France Since 1814
France, 1814-1940. A History. By J. P. T. Bury. (Methuen. 18s.) THERE was room for a new text-book on the history of France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and Mr. Bury has filled the gap admirably. He manages to include a surprising amount of material in a short volume. A special word of gratitude is due for the fact that he does not scorn to acknowledge his sources, and provides useful notes and bibliographies. His history is concise and well-written, and his judgements are shrewd and moderate. It is not Mr. Bury's fault, but rather a testimony to the success with which he has brought out the unity underlying the many vicissitudes of French history during the period, that the reader often has the feeling that he is going over the same ground more than once rather than moving forward, and that each section ends with the same formula: " thus, politically the regime was a failure, but in the realm of art, literature, scientific discovery. . . ." France is an historically minded country, where the revolutionaries of 1848, as de Tocqueville saw, repeat the gestures of 1789, and the Right-wing politicians at Vichy fall unconsciously into the attitudes of eighteenth-century Versailles. In the course of the last twenty- five years one has often felt that the originality of history was exhausted in France. We need not look farther than Mr. Bury's book for examples. Governments of the Left fall through bad finance —this is not necessarily peculiar to France. Stavisky echoes Ouvrard, Teste, the Panama scandal. A Louis Bonaparte, Boulanger, de la Rocque, de Gaulle, puts himself forward as a saviour of society,
but only one with the tradition of a Napoleon behind him is accepted. A government of republican union follows the decline of a would-be dictator ; and the modest spirit of a President Sadi Carnot, a Waldeck-Rousseau, perhaps a Queuille, succeeds where more brilliant men had failed. A struggle for influence in Spain twice precedes a great war with Germany. Napoleon III, writes Mt. Bury, " had been unable to overcome the resistance of the routine-loving War Office and High Command to his proposals for reform," and one remembers de Gaulle. The sad road from Paris to Tours and Bordeaux is travelled more than once. A great military defeat is followed thrice by a short attempt to gain power by the Left and then by a longer and more fundamental swing to the Right.
France is a conservative, traditionalist dog, with a revolutionary but equally traditionalist tail, which never succeeds in wagging the dog for more than a brief moment, but never abandons hope of reversing the course of nature. A great revolution, such as France and Russia have experienced, seems to exhaust the national capacity to progress beyond it for a long time after, and to produce an essen- tially conservative attitude of mind, even if it is concealed in ,revolutionary phraseology. But France, I believe, is near the end of that stage in her history. When Mr. Bury is called on to add a further chapter in a later edition of his admirable survey, to cover say the next ten years, I suspect that he may find it difficult to do so without opening many new doors, and spoiling the nice architectural
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