Reynaud v. Communazis

Active new Premier Paul Reynaud last week ordered Minister of Interior Henri Roy to get ready a decree making any further Communist or Nazi agitation in France punishable by long imprisonment or death. Police said current Red propaganda in France almost exactly duplicates Nazi propaganda urging the Allies to make immediate peace. Sensation of the Paris trial of 44 Communist ex-Deputies (TIME, April 8) was a declaration by the chief defendant, Communist Florimond Bonte. He said that he and his fellow prisoners "deserved well" of France for urging prompt peace with Germany on Adolf Hitler's terms.

Notwithstanding, the court imposed sentence of five years in jail, fines up to 5,000 francs ($101.50), and loss of civil rights for five years upon Red Bonte and 35 other Communist ex-Deputies. Eight were let off with suspended jail sentences of four years, but sent to concentration camps for Communists & Nazis near Paris (soon to be moved to North Africa). Nine Communist ex-Deputies tried in absentia (Paris believes several of these are hiding in the Soviet Embassy) received five-year jail sentences and fines of 5,000 francs, but further charges of "treason against the external safety of the State" will be pressed against them and they may be sentenced to be guillotined should they be caught in France.

In northern suburbs of Paris, meanwhile, police rounded up 19 factory workers charged with operating a Communist network for distributing subversive pamphlets. A decree law of Sept. 26 makes illegal "activity having the direct or indirect object of propagating the watchwords emanating from or relating to the Third International" of Moscow. Daily arrests of Communists are now the rule, and French police have made over 11,000 raids on suspects since break of war, have seized as much as two tons of Communist propaganda in a raid.

"No Counterfeit Peace." Premier Reynaud last week went into a two-hour war huddle with Allied Commander in Chief General Maurice Gustave Gamelin, French Navy Commander Admiral Franc,ois Darlan, French Air Force head General Joseph Vuillemin and famed little Chief of the Allied Near East Army General Maxime Weygand, who flew up for the occasion from Syria. Few minutes after his talk with the generals, Paul Reynaud went on the short waves to tell U. S. listeners that France stands for "no phony peace after a war which is not phony in any respect." In his slightly tortured English, dynamic M. Reynaud continued: "I did not know this word 'phony' before the war. I understand that it means counterfeit, so I shall say: 'No counterfeit peace!' "Hitler's Germany would not succeed in selling us a counterfeit, and as for other counterfeits, we give them to her. May she keep her horrid counterfeit for true religion which she calls 'racial cult' and the no less horrid counterfeit for order which she calls the Gestapo. . . . In France the priest and the pastor are not thrown into prison because they serve another master than the head of the State. . . . We have no Gestapo to alienate citizen from citizen, Aryan from non-Aryan, man from God. . . . [The] sort of peace Nazi Germany is meditating ... a sinister peace which reigns, for the time being, in Warsaw and Prague . . . would expose all humanity to an unprecedented danger. . . . No peace treaty--and Hitler knows it--has ever been brought up at a conference table that the decision has not first been made on the battlefield. . . . France and England are strong--and strong enough to win! . . . The Allied cause, which is the cause of Liberty, will triumph. And life will be fine again for free men."

Cracked back the German radio in a broadcast to the U. S. which confused P. T. Barnum with Abraham Lincoln: "Premier Reynaud ought to know that world-famous saying, 'You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time,' a saying which was coined by none other than Phineas T. Barnum, America's famous circus manager. . . . Reynaud's radio speech was an outright insult to the American people, whose gullibility he evidently regards as exceeding all human bounds." Bonnet, Laval & Retain. This week Paul Reynaud's Cabinet faces its first severe test in the Senate. Georges Bonnet did not plan to make it any easier for the regime which had cost him his Cabinet job. He urged a Senate caucus of his Radical Socialist Party, largest in the Senate, to refuse its united support to Paul Reynaud. The Party thereupon left its Deputies and Senators free to vote as they please.

In political potency Senator No. 1 is probably Rightist Pierre Laval, believed last week implacably bent on upsetting the Cabinet because M. Reynaud has the reputation of being anti-Italian, and vital to the Allied cause is continued Italian "nonbelligerency" or Italian friendship, if that can be bought not too dear.

The French Parliament with its festering intrigues is not France, and public opinion swiftly hardened against another such misuse of "Democracy" as occurred fortnight ago when scores of petulant Deputies refused to vote either way with the result that Premier Daladier resigned rather than be accused of "acting like a dictator." Many an abstainer then had no idea of the consequences of his action and the country last week was annoyed with its legislators.

Seeing that Reynaud, after more than a week of premiership, appeared to offer only the same old Sitzkrieg, many Frenchmen could not see why Daladier should not be recalled to re-form his Cabinet, again without Socialists, and get on with the unexciting policy urged by nearly all military experts: to strangle the Germans until in desperation they begin to use their stored materials in some sort of action. There were even rumors that in case Parliament got out of hand President Lebrun might call Marshal Petain, now French Ambassador in Madrid, to form a Cabinet. In every recent French crisis the old warrior, strictly nonpolitical, has been thought of as a possible Savior.

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