Same song, second verse

Further readings from The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940

The financial crisis of the mid-twenties had another profound effect on French public opinion which would further divide the citizenry and weaken the Republic.  The bankers, industrialists, and businessmen, and even the more thriving peasants and shopkeepers, came to believe, with a certainty that brooked no compromise, that the political “Left” was incapable of governing the country.  They believed that unless the conservatives dominated Parliament and government, France was lost.  Of couse, they could not see their own shortcomings, above all their selfishness, their reluctance to make a fair share of the sacrifices needed, and their blindness to the need in a modern industrial society of some measure of social security and a more equitable distribution of both wealth and the increasing tax burden.  In social welfare France in this period lagged behind all other nations in the West, and in wages and conditions of labor it was the worst of all. 

A few visionaries urged Poincare to take advantage of the vastly improved situation after 1926 to overhaul the old-fashioned, nineteenth-century structure of French society, modernizing the government and the economy, building new housing so urgently needed, rescuing agriculture from its unmechanized stagnation, encouraging responsible trade unionism and responsible collective bargaining of labor disputes, and instituting a bold program of social security.  In a country where the workers and peasants were just able to exist and a considerable section of the lower and middle bourgeoisie was being proletarianized by inflation and the devaluation of the franc, this would have strengthened the nation for the unseen but inevitable ordeals that lay ahead.

Poincare responded – but only feebly.  The Parliament was not ready for such a far-reaching regeneration.  Finally, on April 5, 1928, just in time for the elections, the Chamber and Senate approved a modest program of social insurance, limited mostly to the sick and the aged, with wage and salary earners contributing 5 percent of their pay, the employers an equal amount, and the state defraying the cost of the operation.  Characteristically, the Parliament provided a delay of twenty-two months in the implementation of the law.  Characteristically, too, the various employers’ associations, having lost their fight to prevent Parliament from enacting the modest social-security legislation, continued their well-financed campaign in the press and on billboards to render it ineffective and to get it repealed.

The Left had its blind spots too in these troubled years of the 1920s.  … like those on the Right they failed to recognize their own shortcomings.  They did not seem to comprehend their own responsibility for the financial mess of the government, which lay primarily in their indecision, in their inability to agree on – let alone enforce – any policy which might have put the government in the black and stopped the financial panic, the flight of capital abroad, and the disastrous fall of the franc. 

In this time the gulf between the Right and Left, between the possessors and the masses, between popular press and its readers, was further enlarged.  More and more, as the 1920s came to an end and the clouds threatening a world-wide depression appeared over New York, Frenchmen faced one another across widening chasm that made hearing over it more difficult and mutual understanding almost impossible.  Each side hardened in its belief that the other was unfit to govern the Republic.