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At this juncture French Foreign Minister Flandin bestirred himself to make a French "gesture" toward peace. Working day & night with his Foreign Office experts, he framed a plan that combined "collective security" with the necessities of a campaign document for the French elections next fortnight. Its chief virtue was that it would be discussed in the atmosphere set by the French, Belgian and British staff conversations which the German Press were excoriating as "a diplomatic blunder'' and "a dark shadow."
The Flandin Plan rejected Adolf Hitler's political case in toto. demanded permanent defortification of the Rhineland and proposed a network of mutual assistance pacts to cover Europe and include Russia. It also proposed Andre Tardieu's favorite idea of a League of Nations Army for Europe's exclusive use.
In the Chancelleries of Europe last week a huge split was appearing between the "legal" and "political" realities of Europe. France, for good reasons of her own, was insisting on the exclusive maintenance of the legal realities set forth in treaties made in a bygone era. Germany was rigidly insisting on the political reality of her might as a Great Power. Britain straddled the split. She promised to go to the aid of France in case of a German invasion. She deplored the scrapping of the Locarno Pact. But in the last pinch she did not consider that Germany had yet invaded anybody by invading her own Rhineland.