Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [183]
I did not need him to tell me about the Germans, but in Giraudoux I encountered and recognized for the first time the kind of France of which my friend the historian Richard Cobb has written better than anyone: the France of the Third Republic in which Giraudoux was rooted. The France to which I was introduced through the implausible medium of his novels was not the France of high intellectuals, confident in their superiority as only Etonians are in Britain – although as a product of the Paris Ecole Normale Supérieure he was himself a very good specimen. It was the Jacobin France I shortly discovered for myself through its very own mouthpiece, and which became the France of my 1930s, the Republic of the Canard Enchainé.
That grey four- or exceptionally six-page broadsheet of comments, jokes and cartoons, unsponsored, unsubsidized, refusing all advertisements, describing itself simply as ‘a satirical journal appearing on Wednesday’ and bought weekly by half a million frequenters of the Cafés du Sport and the Cafés du Commerce from Dunkirk to Perpignan, was perhaps the only national expression of the Third Republic. Indeed, its language, conventions, terms of reference and assumptions were so esoteric as to be largely incomprehensible to anyone not born and bred within it, at least without extensive commentary. Since General de Gaulle, whom it was to send up in a weekly ‘court bulletin’ in the classical style of the Duke of Saint-Simon’s Memoirs of Louis XIV, it has perhaps appealed more to graduates and the political in-groupies than to its original readers, the radical-socialist, socialist or even communist electors of Clochemerle (the archetypical community of the Third Republic, no longer recognizable in a country which is to abolish rural public telephones because of the spread of mobile phones in la France profonde).9 For it was an article of its and their basic faith that the Republic had no enemies on the left. (The other articles were a belief in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and Reason, anti-clericalism, an abhorrence of war and militarism, and in the virtues of good wine.) It was utterly sceptical of governments. Its readers in the 1930s liked to think they had no illusions about the rich, who exploited them and corrupted both the government, which overtaxed them, and most of the politicians and the journalists who tried to ‘stuff our brains’ (bourrage de crânes). The Canard confirmed their convictions, though, like its readers, it did not actually denounce the system. As in Marcel Pagnol’s then famous comedy Topaze, in which an idealistic schoolmaster learns that careers and wealth are not achieved by republican virtue – not even the state’s recognition of educational merit, the order of the Palmes Académiques for which he thirsts10 – corruption was not for crusading but for disenchanted laughs.
Nothing could have been further from the world of the Canard than my instructor in the ways of another France, Madame Humbline Croissant, in whose apartment by the Porte de Versailles I lived during the summer of 1936. I was on a grant from the London County Council while waiting to go up to Cambridge. Madame Croissant, a grey-haired lady of Norman origin, played the harp, took the ancient and conservative Revue des Deux Mondes, and disapproved, among many other matters, of my reading of Proust, whom I brought into her salon from the Gallimard lending library on the boulevard Raspail which I visited almost as regularly as the Dôme in Montparnasse. (The Gallimard bookshop is still on the same