A Self-centred People

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32298, 16 May 1970, Page 4

A Self-centred People

The French. By Francois Nourissier. Hutchinson. 324 pp.

This lively and perhaps too ambitious book attempts to do two things not wholly compatible: to characterise the French permanently and to account for the events and behaviour of the last 20 years. The new France is genuinely new: a revolution in age-grouping gives her 20 millions under 25 out of a 50 million population. The consequence of this, and the related pace of change, are a greatly raised level of expectation in education and increasing insecurity for those over 40, the casualties of an affluent society.

Nourissier is at his best in explaining that long-nosed portent, de Gaulle. “The French are cantankerous, mocking, grumbling people; the General is the same.” He quotes de Gaulle: “a nation worthy of the name has no friends.” Finally, however, he regrets that “the great confident and proud era of Gaullism, 1962-67, seems to have been succeeded by a period of puttering and improvisation.” It is far more true of the Frenchman than of the Englishman that his home is his castle—and the drawbridge is up. One reason Nourissier gives for this conspicuous inhospitality is that many Frenchmen economise on their style of accommodation. Of course, the 2000 wealthy hostesses who constitute “Tout Paris” invite everybody momentarily in the public eye, though “the republican drawing room” is still most receptive of “millionaires, dukes and artists.” The Protestants are the only minority to enjoy prestige in France. Their position in business is oddly comparable to that of Quaker families in Britain. Nourissier’s French are too individualistic to be amiable. Rude to

foreigners, evasive of taxes, permissive of hatred and violence between, for instance, police and students, the grand principles which elevated the nation in the past abandoned for unashamed materialism, the French yet cling to their history and try to irradiate the present with the blaze of past glories.