Vol. 17 No. 5 · 9 March 1995
pages 19-20 | 3141 words
Veni, Vidi, Vichy
Jean-Pierre Chapelas
- Une Jeunesse française: François Mitterrand 1934-1947 by Pierre Péan
Fayard, 615 pp, frs 160.00, September 1994, ISBN 2 213 59300 0
A provincial boy (from the Charentes), a Catholic, not necessarily Action Française, but certainly on the extreme, or at any rate hard right, ambitious, intelligent, fond of disguises, fully determined from the start to work for the greater glory of François Mitterrand. But with one ‘gap’, as it were, through which the wind from the left could come gusting in, that same left which in his young days our hero had so vigorously rejected. This boy from the South-West, educated in private schools and later a student in Paris, became enamoured – and why blame him? – of a social Christianity, an ideology that could if need be turn into Christian socialism and then into socialism pure and simple. Though not without faintly cynical, often inelegant motives on the part of the (future) leader of the Socialists. But let me not anticipate.
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Letters
Vol. 17 No. 6 · 23 March 1995
From Willie Thompson
Your pseudonymous reviewer of François Mitterrand’s biography (LRB, 9 March) inserts – for no discernible reason, since it connects to nothing else in the review – a paragraph in which it’s alleged that Marguerite Duras ‘never subsequently made any mystery of the fact … that she felt no scruples about torturing the imprisoned collaborators over whom she was watching’. Presumably this refers to the short story ‘Albert of the Capitals’ in her collection La Douleur (1985). Now certainly there are suggestions of identification between the author and the woman who in this work of fiction tortures a Gestapo informer, but it is hardly conclusive evidence of what Duras actually did in 1944. ‘Jean-Pierre Chapelas’ is therefore being somewhat economical with the truth. Moreover, the story is precisely about the scruples felt by the protagonist and the effort she makes to overcome them.
Willie Thompson
Caledonian University
Vol. 17 No. 7 · 6 April 1995
From Bu Wilson
In some circumstances, it’s justifiable to grant anonymity to governmental whistle-blowers. However, the review of Une jeunesse française (LRB, 9 March) was permeated by the arguments and style most commonly associated with academic reviewers. If such is the case, anonymity liberated an armchair polemicist to ascend to ever-greater heights of stylistic tomfoolery and moral flippancy. Evidently, the pseudonymous reviewer conceives his ‘imprescribable right to criticise’ as entailing no public accountability, no risk to his own professional reputation, and no sense of personal responsibility.
Bu Wilson
Iowa City
