Nothing to Chance

Though written by a man, this novel largely takes the viewpoint of the young women who are central to the plot. Published in 1936, the novel is set in the north of France near to where much of the trench warfare of the Great War took place. The author, Charles Plisnier (born 13 December 1896) came from the Mons district of Belgium, an area similarly devastated by the war. In early 1917 he had gone to the Netherlands in an unsuccessful attempt to join the Belgian army of resistance. Instead he took to the cause of Communism following the success of the Bolshevik revolution. It's hardly surprising, therefore, that the context for this epic novel is an industrial bourgeois family that owns a small-town shoe factory.

At the outset of the novel, Fabienne, the daughter of the factory chief, sets the scene for the battlegrounds of the story:
“To start with there’s been this ridiculous war. It’s not only left us short of men — it’s made the ones that are still alive think far too much of themselves.”
The simple French title translates as Marriages. Fabienne abandons an unhappy engagement and carefully contrives to lure Maxime, one of her father’s salesmen, into a desperate marriage of convenience. In parallel plots we read of the similarly unconventional marriages of Fabienne’s cousins, Marcelle and Christa. All three marriages are portrayed as having been instigated by the women (a revolutionary feminist concept for the time perhaps — but the author ascribes to them a prejudice learnt in romantic novels).

Whereas Maxime might have been shown as a hero of the proletariat in his ascent from serving the firm and its clients to managing the whole business with rationalisation and economy of labour, he is instead shown as a villian both in matters of money and of the heart. Plisnier concludes the novel with a victory for Fabienne over Maxime, the man she had chosen to be her husband but who had undermined the marriage with infidelity and disloyalty:
“She was beautiful again with a kind of beauty which only adorns the very strong and unimpeded. In her whole bearing was that resplendent dignity which maturity bestows on women who have won.”
That generation of young French women are shown here to have become assertive through the responsibilities that arose due to the absence of men during the war. In contrast the narrative implies that many of the men in post-war French society were second-rate, weak individuals that could not fill the shoes of the fine young men who were killed or maimed during the war. This also is in contrast to the men of the previous generation. Marcelle’s mother had seen her marriage and her man far more positively than her daughter viewed hers:
“Married, she had loved him for his loyalty, his earnest method of dealing with life, his quiet attentions.”
Perhaps then this is a novel of nostalgia, of mourning for a society alienated from the standards that had existed before the war.