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PARTISAN REVIEW
that an adequate response has always in the end been made--some–
times, it
is
true in a sanguinary and dramatic fashion. The decay of the
Bourbon Monarchy gave rise to the Revolution, the disaster of 1870
to Gambetta, the Commune, and the establishment of the Republic;
since 1940 the country has witnessed a whole series of energetic at–
tempts to overcome previous weaknesses, down to and including the
obstinate struggle in Indo-China, whose morale-building significance
should not be overlooked merely because the over-all political direction
was bungled. Gaullism, though in the end a failure, was another signifi–
cant reaction to the humiliating collapse of 1940; so was the (perhaps
over-ambitious) Monnet Plan for modernizing the French economy, and
the successful Schuman Plan for integrating the heavy industries of
Western Europe.
The Fourth Republic is unquestionably a more streamlined
and
modern affair than the Third. Compared with the postwar German
regime it has the additional great merit of having come into being at
the crest of a violent and bloody reaction against what went before.
The 20,000 to 100,000 victims of the 1944-45 "purge"-no one knows
the exact figure--probably included a proportion of scapegoats; but
though civil war and massacre are a high price to pay for purification,
there is no doubt that morally France is better off today for having
enshrined its Resistance heroes and heroines in the national legend,
where other countries persist in glorifying figures of a very different
stamp. One may on occasion be tempted to feel that the French make
too much of the Resistance (did they
really
all take part in it?); but
that is rather like whether Jeanne d'Arc was
really
needed to drive
the English out, or whether all her countrymen
really
supported her
(a good many did not). Every nation has its favorite image of its own
better self, and if the French choose to pretend that the whole country
was behind de Gaulle (or behind Gambetta, or behind Danton) the
political scientist, if he has any rudiment of historical sense, will enter
these myths on the credit side of the ledger.
What will he place on the debit side? Principally, no doubt, the
relative backwardness of an economy ill-adapted to mass-production
methods; the social cleavage between the working class and the re–
mainder of society, which accounts in large part for the unnatural size
of the Communist vote; and perhaps the torpid state of the body
politic, though that seems on the point of changing for the better. Not,
however, the alleged weakness of French political institutions. Here
one has to distinguish between temporary difficulties due to social,
and
political deadlock, and structural faults which are not nearly as
im-
