FRANCE: Last Card

With long-handled brushes and pots of paste, one group of bill posters hired by a Socialist political club and another group hired by a Rightist club went out into the gloom of Marseilles last week to slap their employers’ respective opinions on the blank walls of the city. At the end of a street they met. Brushes went flying. Paste pots were spilled. Damp bundles of posters littered the ground. Pistols cracked in the half-light. By the time the breathless police arrived two men lay dead on the sidewalk, four others were seriously wounded.

That set-to in Marseilles was small but significant. The political temper of France was stretched no less tight throughout the Republic. And that same night Premier Gaston (“Gastounet”) Doumergue sat down before a microphone to give another of his Rooseveltian broadcasts. Shrewdly, his first move was to attack the Reds. Cried the Premier:

“The United Front [recent union of Communists and Socialists] are united enemies of the system of democratic government. They are intriguing to set up a dictatorship controlled by themselves. The United Front has shown us, fortunately, that Socialism and Communism are exactly the same thing.”

Next he assured the tax-paying rentiers that there would be no devaluation of the franc.

“The advocates of devaluation would lead the franc to zero. They would ruin all France and finally ruin that famous French woolen stocking that people abroad sometimes laugh at because they are envious of it. Perhaps someone will say to me that the currency, once devalued, can be restored again. That is impossible when it no longer has any value. You cannot bring the dead back to life.”

Then came the real cracker of the Doumergue speech, a demand for immediate constitutional reforms.

“We must ask ourselves what would have happened if the advent of the constitutional Government over which I preside had not halted the rioting and prevented the outbreak of a civil war which would have led to a foreign war!” To save the Republic the 71-year-old Premier demanded four great changes:

1) A definite description of the Premier’s powers and responsibility.

2) Restoration of the practice of dissolving Parliament in a crisis and a law to make dissolution independent of the Senate’s consent. In other words, a prime national issue would precipitate a national election.

3) The right of the Government alone, as in Great Britain, to introduce money bills for the approval of Parliament. Today France appropriates money according to the U. S. system of legislative committees.

4) A law to fix the status of France’s innumerable government employes and take them out of politics. “In Great Britain,” cried Premier Doumergue, “there is real separation of power, and the judiciary has nothing to do with politics. That is the sole method of insuring impartial justice. … As to civil servants, their salaries and pensions are assured. These workers are a privileged class, and in return for their privilege they must submit to discipline and not spend their time both in and out of office hours on political work.”

To Britons and U. S. citizens, these demands seemed modest enough. But to French politicians they were more drastic than President Roosevelt’s inauguration of the New Deal. In France today one citizen out of every ten has wangled himself on to the Government payroll, keeps himself there largely by his own political efforts.

Le Temps preferred to think of these demands not as a New Deal but a Last Card:

“M. Doumergue is on the right road, and we must aid and follow him. The card he asks us to play is at once the last one and the best that sincere democrats have at their disposal to save republican liberty. It is the last card, because if the State is not reformed, and reformed as M. Doumergue proposes to do it, then in a few years, perhaps in a few months, it will be all over with our liberal regime.”

Almost every other responsible Paris paper also backed the scheme. Not so the army of civil employes, les ronds-de-cuir, the leather pads.* In icy fear for their jobs, they published manifestoes damning “the malevolent, fallacious and stupid assertions” of Premier Doumergue. The Postal Workers Association, the Federation of Civil Employes and the General Confederation of Labor vowed to fight to the death for their right to remain in politics. Scrawny Leon Blum, Socialist leader, appointed himself official champion and protector of les ronds-de-cuir. But chunky “Gastounet” was not fooling. Four days later he assembled his Cabinet and delivered an ultimatum: if either the radical Socialist Party or the Chamber of Deputies as a whole should refuse to convoke a special session of the National Assembly at Versailles and pass his cherished reforms, he would ask the Senate to dissolve Parliament, which is to meet this month, and call new elections. That would mean that the Deputies, now safe in their seats for another 18 months, would have to get out and face their angry constituents. There was a hot poker nobody else wanted to pick up. The Ministers left in chastened mood.

*The leather pads refer to the shiny cushions with which government clerks, schoolteachers, telegraph operators, curators, etc., preserve the seats of their trousers. U. S. equivalent: chair warmers.