The Short Reign of Pippin IV by John Steinbeck begins with twelve parties who cannot form a government.
They are listed by position rather than strength: Conservative Radicals, Radical Conservatives, Royalists, Right and Left Centrists, Christian Atheists, Christian Christians, Christian Communists, Proto-Communists, Neo-Communists, Socialists and Communists, the last of whom subdivide four ways. They sleep on brocade couches for a week on bread, cheese and Algerian wine, in a ballroom mirrored on walls and ceiling, so that forty-two party chiefs appear as thousands and every raised fist becomes fifty.
The deadlock breaks because everybody loses their voice except the Royalists, who had nothing to gain and so said nothing. And when the parties consider a king, each finds a reason. The industrial centrists expect a monarch to end demands for shorter hours. The Christian Atheists expect him to check Rome. The Socialists expect him to check the Communists. The Communists, who will abstain and then denounce the whole thing as imperialist pressure, reason that you cannot revolt against anarchy, and that a throne at least gives you something to aim at.
What Happens in The Short Reign of Pippin IV
Published in 1957, this is his only political satire, set in a thinly disguised Fourth Republic.
The crown goes to Pippin Héristal, a fifty-four-year-old amateur astronomer with a documented Carolingian pedigree, a small vineyard income and no interest in governing. He is crowned at Reims on the fifteenth of July. The Daily News in New York goes with FROGS CROWN PIP. Miss France faints with a noise like falling kitchenware, is propped against a Gothic column by two bishops and forgotten entirely. Souvenir guillotines sell briskly, and the state coaches, no other horses being available in quantity, are drawn by animals borrowed from the abattoir.
Then the king decides to find out how France actually works, and The Short Reign of Pippin IV by John Steinbeck turns from farce into something with an edge on it.
The American in the Room
The most useful character for a group is Tod Johnson, who is at Princeton, speaks good French and is the son of H. W. Johnson, the Egg King of Petaluma, proprietor of two hundred and thirty million white leghorns.
Tod courts the king’s daughter and, more importantly, explains America to him. His family business is a corporation, so he talks about government the way he talks about a board. Asked whether a chairman can simply order what is obviously good for the shareholders, Tod walks him through it: the board votes, and if it splits the matter goes to proxies, and whoever holds the most proxies holds the company, and then the unions must be squared. Even for a programme plainly good and desirable? Particularly then, Tod says.
The king concludes that a corporation is not very different from a government. Tod concludes that there is a fortune in selling French titles to Americans, that a knighthood would fetch a hundred thousand dollars, and that the launch wants a department store behind it and Billy Rose producing. This is the real argument inside The Short Reign of Pippin IV by John Steinbeck, and when the fall comes Tod’s verdict is one practical sentence: the king did not have the money, the proxies or the stockholders.
The Night The Short Reign of Pippin IV Ends
The king delivers a reform programme as his address from the throne. The chamber receives it in silence, then converts the shock into laughter when his cape catches and his rented uniform comes apart. He is deposed before morning.
What follows is the funniest page in The Short Reign of Pippin IV by John Steinbeck and worth reading aloud. Luxembourg mobilises. Monaco shuts its borders and its soldiers take the flowers out of their rifle barrels. A Soviet submarine is reported in San Francisco Bay. England is delighted and offers the royal family sanctuary. The Pope offers arbitration. Students take the royal standard off the Eiffel Tower. In one town the populace burns the town hall led by the chief of police, after which the same populace burns the police station led by the mayor. Marseille, we are told, rioted courteously and looted with discrimination. In Paris the gendarmes help the rioters build barricades, lending police hurdles for the purpose.
Through all of which the king sits in a dark room at Versailles teaching himself a cheap harmonica, having established that it has no sharps or flats and that he must stick to tunes needing none.
Where Pippin IV by John Steinbeck Loses People
- It is slight. Under two hundred pages, and the plot is a mechanism rather than a story.
- The women are functions. The queen runs a kingdom exactly as she ran a household. The daughter, who wrote a bestseller at fifteen, started a national fashion for blue jeans and holds the record for picketing the Citroën plant, is a catalogue of attitudes rather than a person, and ends the book headed for Hollywood on the grounds that she is an artiste.
- The jokes are of 1957 and some now need explaining.
- Nobody speaks like a human being. The Short Reign of Pippin IV by John Steinbeck is a fable and its people are positions, which is fine until you want to care about one of them.
- Readers who come to Steinbeck for the Californian books will recognise almost nothing here.
Reading It With the Rest
Set it beside the other book written in a frankly fabled register, which our review of Tortilla Flat covers. The comic Steinbeck at full power is Cannery Row, an unkind but instructive comparison. For the political anger arriving straight rather than sideways, try our analysis of The Grapes of Wrath. And on how adaptation treats him there is East of Eden on screen, pointed here because The Short Reign of Pippin IV by John Steinbeck has never been filmed at all.
Questions for the Table
- Every party wants a king for a reason that would wreck the other eleven. Is that a joke about France in 1957 or about coalitions generally?
- Tod’s theory is that power lives with whoever holds the proxies. Does the book agree?
- The chamber answers the reform programme with silence and then laughter. Why is laughter the more effective response?
- Pippin refuses to escape, reasoning that flight would make him worth killing. Wisdom, vanity, or exhaustion?
- A nun and a rich young tourist are the only people who speak honestly to the king. Why those two?
- Does satire need characters you can believe in, or only positions you recognise?
Before You Assign It
Violence in The Short Reign of Pippin IV by John Steinbeck is brief but real: a man is beaten and held under water, and the opening pages treat five deaths and thirty-two injuries as a punchline. Executions are discussed throughout in a light register, and the portraits of Americans, Communists and the clergy are broad for the period. Nothing will trouble an adult group; a younger one will be baffled by the politics.
After the Last Page
Late on, the deposed king is offered a seat in a Buick and a run for the Channel, and takes a swallow of brandy instead and laughs, because he has just thought of Julius Caesar, who surrounded Vercingetorix at Alesia with five legions and pacified Gaul. Tod suggests that perhaps Gaul does not want to be pacified. The king agrees, and says that in that case perhaps even Caesar did not manage it, and that “maybe Gaul can only be pacified by Gaul.”
That is the actual argument, and it arrives in a running car at a palace gate at one in the morning, which tells you how The Short Reign of Pippin IV by John Steinbeck is built. The set-pieces are decoration. Underneath is a question about whether anybody can be governed from outside their own consent, asked by a writer who had spent a winter in Paris watching a republic fail to produce a cabinet.
It is a minor book and it knows it. For a group that is close to an advantage: two hours of reading, no emotional cost, and an argument about power that will outlast the discussion of the novel itself. Send everybody home with the last scene in mind. The king walks the final stretch because his scooter has run dry, talks about the harvest with a gendarme and a provincial election with his concierge, then rings his own doorbell, a private citizen again, with nothing to show for the reign but a harmonica and a programme nobody adopted.