Figaro's Descendants

THE FRENCH by Francois Nourissier. 309 pages. Knopf. $6.95. c,

"No one appears to give much thought to revolt," writes Franc,ois Nourissier in The French, which obviously went to press too soon. "Our young people are not brutal or rebellious or vicious or despairing or drugged or headed for extremist adventures. Indifferent? Yes. Nihilistic? No." Events since May seem to have proved Nourissier wrong, but curiously enough, they have in no way invalidated this splendidly instructive book. With affection and impeccable style, Novelist Nourissier (Une Histoire Franc,aise) shows his countrymen to be a gifted, cantankerous and immensely vital people, whose only predictable quality is their very unpredictability.

Author Nourissier, after all, was not alone in postulating a France given over to the duller virtues of domestic peace and prosperity under De Gaulle. Indeed, he regretted the situation: from such young people, he asks at one point, "Can we hope for vigor, depth, distrust and passion?"

Decaying Faiths. Now that at least part of the generation has fulfilled his hope, the reader can examine Nourissier's catalogue of France's ills for the probable causes of the recent explosion. Among some obvious choices are "an incoherent education system" and "a vogue for youth but not a policy for youth." Also an older generation "forever one revolution and one republic behind the times"--a generation still paralyzed by the traumas of two world wars and the colonial debacles of Indochina and Algeria.

Not just God, but belief itself seems to be dying, suggests Nourissier: there is a miasma of decaying faiths, whether in Jacobinism or in the church, that leaves the air redolent with cynicism. Even the material world is forbidding. Citizens must seek treatment in hospital buildings that may date from the 17th century, archaic highways are jammed, and telephones do not work-- a trivial complaint, perhaps, but symbolic of a more profound lack of communication between groups and generations. "Weary and shrewish" Paris, the heart of the country, has become, "beyond question, the most exhausting capital in the world."

Overwhelming Irony. With the possible exception of John Kenneth Galbraith, most American critics embarked on a similar analysis of the U.S. would be likely to castigate their own culture in the stern and relentless manner of modern Cotton Mathers. But the French manage to be amusing, or at least elegant, even about the prospect of doom. Nourissier's book is charming and witty, his chief weapon being irony. If the irony at times seems to overwhelm the reader, that too is part of his message: the French are so full of contradictions that he can only explain their affection for "this huge, embarrassing figure" of De Gaulle by noting that the general himself is just a "vast, multiform and moving contradiction."

In an engaging conclusion, the author conjures up an evening at the theater to evoke what he likes best about France: the mocking, lighthearted spirit of Beaumarchais' Le Manage de Figaro. It was just such a Figaro-like nation, he says, young and insolent, that was able to teach France's two great traditions to the world: the hierarchic and the libertarian. "We taught kings how to be kings," exults Nourissier, "then taught the people how to rid themselves of kings." In the process, "France perfected a certain kind of man--quick, insolent, fired by his conquests and the vision of his future." The territorial conquests may be gone, Nourissier admits, but "the great French adventure" can still continue if the vision--and indeed the insolence--remains. That is a tall order for the descendants of Figaro, comparable to telling a middle-aged man that he must remain young.

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