In their different ways Britain and France fail to match German autarky

Leon Blum’s second and final Front Populaire government was embattled from the start. Gentle proposals to intervene in the Spanish civil war were emphatically rejected by the parties of the right and just as loudly trumpeted by the Communists. Blum remained committed to rearmament and finally took the plunge that he had avoided during his first government: announcing the introduction of exchange controls so as to cope with the inflationary pressures of a debt-financed weapons programme. The Senate rejected Blum’s finance bill and withheld powers to government by decree. Mass strikes in the engineering industry added to his woes. The Anschlu ß had pushed Britain too in the direction of accelerating rearmament. But even though the government enjoyed a solid and dependable majority coupled with an ineffectual and divided opposition, it was not going to go to the lengths of sacrificing conservative financial policy. A sound, market economy was considered to be the fourth ar