Saint-exupery: A Biography by Stacy Schiff

Author:Stacy Schiff
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307798398
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-07-26T22:00:00+00:00

XIII

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Civil Evening Twilight

1937–1939

One must pay dearly for immortality: one has to die several times while still alive.

NIETZSCHE, Ecce Homo

France, in 1937, was a country befuddled. When she looked around she seemed to be one of the last great hopes for liberal democracy in Europe, but she did not often dare to look around. There was constant talk of Franco, of Mussolini, of Hitler; the Spanish Civil War dominated the newspapers during the second half of 1936 and into 1937. But all the talk of the threat to the legitimate Spanish government, of the invasion of Ethiopia, of Germany’s repeated aggressions, amounted to precisely that: talk. It was the chatter of a confused, divided people reeling with their own problems, obsessed with their own intrigues, bruised still by a war they could not conceive of fighting again. Across the Channel the British governments of Baldwin and Chamberlain followed the affairs of Europe with apathy and disinterest, convinced that Churchill’s warnings were idle exaggerations; understandably, France had no burning interest in taking a lonely stand as the defender of European democracy. As early as 1935 the writing had been on the wall, however. Sometimes it was even eloquent. That year Jean Giraudoux published Tiger at the Gates, a play that trumpeted—in its keen-witted, agreeable manner—the news that war was inevitable.

France chose to look the other way when Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland in 1936, the first opportunity she had to stop him and arguably the last occasion on which she was still militarily strong enough to do so. When civil war broke out in Spain she again backed away, worried that intervention would plunge her directly into a confrontation with Italy and Germany. That conflict, which France worked so hard to avoid, made itself felt all the same: it went a great way toward destabilizing the tentative alliance on which the Front Populaire government of Léon Blum, forged in the fury of 1934 and voted in with much enthusiasm two years later, had been based. When it was revealed that Blum had been approached by the Spanish Loyalists for arms and had not automatically refused, things began to go awry, enough so that the new premier, acting against his principles, was shamed into maintaining strict neutrality. He lost support on the Left—where cries of “Airplanes for Spain!” went up regularly—for treating Franco too gingerly. The Right—desperate for ground on which to break up the government—accused him of being anything but conciliatory. Its extreme elements painted Blum as a warmonger. France was at the time a country so much racked by infighting, so skittish, so bleary-eyed, that Blum’s instinctive reaction was seen not as a heroic vote cast on a dark day in favor of liberty, fraternity, and equality but as a subversive act of a guileful politician bent on engaging France in a conflict with Germany because he was a Jew and had a personal account to settle with Hitler.

Between March 1936, when Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland, and March 1938, when he continued on into Austria, one could practically hear the heavy footfalls in the distance.

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