France troubled ally

As a little France, Troubled Ally says too much and too little. Too little, for France more than most Western de mocracies has been troubled by crises for a long time. In deed it has been suggested that perpetual crisis, for all it is a contradiction in terms, describes France from 1946, or 1939, or 1914, or 1870, or 1789. Too much, for France, al though the recurrent despair of its friends for years, if not for decades, has only rarely permitted its self-generated crises to disturb greatly the course of its national life. Perhaps in deed this has been part of the trouble-the French genius for superficial volatility combined with deep-seated stabil ity. "Plus ça change . . ." is, after all, a French expression, again echoed before the elections of 1958 by the French voter. Even the climactic events of May 1958, as I observed them in France, ruffled only the surface of the deep waters, and many French groups combating for and against De Gaulle strove earnestly to see that this remained so.

One basic theme of this volume is that French foreign policy cannot be understood except in the light of the po litical, economic, and social setting in which it is shaped. Therefore, French actions on the international scene have been examined as the outgrowth of the domestic demands placed upon the policy-making process. As the Fourth Re public declined into immobilisme after 1954, these domestic requirements became at the same time more pressing and more contradictory than they had been before. Conse quently, successive governments could do little more than go through the motions of making policy, with individual political leaders hoping that they would escape becoming the personal victims of a "system" which was becoming in creasingly divorced from the real life of France. It was this fact which reinforced the faith of French leaders in the value of diplomacy: if diplomacy could not win the day for France, nothing could. Had not sheer diplomatic virtuosity postponed for over six years the appearance of that feared and distrusted phoenix, the West German army?