, coupled to the subsequent growth of a potent Gaullist myth-making machine, have tended to cast de Gaulle, in peace-time, as an unhonoured prophet of original genius, and in war-time as the heroic executor of his own theories, on a plane above all other French commanders during the brief conflict of 1940. Pétain, on the other hand, emerges as the malevolent scapegoat responsible for all the military shortcomings of France in the inter-war period. Both estimates err by exaggeration. This is not the place to attempt to restore the image of Pétain, but on a few specific points it may be relevant to put the record straight. As has been noted earlier, Pétain, with his doctrine of the ‘continuous front’, may well be blamed for inculcating wrong-headedness in the French Army – up to 1936. But this false doctrine was shared by the vast majority of French leaders, and, one might well ask, why did even Reynaud appear to challenge Pétain’s errors only in the wake of 1940? The same question could be levelled with equal force at other eminent Frenchmen. Then Pétain is accused of having gravely neglected the Army while Minister of Defence under the Doumergue Government of 1934, but in fact his term of office was a steady struggle with the politicians to obtain the necessary military credits, a struggle which he, already approaching eighty and with a life of antipathy to politicians behind him, was least fitted to wage. One of Pétain’s utterances most held against him ex post facto was that of March 1934, when he claimed that the Ardennes Forest was ‘impenetrable’. But this, too, was the general view of the French Army, and indeed, as Guderian’s Panzers had not yet been invented, at the time it made reasonably good sense. Also, it should be noted, Pétain had added the essential qualification – ‘provided we make some special dispositions’. As will be seen, no such ‘special dispositions’ were ever made. Further, the generalization that de Gaulle foresaw the potentialities of the armoured Blitzkrieg, while Pétain, in his dotage, failed to do so, is also not strictly correct. Speaking at the École de Guerre in 1935 about the impact of air power and armour on the warfare of the future, Pétain made a prophecy that de Gaulle would not have improved upon; ‘victory will belong to him who is the first to exploit to the maximum the properties of modern engines and to combine their action, on whatever level, to destroy the adversary’s means of carrying on the struggle…’ At St Quentin the following year he declared that

  The conception of the defensive army which has had priority in France since the Treaty of Versailles has had its day… we must direct our activity so that we have on the ground and in the air powerful forces for immediate unleashing… for modern offensive techniques are alone capable of effectively collaborating with an ally in peril…

  But what is really important, as far as Pétain is concerned, is that during the years when the really irreparable damage was done to the French military machine – 1936 to 1940 – the old Marshal’s influence had largely been removed from the councils of war.

  Although the publication of Vers l’Armée de Métier in 1934 provoked the final breach between Pétain and his former protégé, by his heretical unorthodoxy in the book de Gaulle showed himself to be (in the view of one of his biographers) ‘the spiritual heir of the Pétain of 1914’. After beginning, characteristically, with a great sweep of h
istory, de Gaulle wrote: ‘Nowadays, Germany is ceaselessly marshalling the means at her disposal with a view to rapid invasion.’ To meet this menace, ‘A certain portion of our own troops must always be on the alert and capable of deploying its whole force at the first shock of attack.’ An inert, passively defensive Army, de Gaulle scornfully predicted, would be ‘surprised, immobilized and outflanked; and thus you have… Bazaine blocked in Metz’. He heaped derision on France’s conscript Army with its ‘provisional groupings’, which, ‘once dispersed, are re-united with difficulty, like a pack of cards continuously shuffled and mixed up’. The only hope for France, de Gaulle considered, lay in mobility – ‘it is therefore in manoeuvring that France is protected’ – and such mobile striking power could only be obtained by an efficient professional Army mounted on tracks. Six Guderian-style armoured divisions backed by air power would form the nucleus of de Gaulle’s force; but the main point was that it had to be a professional corps, of some 100,000 élite troops. This point is hammered home repeatedly in Vers l’Armée de Métier.

  Yet there is a certain romantic imprecision about all de Gaulle’s ideas expounded here, and none of the meticulously technical blueprinting to be found in Guderian – or for that matter any of the original thought-content produced at an earlier date by Liddell Hart or by Seeckt. In fact, de Gaulle was a fairly late convert to the mechanized philosophy of the earlier apostles. He seems only incompletely to have understood the importance of air-armour co-operation, and in the post-war edition of his book there is a bad piece of ex post facto ‘fudging’ where he adds an important passage on the impact of air power written after the fall of France. Nevertheless, the real significance of de Gaulle and his pre-war writings was that, for France at that time, his views were as outstanding as his courage in stating them.