Stephen Harding - The Last Battle

While Daladier’s response to the riots led to the fall of his government, the fascist threat inherent in the street fighting prompted him to take his Radical Socialist Party into a leftist coalition with the French Communist Party and its longtime rivals, the Socialists. Known as the Popular Front, the alliance won power in the 1936 elections and the leader of the Socialists, Léon Blum, became premier. [51] 4. He also became the first socialist, and the first Jew, to hold the office. He named Daladier his minister of national defense and war, a position the latter held until Blum resigned in June 1937. Daladier again served as minister of national defense and war when Blum briefly returned to the premiership in March and April 1938. The quick collapse of the second Blum ministry led French president Albert Lebrun to turn to Daladier, whose third and final term as France’s premier began on April 10, 1938.

It was, of course, a period fraught with political intrigue and the real possibility of war. German forces had marched into Austria less than a month earlier, and Adolf Hitler was making increasingly strident demands regarding the Czech Sudetenland. Though Daladier was personally opposed to negotiating with Hitler—believing that to do so would only whet the Nazi leader’s appetite for further expansion—his vivid memories of the butchery he’d witnessed in the trenches during World War I and his belief that France was not ready for war led him to join British prime minister Neville Chamberlain in signing the September 1938 Munich Agreement that gave the Sudetenland to Germany. Though the French people lauded Daladier as a peacemaker on his return from Munich, he—unlike the gullible Chamberlain—had no illusions that the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia had prevented war. His intent, he later said, [52] 5. See the introduction to Daladier’s Prison Journal . was to use the “reprieve” provided by Munich to strengthen both France’s defenses and its national resolve.

Though Daladier set about improving his nation’s military power—especially in terms of combat aircraft—the process was far from complete when Germany’s September 1, 1939, invasion of Poland sparked the general European war the French premier had long believed to be inevitable. While several members of his government—including his Conservative Party justice minister, Paul Reynaud—urged him to take swift and decisive action following France’s declaration of war, Daladier sought to minimize French losses and continue the military buildup he felt was absolutely necessary if France was to have any chance of successfully engaging the German juggernaut. Unfortunately for Daladier, his caution was widely seen as weakness, and support for his policies soon began to erode both within his government and among his increasingly bellicose people, and, on March 21, 1940, he resigned as premier and was immediately replaced by Reynaud.

Despite stepping down from the premiership, Daladier remained in government as Reynaud’s minister of national defense and war. This was an act of political pragmatism on the latter’s part, for the two men were poles apart ideologically and were in the first stages of a personal enmity that would eventually grow to epic proportions. [53] 6. Their political differences were exacerbated by the fact that their mistresses were social rivals, despite having known each other since childhood. Daladier’s mistress was Jeanne de Crussol; Reynaud’s was Hélène de Portes. Each woman took every opportunity to publicly and privately malign the other’s man and, of course, to report to her own lover every word spoken against him by his political rival. Daladier’s relationship had originated after the 1932 death of his wife, Madeline. Reynaud, on the other hand, remained legally married to his first wife, the former Jeanne Henri-Robert, until 1948. His relationship with Hélène de Portes was an open secret, one not contested by his wife. Their personal differences notwithstanding, Reynaud realized that Daladier was well versed in the intricacies of defense procurement and military reform and kept him in the cabinet. It was a rocky relationship at best, for in addition to their clear distaste for one another, Daladier was a supporter of General Maurice Gamelin, the elderly chief of the French army’s General Staff, whom Reynaud believed to be too old and inept to properly defend France against a German assault. Daladier had appointed Gamelin to his lofty position and took personally any criticism of the army chief.

Even after Gamelin’s bungling failed to halt the German invasion of France that began on May 10, 1940—ineptitude that led Reynaud to replace him just eight days later with the even older and arguably more hidebound General Maxime Weygand—Daladier continued to defend Gamelin as a brilliant military leader brought low by the incompetence and cowardice of others. This attitude helped ensure that the antagonism already existing between Daladier and Reynaud flared into outright hatred. Reynaud made it increasingly difficult for Daladier to carry out the duties of his ministry, and that situation, coupled with the certainty that the appallingly swift collapse of the French army would soon lead to a German occupation, prompted Daladier to join several other prominent politicians who believed they could carry on the struggle from Morocco, a French colony.

The group—which in addition to Daladier included former interior minister Georges Mandel, former secretary of state for finance Pierre Mendès-France, and former minister of marine Caesar Campinchi [54] 7. In addition to some twenty-seven politicians, Massilia’s passenger list included thirty-three other passengers, among them Mendès-France’s wife and two sons and Mandel’s mistress. —sailed for Casablanca on June 21 aboard the steamer Massilia , arriving four days later to a decidedly chilly reception. France had capitulated the day after the ship left Le Verdon-sur-Mer, [55] 8. Le Verdon-sur-Mer was a harbor at the mouth of the Gironde River, some fifty-four miles northwest of Bordeaux. The French government had relocated to Bordeaux on June 10. and General Charles-Auguste Noguès, the commander in chief of French forces in North Africa and governor-general of Morocco, was waiting to see which way the political wind was blowing in Paris. Though he personally believed that France was capable of carrying on the fight against Germany from North Africa, he did not want to seem overly welcoming to the politicians aboard Massilia —this despite having been appointed to the Moroccan governorship by Daladier. Noguès therefore ordered Daladier and several others detained on the ship under guard.

That detention lasted until June 27, when Daladier was able to travel to Noguès’s headquarters in Rabat. Though the two men agreed that French forces in North Africa had both the will and the wherewithal to continue the fight against Germany, Noguès refused to act without clear instructions from the rump government in Bordeaux. As Daladier later recalled, the general “was seeking government authorization to break with official policy and fight on, even if the government had to disavow its involvement in the process.” [56] 9. Daladier, Prison Journal , 2. Recognizing the irony in the general’s cables, Daladier said on the same page of his journal, “Strange fellow, this General Noguès, who felt he had to ask the government for permission to rebel.” Noguès’s first few cables had gone unanswered, but on June 28 the general received a very definite reply: he was to abstain from any military action. Further, he was to detain Daladier and the other politicians in Morocco until after the scheduled July 10 vote in the National Assembly that was expected to ratify the Franco-German armistice and grant “full and extraordinary powers” to Marshal [57] 10. In the military usage, a rank roughly equivalent to a U.S. general of the armies. Philippe Pétain to form a new government to administer that part of France not yet occupied by German forces.