Books: In Creation’s Seventh Day

FRANCE AGAINST HERSELF (476 pp.) —Herbert Luefhy—Praeger ($6.50).

This is a book for all those who, like Thomas Jefferson, think of France as every man’s second country. A Swiss journalist who has lived for ten years in Paris, Herbert Luethy, 37, writes about France with caustically earnest and wide-ranging impartiality, a depth of historical per spective, and a total absence of lecturing, hectoring or sentimentalizing. Luethy calls his book “an attempt to draw up an inventory of what has survived, and also of what has become ossified, in the France of the present day.” Though his portentous paradoxes are far from glib, they face up to the impatiently reiterated de mand — what’s the matter with France?

The Old Bottles. All the parliamen tary rows and ministerial switches, says Luethy, have precious little to do with” the governing of France, which is actually one of the world’s most stable and conservative societies. The “anonymous, pro saic, tremendously persistent . . . host of official., jurists, clerks and bookkeepers [who have survived] forty kings and nearly as many revolutions and coups “d’ét” administer the enormously centralized state with all the finality of one thousand years’ unbroken tradition. These “supreme luminaries who control the state itself, its legislation, its finances and its personal politics, are totally removed from the eyes of the profane, and no breath of air disturbs the venerable dust of centuries that has gathered about them.

“The Conseil d’État will unhesitatingly interpret a law newly passed by the National Assembly in the light of decrees or regulations issued by Francis I or Louis XIII, and use the final and authoritative construction thus put upon it to pour back the new wine into the old bottles of an archaic jurisprudence. Before the last war the Cour des Comptes still used the same antiquated accounting system, the same quill pens, and the same bewildering piles of ledgers that were used in the Chambre des Comptes of the last Capetians [circa 1300].” The typewriter and the calculating machine were added only after V-E day.

With conservatism in such permanent authority, politics tends to consist largely of ideology and favormongering. “Only the slightest ideological nuances divide the harmless Radicals . . . from the Communists” when their parliamentary stentors shout the glorious insurrectionary principles of the Revolution, says Luethy. France, in short, has attained “the seventh day of creation” and wants only to keep what it has. Stability, says Luethy, is the Frenchman’s great desire—stability that preserves all the innumerable positions of petty local privilege first won as a rule from the all-compassing state, stability that permits the anarchic individualism by which “everyone is allowed his own destiny, and is allowed, to follow it to the end; no man’s hand will be raised to stop him.”

The Old Bones. Always working from this picture of France, “not only as a country or a nation but as a personal form of civilization,” Luethy looks at the political consequences of its self-preoccupation since 1940. He concludes that defeat taught the republic practically nothing. He finds that Communists cynically wrecked the hope of renewal that the Resistance movement contained, that the Gaullists threw away their credit with a sterile diplomacy based on outdated estimates of France’s international strength, and that the spokesmen of the “little France”—”the France of the sheltered, sleepy small towns, of closed doors and shop windows and limited horizons” —thereupon restored the ossified republic just as it was before Hitler knocked it in a heap.

All the same, it was France’s own Robert Schuman, “a great statesman,” .who came forward with the essential plan for the renewal of France’s vitality. The idea of a France joining in a larger European community, Luethy insists, was proper to the French. Their “national myth was that of the great Revolution; the nation was the absolute and supreme unity, and the sovereign individual the final and ultimate measure of all things. But this national ideal always drew sustenance from its expansion into the supranational and universally valid, and in the form of nationalism it can only negate and destroy itself.”

The Old Receptivity. The underlying crisis of contemporary France, says Luethy, stems from the nation’s profound inclination to lapse back into “a tragic retreat into herself.” Obviously, Luethy does not regard last year’s lame and tardy ratification of the Western European defense agreements as any sure indication that France has conquered the urge to withdraw.

Yet no nation, he says, could be “less in danger of losing herself and her rich heritage in a wider community than this ancient civilization, whose crystal clarity extends even into the forms and patterns of everyday life.” Let France but keep open her traditional “receptivity to alien things,” concludes Luethy, and her “idea of civilization” will again “possess a conquering force greater than all the imperialisms and ideologies.”