TABLE TALK

Ancestral nonsense

DENIS BROGAN

Returning to the subject of the French right wing thinkers which I began last week, I turn now to Gobineau. Here we have not only a race theorist, but a race theorist

of a peculiarly maddening type. I have noted in the distant past that it is very rare indeed to find a race theorist who says, say, of the Ruritanian nation, 'these are contemptible, docile, worthless people, and I belong to them'. Gobineau in a sense got round this dilemma by attacking the French from the point of view of Aryanism. He is almost more irritating to read than Maurras because he borrowed a great deal of mid-nineteenth century German race theory. He cast himself as a Norman. He believed that what made

the Normans important and what made the French important when they had been im- portant was their Germanic blood.

This nonsense, of course, was not confined to Gobineau and not confined to France. and not confined to Germany. After all, John Richard Green asserted at the beginning of his famous Short History that for the begin- nings of the English nation the most sacred spot was somewhere in Schleswig-Holstein. This, I suggest, is not true. And it was perhaps ironical that John Richard Green married a violent Irish patriot. Alice Stop- ford—who patted me on the head when I was a little boy, and said I would go far.

Some of this Teutonic nonsense still survives. A few months ago I read in one of the quality Sundays that it was absurd to talk of the Norman Conquest as French becaus'e the Normans were not French : they were Scandinavians. The author of this letter did admit to the presence of a certain number of Bretons in the Conqueror's army, but seemed to think that there was a rigorous customs and passport barrier round the duchy which kept out all mere Celts. i.e.

nearly all French people. I am quite prepared to believe that Robert the Devil was descended from Odin, but the author of this letter did not seem to appreciate the pro- blem presented by the unknown origins of William the Bastard's mother, Arletta, daughter of the miller of Falaise. A good deal of Teutonic nonsense could be found in the nineteenth century even in Scotland where there was a steady writing down (despite John Brown, despite the bagpipes) of the Celtic elements in Scottis)) history.

But much more serious in France than Gobineauesque nonsense was, of course, the legacy of the Revolution and the theory that you could dignify it by such a title that the Revolution was a revolt of the Gallo- Romans against the Franks. Needless to say, Mauna% as a provencal, was very hostile to any such theory, and it was for that reason that the Action Francaise built up Fustel de Coulanges: he was the defender of the Romanity as compared with the Frankishness of what became the Kingdom of France. In this sense it could not be a race of the Wagnerian type. But the Revolution did provide controversial material for the endless quarrel of Frenchmen against Frenchmen which Bodley acutely analysed around 1900.

I cannot for myself see why there should be any doubt that Taine was in fact an orna- ment of the right. His history, if you can call it that, of the Revolution was certainly an at- tack on the Jacobin tradition of the Revolu- tion on which the Third Republic was based. The late Pieter Geyl used to tell with a great

!al of amusement of an historians' congress in which Daniel Halevy, the brother of Elie Halevy, tried to suggest that Taine had something valuable to say about the French Revolution, a heresy which produced a levee des boudiers from the normaliens. He always thought this was typical of normaliens, a group he did not much admire. But I have recently taken to re-reading Taine for a book I was planning to write on French reactionary thought (a plan I have given up) and I came to the conclusion that the normaliens were right, that Taine was a bad and tendentious historian who seemed to have very inadequate ideas of how history should be studied, and his attack on the

Revolution was in the strictest sense of the term reactionary, and also incompetent. The reactionary author to whom injustice seems to me to be done is Barres. Barres was, of course, not a serious historian, nor did he pretend to be. But he was a very remarkable writer. His three volumes of quasi-memoirs,

the Roman de finergie nationale, is one of the best French memoirs of the Third Republic, and the Cahiers are a very

valuable series indeed. Nor can I see anything particularly odd in his cultivation of the graves of his ancestors. After all, the

Greeks had a great cult for their graves. So

had the classical Chinese. One can object that Barres was not very clear as to where his graves were—whether in Lorraine or in Auvergne or, by this time, in Provence. Nevertheless Barres was a writer of very great talent, and once or twice more than that, and his was a much more amiable talent than the often odious displays put on by Maurras.

There was in Barres a capacity for generosity and a capacity for objectivity en- tirely lacking in Maurras and of course en-

tirely lacking in Gobineau. The Action Fran- gaise is for all practical purposes dead, and the royalism of the Action Francaise was never very much alive even before the Se- cond World War, although it was a little more alive than the Bonapartism to which Barres secretly adhered. Many more people read the Action Francaise than believed in it.

even if they read in it only the scandalous polemics of Leon Daudet. (Alphonse Daudet used to bring his obstreperous son to England, notably to Oxford, when he was a schoolboy, and Winifred Whale, the brilliant translator of Anatole France, said he was the most odious schoolboy she had ever en- countered. Thii I can well believe.) It is perfectly true that there is something absurd in Barres's writing about Lorraine as if it was still the Lorraine of good King Stanislas and not one of the great industrial prizes of

Europe. But after all, how many patriotic Tories talk as if England's green and

pleasant land is represented, let us say, by Stratford-upon-Avon, but not by Birm- ingham.

Historical quarrels are not confined to France, but they are particularly violent, bad-tempered, and divisive in France. As Bodley said, the bitterest enemies of France are Frenchmen and the foreigner who comes to France to cover political explosions, like

the Days of May of 1968. should remember this and believe, at most, a quarter of what

he is told. Thus. I did not believe it when a

young publisher told me that General de Gaulle had deserted to the Germans in 1940

and had been sent back by them in an equivalent of Lenin's sealed train to wreck the union forming round the Marshal. Some left wing anti-Gaullist fiction is equally absurd.

Dr Johnson in a celebrated remark asserted that patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel. H. L. Mencken said it was often the first refuge of a scoundrel. At any rate, in France it is often the last and first refuge of a liar. Of course while it is impossible to consider nationalist theory without thinking of the horrible example of Germany, it is perhaps wise to remember that the first great genocidal crime of this century was committed against the Arme-

nians in the First World War by what was the formally enlightened government of the Turkish 'Committee of Union and Pro- gress'—a Masonic left wing organisa- tion—which shows how complicated the whole problem of guilt isl