Stavisky dead in a house in Chamonix where he had been hiding with his mistress. Suicide was alleged, but it was widely believed that he had been shot by a policeman – conveniently, it seemed, for Chautemps. Overnight Stavisky became the best-known name in France since Dreyfus.Crowds appeared outside the National Assembly, shouting ‘Down with the thieves!’ and spitting on Deputies. On 27 January 1934, the Chautemps Government fell – after an innings of just two months and four days.
In common with Sartre and Beauvoir, the great mass of Frenchmen indulged themselves heartily in the spectacle of political scandals as part of the nation’s pursuit of escapism. Hand in hand with this indulgence went a deep disgust and disillusion with politicians and government, which was about to create a grave split in France just at the moment when the Nazi jackboots were striding out in mounting unison. By 1934 the reputation of politicians in France had sunk to a record low; but it was to sink still lower, and with it all efficacy of government. Constantly there was some new scandal and, however distantly, some Minister in what the cynics dubbed ‘the Republic of Pals’ always seemed to be implicated. As Pertinax pungently observed, French politicians had assumed the habit of ‘dealing with their country as if it were a commercial company going into liquidation’. Recounting a typical scene of the Third Republic, Élie Bois describes how at a lunch party Georges Bonnet and Camille Chautemps ‘vied with one another to succeed a Premier whose ministry had just fallen: “It’s my turn!” “No, Georges, it’s mine…” ’ Dizzier and dizzier became the game of musical chairs played by the little men unaware of the proportions of the tragedy moving in on them. In the eighteen months preceding 1934, there had been five different governments but with virtually the same faces in each; from mid 1932 to the outbreak of war in 1939, France’s score of governments was to total nineteen, including eleven different Premiers, eight Ministers of Finance, seven Ministers of Foreign Affairs, and eight Ministers of War. A favourite insult with Parisian taxi-drivers became ‘ Espèce de député ’!’ The populace loathed the politicians; the politicians loathed each other.
Beginnings of Civil War
On 6 February 1934, passions overflowed. This was the datemarking the beginning of what approximated to civil war in France, which was to have so insidious and powerful an influence on the events of 1940 that its background needs to be carefully understood. Since Armistice Day 1918, two major ideological streams, distinct and opposing, had flowed through the political life of France. One was revolutionary, the other patriotic; or, simplified in terms of the two historic events which supplied each with its most potent, fundamental inspiration, they might well be called, respectively, the streams of the Commune and of Verdun. The revolutionary, Commune stream may trace its original source back to the Great Revolution of 1789, whose spiritual heirs fought against the Establishment on the barricades in 1830 and 1848; while, as has already been suggested, its main motivating force in the post-1918 world was derived from the Russian Revolution. But it was the Paris Commune of 1871 in which resided the numen of France’s Left wing, and especially of that important section comprised by the Parisian proletariat. It was the Commune which, though unsuccessful, had first pointed the way to the possibility of a Government of the proletariat, based on revolution and the destruction of the bourgeois monopoly; moreover, it was upon the achievements and errors of the Commune (as interpreted by Karl Marx) that Lenin had based his own triumphant revolution of 1917. Above all, in France it was the savage memories of the 20,000 Communards so brutally massacred by Thiers’s forces of order which kept alight the flame of revolution, making the gulf between
In common with Sartre and Beauvoir, the great mass of Frenchmen indulged themselves heartily in the spectacle of political scandals as part of the nation’s pursuit of escapism. Hand in hand with this indulgence went a deep disgust and disillusion with politicians and government, which was about to create a grave split in France just at the moment when the Nazi jackboots were striding out in mounting unison. By 1934 the reputation of politicians in France had sunk to a record low; but it was to sink still lower, and with it all efficacy of government. Constantly there was some new scandal and, however distantly, some Minister in what the cynics dubbed ‘the Republic of Pals’ always seemed to be implicated. As Pertinax pungently observed, French politicians had assumed the habit of ‘dealing with their country as if it were a commercial company going into liquidation’. Recounting a typical scene of the Third Republic, Élie Bois describes how at a lunch party Georges Bonnet and Camille Chautemps ‘vied with one another to succeed a Premier whose ministry had just fallen: “It’s my turn!” “No, Georges, it’s mine…” ’ Dizzier and dizzier became the game of musical chairs played by the little men unaware of the proportions of the tragedy moving in on them. In the eighteen months preceding 1934, there had been five different governments but with virtually the same faces in each; from mid 1932 to the outbreak of war in 1939, France’s score of governments was to total nineteen, including eleven different Premiers, eight Ministers of Finance, seven Ministers of Foreign Affairs, and eight Ministers of War. A favourite insult with Parisian taxi-drivers became ‘ Espèce de député ’!’ The populace loathed the politicians; the politicians loathed each other.
Beginnings of Civil War
On 6 February 1934, passions overflowed. This was the datemarking the beginning of what approximated to civil war in France, which was to have so insidious and powerful an influence on the events of 1940 that its background needs to be carefully understood. Since Armistice Day 1918, two major ideological streams, distinct and opposing, had flowed through the political life of France. One was revolutionary, the other patriotic; or, simplified in terms of the two historic events which supplied each with its most potent, fundamental inspiration, they might well be called, respectively, the streams of the Commune and of Verdun. The revolutionary, Commune stream may trace its original source back to the Great Revolution of 1789, whose spiritual heirs fought against the Establishment on the barricades in 1830 and 1848; while, as has already been suggested, its main motivating force in the post-1918 world was derived from the Russian Revolution. But it was the Paris Commune of 1871 in which resided the numen of France’s Left wing, and especially of that important section comprised by the Parisian proletariat. It was the Commune which, though unsuccessful, had first pointed the way to the possibility of a Government of the proletariat, based on revolution and the destruction of the bourgeois monopoly; moreover, it was upon the achievements and errors of the Commune (as interpreted by Karl Marx) that Lenin had based his own triumphant revolution of 1917. Above all, in France it was the savage memories of the 20,000 Communards so brutally massacred by Thiers’s forces of order which kept alight the flame of revolution, making the gulf between
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