J'Accuse, 1957

THE TAXIS OF THE MARNE, (244 pp.) --Jean Dutourd--Simon & Schuster ($3.50).

France is the Sick Woman of Europe. Diagnoses of her ailments are plentiful, with blame falling on practically anything, including the parliamentary system, the Gallic spirit, absinthe, existentialism, contraceptives, conservatism, radicalism, modern art, the unreasonable insistence on reason, the undigested principles of the French Revolution. Brilliant Satirist Jean Dutourd (A Dog's Head, The Best Butter) will have little to do with any of these explanations. He refuses to see history in terms of abstract ideas, cycles or forces. He sees it in terms of men--weak or strong, good or bad. wise or stupid, to be judged by such quaint values as honor and courage, dishonor and cowardice.

For months the taunt as well as the talk of Paris, Dutourd's book does not explain anything--it merely accuses. Zola himself might have been proud of its polemic passion; few Americans will fail to be moved --or to understand France better--reading this cry from the heart of an enraged patriot. On Dutourd's lips, the famed French proverb becomes: "To understand all is to forgive nothing."

Cockroaches & Poltroons. In June 1940 Jean Dutourd was 20, and for all of two weeks a pseudo soldier in a pseudo army in a pseudo fight. He and his fellow soldiers had a shrugging attitude of callow "realism," which is "a polite translation of the word cowardice." He describes how after the German breakthrough he and five buddies wandered around Brittany like truant schoolboys, cadging six meals a day from the peasants, who treated them as heroes. Only one farmer told them off: "Get out! If you had fought, you'd be fed now instead of having to beg!"

What had happened to France since the days in 1914, when the Germans also threatened a breakthrough and 6,000 reinforcements were rushed in hastily commandeered Paris taxicabs to the Marne, where they helped to stem the Boche tide? Dutourd says simply: in 1940 "the generals were stupid and the men did not want to be killed." From Commander in Chief Gamelin down, with the honorable exception of De Gaulle ("one great soul"), the generals were "doddering numskulls." "cockroaches," "poltroons." They "had the instruments of victory in their hands. What nobody realized was this: they were longing to change their profession. They did not like war . . . Their real inclination was for quieter occupation: accountant, postmaster, colonial administrator . . . The damned scoundrels!"

Dutourd soon found himself imprisoned in a vast aircraft hangar, along with 8,000 other Frenchmen who lolled about admiring the conquering Germans for their elegance, and green with envy of their boots. (In a devastating aside, Dutourd suggests that the money poured into the Maginot Line might better have been spent on boots for the French army.) It was assumed that the war was nearly over, that the Germans would send the prisoners home on free railroad passes. But Dutourd got away. He carries modesty about his three-year stint with the Resistance to the point of devoting half a sentence to it.

Finally, "France was handed back to us, but not the taste for living in it. The men who are modeling the face of France today are the same who lost the war of 1940," and for them Dutourd reserves his supreme contempt: "France, this aged, unhappy mother, this pauper to whose rags still cling tattered bits of the fineries of the past--the frayed fleurs-de-lys, the tarnished eagles, the plucked cock--this parent you have forced to go begging at all the gates of the world, who is being kicked out of Africa and Asia, who is being spat at by the guttersnipes of Cairo, whose last resources are dropping from her rheumatic hands--this France will one day drag you, men of fifty, before the bar of history . . . The lost generation is not our generation, it is yours."

Requiem for La Gloire. In part, Dutourd's book is a requiem for la gloire and the waning power of a demoted France: "[My heart] bleeding from a thousand wounds, calling with all its will for a little seriousness and a little glory ..." And in part the book is an almost covert expression of hope. Dutourd thinks that "one genius and ten honorable men" could still put France back on her feet.

In this hope Dutourd may be as far removed from reality as the phony "realists" he denounces. The very symbol he chooses for the glory of yesteryear is shaky. For the troops who were rushed to the Marne in taxicabs not only signified courage; they signified desperate improvisation in a desperate mess. Perhaps in a grim and homely sense the symbol is correct. As any tourist knows, those Paris taxis are rickety, hazardous--fun, perhaps, but unstable and expensive--and the meter ticks away, inexorable as fate.

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