France

H2

b

Politics Between the Wars

At home, the shape of politics changed relatively little in the aftermath of World War I, as France was governed by a variety of center-left and center-right coalitions. The most important change was the division of the SFIO into separate communist and socialist parties, which occurred in 1920. The Communist Party continued to profess Marxist revolutionary doctrines and warmly embraced the Soviet regime that had come to power in Russia in 1917. The Socialist Party, under Jaurès’s protégé Léon Blum, adopted a less confrontational position with regard to the Third Republic and refused to endorse the Soviet government in Moscow.

Although the Socialist Party initially had fewer members, they were far more successful than the Communist Party at the polls. In the 1932 election, they won 131 seats in the legislature—more than any other party—while the Communist Party won only 10 seats. However, neither party had much impact on French government social policy until the Great Depression, especially because the Socialists refused to participate officially in any coalition they could not dominate.

The major domestic political concerns of the 1920s were fiscal. Although the economy expanded in the mid-1920s, state finances remained shaky. Accumulated war debt and deficit spending caused the franc to decline; it was only one-tenth of its prewar value by 1926. In that year, a centrist government under Raymond Poincaré restored the franc by raising taxes and cutting spending. These measures increased confidence in the economy, and capital investment grew. By 1929 manufacturing and trade had climbed to roughly 50 percent above prewar levels. In the agricultural sector, efficiency improved, but the sector was still much less prosperous than were manufacturing and trade.

The coming of the Great Depression changed fiscal concerns into economic ones. France escaped the depression until late 1931, many months after it had begun elsewhere. But when the depression did reach France, it lasted longer. Whereas in 1937 British industrial production was 24 percent greater than in 1929 and German industrial production 16 percent greater, French industrial production in 1937 was 28 percent lower than it had been in 1929. The response of the French government, like that of many other nations, only aggravated the problem. Having fought so hard to support the franc in the 1920s, the French government resisted devaluation, although the franc declined anyway. To protect home markets, the French government, like others, raised tariff barriers, thereby worsening the prospects for a general European recovery. What made France’s situation bearable was the fact that unemployment was less serious than elsewhere, partly because many foreign workers were sent home and many unemployed workers returned to family farms. Nonetheless, the standard of living declined.

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The center-right coalitions failed to stop the economic slide, and in 1932 they gave way to governments run by the Radicals and supported by the Socialist Party. But these governments could not agree on a coherent economic program. Paralysis in the center-left encouraged the growth of a variety of new political organizations on the right. These ranged from blatant imitations of Benito Mussolini’s and Hitler’s fascist movements, such as Jacques Doriot’s French Popular Party (PPF), to more tradition-minded groups, such as the Cross of Fire. Both groups had memberships in the hundreds of thousands.

When the operations of a shady financier, Serge Stavisky, were made public and linked to the Radical Party in 1934, the right staged a massive demonstration in Paris, joined by members of the Communist Party. The demonstration threatened to overthrow the Third Republic, although its goal was apparently only to force a change of cabinet. During the demonstration, 17 people were killed and thousands were wounded. The cabinet was changed, but the new government offered no effective cure for the Depression. Equally ineffective was the next government led by Pierre Laval, who would later be a key member of the Vichy government.

H2

c

The Popular Front

In 1935 the Communist Party, acting on Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s orders, offered to ally with the Socialists and the Radicals to stem the tide of fascism sweeping Europe. This coalition would be called the Popular Front. Stung by previous communist attacks on them as social fascists, the Socialist Party was reluctant to join, but did so. To solidify the alliance with the Radicals, both Communists and Socialists dropped earlier plans to socialize the economy, but even the coalition’s mild calls for government intervention to improve the lot of workers scandalized the right.

The bitterly fought 1936 elections witnessed the beginning of the end of the broad centrist consensus that had supported the Third Republic. The center’s failure to solve the Depression drove voters to extremes on both right and left at the expense of the center, and the Communist Party increased its seats from 10 to 72. This gave Léon Blum the support he needed to form the Popular Front, the first French government led by a Socialist.

The record of the Popular Front was mixed. Blum settled a wave of strikes by arranging for wage increases, collective bargaining, a 40-hour workweek, and paid vacations. He also attempted to support farm prices. But Blum’s government lacked an adequate theory to explain the Depression and had no better idea than earlier ones for how to cure it. When the Popular Front was toppled by the Radicals in 1937, the economy was no stronger than before.

Except for a very brief period in 1938, Radicals dominated the government from 1937 until 1940. During this time, they managed to nudge production up, through tax cuts and concessions to business at the expense of labor. Even so, by the summer of 1939, economic activity had returned only to the level of 1928.

H

3

World War II

The failure of the Third Republic to deal effectively with the Depression was accompanied by the collapse of its foreign and military policy. Until 1936 the rise of Nazi Germany caused little controversy in France. The government responded to growing Nazi power by attempting to strengthen ties with France’s central and eastern European allies, establish new agreements with Italy and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), and renew the old entente with Britain. But after the Popular Front government came to power, the right, which portrayed the Popular Front as the prelude to a communist takeover, began to see Hitler as less of a menace than Blum. The left, torn between its old pacifism and its fears of creeping European fascism, was divided on whether to confront or negotiate with Germany.

Clearly, the majority of the French people wanted to avoid war at almost all costs, and British pressure to do so inclined France toward a policy of appeasement. In 1936 France merely protested Hitler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland, despite the fact that this move violated the treaties of Versailles and Locarno. While the Popular Front was in power, Blum declined to aid the Spanish Republic, which was fighting a brutal civil war against anti-Republican forces led by Franco and supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Since the right favored Franco, Blum feared a civil war in France if he intervened in the Spanish conflict. In March 1938 France acceded to Germany’s annexation of Austria. At the Munich Conference (see Munich Pact) in September 1938, France violated its own defense treaty with Czechoslovakia by agreeing to German occupation of the Czech Sudetenland. The next March, France stood by while Germany occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia.

Only on September 3, 1939, after Germany invaded Poland, did France and Britain reluctantly declare war. Even then France took little offensive action beyond participating in a naval blockade of Germany, still hoping that something might be worked out. Such paralysis, far from thwarting Nazi aggression against France, only invited it. The German attack on France in May 1940 was no repetition of the attack of September 1914, which had stalled out very quickly. Hitler directed his massed tank divisions north of the Maginot Line through the supposedly impenetrable Ardennes forest. France and the rest of the Allied Powers did not lack men and material, but they were unprepared strategically. In six weeks Hitler won the decisive victory that had eluded the Germans in World War I. Seventy years after the Battle of Sedan, France was once again an occupied nation.

H3

a

The Vichy Government

While millions took to the roads to escape the German advance, the French government left Paris for Bordeaux. On June 17 the government asked Germany for an armistice, after which aging Marshal Henri Pétain, the hero of World War I, was appointed prime minister. On June 22 France signed an armistice agreement in the same railroad car in which the Germans had signed the armistice of 1918. French armed forces were to be demobilized, the southern third of France would continue to be governed by the French, and the northern two-thirds was to be occupied and administered by the Germans with funds provided by French taxpayers. Reassuring the French people with a soothing, paternal radio voice, Pétain called upon France to lay down its arms and accept the armistice. Most French people, in shock over the quick defeat, followed his advice.

In the south, the government moved from Bordeaux to Vichy, where on July 10 it voted overwhelmingly to authorize Pétain to draft a new constitution. Under this constitution, Pétain became head of state and the final arbiter in all decisions, while a variety of ministers responsible to him carried out government functions. Pétain’s deputy, Pierre Laval, pushed the plan through the Chamber of Deputies.

The professed goal of the new regime was a national revolution, which would regenerate a decadent France by rerooting the nation in its traditions of religion, family, and the land. The squabbling and corruption of parliamentary democracy was now supposed to give way to the authoritarian efficiency of one-man rule. Legally and spiritually, the Third Republic, which was blamed for involving France in a war it could not win, was now dead.

In fact, Vichy was a hodgepodge of competing factions and interests. The principal division lay between the traditionalists and the modernizers. A majority of Vichyites were traditionalists who sought to contain capitalist competition, organize society into partially self-governing associations, and restore the influence of the Catholic Church. The modernists, who were closely associated with big business, wanted to push France forward through more active government intervention in the economy. Although they were in the minority, the modernists gradually gained influence, in large part because their program called for measures that were more practical. If Vichy had a positive legacy, it lay in its efforts at government economic planning, which were continued after the war and helped remove obstacles to growth. One of the ironies of the Vichy regime was that in some ways it promoted modernization more effectively than the Third Republic had.

Yet Vichy also meant an active collaboration with Nazi Germany. Although Vichy leaders protested after the war that they had resisted German demands as much as they had dared, they were in fact convinced in 1940 that the future belonged to fascism. They actively cooperated in building the Nazi-dominated European empire, doing even more than Germany expected or demanded.

Germany did not, in the end, reward France for this cooperation. France was required to supply Germany with hundreds of thousands of forced laborers and more material aid than any other German satellite. Despite their vast agricultural resources, the French ate more poorly and suffered more inflation during the war than any other western European people except the Italians. Alsace-Lorraine was again annexed by Germany, and in November 1942, the Germans occupied the southern third of the nation, thereby removing most of Vichy’s independence.

However, the most shameful acts committed by the Vichy government resulted more from its own hatreds than from German demands. Not only did Vichy hunt down and execute resistors to German rule, but it also initiated its own campaign of anti-Semitic persecution. Jews were fired from positions in the civil service, judiciary, army, public schools, and cultural institutions (publishing houses, newspapers, radio, and entertainment), and only a limited number were permitted to practice medicine and law. Vichy seized Jewish property, while Jews who had recently immigrated to escape persecution elsewhere were interned in concentration camps.

Still worse was Vichy’s collaboration in the Holocaust. Vichy was not inclined to commit genocide itself and was anxious to keep French-born Jews under its control, all the better to strip them of their property. However, Vichy employed its own police and militia to round up Jewish men, women, and children, most of them foreign-born. They were then shipped in appalling conditions to German-occupied Poland and gassed in Nazi death camps. The death toll of Jews transported from France was about 75,000.

H3

b

The Resistance

Most French people initially supported Pétain’s regime, but resistance to German rule and opposition to Vichy began almost immediately after France was defeated. Charles de Gaulle, a career general and undersecretary of war who had bitterly criticized French strategy in the 1930s, escaped to London in June 1940 and established a government in exile. Lacking any formal authority, de Gaulle attracted few followers at first, but he received vital recognition and material assistance from British prime minister Winston Churchill.

In France, small groups of resisters formed and committed isolated acts of protest and sabotage. These groups were better organized in the southern unoccupied zone and attracted support from various parties, especially the Communist Party. Contacts between de Gaulle’s government in London and the Resistance in France increased, and gradually de Gaulle was able to impose control from abroad on the expanding Resistance in France.

In 1943 de Gaulle moved his headquarters to Algiers, after clashing with Churchill and U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt over strategy. De Gaulle’s relations with the Resistance in France were also sometimes difficult. Resistance leaders feared de Gaulle’s ambitions, but sufficient harmony was maintained to prevent a breakdown in relations. As the tide of war turned against the Germans and the Germans demanded more forced labor from the French, the ranks of the Resistance swelled. By 1944 most people could demonstrate they had done something to resist the Germans, so they could later claim to have been members of the Resistance.

Following the successful landing of Allied troops in Normandy on June 6, 1944, France was gradually liberated. The communists made some attempt at seizing power, most notably through an uprising against the Germans in Paris in August 1944. But in the end de Gaulle was able to establish his authority throughout France without much difficulty. A new provisional government under de Gaulle’s leadership assumed power. The harshness of the occupation led to rough justice against former collaborators, often without formal trials. About 10,000 people were executed and 40,000 sent to prison. Laval was tried and executed. Pétain was also tried and sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

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