THE FRENCH POLITICAL SYSTEM By W. L. Middleton
Lacking the sweep of J. E. C. Bodley's famous study and the brilliance of some recent impressionistic sketches of France by friendly Germans, this sober, straightforward explanation of French political affairs is none the less a useful piece of work. The French Political System (Benn, I25. 6d.) is exhi- bited here as a mechanism subject to very divergent strains and stresses, which, however, has the great merit that it works. There is indeed a peculiar irony in the fact that the Constitution of the Third Republic should be the briefest and most practical charter of its kind on record—in a country where the tradition and habit of mind is all the other way. No Frenchman, as the author remarks, can stomach improvised, loose and piecemeal solutions of a problem. And French foreign policy since 1918 is remarkable not so much for its "simple realism and self- interest" as for the unfailing method of "approach, consisting in "large and general solutions informed with logic in their minutest details.' Mr. Middleton depicts particularly well the forces of gravitation that are gradually detaching the parlia- mentary system from its " political " axis—i.e., for or against the Republican regime and the " lay " State—and placing in the forefront the issues of social reorganization. But it is a slow and chequered process. The Senate, for instance, is eminently a socially conservative body, yet its tradition was still strong enough to turn out M. Tardieu's Government in 1930 'because the latter was suspect of deriving his support from Catholic and " reactionary" forces. M. Herriot's mot with reference to the Socialist Party : Restaurant ouvrier, cuisine bourgeoise (a placard actually exhibited at an eating-house) is shown to be very much to the point. Mr. Middleton has been a journalist, and one is amused by the characteristic note of a passage like this : !" Certain big industrial organisations like the Comite des Forges are often credited with exercising all sorts of mysterious influence over Governments, political parties and newspapers!"
A delicious example of the deprecatory style.
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