Poincaré's immediate heir, André Tardieu, was far too intelligent and far too undiplomatic to please most deputies. Originally a protégé 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 Laval—a 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 again—as had happened then—the 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 these—Edouard Daladier—had 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

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