Hitlers first hundred da.., p.33
Hitler's First Hundred Days, page 33
HITLER’S FIRST hundred days were widely perceived as a sudden tectonic shift in European politics that threatened the very idea of liberal progress. The reverberations of 1933, the nationalist insurgency and the socialist collapse, shook the continent for many years to come. Events occurring in Germany prompted Europeans to examine their “symptoms”—of mobility unleashed and energy harnessed and of the failure to achieve the same results at home. A new appreciation of power acknowledged its primitive, irrational, and mystical sources and, most of all, recognized that such power was there to be tapped. New histories emerged in the “eruptive violence of time.”12 Precisely the transnational nature of the fascist phenomenon, something confirmed by global responses to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, enhanced its legitimacy and sturdiness. Even France, the historic foe of Germany, registered in profound ways the shock waves of Hitler’s revolution. The turbulence of 1933 later shaped both France’s resistance to and its collaboration with the German Nazis.
The magical pull of National Socialism from across the Rhine was irresistible. There can be no doubt that French fascism was a homegrown phenomenon, prepared intellectually in the ferment of the antirepublican and anti-Dreyfusard activity before the Great War and promoted in a more organized, forceful fashion in the early and middle 1920s. In Germany, there had also been mini “Hitlers” before the “Führer” and paler versions of what became recognized as National Socialism before the party’s electoral breakthrough in September 1930. Nonetheless, 1933 represented the possibility of radical, unanticipated change. The year scheduled new arrivals and departures in French (and European) politics.
French reporters approached the first hundred days as if they were explorers of a new wilderness. Although Paris-soir’s Jules Sauerwein judged Hitler’s “mystical discourse” insufficient to “dispel the anxiety” as Germans watched the encroachments of dictatorial rule, he kept coming back to the “blasts of trumpets,” to the “intoxication” and ecstasy of the Nazi men, to the religious aspects of Hitler’s “sermons,” and to the wide appeal of the “ideals, discipline, and hate” of his “crusade.”13 The crowds he surveyed were “immense,” the ceremonies “solemn.”14 Nazism proved that a new church of belief could be built.
It was important to keep in mind the “ministerial cocktail” of the new government and to ask whether Adolf Hitler was really “master of the situation in Germany,” cautioned Philippe Barrès in Le matin, but the more he watched the new regime, the more unrestrained his language became. Hitler spoke the “poetry” of a “demagogic messiah, at once noble and confused.” Barrès spent an evening listening to one of Hitler’s speeches with a group of German Catholics and reported on their tears of joy; they were “crying like Madeleines,” the sponge cakes popular in northern France and immortalized by Marcel Proust. Hitler rallies had the jolly atmosphere of a “county fair.” On the Day of National Labor, “everybody was happy.”15
In his 1939 novel, Gilles, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle traced his own autobiographical journey through the wilderness of the 1930s. Attending a Radical Socialist congress in Chateau-le-Roi, the character Gilles found himself among left-leaning centrists who provided the point of gravity to French politics that in Germany had disappeared (he still considered himself to be a republican who believed in the old resonant words “democracy, freedom, equality”). He observed the meeting’s proceedings in the shadow of the volcano: “the monstrous conspiracies of the Soviets,” “the new Slavic states in which barbarism has hardly been restrained, Italian fascism, the grumbling case of Germany.” It suddenly occurred to Gilles that the Radical Socialists on the dais felt completely “exonerated” by their liberal dogmas. They were “untouched” by evidence of other, blazing new life forms. Their “arrogance” veiled a “fainthearted mediocrity.” They were “beneficiaries,” “successors,” “substitutes” who had dug the graves of aristocrats without completing a genuine revolution, leaving France without a path to a vibrant future.16 Gilles began work at an alternative magazine with the spiteful name Apocalypse, though he drifted without being able to make connections and ended the novel by following fellow Catholics to Spain to fight for Francisco Franco on behalf of Europe.
Nineteen thirty-three provided Gilles’s creator, Drieu la Rochelle, roiled waters on which to imagine a new society. A year after Hitler came to power, he wrote Socialisme fasciste, a book praising Germany’s youthful revolution and the honor it accorded to primitive, physical virtue, which formed a “new aristocracy” of action. (Drieu’s fascism was incomplete, however. It honored the barbarian but not the demonic character of a war that Drieu, wounded three times as a soldier on the western front, found horrifying.) Many others in France felt themselves drawn into fascism’s “magnetic field,” a zone of energy, action, and renewal—even some who lacked a résumé of extreme right-wing activity. Novelist Jules Romain and philosopher Emmanuel Mounier carefully disentangled the strands of National Socialism, laying aside the impulse toward totalitarianism and the drive to war but picking up the urgent energy, the collective spirit, and the valorization of sacrifice they hoped to graft onto a reassembled generation of young people to create a confident and dynamic new community in France.17
Germany was everything that France was not. “Paris-Berlin” provided Gringoire with a fundamental contrast: across the Rhine, “order, discipline, power,” and “on the same day, at the same hour, what was happening in Paris?” Another in the “endless series of ministerial crises”—on January 30, 1933, the socialists refused to sign onto party leader Edouard Daladier’s program even though they had agreed to participate in his centrist, radical-led government.18 On the right, French observers cherished the enthusiasm and energy of National Socialism and proposed antiliberal and anti-parliamentarian solutions to restore faith and community at home. Creating a vehicle for decisive, collective action was more important than the precise materials used in building it.
In 1933 the fictional Gilles realized he had misjudged the Radical Socialists, and in June 1933 the very real Marcel Déat appealed to the Socialist Party to conquer “the masses” as the Nazis had and to rejuvenate the nation under a parole—“Order, Authority, Nation”—that superseded “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.” Outraged socialists quickly kicked Déat and the small number of his supporters out of the party. A new fascist league, the blue-shirted Solidarité Française, sprang into action in 1933 as well, outorganizing the Communists by membership but not winning battles on the streets. Solidarité Française portrayed itself as a movement of renewal, offering the French the “open palm” (that is, the fascist salute) rather than the “clenched fist.” Like many fascist groups, the league retained the vocabulary of the French Revolution, honoring ancestors who had taken to the “barricades” to make a “revolution” against feudal privileges and “shocking fiscal inequities.” “We are of the people. We go to them, and they listen to us,” explained the movement’s leader, Jean Renaud, a former military officer who had served in Indochina. But the revolutionary justice he proposed was directed squarely at the Third Republic: “If at seven o’clock in the morning the Solidarité Française attacks and takes power,” he fantasized, “at eight o’clock L’Humanité will be closed, Le Populaire banned, Freemasonry expelled, [and] the Popular Front dissolved. And at nine o’clock, Leon Blum will be taken before a council of state or a High Court.” “In ten days,” L’Ami du peuple claimed as Renaud and his solidaritists watched the resolute action led by the brownshirts in spring 1933, “Marxism will no longer exist in Germany.”19 Without saying as much, Solidarité Française took the Third Reich as a model for what would come after the Third Republic.
Far more important than the blue-shirt imitations of Germany’s brownshirts was the veterans’ group Croix de Feu, which, in the early 1930s, turned decisively to the right, opening up membership rolls to all citizens and taking to the streets to rally the counterrevolution. Its leader, François de la Rocque, an old military man who before the war had been posted to Algeria and Morocco, spoke constantly of the Croix de Feu’s preparation for the “J-Day and H-Hour” of the “National Revolution,” offering the propertied middle classes a militarily proficient defense against the socialist Left without going on the attack, a hesitation that probably formed part of its appeal. De la Rocque’s “bark was bigger than his bite.”20 Even so, by the mid-1930s, the Croix de Feu had more members than the Socialist and Communist parties combined: 1 million members in a nation of 40 million. Under its own tripartite motto, “Work, Family, Fatherland,” which Vichy later adopted, the “cross bearers” mobilized proportionally more citizens in France after 1936 than the Nazis had in Germany before 1933.
The Croix de Feu’s battlefield was populated by readers rather than soldiers. There were none of the SA’s Sunday morning truck trips through the French countryside. Although it could count on a few thousand paramilitary shock troops, called dispos (from the French word disponible, meaning “available”), hundreds of thousands of sympathizers saw more action in reading the right-wing press. The daily L’Action française, a contemporary remembered, brought “an hour of bliss every morning.” You could “denounce liberal errors with an air of self-satisfied superiority, scoff at liberty, equality and fraternity, joke about progress, look skeptical when human dignity and the rights of conscience were spoken of.” Yet even reading implied discernment and judgment.
“What is a nation?” asked French historian Ernst Renan in an 1882 lecture at the Sorbonne. “The existence of a nation,” Renan had argued, was based on a “daily plebiscite.” He rejected the essentials of race, ethnicity, or language to emphasize political culture: commonly held ideas, history, and civic ideals. But in the 1930s, the words that made up this discursive plebiscite began to change so that the idea of the nation shifted as well. The year 1933 reposed Renan’s question. For the new Right, to restart France was to move it beyond the uncertainties, contradictions, and discontents of the postwar years and to give France a younger, more dynamic, and leaner form.
To cut France into shape required more clearly defined boundaries. France was not Germany, and the newly energized Right was never comfortable with the “paganism” and violence of the Third Reich. But the French had to assemble just as Germans had under the banner of national community. France needed to be protected from the so-called métèques, a word derived from the Greek metic, a foreign resident of ancient Athens denied the rights of citizenship. This meant jettisoning universal “general ideas” and affirming a sense of historical, religious, and ethnic identity—making a “France for the French.”
To supplement the “old demographic deficiency” of French births, immigration had been allowed to increase dramatically since the Great War. By the early 1930s, France had become the nation most hospitable to immigrants, ahead of the United States. One in ten Parisians was foreign-born. But only in 1933 and 1934, with the rise of Hitler and the power and appeal of ethnic nationalism, did the métèque burrow into the thinking of French citizens. Suddenly taking notice, newspapers published dozens more articles than in previous years. All at once macaronis, Polaks, and “sand niggers” sprang into view. These were identified as Other, not French. Although Italian and Polish immigrants made up the majority of foreigners in France, Jews garnered the most attention. The numbers of foreign-born Jews had increased since the end of the war; other “alien” elements, like French Jews, Protestants, Freemasons, and even the American stars in the popular Hollywood movies (like King Kong) playing on the boulevards, attracted coverage as well.21
The Jews were named first; other métèques were afterthoughts. Of course, it did not take Hitler to recall the French to their own anti-Semitism; at seventy-three, Albert Dreyfus was still alive in 1933. In the beginning of 1932, the republican journal Le droit de vivre already lamented the resurgence of anti-Semitism: it was not German; “it is French. It circulates in the veins of the countryside. It has already poisoned the cities. It is no longer a topic of conversation only in the clubs but also on the street.” Everyday speech effortlessly passed along the expression “dirty Jew” or the hardly more encouraging amendment “Jewish, but he’s a pretty good guy.” The firm line in Germany—the boycotts, restrictions, and quotas—gave more precision to anti-Jewish attitudes. Ideas about Jews also spread the concept of Jewish practice and Jewish buildings and notions of infiltration and contamination (and eventually, after 1940, expropriation). The sudden presence of many thousands of German refugees—4,000 by the end of May, 25,000 at the end of the year—most of them Jewish and most of them in Paris, made foreigners even more visible.
“By being persecuted,” reflected the journalist Alexander Werth, German “Jews were rendering France a service” for it allowed the country to demonstrate its humanistic values. But Germany’s Jews also reminded the French of disorder and uncertainty in international affairs. Jews were the first victims of the war the French wanted desperately to avoid. When Parisians watched German-speaking refugees sitting in the cafes, the police admitted, the attitude was “not generally very warmhearted.” Refugees filled the air with “quarrels from beyond our borders,” noise that “does not interest us,” and posed a threat to the security of the streets.22 The Jews represented a militant antifascism that disputed the broad French desire for peace; they were associated with the anti-German warmongering party and thus were regarded as a threat to the security of house and home. Even the frightful anti-Semitism that had ejected these people from Germany seemed to prove that Jews were powerful and dangerous.23
Anti-Semitic tracts and pamphlets sold well on the streets, and their vocabulary crept into the mainstream press. Distinctions were drawn between “us” and “them,” the real French, who wore regional costumes and ate local fare and took weekend hikes between youth hostels, and the imposters. “Oh! races, races. All these many races,” mused Drieu’s Gilles, and “I belong to one.” Just “open the telephone book for the Department of the Seine,” invited another attentive observer. “The proportion of Jewish subscribers is frightening. The list consisting of ‘Lévy’ is two times as long as that of ‘Durand’ or ‘Dupont’ combined.” (One Café Dupont on the Left Bank tried to get even, posting in 1941 the sign “Jews and Dogs Prohibited.”) And there was more to worry about since the “invasion” or “colonization” occurred under camouflage. “How many Jews or half-Jews hide themselves behind good French names?” the writer reminded his readers. (Telephones, like swimming pools, stipulated an intimacy among strangers and challenged them to live according to abstract or universal norms. Who was at the other end? In April 1933, the German post office, which ran the telephone exchanges, amended the phonetic alphabet so that you no longer spelled out by saying “D as in David,” “J as in Jakob,” “N as in Nathan,” “S as in Samuel,” or “Z as in Zacharias,” but used “Deutschland,” “Joachim,” “National,” “Siegfried,” and “Zeppelin” instead.24) People started calculating the proportions of foreign-born lawyers, doctors, and university students; compliant legislators passed laws to limit their numbers. Many foreigners disappeared when 1927 legislation untangled the byzantine naturalization process, but this made the problem of camouflage and the idea of the “real” France all the more compelling. In response to sentiment like this, Renan’s “imagined community” was reimagined in more ethnic-based terms after 1933.
Nuanced discussions that distinguished between “good” and “bad” Jews gave heart to some, who felt safe on one side of the line—without fully understanding the violence of line drawing in the first place. French Jews referred to themselves as Israélites, which was something else and better than Juifs, but the distinctions left collective designations and thus collective prejudices intact. Yiddish-speaking newcomers from Poland, Russia, and Ukraine stood in stark contrast with older French-speaking families; unassimilated Jews, the “strangest of the strangers,” in the words of some, differed from assimilated ones, although some Jews were seen to be too assimilated, judging by the alacrity with which they sought out French girls.
Of course, some French Jews had fought bravely in the Great War. Yet anti-Semites disputed even this sacrifice. A long debate ensued about how many Jews had died for France in the years 1914 to 1918. The number was 3,500 according to Paul Ganem, 3,305 if one believed La France enchaînée. The propaganda sheet L’Antijuif asserted that the dead totaled exactly 1,812, while Robert Brasillach put forward the estimate of 1,700. The number “most frequently advanced” was 1,350, which meant that one soldier died for every thirty-five Jews mobilized as opposed to “one in three” French soldiers, that is, the “true” Frenchmen who had not shirked their duty. (All the figures and conclusions were wrong: out of a 1914 population of 190,000, 32,000 French Jews were mobilized and 6,500 killed, or 1 in 5—compared to 1 in 6.5 for all mobilized Frenchmen. Motivated by like-minded anti-Semitism, Prussia’s notorious 1916 “Jew count” registered similarly counterintuitive results. How to explain the disparity? Apt to be middle-class, Jews more likely achieved the rank of noncommissioned officer, the leader of first resort on the dangerous front lines.25)
By the end of the 1930s, French political discourse examined huge numbers of people for their suitability to live in France: thinking about German Jews led commentators to condemn all refugees, then all immigrants—naturalized or not—and finally French Jews. By drawing careful distinctions between Israélites and Juifs, the French asked who belonged and who did not, justifying indiscriminate prejudice against those who were labeled outsiders. Alarmed observers regarded Paris as “Canaan-on-the-Seine” or “God’s own concentration camp.”26
