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

6—August 1939

C H A P T e r 6 august 1939 In 1969, thirty years later, William L. shirer described Paris during that last summer before World War II in The Collapse of the Third Republic. The 1789 revolution and the storming of the Bastille were celebrating their sesquicentennial. Dressed by schiaparelli, Maggy rouff, Lanvin, and robert Piguet, the women of high society were crazy for dancing, just as in the movie sensation Toute la ville danse (The whole town is dancing). The economy was a marvel: strikes and unemployment down, industrial production and the stock market up. shirer remembered especially the gala soirée at the Polish embassy in the Hôtel des Princes de sagan that began on the night of 4 July and ended early the next morning. At its climax, the Polish ambassador, Jules Lukasziewicz , led a dozen dancers in a frenzied mazurka as more than a hundred onlookers, all privileged and powerful, clapped and stamped, the scene illuminated by the flames of Bengal torches. At least two of the guests were immune to the spell of this magic. Paul reynaud, minister of finance and architect of the economic turnaround, told Pierre Lazareff, editor of Paris-Soir, “They are dancing on a volcano. For what is an eruption of Vesuvius compared to the cataclysm that is forming under our very feet?” And Georges Bonnet, the fearful minister of foreign affairs, would write in his memoirs: “This sumptuous fete marked for me the end of an epoch. I returned to the Quai d’Orsay, thinking about the wind of folly which was blowing all these carefree dancers towards a catastrophe without precedent.”1 184 Y e A r s O F P L e N T Y , Y e A r s O F W A N T August 1939 began outwardly confident and carefree in Paris. Any hangover from the Munich Conference had been dispelled by the economic revival and by the newly confident policies of Prime Minister edouard Daladier. Yes, at Munich on 30 september 1938, France and Great Britain had chosen “appeasement,” permitting Adolf Hitler to despoil Czechoslovakia of its sudetenland and more—for France, much the greater shame because a treaty of mutual assistance with Czechoslovakia was involved. And yes, both Great Britain, on 30 september, and France, on 6 December 1938, had signed friendship pacts with Germany—again, for France the greater shame because Nazi foreign minister Joachim von ribbentrop was literally feted in Paris for the occasion. And finally, yes, on 15 March 1939, Hitler indeed violated his promises at Munich by destroying the remnant of Czechoslovakia. But in reaction, Great Britain and France shifted to “resistance,” solidifying their alliance as two weeks later, on 31 March, they jointly issued a guarantee to Poland against German aggression and began serious staff talks about possible military steps. The Western democracies were reasserting themselves , recovering their nerve, and seeking to re-create the coalition that defeated Germany during the Great War two decades earlier by adding russia (now, of course, the soviet Union), opening those negotiations on 18 April 1939. Of lesser moment, but certainly not of less bravado, the effort by Benito Mussolini’s Italy to extort French territory—the chant in the Italian legislature on 30 November 1938 was for “Tunisia! Corsica! Nice!”—had been well and truly rebuffed. A contentious issue in the historiography of modern France is the degree to which the leaders of the Third republic effectively confronted the challenges of the 1930s, above all the threat from Nazi Germany. The debate turns especially on the quality of the postMunich revival. In his magisterial account of these years, La Décadence , 1932–1939, Jean-Baptiste Duroselle declared, “The French . . . were more and more attracted [attiré], the legend notwithstanding, to resisting Hitler.” The conduct of French leaders in the last month before the war provides a measure of whether he was right.2 Immediately after the Munich Conference, hero aviator and writer Antoine de saint-exupéry captured the ambiguities of the moment August 1939 185 in an interview for Lazareff’s Paris-Soir: “We have chosen to save the peace. But in doing so, we have destroyed friends. . . . We have oscillated from one opinion to the other. When peace was threatened, we saw the shame of war. When war seemed to menace us, we felt the shame of peace.” Half a year later in the summer of...