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FRENCH PERSONALITIES AND PROBLEMS (241 pp.)-D. W.-Brogan-Knopf...
Denis William Brogan, a Cambridge University don (political science) and BBC adviser on U.S. affairs, is fast becoming the western world's most frequent spokesman on Anglo-American characteristics. By birth (1900) a Scots-Irish Glaswegian, Brogan was educated at Glasgow, Oxford and Harvard, has since published scholarly, lively studies of three nations-The American Character, The English People, The Free State. His newest foray is a collection of 27 essays on French figures and subjects ranging from political and military (including Clemenceau, Jaures, Darlan, De Gaulle) to literary (Dumas, Proust...
Most of Author Brogan's essays feature historical figures, but, in the modern manner, the chosen figure serves equally as a peg on which Author Brogan hangs dissertations on social conditions and any lively bits of stuff that catch his eye. The essay on Marshal Bazaine, for example, is not merely a portrait of the man who lost the Franco-Prussian War, it is also a discussion of the grand tradition of French marshals, from Turenne to Rochambeau...
...study of General De Gaulle (written when the Free French had their headquarters in London) has much to say about the traditional reluctance of the French to accept a leader whose feet are not actually on French soil. And in addition to his wealth of purely French material, Author Brogan draws constantly and easily on analogies and contrasts from British and U.S. history and characteristics (he is probably one of the few English scholars who can quote, virtually in the same breath, from addresses by Montaigne and Boss Pendergast...
...faults of French Personalities and, Problems spring from the same sources as its virtues. Author Brogan's erudition often climbs over the reader's head, his sensitiveness in matters French leads him into pretentious overuse of French words and phrases. Most, readers will be justly irritated, for example, at being obliged to swallow sentences as obscurely pregnant as the following: "In a sense, the noblesse de ĺépée was almost innocent compared with the noblesse de la robe. For the court nobility was at least true to form; the intriguers of oeil-de-boeuf were...