NATION NEIGHBOURS

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 122, 16 February 1935, Page 19

NATION NEIGHBOURS

The English Through a Frenchman’s Eyes “The French and Ourselves,” as seen by Comte Serge Fleury (London: G. Bell and Sons, Ltd.). As a liaison officer between the French and English armies during the Great War, and as a member for some years of the French diplomatic service in England, Count Fleury is well qualified to draw comparisons between the two nations. Realising that a country is too often popularly judged by the limited aspect presented to the ordinary tourist, he takes his readers into the homes, the countryside and villages, the churches and clubs of both countries. He shows his own countrymen as they appear to one who loves and understands them without blindness, and, in turn, attempts to picture and explain the Englishman with his outstandingly different characteristics and assessment of values. In doing so he draws attention to certain virtues not always apparent to ourselves, and even in his critical moments he maintains throughout an attitude of sympathetic good humour. In the preface he says

It would be a great satisfaction to me if I were able to explain to my French countrymen the attitude of neighbours whose aspirations, though sometimes difficult to understand, have suffered no change for centuries. What infinite pleasure I should find, moreover, in convincing our British neighbours, in the eyes of whom our ingrained habit of finding fault with ourselves has caused us the gravest prejudice, of the soundness and resiliency of the French race.

“The French and Ourselves” is entertaining and, at times, very amusing, hut its deeper significance lies in its value as a plea for greater tolerance and understanding on the part of two great neighbouring, if not always neighbourly, nations, “between whom,” to quote Lord Tyrrell, who writes the foreword, “understanding and sympathy was never more important than it,is to-day.”