France on Parade
I
OF post-war world economics one pleasant thing at least can be said. Variety has been overflowing; monotony has not scummed the waters of events. New super-gods are ever arising from the depths. At first America was worshiped as the King of Kings. But with the loud collapse of America’s miraculous era of scientific, machinemade prosperity, the world beheld the feet of clay on the great image of brassy materialism, and looked again toward the depths. Whereupon the apparition of a titanic Slavic Five-Year Plan convinced our economic watchers that Russia, with its iron-handed willingness to abandon haphazard individualistic development and to plan according to scientific, merciless laws, was the genuine miracle of the ages. . . . And now it is France.
Smiling, feminine, wronged France! France, who appealed yesterday so winsomely yet so sadly — and we now suspect so shrewdly — to the hearts of her allies! France, overwhelmed yesterday with fear of the Teuton hordes and begging only peace and protection and restoration for her outraged, defenseless soil! Even a Tory as coldhearted and hard-headed as Austen Chamberlain was seduced; with awkward gallantry he bestowed England’s protection and generosity upon a France in tears. Concession after financial concession was made by Tory England to her sorely wounded ally in the adjustment of reparations and of the costs of the World War, until the idealistic Laborite Snowden — far too late — adopted a genuinely coldblooded, realistic policy and won an avalanche of laurels from Englishmen of all classes. The world had sympathetically watched France engage in an apparently losing fight in the battle of the franc, and had concluded that France, bled white, was doomed to stagger on for a generation or two under the heritage of a ruthless war and of an even more ruthless peace. France, however, shrewdly trusting in her own innate strength and to self-help, wept publicly, but toiled wisely and well.
So wisely and so well that within the last year a new France has suddenly risen before the world — a France possessed of the world’s largest army, of the world’s most formidable air force, of the world’s second-largest hoard of gold, of the world’s soundest, least shaken economic structure, of the world’s most profitable colonial empire, of the world’s most extensive array of loyal European allies all smilingly within the sphere of her influence. America’s larger hoard of gold, when one considers comparative populations and comparative economic resources and needs, is in fact secondary in potency and in liquidity to that of France, for France’s treasure is entirely a peace-time accumulation gathered through thrift — a hoard of wealth more mobile and more available for utilization abroad than that of America. And France shrewdly kept her gold and her short-term credits out of Germany, letting America and England take the risks, gain the perilous profits — and attempt to help world conditions along.
Unfortunately England, the rival of France for centuries in the European cockpit, seems to find that every staff she reaches for turns into a reed. Her great colonial empire has ceased to be an empire yielding wealth to London, and has become a hit-and-miss Federation of Commonwealths, each bringing its burdens rather than its trade to the mother country, and all treating the mother country cavalierly as they scramble after their own advantage. Compare tumultuous India and radical, well-nigh bankrupt Australia with Northern Africa, for example, as a docile outlet for manufactured products and as a field for capitalistic exploitation. France’s ring of European satellites — Poland, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Jugoslavia — are all at peace and for the moment are all trustful of their protecting guardian Goddess. Indeed, France has only one perplexity — Germany. And her fear of Germany has even grown less strident and more shrewdly objective.
II
The vaulting of the French cock to a perch where it can gayly crow over Europe and even America is not a whim of Fortune. Only if we glimpse the factors that have made it possible can we avoid heightened world antagonisms. Basically France’s rise represents the triumph — momentary, perhaps, but nevertheless the triumph — of the older agricultural, non-industrial order of life. It represents the backward-glancing triumph of the soil. France of all the Great Powers has yielded least to the machine, to the modern industrial high-speed era. France is least dependent upon the vast outpouring of machine-made goods and the frantic scattering of such output by high-speed international trade and savagely stimulated domestic consumption. Her agriculture is diversified, rationalized, not an imitation of high-speed industrial overproduction
In France, the siren doctrine of the Coolidge madness, singing that prosperity and security come from spending more and saving less, never seemed other than naked madness leading to disaster. Thrift, plain old-fashioned thrift, — the admonition ‘Put money in thy purse,’ — always has been and still is a high moral law of French life. A self-contained, agricultural country, with a rich, jealously closed market in its colonies, France is not dependent upon foreign trade. She is closer than America or Germany or England, or even Japan and Italy, to the simpler mode of life where a family, by diversified firming, simple needs, and deft skill, can sustain itself in happiness indifferent to events beyond the seas, or even beyond the township line. The Frenchman has clung tenaciously to the peaceful, though modest, security of a life without luxuries, beneath the shade of his own vine and fig tree.
If the present economic blizzard rages unchecked, it will not mean the somersault of capitalism into communism, as some suggest, but rather the return of the world to the French outlook, to simpler, self-contained, economic family units. France alone is not overwhelmed by our highly complex, ant-hill life of fast-pounding machines, frantic foreign trade, and bally hoo sales propa ganda. The Western world, excepting France, is economically without insulation; overproduction in one land leaps like lightning to other nations. France alone can seem indifferent. She prefers, to be sure, a prosperous world, to whom she can sell her luxuries and her styles; but she is not stricken to the marrow by an abrupt decline in foreign trade as are the machine-ruled industrial countries. And so long as the French spend a little less than the little they gather in, so long as they thriftily keep population down by birth control, a world depression will see them growing richer and increasingly indifferent to the spectre of an international trade debacle.
All that France fears is something which will upset the simple security of her self-contained life — a war. And since she needs her gold not at all to stimulate foreign trade, or to revive bankrupt buyers of her wares, she uses her gold for what she deems an apparently proper and natural use — to augment cannon as an instrument of foreign policy. England and America consider it constructive and peaceful to use gold solely to stimulate foreign trade, to stiffen the backs of purchasers so that they can and will buy more goods. For a nation to use gold to gain political ends, to scatter it abroad as a means of political rather than mercantile aggression, to lend it with black, sticky political strings attached, seems to these mercantile nations but another form of Prussian militarism. For a decade Prussian militarism rattled the sabre; France keeps her sword under a silken mantle, but rattles her gold. And France apparently does not appreciate that rattling gold for political ends gets on the world’s nerves as sharply as did Prussia’s rattling of the sabre.
The menace to world peace and to civilization to-day is thus a conflict of ideals. America, England, Germany, Japan, and Italy think in terms of trade; France, free from the harrowing terrors of declining trade, thinks in terms of political security — and perhaps of world power. To accuse France of Napoleonic dreams of world empire is unfair; America, England, and Germany have their Napoleonic dreams of dominating the world’s markets. A nation dreams in terms of its experience, its hopes, and its fears. Our nightmares are the spectre of hard times; France’s the spectre of invasion. Our happy dreams picture prosperity and the death of poverty. France pictures armies marching victoriously to fanfares of trumpets under the Arc de Triomphe, bringing centuries of security. This basic conflict of outlook cannot be ended by hard words or bitter bickering, for the dreams of both France and the rest of the world quickly transform themselves into nightmares. For us to snarl at France and France to smirk at us means the decline of both world prosperity and world peace.
An alliance of the machine-ruled nations against more simply organized France, an alliance which too clearly looms upon the horizon, would bring us back again to 1914. We have toppled Germany into the dust to our own loss and injury; to topple over France would only double the world’s loss.
But France above all needs to be wise and understanding. In the event of another war, she will find herself helpless. Machines rather than trained soldiers win modern wars. With a vast aviation force already outmoded by the far speedier American and English aeroplanes; with a navy that can be sunk all too easily by English and German skill on the sea — as always has been the case, owing to French inaptitude with machines; with a backward skill and organization in the use of machines for making the munitions of war, France, pitted against Germany, with the English and American factories no longer at her elbow, as they were in the last war, would find her large army, her gold, her ring of allies of little avail. Just as the rest of the world must understand machine-free France, France must understand and make her peace with the machine-powerful, machine-afflicted balance of civilization. She has more to lose, for she is more vulnerable; she, not the rest of civilization, stands perilously near to the precipice of world isolation.
III
To insist, as the French love to do, that the conflict of ideals involved is basically a conflict between French realism and rationalism on the one side, and Anglo-Saxon opportunism and haste on the other side, is unfortunate, because it is not sufficiently realistic. We know that the Frenchman reasons more profoundly and more trustingly than does the Englishman, who worships common sense. The Frenchman is ever searching for rationalistic theories in politics and will die for his country, but will not pay heavy taxes. The Englishman muddles and patches and keeps his eye ever close to the practical facts of the moment, and is willing to pay taxes when the national budget shows that taxes have to be paid. The English and American point of view, in a word, is dictated by the necessities of modern high-speed business. Like a stock trader, the modern business man must shift and dodge and follow the facts of the day. The Frenchman, with his simpler, more even-paced economic structure, can be more theoretical and more consistent.
For example, the French tell us that a written agreement — a Treaty of Versailles, a Young Plan — is sacred and should not be lightly and quickly changed. The French cry out that to dishonor a writing, a contract, is the sin of sins. But the American and English, with their quick-shifting business eye on realities, believe in honoring but not in worshiping a written document. If a customer can’t pay a note, written even on parchment, do not jump on him; give him a chance to regain his feet. After all, it is more important that he buys, if his failure to pay is due to temporary circumstances beyond his control rather than a dishonest effort not to pay. Worshiping anything that is impractical, to the Anglo-Saxon mind, is the sin of sins; written contracts must always be bent to fit the facts of the moment.
Coöperate with the buyer to the limit of the practical; never use arguments based on emotions rather than facts; never weep over spilt milk — these are the axioms of the machine age of trade which control the average American reaction to the German situation. For France to linger over her outrages suffered during the World War, and to begin and end every argument with that emotional note, is but the rôle of the wronged woman who reminds rather than forgets. France, for her own safety, must understand the point of view and the afflictions of the industrial nations. She must not expect the world to climb over the fence to her. She must adapt her attitude of mind and her manners to the manners of the rest of the world. Not that she should abandon her great economic advantages; but France should neither gloat nor be hard-hearted as she surveys the balance of the world.
America and England are in far greater need of world-trade recovery than is France; the depression has grown so acute that the shadow of fear of destruction through poverty, hovering over the average American and English home, is almost as dark as was the shadow of the fear of destruction through war that hovered yesterday over the French hearth. If France expects sympathy to-morrow from her former allies as she received it yesterday, she must show sympathy to-day. The great problem in international economic bartering is whether to yield too much and play the fool or to yield too little and play the black devil; and the fool usually keeps more of his skin on his back than does the devil.
The startling thing is that France has so often been right in big things but wrong in little things in her international trading. She has grown sensitive. Her manners are suddenly bad and irritating. And for France to take on the mannerisms of the grasping nouvelle riche and forget the uses of the grand gesture is unusual indeed.
Good manners and the grand gesture are even more important in international affairs than in private business. The great sin of pre-war Germany was that her manners were bad. She could not trade without pounding the table. She always insisted on displaying her sword and fingering her pistol while she conferred or traded. Thus, because of her pre-war bellicose manners, in her hour of need the Allies found it easy to fasten the name ‘Hun’ upon Germany.
France suddenly seems to the world a haggler, not a trader. For trading in business and in international politics is akin. The wise trader puts on an act; he demands more than he expects to get; but, above all, he distinguishes big things from little things. The American and Englishman tend to reach for the big things and yield the little things; above all, they know when not to overreach, when to be satisfied with an equal exchange. The French as traders, unfortunately of late, seem eager to gather in the little as well as the big things. And it is the haggling over little things that breaks deals and creates enemies. Somehow it is difficult to be personal or petty over a big issue; we always spill our rancor and our sarcasm over small things that mean little. Then we shout about the principle of the thing. France in her international trading has come to be a matchless snatcher up of trifles. Her manners during the bickering over Hoover’s proposal of a year’s moratorium to Germany were as bad as was Germany’s gesture with the cruiser Panther during the Agadir crisis.
France can be gracious indeed when she chooses to be; she used the grand gesture matchlessly in her dealings with Tsaristic Russia before the World War. At this moment of her great opportunity and her great peril, she needs to consider her manners well. For a brief moment she holds the centre of the stage; she rules the spotlight.
IV
Holding the centre of the world stage has proved repeatedly a momentary and a dangerous affair. There are many errors indeed, both of substance and of manner, which France can point out that America committed while our nation paraded under the dangerous spotlight. Our manners were bad. We were so fearful that we could not collect our world debts that we refused to enter a League of Nations which our Chief Executive went to France to persuade our allies to accept. We thought that we could shut ourself off from Europe by a Chinese Wall, collect our interest, and grow daily fatter and safer — the darling of strumpet Fortune. We paraded our wealth.
But adversity has proved a matchless teacher. To-day we are humbler. We are ready to postpone the payment of war debts; we are even ready to discuss world cancellation of all Interallied debts. France has won a handsome victory in forcing us to link Germany’s debt to her with France’s debt to us. We are ready to do anything that will get us out of the ditch of hard times. And, observing what adversity has done to us, France should accept her victory graciously, consider how fickle is Fortune, and grasp her greatest opportunity. For France has before her to-day roads to glory unequaled even in her long and tumultuous history.
By tact, by good manners, by psychological international understanding, by a wise policy of seeking only a reasonable exchange, she can bring stability into a world emotionally in flux. She can give the cause of disarmament a greater turn toward consummation than did even the Allied victory. She can gain the good will of her former allies by appreciating their needs and trying, with gracious good manners, to establish international confidence in our credit system, based as it is upon an insecure, artificial foundation of gold. Credit and confidence are a matter of appearance, of mannerism rather than of substance. And to pursue the road of international understanding France must escape delusions which have pursued her since the Armistice, and which will cast her down from her place of might as surely as did Nietzsche’s doctrine of the strong arm cast Germany into the dust.
France cannot ask her allies for a guarantee of armed help, even against an aggressive Germany, unless she is willing — as she cannot possibly be, out of regard for her national pride — to give her allies the power of veto over her international affairs. A guarantor always is accorded the right to limit expenditures so that the extent of debt he may have to pay cannot suddenly ruin him. Every war in modern times has involved a fierce dispute as to which side was the aggressor. France cannot create a ring of European allies, add to her colonies, insist upon the complete freedom of a first power in world affairs, and at the same time ask her former allies to stand ready to underwrite her conduct when her foreign policy may have made a war inevitable. To harp upon such an alliance as a condition of her disarmament is to ask for the impossible and to anger those whom she asks. It is the height of irritating manners constantly to bring this argument forth largely as a trading point.
Nor can France forget that the Treaty of Versailles must be appraised rationally and dispassionately. It is not realistic to speak emotionally about the sacredness of contracts. The Treaty of Frankfort which France signed in 1871, after Bismarck had paraded about Versailles, whereby she solemnly and forever ceded AlsaceLorraine to Germany, France immediately set out to break. In insisting that Alsace-Lorraine was still French, she did not play the moral reprobate. A treaty is as strong as the just appraisal of realities upon which it rests. France can well understand how an unjust cession of territory can create a running wound that will not heal. Fortunately, the world now has no Alsace-Lorraine issue; France should not be eager to perpetuate a Polish Corridor issue. She should not base her whole foreign policy and her own security upon an insistence to maintain the Treaty of Versailles as a sacred decree above the query of cold facts and of naked realities.
Nor should France pursue too boldly her programme of bringing a large number of the European members of the League of Nations under her domination through the skillful use of her hoard of gold. She can probably accomplish that end; but if she succeeds she will only destroy the functions of the League and reduce it to an assembly of her allies with the balance of the world distrustful of its value and resistant to its purposes. France can create a balance of power in the world much more sinister than that which existed in 1914. She can do more to retard the world’s hopes of security through a world alliance than has been accomplished since mediæval days. Her suggestion to place all the armies of Europe under the control of the League as a means of disarmament would not be smiled at everywhere were her plan to use gold to rule the League not so apparent.
France’s promptness in lending credit to England, on the other hand, was an admirable step. The celerity and directness of her aid were a splendid example of the uses of the grand gesture. It will do much to dispel the rising world suspicion that the credit of Austria, of Germany, and even of England was upset by France’s skillful manœuvring of the withdrawal of short-term credits as part of her programme to upset a German-Austrian tariff union. That suspicion, if ever supported by fact, must make cynics of us all. For, though the world has much to lose through a France on parade, a France on parade, rattling the sabre and clinking her gold, has far more to lose. World dominance means unparalleled opportunities to make enemies. And world isolation is a heavy price to pay for bad manners.
Premier Laval’s visit to Washington may reveal to a disheartened world new leadership, a leadership worthy of the high glories and traditions of France. The gesture on the Premier’s part calls for our cordial response. Now that England has gone off the pound and has come to have an outlook upon European affairs so different from that of France, the shadows of precarious isolation loom larger in the eyes of Paris. Yet statesmen to-day are but the slaves of public opinion. Pierre Laval has at least made a show of good will toward Germany — and has not met Aristide Briand’s fate. We can thus hope that in these critical days French public opinion will become truly realistic, and will face the facts about the Treaty of Versailles and about the folly of trusting to preparations for war as sureties of peace.
That road the world knows too well. In 1913 Germany was insisting upon the Treaty of Frankfort and placing her complete faith in preparations for war as a means of securing peace. Germany first became frightened, then bad-mannered, then encircled, then psychologically and politically isolated — then destroyed. A France on parade can well ponder. And the rest of the world can but hope that help will yet come from that nation whose history is so rich with sad experience, with beauty, with gallantry, and with realistic wisdom.