The Timaru Herald SATURDAY, DECEMBER 3, 1938 THE CHALLENGE TO AUTHORITY IN FRANCE

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLV, Issue 21210, 3 December 1938, Page 10

The Timaru Herald SATURDAY, DECEMBER 3, 1938 THE CHALLENGE TO AUTHORITY IN FRANCE

If the Paris correspondent of The Daily Telegraph gives an accurate summing up of the internal situation in France following the challenge the strikers threw into the teeth of governmental right to control the affairs of the country the Prime Minister’s authority throughout the country has been substantially strengthened in what is regarded as a veritable “show down” between the Government and the French elements that sought to take the law > into their own hands. The failure of the organisers of a general strike as a protest against the emergency measures the Government considered imperative, if democratic and stable government is to be preserved, is regarded as deeply significant. The Prime Minister in a nation-wide broadcast following the failure of direct action by disgruntled Frenchmen, claimed that the survival of the Government in one of the severest ordeals that had confronted democratic governments in France, had demonstrated the confidence of the nation in the Government to save Democracy from disaster. But the Prime Minister of France did not broadcast on a note of triumph which the Government victory in a fierce ordeal might seem to justify. On the contrary, M. Daladier seized upon the historic movement to hold out the hand of friendship to his opponents and his critics. “The Government’s role,” declared the French political leader, “would be to promote conciliation and co-operation between employers and workers.” Every Frenchman knows only too well, moreover, that a nation divided against itself imperils its very existence in face of aggressive and covetous neighbours; France, moreover is sufficiently acquainted with the history of nations to know that Democracy is more prone to suicide than to conquest! The victory of the forces of law and order in France is of the utmost importance to every normal citizen in Europe. For days, all that the Nazis and Fascists said in 1935-36 about the inevitable disunity and downfall of Democracy could be quoted by them in 1938 as finding exemplification in the case of France, which sustained two shocks like Austria and Czechoslovakia, but which remained a victim of internal strife in face of humiliating evidence of external weakness. Totalitarianism always rejoices in an enemy weakened and in a propagandist argument strengthened. No one will deny that the strikes in France represented an exercise of the privileges of freedom, but such defiance of constitutional government, particularly in the case of France, gravely undermines the wider freedom of the nation as against the interests of the individual. It is recognised, of course that no question is settled until it is fairly settled, but one thing can be said of the internal situation in France, and that is that national unity in face of grave international situations, demands the absence of internal strife which not only weakens the nation’s powers of resistance but invites interference by influences that seek the downfall of Democracy and the implementation of the most rigid totalitarianism which once at grips with plain people arrogantly discountenances and inevitably suppresses with unrelenting ruthlessness all semblance of questioning of the authority of the State, without any regard to individual freedom.