The Rulers of France
I Worked With Laval. By Pierre Tissier. (Harrap. 55.) LT.-COL. TISSIER, who now works with General de Gaulle and is the author of The Government of Vichy, devotes 44 pages out of 128 to M. Laval and 25 to M. Anatole de Monzie, with whom he later collaborated in preparing the uncompleted Encyclopedic Fran caise. The remainder contain a glossary of events from 1934 to 1939; like other writers, Col. Tissier points out the faults— culminating in the toleration of the remilitarising of the Rhineland —that gave Hitler courage to prepare to subdue the world. No attention was paid by responsible statesmen at the time to those who knew, as every German schoolboy did, what was the trend of Nazi preparations, and this fact explains why such men as M. Flandin abandoned hope in Britain and moved into the camp of such cynics or enemies as MM. Bonnet or Laval.
The impersonal sections of this book give an interesting picture from the inside of the working of the French political machine and expose the more glaring of its faults. Col. Tissier has some sug- gestions for improving the Constitution of 1875 which, intended to leave room for a Monarchist restoration, ha; led the National Assembly always to choose "a President of moderate ability . . . who would never be tempted to use his theoretical powers." Col. Tissier would prefer "a President who is a ruler, like the President of the United States." He believes that the chances of "an authoritarian" President "have a fair chance of prevailing." Yet he describes the people as disillusioned with Marshal Petain's "utter despotism" in which the police takes the place of all other institutions. Since the Marshal constantly refers to himself as an authoritarian, especial care must obviously be taken in France that the remedy which consists of placing a military authoritarian at the head of the State is not worse than the diseases of the French form of democracy. As General de Gaulle has so often said, the people of France must select their own form of government. Col. Tissier's suggestions for making it work may well be worth trying. He has been through the whole political mill, and this book illuminates its early and formative stages, about which in this country knowledge is scanty.
About M. Laval we learn little that is fresh. Col. Tissier has obviously acquired a certain admiration for him personally, though he dutifully condemns his corruption, lack of principle and refusal or inability to act from patriotic motives. He is first and last a parliamentarian who, without a parliament, is now unable to " sense " the country. This is as near to an explanation of Laval's political psychology as the writer comes, though others suggest themselves
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