84
PARTISAN REVIEW
to have escaped the French entirely. His book is a brilliant account of
the historical background, the economy, and the social structure of post–
war France; and, in view of the fact that no other such work exists, so
far as I have been able to discover, in any language, one might have
expected it to be received with some fanfare and seriously discussed.
Nothing of the sort happened. In fact, I am rather at a loss to say
precisely what did happen, although I have inquired assiduously about
me, like La Fontaine fresh from his discovery of Baruch. I even went to
a meeting organized by the review
Preuves,
which confronted Luthy
with Max Richard of "Federation" and a couple of Monnet Plan econ–
omists, i.e., the sort of people who proceed, in their own critique of
French society, in a most "un-French"-meaning anti-ideological–
manner. But Luthy's interlocutors spent the evening caviling at details
and the air was heavy with reprobation, politely repressed. One might
have supposed that Jean Fourastie, or Alfred Sauvy, or at least Raymond
Aron, those Keynesian voices in the literary-ideological wilderness, who
spend their lives trying to teach their compatriots what every English
schoolboy knows about productivity, inflation and competition, would
have clasped Luthy to their respective bosoms. But no. Aron, the one
French intellectual who, with Bertrand de Jouvenel, went to Milan to
help put an "end to ideology," has made so far as I know only one
public allusion to Luthy's book; and that was a rather ungenerous re–
mark in a recent
Figaro
article, to the effect that a foreign journalist
(unnamed) had recently taken the trouble to assemble in a single
volume all the criticisms which the French are constantly making of
themselves.
I must urge you to read Luthy's book, not only as the best available
study of contemporary France but as a case history in our own cultural
predicament. French resistance to economic and social change, as Luthy
shows, is aided and abetted by the pseudo-revolutionary Mandarins,
who will compromise for nothing less than the Apocalypse, although they
are not sure what that means. But meanwhile the postwar investment
programs are beginning to produce their effects, there has been a striking
reversal of the demographic trend, and after decades of frustration and
disaster, there is a perspective, straight ahead, which could truly revo–
lutionize French society. This, succinctly stated, is the prospect of an
expanding economic system, capable of housing, feeding, and clothing
an expanding population. It probably implies a large degree of European
integration, if not actual federation, as well as certain changes in the
ancient educational system, along with a democratization of culture and
a general acceleration of that process which the beneficiaries of the old
