in which France had attempted to reassert its
standing as a great power in Europe, and coin-
cided also with the time when the depression
became more serious worldwide. French govern-
ments after Poincaré lost their stability once
more: between 1929 and 1934 they lasted an
average of three or four months. Albert Lebrun,
elected president in 1932, remained until the fall
of France in 1940, but he was a colourless politi-
cian who gave no lead. At first, the strength of
France’s financial position seemed to make it
immune, alone among the Western nations, from
the debacle following the crash in October 1929
in the US. Throughout 1930 unemployment
remained low. But in the autumn of 1931 the
slump and unemployment finally spread to
France. French governments now sought by
financial ‘orthodoxy’ to meet the crisis, simulta-
neously cutting pensions, salaries and public
expenditure. The cessation of German reparation
payments in 1931, coupled with the Americans’
continuing insistence on repayment of debts,
compounded the difficulty. Despite devaluing
once in 1928, successive governments until
1936 added to France’s problems by refusing to
devalue an overvalued franc which made the task
of exporting increasingly hard. During the worst
years from 1933 to 1934 the survival of the
Republic itself seemed very doubtful. Big business
and the extreme right admired the fascist model
as an authoritarian solution behind which they
could operate profitably. Among politicians of the
right, Pierre Laval and André Tardieu as well as
Marshal Pétain, the hero of Verdun, inclined
towards some sort of authoritarian resolution for
the troubles and divisions of the Republic.
The unpopular measures of successive French
governments in a parliamentary Chamber of pre-
dominantly centre and left-wing parties, as well as
fear of communism, played into the hands of the
right. The Socialists led by Léon Blum would
not join any coalition government that included
the ‘bourgeois’ Radical-Socialists, whose main
support came from the conservative peasantry and
the middle classes and whose aims were not in the
least socialist. The communists under Maurice
Thorez meanwhile followed the Moscow line of
the Comintern, which ordered them to regard the
Democratic Socialist Party as their greatest
enemy. So governments were formed mainly by
the Radical parliamentary leaders seeking align-
ments to the right. The impact of the depression
gravely weakened and divided the left, with the
communists until 1934 pursuing an apparently
insane tactic of undermining the stability of the
Republic that might well have helped fascism to
power in France as it had done earlier in
Germany. The realisation of the folly of the
Moscow course dawned on Thorez and in 1934
he became a leading and successful advocate of
changing it.
The years 1933 and 1934 also saw the growth
in France of paramilitary fascist ‘leagues’ whose
bands of rowdies brawled in the streets of Paris
like Nazi storm troopers. There was the royalist
Action Française, the oldest of the leagues
founded before the First World War. Another was
the Jeunesses Patriotes composed mainly of stu-
dents. François Coty, the perfume millionaire,
financed the Solidarité Française and a fascist
journal, L’Ami du peuple. The most important of
these leagues was the Croix de Feu, made up of
war veterans led by Colonel de la Rocque, whose
main aim was the negative one of overthrowing
the parliamentary Republic. Royalism, extreme
Catholicism, anti-Semitism, other movements
inspired by Mussolini’s and Hitler’s examples, all
had little in common except a determination to
undermine the Republic. With this aim the polit-
ically opposite Communist Party at first also
agreed, and the communists were even ready to
work in parallel with fascists to achieve this object.
The leagues were supported by numerous vicious
Parisian newspapers which were constantly stirring
up popular hatred against the legislators.
At the worst possible moment, with the gov-
ernment discredited by its instability and inept
handling of the depression, with financial hard-
ship deepening and polarising class antagonism,
the politicians were smeared with the taint of cor-
ruption by what became known as the Stavisky
scandal. Stavisky was a swindler who had through
the years floated a number of bonds and shares
that defrauded the investors. Although arrested,
he had enjoyed a strange immunity from trial, in
the meantime making more money from shady
1
THE DEPRESSION, 1929–39 157
