Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago. 

“L’ORDRE DU JOUR” by Eric Vuillard (first published 2017)

            In my last posting, I devoted the “Something Old” section to Anna Burns’ 2018 Booker Prize-winning novel Milkman. Dear reader, let me tell you how I came to buy that novel. I was in Bordeaux for some weeks, attempting (with mixed success) to improve my spoken French and trying to read nothing but French-language texts and newspapers. But at a certain point, I found myself craving for something in the English language, so I made my way to a huge Bordelais bookshop which trades mainly in French-language books, but which also has a decent English-language section. And there I bought Anna Burns’ novel.

Having bought what won England’s most prestigious literary prize, I then thought I’d also buy a winner of France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt. The most recent they had was the Prix Goncourt winner of 2017, Eric Vuillard’s L’Ordre du Jour, so here I am reviewing it. Vuillard, well-known in France as much for being a movie-maker as a writer, was apparently a surprise winner of the prize.

Just a few warnings to begin with. L’Ordre du Jour is very short (c.150 large-ish print pages in the Actes Sud edition I read). Despite this, it has quite a lot of recherche vocabulary – I found myself resorting to a French-English dictionary more often than I usually do when reading French texts. More important, L’Ordre du Jour announces itself as a “recit” rather than a “roman” – in other words, it is an “account” rather than a true “novel”, because it is not a work of fiction. All its characters are real characters. All its events are real events. It is, in effect, a colourful evocation of, and commentary upon, a particular historical event. The event in question is the Anschluss of 1938 – the process by which Hitler’s Nazi Germany took over Austria and incorporated it into the Third Reich, while the rest of Europe looked on and basically did nothing.

This “recit” resolves itself into a series of vignettes. 

It opens with a scene in which 24 leaders of Germany’s top business corporations (Krupp, von Siemens, Opel, IG Farben etc.) meet in Herman Goering’s palatial residence in 1933 near the German parliament, and pledge their support for the policies of the new chancellor who has just been weaselled into power, Adolf Hitler. They are depicted as “lobbying” (Eric Vuillard uses the English word) for their own interests and the author sees them as assuming that Hitler’s regime will simply be “business as usual” – after all, they have always collaborated with political parties that will advance their own interests. From the very beginning of this “recit”, we know the first-person omniscient narrator will be commenting on events from the eye-of-history, noting as the businessmen gather in 1933: “Dans quelques annees, il n’y aura meme plus de Parlement, seulement un amas de decombres fumants” (pp.10-11) [“In the few years there won’t even be a parliament – only a pile of smoking ruins.”] Doom lies ahead.

We then move to a vignette of the English diplomat Lord Halifax appeasing Hitler. (This French writer can’t forbear to tell us that Halifax’s grandfather was one of the men whose policies helped starve Ireland during the Great Famine of the 1840s). Not that Vuillard lets French diplomacy off the hook. Another vignette depicts the French President Albert Lebrun idly signing off trivial bills concerning French wine while Hitler’s forces gather for invasion of Austria. Complacency is the target for much of the author’s implicit satire. In 1938, in Downing Street, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain is seen hosting a farewell party for Hitler’s ambassador to Britain, von Ribbentrop, who has just been promoted to be the Reich’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. The party is all very chummy and cosy and courteous, with chatter about tennis and other sporting pastimes. (Vuillard notes, inter alia, that Chamberlain was von Ribbentrop’s landlord while Ribbentrop was in London, drawing handsome rents from his residency.) This is at the very time when Nazi troops are entering Austria. The suave, oily servility of von Ribbentrop is emphasised: “L’ambassadeur du Reich semblait tout a son aise. Il avait d’ailleurs ete remarque par Adolf Hitler pour son aisance, son elegance old fashion et sa courtoisie, au milieu de ce qu’etait le parti nazi, un ramassis de bandits et criminels. Son attitude hautaine, accorde a un fonds de servilite parfaite, l’avait propulse jusqu’au poste de ministre des Affaires etrangeres, poste envie…” (p.89) [“The Reich’s ambassador seemed completely at ease. He had already been noticed by Adolf Hitler for being so easy in company, his old-fashioned elegance and his courtesy, even among what the Nazi party really was, a bunch of bandits and criminals. His haughty attitude, built on a foundation of complete servility, had pushed him into that most desirable post, Minister of Foreign Affairs…”] Hitler later decribes him, behind his back, as “a champagne salesman” – the type of chap who can deceive English and French diplomats and ministers by his apparently civilised demeanour.

Other vignettes show the Austrian chancellor Schuschnigg (who, after the Second World War, had a comfortable post lecturing in political science at an American university) being bullied into submission by Hitler. But Schuschnigg is no hero, for his own regime, supported by the church, is very much clerical-fascism. When this petit dictator is forced, by Hitler, to take on the Austrian Nazi Seyss-Inquart as his foreign minister, he retreats into vague reveries inspired by classical music, but is impotent to do anything. As for the Austrian people, on the whole they greet the Nazi invasion with delirious joy, and for them Hitler is a popular idol, the way Tino Rossi is in France and Benny Goodman in America: “Les chars, les camions, l’artillerie lourde, tout le tralala, avancent lentement vers Vienne, pour la grande parade nuptiale. La mariee est consentante, ce n’est pas un viol, comme on l’a pretendu, c’est une noce.” (p.100) [“The tanks, the trucks, the heavy artillery, the whole shebang, advanced slowly towards Vienna, for a great wedding march. The bride consented. It wasn’t rape, as people have claimed. It was a wedding.”] Once the Nazis are in power, Austrians gleefully join in pogroms against Jews. Only one Austrian newspaper dissents – its editor is promptly arrested.

What is Vuillard’s purpose in telling, so dramatically, this familiar historical story?

Obviously L’ordre du jour is a condemnation of pre-war appeasement of Hitler, and the diplomatic complacency of France, Britain and other powers who might have been able to stop the Fuhrer in his tracks. (Interestingly, Vuillard never once mentions the Soviet Union, whose underhanded diplomatic dealings were also part of the European scene in the 1930s – but that’s another story.) The “recit” is also a refutation of the “victim theory” of Austria whereby, after the war, the Austrian state was able to claim that it had been invaded by a foreign power and was not in any way complicit in Nazi crimes. The record shows how fully Austrians participated in the Third Reich (given that the Fuhrer was one of their own), how eagerly they accepted much Nazi legislation, and how many of them took leading positions in the Nazi regime. Vuillard is also pushing the left-wing view that corporation capitalism was the backbone of Nazism. Not only does he begin his “recit” with a malign gathering of capitalist pluotcrats, but he ends with a reminder that many of these same corporations were happy to use slave labour under the Nazi regime and do the Fuhrer’s bidding. And, post-war, they were able to whitewash their past actions and fit comfortably into the new Federal Republic.

These ideas are not what make the book distinctive, however. After all, they have all been bruited before often enough. Vuillard’s most pervasive interpretation is about the power of spectacle in shaping both history and our view of history. History is often play-acting and charade. This idea is pushed especially in the chapter “Le Magasin des Accessoires” about a Hollywood costumier, a refugee from Nazi Europe, who is capable of staging, with his vast array of costumes, any event in history. Bluff is a part of such play-acting and, as Vuillard tells it, the Nazi threats to Austria were pure bluff. Far from being the formidable, efficient war-machine that German newsreels depicted, the German army in 1938 was a stumbling and under-prepared thing. Tanks and trucks break down and have to be dragged off the road as Hitler’s army crosses the Austrian border. The advance to Vienna is delayed for most of a day as the mechanised troops bumble along. Hitler is furious. Krupp is embarrassed that his prototypes don’t work as well as he expected. But the bluff was enough to daunt Europe. And then there is retrospective bluff. As Vuillard reminds us, the Viennese really did welcome Hitler deliriously. BUT all the newsreels we have of this are images approved by Dr Goebbels’ propaganda machine – so how much do we have to modify our historical judgements when we take this into account?

I have, with my usual diligence, given you a full and fair account of what this book is about and how the author handles things. But there are some problems. While not denying that “spectacle” is a part of history. Vuillard’s emphasis tends very much towards the postmodernist dogma that “nothing is real” – there is no objective fact to history, only “narratives”, perceptions and opinions. Much as I enjoyed reading L’ordre du jour, I found its facility irritating. Vuillard makes such quick and easy judgements on people and events – and they are usually familiar ones that few people have denied for years.

I have not read Mark Polizzotti’s English-language translation of this “recit” The Order of the Day, but I have read on-line reviews of it, and they are a very mixed bunch. The Observer, the Guardian and the New Yorker loved the book uncritically, but in some cases it sounded as if their reviewers had never heard of the basic – and well-known – historical facts that Vuillard dramatises, and therefore this little book was a “revelation” to them. Not much of a basis on which to write a review of it. By contrast, Max Fletcher in the Spectator gave it a roasting as a caricature of people and events, which was too ready to shove glib opinions at us. And Eileen Eattersby in the Financial Times judged it to be “fact mixed with opinionated bombast”. I am not partisan enough to support either camp wholeheartedly, but I can say that while L’ordre du jour engaged me, it is no masterpiece. Its winning of the Prix Goncourt does make me wonder what the quality of the others finalists must have been. 

Snarky footnote proving how trivial I can be: On p.130 of the French text, Vuillard tells us that the Emperor Nero made his troops gather seashells to prove he had won a great victory over the ocean. Actually, Vuillard got his emperors wrong. This ancient tale refers to Caligula, not Nero.