Foreign News: Hatchet Buried?

The Foreign Ministers of those two implacable enemies, France and Germany, signed last week in Paris a vaguely worded, three-article declaration in which the two countries: 1) pledged “pacific and good-neighborly relations”; 2) recognized the “frontier of their two countries as it is at present established”; 3) promised to consult together in case of international tension. The new pact was widely accepted as meaning: 1) that Germany in black & white renounced all claims to Alsace-Lorraine (which Adolf Hitler has verbally already done); 2) that France agreed not to interfere with Germany’s political, economic drive in the Balkans.

Many points of possible Franco-German friction were left hanging. Nothing whatever was said about German (or Axial) claims to French colonies (like Algeria), protectorates (like Tunis) or mandated territories (like Cameroon, formerly German). Nor was there any mention of the moribund but unrenounced treaty of mutual aid between France and Russia, always a sore point with Germany. However, three days later the Chamber of Deputies voted (315-to-241) confidence in Premier Daladier’s foreign policies, of which the French-German “friendship”‘ declaration is a keystone. Strangely, it was from the Right, which for 15 years scorned any diplomatic appeasement toward pre-Nazi Germany, that M. Daladier drew his support. The Left, traditionally friendly to the German Republic, voted against him.

In friendly conversations with French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet, youthful, good-looking Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Reich Foreign Minister, pointed out Germany’s deadly fear of Communism and her desire to see a stable government in Spain—i.e., to see Generalissimo Francisco Franco win the Spanish War. M. Bonnet got a quibbling answer when he asked Herr Ribbentrop point-blank whether Germany supported Italian claims to Tunisia (see below).

On the constructive side, it was reported from Berlin that Führer Hitler had agreed to delete from Mein Kampf certain uncomplimentary references in which France was described as a “bastardized, negroid” country, an “eternal danger to the white race of Europe.” an “enemy-to-the-death of the German people.” There were also suggestions that France in turn might tone down the inscriptions on some World War monuments which bitterly refer to the “ravages of Huns.”

It was at least the fourth time since Armistice Day, 1918 that the hatchet of the 1,000-year-old Franco-German enmity had been officially buried, and the realistic French public, which remembered how Adolf Hitler had emasculated the Locarno Pact, the League of Nations Covenant and the Kellogg-Briand Pact of Paris, was skeptical about the new pact’s length of service. Even some members of the Daladier Cabinet looked with suspicion on the new “friendship.” Noteworthy it was that the guest list to the French Government’s banquet for the visiting Nazi diplomats did not include the names of Jean Zay, Minister of National Education, and Georges Mandel, Minister of Colonies, both Jews. Minister of Marine Cesar Campinchi, denouncing the pact as a “smoke-screen,” returned his invitation.

In general, no foreign diplomat on a big mission to Paris ever had a thinner time than Herr Ribbentrop. There was no public acclamation for him. The police scarcely let his top hat come into public view. So numerous were the guards around the Arc de Triomphe when Herr Ribbentrop, wearing the German Iron Cross, laid a swastika-decorated wreath at the tomb of France’s Unknown Soldier, that few saw this unprecedented ceremony.

Some idea of the new pact’s domestic popularity was given by the large number of prominent French politicians who went to hear a speech given in Paris the night of the signing by Alfred Duff Cooper, former British First Lord of the Admiralty. Warned Mr. Duff Cooper, who resigned because he could not “stomach” the Munich Pact: “War cannot be avoided by perpetual concessions.”