396
PARTISAN REVIEW
Reichstag fire should have been enough to alert the astute to the true
direction of things. But we know it was not; in May 1933 Gide was
still able to write in his journal: "Excellent speech by Hitler to
Reichstag . .. Everything remains to be seen." This date pairs off
with the Proclamation of the Axis in November 1936. Here is the
second frame.
In the mid-thirties, France had to assume cultural leadership of
Europe by default. Writing from Moscow, Victor Serge referred to
France as "an oasis ... facing a crisis." Paris became the arena of
events in great part because France was the only country where the
Communist Party emerged from the Third Period of Comintern
strategy with both numbers and prestige . In Italy and Germany, the
communists had been liquidated or forced underground. But natu–
rally in France a domestic confrontation was needed to produce a
sense of urgency. Fascism in Germany and Italy could look remote
and even comic until it struck in the streets of Paris. A highly com–
plex and often contradictory sequence of events, including a finan–
cial scandal, a cabinet crisis, and a powerful Prefect of Police, led to
what has often been interpreted as an attempted fascist coup against
the Third Republic and the parliamentary system. That was Febru–
ary 6, 1934. We now know better; the fascist leagues and the Action
Fran~aise
had planned no such coup. Nevertheless, soldiers had to
be brought in to protect the Chamber of Deputies from attackers on
the Place de la Concorde . Pushed hard by demonstrators armed
with iron bars and knives mounted on poles to disable the horses, the
soldiers finally had to fire into the crowd. For all its confusion (there
were quite a few communists among the rioters), this single night of
fighting galvanized Paris into a series of frenzied counterdemon–
strations, meetings, appeals to honor and to freedom, congresses,
maneuvers, and reversals of policy. Out of that activity came the vic–
tory of the Popular Front and the Blum government. Politically and
intellectually, the three years from the February riots in 1934 to the
triumph and decline of the Popula!" Front in 1936 form the heartland
of the decade, the unreal interval during which it seemed still possi–
ble to save European culture from totalitarianism without war, and
even to assimilate the Soviet revolution into the Western tradition
without more bloodshed. Here is the third frame.
In June 1936, huddled over his shortwave radio in Norway,
Trotsky wrote his fifth successive pamphlet about the crisis and called
it: "The French Revolution Has Begun." He was wrong: who knows
what it would have taken to make him right. That was the way
things felt in Paris also.
