y avait la France
By D. W. BROGAN IREMEMBER asking a Frenchman who had escaped from occupied France what various eminent Frenchmen involved in the catastrophe were doing. 'They are preparing their memoirs in two volumes chez Pion.' He was right; there has been a flood of memoirs, MM. Gamelin, Weygand, Muselier, Reynaud, and a flood of lesser figures have told their story, pleaded pro domo SUO, and now we have the greatest figure of them all giving us the first volume of memoirs* that are already, in France, seen as a classic. And seen not merely as a classic document pour servir but as a literary classic, for General de Gaulle, though in a very different way, is as much a master of French as Sir Winston is of English. The young Colonel de Gaulle was already a most brilliant writer, but his style was rather hermetic, occasionally too personal. But the style of the Memoires de Guerre is French prose, sober, beautifully organised, using irony and emotion IREMEMBER asking a Frenchman who had escaped from occupied France what various eminent Frenchmen involved in the catastrophe were doing. 'They are preparing their memoirs in two volumes chez Pion.' He was right; there has been a flood of memoirs, MM. Gamelin, Weygand, Muselier, Reynaud, and a flood of lesser figures have told their story, pleaded pro domo SUO, and now we have the greatest figure of them all giving us the first volume of memoirs* that are already, in France, seen as a classic. And seen not merely as a classic document pour servir but as a literary classic, for General de Gaulle, though in a very different way, is as much a master of French as Sir Winston is of English. The young Colonel de Gaulle was already a most brilliant writer, but his style was rather hermetic, occasionally too personal. But the style of the Memoires de Guerre is French prose, sober, beautifully organised, using irony and emotion
Mernolres de Guerre. I: L'Appel. Par Charles de Gaulle. (Pion, 1,200 francs.)
soberly, but with all the greater effect. And as this is an age when French prose seems to me to be going rapidly downhill, to be liquefying, being swamped, not fertilised by neologisms and imports, the mere literary merits of General de Gaulle's style call forth gratitude and admiration.
But the weight of the Memoires is not solely due to their style. For here 'le style est de l'homme nieme; Here is the man who not only did not despair in the darkest hour, but pre- served his pride, his resolution, his sense of mission, not only in face of Hitler and of the claims of Vichy, but of the natural irritation of Sir Winston and of the scepticism and often ill- mannered and ill-informed policy of the White House. In a sense, the Menzoires testify to the naturalness of the irritation caused by General de Gaulle's inflexibility; the storms are often storms in a teacup. But it is because de Gaulle was inflexible in small things that he was successfully inflexible in great. De mitzimis non curat prcetor was a lawyer's maxim that made no appeal to him. He had seen la facilite ruin the Third Republic; he was determined it would not ruin la France combattante.
This contrast is admirably brought out by the very different story that M. Robert Aron* has to tell. The years of Vichy are the most distressing and depressing in modern French history, perhaps in French history. There is a natural revulsion from those times, a natural desire to forget. It took, then, courage and a high sense of mission for M. Robert Aron to try to assess the balance sheet of the 'Vichy gamble' (to use in another context Professor Langer's useful phrase). And it is important for us to remember that our judgement of Vichy in those years was, and had to be, summary. Few they were who had the sense of historical perspective of a friend of mine who, just as London was to be attacked, pointed out that there was a good deal to be said for Pierre Laval and that France had gained a lot in previous disasters from characters morally no more impressive. It would be going very far indeed to suggest that M. Aron has made Laval is hero; but, like Milton and Satan, he has been forced to a reluctant admiration for the adroit, courageous, unscrupulous, deluded, greedy but, in his own way, patriotic maker and master of the Vichy regime. For it was he who induced the National Assembly to commit suicide in 1940; it was he who saw that the Vichy of Main had no policy and needed one; it was he who soared above the dupes, crooks, condottieri of the government of the Etat Francais. He was something like 'less than archangel ruined.' It was not of mere vanity (although he had plenty of that) that he declared that the only Frenchman worthy of comparison with himself in this great crisis was de Gaulle. Each knew where he stood. It was like Walpole's praise of the incorruptible Jacobite, Shippen : 'I am for King George; he is for King James; the rest are for themselves.' scaffold; one or two of the most infamous to escape entirely. except for the pains of exile.
The Vichy regime was so much formally centred on Pewit] that one of the most interesting revelations of M. Aron's book is the emptiness of the authority of the Marshal. His role recalls that of Marshal Soult under Louis-Philippe. The Marshal's prestige was used to cover the real rule of less- admired figures until the evocation of Tillustre epee' provoked the retort, T illustre fourreau.' Main was the scabbard for Laval's sword or whatever weapon he put into it. Du Moulin de Labarthete, one of the most intelligent of the servants of the Marshal, called the epoch 'le tenzps des illusions' and the chief victim of the illusions was Main himself. He was betrayed by vanity; he was the destined saviour of France: no monarch by divine right had a more firm conviction of his indefeasible right than had Main. As the whole edifice was tumbling around him, he was arranging a new constitution for his grateful country and after D-Day he was willing to overlook the offences of de Gaulle and of the 'Dissidents.' Probably, Petain's last chance of serving France effectually came with the German occupation of all France and the chance then offered to him of flight to North Africa. He refused; Louis XVI at least got as far as Varennes! As another Marshal put it: 'Ty suis; j'y reste.' But MacMahon on the Malakoff, like MacMahon as President of the Republic, was 'brave homme et homme brave' in a sense that Petain did not attain to. Vanity and jealousy. It used to be said how much he was jealous of Foch and slat magni nominis umbra explains something. But more is explained by his political naivety. It would be unjust to blame Maurras for all of it, but the Marshal did display some of the sillier characteristics of the Action Francaise in its decline—and it declined far and fast! The whole idea of a 'national revolution' under German pro- tection was imbecile. As an honest if not very bright Vichyite put it: 'Notre erreur a ete de croire qu'on pourrait re/ever un pays avant de le liberer. On ne reconstruit pas une maison pendant qu'elle flambe.'
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