Intellectuals and Politics in Post-War France (French Politics, Society and Culture)

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Intellectuals and Politics in Post-War France

David Drake

Intellectuals and Politics in Post-War France

French Politics, Society and Culture Series General Editor: Robert Elgie, Senior Lecturer in European Politics, The University of Nottingham France always fascinated outside observers. Now, the country is undergoing a period of profound transformation. France is faced with a rapidly changing international and European environment and it is having to rethink some of its most basic social, political and economic orthodoxies. As elsewhere, there is pressure to conform. And yet, while France is responding in ways that are no doubt familiar to people in other European countries, it is also managing to maintain elements of its long-standing distinctiveness. Overall, it remains a place that is not exactly comme les autres. This new series examines all aspects of French politics, society and culture. In so doing it focuses on the changing nature of the French system as well as the established patterns of political, social and cultural life. Contributors to the series are encouraged to present new and innovative arguments so that the informed reader can learn and understand more about one of the most beguiling and compelling of all European countries. Titles include: David Drake INTELLECTUALS AND POLITICS IN POST-WAR FRANCE David J. Howarth THE FRENCH ROAD TO EUROPEAN MONETARY UNION

French Politics, Society and Culture Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–80440–6 (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Intellectuals and Politics in Post-War France David Drake Principal Lecturer in French School of Humanities and Cultural Studies Middlesex University London

© David Drake 2002 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0–333–77808–1 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Drake, David, 1946– Intellectuals and politics in Post-War France / David Drake. p. cm. — (French politics, society, and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–77808–1 (cloth) 1. France—Intellectual life—20th century. 2.France—Politics and government—1945– 3. Politics and culture—France– –History—20th century. I. Title. II. French politics, society and culture series. DC33.7 .D73 2001 305.5’52’09440904—dc21 2001035822 10 11

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

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For Sarah, Dylan and Kieran

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Contents Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction

1

1

Liberation, Épuration, Existentialism and Marxism

9

2

The Onset of the Cold War

34

3

From Kravchenko to Hungary via Korea

63

4

Colonialism and Anti-Colonialism: Indochina and Algeria

97

5

May, Mao and the End of the ‘Classic Intellectual’?

128

6 From the ‘Silence of the Intellectuals’ to the End of the Millennium

167

Conclusion

205

Notes

209

Select Bibliography of French Texts

242

Index

244

vii

Acknowledgements The researching and writing of this book was made possible by the support I received from Middlesex University, which, as part of its research strategy, agreed to my having a reduced teaching commitment from September 1999 until February 2001. While I was researching and writing the book, I was also an Associate Research Fellow, attached to the Politics and Sociology Department at Birkbeck College, and I would like to express my deep thanks and gratitude for the facilities that the College made available to me. It really made a huge difference. In addition to thanking the staff at Birkbeck College Library for their help, I would like to thank those at the Middlesex University (Tottenham Campus), at Senate House (University of London) and at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Paris). On the technical side, I would like to thank the helpful Computer Support staff at Birkbeck College, especially for their retrieval of a whole chapter which I thought had disappeared for good into cyberspace after a power cut. I would also like to thank the ever-patient Lucy Dawson in the office of the School of Humanities and Cultural Studies at Middlesex University for all her handy tips and advice. Throughout this project, I have been greatly encouraged by the support from friends, family and colleagues on both sides of the Channel. In particular, I should like to thank the following who kindly supplied me with references, documents, articles etc.: Professor Chris Flood (University of Surrey), Professor Hilary Footitt, Professor Nick Hewlett, and Michel Leymarie and Jean-François Sirinelli. I would especially like to thank Ian Birchall, Dr Martyn Cornick and Professor Keith A. Reader, all of whom read and sent me detailed comments on an early draft, and Dr Cathie Carmichael, John Kalmar, Professor Francis Mulhern and Dr Martin O’Shaughnessy, who all read and commented on sections of the manuscript. I would also like to thank Rod Prince for his invaluable help with proofreading and editing. I found this feedback extremely and helpful and have acted on many of the comments and suggestions I received. I will not, however, follow the American crime writer Harlan Coben, who concludes the acknowledgements of at least one of his books with the words, ‘Any errors – factual or otherwise – are totally the fault of these people.’ Those who have kindly offered thoughts, comments, criticism are not, and should not be seen viii

Acknowledgements ix

to be, in any way responsible for the views expressed here or any factual errors which may have crept into the text. That’s down to me. Finally, closer to home (actually as close as you can get), I would like to thank Kieran and Sarah. I, after all, chose to live close to this project; they didn’t. Their support has been invaluable.

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Introduction

Since the publication in 1986 of Ory and Sirinelli’s examination of French intellectuals since the Dreyfus Affair,1 the history of intellectuals as an area of research interest has steadily asserted itself in France. This is also true, albeit to a lesser extent, on this side of the Channel and in the USA, where we find books on intellectuals in relation to particular political organisations,2 books and articles on intellectuals in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s,3 and a number of articles, sometimes collected in book form,4 on various aspects of intellectual life in France. And of course biographies.5 But to date there has been no attempt to offer a chronological overview in English of French intellectuals from the end of World War Two until the end of the twentieth century and it is this gap that this study aims to fill.6 The term intellectual as a substantive was popularised in France at the time of the Dreyfus Affair. It was used to refer to those men (there were very few women) of letters and members of the university who lent their prestige to the call for the release of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French army captain who had been wrongly charged with spying for Prussia and sentenced to life imprisonment in exile. The intellectual, as used in this study, is drawn from the socioeconomic stratum of society which, in the words of Leszek Kolakowski, includes ‘all those whose profession is to create and communicate cultural values – scientific information, an outlook on the world, works of art, knowledge of current society, political opinions’.7 The phrase ‘drawn from’ is important in that in this study intellectual does not refer to totality of the broad socio-economic grouping identified by Kolakowski. Rather, at least up until the mid-1970s,8 ‘intellectual’ will be taken to refer to those whose professional activities place them within the socio-economic formation outlined above but who use their 1

2 Intellectuals and Politics in Postwar France

fame, their prestige to lend their weight to a particular political cause. As Jean-Paul Sartre commented in a lecture in 1965, ‘Originally the intellectuals appeared as a collection of assorted individuals who, having acquired a certain degree of fame through their intellectual work (in the sciences, the applied sciences, medicine, literature etc.), abused this fame by stepping outside their area of expertise and criticising society and the powers that be in the name of global and dogmatic conception of man which could be vague or specific, with a moral dimension or a Marxist one.’9 Sartre added that, in his view, scientists working on atomic fission to make even more sophisticated nuclear weapons were not intellectuals. They were scientists. But if the same scientists, appalled by the destructive power of the use to which their knowledge was being put, were to join together and issue a statement warning the general public about the dangers of these weapons then, in Sartre’s view, they became intellectuals. But it should not be assumed that the intellectual is restricted to intervening in areas related to his/her own specialism(s). Sartre, after all, refers to the intellectual becoming an intellectual by ‘stepping outside’ his/her area of expertise. J’accuse! … , Emile Zola’s impassioned open letter to the President of the Republic in 1898 denouncing the treatment of Dreyfus, was not informed by an intimate knowledge of the French army or political and legal institutions any more than many of the political interventions by intellectuals in the postwar period were made in areas where they could claim to be experts.10 But as Sartre has observed, ‘The intellectual is someone who gets involved in matters which are none of his business.’11 This perspective is echoed in the introduction to a recently published dictionary of French intellectuals: ‘If a particular Nobel prize-winner in Physics or Medicine has not been included, this does not mean that his/her contribution to science or to the well-being of humanity has not been recognised. What it does mean is that we have noted that s/he always refused to leave his/her laboratory to join a street demonstration, sign a petition, give his view on the future of socialism, the decline of religion or the vicious nature of an Asian dictatorship.’12 Before commenting briefly on the content of the book, further remarks need to be made concerning the intellectuals whom the reader will encounter in this book. First I have chosen to give the lead roles to a relatively small number of intellectuals, some of whose names at least are likely to be familiar to English-speaking readers – Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, François Mauriac, Raymond Aron, André Malraux,

Introduction 3

Michel Foucault, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Pierre Bourdieu – with other intellectuals being given smaller walk-on parts. To have done otherwise would have been to overwhelm the reader with a barrage of names which could have resulted in the issue under discussion getting lost and the reader feeling s/he was reading a French telephone directory. This decision, which I hope gives the book more clarity, has the disadvantage that there are a number of intellectuals, e.g. Edgar Morin, Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, who unfortunately do not receive as much attention as they deserve. Of the intellectuals discussed in the book, it is Sartre to whom most space is devoted, and the pre-eminent place that Sartre occupies in this book is a reflection of his pre-eminence among postwar French intellectuals during much of this period. The position of Sartre as the dominant intellectual of the post-Liberation period has been widely acknowledged. Michel Winock in his history of French intellectuals in the twentieth century notes that in the postwar period ‘Sartre’s fame and success were extraordinary’,13 and entitles the section of the book covering the postwar period ‘The Sartre Years’. Benoît Denis in his history of committed literature confirms Sartre’s dominance during the years following the Liberation, concluding that ‘Sartre was, without doubt, the century’s most important intellectual and the one to whom most attention was paid’, and later refers to Sartre’s ‘unprecedented hegemony’.14 Jean-François Sirinelli, one of France’s leading intellectual historians, refers to Sartre’s dominant position and even of Sartre’s ‘seizure of intellectual power’,15 while Annie Cohen-Solal, in her biography of Sartre, writes of Sartre’s ‘intellectual hegemony’.16 The reasons for Sartre’s extraordinary pre-eminence need to be briefly identified. First, as an intellectual in the broad sense, as defined by Kolakowski (see above), he had no rival. L’Être et le néant (Being and Nothingness) published in 1943, had established his reputation as a philosopher. Les Mouches (The Flies) performed in 1943 had revealed his talents as a playwright. The publication in 1945 of the first two volumes of the Chemins de la libérté (Roads to Freedom) trilogy confirmed his reputation as a novelist which he had started to establish before the war with the publication of La Nausée (Nausea). His contributions to the underground press during the Occupation had earned him recognition as a literary critic to which were to be added, through newspaper articles on the Liberation of Paris, and America (1945), recognition as a journalist, and later political polemicist and art critic and writer of screen-plays. Second, as is discussed in Chapter 1, Sartre’s existentialist philosophy with its blend of freedom and commitment caught the


spirit of the times in post-Liberation France. Sartre’s fame (or notoriety) was spread beyond the confines of Parisian intellectual circles through the extraordinary press coverage of ‘existentialism’ which focused on the life style of the frequenters of the jazz clubs and cafés of St Germain-des-Prés who called themselves ‘existentialists’ – and of course on the unmarried, unconventional couple of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. However, the press coverage of the bohemian life-style of the habitués of St Germain had little to do with Sartre’s philosophy. Indeed, as Jean Cocteau remarked: ‘The existentialists. Never has a term been so far removed from what it expresses. Doing nothing and sitting around drinking in little dives, that’s being an existentialist. It’s as if in New York there were relativists who danced in night-clubs believing that Einstein was there dancing with them.’17 Sartre thus found himself in the period immediately after the Liberation enjoying an unrivalled literary reputation, and not enjoying the attention of the popular press. But the particular relevance for Sartre as far as this study of postwar French intellectuals is that for the thirty years or so after the war Sartre epitomised the committed intellectual. In the Introduction to the first issue (October 1945) of Les Temps modernes (Modern Times), the review which he co-founded, Sartre insisted that the writer had to be committed, indeed was so, whether s/he liked it or not, through his/her very writings (and silences). Left-inclined but affiliated to no political party, Les Temps modernes soon came to be the most important of the postwar intellectual reviews, acting as a magnet for other independent intellectuals. The success of Les Temps modernes reinforced Sartre’s dominance as the committed intellectual, just as his success reinforced the dominant position occupied by the review. Finally, Sartre’s political commitment (and that of Les Temps modernes) caught, and helped to form, the prevailing mood among intellectuals in the postwar period. It shared in and contributed to the immediate post-Liberation optimism. It was forward looking (it is no coincidence that the review called itself Les Temps modernes). It was on the Left at a time when the Right, contaminated by accusations and suspicions of wartime collaboration, was largely absent from the political and intellectual arenas.18 With the polarisation of the Cold War, Sartre and Les Temps modernes, while remaining in favour of revolution and sympathetic to the USSR, refused to align themselves with either bloc. Their ‘anti anti-communism’ (sic) struck a chord with other Left intellectuals who refused to align themselves with the PCF and its extolling of all things Soviet. A final reason for the insistence on Sartre and that of Les Temps modernes was their leading role in

Introduction 5

opposing French involvement in the colonial wars in Indochina and especially Algeria. This is not to argue that Sartre went unchallenged. Immediately after the Liberation, Sartrean existentialism was attacked by the French Communist Party (PCF) – see Chapter 1 – and by the Right (see Chapter 3), as was his concept of committed literature (see Chapter 3). Sartre’s views and political activities were contested by fellow intellectuals, notably Aron and Camus, but such was his dominance that they both remained somewhat on the fringes of the intellectual field. In the 1960s his existential marxisant humanism was overshadowed by structuralism, but it was not until the mid-1970s that a serious challenge came to the conception of the ‘classical intellectual’ that Sartre had personified since the Liberation – and even more so to his gauchiste conception of the ‘revolutionary intellectual’ which he attempted to realise in the early 1970s. The debate from the mid-1970s about the role of the intellectual was constructed largely in reaction to ‘the universal intellectual’ as personified by Sartre. Within my treatment of the political interventions of intellectuals up to the mid-1970s, I have made frequent reference to intellectual reviews. In the days before television had established itself, the printed word was the main means for the intellectual’s interventions. Sartre’s Les Temps modernes, the progressive left-leaning Catholic Esprit and, later, the anti-Communist Preuves, were the vehicles for important polemics and exchanges (for example, the dispute between Camus and Sartre following the publication of the former’s L’Homme révolté (The Rebel) was conducted entirely through the pages of Les Temps modernes). To have ignored the reviews completely would have been perverse; at the same time this study makes no claim to be a comprehensive examination of the postwar intellectual reviews and publications.19 It will be apparent that the postwar French intellectual field is dominated by men. There are exceptions – Simone de Beauvoir and, to a lesser extent, Marguerite Duras – but the under-representation of women is, as Martyn Cornick has noted, ‘attributable to historical factors that have borne down with considerable oppressive force’.20 Cornick cites for example the traditional restriction of women to the private domain, the banning of women’s public expression and the taboo, until very recently, against women discussing politics. It should not be forgotten that women only obtained the right to vote in 1944, and were first able to exercise it in 1945. In 1983 there were fewer female members of the two legislative assemblies (Sénat and National


Assembly) than in 1946. The overwhelming male dominance in the four main French publications devoted to French intellectuals21 is an accurate reflection of the gender imbalance of the world of French intellectuals itself. Almost without exception it was male intellectuals who gained recognition both from their peers and from a wider public. Although in recent years more women have gained recognition in academic fields of say, history (Mona Ozouf), criticism and psychoanalysis (Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray) they still remain largely absent from the intellectual field as defined for the purposes of this book. This study then is concerned with the interventions of intellectuals on the national and international political issues of the second half of the twentieth century. It opens by identifying the intense if short-lived sense of optimism and fraternity which pervaded the intellectual community immediately after the Liberation but which was soon dented by the debate among intellectuals about the appropriate treatment of those of their number who had collaborated during the Occupation. This debate is analysed in some detail since at the heart of the polemics lay the question of the responsibility of the writer. The first chapter concludes with an examination of the onslaught launched by intellectuals within the French Communist Party (PCF) against Sartre and Sartrean existentialism. Chapter 2 traces the polarisation of the French intellectual community under the weight of the Cold War, with PCF intellectuals offering uncritical support for the USSR, Raymond Aron and André Malraux becoming anti-Communist cold warriors, and Sartre and others attempting to define an independent left-inclined position. This ended, for Sartre, in 1952 when he aligned himself for the next four years with the PCF. Chapter 3 examines the positions adopted by French intellectuals on a number of the key issues during the Cold War including the question of the Soviet camps, Tito’s expulsion from the Cominform, the Korean War, Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, while Chapter 4 concentrates on the response of French intellectuals to the French colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria. The Algerian struggle for independence was the final straw that broke the back of the Fourth Republic. In 1958 it brought de Gaulle to power and with it a new republic even though Algerian independence was not achieved until 1962. Chapter 5 considers the upheaval of May–June 1968 which briefly seemed set to topple the Fifth Republic; it views the events primarily

Introduction 7

through the positions held by Sartre and Aron. The short-lived post-1968 period of revolutionary gauchisme (revolutionary leftism) is considered with particular reference to Michel Foucault, Sartre, the question of popular justice and the appeal of China for French intellectuals. Until the mid-1970s, the French intellectual field had been dominated by the Left. However, the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (1974), underpinned by the subsequent tales of terror and repression which were seeping out of China, Vietnam and Cambodia, marked the start of a radical shift in the French intellectual field. Against a background of Western neo-liberal economics in the USA under Reagan, and in the UK under Thatcher, there was a turning away from Marxism, and away from the intellectuals’ identification with the universalist revolutionary project which had dominated the intellectual discourse hitherto. The role of the ‘New Philosophers’ is discussed in this context and attention is also paid to the Women’s Liberation Movement (MLF), the rise of the New Right, the campaign in favour of the Vietnamese boat people and Foucault’s support for the Iranian Revolution. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the questioning of the role of the intellectual. The challenges to which the Sartrean model of the classic committed intellectual was subjected (including one from Sartre himself) are considered, as is the debate conducted from the middle of the decade over the very definition of ‘the intellectual’ and his/her role. In this context not only are ideology and politics considered, but also the increased médiatisation of the intellectual (the transformation of the intellectual into a media personality, largely through the medium of television), and the impact of this on the popular perception of who was an intellectual. Chapter 6 opens with the reserved reaction of many intellectuals to the Socialist victory in 1981, their response to the rise of the extremeright Front National, and to the rise of Islam at home and abroad. It concludes with an examination of the interventions of French intellectuals on the conflicts in the Balkans, immigration and the social conflicts in France at the end of 1995. The conclusion offers a few personal thoughts about the role of intellectuals in France, and makes some brief comparisons with Britain and the USA. It should be clear from the above, that this book is not an intellectual history of France since the end of the Second World War in that it does not attempt to offer a postwar history of French intellectual theory and theorists.22 Nor is this book a postwar cultural history of France.23 Although cultural phenomena are briefly referred to in order to better contextualise the political interventions of the intellectuals


(e.g. the emergence of youth culture in the 1960s, the growing significance of television), it is the political dimension of the praxis of intellectuals which remains the prime concern of this study.24 It is the political positions taken up by intellectuals located within the national and international context which this book sets out to explore. Covering 56 years in some 200 pages means that this book can only be an introductory overview. However, by drawing extensively (but not exclusively) on sources in French, it assembles and makes available to non-readers of French, insights into the political positions adopted by intellectuals which are not readily available, if available at all, in English. At the same time the fairly extensive system of referencing directs the reader of French to the primary and secondary sources used in writing this study, thus allowing him/her to read further on about a particular topic or a particular intellectual.

1 Liberation, Épuration, Existentialism and Marxism

The Liberation of Paris and the founding of the Fourth Republic On 26 August 1944, a week after the opening shots of the popular uprising in Paris that marked the start of the liberation of the city, Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French and head of the Provisional Government, led a triumphant parade down the Champs–Elysées. The atmosphere in Paris was euphoric, with Parisians swept up in what Simone de Beauvoir called ‘an orgy of brotherhood’.1 Catholic novelist François Mauriac wrote of the Liberation as a ‘deliverance’,2 while Albert Camus, writing in Combat, whose masthead proclaimed ‘From Resistance to Revolution’, spoke of ‘that terrible and marvellous joy which engulfed us like a tide’.3 Beauvoir was far from alone in believing that the shock defeat of 1940 and the trauma of the Occupation meant that France ‘had been shaken deeply enough to permit a radical re-modelling of its structures without new convulsions’.4 An official report by the Allies published in November 1944 stated: ‘What their [the French] experience in Resistance has given them is a fervent desire for new men of action and efficient institutions rather than definite constitutional and political ideas’,5 and a few months later Emmanuel Mounier, editor of the progressive Christian review Esprit, was writing, ‘If we call ourselves revolutionaries it is not just hot air or being overdramatic. It is because an honest analysis shows us that France is in a revolutionary situation.’6 As well as the widespread elation came the realisation that, given the raft of immediate problems as well as the longer-term tasks of political, economic and social reconstruction, building the new post-Liberation France would be a Herculean task. Paris may have been liberated but the war was still raging in the eastern part of the country; a million 9

10

Intellectuals and Politics in Postwar France

and a half French citizens (prisoners of war, deportees, conscripted workers) were still in Germany; the country’s infrastructure had been devastated and the resultant transport difficulties badly hampered the distribution of food and other essentials. France’s economic base was in a shambolic state as a result of Allied bombing, sabotage and the transfer of labour and machinery to Germany. In addition there was the question of what political and constitutional arrangements France should now adopt. As head of the Provisional Government, de Gaulle realised that its authority in many parts of France was tenuous if not almost nonexistent, and its ability to control events beyond Paris, where local liberation committees called the shots (often literally), was extremely limited. An immediate priority was the reassertion of the authority of central government and the establishment of French national unity. For de Gaulle these were prerequisites of his desperate need to secure France’s acceptance as an equal among leading nations of the world, an acceptance which would in turn strengthen the sense of national unity and purpose. Thus was de Gaulle’s strategy to unify the country politically, socially and economically around a strong centralised state. De Gaulle’s main political rival was the French Communist Party which, firmly rejecting the option of transforming the armed struggle against the occupying forces into a revolutionary struggle for socialism, accepted two seats in the Provisional Government. The Party claimed that a transformation of the anti-Nazi struggle into a revolutionary socialist struggle was impossible because of the presence in France of the Allied armies, which would have been mobilised against it. However, it was Stalin who had ruled out such strategy. His position was to maintain (for the time being anyway) the USSR’s alliance with Britain and the USA, since he wanted to minimise the possibility of their signing a separate peace treaty with Germany. In addition, he wanted to advance as far west as possible in order to establish Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe. In pursuit of its reformist strategy, in which ministers concurred, for example, with the disbanding of local resistance militia, the PCF sought to broaden its appeal by presenting itself as the embodiment of the French nation and national interest, as it claimed to have done throughout the Occupation.7 Thus it was in the autumn (1944) that the Party urged the working class to throw itself into the battle for increased production, while its leaders endlessly issued calls for broad-based unity with Catholics and Socialists and indeed the unity of ‘all good French people, workers, office workers, peasants, bosses and intellectuals’.8

Liberation, Épuration, Existentialism and Marxism 11

The various electoral consultations which led, eventually, to the founding of the Fourth Republic revealed the extent of the support for the PCF. In October 1945 the French voters (now for the first time including women) went to the polls in a general election and a referendum on the constitution. The PCF attracted some five million votes (over a quarter of the total vote) and emerged as the biggest political party in the new Constituent Assembly. After a referendum that revealed that 96 per cent voters favoured a new constitution, there followed a period of intense wrangling over the principles on which it should be based. In January 1946 de Gaulle, exasperated that his demands for a strong executive were being thwarted by those, including the PCF, who wanted more power to be invested in the legislature. In a referendum held in May 1946, the voters’ rejection of the proposed constitution precipitated new general elections (held in June) when once again the PCF secured about a quarter of the votes cast. In the legislative elections of November 1946, a month after a second proposed constitution had been accepted, the PCF emerged as the largest parliamentary grouping, with 182 seats ahead of the Catholic centreright Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP) and the Socialists. The Fourth Republic was now in place, with the Communists in government, where they were to stay until May 1947. The intellectuals, like their fellow countrymen, had their views about the values that should underpin the new France. Camus, for example, writing in Combat in September 1944, declared that he hoped for justice in the economic domain combined with the guarantee of freedom in the sphere of politics.9 Beauvoir, referring also to September 1944, wrote of ‘Journalists, writers, budding film-makers discussing, planning and taking decisions with passion as if their future only depended on them.’10 However, with the exception of novelist André Malraux, who served as Minister of Information from 1945–6, and to a lesser extent Raymond Aron, who joined him as his directeur de cabinet (chief aide), the intellectuals were only indirectly involved in political and economic reconstruction. But post-Liberation national reconstruction was not limited to political and economic reconstruction. It also included cultural reconstruction, ‘both in the sense that culture played a significant role in political and economic recovery, and in the sense that French culture was reconstructed as a national institution and as a vibrant profusion of ideas images, and narratives’.11 It was a clash of ideas and images that lay at the heart of the first important post-Liberation debate in the milieu intellectuel over the identification of and punishment of

12


intellectual collaborators and the underlying issue of the responsibility of the writer.

The postwar purges The purging of the intellectuals was part of the wider movement of épuration (purges), which entailed defining collaboration, bringing alleged collaborators to justice and punishing those found guilty. Unofficial reprisals against alleged collaborators began as early as 1942 and official prosecutions continued into the 1990s, as the trials of Paul Touvier, leading member of the pro-Nazi milice protected for decades by the Catholic Church, Klaus Barbie, ‘the Butcher of Lyon’, and Maurice Papon testify. Besides an estimated 10 000 summary executions, mainly occurring during and in the immediate aftermath of the liberation of towns, cities or regions, the official prosecutions for collaboration carried out by cours de justice (courts of justice) and chambres civiques (civic chambers) up until the end of 1948 resulted in 791 executions, 24 116 prison sentences and around 49 000 sentences of national degradation (removal of political and civic rights).12 The issue of the épuration identified clear differences between de Gaulle and the PCF. While apologists for Vichy presented exaggerated claims of up to 150 000 people killed in summary executions, de Gaulle was working to limit and contain the purges. In de Gaulle’s view, a demoralised France, incompetently led, had been crushed in 1940 by superior weaponry and subjected to a cruel occupation. But despite the military defeat the French people had refused to be cowed and had resisted valiantly, and had ultimately driven out the German invader, albeit with the assistance of the Allied forces. According to this Gaullist myth, resistance was therefore a generalised national phenomenon and collaboration, by definition, was applicable only to a small minority. The purpose of the épuration, in de Gaulle’s view, was to bring this tiny minority of French men and women before the courts. De Gaulle was opposed to a widespread and extensive purge, since this would extend the bitterness and divisions of the war years and would undermine his bid to restore national unity and the image of a proud, united nation taking her rightful place alongside the other great nation-states of the world which he was so keen to promote. The PCF on the other hand demanded a comprehensive and rigorous épuration. The Party, calling itself le parti des 75 000 fusillés13 (‘The party of the 75 000 shot’), was the party of the resistance, its prestige enhanced by the part played in the defeat of Nazi Germany by other


Communist forces, especially the Soviet Red Army, but also by Communist partisans in Greece, Eastern Europe and Yugoslavia. Having eschewed a strategy of a revolutionary seizure of power on instructions from Moscow, the Party sought instead to increase its influence through the ballot box and by securing key positions in the new economic and political institutions. Publicly, the Party argued that a refusal to organise a comprehensive purge within the state bureaucracy, where it urged that the property of those guilty should come under state control, and in the newly nationalised industries, would compromise France’s postwar reconstruction. By calling for an extensive purge of personnel, the Party hoped to create vacancies which would be filled by PCF members and supporters. This strategy led to the accusation from the Socialists that the Communists were ‘using nationalised industries (for example the mines) in order to achieve their party’s domination of the very structure of the State’.14 In the intellectual field too, the question of the épuration provoked fierce debate in and around the Comité national des écrivains (CNE), (National Writers’ Committee), a Communist-inspired committee established during the Occupation which had brought together anti-Nazi writers from across the political spectrum but which, in the months and years following the Liberation increasingly came to be dominated by the PCF and its supporters.15 At its first non-clandestine meeting on 4 September 1944, the CNE issued a statement calling for ‘the just punishment of the impostors and traitors’, which, in its view, was indispensable to ‘France’s resurrection’.16 Five days later Les Lettres Françaises, the leading cultural publication of the Resistance, now legalised, published a manifesto signed by over sixty intellectuals supporting these demands. The heterogeneous political and ideological pedigrees of these writers, which included the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel, the Catholic novelist François Mauriac, the Communists Louis Aragon and Claude Morgan, resistance author Vercors, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, the poet Paul Éluard, and the soon-to-be Gaullist government minister André Malraux, was a testimony to the optimistic, progressive consensus born of the Resistance which prevailed immediately after the Liberation. It was not to last. While the signatories demanded the punishment of all ‘traitors and impostors’, the CNE was particularly concerned with the collaborationist activities of writers and publishers. Thus, later the same month, the CNE announced the creation of a Comité d’épuration de l’edition (a Publishing Purge Committee), including Sartre and Vercors, which was to identify those publishers who, during the Occupation, had

14


received subsidies from Germany or approved the officially sanctioned list of ‘acceptable’ authors. The CNE also demanded that the government punish all those writers who were members of pro-German political parties and paramilitary organisations, who had attended literary conventions in Germany after June 1940, who had received money from Germany, directly or indirectly, and all those who had ‘helped, encouraged and supported through their writings, their actions or their influence Nazi propaganda and oppression’.17 In addition, the members of the CNE undertook to refuse to write for any newspaper, journal or collection of texts which contained a text written by a writer whose attitude or whose writings during the Occupation had ‘afforded moral or material support to the oppressor’.18 It was also in September that the CNE drew up its first ‘blacklist’ of authors accused of collaboration which was compiled by its Purge Committee which included Vercors, the Communist poet Paul Éluard, Gabriel Marcel and the writer Raymond Queneau. The writers on the blacklist included Robert Brasillach, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle (who was to commit suicide in March 1945), Jean Giono, Sacha Guitry, Charles Maurras, Henry de Montherlant and Alphonse de Châteaubriant. In October 1944, Albert Lejeune, editor-in-chief of a number of provincial newspapers, became the first press baron to be tried for ‘collusion with the enemy’ (intelligence avec l’ ennemi) and executed. A few days later, Georges Suarez, editor-in-chief of the collaborationist daily Aujourd’hui, was also sentenced to death. On 29 December 1944, the trial opened of Henri Béraud, winner of the prestigious literary Goncourt Prize in 1922, editorialist and polemicist on the collaborationist weekly Gringoire, now accused of ‘collusion with the enemy’. Béraud had been publishing anti-Semitic and xenophobic (especially Anglophobic) articles since the 1930s, and enjoyed a reputation for being the richest journalist in France. The prosecution case against Béraud was seriously flawed by accusations that he had penned articles and books that he had not written, and that he had attended meetings at which he had not been present. Nonetheless, probably influenced by press coverage of the trial by newspapers with links to the Resistance, the jury returned a guilty verdict and Béraud was sentenced to death. Prompted by Béraud’s lawyer, François Mauriac decided to take a public stance against Béraud’s sentence, arguing that Béraud was innocent of the charge of collusion with the enemy. While conceding that his virulent Anglophobia during the war had been a very serious error, Mauriac denied that the Germans’ use of some of his


writings justified a charge of treason. Three days after Mauriac’s intervention, de Gaulle announced his decision to reprieve Béraud, who was exiled to the Ile de Ré. Mauriac’s intervention on behalf of Béraud in January 1945 was part of a wider debate about the épuration that had been exercising the intellectuals since the CNE pronouncements of September 1944. While the CNE had called for the ‘just punishment of impostors and traitors’, it was soon apparent that there was little agreement about the definition of ‘traitor’ (or ‘impostor’) and what constituted ‘just punishment’. An early example of this was the threatened resignation from the CNE of Jean Paulhan, editor of the prewar Nouvelle Revue française (New French Review), the most prestigious literary review of the interwar years, because of the inclusion on the list of his friend Marcel Jouhandeau, author of Chaminadour and Chroniques maritales. (Nonetheless, Jouhandeau’s name still appeared in the definitive ‘blacklist’ of some 150 authors published in October 1944.) Underlying the differences of opinion among the intellectuals about the definition of ‘traitor’ and ‘just punishment’ were fundamental differences about the purpose of the épuration itself. Intellectuals who were members of the PCF, like poets Aragon, Paul Éluard and Claude Morgan, echoed the Party line and enthusiastically advocated a massive and rigorous épuration of intellectuals. They argued that the deaths of civilians – both resisters and non-resisters – at the hands of the Nazis and the milice, the French pro-Nazi militia, demanded that those who had collaborated be made to pay for their crimes. In a moving personal testimony published in Les Lettres françaises on Armistice Day (11 November) 1944, Vercors recognised that there were honourable reasons for advocating forgiveness but, recalling a promise he had made to those who had died, argued that he owed it to his dead comrades to opt for punishment. To advocate any other course of action would be an act of betrayal.19 A similar view was expressed in the same publication the following month by Bernard Severine, who wrote: ‘Our right to life is built on the dead. It is they who have paid. We have to repay that debt.’20 At the other extreme among anti-collaborationist intellectuals stood François Mauriac and Jean Paulhan, who counselled caution and moderation, with the latter arguing that writers had the right to make mistakes (le droit à l’erreur). In October 1944, Mauriac called for ‘national reconciliation’ and denounced the excesses of disorder, confusion and arbitrariness of the épuration, which was resulting, he believed, in too many miscarriages of justice. The reality of the épuration was, according

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to Mauriac, too harsh. There were too many people presumed to be guilty and held in prison on the flimsiest of evidence while awaiting trial. Mauriac urged greater understanding for those who believed they had been doing their duty by supporting the Vichy government, which after all had been recognised by the USA, the USSR and the Vatican.21 Paulhan continued to campaign against the épuration right up until 1952 when he published his pamphlet Lettre aux directeurs de la Résistance (Letter to the Directors of the Resistance). Besides what Paulhan saw as the iniquities of the épuration was his concern that the CNE, from which he resigned late in 1946, ‘had effectively become a communistfront organisation, with powerful ambitions to become the new hegemonic cultural institution’.22 In relation to the debate on the épuration, Albert Camus occupied an intermediary position between the ‘hard-liners’ and Mauriac, with whom he engaged in a lively polemic. Camus rejected hatred as a legitimate motivating force, but at the same time, stressing his commitment to justice, rejected Mauriac’s appeals for charity, mercy and forgiveness. Unlike the Catholic Mauriac, the atheist Camus ruled out any ultimate divine retribution; his passionate commitment was to justice here and now, to ‘human justice with all its terrible imperfections’,23 which should be dispensed as fairly and rapidly as possible. For Camus, this espousal of justice offered a middle way between the two extremes of hatred and forgiveness. As he wrote in Combat on 11 January 1945, ‘Each time, when referring to the épuration, I spoke of justice, M. Mauriac spoke of charity … You would think, listening to M. Mauriac, that we had to make an absolute choice in these daily matters between Christ’s love and men’s hatred. Well, no!’24 Mauriac, on the other hand, was convinced that a commitment to charity was indispensable and asserted that if one day charity were ever to leave the world, concentration camps, gas chambers and mass graves would also be the order of the day everywhere.25 At the beginning of 1945, the intellectuals’ concerns about the épuration was given a particular focus when on 19 January the trial of ‘one of their own’, the novelist Robert Brasillach, opened in Paris. Brasillach’s trial was to raise in dramatic circumstances – if found guilty he risked the death sentence – the questions of what constituted treason and what precisely was implied by ‘the responsibility of the writer’. Brasillach, like fellow-writer Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, had proclaimed his enthusiasm for fascism well before the fall of France. In the 1930s, this disciple of arch-nationalist Charles Maurras had written articles in the anti-Semitic extreme right-wing weekly paper Je Suis Partout


lauding Franco, Mussolini and Hitler, denouncing bolshevism, freemasonry, and proudly proclaiming his own anti-Semitism. At the outbreak of war, Brasillach was mobilised and was taken prisoner in June 1940. In his prisoner of war camp he wrote an article for Je Suis Partout praising Pétain and his National Revolution project and applauding Vichy’s suppression of parliamentary democracy and its measures against Jews and freemasons. After the intervention of Admiral Darlan,26 he was released from captivity and returned to Paris where, until August 1943, he produced a stream of virulent articles for Je Suis Partout denouncing the Third Republic, the Jews, the Gaullists, the British, the Americans, the Communists and the freemasons. In the spring of 1943, he twice applauded the assassination of Max Dormoy, Socialist Minister of the Interior during the Popular Front, as ‘the only act of justice carried out by decent Frenchmen (d’admirables Français) since June 1940’,27 and in September 1942 had argued that Jewish children should be deported along with their parents. In 1943, he resigned from Je Suis Partout but continued to propound his views in other collaborationist publications including Révolution Nationale, La Gerbe and L’Echo de la France, where he reasserted his pro-German views and emphasised the blood ties which linked Germany and France. The case against Brasillach was based essentially on his writings during the Occupation, added to which was his involvement with Rive gauche, a bookshop in the Paris Latin Quarter selling German propaganda, his participation at two international writers’ congresses held in Germany, and his fraternisation with members of the PropagandaStaffel and the Institut Allemand in Paris. At the trial, Brasillach’s lawyer, Jacques Isorni, began by reiterating the argument that collaboration was the official policy of Vichy government, a government legally constituted by the National Assembly in July 1940 and, as Mauriac had noted, recognised by Washington, Moscow and the Vatican. As Brasillach was simply complying with the policy of a legally constituted government, it would be unjust and illogical to pass judgement on him before those who had formulated the policy had been brought to trial. This was firmly rejected by Marcel Reboul for the prosecution, who argued that Brasillach’s trial was independent of any other trial which had taken, or might take place. Since the rulings (ordonnances) of the Provisional Government had declared null and void all measures passed by Vichy government, all acts of collaboration were therefore illegal. Brasillach stood accused of treason as defined in Article 75 of the Penal Code which stated, in Paragraph 5, that any French person who in time of war, was found guilty of

18


collusion with a foreign power or its representatives with a view to promoting the projects of this foreign power against France should be executed. The subtext of this exchange between the lawyers was the conflict of political and ethical legitimacy which had been played out in France during the dark years of the Occupation: Pétain’s Etat français versus the Republic; the armistice versus a continuation of the war; resistance versus collaboration; Vichy versus London; servitude versus freedom; dictatorship versus democracy; Travail, Famille, Patrie (Work, Family and Country), the slogan of Pétain’s Etat Français, versus freedom, equality and fraternity.28 Brasillach’s second line of defence was that he had always acted in what he considered to be the interests of his country. Questioned by Joseph Vidal, the président of the court, about his attendance at two writers’ congresses in Germany, Brasillach replied that he believed that it was important for France to be represented and added that he believed the policy of collaboration had allowed France ‘to continue to live’. Neither during his attendance at the international writers’ congress in Weimar in October 1941 nor through his fraternisation with German intellectuals at the Institut Allemand in Paris had any attempt had been made to make him become a mouthpiece for German propaganda. Moreover, he added, at the Institut Allemand he met other members of the world of French writing; he cited Georges Duhamel, Jean Giraudoux and the publisher Gaston Gallimard. As for his involvement in the Rive gauche bookshop, Brasillach claimed that for every six German books sold, the shop sold two French books, including the works of the Communists Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet. Thanks to the Rive gauche the works of Molière, SaintSimon, Corneille, Racine and other classical French authors were dispatched to German universities to replace those destroyed during the Allies’ bombing raids. In any event, he added, it was the publishers, not a bookshop, who produced propaganda. The bookshop in question was simply a commercial organisation trying to do business. Brasillach explained that it was a desire to defend the interests of France that led him to support the French Legion Against Bolshevism, to launch his attacks on Léon Blum, Paul Reynaud, Georges Mandel (guilty, according to him, of having helped push France into a war for which she was patently ill-prepared) and to espouse the idea of a Franco-German alliance. In conclusion, while admitting that he might have made mistakes, he insisted that he had been motivated by a love for his country. Vidal’s questioning of the accused had been essentially an examination of the facts of the case; it was then the turn of the prosecutor, the


commissaire du gouvernement Marcel Reboul, who developed his argument on the responsibility of the writer. He began with a tribute to Brasillach’s literary and intellectual qualities and recognised his influence among a section of France’s youth, but argued that Brasillach’s very fame and status implied a corresponding sense of responsibility. He then moved to read out extracts of vituperative prose taken from Brasillach’s contributions to Je Suis Partout in 1941 and 1942 including his call for the physical elimination of Blum, Reynaud and Mandel. However, Reboul hastened to insist that Brasillach was not on trial because of his opinions. The trial was not about freedom of expression. His views had not been expressed in peacetime in a democratic society where they could be contested, but in wartime in Occupied France. His support for the policies and actions of the occupying forces were therefore an integral part of the offensive against the Resistance and the anti-Nazi alliance. ‘To be anti-English or anti-Russian when English or Russian blood is being shed for freedom is not being French it is being pro-German.’29 Coming to the nub of his argument, Reboul asserted that Brasillach’s betrayal was essentially an intellectual betrayal, a betrayal of a man driven by pride, a man who was willing to do anything to find an audience, a public platform and political influence. Calling for an alliance between France and Nazi Germany and advocating that France fight alongside Germany placed Brasillach well to the right of Vichy. Furthermore, his contempt for his fellow citizens showed that he had no confidence in France but only in Nazi Germany. Despite the reading at the trial of letters from François Mauriac, Marcel Aymé, Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel praising Brasillach’s literary talents and his contribution to the French world of letters, he was found guilty and on 19 January 1945 sentenced to death. There then followed a vigorous campaign by a number of intellectuals, led by François Mauriac and his son Claude, which attempted to secure a reprieve. A petition calling for clemency was signed by over fifty intellectuals, both authentic résistants like Paulhan and others tainted by suspicions of collaboration, who were opposed not only to Brasillach’s sentence but to the very idea of any épuration. A signature that raised a few eyebrows was that of Camus, who had nothing but contempt for what Brasillach represented. After a night of agonising, he had agreed to sign because of his passionate opposition to the death penalty. Not surprisingly, those intellectuals who were members or sympathisers of the PCF refused to sign. Aware of the lingering power of reactionary ideas Claude Morgan wrote that ‘the influence which a Maurras or a Brasillach still exerts, despite their crimes, on a small section of our

20


young people, will only disappear with their deaths’.30 Beauvoir and Sartre also refused to sign, and Beauvoir echoed Vercors when she expressed her solidarity with dead or dying friends. ‘If I had lifted a finger to help Brasillach they would have been right to spit in my face.’31 On 27 January 1945 after a short trial in Lyons, Charles Maurras was sentenced to life imprisonment, the announcement of which elicited his famous outburst, ‘It’s the revenge of Dreyfus.’ Maurice Pujo, the coeditor of Action Française, was sentenced to five years in prison and a 20 000-franc fine. Both men forfeited their civic and political rights. If those intellectuals campaigning for clemency for Brasillach were encouraged by this verdict, their hopes were misplaced. De Gaulle refused to commute Brasillach’s sentence. On 6 February 1945, eleven years to the day after the extreme right-wing riots outside the French parliament about which he had been so enthusiastic, Brasillach was taken from his cell and shot. Brasillach’s trial and execution had dramatically highlighted the issue of the responsibility of the writer. In the impassioned debate which ensued among intellectuals, many writers observed that intellectuals were being more harshly treated than those suspected of economic collaboration. There were three main reasons for this. First, the writers’ signed works constituted readily accessible evidence already in the public domain, whereas cases of suspected economic collaboration entailed the lengthy and hazardous process of locating and scrutinising company records, exchanges of correspondence, records of bank transactions and so on. So the trials of those accused of economic collaboration took much longer to come before the courts, and it was a feature of the épuration that the longer the time it took for a case to be heard, the more lenient the sentence was likely to be. Second, experienced businessmen, like senior civil servants and members of the judiciary, were indispensable to de Gaulle’s project for the reconstruction of an economically strong and viable France with a powerful, efficient state apparatus. It was therefore in the interests of the postwar ruling elite to keep sanctions to a minimum. Finally, whereas industrialists, like the judiciary and the civil service, tended to close ranks (although there were cases of denunciations motivated by profit or personal advancement), the intellectuals, spearheaded as we have seen by the CNE, took it upon themselves to purge their own ranks. Jean Paulhan ironically observed the difference in treatment between writers and ‘economic collaborators’. ‘The engineers, the contractors and builders who constructed the Mur de l’Atlantique32 are now moving among us as free as you like. They’re being used to build new walls, the walls of the new


prisons where journalists who made the mistake of writing that the Mur de l’Atlantique was well built are now being held.’33 The relative responsibility of industrialists and writers who had collaborated was addressed by Vercors in the first of a series of articles on the responsibility of the writer published in the wake of Brasillach’s trial by the newspaper Carrefour, a weekly founded in August 1944 by a group of former members of the Resistance. While conceding that it was unjust to leave industrialists who had collaborated not only at liberty but also, as result of their collaborationist activities, rich and powerful, Vercors argued that writers who had collaborated bore a heavier responsibility than the industrialists. The crimes of the industrialistcollaborator only implicated himself, whereas what the writer offered the enemy were his thoughts and ideas through which he had sought to influence others. ‘To compare the industrialist with the writer is to compare Cain with the devil. Cain’s crime stops with Abel whereas the danger posed by the devil is limitless.’34 In this series of articles, more than one contributor responded to the accusation that the trials of intellectual collaborators were an attack on freedom of expression. Vercors reiterated the argument of the prosecutor at Brasillach’s trial and emphasised the crucial distinction between writings published in a free society where they could be openly debated and challenged, and those published in a repressive one where they could not. To use ‘freedom of expression’ as a reason for not punishing would be a double error, argued Vercors, since to excuse both the writings (against freedom) and the author (who was responsible for them) was a double denial of every citizen’s responsibility to have regard for the life and freedom of others.35 The literary critic Emile Henriot echoed Vercors’ views on the distinction between writing in a democratic society and under a repressive regime and further noted his agreement with Vercors that in a repressive regime the responsibility of the writer is even greater than in the former.36 Gabriel Marcel also drew attention to the particularity of the responsibility of the writer living in extreme conditions: ‘It is absolutely true to say that by expressing publicly, in times of war, opinions which are in line with the doctrine and the interests of the enemy, one is guilty of treason and, as a result, liable to very serious punishment.’37 The singularity of the Occupation from a resistance perspective was underlined by Sartre. In an article published in the first legal issue of Les Lettres françaises, he wrote: ‘Every word became as precious as a declaration of principle. Since we were hunted down, every one of our gestures carried the weight of a commitment.’38

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To write was to act. For many intellectuals, there was no distinction between writing and the practical realisation, albeit by others, of measures they advocated. In his contribution to the debate, Emmanuel Mounier attacked those like Brasillach who, ‘peddling anti-Semitic views from the comfort of their armchair in their editorial offices in Paris, were torturing at Dachau or massacring at Lublin’.39 Or as Beauvoir observed, alluding to Paulhan, ‘People are critical that the épuration has been harsher on those who approved the Mur de l’Atlantique than those who built it. I find it utterly unjust that economic collaboration should be excused but not that Hitler’s propagandists should be dealt with severely … There are words which are as murderous as a gas chamber.’40 Referring specifically to Brasillach, she continued, ‘with his denunciations, his advocacy of murder and genocide he had collaborated directly with the Gestapo’.41 But what of the argument put forward by Paulhan and others that the writer had the right to make mistakes (le droit à l’erreur)? Paulhan’s premise, based on his prewar experience as editor of the Nouvelle Revue française when he mixed with famous writers of all political persuasions and none, was that intellectual and literary values were supreme and as a result, he viewed the purge essentially in aesthetic terms. Whereas the logic of the argument espoused by Vercors, Henriot and others was that the more talented the author, the greater the responsibility, Paulhan argued that the greater the talent, the more compelling the reason not to punish. Had the writer not the right to make mistakes? In (implicit) response to Paulhan, Henriot argued that while it was unjust that writers appeared to have borne the brunt of the épuration, the argument that the writer had ‘the right to make mistakes’ was untenable. If the scientist experimenting on himself with poisons had the right to make mistakes because it concerned only him, the writer was, by definition, operating in the public domain: as soon as his words appear in print, the writer-collaborator is spreading his poison abroad. If the ‘right to make mistakes’ were to be accorded, writing would be reduced to a game, with the writer able to escape his or her responsibilities. ‘Talent, even genius, gives nobody the right to say stupid things with impunity.’42 Once things have been written and are in the public domain they cannot be unwritten; the writer is committed and has to take responsibility for his or her words. As Claude Morgan noted: ‘Intellectuals are not without responsibility. On the contrary, they have the highest degree of responsibility. Our writings are not abstract signs. They can save or they can kill. They commit us completely.’43 Ironically perhaps,


one of the clearest statements stressing the responsibility of the writer came from the collaborationist writer Drieu La Rochelle, in the Nouvelle Revue française which he edited, at the end of 1942. Drieu, who had intervened with the German authorities to secure Paulhan’s release from captivity, shared Paulhan’s belief in the community of writers but nevertheless believed that a writer should be prepared to die for what he had written. ‘The writer … should not wish for the death of other writers in the opposite camp, even if their activities seem to pose a deadly threat to the cause which he is defending. But the writer must accept to die for his words.’44 In the end the épuration satisfied no one. Those who, like the Communists, favoured a thorough and extensive purge were disappointed.45 Only 94 per 100 000 inhabitants were sentenced to prison in France, compared to 633 for Norway, 596 for Belgium, 419 for Holland and 374 for Denmark.46 While de Gaulle’s wish for a limited purge may have prevailed, those like Mauriac who had urged caution and moderation, and Camus, who had hoped for justice, were similarly disillusioned. At the end of 1944, Camus had resigned from the CNE, complaining of an intellectual climate where objectivity was viewed as malicious criticism and where there was so little tolerance of straightforward independent morality. The épuration process, which rumbled on until the early 1950s, continued as it had begun – a ramshackle arbitrary process where the chances of being charged and of being found guilty and the severity of the penalty depended significantly on the defendant’s social class (with the lower classes coming off worst) and where the trial took place. As has been noted, the timing of the trial was also an important factor. As Pierre Assouline has observed, to cast a retrospective eye over the severity of the sentences reveals that the later the trials took place, the fewer were the condemnations and the less severe were the sanctions.47

Existentialism and Marxism As the months after the Liberation passed, especially after the German capitulation in May 1945, public interest in the épuration waned as the French concentrated on the pressing problems of food and supplies, housing and the forthcoming elections. The debates of the post-Liberation period were now increasingly characterised by intellectuals positioning themselves in relation to existentialism and/or the Marxism of the PCF, and more than a decade after the Liberation, Raymond Aron was writing that the fashionable philosophies in France were still

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Marxism and existentialism.48 Because of the centrality both of Sartre and existentialism and of the PCF and Marxism to the political history of French intellectuals over the next thirty years or so, the remainder of this chapter will be an examination of Sartrean existentialism and the criticisms made of it by the PCF. It should be noted, however, that the PCF did not hold a monopoly on Marxism: many members of the Socialist SFIO (including Guy Mollet and the leadership) considered themselves Marxists, as did many of the (small) anti-Stalinist organisations. However, the political prominence of the PCF, reflecting its support within the working class and its close links with the USSR, allowed the PCF to present itself as the embodiment of Marxist orthodoxy. In September 1945, Beauvoir’s existentialist resistance novel Le Sang des autres (The Blood of Others) was published, shortly followed by two existential novels by Sartre, L’Age de raison (The Age of Reason) and Le Sursis (The Reprieve), and in October Sartre presided over the launch of the monthly review Les Temps modernes. This ‘existentialist offensive’ as Beauvoir was later to call it, caught everyone by surprise and thrust a somewhat bemused Sartre to the centre of the Parisian intellectual stage, where he was to remain for the next thirty years or so.49 With its epicentre located in the cafés and jazz-cellars of St Germain-des-Prés on Paris’s Left Bank, existentialism was much more than a purely philosophical movement. Fanned by media hype, what passed for existentialism became a bohemian way of life for hundreds of young Parisians who were not necessarily familiar with Sartre’s writings and who took existentialism to mean, in a phrase which became fashionable in the 1960s, that you could do your own thing. As a result of their fame, Sartre and Beauvoir were endlessly pursued and their habitual haunts like the Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots were invaded by journalists and members of the public hoping to catch a glimpse of Beauvoir and the guru of existentialism. Such was Sartre’s unease about the misconceptions and misunderstandings concerning his philosophy that he gave a public lecture on existentialism which was so popular that people had to fight to get in, and the press carried reports of people fainting in the frenzied crush.50 Sartre’s philosophical existentialism, with its roots in the prewar writings of the German phenomenologist Edmund Husserl and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, had been developed in a densely written philosophical tome L’Etre et le néant (Being and Nothingness), published in 1943. L’Etre et le néant is most noted, in the words of the American Sartrean scholar Ronald Aronson, ‘… for its passionate argument against all determinism and for human freedom, and its


exploration of the meanings of our involvement and action in the world. At its most profound, it was a strikingly original discussion of the ways in which individuals make themselves unique: of their consciousness, their subjectivity, their roles as centres of meaning, sources of values, creators of possibilities.’51 With its emphasis on personal freedom and responsibility Sartrean existentialism had, according to one of Sartre’s biographers, Ronald Hayman, and according to Beauvoir, captured the mood of the times. For the duration of the Occupation, the French had been divided (but not, as Ronald Hayman observed, neatly in two halves) between the resistance fighters and the collaborators. In between there had been ambivalence and ambiguity. Everyone had made compromises, sometimes by remaining passive – failing to help Jews or failing to stop a neighbour from denouncing a Resistance network. Everyone had taken risks, but criteria were quantitative – how much risk, how much to be gained? For the unstable majority it had been impossible to hope wholeheartedly and consistently. […] Sartrean existentialism mingled optimism with responsibility: each of us chooses the historical context in which he lives. […] What he [Sartre] was offering the French people was a chance to accept a share of the blame for the immediate past at the same time as affirming their willingness to take charge of the immediate future.52 Or, as Beauvoir wrote: His petit bourgeois readers too, had lost their faith in eternal peace, in steady progress, in immutable essences. They had discovered History in its most terrible form. They needed an ideology which could accommodate these revelations without forcing them to jettison their old justifications. Existentialism, which was struggling to reconcile history and morality, allowed them to accept their transitory condition without abandoning a certain absolute, to confront horror and absurdity while still retaining their human dignity, still preserving their individuality. It seemed to offer them the solution they dreamed of.53 Les Temps modernes, which was to become a vehicle for existentialist commitment and responsibility, had been founded by Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who had dreamed of setting up the review

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since 1943. Besides Sartre, Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty, the editorial committee, announced in September 1944, included the sociologist Raymond Aron, Sartre’s petit camarade from his student days, the anthropologist Michel Leiris, journalist Albert Ollivier and Jean Paulhan. Its political heterogeneity reflected the (short-lived) post-Liberation optimism that the unity of the intellectuals forged during the Resistance years could be maintained after the Occupation. André Malraux declined an invitation to join, as did Camus, who pleaded his commitment to Combat, the resistance paper which was now legally on sale. Against the backdrop of the war and the Occupation, the review’s mission was to view problems from a new perspective, and in the founding statement Sartre again addressed the question which had been raised in the context of the épuration, namely the responsibility of the writer. In the first sentence, Sartre acknowledged that ‘Any writer of bourgeois origin has faced the temptation of irresponsibility’ and it was against this temptation that Sartre was pitting himself and the review. Anything written has a meaning, even if this meaning is very far from the one intended by the author. For us in fact the author is neither a Vestal nor an Ariel. He is ‘in it’, and whatever he does he is marked, compromised even in his farthest hiding place. […] Since the writer has no means of escape, we want him to tightly embrace his time; it is his only chance: it made itself for him and he is made for it.54 Contrasting his view of the role of the writer with Balzac’s indifference to the French Revolution of 1848 and Flaubert’s frightened incomprehension of the Paris Commune of 1871, Sartre called for the writer to be committed to his time and to take a stand in helping to bring about changes in society. Although the review advocated siding with those who wanted to change both people’s social condition and the concept they had of themselves, it refused to align itself with any political party or organisation. Very soon, Les Temps modernes had established itself as the leading progressive intellectual review, filling the space left by the Nouvelle Revue française, banned in 1944 because of its collaborationist activities during the Occupation under Drieu La Rochelle’s editorship. The appeal of Les Temps modernes through its association with existentialism was compounded by the novelty of a venture that aimed to combine ‘literary and philosophical excellence, freedom and commitment,


close reasoning and the capacity to think about everything’.55 The review’s prestigious editorial committee and political independence meant that it drew in other intellectuals attracted by the intriguing paradox of free commitment. A further reason for its success was the standing of its co-founder and co-editor, Sartre. In 1945, Sartre, with an established reputation as a novelist, a philosopher, playwright, critic and journalist, enjoyed a unique position in French intellectual life. His closest rival in literature, Camus, was a philosophical pygmy compared to Sartre. Merleau-Ponty, although more politically educated than Sartre, was a philosopher with no pretensions to be a novelist or playwright. Aron, who had spent the war in London could not compete with Sartre’s resistance record (as it was perceived at the time)56 and his cautious sociological analyses were out of tune with the more radical general aspirations of the time. While existentialism (or what was understood by existentialism) was embraced by many, especially young educated Parisians, it was vehemently attacked from the intellectuals on the right, by the Catholic Church and by the Communist Party. It should be noted that although the Right engaged in polemics against existentialism, its impact was less than that of the PCF since it had largely been discredited because of its collaborationist activities during the war; it thus had far less political significance than the attacks of the PCF. The PCF viewed intellectuals in general with the greatest suspicion (see Chapter 2), and none more so than Sartre. Sartre, now a libertarian socialist committed to direct democracy and freedom, was the very antithesis of the Party intellectual, subject as s/he was to the rigid hierarchical discipline of democratic centralism and the cult of the leader. Moreover, despite a sympathy with the proletariat, Sartre was deeply critical of the PCF’s interpretation of Marxist philosophy and remained firmly wedded to his philosophy of human existence, at the heart of which lay the inescapable responsibilities which flowed from our being free. In the eyes of the PCF, Sartre was a degenerate petit bourgeois writer, the epitome of idealism and individualism who rejected the materialistic ‘scientific’ truths of Marxism, and who was a friend of the ‘traitor’ Paul Nizan to boot.57 The Communist Party attacks on existentialism began as early as 1944 and continued, with varying intensity depending on the political juncture, up until Sartre’s rapprochement with the PCF in 1952. For his part, Sartre offered three public defences of existentialism,58 and in 1946 published ‘Matérialisme et révolution’ (‘Materialism and Revolution’), his critique of the orthodox (i.e. Stalinist) interpretation of

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dialectical and historical materialism as propagated by the Party.59 While the PCF’s onslaught against Sartre contained examples of purely philosophical critiques of existentialism, the vast majority of the Party’s attacks were primarily political, aimed at undermining the popularity of Sartre’s existentialism. One of the prongs of the Communist Party attack on Sartre’s existentialism was its alleged links with Nazism through its association with Martin Heidegger. In ‘A propos de l’Existentialisme: Mise au Point’ (‘On the Question of Existentialism: a Clarification’) Sartre, while admitting it was regrettable that Heidegger had joined the German National Socialist Party, thought this might be explicable by fear, opportunism or a desire to conform, and stressed that Heidegger had been a philosopher before joining the Nazis. Furthermore he emphasised an important distinction between a philosophy which owed a debt to its precursors and the philosophy of those precursors. Marx after all, noted Sartre, took his concept of the dialectic from Hegel but that did not make Das Kapital ‘a Prussian work’.60 Sartre’s defence clearly failed to convince, as attacks in this vein continued and in 1948, Dominique Desanti was still referring to Heidegger as the father of existentialism and claiming that existentialism was historically linked to national socialism.61 These attacks on Sartre’s existentialism were part of the Party’s postwar strategy of promoting itself as the incarnation of French national interest. By smearing Sartre’s existentialism with the brush of Nazism, the Party was attempting both to discredit it and underscore its own national, patriotic credentials. While Marxist theory might have German origins and its most practical application be found in the USSR, Marxism was, the Party claimed, universal in its application. Moreover, much effort was spent portraying the Russian Revolution of 1917 as organically linked to the French Revolution whereby the victory of the Russian proletariat (and peasantry) over the bourgeoisie completed the revolutionary process begun in 1789 with the victory of the French bourgeoisie over the decaying reactionary forces of feudalism. The origins of existentialism on the other hand were held, not only to be ‘foreign’, they were German (Husserl) and fascist (Heidegger). Sartre’s existentialism was viewed by the PCF as the very antithesis of dialectical and historical materialism, and as the latest manifestation of philosophical idealism. In effect, most of Sartre’s critics in the Party viewed Sartre’s existentialism as the latest manifestation of ‘bourgeois thought’ or ‘bourgeois idealism’; it was, the Party claimed, the ideological representation of the decadent, decaying moribund bourgeoisie in


postwar France. With its faith in its own stability and security shaken to the core by the impact of World War Two, ‘no longer able rationally to manage the forces of production because of the increasing aggravation of the internal contradictions which dislocate the capitalist system’,62 the bourgeoisie was perceived as fleeing reality and in so doing embracing a philosophy which reflected its terminal decline. The links between the decadence of the bourgeoisie, of bourgeois thought and culture, and the ‘decadence’ of Sartre’s writings is a recurring theme in the PCF’s attacks on Sartre’s existentialism. The admission in 1945 by Henri Lefebvre, who liked to refer to existentialism as excrementalism, that he had read neither Sartre’s L’Age de Raison nor Beauvoir’s Le Sang des Autres did not prevent him from asserting that Sartre’s works stressed the pain of life rather than the joy. He further revealed that Sartre’s philosophy was rooted in the morbid, in decay and was quite in keeping with the decomposition of bourgeois culture.63 While the majority of Sartre’s Party critics accused him of being a philosophical mouthpiece of the bourgeoisie, there were those who stressed existentialism’s links with the petite bourgeoisie. For example, in an article published in 1947, Cécile Angrand wrote of graduates from the École Normale Supérieure who were convinced they would be members of the new elite, but as teachers encountered a deep contradiction between their high aspirations and relatively low pay and status. Their ‘discovery’ of existentialism allowed them, according to Angrand, to carve out a place in the sun under capitalism by making existentialism a commercial enterprise.64 As part of his commitment to freedom and his belief in the contingent nature of the world, Sartre was unable to endorse the Party’s ‘certainties’, for example, history seen as the inevitable forward march of progress, the dialectic of history based on class solidarity, and class conflict inevitably leading to the victory of the proletariat, the defeat of capitalism and the emancipation of humankind. For some in the PCF this was pure prevarication and typical of the petite bourgeoisie whence he came. For example, Roger Vailland, a Communist sympathiser writing in 1948, before he joined the Party, highlighted the links between existentialism and the petite bourgeoisie, an angst-ridden, abandoned class, caught between the power of the dying ruling class yet excluded from the vitality, the hope and the desire for struggle found within the soon to be triumphant proletariat.65 Roger Garaudy referred to existentialism as ‘an illness’66 adding that Sartre’s thesis in Being and Nothingness was rooted in metaphysical

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pathology.67 Elsewhere Garaudy noted that he had already criticised Sartre ‘for depicting only degenerates and human wrecks in his novels’,68 modelled, according to Garaudy, on ‘these dead souls, these aimless existences, these debauchers who can only brood over their impotence and their frustrations’ with whom Sartre was accused to fraternising in the cafés of St Germain des Prés and the night-clubs of Montmartre.69 In response to the Communists’ charge that existentialism dwelt in the sordid, and was more willing to reveal the wickedness and base facets of humanity rather than its positive sides, Sartre replied that while he recognised that there was nothing better than heroism, greatness, generosity and selfishness which were ultimately the very sense of human action, he remained suspicious of people who called on literature to paint a glowing picture of life made up of goodness and purity because of their need to believe that it was easy to do the right or good thing. For his Communist critics, Sartre’s view of the ‘individual’ was, like his philosophy, apolitical, ahistorical, asocial – a purely idealistic construct with no relation to the material world. ‘Sartre separates man from his natural and social environment and opposes him to it, making of him an isolated individual, an absolute subject with his raison d’être in himself’,70 wrote the Marxist historian Auguste Cornu. Sartre’s view of the individual was held by the Party to be the very antithesis of the individual of Marxist theory. For the Marxists of the PCF, it was impossible to accept this ‘pure’ individual, standing apart from a particular social class which, according to the Party, was further located within a specific mode of production within a clearly defined historical epoch. To pose ‘the individual’ as some sort of timeless abstraction was, for the Party, pure idealism and a denial of history. Another dimension of Sartre’s ‘abstract individualism’ attacked by the Party was his view of the core of his philosophy – human freedom – which, presented without reference to political, social, economic or historical conditions, was held to be meaningless and evidence of a refusal to recognise human progress. Garaudy wrote, ‘Uprooted from history, freedom is nothing but an ineffective ersatz. We are not naked savages without a past, arriving in a virgin forest in order to “choose” to be free. History exists, and we are at the end of its sharply defined trajectory […] We are neither the only ones nor the first ones to travel “the roads of freedom”.’71 By refusing to recognise the constraints of a class society the freedom of the existentialist became, according to the Party, only freedom for


the existentialist, a relatively privileged member of capitalist society. The proletariat, however, was not free; it was engaged in the fight for its freedom and the freedom of humankind in general; the existentialist’s ‘abstract’ freedom threatened to undermine this spirit of struggle and therefore had to be strenuously opposed. Quoting the opening line of Sartre’s article on the black years of 1940–4, ‘We have never been freer than during the German Occupation’72 Garaudy attacked Sartre’s conception of freedom as essentially negative freedom, the freedom to say no, the freedom to refuse. This he contrasted with the positive freedom experienced by those who marched, in a spirit of solidarity, towards the future intent on building the new world. When there is nothing to deny, nothing to reject, Garaudy argued, Sartre’s freedom is exposed as a ‘formless freedom’.73 Cornu captures well the Communist perception of this ‘formless freedom’: Existence reduces to a purely formal activity, the exercise of a liberty of choice which is not motivated by anything, is located in the absolute, outside of concrete activity, and answers on the plane of action to a conception of the world expressed by nothingness and absurdity. As choice has no object and no aim except for the individual who chooses, and as it is unpredictable anyway, the result is that human activity has a subjective and arbitrary nature, and action loses all its social import.74 If the individual was totally free to choose, as Sartre claimed, who was to say that one choice was preferable to another save the chooser him/herself? Henri Lefebvre, recalling in 1946 his youthful flirtation with ‘existentialist ideas’ in the 1920s, wrote that his philosophical position and his description of existence at that time gave him no basis for opting for one course of action rather than another.75 Later in the same book he argued that freedom as incessant and perpetual necessity was nothing but a luxury, a piece of pure self-indulgence. According to the PCF, Sartre’s view of the individual and individual freedom was intimately linked to the promotion of passivity or ‘quietism’, an attitude which passes the responsibility for action from self to others. Sartre rejected the allegation and asserted that existentialism, with its central tenet of existence preceding essence, implied quite the opposite. For Sartre, an individual’s nature is not a given but can only be created through action. In his lecture on existentialism, he reiterated that existence preceded essence and clarified some of the implications. ‘It means that man first of all exists, encounters himself, bursts

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into in the world and defines himself afterwards. Man as the existentialist sees him is not definable since to begin with he is nothing. It is only subsequently that he becomes, and then he will be what he makes of himself.’76 In ‘A propos de l’Existentialisme’ Sartre, attempting to establish common ground between himself and the Party, claimed that this view of the individual would have been endorsed by Marx. ‘Would not Marx accept our formula for man: to do, and in doing make oneself and be nothing but what one has made of oneself.’77 Needless to say, the Party vehemently disagreed and considered any initiative by Sartre to establish a rapprochement with Marxism as an attempt to subvert it. In his lecture on existentialism, Sartre had given an example of the type of comments put to him by Communists: Obviously your action is limited by your death, but you can count on the support of others. That means that you can count both on what others will do elsewhere to help you, as in China and Russia, as well as what others will do after your death, in order to take up your action and carry it forward until its realisation which will be the Revolution.78 Sartre explicitly rejected what he saw as the Party’s historical determinism (‘I do not know what will become of the Russian Revolution’79). Nor could he, given his belief in individual freedom, subscribe to the view that after his death people would continue whatever political work he or others might have been involved in. Nevertheless, possibly sensitive that he was exposing himself to further accusations of promoting ‘quietism’, Sartre added that he had first to commit himself, and then act out that commitment according to the age-old formula, ‘you do not have to hope in order to act’.80 For the Party then, Sartre’s existentialism was tainted with Nazism, removed from reality – its idealism finding its focus in Sartre’s ahistorical concept of the individual – and his abstract view of freedom and choice lacking any moral underpinning. His philosophy, it was argued, denied the importance of collective action and indeed positively encouraged ‘quietism’. The exchanges between Sartre and the PCF in the post-Liberation period reveal a Sartre patiently and reasonably responding to the criticisms and attacks directed against him by the Party only to be subjected to further and more virulent attacks. The underlying reason for the intensity of the attacks launched by the French Communist Party against Sartre and existentialism was that the Party (quite correctly) perceived them as a threat. During and


immediately after the war, large numbers of (primarily) young people had joined the Party but had not yet been fully integrated, educated or indoctrinated (depending on your one’s of view) into its theory and praxis. Moreover there were thousands more who were potential recruits to the Party. It was therefore essential from the point of view of the PCF that these people should not be seduced and wooed away from the party by what Sartre’s Communist critics admitted was the seductive appeal of existentialism with its emphasis on ‘freedom’ and ‘choice’. When asked, in 1972, why the PCF was so hostile to him immediately after the Liberation, Sartre replied: ‘It’s quite simple. In those days, I had a certain public, a clientele if you will, and they wanted it back for themselves. Period. I don’t think it was any more complicated than that.’81 Given Sartre’s popularity in the immediate postwar period and the concomitant popularity of existentialism (and a bohemian lifestyle which claimed to be inspired by existentialism), the PCF would only have considered working with Sartre if he had been willing to renounce his existentialism and uncritically embrace Marxism, which was clearly out of the question. Sartre would only have countenanced working closely with the Party if it had been willing to reform both its theory and praxis which was obviously impossible. The very idea of the Party contemplating for an instant a reassessment of its sacred texts in response to Sartre, of all people, was clearly unthinkable. The divisions over the épuration and the antagonism directed by the communist intellectuals towards Sartre’s existentialism were the two most important fissures which opened up in the post-Liberation consensus among progressive intellectuals. With the start of the Cold War, what had been tensions within the milieu intellectuel were transformed into a radical polarisation. There were those like Aron and Malraux who joined the anti-communist camp pitted against the communist intellectuals and fellow travellers who resolutely defended the USSR. Sartre and his colleagues at Les Temps modernes along with Mounier’s Esprit attempted to hold a position best defined as anti-anti-communism. The post-Liberation debates, however intense and polemical they may have appeared at the time, were to pale into insignificance compared with the conflicts which were to rage among French intellectuals during the period of the Cold War.

2 The Onset of the Cold War

No sooner had the Fourth Republic staggered into existence in November 1946 than France found herself caught up in the rumblings of the start of what was to become the Cold War. This polarisation between East and West would serve, with varying degrees of intensity, as a paradigm for world politics until the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. The key moments of the beginnings of the Cold War are well known but deserve to be briefly mentioned. As early as March 1946, while France was still struggling to establish new constitutional arrangements, Britain’s wartime leader, Winston Churchill, in his now famous speech at Fulton, Missouri, had identified an ‘iron curtain’ descending across Europe from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic. On 12 March 1947, the US President Harry Truman successfully appealed to Congress for $400 million in aid for Greece and Turkey by insisting that American interests were at stake in a struggle that pitched democracy and freedom against oppression and tyranny. Fuelled by the belief that communism thrived on misery and want, the US sought to avert the danger of an impoverished Europe slipping under the influence of the USSR. It was this fear that lay behind General George Marshall’s announcement on 5 June that the USA was prepared to finance the political and economic reconstruction of Europe. In theory aid was to be made available to all European states but the USSR used its influence in Eastern Europe to ensure that Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Albania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia refused the offer. The battle lines of the Cold War were beginning to be drawn and were about to harden. In September 1947 in the small Polish spa town of Szklarska-Poreba, Communist Party representatives from the USSR, Bulgaria, France, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia heard 34

The Onset of the Cold War 35

Andrei Zhdanov, member of the Soviet Central Committee with special responsibility for ideological issues, bury the East–West co-operation that had defeated Nazism. In the present conjuncture, asserted Zhdanov, the world was divided into two antagonistic camps – the imperialist, anti-democratic camp and the anti-imperialist, democratic camp. The former, spearheaded by the USA, stood accused of seeking to strengthen imperialism, preparing for war and opposing democracy and socialism. The anti-imperialist and democratic camp with its base in the USSR, on the other hand, was opposed to any imperialist expansionism and was committed to peace, the strengthening of socialism and democracy and the elimination of any vestiges of fascism. It was in order to facilitate the struggle of the anti-imperialist camp, that the conference launched the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform). Before turning to consider the positions adopted by French intellectuals in the early days of the Cold War, brief mention needs to be made of two important political developments in France. These were the creation in April 1947 of the Gaullist Rassemblement du Peuple Français1 (RPF) with which André Malraux and Raymond Aron were to be associated, and the expulsion from government of the five Communist ministers on 5 May. De Gaulle’s hopes that, following his dramatic resignation in January 1946, he would be swept back to power on a wave of popular revolt against the Fourth Republic remained unrealised. By 1947 he decided that history needed a nudge and on 7 April in Strasbourg he launched the RPF. The launch was followed by a series of mass meetings which sympathisers likened to American political conventions and critics compared with fascist rallies of the 1930s. De Gaulle hoped the RPF would propel him to power to save France from the danger of anarchy (engendered by the domination of political parties) and the danger of the Republic being swallowed up by a Communist dictatorship. By October the RPF was claiming a million and a half members, but despite winning nearly 40 per cent of the vote in that month’s municipal elections, de Gaulle’s hoped-for mass mobilisation failed to materialise. Despite a fairly rapid succession of governments over the next three years, a certain degree of political and economic stability was established which flew in the face of de Gaulle’s predictions of impending catastrophe, and the RPF went into terminal decline. The expulsion of all Communist ministers from the government of Paul Ramadier on 5 May 1947 was another indicator of growing unease

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within the political establishment about Communist motives and intentions. With the exception of an all-Socialist government headed by Léon Blum (16 December 1946–16 January 1947), the Communists had been members of all governments from 1944. As part of its reformist strategy, the PCF had consistently called for increases in productivity and through its opposition to strikes had been instrumental in largely containing working-class militancy. However in April 1947, fearful of being outflanked on its left by a Trotskyist-led strike at Renault, the leaders of which the PCF had denounced as ‘Hitlero-Trotskyite provocateurs in the pay of de Gaulle’, the Party performed a volte-face and declared that it was backing the legitimate demands of the workers. In government, the Communist ministers declared that they could no longer support the government’s economic and financial policies and were duly sacked. Like de Gaulle in 1946, they anticipated they would soon return. Like de Gaulle they did … eventually. But not until 1981. At the founding conference of the Cominform in September, the PCF delegation (like the delegation from the Italian Communist Party) was savagely criticised for having adopted a postwar strategy which was denounced as opportunistic with an over-reliance on legalism and parliamentarism. In the autumn of 1947, after its earlier removal from government and following its castigation at the Cominform conference, the PCF decide to show its mettle. Life in France continued to be hard. Industrial and agricultural production was increasing but slowly. Bread rationing, which had been lifted at the end of 1945, was reintroduced and between 1 September 1947 and 31 May 1948 was limited to a daily allowance of 200 grams. There was a large trade deficit (France needed to buy much and had little to sell) and salaries were failing to keep up with price rises. For example, at the end of October 1947, food prices had risen by over 40 per cent since April while wages had risen by just over 10 per cent. There was widespread bitterness that three years after the Liberation, living conditions remained dire. The level of discontent was expressed through unrest, strikes and demonstrations, leading President Vincent Auriol to record in his diary: ‘Everyone is discontented, workers and civil servants […] The madness is not far from panic […] This regrettable state of affairs is beginning to look much more like a real crisis of the régime than a passing crisis of governmental unpopularity.’2 It was against this background that the Communist-dominated CGT launched its autumn offensive. In November, building on the deep resentment which had already manifested itself, not least through a Metro and bus strike in Paris in October, a huge wave of strikes swept


through France. After riots in Marseilles, the northern coalfields came out on strike. The government ordered the security forces to use their arms to evacuate the pits and, for the first time since the war, strikers were fired on. Worryingly for the government, there were also cases of workers and troops fraternising. As the strikes spread to include dustmen, sewage workers, undertakers, public service workers and car workers, Auriol wrote: ‘We are on the edge of the abyss.’3 With violent confrontations between police and workers it now looked as if France was on the threshold of a civil war. De Gaulle missed no opportunity to attack the government of Paul Ramadier as lacking any legitimacy and of being incapable of controlling the ever-worsening situation. By the time Ramadier resigned (19 November), there were three million workers on strike. In response to Communist reprisals against strike breakers, the new government of Robert Schuman prepared a bill instituting prison sentences and fines for anybody found guilty of interfering with the right to work. The bill, thanks to filibustering and protests by Communist deputies, took five days to get through the Assembly.4 By early December, however, the strike movement was losing momentum and the deaths on 4 December of twenty people in a rail crash caused by sabotage helped turn the public mood against the strikers. A few days later, on 9 December, the CGT ordered a return to work. Against this background, we shall now examine the motivations and praxis of those French intellectuals who aligned themselves with the PCF, those who aligned themselves with de Gaulle and the RPF (Malraux and Aron), and those who sought to carve out a third way (Sartre and Les Temps modernes, Mounier and Esprit).

Intellectuals and the French Communist Party In his classic study of the French Communist Party and intellectuals, David Caute identifies five useful functions that an intellectual might exercise, which he calls the ‘principles of utility’.5 The first function was to bestow pure prestige or eminence on the Party through his/her membership of the PCF, e.g. Pablo Picasso or Frédéric Joliot-Curie, the joint winner in 1935 (with Irène Joliot-Curie) of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. The second function was the application of ‘professional excellence’ when Communist intellectuals drew on their expertise, hoping to influence other intellectuals and the educated community in general. This usually meant, especially after 1947, producing texts which reiterated the Party line. The third function was political agitation within professional bodies, front organisations or the Party press,

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which might involve, for example, signing petitions or being active in the peace movement. The fourth function was political journalism, and the fifth was to advance and guide the political and cultural attitudes of the masses. What the intellectuals were not to do, and indeed were prevented from doing, was to help formulate the Party’s political strategy or tactics. Although the intellectuals had their uses, the Party hierarchy, as we have seen, viewed them with the greatest suspicion. They were not considered as a social class but as a social formation with its roots in the petite bourgeoisie, an intermediate class between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie which, as we have noted, was seen as being particularly susceptible to individualism and opportunism. The intellectual could play a political role but only if s/he firmly and unequivocally aligned himself/herself with the political and ideological positions of the working class. In practice, given that the PCF defined itself as the party of the working class, this meant uncritical support for the PCF. In the period between the Liberation and 1947, there had been a certain degree of openness towards non-Party intellectuals. Despite the hard-line taken by the Party during the épuration and the attacks on Sartrean existentialism (see Chapter 1), the Party had allowed nonParty ‘progressive’ intellectuals to go into print in publications which it controlled. For example, Action, the best of the Party-backed publications of this period which was published weekly from September 1944, carried contributions from phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Julien Benda, author of La Trahison des clercs (The Betrayal of the Clerisy), the historian and journalist Edith Thomas, François Mauriac, photographer Robert Doisneau and Michel Leiris. Sartre was even allowed to publish a defence of existentialism, although it should be noted that this was in December 1944 before the Party campaign against him had really taken off. With the onset of the Cold War such openness was abandoned. Intellectuals were now required to produce material which was strictly in line with Party orthodoxy. Part of the PCF’s propaganda offensive had always been the extolling of the virtues of the USSR. Following Zhdanov’s declaration that the world was now divided into two antagonistic blocs, praise for the USSR (and the ‘People’s Democracies’ of Eastern Europe) became a central part of the weaponry to be turned against the ‘imperialist camp’. Now the paeans from Party intellectuals for the achievements of the USSR under the genial guidance of Stalin reached new heights.6 According to these writers, in the first socialist state in history, all social ills of crime, prostitution, alcoholism, homelessness, unemployment and


anti-Semitism had been, or were well on the way to being, eliminated. Such eulogies were employed by the Party to ‘prove’ to the working class that there was a better world worth fighting for and to draw those who did not (yet) support the Party into its orbit. Such writings further served to ‘prove’ the superiority of the peace-loving USSR over the bellicose, expansionist USA whose over-riding aim (supported by its allies – including the French government), was to undermine and ultimately destroy the USSR. The realm of ideas and ideology was, according to Zhdanov, an important terrain in the battle between, on the one side, the peaceloving socialist USSR and her supporters, and the imperialist capitalist USA and her allies on the other. Thus it was that Communist parties, including the PCF, sought to promote the ‘proletarian line’ and defeat the ‘bourgeois line’ in art, science, literature, history, philosophy, sociology, psychology etc. However, just as the intellectuals were excluded from any participation in the formulation of the Party’s political strategy and tactics, so were they also banned from formulating the Party line in cultural matters – even in areas of their own expertise. For example, the biologist Marcel Prenant, who was elected to the Central Committee in 1945, was appalled in 1948 when the Party had embraced the ‘materialist’ theories of biologist Trofim Lysenko in opposition to the ‘idealist’ theories of Gregori Mendel. (The Party finally abandoned its adherence to Lysenko’s theories in 1966 but Prenant had already been excluded from the Central Committee in 1950 for his refusal to support Lysenko unreservedly. He resigned from the Party in 1958.) Not only were intellectuals excluded from the formulation of the ideological line they were expected to toe, but their works were systematically subjected to scrutiny by Party apparatchiks who all too frequently insisted on changes to bring them more in line with the Party’s positions. The philosopher and mathematician Jean-Toussaint Desanti was one of the Party’s most orthodox intellectuals until his resignation in 1956. In the autumn of 1948 he prepared a paper on ‘Marxism and Science’ for delivery at a public meeting. Although approved by Desanti’s intellectual peers at a private presentation, it was rejected by two members of the Central Committee as too eclectic and for containing an omission that was both ‘incomprehensible’ and ‘inadmissible’. Desanti had failed to mention the name of the greatest scholar on earth – Joseph Stalin.7 Held in a subordinate position by the Party hierarchy, the Party intellectuals were viewed by the PCF as a useful, if potentially unreliable,

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means through which the Party could propagate its world-view. What is more problematic is why the intellectuals accepted this role. If we accept that independent thought is central to the definition of an intellectual, why did so many accept a role that was the very negation of this? To explore this fully would require a socio-political, psychological analysis which attempted to grapple with the exceedingly complex matter of individual motives and motivations. Nonetheless a number of reasons can be advanced as to why intellectuals were drawn to the Party and, importantly, why they remained there. An important factor was the very high prestige enjoyed by Stalin and the USSR in the postwar years, thanks to the role played by the Red Army in the defeat of Nazism, and the suffering and the sacrifices of the people of the USSR with its 23 million dead. This not only assuaged the unease felt in intellectual circles about the interwar purges and show trials, but appeared to vindicate them in that they had resulted in the emergence of a healthier, more powerful Soviet society. ‘Would millions of people have laid down their lives,’ Communists liked to ask rhetorically, ‘if the USSR was the sort of repressive society painted by its enemies?’ As has been noted the PCF too enjoyed high prestige as a result of its heroic role in the Resistance – at least after June 1941. Not only had le parti des 75 000 fusillés paid the human price for its commitment but in addition, the post-Liberation elections seemed to confirm its claim to be the party of the working class. To many intellectuals, History was on the march and they did not want to get left behind. The PCF, with the USSR as its inspiration and guide, appeared to many intellectuals to represent the future. When the Party issued directives it appeared to speak with the authority and the endorsement of the French proletariat, of Stalin and the USSR and its millions of citizens who were actively building a better world. When placed on the scales of History, any reservations or hesitations that an individual French intellectual might harbour counted for little. Many French intellectuals felt isolated, and working for the Party offered the possibility of breaking out of this insularity. This traditional isolation of the intellectual was often, in postwar France, closely related to guilt. There was the guilt that the intellectual had not done more during the Occupation. There was the guilt that the intellectual, while not an exploiter, was nonetheless a relatively privileged member of French society and, while sympathetic to the working class, was neither in the front line of the struggle nor exploited like the workers. Since the PCF was the party of the proletariat, joining the Party


appeared to promise a link with the class of the future. Although this link with the workers was more often a dream than a reality (the Party was very nervous about contacts between intellectuals and workers lest the workers be ‘contaminated’ with petit-bourgeois ideology), the image of participating in the struggle on the same side as the French proletariat was very powerful ‘[B]ecause the workers are at the heart of the just struggle for peace, national independence and freedom. Because the workers are at the heart of the just struggle which carries within it the future of the world.’8 The idealisation of the French proletariat helps explain the deference of the intellectuals towards the Party hierarchy, many of whom, like general secretary Maurice Thorez and his deputy Jacques Duclos, were originally from the working class. Even if an individual member of the Party hierarchy might appear mediocre or worse, he was nonetheless a member of the group that, thanks to a comprehensive grasp of ‘scientific’ Marxism, was ‘guiding the working class towards final victory’. The leaders were leaders because they ‘knew’, and it was because they ‘knew’ that they were leaders. Even Party intellectuals with an international reputation in their field of expertise like Frédéric Joliot-Curie felt over-awed by the Party: ‘Positioned at the very centre of the struggle with access, thanks to its activists, to all the facts and armed with Marxist theory, the Party is bound to have a better understanding than each of us.’9 This point is further illustrated by the reactions of Desanti to the criticisms levelled at his paper on ‘Marxism and Science’ and Prenant’s reaction to the Central Committee’s endorsement of Lysenko (see above). Desanti’s initial reaction was silence. He and his intellectual peers were incapable of replying and such was the weight of the Party opinion articulated by the two Central Committee members that Desanti was soon convinced that it was he who was wrong. His conception of intellectual work was not what the Party required, and it had failed to meet the Party’s political objectives. Prenant’s worst fears about Lysenko had been confirmed when he met him and concluded he was a complete imbecile and a phoney. Nevertheless Prenant was too attached to the USSR to say publicly what he thought of Lysenko and his theories.10 Marxism, or at least the version of Marxism peddled by the Party, offered intellectuals the same certainty about life and the future that Christian fundamentalists find in the Bible. By using a Marxist method of analysis – dialectical and historical materialism – the Party claimed to be able to establish a correct line on everything. Scientific Marxism revealed the meaning and direction of History and proved that the

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emancipation of the working class would result in the emancipation of humankind. Many intellectuals desperately wanted this to be true, and so wanted to be part of a project which would literally change the world, that they were willing to suspend all their critical faculties in the pursuit of this end. It was the demand that Party intellectuals cease to become independent critical thinkers that led Sartre to write in 1947 that ‘the politics of Stalinist communism is incompatible with the honest practice of literary craft’.11 This view was echoed by François Mauriac who wrote in 1950 that ‘Stalinist orthodoxy aims at the suppression of what we call in Europe an intellectual.’12 In order to play a full part in this great historical enterprise, the intellectual had to transform him/herself. Intellectuals were frequently criticised by the Party hierarchy for their ‘bourgeois’ lifestyle, culture, preoccupations and taste, and were constantly being urged to reinvent themselves as intellectuals worthy of serving the working class. It was not enough to be an intellectual and a Communist, one needed to be a Communist intellectual. The means to achieve this were to wage war against oneself, to rid oneself of any hesitations or doubts about the correctness of the Party, or the USSR, or the inevitability of a revolutionary transformation of society and to stamp out all vestiges of individualism and opportunism. Thus it was that joining the Party meant radically and fundamentally changing one’s persona. This was frequently done through a procedure of self-criticism and even artists from a working class background like social-realist painter André Fougeron were not spared this process as this particularly cringing example of self-criticism reveals. To summarise briefly with regard to the mistakes which I have slipped into making, I wish to say simply that what I have done best belongs solely and completely to the Party. And concerning my mistakes, or rather, my bad paintings, it is I who am mainly responsible for not having better assimilated the teachings of the Party … I will make very effort to correct my personal mistakes in my work … so that I will be able to bring to the working class and to the Party, as far as I am capable, works which are able to express my thanks to the Party of Maurice Thorez to which I owe everything and which I need in order to live as much as I need air and water.13 Concomitant with the criticisms and need to confess one’s ‘errors’ was an impressive menu of rewards which the Party was able to endow on those it deemed deserving of praise. Given the awe in which many


intellectuals held the PCF, one of the most valued rewards was praise from a leading member of the Party, perhaps even from Maurice Thorez himself. Endorsements from the ‘party of the working class’ confirmed in the minds of many intellectuals that they were making a useful contribution to the struggle and, importantly, that they were a part of a wider movement that would usher in the new world. The Communist intellectual, although destined to be inferior (in the eyes of the Party) to the workers, could nevertheless feel superior to those ‘isolated’ intellectuals who were not privileged to be part of the great project. Importantly, the Party also rewarded intellectuals materially by promoting the works (books, articles) of orthodox intellectuals and those fellow travellers whom it wanted to keep on board. An article in one of the many Party organs conferred a certain cachet on its author and selected literary works were aggressively promoted by the Party during its Bataille du Livre (Battle of the Books).14 Party publications also carried lists of recommended authors and their works as well as enthusiastic book reviews of selected titles. As well as raising the profile of certain authors in France, the Party also selected books for translation and distribution in the USSR and the ‘People’s Democracies’, where total sales could run into hundreds of thousands. While the material benefits to an author of such sales were minimal (the Party only paid royalties in exceptional circumstances), the status of any author whose works were distributed and read in the promised lands of socialism was boosted considerably. Huge prestige too was conferred on any writer chosen by the Party to visit the USSR and the ‘People’s Democracies’ and the privilege of visiting ‘the socialist paradise’ or one of its satellites cannot be underestimated. Furthermore, being an ‘approved’ intellectual also meant being a member of informal Party networks which could be of considerable professional advantage in those sectors, like education, where PCF members had considerable influence. Many intellectuals remained in the Party because, despite being frequently treated as inferior and untrustworthy, they found in the Party an atmosphere of fraternity and warmth that reinforced the feeling of belonging and of being useful. The Communist movement has often been compared to a religious organisation, with its infallible leader (Stalin), its ‘holy scriptures’ (the writings of Marx, Lenin and Stalin), its rites and rituals, its excommunications (expulsions) of ‘heretics’, and so on.15 The Party can also be compared to a demanding and inflexible father who set standards, and who demanded respect and total obedience. Thus Stalin was frequently likened to a wise perceptive father

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who offered guidance and reassurance to the junior members of the family. In return he was revered with ‘a love based on knowledge and recognition, confidence and admiration, a love shared by millions of people across the globe’.16 While the number of prominent intellectuals who actually joined the Party remained relatively low, the ‘party of the working class’ remained a powerful force in the world of Parisian intellectuals.

Aron, Malraux and Gaullism While the PCF bewitched some intellectuals and intrigued many more, there were others who from the early days of the postwar period made their anti-Communist positions clear. Two of these were Raymond Aron and André Malraux, both of whom were committed to the virulently anti-Communist Gaullist organisation the RPF, albeit with different degrees of enthusiasm. In order to understand Aron’s and Malraux’s involvement with the RPF, we need briefly to glance back to World War Two. Aron’s initial involvement with de Gaulle began with his decision to leave France for England on 24 June 1940 and his subsequent choice to remain in England with what was to become the Free French movement. In London, Aron was enlisted to help launch La France libre, a monthly journal which first appeared on 15 November 1940 and which became an intellectual and cultural rallying point for the antiVichyite and anti-Nazi forces in exile. Largely thanks to Aron’s efforts La France libre published contributions by intellectuals from across the political spectrum embracing the deeply conservative novelist Georges Bernanos (in exile in Brazil), and Communist Party members Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard. British and American luminaries including H.G. Wells, Harold Laski, Julian Huxley and John Dos Passos also contributed, as well as Polish, Czech, Belgian, Norwegian and Dutch émigrés. Aron collaborated with Stanislas Szymonzyk (Staro), a Polish ex-Communist, on a series of articles on military issues. In addition he published some sixty articles under the heading ‘Chronique de France’ (‘News from France’)17 in which he analysed the political, economic and cultural situation in Vichy France. These articles revealed Aron’s ability to apply to journalism the analytical skills he had displayed in his prewar academic work. They were widely praised for their clarity, precision and intellectual rigour and marked the start of a career in political journalism which he was to continue after the war.


Although La France libre became to be seen as the expression of the Free French movement, de Gaulle and his hard-line followers complained that the review was not sufficiently Gaullist. Although Aron never became anti-Gaullist during the war, neither did he become a slavish follower of le Général. While respecting him, Aron was also critical of de Gaulle for personalising the struggle of the Free French and was irritated by de Gaulle’s exclusivity and theatrical grandiose manner. In June 1943, shortly after de Gaulle’s arrival in Algiers, Aron published an article ‘Vive la République’ (‘Long Live the Republic’)18 welcoming the creation of the French Committee of National Liberation which implied that a choice had been made for ‘a liberal democratic and parliamentary republic and against a mystical, authoritarian “personal adventure” ’.19 In August Aron’s article ‘L’Ombre des Bonapartes’ (‘The Shadow of the Bonapartes’)20 appeared, which, although not mentioning de Gaulle by name, spelled out the links between Bonapartism, Boulangism and Fascism. Unlike de Gaulle, Aron adopted a more understanding attitude towards Vichy. Until November 1942, when the extension of the German occupation to the whole of France shattered any of Vichy’s claims to be independent, Aron criticised the Gaullists’ anti-Vichy propaganda as crude and excessive, believing that the correct approach was to try to win over as many Vichy supporters as possible. Aron’s success as a journalist at La France libre largely explains his refusal, after his return to France in 1944, to move into academia. He chose not to take up the university post at Toulouse that he had been offered in 1939, and did not apply for the Chair of Sociology at Bordeaux (which he almost certainly would have secured). Now, in his words, bitten by the bug of politics (le virus politique), he wanted to serve his country by contributing as a journalist to national debates. He intervened little in the heated debates around l’épuration (see Chapter 1) and when he did it was to analyse how and why intellectuals like Drieu La Rochelle and Henry de Montherlant had become collaborators rather than taking part in the main debate or indulging in personal attacks or a settling of scores. On his return to France, Aron continued to work on La France libre until September 1945, and from March 1945 also contributed editorials to a weekly, illustrated journal Point de vue (Point of View). This collaboration ended in November 1945 when he became directeur de cabinet (chief aide) to his friend André Malraux, who had been appointed Minister of Information in de Gaulle’s short-lived postwar government. After de Gaulle’s departure in January 1946, Aron spent from April 1946 until May 1947 working for Combat and then in June, following

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Malraux’s advice, left Combat to join the conservative daily newspaper Le Figaro, to which he was to contribute two or three articles a week for the next thirty years. One of the reasons for Aron’s departure from the left-leaning Combat was his decision to join the Gaullist RPF. Although Aron’s friendship with Malraux certainly played a part in this decision, there were three other factors that influenced this choice. First, Aron shared de Gaulle’s frustration with the in-built weaknesses of the Fourth Republic which he saw as an obstacle to the reconstruction of France. He had advocated a ‘No’ vote in the May 1946 referendum which, had the ‘Yes’ votes constituted a majority, would have resulted in an all-powerful single Chamber. He reluctantly voted ‘Yes’ in the second referendum in October only because he believed France needed a constitution, even if it was one about which he had strong reservations. Second, an important dimension to the RPF was its anti-communism, a recurring theme of de Gaulle’s speeches which carried dire warnings of the ‘Communist threat’ and attacked the French Communists as separatists. Even before joining the RPF in 1947, Aron had warned that the main threat to Western democracies came not, as many French people believed, from a resurgent Germany but from the USSR, a threat which the polarisation of the Cold War rendered even more serious. In 1948, Aron published Le Grand Schisme (The Great Rift)21 where he developed his views on the USSR and communism through lucid, calm analyses of national and international politics within historical framework. Despite the savage attacks on Aron by the PCF, he was never – unlike many other anti-Soviet cold warriors – a hysterical anti-Communist extremist: he recognised the virtues of the Party militants, the attachment of millions of workers to the hope apparently offered by communism and the need for social reforms. What he rejected in the name of his liberal democratic values was the totalitarianism of Stalinist communism which, like Nazism, was, in his view, a secular religion. A third reason for Aron’s involvement in the RPF in 1947 was his regret that he had not been more committed to the Gaullist movement during his time in London, especially after the Allied landings in north Africa in the autumn of 1942. Although Aron maintained good relations with de Gaulle during his participation in the RPF, he continued to hold different views from the general on a number of questions (e.g. Germany) and never subscribed to the views expressed by many of the RPF hierarchy that war was imminent. On the contrary as he argued in Le Grand Schisme if peace was impossible, war was improbable.22


He was never, as he later admitted, ‘a Gaullist in the way that André Malraux was’.23 If people were surprised that Aron, a socialist in his youth and a critic of de Gaulle while in London, should join the RPF, the alignment of André Malraux with the Gaullist project was for many even more puzzling. How was it that Malraux, the anti-colonialist, internationalist fellow traveller who had fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, had become one of the most enthusiastic followers of de Gaulle, the epitome of French nationalism and leader of the antiCommunist RPF? As with Aron, in order to seek answers we need to return briefly to World War Two. Mobilised in October 1939, captured in June 1940, Malraux escaped from his prisoner-of-war camp later that year and made his way to the south of France where he remained until the zone libre (Unoccupied Zone) was taken over by the Germans in November 1942. Despite visits from representatives from at least three resistance organisations (including a visit in 1941 from Sartre and Beauvoir who wanted him to support their resistance group Socialism and Freedom) urging him to become actively involved in the anti-Nazi struggle, Malraux declined. It was not until 1944 that he emerged, under the name of Colonel Berger at the head of the 2400-strong Alsace-Lorraine Brigade (ALB) which was to fight in the Vosges, participate in the defence of Strasbourg and be the first French unit to enter the liberated city. For the first time, Malraux the novelist and ‘man of action’ had fought with fellow-Frenchmen in France and for France – and in the case of the many members of the ALB, who hailed from AlsaceLorraine, for the return of the two annexed provinces. Malraux, who had always been haunted by death, was only too aware of the supreme sacrifice made by those in the ALB and beyond, including his brothers Claude and Roland. This, combined with a growing sense of national pride and commitment to the future of France, led him to consider what shape the new France should take and how it should be constructed. In January 1945, he expressed his public support for the de Gaulle government as the government of the Liberation and of the Resistance, and showed his determination to prevent a Communist take-over of the Resistance movement. Malraux attended the Congress of the Mouvement de libération nationale (MLN) (Movement of National Liberation) held in Paris at the end of January 1945, where he argued passionately and successfully against the fusion of MLN, the broad-based resistance grouping, with the PCF-dominated Front National (National Front).24

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Such a fusion would, according to Malraux, have resulted in a de facto Communist take-over of the resistance movement. At a meeting with de Gaulle a few months later, Malraux discovered that the man matched the myth and admitted to being impressed by the charismatic presence of ‘the man who was responsible for France’s destiny’.25 De Gaulle discovered that Malraux shared his views about the primacy of the nation and although Malraux’s anti-communism was less pronounced than it was to become only a few years later, he was already identifying a powerful, expansionist USSR as a threat to France. Shortly after this meeting he joined de Gaulle’s staff and in November 1945 was appointed Minister of Information. Two months later, Malraux followed de Gaulle out of government and fifteen months after that was at his side for the launching of the RPF. Despite being in charge of propaganda, Malraux remained a fairly marginal figure within the RPF, although he was useful to the movement by providing Gaullism with a left-wing flavour which helped support the RPF’s claim to be a broad-based political formation. It is useful to compare Malraux’s involvement in the RPF with that of another intellectual, Jacques Soustelle, the future governor-general of Algeria. Soustelle, General Secretary of the RPF, was an ex-student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure turned ethnographer, researcher and teacher who had, like Malraux, been active in the anti-fascist movement of the 1930s. He had joined de Gaulle in London and had been one of those ultraorthodox Gaullists who had viewed Aron with such suspicion. He now deployed his undisputed organisational skills on behalf of the RPF aiming to turn it into a political machine which would mobilise the French electorate and return de Gaulle to power. Malraux, on the other hand, the self-taught man with no university qualifications, had little interest in matters of organisation or political doctrine and was, on the whole, more interested in style and presentation than in content. In Malraux’s view, the essence of the RPF was that it was different from other political organisations and that it had a historical mission under de Gaulle’s leadership to re-energise France and allow her to take her place once again amongst the great nations of the world. Unlike Soustelle (and de Gaulle for that matter), Malraux quite happily entertained the idea of the RPF illegally seizing power by force if necessary. It was Malraux’s obsession with style and panache, coupled with these extreme views, which led many in the RPF to consider him something of a maverick which resulted in his relative isolation within the organisation. However, the commitment of the man of action, the resistance hero and prewar anti-fascist helped the RPF to


portray itself as not simply a right-wing movement, and Malraux’s skills as an orator and a propagandist were both recognised and appreciated by the members of the inner RPF circle. Unlike Aron, Malraux had little interest in detailed political analysis and many of his speeches and articles in this period are more like broad brush-stroke paintings on the theme of France as she was and as she could, and should, be. Like de Gaulle, Malraux held the mainstream parties in contempt, viewing them as negative and concerned only with their own selfish interests. He attacked the post-1947 Third Force governing coalition governments of the Socialists (SFIO) and the centre-right MRP for their dishonesty, weakness, insincerity and general incompetence which was undermining France and preventing her from realising herself. The other main obstacle to France’s selfrealisation was communism – the external threat from the USSR and the related internal threat from the PCF. Malraux’s anti-communism was of a different order from the hysterical paranoia which presented the communist threat through a reworking of the old ‘Bolshevik with a knife between the teeth’ bogey. This had been part of the imagery of the Right and extreme Right in France ever since the Russian Revolution of 1917 and had been given a boost by the social unrest at the end of 1947. It was also different from Aron’s anti-communism, which resulted from a measured and careful analysis of international politics. Malraux’s anti-communism certainly had an international perspective, but unlike Aron or the extreme anticommunists of the right, Malraux’s anti-communism was fuelled by a strong element of betrayal. According to Malraux, at the outset the Soviet experiment had been posited on freedom and social justice with a commitment to internationalism. But since 1917, the history of the USSR had been one of degeneration, a downward slide to a political system characterised by internal repression and external aggression. According to Malraux, the initial revolutionary energy within the USSR had been crushed. The freedom of individual expression at the time of Lenin, when Chagall was invited to paint the frescoes at the Jewish theatre in Moscow, had been replaced by an anti-individualistic conformity which was the antithesis of freedom of thought and expression. Artistic creators had been turned into producers of ‘orthodox’ art and literature while those who refused to conform were driven underground, imprisoned or physically eliminated. The secret police (a ‘dreadful necessity’ at the time of Lenin) had become an integral part of the Stalinist system, ‘forcing the citizen to adhere without any reservation to the ideology of the leadership’.26

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Externally Stalinism was the latest manifestation of a hegemonic and aggressively expansionist Russian nationalism which aimed to extend its power and influence as widely as possible. The strength of the formidable Red Army which underpinned the eastward expansion of Soviet influence meant, in Malraux’s view, that France (and the rest of Western Europe) was now facing a very real threat from the USSR. It was this shift in the balance of power that led Malraux to view the Soviet Union differently from the way he had viewed it before the war when he was a fellow traveller. As he told de Gaulle at their first meeting: ‘When a weak France is faced with a powerful Russia, I no longer believe a single word of what I believed when a powerful France was faced with a weak Russia.’27 In Malraux’s view, a country like France within the American sphere of influence posed an obstacle to the expansionist aspirations of the USSR. But wherever possible, the Soviet Union would rely on an indigenous Communist Party to subvert the political and economic structures of the country she wished to undermine – hence Malraux’s antipathy to the PCF. In 1947, Malraux observed that great democratic systems only existed in ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and Scandinavian countries which, he stressed, were countries without a powerful Communist Party. In France the PCF, at the behest of Moscow, had fermented disorder through strikes and mass demonstrations which Malraux predicted were but a prelude to more serious upheavals. Although the French Communists, whom he stigmatised as ‘separatists’ or ‘Stalinists’, may have lacked the repressive apparatus of their Soviet comrades, they nonetheless consistently attempted to silence their opponents through the disruption of meetings, physical attacks, lies and distortion. The PCF was a serious opponent but was not invincible. It was essential to take a stand against the destructive activities of the Communists, and the inability of the governing parties so to do was further evidence of their feebleness and it confirmed that the only political force able to combat Communist subversion was the RPF. Malraux was convinced that the apathy and indifference of sections of the French population would facilitate a Communist take-over. Thus he again stressed the singularity of the RPF, the only political force which could inject energy into the nation and the body politic and thus enable an invigorated France to repel the Communist threat and realise herself. Despite his scathing attacks on the PCF and his apocalyptic flights of fancy concerning the intentions of the USSR (accused of preparing to invade France) and the PCF (accused of preparing to unleash a national campaign of economic sabotage), Malraux retained, as we have seen,


respect and admiration for the Russian Revolution. However, his view of the betrayal of the revolutionary ideal, which he offered as part of the explanation of his turning away from communism to Gaullism, is somewhat disingenuous. The ‘betrayal’, if one wishes to adopt that perspective, was well underway by the time Malraux was a fellow traveller: the mass deportations and the show trials in the USSR were evidence of this. In the 1930s, Malraux had been attracted to communism because of its anti-fascist and anti-bourgeois credentials, and, like many other intellectuals, had preferred to believe what the USSR and the communists were saying, rather than confront what they were doing. Despite his opposition to the structures of communism – the PCF and the Soviet state – Malraux maintained his respect for those in France, especially workers, who had embraced the communist cause. For example, Malraux believed that what he saw as a campaign of communist subversion was essentially driven by ‘outside agents’ who were manipulating French workers. After his speech at the MLN congress opposing any fusion with the Front National, Malraux admitted to thinking of his communist comrades in Spain and the communist farmers who had hidden him during his time in the resistance.

The ‘neutralists’ Between the pro-Soviet intellectuals in and around the Communist Party and those like Aron and Malraux who were staunchly antiCommunist were to be found other intellectuals who refused to commit themselves to either of the two camps of the Cold War. For many of the ‘neutralists’ the main aim was to avoid another world war and at the same time to ensure that France maintained her independence and her security. As early as 1945, Hubert Beuve-Méry, founder-editor of Le Monde, was proposing a European alliance which would be located geographically, economically and politically between the USA and the USSR,28 and in 1946 he wrote: ‘France cannot and must not opt for American capitalism. She knows its flaws and whose future is certainly holding in store the same reverses (déboires) which had such a devastating effect on European capitalism. Nor can she nor should she opt for Russian totalitarianism which would be a negation of her whole history and her whole being.’ At the same time, Beuve-Méry added that, whether she liked it or not, France was no longer able, alone, to defend her ideas and her interests up to and into another war. She and her overseas territories should proclaim their neutrality.29 Beuve-Méry was concerned that if France aligned herself with the USA this would

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make war between the superpowers more likely and it was a war that would engulf France because of her geographical position. The debate over French neutrality continued beyond the very early years of the Cold War30 and we shall return to this theme in the next chapter. The remainder of this chapter, however, will concentrate on the politics of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Les Temps modernes. There are three reasons for this. First, Sartre was the most prominent of the ‘unaligned’ or ‘neutral’ intellectuals. Second, his sympathies for the USSR, and suspicions of the USA (which he shared with Mounier and Esprit) were a reflection of the prevailing mood of that cohort of unaligned leftleaning intellectuals who were neither members/sympathisers of the PCF nor left-wing anti-Stalinists. The doubts, uncertainties and dilemmas which Sartre, and his political guide Merleau-Ponty, expressed were therefore typical of a wider constituency of intellectuals in the early days of the Cold War. Third, importantly, Sartre (and to a lesser extent Merleau-Ponty) attempted to engage with a political praxis of neutralism within the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire (RDR) (Revolutionary Democratic Movement), which explicitly attempted to find an alternative to American capitalism and Stalinist ‘socialism’. The politically diverse editorial committee of Les Temps modernes which prevailed in the immediate wake of the Liberation reflected the spirit of unity of the times. However, such unity was to be short-lived, with Aron and Albert Ollivier soon departing for Combat and subsequently aligning themselves with de Gaulle and the RPF, where in 1948 Ollivier became directeur of the movement’s publication Le Rassemblement. Although Sartre remained the most celebrated of the Temps modernes team, it was the philosopher Merleau-Ponty, sympathetic to Marxism and maintaining reasonably good relations with leading members of the PCF, who gave the review its political direction. As Sartre was to admit in 1961 in a tribute to Merleau-Ponty, his own ideas in the immediate post-Liberation period had been confused and dangerous,31 and he had been happy to let Merleau-Ponty become de facto political editor.32 Although not tied to any political orthodoxy, Les Temps modernes saw itself as a radical force for change firmly rooted on the Left where it would be a clarifier of concepts, issues and situations. The members of the review were, in Sartre’s words, to be ‘hunters of meaning’. In order to explore in more detail the left-leaning neutralism of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, we shall consider their positions, and where relevant those of other collaborators from Les Temps modernes in relation to de Gaulle and the RPF, the USA, the PCF and the USSR. We shall conclude by examining the attempt by Sartre and, to a lesser extent by


Merleau-Ponty, to find practical political expression for their views through the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire. As early as December 1945, Les Temps modernes carried an (unsigned) article which analysed the October 1945 election results and, with reference to de Gaulle, evoked the danger of dictatorship. But it was the remarks in a radio programme broadcast on 20 October 1947 which constituted the most powerful attack on de Gaulle and the RPF.33 De Gaulle was not portrayed as personifying the Resistance but as the epitome of tradition, and of military and right-wing conservatism which was the very antithesis of the liberated commitment of Les Temps modernes. The radio broadcast can be seen as a reaction to the success of the RPF in the first round of the municipal elections held the previous day. The participants of the broadcast included members of the Temps Modernes team (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir and J.-B. Pontalis), and an actor R.-J. Chauffard, who played the part of a Gaullist. With Sartre and Merleau-Ponty taking the lead, the participants launched a merciless attack on de Gaulle and the RPF. Sartre’s opening remarks placed the electoral ‘triumph’ of the RPF in perspective by pointing out that 32 per cent of the electorate had abstained, which he interpreted as a large section of the population registering their dissatisfaction with all political parties. In the course of the programme, the participants drew parallels between de Gaulle and Marshal Pétain (their Catholic and army backgrounds, their skills as public speakers and their presentation of themselves as the saviours of France). Beauvoir, for her part, saw in the Gaullist-inspired comités d’entreprise (factory committees) close similarities with worker organisations created under fascist regimes to replace trade unions. She also denounced de Gaulle and Gaullism as constituting a threat to freedom. There were further strong words as the RPF was compared to the fascist Parti Populaire Français (PPF) founded in 1936 by Communist dissident Jacques Doriot, and a physical similarity was even asserted between de Gaulle, as he appeared on the RPF election posters, and Hitler. De Gaulle was further assailed, now by Merleau-Ponty, because he lacked a proper understanding of politics, and for his crude simplistic analysis of communism. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty castigated de Gaulle for whipping up a war psychosis, for presenting a war with the USSR as inevitable and using this fear to present himself (and the RPF) as the only means of saving France from the Russian advance. Sartre insisted on his rejection of the inevitability of war and, in what was to become a recurring theme throughout the series of programmes, refused to choose between the competing power blocs headed by the USA and the USSR.

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The radio programme also provoked a definitive break between Sartre and Aron, whose friendship stretched back to their time as students at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in the mid to late 1920s. After graduation Sartre had undertaken military service under Aron’s command; soon afterwards Aron, who had been studying in Germany, had introduced Sartre to phenomenology and the work of Husserl. Sartre then replaced Aron in Berlin (1933–4) while Aron took on Sartre’s teaching responsibilities at Le Havre. In November 1944, Sartre wrote an article on Paris under the Occupation for La France libre34 and in January 1945 wrote a very positive critique of La France libre for Combat.35 It was about this time that Sartre wrote to Aron envisaging a collaboration with him on a new weekly illustrated review36 and, as has been noted, Aron was a member of the first editorial committee of Les Temps modernes. Although the final break between Aron and Sartre did not occur until October 1947, evidence of strains in the relationship started to become apparent from 1945. Aron’s appointment as Malraux’s directeur de cabinet in the de Gaulle government in November 1945 contributed to his reduced involvement with Les Temps modernes and his last article appeared in June 1946. On 8 November 1946, Sartre took offence when Aron walked out of the opening night of Sartre’s play Morts sans sépulture (The Victors) with his wife Suzanne, who had been distressed by the scenes depicting torture. In February 1947, Aron gave a lecture on the relations between Marxism and existentialism, which argued that they were incompatible at a time when Sartre was trying in vain to convince the PCF that they were not. In the spring of 1947, as we have noted, Aron threw in his lot with the RPF, resigned from the left-leaning newspaper Combat and on 22 June the first of over 2000 articles he was to write over the next thirty years for the conservative daily Le Figaro was published. The Gaullists had been so outraged by the Temps modernes radio programme that it was agreed that two RPF representatives would have the right of reply and the right to confront Sartre on air. Sartre invited Aron to attend, and during the verbal onslaught to which Sartre was subjected, Aron remained silent, torn between his friendship for Sartre and his Gaullist sympathies. Sartre took Aron’s silence as a betrayal and recalling the incident in 1974 stated, ‘It was then that I realised that Aron was against me politically speaking. I considered his solidarity with the Gaullists against me as constituting a break.’37 Unlike the PCF who denounced everything American from Henry Miller to Camel cigarettes, Les Temps modernes adopted an attitude which was both more muted and more ambivalent. America had been


the home of Sartre’s childhood comic heroes, and as a young man he had developed an interest in jazz, American cinema and detective fiction. He had gained direct knowledge of the USA through his two visits in 1945 and 1946 when he noted the contradiction between individualism and conformism, wealth and thrift, pleasure and a deep sadness, a sense of well-being and anguish. He was particularly marked by the racial discrimination which he witnessed, and this prompted him to write La Putain respectueuse (The Respectful Prostitute).38 First performed in November 1946, this play denouncing racism was for Sartre an example of committed writing. It also led to Sartre being accused of ‘anti-Americanism’, a charge which he vigorously rejected. Between December 1947 and April 1948, Beauvoir published in Les Temps modernes a series of articles entitled ‘America Day by Day’ which resulted from her visit to the USA in 1947 and which were far more critical of the USA than Sartre’s articles written during his first visit to America in 1945 and published in Combat and Le Figaro.39 In 1948, Les Temps modernes published a series of articles on the Marshall Plan which culminated in an editorial in July.40 It argued that the Marshall Plan was an ambiguous project, and rejected the analyses of both the PCF, who opposed the Plan on the grounds that it was but a tool of US imperialism, and the RPF, who tried to incorporate it into its antiCommunist crusade. According to the editorial, although the Plan was part of America’s project to extend its political influence it was not ‘imperialist’ in the Marxist sense of the term and intrinsically was neither destined to lead to peace nor to war. The appropriate (socialist) response to the Plan was not to oppose it per se, as did the PCF, but to change its significance and prevent American capitalism from turning aid to Europe into a tool of imperialism. The question of American aid needed to become ‘the business of the working class’. In April 1947, the progressive Catholic review Esprit had adopted a similar position, arguing for acceptance of the Marshall Plan, which it considered indispensable to France’s economic recovery, but vehemently opposing acceptance if this meant France’s military and diplomatic subjugation to the USA. The answer, according to Esprit, was to view the Plan as it was presented officially – i.e. a purely economic project – and keep economic matters as separate as possible from political issues. This, it was hoped, would allow the development of an independent Europe committed to peace which would counter the growing Americanisation of Europe. In August 1948, following approval of the bilateral ratification of the Marshall Plan by the French government on 28 June, an article in Esprit adopted a far more pessimistic tone which

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reflected the hardening of the Cold War. Now the Plan was seen as turning France into a supplier of strategic raw materials for the USA as part of the preparation for a war where France would be the first and main victim. The Plan was now viewed as locking France into the ‘Atlantic bloc’ and reinforcing the polarisation of the world into two hostile camps.41 Although Sartre (and Les Temps modernes) were subjected to a constant stream of abuse from the PCF, he and the review refused to reply in kind. As Aron noted in his paper given at the Collège Philosophique in 1947 (see p. 54), Sartre and the PCF were engaged in a strange dialogue whereby Sartre’s declarations of friendship were constantly rebuffed.42 As we have seen, Sartre (and Les Temps modernes), while embracing a class analysis of French society, the concept of class struggle and believing that the working class held the key to the emancipation of humanity, rejected the notion of the proletariat having a pre-determined historic mission. And yet, the majority of the working class, Sartre had to admit, was wedded to the PCF and its deterministic materialism. Sartre was critical of the conservative and opportunistic policies followed by the Party after the Liberation as part of what he saw as an appeasement of the bourgeoisie; he also attacked the Party’s attitude towards intellectuals and political debate and gave examples of the methods adopted by the PCF: Persuasion by repetition, intimidation, and by veiled threats, by forceful and contemptuous assertion, by enigmatic allusions and ‘proof’ which never materialises, while exhibiting a conviction which is so complete and breathtaking that from the outset it places itself above all debate, mesmerises and finally becomes contagious. The opponent is never answered, he is discredited, he belongs to the police or the intelligence services, he’s a fascist.43 Not surprisingly Sartre drew the conclusion that the politics of Stalinist communism was incompatible with the honest practice of literary craft and added that since he was still free he refused to join ‘the watchdogs of the Communist Party’.44 The Watchdogs (Les Chiens de garde) was the title of a work published in 1932 denouncing the support given to the status quo by university luminaries. It was written by Paul Nizan, Sartre’s friend at school and at the Ecole Normale Supérieure who had joined the PCF in 1928, and who by 1937 occupied a key role on the Party paper Ce Soir. In 1939, disgusted by the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact, he resigned from the Party. On 23 May 1940, he was killed in action near St Omer. Nizan’s


resignation had unleashed a stream of unsubstantiated accusations from the Party which were still circulating after the war claiming that Nizan had been a traitor in the pay of the Ministry of the Interior. In 1945, Aragon refused to include any works by Nizan in a promotion of books, organised by the CNE, by authors who died for France, and frequently denounced Nizan in private conversations. In L’Existentialisme (Existentialism) which appeared in 1946, Henri Lefebvre referred to the idea of betrayal that permeated all of Nizan’s work. On 29 March 1947, a petition organised by Sartre and signed by some twenty-five intellectuals including Sartre, Aron, Beauvoir, MerleauPonty, Julien Benda, André Breton and François Mauriac appeared in Le Figaro littéraire, in Combat (4 April) and, accompanied by other related texts, in Les Temps modernes (July 1947). The petition called on the PCF to clarify its position on Nizan. Was he considered a traitor because he resigned from the Party in 1939, or because he was a police informer? If the latter, the signatories called on the Party either to support its allegations against Nizan or to stop attacking him. In the event, the Party failed to produce any proof whatsoever of Nizan’s ‘treachery’. Despite the ‘Nizan Case’, Sartre was still in the autumn of 1947 affirming his sympathy for the PCF. In a Tribune des Temps Modernes radio programme broadcast on 27 October Sartre stated: ‘Given that we are on the side of the working class, it follows that we are in principle sympathetic to the party representing it.’45 Sartre believed he had developed a revolutionary philosophy (Part Two of ‘Materialism and Revolution’) which avoided both the dangers of materialism (whereby the individual is reduced to an object) and idealism (which denies the importance of the material world). Sartre stressed the importance of human subjectivity interreacting with the material world in order to change it. Sartre aspired to a fusion between his revolutionary philosophy and the working class which he continued to believe held the key to the liberation of humankind. But while the PCF continued to ‘represent’ the working class, it was only through the Party that Sartre could hope to reach the proletariat. Unfortunately, these people to whom we must speak, are separated from us by an iron curtain in our own country; they will not hear a word that we shall say to them. The majority of the proletariat, strait-jacketed by a single party, encircled by propaganda which isolates it, forms a closed society without doors or windows, There is only one means of access and a very narrow one at that, the Communist Party.46

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The dilemma then for Sartre was that his remaining outside the Party underscored his isolation from the working class, while joining the Party was incompatible with his remaining a critical, free-thinking writer. The blind allegiance of the PCF towards the USSR stood in contrast to the sympathetic but not uncritical attitude of Sartre and Les Temps modernes.47 An editorial ‘Pour la vérité’ (‘For the Sake of Truth’), written by Merleau-Ponty at the end of 1945 and published in Les Temps modernes in January 1946,48 asserted that history had reached an ambiguous moment. Capitalism was unsure of itself and unable to project itself as a positive theory, while Marxism had ceased to inspire proletarian politics and within the USSR had been reduced to mere ideology, that is to say a collection of a posteriori rationalisations and justifications. The working classes of the world were divided both within and between themselves. As a result, the proletariat was too weakened to remain an autonomous factor of history and the class struggle was masked. However, this derailment of history was, Merleau-Ponty hoped, only temporary. There was a question-mark over the revolutionary potential of the USSR and the future of Marxism. The future would reveal its validity (or otherwise) and reveal whether the class struggle would once again become a vital factor in world history. In the meantime it was essential, Merleau-Ponty concluded, that care should be taken to do nothing which might check any revival of the workingclass movement. If there were a strike, one should support the strikers and, in the event of a civil war, one should back the proletariat and overall to do everything possible to prevent open conflict between the USA and the USSR. In the Tribune des Temps modernes radio broadcast of 27 October 1947, both Merleau-Ponty and Sartre identified the glaring discrepancy between the theory and aspirations of Marxism, and the so-called application of Marxism within the USSR. Sartre, writing in 1947, observed that, contained within the frontiers of the Soviet Union, the revolution had congealed into a defensive and conservative nationalism.49 But Sartre was quick to explain that this had been necessary in order to protect the achievements of the USSR. ‘She was forced to withdraw into herself … and to perpetuate herself by an authoritarian regime in the form of a revolution which had broken down.’50 Elsewhere, Sartre identified the backwardness of Soviet industry, the shortage of personnel and the masses’ lack of culture, as evidence that while the USSR had embarked on a revolutionary path, the revolutionary process was far from complete. While refusing to follow the PCF in its


adoration of all things Soviet, Sartre was unwilling to go too far in his criticisms of the USSR. The USSR remained a symbol of hope for millions of workers and Sartre had no wish to demoralise the French working class. Moreover, to have gone any further in his criticisms of the USSR could have resulted in his being perceived as having been coopted into the anti-Soviet intellectual camp. Thus it was that he offered explanations of the shortcomings of the Soviet Union while hoping that it would rediscover its revolutionary momentum. At the end of 1945 in ‘Pour la vérité’,51 Merleau-Ponty had claimed that he had had no knowledge of what had been happening in the USSR for at least the past six years, but by 1947 he had become more explicit in his reservations about the fate of Soviet socialism. In the 27 October 1947 radio broadcast, he admitted that the dictatorship of the proletariat would necessarily entail a loss of freedoms but that this was acceptable on condition that this was offset by revolutionary gains. He now accepted that this had not occurred and cited the banning of free discussion within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the widespread recourse to repressive measures. In searching for revolutionary gains, one found instead the maintenance of salary differentials, centralised planning executed with no consultation with the rank and file, and a persistent and generalised mood of alienation. Although more pessimistic than in 1945, Merleau-Ponty still refused to condemn the USSR, explaining these phenomena by the backward condition of the country in 1917 and the Soviet Union’s need to build socialism under the threat of and the actual experience of war. Merleau-Ponty’s unease about the USSR was made clear in his preface to Humanisme et terreur (Humanism and Terror).52 Here he admitted that over the past ten years the social hierarchy in the USSR had been considerably accentuated, that the proletariat played an insignificant role in Party congresses, and that it would be hard to claim that the USSR was moving towards internationalism or towards the withering away of the state and the realisation of proletarian power. Russian communism, he concluded, was increasingly strained and more and more revealing its dark side. However while Merleau-Ponty conceded that the revolutionary process in the Soviet Union had ground to a halt, he continued to assert that the Marxist critique of capitalism remained valid and that contemporary anti-communism resembled ‘the brutality, hubris, vertigo and anguish that already found expression in fascism’.53 He concluded that it was impossible to be an anti-communist and it was not possible to be a communist.

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By 1947/8, the position shared by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty was as follows. They totally rejected the psychosis of war promoted, for example, by the ultras of the RPF, with their hysterical scenarios of a Soviet invasion or a communist take-over of France masterminded in Moscow. They also rejected the PCF’s assertion that the USA was hell-bent on declaring open war on the USSR. However, they accepted that the Cold War was a reality – and an extremely dangerous one at that. There was a very real danger of France being sucked into an anti-Soviet European bloc as the governing parties of the ‘Third Force’ rivalled the RPF in their anti-communism and in their quest for dollars. Although the PCF was still playing the nationalist card and presenting itself as the bulwark against US economic, military and cultural expansionism, this claim was undermined by the Party’s subservience to Moscow. Faced with the growing polarisation, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre while remaining sympathetic in spite of everything to the USSR, refused to align themselves with either bloc. In 1948, both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty associated themselves with the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire (RDR), although Sartre was more involved than was Merleau-Ponty, who remained unwilling to jeopardise the good relations he still maintained with individual members of the PCF. The RDR, founded early in 1948 by journalists and militants from the non-communist left, namely Georges Altman, Jean Rous, Gérard Rosenthal and the group’s main driving force, ex-Trotskyist David Rousset, was a nascent radical political movement which appeared, like Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, to be advocating ‘a middle way’.54 The founding statement of the RDR set out its perspective: Between the rottenness of capitalist democracy, the weakness and flaws of a certain kind of social democracy, and the limitations of communism in its Stalinist form, we think that a grouping (rassemblement) of free men and women coming together in the name of revolutionary democracy is capable of breathing new life into the principles of freedom and human dignity by linking them to the struggle for social revolution.55 The founding statement made clear that the RDR had no intention of splitting existing workers’ organisations but presented itself as a rallying point where members of left parties and those of no party would gather together. This hope proved to be short-lived as the RDR was immediately denounced by the PCF, and the SFIO ruled that any member joining the RDR would be expelled.


In the course of 1948, Sartre made a number of interventions defending the politics of the RDR and advocating peace. The RDR, Sartre stressed, was not a party but a broad-based left grouping committed to preserving the revolutionary ideal and working to within a European perspective to fight for democratic, revolutionary socialism and peace. Such grandiose aspirations could only be realised if the RDR attracted mass support, but given the attitude adopted by the PCF and the SFIO it was hard to see where this support would come from. In the event the RDR’s appeal of March 1948 for 50 000 members a month turned out to be pure fantasy. Sartre later estimated that the membership of the RDR was between 10 000 and 20 000,56 but even this was probably something of an overestimate; according to a report to the executive committee of the RDR in January 1949, there were 1900 members. (This only included those who had officially submitted their names to the executive committee, so it is possible that actual support was greater.) The peak of the RDR’s activities came on 13 December 1948 when it organised a mass meeting at the Salle Pleyel in Paris attended by some 4000 people, and featuring a galaxy of national and international celebrities including Sartre, Camus, André Breton, the black American author Richard Wright, Carlo Levi, and intellectuals from India, Madagascar, Vietnam, Spain and Morocco. Merleau-Ponty had been invited to speak but Camus refused to share a platform with him because of what he viewed as Merleau-Ponty’s crypto-communism. Since Camus was more famous than Merleau-Ponty, the organising committee chose him in preference to Merleau-Ponty. In his speech, Sartre rejected the politics of the two antagonistic blocs and called for the construction of a unified socialist Europe built from below. Other speakers denounced fascism and articulated their commitment to freedom, internationalism, peace and unity, but despite such fine sentiments it was unclear what the RDR could actually do in order to become the effective mass movement it aspired to be. Under attack from the Left and the Right, and beset with desperate financial problems resulting from its inability to recruit large numbers of members, its political effectiveness remained limited. In February 1949, Rousset went to the USA in search of funds which he hoped to extract from the American trade unions. Following his return from the USA, Rousset set about organising an International Day of Resistance to Dictatorship and War. This was attended by 2000 at the Sorbonne in the afternoon, and by 10 000 at the Vélodrome d’Hiver in the evening of 30 April 1949, at the same

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time as an international peace rally organised in Paris by the PCF. Small wonder then that the RDR-sponsored rally was perceived as being a proAmerican rather than neutralist event. This perception was reinforced by the choice of speakers and the content of their contributions. The speakers included Sidney Hook, an ex-Marxist and now militant anticommunist who pledged his support for the Marshall Plan and the recently-formed NATO, and a socialist member of the Dutch parliament who also extolled the virtues of the Marshall Plan. There was a woolly message of solidarity from Gary Davis, an American who had declared himself to be a citizen of the world. Eleanor Roosevelt, the widow of the American president, and the author John Dos Passos, already on his way to becoming a staunch Republican and neurotically scared of Russia and communism, also sent messages of support. Another speaker, the atomic scientist Carl Compton, provoked uproar when he spoke of the good intentions of the USA in the use of atomic energy, and justified the atomic bomb as a weapon of peace. (It later transpired that the organisers had invited his brother Arthur Compton, a pacifist who had won the Nobel Prize and who, unable to attend, had sent his brother instead.) Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Wright had refused to attend, fearing, with justification as it transpired, that the meetings would become anti-communist rallies. It has since been revealed that the conference was funded by the Office of Policy Co-ordination, a branch of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) specifically committed to combating Soviet influence on the cultural and intellectual front.57 Despite their misgivings, Sartre, Wright and Merleau-Ponty did send a message, which was enthusiastically received by the crowd. In their statement, they declared that they sided with those who sought peace by peaceful means, and reiterated their opposition to both the effective take-over of Central and Eastern Europe by the USSR, and to the Atlantic Pact.58 The 30 April meetings were a turning point in the short history of the RDR and confirmed the RDR’s move to the right. In October a disillusioned Sartre tendered his resignation while the RDR slid into obscurity and died.

3 From Kravchenko to Hungary via Korea

The USSR and the camps A central theme of Cold War debate was the thorny question of the nature of the Soviet state and Soviet-style Communism. While proAmerican partisans seized upon each and every report of Soviet tyranny in the USSR to support their contention that the authoritarian oneparty system was the very antithesis of democracy, pro-Communists refuted with equal vehemence any criticism of the ‘workers’ paradise’ claiming that talk of repression in the USSR was pure anti-Soviet propaganda. The controversy over the nature of the Soviet state peaked with the Kravchenko libel trial, which opened in Paris in January 1949 (see below), but information revealing the existence of the Soviet camps had been in the public domain since before the World War Two – for those who wanted to read about it. For example, before the war, Boris Souvarine, ex-member of the Political Bureau of the PCF and former member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern, had, in his book Stalin, written of ‘the concentration camps’ which, he estimated, held in 1937 some seven million inmates out of a total prison population of around fifteen million.1 After the war, further evidence was supplied by the Soviet archives, initially seized by the Germans and subsequently appropriated by the Allies. In addition there were the testimonies of Russian officials who had defected to the West, the harrowing accounts of the million and a half Russian prisoners and the tales told by the 150 000 Poles who had escaped from the Russian camps and whose accounts were published in France and Britain. These revelations were dismissed by PCF mouthpieces as vicious, counter-revolutionary anti-Soviet lies designed to discredit the USSR 63

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in the eyes of the world and in particular in the eyes of the working classes of the world. Yet for those left-leaning intellectuals who were less dogmatic and blinkered, who had private reservations about Soviet Marxism and the USSR, the question of the camps involved considerable agonised soul-searching – witness the cases of Esprit and Les Temps modernes. The silence of the former led the revolutionary Victor Serge, who had supplied Esprit with information about deportees and the Siberian camps, to write on 7 March 1946 that the review gave the ‘clear impression of being a pro-totalitarian, pro-communist publication which ignored the crushing of man and the annihilation of truth by a regime which is essentially inhuman’.2 In January 1948, in an obituary of Serge, who had died the previous year, Mounier wrote of Serge’s obsession with the camps and the Soviet dictatorship and concluded that he was giving a false account of realities about which he knew nothing.3 Such an ostrich-like attitude can be explained by linking Mounier’s attitude to the camps to his and the review’s relations with the PCF. Like Les Temps modernes, but with a progressive Christian rather than an existentialist orientation, Mounier and Esprit refused to align themselves uncritically with either of the two power blocs. Mounier and his colleagues were impressed by the PCF’s disciplined organisational efficiency and by its opposition to fascism and colonialism as well as its commitment to peace. The results of the postwar elections had proved that the PCF was the party of the proletariat; it was the party of the poor and the dispossessed to whom it gave hope and for whom the USSR represented an alternative to the exploitative regime they knew in France. Esprit thus rejected any stance which smacked of anti-Sovietism or anti-communism which would risked discouraging the proletariat and pushing Esprit into the anti-Soviet camp. Whereas Mounier, although clearly disquieted by stories of Soviet repression,4 ultimately chose to refuse to believe them, Sartre (at least in private) accepted that accounts of Soviet repression were true. He attempted to process this by relativising Soviet repression by locating it the wider context of worldwide oppression, in particular colonial repression and racist oppression in the USA. On 29 October 1946 Sartre, along with Manès Sperber, Malraux and Camus, attended a small informal gathering called by the Hungarian intellectual Arthur Koestler, one-time Communist and now a militant anti-Communist. In a discussion, prompted by Koestler’s proposal for the creation of a new French human rights organisation free of Communist influence, Sartre insisted: ‘I cannot turn my moral values solely

From Kravchenko to Hungary via Korea 65

against the USSR. While it is true that the deportation of several million people is more serious than the lynching of a black man, the lynching of a black man is the result of a situation which has been going on for more than a hundred years. So it represents the suffering of just as many millions of black people over the years as there are millions of inhabitants of the southern Caucasus who have been deported.’5 In the October 1947 radio programme (see Chapter 2), ‘Communisme and Anticommunisme’ (‘Communism and Anticommunism’), Merleau-Ponty had declared that the concentration camp system was an integral element of the Soviet regime. In July 1948, an editorial in Les Temps modernes which has already been mentioned (see Chapter 2) admitted that ‘forced labour or concentration camp work … has become a permanent feature of Soviet production … and as a result the system has no chance at all of realising socialism.’6 However, like Sartre, Merleau-Ponty was keen to contextualise the question of the camps. Merleau-Ponty, still haunted by the spectre of war, believed it was essential to cease demonising the USSR and as long as the USSR showed that it did not wish to pursue bellicose policies the Soviet point of view on all issues should be taken seriously. Thus by the time the Kravchenko trial opened, the Soviet regime had been lambasted by the anti-Communists, passionately defended by the PCF and its fellow travellers, and had proven to be a subject of some thorny embarrassment for followers of the third way like Mounier and Esprit, and Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Les Temps modernes. When he defected to the West in 1944, Victor Kravchenko had been an official in the Soviet Purchasing Commission in the USA and two years later published I Chose Freedom, written with the help of an American ex-Communist author, Eugene Lyons. Subtitled ‘The Personal and Political Life of a Soviet Official’, I Chose Freedom was translated into over twenty languages with total sales of over five million and appeared in France in May 1947 as J’ai choisi la liberté.7 This damning indictment of the Soviet system exposed planning mismanagement, corruption, the devastating consequences of collectivisation, the Moscow trials, and the labour camps, leading Kravchenko to conclude that Nazism and Stalinism were but two sides of the same coin. In November 1947, Les Lettres françaises claimed that Kravchenko’s book had been concocted by the American secret services and, as a result of this and other attacks on his integrity in Les Lettres françaises, Kravchenko filed a complaint for criminal libel. The case opened on 24 January 1949, and for its two months’ duration, it became, in effect, a trial of the Soviet Union. Kravchenko’s witnesses included other

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defectors, survivors of the camps and the great famine in the Ukraine, and victims of the purges and state repression. Defence witnesses included intellectuals who were either members of the PCF or fellow travellers, the most eminent of whom were Nobel prize-winner Frédéric Joliot-Curie, the historian Jean Bruhat, the economist Jean Baby, the philosopher Roger Garaudy and resistance author Vercors. The defence argued that, by defecting in 1944, Kravchenko was a traitor to the wartime ‘patriotic and anti-fascist cause’, and also alleged that he was not the author of I Chose Freedom. The defence successfully discredited a number of prosecution witnesses, but more than met its match with the testimony of Margarete Buber-Neumann, wife of Martin Buber, a leading member of the German Communist Party. The couple had sought refuge from Hitler’s Germany in the USSR, but after the arrest (and presumed execution) of her husband in 1937, BuberNeumann was sent to a Siberian labour camp. However, after the signing of the Soviet-German pact in 1939, she was duly handed over to the Nazis who dispatched her to Ravensbrück concentration camp where she spent the next four years. She was thus well placed to offer a comparative assessment of the Soviet and Nazi camps. Despite the defence attempts to discredit Buber-Neumann’s testimony by insisting that, because the Siberian camp did not have walls, it wasn’t a ‘proper’ camp, many of those present were clearly affected by Buber-Neumann’s account of the forced labour, the fear, the threats, the cold, the hunger. Dominique Desanti, then a hard-line Communist journalist, recalls being shaken and haunted by her account8 and Beauvoir described Buber-Neumann’s testimony as logical, intelligent, and confirmed by numerous facts and carrying conviction.9 On 4 April 1949 the court found in favour of Kravchenko, and Claude Morgan, editor of Les Lettres françaises, and André Wurmser, author of articles attacking Kravchenko, were fined and ordered to pay damages. The legal question had been settled and so, for many, had the issue of the existence of the camps. As Beauvoir wrote: ‘Whatever lies he [Kravchenko] told, however great his venality and although the witnesses called were as suspect as he was, one truth did emerge from their testimonies: the existence of the labour camps.’10 And yet among the non-aligned Left there was still a reluctance to face up to the enormity of repression within the USSR. For example, in an article on the Kravchenko case published in Les Temps modernes in May 1949, Jean Pouillon wrote: ‘We do not really know what is happening in the USSR. To be more precise, even if we know some facts we do not know what a Russian thinks about his/her present and his/her future; we do not


know how s/he experiences life under the regime.’11 This search for the subjective perception of life in the USSR sits uneasily with the flurry of other works on life in the Soviet Union which were appearing.12 David Rousset, one of the founders of the RDR, had in 1946 published an autobiographical account of his time in a Nazi camp during 1943–5.13 On 12 November 1949 he caused uproar in the ranks of the PCF when he launched an appeal to all former political deportees to support a commission of enquiry into the Soviet camps. Five days after Rousset’s appeal, Les Lettres françaises published an article by the editor-in-chief Pierre Daix, an ex-inmate of a Nazi camp, accusing Rousset of factual inaccuracies, of inventing his sources. He further claimed that Rousset’s attempt to assimilate Nazi and Soviet camps was part of a project to rehabilitate Germany and launch a new attack against the USSR.14 Rousset, he concluded, was a shamefaced liar. After Kravchenko, it was now Rousset’s turn to take Les Lettres françaises to court. Unable any longer to deny the existence of the camps, the PCF now claimed they were re-education centres where deviants learned the importance of Soviet discipline, and it contemptuously dismissed any attempt to compare these with the Nazi work camps. As in the Kravchenko case, the prosecution presented witnesses, including the indefatigable Margarete Buber-Neumann. As in the Kravchenko case, Les Lettres françaises presented its arguments and witnesses and, as in the earlier case, lost. Les Lettres françaises may have lost both cases but the impact of the two cases on supporters and opponents of the USSR was slight. For the PCF and its supporters, it was unthinkable that the allegations about the purpose of and conditions in the Soviet camps could be true. Those who alleged otherwise were counter-revolutionary traitors, probably in the pay of the USA. For the anti-Soviets, the revelations of the cases brought by Rousset and Kravchenko simply confirmed what they had been saying all along. However, the trials did have an impact on those like Sartre and Merleau-Ponty who, while broadly sympathetic to the PCF and the USSR, had been trying to steer a middle path. In 1946, Merleau-Ponty had already grappled with the issue of violence under communism when Les Temps modernes published his series of articles entitled ‘Le Yogi et le prolétaire’ on the Moscow trials of the 1930s. This radical, anti-liberal defence of revolutionary violence, and a counter-blast to Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon (1946) and his ‘Le Yogi et le commissaire’ formed the basis of his book Humanisme et terreur.15 Although both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty had voiced criticisms of the USSR, these had been somewhat muted and restrained, and in

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February 1948 they felt obliged to distance themselves from a fierce left-wing critique of the USSR by the Trotskyist Claude Lefort which appeared in Les Temps modernes. In this article, Lefort broke with orthodox Trotskyism by arguing that the USSR was not a degenerated workers’ state but was state capitalist.16 Although the publicity from the Kravchenko and Rousset cases had increased the pressure on Sartre and Merleau-Ponty to take a position on the USSR, it was not until January 1950 that anything substantial by both men appeared. In the late autumn of 1949, Sartre was ready to publish an article in Les temps modernes on the Soviet camps by Roger Stéphane, but felt obliged to postpone this initiative because of Rousset’s appeal, with which Sartre had no wish to be associated. In January 1950 an article by Stéphane did appear17 where, after analysing the UN debates about forced labour, he explicitly rejected the amalgam that Rousset and others were attempting to establish between the Nazi and Soviet camps. In the same issue appeared an editorial on the camps signed, unusually, by both Merleau-Ponty and Sartre.18 The editorial acknowledged that the camps existed, that they were not institutions of re-education, and that Soviet citizens could be sent to them during an investigation without a judgement or time limit. The existence of the camps forced Sartre and Merleau-Ponty to call into question the nature of the Soviet regime, leading them to conclude that ‘there is no socialism when one citizen in twenty is in a camp.’19 Having accepted the existence of the camps, having rejected the PCF’s justification for them and asserted the incompatibility of the camps with socialism, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre then attempted once again to contextualise the phenomenon. The editorial denounced attempts by Rousset and others for trying to confuse Communism with Nazism, whose respective values and explicit aims were diametrically opposed. While conceding that the Marxist project may have become derailed in the USSR, the authors asserted that whatever the nature of Soviet society (camps and all), it remained on the whole situated on the side of those who were struggling against exploitation. The editorial also sought to place the question of the camps in a broader perspective by criticising Rousset for his decision to launch an enquiry into the camps in the USSR alone, thus ignoring repression elsewhere in the world. What, the editorial asked, of the repression in Franco’s Spain, of the deported Greek dissidents dying in the Greek islands, of the condition of the blacks in America, of the forced labour in the colonies, and of the victims of the colonial wars? While some claimed that the Soviet camps were the colonies of the USSR, Merleau-Ponty countered that


‘In that case, our colonies are – mutatis mutandi – our slave labour camps.’20 Sartre then gave the comparison a political spin: These camps have but one aim which is to make the privileged classes even richer. Those in Russia are perhaps even more criminal since they betray the revolution. But the fact remains that they were created with the idea of serving it. It may be that Marxism has been bastardised, that internal problems and external pressure have distorted the regime, perverted institutions and driven socialism off course, but Russia cannot be compared to other countries. You can only judge it if you accept its project and then only in the name of that project.21 In her autobiography, Beauvoir struck a similar note: Perfectly indifferent to the 40,000 people killed at Sétif, the 80,000 murdered Madagascans, the famine and the misery in Algeria, the burned-out villages in Indochina, the Greeks dying in the camps, the Spaniards shot by Franco, the bourgeoisie was suddenly heart-broken when faced with the misfortunes of the Soviet prisoners. Truth be told, the bourgeoisie gave a great sigh of relief as though the crimes of colonialism and capitalist exploitation had been annulled by the Siberian camps. As for Rousset, he had found himself a job.22 Les Temps modernes was still striving to steer a middle course. In Humanisme et terreur, Merleau-Ponty had tried to find a radical middle way between the anti-Stalinist view of Moscow trials as the encapsulation of a vicious repressive regime, and the PCF’s presentation of them as fair trials of traitors to the revolution. On the question of the Soviet camps, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre were attempting to offer an alternative analysis to the vitriolic denunciation of the camps by the antiSoviet cold warriors and their equating of Stalin’s Russia with Hitler’s Germany. They were also impatient with people who were keen to point an accusatory finger at Soviet repression, but who remained silent about repression in the colonies and in ‘friendly’ countries. At the same time, they refused to embrace the benign picture painted by the PCF of the camps as simply places of re-education for ordinary and political prisoners. In her autobiography, Beauvoir puts a favourable gloss on Sartre’s position on the camps,23 and in a later interview de Beauvoir went further and claimed that Les Temps modernes had not hesitated to

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denounce the concentration camps in the USSR and she even went as far as to claim that ‘we (Les Temps modernes) were almost the first to do so’.24 But not all observers shared Beauvoir’s perception. Indeed in July 1950, a second Temps modernes editorial25 was devoted to the question of the camps in response to a text by J.-D. Martinet which asked why the review had taken so long to adopt a position on the camps and forced labour, when information about conditions in the USSR had been in the public domain at least since the 1930s. The author of the editorial (Merleau-Ponty) replied somewhat disingenuously that, although he had known of the existence of the camps prior to 1950, the number of camps, their role in the Soviet system of production and the extent to which they were a distortion of Soviet state socialism was not known. Given the wealth of material that was available before 1950, this was scarcely convincing, as Merleau-Ponty himself almost conceded in the editorial when he wrote that perhaps he was too slow to understand. Ultimately it had not been Sartre’s courage or perspicacity which had led Les Temps modernes to take a public position on the Soviet camps: it was the pressure of political events, the steady stream of allegations against the USSR and the often absurd defence of the Soviet camps by the PCF. The reluctance of Les Temps modernes to take a stand earlier, like the refusal of Esprit, stemmed from a fear that to do so would irreparably damage the reputation of the USSR in the eyes of the workers for whom it remained a symbol of hope. Furthermore, to be seen to be denouncing the Soviet regime would have ended any hopes of maintaining a credible ‘third way’, since, in the eyes of many, this would have thrust these left-leaning intellectuals into the arms of the anti-Soviet cold warriors. It should be noted that Sartre and MerleauPonty were not alone in their attempt to place Soviet repression in a wider context. Edgar Morin, one of the few PCF intellectuals who refused to blindly follow the Party line and who was to be expelled in 1951 (although not over this issue), adopted a similar line of reasoning. Since I could not dispute the millions of victims of the NKVD, living or dead, I was keen to put these figures in a historical context, to relocate them in a larger framework of horror, a framework so vast that it became serene. The deaths resulting from Stalinist repression were in the final analysis far fewer than those of the [Russian] civil war, far fewer than those of the famine of 1921 and far far fewer than the 50 million dead of the Second World War for which capitalism was responsible.26


To support his argument further, Morin recalled the plight of workers under capitalism and people living under colonial oppression, all those who had suffered since the dawning of time. ‘I added together all the horrors of the past and the present to build a pyramid compared to which the pile of Stalin’s victims seemed like but a little mound. And I told myself that the world victory of socialism would mean the end of such crimes.’27 The lines of demarcation on the question of forced labour and the camps were now clearly drawn. For those who were in the proAmerican bloc, the camps and forced labour proved beyond doubt their allegation that the USSR was a police state. For the orthodox Communists of the PCF, the USSR was a priori socialist and therefore de facto superior to Western ‘democracies’. Morin noted that within the Communist paradigm, if you could talk about your experiences in a camp, you must have been a criminal or a counter-revolutionary to have been sent there in the first place. If you had left the USSR you were a deserter and if you wrote about your experiences, you must be an American agent. At the same time, those ‘critical Communist sympathisers’ like Esprit or Les Temps modernes persisted in their refusal to denounce the USSR and clung desperately to the hope that somehow the Soviet Union would recover its earlier revolutionary momentum. The Kravchenko trial had opened against a backdrop not only of the issue of continuing state repression within the USSR, but also the establishment of Communist control in Eastern Europe. In 1945, the USSR’s interest in Eastern Europe was essentially strategic and economic and while Stalin was keen not to alienate his wartime allies (especially the USA), he was willing to tolerate ‘progressive’ non-Communist political parties and publicly to entertain the idea of parliamentary elections. However with the entrenchment of the Cold War and perceived American aggression and expansionism as evidenced by the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, popular front-type coalitions were soon replaced by bogus coalitions which in turn gave way to People’s Democracies, pro-Soviet monolithic regimes whose coercive state embarked on a programme of massive and rapid industrialisation and the collectivisation of agriculture. The unfolding of events in Eastern Europe provided more evidence for French anti-Communist intellectuals of the USSR’s aggressive, expansionist anti-democratic nature. The intellectuals of the PCF, on the other hand, were quick to eulogise the newly-created People’s Democracies. For example, L’Humanité hailed the victory of the Romanian pro-Communist Popular Democratic Front in the March 1948 elections as a new defeat for the international forces

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of reaction, ‘the triumph of the desire for a better life and a lasting peace’ and further proof that ‘the forces of socialism and democracy are continuing their advance in Europe and throughout the world’.28

The Tito affair Communist repression moved into a new phase from June 1948 following the publication of the Comintern resolution condemning the leadership of the Yugoslav Communist Party which, as Le Monde reported, had the effect everywhere of ‘nothing short of a bomb’. The de facto excommunication by the Cominform of Marshal Tito, hero of the anti-Nazi struggle and second-in-command in the international communist hierarchy, was followed by a crack-down on any leading Communists in Eastern Europe suspected of deviating from (or thought likely to deviate from) the political line of subservience to Moscow.29 And it was not just Communist leaders who were targeted: it has been estimated that around 2.5 million people were expelled from the Communist parties of Eastern Europe and that between 125 000 and 250 000 were imprisoned.30 Tensions between Yugoslavia and the USSR had been simmering since 1945, generated by alleged Yugoslav criticisms of the Red Army and differences over agricultural policy. In addition, the USSR and Yugoslavia had deep differences over the terms of trade agreements between the two countries, and strategies for economic recovery. Furthermore the USSR was critical of Yugoslavia’s support for the Greek Communists, while Yugoslavia was concerned about Soviet infiltration of Yugoslav intelligence service and other institutions. What underpinned all these questions was the vital issue of whether Yugoslavia was to be an independent socialist nation-state or a socialist dependency of the USSR. Soviet–Yugoslav tensions escalated from early in 1948 as the Yugoslav leadership continued to resist Stalin’s attempts at Yugoslav subjugation, and came to a head with the effective exclusion of Yugoslavia from the Cominform in June. The PCF, like other Cominform parties, joined in a six-year antiYugoslav/anti-Tito campaign of vilification initiated by Moscow in which Party intellectuals were to play an important role. This campaign became even more hysterical after the publication in L’Humanité (13 August 1949) of the Soviet declaration that the Yugoslav government was behaving like an enemy of the USSR. The hysterical paranoid dimension was further boosted by the trial in Hungary in September 1949 of former Foreign Affairs Minister Laszlo Rajk, who was accused of being a police spy, a fascist and imperialist agent, and was executed


on 15 October. For example, Jean Kanapa claimed that Tito was the co-ordinator of all US spying activity in the People’s Democracies, while in his book Tito, Maréchal des traitres (Tito, the Traitors’ Marshal)31 poet, journalist and fellow traveller Renaud de Jouvenel argued that Tito, ‘the dictator of Belgrade’, had, with the backing of Churchill, established a fascist regime run by Gestapo agents and that, under the orders of ‘Titler’, forced labour had been introduced and concentration camps had been set up. Dominique Desanti accused Tito of being backed by the USA and heading a vicious, repressive anti-Communist regime; Desanti compared him with Mussolini, while Jean Baby and Victor Leduc claimed that Tito’s Yugoslavia had become the cruellest country of capitalist exploitation, run by a repressive police apparatus which was more powerful than the Gestapo.32 The PCF and its intellectuals set about their anti-Tito tirades with some satisfaction since they had not forgotten that it was the ‘treacherous’ Yugoslav leadership who had led the attack on the PCF at the founding conference of the Cominform in 1947. Now the PCF was taking its revenge. If the hard-line Party intellectuals loyally rose to the occasion, others close to the Party expressed doubts and reservations about the anti-Tito campaign. Louis Martin-Chauffier, a fellow traveller who had been elected President of the CNE, wanted to know why, if Tito had been a traitor since 1936, this had not been realised or revealed earlier. Claude Aveline, writer, editor of Anatole France’s works and another fellow traveller, was convinced that the USSR–Yugoslav dispute was the latest attempt by Russian great-power chauvinism to suppress national independence. He visited Yugoslavia in 1950 and expressed his support for Yugoslav socialism. Within the Party too the campaign against Tito was causing disquiet among those intellectuals who had retained some critical and intellectual integrity. Edgar Morin, who had joined the Party during the war, revealed in his autobiography that the Rajk trial was a caricature of the Moscow trials, which were already caricatures.33 He refused to believe that Tito was the key to the American spy network in the Balkans or that Rajk had been an informer for the prewar Hungarian police, the French, the Americans, the British and the Gestapo. Morin noted that the Rajk trial was a turning point in his disillusionment with Communism but it would be almost another two years before he was expelled from the PCF. Other examples of disillusionment with the Party line on Tito include the novelist Clara Malraux and the philosopher Jean Duvignaud, both Party members, who visited Yugoslavia and on their return resigned from the PCF.

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Esprit had initially taken the view that the split between the Yugoslav leadership and the USSR was essentially a matter for Communists. Thus, articles published in 1948 were attempts to establish why the Tito and the Yugoslav leadership had been excommunicated by the Cominform, to determine how much truth there was in the accusations levelled by the USSR at Yugoslavia, and so on.34 However, in the wake of the PCF’s increasingly hysterical anti-Tito campaign from the summer of 1949, there was a sharp shift in Esprit’s position. In the editorial of its November issue,35 Mounier warned that Communism, which represented hope for millions of people was, through its reliance on repression and insistence of the primacy of Soviet interests in its policies, isolating itself from the European working classes. The same issue contained an explosive sixty-page article by François Fejtö on the Rajk trial.36 Fejtö, an ex-member of the Hungarian CP and a friend of Rajk who had settled in France in 1938, had been active in the resistance and had since the Liberation worked in Paris as a journalist. His analysis of the Rajk trial was in stark contrast to the cosy, coherent PCF version of the trial as set out for example by Party hard-liners Pierre Courtade and André Wurmser. Fejtö highlighted the contradictions, lacunae and absurdities of the case against Rajk, in particular those of his ‘confession’. Rajk’s trial was soon followed by that of Kostov in Sofia, and Fejtö was to contribute his thoughts on the two trials in a short article published in the January 1950 issue of Esprit.37 In December 1949, Esprit published two more articles on Yugoslavia, both by fellow travellers of the PCF, under the general title ‘Il ne faut pas tromper le peuple’ (‘The People Must Not be Deceived’). The first38 marked the break with the PCF of Jean Cassou, poet, novelist and art historian, and was indicative of the unease felt by many intellectuals on the Left both within and outside the Party about the anti-Tito campaign and events in the People’s Democracies. Cassou, brother-in-law of PCF journalist André Wurmser, had been a fellow traveller since the 1930s, had fought in the Resistance, and had been president of the CNE from 1946 to 1948. He had also appeared as a witness for Les Lettres françaises at the Kravchenko trial. Now in his article, written after a visit to Yugoslavia, he defended Tito and Yugoslavia and denounced the dogmatic doctrinal pronouncements of Cominform propaganda. The second article39 was written by Vercors, another long-standing fellow traveller, the symbol of intellectual resistance during the Occupation, who, like Cassou, had appeared as a witness for Les Lettres françaises at the Kravchenko trial. In the opening paragraph, Vercors highlighted the disquiet that the Rajk affair and the Tito affair had


provoked in and around the PCF. Although on balance Vercors believed Rajk to be guilty, Rajk’s guilt or innocence was not, for Vercors, the main issue. What concerned him, and what he denounced in the article, was that the whole trial was a lie. Either Rajk had been a loyal communist and ‘facts’ in his ‘confession’ were therefore lies, or he had really been a committed anti-Communist all along, in which case why would he confess to being a traitor? Why did he make no attempt to justify, explain or defend his actions? If he was an antiCommunist, why did he not attempt to use his trial to denounce Communism? Vercors concluded that the people were being lied to and this he could not accept, here echoing Fejtö, who had concluded his article with the assertion ‘… lies, fiction, myths are the antithesis of the moral foundations and the life-conditions of socialism. Truth is the oxygen without which it cannot live’.40 In February 1950, Esprit published three articles by a trio of journalists who had spent three weeks in Yugoslavia.41 These measured eye-witness accounts, while not afraid to expose authoritarian features of the Tito regime, rejected as false the wild accusations levelled against it by orthodox Communists. Even before these three accounts appeared, the French Communists had been using their publications to hit back at Cassou, Vercors and Fejtö. For example, Les Lettres françaises published extracts of André Wurmser’s Réponse à Jean Cassou42 (Reply to Jean Cassou) which would appear in pamphlet form in 1950, accusing Cassou amongst other things of distorting history and being a political illiterate. It fell to Roger Garaudy to attack Esprit’s editor Mounier, and in a seventeenpage open letter published in 195043 he asserted, inter alia, that it was impossible both to engage in pro-Tito propaganda and be in favour of peace. Mounier was personally hurt by Garaudy’s attacks, and by the onslaught by other Communist intellectuals against Cassou, Fejtö and Vercors. In a private letter to Jean-Marie Domenach dated 7 September 1949,44 Mounier wrote that he hoped that the Tito affair might break the ‘totalitarian monolith of Moscow and re-establish the conditions for a pluralistic democratic socialism’. But at the same time he feared that Tito’s repressive regime was even worse than the USSR and refused to take up an official invitation to visit Yugoslavia for fear that anything positive he might write about the country would only deepen the despair of those held in Tito’s prisons. Given the severity and intensity of the Communist broadsides launched against Esprit, Mounier was forced to conclude, at the end of 1949, that a policy of collaboration with the PCF was no longer

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possible – at least for the time being. And this at a time when in Mounier’s eyes there could be no doubt that the PCF was undoubtedly still the only force representing the working class, and thus dialogue with it was indispensable. Despite the trials, despite the Stalinist camps, despite the dreadful personal and political behaviour of the French Communists, Mounier refused to join the anti-Communists. Mounier died on 22 March 1950 aged 45. An obituary, published in L’Humanité,45 recognised his attachment to the working class, his rejection of anti-Communism, his commitment to peace and national independence but it did not shirk from pointing out that recently Esprit had been praising Tito and indulging in attacks on the Communists and the USSR. It concluded hoping that Esprit would see the error of its ways and respond to the call of unity from the working class (that is to say become an uncritical fellow traveller of the PCF). Les Temps modernes also engaged with the Tito affair and published, in the issues covering March–May 1950,46 a series of three articles by Louis Dalmas, which were sympathetic to the Yugoslav experiment. These articles were to form the basis of his book Le Communisme yougoslave depuis la rupture avec Moscou (Yugoslavian Communism Since the Break with Moscow) which appeared a few months later, with a preface by Sartre. In his articles, Dalmas offered an impressive analysis of political and economic relations between the USSR and Yugoslavia, reviewed the accusations levelled at Yugoslavia by the USSR, examined the postwar economic reconstruction of Yugoslavia, and the building of a multinational federal state and a new concept of socialist democracy. He continued by examining the political infrastructure (especially the People’s Committees), considered the chances of Yugoslavia developing into another USSR, evaluated the theoretical contributions of Yugoslav Communists and the Yugoslav critique of Stalinism etc. In his preface to Dalmas’ book,47 Sartre recorded that he shared Dalmas’ sympathy both for what Tito was trying to achieve and his view that the outcome of the ‘Tito experiment’ was uncertain and unknowable. What especially appealed to Sartre was the subjective dimension of the praxis of Tito and the Yugoslav leadership which contrasted with the dogmatic deterministic ‘objectivity’ of the USSR and Stalinist parties of which he had been critical since the Liberation. While the passionate debate about Tito and Yugoslavia was raging on the Left, a new front in the Cold War opened up in Asia. As a result of an agreement between the USA and the USSR, Korea had been divided at the 38th parallel with the USSR occupying the north of the country, and the USA the south. By 1948 the division of the country had hardened


with the creation of the Republic of Korea in the south (July) and Democratic People’s Republic in the north (September). In the autumn of 1949, the situation in Asia was radically transformed by the victory of the Chinese Communists led by Mao Zedong and the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

The Korean War In June 1950, North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel and invaded the south, allegedly in response to an armed incursion. Taking advantage of a Soviet boycott of the United Nations over its refusal to admit (mainland) China, the USA was able to engineer the first UN vote dispatching a military UN force to assist one country attacked by another. Thus it was that the USA, Britain and other Western allies were to fight in Korea under a UN banner. The outbreak of the Korean War provoked a crisis within Les Temps modernes and led, indirectly, to Sartre’s rapprochement with the PCF two years later. When the Korean War began in June 1950, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were apart and were not able to compare their comments on the situation until a day in August when they met in the Mediterranean resort of St Raphaël. For Merleau-Ponty, Korea was the final straw. Since the Liberation, he had been growing ever more pessimistic about the USSR, but at the beginning of 1950 was still defending it because of its revolutionary aims. He believed he could continue to defend her as long as the USSR showed it was neither imperialist nor bellicose. The outbreak of the Korean War shattered the last of his hopes and illusions: For Merleau-Ponty, as for many others, 1950 was the crucial year: he believed he had seen the Stalinist doctrine without its mask and it was Bonapartism. Either the USSR was not the country of socialism, in which case socialism did not exist anywhere and doubtless was not possible or this was socialism – this abominable monster, this police state this country preying on others.48 Merleau-Ponty concluded that the only response to events in Korea was silence and that Les Temps modernes should not breathe another word about politics because ‘everything will be decided by brute force. Why speak since brute force is incapable of listening?’49 While Merleau-Ponty sank into gloom and despondency, seeing the Korean War as irrefutable evidence of Soviet war-mongering, Sartre’s reaction was to blame the war on the world leaders who had split

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Korea in two. A lack of reliable information meant that Sartre found it difficult to come to any firm conclusions about how the armed confrontation had started. However, writing in 1961, while conceding that the north attacked first, Sartre placed the blame at the door of the feudal interests of the south and the American imperialists. The north Koreans may have invaded first but they had simply fallen into a trap laid by the USA and its reactionary puppets in the south. Sartre’s view that the USA now posed a greater threat to world peace than did the USSR was clearly articulated at the end of 1950 in an article published in The Nation.50 At Les Temps modernes, Merleau-Ponty fell silent and with the silence of the man who had been its main political inspiration, the review temporarily lost its political direction and for the next two years relatively few political articles appeared and many of those that did were anti-American and broadly pro-Communist. The review had become, according to Sartre, like a boat without a captain.51 Sartre was soon to come to the conclusion that the only way forward for the non-Communist Left was to find a way of working with the PCF. This perspective became a practical possibility for him when, in 1951, he agreed to join the Communist-led campaign to free Henri Martin, a Communist sailor sentenced in October 1950 to five years’ imprisonment for distributing leaflets condemning French involvement in Indochina. In January 1952 Sartre secured a meeting with Vincent Auriol, President of the Republic, to whom he submitted a petition calling for Martin’s release and 1953 saw the publication of a book on the affair edited by Sartre52 by which time Sartre’s rapprochement with the PCF had become more explicit. The turning point in Sartre’s rapprochement with the PCF came with the repression of a demonstration in Paris in May 1952 against General Ridgway53 who had been appointed Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. Ridgway had replaced General MacArthur in Korea, where, according to the PCF, he had sanctioned the use of chemical and bacteriological weapons. For the PCF, he was thus the very personification of US militarism and aggression. The demonstration of 28 May 1952 against ‘Ridgway-la-peste’ (‘Ridgway-the-Plague’) had been officially called by the Peace Movement (see below) but was in fact planned by the PCF to be a violent confrontation with the police, which, in the event, had both its tragic and farcical sides. In the clashes with the police, at least one demonstrator was killed, over 700 arrests were made, and PCF premises and homes of militants were raided. Among those arrested was the PCF


second-in-command, Jacques Duclos. In his car, the police found two pigeons which, the police claimed, were to be used to carry reports of the demonstration to Stalin in Moscow. That the birds were dead and were destined for Duclos’ dinner-table somewhat undermined the police’s already absurd allegation. Sartre heard the news while on holiday in Italy. The news of the repression fuelled his hatred of the bourgeoisie. This, combined with his work with the PCF in the Henri Martin campaign and his reading of Henri Guillemin’s book on Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état of 2 December 1851, which led him to believe the French ruling class was again preparing a coup, propelled him to become a Communist fellow traveller. He was to remain a fellow traveller until the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. In ‘Les Communistes et la Paix’ (‘The Communists and Peace’),54 the central text of what he called his ‘conversion’, Sartre argued that the PCF was the exact and the necessary expression of the working class, which itself was the only force with the potential to end exploitation and usher in a new society. As for the USSR, Sartre asserted that he had looked back in vain over the past thirty years for any desire for aggression on the part of the Russians; they simply felt hounded and besieged, but refused to submit.

Sartre, the Peace Movement and the PCF One of the key roles that Sartre was to play as a Communist fellow traveller55 was as a supporter of the Communist-inspired Peace Movement. This organisation had its origins in the Combattants de la paix et de la liberté (Fighters for Peace and Freedom). This organisation was launched in February 1948 by a number of key personalities of the Resistance who were in or close to the PCF, including the painter and journalist Yves Farge, Jean Cassou, Vercors, Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie, Charles Tillon and Louis Martin-Chauffier. Its stated aim was to defend the Republic and national independence, to campaign for the end to colonial wars and to fight the dangers of creeping fascism. The movement was soon subsumed within the Mouvement des Intellectuels Français pour la Défense de la Paix (The Movement of French Intellectuals in Defence of Peace), born at the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace which held its first congress in Wroclaw, Poland in August 1948. The French delegation attending the Congress, comprising painters Pablo Picasso and Fernand Léger, the poet Eluard and scientist Irène Joliot-Curie, as well as fellow travellers such as Martin-Chauffier and Vercors and film-director Louis Daquin, was the most impressive group from the West.

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The Mouvement des Intellectuels Français pour la Défense de la Paix was charged with organising a World Peace Congress. This opened in Paris with Frédéric Joliot-Curie in the chair on 20 April 1949 (just over two weeks after France had signed up to the Atlantic Pact), and was attended by around 2000 delegates representing 75 countries. On 18 March 1950, the international steering committee of the Movement launched the Stockholm Appeal against Atomic Weapons which called for an international body to enforce an absolute ban on atomic weapons; it also demanded that any government using atomic weapons should be charged with crimes against humanity. According to the organisers, the Appeal eventually secured 14 million signatures in France as part of the 600 million signatures worldwide; this was despite a papal decree issued by Pius XII forbidding co-operation of any kind with the Communists.56 The international Peace Movement and its national components appealed to many who were genuinely concerned about the threat of another world war, but the movement was driven internationally by the Cominform (which launched its own campaign for peace in June 1949) and thus in France by the PCF. The influence of the Communists is evident from the interspersing of general appeals to world solidarity against war with specific denunciations of the Atlantic Pact, Marshall Aid and the new West German state. Leading representatives of the PCF may have claimed that the Peace Movement was a broad-based, complex mass organisation characterised by a large number of diverse positions and opinions, but the (unconstitutional) expulsion of JeanMarie Domenach and Jean Cassou in 1950 for alleged Titoist sympathies indicated otherwise.57 In December 1952, Sartre, in a personal capacity, attended the People’s Peace Congress held in Vienna. Here he addressed the opening session on 12 December calling for peaceful coexistence based on East–West exchanges, the reunification of Germany without changing the economic structure of the two zones, peace in Indochina and the admission of mainland (Communist) China to the UN. On 23 December he addressed a mass meeting at the Vélodrome d’Hiver in Paris and attacked the way the Peace Movement had been misrepresented in the mainstream press. Referring specifically to the Vienna Congress, he described it as ‘an extraordinary experience’, which with the Popular Front (1936) and the Liberation was one of the three moments in his adult life which had given him hope.58 In May 1954, after protesting at the ban on Russian ballet companies visiting France, Sartre travelled via Berlin to Moscow, where at a special


meeting of the World Council for Peace he gave a speech entitled ‘La Bombe H, une arme contre l’histoire’ (‘The H-Bomb: a Weapon against History’). But it was his reports of his four-week trip to the USSR, which began on 26 May, which revealed just how close to the Communists Sartre had positioned himself. Sartre’s accounts, as written up by journalist Jean Bedel published in Libération in July and, lacked any critical perspective whatsoever. The headline of the first article set the tone: ‘There is complete unrestricted freedom to criticise in the USSR and the condition of the Soviet citizen is ceaselessly improving within a society marked by constant progress.’ In December 1954, Sartre was made vice-president of the France–USSR Association and, although unable to attend the Congress of the Association, sent a message stressing the importance of friendship between the French and Soviet people. In the course of 1955 he was to pen a number of articles on this theme for the review France–USSR. Sartre’s rapprochement with the PCF had met with broad approval from the editorial team of Les Temps modernes, especially new members Claude Lanzmann and Marcel Péju, but led to a break with other contributors, namely René Etiemble and ex-Trotskyist Claude Lefort. It also consummated the estrangement with Merleau-Ponty which had been triggered by the Korean War. Merleau-Ponty had bidden farewell to Les Temps modernes with an article ‘Le Langage indirect et les voix du silence’ (‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’) published in July 1952,59 shortly after he took up a chair in philosophy at the Collège de France. In April 1955 Gallimard published Merleau-Ponty’s Les Aventures de la dialectique (The Adventures of the Dialectic) in which he developed his views on the theory and practice of Marxism. The longest of the five articles which made up the book was entitled ‘Sartre et l’ultra-bolchevisme’ (‘Sartre and Ultra-Bolshevism’). This was a powerful critique of Sartre’s rapprochement with the PCF and the USSR, in the course of which Merleau-Ponty criticised Sartre’s relation to classical Marxism, his conception of truth, his view of the relation of the individual to society (self to others), and his conception of revolution. 60 Although Sartre did not reply to Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, who had recently declared in a press interview that in her view intellectuals on the Left should work with the PCF, accused Merleau-Ponty of wilfully misrepresenting Sartre’s thought, of trawling through the right-wing press in search of anti-Communist arguments, of siding with the bourgeoisie and of falling victim to philosophical idealism.61 In 1956, after the Soviet invasion of Hungary, which ended Sartre’s fellow-travelling, there was a quasi-rekindling of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty’s friendship

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when both men met in Venice at a conference for writers from the West and the East. On 3 May 1961, Merleau-Ponty died unexpectedly, and the October 1961 issue of Les Temps modernes, devoted to MerleauPonty, contained a lengthy and moving tribute by Sartre to the man who had been the journal’s co-founder and, until 1950, its political guide.

Camus and Sartre But Sartre’s most famous quarrel with a fellow intellectual was the one with Camus in 1952. The two men were familiar with one another’s work before they first met in Paris in 1943 at the opening night of Sartre’s play Les Mouches (The Flies).62 After the Liberation the two had become good (rather than close) friends and Sartre had asked Camus to join the editorial board of Les Temps modernes. But from the outset differences of social and cultural background (Camus from a poor working-class Algerian family, Sartre from a literary Parisian petit bourgeois household) introduced a certain tension in their relations. Thus, while Sartre became the Parisian intellectual par excellence, Camus never felt at ease either in Paris or in the intellectual milieu of the capital city. Moreover, although Camus’ name was frequently linked with Sartre’s, Camus denied he was an existentialist and was opposed to the concept of committed literature.63 Although both men had been part of the anti-German resistance during the Occupation (Camus more so than Sartre) and both shared the general optimism at the Liberation, it was soon apparent that their political views differed considerably. Immediately after the Liberation, Sartre favoured a more extensive purging of collaborators than did Camus, and Camus’ willingness to sign the Brasillach petition contrasted with Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s refusal (see Chapter 1). But it was the onset of the Cold War which underscored their political differences. Camus, like the postwar Sartre, considered himself a man of the Left. As Sartre vainly sought some sort of accommodation with the PCF, Camus (in the autumn of 1944), while endorsing the view that anti-Communism was the beginning of dictatorship,64 was drawn to the Socialist SFIO and favoured a socialism based on a collectivist economic structure and a liberal-democratic political framework.65 Camus, while retaining his sympathy for revolutionary syndicalism,66 was more attached to the values and institutions of contemporary social-democracy than was the iconoclastic Sartre. An absolutely central tenet of Camus’ worldview was that there could be no socialism


without freedom and justice. It was his commitment to justice and freedom that soon led him to reject the version of socialism peddled by the PCF and practised in the USSR. Unlike Sartre and most other intellectuals on the Left, both within and outside the PCF, who came from a relatively comfortable background, Camus could not be accused of harbouring a middle-class guilt complex vis-à-vis the working class. Thanks to his upbringing on the wrong side of the tracks in Algiers, he had first-hand experience of working-class life and, unlike many intellectuals on the Left for whom the proletariat was largely a political abstraction, Camus did not view the working class as the force which would emancipate humankind. Furthermore his short time as a member of the Communist Party in Algeria in the 1930s had given him a direct experience of the cynical opportunism of Communist politics. Camus’ fear of a PCF takeover of the wartime resistance movement had led him, in January 1945, to support Malraux (see Chapter 2), and by 1946 he was agreeing with Malraux that the main danger to world peace came from the USSR, not the USA. At the meeting convened by Koestler in October 1946 (see pp. 64–5), Camus, following his humanistic principles, supported Koestler’s proposal for the creation of a new human rights organisation while Sartre, believing that it would be just another stick with which to beat the USSR, rejected it. Shortly afterwards, at the home of author and jazz trumpeter Boris Vian, Camus attacked Merleau-Ponty for what he saw as his justification of the Moscow purge trials of the 1930s in ‘Le Yogi et le prolétaire’. Sartre sprang to Merleau-Ponty’s defence and Camus stormed out. The break between Sartre and Camus lasted until March 1947. However, Camus’ attacks on the absence of justice and freedom in the USSR did not imply much admiration for the USA. Camus had visited the United States and Beauvoir noted in her memoirs that he seemed less positive about the USA than Sartre who had visited the States in 1945 and 1946, the first time at Camus’ invitation as a journalist for Combat. In March 1946 Camus left Le Havre for New York, where he was received by the French cultural attaché, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and spent time with Dolorès Vanetti, the mysterious ‘Dolorès’ with whom Sartre had had a passionate love affair and to whom the founding statement of Les Temps modernes was dedicated. He also met André Breton, leading member of the prewar surrealist movement who had spent the war in America working in the Office of War Information. While Camus appreciated the American attachment to freedom and happiness, and valued the generosity and hospitality

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which he encountered, he was soon tired of the USA (if not its people) and admitted that he never really understood the country. In November 1946, Combat published the first in a series of eight articles by Camus entitled ‘Ni Victimes ni bourreaux’ (‘Neither Victims nor Executioners’),67 the clearest public statement to date of Camus’ objections to Stalinism. The twentieth century, according to Camus, was the century of fear where those driven by an ideology like Communism, had used it a justification to torture, kill and lie. Rejecting the political/ideological certainties of both the ‘democratic’ USA and the ‘revolutionary’ USSR, Camus called for international dialogue and a rejection of the servitude, lies and injustice which prevented it from taking place. Placing the value of human life above political abstractions and ideologies, Camus believed it was inadmissible to kill in the name of ‘the revolution’ – but also in the name of ‘justice’ or ‘democracy’. Murder, legal or other, may be inevitable but it could never be justified. The dividing line was not between Communism and capitalism, or West and East, or the USA and the USSR, but between those who were willing to be murderers and those, like Camus, who refused. Both Sartre and Camus were drawn to the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire although Sartre’s involvement was greater than that of Camus. While Camus identified with the RDR’s general aims, he was unhappy about Merleau-Ponty’s involvement and, as has been noted, refused to share a platform with him at the meeting organised by the RDR in Paris in December 1948. Sartre and Camus drew closer during the rehearsals of Sartre’s play Le Diable et le bon dieu (The Devil and the Good Lord ) which opened on 7 June 1951, and on 22 February 1952 both men shared a platform at a meeting in Paris in support of a group of Spanish trade unionists sentenced to death by the Franco regime. In the meantime, however, Camus’ L’Homme révolté (The Rebel) had appeared (October 1951); this was to provoke a final showdown between Camus and Sartre. The details of this rupture are well-known and so will be but briefly summarised here. The essence of L’Homme révolté is a radical (and Camus believed leftwing) denunciation of the concept of revolution. Taking the French and Russian revolutions as examples, Camus portrayed them as the antitheses of freedom, sliding from revolutionary idealism into dogma and repression. Not surprisingly, given the context of the Cold War and Camus’ unambiguous stand against Stalinism, the book was well received in the conservative press, but at Les Temps modernes it was a different matter altogether.


After much embarrassed prevarication Francis Jeanson, who had replaced Merleau-Ponty as manager of Les Temps modernes, was designated to write a review of Camus’ book and this was duly published in the May 1952 issue.68 Although Sartre had warned Camus in February that the treatment of his book would not be favourable, Camus was clearly stung by the vehemence of Jeanson’s twenty-one-page critique, in which he accused Camus of writing a pseudo-philosophy of revolution, of rejecting history and of adopting the stance of a moralising idealist who wanted to replace ‘revolution’ by a politically pure ‘revolt’, but a revolt that, in Jeanson’s view, could never go beyond the metaphysical. The August issue of Les Temps modernes published Camus’ rather cold twenty-page reply, ‘Lettre au directeur des Temps modernes (‘Letter to the Directeur of Les Temps modernes).69 This was followed by a new text by Jeanson70 and a bitter riposte to Camus’ letter by Sartre.71 In his ‘Lettre au directeur’, Camus had admitted to being rather tired of seeing himself and especially seasoned political activists endlessly receiving lessons on how to be effective from critics who had only ever placed their armchairs to face the way history was heading. Sartre took this as a clear dig at him and counter-attacked. Sartre castigated Camus’ sanctimonious superiority, noting that when Camus deigned to contribute to the current issue of the review he brought with him ‘his portable pedestal’. He attacked Camus’ formality (‘You call me Monsieur le Directeur when everyone knows we have been friends for ten years’), accused him of being devious (‘You write to me when it is obvious you want to reply to Jeanson’), and of making Jeanson out to be a liar and a traitor. He called L’Homme révolté ‘a rag-bag of hastily cobbled together second-hand knowledge’, which revealed Camus’ ‘vague and banal thoughts’ and his ‘philosophical ignorance’. And he attacked Camus’ self-appointed role as the defender of the oppressed. ‘It is possible that you were once poor’, he wrote, ‘but you are poor no longer. You are a bourgeois like Jeanson and I.’72 Sartre believed that Camus ignored the class struggle and he rejected as a lie Camus’ insinuation that he (Sartre) had never denounced the Soviet camps. He then reiterated his view that the camps were inadmissible but added that the daily exploitation of the issue by the bourgeois press was equally inadmissible. At the heart of Sartre’s onslaught lay his contention that he was prepared to assume his responsibility as a part of History, to have a public political praxis in concert with others – even those like the PCF with whom he had certain differences – to get

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his hands dirty, as it were. Camus, on the other hand according to Sartre, persisted in standing on the sidelines adhering to pure principles, refusing to participate in specific concrete political struggles and preferring to wring his hands in anguish as he despaired at the cruelty and brutality of humanity. Thus several years into the Cold War, both Camus and Sartre recognised that there were inequities in both blocs, but whereas Camus emphasised those of the USSR and its satellites, Sartre turned his guns on those in the Western camp. By 1952, Sartre was unable to envisage any radical socialist transformation without Communist involvement and was committed to a violent, revolutionary transformation of society. Like Sartre, Camus hoped for a better world but rejected revolution, and denounced the Communist movement as a tyranny driven by an ideology where ends were cynically used to justify means. If Sartre passionately subscribed to an iconoclastic Communist revolution, Camus just as passionately rejected it.

Meanwhile on the Right … As was indicated in the Introduction, it was the Left that dominated the postwar intellectual milieu in France where the USSR and PCF were constant reference points. Should the intellectual join the Communist Party? If not, how was s/he to position himself in relation to the Party? What position was s/he to adopt with regard to the USSR? The camps? Tito? But although the Left dominated the intellectual discourse of the postwar period, this is not to say that those on the Right were silent or inactive. On the contrary Nicholas Hewitt argues that it is possible to detect, as early as the summer of 1944, ‘the existence of a flourishing extreme right wing, implacably opposed to the regimes which emerged from the Resistance and totally unrepentant about the Right’s collaborationist policies from 1940 to 1944’.73 However, in my view, it was really only after the amnesties granted for collaboration in the early 1950s that the Right started seriously to impact upon the literary scene. One vehicle that the radical Right used was the Revue de la Table Ronde, founded in 1948, which aimed to replace the Nouvelle Revue française of the interwar years and specifically to counter the influence of Sartre and Les Temps modernes. La Table ronde was anti-Communist and specifically opposed to Sartrean ‘commitment’ and initially its editorial committee included François Mauriac, Jean Paulhan (one of the earliest opponents of ‘committed literature’), Albert Camus, Thierry


Maulnier, Raymond Aron and (briefly) André Malraux. It was La Table ronde that became instrumental in popularising Roger Nimier, Jacques Laurent, Michel Déon and Antoine Blondin, known collectively as les Hussards. Despite a claim to be ‘apolitical’, les Hussards shared a resolute opposition to what they saw as Sartre’s ‘intellectual terrorism’, a passionate anti-Communism, and a belief in virility, elitism and nationalism. Eventually tensions at La Table ronde between the younger more extreme members of the radical Right and the older generation, typified by Mauriac, reached a head and in 1954, Mauriac departed for L’Express. As Mauriac recalled: ‘Never did a hen hatch so many nonconformist extreme right-wing ducks.’74 While les Hussards denied that they were ‘political’, others were less circumspect. On 26 June 1950, as Communist forces from the north moved into south Korea, the Congrès pour la Liberté de la Culture (The Congress for Cultural Freedom) opened in the American sector of Berlin. It was no coincidence that Berlin, the divided city deep in the heart of what was now the German Democratic Republic, the city which survived the Soviet-imposed blockade (June 1948–May 1949), had been chosen as the venue for the first international congress in defence of freedom of thought and expression. The main organisers of the Congress, a Western riposte to the 1948 Communist Wroclaw congress, were Melvin Lasky, an American living in Germany and founder of the review Der Monat (The Month), Sidney Hook and James Burnham, both ex-Trotskyists, now militant antiCommunists, Arthur Koestler, and Irving Brown, the European representative of the American Federation of Labour (AFL). Most of those attending the Congress were American or German, but a number of French intellectuals were also present including David Rousset, Georges Altman, the novelist Jules Romains and Claude Mauriac. French intellectuals, including André Gide, François Mauriac, Georges Duhamel, Albert Camus and Raymond Aron, were also members of the 38-person International Committee, which sponsored the Congress. The recurring themes of the Congress were exaltations of cultural, artistic and scientific freedom, denunciations of the Soviet camps (Rousset’s campaign was still in full flow) and other examples of Soviet tyranny. The main target of the Congress was not committed Communists but those intellectuals who persisted in holding neutralist positions. In his intervention at the Congress, later published as ‘Impostures de la neutralité’,75 Raymond Aron argued that, faced with the new totalitarian threat, the West should learn the lessons of the 1930s, assert its unity and proclaim its determination to oppose any armed Soviet

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aggression. The only viable policy for peace was for the West to show that it was prepared for the possibility of total war; ‘neutralism’ with its overtones of sympathy for the USSR would only encourage Soviet aggression. The continuing importance of Sartre and Les Temps modernes in this context was made clear in 1951. In February, at a meeting at Versailles, the Executive Committee of the Congress discussed the need to establish a French review which could compete with Les Temps modernes and woo people away from Sartre’s influence. ‘What they were really obsessed with was Sartre and Beauvoir. That was “the other side”’.76 In March 1951, the first issue of Preuves appeared. Its aim was to defend and embody the freedom of critical and creative thought and publish proof (preuves) of totalitarian oppression. It went on to publish personal testimonies from intellectuals on the other side of the Iron Curtain, and provided a forum for East Europeans whose writings were banned in their own country. It also offered its readers some of the more extreme Zhdanovian tirades translated from Soviet publications like Novy Mir and, in addition, took great delight in pointing out that the works of Marx were subject to Soviet censorship, as were those of Gorky and Chekhov. Preuves saw itself as a forum for intellectual debate; its contents would be proof (preuves again) of the critical and creative spirit, a vital weapon in the struggle against dogma, propaganda and the state control of thought and expression. In the field of international relations, the review favoured Franco-German rapprochement and the building of a united Europe; later, perhaps surprisingly, it supported independence for the countries of the Maghreb. The list of contributors to Preuves was impressive; it included novelists Koestler, Malraux and George Orwell, philosophers Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers and Isaiah Berlin, ex-Communists Franz Borkenau, Boris Souvarine and Manès Sperber, later to be joined by Edgar Morin, Jean Duvignaud and Annie Kriegel after their expulsions from the PCF. As Ian Birchall has noted, it was a deliberate policy of Preuves to enlist support from the anti-Stalinist Left to give itself some Left credibility, thus establishing some symmetry between its attempts to mobilise intellectuals to its side during the Cold War and those of the PCF.77 The reaction to Preuves from the French (i.e. Parisian) intellectuals where anti-Communism was still considered anathema was one of quasi-unanimous antagonism. The PCF called it a mouthpiece of police repression (revue policière); Les Temps modernes stigmatised it as a rightwing publication; Esprit attacked it for being a vehicle for (pro-American)


propaganda, and both L’Observateur and Le Monde labelled it ‘proAmerican’. Suspicions that Preuves and other Congress for Cultural Freedom journals like Encounter (UK), Tempo Presente (Italy), Forum (Austria) and Cuardernos (Spain) were being secretly and generously funded by the American government were rife, but were only confirmed in 1966. Since then, the role played by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in this covert, multimillion dollar attempt to promote an Atlanticist, anti-Communist, anti-neutralist consensus among European intellectuals has been well documented.78 Under the editorship of Swiss journalist François Bondy, Preuves’ circulation hovered between 10 000 and 12 000 and soon overshadowed Liberté de l’Esprit. This Gaullist, anti-Soviet publication founded in 1949 by Claude Mauriac was born out of the RPF and declined with it as the Gaullist movement lost momentum. The emergence of Preuves as the intellectual outlet in France for pro-European, liberal-democratic, intellectual anti-Communism was in no small part due to Raymond Aron, who contributed some 50 articles to the review between 1951 and 1966, many of which appeared in translation in Encounter and Der Monat. On the issue of covert funding, Aron said in his memoirs that he would probably not have accepted the financial support from the CIA had he known about it. But he then immediately qualified this by adding that, in the final analysis, this attitude would have been unreasonable since neither his articles nor his speeches were subjected to any political censorship or interference.79 Preuves (and the other journals financed by the CIA) were, according to Aron, indispensable in mobilising intellectuals against the Soviet threat and provided him and his colleagues with a platform when outlets for their views were in short supply in the France of the early 1950s. Although Aron had a number of reservations about capitalism in general and the USA and American society in particular, these paled into insignificance when set against his condemnations of the grotesque excesses and expansionist ambitions of the USSR. However, within the French intellectual landscape of the 1950s, Aron found himself marginalised by his peers because of his unfashionable advocacy of liberal democratic values. In the eyes of many of his intellectual contemporaries Aron was simply a mouthpiece for anti-Communism, American capitalism and imperialism. The publication in 1955 of his L’Opium des intellectuels (The Opium of the Intellectuals)80 served to isolate Aron even further from the mainstream of French intellectual life, and opposition to him was so strong that it threatened to block his appointment in June 1955 as Professor of Sociology at the Sorbonne.

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In a riposte to attacks made on him by Sartre in Entretiens sur la politique,81 (Discussions about Politics), Aron had dismissed Sartre’s political views as youthful sentimentality, adding that whereas Marx had characterised religion as the opium of the people, ‘revolution’ in Entretiens sur la politique was nothing more than ‘the opium of the intellectuals’. In his book, L’Opium des intellectuels, Aron combined his impressive intellect with his equally impressive grasp of history and Marxism, and set out to demolish many of the ideas and aspirations dear to ‘progressive’, antianti-Communist intellectuals. In the first section of the book, he dismissed as myths three political concepts central to their discourse, namely the Left, Revolution and the Proletariat. Aron argued that the Left was composed of several competing strands and the so-called unity of the Left post-1789 was but ‘a retrospective myth’. Revolution, according to Aron, was simply a nostalgic refuge for utopian intellectuals. He dismissed the view of the proletariat as ‘collective saviour’ and attacked those who dismissed tangible, albeit piecemeal measures which improved the lot of the workers. Such people preferred instead the Winter Palace scenario which was nothing more than the seizure of power, in the name of the working class, by a minority, and yet was portrayed as the template for the emancipation of the proletariat. In a section entitled ‘The Idolatry of History’ Aron targeted the socalled infallibility of the Party, revolutionary idealism, revolutionary ‘justice’, and concluded with an attack on the Marxist philosophy of history. In the final section of the book, Aron analysed the alienation of the intellectuals and inter alia castigated the arrogance of those French intellectuals who claimed to speak for the whole of humanity. He offered a measured, ironic defence of reform against revolution, of cold reality against rosy romantic illusions. He provided a powerful critique of the keystones of the ideological edifices which the left-wing intellectuals had constructed for themselves, lambasting those who, sacrificing their integrity and lucidity, had turned a blind eye to the reality of the ‘revolutionary’ means employed to realise an end which he considered pure utopia. As might have been expected the reception in the press of Aron’s work split along political lines. While the Right hailed its publication as an overdue lesson to the ‘apostles of revolution’, it unleashed a furore among Marxists and fellow travellers alike, although the most violent response came from political scientist Maurice Duverger in an article published in Le Monde.82 Only the weekly L’Express remained neutral. The publication of L’Opium des intellectuels marked the high point of Aron’s isolation from the Parisian intellectual community, where he


was now treated by many as a pariah. Yet L’Opium des intellectuels had struck a chord with a number of ex-Communist intellectuals and reinforced the doubts of many who were still party members.83 It was around this time that Aron drew closer to Camus. On learning that the ever-sensitive Camus had been hurt by the critical comments about L’Homme révolté in L’Opium des Intellectuels, Aron offered to delete the remarks from all foreign translations.84 In his reply, Camus assured Aron that this was unnecessary and expressed his pleasure that Aron believed they had more reasons to agree than to quarrel.85

The Twentieth Congress of the CPSU In 1956, a little over ten years after the Liberation and against the backdrop of the Algerian War of Independence (see Chapter 4), two events stunned those intellectuals who were members or fellow travellers of the PCF. They were the release in June of the contents of Khruschev’s ‘secret’ speech and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in November. Stalin’s death on 5 March 1953 was followed almost immediately by the first hints of a relaxation of the Soviet regime – the freeing of twelve Jewish doctors accused of plotting against Party cadres (April), Pravda’s publication of a speech by Eisenhower and a statement from the new leadership that the Cold War could be resolved peacefully (May). This was followed by a rapprochement with Tito, posthumous pardons for some victims of the Gulag, and the arrest (26 June) and subsequent execution of Beria, the head of the political police, and six of his assistants. At the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU in 1956 came more indications of a shift in Soviet politics. The doctrine of peaceful co-existence was advanced to replace the Zhdanovian ‘two warring blocs’ analysis and the viability of diverse national roads to socialism was admitted. However, it was Khruschev’s secret report on the night of 24/25 February which secured the Congress’ place in the history books. Stalin had been hailed by orthodox Communists over a quarter of a century as the noble and worthy heir of Lenin, the military genius, the genial theoretician and wise leader whose extraordinary energy inspired love in the hearts of millions workers across the globe. Now he was being castigated by the Soviet leadership as a despotic paranoid megalomaniac, a mass-murderer and torturer who had hidden his crimes and mediocrity behind a self-engineered personality cult. The publication of extensive extracts from the speech exploded like a bomb over the Communist and non-Communist world alike,

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vindicating, it seemed, the attacks on the USSR by the Right and antiStalinist Left. Thorez, Duclos and other members of the French delegation attending the Congress had been given a copy of Khruschev’s report but on their return to Paris denied its existence,86 a position undermined when, on 6 June 1956, Le Monde started publishing in full a French translation of the report. While the Party leadership went through the charade of questioning its authenticity, the majority of intellectuals in and around the Party believed the document to be authentic and many believed its contents to be true.87 Many of the intellectuals in and around the Party were positively relieved when the truth about Stalin was revealed. While a minority may have genuinely believed the homages to the genius Stalin, for most this ritual adulation was the price one had to pay for the privilege of marching into the bright new socialist future with the Party of the working class. The revelation of Stalin’s crimes opened up the possibility of constructing a post-1917 history of the USSR and the international worker’s movement based on facts and reason rather than on myth and propaganda. As Jorge Semprun noted: ‘What was incompatible with reason was not that Stalin was a tyrant, but that Trotsky was capable of being in the pay of the Gestapo or that Bukharin was the mastermind behind sabotage and terrorist crimes … The secret report freed us; it gave us at least the possibility to escape from this madness, to free our reason from the coma into which it had fallen.’88 The leading cadres of the PCF grouped around Thorez had close links with Molotov, who they hoped would replace Khrushchev, but even so evidence of de-Stalinisation, however reluctantly undertaken, was soon apparent. There was, for example, a ‘revision’ of the book-lists of Éditions Sociales, the PCF’s publishing house, which saw the removal of the official history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, of books attacking Tito, books praising the trials of Rajk, Kostov and other victims of the postwar purges. French translations of Russian texts on Soviet law and democracy and nearly all of the lyrical accounts of life in the USSR and the People’s Democracies written by French Communist visitors also disappeared. And so of course did texts by Stalin, which had once been part of the Holy Grail of orthodox Marxism. Initially it appeared that liberalisation in the USSR might slacken the Soviet grip on its East European satellites. As part of its rapprochement with Belgrade, Moscow dropped attempts to drown out Tito’s advocacy of (different) national forms of socialism. In Hungary in March, the posthumous rehabilitation of Rajk was announced, and in July the


Stalinist Rakosi was ‘resigned’. In Czechoslovakia, the survivors of the Slansky trial were rehabilitated. In Poland in April, 35 000 political prisoners were amnestied, but the repression (applauded by the PCF) of strikes and riots in June resulted in over fifty deaths and over 300 injured. Political instability in Poland continued and the USSR was getting jumpy. In October Gomulka, symbol of the Polish road to socialism who had been imprisoned in 1951, became General Secretary of the Polish Party, having managed to convince the Soviets that Poland would remain an ally of the USSR but that a more liberal policy was indispensable if an insurrection were to be prevented.

Hungary 1956 Millions of Hungarians were scrutinising the events unfolding in Poland. On 23 October, a massive largely spontaneous demonstration demanding reforms and the reinstatement of Imre Nagy turned into an insurrection and civil war. Martial law was proclaimed, but this had little effect since sections of the army and police were going over to the insurgents’ side. Ominously the government called for Soviet support and Russian tanks moved in. Battle raged from 25 to 28 October, and on 30 October after the reinstatement of Nagy as head of the government, the USSR agreed to withdraw its troops. But Nagy’s announcement on 1 November that Hungary intended withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact was too much for the Soviets. Back came the tanks and the popular uprising was finally crushed with some 20 000 people killed, tens of thousands fleeing to Austria and between 10 000 and 20 000 deported by the Soviet police. The PCF enthusiastically supported the Soviet invasion and rationalised its position with rhetoric worthy of Orwell’s 1984. The bloody crushing of the popular reform movement was thus transformed into the USSR offering fraternal aid to the Hungarian working class to enable it to defeat the forces of reaction and counter-revolution. This stance, according to one author, ‘brought upon it [the PCF] the same hatred and the same isolation as at the time of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939’.89 The same author, broadly sympathetic to the PCF, has estimated that in the wake of Hungary about 25 per cent of the 300 000 members of the PCF left the Party, but other writers have suggested a lower figure.90 For those intellectuals in and around the PCF who had hoped for a democratisation or liberalisation of the Soviet regime, Hungary came as a cruel blow and seemed a throwback to the darkest days of Stalinism.

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The Hungarian invasion seemed to confirm the thesis of the antiCommunist Right and the anti-Stalinist Left that behind its talk of proletarian revolution and international working-class solidarity, the USSR was an expansionist and imperialist power, an exponent of realpolitik only interested in defending its own national interests. On 8 November, France-Observateur published a manifesto initiated by Vercors headed ‘Contre l’intervention soviétique’ (‘Against the Soviet Intervention’). This was signed by poet and novelist Claude Roy and three other Party intellectuals, Roger Vailland, Jacques-Francis Rolland and Claude Morgan, as well as members of Les Temps modernes team (Michel Leiris, Jean Cau, Claude Lanzmann, Marcel Péju, Sartre and Beauvoir) and another thirty or so intellectuals.91 The signatories, describing themselves as ‘never having expressed any unfriendly sentiments towards the USSR or socialism’, felt moved to protest to the Soviet government about its use of military force to ‘crush the revolt of the Hungarian people and its desire for independence’ even if, they added, ‘some reactionary elements have infiltrated this revolt’. They continued: ‘We believe and will always believe that socialism, like freedom, is not brought into being on the ends of bayonets.’ The PCF was trying desperately to contain the unrest within its ranks that the invasion had provoked. The response of L’Humanité to the Vercors manifesto was to warn those PCF signatories that ‘their breaking with Party discipline was contrary not only to the principles of the Party but also to the interests of the working class and the nation, and would be harshly judged by all workers’.92 On 22 November, Rolland was expelled from the PCF, having been found guilty of openly participating in the enemy’s anti-Communist and anti-Soviet campaign after articles by him attacking the Party’s servile position on Hungary had appeared in L’Express. The PCF meanwhile continued to claim that the Hungarian uprising was the work of fascists supported by US imperialism. Another signatory was Louis de Villefosse, a contributor to Europe, a pro-PCF review founded in 1923 and relaunched in 1946, and who had played an active role in the Henri Martin affair. He wrote in FranceObservateur93 that the Soviet aggression in Budapest had convinced him that the Soviet regime no more represented democracy than the Catholic Church did Christianity, and that Communism was nothing more than left-wing reactionary falsification. Esprit, whose annual congress coincided with the Soviet invasion, published a special issue in December with an editorial supporting ‘the genuine Hungarian revolution’. But it was the name of Sartre, fellow traveller par excellence since 1952, at the head of the signatories, which had the greatest impact.


This was compounded by his announcement the following day in an interview in L’Express where he condemned ‘the Soviet aggression absolutely and without any reservation at all’. He added that he was breaking with the PCF ‘whose leaders’ every sentence and every gesture is the culmination of thirty years of lies and stagnation’. He also said that he was breaking with Soviet literary friends who had not spoken out against the invasion.94 Sartre developed his position further in Le Fantôme de Staline (The Ghost of Stalin) published in a special issue of Les Temps modernes95 where he replied to objections raised against his article in L’Express. In Le Fantôme de Staline, Sartre offered a detailed exposé of recent events in Hungary, an analysis of the contradictions resulting from the specificity of the Communists’ seizure of power in Hungary. He also provided an explanation of Stalinism which concluded that Soviet repression could be explained by the provisional victory of a non-de-Stalinised fraction of the bureaucratic leadership of the USSR. Turning his back on the PCF, he argued that to continue to work together would compromise both the rapprochement of the workers’ parties in France and a policy of peace and socialism.96 The historian Alain Besançon has described Communism as ‘one of the modern forms of bewitchment’,97 and at the start of 1956, large numbers of French intellectuals were still under its spell. But the events of that year, especially Hungary, opened a breach between the intellectuals and Communism, a breach which was destined to grow ever wider. While some intellectuals stayed in the Party, hoping to reform it from within, many others joined the mass exodus or were expelled. Aimé Césaire, the author and Communist deputy from Martinique, resigned from the Party while Sartre, actors Simone Signoret, Yves Montand, Gerard Philipe and Vercors quit their posts in the Peace Movement or the Franco-Soviet Association. Claude Morgan did not renew his Party membership, nor did Dominique Desanti. Henri Lefebvre resigned from the editorial committee of the PCF review, La Nouvelle Critique, as did Jean-Toussaint Desanti. Another indication of dissatisfaction with the Party was the post-Hungary proliferation of new publications around the periphery of the PCF. It was now clear that the semi-mystical appeal that Communism had held for French intellectuals had disappeared. It would not be revived until the early 1970s when China, in the throes of the Cultural Revolution, played a similar role – albeit for a much shorter time (see Chapter 5). In the 1960s the Third World in general and Cuba in particular were also objects of fascination for French intellectuals, but to a lesser degree than the USSR (pre-1956) and China in the 1970s.

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Disillusioned with the PCF and confirmed in their contempt for the leadership of the SFIO over its position on Suez and Algeria (see Chapter 4), large numbers of intellectuals pinned their hopes on the emergence of a movement or party of ‘the new left’. Some like Sartre saw its future as a key player in a new-style Popular Front; others, like political journalists Claude Bourdet and Gilles Martinet, co-founders in 1950 of L’Observateur – later France Observateur and later still Le Nouvel Observateur – envisaged the future ‘new left’ existing independently of, and thus untainted by, the PCF and the SFIO. The first step in this direction occurred in 1957 when a number of small progressive movements combined to form the Union de la gauche socialiste (The Union of the Socialist Left). Three years later, the UGS merged with the Parti socialiste autonome (the Autonomous Socialist Party) – an SFIO splinter group – to form the Parti Socialiste Unifié, the PSU (Unified Socialist Party). The Soviet invasion of Hungary took place a little over two years after the ignominious defeat of the French forces at Dien Bien Phu in Indochina and almost exactly two years after the start of the Algerian struggle for independence. By the end of the Algerian conflict in 1962, the Fourth Republic was no more and de Gaulle was firmly installed as head of state. It is to the attitudes adopted by French intellectuals over France’s two main postwar colonial wars that we shall now turn.

4 Colonialism and Anti-Colonialism: Indochina and Algeria

This first part of this chapter marks a break with the chronological narrative and returns to the immediate post-Liberation period of the 1940s to consider the response of the French intellectuals to the struggle for national liberation in Indochina. It then returns to the chronological narrative and analyses the role of the intellectuals during the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62).

Indochina (1946–1954) French penetration into Indochina, which dates back to the second half of the nineteenth century, had, by 1907, resulted in the creation of the Indochinese Union. This comprised Cambodia, Laos, and the three ky (provinces) of Vietnam, namely Annam, Tonkin and Cochinchina, all of which were protectorates, with the exception of Cochinchina, which was designated as a colony. Despite periodic upsurges of nationalist opposition, French rule in Indochina continued without serious challenge until World War Two when, following the fall of France in 1940, effective power passed to the occupying Japanese forces. However, for the next five years the representatives of (Vichy) France formally retained sovereignty and continued to administer Indochina. Although there was little Charles de Gaulle could do in the wake of the 1940 defeat to influence events in this outpost of the French empire, he resolved that come the time he would return Indochina to the French sphere of power and influence.1 On 9 March 1945, the Japanese unilaterally ended the period of collaboration with the representatives of Vichy France in Indochina by turning on the French and backing Bao Dai, the Emperor of Annam, who proclaimed Vietnamese independence; the surrender of Japan five 97

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months later in August 1945 generated a power vacuum in Indochina. Bao Dai lacked any credible popular support; the defeated Japanese were demoralised and in disarray; the French had insufficient forces to impose France’s authority; the Chinese and British troops who as a result of the Potsdam Agreement were to occupy Indochina, respectively north and south of the 16th parallel, had not yet arrived. A well-orchestrated campaign spearheaded by the Viet Minh, the Communist-led independence movement, culminated in its leader, Ho Chi Minh, announcing in Hanoi on 2 September 1945 the creation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. In the course of World War Two, de Gaulle had realised the necessity of modifying the relations between France and her protectorates if France was to continue to maintain her control. On 24 March 1945, proposals for a new decentralised Indochinese federal structure were announced. France’s political and military establishment refused to entertain any aspirations to independence within what had been the empire; however, the maintenance of ‘her’ territories within the proposed Union Française (French Union) would, it was believed, be evidence of France’s claim to great power status and would form a cornerstone of postwar foreign policy. From a Vietnamese perspective, the 24 March announcement lacked credibility, coming as it did two weeks after the crushing (in a single day) of the French in Indochina by the Japanese together with Bao Dai’s declaration of independence. Moreover, the French announcement had failed to recognise the unity of Tonkin, Annam and Cochinchina, a central plank of the programme of the powerful independence movement. From September 1945, French troops were dispatched to Indochina under General Leclerc with a brief to re-establish French control, and, by February 1946, Leclerc reported that he had ‘pacified’ the south and most of central Vietnam. However the Viet Minh were still firmly entrenched in the north. The possibility of a Franco-Viet Minh negotiated settlement was offered by a text signed on 6 March 1946 by Ho Chi Minh and Jean Sainteny, the French representative in Hanoi. However subsequent machinations by French hard-liners in Paris and Saigon, believing that France could defeat the Viet Minh militarily, ensured that the text remained a dead letter. After the failure of the Fontainebleau conference (July–September 1946) to make any significant progress, positions on both sides hardened. In November 1946, after a series of clashes in Haiphong, Hanoi’s port, French weaponry bombarded the Vietnamese

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quarter from the sea prior to the use of French tanks, artillery and aircraft to clear the area, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Vietnamese (6000 according to French sources, 20 000 according to Vietnamese sources). The Vietnamese, now convinced that the French were determined not only to deny them independence but were planning a military takeover of the whole of Tonkin, retaliated by launching an offensive against the French district of Hanoi. The Indochina War had begun.2 Events in far-off Indochina had relatively little impact on postLiberation metropolitan France. Until May 1945, the main priority had been to participate actively in the defeat of Germany. After the Nazi surrender, the priority became the political, economic and social construction of the new France (see Chapter 1). Thus it was that the French, tackling pressing domestic concerns, were largely indifferent to events in Indochina, and indeed continued to remain so throughout the conflict. The [French] nation never really considered that this conflict on the other side of the world deserved constant attention or required massive and sustained initiatives aimed at shifting government policy in one direction or another. With the exception of the two militant pro- and anti-war peripheries, there was neither political action nor sustained interest.3 This lack of interest among the French population as a whole was replicated, with one or two exceptions, among the French intellectuals. Raymond Aron, for example, who initially contributed articles on Indochina for Combat (1946–7), soon turned his attention to other matters. In his contributions to Combat, Aron opposed the French endeavours to reconquer Indochina by force, and favoured the replacement of the prewar colonial structures by a new set of economic, political and moral relations. In an article published in Combat on 20 March 1947, Aron confessed to feeling a dull anguish and a kind of guilty conscience at the thought of troops of a liberated France fighting in a distant land and declared himself impatient at the lack of political progress.4 Aron believed that France should support the forces of moderation in Indochina and, in concert with them, move towards the creation of an independent Indochina within the framework of the French Union. According to Alain Ruscio, between his departure from Combat for Le Figaro in June 1947 and the end of the war in 1954, only 18 of Aron’s 162 articles for Le Figaro were specifically on Indochina and


six of these were on the 1954 Geneva Conference.5 In 1951, in Les Guerres en chaîne,6 Aron did, however, criticise the hesitations and contradictions of France’s policy in Indochina, which resulted, in his view, in France squandering its resources in an adventure that, while perhaps justifiable in terms of global anti-Communism, was not in France’s national interest. Like Aron, Albert Camus contributed articles on the Far East to Combat, but like Aron they were few – in Camus’ case only four, all written in 1945. As his biographer Olivier Todd has noted, ‘Camus hardly took any interest at all in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos.’7 As far as he had a view, it expressed the liberal-left consensus of the time that France should retain her links with her overseas territories, but that economic and political relations should be democratised. Two further examples of the intellectuals’ relative lack of interest in Indochina are those of the Catholic novelists Georges Bernanos and François Mauriac. Bernanos, who had spent most of World War Two in Brazil, from where he denounced Pétain and supported de Gaulle, wrote 78 newspaper articles on current affairs between his return to France in 1945 and his death in Neuilly in 1948. None was on Indochina. And François Mauriac, who was later to earn a reputation as a stern critic of colonialism, wrote relatively little on the war in Indochina until the very end and up until then what he did write broadly supported French intervention.8 Outside the dominant consensus of opinion, which favoured a political settlement predicated on greater Indochinese autonomy within the French Union, were a minority of intellectuals who championed France’s military defence of her colonies and others who castigated France’s latest colonial adventure in the strongest terms. As late as 1953, the poet, playwright and novelist Jules Romains was lyrically extolling the French character of Saigon and the benevolent civilising influence of the French in Indochina, concluding with a certain self-satisfaction that ‘our people have done some good and worthy work here’.9 In the opinion of André Siegfried, political scientist and member of the Académie Française, what was at stake in Indochina was ‘not so much colonial standing itself, as the future of the white race in the world and with it Western civilisation, of which it is the guarantor, the sole guarantor’.10 From 1949 onwards, and particularly after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, there was a noticeable shift of emphasis within the discourse of the defenders of French involvement in Indochina, with France increasingly portrayed as a key player in the containment of


Communist expansion in south-east Asia. In June 1948 France had conceded to her puppet, Bao Dai, the Indochinese unity and independence within the French Union it had earlier refused Ho Chi Minh, and now claimed to be fighting for Vietnamese independence against the Vietnamese communists. A victory by the latter, it was claimed, would mean not independence but a life of servitude within the Soviet/Chinese sphere of influence. The position of the PCF on Indochina was quite equivocal. Until 1947, when the Communist ministers were expelled from government, the Party in theory disapproved of the war, though this did not stop ministers voting twice and deputies voting on one occasion for military credits. At the same time, the PCF rejected any separation between Indochina and France, since in its view, Indochina and France were both threatened by American hegemony and the maintenance of Indochina within the French Union would save it from falling victim to US imperialism. Later, with the polarisation of the Cold War, and especially after the recognition of Ho Chi Minh’s government by the USSR and China, the PCF came to oppose to French involvement in Indochina. It now inveighed against la sale guerre (the dirty war) which, according to the PCF, was being waged to the benefit of the trusts against the interests of the French workers. After the victory of the Chinese Communists in 1949 and the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, the PCF, like the supporters of French military involvement in Indochina, increasingly saw Indochina in the context of a struggle between Communist and anti-Communist forces. The Party now viewed the struggle for Indochinese liberation as a war waged against France, which was being supported morally, ideologically, militarily and financially by the USA. Thus it was that the PCF was able to argue that support for the Indochinese independence struggle coincided with support for French independence (from American influence) and world peace. Indeed, the PCF offensive for peace in Indochina (the emphasis was placed on ‘peace’ rather than Indochinese independence or an Indochinese victory) was one of the main strands of the Communist-led Peace Movement. It was also a central theme of the PCF-led campaigns against the war which targeted industrial workers the docks, railways and car industry. The PCF also spearheaded the campaign to free Henri Martin, with which Sartre was to become involved (see p. 105). Two important strands of intellectual opposition to the Indochina War, located around Esprit and Les Temps modernes, differed from the opposition of the PCF and Communist intellectuals in two important


respects. Although on the Left, both Esprit and Les Temps modernes were independent of any political party, and second, their opposition to the war was unequivocal and was articulated consistently from the very start of the war. According to Alain Ruscio the contribution of Les Temps modernes outweighed both qualitatively and quantitatively that of Esprit. Between 1945 and 1954, Esprit devoted 16 articles specifically to Indochina compared with 39 in Les Temps modernes. (The Communist review Démocratie nouvelle published 31 articles during the same period but 12 (nearly 40 per cent) of these appeared in 1954.) Ruscio concludes that ‘without any doubt, it is Les Temps modernes, the review founded at the Liberation by Jean-Paul Sartre, which made the greatest contribution to a deep understanding of the Vietnamese question between 1946 and 1954.’11 It is thus on Les Temps modernes that attention will be particularly focused in this section. Although Les Temps modernes was to emerge as the driving force of the intellectual anti-war movement, it was Esprit which first adopted an explicitly anti-war stance. As early as October 1945, it called on the French government to be honest about its intentions in Indochina. The following month an article appeared assailing colonial exploitation, the ambiguities of French policy, the reactionary dimension of de Gaulle’s declaration of 24 March 1945, and supporting the cause of Vietnamese nationalism, which was born out of opposition to Vichy and Japan.12 Although Les Temps modernes was later to play a leading role in attacking French involvement in Indochina, prior to the Haiphong bombardment it remained more circumspect than Esprit. True, it did publish an article early in 1946 by a Vietnamese ex-student of Merleau-Ponty’s claiming that the struggle for Vietnamese independence had already begun, but a disclaimer preceding the article made it clear that the editors did not endorse the views of the author.13 The Temps modernes editorial in December 194614 marked a defining moment in the history of the review’s position on colonialism in general and Indochina in particular. It constituted not only the beginning of a campaign against that particular colonial adventure but also established anti-colonialism as one of the principles of the review, which it never subsequently abandoned. Written by Jean Pouillon, but committing the review as a whole, the editorial ‘Et Bourreaux et Victimes …’ (‘Both Executioners and Victims …’) castigated the distortions, sensationalism and the war fever of the French press, and denounced the conflict in Indochina as that most disgusting of all types of war – a colonial war. The editorial


provoked a furore by drawing an explicit parallel between the German Occupation of France and French involvement in Indochina, and called unambiguously for a withdrawal of French troops. The significance of the editorial was spelled out in a book on Les Temps modernes and politics written in 1966. This text is important because it is the first one where the review explicitly and globally confronts government policy as a whole, the first one where it adopts such a clear stance. Furthermore, because the policy of Les Temps modernes on colonialism will remain constant for almost twenty years … It should be noted that from the outset, Les Temps modernes took a clear position on colonial wars, defending the colonised against the colonisers without any ambiguity whatsoever. [Les Temps modernes] was the first to see the importance of these questions for France and for the French left, and were the first to call for immediate independence without any quid pro quo.15 Between December 1946 and 1950 Les Temps modernes published an impressive range of articles on Indochina which included soldiers’ recounting their own experiences in Vietnam, accounts of French atrocities detailed by French sociologist Jeanne Cuisinier. There were also more conventional political articles analysing, for example, Franco-Vietnamese relations since World War Two and a polemical exchange about Viet Minh tactics and strategy. Taken together, these articles aimed to offer a composite, multi-faceted picture of what was happening in Indochina.16 But the review was not simply a platform for anti-war sentiment. While acknowledging the international dimensions of the conflict, Les Temps modernes continued to castigate it as essentially a colonial war and criticised the French government, parliament and political parties (including the PCF) for failing to debate the issue thoroughly and openly and to take effective action. Nor did the review aim simply to inform; it also attempted to mobilise public opinion against the war. At the end of 1948, the review published a three-page statement attacking the cost of the war and the incoherence of government policy and calling for peace in Vietnam. The statement was signed by over 50 intellectuals including, besides Beauvoir, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, André Breton, Jean Cocteau and Henri Matisse.17 As the conflict increasingly took on an international significance, Les Temps modernes responded to the shift in the rhetoric of the defenders


of French involvement away from a defence of purely French interests to commitment to an anti-Communist crusade. As early as March 1947,18 Les Temps modernes responded implicitly to the charge that the Indochina War was all part of a ‘Communist plot’. It noted that the Viet Minh had not received any significant support from the USSR; that most of the Viet Minh weapons came from China (not yet a Communist state); that the Soviet Union sought compromise, not a war which risked the involvement of Britain and the USA; and that the French Communist Party, as members of the government, bore a responsibility for France’s colonial policy in Indochina. As the Cold War rhetoric of the supporters of French military involvement became more strident, Les Temps modernes stepped up its campaign for peace. In 1948, as has been noted, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty joined the newly formed Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire. The RDR, besides countering the bellicosity of the Cold War with its general demands for peace, was also committed specifically to peace in Indochina, and in January 1949 launched a petition calling for immediate negotiations with Ho Chi Minh. While Esprit’s opposition to the war is beyond doubt, the review was prepared to offer a broader platform on the war than was Les Temps modernes and its stance was less radical than its rival, as a brief comparison of articles published in 1947 will illustrate. An editorial in Esprit in February 1947 called for the acceptance of Vietnam within the French Union, and its ‘Dossier France-Vietnam’ published in July 1947 included an article defending French involvement in Indochina and another arguing that responsibilities for the conflict were shared.19 In March 1947, Les Temps modernes published an article by Jean-Pierre Dannaud20 expressing views which the review described as ‘liberal’.21 But this was as far as the review was prepared to go. And furthermore an editorial in the same issue roundly criticised Dannaud’s perspective.22 By the beginning of 1950, the international context of the war in Indochina had changed dramatically. In October 1949, the Communist Party headed by Mao Zedong had seized power in China, and in December, it had positioned troops on the Vietnamese border. In January 1950, China and the USSR recognised the Democratic Republic of Vietnam; they were soon followed by North Korea and the states of Eastern Europe. And in the spring Ho Chi Minh visited Peking and Moscow, where he met Mao Zedong and Stalin. Meanwhile, the West recognised Bao Dai, and in March the first American boats carrying arms for the French forces started arriving in Saigon, while Chinese


arms were being supplied to the Viet Minh. Then in June, North Korea crossed the 38th parallel and invaded the South. As we have seen, the outbreak of the Korean War marked a crisis point for Les Temps modernes, with Merleau-Ponty, the review’s political mentor, concluding that North Korea’s act of aggression (which he assumed had Stalin’s encouragement) proved that Stalin viewed war as inevitable. The USSR was an imperialist power and there was nothing to choose between Soviet and US imperialism. With the review’s political mentor in retreat, Les Temps modernes entered a period which Sartre called ‘the interregnum’. This lasted until 1952, although, as Howard Davies has pointed out, Merleau-Ponty did not finally leave until January 1953,23 but only one article of substance was published on Indochina between the summer of 1950 and July 1953. However, it should not be forgotten that from 1950 Sartre had been active in a campaign led by the PCF to free from prison Henri Martin, a sailor who was serving a five-year sentence for campaigning against the war in Indochina. Between 1950 and 1953, Les Temps modernes’ treatment of colonialism became more generalised, with a number of theoretical articles on colonialism, and contributions on colonialism in other parts of the world (e.g. South Africa, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia). The August–September 1953 special issue of Les Temps modernes on Vietnam put the Indochina War back at the top of the review’s agenda. The selection of the articles, including a number on the achievements of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), underscored once again the review’s solidarity with the Vietnamese struggle for independence, the disgust of the review with French policy and a reiteration of the call for negotiations with Ho Chi Minh. By mid-1953, it was becoming increasingly clear that the French were not going to win in Indochina with the numbers of men and amount of material at their disposal. It was equally clear that the French government was not prepared to increase its commitment and that even if it did, victory was still very far from certain. In May 1954, the French army was finally and comprehensively crushed at Dien Bien Phu. The opening statement of the editorial of the May 1954 issue of Les Temps modernes24 asserted that the truth of Dien Bien Phu was that the war in Vietnam was lost. It was not, the review asserted, its defeat, a defeat for France or for the soldiers who had fought in Indochina, but a defeat for French policy-makers who had lied and indulged in cover-ups and who, having rejected a peaceful solution for so long now sought an ‘honourable’ solution. According to the editorial France


should now recognise the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and organise the withdrawal of the corps expéditionnaire. In the same issue, Sartre, in a letter to the readers of Les Temps modernes, reiterated what had been the aim of the review during the Indochina conflict: ‘What the public demands of our review is not agitation but an exposition of the events, an analysis and wherever possible a clarification of the situation. In short to comment and convince … All our readers know that we believe the government policy to be damaging and that we have nothing but contempt for the architects of that policy. But our task is to point this out over and over again.’25 In the event, the attempts by Les Temps modernes, Esprit and others to raise people’s consciousness about the war had very little impact and its impact on government policy was non-existent. For example, in a poll conducted in January 1947, shortly after the French bombardment of Haiphong and the Vietnamese retaliation against the French quarter in Hanoi, 30 per cent of interviewees had no opinion on the future of Indochina. A year later the number of people citing the war in Indochina as one of the main events of 1947 was so insignificant that it was subsumed in the 6 per cent ‘other’ category. As the war progressed, interest in events in Indochina continued to remain extremely limited. In October 1950, 20 per cent of interviewees described themselves as having no opinion concerning events in Indochina, a figure which in February 1954 had risen to 30 per cent. Among those who did express views about the war, it is of note that those supporting French intervention in Indochina were never in a majority and by February 1954 had fallen to a mere 8 per cent of the French population.26 The relatively small impact that the war in Indochina had on France’s population was in stark contrast with France’s next colonial (mis)adventure in Algeria, which began a mere four months after France’s defeat at Dien Bien Phu and was to bring her to the very brink of civil war.

Algeria I: 1954–1958. From insurrection to the death of the Fourth Republic After the landing of nearly 4000 French troops in the Bay of SidiFerruch on 14 June 1830, Algeria was initially placed under French military rule but, following the encouragement of French settlement during the 1848 Republic, Algeria subsequently became an integral part of France and was divided into three départements and a varying number of arrondissements administered by préfets and sous-préfets.


An appreciation of Algeria’s particular constitutional status as a part of France is essential to an understanding of the passions generated by the Algerian War of National Independence, which began in earnest on 1 November 1954. Algeria’s de jure status as an integral part of France was one which was defended, in public at least, by the French political establishment just as fervently as it was opposed by was those struggling for independence. And yet at the same time Algeria was de facto a settlement colony with roughly an eighth (1 250 000) of its population of nine million being of European origin – mainly French and Italian – of whom some 80 per cent had been born in Algeria. Despite their socio-economic diversity and minority position, these European colonialists or pieds noirs (black feet), as they were commonly known, constituted the dominant social and political and economic force in Algeria. It was both the power of the European settlers within Algeria and the power of mainland France over Algeria which were to be destroyed in the struggle for national independence. The consensus shared by the French political establishment, the vast majority of the French population and the pieds noirs that there was no such thing as an ‘Algerian nation’ and that Algérie would always be française was unshaken by the bomb attacks of 1 November 1954. However, the proliferation of attacks, especially at the end of 1955, led to a dawning of realisation that France was not confronting a little local difficulty in Algeria, but was being sucked into yet another colonial war. Thus if in December 1954 Esprit was asking ‘Is it War in North Africa?’,27 eleven months later it was demanding ‘Let’s Stop the War in Algeria’.28 In the first article, which confirmed that the French were already using torture, Jean-Marie Domenach defined the role of the intellectual as reporting intelligently what was happening in Algeria and offering advice to policy-makers and executors. By November 1955, with a whole issue devoted to the theme ‘Let’s Stop the War in Algeria’, the review rejected the idea of French Algeria and distanced itself from official government policy. It was in the autumn of 1955 that sociologist Edgar Morin, author and ex-deportee Robert Antelme and polemicist Dionys Mascolo, all ex-members of the PCF, and Louis-René Des Forêts founded the Comité d’action contre la poursuite de la guerre en Afrique du Nord (Action Committee against the War in North Africa). According to Morin the group wished ‘to take a stand against the very principle of the colonial war and in support of the very principle of the right of peoples’ [to determine their own future].29 The initiative was soon to be backed by a politically heterogeneous group of intellectuals which included


François Mauriac, André Breton, Jean Guéhenno and Jean-Paul Sartre, leading the editor of L’Express to comment that the founding meeting of the committee on 5 November 1955 in Paris constituted the most important gathering of French intellectuals since the anti-fascist committees of the mid-1930s.30 It was at a meeting organised by the Comité d’action contre la poursuite de la guerre en Afrique du Nord in Paris on 27 January 1956 that Sartre made the first of his many interventions on Algeria.31 Here he attacked the ‘neo-colonialist mystification’ which held that a society based on Franco-Muslim fraternity and co-operation could be constructed in Algeria through a series of economic and social reforms. Sartre supported his argument with statistics and an impressive historical overview of Franco-Algerian relations since the nineteenth century which revealed his growing familiarity with Marxism as a result of his rapprochement with the PCF. The central thrust of Sartre’s argument was that colonialism constituted a system built on the relentless and ruthless exploitation of Algeria by France and the colons (colonial settlers). It was precisely because of its intrinsically exploitative nature that the colonial system could not be reformed, since to do so would remove its very essence. The system had to be destroyed, and indeed the system had already started to auto-destruct as a result of its own internal contradictions – a view which Sartre was to reiterate in the preface to Albert Memmi’s Portrait du Colonisé32 (Portrait of the Colonised ). In retrospect, what is striking about the positions adopted by the intellectuals opposed to the war in the early years of the conflict is the relative moderation of their demands; the Comité d’action, for example, called for an end to repression and racial discrimination in France and Algeria and an opening of negotiations, without proposing a political solution to the conflict. On 20 March 1956, eight days after the voting of special powers to Guy Mollet (see below), the Comité d’action simply called for the end to policy based on force, the declaration of a cease-fire and the opening of negotiations. Similarly, Sartre had concluded his 27 January speech with a somewhat vague call for the French to struggle alongside the Algerian people in order to free both Algerians and the French from the tyranny of colonialism. Thus, in 1956, while there were intellectuals opposed to the war, no leading figure was yet willing to openly support the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) (National Liberation Front) or call explicitly for Algerian independence. French intellectuals do not operate in a vacuum, and two important factors combined to inhibit them from thinking the unthinkable, and


speaking the unspeakable. First, there was the enormous cultural, political and ideological weight of the view that Algeria was French, which was continually repeated like a mantra by the media and by politicians of all parties. Even the anti-colonialist Sartre was not yet demanding openly that Algeria be independent, let alone expressing his support for the FLN. Second, no political party was even willing to countenance the idea of an independent Algeria. The only party which might have done so, the PCF, had denounced the attacks of 1 November 1954 as ‘individual acts’, was suspicious of the nationalism of the FLN, frightened of alienating the PCF electorate in Algeria and, as with Indochina, afraid that any move towards independence would result in Algeria falling under American influence. Moreover, given that the PCF was supporting Mollet’s government and had indeed voted special powers to Mollet in March 1956, the party was too close to the centre of power to take an independent line (even if it had wished to). At the same time it was too timorous and weak to influence government policy or counter the increasing power of the army. In addition, calls for victory to the FLN were inhibited by the existence of a rival political organisation, the Mouvement National Algérien (MNA) (National Algerian Movement). Founded in 1954 by Messali Hadj, who refused to accept the leadership claims of the FLN, the MNA remained influential, especially in metropolitan France, until at least 1958. While Sartre was demolishing the view that the colonial system could be reformed, a reformed colonialism was precisely what Albert Camus was advocating. Unlike Sartre, Camus had extensive first-hand experience of Algeria. Born and raised in the slums of Belcourt (Algiers), he had been politically active in the Communist Party in the 1930s and as a journalist had written of the human misery in the Kabylia region of Algeria.33 Although bruised by his 1952 clash with Sartre and politically somewhat marginalised because of his refusal to align himself with either the pro-American or pro-Soviet intellectual camp, Camus nonetheless remained part of the Parisian intellectual scene and, thanks especially to his novel L’Etranger (The Outsider), published in 1942, enjoyed national and international fame as one of France’s leading young writers. Yet, despite his place among the Parisian literati, Camus had never forgotten that he was and would always remain Algerian. The sense of self which he had painstakingly knitted together from his pied noir working-class past and his intellectual star status was always a fragile construction. The armed struggle of non-European Algerians against the colons and France thus represented


a dramatic and painful externalisation of his own inner tensions and contradictions. The central theme of Camus’ position in the early months of the war was reconciliation. For example, in October 1955 in a letter to Aziz Kessous, the editor of a journal advocating rapprochement between European and Muslim Algerians, Camus called for mutual understanding and moderation. He wrote that he found unbearable the idea of the two communities pitted against one another, implacably determined to inflict as much pain as possible on one another.34 This letter was the first of many such pleas for restraint and dialogue which underpinned his hope that the spiral of inter-communal violence could be halted. Although aware of the sufferings of the indigenous population, Camus, unlike Sartre, did not see this as a result of a colonial ‘system’. In an echo of his 1939 writings on Kabylia, he argued that the deprivations were a result of France’s failure to realise in Algeria the republican ideas of freedom, justice, fraternity and equality. The deprivations of the Algerians could, he believed, be relieved by a series of reforms which would ameliorate the social conditions which had given rise to alienation and revolt. Camus was extremely sensitive to the position of the million or so Europeans, whose right to continue living in Algeria he never stopped advocating. In his letter to Aziz Kessous, he spoke of the two communities ‘who have now and forever to live together on the same land’,35 and in the same letter he argued that the pieds noirs were tied to the Algerian soil by roots which were both too well-established and too enduring for their removal to be contemplated. Camus challenged the type of presentation that Sartre would make of the European settlers as an undifferentiated bloc of beneficiaries of a vicious system of exploitation, pointing out that 80 per cent of the French settlers were wage earners and shop-keepers whose standard of living, while higher than that of the Arabs, was lower than those of an equivalent social standing in metropolitan France.36 In the early years of the war, then, Camus sought a solution which would improve the lot of the non-European population, giving them hope and dignity, but also one which would recognise the legitimate claims of the European population. Camus envisaged a form of association whereby Algeria would remain part of France with the two communities living together in freedom, each respecting the rights of the other. It was the quest for a negotiated settlement that prompted Camus in October 1955 to call for a round-table discussion with all interested parties from hard-line colonialists to Arab nationalists.37


Three weeks later, on the anniversary of the beginning of the uprising, he launched an appeal for a halt to the killing of civilians by both sides,38 a call reiterated in two other articles published in January 1956.39 The same month Camus travelled to Algiers where he courageously put the case for a civilian cease-fire to series of mass meetings.40 Camus argued passionately that his proposal would not only save precious lives but would create a climate in which constructive debate addressing the complexities of the Algerian question could take place. It should be noted however that while Camus denounced the brutality of both sides, the main and recurring target of his outrage was the terrorist methods of the FLN, which he believed was being manipulated by Egypt’s head of state, Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, and the USSR. Camus’ calls for mutual understanding and restraint in the name of humanity and his plea for a de-escalation of violence fell on deaf ears, and shortly after his trip to Algeria he decided to stop publishing his views on the conflict. Still longing for some sort of reconciliation between the two opposing forces, but now with little hope of seeing this realised, Camus decided to withdraw from the debate over Algeria. He believed that the endless polemics on the subject, complete with their empty posturing, served only to harden the resolve the warring parties and deepen the growing divisions in France. Although Camus was the most famous intellectual to defend an Algeria that was française, he was far from alone. On 21 April 1956, Le Monde published an appeal ‘Pour le salut et le renouveau de l’Algérie française’ (‘For the Salvation and Regeneration of French Algeria’), signed by a heterogeneous collection of public figures including the Archbishop of Toulouse, the novelist Georges Duhamel, a leading member of the trade union Force Ouvrière, the Rector of the University of Paris and three ex-governor-generals of Algeria (including Jacques Soustelle, the ethnologist and recently sacked governor-general). The statement asserted that if France failed to pacify Algeria and secure its position as part of France, she would stand condemned by history. ‘125 years of civilisation’, the statement claimed, was threatened by an alliance of gang leaders, ruthless assassins and people blinded by propaganda who were the tools of ‘a theocratic, fanatical and racist imperialism’, namely pan-Arabism. The signatories claimed that France’s use of force was a justified defence against the terror used by her opponents. Once the enemy was crushed, France would launch an extensive economic, social and political reform programme involving French and Muslims working together to build a new Algérie française.41


Another statement of support for French Algeria appeared in Le Monde on 23 May 1956. Signed by twenty-six professors at the Sorbonne (including Aron), it was a response to Professor Henri Marrou’s article in Le Monde (see below). The statement supported the government’s Algerian policy and France’s military efforts in Algeria, and while agreeing with the signatories of the 21 April appeal that extensive reforms were needed, the statement added that this should not be allowed to overshadow all the positive aspects of France’s historic involvement in Algeria. In addition, the signatories attacked the double standards of those opposing French involvement in Algeria, whom they accused of launching blistering attacks on the French, while remaining inadmissibly indulgent towards the violence of the FLN. The signatories concluded by saying they would do all they could to ensure that the young Frenchmen charged with re-establishing peace in Algeria would receive the respect and the moral support which was their due from the older generation. Since the autumn of 1955, these ‘young Frenchmen’ had included national service conscripts, and between March and June 1956 the total number of French soldiers serving in Algeria doubled from 190 000 to 380 000. But it was not just the numerical increase that was worrying opponents of French military involvement. Concern was growing about the methods being used by the French army, and the perception that the army was increasingly becoming a law unto itself. By 1956/7, the FLN and the French Army were both ‘too steeped in blood’, too committed to the military defeat of the other, to contemplate the reduction in violence to which Camus aspired. It was too late also for promises of a reformed French Algeria to sidetrack the fight for independence. Sabotage by the pieds noirs, combined with a distinct lack of political will in Paris, had ensured that ever since the 1930s any proposal to introduce meaningful political, social or economic reforms had been doomed to failure. Now both sides in the conflict were locked in a bloody fight to the finish, with every FLN ‘outrage’ used by the French army as justification for the murderous reprisals which inevitably followed. Repressive colonial rule was moving into out-andout war. As early as December 1954, despite an official news blackout on the question, L’Humanité had protested against the use of torture in Algeria and, as has been noted, Jean-Marie Domenach had revealed the use of torture in his article ‘Is it War in North Africa?’ published in the same month. In January 1955, France Observateur had published an article by one of its founders, Claude Bourdet, likening the behaviour of the


French army in Algeria to that of the Gestapo,42 and two days later in L’Express François Mauriac protested about the French army’s use of torture.43 In November 1955, Esprit published an article by F. Sarrazin which echoed Bourdet by noting that the torture carried out by the French police was worthy of the Gestapo.44 On 5 April 1956, Le Monde published a text by Henri Marrou,45 a highly respected professor and specialist in the origins of Christianity at the Sorbonne, entitled ‘France ma patrie’ (‘France My Country’), which has been described as ‘one of the founding texts of the “resistance” to the Algerian War’.46 Writing as a ‘simple citizen’, Marrou believed that the very essence of France was being undermined. This was occurring through media censorship imposed by a government now invested with ‘special powers’, but especially by the systematic practice of torture, which Marrou considered inflicted shame on the country of the French Revolution and the Dreyfus Affair. Although official spokesman were still falling over themselves to deny the use of torture, Marrou, who like Bourdet and Sarrazin, compared the French torturers to the Gestapo, asserted that nobody in Algeria denied it was being used. Official denials continued nonetheless, but by 1957 were sounding increasingly hollow and implausible in the light of even more detailed evidence of the extensive and systematic use of torture by the French army. Eye-witness accounts appeared, for example in the Christian review Témoignage chrétien, Esprit and Les Temps modernes47 and a number of books protesting against the use of torture appeared.48 Although the French had used torture in Madagascar (in 1947), Indochina and Morocco, and indeed in Algeria before 1954, in Algeria it now became a daily, routine occurrence, a bureaucratised institution with its own structures, organisers, practitioners, rules and regulations. In November 1957, the historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet created the Comité Maurice Audin (Maurice Audin Committee). The Committee was named after a young mathematics teacher arrested in June 1957 in Algeria, and killed after several days of torture, although the official version was that he had escaped from custody. In May 1958, VidalNaquet published a book devoted to the affair.49 At the same time an information centre, the Centre du Landy, was established with the backing of Esprit and Les Temps modernes, whose main task was to publish on spot the ever-increasing number of books and articles which the government was banning and seizing. It was in 1957 that Sartre once again took up his pen to castigate the French army’s brutal ‘pacification’, describing it as the ‘cynical and


systematic use of absolute violence’.50 In addition he wrote a commentary on (later published as a preface to) La Question, an account by Henri Alleg, a Communist pied noir journalist arrested and tortured in 1957 by the French army.51 It was typical of the government’s repressive censorship of this period that the issue of L’Express in which Sartre’s account first appeared was immediately seized, as was Alleg’s book. Whereas the previous year Sartre had held the colonial system or ‘France’ responsible for the situation in Algeria, he was now confronting the French people themselves for their refusal to protest at the torture, rape, summary executions and other brutalities being carried out in France’s name by the army. This silence was, for Sartre, evidence that France was sick, suffering from a creeping gangrene which was infecting the whole of society. Since its appointment in February 1956, the government of socialist Guy Mollet had based its strategy (such as it was) on the twin assumptions that the FLN would accept a negotiated settlement which did not involve complete independence, and that the pieds noirs would accept sweeping reforms. Both assumptions were wrong. On 6 February 1956, during a fact-finding mission to Algeria, Mollet had found himself bombarded with tomatoes, stones and rotten eggs, thrown by furious settlers who resented Mollet’s decision to replace the ultra Jacques Soustelle by a liberal General Catroux. A traumatised Mollet swiftly dropped Catroux and replaced him by the socialist Robert Lacoste who, like Soustelle, very soon became an Algérie française extremist and was the main architect of the policy of ‘pacification’. For the first time under the Fourth Republic a French government had bowed to the wishes of the mob and accepted that the French settlers in Algeria could call the tune. Although in March 1956 the National Assembly voted to give Mollet ‘special powers’, and the Mollet government had increased the number of soldiers in Algeria (see above), the weakness of the government had become only too apparent. On 22 October 1956, a Moroccan aeroplane carrying Ben Bella and other FLN leaders was forced to land in Algiers, where they were promptly arrested and put in prison, where they were to remain until the end of the war. The French government was only informed after the incident, which triggered the resignation of Alain Savary, minister with special responsibility for relations with Tunisia and Morocco. In the same month the French government was forced into a humiliating climb-down after its joint invasion of Egypt, with British and Israeli forces, was aborted in the face of stiff opposition from the USA (frightened of losing influence in the Middle East) and the USSR


(keen to turn world attention away from events in Hungary). France now found herself under attack at the United Nations both for her aggression again Egypt and for her Algerian policy. On 21 May 1957, Mollet’s government fell, and it was impossible to find a stable majority to form or even support a government. The socialist Left was still reeling from the failure of the Mollet government, while the PCF was trying to recover from the impact of Khruschev’s speech and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. The centre and right were divided between those who advocated a negotiated settlement, and those who would countenance nothing short of the crushing of the Algerian independence movement. The weakness and vacillations of the politicians allowed the army in Algeria increasingly to operate outside any political control and to assume a number of civilian responsibilities as well. Algeria had become in effect a military province. In 1957, as Sartre was denouncing both the indifference of the French population to the murderous activities of the French army and Camus had retreated into hand-wringing silence, Raymond Aron published his contribution to the debate on Algeria. While Camus might have sympathised with the title of Aron’s book, La Tragédie algérienne (The Algerian Tragedy),52 he would have firmly rejected its conclusion: that Algeria should become independent. Although Sartre had written off colonialism as a busted flush, he was not (yet) advocating Algerian independence as explicitly as was Aron.53 If the tone of Sartre’s writings on Algeria was passionate and polemical, Aron’s opinions were delivered with what François Mauriac called an ‘icy clarity.’54 While Sartre was driven by moral outrage, with his views informed by Marxism and an existentialist commitment to freedom, Aron reached his conclusion that Algeria should be independent as a result of a composed detached analysis of the Algerian situation. While Sartre was urging the French people to oppose the prosecution of the war, Aron was targeting policy-makers, advisers and opinion formers. As Aron noted in an interview given towards the end of his life, ‘… it was necessary, in my view, to convince those who were on the right and who were unmoved by moral condemnation of colonialism … the important thing was not to convince the anti-colonialists, it was to convince the colonialists.’55 In the first part of La Tragédie algérienne (written in April 1956), Aron argued that the links with Algeria were not indissoluble and that Algeria was an economic burden for France. Furthermore, France, already under attack at the United Nations and from the USA over Algeria, could not sustain a fight that had no realistic or tangible objectives.


France could either repatriate the French settlers or possibly establish an unassailable French enclave on the coast, but could not resist the pressure for Algerian independence indefinitely. Aron wrote that ‘the heroic solution of abandonment and repatriation is preferable to a war fought without conviction, resolution or prospect of success’.56 By the time Aron came to complete the second part in May 1957, the situation in Algeria had deteriorated even further: Lacoste’s ‘pacification’ policy had aggravated the situation considerably and the two communities in Algeria were more entrenched than ever. Aron dismissed the concept of Algérie française posited on the peaceful coexistence of Muslims and Europeans as the ‘ravings of national vanity’. Once again he insisted that Algerian independence was not contrary to France’s long-term interests; indeed the striking demographic and economic differences between France and Algeria made the separation of the two countries inevitable. France needed to embrace the idea of Algerian independence, and the sooner the better, since, as he added in a postscript on 6 June 1957, with the passing of each day the Algerian war was taking on more and more the character of a tragedy. A courageous policy of granting Algerian independence was, according to Aron, preferable to a war which was being waged reluctantly and with no chance of success. The publication of La Tragédie algérienne had an impact which has been compared to a pistol being fired at a high mass.57 It was Aron, the anti-Communist darling of the liberal Right, who had dared to utter the ‘i’ word at a time when most critics of the government’s Algerian policy were limiting themselves to condemning repression and torture, and calling for the opening of negotiations. Aron had, in his own words, ‘violated the rules of the shadowy game of diplomatic hide and seek’ and found himself ‘swept up in a political whirlwind’.58 Not surprisingly, much of the buffeting which he received, sometimes liberally peppered with anti-Semitism, came from the Right and extreme Right, like the contribution from Emmanuel Beau de Loménie.59 The Algérie française die-hard, ex-Governor General Jacques Soustelle, also leapt into print,60 accusing Aron of giving France’s enemies valuable support in the psychological war she was waging. Soustelle concluded his tirade by proclaiming that to abandon Algeria was to condemn France to decadence, while saving Algeria would put an end to France’s degradation and provide opportunities and a future for her people and her youth. An article in the pro-colonialist Carrefour claimed that Aron preferred a France that was a little European country modelled on America to a France that was a world power with a string of overseas territories.61


Another article in the same publication compared Aron’s position with the defeatism of Pierre Laval in 194062 – a similar charge to the one levelled at him by his old friend and Catholic politician Etienne Borne – while the royalist Right accused Aron of assisting the FLN.63 While the reaction from the Right and extreme Right was largely predictable, other responses took Aron by surprise. He admitted to being taken aback by an article by Pascal Pia, his pied noir ex-colleague at Combat, accusing him of wanting to bring French Algerians to France and intern them in camps,64 a view echoed by another pied noir, journalist Jean Daniel, who accused Aron of advocating the immediate repatriation of the Algerian French.65 Although Aron received something of a mauling in the press, he also received many letters of support from civil servants and politicians. He was particularly struck by the discrepancy between what the politicians said in private and their public declarations, and concluded that of the leading figures of the Fourth Republic probably only Georges Bidault, Jacques Soustelle, Michel Debré and possibly Jacques Chaban-Delmas sincerely believed in Algérie française.

Algeria II: from the birth of the Fifth Republic to Independence By 1958, events in Algeria were not just a major preoccupation for the Fourth Republic; they were threatening to destabilise it completely. In February, 69 people, including 21 children, were killed during the French bombing of a Tunisian village, Sakhiet-Sidi-Youssef. French claims that the village was an FLN base did little to lessen the international opprobrium to which she was subjected, and on 15 April the government headed by Félix Gaillard was forced to resign. After almost a month without a government, the prospect of one headed by Pierre Pflimlin, thought to favour a liberal negotiated solution in Algeria, brought the crisis to a head. In Algeria huge demonstrations on 13 May resulted in the sacking of the Governor-General’s office and the formation of a Comité de salut public (Committee of Public Safety) headed by General Massu. René Coty, President of the Republic, was warned by the top brass in Algeria that they would not stand by if Algeria were to be abandoned; plans were finalised for a seizure of power in Paris by the military. The French army, humiliated in 1940 and again at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, was not prepared to face further ignominy because of what it saw as weak and vacillating politicians.


With France facing the prospect of a military coup, de Gaulle made it known on 15 May via a press release that he was prepared to assume power. After nearly two eventful weeks which included secret negotiations, de Gaulle’s public announcement that he had no intention of becoming a dictator, and the resignation of the Pflimlin government, de Gaulle was sworn in as head of government on 1 June. The following day he was given unlimited powers for six months, with a brief to revise the constitution. This was the day for which de Gaulle had waited since his resignation in January 1946. De Gaulle’s return was enthusiastically hailed by his faithful supporters, and welcomed by the army, which was reassured to see a man with a military background at the helm. At the same time, de Gaulle’s re-entry onto the political stage also provoked fear and foreboding on the Left and among the supporters of Algerian independence, who feared an alliance between de Gaulle in Paris and the army in Algeria. The French people were invited to pronounce on a new constitution in a referendum held on 28 September 1958, when the proposals were endorsed by almost 80 per cent (79.25 per cent) of those voting. In Algeria, the percentage in favour was 95 per cent. The massive vote in favour of the constitution and the low abstention rate (15.6 per cent) marked not only a huge endorsement of the new constitutional arrangements but an equally important approbation for de Gaulle. The constitution of the new Fifth Republic, with its reinforcement of the powers of the president and the government at the expense of the elected assembly, marked a clear break with the parliamentary regimes of the Third and Fourth Republics. While there were those who heaved a sigh of relief and welcomed the prospect of active and firm government, others feared that it would open the door to a reactionary or even fascist regime. Hopes and fears alike were increased by the success of the Gaullist party, the Union pour la Nouvelle République (UNR) (Union for the New Republic), in the legislative elections held at the end of November. They were further reinforced by the 78.5 per cent of the votes cast by the electoral college which on 21 December confirmed de Gaulle as the first elected president of the Fifth Republic. The return of de Gaulle had split the intellectuals. In the third chapter of L’Algérie et la république,66 published in July 1958, Aron had considered de Gaulle to be the only alternative to civil war or a military coup. He also perceptively noted the heterogeneous nature of de Gaulle’s supporters who were each projecting onto him their hopes and aspirations, including Camus who, according to his biographer,


hoped that de Gaulle would turn out to be the saviour of les petits blancs (the poor whites) of Algeria.67 Sartre, on the other hand, viewed the return of de Gaulle, backed by the military and civilians in Algeria, as a severe setback for the cause of Algerian independence. Moreover, in Sartre’s view de Gaulle represented the very antithesis of republican democracy,68 and de Gaulle’s success in the 28 September referendum led Beauvoir to conclude that the French people had disavowed themselves in a mass collective suicide.69 This popular endorsement of de Gaulle by the French electorate, coupled with the failure of the Left to prevent his return to power or to resolve the Algerian crisis, now led Sartre to adopt a more radical stance on the question of Algerian independence. This radicalisation was underpinned by a belief that de Gaulle could not and would not resolve the crisis. It was further reinforced by Sartre’s outrage at the intensification of the French military campaigns in Algeria and the extension of army repression against the civilian population. In addition Sartre was becoming increasingly frustrated by the refusal of the French to mobilise in large numbers against what was happening in Algeria. In 1959, Sartre was contacted by Francis Jeanson, his colleague at Les Temps modernes, who had led the review’s charge against Camus’ L’Homme révolté. Jeanson now headed Jeune Résistance, an illegal FLN support network, and it was for the network’s clandestine monthly that Sartre agreed to give an interview.70 Addressing the question of the silence of the French proletariat on Algeria, Sartre contended that colonial exploitation protected French workers from unemployment and ensured a higher standard of living than they would otherwise have enjoyed. It also encouraged a paternalistic attitude towards the subproletariat in Algeria and a certain degree of class collaboration between workers and bosses in metropolitan France. Sartre argued, however, that French workers not only had a responsibility to take a stand against the ruthless exploitative system of colonialism but it was also in their own interests so to do, since it was the colonial system that drove many Algerians to seek work in France, that drove others to fight the French and forced young men from metropolitan France to kill and die in Algeria. Sartre also told Jeanson off the record that he had his full support, and that he and his friends were ready to do what was needed in order to help Jeanson in his activities. In early June 1958, de Gaulle had visited Algeria and on the first day of his visit had enthralled his pied noir audience in Alger when he told them ‘Je vous ai compris’71 and even more so in Mostaganem, where he declared ‘Vive l’Algérie Française’. In October, he instructed the French


army officers to quit the Comité de salut public in Algeria and in December recalled General Salan, one of the leading military ultras, to France. This coincided with de Gaulle ordering an intensification of military operations in Algeria while simultaneously offering the FLN the chance of a peace settlement (la paix des braves). This olive branch was rejected out of hand by the FLN leadership, who stepped up their violent campaign for independence which was now being waged in metropolitan France. De Gaulle was now coming to the view – in private at least – that given the intransigence of the pieds noirs ultras and the FLN’s determination to fight on, France’s involvement in Algeria in defence of Algérie française was simply not worth the economic and political damage it was causing. Moreover ‘the war without name’72 constituted a major obstacle to France asserting herself as an independent great power on the international stage. In September 1959 de Gaulle announced a policy of self-determination for Algeria which could take one of three forms: secession, integration or association. Now for the first time, a French government was prepared to publicly entertain the possibility of an Algerian Algeria. The growing unease among the Algerian colons and within the UNR was shown by the resignation of eleven UNR deputies in October, and in January 1960, following de Gaulle’s sacking of General Massu, unease in Algeria spilled over into open rebellion during la semaine des barricades (the Week of the Barricades) from 24 January until 1 February 1960. On 4 January 1960, Albert Camus was killed in a car crash. While he had withdrawn from any public discussion on Algeria in what he considered pointless and ultimately damaging exchanges (see above), and had refused to sign any of the left-wing petitions for ‘peace in Algeria’, he had been extremely active behind the scenes. According to journalist Jean Daniel and ethnographer Germaine Tillion, Camus intervened with the authorities in Algeria, France and abroad on behalf of some 150 individuals imprisoned for their activities in the Algerian war, many of whom had been sentenced to death. In the case of individuals being sentenced to death, Camus’ disapproval of their actions was over-ridden by his abhorrence of the death penalty, as it had been when he signed the petition to save Brasillach (see Chapter 1). More generally he hoped that a display of clemency would halt the spiral of reciprocal violence in which the French army and FLN were engaged and thus would break the vicious cycle of terrorist actions and legal executions. As he wrote to René Coty, president of the Fourth Republic, clemency would ‘preserve a little of the future Algeria which we all hope for’.73


In Stockholm in December 1957 to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, Camus alluded to his actions on Algeria. ‘I have been silent for a year and eight months, which does not signify that I have stopped being active.’74 He continued by reiterating his hopes for a fair and just Algeria where the two populations would live in peace. He reminded his audience that he had always opposed terror and therefore condemned the arbitrary terrorism that reigned on the streets of Algiers and which could one day strike his family. He then added the now infamous sentence: ‘I believe in justice but I would put defending my mother before justice.’75 Some people understood Camus to be saying that if ‘justice’ meant that his mother could be blown up by a bomb, then he would side with his mother against this justice through terror. Supporters of Algerian independence, however, took Camus to mean that rather than defend justice due to millions of Algerians he would choose justice for one person – his mother. The Algerian Christian anarchist Jean Sénac wrote: ‘Apparently the enemies of Mme Camus are the terrorists; apparently it is the French politico-military police machine that protects her.’76 Whether in public or in private, Camus never abandoned the premise that Algeria should remain part of France with the political, social and economic reforms that he advocated being introduced within that constitutional framework. On 7 January 1960, France-Observateur published a warm and moving tribute to Camus from Sartre.77 Despite their fundamental political differences and despite, or perhaps because of, Camus’ silence on Algeria, Sartre admitted to having thought about Camus a great deal since their break in 1952, asking himself frequently what Camus thought about this book or that newspaper article. He paid tribute to Camus’ stubborn humanism and asserted that Camus would never cease being one of the driving forces of French culture or representing, in his own way, the history of France and the twentieth century. Sartre spent from February to March 1960 in Cuba, where he was greatly impressed by what he saw as the spontaneous and undogmatic nature of the Cuban revolution; he wrote a series of sixteen articles for France-Soir, published between 28 June and 15 July, extolling its virtues.78 On his return he gave an interview to a small left-wing publication, Vérité-Liberté,79 in which he recognised the role played by young people in the anti-war movement and supported their use of violence in opposing the war. By now Sartre was coming to believe that the French Left could be radicalised by aligning itself with those fighting for independence in Algeria. ‘The French Left must be in solidarity with the FLN. Their fates are linked. The victory of the FLN will be the


victory of the Left.’80 Such a view was far from being a widely held one in progressive circles, however, and in the May (1960) issue of Esprit, Jean Daniel had warned of ‘our philosophers “worshipping” the FLN like Stalinist intellectuals used to worship the PCF a few years previously’.81 On 5 September 1960 some twenty members of Jeanson’s network, who had been arrested in February, went on trial before a military tribunal in a building in the rue Cherche-Midi where Captain Alfred Dreyfus had appeared, charged with spying, in 1894. The chaotic proceedings caused by the determination of the defendants and their lawyers to ridicule the whole procedure seemed to vindicate Marx’s dictum about history repeating itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. The antics of the defence ensured that a trial which should have lasted a week lurched on for nearly a month. On 20 September defence lawyer Roland Dumas announced he had received a telegram and a letter from Sartre who had been detained in Brazil. (In fact the letter had been penned by colleagues from Les Temps modernes who had consulted Sartre by telephone.) The telegram offered his apologies for his non-appearance and confirmed his full solidarity with the accused. The letter, dated 16 September, asserted that those helping the FLN were not simply inspired by unselfish feelings for an oppressed people, nor were they working for a foreign power; they were working for their own future and freedom and for a truly democratic France. Sartre, for his part, unequivocally confirmed his solidarity with the anti-war militants and stated: ‘If Jeanson had asked me to act as a courier ( porter des valises) or to shelter Algerian militants, and I could have done so without putting them in danger, I would have done it without a moment’s hesitation.’82 While the defendants and their supporters were creating uproar and scandal in the rue Cherche-Midi, the publication of a manifesto signed by 121 intellectuals was having a similar effect beyond the confines of the courtroom. The idea of the manifesto, publication of which was briefly announced in Le Monde on 6 September, had been discussed before the summer holidays by author Maurice Blanchot, Dionys Mascolo, Maurice Nadeau and two stalwarts of Les Temps modernes, Marcel Péju and Claude Lanzmann. Signatures were collected and the manifesto was made public to coincide with the trial of the members of the Jeanson network. The title of the manifesto, ‘Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie’ (‘Declaration of the Right of Insubordination in the Algerian War’), says it all. The 121 signatories, including Sartre, Beauvoir, novelists Marguerite Duras, Françoise Sagan, Nathalie Sarraute,


actress Simone Signoret, film-makers Alain Resnais and François Truffaut, historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and André Breton were denouncing the war and supporting all those prosecuted, imprisoned and sentenced for refusing to take part in it, or for coming to the assistance of the Algerian fighters. In the final paragraphs, the signatories expressed their respect for and agreement with those who refused to bear arms against the Algerian people or who gave help and protection to Algerians being oppressed in the name of the French people. Although no mainstream publication in France dared reproduce the Manifesto of the 121,83 copies of the text were circulating and causing a sensation. However, the furore and publicity generated by the Manifesto of the 121 should not conceal the divisions among the French intellectuals, even among those opposed to the war. While the 121 were urging insubordination and support for the Algerians, others opposed to the war were taking a more moderate line. In October 1960, Enseignement Public, the monthly organ of the Fédération de l’Education Nationale (FEN), published an Appel à l’opinion pour une paix négociée en Algérie (An Appeal for a Negotiated Peace in Algeria) which argued that Algérie française was an impossibility and the only way out of the Algerian crisis was through a negotiated peace. While not endorsing insubordination, the signatories nevertheless recognised that as long as the war continued ‘a crisis of conscience and spirit of revolt among the young would be inevitable’.84 The signatories included a number of leading trade unionists followed by intellectuals including Roland Barthes, Georges Canguilhem, Vladimir Jankelevitch, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edgar Morin, Jacques Prévert and Paul Ricoeur. Besides provoking a reaction from more moderate opponents to the war, the Manifesto of the 121 also caused a number of conservative intellectuals to leap into the fray. On 7 October 1960, Le Figaro published the Manifeste des Intellectuels Français (Manifesto of French Intellectuals) initially signed by 185 intellectuals who condemned the signatories of the Manifesto of the 121 as ‘apologists of insubordination and desertion’. Without explicitly identifying them, the signatories castigated events and statements at the trial of members of the Jeanson network and the Manifesto of the 121 itself as the latest in a long line of attacks inspired by foreign propaganda and waged by France’s fifth column against national and Western values. According to the signatories, the war in Algeria, far from being a war waged by the Algerian people for their independence, was ‘a war forced upon France by a minority of fanatical, terrorist, racist rebels led by men whose personal ambitions are only too evident and armed and


financed by foreigners’.85 And what of the French army? ‘For years this army has been carrying out a social and humane civilising mission which has been publicly applauded by all honest witnesses.’86 The purpose of the manifesto was to disabuse anyone of the idea that the advocates of desertion were representative of French intellectual opinion. The signatories included Marshal Juin, a member of the Académie Française, and the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel, and dozens of writers, journalists, lawyers, doctors and members of the French university establishment. Thanks to his pre-eminent position as the committed intellectual – even if he was not committed enough to return from Brazil to appear at the trial of the members of Jeanson’s network, much to the annoyance and chagrin of those to whom he had promised that he would – Sartre was the intellectual who had made the Algerian War his war. In 1961 his growing radicalisation took another leap forward with the publication of the most violent text he ever wrote, namely the Preface to Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth) in which he asserted that violence was necessary in order to destroy the violence of the colonial system. Moreover, it was through violence against the colonial oppressor that the colonised reasserted him/herself as a human being and radically rejected the coloniser’s definition of him/her as an Untermensch, a sub-human. The explanations for Sartre’s extreme violence can be found in his rage, frustration and guilt at colonialism in general and French colonialism in particular, and his need for the Algerian independence movement to succeed both for the sake of the Algerians and, as we have seen, as a means of radicalising the French Left. It was also a reflection of the irresolvable contradiction in which Sartre found himself in 1961. On the one hand there were the Third World anti-colonialist movements which he admired and saw as the inspiration for renaissance of a radical Left in Europe but of which, as a European, he could never be a part. At the same time there was a France dominated by de Gaulle whom he detested and whose inhabitants’ apathy over colonialism drove him to despair, and yet a France of which he was a part. On the political front, it was becoming increasing clear to many observers that de Gaulle was moving towards Algerian independence as a solution to the crisis. In the course of a press conference on 4 November 1960, de Gaulle spoke of an Algerian Algeria. On 8 January 1961 the question of self-determination for Algeria was put to the French electorate in a referendum and was endorsed by just over 75 per cent of those voting, although the high percentage of abstentions


(23.5 per cent) indicated a certain reticence or unease among the voters. The realisation that the French army and the French settlers were about to be, in their view, ‘betrayed’ triggered a military putsch in Algeria in April 1961 when the military chiefs supported by a number of parachutist regiments seized power. De Gaulle’s recourse to Article 16 of the Constitution, which gave the president unlimited powers, the refusal of the conscripts to support the putsch and the hostility of the population in metropolitan France combined to ensure that the putsch failed. The failure of the putsch gave a fillip to the activities of the recently formed Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS) composed largely of army officers and pied noir extremists. The OAS resorted to a terror campaign in France, targeting opponents of Algérie française and hoping to cause enough mayhem and destruction to bring down the regime. Collusion between the police and the OAS was widely suspected, and the brutality of the police was dramatically demonstrated on 17 October 1961 when hundreds of Algerians in a peaceful demonstration were killed by Paris police under the direction of préfet de police Maurice Papon,87 later found guilty of deporting Jews from the Bordeaux area to concentration camps during World War Two. For the ultras of the OAS and their supporters, de Gaulle was about to betray Algeria and was thus an enemy and a traitor. It was for this reason that de Gaulle was the target of assassination attempts both in fact (for example at Pont-sur-Seine on 8 September 1961 and at Petit Clamart, in the south suburbs of Paris, on 22 August 1962) and in fiction (Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal). In Algeria the OAS used indiscriminate and targeted terror – including the assassination of liberals and Muslims – in its attempt to establish its control over the European population. Throughout what turned out to be the end game of the Algerian war, Sartre continued to be in the forefront of protests over Algeria. He was co-organiser of a silent demonstration in Paris on 1 November 1961 in protest at the killings of the 17 October demonstrators by the police. He took part in a demonstration called by the PSU on 18 November, followed by a press conference. On 13 December he participated in a meeting on Algeria in Rome, and on 19 December was at another particularly violent demonstration in Paris called by the trade unions. On 13 February 1962 he participated in a huge demonstration protesting at the deaths of eight demonstrators a few days earlier. They had been in a demonstration on Algeria and had been crushed to death when Papon’s Paris police forced a section of the crowd into the Charonne metro station.88


Not surprisingly Sartre’s political activities led to him being targeted by the OAS, which bombed his flat in the rue Bonaparte in the St Germain-des-Prés area of Paris on two occasions – 19 July 1961 and 7 January 1962 – while the offices of Les Temps modernes were bombed on 13 May 1961. While the extremists among the advocates of Algérie française were becoming ever more desperate in their attempts to prevent ‘a sell-out’, Sartre remained convinced that de Gaulle, far from being their enemy, was secretly working with them to ensure that Algeria remained French. In an interview published in the summer of 1962, Sartre insisted that there was ‘an objective complicity between the government and the OAS at least as far as de Gaulle was concerned’.89 It was largely because of the perceived collusion between de Gaulle and the extreme Right that Sartre was involved in the creation of the Front d’Action et de Co-ordination des Universitaires et Intellectuels pour un rassemblement anti-fasciste (FAC) (Action and Co-ordination Front of University Staff and Intellectuals for an Anti-Fascist Movement). In March 1962, after protracted negotiations, the Evian agreements were signed, committing France to Algerian independence; they were overwhelmingly endorsed in a referendum held on 8 April 1962 and Algerian independence was declared on 3 July. However, in the first internal bulletin of the FAC which briefly preceded the announcement of a cease-fire in Algeria (19 March 1962), Sartre asserted that France was threatened by fascism and that the government was using the OAS against the people.90 In the interview of summer 1962 Sartre persisted in his view that France faced a fascist threat and claimed that ‘it is not true that peace in Algeria means the end of fascism in France … when peace is truly established in Algeria the fascist danger in France, far from having disappeared will be all the greater’.91 Ultimately Sartre had to accept that it was the Right with de Gaulle at its head who emerged in France as the winners from the Algerian crisis. De Gaulle’s victory had both consolidated the position of Sartre’s arch-enemy and put paid to Sartre’s hopes that the French people would play a determining role in the struggle for Algerian independence. In a scathing article written in February 1962 and published a month later, Sartre castigated his fellow-countrymen and women for their indifference and their refusal to take responsibility for what had been taking place in Algeria since 1954.92 As a right-wing critic noted, ‘When de Gaulle ended the Algerian War, Sartre greeted this agreement with indifference since it was no longer a question of a victory of the French people over its colonialist bourgeoisie.’93 The nature of the


resolution of the conflict also put paid to Sartre’s hopes that the war would radicalise the French and European Left. Sartre’s disillusionment was deepened by his disappointment in the way Algeria developed after independence. Using terms reminiscent of those he and MerleauPonty had used about the USSR, he noted in 1963 that there was a hiatus in the development of the revolution which had ‘objective reasons’94 and observed two years later that ‘the regime is a long way from being brilliant’ but that ‘we should do nothing to embarrass independent Algeria’. He concluded, again with words that echoed what he and Merleau-Ponty had been saying about the USSR in the late 1940s: ‘We lack information about what is happening.’95 While there may not have been an immediate radicalisation of the French Left, the Algerian war had laid the seed of a revolt which was to erupt six years later. Despite the overall indifference of the French to events in Algeria, the war had nonetheless politicised numbers of students and other young people who had been born during or just after World War Two. Disgusted by the actions of the ‘socialist’ government and the SFIO whose internal documents compared Jeanson and his comrades with war-time collaborators, and the FLN with the Nazis, and appalled by the timidity of the reformist French Communist Party, the younger generation was moving to embrace the theory and practice of revolution.

5 May, Mao and the End of the ‘Classic Intellectual’?

Towards May 1968 At an international level, once Kennedy and Khruschev had successfully defused the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, it was ‘peaceful coexistence’ which informed superpower politics. On the domestic front, de Gaulle had seen his position reinforced by the referendum vote in October 1962 approving the election of the President by universal suffrage, and by the crushing success of the Gaullist candidates in the parliamentary elections a month later, when they won 233 seats out of 482. (The next most successful grouping was the Socialists with 66 seats.) The cementing of this symbiotic relationship between the president and the French further legitimised de Gaulle’s determination to assert France’s independence and challenge a world where politics were dominated by the USSR and the USA. One of the arms to be used would be the consolidation of Europe stretching, in the words of de Gaulle, from the Atlantic to the Urals, and underpinned by closer collaboration between France and Germany. Opposed to an integrated Europe, de Gaulle envisaged a Europe based on collaboration between nation-states in which France would play the leading role. Britain’s participation in the project was explicitly rejected by de Gaulle, who feared that her close links with the USA would undermine Europe’s independence. An indispensable element of France’s political independence would be control over her own defence. After coming to power in 1958, de Gaulle had increased the funding for France’s nuclear weapons programme and her first atomic bomb had been exploded in February 1960. De Gaulle refused to involve France in any American-sponsored

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May, Mao and the End of the ‘Classic Intellectual’? 129

multilateral nuclear force and in 1966 announced France’s withdrawal from NATO. De Gaulle realised that France’s leading role on the world stage was conditional on French prosperity and this was indeed a feature of France in the early 1960s. As Kristin Ross has observed, at this time: French people, peasants and intellectuals alike, tended to describe the changes in their lives in terms of the abrupt transformations in home and transport: the coming of objects – large-scale consumer durables, cars and refrigerators – into their streets and homes, into their workplaces and their emplois du temps. In the space of just ten years, a rural woman might live the acquisition of electricity, running water, a stove, a refrigerator, a washing machine, a sense of interior space as distinct from exterior space, a car, a television, and the various liberations associated with each.1 The increase in ownership of television sets is an indicator of the speed of and enthusiasm for the consumer society which was occurring in France, in that in 1958, 9 per cent of households had a TV, while seven years later the figure had risen to 42 per cent, and by 1969 reached 60 per cent. There is agreement among economists that the decade or so before 1968 represented a period of ‘growth without precedent of capitalism in France’2 and was the peak decade of the trente glorieuses, the thirty-year postwar economic boom. By the mid-1960s, the baby-boomers had reached adolescence. What became to be known later as youth culture was being born. In June 1963, Daniel Filipacchi, initiator of the pop magazine Salut les Copains, staged an open-air concert in Paris which attracted over 150 000 young people. ‘Youth’ was asserting itself as a social cultural force. In the universities the impact of the baby-boomers too was making itself felt. In 1954 there were some 140 000 students in higher education; by 1961 the figure had risen to over 200 000. In 1968 there were over 500 000. The main student organisation, the Union nationale des étudiants de France (UNEF) (National Union of French Students), founded in 1946, had been radicalised during the Algerian war, when it had denounced the French army’s activities in Algeria, and in 1960 had called for negotiations with the FLN. After the end of the war, the leadership of the UNEF was dominated by ‘politicos’ who had been radicalised by thirdworld liberation struggles (Cuba, Latin America, Vietnam, Algeria). Many were members of the Union des étudiants communistes (UEC) (Communist Students Union), the student wing of the PCF, but their radicalism was to prove too much for the Party. Many of them


were expelled and went off to form a number of small, revolutionary organisations, the most significant of which were the Trotskyist Jeunesse communiste révolutionnaire ( JCR) (Revolutionary Communist Youth) led by Alain Krivine and the pro-Chinese Union des jeunesses communistes marxistes-léninistes (UJCM-L) (Union of Communist Marxist-Leninist Youth) whose base was the Ecole Normale Supérieure, where many were students of the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser.

‘May 68 was something of the order of a pure event, free of all normal and normative causality’3 The explosion of May–June 1968 was not ignited by either of these revolutionary groupuscules who remained firmly rooted in the orthodox discourse and praxis of Marx and Lenin. They had mobilised in favour of the Vietnamese NLF under the banner of anti-imperialism, but much time had been devoted to the reading of the Marxist canon, agonising about the ‘correct’ way to build the revolutionary party and engaging in sectarian polemics with the PCF, and groups and individuals of rival revolutionary tendencies. The events of May–June have been well documented4 and will only be sketched in here, since it is the intellectuals’ relation to the events which is the focus of our interest. On 2 May the university campus at Nanterre in the north-west suburbs of Paris was closed as a result of occupation of the administrative buildings by a small group of anarchist libertarians including Daniel Cohn-Bendit. The following day, to coincide with the appearance of eight of the ‘agitators’ before a disciplinary tribunal, a meeting was held in the courtyard of the Sorbonne in the heart of Paris’s Latin Quarter. The Dean of the Sorbonne called in the police to clear the courtyard. The clashes between students and police soon escalated into full-scale riots and the building of barricades. The revolt spread to other universities and soon to the industrial sector, where millions of workers were to come out on strike. The spontaneous character of the movement caught everyone by surprise including the revolutionary groupuscules and the PCF. Although registered at universities themselves, the leaders of the orthodox Marxist groupuscules shared the PCF’s suspicions of intellectuals, frequently dismissing them as privileged petit-bourgeois cut off from the working class. For example, although members of the JCR were active in the student revolt from the early days of the movement, the leadership of the UJCM-L initially instructed its members not to go to the Latin Quarter and not to participate in the demonstrations.


Although all the revolutionary groups were soon to be actively involved, the student movement was not primarily composed of self-proclaimed revolutionaries any more than the workers’ revolt which it spawned. The movement of May was a carnival of protest in which (primarily) young people found an outlet for their revolt against a range of targets which included, for example, traditional sexual mores, capitalism, authority, ‘bourgeois’ culture, the content and structure of traditional education, the consumer society, Gaullist paternalism, and censorship. It was all too much for the PCF. Since the Party’s 17th Congress (1964) the PCF had been committed to a policy of uniting the Left around a common programme. This new unity was evident in the presidential elections of 1965, when the Left had presented a single candidate (François Mitterrand), and there was an agreement between Communists and Socialists that their candidates would not stand against one another in the second round of legislative elections in 1967. Faced with a radical anti-establishment movement over which it had no control and which in the Party’s view threatened to undermine its electoral strategy by equating the left and violence, the Party moved quickly to distance itself from the student radicals. On the day when the Sorbonne was closed (3 May) Georges Marchais, future General Secretary of the PCF, wrote in L’Humanité of ‘the German anarchist Cohn-Bendit’, of ‘pseudo-revolutionaries’, ‘sons of wealthy bourgeois’ who ‘objectively were serving the interests of the Gaullist power structures and big monopoly capitalism’.5 While still castigating the gauchistes (leftists), the PCF was nonetheless obliged to acknowledge the scope of the movement and before too long it started to make noises about the legitimate grievances of the students. After the movement spread to the factories, the PCF briefly gave the impression that it saw the possibility of using the movement to sweep a popular left-wing government into power. However, after de Gaulle’s dissolution of the legislature and call for new elections, the PCF threw itself wholeheartedly into electioneering, trying to convince conservative voters that it was respectable and responsible while at the same time attempting to persuade the left-wing electorate that it was radical. In the June 1968 elections it lost over 600 000 voters compared to those of 1967, and the result constituted a massive vote of confidence for de Gaulle, and the Gaullists of the Union pour la Défense de la République (UDR), who with their allies, the Républicains Indépendants, secured more than 72 per cent of the seats in the National Assembly. When the ‘events’ of May began, a number of left-wing intellectuals were quick to show their support for the students. On 8 May, Le Monde


published a short statement signed by Sartre, Beauvoir, Colette Audry, Michel Leiris and Daniel Guérin calling on ‘all workers and intellectuals to give moral and material support to the struggle of the students and teachers’.6 Two days later a longer statement appeared in Le Monde,7 again signed by Sartre and over thirty other intellectuals including Marguerite Duras, Jacques Lacan, André Gorz, Maurice Nadeau and Henri Lefebvre. This statement linked what was happening in France to contemporaneous student movements across the world, and refused to condemn the students’ recourse to violence. The student violence, the signatories argued, was simply a response to the inherent violence of contemporary capitalist societies, which was now being exposed through the brutality of the police. In an interview on RTL on 12 May, Sartre recognised the radical potential of the student movement (as opposed to the traditional parties of the Left) when he argued that the student movement was the only left-wing movement prepared to mount a challenge to the status quo. Sartre was also aware that the student movement represented a rejection of contemporary capitalism and of the same sort of lifestyles that the students’ parents enjoyed. ‘Whatever the political regime, violence is the only thing left to students who haven’t yet become part of the system created by their fathers and who do not want to be part of it.’8 On 20 May Sartre underscored his solidarity with the students by joining them in the Sorbonne, which had been occupied by the students after Prime Minister Pompidou had ordered the police to withdraw from the University. According to the correspondent of France Soir, Sartre’s appearance was greeted with ‘wild applause’. Sartre immediately engaged in a question and answer session with his audience, giving his views on the dictatorship of the proletariat, the meaning of democracy in a class society, the relevance of the student movement for the third world, the reason for the decline of the traditional Left, workers’ control, and the policy of the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), the Communist-dominated trade union, of preventing students from contacting workers and so on. Sartre’s views were later distributed as a political leaflet.9 When a member of the audience shouted out that Sartre was a talented writer but a lousy politician, Sartre replied that he had not come as a politician but as an intellectual. Indeed throughout the events Sartre continued to play the part of the classic intellectual – signing statements, appearing on radio, showing his solidarity with those occupying the Sorbonne, and writing articles supporting the student demands. Here he was using his fame to endorse the students’ case – a


tactic which was used with particular effect when he, who had been interviewed hundreds of times, turned interviewer and, questioning Daniel Cohn-Bendit, provided ‘Dany le Rouge’ with a platform which would guarantee the maximum of publicity. The interview, publication of which in a special issue of Le Nouvel Observateur coincided with Sartre’s appearance at the Sorbonne,10 allowed Cohn-Bendit to explain the student movement and to counter the personal vilification to which he had been subjected in the press. Facing Sartre across the barricades, as it were, stood Raymond Aron. On 11 May, after the first night of the barricades, Aron took part in an emotional meeting with, amongst others, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the economist Charles Morazé and political scientist Jean-Pierre Vernant, where he signed a statement condemning the violence. While he later admitted to feelings of dismay at what was happening, Aron initially opted to keep quiet and refused an invitation to appear on television. On 14 May Aron left France to give three lectures in the USA, leaving behind two articles which were published in Le Figaro.11 Although critical of a government which, in his view, lurched from weakness to brutality, Aron forcefully condemned the student revolt. As a member of the university, he placed himself unreservedly on the side of those teachers who, he said, were more concerned with doing their job than participating in a crusade without a cross and without an aim. Returning to France via Belgium (all the French airports were closed as a result of strike action), Aron arrived in Paris on 23 May. Six days later, he was contacted by the Russian academic, Alexandre Kojève. Aron had attended Kojève’s now legendary lectures on Hegel in Paris in the 1930s and, after the war, Kojève had become a negotiator for the French government. During this phone call, made a few days before his death, Kojève contemptuously dismissed the student revolt as a pseudo-revolution, a view which was to find an echo in Aron’s La Révolution introuvable (The Elusive Revolution),12 where he described the events as a psycho-drama (see below). On 30 May Aron enthusiastically joined the massive demonstration on the Champs Elysées in support of de Gaulle, and from early June, when the ending of strike action meant the Le Figaro was again on sale, Aron once again had an outlet for his views. Although the tide had turned in favour of the status quo, there was still widespread disruption in the faculties. In the first of a series of six articles on ‘The Crisis of the University’ appearing between 11 June and 19 June, Aron launched an appeal for the formation of a ‘vast committee for the defence and renovation of the French University’ in


the face of student terrorism.13 The other articles analysed the crisis in French universities and suggested a number of reforms within a conservative-liberal framework, but explicitly ruled out any student involvement in the appointment of teaching staff, or in the examination of their peers, which had been two of the popular demands of the students. According to Aron, any student participation should be kept within strictly defined limits as far as teaching and syllabuses were concerned.14 Aron’s appeal initially generated some 2000 letters of support and eventually totalled between 3000 and 4000. The letters were processed by a small group of sympathisers including ex-Communist historians Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Annie Kriegel, Alain Besançon, an expert on Soviet affairs, and sociologist Jean Bachelier. Not all reactions were favourable, however. The ex-Communist historian, François Furet, criticised what he considered to be Aron’s overinsistence on the manipulation of the student movement by small revolutionary groups.15 Alain Touraine in his book on the May events described Aron’s contributions to Le Figaro as ‘vehement articles [which were] resented as an unfair attack by all those who had participated in the actions sparked by the movement’.16 The most virulent and personal attack, however, came from Sartre in the form of an interview published in Le Nouvel Observateur on 19 June.17 In this vitriolic broadside launched in reply to Aron’s 11 June appeal, Sartre again defended the students’ recourse to violence and attacked the conservative elitism of the French system of higher education. In the course of his onslaught against Aron’s views on reform he referred to ‘the ageing Aron endlessly trotting out the ideas set out in his thesis written before World War Two, while those listening are unable to impose the slightest critical checks on him. He is exercising real power but it is certainly not based on any knowledge worthy of the term.’18 Later in the same interview Sartre stated ‘I am willing to bet anything you like that Raymond Aron has never questioned his own ideas and that as a result is, in my opinion, unworthy to be a teacher.’19 He concluded that the university needed to be shaken up by a revolution which would mean, amongst other things, that ‘people should no longer think, like Aron does, that sitting thinking alone at your desk and thinking the same thing for thirty years represents the exercise of intelligence’.20 Two weeks later Le Nouvel Observateur published a letter signed by a dozen ex-students of Aron’s, including the German specialist Alfred Grosser and historian Pierre Nora, who, while indicating that they did not all necessarily agree with Aron’s views on the events of 1968,


nonetheless expressed their amazement and indignation at Sartre’s outburst. Although over a decade later Aron laughed off Sartre’s attacks on him,21 he took the trouble in his memoirs published two years later to refute each of Sartre’s assertions, likening the tone of Sartre’s article to the extreme right-wing rantings of prewar journals like Je suis partout and Gringoire.22 While in La Révolution introuvable, Aron’s overview of the May events, the author again acknowledged the inconsistencies of government action (vacillating between repression and capitulation), he reiterated his implacable opposition to the student movement on account of its vague aims and its embracing of illegal violent direct action. Although he willingly conceded that there was a need for reform of the university system, the aim of his book was to demystify the events – which he claimed were nothing but ‘a psychodrama’ – and reduce them to a non-event. While the book received a favourable reception in the right-wing press and from certain intellectuals (including Malraux and the poet Francis Ponge), it served to confirm Aron as the epitome of reactionary conservatism in the eyes of the radicals and revolutionaries.23 If, for Aron, the events of May–June 1968 revealed ‘the fragility of the modern order’,24 Sartre believed that they represented ‘hope for a different order’.25 One of the first conclusions Sartre drew from the events concerned the PCF and the Communist-dominated CGT. In an interview in Der Spiegel in July he asserted that the PCF had betrayed the May revolution, objectively siding with de Gaulle and doing all in its power to prevent contact between workers and students.26 According to Sartre, the French Communist Party was not a revolutionary party, nor even a reformist one, and by 1969 he was describing it as ‘the largest conservative party in France’.27 Sartre’s disillusionment with orthodox Communism was further underscored by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, crushing the liberalising initiatives of the Prague Spring, which Sartre had supported. In an interview in August 1968 he described the Soviet invasion as ‘a true act of aggression … a war crime’ which he condemned unreservedly, adding that ‘[T]oday the Soviet model, smothered as it is by a bureaucracy, is no longer viable.’28

Gauchisme: the revolution continued? On 28 April 1969, having failed to secure a majority in a referendum on regional reform, de Gaulle resigned; some eighteen months later, on 9 November 1970, he died at his home in Colombey-les-Deux Eglises.


In June 1969, de Gaulle was succeeded as president by Georges Pompidou, who had been Prime Minister for over six years until his dismissal in July 1968, in the wake of the May–June events; he was to remain as head of state until his death in 1974. May 1968 had triggered an explosion of different movements which challenged the structures and values of French society, with groupings mushrooming and mobilising against the school system, the reforms of higher education spearheaded by Edgar Faure, the position of women, the treatment of homosexuals, the legal system and prisons, and military service. From 1968 until the early 1970s, French society was characterised by a tension – frequently taking the form of violent confrontations – between these manifestations of the spirit of May, and the forces of law and order under Minister of the Interior Raymond Marcellin, who was determined at all costs to suppress any perceived threat to the status quo. The most radical post-1968 alignment between an intellectual and the new radical Left concerned Sartre and the Maoist group La Gauche prolétarienne (GP) (the Proletarian Left). This relationship will be discussed in the context of Sartre’s reformulation of the concept of the intellectual and the adoption of China as a new revolutionary model by numerous French intellectuals. Sartre may have offered unconditional support for the students during the events of May–June but his reflections post hoc led him to realise that the thrust of the May movement was directed not just at intellectuals who were considered reactionary and conservative, but also at classic, left-wing intellectuals like himself. This realisation crystallised at a student meeting in February 1969 when, appearing on the platform to show his solidarity with those present, Sartre realised that he had no place there. The classic intellectual, which Sartre had epitomised since the Liberation, was no longer adequate, he realised, for someone who wished to be on the side of radical change. The classic intellectual, Sartre now believed, was someone who used his fame and presence to lend weight to a cause which he supported but as a star remained essentially an outsider. What had been valid and appreciated at the Sorbonne in May 1968 now seemed anachronistic. Sartre was now starting to develop the concept of the ‘revolutionary intellectual’ whose place was not showing solidarity with those in struggle, but actively working with them.29 May and post-May coincided with the emergence and promotion of China as the latest revolutionary society to whom many French intellectuals turned for revolutionary inspiration, for living ‘proof’ that a better society was not only desirable but possible.


As misgivings and reservations about the USSR had become more widespread, revolutionary hopes from the late 1950s to the early 1960s had been redirected towards the ‘third world’, especially Algeria and Cuba and, of course, Vietnam. In 1960, Sartre had visited Cuba, where he met Fidel Castro and Che Guevara and, as has been noted, praised the achievements of the Cuban revolution and its spontaneous and undogmatic character in newspaper articles and interviews. Régis Debray, ex-student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, went further and became both a theorist of, and a participant in, pro-Cuban third world revolutionary politics. Early in 1967 he published in Cuba Révolution dans la révolution?30 (Revolution in the Revolution?) which expounded a theory of revolution based on the Cuban experience. After training with the Cuban guerrillas while ostensibly engaged as a professor of philosophy at the University of Havana, Debray was asked by Castro in 1967 to join Guevara in Bolivia. This he did, but he was arrested in April, tortured and in October, the same month that Guevara was killed, sentenced to thirty years’ imprisonment. He was freed in December 1970 under an amnesty granted by the Bolivian president, Juan José Torres.31 By the time Debray was released the third world had lost much of its appeal for French intellectuals. While support for the NLF in Vietnam remained strong, Algeria appeared to be a stagnating one-party bureaucratic state, and much of the joy and carnival atmosphere of the early days of the Cuban revolution had evaporated as the US blockade had driven Cuba ever closer to the USSR. In addition, Castro’s endorsement of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, plus reports of internal repression against critics of the Cuban regime, had accelerated the decline of Cuba’s appeal to Parisian intellectuals. (Sartre officially broke with Castro in 1971.) For a brief period then, it was to be a red star in the East on to which the French intellectuals and sections of the Left would project their dreams and aspirations. Of course not all those on the Left were sympathetic to China. The leadership of the PCF was implacably hostile, reflecting the antagonism between China and the USSR. The anarchist groups were also hostile, since China claimed inspiration from Marx and Lenin, while apart from any other criticisms, China’s promotion of Stalin as a great revolutionary ensured that the Trotskyist groups also remained antagonistic. Before considering Sartre’s involvement with the Maoists it will be useful to identify some of the reasons for China’s appeal, which was evident in the late 1960s but reached its zenith in the early 1970s.


First, China was not the USSR. The invasion of Czechoslovakia (August 1968) was for many on the Left further confirmation that the USSR was a bureaucratic, conservative, expansionist and militaristic state, prepared to crush any movement within its sphere of influence which it considered to pose a threat to its power. They were further reassured and encouraged that the leadership of the world’s most populous socialist state criticised the USSR from the left, accusing it, for example, of betraying the revolution and directing a comprehensive restoration of capitalism.32 Second, since 1966 China had been embroiled in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution which, as it was presented by the Chinese leadership at the time, appeared to be a positive qualitative innovation in revolutionary practice. And, moreover, one which appeared to chime with the spirit of May 1968 in France. For the first time in history, it seemed that the radicals (led by Mao Zedong) within the leadership of a socialist country were mobilising its people, and in particular young people, to confront and criticise conservative forces, practices and ways of thought which still persisted. The denouncing of ‘bourgeois ideas and ideology’, of reactionary professors and teachers, and those deemed to be experts appealed to those who in France had mobilised against the structure and content of the French university system and the perceived alienation of modern technocratic France. Thus the spirit of the Cultural Revolution, like May 1968, was one of revolt. Had not Chairman Mao proclaimed ‘It is right to rebel’?33 Third, China’s recognition that class differences would persist after the revolution at the level of ideas, attitudes and ideology, and that these would then find expression in practice, appeared to offer an explanation of what had gone wrong in the USSR. More importantly, the Chinese Communists appeared to have found a way of resolving this issue. Those individuals who displayed ‘bourgeois’ attitudes would have their world outlook corrected by sharing the life-experiences of the masses and ‘becoming’ workers or peasants. Not only was this preferable to the Soviet solution of throwing people into camps but it had a particular appeal for French intellectuals on the Left whose tendency to idealise the workers and feel guilty about their own privileged position has already been noted. Thus through re-education rather than punishment, the individual in China (often from a ‘bourgeois’ or petit-bourgeois background) who was displaying ‘bourgeois’ tendencies was given the opportunity to re-create himself/herself within a revolutionary context and be part of the ongoing revolutionary process. China seemed to be realising the old revolutionary dream of creating a


radically different type of society peopled by ‘new men and women’. Even for those who were not prepared to go that far, it appeared undeniable that the Chinese experiment was positively exciting and new.34 A fourth reason was that China was, in world economic terms, a ‘backward’ country which, or so it appeared, was inspired by a moral purpose and vision (rather than material incentives). Although the May events could be seen as a blow struck against the impersonal, modern, technocratic, consumer society that France was becoming, many members of the pre-1968 Left believed that Western capitalism had resolved the boom–slump cycle, and that mass unemployment, falling living standards and so on had gone for ever. While the events of May–June had revealed that working-class radicalism was not a dead letter, the resolution of the crisis revealed how relatively easy it was for the proletariat to be subdued and for the capitalist status quo to be re-established. The significance of China was that, irrespective of level of economic development, the revolution could be brought about through will, determination and commitment. Some supporters of events in China saw the success of the Chinese Revolution as part of a wider global revolutionary phenomenon. At the heart of its revolutionary struggle to seize power, the Chinese Communist Party had mobilised the peasantry and encircled the cities. Now, it was claimed, the peasantries of the world’s non-industrial societies were breaking free of their colonial pasts, adopting strategies which were anti-capitalist and so would eventually encircle the capitalist nations and bring about their downfall. Furthermore, because of France’s relatively late emergence as an industrialised society, a very large number of French people, including students, had grandparents or even parents who lived and worked on the land, and so they often retained a personal link with rural France. Thus the centrality of the peasantry to the Chinese revolutionary experiment had a sentimental appeal, and the Chinese experience suggested that, despite the historical antagonism between town and country in France, the French peasantry too might have a role to play in any future French revolution. China had become fashionable – even among those who were not left-wing radicals. One can point, for example, to the upsurge in the number of newspaper and magazine articles about China published in the West, the worldwide popularity of Andy Warhol’s portrait of Mao and the publication in 1967 of Malraux’s 1965 conversations with Mao Zedong.35 In the early 1970s, the publication in France of Italian Communist Maria-Antonietta Macciochi’s De la chine (About China) (1971),36 and Alain Peyrefitte’s Quand la Chine s’éveillera (When China


Awakens) (1973) served further to promote interest in China which was supported by the writings of journalists well-disposed to the Chinese experiment like Alain Bouc (Le Monde), K.S. Karol (Le Nouvel Observateur) and Jean Daubier (Le Monde Diplomatique). In 1971 the literary journal Tel Quel, founded by Philippe Sollers in 1960, abandoned its support for the PCF and became passionately pro-Chinese and in 1974 the key members of the review plus Roland Barthes undertook a visit to China.37 The Maoist Gauche prolétarienne (GP), the most radical of the post1968 groupuscules, was formed in 1968 by a minority from the proChinese UJCM-L and members of the unaligned, anarchist 22nd March Movement which had originated at Nanterre. While the Trotskyist organisations and orthodox Marxist-Leninist (i.e. pro-Chinese) groups believed that May had ‘failed’ because of an absence of leadership and hence prioritised building the (revolutionary) Party, the Maoists of the GP had a different analysis. According to them May had revealed an undeniable spirit of revolt among ‘the masses’ and it was the reactivation of this revolutionary spirit through provocative propaganda and actions which was to be their priority. The initial rapprochement between Sartre and the GP in April 1970 has been well documented.38 Briefly, the leading members of the GP approached Sartre asking him to take legal responsibility for the organisation’s newspaper La Cause du Peuple (CDP) following the arrest of each of the paper’s two previous directeurs. Although Sartre initially assumed this responsibility in order to defend freedom of expression, he soon found himself working more closely with the Maoists. While never becoming a Maoist, Sartre nonetheless approved of the group’s spontaneity, its radicalism and its rejection of bourgeois legality. Although the Maoists rejected the charges of left-wing adventurism which were levelled against them they, unlike the PCF, openly espoused revolutionary violence and believed that through actions against symbols of capitalist power and oppression they were paving the way for a violent seizure of power by the masses. Sartre approved of the way that the Maoists were committed to action which in turn informed their theory and was further attracted by their sense of revolutionary morality (a far cry from the politicking and compromises of the PCF) and their commitment to direct democracy.39 Sartre’s contacts with the Maoists allowed him to put into practice his idea of the ‘revolutionary intellectual’ which he had been conceptualising in the wake of 1968. He was now associated with a group committed to establishing itself among the masses who, it was convinced ( pace China), were makers of history. Continuing a strategy


which the UJCM-L had adopted before May, many Maoist militants had abandoned their studies and ‘become’ factory workers. Although age and fame meant that this was not an option for Sartre, he approved this initiative and a main theme of his now famous address to the Renault car workers in 21 October 1970 was the need of workers and intellectuals to unite.40 Whereas the PCF did all it could to keep workers and intellectuals apart, Sartre’s involvement with the Maoists did bring him into contact with ‘real’ workers, in particular car workers and miners from the Pas de Calais. Besides being involved in the planning of a number of political actions carried out by the Maoists, Sartre was also a participant. In June 1970, after the banning of the GP (27 May 1970) when mere possession of a copy of La Cause du Peuple could lead to arrest, a fine and even prison, Sartre, Beauvoir and other personalities, including filmmakers Louis Malle and Alexandre Astruc, sold the paper openly on the streets. In 1971 Sartre participated in anti-racist demonstrations, notably one in the predominantly Arab area of the Goutte d’Or in Paris in November along with other celebrities including the philosopher Michel Foucault, playwright Jean Genet, Claude Mauriac and anthropologist Michel Leiris. In February 1972, Sartre was smuggled into the Renault car factory where he tried to hold a meeting with the workers to protest at the management clamp-down on political activity.41 Despite his sympathy for the maos and the camaraderie that this collaboration brought him, Sartre retained his independence and was quite prepared to voice his disagreements with them. For example, he was dismissive of ‘Mao Zedong Thought’ and rejected the parallels the maos drew between France in 1970s and the Occupation (bosses:fascists, PCF:collaborators, Maoists:resistance). He had his criticisms of the revolutionary press,42 and while sharing the Maoists’ commitment to the necessity of revolutionary violence he disagreed with them on at least two occasions over its use. The first was in March 1972, following the fatal shooting on 25 February of a Maoist militant, Pierre Overney, by a security guard at the Renault factory. When the Nouvelle Résistance Populaire (NRP), the Maoists’ military wing, retaliated by kidnapping Robert Nogrette, a senior personnel officer at Renault, Sartre considered this to be a political error, but once the action had been carried out Sartre thought it was a mistake to release Nogrette. The second disagreement arose over the killing of Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in Munich. Surprisingly, perhaps, Sartre, who had always defended Israel’s right to exist, defended the killings whereas the passionately pro-Palestinian Maoists condemned them.


Through their militant actions and propaganda, the Maoists consistently used a revolutionary perspective to highlight the injustices of violent exploitation which, according to them, constituted the reality of life for ‘the masses’ in France in the early 1970s. This concern with the injustices of the system led them in turn to confront the issue of justice. In 1967 Sartre had already headed the Stockholm-based Russell Tribunal which had found the USA guilty of genocide in Vietnam. Now he turned his attention to France. Whereas the Russell Tribunal had been international in its composition and appeal, and had operated within a paradigm of human rights, the focus was now national, and the key concepts were those of class justice and popular justice. On 21 October 1970 when he addressed workers outside the Renault factory at Boulogne-Billancourt (see above), Sartre was scheduled to appear as a witness at the trial of Alain Geismar, one of the leaders of the GP. He had chosen to address the workers instead because he considered that the system of ‘class justice was determined to punish Geismar and the penalty had already been decided’.43 The only people who were qualified to judge Geismar, according to Sartre, were the workers because they were victims of the violence which Geismar had denounced. In December 1970 Sartre headed a popular tribunal at Lens, in coalfields of northern France, to investigate the deaths of 16 miners in an underground explosion. The tribunal concluded that the deaths were ‘murders’ committed by the ‘boss-state’ (Etat-Patron) of the pits which, in its drive for increased productivity, had been criminally negligent in matters of security. The popular tribunal further demanded the release of Maoist militants, accused of fire-bombing the offices at the mine following the underground explosion.44 The tribunal had been necessary, claimed Sartre, since ‘bourgeois justice is no justice at all. The idea of justice emanates from the people.’45 In June 1971 Sartre was obliged to abandon his plan for a popular tribunal on the police scheduled for 27 June after it was banned by the préfecture de police. It was replaced by a ‘press conference’ attended by some 2000 people, but not including Sartre, who was too ill to participate.46 The concerns of Sartre and the Maoists with justice brought them into contact with the Groupe d’information sur les prisons (GIP) (The Information Group on Prisons), which had been launched in February 1971 by Michel Foucault with the support of Esprit’s Jean Marie-Domenach, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Foucault had been absent from Paris during the May events of 1968 but on his return was appointed to organise a philosophy department at the new university at Vincennes. The creation of the GIP coincided


with a second hunger strike undertaken by imprisoned Maoist militants in pursuit of their demand for recognition as political prisoners, which had fuelled a wider public debate about prison conditions. The aim of the GIP was to provide a platform for prisoners to use to speak out about prison conditions. The GIP was explicitly antireformist. The ‘investigations of intolerance’ which the GIP would undertake were not intended to ameliorate or make more bearable a system which it considered to be fundamentally intolerable. The GIP’s intention was to attack an oppressive system which claimed to be something else – acting in the name of justice for example – and would do so by identifying institutions and naming names. The GIP represented a new model of political intervention in that whereas the Maoists intervened on a number of fronts (housing, work, schools, universities, racism), the GIP was ‘a specific group undertaking a thorough investigation on a particular issue, namely the realities of the French prison system’.47 The GIP was succeeded by other groups which adopted the same model and a similar political approach including, for example, the Groupe d’Information Santé (GIS) (The Information Group on Health), and the Groupe d’Information et de soutien des travailleurs immigrés (GISTI) (The Information and Support Group for Immigrant Workers). During the winter of 1971/1972, the GIP mobilised to support the prison rebellions which erupted in prisons across France, notably at Toul, Lille, Nîmes, Fleury-Mérogis and Nancy; soon there was a national network of GIP groups. Although Maoist militants and sympathisers were well represented in these groups, they also attracted lawyers, doctors and progressive Christians. Later in 1972, the GIP was eclipsed by the establishment of the Comité d’Action des Prisonniers (The Prisoners Action Committee) composed of ex-prisoners, and subsequently the GIP was dissolved amongst much bitterness and a certain sense of failure. Sartre and Foucault had both attended the student meeting in Paris on 10 February 1969,48 but their first proper encounter occurred in November 1971 in the Goutte d’Or.49 While Foucault was happy to work with the Maoists, he was never as close to them as was Sartre and had fundamental differences with them, notably over the question of popular justice. This is evident from the discussion with Maoist militants in June 1971 when Sartre and the maos were preparing the popular tribunal on the police.50 While the Maoists, inspired by China, were committed to a tribunal guided by proletarian values, Foucault challenged the view that popular justice had to be exercised through a


court at all. In opposition to the Maoists, he advanced the hypothesis that the historical function of the court is to ‘ensnare, dominate, and strangle popular justice by re-inserting it within institutions which are characteristic of a state apparatus’.51 While Foucault’s main interlocutor, Pierre Victor (Benny Lévy), argued for the necessity of a revolutionary state apparatus, Foucault held that ‘the revolution can only take place through the radical elimination of the judicial apparatus; everything which is a reminder of the penal apparatus, everything which recalls its ideology and which allows this ideology to surreptitiously creep back into popular practices must be banished’.52 In 1973, Sartre expressed his agreement with the Maoists, holding that the people are perfectly capable of creating a court of justice and criticising Foucault for being too radical.53 Keith Reader has noted that today this entire debate may appear embarrassingly irrelevant but he adds, importantly, ‘this is to disregard the very real impact of the debate at the time – the manner (however maladroit) in which it drew attention to the flagrant inequalities that pervaded the French judicial system’.54 The debate on popular justice found a new focus in April 1972 when a young girl, Brigitte Dewevre, was raped and murdered in the northern mining town of Bruay-en-Artois.55 The newspaper La Cause du Peuple/J’Accuse embarked on a hysterically violent press campaign against a local lawyer who had been arrested in connection with the murder, and against his lover, who was his presumed accomplice. Under a headline ‘And Now They are Massacring Our Children’, the paper screamed ‘Only a bourgeois could have done that’. According to the paper Bruay was composed of two communities – a handful of rich people who with their ‘bourgeois manners, ghastly ballets and orgies’ lived in the lap of luxury, and the poor but essentially good and honourable workers and their families. The views of some of the latter as to what should happen to the lawyer (who had not even gone on trial) included ‘Give him to us and we’ll cut him into tiny pieces with a razor!’, ‘I’ll tie him behind my car and drive through Bruay at 60-mph!’, ‘We should cut off his balls!’56 The coverage of the Bruay affair exposed fundamental differences between the Maoists and Sartre on the question of popular justice. In the following issue of the newspaper Sartre, while recognising the importance of class hatred, protested at the paper’s assumption of a person’s guilt without proof.57 In the same issue, Pierre Victor/Benny Lévy replied on behalf of the newspaper, claiming that for the first time since 1968 the workers (rather than students and ‘intellectuals’) had taken charge of justice and did so inspired by class hatred. In a chilling


paragraph, Victor wrote that ‘To overthrow the authority of the bourgeoisie, the humiliated population will be right to institute a short period of terror and physically attack a handful of hated and despised individuals.’58 The extent of Foucault’s involvement in the Bruay affair is a subject of dispute but it is clear that he, like Sartre, visited Bruay and there are indications that he saw the mobilisation of a town around the problems of justice as ‘an exemplary act of popular will’. While Claude Mauriac, like Sartre, condemned the local lawyer being castigated as guilty without proof, Foucault claimed that had it not been for the local mobilisation the lawyer would have been quietly released.59

Women’s liberation movement The other important movement that emerged from May 1968 was the women’s movement. As will have been only too apparent, the vast majority of prominent intellectuals in the period considered thus far have been male, and a perusal of the seminal works in French on French intellectuals by Winock and Sirinelli will confirm this male dominance. That these texts were written by men does not explain the virtual absence of women from this chronology. Rather the explanation lies in the nature of the postwar intellectual field as defined in this study, from which women were largely excluded. It cannot be emphasised enough the extent to which the postwar intellectual field, like all other leading fields (economic, social or political), were male-dominated during the period under discussion and still continue to be so. As indicated in the Introduction, this book examines the interface between intellectuals and politics, two arenas where women were (and remain) grossly under-represented. It should not be forgotten that French women only obtained the vote during the Occupation under Vichy (compared with 1928 in Great Britain), and were first able to exercise it in 1945. In addition, until relatively recently it was considered vulgar for ‘respectable’ women to hold political opinions, let alone discuss politics. Simone de Beauvoir might at first sight appear to be an obvious exception to the above generalisation given her written contributions to literature and philosophy and her association with Sartre. However, until the 1970s her involvement in politics was undertaken alongside Sartre and it was he who was more interested in and committed to political activity than was Beauvoir, as can be seen, for example, from Sartre’s involvement with the RDR, the PCF and the Maoists, which contrasted with Beauvoir’s relatively lukewarm attitude. Indeed,


Beauvoir had reservations about Sartre’s passionate involvement with the Maoists and was personally threatened by his close friendship with Pierre Victor/Benny Lévy. Five years after the Liberation of Paris, Beauvoir had published Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex). Writing in 1949 about menstruation, pregnancy, the menopause, abortion, adultery and lesbianism in a text which argued that ‘womanness’ was a cultural construct, born of a male-dominated society, was bound to create a scandal. The book was vilified by the Communists and others on the Left and the Right (it was placed on the Vatican’s list of proscribed books) and attacked by Camus and Mauriac. Nonetheless, it became a bestseller and subsequently established itself as one of the founding texts of postwar feminism. The thin media coverage of the participation of women in the events of May 1968 and the prevailing sexual division of revolutionary labour at the time should not be allowed to obscure the importance of the events for the French women’s movement. May acted as a catalyst, bringing women an increased awareness of their needs and desires while grounding a rejection of the male chauvinistic attitudes and behaviour that had permeated May and much of post-1968 gauchisme. The Mouvement de la Libération des Femmes (MLF) (Women’s Liberation Movement) which emerged after 1968 ‘[I]n one sense continued the spirit of May ’68, adopting its spontaneous actions and its rejection of leadership and organisation. In another sense, the women militants began to develop a new, completely different theory of oppression and exploitation, which placed gender squarely in the centre of their analysis.’60 The most striking example of the mobilisation of female intellectuals came on 5 April 1971 when Le Nouvel Observateur published a manifesto signed by 343 women admitting they had had an abortion and demanding open access to contraception and free, legal pregnancy terminations. Signatories included Beauvoir and Marguerite Duras, and actresses Catherine Deneuve and Jeanne Moreau. At the time the manifesto was published, abortion was illegal in France and the abortions carried out by unqualified individuals meant infections, perforations, sterility, and even death for thousands of the million or so French women who sought abortions each year. This manifesto triggered the start of a campaign for free legal abortion which was given an extra fillip in November 1972 when the trial opened of a 17-year-old girl (who had had an abortion after having been raped), and of the abortionist and accomplices (including the young woman’s mother). Gisèle Halimi, a radical lawyer who had signed the 1971 manifesto, acted for the defence. The young woman was acquitted and the abortionist, who


risked the death penalty, was given a one-year suspended sentence. In 1973 the Mouvement pour la libération de l’avortement et de la contraception (MLAC) (Movement for Free Abortion and Contraception) was founded. The energetic and high-profile campaign waged by women, the media coverage and the election of in 1974 of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the first non-Gaullist President of the Fifth Republic, and one publicly committed to liberal reforms, created the conditions for change. Despite vigorous opposition from the conservative majority in the National Assembly, Simone Veil, Minister of Health, fought for and secured the legal right to abortion during the first ten weeks of pregnancy. By the time the law on abortion was being debated in November 1974, gauchisme had all but burned itself out and the intellectual landscape was being shaken by Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago which had appeared in French in June 1974 (see p. 148). In January 1973, Sartre and a few Maoist militants, notably Jean-Claude Vernier and Serge July, launched Libération with the aim of creating a radically new type of daily newspaper,61 and later that year the Maoist movement of the ex-Gauche prolétarienne was dissolved by its own leaders. 1973 also marked the banning of the main Trotskyist group, the Ligue Communiste, which, while soon re-emerging as the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, nonetheless abandoned its ‘unrestrained gauchisme and permanent political agitation’.62 The militant formations that May had spawned – the MLF, anti-psychiatry groups, radical education groups, ecology groups – continued to exist and were often the fora for passionate debates over reform versus revolution. Increasingly, however, they came to resemble interest groups who pressured the authorities for change, rather than groupings primed to mount an assault on the political institutions. The temptation for such groupings to act more like conventional pressure groups had been increased by the rise of the new Parti Socialiste (Socialist Party), founded at Epinay in June 1971. The Parti Socialiste (PS), headed by François Mitterrand, was committed to a common programme of government with the PCF which had been formally agreed and signed in June 1972. The beginnings of a revival of the traditional Left (PS, PCF) was evident in the Left’s success in the legislative elections of March 1973, when the PS won 102 seats and the PCF 73. It was further confirmed in the presidential elections of May 1974, triggered by the death in April of Georges Pompidou, when, in the second round, Mitterrand, the candidate of the Left, was beaten by the narrowest of margins by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (50.8 per cent votes cast


to 49.19 per cent). These gains made by the Left meant that the possibility of a president and/or a government of the Left were no longer just pipe-dreams. This strengthened the more moderate elements within the left-leaning sectional groups who were agitating for change. The ‘reformists’ argued there was now a very real possibility of individuals occupying influential positions within the political structures who were more likely to be more sympathetic than the right-wing elements who had held them in the past. It was therefore paramount to do nothing which would jeopardise their being elected.

The Gulag Archipelago: ideological catalyst While the election results of 1973 and 1974 indicated a strengthening of the Socialist-Communist Left, this shift coincided in the intellectual field with a movement away from Marxism and orthodox Communism which was triggered by the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1970) and author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, The First Circle and Cancer Ward, had drawn on his own experiences as an inmate of the Soviet camps and the testimonies of over 200 other prisoners to produce a devastating analysis of the Russian archipelago of labour camps. Predictably, the PCF, which claimed that the USSR was on the road to democratisation, attacked the book as anti-Communist, anti-Soviet provocation designed to undermine East–West détente at the international level and new-found unity between the PCF and the PS in France. As was the case at the time of the Kravchenko affair (see Chapter 3), the Party once again mounted a personal campaign against the author, in this instance dismissing him as a reactionary, mystic and Nazi sympathiser. In February 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested in the USSR, deprived of Russian nationality and expelled from the Soviet Union. From the end of 1973, extracts from the Gulag had appeared in French and a fierce debate was already raging by the time the French edition of the first volume appeared in June 1974, six months after the publication of the Russian text. Within weeks over 700 000 copies had been sold, paving the way for the publication of the second volume in December. The violent polemical exchanges that The Gulag Archipelago provoked, particularly between the PCF and journalists from Le Nouvel Observateur and Esprit, ensured that the issue of Soviet Communism was once again back at the top of the intellectuals’ agenda.63


After Souvarine, the Kravchenko affair and the Rousset affair, the nature of the Soviet camps was already in the public domain. So why should the publication of yet another book on the Soviet camps have provoked such a polemic and furthermore, as will be shown, trigger a seismic shift in the intellectual field? A brief comparison between the Solzhenitsyn affair and the Kravchenko affair (1949) will help to provide an answer. First, the context. In 1949, the manichaeism of the Cold War meant, as we have shown, that sections of the non-Communist intellectual Left were reluctant to go very far in their criticisms of the USSR. Furthermore, any discussion of the nature of the USSR was overshadowed by the part that the Red Army and pro-Soviet parties (like the PCF after 1941) had played in the resistance to and defeat of Nazism. By 1974, the credibility of the USSR as a model for an emancipated society had been all but obliterated by Hungary (1956), the revelations of the Twentieth Congress (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968). Second, the content of the revelations. If Kravchenko had provided an individual view of life in the USSR, Solzhenitsyn provided a literary investigation into the roots of the vicious Soviet penal system. Furthermore, the camps, Solzhenitsyn claimed, were not a creation of Stalin but had their origins in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution under Lenin and were not, therefore, the product of a subsequent distortion of the revolutionary process. Third, the personalities. Kravchenko was a bureaucrat – not an occupation which commanded much respect in intellectual circles. He was just a cog within the Soviet machine. Solzhenitsyn on the other hand was a victim; he had been in the camps. Moreover, importantly, he was an intellectual, a writer of considerable standing, speaking out against repression and being punished for his pains. In the wake of the polemics around The Gulag Archipelago, themes raised by Solzhenitsyn were developed in André Glucksmann’s La Cuisinière et le mangeur d’hommes (The Cook and the Cannibal) (1975), and Claude Lefort’s Un Homme en trop (One Man Too Many) (1976). In 1967 Glucksmann had published Le Discours de la guerre (The Discourse of War). He had been an activist in May 1968 and subsequently had been very closely involved with the Maoists. The argument in La Cuisinière et le mangeur d’hommes that the roots of the camps lay back even beyond Lenin in the writings of Marx marked Glucksmann’s own break with Marxism, and also anticipated a more generalised break between gauchisme and Marxism, as would soon be revealed in the writings of the ‘New Philosophers’ (see below). Claude Lefort, ex-Trotskyist co-founder in 1948 (with Cornelius Castoriadis) of Socialisme ou


barbarie (Socialism or Barbarism), had been an implacable left-wing critic of Stalinism. Despite being more hostile to the USSR than many of those closely associated with Les Temps modernes, Lefort had contributed to the review in the 1940s and 1950s, and had debated with Sartre over the latter’s The Communists and Peace. Now finding himself in tune with an anti-Soviet current which was on its way to becoming the new intellectual consensus, Lefort welcomed The Gulag Archipelago. This book, he claimed, filled a thirty-year gap in left-wing intellectual discourse and a historical refusal by large sections of the Left to confront the repressive nature of the USSR. Lefort’s reading of Solzhenitsyn allowed him to tease out a number of themes (repression of the people in the name of the people; the cult of the personality; the role of ideology; the revolts in the camps etc.; the logic of totalitarianism) which he believed permeated the text. ‘Totalitarianism’ was becoming the latest watchword with Glucksmann and Lefort and others, showing that its use was a no longer restricted to right-wing or liberal-democratic intellectuals like Aron. This point was further dramatically illustrated by the explosion onto the intellectual scene of a group of young writers who were promoted, and promoted themselves, under the name les nouveaux philosophes (The New Philosophers).

The New Philosophers64 The term ‘New Philosophers’ was coined by their ‘leader’ (although he rejected the label), Bernard-Henri Lévy, in a ‘Dossier de nouveaux philosophes’ (‘A Who’s Who of New Philosophers’) in Les Nouvelles littéraires in June 1976 which featured a number of young and largely unknown writers. These ‘New Philosophers’ were male, born between 1940 and 1950, had degrees in philosophy, had attended the Ecole Normale Supérieure and had a gauchiste past.65 In addition, as Peter Dews has noted, all but one had published, or was about to publish, in one of a series edited by Lévy for the publishing house Grasset.66 Through connections in the world of publishing, their contacts with left-wing journals (especially Le Nouvel Observateur) and their frequent appearances on television, the ‘New Philosophers’ were able to gain maximum publicity for their assault on Marxism as the theoretical source of totalitarianism and for their commitment to human rights.67 Appearing on TV, writing books, articles, giving interviews, the ‘New Philosophers’ seemed to be everywhere. Beauvoir, who was broadly sympathetic to gauchisme (although she kept her distance from the


Maoists), found the ‘New Philosophers’ boring. ‘They don’t seem like philosophers at all and there’s precious little new about them. All the fuss about them is publicity; they’re often very well placed for that.’68 Cornelius Castoriadis also recorded his reservations noting in 1978 that ‘simply to denounce totalitarianism and defend the Rights of Man is certainly very important … but it does not constitute a politics’.69 Meanwhile, a systematic critique of the ‘New Philosophers’ was provided by François Aubral and Xavier Delcourt in Contre la nouvelle philosophie70 (Against the New Philosophy). Somewhat confusingly perhaps, the ‘New Philosophers’ insisted that they were on the Left, appealing to the Left and claiming to represent the spirit of May, and yet their attacks on totalitarianism were almost entirely restricted to ‘left-wing’ regimes where Marxism was the official ideology.71 Although it would be wrong to dismiss the ‘New Philosophers’ as simply a commercialised media circus, it would be equally misguided to ignore the comments of Françoise Verny, editor at Grasset. Looking back to when Glucksmann and Lévy faced their critics Delcourt and Aubral on the television programme Apostrophes on 27 May 1977, Verny commented, with reference to the ‘new philosophy’: ‘All scholastics are bad and Marxism had become a scholastic. It allowed people to clean out their minds. And to sell books, which was after all the prime objective of the operation.’72 Although the New Philosopher phenomenon lasted only a couple of years, and at the end of the century only Glucksmann and Lévy were still in the public eye, the significance of the group is that it formulated and promoted the key elements of what was becoming a new intellectual consensus, namely that Marxism is in some way responsible for the terror of the Soviet camps; that the state is the central source of social and political oppression, and that therefore any politics directed towards the seizure of state power is dangerous and vain; that science always operates within and reinforces relations of power or, to raise the stakes a little, that ‘reason’ is inherently totalitarian; that since any political ideology will eventually be used to justify crimes against humanity, the only ‘safe’ form of political action is a militant defence of human rights.73 The period between the Solzhenitsyn’s ‘private’ visit to Paris in January 1975 and the end of the 1970s provided a wealth of ammunition for those who were drawn to the theses advanced by the ‘New Philosophers’. In April the Khmer Rouge took the Cambodian capital Phnom


Penh, and in the same month pro-Communist forces in Vietnam gained control of Saigon, now re-named Ho Chi Minh city. Any euphoria that might have been felt in French intellectual circles was soon to turn to unease. Information leaking out of Cambodia indicated that the Khmer Rouge policy of purging Cambodian society of any vestiges of ‘bourgeois’ behaviour was resulting in the physical elimination of hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, in addition to the hundreds of thousands who were dying in the famine caused by the collectivisation of the rice fields. In 1977, one estimate placed the number of Cambodian dead since the Khmer Rouge victory at two million.74 In Vietnam, centres were being established for the re-education of those who had been supporters of the pro-American regime in the south, and it was alleged that between half a million and a million people, out of a population of 20 million, passed through the camps. Following the death of Mao Zedong in September 1976 and the arrest of the gang of four (including Mao’s widow), accounts of the excesses of the Cultural Revolution began to circulate in the West with more credibility than they had hitherto.75 In December 1979 the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (supported by the PCF) provided another reminder of the expansionist and militaristic nature of the USSR. The crackdown on the Polish trade union Solidarnosc and the proclamation of martial law by General Jaruzelski in December 1981 was to be yet further evidence of the repressive nature of Soviet-style ‘socialism’. 1978 saw a confirmation of the new intellectual consensus built on anti-totalitarianism and freedom when, in January, Le Monde published a manifesto announcing the creation of a Comité des intellectuels pour l’Europe des libertés (Committee of Intellectuals for a Europe of Freedoms).76 What is striking about this manifesto with its subtitle ‘Culture versus totalitarianism. Freedom is not negotiable’, is that the list of over a hundred signatories included not only (as one might have expected) Cold War liberals like Aron and Eugène Ionesco but also ex-gauchistes like Julia Kristeva and Philippe Sollers (from Tel Quel) as well as J.-M. Domenach and François Fejtö.

The Vietnamese boat people This new humanitarian consensus which united old political protagonists was vividly illustrated at the end of the same year over the issue of the Vietnamese boat people. In the 1960s, the Vietnamese struggle for independence against the American forces had proved a rallying point for the radicals,


revolutionaries, liberals and humanists across the world. In 1965 in France, in the wake of the US bombing of North Vietnam, French intellectuals including Sartre, Mauriac and Beauvoir had mobilised against American policy. In May 1966 a six-hour public meeting (Six Heures pour le Vietnam) was held in Paris to denounce the US occupation of Vietnam and support the liberation struggle being waged by the Vietnamese people under the leadership of the National Liberation Front (NLF). Other meetings proliferated as did demonstrations, and 1967 saw the creation of a network of local Vietnam committees (Comités Vietnam de base). In the same year Sartre chaired the International Russell Tribunal on Vietnam which concluded that the USA was guilty of genocide against the Vietnamese people, and in March 1968 there was a day of mobilisation for Vietnam organised by the intellectuals (‘une journée des intellectuels pour le Vietnam’) backed by, amongst others, Sartre, Beauvoir, Mauriac, Aragon, Vladimir Jankelevitch, Vercors, Jean Vilar and Pablo Picasso. Yet within a decade, as we have noted, disillusionment with Vietnam had set in. Yesterday’s heroes, those Vietnamese who had been in the forefront of the war against the US imperialism, were now included among the totalitarian villains and stood accused of persecuting their own people, thousands of whom were now attempting to flee the country. The refugees’ plight was dramatically highlighted in November 1978, when filmed footage of the Hai-Hong, a boat with 2500 Vietnamese refugees on board that was sinking off the coast of Malaysia, was brought to television screens across the Western world. In France a committee was created to mobilise in favour of the Vietnamese boat people under the slogan Un Bateau pour le Vietnam (A Boat for Vietnam). The founding members were Bernard Kouchner, Alain Geismar, a former leader of the Gauche prolétarienne, André Glucksmann and ex-Maoists Jacques and Claudie Broyelle. All had been enthusiastic supporters of the Vietnamese NLF in the 1960s and early 1970s.77 The aim of the campaign, launched on 22 November, was to raise enough money to purchase a boat that would rescue the Vietnamese refugees fleeing by sea, and find a country willing to accept them. According to Kouchner, ‘Un Bateau pour le Vietnam Committee was primarily a revolt against indifference and the conventions [bienséances] of politics, and was a burgeoning humanitarianism’.78 The first appeal was signed by a politically heterogeneous configuration of intellectuals including ex-Maoists (e.g. André Glucksmann), ex-Communists (Dominique and Jean-Toussaint Desanti), Bernard-Henri Lévy, Simone de Beauvoir, Raymond Aron and Roland Barthes. Also to be found among the signatories


were journalists Olivier Todd and Jean Lacouture who had publicly repudiated their earlier pro-NLF enthusiasms, or were about to do so.79 It was the campaign for the boat people that provided the most striking symbol of the new intellectual consensus. Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Aron, who had taken opposing positions on almost every political issue since their break in 1947, were now to be found sharing a platform at a press conference on the issue of the Vietnamese refugees. It was held at the Hotel Lutétia on 20 June 1979 and six days later both were received by the President of the Republic, Giscard d’Estaing, who agreed to issue 1000 visas for the boat people. The Boat People Committee had requested 3000.

The New Right It was at the time of the Aron–Sartre encounter in the summer of 1979 that another grouping, la nouvelle droite (the New Right), burst upon the intellectual scene. The origins of the ‘New Right’ can be traced to the creation at the end of 1967 of Le Groupement de recherche et d’études sur la civilisation européenne (GRECE) (The Group for the Research and Study of European Civilisation), followed in February 1968 by the appearance of the group’s review, Nouvelle Ecole. The group’s profile was raised in 1973 by the appearance of another publication, Eléments, but it was the link with Le Figaro Magazine (launched in October 1978) and its editor Louis Pauwels which gave the group publicity and a platform for its views. These will be discussed after a brief detour into the world of parliamentary politics. The election of Giscard d’Estaing, a centre-right non-Gaullist president committed to reform, meant a reconsideration of what it signified to be ‘on the right’. Giscard’s liberal reforms of 1974/5, which included the lowering of the age of majority to 18, the legalisation of abortion, and the granting of divorce on grounds of mutual consent, made many conservative members of the Right coalition uneasy to say the least, and the legalisation of abortion was only passed thanks to 181 votes from the opposition parties. In the 1974 presidential campaign, Gaullist Jacques Chirac had backed Giscard against Jacques Chaban-Delmas, the official Gaullist candidate, and had been duly rewarded by being appointed prime minister. Against a background of a worldwide economic crisis with erratic exchange rates, soaring inflation and rising unemployment, tensions between the president and his prime minister reached a climax in the summer of 1976, when Chirac resigned and was replaced by Raymond Barre. Freed from political office, Chirac set


about remodelling the Gaullist Party which was re-launched in December as the Rassemblement du Peuple pour la République (RPR) with a more right-wing populist flavour than its predecessor, the UDR. Chirac strengthened his position further in March 1977 when he defeated Michel d’Ornano, the president’s preferred candidate for the elected post of mayor of Paris. In the run-up to the 1978 elections the Right was divided between the Gaullist RPR and the Union Pour la Démocratie Française (UDF), a loose centre-right coalition formed in February 1978 which included Giscard’s Independent Republican grouping, relaunched in May 1977 as the Parti Républicain. The Left coalition, built on the PS/PCF union of the Left strategy initiated in 1972, was also characterised by a fight for dominance, and it was clear by the end of 1974 that the PS was winning by drawing workingclass voters away from the PCF and thus strengthening its own popular base. But in 1977 the Union of the Left shattered when negotiations between the PCF, PS and the Mouvement des radicaux de gauche (MRG) broke down. In the first round of the legislative elections of March 1978 the four main parties split the bulk of the votes cast fairly evenly between them (PCF: 20.61 per cent; PS: 22.79 per cent; RPR: 22.84 per cent; UDF: 23.89 per cent). After the second round the RPR emerged with the most seats (154) followed by the UDF (137), the PS (114) and the PCF (86). The political/intellectual landscape of the late 1970s was characterised by intellectuals claiming to be on the Left embracing concepts and ideas traditionally associated with the Right, and a parliamentary Right which, despite its 1978 election success, remained riven with tensions over personalities and programme. Despite a shift to the Right from 1978, Giscard had already been compromised in the eyes of many on the Right by his earlier liberalism. The Right might be in power, it was said, but it did not rule. What was missing in the opinion of the thinkers of the ‘New Right’ was a sense of clarity as to what ‘the Right’ meant and the values that underpinned it. In short what was needed was an authentic right-wing culture. One of the central tenets of the thinking of Alain de Benoist, leading figure among the ‘New Right’, was the importance of the battle of ideas, which should be conducted as publicly as possible. A clear exposition of what de Benoist considered to be ‘the right’ was set out in 1977: ‘[What] I call on the right by pure convention is an attitude which considers the diversity of the world and subsequently the relative inequalities which necessarily arise from this as a good thing, and the steady homogenisation of the world preached about and brought into


being through two thousand years of egalitarian ideology as a bad thing … That is to say that, in my opinion, the enemy is not “the left” or “communism” or even “subversion”. Quite simply it [the enemy] is this egalitarian ideology whose religious, secular, metaphysical or so-called “scientific” formulations which have been flowering continuously for the past two thousand years. “The ideas of 1789” were only a stage of which the current subversion and communism are the inevitable conclusion.’80 The three fronts on which the ‘New Right’ mounted a simultaneous assault against egalitarianism were a championing of inequality between individuals, between men and women and between races. (In the case of the latter two, ‘inequality’ was sometimes replaced by ‘difference’.)

Foucault and Iran Despite the anti-Marxist, anti-Soviet shift that occurred in the milieu intellectuel in the mid-1970s, there were at the end of the decade still a handful of intellectuals, including Louis Aragon, who remained faithful to the PCF. At the 23rd Congress of the PCF (1979), the Party leader, Georges Marchais, asserted that the balance sheet of the socialist countries was ‘globally positive’. The credibility of this assertion was severely undermined by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December which was supported by the PCF, the only European Communist Party which took this position. While the poet Eugène Guillevic, who had supported the Soviet invasion of Hungary, resigned from the Party, as did the film-maker Antoine Vitez, Aragon remained and was a signatory of a petition endorsing the Party line on Afghanistan. By the end of the 1970s the vast majority of French intellectuals had definitively abandoned the search for a society or state which could serve as an inspiration or a model as the USSR, Cuba, Algeria and China had done in the earlier postwar period. However, it would seem that old habits die hard. In the autumn of 1978, Michel Foucault undertook two trips to Iran for the Italian newspaper Corriere della sera, in between which, near Paris, he met Abolhasan Bani-Sadr, who would become – for a short while – president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the Ayatollah Khomeini, the exiled leader of the religious Iranian opposition. On his first trip to Iran, Foucault described and analysed what he correctly identified as the death throes of the dictatorial regime of the Shah, and found in Iran what was lacking in Western Europe, namely a political spirituality.81 Foucault was intrigued by the exiled Khomeini, whom he described as ‘the point of fixation for a


collective will; he hailed the Iranian uprising against the corrupt, pro-Western regime of the Shah as ‘perhaps the first great insurrection against a planetary system, the most modern form of revolt’.82 After Khomeini’s departure from Paris on 1 February 1979 (Foucault had been at the airport), Foucault was speculating that events in Iran would ‘turn all the political facts in the Middle East upside down – hence doing the same for the strategic balance of power in the world’.83 Foucault’s fascination for Iran was both similar to and different from the fascination that French intellectuals had shown for other revolutions or ‘revolutionary societies’. Like his predecessors, Foucault was unable to escape the veneration of the leader (in this case Khomeini): ‘No head of state, no political leader, even with the support of all the media in his country, can today boast of being the object of such personal and intense affection.’84 The second similarity was Foucault’s conviction that the Iranian movement was heralding a qualitatively new society. What was different from the analyses of the admirers of say, the USSR, China and Cuba was that Foucault believed that the Iranian revolution was a revolution without politics, i.e. a revolution which did not conform to Western political categories. For example, in November 1978, he wrote: ‘Finally Khomeini is not a politician. There will be no Khomeini party, there will be no Khomeini government.’85 The ensuing vicious factional in-fighting, the arrests, the executions and imposition across the country of a religious-inspired conformity were a far cry from Foucault’s aspirations. Foucault was subjected to a drubbing in the press (including one from journalists Claudie and Jacques Broyelle who had been pro-Chinese zealots a few years earlier – see n. 77) and thereafter commented relatively rarely on politics.86 He died in 1984 of an AIDS-related illness. The collapse of the Union of the Left in 1977 had revealed clear and significant tensions between the PS and the PCF which were not helped by the latter’s support for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. However, in the run-up to the presidential elections scheduled for April/May 1981, the PS’s realisation that it would be dependent on Communist votes in the second round meant that it was reluctant to indulge in polemics with the PCF. There were strains and tensions too on the Right, where the Gaullist RPR continued to attack the policies of Giscard’s Prime Minister, Raymond Barre. In the first round of the elections (26 April 1981), Valéry Giscard d’Estaing received about eight and a quarter million votes (8 222 432), François Mitterrand (PS) about seven and a half million votes (7 505 960), Jacques Chirac (RPR) about five and a quarter million votes (5 225 848) and Georges Marchais just


under four and a half million votes (4 456 922). Smarting from its lowest share of the vote since the Liberation (15.35 per cent of votes cast), the PCF nonetheless decided to back Mitterrand in the second round. On the right, Chirac, the defeated RPR candidate, was less enthusiastic about Giscard d’Estaing and called on his supporters to vote in the second round ‘according to their conscience’. In the second round on 10 May 1981, François Mitterrand was elected President with 51.76 per cent of the votes cast, against 48.24 per cent for his opponent Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. The new president dissolved the legislative chamber and in the parliamentary elections held in June the PS emerged with an absolute majority of the seats (285). The PCF won 44, the RPR 88 and the UDF 62. Unaffiliated deputies numbered 11. For the first time in the life of the Fifth Republic, France had a Socialist president and a Socialist-dominated legislative assembly. The victory of the Left coincided with an unparalleled crisis in the milieu intellectuel which had been evident since the mid1970s. Some aspects of this crisis have already been mentioned, but at its epicentre lay a questioning of the very definition and role of the intellectual. It was this self-interrogation which in part explained the so-called ‘silence of the intellectuals’ which greeted the Left’s victory and which will be examined in the next chapter.

The ‘crisis of the intellectuals’ Before considering the reluctance of many intellectuals publicly to endorse the Socialists after 1981, we shall return to the crisis concernIng the nature, role and definition of the intellectual, evident since the mid-1970s.87 Of course, discussion about the role of the intellectual was nothing new. To take just three examples: Julien Benda’s La Trahison des clercs (The Betrayal of the Clerisy) (1927), which accused intellectuals of abandoning their advocacy of universal values in favour of the particular interests of class, nation or race; the debate about the responsibility of the writer provoked by intellectual collaboration during the Occupation (see Chapter 1); and Aron’s L’Opium des intellectuels (see Chapter 3). The crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, however, was qualitatively different. Rarely since the Dreyfus affair had there been so much discussion about the definition of the intellectual and his/her role. As Ory and Sirinelli observed, none of the periods prior to the post-1968 years had known ‘such a rapid upheaval in the general tone of both discourse of the intellectuals and the discourse of society on its intellectuals’.88


The complex issue of the ‘crisis of the intellectuals’ will be addressed through two themes. First, the debate among intellectuals about the role of the intellectual. Second, the médiatisation of the intellectual (the extension of intellectual activity into the mass media, especially TV) which radically altered the perceived definition of the intellectual as well as dramatically affecting the intellectual’s field of intervention. As we have seen, the mid-1970s were marked by an embracing of anti-totalitarianism, and a rejection of socialism, Marxism, and the type of left, philo-Communist politics which informed a belief that it was possible to build a radically qualitatively better world. This meant also a rejection of the two intellectual ‘models’ that Sartre had personified, both the classic, committed intellectual and the revolutionary intellectual. The rejection of the two models which Sartre epitomised led to the proposal of a number of alternatives, the most famous of which was Foucault’s advocacy of the ‘specific intellectual’, first advanced in 1972 but developed more fully in an interview given in 1977.89 Although these ‘models’ are of interest in that they illustrate the intellectual’s search for a new role, it should be added that while they influenced the intellectual’s self-definition, none of them became the new consensual model. Unlike the classic (universal) intellectual who ‘was heard, or purported to make himself heard, as the spokesman of the universal’,90 the field of intervention and discourse of the specific intellectual is more limited and focused. If the universal intellectual like Zola or Sartre was typically a ‘writer of genius’ and something of an amateur in his field of intervention, the specific intellectual was a recognised authority or an expert in the area in which s/he intervened. According to Foucault, the ‘specific intellectual’ was a relatively recent phenomenon; he cited Oppenheimer as the personification of the transition between the universal and the specific intellectual. Oppenheimer’s scientific knowledge and understanding of the institutional structure of the US atomic weapons programme invested his pronouncements on the dangers of nuclear weapons with authority. At the same time, because the nuclear threat was a threat to all, his discourse was simultaneously universal. The concept of the ‘specific intellectual’ had a clear link with Foucault’s praxis in the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons. It was also, incidentally, the very antithesis of the PCF’s view of ‘its’ intellectuals who, as has been shown, were positively discouraged from using their expertise to help formulate Party policy. In a statement identifying the objectives of the GIP, attention was drawn to a political oppression which was exercised through the courts, prisons, occupational medicine,


hospitals, psychiatric hospitals, universities and the press. While it was true that the exploited class had always recognised this oppression, ‘those responsible for distributing justice, health, knowledge, and information are starting to feel in things they do themselves the oppression of political power’.91 Foucault was aware of the danger of the ‘specific intellectual’ being stuck at the level of the particular, being manipulated by political parties or trade unions, or not being able to develop the struggles because of the lack of a global strategy or support. But on this point, the GIP statement had spoken of breaking down barriers between prisoners, lawyers and magistrates or doctors, patients and hospital personnel. At the time of the publication of The Gulag Archipelago, French intellectuals had expressed considerable interest not only in Solzhenitsyn but in the literary and political work and the plight of dissidents in the USSR and Eastern Europe more generally. For example, following the death in police custody in March 1977 of writer Jan Patocka, one of the three spokesmen of Charter 77, the Czechoslovak human and democratic rights organisation, a French Charter 77 support committee was founded whose members included ex-Communist Pierre Daix, Vercors and Jean-Marie Domenach. On 21 June 1977 while President Giscard d’Estaing was entertaining Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev at the Elysée Palace, a prestigious rival gathering of French intellectuals and Soviet dissidents was co-organised by Michel Foucault and Pierre Victor, ex-leader of the Gauche prolétarienne and now Sartre’s personal secretary. Those attending included Sartre (now blind and very frail), Beauvoir, Ionesco and Foucault. The French intellectuals’ fascination for and solidarity with the Soviet dissidents both underscored the anti-totalitarian mood of the mid-1970s and the widespread rejection of ‘revolutionary utopianism’. But for Julia Kristeva, the dissident also provided the inspiration for a new type of intellectual. In an article published in Tel Quel in 1977,92 Kristeva identified three groups of intellectual dissidents, and the word is chosen with direct reference to the dissidents of the USSR and the Soviet bloc. They are: the rebel who attacks political power head-on, the psychoanalyst whose field of activity (‘psychoanalysis and its spiritual spin-offs’) remains a site of active dissidence in the face of an allembracing rationality, and the writer who experiments with the limits of identity. In addition, Kristeva points to the subversive potential of women. Although neither Foucault nor Kristeva (nor anyone else) established a generally accepted model to replace that personified by Sartre, their


views of the intellectual nonetheless encapsulated two features which typified many of the interventions of intellectuals from the mid-1970s. First, the field of the interventions tended to be more limited, focusing on a particular issue or theme (e.g. racism, human rights, militant Islam, illegal immigrants, the homeless). Moreover, the purpose of the intervention was to correct particular excesses of the world we live in, rather than to view any victory as a step towards the building of the new Jerusalem. Second, while the tradition of the intellectual as amateur persisted in some of the writings of the ‘new generation of intellectuals’,93 there are also numerous examples of interventions underpinned by expertise. For example, the impact of the political interventions of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu over Algeria (post-1992) and the social conflicts in France in 1995 was enhanced by his work as a sociologist both in Algeria and on the underprivileged and marginalised in France.94 More recently, the publication in 2000 of a book by a doctor at the Santé prison in Paris exposing the appalling conditions under which the prisoners are held is a good example of the intervention of what Foucault would call a ‘specific intellectual’.95 The rejection of ‘revolutionary utopianism’, which established itself as the dominant orthodoxy among French intellectuals from the mid1970s, led to the emergence of a softer, less ideologically determined and more humanitarian form of intellectual praxis. This was evident in 1979 at the press conference on the Vietnamese boat people when Sartre observed, ‘We don’t care about their politics any more, we’re concerned with their lives.’ Camus could not have expressed it better. In the thirty years following the Liberation, when French intellectual life had been dominated by a revolutionary project whose aim was the creation of a qualitatively different society, liberalism96 was seen at best as irrelevant and at worst dangerous and counter-revolutionary, since its commitment to reform was often perceived as an obstacle to the realisation of the revolutionary dream. The rejection of the radical project in the mid-1970s created an ideological vacuum into which liberalism was able to move and, by the mid-1980s, had established itself as a powerful intellectual voice. Writers like Alexis de Tocqueville, ‘the greatest liberal of the nineteenth century’,97 and Benjamin Constant, a passionate advocate of individual liberties, whose unfashionable liberalism had placed them at the margins of the history of French thought, were ‘re-discovered’. In addition non-French liberal/anti-Communist intellectuals, including Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper, enjoyed a popularity which had hitherto eluded them. The ‘liberal revival’ also marked a


belated recognition of the work of Aron, whose criticisms of the dominant philo-communism of the earlier period had led, as we have shown, to him being relegated to the wings of the French intellectual stage. Aron’s political analyses were now being favourably re-assessed; he was enjoying considerable if belated, popularity and respect, reinforced by the publication in 1983 of his memoirs.98 The ‘political’ Camus too enjoyed something of a revival. In 1978, for example, Jean Daniel wrote of ‘this strange recourse to Camus’ and noted from 1968 onwards the popularity of Camus within the Soviet bloc and other places where ‘oppression and murder are justified in the name of History’.99 Now in France too, where Camus so frequently had been castigated, patronised and dismissed, a new generation of intellectuals was granting his politics recognition which few of his peers accorded him during his lifetime. In the new intellectual context from the mid-1970s, voices were raised urging the intellectual to adopt a more modest role. An important example of this trend was the view of the intellectual advanced by the historian Pierre Nora in 1980 in the first issue of Le Débat, a new review covering history, politics and society. Proposing a form of intervention in social life for intellectuals which was radically different from the one practised hitherto, Nora insisted that the intellectual should be a competent guide. As Jeremy Jennings, a British authority on French intellectuals, has written: ‘The intellectual was no longer to speak in the name of those who could not speak but was rather to utilize his or her critical capacities and judgement to enlighten and inform … the intellectual is no longer entitled to play the role of prophet or hero or (worse) despot. The intellectual is there to demystify and not to preach.’100 By the time, then, that Mitterrand and the Socialists came to power in 1981, French intellectuals were on the whole agreed in their rejection of the ‘Sartre-style’ intellectual but were far less certain about what their role should be. Before discussing the ‘silence of the intellectuals’, however, we need to consider the second dimension of the reassessment of the intellectual which occurred from the mid-1970s, namely the médiatisation of the intellectual. In 1962, Alain Peyrefitte, de Gaulle’s newly nominated Secretary of State for Information, was told by his predecessor that every evening he should ring the television and radio producers and set the agenda and political slant for the evening’s news programmes. Not surprisingly, Peyrefitte commented, ‘French television is the (French) state in the dining room.’ Even after de Gaulle’s departure, his successor,


Georges Pompidou, claimed, ‘Television is considered to be the voice of France both by the French people and abroad.’101 From the mid-1970s, starting with the break-up of the statecontrolled Office de la Radio et Télévision Française (ORTF) and the beginnings of a process of democratisation under Giscard d’Estaing,102 French television has undergone a radical transformation which has had a direct bearing on the role, definition and praxis of the intellectual. The literary/intellectual television programme Apostrophes which was first broadcast in 1975, played a vital role in the médiatisation of the intellectual. A number of intellectuals initially treated the programme with a patronising disdain, if not outright hostility, but in the next twenty-five years Apostrophes, chaired by Bernard Pivot attracted audiences of up to six million, becoming not only the number one intellectual-literary showcase, but also a window onto current intellectual debates.103 It became, in the words of Rémy Rieffel, ‘the pivot of intellectual life in France in the second half of the 1970s’.104 While the ‘opening-up’ of television provided a proliferation of new fora for French intellectuals,105 it also played an important part in the redefinition of the perception of the intellectual. In Le Pouvoir intellectuel en France,106 Régis Debray identified three sequential if overlapping cycles of intellectual activity: the university cycle (1880–1930), the publishing cycle (1920–60) and the media cycle (1968–?). In the post-1968 cycle, Debray argues that the high intelligentsia (haute intelligentsia) forged an alliance with the new mediocracy, with which indeed it was beginning to merge, ensuring it ‘a monopoly in the production and circulation of events and values, of symbolic facts and norms, over an increasingly wide area … The price of this integration into the main means of diffusion, whereby the high intelligentsia has bought its social supremacy, has been a considerable degradation of the intellectual function.’107 Critics of the mass media, like Debray and Bourdieu,108 say that it focuses on the individual (the more charismatic the better), the sensational and the scandalous all served up in easily digestible sound-bites. All at the expense of thoughtful, intellectual discourse. As we have seen, from the Dreyfus affair until the mid-1970s, the French intellectual was generally considered to be a man (or very rarely woman) of letters willing to lend his reputation to a particular cause, e.g. the defence of Dreyfus (Zola), Algerian War of Independence (Sartre), anti-Communism (Aron, Malraux etc). Now in the era of television, it is no longer the intellectual with a solid corpus of work


behind him who is invited to give his view on this or that issue. In the multi-media age which blossomed from the mid-1970s, those individuals now commonly referred to as ‘intellectuals’ have frequently established themselves as such, not because of a corpus of work which underpins their political intervention, but via a popularisation of their work (however meagre) – and themselves – through the media. This is well illustrated in the case of the ‘new philosophers’ to whom their mentor philosopher Maurice Clavel said in 1973, ‘You have two years to make yourselves famous.’109 The collusion between ‘intellectuals’ and programme makers is well summarised by Winock: ‘The system of exchange is now as follows: you come and grace my programme and I’ll give you publicity by getting your name and face known.’110 Despite the criticisms of Bourdieu and Debray about the impact of television on intellectual praxis, French intellectuals have found it difficult to resist the lure of the TV studio. Pressure from one’s editor, the close relationship between the world of publishing and TV, market forces, the competitive intellectual field, vanity and the promise of fame all conspired to draw intellectuals into the orbit of television and launch them via TV into the homes of millions of French men and women. This médiatisation of the intellectual field inevitably favoured those who were photogenic, articulate and could ‘perform’ well. Thus it was that the same dozen or so names would turn up over and over again on radio and TV programmes, the most famous and most ubiquitous probably being the dashing figure of Bernard-Henri Lévy. This médiatisation of the intellectual has led to the definition of ‘intellectual’ becoming much more fluid and diluted. And this process is not restricted to the realm of television. For example, Winock, referring to the ‘banalisation of the intellectual stance’, notes how each day the pages of Le Monde and Libération are full of articles by teachers, engineers, doctors, civil servants and trade unionists who are passionately defending a cause or proposing an analysis of a current problem ‘as if the intellectual function had been democratised and was no longer the private domain of famous writers and philosophers’.111 It was almost as if anyone from outside the orbit of professional politics who took up a political position was referred to as an ‘intellectual’. Democratisation, then, of the term intellectual but also, perhaps paradoxically, professionalisation too. First, there are those, like BernardHenri Lévy and André Glucksmann, who are ‘professional’ intellectuals. Sartre and Camus, while intervening politically, nevertheless retained their literary reputations, winning, for example, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957 and 1964 respectively. Much of Bernard-Henri Lévy’s


published output on the other hand is either about intellectuals (e.g. L’Idéologie française, Les Aventures de la liberté, Eloge des intellectuels, Avec Salman Rushdie, Le Siècle de Sartre), or political polemics (e.g. La Barbarie à visage humain, La Pureté dangereuse) or edited collections of his own writings which have appeared elsewhere (e.g. Questions de principe, Vols 1–4). While Sartre (and Camus to a lesser extent) wrote about ‘the intellectual’, it remained very much a minor part of their oeuvre, whereas for Lévy it represents a significant component. Lévy the intellectual intervening passionately on political issues (e.g. Bosnia, Algeria, racism) is also the intellectual who writes extensively about intellectuals. He, more than anybody else in France today, is the personification of the intellectual who is famous for being an intellectual. The professionalisation of the new intellectual has another sense which stands in contrast to the amateurism of the earlier intellectual. Sartre had no hesitation whatsoever about taking a stance on political issues – or indeed any subject – about which he knew relatively little. Indeed, as has been noted, in his lecture on intellectuals he defined an intellectual as somebody who gets involved with what does not concern him. One of the features of the 1980s and 1990s has been the emergence of the specialist intellectual (echoes here of Foucault’s ‘specific intellectual’) with, for example, economists, doctors and historians intervening publicly on matters within their field of expertise. Another feature of post-1975 developments has been the emergence of the ‘intellectual-journalist’. Although much has been made of this, it is not as much of an innovation as is sometimes suggested. Emile Zola was a prolific journalist, and in the period here under consideration, most of the intellectuals during the glorious thirty years after the Liberation (les trente glorieuses) had more than a passing acquaintance with journalism. Aron, having turned his back on an academic career, was a committed and prolific journalist at Combat and later Le Figaro; Camus’ involvement with Combat is well known and well documented; Malraux wrote for the Gaullist RPF publications while Mauriac published his Bloc Notes initially in L’Express and later Le Figaro. Sartre wrote for Action, Combat, Le Nouvel Observateur, L’Express and, perhaps surprisingly, Le Figaro (although this was in 1945). The main difference between the intellectuals mentioned above and the new generation of ‘intellectual journalists’ is that the latter have used journalism to establish their reputation to an extent far beyond that of the former who, with the exception of Aron, had a publicly recognised reputation in literary fields which both predated and overshadowed their activities as


journalists. (Aron, it should be remembered, had forsaken an extremely promising university career to which he later returned.) The confusion about what the role of the intellectual should be continued into the 1980s. For example, Bernard-Henri Lévy, writing in 1987, referred to French intellectuals ‘going through a diffuse, veiled, almost stifled crisis’,112 while Sirinelli refers to the second half of the 1970s as having been a period of ‘profound destabilisation of the intellectual milieu and the loss of its reference points’.113 The uncertainties and confusion experienced by many intellectuals was compounded by a sense that they had become irrelevant as far as the wider French society was concerned. A survey published in L’Express a month before the 1981 presidential elections revealed that for 61 per cent of those interviewed, the endorsement of a candidate in an election by an intellectual whom they held in high esteem ‘had absolutely no importance’, and that 56 per cent of those interviewed said they did not read texts or petitions signed by intellectuals. When asked whether, over the past 20 or 30 years intellectuals had, on the whole, been right or wrong in the political positions they had taken, 54 per cent did not have an opinion.114 As Bernard-Henri Lévy noted six years later, France, who had invented the intellectuals, ‘praised them to the skies and dragged them through the mud, but always with passion, no longer knew what to do with them or think about them’. Never had the intellectuals experienced such a feeling of being cut off from reality.115 Despite this, despite the reservations towards Mitterrand and the Socialist Party (PS), despite the so-called silence of the intellectuals (see Chapter 6), intellectuals were still present in the 1980s even if it was a fallow decade for interventions.

6 From the ‘Silence of the Intellectuals’ to the End of the Millennium

Since the Liberation, French intellectuals had, for the most part, been on the Left, but the ideological collapse of Marxism had led, as we have seen, to a rejection of much of the traditional left-wing mindset, resulting in a certain confusion as to what it meant to be progressive in the late twentieth century. This in part explains why there was such a muted response to the Socialist victories (presidential and legislative elections) of 1981. Nonetheless, despite a lack of clarity about their role, despite abandoning the old Left–Right dichotomy which had dominated intellectual discourse until the mid-1970s, French intellectuals did identify a number of issues in the course of the next two decades around which they would mobilise. Shortly after the arrival in power of the PS in France in 1981, the Polish state crackdown on democratic reformist movements in Poland provided another opportunity for intellectuals to take a stand against a totalitarian regime and in favour of human rights and democracy, but as the decade progressed, culminating in the ‘collapse of Communism’, a new threat to democracy and liberty was identified, namely Islamic fundamentalism. The spread of Islam in France (which came to a head with the so-called affaire du foulard (‘headscarf affair’) in 1989) was viewed with extreme disquiet by numerous intellectuals. So too was the continuing success of the Front National, which had been given sharp focus by its success in the by-election in Dreux (1983). It is therefore no surprise that French intellectuals mobilised against both militant Islam and against the NF, with many of them seeing their actions in both instances as contributing to a defence of the Republic and democratic republican values. The conflicts in the Balkans, with their deadly mix of religious, national and ethnic antagonisms which accompanied and succeeded 167


the implosion of the old Yugoslav federation, was another issue on which the intellectuals wrote, protested, demonstrated and signed petitions, while the last major domestic issue of the century to which the intellectuals committed themselves was the protests by public sector workers against the Juppé plan in 1995. This massive wave of strikes saw one group of intellectuals, led by Pierre Bourdieu, throwing their weight behind the protesters of the mouvement social (social movement) while another group, strongly influenced by the review Esprit, backed the plan. Each of these issues will now be examined in more detail.

The ‘silence of the intellectuals’ The ‘silence of the intellectuals’ refers to the muted response of the intellectuals to the 1981 victories of Mitterrand and the PS. In August Le Nouvel Observateur contrasted the intellectuals’ support for the 1936 Popular Front with the ‘reservations or silence of leading French intellectuals’1 which greeted Mitterrand’s victory. Before considering this ‘silence’ in more detail, it should be noted that, although widespread, the intellectuals’ reservations about the new government and president were not universal. A number of intellectuals including Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard and Françoise Sagan openly supported the government, and if the new Minister of Culture, Jack Lang, is to be believed, they were not alone. In an announcement that would not have been out of place in Pravda under Stalin, he proclaimed to the National Assembly in November 1981 that ‘testimonies from writers, film-makers, painters and composers expressing their gratitude were arriving on the President’s desk in their hundreds.’2 However, one should also remember the support from Bourdieu, Gilles Deleuze, Maurice Nadeau and other intellectuals for the presidential candidacy of the anarchic, anti-establishment comedian Coluche.3 In their consideration of the ‘silence of the intellectuals’ after 1981, some writers have drawn attention to the deaths of leading intellectuals and thinkers which, according to one author, left ‘gaping holes in the Parisian high intelligentsia’.4 Clearly these deaths, especially those of Sartre (15 April 1980) and Aron (17 October 1983), do mark the end of an era, especially when one adds the deaths of other thinkers – Roland Barthes (1980), Jacques Lacan (1981) and Louis Althusser (interned in a mental hospital in 1980 after strangling his wife; he died in 1990) – whose influence on postwar French thought is beyond question. However, the significance of these deaths as far as the issue of the

To the End of the Millennium 169

‘silence of the intellectuals’ is concerned should not be over-stated. Lacan and Althusser were not much given to making public interventions on political issues5 and Barthes but rarely. As has been noted, by the time he died, Sartre’s model of the ‘committed intellectual’ had been very largely rejected. Although much media interest was generated by his ‘reconciliation’ with Aron in 1979, Sartre was by then totally blind, and his physical ill-health, together with suspicions, fuelled by Beauvoir, that he was being manipulated by his secretary, ex-Maoist leader Benny Lévy, cast doubts on the credibility of his published views.6 After his death, Sartre continued to be, along with Proust and Camus, the most studied of French writers,7 but as an intellectual (in the sense that we have been using the term) he was either denigrated or generally ignored8 until the publication in 2000 of a perceptive and surprisingly sympathetic study of Sartre by Bernard-Henri Lévy.9 Since the mid-1970s, Aron had, as we have seen, discovered a generalised respect and admiration among his peers which had largely eluded him for the thirty years or so following the Liberation, and he had also become the object of considerable media attention. Despite suffering a stroke in April 1977, he continued to take an interest in current political events,10 but by the turn of the decade he was primarily concerned with reflecting on the past. In October 1981 he was the subject of a three-part television interview covering 1930–47 (‘France in Torment’), 1947–67 (‘Democracy and Totalitarianism’) and 1968–80 (‘Liberty and Reason’) which appeared simultaneously in book form11 and which remained on the bestseller list of L’Express for the next six months. 1983 saw the publication of his 778-page political memoirs12 which also enjoyed a huge commercial success. The disappearance of leading intellectuals and thinkers was not, then, the main cause of the intellectuals’ ‘silence’, which ironically generated a good deal of debate and discussion.13 It can be explained in large part by the unease that many French intellectuals felt about socialism, about key aspects of the government’s political programme and about the composition of the government itself. Socialism, for many intellectuals, was an idea that was well past its sell-by date.14 One of the most theatrical moments of Mitterrand’s inauguration had been the highly orchestrated placing of red roses on the Panthéon tombs of Resistance hero Jean Moulin; Jean Jaurès, the Socialist leader assassinated on the eve of World War One; and antislavery campaigner Victor Schoelcher. (Mitterrand’s future special adviser, Jacques Attali, also placed a red rose on the grave of Léon Blum, Socialist leader of the Popular Front government of 1936.) Mitterrand’s


attempts to establish a historical link between himself and liberty, the Resistance and socialism appeared to many, especially with regard to Blum and Jaurès, to be endorsing an ideology which was not only outdated but, according to those involved in the intellectual onslaught against countries calling themselves socialist, actually dangerous. Two years later, André Glucksmann, referring to the writers who had been invited to the ceremony at the Panthéon, noted that Mitterrand had omitted to invite those writers in ‘socialist’ countries who were fighting for their freedom.15 This suspicion of any form of socialism, which many intellectuals read off from their critiques of Marx and the totalitarian ‘socialist’ states, was further reinforced by key elements of the government programme. At a time when the West (especially the USA and Britain under Reagan and Thatcher respectively) were embracing economic neo-liberalism in order to tackle the worldwide economic crisis, the French Socialists were planning to spend their way out of the crisis through a neo-Keynesian strategy. This involved huge increases in state-funded social benefits aimed at boosting consumption and, as a result, it was hoped, domestic production. The government also initiated a programme of nationalisation. Since the Liberation, the state had played a central role in the French economy in general, and in planning in particular. However, an enhanced role as now envisaged by the Socialists was viewed with unease by those intellectuals who had been attacking totalitarian state socialism so vigorously over the past few years. With the PS’s overwhelming parliamentary majority, Mitterrand could have appointed a government drawn exclusively from the PS, but he chose to include four Communists – the first time Communists had been part of the government since 1947. Mitterrand gave a number of reasons for this. The concept of fairness was invoked: the Communists had secured about 10 per cent of the seats in the legislature, so they should be given 10 per cent of the seats in government. Mitterrand also argued that in order to tackle the country’s acute economic problems France needed to mobilise all her forces, just as de Gaulle had done immediately after the war. Unofficially, Mitterrand was hoping that the presence of Communists in government would reduce the likelihood of worker protests against its programmes. In addition, he hoped that such clear evidence that the PCF was now the junior partner of the PS would continue the erosion of political support for the PCF to the benefit of the PS, thus extending a process which had been evident since the early 1970s.


Whatever Mitterrand was up to (and he was always up to something), the presence of Communist ministers in the French government was a shock and a bitter pill to swallow for those intellectuals who had been in the vanguard of the intellectual anti-Communist crusade. In June 1981, the same month as the legislative elections, Jorge Semprun, ex-member of the French resistance, inmate of Buchenwald, and from 1956 until the early 1960s member of the political bureau of the Spanish Communist Party, stated that the touchstone of left-wing thinking was ‘a critical attitude towards the USSR and clearly, as one of the corollaries of that, a rejection of those parties which come out of the Comintern tradition’.16 According to Martyn Cornick, philosophers François George and Gilles Deleuze both agreed that ‘as long as the government has to play along with the Communist Party, its actions will not be understood’.17

Solidarity with Solidarity The unease numerous intellectuals felt about what they saw as the Socialist government’s dangerous liaison with the PCF and Communism was dramatically highlighted at the end of 1981 when, during the night of 12/13 December, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, Poland’s Prime Minister and Defence Minister, announced that the country was in a state of war and declared martial law. An Army Council of National Salvation was appointed to run the country: the press was closed down; freedom of association was outlawed; curfews were imposed; the independent trade union Solidarnosc (Solidarity) was banned and its leaders, including Lech Walesa, along with thousands of activists were arrested and interned. Interviewed on the radio on 13 December, the Foreign Minister, Claude Cheysson, provoked a general sense of outrage when he stated that events in Poland were ‘an internal matter’. When asked if the French government intended taking any action, Cheysson replied, ‘Absolutely not. Of course we’re not going to do anything.’18 Although Cheysson later regretted this comment, which had ‘slipped out’,19 it was too late. The protests from the intellectuals who had been championing human rights and campaigning against the repressive nature of ‘socialist’ societies were as loud as they were predictable. In the 15 December edition of the pro-PS newspaper Le Matin, BernardHenri Lévy wrote of his rage, his impotence and his shame at the government’s position, which implicated the French people as a whole, while Aron, who had supported Giscard d’Estaing in the presidential elections,


talked of ‘a guilty conscience that borders on shame’.20 A letter of protest written by Cornelius Castoriadis and signed by nineteen other intellectuals including François Fejtö, Jacques Julliard, Edgar Morin, Alain Touraine and Pierre Vidal-Naquet was sent to Jacques Fauvet, editor of Le Monde, in the early hours of Monday 14 December, but was never published. The signatories expressed their ‘indignation’ at Cheysson’s remarks and attacked the hypocrisy and double talk of a government that was prepared to acknowledge the oppression of peoples in Latin America but turn its back on repression closer to home.21 A second statement, published this time, appeared in the press a few days later.22 It is of interest for two reasons, namely the content of the text and the composition of the signatories. Like the text written by Castoriadis, it attacked the government’s view (or at least Cheysson’s view) that events in Poland were an internal matter, calling it ‘an immoral and lying assertion’. It also made explicit the link between domestic French politics and Cheysson’s remarks by asking if ‘Good relations with the PCF are more important than the crushing of a workers’ movement by the military?’ (sous la botte militaire). The signatories also reminded the government of its promise to put international moral obligations before realpolitik. The signatories offer a clear example of a tendency for signatories of political statements/manifestos increasingly to include not only academics and men/women of letters but also personalities from the visual media. This is not to argue that for personalities from the world of cinema to take up political positions was a new phenomenon in itself. After all, for example, François Truffaut and Alain Resnais had signed the Manifeste des 121 (see Chapter 4), and Catherine Deneuve and Jeanne Moreau had both signed the 1971 manifesto on abortion (see Chapter 5). Jean-Luc Godard, along with Claude Chabrol, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Michel Piccoli, Truffaut and others had been active in May 1968, especially fighting the sacking of Henri Langlois, director of the Paris Cinémathèque. But through the 1980s and 1990s, as part of the médiatisation of the intellectual field and the blurring of the distinction between intellectual and media star, relatively more ‘names’ from show business were to be found endorsing published political statements alongside those who fit the more conventional definition of intellectuals.23 The signatories of this second statement on Poland included, alongside Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Claude Mauriac, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, André Glucksmann, Jorge Semprun and Marguerite Duras, film-makers Costa-Gavras, Claude Sautet, Jean-Louis Comolli and actors Yves Montand and Simone Signoret.


The government tried to breach the gap which Poland had opened up between it and the intellectual left by supporting a cultural evening, staged at the Paris Opera on 22 December, and attended by over 2000 guests. Here homage was paid to and solidarity expressed with the Polish people and Polish artists. The presence of no fewer than eleven members of the government and Danielle Mitterrand (the president’s wife) indicated just how keen the government was to win the support of the intellectuals, but for many it smacked of opportunism and manipulation. On 23 December Le Monde published an ‘Appeal from left-wing writers and scientists’ who expressed their total solidarity with the Polish workers’ movement, Polish writers, students and intellectuals in their struggle for a pluralist society and their opposition to external threats and the militarisation of Polish political life. The tone of the text was more conciliatory than the earlier public statements – indeed the statement even quoted Mitterrand – which probably indicated that the damage-limitation exercise undertaken by the government and the president after Cheysson’s faux pas had had some impact. Signatories of the text included philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Vladimir Jankelevitch, Clara Malraux and historians Vidal-Naquet and Madeleine Rebérioux. On 24 December yet another statement signed by some fifty intellectuals appeared in Le Monde which asserted once again that events in Poland did not constitute ‘an internal affair’. It emphasised the role played by the Soviet Union by stressing that the December clampdown had been imposed ‘under pressure from the USSR’ and concluded that a definitive division of Europe which ruled out a democratic future for Poland and other countries currently under the domination of the Soviet Union was unacceptable. Signatories included Pierre Bourdieu, Cornelius Castoriadis, J.-M. Domenach, Michel Foucault, historians François Furet, E. Le Roy Ladurie and Pierre Nora, Alain Geismar, André Glucksmann, Claude Lefort, Claude Mauriac, Edgar Morin, Maurice Nadeau, Jorge Semprun, David Rousset and Roger Stéphane. The world of cinema was again represented by Signoret, Montand and film-maker Joris Ivens.24 In any event, on Christmas Day Le Monde published yet another petition. Signed by over 4000 intellectuals and scientists, including two Nobel prizewinners and twenty professors from the Collège de France, it once again stressed that what was happening in Poland was not simply an internal matter – and added that it constituted a threat to ‘peoples’ rights and human rights’. The signatories expressed their solidarity with Solidarnosc and the vast majority of the Polish people who were


opposed to their unworthy and incompetent leaders. They called for the release of all those arrested, and for the opening of meaningful negotiations between different Polish interested parties. The statement further called on France (and other unspecified countries) to sever relations with Poland (except the provision of food aid) until basic freedoms were re-established.25

The extreme Right and the Dreux by-election But Poland was not the most important of the Socialist government’s problems. The government’s spending spree and its attempt to stimulate the French economy by boosting consumption had been predicated on a world economic upturn occurring at the end of 1981 or the beginning of 1982 at the latest. This upturn failed to materialise. Furthermore, the increase in consumer spending had provoked a rise in imports rather than boosting domestic production, with the result that the trade deficit leapt from 50.6 billion francs in 1981 to 93.3 billion francs in 1982. At the same time the budget deficit, which had been 30.3 billion francs in 1980, rose to 80.9 billion francs in 1981, reaching 98.9 billion francs in 1982. Inflation remained high (at around 14 per cent) while elsewhere in Western industrialised countries it was falling, and unemployment was climbing steadily upwards from between one and a half and one and three-quarter million in March 1981 to over two million by the end of March 1983. Many voters had supported Mitterrand and the PS in the 1981 elections hoping to see realised the Socialist slogan ‘Changer la vie’ (‘Change Life’). Now many felt that what they were getting was more of the same – if not worse. Following losses in the local cantonal elections (March 1982) and a decline in popularity as registered in the opinion polls, the government made a U-turn in its economic policy and adopted a policy of rigueur (rigour), preferring this term to austérité (austerity). The Left did badly in the first round of the municipal elections on 6 March 1983, and on 23 March a third devaluation of the franc was followed, two days later, by the announcement of a second plan de rigueur. The spring of 1983 saw waves of demonstrations against the government by students, hospital interns and heads of clinics, Breton farmers and the police. At the same time, the PCF was becoming more openly critical of the government policy – even if the four Communists remained in government until 1984. It was against this background of falling government popularity that Max Gallo, spokesman of the Mitterrand government, penned an


article in Le Monde complaining about the lack of support from leftwing intellectuals on whom, according to him, the success of the political Left ‘and above that, the destiny of France’ depended. An article which, incidentally, provoked twenty articles in Le Monde, which showed that whatever else they were, the intellectuals were scarcely silent.26 1983 was also the year that the Front national (National Front), the extreme-Right populist movement led by Jean-Marie Le Pen, made its breakthrough. Established by Le Pen in 1972, the FN had remained on the fringes of French politics for the next ten years or so. For example, its score in the 1978 and 1981 legislative elections had been derisory, and in 1981 Le Pen had been unable to find the necessary sponsors (parrainages) to present himself as a candidate in the presidential elections. However, the generalised disillusionment with the Socialist government and president, the continuing (and worsening) economic crisis, the government’s austerity measures and the participation in government by members of the PCF – the traditional party of protest against ‘the system’ – created the conditions in which the FN asserted itself. Placing the issue of immigration at the centre of its political strategy, the ‘immigrants’27 became useful scapegoats, and were held to be responsible for everything from unemployment and housing shortages to social security fraud and the spread of AIDS. The FN started to make its mark in the municipal elections of March 1983 when, aided by a change in the electoral system to proportional representation, Le Pen for example, obtained 11.3 per cent of the vote in the 20th arrondissement of Paris. But it was a re-run of the municipal election in Dreux held in September 1983 which caused a sensation when the FN candidate, Jean-Pierre Stirbois, obtained 16.7 per cent of the vote in the first round. At the same time the Left’s vote fell from 45.08 per cent (in March) to 40.6 per cent, while the right-wing coalition of RPR and UDF obtained 42.7 per cent. The traditional Right could command a majority at Dreux – on condition that it allied itself with the FN. This it agreed to do and prepared a joint list of candidates for the second round to be held on 11 September. A demonstration held on 9 September on the theme of the danger of fascism united Left and extreme Left politicians including Socialists Michel Rocard and Pierre Joxe and Trotskyist leader Alain Krivine, with singer Lény Escudero, actor Daniel Gélin and film-maker Costa-Gavras. An appeal launched two days earlier asserted that ‘the whole of France is concerned by the renaissance of racist ideas at Dreux’ and called on voters to reject electoral lists which included ‘extremists who don’t


give a damn about freedom and human dignity’. The 39 signatories again included academics and writers (e.g. historians Jean-Pierre Azéma and Jean-Pierre Rioux, philosophers Vladimir Jankelevitch and André Glucksmann, and Claude Mauriac) and people from the world of entertainment including film-makers Costa-Gavras and Claude Chabrol, actors Stéphane Audran, Gérard Depardieu, Yves Montand and Simone Signoret and comedian Guy Bedos. The result of the second round would appear to support the findings of the survey in L’Express (see p. 166) on the impact of the intellectuals’ views on public opinion. The number of abstentions fell from 32.5 per cent to just under 25 per cent; the Left obtained 44.56 per cent of the vote while the combined Right/extreme Right list obtained 55.44 per cent, only 4 per cent less than the two separate lists had obtained in the first round.28 One of the themes peddled by the FN was the ‘threat’ of Islam to the social fabric and traditions of France. But concern with Islam was not restricted to the right-wing extremists and their sympathisers. The relationship between Islam and secularism in France and the role of militant Islam in the world were two important debates among intellectuals which took place at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s.

The ‘headscarf affair’29 Between 1954 and 1974 France experienced the greatest influx of immigrants in its history as workers from Spain, Portugal, the Maghreb and elsewhere were encouraged to come to France to met the labour demands generated by France’s economic boom. For the most part, these travailleurs immigrés (immigrant workers) found themselves employed in the car and steel industries, the building industry and the public sector where they undertook the low-paid, arduous and dangerous jobs that the French workers were not prepared to do. The economic crisis triggered by the OPEC hike in oil prices in 1973, marking the end of the year-on-year rise in prosperity, led President Giscard d’Estaing in July 1974 to suspend immigration. Rising unemployment meant the end of the need of a cheap reserve army of labour; the first measures of voluntary repatriation were introduced, but the takeup rate was minimal, with only 94 000 departures between 1977 and 1981. However, dependants of male immigrants already settled in France were allowed to join their fathers and husbands. Thus the profile of the immigrant became diversified as it shifted from the single


(i.e. unaccompanied) male to include women and children. The stereotype of the ‘immigrant’ became someone (not just male) from the Maghreb, or whose family had roots in the Maghreb; such people’s appearance marking them out from European immigrants (e.g. Spanish, Portuguese, Yugoslav) made them more vulnerable to discrimination and racist attacks. Most of these North African ‘immigrants’ were Muslims and the extreme Right constantly insisted that since the ‘immigrants’ were from a different culture they had no place in France. By the end of the 1980s, the number of Muslims was between three and five million (out of a total population of about 58 million) representing between 8 per cent and 9 per cent of the population, and it was at the end of the decade that the simmering issue of the place of Islamic culture in France erupted with the affaire du foulard (the headscarf affair). In 1989 three teenage female students were excluded from a collège at Creil, some 50 kilometres north of Paris, for refusing to remove their Muslim headscarves30 while attending school. The reason given by the headmaster was that the wearing of the headscarf was incompatible with France’s secular educational tradition, established by the separation of Church and state in 1905. One of the implications of this law was that religion was a private affair and had no place in school (or any other state organisation).31 The long-minning passionate debate which the headscarf affair ignited revealed not only a fear in certain quarters of Islamic fundamentalism but also provoked a re-examination of secularism, a cornerstone of France’s republican tradition. For Jacques Soustelle, ex-governor-general of Algeria, later elevated to the Académie Française in 1982 in recognition of his work as an ethnographer, the wearing of the headscarf was part of an organised provocation by Islamic fundamentalists. Their conception of the world, society and the state was so radically at odds with that of France that he raised the spectre of France becoming another Lebanon.32 Others, including André Glucksmann, philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, and Jean-Marie Domenach, linked the wearing of the headscarf with oppression, which they viewed as an integral ingredient of Islamic fundamentalism. Finkielkraut denounced the ‘Islamic veil’ as a principle of segregation and deplored the plight of the young ‘veiled’ girls who would stay at school until sixteen before being married off.33 For Domenach the girls were victims of manipulation by Islamic fundamentalists and he asserted that the tchador was ‘a symbol of the subjugation of women’.34 In October 1994, Glucksmann asserted that the headscarf was a ‘terrorist emblem’35 and the following month claimed that the


headscarf was ‘stained with blood’.36 It should be noted that these assertions concerning the significance of the foulard ignored the work of Gaspard and Khosrokhavar which examined why young Muslim women chose to wear the headscarf and rejected the view that it had but a single significance for the wearer.37 In the debate among intellectuals over the affaire du foulard, the majority of those intellectuals in favour of the students being allowed to wear the headscarf and those opposed defended their positions in the name of secularism. The difference lay in their respective understandings of this term and the practical implications that flowed from it. Before considering the arguments of the two camps, reference needs to be made to political developments since 1983/4, and to the broader political/ideological context within which the affair was located. The socialist austerity policies introduced in 1983 started to make some impact on the economy, but by March 1984, there were still over two and a quarter million officially registered as seeking work. Discontent with the Left was revealed when the PS barely scraped a fifth of the votes cast in the 1984 European elections and the PCF’s 11.2 per cent put it only a whisker ahead of the FN’s 10.95 per cent, while the combined RPR–UDF list obtained over 43 per cent of the votes. The unpopularity of the government was further reflected in the massive mobilisation in March/April 1984 against government plans to reform private secondary education. In July 1984, in an attempt to save the PS from defeat in the legislative elections scheduled for 1986, Mitterrand appointed Laurent Fabius to replace Pierre Mauroy as Prime Minister. Despite the absence of the Communists from the revamped government, the popularity of the Socialists remained at a low ebb. It recovered slightly but not enough to avoid defeat in the 1986 legislative elections, when the PS won 215 seats compared with 129 (UDF) and 145 (RPR). The PCF and the FN each won 35. In an attempt to split the Right, Mitterrand had introduced proportional representation for the 1986 legislative elections, as he had for the municipal elections, and without this change the FN would have won far fewer seats. While this political manoeuvre succeeded in weakening the traditional Right (RPR) at the expense of the extreme Right (FN), it also massively enhanced the credibility of the FN. In the regional elections held the same day the Right won control in all but two of the 22 regions. After the victory of the Right in the legislative elections, Mitterrand appointed Jacques Chirac, the RPR leader, as prime minister, and France moved into the uncharted waters of cohabitation with a Socialist


president having to work with a right-wing prime minister and government. Although Chirac had hoped to use his success as a platform to win the presidency in the 1988 elections, this was not to be. Living up to his nickname of ‘Bulldozer’, he launched himself into an energetic programme driven by a commitment to economic liberalism, but it soon became clear that Chirac’s enthusiasms were far from universally shared. Unemployment rose to 2 654 000 in February 1987 and by the beginning of 1988 was still where it had been in 1986. Soon the Chirac government was forced to deal with a wave of popular protests including rail strikes, massive school and university student demonstrations and protests over the proposed changes to immigration law introduced by his hard-line Minister of the Interior, Charles Pasqua. Meanwhile Mitterrand, who remained constitutionally responsible for foreign policy, was constantly wrong-footing Chirac while carefully promoting himself as the wise statesman. He used this image to good effect when he beat Chirac in the presidential election of 1988, having presented himself as the personification of gentle strength (la force tranquille). In the subsequent legislative elections (no longer under proportional representation) the Socialists won 278 seats, UDF 130, RPR 128, PCF 27 and FN 1, resulting in the formation of a Socialist government. The two-year period of cohabitation was over. However, the high rate of abstentions in the first round (34.26 per cent of voters) was widely viewed as reflecting a general lack of enthusiasm for any of the parties and indeed for politics as a whole. Thus when the affaire du foulard broke out at the end of 1989, the new Socialist government (now headed by Michel Rocard) had been in power for about eighteen months. More significantly perhaps, given the nature of the debate and its frequent references to the Republic and the republican tradition, the affair erupted a few months after the national celebration of the bi-centenary of the French Revolution, itself held against a backdrop of a questioning of the orthodox view of the Revolution and its republican legacy. On the night of 14 July 1989, over thirty heads of state attended the extravagant procession choreographed by Jean-Paul Goude which was seen by an estimated 800 million television viewers in over a hundred countries. Régis Debray, for whom the republic was an ideal that needed continually to be defended,38 castigated these official celebrations for trivialising the revolution. Keith Reader, an authority on Debray, has described the official parade as a ‘meretricious deployment of the images and icons of revolution in such a way as to drain them of all substantive content’.39 Given the linkage frequently asserted


between the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917, it is not surprising that the interrogations about the nature and roots of repression in ‘socialist states’ in the mid-1970s led to an upsurge of revisionist histories of the French Revolution. Already in the mid-1960s, François Furet, member of the PCF until 1956, and Denis Richet had challenged the orthodox version with their book on the French Revolution.40 In 1978 Furet reviewed sympathetically those writers including de Tocqueville and Taine who had attacked the 1793 logic of terrorism,41 and by 1988 was boldly asserting that the revolutionary process carried within it the seeds of the Terror.42 Alfred Cobban’s work on the French Revolution, which argued that France was late to industrialise because of the Revolution, was published in French in 1984, twenty years after it appeared in English,43 and the following year his analysis was echoed by François Crouzet.44 The perception that the Revolution, foundation-stone of the republic, was being trivialised and undermined contributed to the passionate tone of those intellectuals opposed to the wearing of the headscarf in school. On 2 November 1989 Le Nouvel Observateur published an open letter from Debray and four other intellectuals – Elisabeth Badinter, Alain Finkielkraut, Elisabeth de Fontenay and Catherine Kintzler – which attacked the view of the then Minister of Education, Lionel Jospin, that the school students should not be excluded for wearing headscarves in school.45 For the signatories of this open letter, the very presence of the foulard in school constituted a threat to secular education, and by implication an attack on the republic itself. According to their interpretation of the republican tradition, the school should be a ‘place of emancipation’ where students should forget the prejudices and preconceptions of community they come from and learn to think independently. The school could not tolerate any distinctive manifestation which deliberately and a priori identified a particular group to which a student belonged, especially if this carried religious connotations. Nor could the school tolerate any interference with its curriculum or timetable. The school had to be a place where authority and discourse were based on reason and where there was only place for those traditions which were not contrary to human rights and were in keeping with the principle of open-mindedness and freedom of thought (libre examen). For the signatories, the headscarf was both an affront to reason and a symbol of the oppression of women. In the view of these strict secularists, the school had to remain the main agent of socialisation, whereby children from whatever background were taught to embrace republican


values. Any concession, any deviation from a strict secularism, would lead to the school and by extension French society becoming a multicultural mosaic of different communities. The text referred to the danger of 1989 being the year of ‘the Munich of the republican school’ with Jospin accused of ‘betraying the School’s mission’. Secularism, it was asserted, was never a given. It, like state education, the republic, and freedom itself, had to be continually defended against those wishing to destroy it. A week later Elisabeth Badinter returned to the fray, emphasising the conflictual nature of the question. She referred to ‘a concerted campaign by certain fundamentalists’ and ‘a general religious offensive in France’ and saluted those teachers who refused to accept students wearing headscarves as ‘people in the front line who have the courage to fight’.46 The number of incidents involving students being excluded increased into the 1990s without any satisfactory resolution, and those supporting exclusion maintained their combative stance. In 1992 Alain Finkielkraut described the wearing of the headscarf as ‘a coup de force by certain Islamic fundamentalist organisations’ and concluded that there should be no compromise with Islamic fundamentalism.47 André Glucksmann referred to the voile as ‘a battle uniform symbolising a theocratic revolution’.48 Those opposing the exclusion of students wearing the foulard defended a ‘softer’ version of secularism. For them the role of the school was to include, not exclude, and it should be a place where the right to be different (droit à la différence) should be respected. Sociologist Alain Touraine agreed with ‘secular fundamentalists’ that France should at all cost avoid the Anglo-Saxon multi-culturalist model of integration whereby the school positively validated cultural and ethnic specificities by, for example, celebrating different religious festivals and introducing pupils to different ethnic foods. However, he failed to see why secularism could not coexist with a diversity of beliefs and personal lifestyles. For him, education in France should, of course, recognise the importance of reason. But should also recognise the significance of cultural heritage and personal freedom.49 In a response to the open letter to Lionel Jospin, supporters of a more relaxed interpretation of secularism responded to those whom it described as ‘hard-line secularists’.50 The signatories, which included Touraine, René Dumont, an African specialist and latterly committed ecologist, and Harlem Désir, co-founder of the anti-racist organsiation SOS Racisme, argued that the exclusion from school for wearing a headscarf was considered a humiliation for many Muslims. The ban


could only reinforce the wider sense of exclusion from French society that pervaded North African communities and would only benefit Islamic extremists and the far Right. The signatories noted that while Catholics, Protestants and Jews all had access to state funding for their own schools, such funds were not available to Muslims even though Islam was the second most important religion in France. Opposing a rigid interpretation of secularism, Touraine et al. called for a secularism which, while not promoting any one particular interest, nevertheless acknowledged cultural and ethnic difference.

French intellectuals and Algeria II51 The ‘headscarf affair’, providing a particular focus to the wider question of the place of Islam within French society, was being played out against a more generalised perception of the threat of militant Islam. After the ‘collapse of communism’, triggered by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Muslim fundamentalists across the world were ever more confidently promoting militant Islam as the inspiration for the only alternative to what they saw as the evil, unjust and bankrupt capitalist and communist models of society. In Iran, had not the people, inspired by Khomeini’s guiding hand, driven out the Shah and his cronies who had wished the country to embrace the decadent social, political and economic ways of the West? In Afghanistan, had not the armed miltiamen of Allah inflicted heavy losses on the Soviet army, culminating in its defeat, its withdrawal and the establishment of an Islamic state under the Taliban? In Algeria too, Islamic fundamentalists were establishing themselves as a political force to be reckoned with. At the time of independence (1962), the Algerian population stood at just over ten million (including about a million Europeans). By the end of the 1980s, it had risen to about 30 million of whom some 60 per cent were under twenty years of age. In October 1988 there occurred a week of urban riots, provoked by resentment over the high levels of unemployment, inadequate housing, shortages of food and other goods, and the blatant corruption of the political/military elite who had managed, or rather mismanaged, the one-party state for the past 25 years. In response to the unrest President Chadli Bendjedid announced a series of reforms, which were presented as part of a programme of democratic transition. As a result, Algeria witnessed the beginnings of a civil society with the creation of independent cultural associations, publishing houses, magazines, newspapers and some 50 political parties, the most significant of which


proved to be the Islamic fundamentalist Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) (Islamic Salvation Front), legalised in September 1989. In the regional and municipal elections of June 1990, the FIS obtained over 50 per cent of votes cast, which was almost twice as many as the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), which had formally monopolised power since independence. Despite a state crackdown and the imprisonment of its leaders, the FIS, by now established as a vector for popular resentment against the regime, won over three million votes and secured 188 seats in the 430-seat legislative assembly in the first round of the legislative elections in December 1991. The FLN secured a mere 18 seats. The prospect of an FIS victory posed a direct and powerful threat to the Algerian army which had effectively run the country since independence. Bendjedid Chadli was removed from office and formal power was vested in the hands of an executive committee which promptly cancelled the elections and declared a state of emergency. In March 1992 the FIS was banned. Leading members who had not already been arrested were detained along with thousands of followers and supporters, and in July the two most important leading figures of the FIS, Abassi Madani and Ali Benhadj, were each sentenced to twelve years in jail. The FIS had been deprived of certain victory in the elections; it had been banned and its leaders and thousands of supporters jailed, while the repressive apparatus of the state was still pitted against it. Now FIS militants, many of whom had been sceptical about the wisdom of participating in the elections in the first place, argued that the FIS had no option but to fight back against the regime by targeting those who represented it or supported it. Thus began attacks against members of the police and armed forces which were soon extended against state employees and officials, as well as journalists and intellectuals who had supported the cancelling of the elections. By the summer of 1992 indiscriminate attacks were becoming more common. This upsurge of blind terrorist attacks was linked to the creation in 1992 of the nebulous Groupe(s) Islamique(s) Armé(s) (GIA) (Armed Islamic Group(s)). These would appear to consist of largely autonomous groupings drawn from the Algerian lumpenproletariat, mujahideen who had fought in Afghanistan, along with other fundamentalist extremists united in their hatred for the regime and anyone not prepared to join the ‘resistance’ and actively oppose it. The picture was further confused by persistent allegations of infiltration of the GIA by state agents provocateurs, and indeed the perpetration of atrocities by the state security services posing as fundamentalists in an attempt to discredit the Islamist opposition. The vicious spiral of violence and counter-violence


had, by the end of the decade, resulted in the deaths of over 100 000 people. In France, events in Algeria revealed a division between the majority of intellectuals, the éradicateurs (eradicators) who believed that the crushing of Islamic fundamentalism was a necessary precondition of any political settlement, and the minority conciliateurs (conciliators) who believed that the crisis in Algeria could only be resolved through dialogue and negotiations with the FIS. The two most prominent éradicateurs were Bernard-Henri Lévy and André Glucksmann, both of whom located events in Algeria within a wider context. In La Pureté dangeureuse,52 Lévy identified Islamic fundamentalism as one of the forces of fanatical conformity and purity which, despite their different mind-sets, had wreaked such havoc in, for example, Bosnia, Rwanda and Algeria. Glucksmann, in an account of his trip to Algeria, cited Afghanistan, Sudan, Iran and Egypt to illustrate the critical link between Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism.53 Both Lévy and Glucksmann made comparisons between Islamic fundamentalism and the brutalities of Stalinist Russia and Hitler’s Germany. Lévy, for example, compared the FIS to the Nazis54 and Glucksmann claimed that the only difference between the Algerian fundamentalists and Hitler and Stalin was that the former gloried in their barbarism while the latter tried to conceal it.55 The danger that Algeria could become an Islamic state was great enough for Glucksmann and Lévy to side with the Algerian regime. Although they recognised that the army had repeatedly been unable (or unwilling) to protect civilians from murderous attacks, and while Glucksmann castigated the state for its corruption, inefficiency and bureaucratic authoritarianism,56 they both believed that the state remained the only force capable of defeating the fundamentalists. So, whatever its shortcomings, the Algerian regime was still infinitely preferable to the nightmarish prospect of the establishment of an Islamic state. Both Glucksmann and Lévy utterly rejected any attempt to equate state violence and the violence attributed to the fundamentalists. Before considering the views of the conciliateurs brief mention should be made of those who adopted an intermediate position. Pierre VidalNaquet, for example, one of the signatories of the manifeste des 121, denounced equally firmly the terrorism of the fundamentalists and the recourse to terror and torture by the Algerian state. In opposition to Lévy, Vidal-Naquet considered that rumours of atrocities being carried out by members of the security forces disguised as fundamentalists could well be true.57 Furthermore, the FIS endorsement of the 1995 Rome


Agreement indicated that the FIS was willing to accept the ground-rules of democracy, and since 1995 it had consistently denounced GIA atrocities carried out in the name of Islam. In 1994, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu launched an appeal in the name of the Comité International de Soutien aux Intellectuels Algériens (Cisia) (International Support Committee for Algerian Intellectuals) calling for solidarity with the Algerian people in general, and democrats and intellectuals in particular. The appeal named a number of Algerian intellectuals who had been assassinated, but unlike Lévy and Glucksmann, Bourdieu did not rule out the participation of the state in atrocities against civilians.58 From the end of 1994, Bourdieu was active in a campaign urging the French government to increase the number of visas granted to Algerians wishing to come to France, which had fallen from 800 000 in 1989 to 100 000 in 1994. In December 1994/January 1995 Bourdieu and philosopher Jacques Derrida engaged in a lively exchange with JeanClaude Barreau, adviser on immigration to the right-wing Minister of the Interior, Charles Pasqua.59 A few months later Bourdieu (together with academic Jacques Leca) accused the French authorities of sabotaging France’s reputation as the home of human rights. The French authorities also stood accused of condemning the Algerian population to a ghettoised existence, where it was caught between the violence of the armed Islamic groups and the repression of the military or police.60 The éradicateurs held the Islamic fundamentalists responsible for all or almost all the bloodshed, and the intermediaries saw the hand of the state and some Islamic groups in the violence. The conciliateurs, on the other hand, argued that the Algerian state was primarily responsible for the carnage, and claimed that the solution to the Algerian crisis lay in negotiation with, and not the elimination of, the Islamic fundamentalists. The leading conciliateur was François Burgat, an authority on Islam who was based at the Institut de Recherches et d’Etudes sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman (the Institute of Study and Research into the Arab and Muslim World) in Aix-en-Provence. The three main themes of Burgat’s position were as follows. First, he argued that the media coverage in France of the complex situation in Algeria was simplistic and distorted by the manipulation of news by the authorities in Algeria. This coverage, according to Burgat, had served to reinforce the position of the éradicateurs and had led to all those (like him) who were not part of the mainstream on Algeria being treated like pariahs. Such an attitude meant that the complexities of the situation in Algeria


were not acknowledged and as a result awkward questions were never addressed.61 The second theme concerned the issue of violence. Burgat pointed out that incidents of Islamic violence were extremely rare before 1992. This changed when ‘The “saviours of democracy” having rejected the choice of the electorate then banned the party which had had the impudence to win.’62 For the conciliateurs like Burgat, the fundamentalists’ recourse to violence was a legitimate response to the brutal state crackdown. This repression by the state included the security forces firing on unarmed peaceful protesters, thousands of ordinary members and sympathisers being interned in camps in the Sahara in conditions denounced by Amnesty International, the widespread practice of torture (using, for example electricity and chainsaws) and the reign of terror inflicted on the civilian population by anti-terrorist units known as ninjas. Thus Islamic violence was a response to state terror and repression. The state therefore had to bear the prime responsibility for the bloodshed. The third main strand of the conciliateurs’ position concerned the nature of the Islamist movement in Algeria. Whereas the éradicateurs saw Islamic fundamentalism as a single undifferentiated fanatical, archaic, regressive, anti-democratic movement, Burgat distinguished between the intolerant extremist fringe groups like the GIA and the other more moderate strands.63 In Algeria, militant Islam had emerged as the only mass political movement capable of mounting an effective challenge to the corrupt one-party state and as such was the legitimate expression of widespread popular discontent with the military dictatorship.64 Although both éradicateurs like Glucksmann and Lévy and conciliateurs like Burgat would consider themselves progressives, there was an unbridgeable gap between their respective positions. The éradicateurs were driven by a militant republican secularism that meant that while they were willing to criticise the Algerian state/security forces, all was subservient to the crusade against militant Islam. The conciliateurs, on the other hand, were more sympathetic to Islam and thus tended to have a less Gallocentric perspective. They were more sympathetic to notions of cultural diversity and less committed to republican secular values than were the éradicateurs, who equated these values with human rights. The conciliateurs’ insistence that Islamist violence was but a response to savage state repression led them to gloss over the part played by fundamentalists in the bloodshed. This resulted in the conciliateurs being accused, by Alain Finkielkraut for example, of absolving


the fundamentalists for their crimes by blaming the state.65 While the éradicateurs insisted that ‘moderate Islamic fundamentalism’ was an oxymoron and supported their argument by seizing on extremist, antidemocratic statements of the FIS (of which there are many), the conciliateurs pointed to FIS statements which stress the compatibility of Islam with democracy, the need to respect minority opinions etc.66

From Yugoslavia to ex-Yugoslavia The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 marked the beginning of the end in Europe of ‘socialism’ inspired by the Soviet model, and nurtured under the watchful eye (and mass weaponry) of Moscow. Throughout Eastern Europe, and indeed within the Soviet Union itself, the stultifying, bureaucratic and autocratic structures were crumbling under pressure for change and reform from within, and dollars and Western encouragement from without. The repercussions of the upheavals in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (which imploded in 1991) were soon engulfing the Balkans, and from 1991 the world was witnessing not only the disintegration of the USSR but also of another federal ‘socialist’ republic, namely Yugoslavia. The move towards independence of the separate components of the Yugoslavian federation was accelerated in April 1990 by the presidential and legislative elections held in Slovenia, and the elections in Croatia a month later, and by the end of December free elections had been held in all the republics. If the old-style Communists had lost power in Slovenia and Croatia, they managed to retain influence in other republics – either as neo-Communists (as in Montenegro) or by repackaging themselves as ‘socialists’ (as in Serbia). The individual states’ desire for independence, the desire for the creation of new independent political formations and the concomitant emergence of competing parties with different and often incompatible political programmes, were placing the Yugoslav federation under tremendous strain. The institutional framework in place since the end of World War Two now appeared to many in Yugoslavia to be anachronistic and incompatible with individual states’ aspirations to independence. The rumbling crisis was made worse by the fact that since the death of Marshal Tito in May 1980, there had been no figure who could legitimately claim authority as a spokesperson, guide or arbitrator, to act nationally or internationally in the interests of the federation as a whole. The concentration of power in the hands of Serbia’s Slobodan Miloševic´67 contrasted with the process of democratisation that was


taking place in Slovenia as it moved to embrace a liberal democracy, to be followed later and more cautiously by Croatia. In contrast to the ever-increasing demands for independence within Croatia and Slovenia, Miloševic´ insisted on the maintenance of a federal but unitary Yugoslavia with its capital in Belgrade, a view described by Misha Glenny, an expert on the Balkans as ‘driven by a volatile fuel containing high a octane mixture of Serbian nationalism and authoritarianism’.68 (In Croatia and Slovenia Miloševic´’s project for Yugoslavia was dubbed ‘Serboslavia’.) In December 1990, a referendum held in Slovenia revealed an overwhelming majority in favour of Slovenia becoming independent from Yugoslavia, and the declaration of independence was fixed for 26 June 1991. Not to be outdone, or perhaps to slip out of the federation under the cover of Slovenia, Croatia’s parliament, the Sabor, voted for independence just before 6 p.m. on 25 June ignoring the warning from the Speaker to both Croatia and Slovenia that ‘The federal government will counter unilateral secession with all available means.’69 The federal army, the JNA (Jugoslovenska Narodna Armija), acting on orders from Belgrade, became briefly involved in Slovenia but soon withdrew in accordance with the Brioni Agreement brokered by the European Community. According to the same Balkan expert, Belgrade accepted the idea of Slovene independence since ‘with the doggedly intelligent politicians of Slovenia removed, Miloševic´ would find it much easier to apply pressure on Croatia’.70 The spectre of Croatian independence inevitably revived memories of World War Two. Then the fascist Ustaša of the ‘Independent State of Croatia’ had waged a terror campaign committing innumerable atrocities against Serbs – both civilians and members of the Serb-dominated Partisans – which rivalled and sometimes surpassed those carried out by the Nazis. Now that Croatia again appeared to asserting herself, many of the 600 000 Serbians resident in Croatia and throughout the rest of the federal republic became convinced that the creation of an independent Croatia was an integral part of a now-reunited Germany’s ambitious strategy to rule Europe. This fear was compounded by the unilateral recognition on 23 December 1991 of Slovenia and Croatia as independent states by Germany, which was followed on 15 January 1992 by recognition by the European Union. Serbia may, under pressure from the European Union, have agreed to withdraw from Slovenia, but Croatia was another matter altogether. This soon became only too evident as Serb militia in Croatia, supported by the federal army, engaged in violent clashes with Croatian forces.


The siege of Vukovar, followed by the destruction of the town in November 1991, and the shelling of Dubrovnik (October–November) confirmed that once again war was being waged on European soil. As with the Gulf War (1991), French intellectuals were divided as to the precise nature of the conflict between Serbia and Croatia. During the Gulf War there were, besides those who adopted a pacifist position, those who opposed Western involvement, believing the intervention of the American-led multi-national force to be a Western crusade, a post-Cold War neo-imperialist venture aimed purely at defending the oilfields in the Gulf. Others argued that the aggression of Saddam Hussein, described by Bernard-Henri Lévy as a ‘new Hitler’, had to be countered with the somewhat naïve hope that this would be the first step to creating a new world order based on respect for basic human rights. In the case of the war in Yugoslavia, opinion was divided between those who saw the war as a civil war and those who considered it to be a war between the rival independent states of Croatia and Serbia. A minority of French intellectuals considered the conflict to be a civil war. They were committed to the maintenance of Yugoslavia as a single state (albeit a federal one) and, like Mitterrand and the French government, were adamantly opposed to the independence of its component parts. This support for the attempts to maintain, as they saw it, Yugoslavia’s unitary federal structure was informed by traditional Franco-Serb friendship, and the anti-Nazi record of many Serbs during World War Two. It was further underpinned by the view that stability in the Balkans would best be ensured by the continuation of a federal Yugoslavia, albeit one with amended laws governing relations between the component states. The intellectual defenders of this position were also influenced by France’s post-revolutionary tradition of a strong centralised state promoted as the ‘ideal’ political model. A fairly extreme form of this position is to be found in Avec les Serbes71 (With the Serbs) by Patrick Besson, writer and Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, and Jean Dutourd, writer and member of the Académie française, who argued that the Serbs were misunderstood and victims of a campaign of systematic denigration.72 One of the most prominent intellectuals among those who rejected the view that the conflict was a civil war was Alain Finkielkraut, who railed against Serb aggression in Croatia and the indifference of France and Europe to it. Finkielkraut was an outspoken defender of Croatia which, he believed, was suffering not only from the Serbian onslaught but also from the rest of the world’s denial or distortion of the truth of its plight. The essence of Finkielkraut’s passionate defence of Croatia73 – which


earned him the nickname Finkielcroate – was that Croatia was a small, independent state which was the innocent victim of Serb aggression. While Bernard-Henry Lévy, like Finkielkraut, was utterly opposed to Serbian aggression, there were two main reasons why he refused to back Croatia. If, for Finkielkraut, the small state (Croatia) needed to be defended against the aggression of the larger state (Serbia), for Lévy the conflict was between two rival nationalisms. Writing in June 1992, Lévy argued that ‘in Zagreb and Belgrade two national passions are asserting themselves, confronting one another, feeding off one another and in the final analysis resembling one another’.74 In an interview published in the same year, Lévy declared that he was shocked by the discourse of the Croat leadership which, in his view, contained sentiments which were incompatible with a young democratic nation. He was further perturbed by the anti-Semitic attitudes expressed by the Croat leader, Franjo Tud–man.75 In October 1991, a small group of intellectuals including Finkielkraut and the Czech novelist Milan Kundera signed a petition calling for the recognition of Slovene and Croatian independence. According to Finkielkraut, their position remained a minority one since the break-up of the Yugoslav federation was considered to be synonymous with barbarism and any national affirmation was tainted with nationalism.76 On 21 November, two days before the fall of Vukovar, a petition signed by a number of intellectuals including Lévy, Jorge Semprun, Elie Wiesel, Edgar Morin, Mario Vargas Llosa and Jean-Toussaint Desanti was published simultaneously in Le Monde, Vreme (Belgrade) and Danas (Zagreb).77 Headed ‘Yougoslavie: Halte au Massacre’ (‘Yugoslavia: Stop the Massacre’) the text refused to back either the Croats or the Serbs, and refused to side with either nationalism. It did, however, concede that because of the disparity of the forces in play ‘the populations of Croatia were at the mercy of the “federal” army’.78 The text called for the freezing of military operations and for Europe to intervene with all its weight with or without the agreement of the combatants. By the end of 1991 André Glucksmann, Pascal Bruckner, Jean d’Ormesson and Eugène Ionesco had joined Finkielkraut in denouncing Serb aggression against Croatia. However, the majority of French intellectuals were either silent, or like Lévy and those who had signed the November petition, refused to take sides in what was perceived as a tribal war between rival nationalisms. Meanwhile, the official position of the French Socialist government and Mitterrand leaned heavily towards sympathy with Serbia. As Mitterrand asserted in an interview published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 29 November 1991,


‘As you know, Croatia was part of the Nazi bloc whereas Serbia was not.’79 The attitude of the milieu intellectuel was to change dramatically with the Serbian offensive against Bosnia in the spring of 1992. The very existence of Bosnia, a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic society, was under threat from the pro-Belgrade Serbian forces, supported from within Serbia by the militant Serbian nationalist forces under Radovan Karadzaic´. Bosnia’s very cosmopolitan character meant that it was a far less ambiguous rallying-point for the intellectuals than defence of Croatia had been. Bernard-Henri Lévy, who had admitted in June 1992 that three months previously he would have been hard pressed to find Bosnia on a map80, now threw himself into an impassioned defence of the Bosnian cause. This was given a particular focus with the siege of Sarajevo, ‘the great cosmopolitan city of Eastern Europe’.81 The populations of Sarajevo, including the Serbs, were, according to Lévy, resisting the aggression of the Serb army and defending their traditions of tolerance and openness to which the co-existence in Sarajevo of synagogues, mosques and churches bore witness.82 Edgar Morin, while rejecting ‘crude anti-Serbism’, nevertheless saluted ‘the inhabitants of all faiths who were refusing to give in under the bombardments in order to save the irreplaceable character of their city, rich with all the ethnic groups of ex-Yugoslavia’.83 In Bosnia, for Lévy and other proBosnians (unlike the conflict between Croatia and Serbia) there was no equivalence between the two sides. There was the Serbian army which was doing the attacking and the civilian populations who were resisting and defending a model of society which was also a model of a multi-ethnic, multi-faith Europe. The aim of Lévy and others mobilised in defence of Sarajevo and Bosnia was to raise public awareness of what was occurring and what was at stake in the conflict and, importantly, to effect a change in French government policy. In June 1992, during the first of his dozen or so visits to Sarejevo, Lévy met the Bosnian President, Alija Izetbegovic´, who charged Lévy with delivering a message to Mitterrand and to Jacques Delors, President of the European Union, urging them to use their influence to bring about a military strike against the Serbian heavy weaponry which was bombarding the city.84 On 23 June, shortly after his return to Paris, Lévy was received by Mitterrand, who, as he soon realised, knew little of what was happening in Bosnia. Lévy duly delivered Izetbegovic´’s message, which drew parallels between Sarejevo and the Warsaw ghetto during World War Two. Lévy then


attempted to explain that in Sarejevo it was not a war between rival tribes, but a battle of ideas, not a war between nations, but a battle of values with the inhabitants of Sarajevo defending republican values.85 The meeting between Lévy and Mitterrand led to the President’s surprise visit to Sarejevo on 28 June, which in turn led to the re-opening of the city’s airport. But the French government and the European Union were still resisting pressure to intervene militarily in Bosnia or to lift the UN arms embargo. In November 1992 some 60 personalities and 14 deputies signed a call for a demonstration to be held on 22 November. The signatories included Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Alain Finkielkraut, Olivier Mongin (editor of Esprit), Cornelius Castoriadis, Jacques Julliard, author of two books on recent events in Yugoslavia, film director Roman Polanski, André Glucksmann and François Fejtö. They called on the French government and the European Community to ‘use all means available, without ruling out recourse to force if necessary, to end the war, maintain the integrity of internationally recognised states, enforce respect for human rights and thus reduce the risk of an extension of the conflict to Kosovo, Vojvodina, then Macedonia, and possibly the whole of south-east Europe’.86 The position of Lévy and other pro-Bosnian intellectual militants was as follows. The territorial integrity of Bosnia should be maintained, ethnic cleansing should be halted, with those responsible for the policy being brought to trial, the heavy armoury around Sarajevo should be removed and the whole of Bosnia should be a no-fly zone. This was underpinned by a view that Serbia was primarily responsible for the bloodshed in Bosnia. The maintenance of the UN arms embargo in effect meant that not only were the aggressor (Serbia) and the aggressed (Bosnia) being considered as equivalent forces, but also that Bosnia was being deprived of the means to defend herself. Lévy’s position was at odds with that of the French government, which steadfastly refused to lift the embargo, arguing that it would only exacerbate the military conflict. The refusal of the French government to be involved in any military intervention against Serbia was unequivocally put to Lévy by Mitterrand in February 1993: ‘Listen carefully; as long as I’m alive, France will never, repeat never, go to war against Serbia.’87 If Lévy plays such a prominent part in this account of French intellectual involvement in the war(s) in ex-Yugoslavia, it is not simply because he was one of the most passionate defenders of Bosnia. What is interesting is that his mode of intervention drew on the practices of the classic intellectual of the first thirty years or so of the postwar


period, a role that Lévy himself had rejected, and also because it revealed a particular relationship between the intellectual and the political class. In the style of the classic intellectual which many thought dead and buried in the mid-1970s, Lévy tirelessly defended the Bosnian cause through the journal La Règle du jeu which he founded in 1990, through interviews, reportages, public meetings and his film Bosna!88 in an attempt to mobilise public opinion. Second, as we have seen, Lévy found himself in opposition to French government policy, which remained unchanged when in March 1993 the Socialist government was replaced by a right-wing government headed by Edouard Balladur, even though, when in opposition, the Right had favoured military intervention. A third element, reminiscent of the praxis of the classic intellectual, was Lévy’s visits to Bosnia. Here, despite the obvious differences (a victorious revolution and a country under attack) there is a similarity with, for example, Sartre’s visit to Cuba. On their respective returns both intellectuals used the media to publicise what they had seen in order to counter the prevailing views and analyses of the situations they had witnessed. Lévy himself was aware that he was slipping back into the type of intellectual activity he had earlier criticised. For example, as early as June 1992, Lévy had asked himself (without finding an answer) why he was unable to abandon the role of the ‘intellectual prophet’? Why, he asked himself, was he unable to embrace the view of the intellectual he had endorsed five years earlier in Eloge des intellectuels89 (In Praise of Intellectuals) and which he considered as more dignified and more correct, consisting as it did of contributing ‘not shouts, emotion, slogans or anathema, but a little bit of intelligence’.90 As with Algeria (but more acutely with Bosnia) Lévy had discovered that the identification with certain ideals (in Algeria, an uncompromising opposition to Islamic fundamentalism, in Bosnia support for the ideals of a cosmopolitan multi-ethnic tolerance and a refusal of nationalism), when placed in a specific political context inevitably led to the taking of a political position (i.e. reluctant support for the Algerian state, enthusiastic support for Bosnia). Despite the similarities with the praxis of the classic intellectual of the 1950s and 1960s, there remains an important difference between Lévy and his intellectual predecessors, namely his relationship with the French political class. While before the mid-1970s there were isolated examples of intellectuals – Malraux is the prime case – who moved both in intellectual circles and political circles, this was on the basis of


support for a domestic political cause or an individual (Gaullism and de Gaulle in Malraux’s case). For the most part, the world of politics and the milieu intellectuel were largely separate. For the most part they only intersected briefly and on a specific issue of the moment, as, for example, Sartre’s audience with President Auriol about Henri Martin, or Sartre and Aron’s audience with Giscard d’Estaing over the Vietnamese boat people. What is new in Lévy’s case is the ease with which he, an opponent of French government policy, had access to members of the political elite, for example, his meetings with Mitterrand (see above), and with Mitterrand’s arch-rival within the PS, ex-Prime Minister Michel Rocard (May 1994)). But it was not just with Socialist politicians that Lévy had contact. Politicians on the Right with whom Lévy had meetings included Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, who immediately after his appointment in April 1993 asked Lévy to write a paper on Bosnia, François Léotard, Minister of Defence (May 1993), and Alain Juppé, Minister of Foreign Affairs (May 1994). Lévy was also a member of a delegation of ten intellectuals received by President Chirac on 23 June 1995. Furthermore, he maintained contact with the Bosnian government, and in particular with President Izetbegovic´; his position as a link person between Paris and Sarajevo led one newspaper to describe Lévy as the ‘other Minister of Foreign Affairs’.91 Invited to join Izetbegovic´ in Geneva (January 1993), Lévy proposed a visit to Paris a few days later which was then transformed into an official visit. The visit brought Lévy into contact again with Bernard Kouchner, Minister of Health and Humanitarian Action, and a somewhat frosty encounter with the official Minister of Foreign Affairs, Roland Dumas. This was the same Dumas who had been defence lawyer at the trial of the members of the Jeanson resistance network during the Algerian War (see Chapter 4). In January 1993, Lévy also dined in Zagreb with Tud–man, whose militant nationalism confirmed Lévy’s belief that he had been right not to join Finkielkraut in his defence of Croatia. Despite his contact with the French political elite, Lévy was unable to effect any change in French policy on Bosnia. In May 1994, in an attempt to place Bosnia on the European political agenda, Lévy, supported by film-maker Romain Goupil, writer Pascal Bruckner, and philosopher Michel Feher, drew up a ‘Sarajevo List’ of candidates for the forthcoming European elections. The list, headed by Laurent Schwartzenberg, was announced by Lévy on the television programme L’heure de vérité on France 2 on 15 May. The aim of the initiative was


‘to force the political class to react’.92 Opposed by Mitterrand and his entourage but supported by Michel Rocard, the announcement of the list had the effect, in Lévy’s words, of ‘a neutron bomb’.93 But the impact was short-lived since the list was withdrawn and never put to the electorate. Ultimately, it was not France or the EU that initiated the process which ended the conflict in Bosnia but the USA. In November 1995, Miloševic´, Tud–man and Izetbegovic´ met at Dayton (Ohio) and in December a peace agreement was signed in Paris confirming the partition of Bosnia after three and a half years of war which had resulted in an estimated 200 000 deaths and 2.7 million refugees. Europe had singularly failed to meet the challenge posed by events in Bosnia and, as in the Middle East, had seen the USA assume the leading role. Europe’s failure in Bosnia revealed its inability to act coherently in the field of foreign policy, and its aspiration to act independently of the USA was seriously undermined by its inability to intervene effectively in a European war. The final chapter – in the twentieth century at least – of the conflict in the Balkans came in 1999 with the Serb aggression against Kosovo, a province of Serbia which had not been covered by the Dayton Agreement. Amid the cries of protest from Lévy, Finkielkraut and others who had campaigned against Serb aggression in Bosnia came a dissident voice, that of Régis Debray. Debray had published in Le Monde in May 1999 an account of his week-long visit to Serbia and Kosovo which appeared in the form of an open letter to the President of the Republic.94 Debray’s account of what he saw – the effects on the civilian populations of the NATO bombing of Belgrade and Kosovo; his positive assessment that Miloševic´, who, he reminded his readers, had been elected three times and who ‘respected the constitution’; his questioning of Western reporting of the war – resulted in his being dismissed as ‘a cretin’ and ‘an agent of Miloševic´’.95 In Le Monde, the day after Debray’s article was published, Bernard-Henri Lévy accused Debray of being a defender of the Serbian cause. He referred briefly to Debray’s presentation of Miloševic´ as ‘an enlightened despot’ and attacked him for denying that under Miloševic´ there were any political prisoners, and for claiming that open criticism of Miloševic´ was permitted.96 What shocked Lévy most of all, however, was Debray’s staggering naïvety. Debray’s capacity to swallow wholesale Serb propaganda was, according to Lévy, reminiscent of those intellectuals who visited Moscow or Berlin in the 1930s. As far as Lévy was concerned, Debray’s open letter signalled his suicide as a French intellectual.97


Intellectuals and ‘the social movement’ of 1995 The next major example of intellectual action in the 1990s to be considered concerns the attitude of French intellectuals to the massive strikes in France at the end of 1995. In the second round of the presidential elections on 7 May 1995, Jacques Chirac who, in the first round had defeated his right-wing rival Edouard Balladur, won 52.63 per cent of the votes cast while the PS candidate Lionel Jospin secured 47.37 per cent. There were over 20 per cent abstentions. After 14 years under a Socialist president (who was terminally ill with cancer and was to die, aged 79, on 8 January 1996), the Right now occupied the Elysée Palace, dominated the National Assembly (which it had done since the legislative elections of May 1993), and controlled a majority of the regions and departments. On 17 May, Chirac appointed as Prime Minister Alain Juppé, who had held the Foreign Affairs portfolio under the Balladur government since March 1993. Chirac and the government were publicly committed to change and modernisation, driven by innovative social and economic policies which would, according to pre-election promises, meet the contradictory aims of respecting budgetary control, speeding economic recovery, increasing salaries and lowering taxes. By the autumn of 1995, however, unemployment, which had fallen for the past ten months, was rising again and economic growth was slowing down. In September Chirac conceded that all was far from well when he admitted publicly that he had no magic wand to wave which would solve France’s problems: a month later the government introduced a two-year austerity programme. Disillusionment with both Chirac and Juppé was soon evident, causing their popularity ratings to plummet ‘with an unprecedented rapidity, especially for a president of the Republic’.98 (And it was to get worse: a poll in May 1996, for example, found that only 28 per cent of those interviewed believed that the government was enacting the programme on which it had been elected.) It was against a background of grumbling discontent with the Right that, on 15 November, Juppé presented to the National Assembly his plan for the reform of the social security system. The proposals included the creation of a new tax, a reorganisation of medical insurance, and limits on health spending; the plan was, according to the government, vital to its bid to balance the budget and reduce social costs. A prelude to the massive protest movement that was to come was the outbreak of student demonstrations in early November calling for the appointment of more teaching and administrative staff. This was


followed by strikes and stoppages in the public sector, especially the railways and Paris metro, where workers took action to defend their employment rights, which were threatened by Juppé’s proposal to raise the retirement age of railway workers. The announcement of the Juppé plan, despite receiving backing from Nicole Notat, head of the CFDT, the non-Communist trade union federation, had the effect of throwing a can of petrol on a bonfire. By December, France was engulfed in the biggest worker mobilisation the country had experienced since 1968. There were, however, important differences between the social movement (as it became known) of 1995 and the strikes and occupations of a quarter of a century earlier. First, in contrast with 1968, the 1995 strikes were largely restricted to the public sector. Second, in 1968, the movement had been an optimistic one driven by a desire for change, whereas in 1995 workers were mobilised to defend gains (opponents would say privileges) that public sector workers had secured and which were threatened by the Juppé plan. Juppé’s proposals created splits and tensions within the French trade union movement. Notat’s support for the plan was contested by many of the CFDT rank-and-file, and the CFDT leader’s support for the plan contrasted with the opposition to it voiced by the rival federation, the CGT. French intellectuals too were divided. Among those who supported the plan (albeit with reservations about some aspects) stood Olivier Mongin and the team grouped around Esprit. In their view, the movement opposing the Juppé plan was conservative and retrograde, an attempt by sectional interests to defend their privileges and oppose reforms which were fair and inspired by a need to modernise France. Opponents of the plan, the most prominent of whom was Pierre Bourdieu, hailed the worker mobilisation as an exemplary resistance movement against economic liberalism and the unfettered dominance of market forces. The two positions crystallised around two manifestos published in Le Monde in December 1995. The first, published on 3–4 December headed ‘Pour une réforme de fond de la Sécurité Sociale’ (‘For a Comprehensive Reform of Social Security’), was initiated by Mongin and Joël Roman of Esprit. It was prompted by an incident when Nicole Notat had been physically threatened a few days previously, and was designed in part to support her stance. Written before the strikes became widespread, and making no reference to the workers’ movement, it came to be seen by its opponents as a disavowal of the strikes. It was signed by over fifty intellectuals including Alain Finkielkraut, Pascal Bruckner, François Gèze, Jacques Julliard, Claude Lefort, Paul Ricoeur and Alain Touraine.


Although it expressed some reservations about certain aspects of the plan, it supported Juppé for tackling an archaic system, and defended the decision to extend the payment of contributions to all, to control expenditure on health and to modify the management of healthcare through parliamentary control of the Social Security budget. It concluded by criticising the Left’s procrastination on these issues and stated that it endorsed the main thrust of the plan in the name of solidarity and social justice. In an interview published ten days after the appearance of the manifesto,99 Mongin, describing himself as an independent left-wing antitotalitarian intellectual, established his credentials for pronouncing on the Juppé plan. He pointed out that Esprit had, for some years, been addressing issues of social marginalisation, exclusion and individualism, which threatened the republican concept of solidarity, upon which citizenship and civic responsibility depended. The manifesto was thus drawn up ‘on the theme of national solidarity through the issue of Social Security’.100 When Mongin referred to the wave of strikes as ‘a suicidal movement which was being in part manipulated’,101 he was referring implicitly to those intellectuals, and particularly to Pierre Bourdieu, who had been vocal defending the strikers and opposing Juppé’s proposals. The rival manifesto in favour of the strikers was published in Le Monde on 15 December under the heading ‘Appel des intellectuels en soutien aux grévistes’ (‘Appeal by Intellectuals in Support of the Strikers’). It uncompromisingly backed the workers engaged in struggle against the ‘offensive unleashed by the government’, and denied that the workers were defending sectional interests or privileges and saw them as defending ‘the most universal gains of the republic’. The workers were ‘fighting for equal rights for all, male and female, young and old, the unemployed and wage earners in the private sector, immigrants and French people’ and, linking the struggle of the workers to that of the students, the signatories praised the latter for their defence of state education. The student and workers’ struggles were seen as paving the way towards a more democratic, more equal society which would contribute to building a social, ecological Europe built on citizenship, rather than the model driven by economic liberalism which, it asserted, was currently being imposed. The manifesto, initially prepared by a small group of relatively unknown far-Left university activists and researchers from the CNRS and amended after discussion by Bourdieu, was signed by hundreds of intellectuals including economists Samir Amin and Etienne Balibar,


veteran Trotskyist activists Daniel Bensaïd and Alain Krivine, left-wing crime writer Didier Daeninckx, ex-gauchiste Roland Castro, Régis Debray, Jacques Derrida, Laurent Schwartzenberg, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Pierre Bourdieu. The language adopted by the opponents of the Juppé plan was more flamboyant, more ‘political’ and less ‘technical’ than that employed by the defenders. One opponent of the plan, Nicole Linhart, a sociologist of the world of work and signatory, like her husband Robert Linhart,102 of the second manifesto, drew parallels between the situation prevailing in France and World War Two. ‘It is not perhaps as serious as the war’, she wrote ‘but it is serious. We have had enough of being invaded. Not by occupying forces, but by an idea [economic liberalism].’103 On 12 December 1995, Pierre Bourdieu, in a move reminiscent of Sartre’s speech to Renault workers in 1970, told railway workers at the Gare de Lyon in Paris: ‘I am here to express our support for all those who for the past three weeks have been fighting against the destruction of a civilisation.’104 The social protest movement ended in December with a ‘social summit’ meeting which saw the railway workers and Paris metro workers conserving their rights and the bulk of the Juppé plan (social spending controlled by Parliament, a new tax and provision for the resolution of the deficit in social spending) intact. However, the divisions among intellectuals which 1995 had opened up continued, focusing on the now controversial figure of Bourdieu (see below).

Les ‘sans-papiers’ In the 1990s, immigration continued to be a contentious issue, perhaps the most contentious issue in French politics, as the mainstream Right ‘got tough’ in an attempt to woo voters who were supporting the Front National. In March 1995, some 300 illegal immigrants (‘les sans papiers’) demanding that their situation be regularised were expelled from the St Ambroise church in Paris and subsequently sought refuge in the St Bernard church. But on 23 August 1996, in a well-publicised show of force, they were evicted by some 1500 police officers, including riot police. The expulsions occurred against the backdrop of a new law on immigration proposed by the Minister of the Interior, JeanLouis Debré, and passed by the National Assembly in December 1996. One of the most contentious clauses was Article 1, which declared that anyone who had registered that a foreign national was staying with them would have to inform the authorities when that person


departed. On 4 February, the guilty verdict brought against a woman who had given accommodation to a Zaireau without papers provoked a manifesto published in Libération on 12 February. It was signed by some 60 film-makers who stated publicly that they too had housed foreign nationals without the requisite papers and they too demanded to be charged. Furthermore the manifesto called on ‘our fellow citizens to disobey and not to submit to these inhuman laws’. In what JeanFrançois Sirinelli has called ‘a real phenomenon of contagion’,105 this manifesto was followed by another 63 lists of signatures opposing the Debré law which were published in Libération between 13 February and 21 February. Day after day, the names of tens of thousands of people, the well-known – Bernard-Henri Lévy, André Glucksmann, actors Catherine Deneuve, Daniel Auteil, photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson – the less well-known, and the virtually unknown, were published. Grouped for the most part in lists according to profession, writers, actors, dancers and choreographers, translators, researchers, teachers, psychoanalysts and doctors joined the protest against the Debré law and expressed their solidarity with those who had given accommodation to the ‘sans papiers’. Although Chirac had hailed the law as ‘reasonable and necessary’, others saw it as echoing legislation passed by the Vichy regime during the Occupation. A manifesto signed by 121 people whose names, according to the manifesto’s title were ‘difficult to pronounce’ (i.e. they had ‘foreign’ names), drew a parallel between the Debré law and the law passed under Vichy in December 1941, requiring anyone housing Jews, even if without charge, to report this to the police within 24 hours of the arrival of their lodger. The manifesto called on those attending a demonstration at the Gare de l’Est, in Paris, scheduled for 22 February, to bring suitcases as a reminder of those Jews, gypsies, foreigners, homosexuals and other ‘undesirables’ who, at the same railway station during the Occupation, had been herded on to the trains and dispatched to the Nazi camps; the Socialist politician Henri Emmanuelli declared that if the majority voted for the wearing of the yellow star, he would refuse. To many observers the continued success of the Front National posed a very real danger that France was sliding towards fascism. This was fuelled by the perception that the government seemed to be drawing close to elements of the FN political agenda (on immigration for example), while at the local and regional level, elements of the mainstream Right were working with the FN. The publication of the 12 February film makers’ manifesto coincided with the mobilisation of over 200 dancers, musicians, film-makers and


actors who left Paris in ‘the train of freedom’ for Toulon, where the Front National mayor had ordered the closure of the Théâtre National de la danse et de l’image (National Theatre of Dance and Image) at Châteauvallon and the sacking of the theatre’s director, Gérard Paquet. Greeted by over 2000 people, the protesters confirmed that they were there ‘to save freedom of expression and creation’.

Bourdieu, the new Sartre? On 21 April 1997, in what turned out to be a huge miscalculation, Chirac announced the dissolution of the National Assembly, and fresh elections were scheduled for 25 May and 1 June. Despite the side-lining of the unpopular Alain Juppé and the appointment of Philippe Séguin to run the electoral campaign, the Left won, although the PS with 259 seats was 30 seats short of an absolute majority. The PS leader, Lionel Jospin, was appointed Prime Minister and France entered its third cohabitation, this time with a right-wing president and a left prime minister and government. The choice of ministers – an ecologist (Dominique Voynet), Communists, left-wing radicals and Socialists – meant that France now had what became known as a ‘plural left’ (‘une gauche plurielle’) government. Although Bourdieu’s support for the ‘social movement’ had not been his first appearance in the political arena,106 it had been his support for the strikers which had projected him centre-stage. After his political activity at the end of 1995, he publicly supported the movement of the unemployed and was one of the initiators of an ‘estates general of the social movement’ which met in November 1996. Almost a year after the elections Bourdieu, frustrated with the timidity of the new government, called for the creation of a new radical Left.107 Still driven by his uncompromising opposition to neo-liberal economic policies which he accused the French government of adopting, he also attacked the government for its ‘piecemeal policies which failed to make any significant change in the daily life of the vast majority of the population’.108 Bourdieu’s emergence as a rallying point for a new, radical left-wing force led one weekly to describe him as ‘the most influential intellectual in France’.109 While Bourdieu’s support for the oppressed, his opposition to what he saw as the construction of a Europe driven by economic liberalism, and his endorsement of a new internationalism made him a hero for some, an intellectual who had taken on the mantle of Sartre in his fight for the dispossessed, for others he was misguided and/or dangerous. Jeannine Verdès-Leroux, author of studies of Communist intellectuals and intellectuals of the extreme Right between the wars,110 dismissed


him as ‘an intellectual Leninist terrorist’, guilty of self-promotion and ‘making do with a radical irresponsible militant discourse’.111 Alain Finkielkraut accused Bourdieu and his followers of engaging in a discourse of hatred, seeing those who disagreed with them not as legitimate opponents but as enemies to be eliminated. Those who disagreed with Bourdieu, Finkielkraut claimed, were lumped together and accused of keeping humanity subjugated by the forces of neo-liberalism with all social problems reduced to machinations by the powerful to ensure that the dispossessed remained powerless.112 In an article in Esprit in July 1988, Bourdieu and his disciples were accused of distortion and intellectual dishonesty and of indulging in a form of ‘leftwing, or rather extreme left-wing, populism which was as harmful as its right-wing counterpart’.113 Bourdieu’s passionate endorsement of the strikers in 1995, and more generally of the oppressed and marginalised members of French society, marked the return on the domestic scene of the ‘committed intellectual’, which many thought had been relegated to history with the radical shift in the perception of the role of the intellectual which had occurred in the mid-1970s. Bourdieu’s rejection of the intellectual who offered a calm lucid analysis of a specific issue, or the intellectual who intervened in a particular issue (often in the name of human rights or republican values – frequently taken to be the same thing), inevitably gave rise to favourable and unfavourable comparisons with Sartre both in his gauchiste and pre-gauchiste phase. Besides extensive media coverage, Bourdieu’s views and those of his supporters were popularised through bestselling cheap pocket-sized books produced by Liber-Raisons d’agir (Liber-Reasons to Act) a publishing house established by Bourdieu.114 In one of these, Le ‘décembre’ des intellectuels français (Le ‘December’ of the French Intellectuals), Bourdieu is hailed as continuing the tradition of the committed intellectual established by Sartre and Foucault.115 Critic Marc Lazar on the other hand implicitly drew an unfavourable parallel with Sartre. In Lazar’s view, Bourdieu’s stance was evidence that he and his supporters were still in the thrall of totalitarianism and ‘dreamed of a perfect, united and coherent society’116 (as had Sartre). He also suggested that Bourdieu’s view that France was experiencing the ‘slide towards fascism of a part of the political class and a section of French society’ echoed the analysis of the French Maoists who had argued in 1971, in an issue of Sartre’s Les Temps modernes,117 that it was necessary to organise a new resistance to counter creeping fascism in France.118


There is some basis for comparing Sartre and Bourdieu. The political commitment of both intellectuals of international renown is located within a perspective of building a better world – rather than attempting to reform aspects of the existing one. Furthermore, Sartre was, as Bourdieu now is, committed to supporting the struggles of those he considered to be oppressed by the prevailing socio-economic system. However, there are also crucial differences. Sartre’s prestige, as leading Sartrean Michel Contat has indicated, was based on his work as a philosopher and a writer which was by definition subjective. On the other hand, according to Contat, Bourdieu’s authority was based on the so-called critical objective authority of science, namely sociology, of which he (Bourdieu) claimed to be the sole authentic representative,119 and indeed Bourdieu described himself as a ‘scientific militant’.120 Bourdieu considers his political stance to be inseparable from his work as a sociologist, but one that Marx would recognise in that he is not willing simply to analyse the world, he wants to change it. Second, Sartre constantly railed against ‘bourgeois society’ and the economic systems which supported it – namely capitalism, colonialism and imperialism. For the postwar Sartre, it was the working class in France and the anti-colonialists and anti-imperialists of the developing world who, he hoped, would spearhead the building of a new order. Bourdieu, on the other hand, envisages the creation of an alliance of the social movements of the dispossessed, the marginalised and the oppressed which, while including the working class, does not confer upon it the privileged status that Sartre accorded it. Furthermore, Bourdieu directs his attacks against a particular form of capitalism – the ravages of neo-liberalism – which has only come to occupy a predominant place on the socio-politico-economic agenda since Sartre’s day. Third, while Sartre’s political commitment did extend beyond metropolitan France, most famously over Algeria, he did not, except during his brief involvement with the RDR, envisage the building of an international movement.121 Bourdieu, on the other hand, insists on the international (and especially European) dimension of his political commitment. For example, in ‘Pour une gauche de gauche’ he wrote of the need to form links between the different social protest movements in Europe to create a practical opposition to the so-called inevitability of ‘economic laws’ and humanise social existence. ‘The perspective of the social movement is an international one, of resistance to neoliberalism and all forms of conservatism.’122


Bourdieu believes passionately that intellectuals should remain autonomous from all other powers, and although he recognises that intellectuals are not spokesmen of the universal, even less of a universal class, he nevertheless believes that they have an interest in the universal. Intellectuals should, according to Bourdieu, not only establish their own autonomy but also reinforce the positions of the most autonomous producers in each professional field. They should resist the temptation to stay within their ivory towers and should fend off attempts by the state and the world of finance to undermine their autonomy. Revealing again his commitment to the international dimension of intellectual commitment, Bourdieu has advocated the creation of an ‘International of Intellectuals’, a worldwide grouping of intellectuals which would combine the talents of specific intellectuals.123 This perspective was echoed in a television interview with Laure Adler on France 2 on 28 April 1998 when Bourdieu spoke of ‘putting the work of sociologists, psychologists and historians at the disposal of the social movement’ and referred to the role of the review Liber in ‘constructing an International of Intellectuals, an international intellectual’.124 Bourdieu’s conception of the intellectual, then, has something in common with the role of the intellectual as enacted by both Foucault and Sartre, but with a more explicit European/international dimension. Bourdieu in effect collectivises Foucault’s ‘specific intellectual’ by urging him/her to place his/her expertise at the disposal of the ‘social movement’ as a whole rather than at the disposal of specific (but interrelated) struggles as Foucault had advocated. From the pre-1969 Sartre, Bourdieu takes the aspiration to build a better world and combines it with the strident rhetoric in which Sartre indulged during his Maoist period. By the end of the century it looked in some respects as if the postwar history of the intellectuals had turned full circle. The relationship between the intellectual and ‘the masses’ was back on the agenda, even if by the end of the millennium to pose the question of the intellectual’s relationship with the PCF (now a shadow of its former self) appeared anachronistic. French intellectuals were still arguing about what should be the role and responsibility of the intellectual, even if, by the end of the millennium, it was being argued that the very term had become unusable because it was claimed by anybody who wanted to have their say in the media, which increasingly was setting the agenda.125 And, of course, as the controversies around Bourdieu amply illustrate, intellectuals were still involved in polemics amongst themselves in the media – now importantly including TV – about the correctness or incorrectness of their political positions.

Conclusion

What then can be said about the power and influence of the intellectual in the period we have considered? Unlike the elected politician or political party, the intellectual has no popular mandate. He or she is not in a position to effect change through the enactment of law or decisions in the field of foreign policy. The best the intellectual can hope for is to lend his/her prestige to a cause in the hope that s/he can influence the policies of elected decision-makers. In contrast with the Dreyfus Affair where it is most likely that without the intervention of Zola and other intellectuals, Dreyfus would have spent the rest of his days languishing in obscurity on Devil’s Island, the postwar period reveals the relative lack of success of intellectuals to effect the changes for which they fought. Would the postwar history of France have been very different if individual French intellectuals had not existed? Probably not. The intellectuals of the PCF did not see the emergence of a movement led by the working class which overthrew the old order and built the ‘new Jerusalem’. The revolutionary aspirations of May 1968 embraced by Foucault and Sartre did not result in the creation of a popular, radical socialist democracy. Neither was French anti-Stalinism instrumental in the implosion of the USSR; it was, at very best, marginal in the decline of the PCF. Sartre and other anti-colonialists were unable to affect French policy over Algeria, just as Bernard-Henri Lévy and others failed to persuade the French government to intervene militarily against Serbian forces in the Balkans. And what of the impact of intellectuals on public opinion? If the survey published in L’Express (see p. 146) is to be believed, it has been marginal. All the efforts of Sartre and others during the Algerian war failed to break down the apathy of the vast majority of the French population on this issue, just as the equally 205


passionate commitment of Lévy and others failed to mobilise public opinion over Yugoslavia. And despite the efforts of Malraux and Soustelle immediately after de Gaulle’s resignation in 1946, no mass movement materialised to sweep the General back to power. When mass protest movements did occur they were either driven by a political party (e.g. the Communist-inspired peace movement) or were largely spontaneous (e.g. the student/worker movement of May 1968 and the ‘social movement’ of 1995). The intellectual was left to adopt a position of support (e.g. Sartre in May 1968 or Bourdieu in 1995) or condemnation (e.g. Aron in 1968, Mongin and Esprit in 1995). Does this mean then that the intellectual is irrelevant? That the intellectual is all froth and no substance? Not so. Over the period we have considered, we have seen how the intellectual (depending on his/her perception of the role) has, on the basis of prestige or expertise, gained access to the printed and audiovisual media. This access has been used to set new agendas, raise difficult questions, clarify issues, support or contest the ideologies and praxis of national and international political parties, political leaders and governments, and lend his/her weight to, or indeed oppose social and political movements. The absence of an equivalent visible social formation in the USA and the UK is striking. In the US presidential election of 2000, the two leading contenders for the leadership of the most powerful nation in the world were engaged in a multi-million dollar political contest which consciously evades discussion of global warming, third-world debt, poverty, and other vital issues,1 as did the mass media. On this side of the pond, Prime Minister Tony Blair stands accused of being a ‘control freak’ and curtailing discussion within the Labour Party (and even within government), as his minions scurry from focus group to focus group in a desperate search for ‘the third way’. At the same time the opposition Conservative Party spent much of the past year trying to cash in on campaigns against so-called ‘bogus asylum seekers’, alleged paedophiles and the jailing of a farmer who fatally shot a burglar in the back. In both the USA and the UK, then, there is a crying need for people with a socially and culturally recognised legitimacy, as with intellectuals in France, to have ready access to the media in order to express their thoughts, analyses, and views about current events, even when – some would say especially when – these break with a prevailing consensus.2 This is not to argue that there are no intellectuals in the UK or in the USA. It is to argue that because of historical, cultural and political

Conclusion 207

differences, the intellectual in the UK and USA occupies a very different social position from his/her counterpart in France. In the USA for example, one thinks of the theoretical linguist Noam Chomsky and writer Gore Vidal, who find themselves marginalised to the point of near-invisibility, rarely able to express their anti-establishment views in a mass media dominated by dross and sound-bites. In Britain, the term ‘intellectual’ is not a popular one – even among intellectuals themselves. As one writer has noted in his study of the English, ‘[I]f you are going to be an intellectual in England, you had better do it discreetly, and certainly not call yourself an intellectual. It does not do to grow passionate about your beliefs or to believe that every problem has a solution.’3 The cultural preference on this side of the Channel for ‘men of action’ over ‘men of ideas’ has contributed to the reluctance to take men and women of letters seriously when they take a public position on a political issue. This suspicion of intellectuals is related to a suspicion of ‘intelligence’ which is largely absent from French culture. If you doubt this, try explaining to a French person the phrase ‘Too clever by half’. A suspicion of culture, of the arts and of intelligence is accompanied, especially in the popular press, by doubts about the usefulness of artists. Such doubts turn to fury when the artist steps outside his/her area of expertise and offers a political view, especially when it is one which goes against the prevailing consensus. For example, the playwright Harold Pinter, who has spoken out on a number of political issues (including the Gulf War and the Falklands/Malvinas War), has found himself being dismissed in the press as mad or bad (or both). A similar process could be observed in the late 1950s/early 1960s concerning Britain’s most important postwar intellectual (in the sense we have been using it in this book), the philosopher Bertrand Russell. Russell’s involvement in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and in anti-Vietnam War protests was proof for the popular press, that even if you were ‘clever’, you could lack that very British quality, ‘common sense’. You were therefore misguided and probably a threat. More generally, and not just in the popular press, we find only too often in the UK, members of what might otherwise be known as the intelligentsia, contemptuously dismissed as members of ‘the chattering classes’.4 In addition, whereas in France robust exchanges on political subjects in the press, on TV or between private individuals are common, this is less true in Britain. In Britain there seems to be a reluctance to accept the view that a healthy democracy is dependent on public, open, informed debate at all levels on political (and other)


issues. Too often political differences between individuals are reduced to ‘personality clashes’, while the expression of differences over policy within a political party is all too frequently described as ‘civil war’. All this is in stark contrast with France, where there is a traditional widespread recognition of the importance of public debate and a respect for culture and the arts.5 It is no coincidence that presidents de Gaulle, Pompidou, Giscard d’Estaing, Mitterrand and Chirac all consider(ed) themselves, and importantly, wish(ed) to be considered as men of culture. In Britain, although Churchill won respect for his history of World War Two and his history of the English-speaking peoples, exConservative Prime Minister Edward Heath’s proficiency as a classical music conductor, together with his love of organ playing resulted in his being the butt of innumerable unkind remarks and being perceived, especially in the popular press, as a bit of a joke. The only other leading politician in recent years who approaches the model of intellectual/politician is Michael Foot, erudite orator, brilliant journalist, and author of a series of critical studies of Byron, Wells and Swift and a penetrating biography of Nye Bevan. When Foot was leader of the Labour Party, the popular press constructed an image of him as a dishevelled Hampstead intellectual. While this is accurate, as far as it goes (he is dishevelled, he is an educated, cultured man living in Hampstead), this image was then used to promote a picture of Foot as ‘a man of ideas’ (i.e. unpractical, cut off from the real world) who was therefore eminently unsuitable to lead the Labour Party. In France, the intellectuals have contributed to raising and agitating on political issues that the government would have liked to have kept quiet. They have acted as a kind of extra-parliamentary, extra-governmental watchdog and have ensured that, by keeping political debate alive, discussion of political issues is not monopolised by the politicians and the professional political journalists of the mass media. Of course, they have often being wrong. But some would argue that the only way never to be wrong is never to take a stand on anything, which is the biggest mistake of all. Since the Liberation in France, all the announcements in the media of ‘the death of the intellectual’ have thus far proven to be premature. There has been and is likely to be for the foreseeable future a cultural acceptance that the ‘intellectual’ (however s/he is defined) has a legitimate right – some would say duty – to write about, talk about and take a stance on, the political issues of the day.

Notes All translations are author’s unless otherwise indicated. Details of English translations of texts where known are included in the notes.

Introduction 1. P. Ory and J.-F. Sirinelli, Les Intellectuels en France de l’Affaire Dreyfus à nos jours (Intellectuals in France from the Dreyfus Affair to the Present Day), Armand Colin, 1986, 2nd edition 1992. 2. For example, a book that predates Ory and Sirinelli by some 20 years, D. Caute, Communism and the French Intellectuals, André Deutsch, 1964. And more recently, S. Hazareesingh, Intellectuals and the French Communist Party, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991. 3. For example Martyn Cornick, ‘Intellectuals in French Culture’, in W. Kidd and S. Reynolds, Contemporary French Cultural Studies, Arnold, 2000, pp. 270–86; H. Lottman, The Left Bank: Writers, Artists and Politics from the Popular Front to the Cold War, Heinemann, 1982; T. Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals 1944–1956, University of California Press, 1992. 4. J. Jennings (ed.), Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century France: Mandarins and Samurais, Macmillan Press – now Palgrave, 1993. 5. For example, A. Cohen-Solal, Sartre, Heinemann, 1987 (an edited English translation of Sartre 1905–1980, Gallimard, 1985); H. Lottman, Camus, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979; O. Todd, Camus: a Life, Chatto and Windus, 1997 (an edited English translation by B. Ivry of Camus – une vie, Gallimard, 1996); R. Colquhoun, Raymond Aron (two volumes), Sage Publications, 1986; D. Eribon, Michel Foucault, Harvard University Press, 1991 (English translation by B. Wing of Michel Foucault, Flammarion, 1989); C. Cate, André Malraux, Hutchinson, 1995; M. Scott, Mauriac: the Politics of a Novelist, Scottish Academic Press, 1980. 6. A companion volume is in preparation which will offer an overview of French intellectuals from the Dreyfus Affair up to and including the Occupation. 7. L. Kolakowski, Marxism and Beyond, Paladin, 1971, p. 177. 8. As is noted below, from the mid-1970s there was a radical re-evaluation in France of the role and definition of the intellectual. This is analysed in more detail in Chapter 5. 9. J.-P. Sartre, ‘Plaidoyer pour les intellectuels’ (‘A Plea for Intellectuals’), Situations VIII, Gallimard, 1972, p. 378. (Italics in the original). English translation by J. Matthews in J.-P. Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism, NLB, 1974, pp. 228–285. 10. For example, Raymond Aron could no more claim to be an expert on Algeria than Sartre could on Indochina. 11. Sartre, ‘Plaidoyer pour les intellectuels’, op. cit., p. 377.

209

210 Notes 12. J. Julliard and M. Winock, Dictionnaire des intellectuels français (Dictionary of French Intellectuals), Éditions du Seuil, 1996. 13. M. Winock, Le Siècle de intellectuels (The Century of the Intellectuals), Éditions du Seuil, 1997, p. 400. 14. B. Denis, Littérature et engagement (Literature and Commitment), Éditions du Seuil, 2000, p. 259. 15. J.-F. Sirinelli, Deux intellectuels dans le siècle, Sartre et Aron (Two Intellectuals in the Century: Sartre and Aron), Fayard, 1995, p. 213. 16. A. Cohen-Solal, Sartre, Gallimard, 1985, p. 341. 17. J. Cocteau, writing in July 1951 quoted in Sirinelli, Deux intellectuels dans le siècle, Sartre et Aron, op. cit., p. 224. 18. For an analysis of the literature of the Right in post-Liberation France see N. Hewitt, Literature and the Right in Post-War France: the Story of the Hussards, Berg, 1996. 19. For this aspect of intellectual life, see R. Rieffel, La Tribu des clercs (The Tribe of the Intellectuals), Calmann-Lévy, 1993, esp. pp. 225–407. 20. Cornick, op. cit. 21. M. Winock, op. cit.; Julliard and Winock, op cit.; Ory and Sirinelli, op. cit.; Rieffel, op. cit. 22. Readers interested in this dimension are referred to the range of books in English translation by, or devoted to, individual French thinkers – Sartre, Althusser, Lacan, Deleuze, Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, Derrida etc. – and to Keith Reader’s excellent survey of left intellectual thought post-1968 (Keith A. Reader, Intellectuals and the Left since 1968, St Martin’s Press, 1987). Two earlier useful books on left theories and theorists are A. Hirsh, The French Left, Black Rose Books, Montréal, 1982 and M. Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France, Princeton University Press, 1975. 23. For a cultural history of twentieth century France, see, for example J.-P. Rioux and J.-F. Sirinelli, Histoire culturelle de la France, Vol 4: Le Temps des masses – Le Vingtième siècle (A Cultural History of France, Vol 4: The Age of the Masses – The Twentieth Century), Éditions du Seuil, 1998; P. Goetschel and E. Loyer, Histoire culturelle et intellectuelle de la France au XXe siècle (A Cultural and Intellectual History of Twentieth Century France), Armand Colin, 1994. 24. For example, the important politico-cultural movement of gays and lesbians that grew after 1968 is not discussed here, since the involvement of intellectuals, as defined for the purpose of this study, was only tangential. For a comprehensive account of this movement, see F. Martel, Le Rose et le noir (The Pink and the Black), Éditions du Seuil, 1996.

1. Liberation, Épuration, Existentialism and Marxism 1. S. de Beauvoir, La Force des choses, Gallimard, 1963, p. 13. English translation by Richard Howard, Force of Circumstance, first published by André Deutsch and Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1965. Henceforth de Beauvoir will be referred to as Beauvoir. 2. F. Mauriac, Mémoires politiques (Political Memoirs), Bernard Grasset, 1967, p. 148. 3. A. Camus, Combat, 25 August 1944 in A. Camus, Essais, Gallimard, (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), 1965, p. 257.

Notes 211 4. Beauvoir, op. cit., p. 14. 5. SHAEF Mission, France ‘FFI/FTP political aspects, Tab 11’, 27 November 1994, PRO, WO 219,214. (Thanks to Hilary Footitt for this reference.) 6. E. Mounier, Mounier et sa génération (Mounier and his Generation), quoted in M. Winock, ‘Esprit’: Des intellectuels dans la cité 1930–1950, Éditions du Seuil, 1996, p. 253. 7. The PCF’s organisational commitment to anti-Nazi resistance was triggered by the German invasion of the USSR in the summer of 1941. 8. M. Thorez, quoted in J. Fauvet, Histoire du Parti Communiste Français (History of the French Communist Party), Fayard 1977, p. 347. 9. A. Camus, Combat, 1 October 1944, reproduced in Camus, Essais, op. cit., p. 1528. 10. Beauvoir, op. cit., p. 19. 11. J. Forbes and M. Kelly (eds), French Cultural Studies: an Introduction, Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 99–100. 12. P. Novick, The Resistance versus Vichy, Columbia University Press, 1968, pp. 218–19. 13. It has been argued that, given the official figure of 29 660 French people shot dead by the Germans, the figure of 75 000 is a grotesque exaggeration. However 75 000, while still an exaggeration, becomes a more realistic figure placed in the fuller formulation of ‘75 000 Communists who died for France and freedom’ as put to de Gaulle by the PCF leader Maurice Thorez in 1945. This broader formulation would include those Communists who were killed in action, shot, tortured to death, or died in the camps or prisons. 14. A. Philip in Le Populaire, 2 September 1946, quoted in F. Giles, The Locust Years: the Story of the Fourth French Republic 1946–1958, Secker and Warburg, 1991, p. 11. 15. For more on the role of the CNE, see G. Sapiro, La Guerre des Écrivains (The Writers’ War), Fayard, 1999, esp. pp. 467–701. 16. ‘Manifeste des Écrivains Français’ (‘Manifesto of French Writers’), Les Lettres françaises, No. 20, 9 September 1944, p. 1. 17. Les Lettres françaises, No. 20, 9 September 1944, p. 2 quoted in A. Chebel d’Appollonia, Histoire politique des intellectuels en France: 1944–1954, Vol 1 (A Political History of Intellectuals in France: 1944–1954, Vol 1) Éditions Complexe, 1991, pp. 70–1. 18. Ibid., p. 71. 19. Vercors, ‘Le Pardon’ (‘The Pardon’), Les Lettres françaises, 11 November 1944, p. 1. 20. B. Severine, ‘Morts pour rien’ (‘They Died for Nothing’), Les Lettres françaises, No. 34, 16 December 1944, p. 1, quoted in Chebel d’Appollonia, op. cit., p. 73. 21. F. Mauriac, ‘Justice’, Le Figaro, 12 December 1944, p. 1. 22. M. Cornick, ‘Reconciling France: Jean Paulhan and the Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue française’, forthcoming. Two examples of the aspirations of the PCF to impose their hegemony in the cultural sphere concern the publication in France of George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. On 9 April 1946 Orwell wrote that although his satire on the Russian Revolution was being translated into nine languages he was finding it very difficult to find a publisher in France. One publisher signed a contract and then said it

212 Notes

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

was impossible to proceed ‘for political reasons’. Orwell eventually found Odile Pathé, a small publisher in Monte Carlo who, according to Orwell ‘seems to have courage, which is not common in France these last few years’. He continued ‘I have no doubt what Camus said was quite true. I am told French publishers are now “commanded” by Aragon and others not to publish undesirable books.’ (See G. Orwell, ‘Letter to Philip Rahv’, 9 April 1946 in S. Orwell and I. Angus (eds), The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 4: In Front of Your Nose, 1945–1950, Penguin Books, 1980, p. 171.) Calmann-Lévy, Koestler’s publisher, was visited by a delegation of leading members of the PCF, led by the Party’s second-in-command, Jacques Duclos which ‘advised’ him not to publish Darkness at Noon. The translator of Koestler’s novel which was based on the 1930s Moscow show trials had used a pseudonym and even then requested that the nom de plume be removed from the second edition. Both cases are cited in C. and J. Broyelle, Les Illusions retrouvées (Rediscovered Illusions), Grasset, 1982, pp. 68–9. A. Camus, Combat, 25 October 1944, p. 2. A. Camus, ‘Justice et Charité’ (‘Justice and Charity’), Combat, 11 January 1945, reproduced in Camus, Essais, op. cit., p. 285. F. Mauriac, ‘Le Mépris de la charité’ (‘Contempt for Charity’), Le Figaro, 7/8 January 1945, p. 1. Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of the Interior, and Minister of Foreign Affairs under Vichy. He was assassinated on 24 December 1942. Je Suis Partout, 2 April 1943 and 21 May 1943, quoted in M. Laval, Brasillach ou la trahison du clerc (Brasillach or the Treachery of an Intellectual), Hachette, 1992, p. 108. Ibid., pp. 240–1. Ibid., p. 251. C. Morgan, Les Lettres françaises, No. 40, 27 January 1945, quoted in P. Assouline, L’Epuration des intellectuels (The Purging of the Intellectuals), Éditions Complexe, 1990, p. 60. Beauvoir, La Force des choses, p. 32. The Mur de l’Atlantique (The Atlantic Wall) was a line of fortification running from Brittany to the Bay of Biscay built between 1941 and 1944 by French companies under German supervision. J. Paulhan, De la paille et du grain (Straw and Grain), Gallimard, 1948, p. 98, quoted in Assouline, op. cit., p. 123. Vercors, ‘La responsabilité de l’écrivain’ (‘The Responsibility of the Writer’), Carrefour, 10 February 1945, p. 1. Ibid. E. Henriot, ‘La responsabilité de l’écrivain’, Carrefour, No. 29, 10 March 1945, p. 5. G. Marcel, ‘La responsabilité de l’écrivain’, Carrefour, No. 26, 17 February 1945, p. 1. J.-P. Sartre, ‘La République du silence’ (‘The Silent Republic’), Les Lettres françaises, No. 20, 9 September 1944, reproduced in J.-P. Sartre, Situations III, Gallimard, 1976, pp. 11–14. E. Mounier, ‘La responsabilité de l’écrivain’, Carrefour, No. 28, 3 March 1945, p. 5.

Notes 213 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48.

49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56.

Beauvoir, op. cit., p. 33. Ibid. E. Henriot, op. cit. C. Morgan, ‘Confusion impossible’ (‘No Possible Confusion’), Les Lettres françaises, 24 February 1945, p. 1. Drieu La Rochelle, ‘La Fin des haricots’ (‘Out of Beans’), Nouvelle Revue française, No. 346, December 1942, quoted in Assouline, op. cit., p. 82. According to Henry Rousso, a French historian specialising in the Occupation, 311 000 cases involving 350 000 individuals were considered for criminal proceedings. 180 000 cases were not taken further. Of the remaining 130 000 cases, approximately three-quarters resulted in convictions. About 1500 people were legally executed in addition to between 8000 and 9000 people who were ‘unofficially’ executed. 20–30 per cent of the executions took place before 6 June 1944, 50–60 per cent between 6 June 1944 and the liberation of the département, and 15–25 per cent after the liberation of the département. Source: ‘La Verité sur l’épuration’ (‘The Truth about the Purges’), Le Nouvel Observatueur, 3–9 August 1995, p. 8. See also O. Wieviorka, ‘Les Mécanismes de l’épuration’ (‘The Mechanisms of the Purges’), L’Histoire, 179, 1994. H. Rousso, ‘L’Épuration en France: une histoire inachevée’ (‘The Purges in France: a Never-Ending Saga’), Vingtième Siècle, January–March 1992: both sources cited by M. Cornick, ‘Liberation and Épuration’, in A. Hughes and K. Reader, Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture, Routledge, 1998, pp. 337–8. P. Larkin, France since the Popular Front, Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 125. P. Assouline, op. cit., pp. 140–1. R. Aron, L’Opium des intellectuels, Calman Lévy 1955, p. xiii of the Introduction to the English edition, translated by Terence Martin, The Opium of the Intellectuals, Martin Secker, 1957. M. Winock in Le Siècle des intellectuels, Éditions du Seuil, 1997 refers to the post-1945 period as les années Sartre (The Sartre Years). The lecture was subsequently published as L’Existentialisme est un humanisme, Editions Nagel, 1946. Republished with an introduction and commentary by Arlette Elkhaïm Sartre, Gallimard, 1996. English translation by P. Mairet, Existentialism and Humanism, Methuen, 1982. R. Aronson, Jean-Paul Sartre – Philosophy in the World, New Left Books, 1980, p. 71. R. Hayman, Writing Against: a Biography of Sartre, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986, pp. 224–5. Beauvoir, op. cit., p. 51. J.-P. Sartre, ‘Présentation des Temps modernes’ (‘Introduction to Les Temps modernes’), reproduced in J.-P. Sartre, Situations II, Gallimard, 1948, pp. 11–12. Boschetti, Sartre et ‘Les Temps modernes’, op. cit., p. 187. At the end of the war, Sartre was considered to have been on the side of the Resistance during the Occupation with his play The Flies, his journalistic contributions to the clandestine Resistance press and his membership of the CNE cited as evidence to support this claim. Over the past 25 years or so however, this portrayal of Sartre has been challenged, notoriously by

214 Notes

57. 58.

59.

60. 61. 62.

63.

64.

65.

66. 67. 68. 69.

Gilbert Joseph in Une si douce Occupation (Such a Sweet Occupation), Albin Michel, 1991. In the recently published Le Siècle de Sartre, Grasset, 2000, Bernard-Henri Lévy analyses and refutes the more scurrilous attacks on Sartre’s resistance record. Sartre probably got it about right when he told John Gerassi that he was a writer who resisted and not a resister who wrote. Interview with J. Gerassi, Oeuvres romanesques, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, 1981, p. lxiii. For different appreciations of Sartre’s resistance record, see I. Galster, ‘Images actuelles de Sartre’ (‘Contemporary Images of Sartre’), Romantische Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte, Heidelberg, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 230–6. For details on Nizan, see pp. 56–7. J.-P. Sartre, ‘A propos de l’existentialisme: Mise au point’ (‘On the Question of Existentialism: A Clarification’), Action, No. 17, 29 December 1944, p. 11, reprinted in M. Contat and M. Rybalka, Les Écrits de Sartre (The Writings of Sartre), Gallimard, 1970, pp. 653–8, English translation by Richard McCleary, The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre: Vol 2 Selected Prose, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1974, pp. 155–60; J.-P. Sartre, L’Existentialisme est un humanisme, op. cit.; ‘Jean-Paul Sartre répond à ses détracteurs: L’existentialisme et la politique’ (‘Jean-Paul Sartre Replies to his Critics: Existentialism and Politics’) in Colette Audry (ed.), Pour et contre l’existentialisme (For and Against Existentialism), Editions Atlas, 1948, pp. 181–90. (This was also the name of one of the radio programmes in the series La Tribune des Temps modernes broadcast in November 1947, see Chapter 2.) J.-P. Sartre, ‘Matérialisme et révolution’ (‘Materialism and Revolution’), Les Temps modernes, No. 9, June 1946, pp. 1537–63; No. 10, July 1946, pp. 1–32, reproduced in J.-P. Sartre, Situations III, Gallimard, 1976, pp. 135–225. English translation in J.-P. Sartre, Literary and Philosophical Essays, translated by A. Michelson, London, Rider, 1955, pp. 185–239. J.-P. Sartre, ‘A propos de l’existentialisme’, in Contat and Rybalka, op. cit., p. 654. D. Desanti, ‘Le pâté “cheval-alouette” ou le “dialogue” des Temps Modernes’, Action, 18 August 1948. A. Cornu, ‘Bergsonism and Existentialism’, in M. Farber (ed.), Philosophic Thought in France and the United States, University of Buffalo, 1950, p. 161. D. Aury, ‘Qu’est-ce que l’existentialisme? Bilan d’une offensive’ (‘What is Existentialism? The Balance-Sheet of an Offensive’), Les Lettres françaises, 24 November, 1945. C. Angrand, ‘L’existentialisme – philosophie antidémocratique’ (‘Existentialism – an Anti-democratic Philosophy’), Démocratie nouvelle, No. 5, May 1947, pp. 242–6. R. Vailland, ‘Un Phénomène de classe qui sert la réaction’ (‘A Class Phenomenon which Helps the Reactionnaries’) in C. Audry (ed.), Pour et contre l’existentialisme, Paris, 1948, p. 178. R. Garaudy, ‘Un faux prophète: Jean-Paul Sartre’ (‘A False Prophet: Jean-Paul Sartre’), Les Lettres françaises, No. 88, 28 December 1945. Ibid. R. Garaudy, Literature of the Graveyard, International Publishers, 1948, p. 60. Ibid.

Notes 215 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

A. Cornu, op. cit., p. 162. Garaudy, Literature of the Graveyard, op. cit., p. 9 (italics in the original). J.-P. Sartre, ‘La République du silence’, op. cit., p. 11. Garaudy, Literature of the Graveyard, op. cit., p. 9. Cornu, op. cit., p. 165. H. Lefebvre, L’Existentialisme, Éditions du Sagittaire, Paris, 1946, p. 34. Sartre, L’Existentialisme est un humanisme, op. cit., p. 29. ‘A propos de l’existentialisme’, op. cit., p. 655 (italics in the original text). J.-P. Sartre, L’Existentialisme est un humanisme, pp. 48–9. Ibid., pp. 49–50. Ibid., p. 50. Sartre by Himself, translation of the text of the film Sartre par lui-même, translated by R. Seaver, Urizen Books, New York, 1978, p. 65.

2. The Onset of the Cold War 1. ‘Rassemblement’ is a difficult term to translate. De Gaulle deliberately refused to use the term ‘party’ since for him it had connotations of squabbling on behalf of narrow interests at the expense of national interests. His Rassemblement was to be an organisation which would act as a rallying point for all French people of good faith who wanted to further the interests of France (as defined by the General). 2. V. Auriol, Journal du Septennat, Vol. 1 (Diary of a Seven-Year Term of Office), Armand Colin, 1970, p. 441, quoted in F. Giles, The Locust Years, Secker and Warburg, 1991, p. 75. 3. Auriol, ibid., p. 529, quoted in Giles, op. cit., p. 82. 4. See Giles, op. cit., p. 83. 5. D. Caute, Communism and the French Intellectuals 1914–1960, André Deutsch, 1964, pp. 34–5. 6. For a flavour of these writings, see B. Legendre, Le Stalinisme français: Qui a dit quoi? 1944–1956 (French Stalinism: Who Said What? 1944–1956), Éditions du Seuil, 1980, pp. 86–102. 7. J.-T. Desanti quoted in D. Desanti, Les Staliniens: Une expérience politique 1944/1956 (The Stalinists: a Political Experience 1944–1956), Fayard, 1975, p. 362. 8. A. Besse (A. Kriegel), ‘Sur l’humanisme socialiste’ (‘On Socialist Humanism’), La Nouvelle critique, 45, April–May 1953, p. 43, quoted in J. Verdès-Leroux, Au Service du Parti, le Parti Communiste, les intellectuels, la culture 1944–1956 (Serving the Party, the Communist Party, the Intellectuals and Culture, 1944–1956), Fayard/Minuit, 1983, p. 78. 9. F. Joliot-Curie, quoted in Verdès-Leroux, ibid., p. 117. 10. Ibid., pp. 224–5. 11. J.-P. Sartre, ‘Qu-est-ce que la littérature?’ (‘What is Literature?’), originally published in Les Temps modernes in six instalments February, March, April, May, June, July 1947, reproduced in Situations II, Gallimard, 1948, p. 280. English translation by B. Frechtman, What is Literature?, Harper and Row, New York, 1965.

216 Notes 12. F. Mauriac, ‘Le pauvre intellectuel communiste’ (‘The Poor Communist Intellectual’) quoted in Mémoires politiques, op. cit., p. 395. 13. A. Fougeron, ‘Discussion sur la peinture’ (‘Discussion on Painting’), La Nouvelle critique, 55, May 1954, quoted in Verdès-Leroux, op. cit., p. 130. 14. Launched in April–May 1950, the Bataille du Livre involved authors being dispatched into working-class areas to lead the masses to (politically) healthy and progressive French literature and to the translated works of approved Soviet writers. 15. The Party itself was not above employing a mystical turn of phrase. In 1920, L’Humanité reported Raymond Lefebvre, who disappeared in the White Sea, as being on a ‘pilgrimage … towards the new Jerusalem … the land where justice will reign and where war will never be known again, as prophesied by Isaiah’, quoted in Verdès-Leroux, op. cit., p. 355. 16. A. Wurmser, ‘D’un amour lucide’ (‘About a Lucid Love’), La Nouvelle critique, December 1949, quoted in F. George, Pour un ultime hommage au camarade Staline (For a Final Homage to Comrade Stalin), Julliard, 1979, p. 32. 17. Subsequently published in three volumes. L’Homme contre les tyrans (1944), De l’Armistice à l’insurrection nationale (1945) and L’Age des empires et l’avenir de la France (1945). All three subsequently reissued: R. Aron, Chroniques de guerre La France libre 1940–1945, Gallimard, 1990. 18. R. Aron, ‘Vive la république’ (‘Long Live the Republic’), La France Libre, 6 (32), June 1943, pp. 81–4, quoted in R. Colquhoun, Raymond Aron: the Philosopher in History 1905–1955, Sage Publications, 1986, p. 234. 19. Ibid. 20. R. Aron, ‘L’Ombre des Bonapartes’ (‘The Shadow of the Bonapartes’), La France Libre, (6) 34, August 1943, pp. 280–8 quoted in Colquhoun, op. cit., pp. 234–5. 21. R. Aron, Le Grand Schisme (The Great Rift), Gallimard, 1948. A useful summary of the main points of this text and reactions to it is to be found in Colquhoun, op. cit., pp. 365–90. 22. See Chapter 1 of Le Grand Schisme, pp. 13–31, entitled ‘Paix impossible, guerre improbable’ (‘Peace Impossible, War Improbable’). 23. R. Aron, Le Spectateur engagé (The Committed Observer, English translation by J. and M. McIntosh, The Committed Observer, Chicago, Regnery Gateway, 1983), Julliard, 1981, p. 121. 24. The Front National was a broad-based Communist-led resistance movement. It should not be confused with the contemporary extreme-right organisation of the same name founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen in 1972. 25. A. Malraux, Antimémoires, Gallimard, 1972, p. 137. 26. A. Malraux, ‘Appel aux intellectuels’ (‘Appeal to the Intellectuals’), speech given in Paris, 5 March 1948, reproduced as a post-face to A. Malraux, Les Conquérants (The Conquerors), Livre de Poche, 1973, p. 302. 27. Malraux, Antimémoires, op. cit., p. 127. 28. H. Beuve-Méry, ‘La Fin et les moyens’ (‘The Ends and the Means’), Temps Présent, 19 October 1945, quoted in A. Chebel d’Appollonia, Histoire politique des intellectuels en France 1944–1954, Vol II, Éditions Complexe, 1991, p. 123. 29. H. Beuve-Méry, ‘Neutralité’ (‘Neutrality’), Temps Présent, 5 April 1946, quoted in Chebel d’Appollonia, op. cit., pp. 123–4.

Notes 217 30. See, for example, Chebel d’Appollonia, op. cit., pp. 121–41 and M. Cornick, ‘French Intellectuals, Neutralism and the Search for Peace in the Cold War’, in T. Chafer and B. Jenkins (eds), France from the Cold War to the New World Order, Macmillan 1996, pp. 39–52. 31. J.-P. Sartre, ‘Merleau-Ponty vivant’ (‘The Living Merleau-Ponty’), Les Temps modernes, October 1961, reproduced in J.-P. Sartre, Situations IV, Gallimard, 1964, p. 199. English translation by B. Eisler in J.-P. Sartre, Situations, London, Hamish Hamilton, 1965, pp. 225–326. 32. Ibid., p. 210. 33. Nine programmes were recorded but only the first six were broadcast in 1947. Those scheduled for 1, 8 and 15 December were censored. All nine programmes were later broadcast on France Culture between 14 and 24 August 1989 under the editorial supervision of Marc Floriot and were made available on audio cassette ( J.-P. Sartre, La Tribune des Temps Modernes, Collection ‘Voix de l’histoire, Institut National de l’Audiovisuel/Radio France, 1989). For more on these broadcasts see M. Scriven, Sartre and the Media, St. Martin’s Press, 1993, pp. 72–86 and C. Todd, ‘Sartre Flirts with Radio’, in J. Dolamore, Making Connections, Peter Lang, 1999, pp. 183–96. 34. J.-P. Sartre ‘Paris sous l’Occupation’ (‘Paris During the Occupation’), La France Libre, (9) 49, 15 November 1944, pp. 9–18, reproduced in J.-P. Sartre, Situations III, Gallimard, 1976, pp. 15–42. 35. J.-P. Sartre, ‘Une grande revue française à Londres’ (‘An Important French Review in London’), Combat, 7–8 January 1945. 36. Letter from Sartre to Aron quoted in N. Baverez, Raymond Aron, Flammarion, 1993, p. 206. 37. S. de Beauvoir, La Cérémonie des Adieux, Gallimard, 1981, p. 354. English translation by Patrick O’Brian, Adieux – A Farewell to Sartre, Penguin Books, 1985. 38. This was initially mistranslated into English as The Respectable Prostitute. 39. For details of these articles, see Contat and Rybalka, op. cit., pp. 117–23. 40. ‘Complicité objective’ (‘Objective Complicity’), Les Temps modernes, July 1948, pp. 1–11. 41. P. Fraisse, ‘Les Français face à leurs responsabilités’ (‘The French Confronted by their Responsibilities’), Esprit, April 1947; J.-W. Lapierre, ‘Plan Marshall et indépendance française’ (‘Marshall Plan and French Independence’), Esprit, August 1948. Both quoted in M. Winock, ‘Esprit’: Des intellectuels dans la cité 1930–1950, op. cit., 1996, pp. 291–93. 42. R. Aron, ‘Marxisme et Existentialisme’ (‘Marxism and Existentialism), in R. Aron, Marxismes imaginaires (Imaginary Marxisms), Gallimard, 1970, p. 27. 43. Sartre, ‘Qu’est-ce que la littérature?’, op. cit., p. 280. 44. Ibid., p. 287. 45. ‘Communisme et anticommunisme’ (‘Communism and Anticommunism’), broadcast on 27 October 1947 as part of the La Tribune des Temps modernes series of radio programmes (see n. 32). 46. Sartre, ‘Qu’est-ce que la littérature?’, op. cit., p. 277. 47. The brief overview that follows does not analyse the question of internal repression in the USSR, which will be covered in the next chapter.

218 Notes 48. M. Merleau-Ponty, ‘Pour la vérité’ (‘For the Sake of Truth’), Les Temps modernes, January 1946, pp. 1–4, translated by H. and P. A. Dreyfus in M. Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Nonsense, Northwestern University Press, 1964, pp. 153–71. 49. Sartre, ‘Qu’est-ce que la littérature?’, op. cit., p. 278. 50. Ibid., p. 278. 51. ‘Pour la vérité’ , op. cit. 52. M. Merleau-Ponty, Humanisme et terreur, Gallimard, 1947, English translation by John O’Neill, Humanism and Terror, Beacon Press, Boston, 1969. 53. Humanism and Terror, p. xxi. 54. Ian Birchall has pointed out the ambiguity of the phrase ‘the middle way’ in this context. ‘The middle way’ could imply an intermediate position between Washington and Moscow, in other words some sort of compromise (Soviet planning plus US democracy) or it could be a rejection of both the Soviet and US models and be a radical democratic socialist alternative to both. He argues, correctly in my view, that Sartre and others in the RDR waver between these two options. For an extended analysis of the RDR see I. Birchall, ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow? The Rise and Fall of the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire’, Journal of European Studies, Vol. 29, Part 4, No. 116, December 1999, pp. 365–404. 55. Quoted in Contat and Rybalka, op. cit., p. 197. 56. P. Gavi, J.-P. Sartre and P. Victor, On a raison de se révolter (It is Right to Rebel), Gallimard, 1974, p. 29. 57. See Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, Granta, 1999, pp. 66–70. 58. Franc-Tireur, 3 May 1949, p. 4. The text of the message appears in Birchall op. cit., p. 390.

3. From Kravchenko to Hungary via Korea 1. B. Souvarine, Stalin, Octagon Books, 1972, pp. 640–41. 2. Letter from V. Serge to E. Mounier quoted in M. Winock, Esprit: Des intellectuels dans la cité, op. cit., pp. 311–12. 3. E. Mounier, ‘Victor Serge’, Esprit, No. 141, January 1948, quoted in Winock, ibid., p. 312. 4. See for example, Esprit, February 1946 quoted in C. and J. Broyelle, Les Illusions retrouvées (Rediscovered Illusions), Grasset, 1982, p. 78. 5. Sartre quoted in A. Camus, Carnets: janvier 1942–mars 1951 (Notebooks: January 1942–March 1951), Gallimard, 1964, p. 186. English translation by P. Thody, Carnets 1942–1951, Hamish Hamilton, 1966. 6. ‘Complicité objective’ (‘Objective Complicity’), Les Temps modernes, July 1948, p. 10. 7. V. Kravchenko, J’ai choisi la liberté, trans Jean de Kerdéland, Editions Self, Paris, 1947. Abridged English paperback edition published by Robert Hale, no date. 8. D. Desanti, Les Staliniens (The Stalinists), Fayard, 1975, p. 169. 9. Beauvoir, La Force des choses, op. cit., p. 191.

Notes 219 10. Ibid., p. 191. 11. J. Pouillon, ‘Le Procès Kravchenko’ (‘The Kravchenko Trial’), Les Temps modernes, May 1949, p. 955. 12. These included, for example, David J. Dallin, La Vraie Russie des Soviets (The Real Soviet Russia) published in March 1948 with a chapter on forced labour and the location of the work camps. This was followed in 1949 by Terre inhumaine (Inhuman Land ) by Joseph Czapski, Buber-Neumann’s autobiography Déportée en Siberia (Deported to Siberia), and La Condition inhumaine (The Inhuman Condition), Jules Margoline’s account of his internment in eight work camps between 1940 and 1945. See Winock, Le Siècle de intellectuels, op. cit., p. 465. 13. D. Rousset, L’Univers concentrationnaire (The World of the Concentration Camp), Éditions du Pavois, 1946, reissued by Hachette in 1993. 14. P. Daix, ‘Pierre Daix, matricule 59807 à Mauthausen répond à David Rousset’ (‘Pierre Daix, Prisoner Number 59807 in Mauthausen Replies to David Rousset), Les Lettres françaises, 17 November 1949. 15. M. Merleau-Ponty, ‘Le Yogi et le prolétaire’ (‘The Yogi and the Proletarian’), Les Temps modernes, January 1947, pp. 676–711. Contains material used in Part II, Chapters 1–2 of Humanisme et Terreur, Gallimard, 1947. 16. C. Lefort, ‘Kravchenko et le problème de l’URSS’ (‘Kravchenko and the Problem of the USSR’), Les Temps modernes, February 1948, pp. 1490–516. 17. R. Stéphane, ‘La Question du travail forcé à l’ONU’ (‘The Question of Forced Labour at the UN’), Les Temps modernes, January 1950, pp. 1228–55. 18. M. Merleau-Ponty, J.-P. Sartre, ‘Les Jours de notre vie’, Les Temps modernes, January 1950, pp. 1153–68. English translation, by Richard C. McCleary, in M. Merleau-Ponty, Signs, Northwestern University Press, 1964. According to Sartre, Merleau-Ponty was the author of the editorial, but Sartre read it carefully and thoroughly approved of it. See J.-P. Sartre, ‘Merleau-Ponty vivant’, op. cit., p. 225. 19. Ibid., p. 1155. 20. Quoted in Sartre, ‘Merleau-Ponty vivant’, op. cit., p. 227. 21. Ibid., pp. 227–8 22. Beauvoir, La Force des choses, p. 220. 23. Beauvoir, op. cit., p. 219. 24. Simone de Beauvoir interview featured in the documentary film On a raison de se révolter (English version When Revolt is Justified ), directed by André Wachsman, Hilversum, Holland, no date. 25. ‘L’Adversaire est complice’ (‘The Opponent is Implicated’), Les Temps modernes, July 1950, pp. 1–11. 26. E. Morin, Autocritique (Self-criticism), Éditions du Seuil, 1975, p. 152. 27. Ibid., p. 153. 28. Quoted in Legendre, Le Stalinisme français, op. cit., p. 185. 29. For example, in June 1948, Lucretiu Patrascanu, who had been General Secretary until 1945, was expelled from the Romanian Workers’ Party and eventually shot (1954). Gomulka was forced to confess to nationalistic and right-wing deviationism and was replaced as First Secretary of the Polish Communist Party by Bierut, a man with unimpeachable Stalinist credentials. In Albania in June 1949 Koci Xoxe, Minister of the Interior, was executed along with other leading members of the Party. In September 1949,

220 Notes

30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

43.

44. 45. 46.

Hungary’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Laszlo Rajk, and his ‘accomplices’ were charged with conspiring with ‘Tito’s fascist clique’ and Western intelligence services, ‘confessed’, were found guilty and hanged. Three months later Traicho Kostov in Bulgaria confessed to anti-Soviet crimes and to conspiring with Yugoslavia. He then withdrew his confession but was executed anyway. In Czechoslovakia the purges which began after the 1948 ‘coup’ reached their climax with the execution in 1952 of Rudolf Slansky, the former Secretary General who had directed earlier purges of leading Party members. F. Fejtö, Histoire des Démocraties populaires, Éditions du Seuil, 1969, p. 246, quoted in A. Westoby, Communism since World War II, Harvester Press, 1981, p. 73. R. de Jouvenel, Tito, Maréchal des traitres (Tito: Marshal of the Traitors), La Bibliothèque française, 1950. J. Baby and V. Leduc, ‘La Yougoslavie dans le camp impérialiste’, Les Cahiers du Communisme, August 1950, quoted in Legendre, op. cit., pp. 191–2. Morin, Autocritique, op. cit., p. 123. See for example, Esprit, August 1948, pp. 207–9; ‘Dialogue autour de Tito’ (‘Dialogue around Tito’), Sept 1948, pp. 293–304 and J. Koruza, ‘Premières clartés sur la Titoslavie’ (‘First Revelations about Titoslavia’), Esprit, Sept 1948, pp. 305–16. ‘De l’esprit de vérité’ (‘Spirit of Truth’), Esprit, November 1949, pp. 657–60. F. Fejtö, ‘L’affaire Rajk est une affaire Dreyfus internationale’ (‘The Rajk Affair is an International Dreyfus Affair’), Esprit, November 1949, pp. 690–751. F. Fejtö, ‘De l’affaire Rajk à l’affaire Kostov’ (‘From the Rajk Affair to the Kostov Affair’), Esprit, January 1950, pp. 143–50. J. Cassou, ‘La Révolution et la vérité’ (‘Revolution and Truth’), Esprit, December 1949, pp. 943–8. Vercors, ‘Réponses’ (‘Replies’), Esprit, December 1949, pp. 949–53. Fejtö, ‘Del’ affaire Rajk … ’ op. cit., p. 751. J.-M. Domenach, ‘Une révolution rencontre le mensonge’ (‘A Revolution Meets the Lie’), Esprit, February 1950, pp. 183–207; J. Baboulène ‘Le sens de l’édification socialiste en Yougoslavie’ (‘How Socialism is Being Built in Yugoslavia’), ibid., pp. 208–23; H. Queffelec, ‘Perspectives’ (‘Perspectives’), ibid., pp. 224–36. A. Wurmser, ‘Réponse à Jean Cassou’ (‘Reply to Jean Cassou’), Les Lettres françaises, 29 December, 1949. Republished by Éditions de la Nouvelle Critique as a pamphlet the following year. R. Garaudy, ‘Lettre à Emmanuel Mounier homme d’Esprit’ (‘Letter to Emmanuel Mounier, Esprit’s Man’)*, Éditions de la Nouvelle Critique, 1950. * There is a pun in the title which is difficult to render in English. Quoted in Winock, ‘Esprit’: Des intellectuels dans la cité 1930–1950, op. cit., p. 303. ‘Mort d’Emmanuel Mounier’, L’Humanité, 23 March 1950, quoted in Winock, Esprit: Des intellectuels dans la cité, op. cit., pp. 333–4. Louis Dalmas, ‘Réflexions sur le communisme yougoslave’ (‘Thoughts on Yugoslav Communism’), Les Temps modernes, No. 53, March 1950, pp. 1589–1634; No. 54, pp. 1820–58; No. 55, pp. 1956–78.

Notes 221 47. Reproduced as ‘Faux Savants, faux lièvres’ (‘Bogus Wise Men and False Hares’), in J.-P. Sartre, Situations VI, Gallimard, 1964, pp. 23–68. 48. Sartre, ‘Merleau-Ponty vivant’, op. cit., p. 237. 49. Ibid., p. 236. 50. J.-P. Sartre, ‘The Chances of Peace’, The Nation, 30 December 1950, pp. 696–700. 51. Sartre, ‘Merleau-Ponty vivant’, p. 246. 52. J.-P. Sartre, L’Affaire Henri Martin (The Henri Martin Affair), Gallimard, 1953. 53. For an account of this episode see, P. Milza, ‘Ridgway la peste’ (‘Ridgway the Plague’), in M. Winock (ed.), Le Temps de la guerre froide (The Time of the Cold War), Éditions du Seuil, 1994, pp. 143–58. 54. J.-P. Sartre, ‘Les Communistes et la Paix’ was published in Les Temps modernes in three parts: July 1952, pp. 1–50; October/November 1952, pp. 695–763 and April 1954, pp. 1731–1819. The complete text is reproduced in J.-P. Sartre, Situations VI, Gallimard, 1964, pp. 80–384. Page numbers refer to Situations VI. English translation by I. Clephane, The Communists and Peace, London, Hamish Hamilton, 1969. 55. For a useful analysis of the international phenomenon of the Communist fellow traveller, see D. Caute, The Fellow Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism, revised edition 1988, Yale University Press. 56. See J. Verdès Leroux, ‘Qui a signé l’appel de Stockholm?’ (‘Who Signed the Stockholm Appeal?’), in Winock (ed.) Le Temps de la guerre froide, op. cit., pp. 113–16. 57. See J.-M. Domenach, ‘Sur une exclusion’ (‘About an Exclusion’), Esprit, April 1950, pp. 675–81. See also J.-M. Domenach, ‘Notre Affaire Tillon’ (‘Our Tillon Affair’), Esprit, June 1971, pp. 1246–54. 58. The text of Sartre’s speech was later published: J.-P. Sartre, ‘Ce que j’ai vu à Vienne, c’est la paix’ (‘What I saw in Vienna was Peace’), Les Lettres françaises, 1–8 January 1953, see Contat and Rybalka, op. cit., p. 255. 59. M. Merleau-Ponty, ‘Le Langage indirect et les voix du silence’ (‘Indirect Speech and the Voices of Silence’), Les Temps modernes, July 1952, pp. 70–94. 60. A useful summary can be found in A. Rabil Jr., Merleau-Ponty: Existentialist of the Social World, Columbia University Press, 1967, pp. 127–30. 61. S. de Beauvoir, ‘Merleau-Ponty et le pseudo-Sartre’ (‘Merleau-Ponty and the pseudo-Sartre’), Les Temps modernes, June/July 1955, pp. 2072–122. 62. See Sartre’s review of Camus’ L’Etranger (The Outsider) in Cahiers du Sud, February 1943, pp. 189–206 and Camus’ review of La Nausée (Nasuea) in Alger Républicain, 20 October 1938. English translation by P. Thody in A. Camus, Selected Essays and Notebooks, Penguin Books, 1984, pp. 167–9. 63. For example in November 1945 Camus told an interviewer that he and Sartre were always astonished to see their names associated and jokingly added that they were thinking of taking out a small advertisement stating that they had nothing in common. Les Nouvelles littéraires, 15 November 1945, quoted in H. Lottman, Albert Camus, Picador, 1981, pp. 371–2. 64. A. Camus, Combat, 7 October 1944, reproduced in Camus, Essais, op. cit., p. 272. 65. A. Camus, Combat, 1 October 1944, reproduced in Camus, Essais, op. cit., pp. 1527–9.

222 Notes 66. For a valuable analysis of Camus and the politics of revolutionary syndicalism, see I. Birchall, ‘The Labourism of Sisyphus: Albert Camus and Revolutionary Syndicalism’, Journal of European Studies, Vol. 20, 1990, pp. 135–65. 67. A. Camus, ‘Ni Victimes ni bourreaux’ (‘Neither Victims nor Executioners’), in Camus, Essais, op. cit., pp. 331–55. 68. F. Jeanson, ‘Albert Camus ou L’Ame révoltée’ (‘Albert Camus or the Revolted Soul’), Les Temps modernes, May 1952, pp. 2070–90. 69. A. Camus, ‘Lettre au directeur des Temps modernes’ (‘Letter to the Directeur of Les Temps modernes’), Les Temps modernes, August 1952, pp. 317–33. 70. F. Jeanson, ‘Pour Tout vous dire’ (‘To Tell You Everything’), Les Temps modernes, August 1952, pp. 354–83. 71. J.-P. Sartre, ‘Réponse à Albert Camus’ (‘Reply to Albert Camus’), Les Temps modernes, August 1952, pp. 334–53. English translation by B. Eisler in J.-P. Sartre, Situations, Hamish Hamilton, 1965, pp. 71–105. 72. Ibid., p. 335. 73. N. Hewitt, Literature and the Right in Post-war France: the Story of the ‘Hussard’s, Berg, 1996, p. 43. 74. P. Louis, La Table ronde: Une aventure singulière, Paris, 1992, p. 92, quoted in Hewitt, op. cit., p. 82. For more on La Table ronde and les Hussards, see, in addition to Hewitt, Ariane Chebel d’Appollonia, Histoire politique des intellectuels en France 1944–1954, Vol. 2, op. cit., pp. 97–105; D. Tillinac, ‘La Légende des hussards’, Magazine littéraire, December 1992, pp. 52–4. 75. R. Aron, ‘Impostures de la neutralité’ , Liberté de l’esprit, September 1950, reproduced in R. Aron in Polémiques, Gallimard, 1955. 76. Carol Brightman quoted in Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, Granta, 1999, p. 101. 77. Correspondence with the author, 4 June 2000. 78. See, for example, Frances Stonor Saunders, op. cit. 79. R. Aron, Mémoires: 50 ars de réflexion politique, Julliard 1983, p. 238. English translation by G. Holoch, Memoirs: Fifty Years of Political Reflection, Holmes and Meier, 1990. 80. R. Aron, L’Opium des intellectuels, Calmann-Lévy, 1955. English translation by T. Kilmartin, R. Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals, Secker and Warburg, 1957. 81. J.-P. Sartre, D. Rousset and G. Rosenthal, Entretiens sur la politique (Discussions about Politics), Gallimard, 1949; R. Aron, ‘Réponse à Jean-Paul Sartre’ (‘Reply to J.-P. Sartre), Liberté de l’Esprit, 5 June 1949. 82. M. Duverger, ‘Opium des intellectuels ou trahison des clercs?’ (‘Opium of the Intellectuals or Betrayal of the Clerisy’), Le Monde, 27 August 1955. Duverger’s riposte is discussed in Colquhoun, Raymond Aron: the Philosopher in History, op. cit., pp. 480–2. 83. See, for example, the case of historian François Furet, who left the PCF in 1956, quoted in Bavarez, Raymond Aron, op. cit., p. 288. 84. See R. Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals, op. cit., p. 54 where Aron writes: ‘In the book [L’Homme révolté], the main lines of his [Camus’] argument lost themselves in a succession of loosely connected essays, while the style of the writing and the moralising tone militated against philosophic exactitude.’

Notes 223 85. Letter from Camus to Aron, 5 September 1955, quoted in Baverez, op. cit., p. 289. 86. It was not until 1977 that the Party admitted that its delegates had had access to a copy of Khruschev’s speech during the 1956 Congress and not until 1982 that it published its contents. 87. See, for example, J. Verdès-Leroux, Le Réveil des somnambules: Le Parti Communiste, les intellectuels et la culture 1956–1985 (The Sleepwalkers Awake: the Communist Party, the Intellectuals and Culture 1956–1985), Fayard/Minuit, 1987, p. 55. 88. J. Semprun, Quel beau dimanche! (What a Glorious Sunday!), Grasset, 1980, p. 318, quoted in Verdès-Leroux, ibid., pp. 56–7. 89. G. Bowd, L’Interminable enterrement: Le communisme et les intellectuels depuis 1956 (The Interminable Burial: Communism and the Intellectuals since 1956), Digraphe, 1999, p. 32. 90. Ibid., p. 34. 91. ‘Contre l’intervention soviétique’ (‘Against the Soviet Intervention’), France Observateur, 8 November 1956, p. 4; see J.-F. Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises, Fayard, 1990, pp. 177–8. 92. Winock, Le Siècle des intellectuels, op. cit., p. 505. 93. L. de Villefosse, ‘La Collaboration impossible’ (‘Impossible Collaboration’), France-Observateur, 22 November 1956. 94. ‘Après Budapest, Sartre parle’ (‘After Budapest, Sartre Speaks Out’), L’Express, 9 November 1956, quoted extensively in M. Contat and M. Rybalka, op. cit., pp. 304–6. 95. J.-P. Sartre, ‘Le Fantôme de Staline’, Les Temps modernes, November–December 1956, January 1957, pp. 577–697. Reproduced in J.-P. Sartre, Situations VII, Gallimard, 1965, pp. 144–307. English translation J.-P. Sartre,The Spectre of Stalin, trans. I. Clephane, Hamish Hamilton, 1969. 96. See Contat and Rybalka, op. cit., pp. 308–9. 97. A. Besançon Une Génération (A Generation), Julliard, 1987, p. 321, quoted in Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions française, op. cit., p. 173.

4. Colonialism and Anti-Colonialism: Indochina and Algeria 1. ‘To me, sailing a tiny little boat on the ocean of war, Indochina appeared at that time like a huge, disabled ship that I would not be able to save until I had finally brought together all means of rescue. As I watched it disappear into the mist, I swore to myself that one day I would bring it back.’ Charles de Gaulle, Mémoires de guerre, Vol. 1: L’Appel 1940–1942 (War Memoirs, Vol. 1: The Call 1940–1942), Plon, 1954, p. 137, quoted in Jean Lacouture, De Gaulle, Vol. 2: Le Politique 1944–1959, Éditions du Seuil, 1985, p. 156. Abridged English translation by A. Sheridar, De Gaulle, The Ruler 1945–1970, Harvill 1991. 2. As there was no official declaration of war it is difficult to pinpoint precisely when the conflict began. The Vietnamese point to the bombing of Haiphong in November 1946, whereas from the French perspective it was the retaliatory action by the Vietnamese a month later which marked the point of no return. In any event, whatever view one takes of French actions before the

224 Notes 3. end of 1946 – ‘legitimate military action to reassert control’ or ‘acts of aggression against a country which had declared its independence’ – by the end of 1946 France was indisputably engaged in a war in Indochina. 3. Alain Ruscio, ‘Les Intellectuels français et la guerre d’Indochine: une répétition générale?’ (‘French Intellectuals and the War in Indochina: A Dress Rehearsal?’), Les Cahiers de l’Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent, Cahier 34, June 1996, p. 113. 4. R. Aron, ‘En pleine confusion’ (‘In Total Confusion’), Combat, 20 March 1947, see Colquhoun, Raymond Aron: the Philosopher in History, op. cit., p. 441. 5. Ruscio, op. cit., p. 115. 6. R. Aron, Les Guerres en chaine, Gallimard, 1951. English translation by E. W. Dickes and O. S. Griffiths, The Century of Total War, New York: Doubleday, 1954, republished Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1981. 7. O. Todd, Albert Camus – Une Vie, Gallimard, 1996, p. 389. 8. See Ruscio, op. cit., p. 115. Six articles written by Mauriac on Indochina between September 1947 and January 1953 are reproduced in F. Mauriac, Mémoires politiques, op. cit., pp. 443–53. 9. Jules Romains, ‘Indochine’ (‘Indochina’), L’Aurore, 29 October 1953, quoted in Ruscio, op. cit., p. 118. 10. André Siegfried, ‘Casse-cou’, Le Figaro, 3 January 1950, quoted in Ruscio op. cit., p. 119. 11. Ruscio, op. cit., p. 127. For a more detailed analysis of Les Temps modernes and the war in Indochina, see D. Drake, ‘Les Temps modernes and the French war in Indochina’, Journal of European Studies, Vol. 28, 1998, pp. 25–41. 12. J. Rovan, ‘La France devant l’Indochine’ (‘France Facing Up to Indochina’), Esprit, November 1945, quoted in M. Winock, Esprit: Des Intellectuels dans la cité 1930–1950, op. cit., p. 340. 13. Tran Duc Thao, ‘Sur l’Indochine’ (‘About Indochina’), Les Temps modernes, February 1946, pp. 878–900. 14. ‘Et Bourreaux et Victimes … ’ (‘Both Victims and Executioners … ’ ), Les Temps modernes, December 1946, preceding p. 385. 15. Michel-Antoine Burnier, Les Existentialistes et la politique (The Existentialists and Politics), Gallimard, Collection Idées, 1966, p. 39. English translation by B. Murchland, Choice of Action: the French Existentialists on the Political Frontline, New York: Random House, 1968. 16. For more details, see Drake, op. cit. 17. ‘Pour la paix au Vietnam’ (‘Peace in Vietnam’), Les Temps modernes, December 1948–January 1949, pp. 122–5. This statement was essentially the same as the one published in January 1949 in Esprit (pp. 115–18). 18. ‘Indochine SOS’ (‘Indochina SOS’), Les Temps modernes, March 1947, pp. 1039–52. 19. See Winock, ‘Esprit …’, op. cit., p. 341. 20. J.-P. Dannaud, ‘Service inutile’ (‘Useless service’), Les Temps modernes, March 1947, pp. 1095–114. 21. ‘Indochine SOS’, op. cit., p. 1045. 22. Ibid., pp. 1045–6. 23. See H. Davies, Sartre and Les Temps modernes, Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 41 and 215. 24. ‘Le Rendez-vous de Dien-Bien Phu’ (‘Rendezvous at Dien Bien Phu’), Les Temps modernes, May 1954, pp. 1920–3.

Notes 225 25. J.-P. Sartre, ‘A nos lecteurs’ (‘To Our Readers’), Les Temps modernes, May 1954, p. 1924. 26. This paragraph draws extensively on Alain Ruscio, ‘L’Opinion française et la guerre d’Indochine (1945–1954): sondages et témoignages’ (‘French Opinion and the War in Indochina 1945–1954: Opinion Polls and Testimonies’), Vingtième Siècle, No. 29, January–March 1991, pp. 35–45, especially p. 36 and p. 40. 27. J.-M. Domenach, ‘Est-ce la guerre en Afrique du Nord?’ (‘Is It War in North Africa?’), Esprit, December 1954, p. 769. 28. ‘Arrêtons la guerre d’Algérie’ (‘Let’s Stop the Algerian War’), Esprit, November 1955, p. 1. 29. E. Morin, Autocritique, op. cit., p. 187. 30. Quoted in Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises: Manifestes et pétitions au XXe siècle, Fayard, 1990, p. 199. 31. This was subsequently published as ‘Le Colonialisme est un systéme’ (‘Colonialism is a System’), Les Temps modernes, March–April 1956, pp. 1371–86, reproduced in J.-P. Sartre, Situations V, Gallimard, 1964, pp. 25–48. 32. J.-P. Sartre, Preface to A. Memmi, Portrait du colonisé précédé du Portrait du colonisateur (‘Portrait of the Colonised preceded by Portrait of the Coloniser’), Les Temps modernes, July–August 1957, pp. 289–93, reproduced in J.-P. Sartre, Situations V, op. cit., pp. 49–56. (A. Memmi’s book was published by Editions Buchet-Chastel in April 1957.) 33. A. Camus, ‘Misère de la Kabylie’ (‘Misery in Kabylia’) reproduced in Camus, Essais, op. cit., pp. 903–38. Originally published in the newspaper Alger Républicain, 5–15 June 1939. 34. A. Camus, ‘Lettre à un militant algérien’ (‘Letter to an Algerian militant’), in Communauté algérienne, 1 October 1955, reproduced in Camus, Essais, op. cit., pp. 960–6. English translation by J. O’Brien, in Resistance, Rebellion and Death., Hamish Hamilton, 1961, pp. 91–4. 35. Ibid., p. 965. 36. A. Camus, ‘La Bonne Conscience’ (‘Clear Conscience’), in L’Express, 21 October, 1955, reproduced in Camus, Essais, op. cit., p. 973. 37. A. Camus, ‘La Table Ronde’ (‘Round Table’), L’Express, 13 October 1955, reproduced in Camus, Essais, op. cit., pp. 971–2. 38. A. Camus, ‘Premier novembre’ (‘The First of November’), L’Express, 1 November 1955, reproduced in Camus, Essais, op. cit., pp. 981–2. 39. A. Camus ‘Trêve pour les civils’ (‘Truce for Civilians’), L’Express, 10 January 1956, and ‘Le Parti de la trêve’ (‘The Truce Party’), L’Express, 17 January 1956 reproduced in Camus, Essais, op. cit., pp. 983–8. 40. A. Camus, ‘Appel pour une trêve civile en Algeria’ (‘Appeal for a Civilian Truce in Algeria’), text of address to a meeting in Algeria on 22 January 1956, reproduced in Camus, Essais, op. cit., pp. 989–99. English translation by J. O’Brien in Resistance, Rebellion and Death, op. cit., pp. 95–102. 41. Le Siècle des manifestes, Saga, No. 1, no date (1998?), p. 51. 42. C. Bourdet, ‘Votre Gestapo d’Algérie’ (‘Your Algerian Gestapo’), FranceObservateur, 13 January 1955. In December 1951, Bourdet had already denounced the French use of torture, three years before the November 1954 bomb attacks that marked the start of the war. C. Bourdet, FranceObservateur, 6 December 1951, reproduced in Le Nouvel Observateur, 14–20, December 2000, p. 42.

226 Notes 43. F. Mauriac ‘La Question’ (‘The Question’), L’Express, 15 January 1955. 44. F. Sarrazin, ‘L’Afrique du nord et notre destin’ (‘North Africa and Our Destiny’), Esprit, November 1955. François Sarrazin was a pseudonym for Major Vincent Monteil, who resigned as military adviser to Governor-General Jacques Soustelle in protest at the direction French policy was taking. Monteil later converted to Islam. See D. Schalk, War and the Ivory Tower, Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 78–9. 45. H. Marrou, ‘France ma patrie’ (‘France my Country’), reproduced in Le Siècle des manifestes, op. cit., p. 50. 46. J.-F. Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises, op. cit., p. 194. 47. See for example Dossier Jean Muller, a collection of letters published by Témoignage chrétien in February 1957; R. Bonnaud, ‘La Paix des Némentchas’, Esprit, April 1957. Les Temps modernes published a series of eye-witness accounts in June 1957, and in September 1957 published J. Pucheu ‘Un An dans les Aurès’ (‘A Year in the Aurès’) – see M. Winock, Le Siècle des intellectuels, op. cit., pp. 518–19. 48. See for example, P.-H. Simon, Contre la torture (Against Torture), Éditions du Seuil; G. Arnaud and J. Vergès, Pour Djamila Bouhired, Éditions du Minuit; Des rappelés témoignent (The Conscripts Speak Out), published by the Comité de résistance spirituelle (The Committee of Spiritual Resistance), which had been formed in January 1957 and included Domenach and Marrou. See Winock, Le Siècle des intellectuels, op. cit., p. 519. 49. P. Vidal-Naquet, L’Affaire Audin (The Audin Affair), Editions de Minuit, 1958, reissued 1989. 50. J.-P. Sartre, ‘Vous êtes formidables’ (‘You’re Great’), Les Temps modernes, May 1957, pp. 1641–7. Reproduced in J.-P. Sartre, Situations V, op. cit., p. 57. 51. J.-P. Sartre, ‘Une Victoire’ (‘A Victory’), L’Express, 6 March 1958, reproduced in J.-P. Sartre, Situations V, op. cit., pp. 72–88. 52. R. Aron, La Tragédie algérienne (The Algerian Tragedy), Plon, 1957. 53. It was fashionable in the 1970s and 1980s to contrast Aron’s alleged perceptive consistency with Sartre’s emotive inconsistency. It should be noted that a month after writing the first part of La Tragédie algérienne, Aron was one of the professors at the Sorbonne who signed the statement published in Le Monde on 23 May 1956 supporting government policy and the ‘military effort’ in Algeria and promising moral support for those fighting in Algeria. See J.-F. Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises, op. cit., pp. 204–5, J.-F. Sirinelli, Deux intellectuels dans le siècle: Sartre et Aron (Two Intellectuals in the Century: Sartre and Aron), Fayard, 1995, pp. 322–3. 54. F. Mauriac, ‘Le nouveau règne’ (‘The New Reign’), L’Express, 21 June 1957, quoted in Sirinelli, Deux Intellectuels dans le siècle, op. cit., p. 325. 55. R. Aron, Le Specatateur engagé, op. cit., p. 191 and p. 194. 56. Aron, La Tragédie algérienne, op. cit., p. 36, quoted in R. Colquhoun, Raymond Aron: the Sociologist in Society, 1955–1983, Sage Publications, 1986, p. 47. 57. M. Winock, ‘La Tragédie algérienne’, Commentaire, 8 (28–29), February 1985, p. 270, quoted in Colquhoun, op. cit., p. 49. This is an allusion to a passage in Stendhal’s, Le Rouge et le noir (Scarlet and Black): ‘La politique au milieu des intérêts d’imagination, c’est un coup de pistolet au milieu d’un concert.’ (‘Politics in the middle of things that concern the imagination are

Notes 227

58. 59.

60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68.

69. 70.

71.

72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert.’) Stendhal, Scarlet and Black, trans. M. Shaw, Penguin Books, 1965, p. 384. (Thanks to Keith Reader for identifying this allusion.) R. Aron, Mémoires, op. cit., pp. 360–1. E. Beau de Loménie, L’Algérie trahie par l’argent: Réponse à Raymond Aron (Algeria Betrayed by Money: Reply to Raymond Aron), Éditions Ethéel, 1957. J. Soustelle, Le Drame algérien et la décadence française: Réponse à Raymond Aron (The Algerian Drama and French Decadence: Reply to Raymond Aron), Plon, 1957. A. Stibio, ‘Une curieuse dissociation de l’esprit de résistance’ (‘A Strange Disassociation of the Spirit of Resistance’), Carrefour, 26 June 1957. L. Terrenoire, ‘Tragédie algérienne et trahison des élites’ (‘Algerian Tragedy and the Betrayal of the Elites’), Carrefour, 26 June 1957. D. Arlon, ‘Raymond Aron au secours du FLN’ (‘Raymond Aron to the Aid of the FLN’), Aspects de la France, 21 June 1957. Quoted in R. Aron, Mémoires, Julliard, 1983, p. 369. J. Daniel, ‘Des vacances algériennes … ’ (‘Algerian holidays’), L’Express, 21 June 1957. For more on the reception of La Tragédie algérienne, see N. Baverez, Raymond Aron, Flammarion, 1993, pp. 350–6; Colquhoun, vol. II, op. cit., pp. 49–53; R. Aron, Mémoires, op. cit., pp. 366–76. R. Aron, L’Algérie et la république (Algeria and the Republic), Plon, 1958. See O. Todd, Albert Camus: une vie (Albert Camus: a Life), Gallimard, 1996, p. 726. For Sartre’s views on de Gaulle’s return, see ‘Le Prétendant’ (‘The Pretender’), L’Express, 22 May 1958; ‘La Constitution du mépris’ (‘The Constitution of Contempt’), L’Express, 11 September 1958; ‘Les Grenouilles qui demandent un roi’ (‘The Frogs who ask for a King’), L’Express, 25 September 1958. All are reproduced in J.-P. Sartre, Situations V, Gallimard, op. cit., pp. 89–144. Beauvoir, La Force des choses, op. cit., p. 472. ‘Interview de Sartre’ (‘Interview with Sartre’), Vérités pour … (Truth for…), No. 9, 2 June 1959, pp. 14–17, reproduced in M. Contat and M. Rybalka, Les Écrits de Sartre, Gallimard, 1970, pp. 723–9. Literally ‘I have understood you’ which his audience took to mean that de Gaulle was sympathetic to their position. However, the phrase could also be translated as ‘I know what your game is.’ France never officially acknowledged that the conflict in Algeria constituted a war. ‘The War without a Name’ is the title of a book on the Algerian conflict by John Talbott, Faber and Faber, 1981, and a film by Bernard Tavernier. Quoted in Todd, Camus: une vie, p. 684. Le Monde, 14 December 1957, quoted in Winock, Le Siècle des intellectuels, op. cit., p. 537. Quoted in Todd, op. cit., p. 700. Quoted in Todd, op. cit., p. 707. France-Observateur, No. 505, 7 January 1960, reproduced as ‘Albert Camus’, in J.-P. Sartre, Situations IV, Gallimard, 1964, pp. 126–9. For details see Contat and Rybalka, op. cit., pp. 347–51.

228 Notes 79. ‘Jeunesse et guerre d’Algérie’ (‘Young People and the Algerian War’), VéritéLiberté, No. 3, July–August 1960. 80. Quoted in Contat and Rybalka, op. cit., p. 356. 81. Quoted in Winock, Le Siécle des intellectuels, op. cit., p. 539. 82. See H. Hamon and P. Rotman, Les Porteurs de valises (Couriers for the FLN), Éditions du Seuil (Collection Histoire), 1982, pp. 301–2. 83. It was published in Italy in Tempo Presente and in Germany in Neue Rundschau. In France Vérité-Liberté published the text, but the journal was immediately seized by the authorities. The October issue of Les Temps modernes appeared with two blank pages where the declaration was to have appeared; its inclusion was refused by the printers. 84. ‘Appel à l’opinion pour une paix négociée’ (‘Appeal for a Negotiated Peace’), in Un Siècle de manifestes, op. cit., p. 56. 85. Quoted in J.-F. Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises, p. 215. 86. Ibid. 87. For more on the 17 October demonstration see J.-L. Einaudi, La Bataille de Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1991, and J.-L. Einaudi, ‘Octobre 1961: pour la vérité enfin’ (‘October 1961: For the Truth at Last’), Le Monde, 20 May 1998, p. 14. 88. See A. Cohen-Solal, Sartre, op. cit., p. 563 and M.-A. Burnier, Les Existentialistes et la politique, op. cit., p. 140. 89. ‘Entretien avec Jean-Paul Sartre’ (‘Interview with Jean-Paul Sartre’), La Voie communiste (The Communist Path), No. 29, June–July 1962. 90. Internal bulletin of the FAC, No. 1, February–March 1962, quoted in Contat and Rybalka, op. cit., pp. 377–8. 91. ‘Entretien avec Jean-Paul Sartre’, op. cit. 92. J.-P. Sartre, ‘Les Somnambules’ (‘The Sleepwalkers’), Les Temps modernes, April 1962, reproduced in Situations V, op. cit., pp. 160–6. 93. J. F. Bondy, ‘Jean-Paul Sartre et la révolution’ (‘Jean-Paul Sartre and the Revolution’), Preuves, No. 202, December 1967, pp. 67–8, quoted in N. Lamouchi, Jean-Paul Sartre et le tiers-monde (Jean-Paul Sartre and the Third World), L’Harmattan, 1996, p. 106. 94. Burnier, op. cit., p. 143. 95. M. A. Burnier, ‘Entretien avec J.-P. Sartre’, June 1965, in Les Temps modernes, October–December 1990, pp. 918–19, quoted in Lamouchi, op. cit., p. 107.

5. May, Mao and the End of the ‘Classic Intellectual’? 1. K. Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture, MIT Press, 1995, p. 5. 2. André Gauron, Histoire économique de la Vème république (Economic History of the Fifth Republic), Maspero, 1983, p. 6 quoted in Ross, op. cit., p. 6. 3. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, quoted in Winock, Le Siècle des intellectuels, op. cit., p. 564. 4. See, for example, L. Joffrin, Mai 68, Éditions du Seuil, 1988; E. Morin, C. Lefort and C. Castoriadis, Mai 68: La Brèche suivi de Vingt ans après (May ‘68: The Breach followed by Twenty Years Later), Éditions Complexe, 1988; P. Seale and M. McConville, French Revolution 1968, Penguin Books, 1968;

Notes 229

5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

R. Johnson, The French Communist Party versus the Students: Revolutionary Politics in May–June 1968, Yale University Press, 1972. Quoted in S. Courtois and M. Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste français, (History of the French Communist Party), Presses Universitaires de France, 1995, p. 331. Le Monde, 8 May 1968, p. 11. ‘Il est capital que le mouvement des étudiants oppose et maintienne une puissance de refus déclarent MM Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri Lefebvre et un groupe d’écrivains et de philosophes’ (‘It is vital that the student movement opposes and maintains the power to refuse, declare Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri Lefebvre and a group of writers and philosophers’), Le Monde, 10 May 1968, p. 9. J.-P. Sartre, interview on RTL, 12 May; see Contat and Rybalka, op. cit., pp. 463–4. See R. Vincent, ‘Sartre à la Sorbonne: “Je n’appelle pas gauche la SFIO et la Fédération”’ , France Soir, 22 May 1968; M. Legris, ‘M. Jean-Paul Sartre à la Sorbonne: pour l’association du socialisme et de la liberté’ , Le Monde, 22 May 1968; J. Besançon, ‘Sartre à la Sorbonne en Mai 68’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 27 May–2 June 1988. ‘L’Imagination au pouvoir. Entretien de Jean-Paul Sartre avec Daniel CohnBendit’, Le Nouvel Observateur, special supplement, 20 May 1968. R. Aron ‘Réflexions d’un universitaire’ (‘Thoughts of a Member of the University’), Le Figaro, 15/16 May 1968. R. Aron, La Révolution introuvable: Réflexions sur la révolution de Mai, Fayard 1968. English translation by G. Clough, The Elusive Revolution: Anatomy of a Student Revolt, London Pall Mall Press, 1969. Quoted in N. Baverez, Raymond Aron, op. cit., p. 397. See R. Colquhoun, Raymond Aron: the Sociologist in Society 1955–1983, pp. 338ff, and Baverez, op. cit., p. 397. Letter to Raymond Aron, 13 June 1968, quoted in Baverez, op. cit., p. 399. A. Touraine, Le Mouvement de mai ou le communisme utopique, 1968, pp. 256–7. English translation by L.F.X. Mayhew, The May Movement: Revolt and Reform, New York, 1971, quoted in Colquohoun, op. cit., p. 340. J.-P. Sartre, ‘Les Bastilles de Raymond Aron’ (‘The Bastilles of Raymond Aron’), reproduced in J.-P. Sartre, Situations VIII, Gallimard, 1972, pp. 175–92. Ibid., p. 186. Ibid., p. 188. Ibid., p. 191. Aron, Le Spectateur engagé, op. cit., p. 256. R. Aron, Mémoires, Julliard, 1983, pp. 487–90. In November 1968 the awarding of the Montaigne Prize to Aron had to be moved from Tübingen University to the Institute of Biology located outside the city because of the threat of student protests. In December the presentation of a doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne by one of Aron’s students and which Aron attended was broken up by student demonstrators. Aron denounced the protestors as ‘red fascists’ and was himself in turn castigated as a fascist. See Baverez, op. cit., pp. 406–8. Aron, La Révolution introuvable, op. cit., p. 15, quoted in J.-F. Sirinelli, Deux intellectuels dans le siècle; Sartre et Aron, Fayard, 1995, p. 341.

230 Notes 25. Sartre, ‘Les Bastilles de Raymond Aron’, Situations VIII, op. cit., p. 184, quoted in Sirinelli, Deux intellectuels dans le siècle: Sartre et Aron, op. cit., p. 341. 26. Extracts of the interview published as ‘J.-P. Sartre: le parti communiste a trahi la révolution de Mai’ (‘J.-P. Sartre: The Communist Party Betrayed the May Revolution’) Le Monde, 16 July 1968. 27. J.-P. Sartre ‘Les Communistes ont peur de la révolution’ (‘The Communists are Scared of Revolution’) in Situations VIII, pp. 208–225; J.-P. Sartre, ‘Itinerary of a Thought’, New Left Review, 58, November–December 1969, pp. 43–66 reproduced in J.-P. Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism, op. cit., p. 60. 28. ‘Jean-Paul Sartre sui fatti di Praga’, Paesa Sera, 25 August 1968. Extracts in Contat and Rybalka, op. cit., p. 470. 29. For Sartre’s exposition of the revolutionary intellectual see ‘L’ami du peuple’ (‘The People’s Friend’) published in L’Idiot International, No. 10 September 1970, reproduced in J.-P. Sartre, Situations VIII, op. cit., pp. 456–76. English translation by J. Matthews in J.-P. Sartre, Between Marxism and Existentialism, op. cit., pp. 286–98. 30. R. Debray, Révolution dans la révolution?, Maspero 1967. English translation by B. Ortiz, Revolution in the Revolution?, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1967. 31. For an analysis of Debray’s revolutionary writings see Keith Reader, Régis Debray: a Critical Introduction, Pluto Press, 1995, pp. 1–23. 32. See for example, How the Soviet Revisionists Carry Out All-Round Restoration of Capitalism in the USSR, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1968. 33. This was chosen as the book-title of a series of interviews with Sartre published in 1974: P. Gavi et al., On a Raison de se révolter (It is Right to Rebel), Gallimard, 1974. 34. For more on the appeal of China to Left intellectuals within an international perspective see D. Caute, The Fellow Travellers, Yale University Press, 1988, Chapter 10. 35. A. Malraux, Antimémoires, Gallimard, 1967. 36. Published in English as Daily Life in Revolutionary China, New York, London, Monthly Review Press, 1972. 37. For an examination of Tel Quel’s pro-Chinese commitment see F. Hourmant, Le Désenchantement des clercs (The Disillusionment of the Clerisy), Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1997, pp. 17–29. 38. See for example, A. Cohen-Solal, Sartre, Gallimard, 1985, pp. 579–622; H. Hamon and P. Rotman, Génération Vol. 2: Les années de poudre (Generation Vol. 2: the Explosive Years), esp. pp. 151ff., Éditions du Seuil, 1987; C. Bourseiller, Les Maoistes français: La folle histoire des gardes rouges français (The French Maoists: the Crazy History of the Red Guards), Plon, 1996, esp. pp. 156–62; D. Drake, ‘Sartre and May 1968’, Sartre Studies International, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1997, pp. 43–65. 39. See J.-P. Sartre, ‘Avant-propos’, in M. Manceaux, Les Maos en France (‘Foreword’ to The Maoists in France), Gallimard, 1972, pp. 7–15. English translation by P. Austier and L. Davis, Sartre in the Seventies: Interviews and Essays, André Deutsch, 1978, pp. 162–71. 40. J.-P. Sartre, ‘Intellectuels et ouvriers doivent s’unir’ (‘Intellectuals and Workers Must Unite’), J’Accuse, No. 00, November 1970. 41. See ‘Nous avons vu le fascisme au coeur de la régie’ (‘We have seen fascism at the heart of Renault’), La Cause du Peuple/J’Accuse, 17 February 1972, pp. 4–5.

Notes 231 42. See M. Scriven, Sartre and the Media, St Martin’s Press, 1993, pp. 60–70; M. Scriven, ‘Sartre, Violence and the Revolutionary Press: 1968–1974’, in R. Günther and J. Windebank (eds), Violence and Conflict in Modern French Culture, Sheffield Academic Press, 1994, pp. 41–55; M. Scriven, Jean-Paul Sartre: Politics and Culture in Post-War France, Macmillan, 1999, pp. 63–79. 43. J.-P. Sartre, ‘Intellectuels et ouvriers doivent s’unir’, op. cit. 44. See ‘L’Accident de Fouquières-les-Lens: Jean-Paul Sartre et son “tribunal populaire” mettent en cause les Houllières’ (‘The Accident at Fouquières-les Lens: Jean-Paul Sartre and his “Popular Tribunal” Blame the Company’), Le Figaro, 14 December 1970; ‘La vieille dame et le philosophe’ (‘The Old Lady and the Philosopher’), Le Monde, 15 December 1970. 45. J.-P. Sartre: ‘La Justice Populaire’ (‘Popular Justice’), J’Accuse, No. 15, January 1971, p. 17; ‘La Justice Populaire’, La Cause du Peuple/J’Accuse, No. 5, 21 June 1971. 46. ‘La Mutualité sans J.-P. Sartre’ (‘The Meeting at the Mutualité without J.-P. Sartre’), Le Figaro, 1 July 1971, p. 11. 47. M. Winock, Le Siècle des intellectuels, op. cit., p. 579. 48. See p. 136 above. 49. See p. 141 above. 50. See p. 142 above. M. Foucault, ‘Sur la justice populaire’, Les Temps modernes, No. 310 bis, February 1972, pp. 334–66. Translated as ‘On Popular Justice: a Discussion with Maoists’, in M. Foucault, edited and translated by C. Gordon, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1980, pp. 1–36. 51. ‘Sur la justice populaire’, p. 335. 52. Ibid., p. 348. 53. J.-P. Sartre, ‘A propos de la justice populaire’ (‘On the Subject of Popular Justice’), interview in Pro justicia, No. 2 (1973), quoted in D. Eribon, Michel Foucault, Flammarion, 1989, p. 262. English translation by B. Wing, Michel Foucault), Harvard University Press, 1991. 54. K. Reader, Intellectuals and the Left in France since 1968, St Martin’s Press, 1987, p. 84. 55. For an analysis of the Bruay affair, see P. Gavi, ‘Bruay-en-Artois: seul un bourgeois aurait pu faire ça?’ (‘Bruay-en-Artois: Only a Bourgeois Could Have Done That?’), Les Temps modernes, July/August 1972, pp. 155–260. 56. ‘Et maintenant ils massacrent nos enfants’ (‘And Now They’re Massacring our Children’), La Cause du Peuple/J’Accuse, No. 23, 1 May 1972, p. 15. 57. J.-P. Sartre, ‘Lynchage ou Justice Populaire’ (‘Lynching or Popular Justice’), La Cause du Peuple/J’Accuse, No. 24, 17 May 1972, p. 12. 58. ‘Réponse à J.-P. Sartre’ (‘A Reply to J.-P. Sartre’), La Cause du Peuple/J’Accuse, No. 24, 17 May 1972, p. 12. 59. Eribon, op. cit., p. 264. 60. C. Duchen, Feminism in France: From May ‘68 to Mitterrand, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986, p. 8. 61. See F.-M. Samulelson, Il était une fois Libé (Once Upon a Time There Was Libé), Éditions du Seuil, 1979; J. Guisnel, Libération: la biographie (Libération: the Biography), La Découverte, 1999. 62. Rotman and Hamon, Vol. 2, op. cit., p. 514.

232 Notes 63. For more details see, for example, F. Hourmant, Le Désenchantement des clercs: Figures de l’Intellectuel dans l’après-Mai 68, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1997, pp. 57–91. 64. For a collection of articles on the ‘New Philosophers’, see S. Bouscasse and D. Bourgeois (eds), Faut-il brûler les Nouveaux Philosophes? (Should We Burn the New Philosophers?), Nouvelles Éditions Oswald, 1978. 65. Those associated with the epithet ‘New Philosophers’ included, besides Bernard-Henri Lévy, Christian Jambet, Guy Lardreau, Philippe Nemo, JeanMarie Benoist, Jean-Paul Dollé and André Glucksmann, although the latter rejected the label. 66. P. Dews, ‘The Nouvelle Philosophie and Foucault’, Economy and Society, Vol. 8, No. 2, p. 127. 67. For more on the impact of television on French intellectuals and the debate around the definition of the intellectual, pp. 158 ff. 68. ‘Simone de Beauvoir: Document de la Semaine’ (‘Simone de Beauvoir: Feature of the Week’), Le Nouvel Observateur, 22 January 1979, p. 84. 69. C. Castoriadis, Domaines de l’homme (Man’s Domains), Paris, 1986, p. 22, quoted by S. Khilnani, Arguing Revolution: the Intellectual Left in Postwar France, Yale University Press, 1993, p. 152. 70. F. Aubral and X. Delcourt, Contre la nouvelle philosophie (Against the New Philosophy), Gallimard, 1977. 71. See for example, A. Glucksmann, La Cuisinière et le mangeur d’hommes, op. cit., and B.-H. Lévy, La Barbarie à visage humain (Barbarism with a Human Face), Grasset, 1977. 72. F. Verny, ‘Chéri, j’ai un truc à te dire’ (‘Darling, I’ve Got Something to Tell You’), interview with D. Garcia, Livres Hebdo, No. 278, 30 January 1998, p. 278, quoted in J. Le Goff, Mai 68: L’Héritage impossible (May 68: the Impossible Inheritance), La Découverte, 1998, p. 419 (my emphasis). 73. Dews, op. cit., p. 129. 74. F. Ponchaud, Cambodge, Année zéro (Cambodia, Year Zero), Julliard, 1977. For more information on Cambodia, see S. Courtois et al., Le Livre noir du communisme (The Black Book of Communism), Laffont, 1997, pp. 630–701. 75. The excesses of the Cultural Revolution had already been documented, see for example Simon Leys, Les Habits neufs du président Mao (Chairman Mao’s New Clothes), Champ Libre, 1971. However, such was the prevailing mood of sinophilia that as with the USSR in the late 1940s, any criticism of China was either largely ignored or dismissed as lies. 76. ‘Création d’un comité des intellectuels pour l’Europe des libertés’ (‘Creation of a Committee of Intellectuals for a Europe of Freedom’), Le Monde, 15–16 January 1978, reproduced in Le Siècle des manifestes, op. cit., p. 65. 77. Claudie and Jacques Broyelle had worked in China and in 1973 wrote La Moitié du ciel (Half the Sky), a eulogy to the paradise that was China during the Cultural Revolution. After a second stay in China (1972–5) they published Deuxième retour de Chine (Back to China for a Second Time) (1977), which was both a self-criticism and an attempt to break the silence about what was actually occurring in China. It was one of the seminal works in the demystification of China. In 1978 they published Le Bonheur des pierres, in which they explored their own Maoist commitment, the reasons for the intellectuals’ fascination with revolutionary China and their earlier refusal to recognise what was happening in China.

Notes 233 78. B. Kouchner, ‘Du coté des victimes’ (‘With the Victims’), Magazine littéraire, Special Issue, La Passion des idées 1966–1996, no date (1996?), pp. 66–7. 79. O. Todd, Cruel avril, 1975 – la chute de Saigon (Cruel April 1975: the Fall of Saigon), Laffont, 1987; J. Lacouture, interview in Valeurs actuelles, 13–19 November 1978. 80. A de Benoist, Vu de droite. Anthologie critique des idées contemporaines (As Seen from the Right. An Critical Anthology of Contemporary Ideas), Copernic, 1977 quoted in S. Quadruppani, Catalogue du prêt à penser français depuis 1968 (A Catalogue of Off-the-Peg French Thought since 1968), Balland, 1983, p. 174. 81. M. Foucault, ‘A quoi rêvent les Iraniens?’ (‘What are the Iranians’ Dreams?’), Le Nouvel Observateur, 16 October 1978, quoted in D. Eribon, Michel Foucault, p. 302. 82. Ibid., p. 305. 83. Ibid., p. 306. 84. Ibid., p. 304. 85. Ibid., p. 305. 86. For more on Foucault and Iran see an interview with Foucault in C. Brière and P. Blanchet, Iran: la révolution au nom de Dieu (Revolution in the Name of God), Éditions du Seuil, 1979, pp. 227–41 reproduced in L. Kritzman (ed.), Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture, Routledge, 1988, pp. 211–24. 87. On this topic, see also, N. Hewlett, Modern French Politics, Polity Press, 1998, Chapter 8, ‘The Waning of Intellectual Commitment’ and C. Flood and N. Hewlett, ‘Structure and Change in Contemporary French Intellectual Life’ in C. Flood and N. Hewlett (eds), Currents in Contemporary French Intellectual Life, Macmillan, 2000, pp. 1–22. 88. P. Ory and J.-F. Sirinelli, Les Intellectuels en France de l’Affaire Dreyfus à nos jours, second edition, Armand Colin, 1992, p. 215. 89. M. Foucault and G. Deleuze, ‘Les Intellectuels et le pouvoir’ (‘Intellectuals and Power’), Le Nouvel Observateur, 8 May 1972, pp. 68–70; ‘Intervista a Michel Foucault’ (‘Interview with Michel Foucault) in A. Fontana and P. Pasquino Microfiscia del Potere, reproduced in Foucault, Power/Knowledge, op. cit., pp. 109–33. See esp. pp. 126–33. 90. Ibid., p. 126. 91. Eribon, op. cit., p. 241. 92. J. Kristeva, ‘Un nouveau type d’intellectuel: le dissident’ (‘A New Type of Intellectual: the Dissident’), Tel Quel, No. 74, Winter 1977, pp. 3–8. English translation by Sean Hand in T. Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader, Blackwell, 1986, pp. 292–300. 93. For example, Bernard-Henri Lévy and André Glucksmann, each writing in about Algeria post-1992 on the basis of a short visit. 94. P. Bourdieu, La Misère du monde (The Misery of the World), Éditions du Seuil, 1993. Bourdieu’s own contribution to the debate about the role of the intellectual will be discussed in the context of his interventions in the strikes of 1995. 95. V. Vasseur, Médecin-chef à la prison de la Santé (Head Doctor at the Santé Prison), Éditions du Cherche-Midi, 2000. 96. Liberalism is used here in the political sense of a commitment to democracy and the rule of law, rather than in the economic sense of a commitment to a free-market economy.

234 Notes 97. Philippe Renaud, quoted in N. Hewlett, ‘Toqueville’s Ghost: the Rise of the New Liberal Intellectual’, in Contemporary French Civilization, Vol. 24, No. 2, Summer/Fall 2000, pp. 192–219. 98. Aron, Mémoires, op. cit. 99. J. Daniel, ‘Cet Étrange Recours à Camus’ (‘This Strange Recourse to Camus’), Le Nouvel Observateur, 27 November 1978, pp. 84–6. 100. J. Jennings, ‘Of Treason, Blindness and Silence: Dilemmas of the Intellectual in Modern France’, in J. Jennings and A. Kemp-Welch (eds), Intellectuals in Politics: From the Dreyfus Affair to Salman Rushdie, Routledge, 1997, p. 78. 101. Quoted in J. Sévillia, Le Terrorisme intellectuel de 1945 à nos jours (Intellectual Terrorism from 1945 to the Present Day), Perrin, 2000, pp. 125 and 127. 102. Although the state maintained ultimate control, there was, for example, an end of overt daily political interference with news coverage, the beginnings of access to TV for opposition politicians, and a more ‘objective’ coverage of opposition events – demonstrations, strikes, party congresses etc. 103. For example, 8 October 1976: ‘Are the French Communists Changing?’; 28 September 1979: ‘What New Right?’; 20 April 1979: ‘Intellectualjournalists’ quoted in R. Rieffel, La Tribu des clercs (The Tribe of Intellectuals), Calmann-Lévy, 1993, p. 606. 104. Ibid., p. 607. 105. These included the following literary programmes; ‘Droit de réponse’ (‘Right of Reply’) 1981–7; ‘Aujourd’hui Madame’ (‘Today Madame’) 1975–81; ‘Aujourd’hui la vie’ (‘Life Today’) 1981–6; ‘Ex-libris’ from 1988. 106. R. Debray, Le Pouvoir intellectuel en France, Éditions Ramsay, 1979. English translation by D. Macey, Teachers, Writers, Celebrities, Verso, 1981. 107. Debray, Teachers, Writers and Celebrities, pp. 1–2. 108. P. Bourdieu, Sur la télévision suivi de L’emprise du journalisme, Liber-Raisons d’agir, 1996. English translation by P. Parkhurst Ferguson, On Television and Journalism, Pluto Press, 1998. 109. C. Sales, ‘Les nouveaux philosophes: la révolte contre Marx’ (‘The New Philosophers: the Revolt against Marx’), Le Point, 4 July 1977, quoted in Quadruppani, Catalogue du prêt à penser français depuis 1968, op. cit., p. 82. 110. M. Winock, ‘La Fin des intellectuels?’ (‘The End of the Intellectuals’), Esprit, March–April 2000, p. 110. 111. Winock, ibid., p. 109. 112. Bernard-Henri Lévy, Eloge des intellectuels (In Praise of Intellectuals), Grasset, 1987, p. 7. 113. Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises, op. cit., p. 263. 114. ‘L’Influence des intellectuels’ (‘The Influence of the Intellectuals’), L’Express, 11 April, p. 90. 115. Bernard-Henri Lévy, Eloge des intellectuels, op. cit., p. 7.

6. From the ‘Silence of the Intellectuals’ to the End of the Millennium 1. Le Nouvel Observateur, 15 August 1981, p. 42, quoted by Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises, op. cit., p. 296. 2. Quoted in Sirinelli, ibid., p. 296. My emphasis.

Notes 235 3. Although Coluche did not in the end contest the Presidential elections, a flavour of his attitude to formal politics can be gleaned from his declaration on radio on 18 November 1980 announcing his intention to stand. ‘I want to go all the way and stir up the shit … Those politicians really piss us off’, quoted in Sirinelli, op. cit., p. 286. 4. N. Hewlett, Modern French Politics, Polity Press, 1998, p. 186. 5. Althusser’s most celebrated intervention was when Le Monde (25–28 April 1978) published four articles by Althusser (still a member of the PCF) on the strategy, organisation, ideology and perspectives of the Party entitled ‘Ce qui ne peut plus durer dans le PCF’ (‘What can’t go on any longer in the PCF’). 6. These discussions were originally published in three parts in Le Nouvel Observateur on 10 March, 17 March and 24 March 1980. A copyrighted translation by A. Foulke appeared in Dissent, Autumn 1980, pp. 397–422 and an unofficial translation by L. Hernandez, G. Waterston and C. Hubert was published in Telos , No. 44, Summer 1980, pp. 155–81. In 1991 the discussions appeared in French (with changes and additions by Benny Lévy) in book form as J.-P. Sartre and B. Lévy, L’Espoir Maintenant, Verdier 1991. English translation by A. van den Hoven, Hope Now: the 1980 Interviews, University of Chicago Press, 1996. 7. According to Le Monde, 15 October 1985, between 1945 and 1985 some 600 works were published on Sartre, and each year sees the publication of about 10 major studies and between 200 and 300 articles on Sartre. In 1979, Michel Rybalka estimated that an ideal bibliography on Sartre would contain between 15 000 and 16 000 entries. I. Galster, ‘Images actuelles de Sartre’ (Contemporary Images of Sartre’), Romantische Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte, Heidelberg, Vol. 11, No. 2, p. 215. 8. For example, in 1982, Annie Kriegel wrote of Sartre’s accumulation of ‘huge errors of analysis’, the incoherence of his thought and action, and his lack of judgement in political matters. Alain Finkielkraut referred to Sartre’s many political errors as did Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Olivier Todd, Le Quotidien de Paris, No. 936, 30 November 1982. Of course, attacks on Sartre were nothing new; what was new was the virtual absence of any defence of Sartre’s intellectual praxis. For most intellectuals in the 1980s, Sartre as an intellectual in the sense we have used it in this study had become either an embarrassment or an irrelevance (see also n. 8 below). 9. Bernard-Henri Lévy, Le Siècle de Sartre, Grasset, 2000. The front cover of the issue of Le Nouvel Observateur (13–19 January 2000), which gave extensive coverage of Lévy’s book, proclaimed ‘Après vingt ans de purgatoire, Sartre revient (‘After Twenty Years in Purgatory, Sartre’s Back’). 10. See Colquhoun, Vol. 2, op. cit., pp. 521–75. 11. R. Aron, Le Spectateur engagé, op. cit. 12. Aron, Mémoires: 50 ans de réflexion politique, op. cit. 13. See M. Cornick, ‘The Silence of the Left Intellectuals in Mitterrand’s France’, in M. Mclean (ed.), The Mitterrand Years: Legacy and Evaluation, Macmillan, 1998, pp. 300–13. 14. See for example, E. Malet, Socrate et la rose (Socrates and the Rose), Éditions du Quotidien, Paris 1983, whose contributors included historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, André Glucksmann, Bernard-Henri Lévy, quoted in K. Reader, op. cit., pp. 136–8.

236 Notes 15. Le Monde, 27 July 1983 quoted in Cornick, ‘The Silence of the Left Intellectuals in Mitterrand’s France’, op. cit., p. 305. 16. Le Débat, 13 June 1981, p. 12 quoted in Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises, op. cit., p. 300. 17. Cornick ‘The Silence of the Left Intellectuals in Mitterrand’s France’, op. cit., p. 305. 18. Quoted in J. Attali, Verbatim: Vol. 1 1981–1986, Fayard, 1993, p. 143. 19. See P. Favier and M. Martin-Rolland, La Décennie Mitterrand, Vol. 1 1981–1984 (The Mitterrand Decade, Vol. 1, 1981–1984 ), Éditions du Seuil, 1990, p. 447. 20. Quoted in Colquhoun, Vol. 2, op. cit., p. 561. 21. See Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises, op. cit., pp. 299–300. 22. According to Sirinelli (p. 302), it was published in Libération on 15 and 17 December and in a shortened form in Le Monde on 18 December. 23. The most extreme form of this type of mobilisation came in 1997 when some 60 film-makers initiated the mobilisation against the proposed Debré laws on immigration (see pp. 200–1 below). 24. See Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises, op. cit., pp. 306–7. 25. Ibid., pp. 307–8. 26. M. Gallo, ‘Les intellectuels, la politique et la modernité’ (‘The Intellectuals, Politics and Modernity’), Le Monde, 26 July 1983. For a complete list of the articles in Le Monde see ‘Le Silence des intellectuels de gauche?’ (‘The Silence of Left-Wing Intellectuals?’) ‘The long debate of summer 1983’, distributed by Dr Martyn Cornick at the 1996 Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France, Royal Holloway College, University of London, September 1996. See also M. Cornick, op. cit. 27. ‘Immigrant’ was a term applied by the FN not only to immigrants – especially those from the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa – but also their children and grandchildren who were born in France and in many cases held French nationality. 28. See Sirinelli, op. cit., pp. 310–17. 29. For a more on the intellectuals and the affaire du foulard, see D. Drake, ‘Intellectuals, Demonisation and Exclusion in the Dreyfus Affair and l’affaire du foulard’, in K. Chadwick and T. Unwin, New Perspectives on the Fin de Siècle in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century France, Edwin Mellen Press, 2000, pp. 43–60. 30. The girls in question refused to remove their foulard which translates as headscarf. However, in the debate around this affair the foulard is also referred to as a voile (a veil) or even a tchador (tchador), the full-length robe which reveals only the wearer’s face. 31. Religious instruction is therefore banned in French schools unlike in Britain where, under the 1944 Education Act, a Christian religious assembly must – in theory at least – be held daily. 32. J. Soustelle, ‘L’Identité culturelle de la France’ (‘France’s Cultural Identity’), Le Figaro, 2 November 1989. 33. A. Finkielkraut, ‘C’est la défaite de la laïcité et de la liberté’ , Le Figaro, 5 November 1992. 34. J.-M. Domenach, ‘Jean-Marie Domenach: “Un symbole d’asservissement de la femme”’ , Le Quotidien de Paris, 24 October 1989.

Notes 237 35. A. Glucksmann, ‘André Glucksmann: “Le Foulard islamique est un emblème terroriste”’ (‘The Islamic Headscarf is a Terrorist Emblem’), Le Figaro, 28 October 1994. 36. J.-C. Casanova and A. Glucksmann, ‘Le voile est taché de sang’ (‘The Veil is Stained with Blood’), L’Express, 17 November 1994. 37. F. Gaspard and F. Khosrokhavar, Le Foulard et la république, La Découverte, 1995; see also Gaspard and Khosrokhavar, ‘L’Egalité des filles avec ou sans voile’ (‘Equality for Girls, with or without the Veil’), Libération, 8 December 1994, p. 7; N. Herzberg, ‘Elles portent le foulard comme une deuxième chance’ (‘They Wear the Headscarf to Give Themselves a Second Chance’), Libération, 8 December 1994. 38. R. Debray, Que vive la République (Keep the Republic Alive), Éditions Odile Jacob, 1989, p. 13. 39. K. Reader, Régis Debray: a Critical Introduction, Pluto Press, 1995, p. 48. 40. F. Furet and D. Richet, La Révolution française (The French Revolution), Hachette, 1965; see J. Savilla, Le Terrorisme intellectuel de 1945 à nos jours, Perrin, 2000, p. 160. 41. F. Furet, Penser la Révolution française (Thinking the French Revolution), Gallimard, 1978. 42. F. Furet and M. Ozouf, Dictionnaire de la Révolution française (Dictionary of the French Revolution), Flammarion, 1988. 43. A. Cobban, Le Sens de la Révolution française (The Meaning of the French Revolution), Julliard, 1984. English original published as The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution, Cambridge University Press, 1964. 44. F. Crouzet, De la Supériorité de l’Angleterre sur la France (On the Question of England’s Superiority over France), Perrin, 1985. 45. ‘Profs, ne capitulons pas!’ (‘Teachers let’s stand firm!’), Le Nouvel Observateur, 2 November 1989. 46. E. Badinter, ‘Je suis fière des profs’ (‘I’m Proud of the Teachers’), Le Nouvel Observateur, 9 November 1989. 47. A. Finkielkraut, ‘C’est la défaite de la laïcité et de la liberté’ (‘It is the Defeat of Secularism and Freedom’), Le Figaro, 5 November 1992. 48. Casanova and Glucksmann, op. cit. 49. A. Touraine, ‘La Peur républicaine’ (‘The Republican Fear’), L’Express, 17 November 1994. 50. ‘Pour une laïcité ouverte’ (‘For an Open Secularism’), Politis, 9–15 November 1989. 51. For a more detailed analysis, see D. Drake ‘French Intellectuals and the Second Algeria War’, Contemporary French Civilization, Vol. 24, No. 2, Summer/Fall 2000, pp. 287–309. 52. B.-H. Lévy, La Pureté dangereuse (Dangerous Purity), Grasset, 1994. 53. A. Glucksmann, ‘En Algérie j’ai pleuré aux portes du XXIe siècle’ (‘In Algeria I Wept at the Gates of the Twenty First Century’), L’Express, 28 January 1998. 54. B.-H. Lévy, ‘Le Bloc-notes de Bernard-Henri Lévy’, Le Point, 4 March 1995. 55. Glucksmann, op. cit. 56. A. Glucksmann and R. Goupil, ‘Qui juge qui?’ (‘Who’s Judging Whom?’), Le Monde, 4 April 1998.

238 Notes 57. P. Vidal-Naquet and F. Gèze, ‘L’Algérie et les intellectuels français’ (‘Algeria and the French Intellectuals’), Le Monde, 4 February 1988. 58. P. Bourdieu, ‘Pour que cesse l’horreur’ (‘Stop the horror’), Le Nouvel Observateur, 30 March 1994. See also Bourdieu’s protest at the by-line to this article in ‘Algérie: Une lettre de Pierre Bourdieu’ (‘Algeria: a Letter from Pierre Bourdieu’), Le Nouvel Observateur, 13 April 1994. For another reference by Bourdieu on the possibility of state involvement in atrocities against civilians, see P. Bourdieu and J. Leca, ‘Avec les intellectuels algériens’ (‘With the Algerian Intellectuals’), Le Monde, 7 October 1994. 59. P. Bourdieu, J. Derrida and S. Nair, ‘Non-assistance à une personne en danger’ (‘Absence of Help to a Person in Danger’), Le Monde, 29 December 1994; J.-C. Barreau, ‘Quand les intellectuels manquent de rigeur’ (‘When the Intellectuals Get Sloppy’), Le Monde, 6 January 1995; P. Bourdieu and J. Derrida, ‘M. Pasqua, son conseiller et les étrangers’ (‘Monsieur Pasqua, his Adviser and the Foreigners’), Le Monde, 10 January 1995. 60. P. Bourdieu and J. Leca, ‘Non à la ghettoïsation de l’Algérie’ (‘No to the Ghettoisation of Algeria’), Le Monde, 25 March 1995. 61. F. Burgat et al., ‘Alger vaut bien une explication’ (‘Algiers is Well Worth an Explanation’), Libération, 8 February 1998. 62. F. Burgat, L’Islamisme en face (A Close Look at Islamic Fundamentalism), La Découverte, 1995, p. 159. 63. ‘François Burgat sur le sens de son engagement dans la problématique algérienne’ (‘F. Burgat on the Meaning of his Position on the Algerian Question’), Le Soir (Brussels), 19 March 1998. 64. See Burgat, ‘Alger vaut bien une explication’, op. cit. 65. ‘Entretien avec Alain Finkielkraut: Europe – La Crise de conscience’, (‘Interview with Alain Finkielkraut: Europe – The Crisis of Conscience’), Politique Internationale, Autumn 1995, p. 231. 66. See, for example, the statement in 1996 by Abdelkrim Ould Adda, leading member of the FIS responsible resident in Belgium. ‘The institutions must be chosen by the people, the principle of alternance (governments presenting themselves for re-election and, in the event of losing, being replaced by an opposition party) must be respected, individual rights and freedoms must be preserved, minorities must be protected …’ P. Denaud, Algérie. Le FIS: Sa direction parle, (Algeria. The FIS: Its Leaders Speak), L’Harmattan, 1997, p. 107. 67. Although Miloševic´’s reluctance to hold multi-party elections was ‘conspicuous’ (Misha Glenny), they did eventually take place in December 1990. Despite Miloševic´ retaining tight control over the mass media and, facing an opposition with no funding, no experience and almost no media exposure, his Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) only managed to win 48 per cent of the vote. 68. M. Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia, Penguin Books, second edition, 1993, p. 42. 69. Ibid., p. 89. 70. Ibid., p. 87. 71. P. Besson and J. Dutourd, Avec les Serbes (With the Serbs), Lausanne, L’Age d’homme, 1996.

Notes 239 72. For a polemical critique of the anti-Serbian stance adopted by Finkielkraut, Lévy, Glucksmann and others see D. Salvatore Schiffer, Les Ruines de l’intelligence, Édition Wern, 1997. 73. See, for example, A. Fienkelkraut, Comment peut-on être Croat? (How Can You be a Croat?), Gallimard, 1992; A. Finkielkraut, ‘Le Réveil des petites nations’ (‘The Awakening of the Small Nations’), Politique Internationale, No. 55, Spring 1992, pp. 49–63. 74. B.-H. Lévy, Le Lys et la cendre (The Lily and the Embers), Grasset/Livre de Poche, 1996, p. 53. 75. B.-H. Lévy, ‘La Yougoslavie au coeur’, Politique Internationale, No. 57, Autumn 1992, p. 280. 76. A. Lévy Willard and M. Semo, ‘De l’indifférence de Vukovar à la passion de Sarajevo: comment l’intelligentsia française a basculé dans l’engagement’ (‘From Indifference over Vukovar to Passion over Sarajevo: How the French Intelligentsia Swung into Commitment’), Libération, 14–15 September, 1996, p. 11. 77. Reproduced in B.-H. Lévy, Idées fixes, (Set Ideas), Livre de Poche, 1992, pp. 82–4 and in Lévy, Le Lys et la cendre, op. cit., pp. 73–5. 78. Lévy, Idées fixes, op. cit., p. 82. 79. Quoted in ‘De l’indifférence …’, p. 11. 80. Lévy, Le Lys et la cendre, p. 25. 81. Lévy, Idées fixes, p. 89. 82. Lévy, Le Lys et la cendre, pp. 50–1. 83. Quoted in ‘De l’indifférence …’, p. 11. 84. Lévy, Le Lys et la cendre, pp. 54–5. 85. Ibid., pp. 64–72. 86. Quoted in V. Bosquet, La Réaction des intellectuels français face à la guerre de Yougoslavie 1991–1995 (‘The Reaction of French Intellectuals to the War in Yugoslavia’), Masters thesis (unpublished), University of Toulouse – Le Mirail, September 1997, p. 144. 87. Lévy, Le Lys et la cendre, p. 166. 88. Bosna!, which was screened at the Cannes Festival in 1994, had a mixed reception. For example, Le Point gave it very favourable coverage drawing a parallel between Bosna! and Zola’s J’accuse (‘Le sang de ‘Bosna!’ (The Blood of Bosna! ) and ‘Bosna!: le ‘J’accuse de BHL est un grand et beau film’ (Bosna!: BHL’s J’accuse is a great and beautiful film’)), Le Point, No. 1130, 14 May 1994, pp. 60–2. On the other hand Daniel Salvatore Schiffer, writing in Le Quotidien de Paris, referred to it as ‘an incredible piece of propaganda, unbelievably manichaean and partisan, dogmatic even, so as a result, unworthy of any self-respecting intellectual.’ Daniel Salvatore Schiffer, ‘Bosnie: le nouveau opium des intellectuels’ (‘Bosnia: the New Opium of the Intellectuals’), Le Quotidien de Paris, 30 May 1994. 89. B.-H. Lévy, Eloge des intellectuels, op. cit. 90. Lévy, Le Lys et la cendre, p. 24. 91. ‘BHL, l’autre “ministre des Affaires étrangères”’ (‘BHL, the Other “Minister of Foreign Affairs”’ ), Le Figaro, 11 June 1993. 92. ‘L’histoire secrète de la liste Sarajevo’ (‘The Secret Story of the Sarajevo List’), Globe Hebdo, No. 68, 25–31 May 1994, p. 10. 93. Ibid., p. 11.

240 Notes 94. R. Debray, ‘Lettre d’un voyageur au président de la République’ (‘Letter from a Traveller to the President of the Republic’), Le Monde, 13 May 1999. 95. R. Debray, ‘Ce que j’ai vraiment dit’ (‘What I Really Said’), Le Nouvel Observateur, 23 May 1999, p. 82 96. B.-H. Lévy, ‘Adieu Régis Debray’, Le Monde, 14 May 1999. 97. For an analysis of Debray’s open letter and the responses to it, see R.J. Golsan, ‘Old Wine in New Bottles? Kosovo and the “Debray Affair”’ , Contemporary French Civilization, Vol. 24, No. 2, Summer/Fall 2000, pp. 341–58. 98. J.-J. Becker, Histoire politique de la France depuis 1945 (A Political History of France since 1945), Armand Colin, 1998, p. 193. 99. O. Mongin, ‘Une Angoisse suicidaire’ (‘Suicidal Anguish’), Politis, 14 December 1995, pp. 12–13. 100. Ibid., p. 12. 101. Ibid., p. 13. 102. Robert Linhart was a leader of the UJCM-L in May 1968 who instructed members of the revolutionary organisation to be wary of the student movement and not to go to the Latin Quarter during what became ‘the night of the barricades’. He paid the price both politically (marginalisation within the UJCM-L) and personally (a nervous breakdown) for this monumental misjudgement. 103. N. Linhart, ‘On récupère notre âme’ (‘We’re recouping our soul’), Politis, 14 December, p. 13. 104. P. Bourdieu, ‘Contre la destruction d’une civilisation’ (‘Against the Destruction of a Civilisation’), in P. Bourdieu, Contre-feux, Propos pour servir à la résistance contre l’invasion neo-libérale (Counterblast, Comments for Use in the Resistance to the Neo-liberal Invasion), Raisons d’agir, 1998, p. 30 (italics in the original). 105. http://www.liberation.com/manifeste/1997.html 106. See, for example, his support for Coluche in 1981, his backing of Solidarity, and his political activities over Algeria post-1992 already discussed. 107. P. Bourdieu, ‘Pour une gauche de gauche’ (‘For a Leftwing Left’), Le Monde, 8 April 1998. 108. Ibid., p. 13. 109. P. Girard, ‘Bourdieu, celui qui prépare la révolution’ (‘Bourdieu, the Man Who’s Paving the Way for the Revolution’), L’Évenement du Jeudi, 25 June– 1 July 1998, p. 39. 110. J. Verdès-Leroux, Refus et violences (Refusal and Violence), Gallimard, 1996. 111. J Verdès-Leroux, Le savant et la politique: Essai sur le terrorisme sociologique de Pierre Bourdieu (The Wise Man and Politics: an Essay on the Sociological Terrorism of Pierre Bourdieu), Grasset, 1998. 112. A. Finkielkraut, ‘Bourdieu et les forces du mal’ (‘Bourdieu and the Forces of Evil’), L’Express, 20 August 1988. For an example of what Finkielkraut was criticising see P. Bourdieu et al., ‘Les Actions de chômeurs flamment’, Le Monde, 17 January 1998, where he wrote: ‘Mass unemployment remains in effect the most effective weapon that the bosses have to impose a freeze on wages or a reduction in wages, the intensification of work, the worsening of working conditions … [and] the establishment of new forms of domination in the workplace and the dismantling of agreements governing work and working conditions’ (code du travail).

Notes 241 113. O. Mongin and J. Roman, ‘Le populisme version Bourdieu ou la tentation du mépris’ (‘Bourdieu-style Populism or the Temptation of Contempt’), Esprit, No. 244, p. 159. 114. For example, Bourdieu’s little book Sur la télévision (On Television), 1996, sold over 100 000 copies and over 200 000 copies were sold of Serge Halimi’s Les Nouveaux Chiens de garde (The New Watchdogs), 1997, and of J. Duval et al., Le ‘décembre’ des intellectuels français (The ‘December’ of the French Intellectuals), 1998. 115. Duval et al., Le ‘décembre’ des intellectuels français, p. 47. 116. M. Lazar, ‘Pierre Bourdieu à la recherche du peuple perdu’ (‘Pierre Bourdieu in Search of the Lost Popular Classes’), Esprit, June 1998, p. 160. 117. Les Temps modernes, No. 310 bis, 1972, ‘Nouveau fascisme et nouvelle démocratie’ (‘New Fascism and New Democracy’). 118. M. Lazar, ‘Pierre Bourdieu à la recherche du peuple perdu’, op. cit., p. 158. 119. M. Contat ‘Le “cas Bourdieu” en examen’ (‘The “case of Bourdieu” under Examination’), Le Monde, 29 August 1998. 120. Quoted in P. Girard, ‘Bourdieu: celui qui prépare la révolution’, op. cit., p. 40. 121. Sartre often, as in the case of his support for the FLN in Algeria, saw his commitment as being part of a wider movement, but this is not the same thing. 122. Bourdieu, ‘Pour une gauche de gauche’, op. cit., p. 13. 123. P. Bourdieu, ‘Les intellectuels et les pouvoirs’ (‘Intellectuals and the Powers that Be’) in Michel Foucault, Une histoire de la vérité (The History of Truth), pp. 93–4; ‘The Corporatism of the Universal: the Role of Intellectuals in the Modern World’, Telos, Fall 1989, pp. 99–110. Quoted in Jennings, ‘Of Treason, Blindness and Reason’, op. cit., p. 79. 124. ‘Pierre Bourdieu devient la référence intellectuelle du “mouvement social”’ (‘Pierre Bourdieu Becomes the Intellectual Reference-Point of the Social Movement’), Le Monde, 8 May 1998. 125. O. Mongin, ‘Fin de partie’ (‘Endgame’), Esprit, March–April 2000, pp. 7–11, quoted in C. Flood and R. Golsan, ‘Intellectuals in the 1990s’ Contemporary French Civilization, Vol. 24, No. 2, Summer/Fall 2000, p. 171.

Conclusion 1. See, for example, Polly Toynbee, ‘The Lesson from America is that Europe is our only Hope’, The Guardian, 23 August 2000. 2. This is not to idealise the situation in France. One should not forget the strict government censorship which prevailed during the Algerian War and de Gaulle’s refusal to allow the Russell Tribunal to be located in France. 3. J. Paxman, The English: a Portrait of a People, Michael Joseph, 1998, p. 188. 4. The term ‘chattering classes’ is also applied to intellectuals outside the UK. During the campaign in favour of the ‘sans-papiers’, an article by John Lichfield in The Independent appeared under the headline ‘Moral revolution of the French chattering classes’, The Independent, 21 February 1997, p. 10. 5. There are of course anti-intellectual currents in France. All I am suggesting here is that there are strong counter-currents which are underpinned by a number of historical factors which are absent in Britain. For example, a historical commitment to ‘reason’, to the importance of ideas, to an education system that is (in theory at least) meritocratic.

Select Bibliography of French Texts

General historical texts J.-J. Becker, Histoire politique de la France depuis 1945, Armand Colin, 1998

General texts on intellectuals Chebel d’Appollonia, Histoire politique des intellectuels en France 1944–1954, Vols 1 and 2, Éditions Complexe, 1991 R. Debray, Le Pouvoir intellectuel en France, Editions Ramsay, 1979 J. Julliard and M. Winock, Dictionnaire des intellectuels français, Éditions du Seuil, 1996 M. Leymarie, Les Intellectuels et la politique en France, Presses Universitaires de France, 2001 (Collection Que Sais-Je?, No. 3584) P. Ory and J.-F. Sirinelli, Les Intellectuels français en France de l’Affaire Dreyfus à nos jours, Armand Colin, 1986, updated edition 1992 R. Rieffel, La Tribu des clercs: Les intellectuels sous la Ve République, Calmann-Lévy, 1993 J.-F. Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises: Manifestes et pétitions au XXe siècle, Fayard, 1990 M. Winock, Le Siècle des intellectuels, Éditions du Seuil, 1997, 1999 Un Siècle de manifestes, Saga, 1998 (?)

Texts on specific intellectuals or topics R. Aron, Mémoires: 50 ans de réfléxion politique, Julliard, 1983 R. Aron, Le Spectateur engagé, Flammarion, 1981 P. Assouline, L’Epuration des intellectuels, Éditions Complexe, 1990 N. Baverez, Raymond Aron, Flammarion, 1993 A. Boschetti, Sartre et ‘Les temps modernes’, Éditions de Minuit, 1985 M.-A. Burnier, Les Existentialistes et la politique, Gallimard (Collection Idées), 1966 A. Cohen-Solal, Sartre 1905–1980, Gallimard, 1985 M. Contat and M. Rybalka, Les Ecrits de Sartre: Chronologie, bibliographie commentée, Gallimard, 1970 D. Eribon, Michel Foucault, Flammarion, 1989 J. Lacouture, Malraux, une vie dans le siècle, Éditions du Seuil, 1973 J. Lacouture, François Mauriac, Vol. 2, Un citoyen du siècle 1933–1970, Éditions du Seuil, 1980 F. Mauriac, Mémoires politiques, Bernard Grasset, 1967 J. Mossuz-Lavau, André Malraux et le gaullisme, Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1982 242

Bibliography 243 G. Sapiro, La Guerre des Écrivains, Fayard, 1999 J.-F. Sirinelli, Deux intellectuels dans le siècle, Sartre et Aron, Fayard 1995 O. Todd, Albert Camus, une vie, Gallimard, 1996 J. Verdès-Leroux, Au Service du parti: Le Parti communiste, les intellectuels et la culture (1944–1956), Fayard/Éditions de Minuit, 1983 J. Verdès-Leroux, Le Réveil des somnambules: Le Parti communiste, les intellectuels et la culture (1956–1985), Fayard/Editions de Minuit, 1987 M. Winock, ‘Esprit’: Des intellectuels dans la cité, 1930–1950, Éditions du Seuil, 1996

Index abortion, 1971 manifesto, 146, 172 Action, 38 Adler, Laure, 204 Affaire du foulard, see Headscarf affair Afghanistan, 182 Algeria, 106–27, 182–7 Comité de salut public, 117, 120 conciliateurs and éradicateurs, 184–6 Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), 108, 121, 122 insurrection to death of Fourth Republic, 106–17 1958 to independence (1962), 117–27 la paix des braves, 120 les petits blancs, 119 pieds noirs, 107, 109, 110, 112 la semaine des barricades, 120 War of Independence, 91, 107 Alleg, Henri, La Question, 114 Alsace-Lorraine Brigade, 47 Althusser, Louis, 130 death, 168 Altman, Georges, 60, 87 American Federation of Labour (AFL), 87 Angrand, Cécile, 29 Annam, 97 declaration of independence, 97–8 Antelme, Robert, 107 Apostrophes, 163 Appel à l’opinion pour une paix négociée en Algérie française, 123 Aragon, Louis, 13, 15, 44, 57, 153, 156 Arendt, Hannah, 88, 161 Aron, Raymond, 2, 6, 23, 26, 27, 33, 54, 87, 153 attitude to Indochina, 99 condemnation of 1968 student revolt, 133 death, 168

directeur de cabinet to Malraux, 11, 45, 54 and Gaullism, 44–51 L’Algérie et la république, 118 La France Libre, 45 La Révolution introuvable, 133, 135 La Tragédie algérienne, 115–16 Le Grand Schisme, 46 Les Guerres en chaîne, 100 L’Opium des intellectuels, 89, 90, 158 membership of RPF, 35, 44, 46–7, 54 resignation from Combat, 54 Aronson, Ronald, 24 Astruc, Alexander, 141 Attali, Jacques, 169 Aubral, François, 151 Audran, Stéphane, 176 Audry, Colette, 132 Auriol, Vincent, 36, 78 Auteil, Daniel, 200 Aveline, Claude, 73 Ayatollah Khomeini, 156, 157, 182 Aymé, Marcel, 19 Azéma, Jean-Pierre, 176 Baby, Jean, 73 Bachelier, Jean, 134 Badinter, Elisabeth, 180 Balladur, Edouard, 194, 196 Bani-Sadr, Abolhasan, 156 Bao Dai, 97 declaration of independence, 97–8 recognition by West, 104 Barbie, Klaus, 12 Barre, Raymond, 154, 157 Barreau, Jean-Claude, 185 Barthes, Roland, 123, 140, 153 death, 168 Bataille du Livre, 43 Beau de Loménie, Emmanuel, 116 244

Index Beauvoir, Simone de, 5, 9, 11, 25, 53, 94, 122, 153 articles in Les Temps modernes, 55 attitude to Russian labour camps, 69 denunciation of Gaullism, 53 Le Sang des autres, 24, 29 women’s liberation movement, 145 Bedel, Jean, 81 Bedos, Guy, 176 Belmondo, Jean-Paul, 172 Ben Bella, Ahmed, 114 Benda, Julien, La Trahison des clercs, 38, 158 Benhadj, Ali, 183 Bensaïd, Daniel, 199 Béraud, Henri, trial of, 14 Berlin, Isaiah, 88, 161 Bernanos, Georges, 100 Besançon, Alain, 95, 134 Besson, Patrick, Avec les Serbes, 189 Beuve-Méry, Hubert, 51 Bidault, Georges, 117 Birchall, Ian, 88 Blair, Tony, 206 Blanchot, Maurice, 122 Blum, Léon, 18, 36, 169 Bondy, François, 89 Borkenau, Franz, 88 Bouc, Alain, 140 Bourdet, Claude, 96, 112 Bourdieu, Pierre, 3, 199 Algerian immigrants, 185 as new Sartre, 201–4 statement on Poland, 172, 173 support of mouvement social, 168, 197 work as sociologist, 161 Brasillach, Robert, 14, 16 trial of, 17–19 Breton, André, 61, 103, 108, 123 Brown, Irving, 87 Broyelle, Claudie, 153, 157 Broyelle, Jacques, 153, 157 Bruckner, Pascal, 190, 197 Buber, Martin, 66 Buber-Neumann, Margarete, 66 Burgat, François, 185 Burnham, James, 87

245

Cambodia, 97, 151, 152 Camus, Albert, 2, 13, 27, 87, 162 articles on Indochina, 100 attendance at RDR conference, 61 death, 120 fear of PCF takeover of wartime resistance movement, 83 L’Étranger, 109 ‘Lettre au directeur des Temps modernes’, 85 L’Homme révolté, 84 liberation of Paris, 9 ‘Ni Victimes ni bourreaux’, 84 position on Algeria, 109–11 position on épuration, 16 quarrel with Sartre, 82–6 receipt of Nobel Prize, 121 support for Malraux, 83 Canguilhem, Georges, 123 Carrefour, 116 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 200 Cassou, Jean, 74, 79 expulsion from Peace Movement, 80 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 3, 172, 192 Castro, Roland, 199 Catroux, General, 114 Cau, Jean, 94 Caute, David, 37 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 14 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 62, 89 Centre du Landy, 113 Ce Soir, 56 Chaban-Delmas, Jacques, 117, 154 Chabrol, Claude, 172, 176 Chadli, Bendjedid, 182, 183 Chagall, Marc, 49 Chauffard, R.-J., 53 Cheysson, Claude, 171 China, 77, 138 Cultural Revolution, 138 popularity in France, 139 Chinese Communist Party, 139 Chirac, Jacques, 154, 157, 178–9, 196 Churchill, Winston, 34 Cixous, Hélène, 6 Claudel, Paul, 19 Clavel, Maurice, 164

246 Index Cobban, Alfred, 180 Cochinchina, 97, 98 Cocteau, Jean, 4, 103 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 130, 131, 133 Cold War, 4, 33, 34–62 Combat, 9, 26, 46, 52 articles on Indochina, 99 ‘Ni Victimes ni bourreaux’, 84 Combattants de la paix et de la liberté, 79 Cominform anti-Tito campaign, 72 founding of, 35, 36 Comintern, 63 Comité d’action contre la poursuite de la guerre en Afrique du Nord, 107, 108 Comité d’Action des Prisonniers, 143 Comité d’épuration de l’édition, 13 Comité de salut public, 117, 120 Comité des intellectuels pour l’Europe des libertés, 152 Comité International de Soutien aux Intellectuels Algériens (Cisia), 185 Comité Maurice Audin, 113 Comité national des écrivains (CNE), 13 Comités d’enterprise, 53 Communist Information Bureau, see Cominform Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), 59 Twentieth Congress, 91–3 Comolli, Jean-Louis, 172 Compton, Arthur, 62 Compton, Carl, 62 Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), 132 Congrès pour la Liberté de la Culture, 87 Constant, Benjamin, 161 Cornick, Martyn, 5, 171 Cornu, 31 Costa-Gavras, 172, 175, 176 Coty, René, 117, 120 CPSU, see Communist Party of the Soviet Union crisis of the intellectuals, 158–66 Croatia, 188

Crouzet, François, 180 Cuardernos, 89 Cuban missile crisis, 128 Cuisinier, Jeanne, 103 Daeninckx, Didier, 199 Daix, Pierre, 160 Dalmas, Louis, Le Communisme yougoslave depuis la rupture avec Moscou, 76 Danas, ‘Yougoslavie: Halte an Massacre’, 190 Daniel, Jean, 120 Dannaud, Jean-Pierre, 104 Daquin, Louis, 79 Darlan, Admiral, 17 d’Astier de la Vigerie, Emmanuel, 79 Davis, Gary, 62 de Benoist, Alain, 155 de Châteaubriant, Alphonse, 14 de Fontenay, Elisabeth, 180 de Gaulle, Charles, 9 death, 135–6 as Head of Government, 118 as Head of Provisional Government, 10 radio broadcast attacking, 53 de Jouvenel, Renaud, 73 de Montherlant, Henri, 14 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 161, 180 de Villefosse, Louis, 94 Debray, Régis, 137, 179, 195, 199 Le Pouvoir intellectuel en France, 163 Révolution dans la révolution, 137 Debré, Jean-Louis, 199 Debré Michel, 117 Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie (Manifeste des 121), 122–4 Delcourt, Xavier, 151 Deleuze, Gilles, 168, 171, 173 Groupe d’information sur les prisons (GIP), 142 Delors, Jacques, 191 Démocratie nouvelle, 102 Deneuve, Catherine, 146, 172, 200 Denis, Benoît, 3 Depardieu, Gérard, 176

Index Derrida, Jacques, 168, 185, 199 des Forêts, Louis-René, 107 Desanti, Dominique, 28, 66, 73, 95, 153 Desanti, Jean-Toussaint, 39, 95, 153, 190 Désir, Harlem, 181 Dewevre, Brigitte, 144 Dien Bien Phu, 105, 117 Doisneau, Robert, 38 Domenach, Jean-Marie, 75, 107, 112, 160, 173, 177 expulsion from Peace Movement, 80 Groupe d’information sur les prisons (GIP), 142 d’Ormesson, Jean, 190 Dormoy, Max, assassination, 17 Dos Passos, John, 44, 62 Dreux by-election, 174–6 Dreyfus Affair, 1, 113 Drieu La Rochelle, Pierre, 14, 16, 23 Nouvelle Revue française, 26 Droit à la difference, 181 Duclos, Jacques, 41, 79, 92 Duhamel, Georges, 18, 87, 111 Dumas, Roland, 122, 194 Dumont, René, 181 Duras, Marguerite, 5, 122, 132, 146, 172 Dutourd, Jean, 189 Duverger, Maurice, 90 Duvignaud, Jean, 73, 88 École Normale Supérieure, 54, 130, 137 Eluard, Paul, 14, 15, 44, 79 Emmanuelli, Henri, 200 Encounter, 89 Enseignement Public, 123 Épuration, 12–23 Eradicateurs, 184, 185, 186 Esprit, 55, 64, 94 articles on Algeria, 107 attitude to Yugoslavia, 74 ‘Il ne faut pas tromper le peuple’, 74 opposition to Indochina War, 101–2 torture in Algeria, 113 Etiemble, René, 81

247

existentialism, 4, 23–33 existentialist offensive, 24 extreme right, 174–6 Fabius, Laurent, 178 Fanon, Frantz, Les Damnés de la terre, 124 Farge, Yves, 79 Faure, Edgar, 136 Fauvet, Jacques, 172 Fédération de l’Éducation Nationale (FEN), 123 Fetjö, François, 74, 152, 172, 192 Filipacchi, Daniel, 129 Finkielkraut, Alain, 177, 180, 181, 186, 189, 192, 195, 197 FLN, see Algerian Front de Libération Nationale Fontainebleau conference, 98 Force Ouvrière, 111 formless freedom, 31 Forum, 89 Foucault, Michel, 3, 7, 141, 172, 173 Groupe d’information sur les prisons (GIP), 142 Iran, 156–8 support for Iranian Revolution, 7 Fourth Republic, founding of, 9–12 France-Observateur, 94, 96, 112, 121 France-Soir, 121 Franco-Soviet Association, 95 French Communist Party (PCF), 5, 6, 27 acknowledgement of scope of 1968 movement, 131 Action, 38 anti-Tito campaign, 72–3 attack on Sartre’s existentialism, 27–32 attitude to Russian labour camps, 63–4, 67 attitude to USSR, 58 intellectuals and, 37–44 le parti des 75 000 fusillés, 12, 40 position on Indochina, 101 rivalry with de Gaulle, 10 support for, 11 support for invasion of Hungary, 93 French Legion Against Bolshevism, 18

248 Index French Resistance, 40 French Revolution, 28 Front d’Action et de Co-ordination des Universitaires et Intellectuels pour un rassemblement antifasciste (FAC), 126 Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), 183 Front Islamique du Salut (FIS), 183 Front National, 7, 175, 178 Furet, François, 134, 173, 180 Gaillard, Félix, 117 Gallimard, Gaston, 18 Gallo, Max, 174 Garaudy, Roger, 29, 30, 75 Gauche prolétarienne, 140 Gauchisme, 135–45 Gauchistes, 131 Gaullism, 44–51 Geismar, Alain, 142, 173 Gélin, Daniel, 175 Genet, Jean, 141 George, Françoise, 171 Gèze, François, 197 Gide, André, 87 Giono, Jean, 14 Giraudoux, Jean, 18 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry, 147, 154, 157, 171, 176 Glucksmann, André, 153, 164, 172, 173, 176, 177, 184, 190, 192, 200 La Cuisnière et le mangeur d’hommes, 149 Le Discours de la guerre, 149 Godard, Jean-Luc, 172 Gorz, André, 132 Goude, Jean-Paul, 179 Goupil, Romain, 194 Grosser, Alfred, 134 Group d’Information Santé, 143 Groupe d’Information et de soutien des travailleurs immigrés (GISTI), 143 Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (GIP), 142–3 Groupement de recherche et d’études sur la civilization européenne (GRECE), 154

Groupuscules, 130, 140 Guéhenno, Jean, 108 Guérin, Daniel, 132 Guevara, Che, 137 Guillemin, Henri, 79 Guillevic, Eugène, 156 Guitry, Sacha, 14 Gulf War, 189 Hadj, Messali, 109 Halimi, Gisèle, 146 Hanoi, 98 Hayman, Ronald, 25 Headscarf affair, 167, 176–82 Heidegger, Martin, 24, 28 Henriot, Emile, 21 Hewitt, Nicholas, 86 Ho Chi Minh, 98, 101 visit to Peking, 104 Hook, Sidney, 62, 87 Hungary, 1956 uprising and Soviet invasion, 93–6 Husserl, Edmund, 24, 28 Huxley, Julian, 44 immigration, suspension of, 176–7 Indochina, 97–106 Institut Allemand, 18 Institut de Recherches et d’études sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman, 185 intellectual-journalists, 165 International Day of Resistance to Dictatorship and War, 61–2 Ionesco, Eugène, 152, 160, 190 Iran, 156–8 Irigaray, Luce, 6 Islam fundamentalism, 177 spread in France, 167 threat of, 176 Isorni, Jacques, 17 Izetbegovic, Alija, 191, 194, 195 Jankelevitch, Vladimir, 123, 153, 173, 176 Japan backs Bao Dai, 97 defeat of, 97–8

Index Jaruzelski, General Wojciech, 171 Jaspers, Karl, 88 Jaurès, Jean, 169 Jeanson, Francis, 85, 119, 122 Jennings, Jeremy, 161 Jeune Résistance, 119 Jeunesse communiste révolutionnaire (JCR), 130 Joliot-Curie, Frédéric, 37, 41, 79 Joliot-Curie, Irène, 37, 79 Jospin, Lionel, 180, 181, 196 Jouhandeau, Marcel Chaminadour, 15 Chroniques maritales, 15 Joxe, Pierre, 175 Jugoslovenska Narodna Armija, 188 Juin, Marshal, 124 Julliard, Jacques, 172, 192, 197 Juppé, Alain, 194, 196, 201 Kanapa, Jean, Tito, Maréchal des traitres, 73 Karol, K. S. 140 Kessous, Aziz, 110 Khmer Rouge, 151, 152 Khruschev, Nikita, 91 Kintzler, Catherine, 180 Koestler, Arthur, 64, 87, 88 Darkness at Noon, 67 Kojève, Alexandre, 133 Korea, 76–7 Korean War, 77–9 Kouchner, Bernard, 153, 194 Kravchenko, Victor, 65, 148, 149 I Chose Freedom, 65 trial of, 63, 65–6, 74 Kriegel, Annie, 88, 134 Kristeva, Julia, 6, 152, 160–1 Krivine, Alain, 175, 199 Kundera, Milan, 190 La Cause du Peuple, 140, 141 La Cause du Peuple/J’Accuse, 144 La France libre, 44, 45, 54 ‘L’Ombre des Bonapartes’, 45 ‘Vive la République’, 45 La Gauche prolétarienne, 136 La Nouvelle Critique, 95 La Règle du jeu, 193

249

La Table ronde, 86, 87 Lacan, Jacques, 132 death, 168 Lacouture, Jean, 154 Lang, Jack, 168 Langlois, Henri, 172 Lanzmann, Claude, 81, 94, 122 Loas, 97 Laski, Harold, 44 Lasky, Melvin, 87 Laval, Pierre, 117 Lazar, Marc, 202 Le ‘décembre’ des intellectuels français, 202 Le droit à l’erreur, 15, 22 Le Figaro, 54, 133 articles on Indochina, 99–100 Manifeste des Intellectuels Français, 123 Le Figaro littéraire, Nizan case, 57 Le Matin, 171 Le Monde, 89, 90, 92, 173 ‘Appel des intellectuels en soutien aux grévistes’, 198 ‘France ma patrie’, 113 ‘Pour le salut et le renouveau de l’Algérie française’, 111 ‘Yougoslavie: Halte au Massacre’, 190 Le Nouvel Observateur, 96, 133, 168, 180 Sartre interview, 134 women’s manifesto, 146 Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 175 Le Roy Laudrie, Emmanuel, 134, 173 Leca, Jacques, 185 Leclerc, General, 98 Leduc, Victor, 73 Lefebvre, Henri, 29, 31, 95, 132 L’Existentialisme, 57 Lefort, Claude, 3, 68, 81, 173, 197 Un Homme en trop, 149 Léger, Fernand, 79 Leiris, Michel, 26, 38, 94, 132, 141 Léotrad, François, 194 Les Hussards, 87 Les Lettres françaises, 65, 66, 67, 74, 75 Les sans-papiers, 199–201

250 Index Les Temps modernes, 4–5, 24–7, 33, 52–8, 64–71, 76–8, 81–6, 88, 101–6 attitude to Russian labour camps, 68–71 ‘Et Bourreaux et Victimes’, 102–3 ‘Le Yogi et le prolétaire’, 67 opposition to Indochina War, 101–6 ‘Pour la vérité’, 58, 59 attitude to Korean War, 77–8 Tito affair, 76 Levi, Carlo, 61 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 83, 133 Lévy, Benny, 144, 146, 169 Lévy, Bernard-Henri, 3, 150, 164, 166, 184, 200 Éloge des intellectuels, 193 La Pureté dangeureuse, 184 opposition to Serbian aggression, 190 writings of, 165 L’Express, 95, 108 L’Humanité, 71, 72, 112 obituary to Emmanuel Mounier, 76 response to Vercors manifesto, 94 Liber-Raisons d’agir, 202 Libération, 147 Liberation of Paris, 9–12 Ligue Communiste, 147 Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, 147 Linhart, Robert, 199 L’Observateur, 89, 96 Lyotard, Jean-François, 168 Lysenko, Trofim, 39, 41 Macciochi, Maria-Antonietta, De la Chine, 139 Madani, Abassi, 183 Malle, Louis, 141 Malraux, André, 2, 6, 13, 26, 33, 87, 88 conversations with Mao Zedong, 139 and Gaullism, 44–51 Minister of Information, 11, 45 Rassemblement du Peuple Français (RPF), 35, 47, 48 Malraux, Clara, 73, 173

Mandel, George, 18 Manifeste des Intellectuels Français, 123 Manifeste des ‘121’, 184 Maoists, 140, 141 Mao Zedong, 104, 138, 139 death, 152 Marcel, Gabriel, 13, 14, 21, 124 Marcellin, Raymond, 136 Marchais, Georges, 131, 156, 157 Marrou, Henri, 112 ‘France ma patrie’, 113 Marshall Plan, 55, 71, 80 Martin, Henri, 78, 105 Martin-Chauffier, Louis, 73, 79 Martinet, Gilles, 96 Marxism, 23–33 Mascolo, Dionys, 107, 122 Matisse, Henri, 103 Maulnier, Thierry, 86–7 Mauriac, Claude, 87, 141, 153, 172, 173, 176 Mauriac, François, 2, 19, 38, 42, 87, 100, 108 blacklisting of, 14 La Table ronde, 86 le droit à l’erreur, 15 Les Lettres françaises, 13 liberation of France, 9 Mauroy, Pierre, 178 Maurras, Charles, 14, 16 sentencing of, 20 May 1968, 128–35 Médiatisation, 159, 162, 163, 164 Memmi, Albert, Portrait du Colonisé, 108 Mendel, Gregori, 39 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 25–7, 38, 52–3, 57–62, 65, 123 association with RDR, 60 attitude to Korean War, 77–8 death, 82 Humanisme et terreur, 59, 67, 69 ‘Le Yogi et le commissaire’, 67 ‘Le Yogi et le prolétaire’, 67, 83 Les Temps modernes, 25–7, 52–3, 58–9, 65, 105 Les Aventures de la dialectique, 81 ‘Pour la vérité’, 58, 59

Index Miloševic´, Slobodan, 187, 195 Mitterrand, Danielle, 173 Mitterrand, François, 131, 147, 157, 169–70, 190, 194 election as president, 158 Mollet, Guy, 24, 108, 109, 114 fall of government, 115 Mongin, Olivier, 192, 197, 198 Montand, Yves, 95, 172, 176 Morazé, Charles, 133 Moreau, Jeanne, 146, 172 Morgan, Claude, 13, 15, 19, 22, 66, 94, 95 Morin, Edgar, 3, 73, 123, 172, 173, 190, 191 Comité d’action contre la poursuite de la guerre en Afrique du Nord, 107 contributions to Preuves, 88 position on Soviet labour camps, 70–1 Moulin, Jean, 169 Mounier, Emmanuel, 9, 64, 75 death, 76 refusal to join anti-Communists, 76 Mouvement de la Libération des Femmes, see Women’s Liberation Movement Mouvement de libération nationale (MLN), 47 Mouvement des Intellectuels Français pour la Défense de la Paix, 79, 80 Mouvement des radicaux de gauche (MRG), 155 Mouvement National Algérien (MNA), 109 Mouvement pour la libération de l’avortement et de la contraception (MLAC), 147 Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP), 11 Mouvement social, 168, 196–9 Mur de l’Atlantique, 20, 22 Nadeau, Maurice, 122, 132, 168, 173 Nagy, Imre, 93 National Liberation Front (NLF), 153 Nazism, defeat of, 40 Neutralists, 51–62

251

New Philosophers, 7, 150–2 New Right, 154–6 Nizan, Paul, 27 PCF position on, 57 The Watchdogs, 56 Nogrette, Robert, 141 Nora, Pierre, 134, 161, 173 Notat, Nicole, 197 Nouvelle Résistance Populaire (NRP), 141 Nouvelle Revue française, 26, 86 Office de la Radio et Télévision Française (ORTF), 163 Office of Policy Co-ordination, 62 Ollivier, Albert, 26, 52 Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS), 125 Orwell, George, 88 Overney, Pierre, 141 Ozouf, Mona, 6 Papon, Maurice, 125 Paquet, Gérard, 201 Parti Républicain, 155 Parti Socialiste, 147 Parti Socialiste autonome, 96 Parti Socialiste Unifié, 96 Pasqua, Charles, 179, 185 Patocka, Jan, 160 Paulhan, Jean, 15, 20, 26, 86 PCF, see French Communist Party Peace Movement, 78, 79–82, 95 Péju, Marcel, 81, 94, 122 People’s Democracies, 43, 92 People’s Peace Congress, 80 People’s Republic of China, 77 Peyrefitte, Alain, 162 Quand la Chine s’éveillera, 139–40 Pflimlin, Pierre, 117 Philipe, Gérard, 95 Pia, Pascal, 117 Picasso, Pablo, 37, 79, 153 Piccoli, Michel, 172 Pivot, Bernard, 163 Point de vue, 45 Polanski, Roman, 172 Pompidou, George, 136 death, 147 Ponge, Francis, 135

252 Index Pontalis, J.-B., 53 Popper, Karl, 161 Popular Democratic Front (Romania), 71 postwar purges, 12–23 Potsdam Agreement, 98 Pouillon, Jean, 66 ‘Et Bourreaux et Victimes’, 102–3 Prenant, Marcel, 39, 41 Preuves appearance of, 88 French reaction to, 88–9 Prévert, Jacques, 123 Provisional Government, 10 ordonnances of, 17 Pujo, Maurice, 20 Queneau, Raymond, 14 quietism, 32 Rajk, Laszlo, 72 posthumous rehabilitation, 92 trial of, 73–5 Ramadier, Paul, 35, 37 Rassemblement du Peuple Français (RFP), 35 Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire (RDR), 52, 84 association of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty with, 60 founding of, 60 membership, 61 Rassemblement du Peuple pour la République (RPR), 155, 178 RDR, see Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire Reader, Keith, 179 Rebérioux, Madeleine, 173 Reboul, Marcel, 17, 19 Resnais, Alain, 123, 172 Revue de la Table ronde, 86 Reynaud, Paul, 18 Richet, Denis, 180 Ricoeur, Paul, 123, 197 Ridgway, General, 78 Rieffel, Rémy, 163 Rioux, Jean-Pierre, 176 Rive gauche bookshop, 18 Rocard, Michel, 175, 179, 194

Rolland, Jacques-Francis, 94 Romains, Jules, 87, 100 Roman, Joël, 197 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 62 Rosenthal, Gérard, 60 Ross, Kristin, 129 Rous, Jean, 60 Rousset, David, 60, 87, 173 International Day of Resistance to Dictatorship and War, 61–2 Nazi camps, 67 Roy, Claude, 94 RPF, see Rassemblement du Peuple Français Ruscio, Alain, 99, 102 Russell Tribunal, 142, 153 Russia, 58 Russian labour camps, 63–72, 148–50, PCF dismissal of, 63–4 Russian Revolution, 28, 51 Sagan, Françoise, 122, 168 Sainteny, Jean, 98 Sakhiet-Sidi-Youssef massacre, 117 Salut les Copains, 129 Sarajevo, 191 Sarraute, Nathalie, 122 Sarrazin, F., 113 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 2–7, 13, 27, 108 A propos de l’Existentialisme, 32 association with RDR, 60 attack by PCF, 27–8 attitude to Algeria, 108 attitude to Cuba, 121, 137 attitude to Korean War, 77–8 break with PCF over Hungary, 94 Les Chemins de la Liberté, 3 conception of freedom, 31 death, 168 denunciation of torture in Algeria, 114, 115 Entretiens sur la politique, 90 involvement with Maoists, 137, 140–5 La Nausée, 3 La Putain respectueuse, 55 L’Age de raison, 24, 29 Le Diable et le bon dieu, 84 Le Fantôme de Staline, 95

Index Sartre, Jean-Paul – continued Le Sursis, 24 Les Lettres Françaises, 21 Les Mouches, 3, 82 Les Temps modernes, 4–5, 24–6, 33, 52–4, 56, 57–8, 68–70, 81, 83, 85, 88, 105–6 L’Etre et le néant, 3, 24 L’Homme révolté, 5 Matérialisme et révolution, 27 Morts sans sépulture, 54 People’s Peace Congress, 80 quarrel with Camus, 82–6 rapprochement with PCF, 77–81 Russell Tribunal, 142, 153 solidarity with student movement, 132 support for Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, 160 support for Peace Movement, 79–82 The Communists and Peace, 150 Sautet, Claude, 172 Savary, Alain, resignation, 114 Schoelcher, Victor, 169 Schuman, Robert, 37 Schwartzenberg, Laurent, 199 Schwartzenberg, Pascal, 194 Séguin, Phillippe, 201 Semprun, Jorge, 92, 171, 172, 173, 190 Sénac, Jean, 121 Serbia, 188 Serge, Victor, 64 Severine, Bernard, 15 Siegfried, André, 100 Signoret, Simone, 95, 123, 172, 176 silence of the intellectuals, 168–71 Sirinelli, Jean-François, 3, 166 Six Heures pour le Vietnam, 153 Solidarity, 152, 171–4 Sollers, Phillippe, 140, 152 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 148–50 Cancer Ward, 148 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, 148 The First Circle, 148 The Gulag Archipelago, 7, 147, 148–50, 160 Sorbonne, 130 Soustelle, Jacques, 111, 114, 116, 177

253

Souvarine, Boris, 63, 88, 149 Soviet Central Committee, 35 Soviet Red Army, 13 ‘specific intellectual’, 159, 160 Sperber, Manès, 64, 88 Stalin, Joseph, 39, 43–4 death, 91 meeting with Ho Chi Minh, 104 Stéphane, Roger, 68, 173 Stirbois, Jean-Pierre, 175 Stockholm Appeal against Atomic Weapons, 80 Suarez, Georges, 14 Szklarska-Poreba conference, 34–5 Szymonzyk, Stanislas, 44 Taliban, 182 Tel Quel, 140, 160 Témoignage chrétien, 113 Tempo Presente, 89 Théâtre National de la danse et de l’image, 201 Thomas, Edith, 38 Thorez, Maurice, 41, 43, 92 Tillion, Germaine, 120 Tillon, Charles, 79 Tito affair, 72–7 Todd, Olivier, 154 Tonkin, 97, 98 Torres, Juan José, 137 torture, use in Algeria, 112, 113 totalitarianism, 150 Touraine, Alain, 134, 172, 181, 182, 197 Travailleurs immigrés, 176 Tribune des Temps modernes radio broadcast, 53, 54, 58, 65 Truffaut, François, 123, 172 Truman Doctrine, 71 Truman, President Harry, 34 Tuðman, Franjo, 190, 195 Un bateau pour le Vietnam, 153 Union de la gauche socialiste, 96 Union des étudiants communistes (UEC), 129 Union des jeunesses communistes marxistes-léninistes (UJCM-L), 130

254 Index Union Française, 98 Union nationale des étudiants de France (UNEF), 129 Union pour la Défense de la République (UDR), 131 Union Pour la Démocratie Française (UDF), 155, 178 Union pour la Nouvelle République (UNR), 118 USSR see Russia; Russian Vailland, Roger, 29, 94 Valéry, Paul, 13, 19 Vanetti, Dolorès, 83 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 190 Veil, Simone, 147 Vercors, 13, 14, 21, 74–5, 79, 95, 153, 160 ‘Contre l’intervention soviétique’, 94 Verdès-Leroux, Jeannine, 201 Vérité-Liberté, 121 Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 133 Vernier, Jean-Claude, 147 Verny, Françoise, 151 Vian, Boris, 83 Victor, Pierre, 144, 146, 160 Vidal, Joseph, 18 Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, 113, 123, 172, 173, 184, 192, 199

Groupe d’information sur les prisons (GIP), 142 Viet Minh, 98, 103 lack of support from USSR, 104 Vietnam, 97 Democratic Republic of, 98, 105 Vietnamese Boat People, 7, 152–4 Vilar, Jean, 153 Vitez, Antoine, 156 Voynet, Dominique, 201 Vreme, ‘Yougoslavie: Halte au Massacre’, 190 Walesa, Lech, 171 Wells, H. G., 44 Wiesel, Elie, 190 Winock, Michel, 3, 164 Women’s Liberation Movement (MLF), 7, 145–8 Wright, Richard, 61 Wurmser, André, 74 Réponse à Jean Cassou, 75 Yugoslav Communist Party, 72 Yugoslavia, 187–95 Zhdanov, Andrei, 35, 38, 39 Zola, Émile, 165 involvement in Dreyfus Affair, 2

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