The French are
perfectionist--mainly about themselves. They carry self-criticism to extremes
but anyone else attempting to criticise them will suffer from French refusal to
accept that they can be perceived as imperfect. The most popular TV programmes
are those depicting the Resistance in their heroic fight against the Nazis, but
anything as shameful as French collaboration with the Nazis or as ugly as anti
Semitism is unpopular. The popularity of a new book by Eric Zemmour is due to its
claims that deportation of Jews by the Vichy regime is not so nasty as history
would have us believe.
The French
endured much in WW2 and Resistance fighters were not the only heroes: private
citizens sheltered Jewish families. De Gaulle was also a hero. But his is the stern
mask that fits over the face of an earlier history, of those who refused to
understand and listen to his warnings so that when war came, France was
unprepared. As was England, thanks to Chamberlain's pacifist policies and his failure
to understand Hitler's intentions.
When Germany
invaded France, Antoine St Exupery, another hero of French legend, then flying with
fighter squadrons against German air attacks, wrote, "We were throwing a
glass of water on a forest fire." France had no chance. De Gaulle fled.
The failure to arm was not only that of France: only the English Channel helped
Britain buy time.
In February
2004, sixtieth year since the Allied invasion, I stayed in a friend's Normandy
farmhouse and walked among tiny hamlets scattered throughout nearby farmland.
Each had its tragic war memorial where long lists of WW1 casualties told of the
loss of young manhood in the trenches. When WW2 threatened, there had to be avoidance
of repetition. The French, with Germans already rolling their tanks towards
Paris, bought time by compromise. There would not be war on French soil.
The Vichy regime
was a typically French compromise. To avoid war, the destruction of historic
Paris, the loss of young manhood, surrender was given an acceptable face. The
Vichy Regime preserved the illusion that there was a France still in control of
its own destiny. That suited the German occupiers perfectly.
Atrocities could
be perpetrated under the guise of being lawful enactments by French government.
Officials in French uniforms knocked on doors of Jewish houses, or did Nazi
dirty work of loading Jews into trains, and German perfectionism, an even more
potent weapon than that of French perfectionism, preserved the Nazi self-image
of a purifying and perfecting force.
Now that history,
and historic guilt, are being revised by Zemmour, in a climate where anti-Semitism
is rife again and openly so at bourgeois dinner parties, that dirty work is
presented as not being so dirty, nor so French. And it suits French
perfectionist mentality. It is a strain that runs through French society, that
denial of anything that besmirches the notion of French civilization. Elegant
clothes, exquisite food, beautiful architecture, gracious manners, mistresses
hidden under the correct choreography of la famille, that is part of French
civilization, and it is indeed beautiful. But as Carl Jung described in his works
on the human psyche, the more one pretends that all is perfect, the more the
dark forces of the psyche accumulate below ground and the more likely they are
to burst forth in violent expression of hideous barbarity.
A French best seller that white washes the Vichy regime is not only a
distortion of history but a warning of historical repetition. The Thirties
brought just such a violent expression of repressed dark forces of the Collective
Unconscious, and conditions are building to be just right for a repetition. While
liberal organs such as Le Monde find his views unacceptable, Eric Zemour's
denials of French anti-Semitic crimes and their enthusiastic embrace by the
French public may be the warning of danger around the corner.
No comments:
Post a Comment