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The Communists at week's end appeared somewhat nervous. Red newsorgans in many cases appealed for swift ending of the strikes on the ground that a France in which the munitions industry was paralyzed would be easy game for Germany, the land whose Brownshirt rulers bludgeon pinks and reds.
Abruptly Premier Blum dismissed Governor Jean Samson Tannery of the Bank of France but appointed to succeed him a person perfectly agreeable to the 200 Families, M. Emile Sosthene Labeyrie, stuffy Attorney General of the Court of Audits.
Since to carry out the Socialist Ten Commandments is going to cost hundreds of millions if not billions of francs, and since the French Treasury has for months been hard pressed for cash, everyone in Paris fiscal circles assumed last week that altering the country's money is now just around the corner. This Premier Blum did his best to avoid mentioning, said that he will resort to "a generous appeal to credit."
Socialist Blum next turned to the precise form of demagoguery for which his followers are accustomed to roast Fascist Mussolini. Appearing before 30,000 pinks and reds who had gathered in a Paris velodrome to give him their plaudits, Orator Blum had a party cheerleader fill in his pauses with such questions as, "Have you confidence in Blum?" "
Yes! Yes! Yes!" roared the new Premier's 30,000 yes-men of the evening. "Yes, we have confidence! Long live the International—Soviets everywhere!"
This imitation of the Fascist rallies at which everyone answers Mussolini's questions "Yes!" was staged between two halves of a conference of Labor & Capital which Premier Blum held at his official residence. To represent Labor came goatee-waggling Leon Jouhaux of the French trade unions, although the outstanding feature of last week's strike situation in France was that neither he nor any other national figure represented the sporadic strikers. Idea of the parley— Premier Blum's own smart idea—was that Capital, as represented by the French employers' associations, should announce that it agreed to all the sporadic strikers' demands and that Labor, in the person of Leon Jouhaux who had never wanted the strikes anyway, should announce that they were over. This scheme was carried through about midnight and at 1:30 a. m. the government radio broadcast that everything was settled.
Everything perhaps should have been settled, since almost everyone else had caved in before the strikers and announced that they were to get what they wanted, but in fact new strikes broke out throughout the north of France and correspondents could not discover how many of the original strikes had in fact been settled. In Paris gasoline flowed again, newspaper kiosks reopened and food became easier to get but every department store and many another was still paralyzed by strikes. Gold continued in flight from France by every steamer. Premier Blum, however, was considered even by his enemies to have made a smart start. In a nearly chaotic crisis he had at least done well enough to get in many parts of the world such headlines as "FRENCH STRIKE IS BROKEN" and "BLUM ENDS STRIKE."
—Because, argues M. Herriot, an unpaid U. S. is sure not to send any soldiers to succor France the next time Germany attacks.