QUE PENSEZ-VOUS DE LA FRANCE?

Ford Madox Ford

Introduction On 5 January 1934 Ford published an article in French in the newspaper L’Intransigeant under the title ‘Que Pensez-Vous de la France?’ – ‘What do you think of France?’ The original French text is republished below in full for the first time, followed by the first English translation, by Dominique Lemarchal. L’Intransigeant was originally founded as a left-wing oppos- ition daily in the 1880s, but had metamorphosed into a mass-market right-wing paper by the 1920s. Ford’s article was the third in a series launched in 1934, in which leading writers and intellectuals were asked to respond to the same headline question: ‘Que Pensez-Vous de la France?’ He was preceded by the man of letters Maurice Baring, and the German novelist Thomas Mann. Others featured over the following month included Gertrude Stein, Aldous Huxley, Theodore Dreiser, Ivan Bunin, Stefan Zweig, and Rudyard Kipling. Kipling, Mann, and Bunin were Nobel laureates; they, like Stein, Huxley, and Zweig, were at the peak of their fame. In short, it was a prestigious series, and deserves to be better known to literary scholars of the inter- war period. Ford’s contribution appeared on the front page and continued onto the next page. Ford had been living mainly in France for eleven years when he sent his response to the paper’s question. Much of that time had been spent in Paris, especially in the mid 1920s when he was editing the transatlantic review and writing Parade’s End. But it had been to the South of France that he’d set off with Stella Bowen in 1922 to stay at Cap Ferrat; and they had begun to return to Provence, wintering in Toulon in 1926 and 1927. He returned again with Janice Biala, his last companion, in 1931, and they found the Villa Paul at nearby Cap Brun, which was to be their main home in France for the rest of Ford’s life. He had known both Paris and Provence for as long as he could remember, visiting both as a child, and then as an adult before and during the war. 30 FORD MADOX FORD

Ford’s article follows a similar trajectory. He starts talking about his love for France, but ends with the significance of Provence. The message is that of his later books Provence and Great Trade Route: that civilization is under threat from another outbreak of barbarism; that the values of European civilization, which he takes Provence especially to represent, must be preserved; and that those values of chivalry, frugality, thought and the arts might, if other nations could learn to appreciate them, offer the solution to the menaces of industrialized modernity and militarism. The article’s plea for a propaganda that stresses French ach- ievements rather than outrages and grievances thus illuminates the intention of Ford’s own books of wartime propaganda, When Blood is Their Argument and Between St. Dennis and St. George, books which sought precisely to define the values of French civilization, by dis- cussing its literature, thought-style and way of life, juxtaposed with a Germanic ‘Kultur’ intoxicated with Prussian militarism. Like his post- war books about France discussed in this volume, these were unusual examples of propaganda, espousing the cause not of nations but of the Romance civilization that constantly traversed national borders. The article also sheds light on the book Ford was going to write next. On 1 January 1934 he completed Henry for Hugh, the sequel to The Rash Act, and equally set in Provence and in a location based on the Villa Paul. Four days later the piece in L’Intransigeant appeared. A week after that, Ford was pitching a new idea to his American editor at Lippincott, for the book they would publish the following year as Provence.1 The newspaper piece comments on the degree of condensation needed to fit his views on France into the short space of an article. Provence, and indeed much of Ford’s writing of the 1930s, should be seen as his more expansive answer to the question of his views on France; and as the answer he anticipates at the essay’s close, directed at the (English-speaking) nations across the Channel and across the Atlantic. Ford spoke French from childhood, read French literature con- tinually, thought of French as a stylistic model while writing English, and occasionally wrote in French. He published at least two wartime propaganda pieces in French, and said he’d written a third. He also wrote a French tribute to Joseph Conrad, published less than two months after his death in 1924.2 Ford thought well enough of two of these pieces to reprint them as French appendices to two of his books. Around 1924 he also began a French translation of the novel he was