AND THE PURSUIT

OF HAPPINESS

by Hollister Barnes

Americans have for generations believed France to be a land where liberte, eqalite, fraternite flowered naturally out of an urbane tolerance of political freedom well blended with literary and artistic sophistication of great elegance.

A series of current events have badly tarnished this bright image, giving rise to the suspicion that it may all along have been one of those strange illusions which so many of us harbor from time to time. What current events have occasioned so dark a heresy?

They are a series of censorship actions, censorship in its specifically Continental form, wearing the mask of a pious morality while disguising political purposes, or so it would seem. In March, Paris publisher Maurice Girodias was sentenced to a year in prison, given a fine of almost $20,000 and forbidden for the next twenty years to publish, on the accusation of publishing pornography.

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Latin Quarter book-seller, Francois Maspero, was convicted and fined for putting allegedly pornographic books 'within the reach" of French youth. The great publishing houses of Julliard and Gallimard both have had some of their books banned. Such instances. and a number of others, have impelled some French publishers to feel that whatever leadership they may once have had has now passed to British and American publishers and that the censorship clouds lowering over the French literary scene are today ominous in the extreme.

The French Commission of Censors which handles such matters acts administratively. This means that its decisions are arrived at secretly, need not be justified or explained and cannot be challenged. In fact, French courts have no choice but to prosecute and convict if the Commission has declared a book to be obscene. Once a publisher has had one of his books declared obscene he thenceforth must

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