The Republic of Men: Gender and the Political Parties in Interwar France

4. “Warning! The Cradles Are Empty!”: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Population

115 4 WARNING! THE CRADLES ARE EMPTY!” gender, race, and the politics of population In the late summer of 1936, in the first year of its existence, the Parti populaire français sounded the alert: “Warning!” an author at L’Émancipation nationale declared, “The Cradles Are Empty!” The two-part article bearing this alarm exemplified the widespread paranoia in interwar France about the country’s stagnant population growth. The Parti populaire français, moreover , was typical of the far right in attempting to assert ownership over the politics of pronatalism; as many historians have observed, the right dominated pronatalist circles. Yet, the Parti populaire français’s fears were, especially by the mid-1930s, shared by the left. This is a phenomenon that has been underestimated in the literature: the degree to which the Radicals, Socialists, and Communists came, certainly by the Popular Front era and to a considerable degree before , to share both the right’s pronatalism and its broader desire to increase the population. Gender historians have tended to focus on how this fixation reflected traditionalists’ conceptions of femininity: conservative French men thought women’s place to be in the home. This was a belief held in common with the right by most men on the left: by the 1930s even in the Communist Party “subversive” visions of femininity were silenced and marginalized . Moreover, pronatalism reflected popular conceptions not just of femininity among France’s political elite but of masculinity as well. All the parties believed that good men were or would be fathers, and preferably prolific ones. In other words, the parties not only imposed a gender role upon women in pursuit of more children for the nation, they imposed one on men too. Just as women were pushed to be mothers in the home, men were pressed to be breadwinning fathers. This trend was most pronounced at the time of the Popular Front. As they tacked to the center, the Radicals, Socialists, and Communists, though they did not wholly abandon the politics of fraternalism, embraced a more paternalist outlook and adopted conservative gender ideals. “ 116 THE REPUBLIC OF MEN This transformation in the left’s discourse also reflected something insidious : a shared belief in a French racial identity. As Elisa Camiscioli has recently demonstrated, a sense of racial hierarchy increasingly shaped French policy on a host of issues, notably immigration, in the interwar years. Certainly, racialist language progressively permeated leftist anxiety about France’s demographic decline; once again, the left moved in this regard considerably toward the right’s position over time. Thus, a host of proposals that were introduced by the right in the 1920s as a means of ensuring population growth and increased French procreation were later adopted wholeheartedly by the left. These included more maternity benefits; protective legislation for women, especially mothers, in the workplace; and family allocations meant to augment breadwinners’ wages. More negatively, racialist concerns over the nation’s demographic health also slanted the views of politicians of all stripes on the availability of birth control and abortion and the treatment of hereditary diseases. As concern for the birthrate spread across the political spectrum, so too did a eugenicist mentality. the demographic panic The pervasiveness and hysterical nature of the interwar panic over the decline in France’s population growth and birthrate have been frequently remarked upon and really cannot be overstated. In Cheryl Koos’s words, Fernand Boverat, the secretary-general and then president of the Alliance nationale pour l’accroissement de la population française, and other pronatalists presented the decision about whether or not to have children as “the choice between life or death” for the nation. This panic was initially most in evidence in conservative circles, with the Marxist left initially rejecting populationist and pronatalist rhetoric for a variety of reasons that will be outlined below. However, over time, the left gradually dropped its objections for reasons of strategy and conviction. By the mid-1930s, the obsession with the dearth of French babies was strictly bipartisan: it could be found from the Communists to the fascists. Concern over France’s declining birthrate was long-standing. Indeed, the by-then powerful pronatalist movement had its roots deep in the nineteenth century. Anxiety over depopulation had percolated among nationalist academics before the Franco-Prussian War in 1870–71, but undoubtedly France’s GENDER, RACE, AND THE POLITICS OF POPULATION 117 defeat...