"Massacre of Ministries"

In utter disgust at the behavior of the Chamber of Deputies last week doughty old Premier Albert ("Tomcat") Sarraut exclaimed, "The financial hemorrhage continues!" Few hours later he rode off to present the resignation of his four-week-old Cabinet to President Albert Lebrun.

The hemorrhage was golden. Because the Chamber has voted down Cabinet after Cabinet rather than balance the budget (TIME. Oct. 30, et ante), gold was pouring out of France at the rate of 100,000,000 francs a day, in flight to London, Amsterdam, Geneva and even Berlin. The Deputies pointed to the Bank of France gold reserves of nearly 80 billion francs and contended that the drain of 100 million francs a day could continue for at least another month before becoming "dangerous." This would give time, they remarked, to construct more Cabinets and "find a real majority."

Three of the four Premiers France has had in the past year have been members of the misnamed Radical Socialist Party --neither Radicals nor Socialists but men of Liberal bourgeois stamp. Their great leader, Edouard Herriot, perpetual Mayor of Lyons and several times Premier, could not form a Cabinet this week because: 1) he has barely recovered from a trip to Russia and Turkey which deranged his kidneys and caused him to lose 50 pounds; 2) he fell as Premier the day before Dec. 15 last year trying to get the Chamber to vote France's War debt payment to the U. S. and does not want to be Premier on Dec. 15 this year, when the Chamber will presumably continue to refuse last year's payment as well as this year's.

"Vive Herriot!" cried scores of deputies when the loose-skinned leader appeared in the Chamber last week for the first time since his illness. When President Lebrun asked him to form a Cabinet he refused amid a buzz of Paris rumor that "Herriot will accept about Dec. 17."

To carry on meanwhile another Radical Socialist was chosen, drab, henchmanly M. Camille Chautemps who once before did stop-gap duty as Premier, that time for only five days (TIME, March 10, 1930). As announced, the Chautemps Cabinet was virtually the same as that led until last week by Albert Sarraut and previously by Edouard Daladier (see p. 17). In the Chautemps Cabinet, M. Sarraut returned to the Naval Ministry he held under Premier Daladier, M. Daladier kept the War Ministry he held under Premier Sarraut and that shaggy-maned comet of the Paris bar, M. Joseph Paul-Boncour, continued to shine as Foreign Minister.

"My policy," declared Premier Chautemps, "will be public safety at home and national security abroad." Flaying this platitude as "weak and vague," the Paris Press clamored for an end to what was called "the massacre of Ministries." As yet no French would-be-dictator loomed, but that slashing Conservative, onetime Premier Andre Tardieu, get out on a stump-speaking tour of the provinces to thunder: "Liberty must be protected by Authority!" Though protesting that he does not aspire to become a Hitler or Mussolini, M. Tardieu warned that "There are rising at the doors of France regimes of mass dictatorships imported from Asia . . . demanding: in France a strong government conscious of her historic mission."

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