France from Dior to de Gaulle
WILLIAMS, PHILIP M.
France from Dior to de Gaulle THE NEW FRANCE By Edward R. Tannenbaum Chicago. 252 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by PHILIP M. WILLIAMS Professor of modern history, Oxford University; co-author "De...
...Foreigners in general and Americans in particular have heard quite enough about the heritage of the French past, a message which generally flatters a reader's prejudices and reinforces his suspicions...
...Tannenbaum also has perceptive things to say about the diminshing differences between Frenchmen of north and south, town and country...
...Though he offers many shrewd remarks on politics, the author is not always at home in this field...
...He can write, for example: "People still resent laws that threaten their political and economic rights, but there is less questioning of the authority of the state itself than in the past...
...Now and then Tannenbaum seems determined to drag in every significant name, even if the reference is so brief as to be useless...
...It would be hard to better his description of the atmosphere of the great sit-in strikes of 1936 ("like Christmas in an orphanage...
...It really does not help much, for example, to be told of Emanuel Mounier only that "His philosophy of Personalism maintained that the human individual is not an object to be observed but a center of reorientation for the objective universe...
...In particular, when he discusses the growing conformity of the masses (about which he has many acute things to say), Tannenbaum surely attaches too little importance to the dynamic minorities...
...While purveying much sociological information, he never lapses into banality and only once into jargon...
...Of course, the author refers to the condition of the Army, and hints at its alienation from the nation...
...I think, too, that Tannenbaum reduces the European idea too narrowly...
...Though the ideal has by no means been realized, it is not an illusory fraud like the French Union concept to which the author compares it...
...The myth of a united Europe has less influence on government in the Fifth Republic than in the Fourth, but it has struck the imagination of many Frenchmen...
...He knows that the damning charge of "Americanization" is often brought by conservative Frenchmen unwilling to admit that the new developments they dislike are in fact products of the taste or inventiveness of their own countrymen...
...It is a serious howler to include among Pierre MendèsFrance's electoral allies in 1956 the Christian Democrats, who were his bitterest opponents...
...He sees the merits as well as the failings of the most powerful of all French conservative forces, the educational system...
...This is a phrase that reads oddly in a year when priests and students and intellectuals are in prison for encouraging desertion and helping the Algerian nationalist rebels, while Army officers and members of Parliament are sentenced for mutiny and revolt...
...But it is not altogether just to dismiss General Jacques Massu as a champion of "racist nationalism," nor altogether wise to underestimate the revolutionary fire and spirit of sacrifice which possess the younger officers, almost alone among Frenchmen—whatever one may think of the purposes for which these theoretically admirable qualities may be exploited...
...It has been said that President Kennedy's intelligence advisers prescribed this admirably discerning, readable and knowledgeable work as an introduction to France today...
...I should like to have seen more space given to the new generation of young Roman Catholic leaders in the labor unions and the peasant organizations...
...If this is true, perhaps a word of congratulation (une fois n'est pas coutume) might after all be spared for the U.S...
...And he also can turn a sharp phrase: Of those Frenchmen who refused to adjust to colonial emancipation he remarks, "They could not escape from the world—they could only keep it waiting...
...I can think of several parties (some would say all) to which the opposite charge would better apply...
...Central Intelligence Agency...
...co-author "De Gaulle's Republic" Edward Tannenbaum is to be congratulated on this bold attempt to describe modern French society and culture—from Dior to de Gaulle, from Piscasso to the presse de coeur, from movies to music— in little more than 200 pages of text...
...No two writers covering this extensive ground would distribute their attention in quite the same way...
...The book inevitably invites comparison with Herbert Luethy's France Against Herself, to which it provides a most welcome antidote...
...or of the Poujadists in 1958 ("ambulance-chasers running after other people's lost causes...
...it is more than a diplomatic conception of Franco-German cooperation...
...It is not true that the social reforms of "David Lloyd George's Liberal government" after 1909 enabled Britain to escape the syndicalist movement which George Clemenceau's and Aristide Briand's tough policy toward strikes failed to avert in France...
...And his summing-up of the readers of the Tintin comic-strip has a wider application: "They want to be independent and mobile (both socially and geographically), but they want the rest of the world to stay put so that they will know where they are when they get there...
...or of the traditional French attitude toward the state (like "that of draftees in a modern army, where the goals are to preserve one's individuality, evade the regulations whenever possible, and obtain special privileges, preferably on a permanent basis...
...These criticisms imply no general disagreement with Tannenbaum's political judgments, which are mostly balanced, pithy and shrewd...
...He recognizes that the workers, with whom he sympathizes, shared with the restrictionist employers, whom he dislikes, the responsibility for France's former slowness in economic modernization...
...As the title indicates, he rightly, if unfashionably, emphasizes France's modernization, concentrating on the revolutionary changes of the last 50, and especially the last 10, years...
...Tannenbaum thinks that French political parties have been too much attached to idealist abstractions and too little to real group interests...
...He complains that Frenchmen clutter up their political conflicts with bogus ideological "isms"—but some of these have no more reality than "Bevanism" in Britain or "Modern Republicanism" in the U.S...
...Although Tannenbaum's pages are enlivened by fewer sparkling halftruths than those of Luethy (who admittedly often clothed them in respectable but utterly unmemorable qualifications), his writing is always readable and lucid...
...For the most part, though, that very French virtue, a sense of balance, is one of Tannenbaum's strengths...
Vol. 44 • November 1961 • No. 37
