Page 112 - Was Hitler a Riddle?

The French Diplomats 99

sufficiently flexible to work with centrists and moderate leftists. He was
strongly committed to the free market and to the sanctity of private prop-
erty, opposed government intervention in the economy, and warned busi-
nessmen against making far-reaching concessions to labor unions. He fa-
vored a republican form of government, but his support for democracy and
universal suffrage was less than enthusiastic. He thought that “responsible
elites” should be the guiding force in running France. By the mid-1920s,
François-Poncet had himself become a man of means, having married the
daughter of a wealthy steel magnate. 9
His growing number of contacts within the affluent and influential
community of Parisian businessmen helped him launch a political career in
1924. in the elections that year he won a seat in the Chamber of deputies,
where he quickly rose in the esteem of his colleagues. seven years later, he
was appointed ambassador to Germany, a prestigious post because of the
ongoing negotiations over various aspects of the peace treaties imposed on
that nation after World War i. and within two years, in 1933, the ambassa-
dorship to Berlin became the most important diplomatic post in the world.
For a man as ambitious, imaginative, and cunning as François-Poncet, the
assignment seemed ideal.
But it was also an assignment rife with pitfalls, and contemporaries as
well as historians raised many questions about François-Poncet’s effective-
ness in Berlin. in the book he published after World War ii, The Fateful
Years, he tried to burnish his reputation. Without entirely ignoring some
of his favorable impressions of Hitler, the Frenchman emphasized his dis-
taste for the dictator’s policies and his antipathy toward the German leader.
He contended that Hitler had made no secret in 1933 of his intention to
“proceed to eliminate the Jews altogether” and to “reintegrate the foreign
policy of the German reich.” in the book, François-Poncet also referred
to the Führer as a man who was little more than “a polemicist, an agita-
tor in public meetings, an ungenerous fanatic.” When Hitler marched into
Czechoslovakia early in 1939, he revealed his true nature, according to Fran-
çois-Poncet: “all Hitler’s personality and the personality of every German is
here reflected. He was a Nimmersatt (glutton), a man never sated; he lacked
all sense of proportion; he set a value only upon what he did not yet pos-
sess; he was urged to extremes by a demon.” the book does not include
10
any reference to François-Poncet’s flirtation with Fascism or to his favor-
able views of Mussolini. Nor does it fully describe his complicated relations
with Hitler and his inconsistent appraisals of National socialism.
this is not to say that all the criticisms of François-Poncet’s reporting