The Police Experience of the Popular Front

8 Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1 From Hope to Disappointment: The Police Experience of the Popular Front

In Marseille, the general election campaign of 1936 got off to a violent start. On 16 April, an off-duty Gardien de la Paix, Charles Antoine Castola, was beaten and then mortally wounded by two bullets in the kidneys in the Boulevard Camille-Pelletan at the entrance to the Celona bar which served as campaign headquarters to the Socialist candidate, Pierre Ferri-Pisani. Castola was not an officer of whom the Police were particularly proud. Born in Ajaccio in 1901, he had entered the force in 1925 and after promising beginnings had fallen out of favour. Each summer he would apply for sick leave, seemingly in an attempt to prolong his holidays to his family’s village of Zevaco in Corsica. In 1932, he took over one hundred days off through illness and soon after returning to work the following year he contracted a hernia raising his truncheon to direct the traffic necessitating further convalescence. In his annual assessments he had passed from a young, energetic, intelligent officer uninterested in politics and with a bright future to a mediocre revolutionary who spent his time provoking col- leagues. Almost as soon as Castola died the campaign to claim him politically began. Ferri-Pisani, who accompanied the dying man to the Hôtel-Dieu, that vast creamy-orange hospital reconstructed in the 18th century, immediately had posters glued on the walls of the city claiming that Joseph (sic) Castola had been a good friend of his and accusing Simon Sabiani, to whom Ferri-Pisani had previously served as political lieutenant before Sabiani’s shift to the extreme-right, of having organised his assassination. Using the medium of their bi-weekly newspaper Marseille-Libre, the Sabianistes replied in turn, reminding their readers that Charles Castola had been a member of the ‘Comité Simon Sabiani’ (‘Friends of Simon Sabiani’) and had spent the after- noon before his death in their company in Sabiani’s headquarters, situated not twenty meters from Ferri-Pisani’s, and accusing the Socialists of having killed ‘one of theirs’. The campaign to claim Castola politically was symbolic of the importance the Police held in political debate in France at that moment.1

1 AD BDR, 4M 76, dossier Castola; AD BDR 4M 178, Commissariat Central, daily report of 16 to 17 April, 1936; Marseille Libre, 19 April 1936 & 23 April 1936; Marseille Soir, 17 April 1936; Petit Marseillais, 18 April 1936; Petit Provençal, 18 April 1936 & 21 April 1936; Loup Durand, Le Caïd, Paris, 1976, p 233; J.-B. Nicolai, Simon Sabiani, Paris, 1991, pp 198-199.

Public order issues were at the very heart of the foundation of the Popular Front, a political alliance of Socialists, Radicals, Communists, trade unions and civil rights groups. The need for a defensive alliance of left-wing forces had become apparent in reaction to the bloody evening of 6 February 1934: one of those tumultuous riots with which Parisian history is littered. In the wake of the Stavisky and Raynaldi politico-financial scandals and the consequent sack- ing of Jean Chiappe, Prefect of Police known for his friendly relations with the leagues of the extreme-right, anti-Republican militants had taken to the streets to demonstrate their hostility to the parliamentary regime. By the light of burning buses and flames provoked by gas spurting out of broken street-lamps, Police and extreme-right militants fought a pitched battle using iron bars, clubs, sabres and handguns. As the number of casualties mounted, reaching a total of 17 dead and 2300 injured, the Police were outflanked. 3000 militants from the para-military league the Croix-de-Feu found just a feeble roadblock of 38 Police officers separating them from the parliament buildings. Historians are still debating why the Croix-de-Feu leader, de la Rocque, decided to send his troops towards the Esplanade des Invalides rather than to force this roadblock but most agree that his grouping could easily have invaded the parliament. Coming just a year after Hitler’s seizure of power, contemporaries viewed this riot as proof of a ‘fascist’ threat in France. From these events, the left drew the lesson that it needed to stop its sectarian in-fighting, recognise the extreme- right as its principal enemy and form an alliance to defend Republican institu- tions and public order.2 In the elections of 1936 even the Communists made public order one of their priorities. The headline of the Communist daily L’Humanité of 24 April read: ‘For public order, vote Communist’. The Radicals and the reformist wing of the Socialist party had always been profoundly legalist and so pleading for public order came much more naturally to them. The Socialist Léon Blum, who became prime minister after the Popular Front’s triumph in the general elections of 26 April and 3 May 1936, stressed that failure to preserve public order would paralyse the government. The Interior Minister Roger Salengro, also a Socialist, announced that between anarchy and order he would always opt for the latter and promised that whatever the cost he would make order prevail. In Salengro’s conception order would be maintained primarily by assuring social harmony and by encouraging a partnership of employers and employees so that negotiation would replace conflict. Salengro was proud to be able to report

2 Chambre des députés, Rapport des événements du 6 février 1934, Paris, 1934; Philippe Bourdrel, La Cagoule, p 22; Jan Stevenson, The Cagoule Conspiracy, Dissertation for Bachelor’s degree (history), Yale University, 1972, pp 17-18.