The spectacle of the last world war fitted me with horror. I came out of it with one conviction: we must at all costs avoid any renewal of such atrocities. . . . This is the vow I made, a solemn vow: “I swear I shall always do everything in my power to prevent the outbreak of another war.”
Until they read these words, most U. S. readers who had heard of Jules Romains at all thought of him as an author brooding in an ivory tower, from which periodically issued a new volume of his tremendous, partly-completed novel, Men of Good Will.
Last week, as the third of a series of seven Romains articles (The Mystery of Daladier, The Mystery of Gamelin, The Mystery of Leopold, etc.) appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, they began to realize that self-important little Jules Romains was also one of the most curious characters the period between the two world wars produced: that he was Europe’s most indefatigable and unsuccessful peace-fixer, whose naivete was only equaled by his Tom Sawyerish delight in conspiracy.
In 1919, young, obscure Jules Romains set out to save peace by two methods. First, he would become a Big Writer, one who could influence public opinion. But he realized that “to affect events in any way, if you are not in a position of authority, it is not enough to have access to public opinion; you must also have access to those with power and authority and be ready at a decisive moment personally to influence their decisions. I called that: ‘Action on vital points.’ ”
By 1934 Romains had cultivated the great and near great with such assiduity that he could write to Premier Edouard Daladier (after the February riots): “Whatever happens, hold on. … A little energy, and you can save the freedoms of our republic.” Daladier resigned next day, but Jules Romains was not discouraged.
Before the year was out, Remains went to Berlin to sell Franco-German cultural unity, was in the thick of the Saar plebiscite controversy as French liaison man for such characters as Otto Abetz (now Ambassador to Unoccupied France) and Abetz mentor, Joachim von Ribbentrop. Neither was very important then, but both were comers. Remains was impressed by Ribbentrop’s “18th-Century mind,” thought he was the kind of cynic who would leaven the extremism of the Nazis. He was more impressed by young Otto Abetz, who had a French wife and spoke feelingly of the cultural bonds between western Germany and France. Abetz became a charter member of an informal international band of peace-lovers who seriously called themselves, after Romains’ big book, Men of Good Will.
Other Men of Good Will in that amorphous, hopeful group were the Frenchmen Daladier, Georges Bonnet, Yvon Delbos (whom Romains says he made Foreign Minister), Ambassador André Francois-Poncet; Belgian Cabinet Minister Henri de Man; presumably many whom Good Willman Romains does not name. They believed that “nothing good could ever come of war,” devoted themselves to plotting peace coups which somehow never came off. The greatest of these plots was hatched by Henri de Man.
Late in 1938, while Great Britain’s Neville Chamberlain and Viscount Halifax were trying to appease Mussolini, De Man went to see Romains in Paris, told him of a scheme to have a peace conference called by one of the five sovereigns of northern Europe (Belgium’s King Leopold, Norway’s King Haakon, Sweden’s King Gustaf, Denmark’s King Christian, The Netherlands’ Queen Wilhelmina). Four of them were to write to the fifth (Leopold) urging him to save the peace of Europe; then Leopold was to appeal to Chamberlain, Daladier, Mussolini and Hitler. A reversal in world affairs would be achieved by the gentle art of letter writing. The trouble with the scheme was that the four men most vitally concerned with peace had to be sounded out first. Remains got an O.K. from Daladier, De Man scooted off to London to get Chamberlain’s blessing. Abetz was to pull it off with Hitler. Either Abetz or Hitler let the Men of Good Will down.
Nine months later, when the war was one month old, Remains was in Brussels trying to get King Leopold to agree to staff consultations with the Allies, to promise to call for aid the minute either The Netherlands or Belgium was invaded. By then he was growing suspicious of De Man, King Leopold’s closest adviser. De Man let him down, he says, by insisting on a great deal of hocuspocus, including a letter from Daladier to Leopold, which Romains tried to get. But Daladier let him down too.
Jules Romains’ estimate of why Leopold and De Man quit the Allies last May could serve also as an estimate of the futility of such machinations as Romains’: “The King and he tried to lie to themselves, until the last minute, so as not to see that the war we were fighting. . was their war. When the last minute came, with its crashing eloquence, they found themselves bound to consent to war, but they consented reluctantly and lay ready at the first occasion to betray it. For when they betrayed their Allies they gave themselves the excuse that they were betraying war primarily.”
(In Washington last week Speaker Frans van Cauwelaert of the Belgian Chamber of Representatives issued a not-too-convincing rebuttal. Said he: “There was no treason involved. The King gave himself up in order to share the fate of his Army. He was then and is now a prisoner of war. The Belgian Ministers in London are still loyal to the King and, having pledged cooperation with the British cause, are working for victory and the day of the King’s release.”)
Jules Romains was duped by some of his friends. Others simply became realists. In the end the only Man of Good Will left in Europe was Romains himself, and he scuttled for the U. S. Strategist Karl von Clausewitz said: “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” If war is only one incident in a battle of political action, Jules Romains wasted his energy trying to avoid a skirmish while the battle passed him by.
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