FRANCE IN CRISIS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 441, 5 December 1947, Page 16

FRANCE IN CRISIS

The Nation Behind the Headlines Tot her economic and political crises and her labour troubles, France is much in the news these days. The following is taken from a BBC talk by DENIS BROGAN, Professor of Political Science at Cambridge, and a leading authority on France and the French.

TT is a great temptation to dismiss the whole idea of national character as meaningless, to assume that we are all much alike and that any given agglomeration of human beings will act much like another. But this is an error, for the human race has not been totally wrong in thinking that, other things being equal, a Frenchman and an Englishman will act a little differently in the same circumstances and that the masses of human beings which we rashly cail "England" or "France," in their joint capacity as nations, will act a little differently. It is not a matter of race. If you land at Dieppe or move around in Normandy you can see plenty of English faces, or rather faces that wotld be English if their owners had been born and bred in England. But they were born and bred in France and _ their walk and speech and a dozen mannerisms reveal that. Indeed, it is the physical type that we call "un-French" that often gives the most vivid impression of real Frenchness. What is more French than a blonde Frenchwoman? And when we say (as it is not absurd to say), "How unlike a typical Frenchman General de Gaulle is," we should go on to say, "How French a way of being un-French General de Gaulle exemplifies." It is not physical appearance or stature or colour of hair or skin that is in question. I shall confine myself to a few general French attitudes that can be called national in the sense that they affect the working of the French State and the impact of the outside world on the French nation. And I think that the first thing that concerns us is the unity of France which is the explanation of the "Frenchness of the French." One and Divisible It is that unity (with its terrible limitations and flaws) that is the first thing that strikes or should strike the observer. Take two such different ports of France as Dunkirk and Marseilles. One is a typical North Sea Port, grey and grim; the other: is a typical Mediterranean port, polyglot, with its roots far back in the days of Greek merchants and their Carthaginian rivals, full of the life (and the scum). of the tideless sea. Yet both are French; both have a vast number of things in common that Dunkirk does not share, say, with Dover or with Ghent, that Marseilles does not share with Genoa or Barcelona. They differ a lot, but inside the common French _ household, France has grown by winning, as much as by conquering, neighbouring territories, making them proud to be French, incapable of being anything else. And that has bred in the French ‘a pride in their culture, a confidence in its excellence, and in the fact that its excellence is not doubted by the outside

world; that has saved the French from the touchiness and moodiness of the Germans, who seem to me to spend a lot of time trying to convince not only the outside world, but themselves, that they are a great nation. The French who for so long were the "great nation" did not worry, which was a good thing--did not, for I am not sure that they are not beginning to worry now, which is potentially a bad thing. The French know that the scale of things has altered and _ that France is no Jonger a Great Power in the sense that she was as late as 1914.

But it is not only statistical changes that worry them. Perhaps French culture and the French way of life are no longer attractive? It is particularly in connection with the problems of the French Empire that this worry is important.: The Englishman does not expect his colonies to become English; that is a thing of birth and tradition, not a mere legal or educational status. But the Frenchman does (or did) expect that the subjects in his: colonies would want to become French. He is no longer so sure and, just as he was worried and put out when he found Germany and Italy no longer content with the status of cultural as well as political satellites, he is worried that French culture is being ‘resisted by Islam, by Asiatic nationalism, and-who knows?even by African nationalism © in embryo? Confidence Bred Amiability French complacency could be very irritating., Germans and Italians found it almost, perhaps quite, as irritating, as English complacency. But confidence in French primacy made for amiability as well as self-satisfaction. The French as a nation expected to be loved and

admired and »so often acted in a way to secure that love and admiration. France was the second country of most civilised men. And it was not only true that, as Tom Appleton said nearly a century ago, "good Americans when they die, go to Paris,’ but good or goodish people of all nations went to Paris in their lifetimes. There were, and are, drawbacks :to this assumption of cultural supremacy. Frenchmen often assumed, and even now assume, that controversies are being carried on in French fashion. And French confidence in being loved has led the French to attach too much importance to sentiment in international politics. So after the first world war the French expected too much remembrance of what they had done and suffered and so continued to expect special treatment, long after we and the Americans had decided to forgive Germany all the wrongs ~ had done to France. To-day there are signs that France is bitterly conscious that her days of uncontested glory are over, that a great many things are going on in ‘the world with which France has little concern and has no power to affect. If we think of France as a beautiful and much-loved woman whose power of attraction is no longer automatic, we may not be far wrong. It is an awkward period in the life of a woman or a nation. And one sign of that change is to be found in the novel readiness of the French to emigrate, to leave the land of France; we must insist on that. For France is still a country deeply committed to an agricultural way of life. It is not merely that she can, if she tries, feed herself, but that half the French population still lives on or near the land and that a far higher proportion of her population has close relationships with people living on the land than is the case with us. As far as any single group sets its mark on French society, it is the peasantry. Many of the virtues, many of the vices that we can call French come from this fact. French thrift, how valuable? How maddening! What a source of national strength! What a source of national weakness! ~ For peasant realism can be a good and a bad thing. It is a good thing as a corrective to the naive optimism of the ignorant town dweller who simply cannot realise that his food supplies may fall short or that no amount of planning, no amount of political oratory or even action, can turn a disastrous harvest into a good one. It is a bad thing, too, for the peasant has no need for wider views to make him a good farmer, at any rate in the old style. But the State may need wider views. And peasant self-reliance can easily degenerate into a grim and formidable selfishness; peasant conservatism can be a source Of great national loss; peasant suspicion of the townsman can be a deep wedge driven into the national unity. We in this country are learning what a loss it is that there is a gulf between the coal-miners and the rest of the population. The terribly impoverished France of to-day is learning what a handicap it is that there is this gulf between the peasantry and the townsfolk. The peasant attitude, too, is present in the French view of the family. The (continued on next page)

THE FRENCH OUTLOOK (continued from previous page) French family is much more of a legal and moral reality than the family is with us. If you know any French bourgeois families you must have received one of those elaborate notices in which a whole host of kinsmen announce the death of Uncle Pierre or Aunt Anne. We may doubt if they feel more sorrow than we should when an elderly and distant and possibly rich relation dies, but they feel bound to express more. French businesses were often and are often family businesses. The Frenchwoman, under the Code Napoleon, may have had fewer legal Tights than under English law, but she was more likely to know her husband’s business affairs inside out. If she did not, how could she keep the cash desk or do the, marketing of the farm products or save up for her daughter’s dot? She did more than marry a lover when she married (assuming that she did marry a lover), she married into a clan, into a business, large or small, she brought her own capital to a joint venture, her own dot, and she exercised a degree of control over her son-at any rate till he went off to the army-trare indeed in England. It is no accident that one of the most famous names in French industry is that of the Widow Clicquot. And the converse was ie the man, on becoming a husband and father, put away many childish things, including some of the bold and generous ideas he had as a young man. "The good family man is ready for anything," says a French proverb and one of the things he is ready for is to cheat the State for the good of his children. Less than China but more than England or America, France is an agglomeration of families. The Influence of Catholicism In the French attitude to the State and the family, a great place must be given to the influence of Catholicism. I say Catholicism rather than the Church. Not many more people in France to-day are churchgoers than in England. But France is as profoundly marked by her Catholic as is England by her Protestant, past. One reason for the weakness of the French State has been its inability, since 1789, to get along with the Church -with a consequent division of loyalty. Not since 1789 has there been a government which all, or nearly all, Frenchmen have accepted as the natural legitimate goverhment of the country. There have always been large and formidable minorities for whom the State (in the hands of its rulers) was an enemy. It was far more than the normal bitterness of party politics, for these groups could never be the State themselves without a revolution. And there were very bitter memories indeed between the parties. Paris has suffered its most terrible losses in French civil wars and not very remote ones at that. The State is not a referee; it is a player (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) and, in the eyes of millions, probably a rather dirty player (depending, of course, on who is in at the moment). Ingenious Evasions Frenchmen are passionately patriotic, courageous, often recklessly generous, but they are not united on what they mean by "France." Even St. Joan, w should remember, was a leader in a civi wat. For the average .Englishman, as the authors of 1066 and All That point out, history consists of "good things" because the bad things are forgotten. They are not forgotten in France. And because the French are extremely intelligent and delight in intelligence, they not only rub salt in the national wounds, but they delight in ingenious evasions and adaptations. "Systeme D" is wangling; it is a national institution and it is more than mere "wangling." It is often exemplified in highly ingenious evasions of foolish regulations. It is not a mere question of profit. I have known French officials take a good deal of time -and display admirable ingenuity in suggesting ways in which I

could avoid-some preposterous regulation that would cost me time or money, but was no concern of theirs. It is the same spirit that makes the French mechanic delight in repairing a ca® or tractor with the most improbable materials. It was the same national talent that made a Dutch business consultant say that France was the most impossible country to reorganise a business in. Everybody from the managing director to the office boy was cleverer than you were. They grasped the plan almost before you had formulated it. But when you returned in a year, there was no plan, for everybody had thought of improvements, and had carried them out on their own. They were genuine improvements, too, things well worth doing, but not all of them at the same time. It is this originality and spontaneity that is ‘the charm and was the strength of France. Is it a strength now, or a luxury that can no longer be afforded? Is Russian discipline or German docility what ‘is needed? If itis, will it be provided? I don’t know. >