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The Popular Front, Civil-Military Relations and the French Army’S Plan to Defeat a Second Paris Commune, 1934–1936

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The Popular Front, Civil-Military Relations and the French Army’S Plan to Defeat a Second Paris Commune, 1934–1936 international journal of military history and historiography 39 (2019) 63-87 IJMH brill.com/ijmh Plan Z: The Popular Front, Civil-Military Relations and the French Army’s Plan to Defeat a Second Paris Commune, 1934–1936 Andrew Orr* Kansas State University [email protected] Abstract Following the formation of the Popular Front in 1934, French generals feared that the alliance, which included the French Communist Party (pcf), could foreshadow a com- ing revolt in Paris. Generals Maxime Weygand and Maurice Gamelin responded by preparing to implement Plan Z, a plan to defeat a Parisian revolt. Given politicians’ fear that many French officers were antirepublican, the French Army would have faced a major political crisis if Plan Z had leaked. Plan Z called for a multidivisional assault on Paris, which showed that the General Staff believed a large-scale revolution was possible. Understanding the development of Plan Z adds to scholars’ recognition of French officers’ long-term fear of communism and mistrust of civilians. It reveals that senior officers were more politicized and afraid of civilians than most scholars have realized and helps explain the military’s central role in betraying the Third Republic and creating the Vichy Regime in 1940. Keywords France – Civil-Military – Communism – Interwar – Popular Front – Vichy * Andrew Orr is Associate Professor of Military History and Security Studies at Kansas State University. He received his PhD in Modern European History from the University of Notre Dame in 2007. He is the author of Women and the French Army during the World Wars, 1914– 1940 (Indiana, 2017) and has published articles on military history and civil-military relations in the Journal of Military History, French Historical Studies, and French History. He resides in Manhattan, Kansas. The research for this article was supported by a grant from the Nanovic Institute for European Studies and a Sorin Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of Notre Dame. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/24683302-03901004Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 03:45:10AM via free access <UN> 64 Orr 1 Introduction Interwar French military leaders’ fear of communism and lack of faith in France’s democratic institutions was a major weakness in the structure of the Third Republic. From 1925 until the declaration of war against Germany, French generals maintained detailed plans to crush a popular revolt in Paris. Between 1934 and 1936, many of France’s generals feared that the formation of the Popular Front, an alliance of left-wing parties including the French Com- munist Party (pcf), could precipitate an armed revolt in Paris and responded by preparing Plan Z, a plan to crush a new Paris Commune. These fears were rooted in officers’ long-term mistrust of civilians, exacerbated by their fear of communism, and magnified by Paris’s history of radicalism. The 1934–36 version of Plan Z was part of a decade-long planning process. Officers’ fears proved to be exaggerated, and they often conflated communism with the civil- ian world, but Plan Z should inform scholars’ understanding of the military’s relationship with the civilian world and its role in creating the Vichy Regime. Plan Z, and senior generals’ preparation to use it in the spring and summer of 1936, showed that the army’s officer corps was politicized, feared a com- munist revolt, and lacked faith in the civilian government’s ability to govern France. Historians of the French Army and civil-military relations during the 1930s broadly agree that the French officer corps was strongly anti-communist. Mar- tin Alexander, Philip Bankwitz, Jean-Jacques Becker, Serge Bernstein, Peter Jackson, and Georges Vidal have all shown that at some point in the interwar era, French officers feared a communist revolution or coup, however that con- sensus masks major divisions.1 Often these scholars have focused on the views and personalities of key individual commanders, especially Generals Maxime Weygand and Maurice Gamelin, to explain changes in civil-military relations, but this has obscured the deeper continuity of views within the military high command. The traditionalist approach, epitomized by Philip Bankwitz and 1 Martin Alexander, The Republic in Danger: General Maurice Gamelin and the Politics of French Defence, 1933–1940 (New York, 1993); Philip Bankwitz, Maxime Weygand and Civil-Military Re- lations in Modern France (Cambridge MA, 1967); Jean-Jacques Becker and Serge Bernstein, L’anticommunisme en France (1917–1940), Vol. 1, (Paris, 1987); Peter Jackson, “Stratégie et idéologie: le haut commandement français et la guerre civile espagnole”, Guerres mondiale et conflits contemporains, 199 (3) (2001); 111–133; Georges Vidal, La Grande illusion?: le Parti communiste français et la Défense nationale à l’époque du Front populaire, 1934–1939 (Lyon, 2006). international journal of military history and historiographyDownloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 39 (2019) 63-87 03:45:10AM via free access <UN> Plan Z 65 Paul Marie de La Gorce, emphasized the fragility of civil-military relations in the 1930s and the politicization of the army high command by General Wey- gand, while Alexander, a revisionist who defended Gamelin, argued that the officer corps he led was apolitical until the German victory in 1940.2 Together with Peter Jackson, whose positions partly support his own, Alexander claimed that previous historians had exaggerated officers’ hostility toward the Popular Front before the 1936 elections and focused on the Spanish Civil War as the catalyst for officers embracing extreme anti-communism.3 Alexander, Jack- son, and Robert Doughty incorporated the work of John Steward Angler and Henry Dutailly to assert that although the officers were anti-communist, they remained apolitical and retained general confidence in the republican govern- ment throughout the late-1930s.4 This article uses Plan Z to challenge the re- visionist position. It builds on and revises Philip Nord’s claim that the Fall of France in 1940 represented a double defeat, a military defeat and a political defeat inflicted on the Third Republic by senior generals by showing that the political climate of June-July 1940 was rooted in officers’ longstanding fear of communism and public disorder.5 Georges Vidal’s expansive work on communism and the French Army in the 1930s provides important background to this article. Vidal recognized the strength of military anti-communism and presented a more fearful officer corps than the revisionists, while arguing it was not politicized based on of- ficers being more discrete than civilian politicians. Vidal’s compromise implic- itly relied on a wave model of military anti-communism with peaks during the 1925–26 Rif War, the 1932 Fantômas Affair, and a period in late 1936 and early 2 Bankwitz, Maxime Weygand, 252–256; Alexander, The Republic in Danger; Martin Alexander, “Soldiers and Socialists: the French officer corps and leftist government 1935–7” in The French and Spanish Popular Fronts: Comparative Perspectives, Martin Alexander and Helen Graham eds. (New York, 1989), 62–66, 73–78; Paul Marie de La Gorce, The French Army; a military- political history (New York, 1963). 3 Martin Alexander, “Soldiers and Socialist,” 62–66, 73–78; Jackson, “Stratégie et idéologie”, 111–133. 4 John Steward Ambler, Soldiers Against the State: The French Army in Politics, 1945–1962 (New York, 1968); Henry Dutailly and François André Paoli, Les problèmes de l’Armée de terre fran- çais: 1935–1939, Vol. 5 (Paris, 1980); Robert. Doughty, “The French Armed Forces, 1918–1940” in Military Effectiveness: Volume 2 The Interwar Period, Alan Millett and Williamson Murray eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 40–41. 5 Philip Nord, France 1940: Defending the Republic (New Haven: 2015), 107–111. international journal of military history and historiographyDownloaded 39 (2019)from Brill.com09/25/2021 63-87 03:45:10AM via free access <UN> 66 Orr 1937 associated with the Spanish Civil War.6 This article builds on Vidal’s work while rejecting the wave model, showing that officers were more politicized and afraid of the Popular Front than most scholars have recognized. Vidal and Jackson have both discussed plans to use the French Army in Paris, but they have underestimated the scale and importance of the plans. Vidal explored a 1932 plan produced by the military governor of Paris’s staff which involved a force of 28,000 to 50,000 men in greater Paris, many of whom would be civilian police.7 Alexander tangentially identified one part of the fi- nal preparations of the 1935 version of Plan Z when he found a request that Gamelin authorize sending six battalions to reinforce Paris in September 1935. He dismissed the episode’s importance by noting that Gamelin only sent one colonial regiment (3 battalions).8 Neither scholar however realized that what they found were merely pieces of a much larger and repeatedly updated plan. Although this article does not use gender as a category of analysis, it draws on the work of Geoff Read and Valerie Deacon, whose gendered analyses of interwar politics and the military have helped show the depth of left-right divi- sions in France and the politicization of critical parts of the officer corps. In his pathbreaking work on interwar French party politics, Read showed the pcf spent the interwar era publicly declaring its goal of infiltrating and subverting the military as part of creating a hyper-masculine proletarian man who would strike physical blows against the bourgeois republic.9 Deacon’s studies of the extreme right in the late 1930s and in the wartime Resistance have illuminated the construction of gender on the right and emphasized that many officers were deeply politicized and antirepublican in the 1930s.10 6 Georges Vidal, “L’Armée française face au problème de la subversion communiste au début des années 1930”, Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains, 204 (2001); 47; Vidal, La Grande illusion?; Georges Vidal “L’Affaire Fantômas (1932): Le contre-espionnage fran- çais et les prémices de la préparation à la guerre”, Vingtième Siècles.
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