The childhood of a French nobleman in the eighteenth century was not usually the period of his life upon which he looked back with either affection or regret. The doctrine that parents exist for the sake of their children was not then accepted, and the loving care and hourly attention bestowed upon the children of to-day would have appeared ridiculous to sensible people. When Rousseau, the first man of sentiment, abandoned all his children, one after the other, to be brought up as unknown foundlings, his conduct was thought odd but not vile. The heir to the richest dukedom in France describes how his education was entrusted to one of his father's lackeys who happened to be able to read, how he was dressed in the prettiest clothes for going out but how at home he was left naked and hungry, and how this was the fate of all the children of his age and class. The modern method reflects greater credit on the parents; but evidence is not yet sufficient to prove that it produces a superior type of individual.

COMMENT:

David Cecil's words apply: "The best beginnings for a book or a poem are marked by two characteristics. They immediately interest the reader so that he is enticed to go on reading and they strike a note which induces in him the mood which is to characterize the work as a whole." Library Looking-Glass -- A Personal Anthology (1975).

INFORMATION:

Alfred Duff Cooper (1890-1954) – known always as Duff Cooper – was the son of Alfred Cooper and Agnes Cecil Emmeline Flower. His father was a London surgeon who specialized in the sexual problems of his upperclass patients. Duff’s mother, the sister of a duke, eloped with two husbands before marrying Duff’s father. (She deserted one; the other died.)

Cooper went to Eton and New College Oxford, joined the Foreign Office in 1913, and served as a subaltern in the Grenadier Guards during the First World War, with six months at the front. Cooper was awarded a DSO, rarely given to a second lieutenant. Almost all his friends from Eton and Oxford were killed in the war.

He married Diana Manners in 1919, known for her beauty, intelligence, and wit. She was the daughter of the Duke of Rutland – at least officially. According to Philip Ziegler, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, "Their marriage was sublimely happy, if by conventional standards irregular. Duff Cooper was endlessly promiscuous, and his wife was endlessly tolerant." Ziegler wrote that Cooper "can fairly be accused of an extravagantly short temper, self-indulgence, and an inordinate appetite for wine, women, and gambling."

Diana Cooper was the author of an autobiography in three parts, The Rainbow Comes and Goes; The Lights of Common Day; and Trumpets from the Steep.

In July, 1924 Cooper resigned from the Foreign Office and was elected to Parliament as a member of the Conservative party. He lost his seat in 1929 when the Labour party won the general election. Out of office, he spent several years working on Talleyrand, published in 1932. In 1931 he was elected again to Parliament, serving thereafter in a variety of government positions. In 1937 Neville Chamberlain became Prime Minister and appointed Cooper First Lord of the Admiralty.

The moment for which Cooper is best-remembered, deservedly, came in 1938 when the British and French governments reached the agreement with Hitler at Munich, effectively allowing Nazi Germany to annex Czechoslovakia. Neville Chamberlain announced that, he believed, it meant "peace for our time." Cooper denounced the Munich agreement and resigned from the government. (A concise on-line description of those events is available at the Wikipedia entry on Neville Chamberlain: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neville_Chamberlain.)

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941 Cooper was made resident cabinet minister for Far Eastern affairs and was subsequently associated with the rapid defeat of the British armed forces in Asia and the surrender of Singapore. Later in the war he was given the job of trying to maintain good relations between the British and Free French; he found both De Gaulle and Churchill difficult. Cooper became British ambassador to France in 1944 and was kept in that position even after Labour won the general election of 1945. He continued as ambassador until 1948. Duff and Diana Cooper moved to Paris in 1944 and continued to live in France for the rest of his life. Duff Cooper’s autobiography, Old Men Forget, was published in 1953.

Philip Ziegler’s first-rate article on Cooper in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is the major source for this description. (The website of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is http://www.oxforddnb.com/) Ziegler wrote a biography of Diana Cooper, published in 1981.

March, 2006

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