Paul Reynaud becomes Prime Minister of France

On 21 March 1940 Paul Reynaud, until then Minister of Finance, became head of the French government. The day before, Édouard Daladier had resigned – Prime Minister since April 1938, a signatory of the Munich Agreement and head of the government that had declared war on Germany in September 1939. He was not brought down by any formal motion of no confidence. He went because, after a secret debate on the defeat of Finland, the majority of the Chamber of Deputies had refused him its support by abstaining. The new Prime Minister, a small, energetic lawyer from the Alps, had long been regarded as the fiercest opponent of concessions to Hitler on the French right. He promised to wage the war more vigorously than his predecessor. He began, however, from a position of political weakness: on 22 March the Chamber gave his cabinet its confidence by a majority of just one vote, and Daladier, his rival, remained in the government as Minister of National Defence and War.

Reynaud became Prime Minister on 21 March, following Daladier’s resignation the previous day. The crisis unfolded as follows: Daladier resigned on 20 March, President Albert Lebrun entrusted Reynaud with forming a government that same evening, and the decree appointing the new cabinet bears the date of 21 March. Some French studies give 22 March, the day on which the government presented itself to the Chamber and the decree was published in the official gazette. Some English-language sources also date Daladier’s resignation itself to 21 March.

The shadow of Finland

Daladier’s government fell not because of the war with Germany but because of a war in which France was not fighting. On 30 November 1939 the Soviet Union attacked Finland. French opinion, from the right to the socialists, took the Finnish side with an enthusiasm that the inactivity on the Western Front had never aroused. For the right, which after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact saw the USSR as Hitler’s ally and the communists as the enemy within, aid to Finland was a matter of principle. Some politicians even believed that Moscow, not Berlin, was the real enemy.

Daladier’s government supplied the Finns with aircraft, guns and ammunition, and in February 1940 the Supreme War Council adopted a plan for an expedition through the Norwegian port of Narvik and the Swedish iron-ore mines. The expedition never set off: Sweden and Norway refused passage, and after the breaching of the Mannerheim Line Finland could not wait. At the beginning of March Daladier promised the Finns 50,000 soldiers and a hundred bombers if they asked for them, but on 12 March a peace was signed in Moscow that gave the Soviet Union the Karelian Isthmus with Viipuri (Vyborg). In France it was received as a French defeat. It was said that after Poland the government had abandoned a second ally, and that grand announcements had come to nothing.

The government came under attack from two sides. The right and the advocates of an understanding with Germany, among them Pierre Laval and Pierre-Étienne Flandin, accused Daladier of incompetence and of chaos in the conduct of the war. Those who wanted a more vigorous war accused him of passivity. In mid-March both houses of parliament debated Finland in secret sessions (comités secrets), without the public and without reports in the press. In the Chamber of Deputies Daladier defended his policy and set out the state of Allied preparations, but he was sharply attacked. Gaston Bergery, a former Radical who was then drawing closer to the advocates of a compromise with the Reich, said that men who had been able neither to avoid the war nor to prepare for it were not fit to end it or to win it.

The vote of 19 March and the resignation

The secret debate ended on 19 March with a vote on an order of the day expressing confidence in the government. 239 deputies voted for it and only one against, but some 300 abstained. Formally the government had won; politically it had lost: the majority of the Chamber did not want to overthrow it, but nor did it want to go on supporting it. Those who abstained included both its critics on the right and some of those who were demanding that the war be waged more energetically. Daladier concluded that in wartime he could not govern without a clear majority. On 20 March he tendered his resignation to President Lebrun.

To many, Reynaud was the obvious successor. As Minister of Finance since November 1938 he had put the budget in order and found the money for rearmament, and his slogan of the autumn of 1939, “We shall win because we are the stronger”, hung on posters all over the country. In Daladier’s cabinet he had been the Prime Minister’s open rival, having long differed from him over Munich, over the conduct of the war and over the Commander-in-Chief, Maurice Gamelin, whom Reynaud considered too cautious. Towards Germany he was uncompromising. Towards the USSR he did not share the obsession of part of the right: in the 1930s he had supported an understanding with Moscow as a counterweight to the Reich. It was reckoned that he would attract both those who wanted a tougher war and the left.

Reynaud’s government

Reynaud formed his cabinet quickly and, as it turned out, at great risk. In addition to the premiership he took the Foreign Ministry himself. The Radical Camille Chautemps became Deputy Prime Minister. Daladier remained Minister of National Defence and War: he was the leader of the Radical Party, without whose support no government could count on a majority. Reynaud would have preferred to be rid of him but could not afford to. Three socialists from the French Section of the Workers’ International joined the government: Albert Sérol as Minister of Justice, Georges Monnet as Minister of Blockade and Albert Rivière as Minister of Veterans. It was the first time the socialists had entered a cabinet since the fall of Léon Blum’s second government. The Ministry of the Colonies went to Georges Mandel, a former associate of Georges Clemenceau and one of the few politicians who, like Reynaud, had warned against Hitler from the start. The engineer and railway organiser Raoul Dautry became Minister of Armament, Lucien Lamoureux Minister of Finance, Henri Roy Minister of the Interior and Ludovic-Oscar Frossard Minister of Information.

The cabinet was very large and brought together men of opposing views. Alongside the advocates of a hard war sat politicians who remembered Munich well and doubted whether the war could be won. Reynaud also set up a War Committee, a smaller body of ministers and commanders that was to coordinate the conduct of the war. As its secretary and as Under-Secretary of State to the Prime Minister he appointed Paul Baudouin, a banker from the Banque de l’Indochine who had previously made no secret of his scepticism about the war with Germany. According to the memoirs of Charles de Gaulle, he himself was to have been secretary of the Committee, but Daladier objected. Paris also gossiped about the rivalry between two women: Countess Hélène de Portes, Reynaud’s influential companion, and the Marquise Jeanne de Crussol, who was close to Daladier. Countess de Portes, openly sceptical about the war and hostile to the British, was to play a sinister role in June 1940.

A majority of one

On 22 March Reynaud presented his government at the Palais Bourbon. The short ministerial declaration was a call to total war. France, the Prime Minister said, was waging a total war, and the stakes of such a war were total: “To conquer is to save everything; to succumb is to lose everything.” By his own account, the text of the declaration had been prepared by Colonel de Gaulle, commander of the tanks of the 5th Army in Alsace, whom Reynaud had known since the end of 1934 and whose views on armoured warfare he had long supported. As recently as January 1940 de Gaulle had sent several dozen politicians and soldiers a memorandum on the coming of the age of “mechanical force”, in which he warned that an army clinging to the defence of the Maginot Line would be beaten by the German armoured divisions. Now he sat in the public gallery watching a debate that in his memoirs he called “dreadful”.

It was indeed one of the most difficult debates in the history of the Third Republic. The right attacked Reynaud for letting the socialists into the government, for keeping in it men whom it blamed for the mismanagement of the war, and for not intending to turn against the USSR. Some of his former political friends on the moderate right, grouped around Flandin, voted against him or abstained. Many Radicals loyal to Daladier gave the new Prime Minister a cool reception. 268 deputies voted for the government, 156 against, and 111 abstained. More than half the votes in its favour came from the socialists. The number voting “for” exceeded by one the combined total of those voting against and abstaining – hence the saying about a government with “a majority of one”. De Gaulle later recorded that the President of the Chamber, Édouard Herriot, confided to him years afterwards that he was not at all sure that Reynaud really had that one vote.

Two men in one government

From its first day the government rested on a compromise that paralysed it. Daladier, resentful and convinced that he had been unseated by intrigue, ran the army from the ministry in the rue Saint-Dominique and communicated with Reynaud reluctantly. He was the guarantor of the position of Gamelin, whom Reynaud wanted to remove. The Prime Minister thus held the Foreign Ministry and had ambitions to direct the war, but had no authority over the army. His closest associate on military matters was Colonel Paul de Villelume, a critic of Gamelin, while de Gaulle, who for the time being returned to the front, remained his adviser on doctrine. The dispute over the command, over strategy and over personnel went on throughout the spring and could have blown the cabinet apart at any moment.

Above all, Reynaud wanted to seize the initiative. He believed that time was not on the Allies’ side if they merely waited behind the Maginot Line while the Germans calmly increased their production. He demanded more vigorous action in Scandinavia, where after the Finnish–Soviet peace all that remained was to cut the Reich off from Swedish ore, and he looked into ideas for striking at the Soviet oilfields in the Caucasus, which were supplying Germany. Daladier and Gamelin were more cautious. In the background the Phoney War went on: five million mobilised men had been waiting in barracks and forts for six months, and the morale of the army and of society was ebbing.

Place in the war

The new Prime Minister’s first step was a journey to London. On 28 March, at a meeting of the Supreme War Council, Reynaud and Neville Chamberlain agreed on a joint declaration that neither country would conclude a separate armistice or peace with Germany, and the Council decided to mine Norwegian coastal waters. Reynaud committed himself to the Norwegian question more than anyone on the French side, but on 9 April the Germans forestalled the Allies and occupied Denmark and Norway. The failure of the Norwegian campaign sharpened the dispute over Gamelin. On 9 May, at a cabinet meeting, Reynaud accused the Commander-in-Chief of mismanaging the war and decided to tender the cabinet’s resignation in order to free himself of Daladier. The next morning the Germans launched their offensive in the west and the crisis was put on hold.

The dispute that had begun in March weighed on the most important weeks of the war. Only after the front had been broken at Sedan did Reynaud take over the national defence portfolio, Daladier moving to the Foreign Ministry, and on 19 May Gamelin was replaced by General Maxime Weygand. Reynaud appointed Marshal Philippe Pétain Deputy Prime Minister, counting on his authority, and in June made de Gaulle Under-Secretary of State at the War Ministry. When the French army collapsed, Reynaud wanted to continue the fight from North Africa, in keeping with the undertaking of 28 March. Pétain and Weygand demanded an armistice. The government, cobbled together from the start out of men with conflicting aims, did not survive this test: on 16 June 1940 Reynaud resigned and Pétain became Prime Minister and asked the Germans for an armistice.

The March crisis showed how fragile France’s home front was during the Phoney War. A war without fighting divided parliament more deeply than a real war: into those who wanted to fight harder, those who called for a fight against the USSR, and those who quietly hoped for a compromise with Germany. Reynaud was the ablest and most determined of the men who could then have headed the government, but he took power with a majority of one, with a rival at the War Ministry and with a Commander-in-Chief he did not trust. With such backing he had to meet the German onslaught that in six weeks decided the fate of the Third Republic.