NOTES ON THE WAR NEWS

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 26, 30 July 1940, Page 8

NOTES ON THE WAR NEWS

WAR GUILT TRIALS

THE MOVE IN FRANCE

SCAPEGOATS SOUGHT

>: The French quest for scapegoats on which to fix the "war guilt" of opposing Hitler's attempt to dominate Europe by force goes on. MM. Daladier, Reynaud, and Mandel are reported to be under arrest or now ; facing the commencement of proceedings against them, and MM. Campinchi and Delbos to be under strict surveillance in ;■' Africa, whither they went after the armistice. Wartime Premier. M. Daladier, of course, is involved because he was the Premier of France ' at the beginning of the war—it might be added that he was also the Premier at the time of Munich. It is to M, Daladier that a good deal of recent history may be traced. He was in " power at the time of the famous riots of February 6, 1934, in which 20 rioters and one policeman were killed and about 1000 rioters and 600 police- ■'"■ men were injured in the streets of Paris; and his confused policy was the cause of the fact that the threat of force from "the street" loomed over French politics for years afterwards. ' M. Daladier's typical act was his method of removing M. Jean Chiappe, the head of the Paris police, after the riots which were caused by the Stavisky scandal and by a terrible railway disaster at Lagny. M. Daladier felt that Chiappe could not stay,xand yet could not be dismissed because of the influence of the Eight. So he offered him the Governor-Generalship « of Morocco, one of the most honoured of French colonial posts. No one was satisfied. Chiappe protested that he was being thrown into the street, and actually helped the planning of more demonstrations against the Government. M. Daladier also dismissed the director of the Comedie Francaise because his production of Shakespeare's "anti-demo-cratic" "Coriolanus" had caused noisy Royalist demonstrations in and about the theatre, and replaced him with a policeman. i The ex-Premier, who fell from power in. 1934, was followed by M. Doumergue, who was recalled from retirement to be head of the Government and who attempted to alter the Constitution in the direction of something like Fascism, giving the Prime Minister the power to dissolve the Chamber on his own initiative, curtail the powers of the Senate, and pass the Budget, by decree. M. Daladier was Minister of War in the Front Populaire Cabinet of 1936 and Minister of War again in 1937. He was Premier again by the time of the Czech crisis of 1938, and went to that memorable meeting at Munich, from which he returned disheartened, to find himself, to his surprise, a hero. Middle Class Origin. M. Daladier, who is leader of the Radical Socialist Party, is short, stout, with an energetic face and prominent chin. The son of a Carpentras baker, he is not an easy speaker, and is sometimes called "the Bull of Camargue," from his birthplace in the south of France. He is reported to have been attacked by his comrades after the great offensive began because of France's unreadiness to meet the German mechanised attack, and to have been blamed for his role in thei Popular Front Government. M. Paul Reynaud, briefly Prime Minister of France after M. Daladier's resignation at the end of March, was previously Minister of Finance and until the end of 1938 M. Daladier's Minister of Justice. For a time he served with Tardieu in the same post. His fame rested largely on his advocacy of a policy of devaluation of the franc for the purpose of restoring some stability to French economic life (his own constituency depended largely on the export trade and on tourists), on his alertness and power of speech. He . has been called "too intelligent to be liked." In the struggle over sanctions during the Abyssinian affair he was one of those in favour of sanctions, which would probably not increase his popularity with a Government now trying to woo Italy. The "Wily" Mandel. The other members of the last Government who are now suspect are less known to the general public. M. Georges Mandel, sometimes known as "the wily Mandel," was Minister of the Colonies in the Daladier and Reynaud Cabinets, and before that he did excellent work as Minister of Posts and Telegraphs under the well-meaning Flandin and under Laval. - When serving with Laval he was often mentioned as the possible successor to that strangely ignorant politician. M. Mandel, who was chief of Cabinet to Clemenceau in 1916, former leader of the Bloc Nationale which ruled France for the first five years after the World Wa,r, preserved his independence in the Chamber for years, and his post under Flandin was his first in any Government. Annoyed the Italians. M. Campinchi, Minister for the Navy under Daladier and Reynaud, was formerly Minister of Marine. It was " while he held that post in 1937 that he roused the Italian Press to fury by a speech at Toulon in which he was reported to have said that war between France and Italy was not only inevitable but necessary to deflate the preposterous Italian claims. He was declared to have said that Corsica was not to be the subject of Italian aggression, that France would defend the island, and that she would '-*» able to launch an offensive which v/ould bring Fascism to its knees. There were official denials of the speech later, but thoy did not appear- to make any difference to the Italian Press, and it was said that the French Government made representations to Italy about this "campaign of calumny." The Record of Delbos. . The last and perhaps the most pathetic of the figures is M. Yvon Delbos, a member of M. Daladier's party, of which he has been president. He was Minister of Justice in the Sarraut Cabinet in 1936, which had the misfortune to face the German occupation of the Rhineland and which lacked the courage to order a general mobilisation in the effort to force British support to eject the Germans. M. Delbos was Secretary for Foreign ! ' Affairs in the Blum Government (the Popular Front) and in the Chautemps Cabinet which followed. It was his j tour of European capitals which j showed how far French influence in Europe had waned after the tearing