The novels by Frenchmen in this study reveal relatively little about
national character and behavior. Stendhal deals with Italians and
Malraux primarily with Chinese. However, the ambitious Ferral, head
of the Franco-Asiatic Consortium in _Man’s Fate_ may be revealing. He
hopes to make enough money in China to return home and buy the leading
French news-gathering and publicity syndicate. With this power he hopes
to regain office and “pit the combined forces of the cabinet and a
bought public opinion against the Parliament.” In Malraux’s words one
catches, under their cynicism, echoes of the declining power reflecting
upon vanished days of affluence:
The threat of bankruptcy brings to financial groups an intense
national consciousness. When their enterprises in distant corners
of the world are suddenly threatened with disaster they remember
with mingled pride and gratitude the heritage of civilization which
their country has given them and which they in turn have helped to
pass on to colonial peoples.
In _Presidential Agent_ Sinclair presents the French as a people
who have installed a rotten government to manage their affairs, a
government eager to join with Britain in obtaining temporary surcease
from German threats to its financial holdings by hypocritically
sacrificing Czechoslovakia. They had decided upon “a compromise
with Hitler as the cheapest form of insurance.” M. Denis admits the
resultant loss of power in Central Europe, but consoles himself with
the thought that “we still have North Africa and the colonies, and we
are safe behind our Maginot Line. Above all, we don’t have to make any
more concessions to revolution at home.”
In _The Age of Longing_ Hydie Anderson reports Feyda Nikitin’s deadly
activities to Jules Commanche of the French Home Security Department.
A scholar and hero of the Resistance, he is one of a new type, but
there are not enough of them to fill “the sclerotic veins of French
bureaucracy with fresh blood.” Their effect amounts merely to “the
injection of a stimulant into a moribund body.” In _The Reprieve_
Sartre had presented France as unaware and unready before the Nazis,
already bled white from great wars. After another conflict, the patient
is almost in extremis. Playing the recurrent part of American pupil to
European teacher, Hydie listens to Commanche’s bitter lecture:
Our last message to the world was those three words which are on
our stamps and coins. Since then, we no longer have anything to
give to the spirit, only to the senses--our novelists, our poets,
our painters, all belong to an essentially sensualist world, the
world of Flaubert, and Baudelaire and Manet, not to the world of
Descartes, Rousseau and St. Just. For several centuries we were the
inspiration of Europe; now we are in the position of a blood donor
dying of anemia. We can’t hope for a new Jeanne d’Arc, not even for
a young First Consul, not even for a Charlotte Corday....
He has told Hydie that the French Revolution substituted its slogan
for the Holy Trinity, that the scalpel which excised autocracy from
the body politic also removed its soul. The French thus seem to be
suffering from a malady which, in somewhat different form, infects
the Spaniards, Italians, and Greeks. Their splinter parties, their
disorganization, their pervasive political cynicism are a legacy of
centuries of conflict, inequities, and colonial misrule. But beyond
this there is exhaustion, a vitality sapped by past efforts and a
sadness increased by awareness of faded glories.