Paris on the Brink by Mary McAuliffe

Author:Mary McAuliffe [McAuliffe, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2018-06-07T16:00:00+00:00

While Blum convalesced, crisis upon crisis continued to mount—not only the social and economic crises at home, but the ongoing rise of Hitler and Mussolini on France’s borders. In March, Hitler invaded the demilitarized Rhineland, but France did little but protest. Hamstrung by a deflationary economic policy—which for several years had dictated a drop in military spending—and constrained as well by a widespread pacifism tinged, at least in some quarters, with anti-Semitism (the belief that it was Jewish émigrés who were pushing for a military response to Hitler), the government settled for appeasement rather than tangle with Germany. As for calling upon the Soviet Union for help, this was ruled out, given the strenuous opposition from the right, which held huge meetings to protest against what it called a “Masonic and Soviet war.”8 Not only did the right detest such an alliance on principle, but also on the political grounds that it might give the Popular Front an edge in the coming elections.

These hard-fought elections consumed France during the spring of 1936 as the split between left and right widened. Despite unease at the news of Hitler’s military move in the Rhineland, people with property were more concerned with defending it than they were with confronting Germany, while workers were indignant at German aggression but were unwilling to take up arms to oppose it. Overall, the coming elections were all-absorbing, with workers calling loudly for “Bread, Peace, Liberty!” and property owners just as vociferously demanding the defeat of the revolutionary and dangerous proletariat.

Amid the furor, anti-Semitism clothed in the guise of nationalism burgeoned as the right fulminated against “aliens,” especially that symbol of the so-called alien, the Jewish Léon Blum. It was now that the bizarre rumor took hold in certain quarters that Blum had been born in Bessarabia with the name of Karfunkelstein.9 Elliot Paul noted that everyone in his Rue de la Huchette neighborhood took sides, and the resulting ill feeling “transform[ed] the formerly charming and harmonious neighborhood into two hostile camps.”10 And as Eugen Weber bluntly put it, “More than twelve months of unabated civil dissension had left the country gutless and spent, with hatred enough only for fellow-Frenchmen.”11

Everyone considered the spring elections to be crucial, with both sides contending that a vote for the other would be a vote for war. The elections did indeed result in a virtual revolution, although an internal war was more likely than one with an external foe. In both the first and second ballots, the Popular Front gained spectacular victories, leaving the moderate center as well as the right in the dust. On the night of May 3, jubilant crowds filled the boulevards of Paris, while sounds of the Internationale wafted on the warm night air.

For the first time, the socialist SFIO received more votes than the Radical party, and Blum became France’s first Socialist prime minister. For the first time as well, the Communists now comprised part of the government’s parliamentary majority, although—much as the Socialists had done in

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