FRANCE: National Solidarity

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FRANCE "National Solidarity"

So many thousands of French people were refugees from the Frontier Zone in the last fortnight, many dead broke and in desperate need, that to get money to succor them the State announced a "national solidarity" tax to be collected after October 1 by taking 15% of all salaries public and private, annuities and even pensions. Refugee traffic through Paris—as refugees moved from one part of France to another—was at the rate of over 5,000 people per day. Since people have to carry baggage even in wartime and many of the refugees are old men, women or children, husky porters who might have been sent to the Maginot Line were still sweating in Paris stations.

Anyone owning foreign securities who dropped in at a French bank to cash the coupons was asked if he was French. In case the answer was "yes," the bank deducted 36% of the payment as a tax. Down at the other end of the economic scale, French workmen found their overtime pay docked by a tax of 25% also for "national solidarity."

Any grumbling about all this simply was out. And the French mood last week was such that any element which could possibly be called subversive was under pressure of cracking weight. Leon Blum, the Socialist leader who three years ago gave France a brief "New Deal" as Premier, wrote in his Le Populaire: "I appeal to the Communist chiefs, and I adjure them once more—let them cry out to the country that their pact with Moscow is broken, that Stalin's stab in the back has freed them from their pledges, that all is finished between them and Moscow and that they are henceforth only French citizens, entirely free, that is to say having now no other duty and discipline than the common duty and common discipline of Frenchmen. But let them make haste."

This was interpreted as a veiled warning that the Daladier Cabinet may soon outlaw the Communist Party altogether. Ever since the Hitler-Stalin pact was announced French Communist Deputies have been quietly resigning from the Party, hoping to keep their seats in the Chamber. The French equivalent of the American Federation of Labor, the C. G. T. (Confederation Generate du Travail) headed by Labor Boss Leon Jouhaux adopted a resolution which described Russia's gobbling up of three-fifths of Poland (see p. 29) as "a premeditated treason consummated against peace, and an act of treachery toward the proletariat, which had been summoned to rise against Naziism. This aid to an aggressor government places in jeopardy the lives of millions upon millions of human beings, including millions of workers."