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PARTISAN REVIEW
both strikingly documented in Mlle. de Beauvoir's book. One is that
the literary and intellectual life of the nation takes place in the capital.
London and New York are publishing centers, but beyond that they
are simply collections of shops and offices; it is hard to imagine the
life of the mind being lived in either place ; they exist for business and
social purposes. As regards the comparison with England, the crucial
decision on the English side was to split the national university into
two and remove both halves from the capital; this fits in with the
stubborn English belief that the countryside is the only place for a self–
respecting man to live in, and also flatters the traditional "balance-of–
power" theory (the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford would be too important
if there wasn't a Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge). This condemned the
University of London to mediocrity, especially after Oxford and Cam–
bridge decided to admit people who couldn't bring themselves to sign
the Thirty Nine Articles; before that, London did at least get a trickle
of brilliant sectarians like Bagehot ; afterwards, it had to get along
with throw-outs plus an increasingly large absentee student body com–
posed of Africans, Indians, etc. None of this makes a Sorbonne; the
firm pyramid of French education, which has enough prestige in the
eyes of the population at large to be able to enforce a hard syllabus,
owes its compact strength to the fact that the national university is
there,
in the midst of the cafes and theaters.
This by itself would not be enough, however; it draws essential sup–
port from the other thing that emerges so clearly from this book. France
still has a bourgeoisie. The middle class may have given way everywhere
else, but in France it stands firm. In the English-speaking world, the
position of the bourgeois has been so undermined that there is nothing
left solid enough to kick against; even in Belgravia, pony-tailed daugh–
ters take no more than fifteen minutes to talk Daddy into letting
Harold paint a surrealistic mural over the fireplace; in America, staid
professors lecture on Beatnik art. But in France the line is held. The
family interior is stuffy, girls are still given a straight choice between
strict virginity on the one hand, and on the other going to the bad
and never being heard of again. French adaptation to the twentieth
century has always been interestingly patchy; in 1909 Bleriot flew the
Channel as a demonstration of his country's willingness to embrace the
new epoch of technology and precision engineering; but little Simone
de Beauvoir, aged one year, was not allowed a glimpse of that epoch.
Not, that is, until she had passed her
bac.hot
and emerged into the
free life of the university student: "free" along lines clearly marked
out by tradition. Here were the brilliant minds at last, the new ideas,
