Looking Back and Looking Ahead

In 1952, Ferrar, Straus, and Young published a book by novelist-reporter-historian William L. Shirer called Midcentury Journey. (For a while I had misremembered the title as Europe at Midcentury, as it focuses on England and the countries of the European continent, following World War II as well as up to and during that war.) True to my francophilic nature, rather than beginning at the beginning, I immediately turned to the third chapter, “The Waning Star of France,” curious to see what I would find. 

French government up to the Second World War was known as the Third Republic, which began in 1870 (after the collapse of Napoleon's Second Empire) and lasted until 1940. It was relatively stable, and the economy as late as the mid-1920s was also in decent shape, Shirer reports. Intellectual life, the arts, and literature, freedom—all were flourishing. “Men were wonderfully free, and they were free from fear,” as Shirer saw them in Paris:

If ever a great nation seemed destined to continue on its glorious and civilized course for centuries to come, France was it.

And yet, even then there were signs of approaching catastrophe that one can only appreciate today—with the benefit of hindsight.

- William L. Shirer, Midcentury Journey 

How to explain the weakness of France in the face of German aggression, and why did so many French people, not just a radical racist fringe but even conservative middle-class Frenchmen, actually see Hitler as a savior?

Part of Shirer’s answer is that there were, in fact, two Frances, a democratic, republican Left (heirs of the 1789 Revolution) and an authoritarian Right, "which looked backward with nostalgia to the ancient régime….” While democratic, republican France was supported by industrial and farm workers and people in the trades and small business, those on the authoritarian side, yearning for a return to monarchy, had support from the church and army, big business and finance. Evenly matched numerically in the population, the two sides had little common ground, and thus power tended to shift back and forth, back and forth, until fear of “Reds” in their own country (“the enemy within”) led the (formerly, I would say) “conservatives” in France to see Hitler as the lesser evil.

Naturally, there were other contributing factors. Loss of male population in World War I and the subsequent falling birthrate, decay of the bourgeoisie, a corrupt press (“venal,” Shirer calls it), widespread tax evasion at all levels of society, and failure to industrialize sufficiently all played a part in the country’s problems. What struck me most forcibly, however, was the deep division Shirer identifies in the French people, a chasm with no bridge across, because had the country been united, couldn’t they have devised solutions for the other problems? 

The troubles of France, it became evident, went back to the French Revolution of 1789, which had given birth to the nation we [Americans] came to know. There the deep fissure developed which has divided France to this day. It was an unfinished revolution in that the old order was never really liquidated or even converted, and therefore survived to combat the republican idea right up to Hitler’s entry into Paris, which it welcomed and which brought the Third Republic to an end.

These two Frances, Shirer argues, “never really fused.” 

Whether or not France is a united country today is not my concern today (although I do see divisions continuing), and it is probably obvious why Shirer’s idea of a divided country strikes me with such force: It is the divisions in the United States of America, my own country, that most deeply concern me. In one of my January posts, I wrote about avoiding difficult subjects. For me, such avoidance means ignoring crisis to pretend that life is normal, although these are not normal times. The great question of our time is, once again, whether our nation, “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” can endure into the future. And yet, and yet—.

Yet conversation across the chasm is all but impossible, because Americans, like those divided French Shirer describes, have so little common ground on which to meet that we live in different realities. 

The fissure was already deep in 1776, when a nation "conceived in liberty for all” allowed some humans to own others. A scant 85 years later came the Civil War, the war Lincoln saw as deciding the nation’s fate. That war came to an end without stitching the country seamlessly back together. The legacy of defeat is still bitter to many who never lived through it but inherited bitterness from those who could not accept the war's outcome, in much the same way that the defeated candidate for the presidency in 2020 has never been able to recognize and accept his defeat that year—and now, despite having successfully avoided military service himself and despite being elected to another term in the White House, has taken up political arms against Americans by withholding Congressionally approved funds, has sent armed forces into American cities and states that contributed to his defeat, and is now bombing foreign countries and killing civilians in the name of America. That is, these things are being done in your name and mine.

***

I wrote the foregoing back in March. Since then--just the other day, in fact--the world has seen an event that fills me with hope. Despite loud support from top officials in the current American government, autocrat Viktor Orbán was defeated for re-election as prime minister by opposition leader Péter Magyar, who ran on a strong anti-corruption platform. Read about the campaign what Magyar to build support, and how he brought down a 16-year regime that had ruled through, in addition to outright corruption, stacking key institutions with loyalists and taking over news outlets. Now the rest of Europe is eagerly welcoming Hungary back into the fold--and meanwhile, Canada is contemplating joining the European Union, no longer able to trust completely in a North American alliance. The Magyar story, though, is inspiring. It can be done! We do not have to slog through another world war and commit mass genocide before returning to sanity!