I bought this book, sans dust cover and consequently of any indication of content, in a second hand book shop, expecting it to be a history book about the ferrying of part of the French Army in a commandeered fleet of Paris taxis to the River Marne in September 1914 in order to exploit the gap in the German advance (revealed by aerial reconnaissance) caused by a failure to hold tightly to the Schlieffen plan.

On starting it, however, I discovered it was a polemic, written by Dutourd in an effort, it would seem, to expiate his (and by extension France’s) guilt at not putting up more of a fight to prevent the later German victory in 1940.

He places the blame for this lack on complacency but also on stupidity, of both the politicians and the generals of the inter war years. He contrasts their pusillanimity and collective failure to inspire with Churchill’s “fight them on the beaches” speech and with the glories of the French army in WW1 and of Napoleon’s times. Only De Gaulle – who, of course, stood out against acquiescence in the defeat - meets with his approval.

Dutourd is not too enamoured of the post war equivalents of those generals and politicians either, referring to the defeat at Dien Bien Phu and obliquely to the Suez debacle. At the time of writing De Gaulle was out of government “in a house not even paid for by the state” and Dutourd hankers for his return. (Was he as in favour of his great man, I wonder, when De Gaulle returned and immediately proceeded to give Algeria away?)

Dutourd’s attitudes are firmly those of someone of his life and times - as he admits himself when he states he wants no part of a future that does not have French civilisation as its foundation. He fears France will never be glorious again and will become what he terms a “female” nation. He is also, in passing, disparaging to Egyptians.

One of his main theses is that private morality and that of the state cannot be equated. To my mind this comes far too close to suggesting that nations are perfectly within their rights to bully others. If that is so, then why is he complaining about France not fighting more energetically in 1940?

Dutourd highlights the enervating effect of the heroes of 1914-18 returning to homes dominated by the women they had left behind and allowing that circumstance to remain unchecked as a main contributor to loss of national backbone. The suffocating nature of those heroes’ tales of war on their children is said to be another source of debilitation.

That France had simply been exhausted by WW1 - bled white, as was Falkenhayn’s intention in initiating the strategy of attrition - and in no fit state to resist a determined war of revenge by the vanquished of that war, that disaster was maybe inevitable, does not seem to occur to Dutourd as a reason for the ennui.

Dutourd was, apparently, mainly a novelist. A Prix Stendhal winner, no less, and a member of the Académie française. I idly wonder what his fiction is like. I shan't be seeking it out though.