Raoul De Roussy De Sales

THE diaries of Raoul de Roussy de Sales (The Making of Yesterday, Reynal & Hitchcock, $4.50) were ended by his untimely death in December, 1942, but despite covering only the period from Munich to the North African campaign, they make notable contributions to the understanding of our era. They give a striking picture of the confusions and weaknesses which marked the approach of the United States to participation in the war; they contain comments on the nature of America and of France that have permanent value for their penetration and observation; and they convey a feeling of the overriding force of world events in a climax which makes a truthful onlooker, borne forward by them, aware of his insignificance and helplessness.

M. de Sales was New York correspondent of Paris-Soir and diplomatic correspondent of the Agence Havas. Hence for a time his diaries reveal him as a journalist at work, which is exciting while it lasts. But this illusion of having a chair in the wings of history is brief. For one thing, the writer was soon to be in his sickroom, reduced to his own speculations. For another, history was preparing a greater event than he foresaw, the victory of 1945.

Today’s reader has the advantage over the diarist, for he knows the outcome of the great struggle. But this is only a deceptive advantage. For today’s reader by now has forgotten the weaknesses and confusions of the past, and does not sufficiently appreciate that the victory of 1945 was no final culmination, since the war has produced no peace. We still live in a time when a truthful onlooker must be aware of his insignificance and helplessness. The strengths which made the American contribution to victory possible must centinue the struggle with the weaknesses which always have beset this nation. For while victory was won by strengths it also was the product of incalculable international coöperation which now is gone.

There is an unintentional parallel between the present and the months after Munich when this diary starts. The diarist, in being utterly baffled, still has the advantage over the contemporary reader. “So, although the war may be only a few days or weeks off,” he wrote in August, 1939, “one reaches the singular conclusion that it is inconceivable because it is potentially too dangerous. No population is psychologically ready, and the peace that will follow the war—except in the event of a German victory— is equally hard to imagine. We arrive al two mathematically certain and contradictory results. The natural course of events leads straight to war. But war is not possible.” Such words describe the strain of world relations today as accurately as that of 1939.

A critic may be tempted to discount M. de Sales for being negative. He was so negative that after the fall of France he could not bring himself for many months to join the de Gaulle movement, a reluctance that now is being vindicated by the development of de Gaulle’s relations to his times. But this negativeness was not any spiritual denial. It was the acknowledgment of helplessness. A decadent France, an America too long adolescent, a Russia no less stupid, provided him no cause, other than the negative one of the defeat of Hitler. He did not dull his own sharp sense of right and wrong, loyalty and civilization. On the contrary, these kept him aloof.

Writing at the end of the decade in 1939 he remarked that the principal lesson of the ten years was that they provided a remarkable demonstration of how little effect political leaders have on the evolution of events. “Not one of the problems that existed in 1929 has been solved,” he said. And he noted in May, 1942: “The greatest catastrophe which one could imagine, outside of a sudden German victory, would be that the war should stop tomorrow, even with the defeat of Germany. Never were people less ready to make peace. Never had they fewer ideas on this subject.” Looking ahead, he said of America: “No country is more convinced than this one that she is right, or is more arrogant in her moral superiority. If she intervenes in the affairs of the world it will be to impose her ideas, and she will consider her intervention a blessing for lost and suffering humanity. The prospect is cheerless. . . . I hope I shall not live to see this epoch of humanitarian businessmen and preaching farmers. I know that everything is threatened and one must choose between various menaces. The American menace is the least terrifying. I prefer Henry Wallace, Dorothy Thompson and Harry Luce, and even, if one wants, Hoover, to the mildest of Axis protagonists; but a world dominated by the present American elite is rather frightening.”

M. de Sales early in 1939 saw what was happening to France. “Fascism in France,” he wrote, “will have a defeatist basis. The Fascist elements — Laval, Flandin, Bonnet and the ‘right thinking’ people — prefer the neutralization of France to the risk of war which might bring them what they call communism. . . . They see no serious inconvenience in taking orders from Berlin which would support them in their desire to suppress workers’ liberties, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and which would encourage and sanctify antiSemitism. In other words the terrain is favorable and pre-Fascism exists, but if it develops ... it will be a nationalist movement of retreat. Patriotism will insist in abdicating, in letting the house burn on pretext of saving the furniture.”

His comments on America were arresting. He observed the fundamental anti-Europeanism in this country, which he considered sometimes as being the cornerstone of Americanism. Because the American came from Europe, he has to rationalize his motives for leaving. If he or his ancestors left Europe it was because Europe was a damned and condemned continent. “If he did not say that,” wrote M. de Sales, the would lose faith in himself and in the destiny of America. To be American is an act of faith. America is a country in which one must believe. It is not necessary to believe in France in order to be French.”

Probing deeper into the nature of America, he marked two fundamental and contradictory characteristics. One is a pronounced taste for personal change, the other an aversion to social change. “Change for the sake of change,” he wrote, “whether it be the house, the woman, the career, or the President, is considered good in itself, and efficacious, preventing the individual from bogging down in a deadly routine. . . . But in opposition to this one finds in nearly all Americans an incredible attachment to old ideas, a narrow, quasi-superstitious individualism, an inordinate fear of everything which is new and unexpected. . . . America has not invented a political idea for 150 years and she raises a wall of resistance which has the thickness of a century and a half of dogmatism against all innovation. Now the new ideas come from Europe. But as soon as they reach here, they call them ‘isms.’ Compared to the American, the European is an adventurous and prodigiously daring being. ... In America there is no revolution possible — except the first one.”

Anyone who enjoys trenchant criticism of his country, and anyone who can bear to relive the untriumphant years before victory, or who is willing to face the fact that these days of the so-called peace are equally dangerous, will profit from these diaries. It should be added that Walter Millis provides for the book a wholly sympathetic and adequate introduction.