ANOTHER VOICE
Can the ghost of Marshal Main yet save us from Thatcher?
AUBERON WAUGH
The conservative tradition in France has a much harder edge than that of Britain, Which soon drivels off into sadistic peno- logy and populist whimsy. We have no conservative tradition, so much as a long history of compromise and survival. The French are also, as I have often main- tained, a more intelligent race than we are, although of course some Englishmen, like Peter Jay, are very clever indeed. It might be thought that Main had finally discre- dited the grand old French tradition which provoked their abominable revolution of 1789 and their resolute hounding of the suspected traitor Dreyfus. Studying the long catalogue of disasters associated with the conservative cause in France, we may ask ourselves, as unprincipled opportunis- tic English conservatives, how they could Possibly have been so stupid. This is because the French are not stupid, and it is absurd to suggest that only the stupidest French people are drawn to the conserva- tive end of the philosophical spectrum.
When one looks at France with this in mind, one sees that for all its revolutions, and catastrophic defeats, it is an altogether more conservative country than Britain. It may not have so many super-rich as we do — the Westminsters and Goldsmiths—but it has a huge and immensely prosperous grande bourgeoisie which might still enter- tain the illusion that the whole of modern society is organised for its benefit. Under- neath the grands bourgeois — but not in any hierarchical sense — you have a large and prosperous traditional bourgeoisie of professional folk — doctors, lawyers, etc — who live in their original homes and enjoy all the traditional comforts of a superior existence. Underneath them, you have the French equivalent of the Sunday Times New Brits, the new managerial and
entrepreneurial classes who, for all their gross and repulsive attitudes, enjoy a fuller and richer life than their British equiva- lents. Descending by slow degrees through the social strata, one eventually arrives at the lowest level before the oldies, baddies, sickies and dafties who make up every society's inert, immovable ballast. This penultimate layer comprises the peasants (in the sense of farmworkers rather than small proprietors), priests, hospital ancil- lary workers, lavatory cleaners, cleaning women, street-sweepers and candidates for membership of whatever the French equivalent of Nupe may be.
When we examine the French equivalent of our own Nupe workers, as I say, we may find surliness and resentment (although by no means always) but we do not find the frame of mind which repudiates such un- dignified or ridiculous employment, or demands grotesquely inflated payments for it. In fact office cleaning women in Paris arc very badly paid indeed, and work abominable hours. This is a great shame, of course, and makes us altogether more virtuous if we pay our London cleaning women £4 an hour for a cursory run of the vacuum cleaner, but my point is that Paris, compared to London, is a conservative's idea of heaven. It may not come up to God's own kingdom of Thailand in this way, let alone to God's own socialist republic of Burma, but it is magnificently ahead (or gloriously behind) our own situation. French conservatives, for all their apparent stupidity and disappearance from the front line since 1944, have done better than anything achieved by Chur- chill, Eden, Macmillan, Home or Heath, let alone Mrs Thatcher, since the War.
So let us examine this grand old tradition which persecuted Dreyfus, lost the war and achieved its own timeless wax-work show in Vichy from 1940 to 1944. The six bogies of traditional French conservatism for the last hundred years — its inspiration as well as its main hope of popular appeal — have been the atheists, the Jews, the Freema- sons, the socialists, the financiers and those of mixed race. In English literature, they are expressed only by Belloe who was, of course, French. These six bogies com- prised the Frenchman's chief anxiety for his culture and way of life. Of the six, only the last survives as a bogy.
Massie does not suggest that there might have been any contradiction between the
three bogies of atheism, Freemasonry and Judaism, probably accepting that these three were no more than historical, xenophobic and anti-conspiratorial rallying cries which have now lost their appeal. He is commendably uninterested in the Maur- ras anathema against meteques, or people of mixed blood, despite its contemporary relevance. But he does, in an aside, suggest a contradiction between French conservat- ism's traditional hostility to socialists and its traditional hostility to financiers, and in this matter I suggest he is profoundly wrong. If English conservatism has any- thing to learn from the wisdom of its more successful brother across the channel, it is surely that socialists and financiers be- tween them represent an identical threat to what we both mean by conservative civi- lisation — call it capitalism, a free society or what you will. Belloc understood this, and I am afraid it may have been part of Mosley's message, although he approached it from an incorrigibly statist point of view.
Photographs of Goldsmith, Rothschild and Packer — only two of them, one notes with relief, are Jews — grinning at the camera as they prepare to raise enough junk bonds to secure their £13 billion takeover of BAT might somehow alert the free world to the fact that the capitalist system is in a dangerously split state. There are two currencies — the ordinary pounds or dollars accumulated by the industry and thrift of the working population and the junk pounds or dollars which exist on video screens as the accumulation of gambling and asset-stripping operations by finan- ciers.
It is the point where the two currencies meet — whether in the housing market or in the closure of working places — that the whole system collapses. Britain is in no position to take an initiative, for fear of losing its place as a world financial centre. An effective capital gains tax, requiring retention of assets for three to five years, is more than the international community of speculators could survive. Inside the Euro- pean Community and under the leadership of France (where every peasant still tradi- tionally sleeps with gold bullion under the mattress), we might yet be led back to sanity and some modern equivalent of the gold standard. Is it too much to hope that the ghost of Petain leaning over Mitter- rand's shoulder may yet save us from Thatcher and Bush?
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