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From Socialist Appeal, Vol. II No. 2, 8 January 1938, p. 7.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
PARIS. – The recent trials stemming from the revelation of ex-Premier André Tardieu that he had paid out secret funds to de la Rocque have strikingly confirmed the repeated warnings of the P.O.I. (Workers’ Internationalist Party) concerning the preparation of a fascist coup under the cover of the administration, the police and the army.
While de la Rocque was pleading not guilty in the affair of the secret funds, Pozzo di Borgo and his followers were arrested on charges of plotting “the re-establishment of the monarchy.” A number of arms depots were uncovered. A third trial was meanwhile going on against the French Social Party on the charge that it was guilty of “reconstituting a dissolved league” (the Croix de Feu).
The witnesses who came to these trials to justify and glorify their plans for massacring the workers, fully confirmed our accusations. The official communique issued by Marx Dormoy, socialist Minister of the Interior, spoke of a “monarchial plot.” But it also revealed something far more substantial than a threatened resurrection of the Orleans family. The plotters “modelled their organization on that of the army.” This little phrase really means that the plot was organized by the army chiefs themselves.
General Duseigneur, Capt. Le Maresquier and a number of business men who are reserve officers, were arrested. These officers are not on active service, any more than Gen. Weygand who, along with Tardieu, was probably at the head of the movement. But their activity would be inexplicable without the support and cooperation of officers on active service, of the higher-ranking officers. Who prepared the training of cadres, the armaments, the connection with aviation centers the arsenals and artillery bases? It was the same group of men whom M. Thorez describes daily as the “elite of the Republican army.”
Daladier, the minister of “national defence,” in reality covered up the preparations of which he could not have been ignorant. Under the debonair gaze of the People’s Front Government the plans for the barbarous assault ripened. Thorez and Guyot preached discipline and “pride in being a soldier”; and the minister of the soldiers encouraged his General Staff to prepare bloody repression against the workers.
At the de la Rocque trial, Pozzo, addressing the Croix de Feu chief, said: “When we spoke to you about arms, you adopted a modest air and said: ‘Don’t worry about that – in any case I have many acquaintances in the army. All that will be arranged.’” Pozzo thus quite cynically revealed the liaison between the army and the mercenaries of capitalism. The plot of the “Cagoulards” (Hooded Ones) is the plot of the General Staff!
By the same blow, the role of the bourgeois army in civil war became plain to the blindest, despite the camouflage of Humanité and Populaire, who on this point are no different from the rightist press. When the minister of the Interior admitted that the plotters “modelled their organization on that of the army,” he was obliged thereby to admit that the army functions and is organized for combat against the workers. The myth of the army as an instrument of external defence of the “fatherland” vanished to give way to reality.
The trial of the French Social Party also revealed what we knew quite well: that Roger Salengro, the late socialist minister of the Interior, and Leon Blum themselves legalized and covered the organization of the French Social Party when the Coix de Feu was dissolved. The testimony of Ybarnegaray and Ottavi, both leaders of the F.S.P. established this beyond question.
Ybarnegaray told how Salengro and Blum together approved the creation of the F.S.P. as successor to the Croix de Feu and assured him that “we have neither the intention nor the desire to make your party subject to the decree of dissolution,” even though admittedly, it was “born of the Croix de Feu.”
Ottavi related that he had two interviews at the ministry of the Interior with Magny, director of the Sureté Generale (police), Langeron, prefect of police, and Verlomme, chief of Salengro’s staff. They were discussing the methods of dissolving the Croix de Feu and Ottavi raised the question of the so-called “benevolent” organizations of the Croix de Feu: “‘Why don’t you attach them to the party you are going to establish?’ they said to me,” related Ottavi.
These are two statements that ought to go down in history. The French Social Party was an incontestable advance for Fascism. While preserving intact its secret military organizations and its connections with the General Staff, it developed more broadly under the cover of “legality” its propaganda among the masses. The disagreements inside its putschist wing do not change anything: in the regroupment of fascism under the People’s Front Government, Blum and Salengro held the baptismal font for the new infant.
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