Jean Dutourd: The Springtime of Life. Denver and Helen Lindley translation. Garden City: Doubleday and Company, 1974.

Paper delivered at the 1997 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D. C., August 1997

 

The Springtime of Life is a novel about fatherhood, love, and friendship in a modern political regime—France in the 1930s, during the last years of the Third Republic. Charles de Gaulle, who knew the terrain well, never stopped asking, How can this modern commercial republic defend itself? Given the kind of people who rule in such a regime, how can they, and their fellow citizens, be protected from the consequences of their own worst vices? How can they be encouraged in their virtues? Further, how can those men and women who are by nature not of the commercial republic nonetheless be brought to defend it against the much worse tyrannical regimes which seek to exploit the weaknesses of commercial republics and their citizens?

De Gaulle caused several writers to think about these questions. The most celebrated of them was André Malraux. Malraux writes in the tradition—the ‘regime,’ the ‘succession,’ in Diogenes Laertius’ sense—of Victor Hugo. A man of very different sensibility, Jean Dutourd writes in the tradition of Flaubert and Proust. This makes him in one sense more interesting than Malraux. A writer in the Hugo tradition might well respond favorably to Gaullist statesmanship, with its themes of la grandeur, la France, Le Tricolore. A writer in the Flaubert tradition will always hesitate before the grand gesture. How grand is it, really? Where does it point? A Flaubertian artist will apply a properly mixed acidic solution to the surface of Gaullism—treat it will a clarifying irony.

In The Springtime of Life, Dutourd presents Jacques de Boissy, a man in his twenties with two friends: Jean Pousselet, the friend of his childhood, and Captain Lacassagne, a new friend, a few years older.

Jean is the most intelligent of the three—or, at least, the most ‘intellectual.’ He dislikes his last name, which suggests something like ‘pushiness,’ bourgeois vulgarity. He is ill at ease with his family name, with his father’s name, with ‘his own.’ He believes that he stands in awe of writers, and believes, fashionably, in “the goodness of the world, in justice and loyalty” (13). He gives no thought to the political conditions of writing, to say nothing of the political conditions of goodness and justice. He ‘believes in’ loyalty, but will not practice it, in friendship or in love.

His mother is a silly, self-pitying war widow—the sort of person who should inspire sympathy, but cannot, leaving her acquaintances a touch irritated and a touch guilty at their irritation. The Great War stripped France of fathers, leaving a generation of ‘feminized,’ that is, submissive sons who imagine that good grace consists of intelligence yielding to stupidity, especially if stupidity is vehement. Living in a “feminine universe,” young men “readily believe in the fragility of women” (33); deference to Mme. Pousselet’s insistent inanities has habituated Jean to a slightly guilty resentment in retreat. By inspiring in her only son “the conviction… that he had been created more to be loved than to love” (43), Mme. Pousselet has left him morally and intellectually flaccid, anerotic. Her idea of motherhood is requiring her little boy to eat all the food on his plate, “hungry or not” (43), substituting annoying, pointless duty for natural desire and pleasure.

A feminized world (in this sense) is a privatized world. “[F]rom 1920 to 1940, the child was the Frenchmen’s alibi; he made it possible for them to abdicated with untroubled conscience their duties and their rights as citizens, to disregard the future of all under the pretext that they were occupied with the future of one, to think no longer about that pressing matter, demanding such tiresome vigilance, that is called liberty” (44).

Jean marries badly, of course. His wife is exactly like his mother, only more so, and with less reason. His mother’s founding moral instruction—eat everything on your plate—deprives him of the strength to push away from the table when young Nadine puts herself on his plate, despite Mother’s disapproval of the offering. An only child, habituated only to be loved and not to love, his soul is the prey of the stronger woman, the one who loves him more insistently. His mother had denatured him in order to attach him firmly to herself, not seeing that no firmness of attachment can arise from a soul with no real desires, not firmness to it.

Jean predictably resents Jacques’s new friend, the “solid, patient, indefatigable, unshakable,” and above all gentlemanly Captain Lacassage. Lacassage hasn’t “read any of the works of André Gide” (22). Surely, had he lived thirty years ago, a soldier like this would have plotted against Dreyfus! Dragooned (so to speak) into an excursion to Les Invalides with Jacques and the Captain, Jean complains about the tedious reminiscences of war veterans, giving thanks that men like Napoleon “are no longer interested in France” (84). Pious about littérateurs, contemptuous of military officers: Sure enough, Jean will enjoy a successful career in journalism.

By contrast, Jacques de Boissy is no intellectual. He is a young man of not exactly aristocratic pedigree: The ‘de’ was shrewdly joined to the ‘Boissy’ only a century back. But he has some of the cultivation of an aristocrat without having lost the aggressiveness of the bourgeois; the de Boissys are new aristocrats. In childhood he dominated Jean because he has a ready-made attitude “for every circumstance of life” and acts forthrightly thereon (11). When he meets Jean’s unfortunate mother, he acts as a sort of social statesman—taking her as she is, leaving her pleased and perhaps a touch better. (As a reader, she likes a good storyteller. Ah, you must try Les Thibaults. Humor? Do you know that very funny English writer, P. G. Wodehouse?) Jacques has the good breeding to be a hard man to embarrass, and never leaves others embarrassed.

Above all, Jacques is a man with a father. De Boissy père is “a bit of a shark,” a tough businessman.” From him, Jacques learns—contra Jean’s humanitarian illusions—that society is “not at all benevolent,” and that “it is a good thing to be on one’s guard” (13). He learns to retaliate when insulted, but to take correction from his superiors—and therefore to recognize that superiority really exists.

M. de Boissy is no bien-pensant, but he has kept his eyes open. After the Great War, he observes, women and horses have disappeared: “When the style of short hair appeared some ten years ago, I had an idea, and it may seem backward to you: I said to myself that we were witnessing Samson’s revenge, that Delilah had gone mad and in cutting off her curls she had given up her powers. A sort of symbolic surrender, if you like. But notice this: my experience has taught me that people do not give up except in the last extremity, when they see that all is lost, that the situation is untenable, that there is no longer any way of holding their ground. This sort of thing must have happened with women. They felt that they had no place in the world as women… that it was necessary to be like men.” (55-56). As for men, according to M. de Boissy, it is really quite simple: Justice consists of helping one’s friends and harming one’s enemies (117). As for his son, he says, with irony, “I am  a modern father,” considering it “his duty to help his son’s personality to ‘expand,'” a modern attitude the novelist entertains with some suspicion, and to which M. de Boissy himself sets firm limits (14).

Unlike Jean, Jacques views literary life with cynicism, Captain Lacassagne with respect. In France, Jacques says, the government no longer governs. The police and the financiers govern, but those who wield “the real power today in a country that is no longer serious, a country that prefers words to events, or, if you like, the newspaper serial to history,” are the women and men of letters (24). They constitute the real French politeuma. Women and men of letters always rule when the government and the military are weak. Proust is “the greatest contemporary novelist” because “he alone has understood this and has made it the essence of his work” (24). Ergo, Jacques announces that he shall use literature as “a means to success”; “in 1935, for Julien Sorel, the red and the black are the colors of ink” (35).

Jean is shocked. His superficial literary idealism is offended. An idealist on the surface, at core Jean is not so much a cynic (that would take strength) but without character. In Jacques, the cynicism is what is superficial. Jacques reads good books seriously and prefers not to discuss them with unserious people, mentioning the names of Stendhal and Balzac “with a sort of affectionate mockery, emphasizing their eccentricities as though he had known them or as though they were still alive” (48). While reading an author, he becomes the author—a Christian with Bloy, an atheist with Diderot (79). He treats greatness as a living thing, a permanent possibility, without admitting to his friend Jean what Jean will never truly perceive: That greatness is a permanent possibility. In a calculatedly offhand way, he does his best to incorporate greatness in himself. He uses a sinecure at the War Ministry to write his first novel, which would indeed have been a success (his father judges), had he chosen to publish it; it is not long before he begins a serious one, with the support of his father, who senses the change and respects it.

A homely young woman falls in love with Jacques, who does his best to repel her, once he realizes that she does (thanks to another young woman, who tells him). But Anne-Marie is a woman who senses how to make the conquest, despite her disadvantage. She is not the least literary, or intellectual. She scarcely understands the manuscript he reads to her. But what she does understand, well before Jacques understands, is the significance of the fact that he is reading it, to her. So she praises his work and (she really does love him) learns how to type. Like men in love with literature, women in love with men are chameleons, “instantly assum[ing] the color of the man at whom they have taken aim” (161-162; compare Jacques, 79). They become exactly like military men in war; love brings out their intelligence. They discard pettiness—in Anne-Marie’s case, her fashionable bohemianism. A real woman is very much like a real aristocrat, the representative man “of the ancient regime,” tough, ardent, and discriminating, kindly conscious of his superiority (162). Anne-Marie, “ugly at twenty-six, would be beautiful at fifty,” thanks to the transformation, the crystallization, of soul that her love will effect. Eventually, and to his credit, “Jacques vaguely fores[ees] this distant metamorphosis,” and will marry her (175).

Captain Lacassagne tactfully gives Jacques the political education he needs to go with the sentimental education he has been receiving. First lesson: France, and the modern world generally, though automated, unhorsed, are not ‘automatic.’ They need tending. without tending, they will perish. The Great War very nearly saw the destruction of France. Its aftermath—fatherless sons and daughters—threatens France still.

Second lesson: Modern France is bourgeois, but bourgeois souls can’t defend it. Going along and getting along, while profitable, won’t work for a country located next to Germany. France won the Battle of the Marne because General Joffre “did not have the soul  of one vanquished”; he “made a stand” (96), showed the courage of an aristocrat, thereby making a modern army of barbers and shopkeepers not aristocratic, of course, but stubborn enough to win, to defend that piece of soil that is France. Without soil, where will the soldier, the barber, the shopkeeper—the writer—stand and work? Without France, the French language will become as extinct as Latin—living on as no more than a component of foreign languages. A writer must write in a language, usually his own. Lacassagne shows a young novelist why ‘his own’ matters to him, how literary life depends upon your own country, your own family, your own friends.

Third lesson: France should be fighting in Spain, on the republican side with the Communists, against Franco and his fascist allies. This has nothing to do with ideology. Lacassagne has met lieutenant colonel Charles de Gaulle, who observed that Soviet Russia is far away, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy on France’s border. A Francoist Spain would mean “France encircled” (204); that concrete geopolitical circumstance means more than the ideology du jour. That a Popular Front government, of all things, could not see this represents the triumph of pacifism over proletarianism—a silly idea trumped by a sillier. Go to Spain, de Gaulle told Lacassagne; “reconnoiter the future enemy” (206). (Jacques offers to go with him, but although Dutourd is a Gaullist he is no Malraux: The man of letters belongs at his desk, not on the battlefield (207). It is enough that he respect those who go to the battlefield.)

Fourth lesson: There really are superior men, by nature and not only by social convention. Lacassagne admits that he had allowed himself to become a bourgeoisified  soldier, a bureaucratic functionary in the War Ministry, “someone who was accommodating himself without reflection to the cowardly mediocrity into which the country had fallen” (200). De Gaulle made him recollect; he re-minded Lacassagne. De Gaulle caused Lacassagne to reflect upon what the French army is for, what France is for, why “there was every reason to die” for France (198). Lacassagne wants Jacques to be the kind of man who writes, lives on French soil, who makes that soil worth defending. He wants him to be part of the succession of French writers.

Lacassagne’s attempt at political education succeeds. He changes neither Jacques’s ideas nor his passions, but “taught him that there is a certain noble and romantic though realistic way of looking at the world” (211). The reconciliation of nobility and realism is the alliance of the spirited part of the soul with practical reason. In Greek terms, it is the alliance of thumos and phronēsis. In Dutourd’s terms, it is “heart.” In his book on Stendhal, The Man of Sensibility, Dutourd defines “heart” as “not only courage” but also “a desire to try one’s strength, a nobility of character, a horror of what is base or vulgar, espagnolisme, a passion for honor—in short, soul. And soul precisely as Alain defines it. Heart is what refuses the body.” [1]  Intellect should ally itself with soul: “How many cowards there are for one Socrates who dies a hero, and how often our intellectual masters give us opportunities to despise them in their lives! One sees every day that it is easier to have intellect, with and philosophy than heart, or, if you prefer it soul. Wars have at least this much good, that they permit us to see the souls of those we admire. Danger brings out the soul as rain brings out snails.” [2]  This alliance constitutes the character of the statesman. To enter into the succession of French writers, a writer needs to understand this alliance, to think about how it might be perpetuated in new circumstances.

Such an alliance is not ‘modern.’ Lacassagne leads Jacques to consider that the modern world is not mere uprootedness, as Barrès had said and Weil would say, but a systematized uprootedness—cars in place of horses, short-haired, streamlined women in place of long-haired, alluring ones. Politically, the modern world consists of “dictatorships by blackguards” and “republics of the petits bourgeois and the workers,” not constitutional monarchies or republics of citizen-soldiers (213). The Lacassagnian, or Gaullist, political education gives Jacques precisely what a writer needs; a theme worthy not only of his talent, but of his character, his sensibility, a theme that will strengthen and refine that character and sensibility. Dutourd’s reply to Malraux is: A political novel should not be directly political. A novel of manners is the novelistic way of writing about politics, because politics—the answer to the question, Who rules?—shapes manners, giving friendships and love affairs tensions unknown in other regimes. (Malraux’s response: Don’t write a novel, write an epic in prose. And in reply to Proust: Don’t write a novel, write an anti-memoir.)

Jean resents Jacques’s new novel. “Up to that time, Jacques and he had been equals”; Jacques’s superior wealth and family connections could be dismissed as mere accidents” (231). Jean, the bourgeois democrat, confronts the dilemma bourgeois democracy poses for its representative man. In the old regime, Jean would have been shielded from resentment by the realities of class. Not for a bourgeois Pousselot to concern himself with the accomplishments of a de Boissy! But now, “the unhappy fellow lied in miniature the drama of democracies where social life is insupportable because it is founded on merit, that is to say, you are exposed constantly to seeing someone who was your equal become your superior, and where consequently friendship is no longer possible” (231). Such weak social bonds make a bourgeois democracy susceptible to faction despite nominal equality, and therefore more likely to be heedless to foreign threats to the regime of democratic republicanism and to the lives of its citizens.

And so Jean fumes. He tries to discourage Jacques, scribbles a thousand corrections on the margins of the novel manuscript. How can a novelist be so insensitive? he complains. How can a novelist fail to wring his hands, feel somehow guilty about the suffering masses, Nazism, Communism, “the war in S[pain, the lack of paid vacations, the housing problem, the armaments race” (239)? Jacques ignores the corrections. When Jean sees the uncorrected published version, the friendship is irretrievable.

Jacques’s father dies not long before the French prime minister Daladier announces the supposed settlement of the crisis in Czechoslovakia. Jacques realizes that Lacassagne is now his best friend, and therefore “suffered less from his father’s death together with the feeling of not being unfaithful to his father” (282). the Springtime of Life is a story about finding a friend worthy of your father. You will need one. The modern regime needs some men and women of the ancien regime within it, braver than the demi-men and demi-women of the modern regime, and also sufficiently gracious not to resent their marginal status in a regime nominally ruled by the persons—hardly to be called citizens—such a regime produces.

Jean was mistaken when he claimed that France no longer interested in men like Napoleon. In Dutourd’s view, one such man remained, Charles de Gaulle. Franklin Roosevelt suspected de Gaulle of Bonapartism in the worst sense, claiming to worry that de Gaulle would destroy French republicanism if given the chance. In the event, he saved it, twice, and left it on a firmer foundation than he had found it. But is not regime politics that Dutourd thinks of when he thinks of Napoleon. He thinks instead of greatness of soul.

“The phrase ‘great soul’ turns up over and over again in Stendhal’s life of Napoleon,” he writes in his 1957 book The Taxis of the Marne. [3]  “What historian other than Stendhal has perceived the greatness of Napoleon’s soul? Yet there lies the whole key to his character.” [4]  Stendhal writes, “This man’s whole life is a paean of praise of greatness of soul,” by which he means something like what the American Founders meant by fame, joined by courage and firmness of judgment, and exhibited in Napoleon’s calmness in exile. [5]  Napoleon was a natural aristocrat formed by an aristocratic civilization. He never understood representative government, and so his soul struggled between “the genius of tyranny and the profound reasoning powers which had made a great man of him.” [6]

De Gaulle too was “a great soul,” one which languished in the last, mediocre decades of the Third Republic, “tied down in the promotion roster of the army,” “condemned to vegetate in garrison towns, with an occasional minor command to relieve the boredom. It needed nothing less than the disintegration of the nation to liberate this great soul from his bonds.” [7]  In his Conversation with De Gaulle, Dutourd admits that he had often worried that de Gaulle might turn tyrant. What he found was that de Gaulle reminded him of Flaubert even more than he resembled Napoleon—an even more surprising comparison. Like Flaubert, de Gaulle was a great anti-bourgeois, understanding France not as “a house of commerce” but as “a work of art, a cathedral upon which one has worked for a thousand years.” [8]  France had been feminized—its government in the Fourth Republic an indulgent mother, its people “one gigantic Madame Bovary, an enormous ninny in the arms of Bohemia.” [9] A bohemianized bourgeoisie will no longer have the discipline to maintain something so modest as prosperity; what had hitherto been supposed to be the ‘low but solid ground’ will turn muddy. France needed fatherliness in order to save its republicanism. It found de Gaulle, and de Gaulle re-founded it.

For de Gaulle (Dutourd learned in conversing with him), France “had a character and a destiny, like a living creature, which one did not model at will.” [10]  This seems flatly to contradict the image of France as a work of art, a cathedral, until one reflects on the way Jacques de Boissy reads the literary artists of the past, treating them as living presences. De Gaulle was more than such a reader, he was such a ‘writer.’ Like Flaubert, in “his Herculean efforts to make one sentence with the balance of those of Montesquieu, de Gaulle strove to perfect a living work of art, France. Thus the “strange kinship” of de Gaulle and Flaubert: “their pride of solitaries, their austere love of glory, their disdain for honors and money,” their “humble placing of themselves in a French line” of succession—for Flaubert, the succession of masters of the French language, for de Gaulle, the succession of those who made France “the most astonishing nation in History.” [11]  “Politics and literature proceeded from an identical patriotism.” [12]  The patriotism of literature and the patriotism of politics proceed from a certain nature, from greatness of soul, from the soul-forming love and friendship that the great-souled have for one another. In a commercial republic, or worse, a bohemianized democracy, greatness of soul will find its rightful place not in the tyranny of Napoleon and not exactly in Napoleon’s grace in exile, but in the political man’s patient vigilance and preparedness, in the literary man’s readiness to recognize and honor such a man when, if he sees him.

 

Notes

1. Jean Dutourd: The Man of Sensibility. Robin Chancellor translation. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961, 218.
2. Ibid. 219.
3. Jean Dutourd: The Taxis of the Marne. Harold King translation. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957, 17.
4. Ibid. 17.
5. Stendhal: A Life of Napoleon. Roland Gant translation. London: The Rodale Press, 1956, 28, 184.
6. Ibid. 181-182.
7. Jean Dutourd: Conversation avec le général. Paris: Flammarion, 1990. 18.
8. Ibid. 31.
9. The Taxis of the Marne, op. cit., 241.
10. Conversation avec le général, op. cit., 40.
11. Ibid. 40.
12. Ibid. 40-41.
13. Ibid. 41.