PARIS LETTER
83
smallholders, and special interests who combine their lobbies and
deputies to paralyze every attempt to renovate the antiquated struc–
tures of French society are, like their eighteenth-century ancestors, un–
aware of the potential explosiveness of ideas; but rather that the idea5
of the Mandarins are so reassuring in the end. And even if there were
some nervousness in the Quai d'Orsay's Cultural Relations Department,
it must surely have been put to rest by Simone de Beauvoir's
M an–
darins.
A part of this interminable novel is devoted to the sort of close
analysis of the heroine's sex life for which the author prepared so strenu–
ously in
Le Deuxieme Sexe;
but all the rest consists of ideological dis–
cussion in a never-never land where the real problems of France–
inflation, the tax system, the new constitution, European integration,
etc.-simply do not exist. The only problem is to define one's position
with respect to the Revolution, which has acquired an irritating Russian
accent without ceasing to be-shades of Clemenceau!-un
bloc.
Just as the French Communist Party, by neutralizing some five
million protest votes, insures that France will continue to be governed
by a right-center coalition, the prestige of the ideologists has had the
effect of stcrilizing the literary intellectuals in the one country of the
Western world where they might have been expected to assume an ef–
fective political role. But this is less because the Mandarins have
whored after strange gods-only a small number of them, after all, have
followed Sartre into the arms of Khrushchev and Mao-than because
they have remained so desperately faithful to the millenarian Jacobinism
of their tradition. Edward Shils, in his penetrating summary of the
proceedings of the Congress for Cultural Freedom at Milan, was able
to proclaim the "end of ideology," by which he meant, I take it, that
intellectuals are tending these days, in political and sociological matters,
to know what they are talking about. But it is significant that this
was one encounter of writers which the French press failed to publicize
in the usual manner, i.e., comparably to the way in which our own
might have treated a congress of Hollywood stars. That the literary
stars might abandon ideology in favor of a concrete intelligence, say,
of economics, is a rather improbable prospect in this country. And per–
haps a disquieting one, too. One can just see old Herriot, a writer him–
self, removing his pipe from his mouth and grumbling,
"OU irions-nous?"
A measure of the resistance to such an idea is afforded by the
reception, here, of Herbert Luthy's
La France
a
l'Heure de son Clacher
(published in the U. S. as
France Against Herself).
Luthy is a Swiss
historian and journalist who writes in German with an exasperated love
for his subject, an indefatigable, grappling, convoluted love which seems
