(2 of 6)
By last week this boast had proved empty. It was clear that the French proletariat were not being led by "Papa" Jouhaux and he petulantly left Paris. Arriving in Geneva, M. Jouhaux sought to bury his chagrin in the stodgy duties of a delegate to the annual session of the League of Nations affiliated International Labor Organization. At once he found himself bickering with the French employers' Geneva representative and with Senator Justin Godart who represented Premier Blum. After a violent, three-cornered quarrel about what was supposed to have been agreed in Paris, pontifical Léon Jouhaux refused to bicker further, sealed his heavy lips with the remark, "Here in Geneva is not the place to settle this."
There was no one place but instead there were something like 1,500 places in which French employes were busy at that moment imposing moderate but inflexible demands upon individual employers, most of whom knuckled under. One who did not, and he seemed to be the only exception in all France, was the spunky owner of a café in Versailles. Rather than yield to his waiters he sought to shoo them out of his place by firing his revolver, was promptly arrested.
The "stayin strikes" and "folded arms strikes" which continued to make Jean Frenchman idle by the million were strictly against French law, but new Premier Blum showed his nervousness last week and strengthened the strikers' hands (much to his own chagrin) by announcing that Minister of Interior Roger Salengro would not instruct French police to oust employes from the property of their employers. In a speech to the Chamber of Deputies 16 days after stayin strikes had become general, Léon Blum wailed, "Do you want me to use the police and then the Army and risk provoking a repetition of the days of June?"
Since the new Premier is voluminously read and prone to pad his speeches with abstruse allusions, no one knew precisely which "days of June" he feared might return. Possibly the June of 1848 in which proletarian strife at Paris was put down by whiffs of grapeshot and opened the way for the brief Second Empire under Louis Napoleon.
"Give them what they want!" In the Chamber the only policy of the Blum Cabinet remained, "Give them what they want!'' and in fact last week Le Peuple Souverain of France were advancing without visible national leadership in broad proletarian gains which French Capital and its representatives had no stomach to oppose. While Communists sought to coax the ending of strikes, while Fascists sought to flatter the workers by editorials in which their orderliness and the moderation of their demands were praised, steadily day by day Le Peuple Souverain saw one measure after another to their liking hastily passed by the Chamber of Deputies.