Croutons in the Soup

THE FRENCH: PORTRAIT OF A PEOPLE by Sanche de Gramont. 479 pages. Putnam. $7.95.

With all their faults, wrote French Poet Charles Peguy, God loves the French best. It would be hard to prove Peguy wrong. Still, one wonders whether even the deity can understand his favorites. Witness the recent miscalculation of their mood by Charles de Gaulle, who presumed himself to be modern France incarnate. The challenge of trying to explicate such a capricious, restive and magnificently wrongheaded people is always strong. It has been stimulated lately by what the French discreetly call "the events" of May-June 1968 as well as by the general's abrupt departure.

Most authors approach the subject of France inductively, offering, like a Parisian epicerie, small, spicy dabs of this and that so that the whole, though piquant, is rarely filling. In one sense, Sanche de Gramont writes in the same vein. Tidbits of throwaway intelligence pop to the surface of his book like croutons in a steaming onion soup. The word bourgeois first appeared (as burgensis) in a 1007 charter establishing the free city of Loches. As a result of Versailles banquets, Louis XIV's stomach was found at his death to be twice normal size. The French Foreign Ministry spends $4,000,000 annually in secret funds, allegedly on payoffs. President Georges Pompidou pays rent on his He Saint-Louis apartment to the Rothschilds, who bought it for him when he lacked the cash. Sometimes a colorful morsel proves slippery--those famous chestnuts that, according to the author, canopy Cours Mirabeau in Aixen-Provence are plane trees.

Codified Concierges. But Gramont, a French count by birth and a Pulitzer prizewinning journalist by trade (via Yale and the New York Herald Tribune), is really offering a well-packaged literary supermarket. His hope, clearly, is that readers in need of predigested fact and opinion should search no farther. Furnished with a vast array of knowledge--much of it the result of his French secondary-school education --he includes generous helpings of statistics, history, philosophy and lore.

Those who want to divine why French public administration is a marvel of codified precision and bureaucratic bungling will find 61 pages on the subject. There they will learn about the schools that produce the French Establishment, quirks of the Code Civil, the ratio of policemen per capita (one for every 347 people) and the 1949 decree that governs a concierge's weekly cleaning of a courtyard, "devoting one minute and a half per square meter for the first forty meters and thirty seconds per square meter for the remaining surface."

France is much in thrall to its own version of the heroic past. Accordingly, Gramont invokes, analyzes and denigrates Jules Michelet, the great French Romantic historian whose writings helped to "create" France's epic past. When Gramont describes French intellectual life, he gives a useful though jaundiced look at Descartes, including his life and times, his seminal Discours de la Methode and the Freudian analysis of the philosopher's three dreams, which symbolized the difficulty of understanding the universe.

The De Gaulle era ended as the book was being completed. Gramont credits the general with transforming the office of President and getting the French into the stabilizing habit of having a strong executive. De Gaulle's towering presence also enabled Frenchmen to forget their defeats and concentrate on raising their standard of living. "Gaullism" continues, Gramont says, as the general's sturdy invention.

When it comes to summing up the people themselves, the author is quick to admit that "statements about the French tend to cancel each other out." The problem is further complicated by Gramont's own lack of sympathy for his compatriots, a perverse need to take a slightly surly view of nearly every aspect of French life. He does rise to a rare lyricism on the subject of French cuisine: "There is the same mysterious gap between the musical scale and a Debussy prelude as between an egg and a souffle." But his assessment of French womanhood is more typical. After an extended look at that exalted institution, Gramont, whose wife is American, suddenly concludes: "Other women are more gracious and natural because they are less demanding." Seemingly attuned to the recent wave of anti-French feeling stirred by De Gaulle in the U.S., Gramont often takes the peevish tone of a first-generation American trying to assert his patriotism by knocking the backward "old country." He even feels obliged, for instance, in a book on France, to defend Americans from French charges of naivete, "whereas politically, the French are chronically immature." The result is a remarkable literary creation--a knowledgeable book about France that manages to be decidedly unpleasant.

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