THE TRAGEDY OF FRANCE

Evening Star, Issue 23723, 2 November 1940, Page 12

THE TRAGEDY OF FRANCE

The stubborn individualism of the French, so exalted by the revolutionary tradition, ensured that the State should always be weak, with shortlived and . vacillating Governments wielding a permanently feeble executive power. One expression of individualism, the desire for personal and family security and Comfort, led to a low birth rate and a stationary population, which caused many Frenchmen to doubt whether France could hope to hold her own against doubly populous Germany. * French individualism demanded a weak State for fear that a strong State would menace liberty, and inevitably it got an inefficient State. It resisted great collective enterprises in industry because they, too, seemed to threaten the individual, and here, too, it got inefficiency, with the result that France had too few aeroplanes and tanks to defend herself. The French way of life, pushed to extremes, wrought it» own ruin.

But it does not follow that Fascism, the abolition of all liberty, the complete disappearance of the individual in a regimented and submissive mass, can offer a solution for France, the home of liberty, who has long regarded herself as the chief custodian of a European culture which only the free minds of an unregimented _ people could have created. . . . Possibly one day she will recover and learn to reconcile individualism with production, freedom with an efficient State, democracy with national solidarity. Such is the problem not of France alone, but of all democracies.—Harold Callender, in the ‘New York Times Magazine.’