Laurence Sterne remarked rather a long time ago that they order these matters better in France, and happily this is still the case. Fifteen hundred teachers of literature recently protested about the choice of a set book for Terminale L du bac — the exam taken by 17-year-olds. Their concern is perhaps more political than literary. Nevertheless they denounced the choice of book as ‘a negation of our discipline’. ‘We are teachers of literature,’ they said; ‘is it our business to discuss a work of history?’
Laurence Sterne remarked rather a long time ago that they order these matters better in France, and happily this is still the case. Fifteen hundred teachers of literature recently protested about the choice of a set book for Terminale L du bac — the exam taken by 17-year-olds. Their concern is perhaps more political than literary. Nevertheless they denounced the choice of book as ‘a negation of our discipline’. ‘We are teachers of literature,’ they said; ‘is it our business to discuss a work of history?’
The book that has provoked their rebellion is the Mémoires de Guerre of General de Gaulle, which has replaced Pascal’s Pensées on this year’s syllabus. One of their objections will be familiar enough this side of the Channel. The General’s three volumes are, they say, too difficult for their students. And Pascal is easy?
Defending the choice, Max Gallo of the Académie Française remarks scornfully that the objectors have certainly never read a line of the Mémoires — no doubt a good reason for many to protest, since to teach a book it’s preferable that you should have read it. (Gallo, incidentally, is a socialist, and was indeed a communist as a young man.)
One Parisian student said she had been told that de Gaulle was in the tradition of Cardinal de Retz and Chateaubriand, but thought that, though de Gaulle was a great historical figure, his work was likely to be irrelevant to a ‘lycéenne’ like her. But she also complained that the other set books were all contemporary and not very enticing. (British students are more likely to reject anything which is not contemporary.)
Dominique Antoine, Sarkozy’s former cultural adviser, defending the proposal, remarked that, like Churchill, de Gaulle wrote history as well as making it, and did so in a rich and masterful style. Well, Churchill got the Nobel Prize for Literature, though perhaps as a good conduct medal, and Evelyn Waugh dismissed his style as ‘sham Augustan’. M. Antoine added that the day may come when the books of another head of state who wrote well will be set texts. ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘François Mitterand.’ This may have been meant as a sop to the left, alternatively as an irritant, the only socialist president of the Fifth Republic being dismissed by many leftists as ‘faux-gauche’ since the revelation of his Vichy past.
De Gaulle’s Mémoires are indeed a work of literature (the history is more questionable). And the comparison with de Retz and Chateaubriand is justified. By contrast, few British political memoirs bear a second reading. This is not only because de Gaulle dealt with great matters; it has something to do with the difference between the two languages. It is still possible to write a classical French without striking a note of falsity, but the English language is now uncomfortable with the Grand Manner. So instead we get the Tony Blair demotic.
We are also nowadays uneasy with rhetoric. Churchill again was the last British politician who could manage it, though some might make a case for Enoch Powell. But the French can still bring it off. André Malraux’s speech when the ashes, or what passed as the ashes, of the Resistance hero Jean Moulin were interred in the Panthéon is a sublime example. The content of such a rhetorical flight may be mendacious, or there may be very little content. Yet it can still sound magnificent and even for the moment sincere.
In our language the best 20th-century political speeches, with the exception again of Churchill’s, were companionable. The first master of this kind of address was perhaps Stanley Baldwin, whose speeches were all delivered as if he was talking to individuals and not to a crowd.
English lends itself to the informality of political journals or diaries rather than to memoirs in which the writer nearly always strikes a pose. If Harold Macmillan had kept a journal it would surely have been as acute and entertaining as his five volumes of memoirs are dull, stodgy and false. The best political diarists like Greville, Chips Channon, Harold Nicolson, Alan Clark and, more recently, Chris Mullin, never got further than the fringes of power. They all press their face against the shop window and report what they see with a mixture of lively curiosity and regret at their exclusion.
What a treat it would surely be for A-level students to be given one of their books — for example, the middle volume of Alan Clark’s Diaries — as a set book. Not much chance of that happening, I fear. Meanwhile I hope these French students are eventually grateful for being instructed to read the Mémoires de Guerre.
—Allan Massie