FRANCE: Cabinet of Premiers

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A new Cabinet was quickly formed containing representatives of nearly every party except Royalists, orthodox Socialists and Communists. Much was made of the fact that, including "Gastounet," who served as Premier once before in 1913-14, six onetime Premiers were in it: Edouard Herriot, now Minister of State without portfolio; André Tardieu, also a Minister of State; Pierre Laval, now Minister of Colonies; Albert Sarraut, now Minister of the Interior; Louis Barthou, now Minister of Foreign Affairs. Republican idealists were more concerned over the fact that for the first time since the founding of the Third Republic the Cabinet contained two generals. Marshal Pétain, defender of Verdun, was the new Minister of War. General Victor Denain, onetime military aide to President Doumergue, is the new Minister for Air. The Cabinet of Premiers' first move was to announce that the plight of Austria was quite as vital to France as anything happening at home. Premier Doumergue and Ministers Herriot, Tardieu, and Barthou formed a sort of Directorate of Four to take up the problem at once. This was followed by an official footnote to reassure Frenchmen that this group had no intention of becoming a Dictatorship like the famed Directorate of First Consul Bonaparte.

In the two days that followed, Paris had a chance to bind up its wounds. Accurate figures on casualties were almost impossible to obtain. Checking the official figures against their own careful survey of all Paris hospitals, U. S. news agencies agreed that 16 people had been killed, about 400 seriously wounded. Finally French officials admitted 21 dead, 2,400 seriously wounded.

Where these swift developments left Jean Chiappe no one pretended to know. Under great pressure, the dapper prefect of Paris police had been dismissed by Premier Daladier because one section of the public believed that he had wilfully failed to prosecute Swindler Stavisky, because another section believed that he collected a fat fortune in office by subtly blackmailing crooked politicians. But even without these groups smiling Prefect Chiappe still had enormous personal popularity throughout Paris. No sooner was his removal announced than roars for his restoration were heard. Rioting crowds interlarded "Vive Chiappe!" with cries of "Voleurs!" "Assassins!", saved their most savage attacks, their deadliest brickbats for the blue-clad Garde Mobile, a section of the French constabulary that was invented and organized by Prefect Chiappe himself.

Jean III. Scrawls of VIVE LE ROI! on walls and sidewalks and roaring young Royalists swinging loaded canes were not lost upon a very tall, very dignified exile in Belgium. Two days after the bloodiest fighting the Royalist newspaper Action Française published a manifesto that had come by special courier from Brussels:

"Frenchmen: From the foreign land where a law of banishment cruelly detains me, I bow with sad emotion before the dead and wounded who, at the cost or the risk of their lives, accepted the challenge to probity and honor given by an unworthy Government in its panic-stricken impotence. . . .