French Vendetta

PRESS

A solid block of 300 French daily and weekly newspapers began last month pounding away at the so-called "New Deal Cabinet" of Socialist Premier Leon Blum. Over and over they hurled charges of which the most effective was the weekly Gringoire's incessant repetition that during the War the present Minister of the Interior, Roger Salengro, deserted from the front-line trenches and rode off into Germany on a bicycle.

Unable to deny that he was in fact court-martialed for desertion, M. Salengro became the butt of jokesters in Paris music halls who kept referring to "Cyclist Salengro" until members of the Blum Cabinet would have liked to scream. They appointed a "Jury of Honor" under General Marie Gustave Gamelin. Chief of the French General Staff, and this last fortnight whitewashed the Minister of Interior by discovering extenuating circumstances, but he is likely to be called "Cyclist Salengro" to his dying day. Indignant, Premier Blum was resolved to punish the man he blamed for organizing the anti-Blum newspaper bloc, M. Pierre Guimier, a director in Paris of the Agence Havas, chief French wire service and advertising agency.

M. Guimier handled more particularly the advertising side of the business and in France it is not considered strange that there should exist an Agence which in the U. S. could be duplicated only by merging into strange bedfellowship, for example, Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn and the Associated Press. Adman Guimier is also the publisher of the violently anti-Blum daily Journal and as such is a newsman in his own right. Last week he broke the biggest French press story in years by resigning his Havas directorship and hurling the charge that Premier Blum had told Havas they could take their choice: either M. Guimier must resign from Havas, or the Havas advertising agency must be unmerged and separated from the Havas news service. How the Premier of the French Republic ever came to have the notion that it is his right to face French journalistic organizations with such alternatives was this week the burning question. Alluding to the fact that the Premier is a Jew, the Royalist newsorgan Action Franc,aise blustered, "Can't we even print that Blum has been circumcized?"

This was printed and nothing was done about it, but Premier Blum does intend to introduce shortly a law compelling all French newsorgans to list and publish the sources from which they derive their income. It is against this that M. Guimier and his friends have been waging what became an open vendetta when the Premier forced him out of Havas. Under the new law the Premier's own newsorgan, Le Populaire, will have to print that it is largely subsidized by the Socialist Party: L'Humanite will have to print that it is subsidized by the Communist Party; the Action Franc,aise will have to print that it is subsidized by the Royalist Party-- and none of these three Paris papers will mind in the least. They constitute openly the bought and kept press of the pinks, the Reds and the bluebloods, but who keeps M. Guimier and most of the 300 papers now attacking Blum?

If the bill becomes law, France will, soon ring with the names of these press-keepers, though indeed the intelligent French public has known and discussed for years what special interest was keeping this Paris paper or that. Few surprises are expected, and Premier Blum intends to write into the bill one interesting section which he describes thus: "The reform of the press which I am going to propose will permit the authors of defamatory articles to offer evidence to support their assertions. Existing laws do not permit this, and it is possible for a person to be convicted of libel for having told the truth. I should like the proof to be always open, so that the truth may be established, but I want to have crushing civil damages to correspond to the actual damage done when falsehoods are disseminated."

In this last phrase the Premier showed how easily his nature turns from generous principles to the vendetta spirit of an eye for an eye. It appeared that a French reporter who makes an honest error and thus lapses into libel may find himself "crushed" by the damages exacted. In alarm against the Left Premier, Right Deputy Henri de Kerillis cried, "Blum's action in the Guimier case was not only dictated by the lowest sentiments of vengeance. It is part of a vast operation under which the Government intends to, have complete exclusiveness on avenues of, information and propaganda in order to strangle truth and liberty and prepare a revolution."

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