From Pillar to Post
FRANCE 1940-1955. By Alexander Werth. (Robert Hale, 35s.) IN spite of the title, this successor to its author's numerous books on the decline and fall of the Third Republic can hardly be called a history of France from 1940 onwards. Alexander Werth has assembled a vast mass of material, but the view he takes of international affairs after 1945 is so distorted as only to deserve the name of myth, and this, in turn, affects his presentation of France's internal development. Of course, there are good things here. On Vichy and the Resistance Mr. Werth is much sounder than on the Fourth Republic. His account of colonial affairs and of the local events leading up to Dien Bien Phu is very clear. But his book is much more a temoignage testifying to the cherished legends of the French Left than a serious attempt to elucidate historical truth. When that truth roughly coincides with the Left-wing view of contemporary history Mr. Werth is adequate and even illuminating. When it does not he is down- right fantastic.
Thus in the introduction we are brought straight up against legend : 'When Attlee flew to Washington to stop MacArthur from running wild in Korea.' Mr. Werth does not even hint in this passage that it was not the British Prime Minister, but the American President who stopped and later dismissed MacArthur. Take another instance of his historical method : 'The person who interviewed Eisenhower for Paris-Match, whom I saw a few days later, also expressed the view (no doubt derived from Eisenhower) that the Russians were "scared stiff" and would be "only too glad to withdraw to their 1938 frontier if they could limit the damage to that"!' If Mr. Werth can seriously accept this kind of not even hearsay evidence, it is hard to see how anything he says can be trusted. This may be the gossip of Parisian Left-wing intellectuals; but it is not history; it is crystal-gazing.
Occasionally, indeed, something rather more unpleasant than misrepresentation peeps out of these pages. Mr. Werth's little joke about Louis Renault dying of 'heart failure back in 1944 at the thought of being nationalised as a penalty for his unpatriotic behaviour . . .' sounds a good deal less funny when we reflect that there is some likelihood that Renault died as a result of beatings-up received in prison. In fact, though I like neither collaborators nor big industrialists, I do not think I find it funny at all.
These things apart, Mr. Werth's book misses a big opportunity. As compared with Dr. Lilthy's recent work on the same subject it is superficial. Pulled from pillar to post by the conflicting claims of a distinctively Western liberalism and a doctrinaire sympathy with a vaguely Marxist Left, its author is hypnotised by the struggle between the French Left and Right and by the Left-wing crise de conscience precipitated by the policies of Stalin. One moment he is being severe about Communist attempts to take all the credit for the Resistance, the next he is glossing over the Communist Party's support of M. Pleven's attack on M. Mendes-France's plan for currency reform in 1945. And the Marshall Plan is treated in such a way as to suggest that the Americans were to blame for the failure of successive French governments to use the aid constructively.
What is quite lost amid these Byzantine discussions (which, incidentally, have very little meaning in the context of inter- national politics) is the fact that both classic French Left and Right are still fighting the battles of 1880, if not of 1789. Left and Right are equally to blame for France's economic stagnation, for the dead hand of the situations acquises, for the failure to adopt a reasonable German policy before it was too late. The sickness of much of French society transcends political parties, and so do the germs of hope which any observer is bound to perceive beneath a sombre surface. Out of the gradual thawing of the most glacially conservative country in Europe Mr. Werth might have made an interesting work. As it is he has produced a source-book for more objective students. ANTHONY HARTLEY
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