MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
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T is strange that the British Press and public should not have I taken a more lively interest in the trials now being held at Riom. All State trials serve as a warning of the mutability of human fortune, the abuse of power and the danger of allowing the judiciary to become subservient to the executive. But the Riom trials have an interest more immediate and more practical than any cautionary tale. They suggest that it is in fact im- possible to fix the responsibility for a national disaster upon any single group of individuals, and that defeatism is a disease which permeates the whole body politic and stretches back beyond the childhood of any given generation. Leon Blum was correct in saying that the trials were an indictment of the French Republic itself. A disaster as tremendous as the surrender of 1940 cannot be mitigated by herding a few politicians and generals into a provincial court-room, nor (as we ourselves learnt to 1757 when we shot Admiral Byng) do the public derive from the slaughter of scapegoats any lasting solace for the mortification of defeat. There are other lessons which the Riom trials may teach us. They may prove that the Vichy Government is a fraudulent, vindictive, terrified, and therefore dangerous, huddle of trapped men. They may prove that the Nazis, although infinitely cunning and ingenious, are as devoid of political insight as were their fathers. And they may prove that French public opinion, although both doped and muzzled, remains sufficiently conscious and conscientious to deter Vichy from adding insults to the injury which they have already done to the honour and good name of France.
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