The Setting in the West

Abstract

The three most powerful Western states involved in the Far Eastern crisis were led by men who, in terms of domestic politics, were insecure and on the defensive. In the French Third Republic, of course, this could almost be assumed as one element of the situation. Since January 1931, Pierre Laval1 had headed one of the conservatively-oriented governments whose tenure of power since 1930 had been facilitated by the refusals of Blum and the Socialists to help the Radicals form an administration.2 Elections due for the summer of 1932, however, might provide a further opportunity for a revival of a Cartel des Gauches. Meanwhile, there was no great harmony between Laval and his Minister for Foreign Affairs, Aristide Briand. For all his basic pragmatism and awareness of the problems of French security in terms of power politics, Briand’s faith in the League aroused scepticism and derision in many French nationalists; a vain and unhappy candidature for the Presidency of the Republic had further weakened his political position in the summer of 1931, and age and ill-health were taking their toll. By the time Laval seized the opportunity of the death of his Minister for War to reform his government in January 1932, to the exclusion of Briand, the latter was already in eclipse and had only a few months to live. In Herriot’s words, ‘Aristide Briand, le pacificateur, est mort comme un exile dans son propre pays’; he died, writes Professor Duroselle, ‘dans la tristesse et dans l’echec’.3