Postwar France
France Against Herself.
by Herbert Luethy.
Praeger. 475 pp. $6.50.
When so able a writer as Herbert Luethy deals at length with so important a topic as France’s position in the modern world, the resulting work has to be taken seriously. This is all the more true since the picture Luethy draws is one that fits the self-critical mood in which the French elite has lived since the liberation. It is therefore paying both the book and the author a compliment to say that it stimulates not only admiration but criticism: admiration for its brilliance, criticism on account of its lopsided treatment of some key issues and its relative neglect of features that do not fit the central theme.
The theme is one with which people in the West, but above all the French themselves, have been made familiar since 1940 by a succession of shocks to France’s position in the world, and the consequent burst of national self-criticism: France has since the First World War failed to adapt successfully to the conditions of a changing environment, and the resulting petrifaction of the social structure is now an obstacle to the radical reforms needed to bring the country into line with its more advanced neighbors. This analysis is of course the essence of “Mendès-Franceism,” which in turn is a reformulation of one aspect of the Resistance credo. In a sense the French have been talking about nothing else since the debacle of 1940, and Luethy’s book sums up for the outside world some of the harsher and more pessimistic things that Frenchmen have said and written during the past decade and a half. For the French are very good at rending one another, both literally and metaphorically, and all the bitter remarks now current about their politics, their economics, and their culture, have been substantially culled from their own national self-examination.
This point is worth making for the non-European reader to whom the flavor of Luethy’s analysis must seem a little exotic. Luethy himself of course is Swiss (Swiss-German Protestant, to be exact; this too is not irrelevant), and his countrymen are close enough both to France and to their own French-speaking fellow citizens to be able to appreciate the sharp edge of his satire (rather muffled in the otherwise admirable translation) without taking his devastating indictment of French politics quite au pied de la lettre. Ruthless criticism of national faults has become a post-1945 habit in more than one European country. It is indeed one of the most trenchant weapons wielded by the reformers; for that very reason it should not be confused with the kind of purely analytical writing exemplified by Mr. Philip Williams’s masterly Politics in Post-War France. Mr. Williams, although an Oxford don, is far from being politically neutral, but his main concern is with a scientific dissection of his subject matter. By contrast, Luethy’s brilliant essay is essentially a massive pamphlet hurled at the defenders of the status quo and the parasites who profit from it. The student who wants to know what has been happening in France since 1945 is advised to consult Mr. Williams. The reader who needs no factual information and is in search of a polemical summing up which will confirm his own suspicion that there is something rotten in the state of France, can do no better than turn to Luethy.
He will, however, have to do some mental work. Luethy, himself a historian as well as a polemical essayist of a high order, takes it for granted that his readers need no information of the kind that can be found in textbooks. He is as intent on generalizing as ever Tocqueville was; indeed, Tocqueville is clearly his master. Whether this is the highest praise that can be bestowed upon a political writer must be a matter of opinion. It is possible to feel that this peculiarly French kind of writing is no longer quite adequate even to a relatively old-fashioned country such as France. There is perhaps some irony in the fact that so sharp a critic of French traditionalism as Luethy should have succumbed to the temptation of writing the kind of essay that hardly anyone but a Frenchman would think of producing in the year 1955.
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This point can be exemplified by turning to some of his judgments. He has a very impressive opening section on the bureaucratic structure of government and on the way in which administrative sclerosis has traditionally hampered both reform at the center and self-government in the provinces. This too is in the tradition of French self-criticism. He then proceeds to take various public institutions apart, starting with the venerable Council of State which emerges in his treatment as a kind of Star Chamber where aged judges and irremovable officials, clad in moth-eaten ermine, impose their constipated outlook upon a helpless citizenry and a shiftless government.
“The courts grind more slowly and more inscrutably than the mills of God, and sometimes when there is a cause célèbre and a great tournament of legal eloquence takes place, they work in the full glare of publicity, with the result that the great lawyers vie in public esteem with the stars of literature, the stage and the cinema. But the supreme luminaries who control the state itself, its legislation, its finances, and its personal politics, are totally removed from the eyes of the profane, and no breath of air disturbs the venerable dust of centuries that has gathered about them. The Conseil d’Etat will unhesitatingly interpret a law newly passed by the National Assembly in the light of decrees or regulations issued by Francis I or Louis XIII, and use the final and authoritative construction thus put upon it to pour back the new wine into the old bottles of an archaic jurisprudence.”
Who would suspect from this eloquent passage that the Conseil d’Etat is the despairing envy of the liberal and up-to-date British lawyers who have studied its workings since the war, and that in their considered opinion this famous old administrative tribunal protects the French citizen against official arbitrariness and mismanagement far better than any of the corresponding institutions in Britain?
Again, Luethy’s gift for satire tends to run away with him when he comes to deal with the complicated story of French politics since the Liberation. In an epilogue to the revised edition of his book, penned eighteen months after the bulk of it was written, he feels obliged to note that the summer of 1953 was in all probability the lowest point touched by France since the war, and that there has since then been a surprising recovery. But a polemical tract originally prepared for publication during this bleak period inevitably overdoes the pessimism then fashionable in Paris. Needless to say, this does not mean that any of the structural faults have been corrected. All that has happened is that they have been brought to the attention of an aroused public, at a moment when that public was beginning to shake off the postwar numbness, amounting almost to shell-shock, which had gripped it after the brief excitement of the Liberation. In this respect the North African crisis seems to have acted as a catalyst. If it destroyed the short-lived Mendès-France administration, it also galvanized its successor.
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It would have done no harm if Luethy had draped the garment of his graceful style around a skeleton of hard factual information, however summary. He does indeed mention the postwar reconstruction plans (which were actually carried out), but gives no precise indication of their material extent, which was considerable. He refers briefly to the nationalized industries as a part of the public domain which could easily be taken over by the state because its management had always been bureaucratic anyhow, “and the only reason why it is so easy to discredit the performance of the industries concerned is that no one seems to remember the state of decay, bureaucratic sclerosis, and chronic deficit borne by public funds in which they were left by their private beneficiaries.” Who would infer from this contemptuous aside that the French mining industry is now, in terms of output per manshift, the most efficient in Continental Europe, that the same is true of the railways, and that electricity output has more than doubled since nationalization? The British citizen in particular who reads that in the French coal mines “output a man overall is now 13 percent above the best before the war, and for all underground workers is 23 percent better than before the war” (The London Times, August 3), whereas in Britain the corresponding improvement has been about 6 per cent, can only grit his teeth in envy as he contemplates the mounting coal bill weighing upon the hard-pressed industries of his own country. Perhaps the talk about France being a backward country has, after all, been a little overdone in the interest of political therapy.
This is not to say that the picture which Luethy paints is substantially inaccurate. It is unfortunately only too true. If it strikes at least one British reader as lopsided, the reason is that the author has unconsciously taken for granted those positive features of his environment which strike every traveler who crosses the Channel from Dover to Calais: above all the sheer physical vitality of the French people, their capacity both for hard work and enjoyment, their mental agility, the color and many-sidedness of their existence, and not least the ruthlessness of their national self-examination, compared with the foggy complacency of their British neighbors. Towards the end Luethy is constrained to observe that the hard shell of French stagnation is beginning to crack under the impact of regenerative processes already visible in a higher birth rate and a mounting curve of production, and he makes the point that if these processes are allowed to work themselves out, France will be a very different country within a decade or so. Perhaps there is some advantage in being sufficiently “under-developed” to leave a margin for further growth in the second half of this crowded century.
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