The Third Gravedigger

IN THE THICK OF THE FIGHT (684 pp.) --Paul Reynaud--Simon & Schuster ($7.50).

When it comes to putting Frenchmen into the tumbrels of political recrimination, none are more skillful than other Frenchmen. In The Gravediggers of France, in 1944, French Journalist Pertinax (Andre Geraud) called Paul Reynaud the third gravedigger (after Gamelin and Daladier and before Petain and Laval). Reynaud now makes an eloquent case for the proposition that, if he helped dig the grave, it was really his political enemies who committed the murder and provided the corpse.

"Why France fell" is familiar ground, but the subject remains important because the fall of France appears to be a continuing process.

The Fiddlers. At 61, Paul Reynaud was one of that rapidly diminishing body of Frenchmen who had never been Premier. In March 1940, he assumed the premiership of France at war, and with it, disaster. Before two months had gone, the Panzers were smashing through Belgium and the Stukas were at work over the choked roads. By then the reader has progressed 340 pages into modern Europe's worst tragedy, but has heard nothing of the rumble of a falling civilization. Instead, he hears the sharp noises of those professional fiddlers--French politicians--who are always tuning up, but whose orchestra never seems to play.

Reynaud is an honest, able man. His financial policies were more sensible than most. He could envision something of what a war of movement and armor would do to France's static infantry. Above all, he knew that Hitler was not Kaiser Wilhelm I, "the old gentleman who took Alsace Lorraine from us," but a modern Genghis Khan. He knew that Laval, "the Robert Walpole* of the rabble," was squalid and detestable; that Petain was a defeatist who had to be "kicked into" his victories in World War I, and in World War II, in the absence of all effective French arms, could only snuffle about the lack of carrier pigeons. But filling the canvas with idiots, crooks and poltroons has the strange effect of diminishing Reynaud's own stature. If such malicious and devious grotesques ruled France, how is it that Reynaud, who saw so well, could not have frustrated them?

The Real Failure. Reynaud himself gives no answer to this question, but perhaps a clue might be found in the reminiscences of Pertinax. Reynaud had a mistress, Countess de Portes, whom nobody except Reynaud seems to have liked very much. He also had a wife. Anglo-Saxons believe that the French have a way of managing these things. Not so Paul Reynaud, who had the unhappy faculty of finding himself in the same salon with both ladies. It is possible to suspect that Paul Reynaud, for all his intelligence, lacked organizing ability. This is confirmed on the political level by the fact that as finance minister, in 1939, he was taken over by a smoothly operating squad of officials who should have been, but were not, executing his will.

Reynaud, of course, like all French politicians, has always been right. He is a brilliant self-advocate, but has never understood that politics is the art of the possible, not the plausible. On his own showing, he won every argument including the last one--with the SS colonel who locked the door on his cell at Oranienburg concentration camp. Colonel: "The Russians would have shot you long ago." Reynaud: "I did not know that you took them as mentors."

The reader may accept much of Reynaud's picture of France. But the picture that really stays in the mind is the one he has drawn by inadvertence--the picture of men who would rather lose a war than an argument.

* Walpole (1676-1745), as Prime Minister of England, ruled on the cynical theory that "every man has his price."

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