204 The Great Depression, 1929–1935

these very principles, and that the House of Commons just chosen was to sit longer than any other Parliament of modern times. Its electoral origins long since forgotten, this same body was successively to endorse appeasement, war, and Winston Churchill, until in the moment of victory in 1945 it vanished unmourned (see Chapter 15, V).

In the intervening years, economic recovery had begun. After reaching its peak at the beginning of 1933, unemployment fell steadily, until it leveled off in 1936 at a lit. tle more than a million and a half. Production rallied in similar fashion. By 1937, it stood 20 percent above its 1929 level. Yet these figures were less encouraging than they seemed. Even before the Great Depression began, Britain had been in a state of semide. pression, so that a return to “normal” did not mean what it did in other countries. The only reason the boat of the economy did not sink more, one contemporary observed, was that it was already half full of water. The plight of men on the dole was not eased, and resentment continued to smolder among the working classes in the depressed areas and in the country as a whole.

In undertaking state intervention, the National Government followed a line that was neither the hands-off attitude that Brüning or Hoover adopted in the early part of the Great Depression, nor the active policy later pursued by such sharply contrasting experiments as the American New Deal, the Nazi Third Reich, and the French Popular Front. Nothing done in Britain provided anything like their stimulus to morale, and its absence helps account for the apathy and discouragement that brooded over the country throughout the 1930s. In general, the National Government restricted itself to keeping interest rates low and sponsoring a substantial housing program. These were largely the work of the one decisive figure in the ministry, the chancellor of the exchequer, Neville Chamberlain.

Chamberlain was never popular, and his association with appeasement and the catastrophe of 1940 has injured his historical reputation. He was stubborn and unimaginative; his rasping voice, his dark clothes, and his perpetual umbrella symbolized all that was unlovable in the British business classes. But he was an excellent administrator who knew what he wanted and had complete confidence in his ability to carry it out. When Baldwin retired in 1937—having successfully surmounted the crisis of a royal abdication”—there appeared no alternative to making Chamberlain prime minister. He at least stood for something—the rest of the cabinet were little more than ciphers.

France: Tardieu, Herriot, and the Election of 1932

When Poincaré withdrew as French prime minister in the summer of 1929, no satisfac. tory successor appeared. Nobody combined as he did a basic conservatism with a thor. oughly “republican” record calculated to reassure the part of the electorate that always suspected authoritarian tendencies on the Right. The men who followed Poincaré in of. fice were too young to have such a record, and in the case of the three most important— Tardieu, Laval, and Flandin—subsequent dealings with fascism or approaches to fascism proved these suspicions amply justified.

*King Edward VIII, who had been on the throne for only eleven months, was forced to abdicate in December 1936 because of his insistence on marrying an American divorcée.