The sociologist Alain Touraine asked the other day why the Rainbow Warrior fiasco had moved the French so little. Everyone had enjoyed the political scandal. Almost nobody had protested against the deed itself. ‘The Greenpeace affair – or rather the absence until now of a Greenpeace “affair” in the line of great affairs of the past – should alert us to the profound degradation of our political life.’
Where, asked Touraine, was that generation of left-wing intellectuals who had protested so valiantly against French policies in the past, and where was the spirit of 1968 or of the anti-nuclear and ‘green’ movements of the 1970s? ‘The State imposes its own discourse, while social actors disintegrate or even seek to incorporate themselves in a State which is more and more corporatist. …’
I remembered Touraine’s lament last week, when I read in Le Monde an ineffably complacent article about the Saar. It is just 30 years since the people of the Saar, a small coal-andiron territory between France and Germany, voted overwhelmingly to reject ‘European status’ and to become a constituent part of the German Federal Republic. The message of the article is that if Paris had been a little more tactful, a little less greedy, these benighted people would not have listened to horrid German nationalists and deprived themselves of the chance of permanent membership of the French family.
But it wasn’t like that – not at all. A thick coat of pious whitewash covers the true story of France’s behaviour towards the western provinces of Germany, much of it sloshed on by Germans anxious for reconciliation. It can be retorted that Germany’s behaviour towards the eastern provinces of France – in 1871, 1914 and 1940 – was far worse. No doubt. So what?
The French ambition to annex Germany west of the Rhine, including the Saar, goes back to Louis XIV. French troops took the Saar in 1684 and again after the Revolution, in 1792. In 1918, the Saar’s mines were awarded to France and the territory was administered by the League of Nations. In 1935, with Hitler already ruling Germany, the mostly Catholic and working-class Saarlanders voted by 90 per cent in a plebiscite to return to the Reich. But in 1945, the French were back again. The Saar was forced into a customs union with France, and General Grandval became its viceroy.
Back in 1935, Shiela Grant Duff was the Observer’s correspondent in the Saar. She passionately supported the group of democrats who campaigned against incorporation into the Reich, but wrote that the Saarlanders ‘were wholly German by nationality.’ How, then, was it possible for the Saar to become a French protectorate for 10 years after 1945 and even – in 1952 – to give 60 per cent of its vote to the puppet government run by the Catholic politician Johannes Hoffmann?
The people of the Saar today have no doubts about the answer. French thuggery, they reply. The Saar, like other border regions of Germany under French occupation, was effectively dominated by the Sûreté, which in turn had been swollen by untrained and vengeful veterans of the Communist sections of the Resistance. Anyone turning up to work with a black eye was greeted with the joke: ‘Been with the Sûreté again?’ The Communist Party, like Hoffmann’s own Christian People’s Party, was licensed. All parties supporting union with West Germany were banned.
France exploited the wealth of the Saar, and French carpetbaggers took over the management of mines and steel mills. Hoffmann, known contemptuously as ‘Yo-Ho’, had fought the Nazis in 1935, but was now hopelessly pliant and resorted to expelling his political critics from the territory. When he let the French get the Warndt coal district, the Saarlanders sang: ‘Yo-Ho the phoney miner’s son/Sold the Warndt for Judas’s sum.’
It all ended happily. Adenauer and Mendés-France cobbled up a shaky arrangement making the Saar a ‘European territory’ with French currency. Asked to vote on it, the Saarlanders flung out the ‘European statute’ by a huge majority and at last joined the Federal Republic. Yo-Ho’s power evaporated, and the Saar is now ruled by the Social Democrats.
With the Saar referendum of 1955, three centuries of French imperialist expansion to the east came to an end. The Germans of the Saar and the Moselle valley retain their memories; the French military presence in a city like Trier still has a conqueror’s obtrusiveness, as the American and British presences in – say – Frankfurt or Dusseldorf do not. But the episode is over. Why, then, bring it up again?
Because a nation which cannot confront its own past honesdy is a nation with problems. The Saar is a tiny place; most people in France have scarcely heard of it. But in die Saar, the French State was twice insulted, once in 1935 (when just 0.4 per cent voted to join France), and once in 1955, 20 years later. And that, it seems, is still not acceptable.
The Revolution of 1789 produced the Jacobin ideology of the centralised State as the engine of social progress. This ideology has transformed the world, mediated through statesmen as different as Hitler and Roosevelt, Lenin and Atdee. As French leftism decays, those who once protested, signed declarations and marched in the streets have lost every ideal save State-worship itself.
And yet the approach to 1989, bicentenary of the Revolution, is raising all kinds of doubts beneath the confident’ official surface. A hundred years ago, the Third Republic proudly proclaimed its middle-class radicalism as the true heir of 1789. Mitterrand’s socialism carries less conviction. From left to right, historians and thinkers raise their doubts.
Some point to the Terror as the source of modern totalitarianism and genocide. Some, in direct challenge to the Jacobin tradition, say that the real revolution was the counter-revolution, when the Vendée peasantry rose in 1793 against government from Paris. The republican consensus which made the France we know is beginning to crack up.
But the State survives, increasingly respected for its mere power rather than for its older function as the provider of liberty and equality. Will 1989 simply celebrate the birthday of the first bureaucracy? Or will the critics manage to promote a real debate about the nature of French State power and the way it has been used in the world – from the Saar to Auckland and Mururoa?
[1985
Greek Civil War – Rambo-Style
The other day, I saw the film ‘Eleni,’ based on the book of the same title by Nicholas Gage. It is a very bad film indeed, gurgling with sentimentality, burdened with the sort of dialogue which makes you twist your ankles together like a schoolchild wanting ‘to be excused.’ But it has a negative importance. It pricks once again Britain’s neurotic conscience about Greece.
The story can be briefly told. Nicholas Gage, born Gatzoyiannis, was a child in a Greek village during the civil war. Communist forces occupied the village and began to organise the removal of children to Communist countries in Eastern Europe. His mother, Eleni Gatzoyiannis, managed to smuggle Nicholas through the lines. For this and other ‘offences,’ she was shot by firing squad on 28 August, 1948.
Years later, as an American journalist, Gage returned to Greece and tracked down the man who had ordered his mother’s murder. He took a gun with him. But in the end, he could not pull the trigger. Instead, he wrote a tormented, intense book, a mixture of fact and fictional reconstruction. As a Greek story of war, exile and revenge, it has much power. As an account of what happened during the civil war, it is understandably but painfully one-sided.
The film was made in Spain, not in Greece. Gage has explained that his village – Lia, in the mountains near Albania – wasn’t suitable, because it had been modernised. Greeks give another version: that the Greek cinema technicians union refused to work on the film because they considered the original book a distortion of history. Whatever the truth of that, the film vulgarises the story until the Communist soldiers become sadistic thugs, the peasants all resentful victims, and the children sent across the border are all forcibly abducted from weeping parents.
Unlike the Spanish, the Greeks are only beginning to assess their Civil War objectively. Over half a million people died between 1946 and 1949 as a result of the conflict, and Greece became a genuinely open democracy only five years ago. But enough is available to sugge
st that the film’s subtitle – ‘An Unforgettable True Story’ – is absurd.
In 1948, the Communist-led ‘Democratic Army’ numbered 26,000, by American estimates. This scarcely suggests that it had no popular support. The atrocity of Eleni’s death took place during years of ruthless mass killing by both sides: the unpunished murderers are by no means only on the Left. The federation of village councils around Lia has issued a statement attacking the ‘civil war atmosphere’ portrayed in the film. ‘It is an insult to the memory of those who suffered and sacrificed themselves on the altar of the liberation struggle to bring back those historical memories which form the cross of martyrdom of the Greek people …’ This is hardly the tone of people supposed to have regarded the Communists as alien oppressors.
Greece touched me only twice – and indirectly – in the postwar years. The first time was when a gentleman from the Greek embassy came down to my school and gave us sheets of smudged, staring little faces – the ‘abducted children,’ still missing. The second was when I was a boy reservist in the Royal Marines. My squad was trained by a group of Commandos who had fought alongside the Communist partisans in Greece. Several had Greek wives, and several were Communists. They taught us their sort of war, not square-bashing; they treated us as human beings with minds, not as rookies to be screamed at. And they would sometimes talk to us about the hopes of a people’s army in a country poorer than we could imagine.
These were two irreconcilable sorts of information. Making sense of both is not just a Greek duty, but a British one, given that Churchill’s 1944 intervention to keep the left-wing resistance out of power was the genesis of the civil war. As A. J. P. Taylor wrote, ‘only the British followed the German example and took armed action against a popular national movement while the war was actually on.’
What about the children? Some 28,000 were taken away, most to Yugoslavia but others to Albania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, even Poland. The guerrillas asserted that their parents had willingly sent them out of the war zone to be properly fed and educated. It’s clear that many families – like Eleni’s – were not willing at all. But others, possibly most, seemed to have assented, and many went to join their children when the rebellion collapsed. The Red Cross reported in 1950 that in Yugoslavia 7,812 Greek children out of 9,106 were living with their relations. In spite of the outcry over their fate, the Greek Government later proved remarkably unwilling to have them back.
England’s Civil War lies over three centuries away. Few people in this country can now conceive of the nature of such wars, their combination of fanatical, messianic certainty with a lust for kindred blood that feeds on itself. It is easier here to understand the Spanish Civil War as a conflict between fascism and democracy – an international struggle – than as a gigantic Spanish fratricide which took on the colouring of rival ideologies in Europe.
Perhaps this is why the British are much less willing to see the Greek Civil War as a social conflict than the Greeks are. Early this year, the Channel 4 film ‘The Hidden War’ – an attempt to tilt the balance of historical knowledge by presenting the Civil War through the eyes of the defeated – met a perfect barrage of protest from a certain British élite in retirement: the generals, diplomats and intelligence officers responsible for British policy in Greece during the 1940s. Without British intervention, they claimed, Greece would have become one more Soviet satellite.
There is little to back that up. In October 1944, Churchill and Stalin drew up their grisly little scrap of paper dividing Europe by percentages. Churchill scribbled: ‘Greece’: 90 per cent British.’ Stalin ticked it with a blue pencil. For once, he kept a promise. He didn’t want a Communist Greece, and cynically betrayed the Greek Communists in their struggle a few years later. The British earned plenty of Soviet abuse for their support of the Right in the Civil War, but in practice Stalin stood back and let the British – later, the Americans -do what they liked in Greece.
If the British had not piled into Greece in 1944 and afterwards, there would pretty certainly have been a Communist republic, following a Yugoslav course. It would have begun with popular support, but – like the early Tito regime – would probably have committed atrocious crimes and mad idealistic blunders. Then, given Stalin’s attitude, my guess is that it would also have broken with the Soviet Union and taken an independent path.
Here, somebody can shout: ‘Objection!’ Because – it can be argued – all the savagery of civil war and all the repressions of the 30 years of right-wing rule that followed were worth it, if they spared Greece what the people of Yugoslavia had to go through in the years of unmitigated terror after 1945.
That is a debate I would like to hear. But nobody around here is trying to start it. Instead, we get the Rambo rubbish of this ‘Eleni’ film, in which Reds almost do manage to eat babies. And that film is only the gutter version of our Establishment’s insistence that the ‘Democratic Army’ were foreign-backed terrorists, while the royalist-nationalist side were noble democrats. The real Eleni did not deserve to be buried a second time under lies.
[1986
The Strange Death of the Peasantry
Not long ago, I heard the historian Eric Hobsbawm remark that Karl Marx had got his timing wrong. Two European institutions which he thought to be moribund had survived for a full century after his death: the peasantry and the Church. Only now, in the last decades of the twentieth century, were they going into their terminal decline.
I write this in a village half-way up an Italian mountainside. The one-track road from the valley below, winding up to the top village 2,000 ft above sea level, was only built some 20 years ago. Until then, the people of these settlements – more like tiny towns built of stone and huddled round a church – walked for two or three hours down forest paths, carrying goods by donkey or on their backs, to reach a market or a shop.
They lived off the chestnut forests which cover the mountain range, grinding the nuts into flour, tending vegetable and vine patches and cows stalled in cabins scattered around the hills. Their sons were periodically taken to fight in distant wars. Otherwise, the State ignored them. The priest in each village, ringing his tinny bells, was the only representative of a wider world.
The road changed everything. Nobody harvests the chestnuts now, and the outlying cabins are roofless, buried in long grass and bracken. The population drained away, until this village, which once held perhaps 200 people, has fewer than 50. The children work in factories in the valley or in the Tuscan cities, driving up at weekends to see elderly relations.
Some have gone further, to Australia, Germany, or – an old immigration from this region – to Scotland. Many houses are derelict; others, like this one, have been converted for the summer holidays of foreigners.
On the way here we visited my sister who married into a French family after the war in one of the most fertile districts of Provence. So much has changed that she has made a picture book to show incredulous grandchildren how life used to be.
The old peasantry is vanishing. Where every square foot was used to cultivate salad and spring vegetables, melons and herbs, one can now see the unimaginable: weeds. The mule-carts have vanished, like the hordes of scraggy sheep being driven in clouds of dust up to summer pastures in the foothills of the Alps. A whole agrarian society – scarcely changed since the French Revolution, with its smallholders, its ragged sharecroppers, its family vendettas over access to precious water – is dissolving.
With it, many tensions have also dissolved. Babies thrive without swaddling; women visit the café on their own without scandalising their families, and can take driving lessons without a chaperone. The small town where my nephews and niece grew up no longer lives in a state of frozen civil war where every child was born Red or White, where everyone knew whose house would be attacked if the revolution came. The anticlerical faith in Science and Progress has gone, and so has the suffocating, reactionary piety it fought. The lay State schools and the Catholic écoles libres, once irreconcilable, are be
ginning to merge and – rather to my regret – no longer teach totally different versions of French history.
As the peasantry goes, the relationship between town and country changes. Instead of feeding the towns, the villagers are fed by them, repaying the debt with clean air and silence. Food comes from industrial farming and imports, the small fields grass over and melt into ‘forest parks’ or ‘areas of natural beauty.’ Children born into poverty among those fields can now afford to regain touch with their roots, plastering and plumbing at weekends to transform the farmhouse into a holiday home.
The Catholic Church retreats more slowly. In these two patches of Italy and France, the congregations diminish and the processions grow fewer. The bells still ring, sometimes on tape through loudspeakers; a friend near here is fighting lawsuits in her effort to run a birth-control clinic. But without an unchanging society to reinforce unchanging authority, the transformation of the Church into something at once more-and-less majestic – ‘League for the Significance of the Individual’ – will gather speed.
So it is over much of Western Europe. The people leave the hills; the little fields in the plain are merged into prairies owned by a capitalist farmer who works them with a few machines. Queer that one must go to a Communist country to see a Christian peasantry – the hundreds of multicoloured strips that make a Polish landscape, the families driving to Mass by cart drawn by blond-maned horses wearing almost as many ribbons as their owners.
What are we getting instead? Years ago, people used to talk and write darkly about the ‘Americanisation’ of Europe. If they no longer do, is it because we are already Americanised? Yes and no.
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