publicly humilated the officials concerned and compelled them to back down. Furthermore, ONE at the same time was in the happy position of having made "case law" which was applicable and mandatory upon every public official and in every state where similar actions might have been contemplated. This same procedure is open to the publishers of Eros and of the Evergreen Review. Can M. Girodias avail himself of similar measures?

He may not. Girodias and his fellow publishers have no recourse. In consequence many American observers view with considerable scepticism the French claim that theirs indeed is a land of liberte, eqalite, fraternite. What, Americans ask, of the unstable alternations of political situation found in France ever since the storming of the Bastille? What of the thousands of political executions, the various Napoleons, the series of "Republics"? Are these the mark of a nation truly mature in matters political, or do they indicate a people still stumbling toward the goal of a viable national identity?

What bearing do these questions have on the situation concerning homosexuality in France? For further light, the view of French sociologist Daniel Guerin (May, 1961) may be cited. He holds the trend toward the use of "plenary powers" to be equally disastrous whether in the hands of de Gaulle or of Petain and writes:

"On February 8, 1945, General de Gaulle, Chief of the Provisional Government of the Fourth Republic, repeated word for word . . . the decree of his predecessor," Petain. While this particular decree referred only to homosexual acts with those under twenty-one it introduced "without parliamentary debate into our law the entirely new idea of an act against nature with an individual of the same sex," a legal procedure quite impossible under the American system.

"In the armed forces," M. Guerin continues, "homosexuality is relentlessly ferreted out by means of informers and even well-paid provocateurs; considered a grave offense against morals it is punished after a veritable secret inquisition on the part of the security services which every day becomes more zealous and more invasive of personal liberties . . ."

While in some respects a description of American military procedures, the rights of homosexuals are painfully and slowly being established throughout American society, whereas what M. Guerin describes as being true in 1959 has now been brought up-to-date, a good many steps farther along the road toward dictatorship, in l'affaire Girodias.

Such melancholy observations cannot fail to arouse in American observers mystified inquiry as to the reasons for the decline from the liberte of the famed Code Napoleon. Could it have been that this Code was more of an historical accident than truly in the main stream of French tradition? Such a question cannot fail to occasion ironic reflection upon the disparity which so often exists between reality and ideology in human affairs.

Such reflections are not intended either as the disparagement or the condemnation of a whole people. Rather they are intended to arouse those American homosexuals who unthinkingly may have fancied that France was indeed the home of all freedoms for them into a more factual appraisal of the situation.

It is to be hoped that sentimental myths can in some degree be swept away and some quite practical Twentieth Century questions be raised. The time would seem to have long since passed when American homosexuals can afford to sigh longingly over the example of those expatriate Hemingways and Steins who forty years ago

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