What I Am Reading: "The Hollow Years" by Eugen Weber

Appropriate, or perhaps not, for Bastille Day, I finally finished this dense cultural history of France in the '30s. The book starts out on a caustic note, comparing the late Third Republic French to the irresolute Spartans who would not resist Athenian expansion in the Peloponnesian War; and proceeds next into a discussion of interwar pacifism that emphasizes unsympathetic voices that opposed the war at a late hour, some in the name of antisemitism or other causes. This section and to have little empathy for the devastation wrought by the first war and the political attitudes that sprung from it. The book begins and ends in this spirit of condemnation, though loosens up in the middle for a while when covering other aspects of French society.

It is the type of book where every paragraph or page is on a new topic, condensing a considerable amount of information; and each chapter is on a subject area, such as church-state relations, economics, or military unpreparedness. In light of this density, I've decided to exercise my summer privileges to shirk a thorough summary. The main takeaway is that in the 1930s especially, France was a backward nation: artisinal where its opponents were mechanized and industrial, pacifist and then defeatist. The country made social and technological progress slowly, and things like refrigerators and electrification and womens' suffrage had to wait until after the war.

Figures from my previous France notes make encore appearances. Léon Blum is here, of course, and sour Daladier. Pierre Cot attempts to reform the aviation industry, Jean Zay works on education, Gaston Cusin utilizes his customs expertise to arrange arms smuggling to Spain. Not a fan despite acknowledging his importance, Weber thought that Blum was indecisive and too oriented toward reasoned debate and compromise when combativeness was called for. He lamented that not all of the Popular Front government was as well administered as Léo Lagrange's efforts to bring sports and leisure to the people. Things proceed as planned. Roger Salengro still commits suicide in the face of a defamation campaign, Marx Dormoy is still blown up by the Cagoule.

I will say that the book gave me a clearer picture of the economic situation that Blum confronted. After the war, France devalued its currency, and there was a massive outcry by the usual suspects, pensioners, creditors, those who bought war bonds, and so on. In the '20s, The French pegged their currency to gold, and resisted all attempts at devaluation (this helped them stave off the Depression a while, though their economy was always somewhat stagnant). This also had implications for a lack of capital investment. Anyway, Blum raised wages for workers, and in the absence of either a floating currency or currency devaluation, this led to an inflationary spiral in prices. When they did belatedly devalue the currency, it was haphazard enough to have caused confusion and expected enough to allow profiteering. France’s policies were again shaped by their past national trauma, to their detriment. This is a vastly oversimplified version of the book's own simplified summary, but I was able to digest it well enough on my non-economical end, after it had bedeviled me in previous reads. (The book also covers stumbles such as the chaos around accommodating the new Blumsday of the two-day weekend, as some industries took a different new day off).

The book had a lot of interesting little points of edification, such as the existence of radio board elections (and specifically the radio board election of 1937); how the French intended to pay their own extensive war debts through the disastrous German war reparations; the defensive mindset of the French military that handicapped any hypothetical intervention in Czechoslovakia or elsewhere; and fairly detailed notes on important novels and other cultural products from the era. It is overall an interesting overview, and perhaps it would have been useful as an earlier read in my interwar France tour. However, the focus on decadence and doom that bookended the material, and the references to how the time was "much like our own," (in a book written in the '90s!) put me in a combative mood, like I was about to read a jeremiad. Everything in the book has a negative spin, including what I would consider to be positive social developments like abhorrence of war or increased public awareness of and participation in politics. This pessimism may be because Weber believes that men and women "are not objects of history - playthings of tides, currents, laws they can't inflect. They are responsible subjects: actors who write and rewrite their script while moving from one decision to the next or, failing to decide, resign the script to others, Each choice, each failure to make a choice commit them to a course and set the limits of their further choices. Decisions and events are not the work of fate, and we are not its baubles unless we choose to be. Not individually, but taken as a whole, the French of the 1930s would not, could not decide. They allowed others to forge their destiny and had to pay for this abdication." (p. 6).

I suppose that pessimism is a reasonable reaction to the times, but surely there was some cause for cheer that could have broken things up a bit, some opportunity to focus on the struggle instead of its doomed end, if only for one market rally or one election day. Other books like Bouverie’s Appeasement or Hochschild’s Spain in Our Hearts roused me against Fascism at its zenith, when opposition was the most urgent. In this book, positive facts pass with little comment, and everything is a signpost on the disorganized march toward strange defeat.