Poincar's immediate heir, Andr Tardieu, was far too intelligent and far too undiplomatic

to please most deputies. Originally a protg of Clemenceau, he resembled the great war
leader in his shortness of temper and impatience with opposition. In a time of grave national
emergency, the Chamber of Deputies might endure leadership of this sort, but Tardieu could not
convince his colleagues that the early 1930s were indeed such a period. The deputies
continued in their customarily irresponsible attitude toward the national economy, and refused to
listen to Tardieu's warnings that unless they consented to heavy investment in economic
improvements, their country was bound sooner or later to be caught up in the worldwide
depression. They preferred the leader who alternated in power with Tardieu-Pierre Lavala sly
and slippery fellow, converted from the Left to conservatism like so many successful deputies,
who summed up in his own person all that was cynical and corrupt in French parliamentary
politics.
By 1932, the Great Depression had in fact struck France, and in the election of that year
the Left won easily. This put the Radicals under Herriot back in power for the first time in six
years, with the Socialists providing support outside the government, as they had done in 1924.
Once againas had happened thenthe Left ministry involved itself in insoluble financial
difficulties. Herriot stayed in office half a year; of his four successors, only one remained for
more than three months. The last of theseEdouard Daladierhad hardly begun his tenure
when the storm broke that was to drown the Radicals in a torrent of well-orchestrated
indignation.

France: The Riots of 1934: Doumergue and Laval

In December 1933, the police unearthed one of the widely ramifying scandals by which the
French Republic was periodically shaken. The details of the Stavisky case are unimportant;
indeed, they were never properly explained. They involved a provincial pawnshop, a fraudulent
bond issue, and all sorts of unsavory minor details. The really sinister aspect of the case was its
exploitation by the authoritarian wing of the French Right. French reactionaries spread reports
that a number of leading political figures were involved in the scandal and that the government
was concealing their guilt; thus democracy and the Republic itself were discredited in the minds
of countless Frenchmen of conservative and patriotic views.
On February 6, 1934, the adherents of the leading rightist and patriotic organizations
flocked into the streets of Paris to call for Daladier's overthrow. They failed in their attempt to
storm the Chamber of Deputies: The police stopped them with gunfire, and eleven
demonstrators lost their lives. But they did succeed in bringing down the government; Daladier
had shed the blood of patriots, and Daladier had to go.
Not since the Commune of 1871 had France been so close to civil war. Although the
riots of February 1934 were no more than an uncoordinated succession of street
demonstrations, they were symptomatic of a deep-seated malaise that was gradually destroying
whatever fragile consensus existed within French society. The government of the Left had failed.
The Radicals had proved themselves unable to do anything coherent to meet the Great
Depression, and they were hopelessly at odds with the Socialists in their notions of economic
policy. The left-wing electorate was increasingly turning in disgust toward a new militancy and a
near-revolutionary temper. On the Right a similar
The Great Depression, 19291935 205