PARIS LETTER
85
aristocratic humanism gloomily see at work all about them. "Americani–
zation" is what they sometimes call it, and the problem is whether and
in what forms the old way of life and the old culture can survive. A
familiar problem, no? But it attains its full measure of pathos in this
country whose very vocation-since population figures and gross na–
tional product have scarcely changed since 1929-has seemed to set it
against the modern world.
Here we return, oddly enough, to what has really been going on.
It is chiefly in terms of material power, after all, that France has ceased
to be in the center of things; and even in those terms the picture has
always been and continues to be more complicated than the view from
the Eiffel Tower. The Mandarins, those paladins of the spirit, may have
adopted Stalin's view to the effect that if you have no armored divisions
you simply don't count; but our own government has constantly allowed
itself, and for the most part happily, to be argued or maneuvered into
following the French line in Europe. This has not prevented every
ministry since 1947 from being copiously denounced as a tool of Wall
Street, but the fact remains that the Brussels Pact, N.A.T.O., the Paris
Agreements in their final form, the E.D.C., the Schuman Plan and even,
to some extent, the O.E.E.C., and the pattern of Marshall Aid were
largely French conceptions.
At this point, in any event, A.D. 1955, at the winter solstice, prices
are stabilized and the moral rot of inflation
(d.
Marcel
Aymes
Chemin
des Ecoliers
and, for that matter, so much of French "manners" writing
since the First World War) seems to have been stopped. The postwar
hopelessness is lifting like fog, despite the usual political mess, and the
Mandarins-much diminished in numbers and influence after the apos–
tasies and schisms of the past few years-are leaving the center of the
stage. In short, as I suggested earlier in this letter, there are new forces
at work and it is time some attention was paid them.
I should like to mention two of these new forces which, although
they seem on the surface to have little in common except their suspicion
and dislike for each other, actually bear a similar, tangential, off-center
and profoundly novatory relation to the old French
Weltanschauungen.
The first of these is the European Movement, so called, a rough
blanket of a phrase covering a number of badly beaten bodies. Until
the E.D.C. debacle, in fact, the blanket covered practically everyone,
for the "Europeans" were paradoxically in power in the key countries
of Western Europe and these countries were all officially committed to
a series of integrating operations, political as well as economic, which
