1870
July: France declares war against Prussia and her German allies.
September 1: Defeated at the battle of Sedan, Napoleon III abdicates. Three days later, on September 4, the empire is supplanted by a Government of National Defense, whose animating spirit is Léon Gambetta.
September 19: The German army besieges Paris.
1871
January: An armistice is declared. The siege lasts four months and results in mass starvation. It ends when, on Bismarck’s command, shells from Krupp cannons are lofted into the city.
February: Nationwide elections of a National Assembly are held, to form a government with which Germany can treat.
March: The National Guard regiments in Paris elect a commune, repudiate the armistice, and induce Adolphe Thiers, the effective head of government, to withdraw regular army troops and batteries from the city.
May: France cedes Alsace and part of Lorraine to Germany in the Treaty of Frankfurt.
May 22–28: Adolphe Thiers unleashes the French army on the Paris Commune in a bloody campaign known as la semaine sanglante.
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La Réforme Intellectuelle et Morale, Ernest Renan.
1874
Frémiet’s statue of Joan of Arc is unveiled at the Place des Pyramides.
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La Tentation de Saint-Antoine, Gustave Flaubert.
After prolonged resistance from Bonapartists and Royalists, the government is officially declared a republic. The First Republic had followed the dethronement of Louis XVI in 1792, and the second, the dethronement of Louis-Philippe in 1848.
1877
Gambetta pronounces a famous indictment of the church for meddling in political affairs: “Le cléricalisme, voilà l’ennemi!” (Clericalism, there is the enemy!).
President Patrice MacMahon (a general promoted to marshal after distinguishing himself during the Crimean War), thwarted by a republican premier and Chamber of Deputies, dismisses the former and dissolves the latter in what is seen as a threat to overthrow the Republic. In the October elections, the public returns a decisive republican majority. MacMahon will resign the following year. No future president will dissolve the Chamber of Deputies, resulting in a government dominated by the legislature.
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L’Assommoir, Émile Zola, the seventh volume of his saga Les Rougon-Macquart. It is his “breakthrough” novel, scandalizing critics with its use of working-class argot.
Le Tour de la France par Deux Enfants, Augustine Fouillée.
1878
June–July: The Congress of Berlin, hosted by Bismarck in the aftermath of the Russo-Turkish War, remaps the Balkan states.
May–November: The Paris World’s Fair, inaugurating the Trocadéro Palace, which will be replaced by the Palais de Chaillot in 1937.
Leo XIII, a liberal pope, succeeds Pius IX, author of The Syllabus of Errors, condemning modern science, among much else of the modern world.
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Trois Contes, Gustave Flaubert.
1879
Léon Gambetta is overwhelmingly elected president of the Chamber of Deputies, an event that signals the beginning of an era of liberal reform, under the leadership of Gambetta and Jules Ferry.
The National Assembly moves from Versailles, where it had convened since 1871, to its traditional home at the Palais Bourbon in Paris. “La Marseillaise” becomes the nation’s official anthem.
1880
June–July: The Jesuits are expelled from their residences and schools. Other “nonauthorized” teaching orders are under threat of expulsion.
July 14 is decreed a national holiday, and the law prohibiting commerce on Sunday is repealed.
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Nana, Émile Zola.
1881
A law is passed abolishing tuition in public primary schools. It will be followed by laws making primary school education compulsory and secular.
1883
The pretender, Henri, Comte de Chambord, whom Charles Maurras will describe as “the priest and pope of royalty rather than a king,” dies at his castle in Austria.
The Catholic newspaper La Croix is founded.
1884
Divorce is legitimized.
Tonkin (Indochina) becomes a French protectorate.
Public prayers opening parliamentary sessions are suppressed.
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À Rebours (Against Nature), J. K. Huysmans.
1885
Jules Ferry is voted out of office after a military defeat at the hands of China in Tonkin. There is rioting in Paris.
May: Two million people follow Victor Hugo’s funeral procession from the Arc de Triomphe to the Panthéon. He is the first grand homme de la patrie to be interred there.
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Germinal, Émile Zola, a novel inspired by the miners’ strike at the Anzin coal fields of northern France.
1886
General Georges Boulanger becomes minister of war.
___________________________
Édouard Drumont’s violently anti-Semitic tracts La France Juive and La France Juive Devant l’Opinion appear, months apart. The former will run through 150 editions by the end of the year.
General Georges Boulanger loses his portfolio as minister of war and is assigned to an obscure command in central France. His departure from Paris provokes a tumultuous demonstration of hero worship at the Gare de Lyon. Boulanger will hold secret talks first with representatives of the royalist party, then with Bonapartists.
1888
March: Boulanger is discharged from the army. The Boulangist newspaper La Cocarde begins publication. Maurice Barrès will serve briefly as editor in chief.
April: Boulanger is elected to the Chamber of Deputies from the industrial north. He will subsequently be the victor in three by-elections, affirming his national stature.
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The first volume of the trilogy Le Culte du Moi, by Maurice Barrès, appears under the imprint of Plon.
The Pasteur Institute is founded.
1889
March: Eiffel unfurls the tricolor flag atop the tower named after him, celebrating the centenary of the French Revolution and inaugurating the Universal Exposition.
April: Georges Boulanger flees to Belgium when word spreads that plans are afoot to try him for high treason.
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Plon publishes the second volume of Barrès’s trilogy, Un Homme Libre.
Thadée Natanson founds the short-lived but important avant-garde magazine La Revue Blanche.
1891
May: Leo XIII promulgates the encyclical Rerum Novarum, defining the church’s view of the relationship between capital and labor and refuting the basic premises of Socialism.
1892
February: Leo XIII promulgates the encyclical Au Milieu des Sollicitudes, addressed to French bishops, the clergy, and the faithful, urging all concerned to accept the legitimate authority of the Republic but to resist the onslaught of anticlerical legislation.
___________________________
Édouard Drumont founds La Libre Parole. Its first issues feature an exposé of fraud perpetrated by executives and financiers of the defunct Panama Canal Company. It will later bring to light the secret court-martial and conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus and will relentlessly argue the case against his retrial in 1899.
France and Russia sign a secret military convention.
December: Alfred Dreyfus is tried and convicted of treason.
Anarchist violence. Auguste Vaillant, who had hurled a bomb into the Chamber of Deputies, is executed. In June, the president of the Republic, Sadi Carnot, is assassinated by an Italian anarchist, Sante Geronimo Caserio.
1895
The major French workers’ union, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), is founded.
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La Psychologie des Foule, by Gustave Le Bon, a work of seminal importance in the literature of crowd psychology, is published. Hitler will draw upon it for his theory of propaganda techniques in Mein Kampf.
The Lumière brothers invent the movie camera.
1897
A year after Alfred Jarry’s five-act play Ubu Roi appears in Paul Fort’s review Le Livre d’Art, Maurice Barrès publishes Les Déracinés (the first volume of Le Roman de l’Énergie Nationale), a novel whose title becomes an ideological argument for the stigmatization of Jews, foreigners, and proponents of Kantian universalism.
André Gide achieves fame and iconic status among the young with the publication of Les Nourritures Terrestres (Fruits of the Earth), a prose poem strongly influenced by Thus Spake Zarathustra, preaching liberation from the family and its moral confinements.
1898
January: “J’accuse,” Zola’s brief accusing the army of framing Alfred Dreyfus, is published on the front page of Clemenceau’s paper L’Aurore. Rioting against Jews erupts throughout France and the Maghreb, with particular ferocity in Algiers.
February: Zola is found guilty of libel. The conviction will be upheld on appeal, prompting him to seek asylum in England.
August: Colonel Hubert Henry, who forged documents used against Dreyfus, commits suicide in his jail cell at the Mont-Valérien military fortress. He becomes a martyr of the extreme right.
October: The High Court accepts a plea by Dreyfus’s defenders for a new trial.
1899
The ultranationalist Ligue de la Patrie Française is founded. Barrès will later preside over it.
August–September: Dreyfus’s second court-martial commences in the city of Rennes. The conviction is upheld. Upon appeal, he is pardoned by the president of the Republic.
___________________________
Charles Maurras founds La Revue de l’Action Française. He will be a contributor during the next half decade to Le Figaro and La Libre Parole.
1900
Dissolution of the Assumptionists, a Catholic order active in the campaign against Dreyfus.
The World’s Fair, organized around the theme “An Assessment of the Century,” opens on April 15. The Palace of Electricity is its most impressive pavilion.
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Charles Péguy founds Les Cahiers de la Quinzaine.
L’Appel au Soldat, Maurice Barrès: the second volume of his trilogy Le Roman de l’Énergie Nationale. It chronicles the rise and fall of Georges Boulanger.
1902
September: Émile Zola dies of carbon monoxide poisoning and is buried in the Montmartre Cemetery, from which his remains are later transferred to the Panthéon.
The Radicals soundly defeat the Socialists in the national elections. Émile Combes, a militant anticlerical, accedes to the premiership and wages war against Catholic orders involved in education. Two years later they will be prohibited from teaching.
___________________________
Leurs Figures, the last volume of Barrès’s trilogy, is based on the Panama Scandal.
1904
Jean Jaurès, French Socialism’s great orator, founds the newspaper L’Humanité.
On an official visit to Rome, Émile Loubet, president of the French Republic, is rebuffed by Pope Pius X, Leo XIII’s successor. France and the Vatican suspend diplomatic relations.
The Entente Cordiale between France and England settles a number of outstanding issues, including England’s control over Egypt and France’s over Morocco.
1905
December: The National Assembly passes a law decreeing the separation of church and state. Religious orders continue to be expelled or denied a pedagogical function, and France severs diplomatic relations with the Vatican.
Wilhelm II challenges France’s intention of establishing a protectorate in Morocco by paying a state visit to Tangiers.
The Ligue de l’Action Française is founded around a review of that name.
July: The High Court reverses Dreyfus’s conviction and reinstates him in the army.
July: The Radicals remain in power after state elections.
October: Clemenceau becomes premier.
December: The papal nuncio is expelled.
___________________________
Paul Claudel’s play Partage de Midi is staged in Paris.
1907
Major strikes and demonstrations take place throughout France. An infantry regiment sent to disband 700,000 demonstrators in Montpellier disobeys orders.
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Alcan publishes Henri Bergson’s L’Évolution Créatrice, a canonical work in the literature of vitalism. It introduces the term “élan vital.”
1908
The bimonthly La Revue de l’Action Française becomes a daily, its name shortened to L’Action Française. Its student hawkers, known as Camelots du Roi, evolve into a body of toughs who will play a conspicuous role in political violence on the streets of Paris.
Austria-Hungary annexes Bosnia-Herzegovina, former Ottoman provinces it had occupied and administered since the Berlin Treaty of 1878.
Georges Sorel’s Réflexions sur la Violence argues that the proletariat, to succeed, must create a violent, catastrophic revolution. Violence is equated with life, creativity, and virtue. He finds disciples on the right as well as the left, in Charles Maurras and Mussolini. Sorel’s contention that myths are important as “expressions of a will to act” comports with a basic premise of L’Action Française.
1909
The Vatican beatifies Joan of Arc.
___________________________
André Gide and two colleagues found the literary review La Nouvelle Revue Française.
1911
July: Germany challenges Morocco’s unofficial status as a French protectorate and England’s maritime supremacy by sending a gunboat to Agadir. War fever runs high in Paris.
November: France and Germany negotiate an agreement whereby France surrenders part of the Congo in exchange for a free hand in Morocco.
Raymond Poincaré becomes premier, a post he will occupy for a year before acceding to the presidency and remaining president for seven years.
France imposes a protectorate on Morocco.
The First Balkan War pits Serbs, Bulgars, and Greeks against the Ottoman Empire.
France’s principal trade union, the CGT, stages a general strike against war preparations.
1913
January: Poincaré is elected president of the Republic.
May–June: No sooner does the First Balkan War end than Bulgaria attacks her recent allies.
July: Strongly endorsed by Poincaré, a law is passed increasing the period of obligatory military service from two years to three. It is opposed by the Left.
August: The Second Balkan War comes to an end.
___________________________
The premiere performance on May 29 of Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées shocks a French audience devoted to the conventions of classical ballet.
Gallimard publishes Du Côté de Chez Swann, the first volume of Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu.
1914
January–March: Le Figaro conducts a campaign against Joseph Caillaux, a likely successor to the premiership and a political liberal.
March: Enraged by the publication of a love letter written by Caillaux during his adulterous affair with her years earlier, Henriette Caillaux kills Gaston Calmette, editor in chief of Le Figaro.
June: René Viviani, an independent, becomes premier, succeeding Poincaré.
June 28: Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the Hapsburg Empire, is assassinated in Sarajevo by a Bosnian Serb.
July 28: Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia.
July 30: Russia mobilizes.
July 31: Germany delivers an ultimatum to France. She will declare war three days later. Jean Jaurès is assassinated.
August 1: The French government orders general mobilization.
August 4: After the declaration of war, political parties agree to suspend partisan disputes and bond in a “Union Sacrée,” which will prove to be only nominally united and sacred.
August 20–23: The French army suffers 40,000 dead in three days of fighting along the Sambre, near Belgium. By the end of the year, 300,000 French soldiers will have perished.
September 6–9: The headlong German advance is halted in the Battle of the Marne, which leads to a stalemate of four years in trenches scoring the hills and valleys of northeastern France.
May: Italy enters the war on the Allied side.
September: The Zimmerwald Conference in Switzerland, attendance at which is regarded as treasonous by the French government, initiates an international pacifist movement.
1916
February–December: The yearlong Battle of Verdun results in no strategic advantage but in more than 800,000 casualties, the spending of forty million artillery shells, the glorification of French steadfastness, the lionization of General Pétain, and an account of the battle in which Pétain vastly exaggerates the effectiveness of turret guns and fixed fortifications, one consequence being France’s disastrous investment in the Maginot Line fourteen years later. He obstinately champions systematic, defensive warfare.
July 1–November 11: The British and French mount an offensive at the Somme River in Picardy, rivaling Verdun in bloodshed. The opening day of the battle sees the British army suffer the most costly military defeat in its history, with 60,000 casualties. After four months it has advanced six miles. The French army is decimated. In three days of fighting, between September 5 and 8, its death toll surpasses 100,000.
___________________________
Henri Barbusse’s antiwar novel Le Feu is serialized, causing violent controversy.
More controversy is stirred by Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, exhibited nine years after Picasso painted it.
1917
February–March: The Russian Revolution erupts in Petrograd, where imperial regiments disobey orders to fire on crowds protesting the dire conditions created by war. A provisional government is formed. Nicholas II, held captive in the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, is forced to abdicate.
April 6: The United States enters the war.
April 16–25: The French army under General Robert Nivelle attempts to dislodge German troops entrenched along a ridge overlooking the Aisne valley in Champagne. The assault fails, and the name of the ridge road, the Chemin des Dames, becomes a byword for carnage.
April–June: An estimated 40,000 troops mutiny, of whom 49 are executed.
November (October 25 in the old-style Julian calendar): The Bolsheviks seize power in Russia.
November: Georges Clemenceau becomes premier.
1918
January 8: President Woodrow Wilson delivers the “Fourteen Points” address to Congress; it will become the basis for terms of the German surrender and the disposition of international relations after World War I.
March 3: Germany and Russia sign separate peace agreements at Brest-Litovsk.
March-July: Germany launches five major offensives, prompting an exodus of Parisians.
November: The German emperor abdicates and a republic is proclaimed, with its capital in Weimar.
November 11: Germany signs an armistice agreement at Rethondes, a small village north of Paris, near Compiègne.
The Spanish influenza pandemic claims the lives of 30,000 French soldiers and as many as 250,000 civilians.
1919
March: Foundation of the Third International, or Comintern, the central body of world Communism.
June: A peace treaty is signed at Versailles, imposing harsh reparations on Germany, a buffer territory in the Rhineland, and the cession of Alsace-Lorraine to France.
July 14: Allied troops parade down the Champs-Élysées.
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Between 1919 and 1927, Gallimard publishes the remaining volumes of Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a bogus document drafted earlier in the century by the czarist police, purporting to reveal a Jewish plot to gain world domination, circulates in various translations. Henry Ford funds the printing of 500,000 copies in the United States.
1920
January 10: The League of Nations is created.
May: Joan of Arc is canonized.
December: The congress of the SFIO (Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière) is held at Tours. A majority votes to join the Third International and founds the French Communist Party (PCF). The minority maintains itself as the SFIO.
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Tristan Tzara arrives in Paris, joins the literary group assembled around André Breton, and, with Francis Picabia, orchestrates events that publicize the Dada movement in Paris. Dada had originated among young expatriate writers in 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich.
The first results of automatic writing appear in Breton and Soupault’s Les Champs Magnétiques.
1922
January: Premier and foreign minister Aristide Briand is forced to resign his offices for showing Germany a conciliatory face. He is replaced by Poincaré.
July: Germany requests a moratorium of four years for the payment of war reparations. The request is denied by England and France.
October: Mussolini seizes power in Rome.
January: French and Belgian troops occupy the industrial Ruhr by way of holding Germany hostage for the defaulted reparations and exacting payment in shipments of coal.
January 22: The young anarchist Germaine Berton assassinates Marius Plateau, a colleague of Charles Maurras’s at L’Action Française.
October: Poincaré agrees to abide by the recommendation of a committee of experts, known as the Dawes Commission, appointed to settle the vexed issue of reparations.
November: Adolf Hitler becomes a nationally recognized name after his failed putsch in Munich.
1924
April: France accepts the recommendation of the Dawes Commission.
May: The Left (Radicals and Socialists) gain a majority in parliamentary elections. Édouard Herriot, the Radical leader, becomes premier.
Right-wing leagues are founded or revived, notably the Ligue des Patriotes.
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The first issue of La Révolution Surréaliste appears in December.
André Breton publishes the “Surrealist Manifesto.”
1925
February: Establishment of the Fédération Nationale Catholique, an anti-republican movement.
April–October: The Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes enshrines the aesthetic of “Art Deco.”
April 23: An uprising in Morocco led by Abd el-Krim is crushed by French colonial troops under the command of Pétain.
July: Belgian and French troops evacuate the Ruhr.
July: Hitler publishes the first volume of Mein Kampf, written during his internment at Landsberg Prison for an attempted putsch in 1923. The second volume will be published in 1926 and a French translation in 1934.
October: At the Locarno Conference, France’s boundaries with Germany are guaranteed and the Rhineland, which had been designated a demilitarized zone in the Treaty of 1919, is reaffirmed as such.
1926
May–July: Speculation; financial panic; the fall of the franc; the parade of several liberal governments and Poincaré’s return to power. France’s economy is stabilized with the passage of a draconian finance law.
September: The pope condemns L’Action Française.
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Abel Bonnard—novelist, future member of the Académie Française, and Nazi collaborator—publishes Éloge de l’Ignorance (In Praise of Ignorance).
In Paris, major demonstrations are held in support of Sacco and Vanzetti, two anarchists accused of murder and brought to trial in a Massachussetts court. They will be executed on August 23.
May: The Third International endorses open warfare against the bourgeoisie, “class against class.”
October: Daladier is elected chairman of the Radical Party, replacing Édouard Herriot.
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Julien Benda publishes La Trahison des Clercs (The Treason of the Intellectuals).
1928
April: Moderate conservatives gain a majority in parliamentary elections.
August: The Kellogg-Briand Pact is signed by forty-one nations, outlawing military aggression as a means of settling international disputes. The following decades will make a mockery of it, but its terms will be reiterated in the United Nations Charter.
December: Marthe Hanau, publisher of La Gazette du Franc, is found guilty of defrauding French financial markets. The fact that she is Jewish provides grist for the mill for anti-Semites.
1929
June: French Communists are under attack. André Tardieu, minister of the interior, initiates legal action against L’Humanité.
July: Poincaré resigns in poor health and is replaced by Aristide Briand, who sits as premier for the fifth time in his long career.
August: The Young Plan definitively establishes the amount of reparations and a schedule for payments.
Allied troops evacuate the Rhineland.
October: The Wall Street crash shakes European financial markets.
December: A decision is made to construct fortifications along the border with Germany—the ill-fated Maginot Line.
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Ullstein publishes Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front.
1930
February: Vietnamese soldiers in the French colonial army mutiny.
November: The banker Albert Oustric joins Marthe Hanau in the postwar rogue’s gallery of swindlers. Prominent politicians are compromised.
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The book publisher Arthème Fayard launches a weekly paper, Je Suis Partout, which will become infamous during the German occupation as a prominent organ of the collaborationist press.
May: Having celebrated the centenary of the conquest of Algeria a year earlier and quelled a revolt of nationalist soldiers in its Vietnamese army, the state opens the Museum of Colonies in conjunction with its Colonial Exposition.
June: Gravely affected by the world economic crisis, Germany ceases to pay reparations. This deals another severe blow to the French economy.
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Pierre Drieu La Rochelle publishes Le Feu Follet, his novel about the unraveling and suicide of an ex-Surrealist, based on the life of Jacques Rigaut.
1932
May: The president of the Republic, Paul Doumer, is assassinated. He is succeeded by Albert Lebrun.
June: Reparations are officially abandoned at the Lausanne Conference. Germany had paid most of her reparations with money borrowed from the United States. She will repudiate those loans.
August: A Congress for Peace is held in Amsterdam on the initiative of the Third International.
December: Germany secures arms equality with the former Allied powers.
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Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au Bout de la Nuit (Journey to the End of the Night), published by Éditions Denoël, is a literary sensation.
1933
January: Hitler is appointed chancellor by President Paul von Hindenburg.
June: A Congress for Peace is held at the Salle Pleyel in Paris.
August: Hitler names Nuremberg the “City of Reich Party Congresses.” Torchlight parades will be held there annually, in September.
October: Germany withdraws from the League of Nations.
Two leagues are founded that will play a significant role in the rise of right-wing extremism during the 1930s: the Francisques and La Solidarité Française Patronnée.
Alexandre Stavisky’s Ponzi scheme is exposed, with enormous repercussions in the political world. Much is made in the anti-Semitic press of his being a Russian Jewish immigrant.
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Gallimard publishes André Malraux’s novel La Condition Humaine (Man’s Fate).
1934
The Tribunal de Commerce rules in favor of a suit to allow a French translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
January: Alexandre Stavisky commits suicide. L’Action Française and other right-wing papers assert that he was murdered by the police at the behest of politicians who would have been compromised in a Stavisky trial.
February 6: At least fifteen people die in right-wing rioting over the Stavisky Affair while Daladier is seeking legislative confirmation of his appointment to the premiership. Camelots du Roi in the front rank of rioters suffer numerous casualties.
Lacking support, Daladier resigns and is replaced by Gaston Doumergue, leading a conservative coalition, which grants him extensive financial powers.
February 9: The French Communist Party and a major union stage a counterdemonstration, in which six demonstrators are killed.
February 12: The major confederation of trade unions, the CGT, calls a general strike “against Fascism.”
April: The conservative Parliament grants the premier the power to issue “decree laws.”
September: The USSR enters the League of Nations.
October: Alexander I of Yugoslavia and the French foreign minister, Louis Barthou, are assassinated by a Bulgarian nationalist in Marseille.
The Radicals split from Doumergue, ending his premiership.
After the riots of February 6, intellectuals exasperated by the ineptitude of parliamentary government and repelled by dictatorships of the Right and Left spawn a profusion of ideas for a society based on technocratic principles. “Planification,” as they are collectively known, harks back to the ur-text of modern technocracy, Auguste Comte’s Discours sur l’Esprit Positif.
1935
May: France and the USSR sign a mutual assistance pact.
June: The conservative premier, Pierre Laval, who will hold that position in the Vichy government, is granted virtually unrestricted power over French finances in the depressed economy, to no avail.
June 21–25: The International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, chaired by Malraux and Gide and attended by literary luminaries from the USSR, England, Europe, and America, takes place at the Mutualité conference hall on the Left Bank. It is sponsored by the Comintern.
July 14: A republican anti-Fascist rally in Paris draws 500,000 demonstrators.
October: Italy attacks Ethiopia with its greatly superior arsenal of weapons. The following June, Emperor Haile Selassie, speaking at the League of Nations, which had stood by impotently, will declare, “It is us today; it will be you tomorrow.”
November: The shifting Radical Party, recently allied with Doumergue’s conservatives, decides to form a coalition with Communists and Socialists in what comes to be known as the Popular Front.
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Gallimard publishes Louis Guilloux’s novel Le Sang Noir (Bitter Victory), one of the most eloquent and scathing condemnations of militarism to emerge in the gathering storm of World War II. Guilloux, an active Socialist, will accompany Gide to the Soviet Union in 1936.
February: L’Action Française descends to the nadir of its incivility when members attack the leader Léon Blum in the street and beat him savagely. As many people as had celebrated Bastille Day gather to express their outrage.
February: The Franco-Soviet Mutual Assistance Pact, initiated by Louis Barthou before his assassination, is finally ratified by the National Assembly, its purpose being to counter the increasingly bellicose temper of Nazi Germany. It is toothless, but it furnishes Hitler with a pretext to occupy and militarize the Rhineland. This he does in flagrant violation of the Locarno Treaty and with no interference from its signatories.
April–May: The Popular Front wins a majority of seats in legislative elections. Socialists outnumber Radicals. Communists, the least numerous party in the coalition, have six times as many seats as after the previous election.
June: Léon Blum assumes the premiership. He is received at his inaugural appearance in the chamber with an anti-Semitic speech by the right-wing deputy Xavier Vallat, whose sentiments are echoed in L’Action Française, Gringoire, L’Écho de Paris, and other dailies.
June: Jacques Doriot founds the French Fascist Party, the Parti Populaire Francais (PPF).
June–July: Parliament passes many of the laws for which the Popular Front achieves lasting fame, if not long life, as the agent of a new dispensation in the lives of the working class: paid vacations, the forty-hour week, and so on. In addition, paramilitary leagues, notably the Croix de Feu, consisting mainly of World War I veterans, are disbanded.
July: Insurgents occupy Spanish Morocco and obtain a foothold on the Iberian Peninsula at Seville, launching the Spanish Civil War.
August: In Moscow, the purge of old-time Bolsheviks begins with the Trial of the Sixteen, including Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, charged with plotting to assassinate Stalin, to dismantle the Soviet Union, and to introduce capitalism. False confessions are extracted from them. They and their relatives will be shot. Other “show” trials and executions will soon follow.
August: Discouraged by England from helping the Spanish republicans militarily, the Blum government opts for a policy of nonintervention.
August–September: The Blum government nationalizes the armaments industry and greatly increases its budget. The franc is devalued, to the chagrin of Blum’s radical allies. The Popular Front fares poorly at the Radical Party congress in October.
November: Roger Salengro, the minister of the interior, who had been taken prisoner during the war, commits suicide after repeated accusations by L’Action Française of having surreptitiously crossed enemy lines to surrender.
November: Italy and Germany recognize Franco as Spain’s ruler.
November: On his return from the USSR, where he was treated with great deference, André Gide publishes an open-eyed account of the Stalinist tyranny, Retour de l’URSS, which runs through many editions.
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Denoël publishes Céline’s second major novel, Mort à Crédit (Death on the Installment Plan).
March: In a riot at Clichy, six Socialists and Communists confronting a demonstration of members of the former Croix de Feu (now transformed from a paramilitary legion into a political party) are killed by police.
May: The World’s Fair, notable for the immense Soviet and Nazi pavilions framing the Eiffel Tower, opens on May 25, a month after the bombing of Guernica by Germany’s Condor Legion. It will stay open for six months, beyond Léon Blum’s first premiership, the show trial in Moscow of Red Army generals, and the disastrous defeat of Spanish republicans in the Battle of Brunete.
Picasso’s painting Guernica is displayed in the Spanish pavilion, having been commissioned by the Spanish republican government. It will go on a world tour to publicize the brutality of the insurgents and their German allies.
June: Blum is unseated and replaced by the radical Chautemps, during whose premiership the French railroad system is nationalized (SNCF) and the franc devalued a second time as capital flees the country.
September: An organization of former Camelots du Roi, the Cagoule, launches a terrorist campaign by bombing two buildings that house a major employers’ association. Their strategy is inspired by the Nazis’ burning of the Reichstag in Berlin and framing of German Communists.
November 5: At a meeting in the Reich Chancellery, the so-called Hossbach conference, Hitler reveals his plans for European conquest.
December: Italy quits the League of Nations.
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Malraux, who fought with the republicans in Spain, publishes his novel about the Spanish Civil War, L’Espoir (Man’s Hope).
Jean Renoir makes a powerful case against war with his film La Grande Illusion.
Louis Aragon, a founder of the Surrealist movement and the author of novels that dramatize his conversion to Marxist-Leninism, becomes the effective director of Commune, a journal committed to mobilizing intellectuals in the war against Spanish Fascism.
Céline writes the first of several virulently anti-Semitic tracts, Bagatelles pour un Massacre (Trifles for a Massacre).
1938
January–April: Political instability is the rule, with Chautemps and Blum each briefly revisiting the Hôtel Matignon before Daladier establishes residence there for the third time, supported by a large majority of conservatives. For the third time, as well, the franc is devalued.
March: Hitler absorbs Austria in the Anschluss.
September: At the Nazi Party congress in Nuremberg, Hitler announces his intention to “rescue” Germans living in Czechoslovakia’s westernmost province, the Sudetenland. France (Daladier) and England (Chamberlain) sanction the annexation at a conference in Munich, to which no Czech representative is invited.
October: Daladier’s minister of finance, Paul Reynaud, prepares executive decrees the effect of which will be the annulment of several key Popular Front reforms. The decrees also provide for the arrest of foreigners.
November 9–10: Kristallnacht in Germany and Austria. After the assassination of a German embassy official in Paris by a young Jew whose family had been evicted from their house in Hanover, Jews are killed and Jewish shops and synagogues burned and vandalized in a series of coordinated attacks which leave streets littered with broken glass, giving the event its name—Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. On November 11, the twentieth anniversary of the Armistice, Le Figaro reports, “A kind of madness seized the German population and hatred of the Jewish race reached its peak today, convulsively. Jews of every age, men and women alike, have been set upon, in their houses as well as on the street. Only two have been killed, but in Vienna a wave of deep despair has led to twenty suicides.” Far from commenting on the event, Charles Maurras’s daily column is a rant against the Jewish minister of education, Jean Zay.
In an official communiqué, Mussolini laments the hospitality France offers Jews and other “parasites.” In France a wave of refugees, mainly from Germany and Spain, provokes xenophobic outcries.
December: Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German minister of foreign affairs, arrives in Paris to sign an agreement of “mutual understanding” with the Daladier government, only a month after Kristallnacht.
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The French Communist Party launches an evening daily, Ce Soir, and appoints Louis Aragon its editor in chief.
George Orwell publishes Homage to Catalonia, an account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War.
Jean-Paul Sartre publishes his first novel, La Nausée.
1939
January: The first internment camp for refugees opens in the mountainous region of central France.
February: France officially recognizes Franco Spain, although nationalist troops will not occupy Madrid until late March. Franco thereupon subscribes to the Anti-Comintern Pact.
March: Germany annexes Bohemia and Moravia.
April–May: Germany renounces the nonaggression treaty signed with Poland in January 1934. Italy and Germany form a military alliance dubbed the “Pact of Steel.”
Countries are scrambling to make preparations for war. A Franco-British mission visits Moscow to discuss military aid but fails to read Stalin’s ulterior design. On August 23, to the shock and dismay of European Conmmunists, he signs a nonaggression pact with Hitler, which includes a secret protocol mapping the division of spoils in Eastern Europe. L’Humanité declares in a front-page headline that the pact serves the cause to which the USSR has always devoted itself: world peace. The paper is suppressed after August 26. In September, Communists will be banished from France’s confederation of trade unions, the CGT.
September 1: Germany invades Poland. France mobilizes and declares its intention to honor its commitments to Poland but conducts no serious military operation at its frontier with Germany.
September 26: The French Communist Party is dissolved. Communist deputies who have defended the Hitler-Stalin pact will soon be arrested and brought to trial.
November 30: The USSR invades Finland, where fighting will continue until March. The Finns have the better of it in every respect but numbers, which finally prevail.
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Gallimard publishes Pierre Drieu La Rochelle’s pro-Fascist novel Gilles.
1940
March: Daladier is unseated and replaced by Paul Reynaud, vice president of the center-right Democratic Republican Alliance. Reynaud is one of the few French politicians who will later endorse Winston Churchill’s proposal that France and the United Kingdom combine their governments in the war against the Axis powers.
May 10: The eight-month “phony war” of German and French troops stalling one another at the border ends when Germany attacks the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. Immense numbers of civilians flee south, toward the Loire and beyond. A French counteroffensive fails.
June 13: Pétain calls for an armistice, opposing Reynaud, who has brought him into the government as vice premier. Three days later Reynaud resigns and Pétain is appointed premier by the president of the Republic.
June 17: Pétain requests an armistice, which is signed four days later at Rethondes, where the same enemies signed an armistice on November 11, 1918. In the meanwhile, General Charles de Gaulle has broadcast a message of resistance on the BBC from London.
July 10: Deputies and senators who had fled from Paris to Bordeaux and then to Vichy confer upon Pétain (now entitled chief of state) full power to revise the constitution. Only 80 in an assembly of 667 vote against the measure. It marks the death of the Third Republic.