Les Anglais
1989
LIKE A BULL, Philippe Daudy charged through life. Born in 1925, he had an energy that seemed to be powering ideas, and what’s more, ideas that rapidly evolved into projects.
Eight formative years of his childhood were spent in Ethiopia, where his father, Bernard, was a doctor. Researching for the Pasteur Institute, Bernard died from a snake-bite. Back in France, Philippe was still a schoolboy when the Germans overran the country. His teacher was dismissed because he was Jewish. Philippe’s reaction was characteristic. Mouvement Ouvrier International, the resistance movement he joined, was on the Left, quite likely a Communist front, consisting mostly of Yiddish-speaking Jews and Spanish Republican exiles. When they attacked the German transport depot at Villeurbanne in Lyon, Philippe was hit by a bullet that passed close to vital organs. For fear of being denounced, he could not be treated in a hospital. Never extracted, the bullet was to give him permanent trouble. At the end of the war, many members of this resistance movement proposed first of all to shoot collaborators and then to become Communists. Philippe, still only twenty, was one of those who argued them out of both courses of action.
Joining Agence France-Presse, the news agency, Philippe covered the post-1945 fighting in Greece and Korea, and he was a foreign correspondent reporting from Tito’s Yugoslavia – rather too favorably, he came to think. In 1968 he married Marie-Christine Gouin, a childhood friend of mine since we had been neighbors at Royaumont. Once the commission to write a book about Britain was signed, they moved to London and bought a house in deepest Chelsea. I was able to introduce Philippe to some of the people he wanted to interview. The first draft of Les Anglais was too conventional he decided, so he rewrote it. The sympathy he revealed to all things British in his final version contrasts with the condescension that came naturally to Anthony Sampson, whose Anatomy of Britain was a sort of competitor.
One day Philippe said to me that the ancient Greeks believed in daimon, an untranslatable word which he took to mean being possessed by a spirit stronger than oneself. Supposedly thanks to my daimon my books were so many judgements about the rights and wrongs of this world, so many attacks and defenses. And this from a man who had been in a fire-fight with the Gestapo and stood on a platform in a crowded hall to tell the truth about the Soviet Union.