Two Nations in France
BY D. W. BROGAN cc HE country," so I learn from the French Press, is -tired of the French Parliament. This is hardly to be wondered at, since the sovereign Assembly is in- capable, apparently, of finding or supporting a government, and is not visibly very distressed at its failure. There are some good, formal explanations of the failure. The constitu- tion of the Fourth Republic has not worked well; the changes In the methods of parliamentary life since the days of the Third have mostly, in practice, turned out for the worse. Personal ambitions, not very deeply concealed, continue to play too important a part in deciding the fate of ministries. The personalities that have greatest weight in the outside world, hke that of M. Robert Schuman, do not necessarily have the same weight in the Palais Bourbon. The imperfect success with Which M. Mayer concealed his contempt for the intellectual equipment of his fellow-members helped to bring him down. But behind all these occasional causes of Governmental Weakness lies something more important and more ominous, the deep and apparently incurable, schism in French national life, the exile from it of the greater part of the politically con- scious workers. For them, as the Archbishop of Bordeaux has recently remarked, the class-war is not a theory; it is a visible fact that they live with every 'day. France, as much as Gaul, ls divided. It is divided into more than three parts; the political system reveals that. But it is divided most deeply into " them " and " us " by the survival and perpetuation in France of the revolutionary division and by the alienation of the workers from the bourgeoisie. It is on this existing division and on the forces that per- petuate it that the French Communists build. Because the division is there, because the attempts to bridge it by the Socialists, by the Mouvement Republicain Populaire and, more lately, by the Gaullists have so far failed, the French Communists can survive the illness of Thorez, the expulsion of Marty, the ignominies and mendacities of servility to the party-line laid down in Moscow. For the Communists can and do capitalise on the fact that they propose real reforms of structure," that they alone promise -them .with plausibility, that the millions of Frenchmen who think that profound changes must be made if France is to survive and revive are tempted, almost forced, to turn to the Communists who, at least, do not pretend that all is pretty much all right.
On the other side must be set the millions of Frenchmen who think that things are pretty much all right, that profound changes would be changes for the worse, that French life must not, need not, be remodelled on modern lines. Above all, it must not be remodelled on lines that will make the cost of reconstruction fall on the possessing classes, that will upset the pattern of small business, of archaic methods of production, will not force a new distribution of the meagre French capital resources. The present French State, as represented by the present Assembly, has shown itself impotent.
France has on the one hand millions of Frenchmen who wish for no fundamental change, and who will never willingly con- sent to give power to a Government likely to make fundamental changes, and millions of other Frenchmen, above all the indus- trial workers, who feel the need for that change, who feel them- selves excluded from the national community, for whom most of the claims made for the charms and benefits of the French way of life seem hollow. French life, that is to say, is seen very differently in the "beaux quartiers" of Paris and in Saint- Denis, in small country towns, and in the mines and mills of the North. The present Assembly, possibly any possible future Assembly on the same lines, can, at best, produce governments on the Pinay model, and that model, though much superior to other models, is quite unsatisfactory to the French who want a new France, in whom the optimism, energy and desire for innovation fostered by the Resistance and Liberation still lives.
The problems that a Pinay government, or another of that type, can face and solve are real problems, and their solution is better than no solution at all; but those who have to deal with the industrial masses, whether they be Socialists, members of the M.R.P. or left-wing Gaullists know that a government of bourgeois from the smaller towns, from the shopkeepers, from the more prosperous farmers, does not feel the problems or the passions or the needs of Roubaix or Saint-Etienne. , It is for this reason that the current M.R.P. congress has firmly refused to go to the Right, that Socialists fear, in most cases, the risks of office, that, because of this division as to what France needs, Communist strength, as the recent local-govern- ment elections show, has not declined at all.
That there is a great deal of illusion in the grievances of the French industrial workers, of the small peasants is true. The French have never been noted for exactness and precision in public economic discussion, and vague appeals to "justice " are no substitute for serious and sobering thought about the realities and possibilities of the French economic situation. No more than with us are the loudest preachers and claimants for a higher standard of living, for a liberation from depend- ence on America, for economic joys in widest commonalty spread, ready for the painful and upsetting alterations in the national way of life which is the price of-that necessary increase in French production without which the State, any State, will be incapable of remedying some of the more urgent grievances of the workers. Such an adjustment would mean the dismissal of many thousands of State officials, the abandonment of many uneconomic tiny collections of fields, the painful encourage- ment of real savings. All of this, even if carried out, would leave France with other grounds of division, with the incurable rancunes of some survivors of Vichy, with the old and not appeased quarrel of Church. and State, of which the Finaly case has suddenly revealed the permanence. The great problem of how to live with Germany would remain. But the greater problem is how to persuade the French to live with each other, how to bring back within the body of the nation the millions of exiles. That they are largely self-exiled is true. I have never been an admirer of the political sagacity of the French working man. But that does not diminish the seriousness of the task—of not only the reconciliation of the older workers but of the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, who have been. born and bred in an atmosphere of internal emigration. That is a problem the Assembly might seriously begin to think about if it could find the time.
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