Monday, Jul. 20, 1936
No, Without Bayonets
Whether French workers are to be permitted to continue "stayin" strikes, which in law are indistinguishable from seizure of their employers' premises, was last week the prime political issue before the Popular Front Government of Socialist Premier Leon Blum. The answer was "No," reluctantly admitted Minister of the Interior Roger Salengro after the French Senate had threatened a vote of no-confidence if it were "Yes." The answer was "Yes," indignantly replied Communist Leader Maurice Thorez, whose 72 votes are indispensable to Premier Blum's coalition majority in the Chamber of Deputies. Said Irish-faced M. Thorez: "M. Salengro was not well inspired in letting it be believed that force can be employed against the working class."
The harried Minister explained what he had meant by "No." To workmen occupying factories illegally, he said, the Government would first send the local mayor to call them out, then a labor union delegate, then the local member of Parliament, and finally, police without bayonets to shoo strikers out "with care." Placated Communist Thorez thereupon threw his weight back to the Popular Front, saying. "The workers must know how to end strikes."
Despite its promise, the Blum Government last week refused French businessmen's pleas that it show France one sample of how it proposed to get striking workers out of the factories. With 80,000 stayin strikers still on strike and farm laborers threatening a strike of their own, sole employer victory was the decision of a Pau court that strikers' occupation of a Pau beret factory was "illegal."
Meanwhile last week Premier Blum staked his Government's prestige on an appeal to the French small-Capitalist class to buy up a huge "baby bond" issue, broken into shares as low as $6.60 apiece. For the occasion the Bank of France, threatened with partial nationalization, lowered the discount rate to 3% and announced that gold reserves were up, the flight of gold from France ended.
Many a bourgeois Frenchman's fear that his new Government is far too chummy with Red Russia was voiced last week in the Chamber of Deputies when Deputy Henri de Kerillis accused Air Minister Pierre Cot of having given to Soviet Russia a priceless French secret: a model and blueprints for the 23-mm. machine gun with which France's huge "airfortress" planes are to be armed. This airplane "cannon," screamed Deputy de Kerillis, is the sole superiority France has over its potential enemies in the air. Scrappy, bespectacled Air Minister Cot replied that nations allied in pacts of mutual assistance, as are France and Russia, ought to exchange information, that anyway the "cannon" was the property of a Swiss engineer named Birckigt who had the right to sell it to anyone and that anyhow he had not yet delivered a single "cannon" to France.
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