PLACE OF FRANCE

Evening Post, Volume CXXVII, Issue 3, 5 January 1939, Page 18

PLACE OF FRANCE

SECOND-RATE POWER

AN OUTSPOKEN FRENCHMAN

MATERIAL V. MORAL

France is no longer a great country in the usual sense of the word "great," i.e., mighty and capable of violence, writes M. Detoeuf in the French journal "Nouveaux Cahiers." If France were still a great country she would not have trembled for 15 years, in the face of a disarmed" Germany. She would not have sought a long series of guarantees of peace, nor have spent 200,000,000^000 francs on armaments during the last 20 years. If France were still a great country she would have taken the lead when the Chaco war, the invasion of Manchuria, and the expedition against Abyssinia successively made it needful for the League of Nations to stand forth as the protector of the weak. If France had been a great country she would, before the Ruhr,, after the Ruhr, and in the days of Bruning, have concluded a generous peace with a defeated Germany. LIVES BY SACRIFICES. Whatever nation deserves to be called a great country lives by collective sacrifices. Above the brutality, the primitiveness, and the magnificent besetting tendencies of Germany, the German nation is now making a common sacrifice —a sacrifice accepted, despite their dissatisfaction, by even those persons in that country who are being ill-treated; underneath Italy's bounce and deceit you will find the futile sacrifices of the Abyssinian battlefields; behind England's incomprehension and hypocrisy there is a collective consciousness which displays itself as soon as any peril even remotely threatens the English nation. But of what sacrifices are we Frenchmen capable? Who in France will offer up to the public interest however little of his spirit and activity? Till the hour in which French soil is invaded —and then only because we retain the old elementary school tradition and have a lively sense of property —we shall be unable to pull ourselves together. Let us not deceive ourselves. France is not big enough for the notion which we want held of France. Her glorious doggedness from 1914 to 1918 —which was spurred on by the invasion of her soil—has deceived both the world and us all. We all thought that such ait effort showed us to be still a great people. "WHERE PEOPLE ARE HAPPY." Believe me, on the material plane France is not a great country; France is merely the country where people are happy. It is true that some Frenchmen —admirers of Russia 'and willing listeners to Russian advice—want France to go to war in the belief that thereby she could play ah important part on the international stage. As if social progress were brought about by war, as 'if the destruction of wealth were a means of bettering the human lot, as if war were not the best way of ensuring the triumph of the dictatorships! France, if we wish it, may yet remain the country where people are happy, where unemployment is moderate, where the peasantry is peaceable and sound, where thinking is untrammelled, and work voluntary—the country with savings and a spirit that radiates over the world. Common sense and an instinct for the happy mean, imagination, and generosity, may be absent from our collective activities; in our individual actions they are constantly visible. Human resourcefulness, a taste for. work, and the personal equation are more frequent among us than anywhere else. That, and not material might, is what makes France great; that is what we need to preserve. NEW EFFORT NEEDED. "Unquestionably, if we are to preserve it, and even if we are merely to subsist, we must now put forth a big effort—a big effort not to acquire might but to acquire self-mastery. It is an effort we are equal to, and we shall make it. Yet perhaps also France could become once again the mighty Power that she was a century ago. But for that she would have to give up politics, the pleasures of talk, competitions for supernumerary jobs, intelligence, and superfluous discussion, prudence and irony. She would have to alter her morality and the very way in which she understands life. She would have to think only of becoming disciplined, of organising herself, and of taking risks. She would have to suffer and be ready to suffer. She would have to be no longer what we know as France. But there must be a choice. We must decide whether we, want to be mighty or happy. We must decide whether what we want is to terrify or to attract. We must decide whether we wish to enforce our will or prefer to fascinate. We must decide between arming beyond our strength and living. HAVE ALREADY DECIDED. In the depths of our hearts we have already decided; but we behave, we shall always behave, as if we had not. We shall go on trying to seem to lead a part of Europe, go on refusing for the sake of a false prestige opportunities for peace, go on claiming to monopolise for ourselves a colonial dominion too large for our strength, and go on posing as a braggart in a way that some day may land us in the warfare we abhor. If we decide to be mighty we shall have forthwith to go on a war footing —a complete war footing. We shall have to welcome war in all its horror, its bombs and its poison gas, and the. civil wars that will come after it, and poverty, and very likely a famine lasting a whole generation throughout a Europe finally given over to anarchy. Not to choose is impossible. It is impossible to go on being weak and yet to play at being strong. It is impossible to go on threatening, only to yield at the very moment in which the threat should be carried out. It is impossible for a country with a population of 40,000,000 in disarray to have the armaments of a country having a population of from 70,000,000 to 80,000,000 who are on a military footing. AN IMPOSSIBILITY. It is impossible to be mighty while working only 40 hours when next door they are working 60; while eating our fill when next door they make do with, a beggar's rations; while insisting on the comforts of well-being when next door they are content with stage gesticulations; while arguing when next door they obey; while avoiding fatherhood when next door they forbid celibacy; while exporting our cash when next door the penalty for exporting funds is death; while being on a peace footing when next door they have martial law. We must have couarge to decide on the one course that we can take, that of remaining France —a France smaller perhaps, on the material plane, but greater intellectually and morally. The French nation must make plain to its friends that it has thought out what peace requires, and that inj future it is going to conduct itself very differently from in the past. As regards material strength, we