There were exceptions, however. As the New York Times reported on its political pages, the circus ball had provided the setting for the second meeting that day between the French Foreign Minister, Georges Bonnet, and the German Ambassador in Paris, Count Johannes von Welczeck. The French minister had given warning that his country would not stand idly by, as it had over Czechoslovakia only a few months earlier, if Germany invaded Poland. Just two weeks after the ball, on 14 July, Paris celebrated the 150th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille and the French Revolution. How many of those who took part in the long-planned pageants, military parades and days of dancing in the streets saw the irony of festivities marking the birth of democracy and the end of tyranny in 1789? Clearly, the deeper significance of the date was not overlooked by everyone. The extent to which the legacy of the Revolution was accepted by the whole of France was about to be severely tested.
Thousands of Spanish republican refugees, who had fled over the border into France after the Battle of Catalonia, were only too aware that fascist tyranny, in the shape of General Franco, had not been beaten in their own country. Some 17,000 were now living in appalling conditions in a hastily constructed camp at Gurs in south-west France, one of the first of about fifty camps on French soil where non-native refugees were ‘concentrated’. The internees had created an orchestra and constructed a sports field; on 14 July 1939 they arranged themselves in military formation in the field and gave a boisterous rendition of ‘La Marseillaise’; they then took part in sports presentations and various choral and instrumental concerts. From the start, Gurs was overwhelmed by the numbers of internees sent there. In 1939, at the outbreak of war, it took in German prisoners of war and French nationals with suspect political views and later, after the German defeat, Jews. Those held at Gurs were neither tortured nor beaten, but food was scarce and often inedible and conditions barely tolerable. There was no sanitation, no running water other than constant rain, no plumbing nor proper drainage as the buildings were unfinished, no one imagining that the situation would continue for long. There was a separate women’s camp at Gurs* and initially the commander permitted some imprisoned women to rent a horse and cart and leave the camp to buy provisions.
Crane Brinton, a brilliant Harvard history professor whose particular expertise lay in the study of revolutions, wrote with great prescience in an essay published on 15 July 1939 that he saw much metaphorical rain ahead. As he contemplated the 150th anniversary of the storming and taking of the Bastille by the people of Paris, he predicted ‘changes which, in pure logic, are quite antithetical to what the men of 1789 were striving for … Democracy is in for harder sledding than it had throughout most of the nineteenth century.’
On 1 September, two months after Elsie Mendl’s surreal circus ball, Germany invaded Poland and democracy was indeed tested. General mobilization of all young men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five was announced in France immediately, and on 3 September France and Britain declared themselves at war.