New Horse in Midstream

FRANCE New Horse in Midstream

In Paris midnight tolled and the 2O0th day of World War II began last week with the Chamber of Deputies locked in secret session. Fate of the Daladier Cabinet was at stake. Cabbies, huddled outside, figured the square-rigged Premier must be taking on his massive chin outspoken criticism from many Deputies because of the war's military standstill.

About 3 a. m. elephantine Speaker Edouard Herriot let spectators stream back into the Chamber galleries. He revealed that during the secret session prominent Rightist Deputy Louis Marin had introduced a motion of no-confidence in the Daladier Government. The "voting urns"--dark brown wooden boxes--had been passed. The count was announced officially as 239-to-1 in support of the Cabinet--with more than 300 abstentions.

If Edouard Daladier were a "Dictator" he had only to sit tight in office. No precedent required him to consider that his Cabinet, having won less than half of all votes that could be cast, had no democratic right to remain in office--but the Premier took that view. He resigned. So France (and the Allies) began another bad week.

In any other country the fall of a Cabinet in war time is a major crisis. In France it is bad enough. But Frenchmen who in peacetime think no more of yanking a Premier than Americans think of yanking a pitcher out of the box, were not unduly upset--not even when a report got about that the Cabinet had fallen because one box of ballots had accidentally gone uncounted. Already those in the know had heard who the next Premier would be: Paul Reynaud, brilliant Finance Minister, considered No. 2 in the Cabinet of which Edouard Daladier had been No. 1.

Sad-eyed French President Albert Lebrun no sooner called M. Reynaud next day than the dapper new Premier promptly announced M. Daladier as his No. 2, retained him as Minister of National Defense--the key post which Daladier has held continuously for the past four years since it was given him in the first Popular Front Cabinet of Socialist Leon Blum.

Three Socialists. The present Chamber, elected in 1936, never had a stable majority and the Daladier Cabinet was from the start in 1938 a precarious bit of political jugglery. It was partly supported by the Right, on the understood condition that no Socialist be taken in--although the Socialists are the most numerous party in the Chamber. But its main supporters in the Center, the misnamed Radical Socialists, were often joined by the Socialists after the collapse of the Popular Front (TIME, April 18, 1938). Last week new Premier Reynaud boldly slapped down a Cabinet list containing three Socialists: Minister of Justice Albert Serol, Minister of Blockade Georges Monnet, Minister of Pensions Albert Riviere.

Injection of Socialists, sure to offend the Right, was balanced by including more Rightists as undersecretaries. The new Premier kept for himself the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, handed over his beloved Finance Ministry to Radical Socialist Lucien Lamoureux, a yes-man. Georges Bonnet, Minister of Justice in the outgoing Cabinet (Minister of Foreign Affairs in the days of "Munich"), was left out of the new Cabinet altogether. The Air Ministry, previously held by Radical Socialist Guy La Chambre, went to Left Democrat Laurent Eynac who has held this job before--no ball of fire.

Thus the Reynaud Cabinet was simply the Daladier Cabinet revamped, although it had a broader political base. But it was a Cabinet headed by an oldtime foe of appeasement, a man who had always distrusted the Nazis and demanded action against them.

"Single aim: to conquer." The Chamber was restive as the new Premier entered to present the aims on which his Premiership would stand or fall. Seeking to warm up the Deputies, he hailed "the flame of Jacobin patriotism which animates Daladier and which is the soul of the country." Daladier meanwhile was being cheered in the Senate, but neither house showed enthusiasm for the short, characteristic Cabinet declaration of Paul Reynaud which he read in four minutes flat. Keynote: "My government has but a single aim--to conquer."

The voting urns again were passed. Result was 268 votes supporting the Reynaud Cabinet, 156 opposed and 111 abstentions. Following the Daladier innovation of adding opposed & abstentions as if they were the same thing gave Premier Reynaud a majority of just one. Later five abstainers redirected their votes in his favor.

Fortunately the eleven-day Easter recess of Parliament was just about to begin --and that gave France a breather. After consulting President Lebrun, Premier Reynaud & Cabinet decided not to resign, to try over Easter to pacify partisan passions and negotiate a solid Chamber majority.

"Jimmy." In 1932 at the final Herbert Hoover campaign rally in Madison Square Garden, sprightly, dapper, top-hatted Paul Reynaud was mistaken by the crowd for ex-Mayor Jimmy Walker of New York City, drew cries of: "What are you doing here, Jimmy?"

When Paul Reynaud, "The Most Traveled French Statesman" (around the world three times), visits Mexico City he is only tending to the Reynaud family dry-goods business. This was founded in Mexico by adventurous Grandfather Reynaud who streaked home to the French Alps as soon as he had fixed everything for the pesos to continue rolling in for the next 100 years or so.

In Siberia in 1918 wiry little Paul Reynaud was a tough French liaison officer with the White Russian Army of Kolchak, got to know Bolsheviks first hand. His dynamism kindled Mme Reynaud, homey daughter of a president of the Paris Bar Association, to step out and become an aviatrix. As for his own exercise, the new Premier is the kind of man who makes everything strenuous, even bicycling--his favorite sport. He once participated in a long-distance road race.

"The Masses." Statesman Reynaud, who belongs to no party, has built a career on his belief that France is primarily a nation of small shopkeepers. This means to him that "two-thirds of the French people are not The Masses," they are the Middle Class. Thus Paul Reynaud did not fear to attack such achievements of the Popular Front as the five-day week, which he called "that poisoned gift" (because it sharply curtailed production) and jibed at as "la semaine `a deux dimanches" ("the week with two Sundays"). When the Popular Front Cabinet of Socialist Leon Blum resoundingly fell (TIME, April 18, 1938), France decided that the first necessity was to lure back into the country enormous sums of French capital which had fled abroad. The entire "New Deal" public works program of Socialist Blum was slashed to the bone. The 40-hour week was lengthened to 45 hours, and in munitions plants to 60 hours. "The masses" retorted with a general strike, but that flopped. Meanwhile capital poured back into France.

Economic Agreement. Notoriously inadequate in World War I was economic liaison between France and Britain--they had nothing but a common grain agreement up to 1917. Quick in World War II were Paul Reynaud and his British opposite number Sir John Simon to make a historic economic agreement binding both countries "till six months after the signature of the treaty of peace" (TIME, Dec. 25). This agreement, according to Statesman Reynaud, is intended to give Europe a foretaste of benefits to be achieved after the war by linking the defeated as well as the victorious states in "Economic Union." In the days of "Munich" M. Reynaud was outspokenly anti-appeasement. Last week he declared in the Atlantic Monthly that the Allies' "conception of free states, equal in rights, voluntarily limiting their sovereignty [in an economic union] is the absolute antithesis of Frederick II's Realpolitik, of Bismarck's Pan-Germanism and of Adolf Hitler's National Socialism." Thus the sort of victory Paul Reynaud is fighting for means the blasting of nearly everything German leaders have stood for in the last 100 years--"total victory" as the new Premier last week told France.

"Confidence!" In the Chamber, if Deputies of all parties represented in the Cabinet give it their united support, Premier Reynaud will have secured, by his inclusion of the Socialists, a broader political base than Premier Daladier commanded. In this event, the French crisis of last week will prove a godsend to the Allies. If the extreme Right quarrels on fundamental issues with the actions of the Socialist Ministers, the Government will have been weakened at the core of decisions on policy. This many Frenchmen feared last week, many Germans hoped, while both Moscow and Rome sneered at Reynaud. Washington was bullish--not only because of high esteem for Paul Reynaud, but because in a crisis the French are known to be a people who can be waked up by great leadership to destroy the bonds of partisanship. The striking fiscal and economic victories won last year by Daladier & Reynaud, the great upsurge of French "confidence" may with any luck be developed this spring by Reynaud & Daladier into a major quickening and strengthening of the whole Allied war effort.

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