The Press FRIDAY, JANUARY 14, 1938. Conspiracy in France

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22300, 14 January 1938, Page 10

The Press FRIDAY, JANUARY 14, 1938. Conspiracy in France

On October 16 of last year some rifle cartridges fell out of a motor lorry which was being examined at the Swiss frontier on its way from Geneva to Paris; on the same day more cartridges of the same make were found on an obscure road in the Jura mountains. The trail of the cartridges led the French police to their first contact with the organisation melodramatically named " Les Cagoulards" ("The "Hooded Ones"); and since that time the world has been alternately alarmed and mystified by official revelations of a vast plot against the French Republic, revelations which, as the cable news shows, are not yet complete. Early in November a series of police raids revealed the existence of stores of arms in specially constructed underground armouries in Paris, Rueil, Lille, Dieppe, Caen, and many other provincial towns, of illegal wireless transmitters conveniently situated near military centres, and even of underground prisons and hospitals. At the same time there were hundreds of arrests, some of those charged with conspiracy being wealthy manufacturers and retired army officers. Rumour was even more active than the police, it being confidently asserted that high political and military personages were involved and that the conspiracy was being subsidised by foreign Powers. Yet what should have been the climax of the affair—the official statement in the Chamber of Deputies on the results of the police investigations—turned out to be something of an anti-climax. The Prime Minister, M. Chautemps. had promised " surprises of "terrible gravity"; but the statement by M. Dormoy, Minister for the Interior, though sufficiently serious, did not provide the sensation which the French public had been keyed up to expect. M. Dormoy disclosed that there had been " a real plot against Republican in- " stitutions," that its object was a dictatorship followed by a restoration of the monarchy, that it involved the assassination of M. Blum and most of the leaders of the Socialist Party, and that there had been leakages of military information. The general reaction to this statement has been one of bewilderment and even scepticism. Indeed, now that the worst of the scare is past, the French nation has astounded foreign observers by turning the affair into a joke. The mere mention of Cagoulards in music hall performances is enough to provoke shouts of laughter. The average Frenchman finds it hard to believe that the Republic was seriously endangered by a few underground armouries; and the impression of unreality is strengthened by the announcement that the ultimate aim of the plotters was the restoration of the monarchy. The activities of the various royalist groups in France have long been regarded as entertainment rather than as politics. Moreover, the Cagoulards affair has been a convincing demonstration of the weakness of the parties of the extreme right. A theory widely accepted is that the Frenchmen implicated in the conspiracy are former followers of Colonel de la Rocque, who became impatient with his preference for constitutional methods; and it is probably not a coincidence that the unmasking of the conspiracy has been accompanied by a violent public dispute (involving libel actions) between Colonel de la Rocque and Count Pozzo di Borgo, a former leader of the Croix de Feu. Since then there has been an equally violent dispute between Action Francais and the principal royalist group. In the circumstances Frenchmen feel that they have little to fear from the reactionaries of the right. Nevertheless, there are some aspects of the Cagoulards affair which remain obscure, and it is thus still possible that it was much more serious than is commonly supposed. It has been remarked, for instance, that the official list of those implicated, although it includes a few substantial industrialists, does not include one man- of the first importance in politics, industry, the civil service, or the fighting forces. This may be because the conspiracy never had widespread or influential support in France. On the other hand, it may be that the names of the real leaders have not been announced either for fear of precipitating a crisis which would adversely affect the franc on the foreign exchanges or for fear of weakening the morale of the fighting forces. What is more important, there is still much speculation over the extent to which the conspiracy was subsidised and otherwise assisted from abroad. There are strong reasons for supposing that the French Government deliberately minimised this aspect of the affair in order to avoid an ugly international situation. Three established facts stand out in a fog of rumour. The first is that the arms found by the police were all of German or Italian manufacture. The second is that the original speech by M. Chautemps in the Chamber of Deputies announcing the discovery of the plot contained a blunt indictment of the German and Italian Governments. In the official report of the speech practicallv the whole of this passage was either deleted or watered down to harmlessness. The third is that the chief conspirator, Eugene de I'Oncle, a director of the dockyards company which built the Normandie, fled to Italy as soon as the police investigations began. It is a safe assumption, therefore, that evidence exists implicating the German and Italian Governments, though whether the overthrow of the Republic was ever regarded as a serious possibility may be doubted.