Sottisier
The French Radical Party. By Francis De Tarr. (0.U.P., 35s.)
READING this excellent, entertaining and depress- ing book, I came on the late M. Jammy-Schmidt.
had long forgotten his name, but once it rang as many bells in my mind as, say, the names of Mr. Anthony Greenwood or of Lord Stansgate do today. And with M. Jammy-Schmidt came back other memories—of Edouard Herriot re- ceiving the Sultan of Morocco (now King) in his good city of Lyons, of the hopes and confu- sions and conflicts of the Front Populaire, of M. Daladier seated uneasily beside M. Maurice Thorez. It was all a remote world, and one would have thought a dead world. For the France that die Radical Party represented and governed (ruled is too much) is dead or dying. It was the world of 'Alain,' of the cultivation of the 'little man,' of the preservation of social and political formulas and, more important, attitudes that helped to account not only for the deplorable weakness of France from a military point of view in 1940, but from a political and economic point of view from 1919.
What Mr. De Tarr does with learning, acute- ness and an admirable sense of the ludicrous is to tell of the galvanic struggles of the Radical Party to stay alive, to exercise its old role of being the 'party of government' par excellence, of being to the Fourth Republic what it had been to the Third, the embodiment of the 'repub- lican spirit.' He is forced to use a lot of detail to make his points, but his detail illuminates and he is in command of it. Thus we learn of the astonishing difference in enrolled membership and electoral strength that made the Radicals
almost as much a Latin-American army after the last war as the 'Independents.' Compared with the Communists, the MRP, even the pre- Mollet Socialists, the Radicals were a party of cadres not of troops. It was their control of the cadres, as Albert Thibaudet wrote, that had enabled them to come to the top after the first war, but that was not enough after the second. The troops were missing. They were missing except for a brief moment during the period when M. Mendes-France aid win tens of thousands of the young to temporary faith in the Radical Party as he conceived and defined it. To govern was `to choose,' said Mendes-France. But the Radical Party existed not to choose, except verbally. It existed to provide ministers, to arrange what the Italians call combinazioni, 'deals,' as the Americans put it. Mendes-France failed disastrously. He was outmanoeuvred by M. Edgar Faure and betrayed by M. Guy Mollet. He was also betrayed by the excessive zeal and righteousness of his passionate devotees like M. Servan-Schrciber of L'Express. He suffered from his Jewish origins and appearance. He suffered because he did not himself suffer fools gladly or suffer endless evasion of the living issues that had to be decided by somebody. They weren't decided by the political class of which the Radi- cals were the chemically purest specimens, so the Fourth Republic went the way of the Third.
M. Mendes-France was not a model leader. He was too brusque, too intolerant and he was not very perceptive of the depressing political realities of modern France. But 'this was a man.' Like Mr. Adlai Stevenson, he perhaps had more uncritical admirers outside his country than inside it. But failing in his take-over bid, he at last left the political holding company that he had entered as a boy under the influence of Herriot. Mendes-France at one end, Herriot at the other, and between what was called in the Convention 'the Marsh'? Not quite. Men like M. Qucuille were worthy and honest if limited servants of the public good. Unlike Herriot, M. Qucuille took the opportunity to get out of the France of Vichy and help in the work of liberation. Herriot stayed on, waiting for something to turn up. His vanity deprived him of the role of national leader. Mr. De Tarr passes over, too briefly, the mysterious negotiations between Herriot and Laval. Herriot talked, when he got back from Germany, in a way that disconcerted his admirers and, perhaps, his continued hostility to General de Gaulle came from a feeling that the General had usurped his role. Mr. De Tarr has provided an excellent sottisier. Radicals on 'les grands ancetres' are usually comic figures. What, in any case, can you make of a party claiming, as its spiritual chiefs, 'Alain' and Mendes-France?
D. W. BROGAN
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