PASSING THE BUCK FOR FRANCE'S DEFEAT
Beston, Henry
Passing The Buck For Frances Defeat TRIUMPH OF TREASON.hy Pierre Cot. Ziff-Davis Publishing Company. $3.50. Reviewed by Henry Beston "WE'VE BEEN SOLD"—nous sommes trahis— all through French...
...The truth is that the regime was very little worse than other regimes which had their day beside the Seine...
...The generals and politicians whom M. Cot accuses were not "traitors...
...Defeated in a skirmish at Jemmapes, dragoons of the French Revolution broke in disorde'r shouting this very thing...
...The penalty was harsh as it always is when life itself is cheated, and the austere realities hocussed and denied...
...Treason...
...one heard little else in 1870, and in 1940 every poor bedeviled infantryman howled it incessantly all along his fugitive way...
...Reaching out from Bordeaux, it collared Gamelin the generalissimo, Daladier and various members of his cabinet, and Leon Blum before the Germans had settled down to a second beer...
...It was only a kind of one-horse New Deal, vague in purposes and confused in methods, and its reign of sit-down strikes, "fun-strikes," and clumsy nationalizations certainly did little to strengthen France in the face of a powerful and military enemy...
...the Vichy gang are all traitors...
...The Germans did little more than watch them with contempt, and ring down the curtain when the show became a kind of 'unseemly farce...
...Four hundred pages of "You're another" are rather an order...
...When every military plane was a vital thing to France, and before the Germans and the Italians intervened in Spain, this man was smuggling out of France the cream of the new machines and putting them at the service of the extreme leftists beyond the Pyrenees...
...The military defeat of France was but a secondary affair, and of significance as the climax of the long social and moral dissolution of the nation...
...THE author of this book, Pierre Cot, is a French doctrinnaire politician who served as Minister of Aviation in Leon Blum's Front Populaire...
...I give a vernacular translation instead of the more formal, "we are betrayed," because the vernacular here seems to me to have more of the modern content of the phrase...
...1 You will not find it an easy book to read...
...It is madness to put on a humanitarian ballet when a nation needs someone to tell it to stop fooling, and speak to it with the grim honesty of Mr...
...everybody was a traitor, it seems, including the cat...
...It was a treason to life itself, a treason to the bodies and souls of the tragic youth of France, a treason to the many cold hearths waiting again for a fire, a treason to the deserted field waiting for the bright blade of the plough...
...In so unwholesome a state of affairs, no soldier or politician could have "saved" the Third Republic...
...It then put its prisoners into cold storage, and looked about to see what could be worked up into a case...
...THE Riom trials were burlesques, and M. Cot is perfectly right in scolding at them...
...This book is M. Cot's counter-accusation of "treason" against everybody connected with the collapse of 1940...
...The generals were incompetent traitors...
...Reviewed by Henry Beston "WE'VE BEEN SOLD"—nous sommes trahis— all through French history this is the bitter shout one hears when things go wrong...
...The Riom trials were essentially French affairs...
...Perhaps it was, but it was also disruptive...
...I doubt if the French infantry of June 1940 would have shared his satisfaction...
...I am not, however, a particular critic of the Front Populaire...
...Churchill's "nothing to offer you but blood, sweat, and tears...
...It is also a defense, and a poor one, of himself as Minister of Aviation in the Front Populaire...
...So undigested, so shovelled-in is its material, so crammed is it with short declarative assertions that only a resident of Paris with a passion for reading the French press could make head or tail of it as part of the documentation of the war...
...It is not an attractive cry, but the French are Latins and intellectuals, and to them any failure is first of all a human responsibility...
...Does anyone really believe that had that noble arch-conservative Paul de Langouste been in power instead of that horrid liberal Jean-Georges Poule-au-Pot the military result would have been different...
...Minor names, meaningless to any American (and, I suspect, to most Frenchmen) together with 400 pages of talk which is never once historically resolved, make the evidence little better than a blur...
...Somebody else is always to blame...
...One reads and reads, and has no sense whatever of advance...
...Yes, there was treason, and the worst of all kinds...
...He admits the fact and glories in it...
...Let us hope that postwar France will create a new concept of national life which shall touch all imaginations, a concept humane, realistically intelligent, intensely French, and honorably free and strong...
...Knowing that the Blum administration would soon be called into court, he came early to this country, and was presently given some sort of small job in the Library of Congress...
...But only imagine this doctrinnaire as Minister of Aviation in a Europe being daily prepared and incited to the second mass-massacre of its young...
...One with the nation temperamentally, the improvised government which in 1940 followed the collapse, wasted no time in gathering "the guilty ones," les coupables...
...But he will get nowhere with his defense of the Popular Front as a glow of political sweetness and light...
Vol. 8 • July 1944 • No. 31
