VIVE LA DEBACLE!
Mayer, Milton
Vive la Debacle! By MILTON MAYER Bruges, Belgium THE English used to have a national anthem, set to the coda of Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance, which went like this: Wider still and wider May...
...England has been reduced to the condition of Europe, seedily prepossessed with survival...
...But from what...
...They are brighter than the English and, like all bright people, more volatile...
...But it can not stabilize democracy and go on making war...
...An Assembly seat is worth a fortune, and the Deputies, no matter what district they represent, all live in Paris...
...The war-making power of France is American, just as it is everywhere else in western Europe...
...The aristocracy calls them "the Americans...
...And survival means socialism, just as the lifeboat means socialism...
...to finance a war against a colonial people and floats a war loan in which participation entitles the lender to a tax reduction (or, to put it plainly, in which non-participation means heavier taxes...
...Where an American customs inspector is ashamed to take money—even if he takes it—a Frenchman holds his hand out...
...He is counterrevolutionary...
...One is Paris and the Parisian-spirited in the half-dozen cities no smaller than Orleans...
...American billions have postponed the battle for Paris...
...English plumbing was never greasier, English food never smellier...
...Britannia waiving the rule is not a pretty picture...
...But you get no service at all in France...
...Congress toward foreign aid played a role, but, say the Swiss, who ought to know, a very small role...
...government...
...they would have to, because Paris is the true shrine and the native home of the left...
...The wars that nobody wants go on...
...The French devotion to liberty is Parisian, not French...
...But among the ruins of Europe and of all of its history and its hopes, there are signs—strongest in England, perceptible in France—of a new spirit which, perhaps, a man or a nation or a continent has to hit rock bottom to imbibe...
...They will destroy France to destroy the rich...
...Cyprus and Algeria are wars for money and power and for nothing else, and so high has the tide of decency run in England that the Prime Minister is compelled to assign parity with the Turkish minority patter to the fact, and the only fact, of the Cyprus matter, namely, the protection of England's oil...
...even the Archbishop of Canterbury, the primate of England, denounced it...
...But the United States is able to prevent a united Europe—a genuinely united Europe—east and west, and there is no Frenchman I met, and I met many, who mistakes NATO for a united anything, or who does not take it for what it is, the guarantor of a divided Europe...
...France is morally paralyzed, as incapable of reform as a light lady with a rich friend, as numb as England is vibrant, as limp as Germany is tense...
...It doesn't go down any more...
...Ends have to be met...
...They want to destroy the rich...
...In all the world the franc is the surest barometer of the surest guessers, because it is the world's most artificially and ineffectively controlled currency...
...The Paris housewife pays forty cents for a head of lettuce...
...The rich steal the easiest, through the tax system...
...But the English have what it takes to come down in the world...
...nothing else moves them...
...It erupted in England with the deportation of Archbishop Ma-karios of Cyprus, a man accused of involving the church in politics by a government whose church is able to depose its king-emperorl Makarios was kidnapped by the British government, just as westerners (or easterners) are kidnapped by the Communists in Berlin...
...There is nothing in France—including the government—that can not be bought for money...
...The State can not afford it, either, but the State has a charge account, and a dwindling few sources of illegal income east of Suez, and a rich (though eccentric) offspring across the sea that still has some small use for a mother country's services...
...Summer, when the tourist dollar comes in, is always the peak season for the franc...
...There was a time, a time of greater moral density than now, when "the protection of the Turkish minority in Cyprus" would have been accepted by the English, who are, or until recently were, an extremely sanctimonious people...
...Cynicism, deepest of all in France, is pervasive in all of Europe, compounded of the disillusions of both victory and defeat and the realization that the only policy of any western European government is a dollar policy...
...It comes from the weather...
...Before Africa it was Indo-China...
...The French farmer—and the merchant...
...The Italian shipyards are building corvettes at American expense to be given (not lent or sold, but given) to Holland and Denmark by the U.S...
...All of them, policies, governments, soldiers, twitch like galvanized corpses at the word "Communism...
...Nothing can "save" France, any more than anything could "save" China...
...They know that their number is up...
...they hate...
...The French character isn't base...
...And, after all these months, it continues to be denounced, along with the whole Cyprus war, by conservatives as well as by liberals...
...Who are they...
...France symbolizes the decay of all of Europe, which has, of course, decayed before, and always for the same reason: war...
...And if they ever crowded into public conveyances, they recognized slowly that, there being so many of them in one place, they would never get on at all unless they stopped crowding...
...Couple the ineluctable decline of a nation of shopkeepers with the unimaginative function of keeping shop, and England, countryside and all, is the least lovely place in Europe...
...And the recent history of Germany does not suggest that a policy vastly supported by Germany and by Germany alone is necessarily a good policy...
...In between are the coming fascists, only a small (but ever-growing) proportion of whom follow the illiterate Poujade...
...Since rents alone are controlled—and very low—there is not a property owner who won't bribe a building inspector rather than pump out a basement or mend a fire-escape...
...The other is the France represented by that 45 per cent of the entire French population which is agricultural...
...the banker, the doctor, the lawyer, and the priest who minister to him—is as conservative and narrow-minded as Balzac painted him...
...They are the people for whom the government and the war and the press are run...
...The buyers' faith in the ability of any French government—left, right, or center— to hold Algeria was shot...
...They know how to grow old gracelessly, but admirably...
...The poor steal through the mark-up, the short weight, and the short change, but above all, from themselves...
...The attitude of the U.S...
...Well, the French, for one...
...The only reality which would rouse this tragic country—a country much more tragic than Germany, because, unlike Germany, it is the light of the world and a dreadful portent, perhaps, of what fate is in store for the light of the world— the only reality which would rouse this tragic country would be a united European polity and economy, in which France, whose culture is still the dream of Europe, would reemerge revitalized...
...And if the Germans, trained in hypocrisy, make nice noises, the French do not...
...Narrower still and narrower have her boundaries been set...
...They are not Marx's bourgeois, who inherited something and do nothing...
...It simply contains, among its ingredients, imagination, as the English does not, and the French have been reduced to living on their imaginativeness...
...The physical condition of Paris—behind the floodlit cathedrals and palaces—is incredible...
...There have never been more high-priced restaurants in Paris, patronized by Frenchmen, or high-priced cars driven by Frenchmen...
...So they stand and take it, and they are much more attractive in their present posture than they were when they were dishing it out...
...52 bus, to know that the English have character and to know where it comes from...
...You get slovenly service from the emancipated waitress in England, and there is less dirt under her thumb than there is under the other four fingers because the thumb is in the soup so often...
...But there is a deep moral revulsion beginning, even in France...
...another 24 hours of such overt fascism and the government would have fallen...
...But last summer the franc on the black market (that is, the free market of Switzerland) failed to rise, for the first time since the war...
...But nobody wants them...
...France, unlike Italy, is still a rich country...
...Only in Germany—of all of western Europe—has the Eisenhower-Stevenson militarist anti-communism any vast (I do not say genuine) support...
...He was in jail less than 24 hours...
...Paris is the city whose boulevards are named for artists, musicians, and poets...
...It is no baser than the English...
...At some point cynicism turns a corner and sprouts moral decency...
...The English people simply cannot afford more than a nickel for a pound of bread (or fifteen cents for medicine), so they have taken their troubles to the State...
...The Austrian ruins have never been more enchanting, the English reconstruction never less...
...but she calls you dearie and she means it, and she says, "Of course," and means it, when you ask her to mind the baby while you go to the washroom...
...He roamed the continent gathering material for articles, lectures, and a series of broadcasts for the National Association of Educational Broadcasters...
...The coming fascists are the squeezed, the little entrepreneurs...
...She and her husband and all the children work or steal or both...
...When one learns that there are twice as many horse-meat shops in the working-class streets as there were five years ago, he remembers Mayor La Guardia's refusal to license the sale of horse-meat for human consumption during the depression, on the ground that to do so would be to establish in America the great symbol of permanent class poverty...
...there is no other city in the world that resembles it or ever did, not even in degree...
...In the slums, city and country, are the poor...
...The French economy, even if war (which rides it harder now than it did in 1939-45) were ended, would not be workable because there is no will to work it...
...There were twice as many independently-owned grocery stores in France in 1955 as there were in 1935, almost twice as many doctors, dentists, and lawyers licensed every year as the country can absorb, and the lowest birth-rate in the world...
...The united front against Egypt is organized in an instant, but nobody believes that Egypt hasn't the right to its own land and its own waters...
...and in England it is raging...
...The only question anyone asks in France is, "How long will it last...
...Where does she get the money...
...If the primordial English ever grumbled, as I suppose they did, they got over it by recognizing slowly (for the English recognize things slowly) that unless thep stopped grumbling altogether they would always be grumbling about the weather...
...They are the cunning...
...It is not just that nutrition is falling—and alcoholism rising, for wine is cheaper than lettuce—but that the condition of the fixed poverty of a whole class is hardened, with its concomitant conviction that this is a system, irremediable except by overthrow...
...The French had no heart for war in 1940, less heart for it now...
...If England is seedy, France is crummy...
...The extreme rightists would pull Paris down in order to pull France down...
...They are absolutely class-conscious...
...it could, unlike Italy, stabilize democracy at the minimum dollar-a-day income stabilization point...
...Thou Who hast made her mighty, Make her mightier yet...
...you pay double or get your throat cut...
...History, not theory, converted England from capitalism...
...The policy that rules the Western world is a dead policy, the governments that proclaim it are dead governments, the soldiers who enforce it are dead soldiers...
...The class war—in which the English are too dignified to engage— is at its pre-revolutionary peak in France...
...If they do not hate the Americans as much as the people of eastern Europe hate the Russians, they do not love the Americans, either...
...The railroad stations are filled with crying mothers and sisters and girl-friends saying goodbye to soft-bearded boys who are going, not to military training, but to death in Africa...
...France is plastered with posters calling up the class of 1938 for the war in Algeria...
...As who isn't...
...War, including victorious war, is a luxury which only inexhaustibly rich empires can afford...
...It was too much to go down the broad British trachea...
...without American dollars and the American militarism that goes with them, the European economy, England's as well as France's, and only excepting the Lowlands', Sweden's, and Switzerland's, would collapse in six months...
...It is a revulsion (intensified, certainly, by financial considerations) against the continuation of colonialism and colonial slavery...
...France is two nations...
...By MILTON MAYER Bruges, Belgium THE English used to have a national anthem, set to the coda of Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance, which went like this: Wider still and wider May her bound'ries be set...
...They are the rich, most of whom were poor before the war (or in jail after it...
...the English are icy cold...
...You have only to stand in a queue la half-block long in a midsummer downpour in London, waiting a solid half-hour for a No...
...All of these people, not just the French, are tired of it, all of them slaves to it and America the master...
...Last spring the French government arrested Claude Bourdet, editor of the independent weekly, France Observateur, for writing editorials of a "demoralizing" character against the Algerian war...
...They don't have it any more...
...A Socialist government raises the price of the poor man's tobacco by 19 per cent (and the rich man's by 20 per cent...
...MITON MAYER, The Progressive's regular contributor, has just returned from a year in Europe...
...Anti-colonialism is moral idealism, and a majority of the French are not preoccupied with moral idealism...
...They have character...
...were it not for Paris, the same fate which overtook Germany from the little-right would have overtaken France long ago...
...And there is no sign of a revulsion—of a revulsion, that is, of policy...
...If a majority of the French oppose the war in Algeria—and a majority of the National Assembly oppose it, even though the non-Communist left and center, in order to oppose the Communists, support the war policy of the right—it is because they do not want to pay for it, not because they are anti-colonial...
...too many Englishmen, and more all the time, are observing to too many other Englishmen that the concern for the Turkish minority is an ancient, and in this instance all too palpable fraud, more palpable, far, than the French concern for "the protection of the French minority" in North Africa...
...It is accepted no longer, except by the wax-museum figures left over from the Churchill era...
...they inherited nothing and do everything...
...The French are taking it very fretfully...
...The little entrepreneurs—professional as well as commercial—are caught between the ruling right and the revolutionary left, and they are readier every day for a new and ruthless deal whose essence, as it has been in France before, and in Russia, Italy, and Germany more recently, is the purge of parliamentary rottenness...
Vol. 20 • October 1956 • No. 10
