Letter from Joseph P. Walshe to Seán Murphy (Paris)
(Secret)

The French Minister has left here for France, where he intends to do a cure of five or six weeks (in the Pyrenees).

We have not yet been able to arrive at any estimate of Riviére's qualities or the prospects of his being a valuable intermediary between this country and France. His egregious faux-pas in relation to the Jammet affair¹ revealed an immaturity of judgment and outlook which raises considerable doubts about his future.

You will have seen in the 'Irish Times' social column of 2nd June a list of invitees to a tea party at the Legation. It consists of the most anti-Irish and the most collaborationist elements in the ascendancy class. The same crowd has not appeared together at any Legation since the inception of the State. One wonders what the French Government would do if you invited to the Legation a group consisting almost exclusively of collaborationists or anti-State Royalists. You would at least be regarded as being gravely indiscreet. Some people here think that Mme. Riviére has already got the ascendancy bug so badly that her opinions of the ordinary Irish have become assimilated to theirs.

Perhaps, in the course of their visit to Paris, you may have an opportunity of getting some reflection of this attitude. There is a general feeling here that, after the dose we had to tolerate during the war from certain Legations, it is time to warn the heads of foreign missions who play fast and loose with our sentiments that they are no longer welcome. In the case of the French Legation, if the present symptoms do in effect indicate a fundamental disease, we may have to ask you to talk to somebody like the former friendly Catholic Minister for Foreign Affairs and to indicate to him by a few apt parallels how much harm can be done to good relations by entrusting French interests here to people who put the attractions of snobbery and flattery before their country's interests.