Years of Plenty, Years of Want: France and the Legacy of the Great War

5—Edouard—The Hesitant

C H A P T e r 5 edouard—the Hesitant In the early morning hours of 7 February 1934, edouard Daladier capitulated. He was prime minister of France, but a single night of violence broke his nerve and left him unwilling to remain in office . The critical hours began the previous afternoon when he faced a Chamber of Deputies in pandemonium. From the left came cries of “Provocateur!” and from the right, “Dictator!” The Communist deputies stood on their desks singing the “Internationale,” while ragged groups in the center and right responded with the “Marseillaise.” When some threw punches, the session was temporarily suspended. eventually, near 10 p.m., Daladier won a vote of confidence, but by then he had far worse to confront. Directly across the seine in the Place de la Concorde, about four thousand police and a thousand Gardes républicains (gendarmes assigned to security for Paris) struggled to control some fifteen thousand demonstrators who became a mob and their demonstration a riot. On the far side of the square, some set the Ministry of the Marine ablaze. On the near side, the most audacious tried to force their way onto the bridge that led to the Palais Bourbon, where the Chamber met. By midnight, the demonstrators had dispersed, but eighteen were dead and nearly fifteen hundred badly wounded. Accounts of this carnage—and predictions of worse to come—shook Daladier severely. When he proposed declaring a state of emergency and martial law, his advisors warned that the discipline of the army could not be assured. A report that 144 Y e A r s O F P L e N T Y , Y e A r s O F W A N T looters had seized weapons from two armories and that menacing figures had knocked at his own home left him staggered. The following day, he resigned before even consulting his cabinet.1 The crisis that enveloped Daladier had begun six weeks earlier. Although the Great Depression came late to France, the nation was now tightly in its grip. Writing of turning fifty in 1931, novelist roger Martin du Gard predicted, “The future appears laden with catastrophic events. Our . . . birthday will doubtless give us a chance to see the beginning of a vast social upheaval in europe.” How sad to be right. Unemployment in early 1931 was only 28,500, but by the end of the year it reached 248,100, and two years later 312,900. Industrial production had declined by 15 percent from 1931, exports by 39 percent, while business bankruptcies soared nearly 80 percent. Confidence in the economy plummeted, and fear of the future led consumers to hoard cash. Among postwar French political leaders, only raymond Poincaré had a serious comprehension of fiscal policy, and he had retired in 1929 and was soon bedridden. Daladier himself admitted mystification. Hard feelings about the economy led rapidly to hard feelings about politics. Transforming them into rage required a catalyst, which took the form of a financial scandal interwoven with political corruption: the stavisky affair, which first came to public notice right after Christmas 1933.2 serge Alexandre stavisky—he dropped his surname when he was in polite company—came to France at the age of fourteen from the Ukraine in 1900 with his father, who practiced dentistry in the Paris slums. By his early twenties, stavisky was a minor player in the underworld of pimping, gambling, fraud, and petty theft. A brief prison term introduced him to past masters of these arts, and upon release he vowed to aim higher, with more sophisticated deceptions and more sophisticated partners. He became a specialist in pyramid schemes, shrewdly disappearing before their collapse and leaving little trace of his involvement. He used his ill-gotten gains to acquire newspapers, racehorses, nightclubs, an alluring mistress, and “friends” such as journalists, politicians, and police officials—to all of whom he purveyed the delights of the demimonde. Goodwill in high places was necessary, because hanging over stavisky’s head was Edouard—The Hesitant 145 trial for a charge of fraud dating from 1927. such goodwill had an effect: by December 1933, this trial had been postponed no less than nineteen times. At that moment, he mishandled his current deception , having audaciously issued 239 million francs ($209 million in 2011) of bonds through the municipal pawnshop at Bayonne. The town’s mayor was Joseph Garat, who sat in...