The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact - ELTE BTK Történelem Szakos Portál

is nothing surprising. Then he took on a reassuring attitude asserting that
„France had known other crisis that she had surpassed” 14 .
Did he want the public opinion to stay quiet? Or did he want to protect the
radicals in the government? We don’t know for sure but he was indeed more
vehement with his political opponent than with Germany or Russia. He stays
always kind to the government because he considered that „the government had
tried to settle a peace through negotiations, so there was nothing to blame it
for” 15 . Moreover, at the end of his editorial he put his trust on the government
saying: „in these dark hours, we have to trust our leaders whose fearsome
honour it is by right to steer the history of France” 16 . This last sentence is
completely rooted in the republican and patriotic ideal. So obviousness and
astonishment are mixed with realism and republicanism.
The motives of the Crime
During the first week which followed the 23 of august politicians tried to
explain it. Concerning Germany, Blum and socialist advance the idea that
Hitler wanted to put the disorder inside British and French governments and
public opinions. Hitler hated the communism and the anticommunist ideology
is a base of Nazism. So, for them it finally seemed logical that Hitler should put
his signature on a pact that could benefit him greatly. Indeed we know that it
allowed him to invade Poland. It was just a diplomatic about-turn to satisfy a
need: to protect himself from the opening of an eastern front and take over
Poland. Moreover, not long before, Italy and Germany had signed an antikommintern
pact. Hitler wasn’t scared of rejecting it, as Jacques Lemoine
emphasized a few days later in his La Petite Gironde Editorial. This daily was
more vehement against the führer keeping the idea of a trick: „it is a German
trick revealed in all its real and cynical cunning” 17 . But he kept the line that it
was only to be expected from Germany. Generally, the political world in the
Landes agreed more or less about the motives they could find to the Reich's act.
Blum wrote a sentence which summed up Hitler’s reasons: „the device used is
shocking for our reason, but tyranny delivers people of all misgivings” 18 . In Le
Démocrate we can read: „forgetful of everything that he had said and writen,
Hitler threw himself into the arms of the red tsar” 19 . He is taken for a trafficker
of conscience that nobody would listen to again.
About USSR, we attend a real trial for high treason. For the socialists,
14
Editorial du 23 août 1939, La Petite Gironde.
15
Idem.
16
Idem.
17
Editorial du 23 août 1939, La Petite Gironde.
18
Le Travailleurs Landais, Editorial du 26 août 1939.
19
Le Démocrate, Républicain Radical Socialiste, art. Cynisme, L.Barbedette, n°du 17 au 24
septembre 1939.
149