Review: Sudhir Hazareesingh, How the French Think

In 1958, aged ten, my father took me on a day trip from Folkestone to Boulogne aboard the Royal Daffodil, one of the ancient ferries which British Railways used for the Channel crossings. You didn’t need a proper passport – a disposable day passport was available cheaply and easily. I found a terrific toy car – a Citroën DS – in a Boulogne shop and on the way back through British Customs kept my hand clamped over it in my raincoat pocket in the belief that it might be an illegal import. It probably was.

Now as someone whose way out of England is still through the Channel crossings, I read the News a bit anxiously as the border between England and France gets harder each day, wondering who will close it first. It was the English who inevitably opted out of Schengen – the word “British” is inaccurate in these matters – but I believe it will be the French who, one way or another, will shut the border completely. They would, wouldn’t they?

There will be lots of people buying Hazareesingh’s book. We would all like to know how the French think because we know that they do think and that this is one of the reasons why they are so difficult to live with unlike the English who don’t think, just get on with life as we have always lived it and intend to continue. We don’t, for example, have to worry about heads of our Ruritanian state – we have them already neatly lined up, hair parted, for the next one hundred years – and increasingly we don’t have to worry about elections: we presently have a government which simply installed itself, promptly telling Parliament that it is now a consultative body like the old Russian Duma.

Hazareesingh’s quite long book is very readable and often amusing. It has two weaknesses. It’s panorama of French thought is quite often not much more than a series of thumbnails. It reminded me in this of Bernard Wasserstein’s On The Eve which I reviewed here a while back. Thumbnails are all right if you are looking for a background briefing but I don’t belong to the class of people who need background briefings on how to deal with the French. The second weakness is its Oxford Common Room geniality. The author has been holed up in Balliol since 1990 and that does not bode well for anyone. At worst, he lets the French off scot-free which may be one reason they have awarded his book one of their big prizes, always a relief to have a foreigner who doesn't trash us.

Hazareesingh’s approach is broadly narrative chronological and it is perhaps this approach which allows the author to avoid anything which you might think of as a confrontation or contestation except in chapter 10 which is more decisive in this respect. What I would like to have seen is more use of the possibilities inherent in the contrast of history and structure – thank you, Lévi-Strauss and Sartre – trying to tease out how the structural awfulness of France today is the product of a history, including an intellectual history. How come the French end up with the paralysed figure of Hollande, who you could see as a sort of tribute act to Brezhnev? How come they end up with so little liberty, so little equality, so little fraternity? Why is it a police state? ( The author never mentions the CRS). Why do the French hate each other so much? Why are they always attracted to authoritarian solutions, left or right? How do they put up with having their lives micromanaged by the state, things closed when you want them open or not allowed to sell what you want, so that the only way to get a plastic bottle of Evian in Paris is to buy it from an illegal street trader? 

Why is the history so grubby and still unacknowledged as such – something on which Hazareesingh might have said more than he does. There is a marked contrast with Germany here. Fanon – a fine thinker and writer - gets in, but that’s about it. Why do they still go around denouncing each other? What is this childish rentreé into the trade union strike season all about? Why have they been  so incredibly conservative about everything down to smoking themselves to death, not learning English, being the slowest to adopt modern communications technology and media, thinking it part of les droits du chien to shit everywhere, and so on and so forth? And one which surely ought to have interested the author more, Why do so few – even none – of their universities figure in World Rankings?

I have a suggestion. The author is incredibly well-read to the point where his book sometimes reads like short book reviews strung together. He should take a deep breath, put all that aside, sit down and write an essay setting out just what he thinks about France. He could title it How I think about the French, even write it in French and put it out, a hundred pages long, no more, through a Parisian publisher. He's done the spade-work already.

Review: Bernard Wasserstein, On The Eve

Some years ago, I visited the Museé d'art et d'histoire du Judaisme in Paris for an exhibition of the photographs of Roman Vishniac under the title "Un Monde Disparu". I used a postcard from the exhibition as a bookmark while reading On The Eve.

Wasserstein does not mention Vishniac anywhere in his 552 pages and, though he uses some photographs as illustrations, he does not use one of Vishniac's. I don't know why, though I now read on Wikipedia that there is controversy over the way Vishniac put together and wrote up his work, for example, combining images from different sources as if they belonged to a single scene. But that doesn't seem enough to me to ignore the work totally.

Anyway, I found it all a bit disconcerting since Vishniac, working without the benefit of hindsight, saw the Jews of Europe through much the same lens as now does Wasserstein, "The demographic trajectory was grim and, with declining fertility, large scale emigration, increasing outmarriage, and widespread apostasy, foreshadowed extinction" (p 434).

Wasserstein's book is, at best, encyclopaedic and, at worst, miscellaneous: "In Hungary, where name-changing was particularly common, Joseph Löwinger, a banker, changed his name upon ennoblment, to Lukács de Szeged. His son, György, born in 1885, was therefore known as von Lukács. In 1919, when he served briefly as deputy commissar for education in the short-lived Communist régime of Béla Kun, he dropped the von. Writing mainly in German, it was as Georg Lukács that he became the best-known Marxist literary critic of the age" (p 197)

A lot of the prose is as plodding and inconsequential as this and, at many points, I just wanted to give up. One cannot read a very long book for snippets of information alone.

There is a sustained engagement with Yiddish, as language and as literature. Wasserstein transliterates and thus makes the language more accessible to an outsider, but at the price perhaps of making it seem more accessible than it really is. More importantly, I felt that here a general historian was trying to do work which needs the co-operation of some pretty heavyweight historical linguists or sociolinguists if one is to hope to understand the dynamics of a minority language whose spoken form is partly inter-intelligible with one surrounding and often dominant language (German) but whose written form is not, since it uses a different alphabet. (The same is true of Judeo-Espagnol, which Wasserstein also discusses).

Structurally, there were times when I would have welcomed some comparison with the situation of Europe's other minorities of the inter-war period, in particular, the Roma. I thought that would help one understand more clearly what is specific to the Jewish experience between the two world wars (essentially, the time frame of this book). And, perhaps for no very good reason, I would have liked just a little about the Kairates especially as the book includes extensive discussion of Jews in Lithuania and Crimea - both Kairate strongholds (well, as Kairate things go). They did, after all, practice a Jewish faith. It is only with hindsight that they become radically other because the Nazis classified them as racially not Jewish.

Wasserstein most of the time avoids the pitfalls of hindsight and most of the time he calls a spade a spade and a rascal a rogue. The Munkácser rebbe appears repeatedly through the book as a warning against religious fundamentalism of all kinds. (I hope I don't misread Wasserstein here). More generally, I found it impossible to read Wasserstein's descriptions of religiously-controlled Jewish primary schooling in inter-war eastern Europe without thinking about what I read in my newspapers today about Islamic primary schooling in,say, Pakistan.

Maybe this book just attempts too much - the apparatus runs to 116 pages - and therefore becomes encyclopaedic and not very readable. Maybe there is just not enough analytical or theoretical zest to focus the remarkable amount of information assembled here.