The Devil in France

No class suffered more in the collapse of France than the considerable number of German and Austrian Jews, liberals and radicals, who had found a precarious refuge there. Caught as they were between the devil of French bureaucracy, which insisted on locking them up as dangerous enemy aliens, and the deep sea of the advancing armored divisions, their plight was tragic, and not a few sought and found escape in suicide. Lion Feuchtwanger, who, after leaving Germany, had established himself in comfortable exile on the Riviera, found himself suddenly consigned to an internment camp, and his latest book is the story of his experiences.

It is told with imagination and literary skill; the varied human types who are swept up in the dragnet of wholesale internment are well described, and the compounded mood of uprooting, squalor, terror, tragi-comedy, so characteristic of falling France, is most effectively mirrored in the account of the refugee train which carried the hapless prisoners from the valley of the Rhone to Bayonne and then hastily brought them back again when it was found that the Germans were on the outskirts of Bayonne.

The ‘devil’ that the author found in France was not one of cruelty — it was rather one of slackness, flabbiness, bureaucratism, everything that could be summed up in that French equivalent for ‘ I don’t give a damn,’ ‘je m’en fou.’

W. H. C.

The critics in this issue of the Atlantic are: —

W. H. C. WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN

W. F. WILSON FOLLETT

E. W. EDWARD WEEKS