Pierre Drieu La Rochelle asserted that the riots of February 6 had been a cure for his infirmity of purpose, that manhood required a weight around one’s neck and the will to leap. We last saw him leaping in 1934. We find that he had not yet touched bottom in 1936. Two years in midair had given him ample opportunity to wonder whether bottom would be Fascism or Communism; to court the immensely rich wife of the automobile manufacturer Renault; to write about their affair in the guise of a Persian tale entitled Beloukia; to feel liberated by his father’s death and imprisoned by his father’s ghost; and to write a long short story about a Russian double agent.
“L’Agent Double,” as he entitled that story, says much about his own doubleness. Torn between Bolshevism and orthodox czarism, the nameless agent cannot exist except at extremes, and rallies to revolution rather than reaction after falling under the spell of a “leader.” In Drieu’s phallically charged language, he feels “the sudden power that spurts from a circle of men.” What they think matters less than the fact that they think it together and fanatically. Ideology is the bond of a virile brotherhood and, without really believing its articles of faith, the double agent masters its rhetoric. Drieu’s character possesses the fluency that served Drieu himself for good and ill throughout his life. It gives him prosthetic muscle. It embellishes a void.1 “I had promptly introduced myself into the ideas proposed to me and argued them to their ultimate consequences. I liked doing that and did it well, too well.… Some people were dazzled by my rapid train of thought, which ended up at an absolute that bordered on nothingness.” His assignment is to spy on radical czarists led by an orthodox pope.
A demonstration of the Popular Front in June 1937. Banners call for the government to provide old-age pensions.
The evangelist of other men’s gospels and the seducer of other men’s wives soon transfers his allegiance to the pope on whom he spies, but in whom he finds instead a new source of virility: “I was bigamous. I had two loves. The soul can be completely separated from itself. I served God and the Devil.” He becomes a double agent, doubly spellbound, when the Rasputinish pope orders him to befriend and betray a young French Communist named Lehalleur. “From the first I recognized all that was precious in [Lehalleur]. He was a leader. And in calling him a leader, I know whereof I speak.… Nothing could be farther from the blurry world of democrats, which reserves high office for mustachioed sopranos always ready to submit their letters of resignation, to drop their burdens.” What makes Lehalleur “precious” is not his wide compass but his narrow focus. For the leader, reason is the servant of action. It doesn’t shed light; it burns like a glass that concentrates the sun’s rays into a laser. Whether Fascist or Communist, he belongs to that singular race of men whose every word and minute count. They are destined. They are the protagonists of history.
In Jacques Doriot, who founded the French Fascist Party (the Parti Populaire Français) several weeks after Léon Blum took office, Drieu, like the hero of Maurice Barrès’s L’Appel au Soldat, believed he had found the charismatic leader ordained to save him from the randomness of his life and cast him in a legendary drama.
Doriot was five years younger than Drieu. The son of a blacksmith, he had left the Picardy countryside at seventeen, settled in the populous, working-class Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, joined the automobile workers’ union and a youth group before being drafted for service on the eastern front, where he witnessed the Communist revolution in Hungary in March 1919 and D’Annunzio’s invasion of Fiume several months later.
Discharged from the army with the Croix de Guerre, Doriot took up where he had left off as a militant member of Socialist Youth, leading his group into the Soviet camp at the Congress of Tours in 1920. This exploit earned him an official invitation to the Third Congress of the Communist International at Moscow, where he rubbed elbows with Lenin and, during a sojourn of fourteen months, conferred with Trotsky on the Commission of Latin Countries. He was twenty-four and intoxicated by his sudden eminence, according to Drieu, who published a biographical essay in 1936: “The young red leader hardly gave a thought to the immense toll of human lives taken by the Bolshevik regime, the material and spiritual wreckage.” Two years later he became a member of the executive committee of the Comintern and secretary-general of the Communist Youth, whose numbers quintupled under his leadership, to the consternation of the Poincaré government, which imprisoned him for violently demonstrating against the occupation of the Ruhr. All these credentials served him well in 1924, when Saint-Denis elected him to Parliament, but he continued to distinguish himself in the streets with his bold protests rather than at the Palais Bourbon with his oratory. “Those who saw Doriot back then, alone, defying two hundred policemen, plunging into their midst while twirling a café table over his head … know that in France there is at least one political man who is a man,” wrote Drieu.
More important than the Republican Parliament was the Comintern, which summoned Doriot to Moscow during the struggle between Stalin and Trotsky and later dispatched him to Shanghai, where he found Chiang Kai-shek and Communists led by Mao Tse-tung locked in civil war. By age thirty, Doriot had acquired as much as he needed of political experience to survive in a world of divided loyalties and to engage in safe transgression, asserting his independence but ultimately toeing the line.
He ceased to toe the line in the early 1930s when his proletarian constituency elected him mayor of Saint-Denis. Greatly admired at home, the burly, stentorian Doriot made himself increasingly objectionable to Moscow with arguments that ran counter to Soviet policy. In 1934, a year before Stalin and his French deputies sanctioned the idea, he championed a popular front. It cost him his membership in the party, but it freed him to form his own, which he did on June 28, 1936. The inaugural meeting of the Parti Populaire Français was held at Saint-Denis. Doriot spoke for almost three hours, promising the thousand people present—among them Pierre Drieu La Rochelle—that their salvation lay in a political model for France akin to Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. He prosecuted internationalism as a crime subversive of the nation’s soul and inveighed against the Soviet Union for holding France hostage to its global designs. The PPF would be national and its program National Socialist.
To restore the French nation its unity, its prosperity, its security, and its place on the world stage, to give each producer his share of social progress, it is imperative that the country rid itself of foreign influence and vanquish the egoism of the propertied classes. To accomplish this goal, an instrument is needed. Our party will serve that purpose.
“Left” and “right” were insidious distinctions bound up with a history of internecine warfare. If there was to be one France, only one party could unify it.2
Doriot drew one thousand people to the Saint-Denis town hall on June 26.
Before long, the PPF’s members numbered 130,000 and its meetings filled the immense Vélodrome d’Hiver in Paris.3 It also published a newspaper, L’Émancipation Nationale, to which Drieu contributed regularly between 1936 and 1938; its circulation exceeded 200,000. Did he finally have ground under his feet? Did he stand as tall as Aragon? To readers who had never read Le Feu Follet or heard of Drieu’s novels, he became known for his political enthusiasms. When the Popular Front was passing social legislation in great earnest during the summer of 1936, Drieu, who wore the label “Fascist” as a badge of honor and claimed his place in the line of Maurice Barrès’s ideological heirs, was preaching the transcendent virtue of the corporate state. “You have lived too long hidden in your houses, cocooned in your little lives and individual histories,” he wrote on August 1. “You no longer know what it is to be together, all together.… People everywhere have taken to the streets, have broken the petty chains of the small individual life, have reimmersed themselves in great communions. Sing, shout, squirm, stretch your arms, invoke the Holy Spirit, it will descend upon you. Remember that you are the people who gave Europe its cathedrals, those powerful monuments of collective fervor, of unanimous faith.” Membership in the PPF was not a matter of paying dues and subscribing to newspapers but an all-pervasive commitment. At stake was not merely one’s political wholesomeness but one’s very reason for being. “The Parti Populaire Français will be nothing or it will be the basis for a riotous multiplication of cells and sections.… One will no longer belong to it for an hour a day, a day a month, a month a year. One will belong to it at every moment. We must retune our lives to one another. We must rediscover the daily rhythm of communal life.” Having witnessed the Nazi Party congress at Nuremberg and likened the spectacle of a human mass animated by the will of a magister ludi to Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, which had sent shock waves through Paris in 1913 with the pagan eruption of The Rite of Spring, Drieu continued in the same vein. The ideal Fascist society would be harmonious and choreographed. It would make him complete, as the mind had not. “In a Europe where the great, cadenced, reharmonized masses of Fascism, of Hitlerism, of Stalinist Russia have risen, we must quickly breathe in lungfuls of grandeur. If we don’t, history will blow away our côteries, our wretched political parties, our crabbed individualities like so much dust.” Physical culture obsessed him. Much of what he wrote for L’Émancipation Nationale suggests that the self-proclaimed Fascist of 1936 could still recite Thus Spake Zarathustra chapter and verse. But also lingering in him was the adolescent hero worshipper besotted with Kipling and Carlyle, who admired his Anglo-Saxon schoolmates romping on the pitches of Shrewsbury. The PPF was the “party of the living body,” he wrote. “The most profound definition of Fascism is this: it is the political movement that charts its course most straightforwardly, most radically toward a great revolution of mores, toward the restoration of the body—health, dignity, plenitude, heroism.”
Jacques Doriot addressing members of the Fascist Parti Populaire Français.
Being absolutely devoid of all these virtues, the Jew emerged as their negative exemplar in Drieu’s outpouring of journalism and in his novel Gilles. Anti-Semitic caricatures were widespread. By the late 1930s, there existed an abundant literature portraying Jews as rootless individualists, neurotic champions of modernism, and foreigners pernicious to the body politic. “The element of disintegration, the element of division, the microbe is the JEW,” Darquier de Pellepoix wrote in his journal L’Antijuif. “[We] assert that the solution to the Jewish problem is the prerequisite for any French renovation.” Drieu may not have had in mind the same solution as Darquier, who eventually played a direct role in the Holocaust, but they quoted from the same text. “In whatever language decadence slavers, whether it be Marxism or Freudianism, the words of Jews inform the drool; biology will have its way,” says the titular hero of Drieu’s novel Gilles. From the perspective of the aesthete, Jews were ineligible by nature and temperament to participate in France’s communal dance. They didn’t know the steps for it; they didn’t have the legs. Gilles’s friend Preuss, for example, “was the most disjointed, the most indecorous, the most ill-assembled Jew ever produced on Christian soil. Wherever he appeared, the senseless disorder of his limbs, of his clothes, and of his statements created a little whirlwind that caught all the Christians or Aryans present in its vortex and dulled their wits.”4 Hectic in speech and spastic in movement, he is herky-jerky even in his ambitions: “Like many Jews, he wasn’t patient or organized in his quest for success. Bolstering him were two or three generations who had acquired material security in France, among whom the hunger for wealth was not as sharp as it had once been. Money lust had become an appetite for success, which haunted him episodically, like a recurrent neurasthenia.”
Jacques Doriot six years after founding the PPF, greeting crowds on the Champs-Élysées during the German occupation.
Preuss is only a superlative specimen of his kind. Referring to Gilles’s Jewish wife, whom Drieu modeled after Colette Jéramec, he writes that in her deracinated milieu “physical experience was unknown, whether it be sport, love, or war.” Theirs was a world of abstraction in which bodies didn’t couple, clash, weigh, belong here rather than there, and generally accord with nature. Being estranged from the natural world led them, like the potion that deranges Titania, to embrace a Bottom of grotesque images celebrated as modernity. The Jew is modernity incarnate.
Whence Drieu’s chimera of a medieval golden age. The obloquy he heaped on rationalism, the Enlightenment, Freemasonry, Jewry, and the “intellectual individualism” fostered by the French school system was bound up with his enthusiasm for the communal spirit that reared churches in which the individual found refuge from his personal history, his conflicts, and daily impostures. “To make a church, there was audacity, risk, the creative expression of faith in the architect’s calculations. There was the tree and next to it the church.… There was French reason in that furious, proud, passionate 12th century gushing with epic poems, cathedrals, Christian philosophies, sculpture, stained glass, illuminations, crusades.” The stone cut from French quarries and the tree rooted in French soil are the stuff of “French reason.” Had Drieu been of age in the 1880s to observe the rising of the Eiffel Tower, he would no doubt have joined the protest of writers and artists who denounced it as an insult to the “august proliferation of stone” that is Paris.
Although Drieu’s political vow was noted with dismay by friends in the opposing camp—for he still had some there—a greater splash was made in 1936 by André Gide’s recantation. At the international congress, which he cochaired, Gide had praised the Soviet Union for marrying nationalism to internationalism in its celebration of the idiosyncratic cultures under its broad sway. He contended likewise that the great literary works of every country—Don Quixote, Gargantua and Pantagruel, the theater of Shakespeare and Racine—did the same, expressing the universal in the particular. What reflected badly on French literature was its infatuation with form and appearance. A penchant for abstraction marred even those works that offered the travails of the common man a prominent place in the realm of literature: Hugo’s Les Misérables, Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart. He tipped his hat no higher than that to the creed of realism, but his peroration made up for his restraint. “Only adversaries of Communism can see in it a will to create total uniformity,” he said. “What we await from it, and what the USSR has begun to show us after its embattled period … is a social state that encourages the greatest possible flowering of every man, the realization of all his possibilities. In our woeful West, we fall far short.”
Being France’s preeminent fellow traveler earned Gide an invitation from the Soviet Writers’ Union, and in June 1936 (after several changes of mind prompted by conversations with his friend Pierre Herbart, who had visited the Soviet Union and peeked behind the facade of Potemkin village), Gide arrived in Moscow. He was carried to an official reception on the shoulders of airport employees, as the novelist Louis Guilloux, the publisher Jacques Schiffrin and other members of his entourage followed on foot. But a dark shadow fell over events the next morning when Mikhail Koltsov, editor in chief of Pravda, informed Gide that Maxim Gorky, who had been ailing, had died during the night. Credible rumors, which reached Gide’s ear, began to circulate that Stalin, fearful of Gorky’s opposition, had had him assassinated. Gide was denied access to Gorky’s villa but joined the honor guard at his coffin in the Hall of Columns of the House of Unions. A day later, he stood on a podium overlooking Red Square, beside Stalin, and delivered a funeral oration that might as well have been scripted for him by a party hack. Willful naïveté was the most sympathetic construction placed upon it. Literature of the future, he prophesied, would be “national in form and in content.” Writers “of value” had always striven to encourage the ferment of insubordination and revolt in society, but in a revolutionary society, such writers were no longer insubordinate. “The fate of culture is bound in our minds to the very destiny of the USSR,” he said. “We shall defend it.”
The state set in motion its propaganda machine for Gide’s benefit during the nine weeks he spent touring the Soviet Union, from Moscow and Leningrad to Tiflis and Sebastopol. It distributed three hundred thousand postcards with his photograph. He was toasted at an endless round of receptions, housed in large hotel suites, chauffeured in Lincoln limousines. His itinerary was planned to a fare-thee-well and armed against improvisation.5 He was taken to model factories and surrounded with smiling workers. He visited Bolshevo, a model labor colony with its own industrial plant, where convicts attended classes in proper Soviet etiquette and recited well-rehearsed accounts of their crimes for the distinguished visitor. Long queues at state stores, uniformly drab clothes, and other depressing sights observed on forays through the streets of Moscow gave him pause, but every respect in which the workers’ paradise obviously departed from an ideal narrative had its justification. Did Boris Pasternak and Isaac Babel, who were now prevented from publishing their work, say nothing to disabuse him when he visited their dachas in the writers’ colony of Peredelkino, outside Moscow?
Gide delivering a eulogy to Maxim Gorky on Red Square in 1936, during his tour of the Soviet Union. To the right are Molotov—chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars—and Stalin.
Two years earlier, in April 1934, a frightened Pasternak had warned Osip Mandelstam that the walls had ears, and maybe even the benches on the boulevard, after hearing the doomed poet recite his satirical poem “The Stalin Epigram.” Babel was not arrested until 1939. Inevitably, he would suffer the same fate as Mandelstam. But Gide, for all his misgivings about the Communist utopia, returned from the USSR clinging publicly to his belief. The Great Purge, which began soon thereafter, in August 1936, with a show trial of Bolsheviks Stalin wanted to eliminate, including Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, disturbed him. “[I read] the report about the Moscow trial (which the Journal de Moscou of 25 August gives in extenso) with indescribable uneasiness,” he wrote in his journal on September 5. “What is one to think about these sixteen defendants accusing themselves, all in almost the same language, while lauding a regime and a man for whose destruction they allegedly risked their lives?” Gide’s qualm was by no means the least skeptical reaction among Western Russophiles. In America, Corliss Lamont, Lillian Hellman, and eighty-seven other public figures published “An Open Letter to American Liberals” denouncing criticism of the Moscow trials. Joseph E. Davies, the United States ambassador to the USSR, declared in Mission to Moscow,
Assuming … that basically human nature is much the same everywhere, I am still impressed with the many indications of credibility which were obtained in the course of the testimony. To have assumed that this proceeding was invented and staged as a project of dramatic political fiction would be to presuppose the creative genius of a Shakespeare and the genius of a Belasco in stage production. The historical background and surrounding circumstances also lend credibility to the testimony.… The circumstantial detail, apparently at times surprising even to the prosecutor as well as to other defendants, which was brought out by the various accused, gave unintended corroboration to the gist of the charges.
L’Humanité served up a report from Pravda that the authorities had indisputable proof of the sixteen “Trotskyites” conspiring with the Gestapo to overthrow Stalin. It excoriated Le Populaire for wondering whether the defendants, guilty though they may have been, had received legal counsel and other benefits of due process during their trial. Editors of that paper, like Gide, felt “malaisés.”
“Malaise” was a euphemism for something much worse. Just as the Socialists could not voice their incredulity without splintering the Popular Front, so Gide could not voice his disillusionment without fearing the clatter of his fall from Marxist grace and the comfort his palinode would give the enemy. He had been placed on a very high pedestal. Still, he wished to make amends for championing a despotic regime, all the more after learning at first hand that it tortured and imprisoned homosexuals.6 When word spread of the possibility that he might write critically about the USSR, Louis Aragon and others begged him not to, arguing that the insurrection of Fascist troops in Spain demanded solidarity. Two years later in his novel Man’s Hope, Malraux would declare that it was necessary in war to cast a blind eye on the abominations of one’s ally. War is Manichean, he wrote, anticipating Churchill’s famous line, also spoken with the Soviet Union in mind: “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”
Once Gide made up his mind, with moral support from Schiffrin and Guilloux, who had quit the Russian tour in disgust, nothing could deter him. Retour de l’URSS was written quickly and appeared on November 13. In a preface, Gide warned the reader that the short book was not a rebuff but an expression of tough love. His mind, he said, was so constituted as to treat most harshly what he would have liked to approve unreservedly. His calling attention to its flaws was not to be understood as disparagement of the Soviet Union but as concern for a revolutionary order whose prodigious accomplishments had stunned the world. If his guide had wandered off a path that promised salvation for the suffering of the earth, was blame to be placed on the path or the guide?
Gide then proceeded to describe the reign of a despot. “One encounters Stalin’s effigy everywhere,” he wrote. “His name is on every tongue, praise of him inevitably enters every speech. Especially in Georgia, I couldn’t enter an occupied room, however humble and squalid, without noticing a portrait of Stalin nailed to the wall, where an icon formerly hung no doubt. I don’t know whether it’s out of adoration, love or fear, but he is always and everywhere there.” Conformism, or what Gide called “the spirit of submission,” was mandatory. Every deviation from the official line was denounced as counterrevolutionary and labeled “Trotskyite.” In a country kept ignorant of events and conditions beyond its borders, truth issued from the head of its leader.
Suppressing the opposition in a State, or simply preventing it from forming, from articulating itself, is a very grave matter. Terrorism is born of it. It would undoubtedly be a great convenience to rulers if all citizens thought alike. But who, in view of such impoverishment, could still dare speak of “culture”? … There is great wisdom, I think, in listening to adversaries, in nurturing the opposition if need be, while preventing it from doing harm: of combating it but not suppressing it. Suppressing the opposition—it’s a good thing Stalin is so bad at it.
Gide went on to write that humanity is not simple, that attempts at simplification, unification, or reduction imposed from above were odious, and ultimately futile.
“The Holy Family will always escape Herod” was Gide’s way of saying that one purge would never suffice. There would always be partisan voices to silence, as well as inconvenient memories. Like a conscience that convicts by its mere existence, “old Bolsheviks” faithful to the spirit of the revolution had become an unacceptable limit to the will of the tyrant. If there was some one thing that finally convinced Gide to throw caution to the winds in Retour de l’URSS it was the show trial of 1936. “The spirit regarded as ‘counterrevolutionary’ today is the same revolutionary spirit that staved in the half-rotten casks of the old czarist world,” he asserted.
One would like to be able to think that an overwhelming love of man, or at least an imperious need of justice filled hearts. But once the revolution triumphed, they were no longer an issue. Feelings of that sort, which spurred the first revolutionaries, became encumbrances.… I compare them to the wedges needed to build an arch but superfluous once the keystone has been inserted. Now that the revolution has stabilized, now that it compounds with its conscience and (some would say) has learned to behave, those who regard its successive concessions as so many betrayals are reviled. Would it not be better, instead of playing with words, to recognize that the revolutionary spirit (and even, simply, the critical spirit) is outmoded? Conformism is the order of the day. What the powers that be want is approbation of everything done in the USSR—and sincere, enthusiastic approbation at that. Astonishingly, they get it. Or not so astonishingly, for any protest, however meek, is subject to the most extreme penalties. I doubt if there is any country, even Hitler’s Germany, in which the mind is less free, more bowed, more fearful, more vassalized.
When backs were turned, Gide had had dangerous conversations during his tour, in one of which an unidentified interlocutor lamented that the Soviet experiment was remarkably successful at breeding incuriosity. For the most part, Russian youths ignored forbidden fruit. It wasn’t necessary to put Dostoyevsky (about whom Gide had written at length) on an index, as the young read only what the state prescribed. “If the mind is so molded that it obeys watchwords even before hearing them, it has lost the very awareness of its servitude,” Gide wrote, paving the way for Orwell.
Within a year, almost 150,000 copies of Retour de l’URSS had been sold, more than any other book on the best-seller list for 1936–37. It had been translated into fourteen languages and banned in Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union. Gallimard reprinted it eight times in ten months. Declaring that the book had obviously been written to make money, a Communist youth club informed Gide that he was no longer worthy of being its honorary president. Gide replied that if they could be taken in so easily by that slur, they would not be disposed to believe that he was losing more in the royalties for his collected works that would have come from Russia than he had earned from the sale of this one in France.
Retour de l’URSS generated a multitude of hate mail, but L’Humanité refrained from commenting on it for several weeks. During the interval, it published in extenso Stalin’s speech on the new constitution of the USSR delivered at the Eighth Extraordinary Congress of Soviets, in which many of Gide’s observations were implicitly held to be the criticism of a benighted Westerner.7 Likewise, L’Humanité countered Gide’s depiction of the collective farm, or “kolkhoz,” as a microcosm of the larger dystopia with its own portrait of a collective abounding in pride, camaraderie, and produce.
L’Humanité let more than a month go by before addressing Retour de l’URSS directly, and, when enough time had passed to demonstrate its contempt, published not its own review but Pravda’s long denunciation of the book and its author. Gide, Pravda declared, was a character straight out of his novel The Counterfeiters, which is to say, a writer who knew whereof he wrote for being himself a prime specimen of the decadent bourgeois intelligentsia. Pravda charged:
Throughout his literary life, he has kept his distance from the great social ideas, the great social ideals.… He is an individualist who delights in his own games. He is one of the “wittiest” French authors and finds perversity irresistibly attractive.8
“Bourgeois” summarized the multitude of Gide’s imperfections. It was predictable that Soviet fare would taste insipid to a bourgeois palate dulled by exotic sweetmeats and that Soviet boasting would disconcert an anoxic “bourgeois soul” dying of refinement. “Our society liberated from exploiting classes seemed to his bourgeois soul too ‘simple’ and ‘uniform’ ” the review posited. “He prefers a society crawling like a swamp with all of the human types spawned by the bourgeoisie. He felt an outsider in a country from which the promiscuous horde of parasites and freaks has disappeared.”
The Kremlin organized a campaign against Gide, beginning with Sergei Eisenstein and Boris Pasternak, who were invited to denounce him as “Fascist and Trotskyite.” Ilya Ehrenburg followed suit. L’Humanité received and published what purported to be the deathbed letter of Nikolai Ostrovsky, a blind, bedridden Soviet writer famous in Communist circles for a realist novel entitled How the Steel Was Tempered, whom Gide had visited during his tour. “You have surely read the article in Pravda about André Gide’s betrayal,” he wrote to his mother. “How he betrayed our hearts! Who would have thought that he could act so basely. Shame on this old man. It wasn’t just us he betrayed, but our valiant people. Now all the enemies of Socialism will use this book against the working class.” Invoking the Synoptic Gospels whenever they served a Soviet purpose, Pravda compared the parting kiss that Gide planted on Ostrovky’s face to the kiss of Judas.
Retour de l’URSS received favorable notice in Le Populaire. What Gide observed of depersonalization in the USSR came as no surprise to the reviewer, who agreed that only malign spirits of the Right would insist on confusing Socialism with Stalin’s sinister perversion of it. Socialism doesn’t enslave, it liberates, he asserted. The idea of a regime in which the cult of liberty did not flourish was “an absurdity.”
These contradictory responses boded ill, and, indeed, the Popular Front, behind which Communists and Socialists masked their differences, proved to be an edifice as short-lived as the national pavilions built for Paris’s World’s Fairs. It had one season of glory, then deteriorated under pressure from within and without.
Social and economic reforms enacted by the Popular Front during its golden summer induced a bipolar state of euphoria and fear, with one class welcoming the dawn and others brooding over nightfall. For workers, it was a new order; for the bourgeoisie, “petite” and “haute” alike, who regarded Blum as Lenin’s Kerensky, Red October lay at hand.
Blum’s cabinet had been sitting for less than a fortnight when Parliament passed laws mandating the forty-hour week at undiminished wages, with two weeks’ paid vacation, in the hope that workers would live and labor more productively under humane conditions, that industry would be compelled to create additional shifts, that more money thus put in circulation would stimulate the economy. America’s WPA inspired a program of large public works. To bolster this legislation, the government appointed an undersecretary of state for sport and the organization of leisure.9 But the new dispensation, as it appeared to be, provided for the common man’s cultural enrichment as well as his material welfare. “Parallel to the great political and social movement … a vast cultural movement is unfolding,” Jacques Soustelle wrote in the weekly Vendredi. “Its motto could be: ‘Let us open the doors of culture. Let us level the wall surrounding it and enter a beautiful park hitherto forbidden to poor people, a culture reserved for an elite.’ ” Adult education courses proliferated. Amateur theater groups sprang up in Paris and provincial cities. The Théâtre National Populaire, which had been inaugurated after World War I at the Arc de Triomphe in a ceremony honoring the Unknown Soldier, rivaled the Comédie Française.
With the Popular Front, France became once again a country “on the march.” The year 1936 was marked not only by legislation that offered the laboring class greater security but by rituals that mobilized Frenchmen en masse. Young people set out in far greater numbers than ever before on treks around France, as youth hostels multiplied under the aegis of a government whose undersecretary for sports and leisure declared, evangelically, that youth hostels were one aspect of an experiment to transform the human condition. The fortnight’s paid vacation called for special trains that conveyed workers at reduced fares to seaside villages where party guides hailed them with close-fisted salutes (this exodus inspiring a counterexodus of bourgeois fleeing the plague sent upon their summer nation).
Even more significant than the movement away from cities was the swarming that took place within them, and particularly within Paris, whenever Communist and Socialist leaders exhorted the faithful to assemble for a show of strength. “France of the Popular Front was, first and foremost, the cortège of militants in all its diversity and anonymity,” wrote one historian. The “cortège of militants” resembled nothing so much as a general mobilization for war, with tens of thousands of workers from the banlieue jubilantly converging on the capital by metro, by bus, by car, by van, on foot. Several days before a march, L’Humanité and Le Populaire would have begun to diagram it in detail—its order, the composition of its eight or ten major groups, the site at which each formed up, the roster of leaders—lest chaos ensue, though chaos was there as an ever-present threat. Wherever marchers marched they made themselves heard, singing songs that evoked the revolutionary past and the utopian future. “From the minute we set out to the minute we dispersed (many hours later for those among us who brought up the rear), we would shout and sing ourselves hoarse,” wrote Henri Noguères. Mingling with Soviet songs widely heard on Chant du Monde records (“Komintern,” “The Partisans,” “Long Live Life”) were songs of the French Revolution—“La Carmagnole” and “Ça Ira”—in topical variations.
Which direction the crowd took was dictated by circumstances, or by the nature of the event that summoned it. A demonstration against L’Action Française mobilized the Latin Quarter.10 Mourning Henri Barbusse, the novelist who had died in Russia, Communists followed his casket up Ménilmontant to Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Commemorating the assassination of Jean Jaurès, Socialists assembled at the Panthéon. Asserting solidarity with Spain’s Frente Popular, leftists generally took the royal road of popular vociferation, which led from the Place de la Nation to the Place de la Bastille. But in any event, the crowd beheld itself as a virtuous army and Paris as the Champs de Mars. “As others reminisce about their campaigns, the veterans among us—who were not necessarily the oldest—would learnedly compare a demonstration which had just taken place with its predecessors, evaluating the number of marchers, enumerating the ‘stars’ they had seen, appraising the behavior of police (both police in uniform and police in civilian clothes).” Not since 1793 and 1794 had such multitudes gathered on so many occasions. Indeed, one mass demonstration was held to commemorate another as the mass become increasingly self-absorbed and the cortège an end in itself, transcending its pretexts. Demonstrations pullulated, like the logos or acronyms that all by themselves tell the sociopolitical story of France during the leftist coalition’s heyday.
Many Parisians remembered that heyday as a radical departure from workaday life, with students roaming the streets, workers occupying factories, Socialists holding rallies in Luna Park, converts to Bolshevism meeting conspiratorially, and everyone marching. It was on an official holiday that Paris of the Popular Front displayed itself at its most exuberant. On July 14, 1936, people were swept up by the passion that informed a million voices singing the “The Internationale” as loudly as the “La Marseillaise” and invoked the names of revolutionaries whose roster dismayed everyone with visions of France revisited by the Terror: Marat, Saint-Just, Robespierre. “We marched, we sang with our comrades,” three prominent writers reported. “Marching in one row between two human hedges, underneath windows from which flags were waving, we looked at the faces. And if we are so joyous this evening, we owe our joy to the fraternal spirit borne home by the smiles of unknown men and women.… Saint-Just used to say that happiness was a new idea. Today we have breathed, in the air of Paris, the newness and youth of that idea.”
Le Populaire described a sea of humanity billowing down the boulevards and submerging the Place de la Nation, where Blum and the Radical leader Édouard Daladier shared a podium.11 L’Humanité drew upon the same fund of images: “immense swells,” “a sea of banners.” Romain Rolland, who rejoiced with his fellow Socialists, might have used the word “oceanic,” as he had done several years earlier to describe his experience of religious rapture in his correspondence with Sigmund Freud.12 Rolland’s play Le Quatorze Juillet—written during the Dreyfus Affair, performed once, and consigned to oblivion—was revived that evening at the Alhambra for crowds who flowed into the huge hall after milling on the streets. With a cast of two hundred, Quatorze Juillet featured a march composed by Arthur Honegger and an enormous curtain painted by Picasso.13 It played to an ecstatic mob, crowning the old age of the Nobelist whose supreme ambition was—had long been—to replace theater with civic festivities, to make the populace the cast, and its revolutionary history the play. In that self-celebratory state, which presented a utopian model for the life of society, there would be no more acting. Gone would be the division between audience and stage. The inner person would marry the outside world. The individual would have united with his god.
In July and August, hearts were gladdened by the abolition of paramilitary leagues and the passage of more egalitarian legislation, notably a law designed to free the country’s central bank from the grasp of an oligarchy called “the two hundred families.” But before long, trouble besieged the government from every side, as if to demonstrate that no good deed goes unpunished. Predictably, the extreme Right answered the euphoria of the Left with campaigns of slander. In a relatively mild editorial written soon after Blum announced his cabinet, Charles Maurras declared that the appointment of the Jew Jean Zay as minister of education was a crime against the fatherland, Zay having insulted the French flag twelve years earlier, at age twenty, by calling it a symbol of the perfervid nationalism to which a million and a half young lives had been uselessly sacrificed. “What insolence!” Maurras wrote. “What madness! What a challenge to the fatherland, to the honor and memory of the dead, our protectors and saviors! After an ascent to the summit, the Jewish neurosis has flared up; in thin air, the imprudent climbers have lost their minds.” L’Action Française reported that Bastille Day 1936 was celebrated by a tenth as many people as left-wing papers claimed and hailed with ten times as many red banners as tricolor. Maurras quoted an observation of “the learned Bertillon” (the inventor of the mug shot and a self-proclaimed graphologist whose ludicrous testimony had helped convict Dreyfus at his court-martial in 1894) that “one never knows what is taking place in the head of a Jew.” Treason came naturally to creatures opaque by nature, with heads for hiding their true allegiances.
On the other hand, it was not thought that Jews enjoyed an absolute monopoly of treasonable secrets. During the summer and fall of 1936, L’Action Française and Gringoire, its partner in calumny, took turns accusing Blum’s minister of the interior, Roger Salengro, of having crossed enemy lines in 1915, as a uniformed bicycle messenger, and surrendered military intelligence to the Germans. Solid evidence had satisfied a court-martial that he had been captured while trying to retrieve the body of a dead comrade, but his prosecutors, who invoked the testimony of anonymous veterans, were relentless. After studying the dossier, a commission appointed by Blum and chaired by the chief of staff, General Maurice Gamelin, found no substance in the charge of desertion. Its report fell on deaf ears. Two days after the eighteenth anniversary of the Armistice, Henri Becquart, a deputy of the Far Right, and Xavier Vallat, who had distinguished himself five months earlier by questioning the appropriateness of a Jew holding sway over a Gallo-Roman nation, declared that Salengro’s record was still suspect. Blum rebutted their argument in exquisite detail, without laboring under the misapprehension that any amount of evidence could change minds in the Chamber of Deputies, and not before a violent scuffle had interrupted parliamentary proceedings. He then called upon the chamber to declare the charges against Salengro groundless, which it did by a large majority.
Four days later, on November 17, Salengro, whose wife had recently died, committed suicide. He could no longer endure the smears, he wrote to Blum, and hoped that “if they hadn’t succeeded in dishonoring me, they would bear the responsibility for my death.” Sad to say, he was bargaining for posthumous disappointment. Politics had become mortal combat. In L’Écho de Paris, a paper to which readers of L’Action Française and Gringoire might have subscribed, Henri de Kérillis laid the blame at Blum’s doorstep, asserting that Salengro would still be alive if the arrogant premier hadn’t appointed him minister of the interior and thus put a compromised man in the line of fire. “Roger Salengro’s death turned a page in French political history,” writes the historian Serge Berstein. “On the French Far Right, the will to destroy one’s political adversary at all costs and by all means had replaced the conflict of ideas, the debate over different ways of resolving national problems.” No doubt, other events had turned the page several years earlier, only now there was a ministerial corpse to be reckoned with. That the church—no friend of Socialists and suicides—denounced the campaign as unchristian provides a measure of its violence. “Politics does not justify everything,” declared Cardinal Liénart of Lille, Salengro’s hometown. According to the cardinal, who spoke ex cathedra, a press “specializing in defamation and slander” found no favor in the eyes of God. Le Croix disseminated his pronouncement throughout France.
In substantive matters, papers of the Radical Right echoed the conservative press (Le Figaro, Le Temps, Le Journal des Débats), whose fierce opposition to the Popular Front was rooted in its fear of a Communist revolution. Behind Blum loomed Stalin, and economic woes enlarged that specter. A steep rise in the cost of living soon compromised the benefits legislated in June. People bought less, production declined, and capital fled to safe havens abroad when investment was most needed at home. France became an even poorer country, burdened with debt. Its dwindling gold reserves forced Blum, despite promises he had made, to devalue the franc. Then there was the so-called wall of money in the form of France’s Banque de France—the bank of issue—which remained the preserve of rich regents bent on bringing Blum to his knees. Inflation bred widespread disenchantment. In turn, disenchantment polarized workers who had chanted for solidarity on Bastille Day. Many were drawn to Jacques Doriot’s PPF and to the political reincarnation of Colonel de La Rocque’s dissolved Ligue des Croix de Feu (the PSF, or Parti Social Français). Others drifted leftward, from the party to militant Communism, widening the rift within the Popular Front. Widening it still further was the desertion of a middle class that normally voted Radical but felt neglected by Blum and harnessed to a coalition that might, under Soviet influence, drive France across the Pyrenees for what was seen to be a gladiatorial contest pitting Hitler and Mussolini against Stalin. They didn’t want entanglements. They didn’t want war. And the Frente Popular was itself an imbroglio.
Internal dissension over the Spanish Civil War may have done more to scuttle the Popular Front than the economic doldrums and the Far Right’s campaign of vilification. War broke out on July 18, 1936, when, assisted by Mussolini, rebel troops stationed in Spanish Morocco invaded the mainland. At the behest of Spanish republicans, Blum undertook to supply the besieged government with arms and matériel, but he encountered vehement opposition from all quarters of the Right and from Radicals inside his own coalition. On July 31, the foreign minister, Yvon Delbos appeared before the Chamber of Deputies and denied that the Spanish Republic had requested arms, though it would have been entirely within its rights to do so: “It did not for reasons of doctrine and humanity, lest it furnish those who wish to help the insurgents with a pretext.” Le Figaro’s commentator quoted this assertion with winks insinuating that the legitimacy of the Spanish Republic might be considered questionable, and the uprising against it lawful.
Colonel François de La Rocque, leader of the Croix de Feu, which, after the banishment of paramilitary leagues, legitimized itself as a political party, the French Social Party.
In Spain, a republic had been established in 1931, after the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera. Republicans and Socialists drafted a constitution that inspired securalizing reforms and legislation calculated to improve the lot of workers and farmers. The Depression hampered their efforts. Popular enthusiasm waned and a conservative government nullified many of the reforms. Left-wing parties narrowly regained power in 1936, amid fears of a military coup on the one hand and a Communist revolution on the other. Violent clashes became commonplace, undermining confidence in the republic’s ability to effect economic and social change peaceably. In July 1936 the Spanish Army of Africa invaded the mainland under the command of Francisco Franco, who characterized the civil war that ensued as a struggle between the “red hordes” and “Christian civilization.”
Faced with choices every one of which threatened the Popular Front, Blum hoped to find support for intervention from Whitehall but was advised that Britain would neither intervene nor come to France’s aid if she went it alone and found herself invaded by Fascist troops. It led him to blindfold himself; in August, he circulated among the European powers a pact of nonintervention in Spain, which was accepted but no sooner signed by all than cynically ignored by Germany and Italy. Soviet tanks and planes arrived later, at the end of October.
On November 6, 1936, amid the amusement rides of Luna Park, outside Paris, where the Federation of the Seine was celebrating the anniversary of the Third Republic (with Josephine Baker and Marianne Oswald entertaining the crowd between ministerial harangues), Blum offered his anguished explanation of what many in the audience understood to be a betrayal of the anti-Fascist cause. European nations engaging in an arms race on Spanish soil could only spell disaster, he declared. The pact prohibiting it was the only solution he could contemplate.
I would that these words did not weigh heavily on the Spanish people. We thought that securing general neutrality and thus avoiding international complications of an obviously grave nature would be best for them as well.… Now all the powers have signed on to our proposal and promulgated appropriate measures. There is no solid basis for presuming that these measures have been violated.14
Factory delegates had demanded that he reverse his position. Three hundred thousand workers in the Paris region staged a strike against the blockade, to no avail.
How can we tear up a document we have asked others to sign, when their ink is still wet on it and no violations have occurred.… In my view, it is impossible at the present time to act otherwise without provoking a crisis whose consequences are unforeseeable.
He persevered above jeers and delivered a Jaurrasian peroration evoking July 1914 and his passionate commitment to peace:
I must tell you what I shall do and what I shall refuse to do so long as I remain in power. We have friends who consider that our conduct is a concession to foreign powers. They tell us that we must exalt national pride, that peace can best be preserved by the development of patriotic sentiment. This language has a familiar ring. I heard it twenty-four years ago. I am a Frenchman as proud as anyone of his country and its history, despite my race. I shall spare no effort to ensure the security of France. One of the elements of French national honor is a will to keep the peace. Have we forgotten that? I shall never admit that war is inevitable. Until I draw my last breath, I shall do everything to prevent it. War is fatal only when one considers it such.
I had an almost visceral need to talk to you today. For almost three months I have been asking myself whether I have the stuff of a leader. There are times when I am not perfectly sure of myself.
It was reported on the same page of Le Figaro that Germany’s ambassador to Spain had left Alicante for Berlin, announcing before his departure that he could no longer represent the Reich in a country run by “irresponsible Marxists.”
Self-doubt did not visit Maurice Thorez, the French Communist leader, who made a show of allegiance to the Popular Front while expressing his repugnance for the neutrality pact before and after Blum’s speech at Luna Park: “Shame mingles with anguish when we receive word of blood flowing in Bedajos and Irun, of heroic combatants being crushed because they lack arms to fight an enemy well provided with airplanes, cannons, machine guns, and ammunition by Fascist dictators.” Arguments, pretexts, cavils, and slurs hurled at the Communist Party all bounced off the iron-clad conscience of “good proletarians.” Summoning the ghost of Jean Jaurès to seal his message, as Blum had done to justify neutrality, he asserted that it was imperative to end the arms blockade: “Twenty-three years ago, the working class learned from his flown spirit that the struggle for peace is the most necessary of wars.” Eighty thousand party faithful heard him lament the “grave error” of nonintervention at a suburban stadium on October 4, three days after the insurgents proclaimed General Francisco Franco head of state at Burgos.
Thorez addressed another huge assembly in the Vélodrome d’Hiver on November 22, when word of the Luftwaffe bombing Madrid in a raid that anticipated Guernica was reaching Paris. “For the purposes of a politics that leads, alas! to war, we republicans, anti-Fascists, and sincere pacifists are mendaciously accused of wanting war. It was this calumny that made Jaurès, an apostle of peace, the first of the world war’s myriad victims. By calumny, the enemies of the people endeavor to sow division. But the masses of the Popular Front won’t allow themselves to become a house divided.” Not all the blame for nonintervention could be laid at the doorstep of London’s financial elite, of Anthony Eden, of France’s two hundred families (who did, in fact, retain control of the Banque de France), of the munitions dealer Sir Basil Zaharoff. As we have noted, there was opposition from within. The Popular Front became a threadbare garment in which three contentious parties continued to wrap themselves, tearing at the fabric even as they proclaimed its integrity. An editor of L’Humanité, Lucien Sampaix, asked how “our comrade Léon Blum,” could ignore the fact that trucks laden with cotton and glycerine for the manufacture of explosives were crossing the Pyrenees to Fascist-held Basque country. L’Humanité ran other such comminatory editorials. But unity remained their watchword.
Almost a year after Blum introduced the neutrality pact, L’Humanité’s editor in chief, Paul Vaillant-Couturier, declared in a kind of ritual incantation that the bond between Socialists and Communists had never been so tight. How, he asked, could one seriously imagine a divorce between two parties pledged to advance the program of the Popular Front, to dissolve paramilitary leagues, to “save the peace with Spain”? One who could easily imagine a divorce was George Orwell. “Anyone who has given the subject a glance knows that the Communist tactic of dealing with political opponents by means of trumped‑up accusations is nothing new,” he noted in Homage to Catalonia:
Today the key word is Trotsky-Fascist; yesterday it was Social-Fascist. It is only six or seven years since the Russian State trials “proved” that the leaders of the Second International, including, for example, Léon Blum and prominent members of the British Labor Party, were hatching a huge plot for the military invasion of the U.S.S.R. Yet today the French Communists are glad enough to accept Blum as a leader and the English Communists are raising heaven and earth to get inside the Labour Party.
Another who could imagine it was Pierre Drieu La Rochelle. In 1937, he spent two weeks observing the war from Franco’s side of the lines and wrote patronizing letters to Victoria Ocampo, whose pro-republicanism he dismissed as a temporary loss of reason.
The death knell of Blum’s premiership, and to all intents and purposes of the Popular Front, which lived in name only until October 1938, was sounded not by the Communist Party but by Radical legislators convinced after the summer of 1936 that a New Deal for the proletariat slighted the interests of their own middle-class constituency. Édouard Daladier, their leader and the minister of war, prevailed upon Blum to suspend his program of economic reform and ramp up the manufacture of armaments. France could hardly afford both butter and bullets. By March 1937, when the flight of capital was emptying the treasury and crippling production, malaise had become a full-blown revolt. Radical youth groups organized large demonstrations in the provinces, at one of which Daladier distanced himself from his premier, speaking as a possible successor with an agenda friendlier to entrepreneurs with enough savoir faire to maintain order where chaos threatened. Everyone knew what chaos meant. On March 16, 1937, Communist and Socialist militants had disrupted a rally of the PSF at Clichy. Unable to clear the square, police had opened fire, killing five of the militants and wounding as many as three hundred.15
Early in June, Blum’s minister of finance, Vincent Auriol, drafted a bill requesting that Parliament grant the administration plenary financial powers until June 31, to deal as it saw fit with the nation’s economic problems. What it considered “fit” went unexplained, and Radical legislators, fearful of measures even more abhorrent than tax increases, chafed at the proposal, which passed through the lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, but twice failed to gain a majority in the Senate. On June 22, Blum, having concluded that he could no longer govern effectively, resigned the premiership. He was succeeded by a Radical we have already encountered in the premier’s office, Camille Chautemps.
There were several grotesque ironies bound up in the Paris World’s Fair of 1937, officially known as the International Exposition of Arts and Technics in Modern Life, which opened on May 24, 1937, after five years in the planning. Blum, who had been an adolescent when the Eiffel Tower began to rise above Paris for the hundredth-anniversary celebration of the French Revolution at the 1889 World’s Fair, foresaw that his government could use the 1937 fair to present itself as the torchbearer of progress and modernity. He applauded President Albert Lebrun’s inaugural speech expressing the hope that “this great assembly would teach mankind yet again that there is no dignity of life but in mutual comprehension of peoples’ needs, aspirations, and genius; no prosperity but in an ever more intense exchange of products and ideas.” He stood tall beside Lebrun for a military fanfare between the colonnaded wings of the newly built Palais de Chaillot, where Hitler was to have himself photographed three years later looking triumphantly at the Eiffel Tower. He and Lebrun led a cortège across the Trocadéro Gardens toward the dense cluster of pavilions on the Champs de Mars and along the Seine. At the Pont d’Iéna they boarded launches to view the exposition from a riverine perspective. Crowds along the quays were reported in newspapers to have shouted, “Vive Blum! Vive Lebrun!,” though not in L’Action Française, which acknowledged Blum’s presence only once, and then by way of noting his “unsightly Semitic profile.” Unsightly as well were the construction sites all over the unfinished fairground. Right-wing journalists cited them as evidence of workers malingering and of trade unions promoting their delinquency. Le Populaire, on the other hand, pronounced the fair a brilliant success. Day after day it reported attendance figures on its first page and the completion of new pavilions.
Two pavilions standing opposite each other and dwarfing all the rest competed for visitors walking down the main avenue between the Palais de Chaillot and the Eiffel Tower. They were stone monoliths in which Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany had invested sums out of all proportion to the buildings’ brief life span but commensurate with their symbolic value. Both had frontal towers. The Soviet’s served as a pedestal for two heroic figures seventy-five feet tall: a male and female worker, he stripped to the waist, she in a swirling peasant dress, thrusting the hammer and sickle skyward like conquistadors setting foot on a new continent and claiming it for the crown and the cross. They might have claimed world supremacy had Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, not obtained their blueprints from a sympathetic French commissioner and subsequently designed a taller, bulkier tower surmounted by a twenty-foot eagle, as imperturbable as the Soviet couple was dynamic, with its wings spread like Dracula’s mantle.
It was not widely commented upon that in the Spanish pavilion, a short walk from the German, Picasso’s Guernica pictured the destruction rained on a Spanish town by the Condor Legion of German bombers.
That Germany had the most prominent pavilion in the exposition’s most conspicuous quarter—that it had any pavilion at all—was the result of what Karen Fiss, who has written brilliantly on the subject, calls “the grand illusion.” Anticipating Munich 1938, French authorities, duped by Hitler, bought into the idea that Germany’s full participation in the World’s Fair reflected her desire to be a good neighbor in the community of nations. Lest she withdraw, as she had withdrawn from the League of Nations in October 1933, they met all her demands, however egregious. It seemed to be assumed that European peace itself depended on her staying, and she milked that illusion for all its worth. Jacques Gréber, chief architect of the fair, agreed to buy—among much else—German pumps and projectors for the light displays, German scientific instruments for the Pavillon de la Découverte, and a German planetarium for the Parc des Attractions.16 Gréber dropped his stipulation that Germany plan a more modest frontal tower. When the Paris-based German exile newspaper Das Neue Tage-Buch alarmed German diplomats by suggesting in an open letter to Thomas Mann that Jewish and German left-wing refugees build a pavilion of their own, French organizers assured them that it was absolutely out of the question.
The Paris exposition of 1937 viewed from the terrace of the Palais de Chaillot, the German pavilion (left) and the Soviet (right), flanking the Eiffel Tower, which had been erected to commemorate the centenary of the French Revolution at the 1889 exposition.
There was more than politics in the magical thinking that characterized France’s obsequious courtship. There was also awe of the regime whose rousing pageants transformed its population into a convulsive organism. We have heard from Drieu La Rochelle, but Drieu had equally zealous company. To French visitors overwhelmed by the Nazi Party congress at Nuremberg, who felt that they had experienced a fullness of being unattainable in their republican homeland, the Rhine marked an existential divide rather than a geographical boundary. Crossing it, one left the parched land of French reason and entered a green world of primitive vitality where reason counted for little. The Right Bank offered a new dispensation, beyond the self. “For the French, alas, the synchronized marching of 120,000 men under blazing flags is nothing but the disguised dance of war,” wrote Alphonse de Châteaubriant, a novelist and old-line aristocrat who collaborated with the Nazis during the occupation. In his view, the French, being “logicians,” could not understand that the marching steps of Germans corresponded to a “metaphysical” feeling. “Frenchmen are reasoners, while Germans are rhythmicians, and it is through the cooperation of each person in unanimous self-effacement that the religion of this rhythm is established, with each consciousness … touching the eternal depths.”17 The French ambassador to Berlin in 1937, André François-Poncet, observed that the Third Reich attributed a social and civic value of the highest order to festivals, for which it obviously had a sinister genius.
The highlight of all these festivals was the Nuremberg Congress.… For eight days, Nuremberg was a city of jubilation, a city gone mad, and practically a city of convulsionaries. This ambience, combined with the beauty of the spectacles presented and the luxury of the hospitality offered, exerted a strong influence on the spirit of the foreigners whom the Nazi government made sure to invite to its annual meetings. The displays were contagious, and the visitors could not resist them; they returned home seduced and conquered, ripe for collaboration, without perceiving the sinister realities hidden behind the deceptive pomp of these prodigious parades.
Presiding over the world’s kermesse with a cracked voice, mindful of Nuremberg, beset by feelings of inferiority, and placing hope of salvation in the “fête nationale,” the French government devoted an entire pavilion to the “Art of Festivals.” Its director, Jacques Viénot, bemoaned the fact that France—the pageant master under Bourbon kings, revolutionary terrorists, and Napoleon—had lost purchase in Europe. “Rome, Moscow, Berlin … all know perfectly how to organize gigantic human maneuvers with an imposing flair for decoration, stagecraft, and propaganda. We must therefore revive the past for the future by reclaiming a glorious tradition and renewing it.”
Viénot urged that the government sponsor research into the art of the festival and that it establish for that purpose an institution to be called the Academy of Joy—a name probably inspired by the Third Reich’s state-controlled leisure organization Kraft durch Freude. Contemporary humanity had to “relearn joy,” he asserted. “Let there be no doubt that henceforth France wants to endow its national demonstrations and popular festivals with new dignity.” The general commissioner of the World’s Fair, Edmond Labbé, concurred, and in a speech inaugurating the Art de Fêtes pavilion told his sympathetic audience that bored youths who had recourse to “Negro-American music” and “Apache rhythms” for excitement needed a patriotic intoxicant. Wise governments offered their people festivals.
Labbé didn’t stop there. The World’s Fair commission launched a nationwide competition to revive “les fêtes françaises,” with publicity flyers citing the Nuremberg rallies and Mussolini’s maneuvers in the Forum as examples of great civic theater. Contestants were given various themes for embellishment: torchlight parades, Armistice Day commemorations, Olympic marches, funeral processions. It was, indeed, the plan for a state funeral that won first prize. “The pageant featured an immense catafalque in the form of a pyramid, which would be carried by two hundred men,” writes Karen Fiss. “The Arc de Triomphe, draped in crepe, would be encompassed by a circle of vertical searchlights forming ‘a luminous funerary chapel.’ The description of these illuminated elements … suggests that the French designers were aware of Speer’s Lichtdom or ‘cathedral of light.’ Speer used a ring of 130 powerful searchlights at the 1934 Nuremberg party rallies, which shot eight kilometers into the dark sky, to form a translucent dome.” No great man qualified for this extravaganza, but the plan for a Bastille Day pageant came to fruition in July 1937, three weeks after Blum resigned from office. Immense tricolor banners hung vertically, often three together, at every major square, like carpet runners measured for the Hall of Mirrors. Fifteen thousand torchbearers imitated the nocturnal lava flow of Nuremberg across seven miles of Paris. One newspaper announced “the birth of a tradition.” L’Action Française noted that “a savage horde” of several hundred Bolsheviks shuffled after the military review, spoiling an otherwise impressive spectacle.
The World’s Fair had not yet ended when, in November, Hitler laid out to key ministers and military brass his plan for the conquest of Europe. It survives as “the Hossbach Memorandum,” named after the colonel who took minutes. Lebensraum was its theme—living space. Eighty-five million Germans needed more of it, and everything that soil provides, to preserve the integrity of the race. Colonies were not the answer, only neighbors, he declared, explaining why Czechoslovakia and Austria could be annexed without interference from France, which, with England, would remain aloof until they themselves were ripe for the picking.18 He wanted this memorandum to be his last will and testament, should he die an untimely death.
1In Marguerite Duras’s brief description of him at a literary salon during the occupation, he is the opposite of glib but nonetheless hollow: “Clearly suffering from pride, he scarcely deigned to speak, and when he did it was as if his voice was dubbed, his words translated, stiff.” Guests encountered a similar absentee at Colette Jéramec’s receptions during their brief, unhappy marriage.
2Doriot was of course familiar with the Nazi slogan: “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer.”
3Nicknamed the “Vel’ d’Hiv’,” it became infamous during the German occupation as the warehouse for thirteen thousand Jews rounded up in July 1942 and subsequently transported to death camps.
4In an unofficial capacity, Jean Giraudoux, the minister of information in 1939, against whom Drieu fulminated for representing a government that censored Gilles, shared his anti-Semitism. Giraudoux described Jews seeking asylum from Nazism in France as “a horde that manages to get stripped of its national rights, to invite expulsion, and whose frail and abnormal constitutions land them in our hospitals, monopolizing wards.” He was known to be in favor of establishing a “ministry of race.”
5“In no country have I seen so many barricades, barbed-wire fences, ‘no entry’ signs, special passes, guards and sentry-huts,” Herbart noted.
6In 1924, Gide had published a famous apology of homosexuality, Corydon.
7The freedom to form political parties, for example, is irrelevant: “We Bolsheviks regard the matter from a different point of view. There are different political parties and the freedom to form them only where there are classes whose interests are hostile and antagonistic.”
8In an excerpt published by Le Figaro, “perversity” is translated as “perversion.”
9In 1936, Léo Lagrange, the undersecretary, a square-jawed young Socialist, helped organize the People’s Olympiad in Barcelona to counter the official Olympiad in Nazi Berlin.
10It should be noted that the student quarter was not exclusively left-wing. The law and medical schools leaned far enough to the right to justify the conviction of the Camelots du Roi that the Boulevard Saint-Michel was their turf.
11Maurice Thorez, leader of the French Communist Party, also addressed crowds. Neither he nor his comrades were members of the government, which his party agreed to support, but in which it refused to participate.
12Freud quotes Rolland’s letter at the beginning of Civilization and Its Discontents (1930).
13The canvas pictured Fascism as a giant with the head of a predatory bird supporting the bestial, moribund body of capitalism while recoiling from the raised arm of a young guardian spirit wreathed in stars.
14By November, Blum had every reason to know that Germany had sent several thousand troops, panzer tanks, tons of bombs, and planes and had placed submarines at the service of the insurgents. He himself was doing as much as he could to bulk up the French military.
15The conservative daily Le Temps reported that the left-wing extremists were armed and had shot up the automobile of Marx Dormoy, Salengro’s successor as minister of the interior; Dormoy had been summoned to the scene. “We have too often reproached the cabinet presided over by Léon Blum for its dilatoriness in defending republican law against the transgressions and violence of partisans of direct action not to acknowledge that in this instance the police, over which it has supreme control, accomplished its duty impeccably.” The Communist leader Maurice Thorez denounced Blum as an “assassin of workers.”
16Gréber was known in the United States for his design of Philadelphia’s Fairmount Parkway.
17Châteaubriant’s glorification of Hitler and Nazism, La Gerbe des Forces, published at the time of the 1937 exposition, made a believer out of Cardinal Baudrillart, rector of the Institut Catholique in Paris. According to Henri de Kérillis, a prominent journalist, the novel, in which Châteaubriant championed the idea of “a European salvation through the Teutonic renaissance, since civilization with roots in the late Roman Empire was dead,” found an enthusiastic readership in student circles.
18“The Fuhrer believes personally that in all probability England and perhaps also France have already silently written off Czechoslovakia, and that they have grown used to the idea that this question would one day be cleaned up by Germany. The difficulties in the British Empire and the possibility of being entangled in another long-drawn-out European war were decisive factors in the non-participation of England in a war against Germany. England’s attitude would certainly not remain without influence on France’s. An attack on Germany without British support is not probable.”
