Interwar France

Labour unions had supported the war effort and grew rapidly until 1919. The general strike and railway strikes of 1920 were a total failure; 25,000 railwaymen active in the unions were later fired, the companies blacklisted union leaders and trade union membership plunged. In 1921, the General Confederation of Labour (CGT) split permanently, with more extreme elements forming the Confédération générale du travail unitaire (CGTU) It enlisted the syndicalists who wanted direct union ownership and control of the factories by and for the benefit of the workers. It soon lost the spirit of revolutionary syndicalism and came under the close control of the Communist Party, which in turn was controlled by the Profintern, the Red Trade Union International, based in the Kremlin.[4]

In the 1920s and the 1930s, the Paris Metal Union became the test bed for communist unionism at the plant level. The model spread to all communist unions as the party shifted from winning votes at general elections to control of factory cells. A small number of disciplined party members controlled the cells, which then controlled the entire union at the factory. The strategy was a success and was essential to very rapid growth in the 1930s.[5]

Union membership doubled during the war and peaked at 2,000,000 for 1919 out of some 8,000,000 industrial workers, or about 25 per cent. After the plunge in 1921, membership slowly grew to 1,500,000 in 1930, or 19% of the 8 million employed that year. The heaviest losses came in metal factories, textile mills, and construction. The greatest density was in printing, where 40% were members. Blue-collar government workers were increasingly unionized by 1930, especially the railways and trams.[6]

Evolution of gross domestic product in several countries between 1929 and 1939

The Great Depression affected France from 1931 to 1939 but was milder than other industrial countries[7] While the 1920s economy grew very fast at 4.4% per year, the increase in the 1930s was only 0.6%.[8] The depression was relatively mild at first since unemployment peaked under 5%, the fall in production was at most 20% below the 1929 output and there was no banking crisis.[9] The depression had some effects on the local economy, which can partly explain the 6 February 1934 crisis and especially the formation of the Popular Front, led by the leader of the socialist SFIO, leader, Léon Blum, who won the 1936 elections.

The sour economic mood after 1932 heightened French exclusionism and xenophobia, which caused protectionism against importing foreign goods and allowing in foreign workers. Asylum-seekers were not welcome, including thousands of Jews trying to flee Nazi Germany after 1933. Hostility to foreign workers was connected to the lack of a legal framework for the effective treatment of refugees.[10] The middle classes resented Jews in France and showed anger at competition for jobs or business. That fed anti-Semitism, which was more than a symbolic protest against the republic or communism. By the end of 1933, France began to expel refugee Jews, and right-wing movements escalated their rhetorical anti-Semitism.[11]

Almost all of the population used church services primarily to mark important life events, such as baptism, marriage and funerals. Otherwise, religiosity was steadily declining and already varied enormously across France. The largest groupings the devout Catholics, the passive Catholics, the anticlerical secularists, and small minorities of Protestants and Jews.[12]

Pope Benedict XV (1914–1922) ended Pope Pius X's harsh anti-modernist crusade and returned to the tolerant policies of Pope Leo XIII. That enabled the French modernizers, such as Christian democrat Marc Sangnier, who had led the liberal Sillon until the Church pressured him into shutting it down, to be restored to the Church's good graces.[13] The new spirit from Rome enabled a permanent end to the rancorous prewar battles between secularism on one hand and Church on the other. It had climaxed in a major victory for the anticlerical Republicans in the 1905 French law on the Separation of the Churches and the State, which disestablished the Catholic Church and took legal control of all its buildings and lands.[14]

Reconciliation was enabled by the wartime dedication of so many Catholics fighting and dying for the nation and so most allegations of disloyalty disappeared. More immediately, the conservatives secured a large majority in the Chamber of Deputies In the 1919 elections, and Aristide Briand took the opportunity for reconciliation. In 1920, 80 members of Parliament joined the delegation to Rome for the canonization of Joan of Arc. Formal diplomatic relations were reestablished in January 1921. In December 1923 the government set up diocesan associations under control of bishops for the administration of church property that had been seized two decades earlier.

In January 1924, the pope approved, and the church was reestablished in the dominant position in French society.[15] The Catholics set up numerous local organizations, especially youth groups, to try to combat falling activism among the remaining church members. In 1919, the Church established a union, French Confederation of Christian Workers (CFTC), to bargain with employers and act as a political force. It was in competition with socialist and communist labor unions. However, only a few industrial workers were unionized until the 1930s.

Expatriate writers, artists, composers and would-be intellectuals from around the world flocked to Paris for study, entertainment, connections and production of artistry in a highly-supportive environment.[16] Many Americans came to escape the commercialism back home. Led by Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, E. E. Cummings, William Faulkner and Katherine Anne Porter, they formed a lively colony that sought out new experiences and soon had a large impact on culture back home.[17] A new factor was the arrival of hundreds of university students stretching their experiences through one of several junior year abroad programs that began about 1923. They lived with French families and took classes at French universities under the close supervision of their American professor for which they earned a full year's academic credit.[18] Many musicians came to study with Nadia Boulanger.

Aimé Césaire, a poet from Martinique, was a representative leader of the emerging black community of Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. He was a founder of the négritude movement, a racial identity movement for a community that included blacks from the French West Indies, the US and French Africa.[19] Other prominent leaders included Léopold Sédar Senghor (elected in 1960 as the first president of independent Senegal) and Léon Damas of French Guiana. The intellectuals disavowed colonialism and argued for the importance of a Pan-African racial identity worldwide. Writers generally used a realist literary style and often used Marxist rhetoric reshaped to the black radical tradition.[20]

Blacks from the US made a dramatic impact by introducing New Orleans-style jazz.[21] American music had a major impact since the avant-garde welcomed what they called "wild sound" of rhythmic explosions that unleashed gyrations upon the dance floor. However, white French musicians based in dance halls softened the harsh and shocking US style and made it very popular.[22]

France was part of the Allied force that occupied the Rhineland following the armistice. Foch supported Poland in the Greater Poland Uprising and in the Polish–Soviet War and France also joined Spain during the Rif War. From 1925 until his death in 1932, Aristide Briand, as prime minister during five short intervals, directed French foreign policy by using his diplomatic skills and sense of timing to forge friendly relations with Weimar Germany as the basis of a genuine peace within the framework of the League of Nations. He realised France could not contain the much larger Germany by itself or secure effective support from Britain or the League.[27]

In January 1923, after Germany refused to ship enough coal as part of its reparations, France and Belgium occupied the industrial region of the Ruhr. Germany responded with passive resistance, which included printing vast amounts of marks to pay for the occupation, which caused runaway inflation. That heavily damaged the German middle class, whose savings became worthless, but also damaged the French franc. The intervention was a failure, and in the summer of 1924, France accepted the American solution to the reparations issues, as expressed in the Dawes Plan. It had American banks make long-term loans to Germany, which used the money to pay reparations.[28]

The United States demanded repayment of the war loans although the terms were slightly softened in 1926. All loans, payments and reparations were suspended in 1931, and everything was finally resolved in 1951.[29][30]

In the 1930s, France built the Maginot Line, an elaborate system of static border defences that was designed to stop any German invasion. However, it did not extend into Belgium, and Germany attacked there in 1940 and went around the French defenses. Military alliances were signed with weak powers in 1920–21, called the "Little Entente".[31]

The Republican-Radical and Radical-Socialist Party, usually called the Radical Party, (1901–1940), was the 20th-century version of the radical political movement founded by Leon Gambetta in the 1870s. It attracted 20–25% of deputies elected in the interwar years and had a middle-class base. The "radicalism" meant opposition to royalism and support for anticlerical measures to weaken the role of Catholic Church in education and supported its disestablishment. Its program was otherwise vaguely in favor of liberty, social progress, and peace, and its structure was always much thinner than rival parties on the right (such as the Democratic Republican Alliance) and the left (socialists and communists). Party organizations at the departmental level were largely independent of Paris. National conventions were attended by only a third of the delegates, and there was no official party newspaper.

It split into moderate and leftist wings, represented respectively by Édouard Herriot (1872–1957) and Édouard Daladier (1884–1970). "Socialist" in its title was misleading, and the party had little support among workers or labor unions. Its middle position made it a frequent partner in coalition governments, and its leaders increasingly focused on holding office and providing patronage to their followers. Other major leaders included Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929), Joseph Caillaux (1863–1944), and Aristide Briand (1862–1932).[32][33]

Domestic politics in the 1920s were a product of unresolved problems left by the war and peace, especially the economics of reconstruction and how to make Germany pay for it all. The great planners were Raymond Poincaré, Alexandre Millerand and Aristide Briand. France had paid for the war with very heavy borrowing at home and from Britain and the United States. Heavy inflation resulted, and in 1922, Poincaré became Prime Minister. He justified his strong anti-German policies:

Germany's population was increasing, her industries were intact, she had no factories to reconstruct, she had no flooded mines. Her resources were intact, above and below ground.... in fifteen or twenty years Germany would be mistress of Europe. In front of her would be France with a population scarcely increased.[34]

Poincaré used German reparations to maintain the franc at a tenth of its prewar value and to pay for the reconstruction of the devastated areas. Since Germany refused to pay nearly as much as Paris demanded, Poincaré reluctantly sent the French army to occupy the Ruhr industrial area (1922) to force a showdown. The British strongly objected, arguing that it "would only impair German recovery, topple the German government, [and] lead to internal anarchy and Bolshevism, without achieving the financial goals of the French."[35]

The Germans practiced passive resistance by flooding the economy with paper money that damaged both the German and French economies. The standoff was solved by American dollars in the Dawes Plan. New York banks lent money to Germany for reparations to France, which then used the same dollars to repay the Americans. Throughout the early postwar period, Poincaré's political base was the conservative nationalist parliament elected in 1920. However, at the next election (1924), a coalition of Radical Socialists and Socialists called the "Cartel des gauches" ("Cartel of the Lefts") won a majority, and Herriot of the Radical Socialist Party became prime minister. He was disillusioned by the imperialist thrust of the Versailles Treat, and sought a stable international peace in rapprochement with the Soviet Union to block the rising German revanchist movement, especially after Hitler's rise in January 1933.[36]

The two major far-right parties were the French Social Party (Parti social français, PSF), originally the Fiery Cross (Croix de feu) and the French Popular Party (Parti populaire français, PPF). The PSF was much larger, reaching as many as a million members, and grew increasingly conservative. The PPF was much smaller, with perhaps 50,000 members, and became more fascist. The chief impact for both movements was to bring together their enemies on the left and center into the Popular Front.[37]

The Croix de Feu was originally an elite veterans' organization that François de La Rocque took over in 1929 and made a political movement. The Croix-de-Feu was dissolved in June 1936 by the Popular Front government, and de La Rocque quickly formed the new Parti social français. Both organizations were authoritarian and conservative, hostile to democracy and devoted to the defence of property, the family, and the nation against the threat of decay or leftist revolution. The motto of PSF was "travail, famille, patrie" ("work, family, fatherland"). Its base was in urban areas, especially Paris, the industrial North, and Algeria. Most members were young (born after 1890) and middle-class, and it had few blue collar or farm workers. The PSF grew rapidly in the late 1930s, with more members than the communists and socialists combined. It reached out to include more workers and rural elements. De La Rocque was a charismatic leader but a poor politician with vague ideas. His movement opposed the far-right Vichy regime and its leaders were arrested and the PSF vanished.

It was never invited to join a governing coalition. Whether or not it was "fascist" is debated by scholars. Many resemblances existed but not the key fascist promise of the creation of a revolutionary "new fascist man". Instead, its goal was to return to the past and to rely upon the old traditional values of Church and Army.[38][39]

The non-conformists of the 1930s were intellectuals seeking new solutions to face the political, economic and social crisis. The movement revolved around Emmanuel Mounier's personalism. They attempted to find a "third (communitarian) alternative" between socialism and capitalism and opposed both liberalism and fascism.[40]

Three main currents were active:

• The review Esprit, founded in 1931 by Mounier and was the main mouthpiece of personalism.
• The Ordre nouveau (New Order) group, created by Alexandre Marc and influenced by Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu's works. Jean Coutrot became during the Popular Front vice-president of the Committee of Scientific Organisation of Labour of the Minister Charles Spinasse and participated in the technical reunions of Ordre nouveau.
• The Jeune Droite ("Young Right") gathered young intellectuals who had broken with the far-right Action Française, including Jean de Fabrègues, Jean-Pierre Maxence, Thierry Maulnier, and Maurice Blanchot.

The young intellectuals (most were about 25 years old) all considered that France was confronted by a "civilisation crisis" and, despite their differences, opposed what Mounier called the "established disorder" (le désordre établi); he meant capitalism, individualism, economic liberalism and materialism. They aimed at creating the conditions of a "spiritual revolution" that would simultaneously transform Man and things. They called for a "New Order", which would be beyond individualism and collectivism and oriented towards a "federalist", "communautary and personalist" organisation of social relations.[41]

The non-conformists were influenced both by socialism, in particular by Proudhonism and by Social Catholicism, which permeated Esprit and the Jeune Droite. They inherited from both currents a form of scepticism towards politics, which explains some stances towards anti-statism and renewed interest in social and economical transformations. The movement paid attention to civil society and distrusted the state. It favored "intermediate bodies", especially the family and the village.

After the February 6, 1934 riots, the non-conformists split several ways. Bertrand de Jouvenel made the link between the non-conformists and the supporters of planisme, a new economical theory invented by the Belgian Henri de Man as well as with the technocratic Groupe X-Crise. They influenced both Vichy's Révolution nationale and the Resistance (Combat, Défense de la France, Organisation civile et militaire etc.)[42]

As the Great Depression finally hit France hard in 1932, the popular mood became hostile. A series of cabinets were wholly ineffective, and anger at the mounting unemployment caused xenophobia, borders being closed and a startling growth in anti-Semitism. Distrust of the entire political system grew rapidly, especially during the dramatic Stavisky Affair. a massive financial fraud that involving many deputies and top government officials. The promise of democracy seemed a failure in France and many other countries as they turned toward authoritarian rule, a trend that began by Lenin in Russia in 1918 and Mussolini in Italy in 1922 and continued in Spain, Portugal, Poland, the Baltic countries, the Balkans, Japan, Latin America and, most horrifying of all, by Hitler in Nazi Germany in January 1933. It now threatened France after the scandal's exposure brought huge mobs into the streets of Paris.

All night on February 6 and 7, 1934, attacks took place against the police defending Parliament from physical assault, mostly by right-wing attackers. The police killed 15 demonstrators and halted their advance.[43] Journalist Alexander Werth argues:

At that time the Croix de Feu, the Royalists, the Solidarité and the Jeunesses Patriotes had no more than a few thousand active members between them, and that they would have been incapable of a real armed uprising. What they reckoned on was the support of the Paris public as a whole; and the most that they could reasonably have aimed at was the resignation of the Daladier Government. When this happened, on February 7, Colonel de la Rocque announced that 'the first objective had been attained.'[44]

PCF = Communists; SFIO = Socialists

The 6 February outrage shocked centrists and leftists, which had been feuding ceaselessly for decades. On February 12, a huge leftist counterdemonstration had communist workers spontaneously joined with the Radical Socialists and Socialists against what seemed to them to be a serious fascist threat. Centrists and leftists slowly began to assemble an unprecedented three-way coalition, with socialists being the largest party, followed by the Radicals and then the French Communist Party. Stalin had recently ordered that all Communist Parties should stop fighting the socialists and combine to form an antifascist popular front, which was carried out in France. The communists supported the government but refused to take any cabinet seats.[45]

The 3 May 1936 French legislative election confirmed the political upheaval. Conservative forces were decimated, and the socialist Léon Blum, who led the largest coalition party, SFIO, became the prime minister. A massive wave of strikes occurred in which 2 million workers shut down French industry and paralyzed the forces of business and conservatism. That inspired the coalition government to pass hurriedly multiple packages of new programs designed for the benefit of the working class.[46]

The key provisions included immediate wage increases of 12 percent, general collective bargaining with unions, a 40-hour week, paid vacations, compulsory arbitration of labor disputes and the nationalisation of the Bank of France and some key munitions plants. The conservative opposition was dissolved, most notably the Croix de Feu, but it reorganised quickly as a political party.

The left had assumed such reforms would liberate the workers and also the entire economy, but the economy did not respond well. Prices rose, and inflation negated the wage increases and hurt the middle class by sharply cutting into their savings accounts. Industrial production did not increase, and militant workers made sure that even if demand was very strong, factories would shut down after 40 hours. Unemployment remained high, the government deficit soared and the government was forced to devalue the franc.

Blum had never been accustomed to working with coalition partners, and his coalition started coming apart until it completely collapsed in June 1937, after only 380 days in office. The working class praised and was always nostalgic about the Popular Front, the middle class was outraged and felt betrayed.[47][48]

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