A Frenchman in Switzerland
Switzerland. By Andre Siegfried. (Cape. 12s. 6d.) WHO has not sometimes felt with Gide that Switzerland is too tiresomely exemplary ?
" Honnete peuple suisse ! Se porter bien tie lui vaut rien. Sans crimes, sans histoire, sans litterature, sans arts, c'est un robuste rosier, sans epines ni fieurs.
In this book on Switzerland M. Andre Siegfried says nothing so frank. But one is left to suppose that he is privately of much the same opinion. He has sub-titled the book A Democratic Way of Life, but there is nothing in it about the arts and literature, the culture of Switzerland. Nothing about history. Nothing about the home and school, the town life and the village. Calvin, Zwingli, Rousseau, William Tell and Dr. Barth are briefly mentioned, but there is no reference whatever to Beza, Bocklin, Bodmer, Breitinger, Constant, Fuseli, Urs Graf, Haller, Keller, Klee, Lavater, Meyer, von Muller, Pestalozzi, Winkelried. There is only demography, trade, industry, finance, politics and constitutional practice. Implicitly, it is far mare profoundly cynical than the words 1 have quoted -from Gide.
M. Siegfried has travelled widely, and his books on foreign countries enjoy a high regard in France. Switzerland has obviously depressed him. He has not even had the spirit to criticise the country. He simply sets forth at length the least interesting of facts. In not one single chapter does he successfully dissimulate his bore- dom. Unlike Ruskin and the rest of us, M. Siegfried finds the German-speaking Swiss " romantic " ; but I think by this he only means that they are not brought up, as he was, on Descartes. Alas, one looks in vain for Cartesian qualities in M. Siegfried's work itself. Teutonic virtues of high seriousness and industry are more apparent. The author has assembled more statistics here than I have hitherto encountered in a work of straight descriptive prose. I am told on good authority that M. Siegfried's figures of Swiss trade and economics are irreproachable. The one disadvantage is that they are four years out of date. English readers wilt find much later and more useful statistics in the Statesman's Year-Book and Whitaker's Almanac for 1949 and 1950. Internal evidence suggests that this edition of M. Siegfried's book has been translated first from French into American and secondly from American into English. It is certainly not the author's fault if such Atlantic voyages have delayed the British publication of his work.
Historians of post-war economics will not, however, be wholly disappointed. The exceptional year of 1946 in Swiss industry .and trade is here analysed in detail ; for example, the proportion of watches made entirely in one factory is compared with the proportion made in parts in several. But on the whole this book is like the science of arithmetic, in that it offers rather little to engage a mind
that has no aptitude for figures. MAURICE CRANSTON.
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