A Bang or a Whimper?
Tills review is being written (and really it should be written by a Frenchman) at a time when the whole world is watching the grandeur and miseries of Dien Bien Phu, which seems to provide the fining: the ironic, the superb climax to the story which began with General de Gaulle's broadcast from London of June 18th, 1940: "Nothing is lost for France." Mr. Matthews, journalist and war-correspondent, who tells this story in his own vein of eloquent anguish and indignation, thinks it probable "that with a little coherent policy-making this war flu Indo-China] need never have started, that with a little more it might have been settled in its first couple of years." Others have said much the same. A Cabinet Minister directly involved described it to me as "the Peninsular War of the Fourth Republic." But that was four years and more ago. The Pourth Republic is an unconscionable time a-dying. The mortal symptoms are recounted, as by a stricken relative, is every chapter of this book. The tragedy of the theme is provided by the immense hopes of the first days of France's liberation, of which Mr. Matthews was a witness. In disillusion of those hopes he sets down, in brisk style and in circumstantial detail, all manner of fatally operating causes: from de Gaulle's lack of interest in economics to the machinations of private capital; from the evils (9i the transferable vote to the cynical foreign allegiance of the Corn' munists. With his account of the controversy over church schools he directs our attention to something which the English observer. so often ignores, the importance of the religious issue in French polities. It is an importance for which we might have to go back to the reign of Queen Anne to find our own parallel, and one is left with 016 feeling that Mr. Matthews, who offers no final remedy for the' disll he is examining, could not find one without impossible English" medicines: an Attlee administration (with a Cripps in it) for Pcis`h; war France, a nonconformist instead of a revolutionary history, and all those things which Voltaire and Montesquieu themselves rather. sanguinely admired on this side of the Channel. His bopk is ludo in its passion, and therefore continually readable whatever one's oWr! picture of the subject may be. It contains, moreover, the most telling portrait of de Gaulle that I have come across--sympatheilet critical, and humanly plausible.
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