FRANCE: Kiss the Reds Good-by

Proud were the French last week as detailed reports on their crisis mobilization of 1,500,000 men showed that it went off everywhere with clocklike perfection.

In 1914, the first two weeks of French mobilization were featured by unholy traffic jams and messes. Aghast, however, was Paris last week to learn that, if war had come, a large, percentage of the capital’s population would have lacked gas masks—a fine French scandal for which no culprit or scapegoat had been found up to this week. Meanwhile, energetic, square-jawed Radical Socialist Premier Edouard Daladier was greeted by the French Chamber of Deputies with a vote of confidence in what he did at Munich, 535-to-75—nearly all the dissenters being Communists.

The mobilization had cost so much that the Cabinet, with sighs of relief, blamed the increased but chronic French Treasury shortage entirely on that, and Premier Daladier set about trying to revalue the gold reserve—which was last revalued in July 1937—so as to make a “paper profit” last week of 34,500,000,000 francs ($931,500,000). The mobilization bill was footed at 12,800,000,000 francs; 4,000,000,000 was paid in cash to those who through necessity or fear withdrew their money from the savings banks when France started to “march”—not to war, as it turned out.

To help Premier Daladier get France “back to normalcy” as soon as possible, President Albert Lebrun and the Cabinet signed over to him decree powers running until Jan. 1, 1939. In democratic France the parliamentary rumpus stirred up by this forced the Premier to promise not to use these powers after November 15 without a further mandate from Deputies and Senators. Daladier had previously been voted confidence 535-to-75 by the Chamber, after keynoting: “All Frenchmen must now consider themselves permanently mobilized in the service of Peace. . . . We hope to substitute legal practices for solutions by force. … In the interests of Peace, we propose to add to old and tried friendships some that are new or renewed.”

The Chamber vote on the decree of plenary powers was of extreme significance because the Popular Front coalition, on which the Daladier Cabinet is nominally based, split three ways. Its Communists voted “Non”; its Socialists abstained; its Radical Socialists voted “Oui.”Thus Premier Daladier—opposed by the Reds and deserted by the Pinks—won only because the remainder of the Chamber, the Right, voted “Oui” with his Radical Socialists (who are moderates). He was considered to have emerged from the debate as head of a new coalition broadly Middle Class, with a touch of French Aristocracy.

No aristocrat himself, Edouard Daladier, son of a humble Provencal baker, was a professor of history and geography before he entered politics. As the Senate and Chamber rose last week, to reconvene November 16, the Premier went to work on a sweeping program of economic, fiscal and defense measures which must now be rushed to make the Republic as strong as possible against “new”—or “renewed”— Friend Germany.

In addition to Britain, the “old friend” whom the Premier especially wants to keep is Russia and, although in Moscow the French-language Journal suggested that the Soviet Union’s treaties with France and Czechoslovakia were “dead” in Paris officials of the French Foreign Office kept pointing out that these treaties had not been broken off by Russia last week. But Maxim Litvinoff had kissed them good-by in Geneva week before.

French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet voiced repeated hope that Russia will join in guaranteeing the new Czechoslovak frontier. But at Paris it was understood that Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia was about to be recognized by accrediting a French Ambassador for the first time to “Emperor” Vittorio Emanuele III, and France was also slated to send a diplomatic agent to Rightist Spain—two moves sure to vex Joseph Stalin.

On his way from Geneva to Moscow last fortnight Soviet Foreign Commissar Litvinoff did not, while in Paris, pay his usual call at the Quai d’Orsay. Anxious French Communist friends said good-by to Commissar Litvinoff with the deepest misgivings, feared he might be “purged” on the ground that his policy of putting Russia into the League and into close alliance with France has “failed to stop Fascism.”