Edouard Herriot, former French Premier and ex-president of the Chamber of Deputies, has come under fire in the increasingly-violent French press campaign for punishment of leaders held responsible for the French “disaster,” the German wireless reports.
According to the German reports, the newspaper Le Journal-Echo de Paris, sharply attacked the veteran French statesman in an article headlined: “Ruthless justice against those who were in power yesterday.”
The newspaper assertedly raised the question of whether it would be right to be lenient toward a man who, in the National Assembly, tried to defend those who deserted the country at the moment when Marshal Henri Petain, French chief of State, requested all Frenchmen to do their duty in the positions allotted them.
The newspaper demanded ruthless action aganist all those Frenchmen who fled to England, representatives of “international Jewry” who fled to Spain and Portugal and all politicians, ministers and diplomats who fled aboard the steamer Massilia. The newspaper said that foremost among the latter were Edouard Daladier, former Premier, Georges Mandel, former minister of the Interior, Cesar Campinchi, former Navy Minister and Yvon Delbos, former Foreign Minister.
(A French language broadcast over the Italian radio picked up in New York said that Mandel has been arrested in Spanish Morocco and taken to Algiers on charges of plotting against the French Government).
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