A civil servant in a civil war
Anita Brookner
THE FREE FRENCHMAN by Piers Paul Read
Seeker & Warburg (The Alison Press), £10.95
Here is a marvellous novel. Its subject is nothing less than 40 years of recent French history, and it encompasses all the triumphs and disasters, the compromises and the treacheries, the manipulations and the antagonisms of native born opposing factions, seen at their most deadly in the course of the second world war. Should this seem too didactic a programme for the innocent novel reader it should be said at once that the narrative is filtered through the story of two Provençal families, their friends, their neighbours, their colleagues and their enemies. Although the novel runs to 570 pages the interest never drifts away from the central conception, which is an examination of the mingled loyalties and disloyalties of Frenchmen, their vola- tile allegiances, and their frequently appalling recidivism. So emotive is this subject that the note of reconciliation on the final page is a proclamation of the end of hostilities that one had scarcely hoped to witness.
It is a novel of great scope and consider- able understanding. Yet it begins very quietly, with two schoolgirls in a convent in Valenciennes, Alice Ravanel and Fran- goise Bart. Alice, the pretty and fortunate one, soon makes a suitable marriage to a professional soldier and becomes Mme de Roujay. Frangoise, who is timid, irritating, and unattractive, marries a boorish student whose rise in the university hierarchy is never in doubt. The de Roujay property, Saint-Theodore, frequently offers hospital- ity to the less advantaged Franciose Bon- net, whose husband soon occupies a teaching post at the University of Montpel- lier. Their children play together, and it is at Saint-Theodore that Bertrand de Rou- jay, the Free Frenchman of the title, meets Madeleine Bonnet, daughter of the in- creasingly eminent Michel Bonnet. De Roujay is a Catholic nobleman; in ensuing events members of his family will turn to increasingly ultra positions on the right, where their sympathies and loyalties natur- ally belong. He is an upright and fairly sensitive character and an appropriate rep- resentative of his class. Madeleine, on the other hand, is the free-thinking daughter of a prestigiously free-thinking professor: un- compromising, dogmatic, and unthinkingly intellectual. Her inclinations will take her in the direction of communism.
The marriage of Bertrand de Roujay and Madeleine Bonnet produces a daughter, Titine, who spends more of her time at Saint-Theodore than she does in Coustiers where Madeleine pursues her career as a teacher. The child is innocent of the ideologies that are driving her parents apart, and the marriage is the first casualty of attitudes that are seen to be both endemic and violently opposed. A casual liaison between Madeleine and Michel le Fresne, a member of the agreeable group of friends that has gathered around the young couple leads to a divorce between Madeleine and Bertrand and also to Madeleine's permanent exile as Michel le Fresne's mistress: as communists neither believes in the marriage tie. Bertrand is not innocent: he visits a Spanish girl, a refugee from the Republican side, on an almost regular basis, and also comes close to an affair with Nellie le Fresne, Michel's wife, and the daughter of an olive oil millionaire. All these details are important and help to build up a picture of a society which might just have held together had it not been subjected to intolerable pressure. All the characters have their part to play in the events that account for most of them. The only member of the group who engages the loyalty and affection of them all is Pierre Moreau, formerly Halevy, a Jew who, at the height of his fortunes, occupies the position of examining magistrate.
The enormous cast of characters, which includes all members of the de Roujay family, Bertrand's civil service associates, the criminal fraternity with whom he has to do battle in the course of his duties as Prefect of Mezac, the military personnel to whom he becomes attached once he de- cides to join De Gaulle's staff in London, his second — English — wife and her family, are carefully tipped into the narra- tive in order to present the conflict of interests, of raisons d'être, and eventually of alibis when the conduct of the war reveals them to be on opposing sides. So masterly is Piers Paul Read's conception of the complexities of this particularly painful chapter in France's history that it seems that they can never be resolved without his intervention, and so dire is the fate of occupied France as he patiently describes it that one wonders how both history and the novel can ever recover from it. He is too wise to hurry us along or to mitigate the suspense that he himself has created.
The setting up of the Resistance, the fragmentation of that Resistance into poli- tical factions, the gradual infiltration of the communists, the sinister role played by a police chief, the trafficking, the deporta- tions, the hideous anti-semitism, the occa- sionally heroic death, the opportunistic revenges summarily enacted, the terrible allure of compromise, the survival not of the fittest and certainly not of the best but simply of the most fortunate prove a severe strain for Bertrand's Catholic faith, though this is allowed to remain. It is the worker priest, Dubec, who betrays him to his communist masters, thus breaking the seal of the confessional and effectively ex- changing one faith for another. It is Michel le Fresne, Bertrand's jovial communist friend, who accounts for the Bonnet pa- rents and causes Moreau to jump to his death. It is Nellie le Fresne who is branded as a collaborator and has a swastika carved on her breast by those savage elements who joined the Resistance a week before the war ended, although it was her father's money which had financed the clandestine newspapers of the underground. It is Ber- trand's ultra Catholic brother, Louis, who joins the Charlemagne Division of the Waffen SS and defends Hitler in his bunk- er. But it is Madeleine Bonnet who finally frees her former husband from imprison- ment and defies her lover in order to do so. They go back to live at Saint-Theodore and at the very end of the novel await the arrival of Henry, Bertrand's son by his faithless English wife.
Not a thread is lost in this extraordinary panorama. Michel Bonnet dies at Buchen- wald, giving away his rations to younger men. Bertrand's nephew, Thierry, becom- es a professional soldier and eventually sees action at Dien Bien Phu and in Algiers, 'wars that affect his mental ba- lance. Dubec becomes a full-time official of the CGT. The police chief, Guillot, ends his days running a brothel for a mafioso family before being found dead in a back street. Alice Ravanel's brother, the bishop of Langeais, a blameless man enjoying the protection of the church, is remembered as a supporter of Petain and removed to the Vatican for his own safety. Nellie le Fresne survives to open a chain of boutiques. And there are many terrible casualties, all of them suffering and sighing according to their beliefs. Noone is left unmarked.
Stendhal, writing in 1835, looked back on what he described as the 'curious transactions' of 1814. Curious transactions are at the heart of this novel, which never ceases to be a novel. The style is dispas- sionate, even colourless; overt sympathy or anger would mar the flow of the story. It is to be hoped that Piers Paul Read wins the Booker Prize with this novel. It is more advanced and more comprehensive than anything else on offer this year. It reveals the true skill of the novelist which is to rewrite history, often with more justice and more compassion than the official records can manage. The book may not please the sentimental Francophile, or even the Fran- cophile tout court, for the antagonisms that Piers Paul Read delineates leave a residual uneasiness in the reader, and this uneasi- ness is a true reflecton of an episode which has left its mark on two generations of Frenchmen. The Free Frenchman is con- siderable in giving such cause for concern, without ever ceasing to be an arresting fiction.
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