988 Ch. 24 • The Elusive Search for Stability in the 1920s
and students from Oxford and Cambridge Universities drove buses and
trucks carrying people in and out of London while troops hauled food.
After two weeks, most workers returned to their jobs, although the miners
remained on strike for seven months. The strike was broken. A year later,
Parliament passed the Trade Disputes Act, which forbade “sympathy strikes,”
walkouts in support of striking workers by those in other industries. This
amounted to a crushing defeat for British workers.
When the French franc, long considered invulnerable to economic
shocks, collapsed in value in a financial panic in 1924, the rightist govern
ment in France collapsed with it. A coalition of Radicals and Socialists,
sharing little more than anticlericalism, formed a left-center government.
But this alliance broke apart when the Socialists suggested a sizable tax on
capital as a solution to the economic crisis. Ministries came and went with
bewildering regularity.
In 1926, the conservative Poincare returned as premier. He raised taxes
on consumption, which the wealthy preferred to levies on capital, because
the burden did not fall on them. The franc stabilized, as wealthy French
men brought assets back from abroad and began to buy francs, which then
rose rapidly in value. Poincare became known as the savior of the French
currency. But his idea that political consensus existed in France was, like
the belief that France was the most powerful country in Europe, only an
illusion. Many ordinary French men and women believed that a “wall of
money” still held the country hostage and, along with an entrenched
bureaucracy, prevented social reform. With an institutionally weak presi
dency, the Chamber of Deputies increasingly came to be seen as a debating