Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956

Past Imperfect

Past Imperfect French Intellectuals, 1944-1956

Tony Judt

UN IVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley / Los A ngeln / Oxford Th;1.s

One

Toutz idie foune finit Mns Ie So1'l'1. HUN"nt k SozI"tlT.

8

INTRODUCTION

although this book is a srudy of the behavior of French intellecruals in a very specific historical moment, it also tries to draw on a larger understanding of France's recent past (and that of other countries too) in order to explain that behavior. The second weak.ness of such histories concerns the even-handedness of the approaches described above, the reluctance to take or a!>Sign responsibility for positions adopted and things said . Everything becomes a matter of context, "the mood of the times." Now it is true that history is a discipline and a method that seeks ro describe and, t hrough description, lO explain . It is not, should not be, an indictment. Nonetheless, there are degrees of disengagement in such things. Thus it is intuitively obvious lO any reader that the hiSlOrian of Nazism faces issues and dilemmas from which the scholar of medieval monasticism, fOr example, is usually exempt. In seeking to explain something that is intrinsically unattractive, to which the reader would nonnally respond with distaste, one is not excused from the obligation to be accurate, but neither is one under a compelling obligation to pretend to neutrality. With respect to the history of postwar French intellectuals, I too make no such pretense. The very imporrance and international prominence of French thinkers in the postwar world has placed on them a special burden, perfectly consistent with the claims made by Sartre and his peers regarding the responsibility of the writer for his words and their effect. It is the contrast benveen those claims and the actual response of a generation of French intellectuals when presented with practical situations and moral choices that is remarkable and requires explanation. Whatcver the emotions of the time, they do not wholly explain; neither do they exculpate: "There is no soul so weak. that it cannot, properly directed, acquire full control of its passions."HI What is more, this contrast, the fuilure of French intellectuals to fulfill the hopes invested in them by their admirers in eastern Europe in particular, together with the influence exerted by the French on intellectual life in other Western countries, had a decisive impact on the history of postwar European life. As I shall argue, the consequences of the attirudes described here were not confined to the years in question, nor to the lives and personal relations of the protagonists. In the history of French intellectual practice during the years 1944-56 there an: [Q be fOu nd nor

1'Opinim fmnp.iJr SOlIS Vichy (Paris, 1990); IWlt Rtmond and ranin~ Bourdin, cds., fA Fmnarr ks Fmnf4is (Paris., 1978). 15

16

THE FORCE OF CIRCUMSfANCE?

were disillusioned by the compromises of the Popular From, the refusal to intervene in Spain and, finally, by the party's about-fuce in August 1939, following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Socialists, so hopeful in 1936, had experienced a comparable loss offuith, accentuated by a division within the Socialist community over pacifism and the correct response to German expansion. To the Right there was the fear and loathing crystallized by the memory of the strikes oflune 1936, bringing conservatives and reactionaries ever closer in a coalition cemented by anticommunism, increasing antirepublicanism, and an ever more confident and aggressive anti-Semitism. InteUectuals oflhe "centtT" werc rnre. Those ft'\\' men who would speak after Munich in defense of the Republic and against fascism did so in the name of values that they continued to hold in spite of the Third Republic and its shortcomings bur that they had mostly ceased to associate with that political regime and its institutional forms. The notion that the Republic and the world that it represented were rotten and unsavable was widespread. Writing in 1932, in the first editorial of his new journal, Esprit, the young Emmanuel Mounier observed, "The modem world is so utterly moldy that for new shoots to emerge the whole rotten edifice will have to crumble."2 For Mounier, the metaphor spoke above all to questions of sensibility, an aesthetic distaste for the cynical worldliness onate-Third Republic Fr:J.nce; ir did not commit him to any particular political position, and after an initial fiirration with Italian &scism (also on aesthetic grounds), he came our firmly against Nazism and was to be a critic of Munich. On the other hand, his vision of an organic, communal alternative to Republican anomie (Mounier and his generation reflected some of Durkheim's suspicion of modernity, albeit on rather different grounds) kept him and his colleagues in Esprit constantly critical of modern democracy. What was needed was a new elite to lead and renew a tired nation. 3 Mounier's outlook was shared by many others, each in his own tenns. Noting the seductive appeal of totalitarian systems, Denis de Rougemont confided to his Journal in 1938 the following reflection: The first task for intellectuals who havc understood the totalitarian peril (from right and left) is not [0 "join up" with some 50rt of anti-Fascism, but [0 attack thc sort of thinking from which both Fascism and Stalinism necessarily grow. And that is liberal thoughr.· 2. Ernmanud Mounier, "Rt:f.tin: Ia Rt:naissance,~ Esprit, Octoixr 1932. 3. John HeUm~n, £",_nllli Mounier(JnJ th~ N"" Guholic Left (foronlo, 1981), 82. 4. I)c:nis de Rougl:moru , JouTn41 d'IIII(~, 11}26-11}46 (Pms, 1968), 374.

DECLINE AND FALL

17

This was a charJcteristic response-fascism might be the immediate threat, bur liberalism was the true enemy. Mounier and de Rougemenr were intellectuals afthe Left (insol3r as this distinction applied during [he thirties), but what they were thinking was echoed on [he intcUectual Right. JeanPiem: Maxcnce echocd their distaste for the mundane world of democratic France: "While most countries of Europe arc being led [Qwards greatness and adventure, our own leaders are inviting liS to transfoml France into an insurance company."S All in all, the sensibility of the contemporary intellectual when meed with rhe condition of France was thus very much that ofDrieu la Rochelle (an author admired o n Left and Right alike): "The only way to love France today is to hate it in its present form."6 Separated as we an:: from the world ofthe thirties by the barrier of war and collaboration, it is easy to underestimate the importance and appeal of the intellectual Right at the time. Political weeklies like Gmdide (339,000 copies sold at irs peak) had a wide audience. T he daily Action fra ,lf"ise published 100,000 copies and had a much wider audience than that number would suggest. Indeed, the influence ofCharlcs Maurras, the fou nder and guiding spirit of Action finllfllisr, was immense, comparable in its impact on contemporary young intellectuals [Q that ofSartrc a decade later. Maurras's particular contribution [Q contemporary alienation from the Republic lay in "his violent and contemptuous attitude towards his opponents," 7 which formed a generation of writen; in whom an aggressive distaste for the compromises of democratic politics became a commonplace. Like the Communist party of the posnvar yean;, Maurras and his movement constituted a sort of rcvoh~ng door through which passed a surprising number of writers aftnw:.lrds associated with quite different political positions. Jean-Marie Domenach, a contributor to Esprit and later its editor, would admit some twenty yean; latcr to having becn affected (albeit, as he put it, in "an intense, childish way,,) by the fu.scist mood of the thirties, and he was fur from alone. 8 5. J. P.....hxence in ComiMt, Octolx:r 1936. Quoted by G. Leroy, ~i..:I. Rc\'lle Ombru, 1936--1939," in Des IIn..m romtr: Groupes (I "'plum, Actes du colloque org;nscil national de la Rtsistance (CNR) was cancerned with practical problems to. be faced in the dail y struggle, with langer-tcnn solutio ns to France's chronic weaknesses to be addressed ance the battle was wan. 2S The Resistance, intellectuals and politicians alike, had no shared background experience, no common view of the future and its possibilities. The Resistance program was primarily a moral condition and a bond of expericnce and detennination. Something better had to come from the sacrifi ces o f the struggle, bur the shape of that vision was left to individuals and political groups to articulate. If there was a general sentiment it was probably something along the lines of Camus's desire for "the simultaneous instauration af a collective economy and a liberal polity."16 In these circumstances, it might be thaught, the wider hopes vested in the Resistance were doomed from the start . This may be so---certainly in Frnnce, as in Italy, the dream of a single all-cmbracing party of the Resistance, breaking old political allegiances and committed to na npartisan national reconstruction, never really gO[ off the ground . But even before the disillusion of 1945, political reality had intervened . It was in 1943 that Jean Moulin allowed (some would say encouraged) the refonnation of political parties within the CNR, largely to appease thase who resented the presence of Communist political networks in their midst. Thus the main organization of the Resistance fostered the reCOIlstitution of the major parties of the defunct Republic, with the notable addition of the MRP. This return to parry politics occasioned some comment and disapproval, but it was not until later, seeing the ease with which postwar Frnncc seemed to have slipped into the comfortable old 24. Oaudc Bourdet, in L'Obsm'll~r, 21 August 1952. 25. Sec J~cqu("$ IXbil-Bridcl, " 1...:1 ~[ri~mc Rtpubliquc csHlk kgitimcl n in Ubmi ik l'espriI, October 1952, 220. 26. Camus, quoted by Janyves Guerin, 0un1/J tt IA /lOti. (Paris, 1986), 231.

38

THE FORCE OF CIRCUMSTANCE

clothes of its predecessor, that intellectuals directed criticism at the parliamentarians for betraying the ideals of a united national renaissance. v Of all the newly reemergent political parties, it was the Communists whose appearance mattered the most for the intellectual community. This is not because the Communist party could count on a significant membership among the hRute intef41entsia-quite the conlr.lry: the impenncable, deathless commitment of an Aragon ("My Party has reslOred £0 me (he meaning of the times I My Party has restored to me the colors of France; was only ever a minority taste. But for many younger intellectuals, not only had the party redeemed itselfin action since 1941, but it represented in France, both symbolically and in the flesh, the transcendent power and glory of Stalin's Soviet U nion, victorious in its titanic struggle with Nazi Gennan)" the unchallenged land power on the European continent and heir apparent to a prostrate Europe. A sense of having experienced the prelude to an apocalypse was widespread among those for whom [he Occupation had been their fonnative political experience. Older left-wing intellectuals might vote Communist and even place their hopes in a Marxist future, but they could not wholly forget the Molotov-Ribbenrrop Pact, nor even the troubling Soviet domestic record of the t.hirties. Younger ones, however, ignorant of the past or anxious to put it behind them, saw in the party a political movement responding £0 their own desire for progress, change, and upheaval. 28 Thus Pierre Emmanuel could write in 1956: I dreamed of an ideal Communism through fear of real Communism, fascinated as I was, like so many Olhers, by me imminent apoc:aIypsc rising out oflhe chasm in to which Europe had just been swallowed up.lII

It helped that communism asked of its sympathizers not that they think

for themselves, merely that they accept the authority of others. For intellectuals who sought so passionately to melt into the community, communism's relative lack of interest in their own ideas was part of its appeal. Moreover, and it was the most important part of the attraction, com~ munism was about revolution. This was [he source of some confusion: intellectuals dreamed of revolution in the immediate and in the abstract, 27. Sec Michel and Mirkine--CuctzCvitch, In

rdies fJl'litiIfueJ a sori4Ies de " Risis-

Dona, 33.

28. JtlJlninc Vcrdes.-.Lcroux, AN 1m'ia io. parti (J'Mis, 1983), 100tf. 29. Emmanuel, "La OrciUes du mi Midas," 781.

IN THE LIGHT OF EXPERIENCE

39

while Lenin's heirs dutifully maneuvered on the terrain of rae tical practice, where revolution in the future could always justity passivity in the prescnt. Bur these crossed purposes, even when conceded, had no impact upon the commitment of imeUectuals 10 the idea of revolution itself, even if they led to occasional ingenuous criticisms of the reF for its lack of insurrectionary fervor in the years 1945- 47. For most postwar French inreUectuals, the term m'(}/utron con rained thn:e distinct meanings, none of which depended upon the Communists or their doctrine. In the first phce, revolution, it seemed, was the natural and necessary outcome, the logical terminw ad quem of the hopes and allegiances of the wartime yem. If France in 1945 was to go in any direction at aU, it would only be propeUed there by a Tt.-volution: If we call ourselves rcmlutionaries, it is not just a matter arhat words or theatrical gestures. It is because an honest analysis of the French situation shows us it is Il:\"olutionary. JO We should not rake too seriously Emmanuel Mounier's claim to have undertaken an "honest analysis" o([he contemporary French situation, nor suppose him as free of "hot words" as he imagined. He had, after all, been proclaiming the need ror "revolution" ever since 1932. But the difference in 1945 was that the cumulative experience of the defeat, Vichy, the horrors of occupation and deporration, the sacrifices of the Resistance, and the revelation of France's decline made it seem realistic to believe in a coming moment of catastrophic and toral change, in a way that had not been the case before 1940. Not only could reasonable people now believe in the likelihood of utter coUapsc and destruction, but it seemed irrational to imagine that major change could be achieved in any other way. If French history from 1939-45 meant anything, it seemed to warn against believing in the possibility of progressive improvement and human benevolence. Second, revolution meant order: in this respect inteUectuals and Communists were in agreement. It had been a commonplace of the cultural critiques of the early thirties in France that capita.lism and bourgeois society were a version of the Hobbesian vision of nature, a war of aU against aU in which the strong emerged victorious and all nonmaterial values were doomed. A ncv.' order was thus called for in the moral and the social realms alike. But disorder, after 1945, described not only the 30. Mounia in 1945, qumcd in Anna BoschcIti, Soal'fn' a " Us 1985), 239.

Tempi~'

(PMis,

40

TI-lE FORCE OF CIRCUMSTANCE?

unfL'glllarcd mediocrity of the Third Republic but also the unjust and arbitrary authority of foreign and domestic fascist fKlwer. Order, in contrast, would be the condition of society after a revolution of a very particular sort, one deriving its political coordinatcs from thc lessons of history and its moral imperativcs from the recent experience of political srruwe and engagement. Third, and this was $artrc's special contribution though it expressed the views of many others at the time, revolution was a categorical imperative. It was not a matter of social analysis or political preference, nor was thc moment of revolution something one could select on the basis of experience or information. It was an a priori existential requirement. R(."volution would not only alter the world, it constituted the act of permanent re-creation of our collective situation as the subjects of our own livcs. In short, action (of a revolutionary nature) is what sustains the authenticity of the individual. In the early postwar years Same, at that time still committed to his writing, would seck ra deculpabilize himself and his social class for their intrinsic !OOCial marginality by claiming that writing JmS action. By revealing it transformed, and in transfOrming, it revolutionized its objects, a view that is seen at its most developed in QuJest-a que f4 littimturel 31 Later, of course, he would abandon this indirect approach and commit himself ro direct action, or as direct as his personal limitations allowed . The abstract and protean quality of revolution thus described meant not only that almost any circumstance could be judged propitious to it and any action fuvorable to its ends; it also meant that anything that qualified under the heading "revolutionary" was necessarily to be supported and defended. The Manichaean heritage of the Resistance did the rest- to be on the side of the good was to seek the revolution; to oppose it was to stand in the way of everything for which men and women had fought and died. Within France this reductionism could do relatively little damage, since the threat of real revolution after 1945 seemed ra be ever diminishing. Thus it cost little to be for the revolution and was hardly worth the effort to be against it, in this abstract form. Bur elsewhere in Europe the impact of war and real revolution was still being felt, and there one's stance on the meaning of revolutionary language and acts n:alIy mattered. This rapic is central ra the theme of the present book and it will be dealt with more fully in later chapters. But because the dream ofrevolu31 . Scr $artre,

Si~,

vol. 2 ,

IN THE UGHT OF EXPERIENCE

41

tion was SO pervasive in the discourse of postwar intellectuals, it is worth noting the moral price that was exacted. The case of Mounier is exemplary, precisely because he and his circle were not attached to any iX>litical movement, had few if any foreign entanglements, and represented in their own eyes a moral iX>sition purer than that oftbeir contemporaries, beholden to no one and driven only by a wish for spiritual renewal and a love of truth and justice. Writing in 1944, Mounier urged on the French community a thoroughgoing spiritual and political revolution, whatever the cost. All r(:volutions, he wrote, arc "fuU of ugliness" ; the only question is, "Should the crisis come to a head, and if so as soon as possiblc~" We are engaged in radical upheaval, he insisted; we cannot go back now. As for a prcripitous historical transformation, "the only way to neutralize its risks is to complete it." The French have the chance, he went on to suggest, to abolish human suffering and lay the basis for happiness and something more besides. This challenge cannot be met by a "parliamentary democracy of the liberal, chatty sort but ... must be organically resolved by a real democracy, with firm struetures."32 All this sounds harmless enough, a t ypical article of its time, combining an invocation of revolutionary possibilities with general iX>litical prescriptions drawing on the language of the thirties nonconformists. But buried just below the surface one can already detect the ''omelet'' thesis, the belief that a sufficiently important historical advance is worth the price we may have to pay to bring it about. Mounier stated this idea a little more openly in an artiele published nvo years later,3l but it is rendered explicit in the editorial commentary published by Esprit on the occasion of the Prague coup in February 1948 . Because this, the last Communist takeover in central Europe, made little pretense of representing the desires of the majority or of responding to some real or imagined national crisis, Mounier's response to it is illustrative of the moral price he was driven to pay in order to sustain his faith in the intrinsic value of revolutionary action. It is worth quoting at length: In Czechoslovakia the coup mask. a retreat of capilaill;m, the inen:asc of workers'

control, the beginnings of a division of landed property. There is nothing astonishing in the flct that it was not undemken with all the ceremonial of a diplomatic move, nor that it is the work of a minority. None of this is unique [0 Communism: there is no regime in the world today or in history that did not 32. Mounier, "Suite mn.,.usc ~ux maladiQ in&miJ"" d"" rtvolutions," Esprit, Decemher 1944. 33. Mounier, " Debat a h~ute voix," Esprif, ",b~ 1946, 76-77.

42

THE FORCE OF C1RCUM~NCE?

begin with force, no progress that was not initiated by an audacious minority in the face of the instinctive lazlncss of the vast majority. As to the victims of the Prague coup, the Czech socialists and their social-democratic allic.s, Mounier had no regrets. The social-democrats in particular he described as "saboteurs of the European Liberations." Their cause is lost, their fate richly deserved- "they belong to a dead Europe."M Mounier and his colleagues on Esprit are significant precisely because they did not claim to share the Communists' worldview. But a revolution was a revolution, its goals ex hypothesi laudable, its enemies and victims in principle the servants of the past and the enemies of promise. One source of this favorable prejudice, and it is a point that has received wide attention in recent years, was the problematic starns of the term rwoll4hon in the history of French political thought and language. One hundred and fifty years after Saint-Just, the rhetorical hegemony exercised by the Jacobin tradition had not only not diminished, but had taken from the experience of the Resistance a renewed vigor. The idea that revolution- the Revolution, any revolution-constitutes not only a dramatic break, the moment of discontinuity between past and future, b ut also the only possible route from the past to the future so pervaded and disfigured French political thought that it is hard to disentangle the idea from the language it has invested with its vocabulary and its symbols. Thus it comes as no surprise that Mounier and his generation adopted such a vision and the venerable language that accompanied it. The disdain felt by Simone de Bcauvoir, for example, at all mention of "refonnism," her desire (0 see social change brought about in a single convulsive moment or else not at all, was a sentiment she shared not only with her contemporaries but with jin-de-iUcle socialists, Communeera feminists, and the Blanquist fringe of French socialist thought throughout the previous century.35 As the last and most enduring of the myths of the Enlightenment, the idea that an intrinsically evil order could only be replaced by onc founded on nature and reason, revolution was always likely to become a dominanr passion of the intellectuals, in France as in Russia. The special quality of the postwar era was thc 34. Moun;,,~, "Pr.agu~ (~ditorial), Eprir, March 1948. 35. See d~ Be:iuvoir's comments mroughoU! her writings from this period, noably in he~ memoirs, La .G>ne ties (hoses (Paris, 1963).

IN T H E LIGHT OF EXPERIENCE

43

immediate possibility it seemed to offer for thc enactment of this last great historical drama. It is this which made all the more poignant the rapid disillusion of those years. Indeed, almost befOre the revolutionary moment seemed to have come, there were those who could already sense its passing. As early as December 1944 an Esprit editorialist lamcnted that there was nowhere to be found in France the smack affirm and new political authority. In the same journal, Jean Maigne drew readers' attention to the dead and deponed Resistance leaders and the mediocrity of the political chiefS now emerging: "We see all of a sudden that the Resistance is but a shadow ofitsclf."36 In some cireles a certain dolorous pleasure was taken in proclaiming the hopelessness of the situation, even as the same writers called for change and upheaval. But in this case the sentiment really was \videspread. By 1947 it was universally believed that the Liberation had failed. The best-known symptom of this was the failure to follow through on the purge of collaborators and tainted political and economic leaders.31 The demand for justice, or vengeance, had been integral to the revolutionary vision of Communists, intcllecruals, and even some within the political center; a final settling of scores \vith France's past was the necessary condition of a better future. Even those like Jean Paulhan , who thought that the purge had been a hypocritical exercise in private revenge, conceded that as a movement for revolutionary change the Liberation had lacked the courage of its convictions and represented a lost opportunity.38 In January 1947 Franliois Mauriac, perhaps recalling his own hopes of l 944 and his biting condemnations of the Third Republic, noted sourly, "Everything is beginning again. Everything remains hopelessly unchanged .... The Third Republic lives on; it is the Fourth that is dead." Who, as Camus lamented a few weeks later, "today cares about the Resistance and its honor1".N The revolutionary hopes invested in the liberation of France and the rapid disillusion that follmved so soon after are an important part of a 36. Jeal! Maignc, Esprit, Dc~cmber 1944, "lllotcd in JUIl G;llticr~BoiMi~n:, Mun jour....I.is 111 Libimtion (r...ns, 1945),81; sec also the editorial in Esprit, December 1944: "Cc qllc Ibn chcn:hc panol!( en vain c'est nne doctnne politiqllc ncm..: et fcrme.» 37. ror detailed figures on the Fn:nch tpumtion, see, for example, Hilary Foot;n and John Simmonds, I'mna, 1943-1945 (New York, 1988). Whereas in NOI\\,":Ir, Belgium,:md the Netherlands thc nllmbers of po.:rsuns sentenced to prison for collaboration varied from 400 to 64{) po.:r 100,000 inhabiuncs, in Francc the figure "'as only 94 Oil! of 100,000. 38. Jean Paulhan, &tm aux dim:tnm de /a RhistlIna (Paris, 1952) _ 39_ Fr:m~ois Mauna,,]""""", vol. 5 (Paris, 1953), 28 Janllary 1947; umlls, 0mlbM, 22 M:m::h 1947.

+t

THE FORCE OF CIRCUMSL\NCE!

number of stories about contemporary France. They cast a revealing light upon the emphasis that was placed in the first postwar years upon "the honor of the Resistancc," the need for a vengeful justice, and the half-acknowledged desire to prolong by all possible means the certainties and hannonies of the resistance experience itself. This entailed on the one hand reconstructing that experience as something born more significant and more decisive than it had been, and on the other extracting from it political and moral positions that could then be applied in other situations and to other conflicts and choices. Had the actual experience of resistance and liberation been more decisive, had the Fourth Republic been the child of something more recognizably decisive and radical by way of birth pangs, things might have been different. As it was, the intellectual community in postwar France remained unhealthily fixated upon its wartime experience and the categories derived from that experience, with significant and enduring consequences.

CHAPTER THREE

Resistance and Revenge The Semantics of Commitment in the Aftermnth of Liberation

La lWiitllna jlI foit de nous WUI des

amustR14im oons WUI !es setIi iu renne, viI-it-viI tits hlmltnel rommt vis-it-viI iu sysrime J1Xial.

The Resistance made us all disputatious in every sense of the word, toward men as toward the social system . Claude Bourdet

We have become familiar with the "Vichy syndrome."l We should not, however, neglect its doppe/giingn; the syndrome of ResiSbnce. After the war, it suited almost everyone to believe that aU but a tiny minority of the French people were in the Resistance or sympathized with it. Communists, Gaullists, and Viehyisrs alike had an interest in fonvarding this claim. By the end of the forties, amidst growing disenchantment with the Fourth Republic, there emerged a new sensibility critical ofrhistnnrialisme and cynical about the whole wartime experience. Promoted by a younger generation of "alienated" apolitical writers, this rejection of the I . Henry

Rou~

u Sptdrome M Vichy, 1944-198- (I'aris, 1987). 45

46

THE FORCE OF CIRCUMSD\NCFl

myths of heroism and sacrifice gained currency and credibility because of the skepticism of genuine fanner resisters like Mauriac, Paulhan, and Camus regarding the exaggerated claims that had been made for the Resistance and the uses to which the power of the victorious side had been put after 1944. After 1958 and the return to power ofthe Gaullists, a modified risismntiRl.isrM became once again the order of the day, the bener to claim for the president and his movement a nationwide and retrospective legitimacy. Since that time a degree of h istorical perspective has entered into discussions of the subject, assisted by the passage of time and a new generation of professional historians of the period. But there is still nothing to compare, for the history of resistance in Fr.mce, to the myth-breaking synoptic srudies of Vichy that began to appear in the 1970s. The historiography of the subject still echoes, however indistinctly, the early official accounts, which treated the war years as though they consisted largely of the activities of a national Resistance and the repression it elicited . The initial postwar myth claimed that although the fighting Resistance may have been a minority, it was supported and assisted by "the mass of the nation," united in its desire for a German defeat. Only Laval, Petain, and their henchmen felt or acted otherwise. This was the official Communist position. ! It was largely echoed by the Gaullists, who insisted in their rum that the Resistance had been the natural reflex of a nation faithful to its historical traditions; the "insurrection" of the summer of 1944 was singled out as "a popular tidal wave surpassing in its dimensions all such uprisings in our pasr."l Although there were from the start those who acknowledged how small and isolated resistance had been: their voice \\.'as drowned by the chorus of mutual admiration. In a book published in 1945, Louis Parrot would write ofthe "pure heroism" of Aragon and his wife Elsa Tholet, the "audacious courage" of Paul Eluard, and the "subtly dangerous game" played by Jean-Paul Sartrc, practicing "open clandestinity" in the face of the occupying authorities. 2. But not jusl the Communists. According 10 Jean Lacroix, "Le rtgime de Vichy a ete une entreprise de trahison contre Ia France: il a cte senti et "Ceu eomme tel par Ie pcupJc f!";\/1~s." Sec Lacroix, "Charil': chretienne et justice poHtique," Esprit, Fcbrwry 1945,386. 3. Jacques OeM-Bridel, " La Quatri~me RCpublique est-cUe legitime?" Libmtlk l'esprit (October 1952): 220. Sec also Claude Morgm, in Us lLrms jm~, 16 Dcttmber 1944, who admitted thai Ihe fighting ~istancc WSition Benda shared with Sartrc. U) For Sarrrc, the condition of the intellectual is one of treason virtually by definition . He lives in a pennanently traitorous condition, and the nearest he can come to "authenticity" is by realizing this and by choosing his treason. The intellectual who throws in his lot with tbe people, with revolution and history, in betrnyal of his class and vocation, at least gives his lifc a meaning. Any backsliding from this commitment constituted not only a personal failure but an act of existential cowardice. This position seems to have been shared by most contributors to Us Temps nwtiernes, even when thl.j' took subtly different political positions. Desertion from the "workers' camp" was just that, desertion, and it made of you a "coward."21 In this overheated context, one can begin to understand why the Communist vocabulary, which at a distance offorty years sounds at once inflated and empty, had some real appeal. Tiro, after 1948 , became first a traitor, then a coward, then ever more trnilOrous, and finally a "traitor from the very start." Whatever one thought of the particular case of Yugoslavia, the language employed for the purpose of expelling it from the community of bien /X'lSants lOuched a chord in its intended audience. Looking ahead, we can already detect the dilemma to be posed by the anticolonial movements of the fifties. Who betrayed whom when one refused to support France in its treatment of coloni7.cd populations? Was it right to obey a government that betrayed France's true interests, in 1955 any more than in 1940: When the journalist 19. Iknd~. "Lc Di~logue cst-i] possibld" Europe, M:m::h 1948. 20. On the w:ly in which the theme of tm:rson links Benda and Sartn:, sec Pascal Ory, "Qubt-ce qu'un imdlcctud?" in Dry c{ aJ., Lln'niem QJ4arions RUX imellututls {Paris, 1990), 16. 2]. Louis Daimu, " RCflcxion s su r Ie communi.,me rougos]a"e," pan 3, fA Tnnps ~ 55 (May 1950): 1961.

52

THE FORCE OF CIRCUMSTANCE!

Claude Baurder began his campaign in defense of Henri Martin, the first of many such, it was narural that he should seek in the language of berrayal the basis for a new opposition. From then until the final defeat of the OAS, French political life would be constantly disfigured by charges and countercharges of treason, poLiticaJ and moral alikc.12 After treason, and as its natural companion in the t hesaurus of postwar intellectual communication, came the fourth trope, rollahomtion. As a term of opprobrium this became so universal after the war that there is little point in offering examples of what had become a standard figure of speech . Its presence here is meant to suggest, however, that its usc was not at all limited to the identification of people who stood accused of sympathizing with Vichy or the Nazis. It is the metaphoric uses to which it was applied that make it of special interest. Thus, to take one instance, from 1947 and with growing frequency in the half-decade to follow, all sympathy for American policy, all expression of support for Anglo-American interests, in France or abroad, was stigmatized as "collaboration," and the United States cast, by analogy, as the "occupier." The campaign against the Marshall Plan (by no means limited to the PCF) took as its central plank the thesis that the plan was the first stage of a peaceful occupation and takeover of France, and that collaboration with it in any fOrm was to be condemned. Paul Fraissc in Esprit drove home the implication of this terminology by calling for a new "resistance." 21 Collaboration, it seemed, was a state of mind, not merely a particular political or social choice. All democratic societies, Sartre asserted, harbor "collaborators" in their midst, even (especially) when the collaborator docs nor realize his (or her) own condition. The solution was not to identify and execute a few "traitors" but to make a revolurionY In a manner reminiscent of the still unknown Gramsci, collaboration was treated as a form of sociohistorical pathology, the condition of acceding to the hegemony of an authority or ruler. One was in this sense "occupied" by the ideas and interests of others (it will be seen here why Sanre and others so readily treated the collaborator as femin ine and her "occupier" as male). The only solution was rejection (in the medical 22. See Claude Bouroct, (;omIn.t, 27 January, 31 January, and 4-5 February 1950. Sec mil« (Chapel Hill, N.c., 1977), 152- 54. 23 . Fraissc i~ quoted by Pierre de Boisdeff"rl:, Des l'imlln rt tIa 1tWt1S ... ~, 1948- 1953 (Paris, 1954), 7. 24. Sec Sann:, uQUCsI _(c qu'un collctobcr 1944.

RESISIj\NCE AND REVENGE

69

apology fOr the Inquisition , saving the soul of France by burning the bodies of selected citizens. Thc distinction Camus was drawing betwccn resisters and traimrs was illusory, he argued; an immense number of the French had resisted "for themselves" and would fOnn once again thc natural "middle ground" of the political nation. 6l Mauriac returned to these mancrs in December 1944 and again in January 1945, at the time of the trials ofBeraud and Brasillach. Of Henri Beraud he wrote that yes, the man was punishable for what he wrote; given the weight that his fanatical polemics had carried in those terrible days, he deserved ten years in prison and more. But to accuse him of friendship or collaboration with the Gennans was absurd, a lie that could only bring discredit on his accusers. 61 Camus, in his tum, did not directly address this last issue (as we have secn, he was shortly to sign a petition on behalf of Brasillach, aftcr giving himself a sleepless night on the question), but he did comment on Mauriac's increased tendency to invoke the spirit of charity in defense of the accused in these trials. Whenever I speak of justice, he wrote, M. Mauriac speaks ofchariry. I am opposed to pardons, he insisted ; the punishment we demand now is a necessary justicc, and we mUSt refuse a "'divine charity" that in making of us a "nation de trairn:s et de mcdiocrcs," will frustrate men of their right to justice. 6f This is a curious response, a mixture of realpolitik and moral fervor. It also hints that there is something weak-kneed and unworthy about the exercise of charity or mercy in the case of condemned collaborators, a feebleness of the soul that threatens the fiber of the nation. At this point, in early 1945, much of what Camus was saying could have been said by Mounier or de Bcauvoir or even Morgan, except that Camus said it ocner. What distinguished Camus was that within a few months me experience of me purge, with its combination of verbal violence, selectivity, and bad faith, led him to change his mind in a quite remarkable way. Without ever conceding that the purge had been unnecessary, he was able to sec, by the summer of 1945, that it had failed . In a much-quored editorial in Combat in August 1945, he announced to his readers, "The word ipumtion is already painful enough . The thing itsclfhas become odious."65 Camus had come to see just how

62. Mauriac, ibid., 22-23 October 1944, 26 October 1944. 63. Mauri~c, ibid., 4 January 1945. 64. Camus., c.-biu, II Jan l1M)' 1945. 65. Camus., ibid _. 30 August 1945.

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THE FORCE OF CIRCUMSTANCE.'

very self-defeating (in his sense) the purge had become. Far from uniting the nation around a clear understanding of guilt and innocence, crime and justice, it had encouraged just the sort of moral cynicism and personal self-interest he had sought to overcome. Precisely because the activities of the purge, especially that of intellecruals, had become so degraded in the public eye, the solution was now exacerbating the very problem it had been intended to resolve. The epumtWn in France, he concluded, "had not only failed but fallen into disrepute." JfFrcnch society was unable to distinguish between pacifism and collaboration in its treatment of past errors, then its spiritual renaissance lay far away. Camus never came around wholly to Mauriac's point ofvicw. Mauriac, fOrcxample, had from the very start taken a more distanced position than Camus would ever adopt, preferring to see the guilty escape rather than the innocent punished. He also, and in this he was truly unusual, rejected the suggestion that Vichy was somehow the work of a minority or an elite. The "'double-game" that marked the Vichy interlude was that of peoples and nations everywhere, he insisted, the French included. Why pretend O(herwisc~ And his vision of a reunited France was closer to that of the Olympian de Gaulle than the partisan intellectuals of the domestic Resistance; Should we try to re-create national unity, with those of our fanner opponents who did not commit unforgivable crimes, or should we, on the contrary, eliminate them from public life, according to methods inherited from the Jacobjns and practiced in rotalitarian lands?t16

Mauriac, in other words, began from the principle of forgiveness, in all but the worst cases (and even in these he advocated moderation), whereas Camus and his colleagues sought justice, or revenge, or both.67 But by 1945, they were moving towards the same conclusions. Of all possible purges, wrote Mauriac, France was experiencing the worst, which is corrupting the very idea of justice in the hearts and minds of the population. Later, as his polemics with the PCF grt.'W bitter and the dividing line between them grew wider, Mauriac would claim that the purge had been a card in the Communists' hand, an asset they refused to abandon. But he was honest enough to concede that at the time he 66. Maumc,J~, \'01. 4 (Paris, 1950).30 May 1945. 67. Curiously, Maumc atbdr.ed Uon Blum in May 1945 for his mod~l:Iticm on just this subject. Blum understandably asked why it was that he aJon~ should not bc;n~fit from M. Mauriac's con«m fOr charity. Details of this polcmic an: in Jean Galtier-Boi!iSier.:, MOIl joNmAf tkpuis 14l.J/Jtmtilm (Paris, 1945), 269.

RESlsrANCE AND REVENGE

71

might have been premature in calling for forgiveness and amnesty; in a Frnnce tom by hatred and fear, some sort of score-settling had perhaps been necessary, though not the one that took place. 611 In other words, Camus might not have occn as mistaken as Mauriac had once thought. By 1948, however, it was Camus, long since disabused of the prospects for revolution and already uncomfortable in the intellectual community of which he was still a leading member, who had the last word . In a lecture to the Dominican community ofLatour-Maubourg, he reflected on the hopes and disappointments of the Liber:ltion, on the rigors of justice and the requirement of charity. In the light of events, he dL'Clared, " In our quarrel, it was monsieur Frnn\ois Mauriac who was right."69 Of course, it was not that simple. Ail Mauriac himself would note in his Mimoires, the purge was a "necessary cvil."70 Even if one remained within the confines of the world of the intellectual and the writet, the problem of collaborntion had to be faced. The wartime French press, a worthy successor to the putrid journalism of the thirties, was in Camus's words, " [he shame of this land." Men like Brasillach or Georges Suarez had not only pursued their racist and political vendettas in the advantageous circumstances of the Occupation, bur they had openly advocated the undertaking of what amounted to war crimes. A fine judicial distinction might exist bcnveen such language and the crime of treason, bur in the overheated a[ffiosphere ofthe Liberation , the surprise is not that the two were sometimes confused but that this did not happen more often. It has been well observed that collaborntionist intellectuals, unlike Fascist intellectuals befOre the war and Stalinist ones after it (in France at least), were in a position [0 have their enemies Icilled . This could not be so easily forgonen in 1945, nor should it have bcen.71 The other complication is this. Some of the most clear-headed and morally honest of the critics of the purge, men like Jean Pallihan, had a tendency to sec the whole problem in almost excessively aesthetic tenIlS. Noting that it was frequently the most gifted of the collaborntors who were being punished most severely, just because they had been most prominent and perhaps most influential, Pallihan defended them in ways that made it seem almost as though their talent should be an excuse for their actions. This was the same distinction drawn by Claude Morgan 68. Maunac,)DH",,", vol. S (Paris, 1953), 9- 10 F The reader will doubtless already have remarked a certain similarity between Mounier and the circle around Sartre when it comes to the handling of morally ambiguous political events, and this is no coincidence. 24 Like Merleau-Pomy and others, the writeTh at Bprit strove hard in the early posrwar years to construct a bridge, in this case between their version of a Catholic ethics and the Communists' account of Marx . Indeed, after Maurice Thorcz, Mounier ....'35 the nation's most visible advocate of a rapprochement between the tv.·o. Although a doctrinal union proved elusive, Esprit long harbored the illusion of a transfonned communism, shorn of its totalitarian habits but resolutely revolutionary in spirit. Indeed, for a while in 1946, it accused the r CF of being insufficiently fervent in its daily practice. lfthe Communists had a weakness, in the view of most of the contributors to Esprit, it was only that their admirable political values were not sustained by that higher $Cnse of the human vocation that only faith could bring.2S For the rest , however, Mounier and his colleagues were drawn to the r CF and its international movement in powerful ways. The antibourgeois, anticapitalist, antimaterialist discourse of the noneonfOnnists of the early thirties appeared to find a comforting echo in the language of communism, and there is no dou bt that the later admiration some Catholics would evince for Stalinism in the primitive East was an o utgrowth of this desire to $Ce in Lenin's Asiatic n:volutian a new beginning. 26 Moreover, Mounier (like other Cathoucs) could find in communism, if 22. Ibid., 21. 23. Mounk:r, "Pragut," Esprit, March 1948, 357- 58. 24. Except thai Mounia w:lS moo: concerned with tht Christian condition than that of illltUc:ctuais. 25. !itt, ror aamp[e, Jean Lacroix, "Y a· t.il deux democr.ltiQ? Do: t:. dCm(>Cr;loe Jibl:r.tle a b d~mOCr;ltic massive," Es/",ir, March 1946, 357. M . &e Man: Simard, " [meUecruds, fuscismt, c! antimodcrnitc dans b l'r:tncc des anntes trenrc:," V~Sitt/e 18 (April-June 1988): 62.

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THE FORCE OF CIRCUMSTANCE

he sought it there, the Christian concern for the poor and the suffering- "Just as the Christian docs not abandon the poor, so the Socialist may not abandon the prolet:l.riat without forswearing his name."17 He could even tell himself, though this took a greater effort of will and imagination, that communism had at least the potential [0 be a more "personalist" community, where the individual-as-pcrson mattered more than under capit:l.lism, and where democracy was thus more "authentic" (very much the key word of the decade) than in bourgeois liberal societies. The symbiotic relationship berween communism and Catholicism in France has been remarked upon by many people. Prominent Communist intellectuals had st:l.rted life as active and practicing Catholicssome of them, like Louis Althusscr, at the Lyon khagne,l8 as pupils of Jean Lacroix, a major st:l.r in thc .&pritgalaxy.19 Indeed, the move was a narural one, at the epistemologicallevcl as much as at the sociological; both represented world outlooks that were pessimistic about humanity but optimistic with regard to history, and both were ant:l.gonistic to the French republican tradition. Raymond Aron may have been right to point out how morally confused was Mounier's "spirirual" opposition to liberalism, his "anri-anticommunism,"30 but there was one overriding reason for this stance, and it carried weight at the time. Mounier and some of his colleagues (in contrast, for cxample, to Jacques Maritain) had placed theif initial hopes in the Vichy "1"L"Volurion" and were thus nl."Ver filll y at home in the resistance spirit of the left Catholics who were to form the MRP. Indeed, this hostility to the MRP, which endured throughout the Fourth Republic (exhibited by persons further embittered by the colonialist practices of MRP ministers), was part of a wider pattern of hostility to politics. MOllllicr and many of his co-contributors to Esprit bvored an aggressive, exhortatory style, demanding of them· sch'es and theif readers all sorts of public commitments, but at the same time they were frequently suspicious of the compromises and shortcomings of party and parliamentary politics. 31 Only with the Communists

27. Mounicr, "' Fidclite,~ Esprir, F-cbruary 195{t 28. The Ire:ec class in which pupils prepare for the: entrance: examination to France's Grandcs £Coles. 29. SirincUi, ~Lcs Nurmalie ns de la rue d'Ulm apri:s 1945, Uoe Generat;on COOlmunistd~ Rnw d'histoirr ~ tt to1llmlpomi"., 33 {October- December 1986): 577. 30. Aroll, ~I'olitic:s and the French Intd!C"Ct llals,~ I'Imis4n Rrvitw 17 (1950): 599. 31 . John HeUmann, E"lIfulnwl Muunier Im4 tbe New Ouholi& Left (Toronto, 1981), 201.

WHAT!S POLnKAL /usnCE?

89

could they cast their moral lot, for thc reF (as it never failed to insist) was "un parti pa.~ comme les autrcs.'" Moreover, Mounier and many of his contemporaries had a bad can· science. Despite a sustained effort to whin.'Wash the memory of 1940 in the January 1945 edition of the jOllnlal and again in a collective work published the same year,ll the problem never quite went away. The desire to find some good in the Vichy regime had lasted well beyond the enactment of the first Statllt tUs jllift, which says something about Esprir's moral priorities, and even though Mouniercould point to a protest they published against the flld SUM and to the republication of a piece by Peguy on Jews (both in 1941), the fJct remained that it took this group a disrurbingly long time to separate itself wholeheartedly and definitively from the Pcrain regime. These srricrures must be applied with caresome of Erprit's postwar collaborators had passed the latter years of the Occupation in the Resistance or as deporrecs. l 3 But it was MOllnicr who set the tone, and Mounier, likc Sanrc, did not have a "good war.'" This did not prevent him and most of his contributors from displaying a remarkably confident and on occasion insufferably superior moral tone. Present from the outset, this lxcame most marked towards 1950, just when the left Catholics were taking the greatest pains to remain antianti-Communist in the f.J.cc of growing Communist atrocities in castCnl Europe (sec chapter 5). We, the argument would run, do not have to choose between communism and anticommunism, optimists and pessimists: "Against pessimism we have Faith. Against optimism, the harsh fact of injustice."·'" On controversial matters such as the attitude ro adopt toward~ Tiro, we take no stand, neither Titoist nor anti-Titoist. It is not our quarrel. This viewpoint mighr have been credible if it had been part of some larger moral vision in which internal Communist quarrels played no part. But it was applied, with Pilare-like disinteresr, on almost every occasion. Even after David Roussct's revelations about the "concentration-camp unh'crsc" of the USSR., Jean-Marie Domenach could evince an air of effort less moral superiority. We, he announced, arc ncutral in such discussiolls: que. II Qut que certains t tres mcurcnt pour hrc rcj-oints.~ Bftx,..Notu, 1952-1957 (Paris, 1958), II March 1956. 37. Jean l'Julhan, Ltftre /JUX dirmnm lie '" Risiml,," (hris, 1952), 69.

WHAT IS POLITICAL JUSfICE?

91

produce some son of debate about justice, evil, and political criminality. Not surprisingly, the results were less than edifYing. 77Jif, then, if the isslle. We slJRiJ miss the poitlt if_srick with an RaUkmic and idm/iwi idm of the law. PMitire law, like phikJsophies and civilizAtimll, is born, lim, mui dies. Emmanuel Mourner

The epumtion, as we have seen, raised troubling questions. Whom did onc seek ro punish? On what grounds? And ro what end1 The philosophical and ethical vocabulary of the engaged intelligentsia in postwar France offered little help, tending on the contrary to confuse and ultimately bury such dilemmas in global accounts of the human condition that left matters of mornl and legal distinction to the tribunal of necessity or to the judgmenrofhistory. Nonetheless, the issue of justice could not be ignored, bur on the contrary gave rise to heated discussions throughOut the early Fourth Republic. The most intense disagreements, and finally the most radically hisroridst conclusions, emanated from within the community of Camolic intellectuals, and in what follows particular attention will therefore be paid to them. But the problem and the attendant ambivalence were universal. During the last months ofthe Occupation, and into the initial period following the Liberation, the question of justice was sriU part of the larger struggle to defeat the enemy and secure freedom. In 1943, for example, it was self-evident that retribution, though it must be just, should above all be swift: «Where treason was public and admitted, the fom1s ofJustice must be reduced to a strict minimum. Confinnation of identity fOllowed by the death semence is the only sort ofJustice possible ror those who were openly agents and recruiting sergeants for the enemy."llI Even in March 1945 it was still reasonable for Julien Benda to warn the govemmem of the risks it ran in delaying the punishment of collaborntors: As 3 government of JXltriots you should have punished the tra.irors 3.'l they deserved. If, as a result of your dereliction of duty, cxaspera.ted patriotic men lose patience and t::;ake thing; into th eir own hands, you will be responsible for wh atever excesses such a pminform (P:uis, 1977). St..., also Fr.;I!1~oi s Fcjro, ~ ~ffiUrc R.:ijk cst unc ~ff.Ure Dreyfus illTcmarionaJe,'" Esprit, November 1949.

SHOW TRIALS

\05

party itself), the emphasis placed on the fuct that elL'ven out ofthe fourteen wcre Je\vs, and thc wholesalc and cnduring persecution ofCzcrhs and Slovaks for years thereafter. The Romanian experiencc ran par:lllel to that of the Czechs, with a series of trials of o usted Commu nist leaders reaching into 1954, with the prosecution in April that ycar of Lucrctiu Patrascanu. In contrast with thc Czechs, howevcr, the Romanian victims (though many were Jews) were not persecutcd for their ethnic origins or supposcd Zionism, and somc of the most promincnt of them, like the forn1er party leader Ana Pauker, were spared execution. Accordingly, thc Romanian trials, dcspite the vimlencc of domestic score-settling that they revealed, and despite traditional French intcrest in Romania, lackcd the ne\\lS \'a!ue of the Czech drama and played a lesser role in Parisian diSClIssion.A The politics and pathology of the East European show trials require a separate study.'> A brief account of them is given here only in order to provide a point of reference for the discussion that follows and to illustrate their importance at the time. Not merely were they contemporary with the high year.; ofthe postwar radical intelligentsia in Paris, but they also puncruated other news from the Soviet bloc, notably the further revelations about rhe "univers concentr:ltionnaire" of Stalinism, as debated in thc libel actions initiated by Viktor Kravchcnko Oanuary 1949) and David Rousset (NO\'ember 1950- January 1951) .10 In ordcr to under.;tand their significance and the particular impact the), would have on the Western consr..;ousness, however, it is necessary to say a few words about the nature and purpose of these trials. Two important distinctions have already been noted, between the persecution of Communists and non-Communists, and within the class of Communist victims, bcnveen those who were part of the anri.::r;roist purges and those who fell victim to the last upsurge of Stalinist terror in the early fifties. A further distinction should also be dr:lwn ix:nveen those who were treated as idc.:ologically dcviationist and others, like thc Slovaks Husak and Novomcsky, who were accused of " nationalism.n 8. For Romania, sec Ghiu ]OllCM:U, Communism in RlP1IiIniR, J944-J962 (OxfOrd, 19(4); Nioolas BJciu, Drsg/&l d'A",14 Pau/rrr au;.: priwm Ik Tiw (Paris, 1951); Jnd Matei Cazacu, ~I.:ExpCricnce de Piteni," NOUIr:ik Alser7ulriPt 10 Qunc 1988): 51- 53. 9. Among aisting works sec Annie Kriegel, Us Gmnds l'Yf1ds dam /es systbna.-... ..,unisln (Paris, 1972) ; and GeorgCd of supporting (U.S.) capitalist imercsts via their assistance to Israel, an assistance ostensibly motivated by their Zionist fellow-feeling. As it happened, the Czechs had been used by the Russians to funnel weapons and assistance to Israel t-"Ver since the fou nding of that state, but the change in Soviet Middle-East policy required that someone take the blame fo r these past errors. H ence it was not enough to prosecute midleve1 or even senior CZcis l'ejto, Mhtwim. d, Rudapen if Pa,v (Paris, 1986).

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115

wo rk with anti-Communists in pursuit of his revelations about the USSR, proving that Sattre at least had learned little from the experience. By 1952 he could write, in " RCponsc a Alber( Camus," " We may be indignant or horrified at the existence of these camps; we may even be obsessed by them, but why should they embarrass US?"13 and Claude Bourdet was already more interested in his crusade against France's colonial wars, expressly stating his intention [0 give the laner priority over any investigation into Soviet crimes. Camus's position was naturally very different, but then he had not waited until 1950 to declare himself. In a biting attack on Emmanuel d'Astier de la Vigerie written in October 1948, he called his opponent "a servant of the concentration-camp universe" and declared that concentration camps were, so fa r as he was concerned, an integral part of the state appararus of the USSR.19 Even if there had been no direct echo \vithin the intellectual community of the issues raised by these ['(.-vciations, the m.ws from the Soviet bloc would stiU have been a prominent matter in France. In the decade foUowing the end ofthe war, Kravchenko's book rivaled that ofKocstler on the best-scUer iists. JO One reason was that it was not JUSt the Left: that was mesmerized by events "over there." Right-wingers in France, as in Italy, saw the persecutions in East Europe as further ammunition in their battles against the Left at home. ThLj' were even happy, on occasion, to accept that Rajk and others might be guilty as chargcdconcluding from this that the system was vulnerable [0 internal divisions and would not long survive. During the Cold War, Left and Right alike shared in the view that the position o lle adopted [Owards Soviet camps o r Hungarian trials was an important and integral patt of one's stand on the major question of the day. For many feHow-traveling intellectuals, to defend the credibility of the charges being made in Prague or Budapest was to place oneself finnl)' on the good side of an insuperable barrier. To do anything less was to risk finding oneself in the orher camp, alone and without friends . There was of course the "other side," which could boast a number of powerful and clear-headed thinkers-Raymond Aron's [0

28. S:ortK, ~ RCponsJ 53. Hcda Km..Jy, Vndera C.-I Smr: A Lift in~, 1941- 1P68 (New YO';", 1989); Rosemary K'l\'all, 1+miom at 4 !'ria (Londo n, 1985) ; Marian Slingm.. , Tl'1Ilh Will !'mail (London, 1968); Jo unb""r, Vne s.. ........... 8mriJIRm (Paris, 1979); Edith Bone, Snno Yell'" SolitMy (London , 1957).

CHAPTER SEVEN

Today Things Are Clear Doubts, Dissent, and Awakenings

Comment, en ron for intbieur, prnx-hl supportn' p"mJIe dJgn:u:/4titm de l'homnu en IR ptrsofme de celui qui U IIWI1tm

ami?

ron

How, in your innennost feelings, can you bear such human degradation in the person of a man who W.lS your friend! Andrt Breton

No o ne who reads the in numerable books, essays, articles, and polemical exchange:;; that studded French public life in the postwar yca~ can fu il to be impressed, in the midst of all tha r noise, by a certain silence. In the welter of verbal presences, there was, so to sp.ris, 1950}, 300. For Elu~rd's reply, sec "L'Honncur des poCICS," EJprit, Sc:ptcmbcr 1950, 378.

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THE BLOOD OF OfHERS

the condition of his generation. Petkov's corpse, he wrote, "shows nothi.ng; no clear path, none of the fine confidence ["belles certirudesj of our Drcyfusard parcnts."s In olle sense Mounier was wrong-it was the very "certitudes" of the Dreyfus episode that directed the consciences of so many of his contemporaries and colleagues. For the generation that had come of age at the rum of the cenrury (Langevin, &nda, Mauriac, and many others), the moral and poliricallcssons of Dn.-yfus were clear. The difficult question was the usc to which these lessons should be put. The younger generation, born in the years between Dreyfus and the coming of World War I, implicitly shared the values at stake in the Dreyfusard engagement but felt less comfortlble invoicing them. The experience of the interwar years and the Occupation had hedged moral absolutes and ethical confidence with doubt and skepticism. The choices with which they were now faced were perhaps analogous to those of 1898, and their engagement was still on the side of the good and the true, but a different vocabulary was adduced to give these choices and those norms a substlnce. It was thus rare to hear such people making direct reference to Dreyfus as the souree of their own political positions. The case of Julien Benda, however, illustrates what happened when a man of the older generation did TCSort to [he Affiir in seareh of MOllnier's "belles certitudes." On a number of occasions after 1945, Benda rumed to the Dreyfus experience to illustr.lte his present engagement. The unconditional alliance with the working class and its politicallcadership, he wrote in 1948, is the necessary basis for any defense against reaction, at home and abroad. What had been true ofWaldeck-Rou!>SCau was true for us today; a coalition of all progressive forees whatever their ideological or programmatic differences is the only sure barrier to the Right and the best route to the fururc/' In March 1948, this amounted to a blank check for Stalin (Benda's article was published a month after the Prague coup), for the belief in an imminent revival of fascism was sufficiently widespread in these years to give credibility to &nda's analogy. For him, the subtle dialectics of a Merleau-Ponty were thus rednndant. One did not need to pretend that Stalinist regimes were good nor even deny the haem they wrought. One had onl), to claim for them membership in the open family of the left and the banner of "republican defense" could be unfurled in good conscience. Pas d)ennemis it gaucht. 5. Emmanuel Mounier, ~Pe{ko" en nous," &pnt, October 1947, 591. 6. Julien Bend:!, ~ L: Dialogue CS{~il possible?" Eumpr, M"",h 1948, 7.

roDA);, THINGS ARE CLEAR

143

The second occasion on which Benda was [Q invoke the argument from Dreyfus was more complex. The Rajk trial drew trom him an impassioned defense of me official Communist line. What, Benda asked, do those who harbor doubts really object to? The confessions of Rajk and his colleagues? And what do they find indigestible about these? Their use as evidence in the absence of any corroborating materials and in the face of grave doubts as to their credibility. But this is absurd, he protested. The anti-Dreyfusards also claimed that a confession is not a "'proor-in their case they were defending Major Esterhazy and assert· ing that his admission that he had written the famous "borde~u» (memo) was not conclusive evidence. We Dreyfusards, on the other hand, defended Dreyfus because he was innocent and refused to confess to the crime, and we correspondingly believed Esterhazy when he said he had done it. 7 Once again, Benda insisted, it is a!1 very simple. Not only does the Hungarian regime have the right to defend itself when under threat (republican defense again), but the criteria we applied in 1898 apply no less today. If a man confesses, we must suppose he is telling the truth and not apply a double standard. It is important [0 under.;tand that Benda was writing [his in good fuith, in keeping, as he saw it, with a position of moral integrity and consistency, which he had presemed in La Tmhisun des c/m;s and which he beli(:ved himself still [0 be upholding. As REVue Socialisu remarked, upon hearing Julien Benda invoke Dreyfus in defense of the alliance with Communists, "Arc we drcaming?"8 And yet Benda's confidence was the nearest thing to moral coherence within the fellow· traveling communit y. It required ofhim that he believe Communists in general and Stalin in particular to be operating under the same rules as Republicans, Socialists, and all other men of good will. But for someone of his generation, this was not only a reasonable bcliefbut the only one compatible with the moral universe into which they had been born . It took greater intellectual courage than Benda or most others possessed to realize that nor only had the rules changed , but the game was not remotely comparable to the one they had known. It is for this reason that open moral condemnation of Communist practices was so uncommon from within the inteUecmal community, even (and perhaps cspcciaUy) from those who had private misgivings. 7. Benda, "futerhazy, l'affaill' Raj", ct la democratie," Us umr:. fi'so"f"iw, 13 Cktober 1949.

8. EditorUJ, "lkfus d'un dilcmme," &Pue I«ialim 20 (April 1948): 339.

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THE BLOOD OF OI1i.ERS

The sort of ethical vision consistent with such condemnation was not easy to sustain. More common was a public expression of simple despair- as in the case of Jean Baboulcne, writing on the front page of Tbtwignage Chrttim following the execution of Petkov: "One can no longer, after this [crimel, look EaSt without dcspair."9 A similar vein of moral anh"llish runs through some of the writings ofFran ~ois Mauriac on the occasion of the Petkov and Maniu trials and again in March 1951. Commenting on the fout-power meeting being held in Paris about the time when thc Slovak Clcmentis was fir,;t arrested (hc would be hung alo ng with tcn mhen; after the Sl~nsky trial), Mauriac imagined the ghost ofClcmentis pn:scnt at the meeting; no world peace will be possible, he hear,; Clementis warning, that is "built upon the saerifice of small nations."10 In Mauriac's case, of course, there \'IaS never any moral ambiguity in thesc marten;. In a mordant article on the Raj k. rrial and the way it had been reported in the French left-wing press, notably that of thc Communists, he noted in particular the COntrast between the stench of death that hung O\'er Budapest and the upbeat style of one of the journalists: "Even over the succulent Hungarian breakfusts described by Madame Simone Tcry one can see the shadow of a body, swinging." Others, like Marcel Peju, might be driven to concede that the show trials werc "an immense edifice of bad fuith,'" in which the charges were a "f3ke story, a distorted picture," but they fough t shy, as we have seen, of drawing from this any larger conclusions about a system that could produce and stage-manage such monstrosities. JJ Beyond Mauriac, the moral high ground rcmained sparsely occupied . Later on, the increased attention paid by some writers to the rcpons of torture in French colonies helped transfonn the discourse of radical politics by introducing into it, almost despite itself, a concern with human rights and normative ethical evaluations. Perhaps the best instance of this is in the writings ofelaude Bourdet. Initially Bourdet's apologetics 9. Jan BaboulCne, T~ OJririm, 3 October 1947. 10. Sec FrJll~ois Mauriac, MiHwil1'1poliw,ua (Paris, 1967), 4.10; see also Mauriac's artides on P"tkov's trial and K:ona(>,,'. cornmcnury upon it, ... well ... on the Maniu trio.! in Romania , from OclOber and November 1947, in J.mrnaf, \ "01. 5 (Paris, 1953) . Camus, 100. nOlcd the imernationo.! indifference 10 developments in the people's democracies: "Cc: n'cst (>'IS nollS qui a\"Ons Ii...rf les libtraux, les socialislcs el Ies arurchistes des democralies POI'UWfCS de: l'Est aux tribu11.3ux sOl."ietiques. Cc n'est pas nous qui 31."0n. pendu PetkO\". Cc 50nt les signatairc:s des (>"ctcs qui cOlllOlcraient Ie panaS" du monde."CamlU.., interview, Dij"mrede f'h_ ....., July 1949; "'printed in Aaueffes, ...,1. 1 (1950; reprim Paris, 1977),233. II. Mauriac, in FigPro, 31 October 1949; Marcel P~ju, "'Hicr el aujourd'hui," part 2, Us TfflIps mMnna 91 (May 1953): 2015, 2021.

lO[)AY THINGS ARE CLEAR

145

for Stalinism conceded nothing in dialectical subtlety to those of Mounier or Sartre; from December 1951, however, he became ever more concerned with French practices in Algeria and els(:whcrc.12 At first [his produced a son of moral bifocalism, but from the Slansky trial and with inc~ased emphasis thereafter Bourdct introduced into his commentaries on Stalinism some of the same criteria he was applying in the West. For Bourdet these issues were neyer truly comparable, and one must not exaggerate the infiltration of categories of assessment from one political debate to another. Bur with the inc~ased discursive emphasis on illegality, cruelty, and exploitation, it was no longer quite so easy to condemn whole nations in the comforring name of necessity. Camus, too, took an carly critical position on French racism, LJ but he had also rebel!cd somewhat sooner against the moral blackmail exercised by Communists; in 1948 he insisted that anyone who criticized repression of free speech under Franco, for example, both could and indeed must do likewise when speaking of the present condition of artists in the Soviet Union. Moral judgment was indivisible, whatever comfort it happened to provide for one's right-wing opponents. In this as much else, however, Camus was 3typical. 14 One reason for the relative absence of any consistent moroll criticism from within the Left \'laS the lack of an analytical framework in which to locate and ground such a critique. For a Catholic moralist like Mauriac this \.'laS less of a problem, especially once the acrimonious dcbates over the ipumtion had freed him from earlier loyal tics to the coalitions of the intellectual Resistance. But fOr others, it was difficult to pronounce definitively upon the crimes of the Stalinists when, a.~ we have seen, 3ny very clear sense of justice was lacking. Hence, the paradox that among analytical critiques of Stalinism , some of the most consistent were to come from Marxists themselves. Of these, two of the sharpest pieces of writing were by Claude Lefort, written at either end of the worst years of Stalinist excesses and both published in Temps Itroden/es. This is curious when a ile remembers that in the same journal there wcre being published throughout this period arguments 3nd apologias diametrically opposed in style and content to everything Lefort sought to express. At one level this is a tribute to the ecumenical editorial policy pursued by 12. 1951. 13. Algeria 14.

for Bourdet's denunciation oftorturc., .\Cc, filrcumplc, L'O/Jsn'Ntmr, 6 December

See, for exampic, Camus's artidc in ComImt, 10 May 1947, condemning racism in and anti-Semitism in France itself. See "",rious artides by Camus in G",.lmt during Nu\'cmber 1948.

146

THE BLOOD OF OTHERS

Sartre and his frie nds. On another, it might be taken to suggest that no one read- or in any ease understood or cared- what anyone else was saying. In his first article, on " Knvchcnko et Ie problcmc de l'URSS," Lefort noted that the workers' movement was the victim of a myth, the idea that Stalin's USSR was in any sense a living revolutionary society. This was a belief also widespread among "bourgeois" commentators, who were happy to credit thc Sovict Union with a " progressive" economy (reserving their criticisms for its repressive excesses). Among such bourgeois defenders of Stalinism Lefort included Merleau-Ponty, whose fuith in the historically progressive character of the regime hinged on a positive reading of its productivc forces and their revolutionary dynamic. The virtue of Knvchenko, Lefort claimed, was that he rcvealcd this to be a lie. By providing further L'Vidence of something "we already know," Knvchenko confirmed that in the perspective of class ("thc o nly one that countS for us"), the Soviet Union was a bureaucratic exploitativc society. IS In his second article, written as an indirect responsc to Sartre's defensc ofthe Communists' special claim to privilege, Lefort hammered home his conclusion: not only is the Soviet Union under Stalin not a workers' state, but it exists primarily for the purpose of exploiting thosc same workers; the purges and trials arc a struggle to the death between competing interests within the mling class. As to the rationalization and planning that so mesmerized Western commentators, this was bureaucratic exploitation of the proletariat. No more, no less. u; Lefort did not really differ from his opponents as much as he thought. He too belil.'Ved that what deternlines the character of a social system is the level and nature of its production rclations. He simply held, like 1rotsky, that the Soviet Union since Lenin's death had ccased to dcvelop and had frozen, under Stalin, into a despotic system of state capitalism. But even this position, leaving him as it did unable to explain why such a blockage had taken place, at [cast released him from any obligation to justify or explain away the cri mes of what in his eyes was an illegitimate governing clique. A Marxist-like Lefort was thus quite well placed to situate and condemn the behavior of Communist governments; what he could not propose was any universalist platform of justice or ethics from which to criticize the specifics of Stalinist behavior. Like Jules Guesde at 15. Claude lefon, " Kr.lVchcnko c[ Ie probl~mc de l'URSS," Ur Ttmps mlJdn..a 29 (February 1948), especi.illy 1491- 1509. 16. leforl, "le Marxismc ct Sarlre," Us Ttmps mlIIkrna 89 (April 1953): 1560.

IDDAY TH INGS ARE CLEAR

147

the time of the first Dreyfus trials, he refused to take sides in an argument between equally unworthy antagonists. Not only did he condemn both the capitalist West and the Stalinist East, but he also treated the death struggles between O:>mmunist leaders as a matter of moral indifference. In this respect , his task was simpler than that of his non-Marxist con+ temporaries, who sought to achie\'e similar analytical clarit y about the Soviet system while maintaining a stance from which they could be morally engaged. Mauriac came perhaps the closest, comparing the Communists' treatment of their victims to the excesses of the French purges, a position from which he fd t able to issue critical commentary, having been no less opposed to French domestic practices a few years before. 17 This was a comfortable position for Mauriac but not for most of his colleagues, whose attitude at the time of rhe epmntWn had been very different. Camus adopted a slightly different posture, standing outside of Marxism itsclfbut treating the defects of Stalinism as part of the larger weakness of Marxism as a philosophy. Because Marxism is a procedural philosophy lacking in any jurisprudence, he wrote, it has no \\'ay of setting for itself a framework for justice or any other transcendent goal. 18 Thus there was no point expecting it to behave in accordance with any such nomlS, though this was no reason to abstain from judgmenr or condemnation. Others would reach similar conclusions, though it took them rather longet. Jean-Marie Domenach in 1955 finally conceded that if all it took to make Tiro respectable again in O:>mmunist eyes was a visit from Khrushchev, then dialectics are mere magic- "the translation of essences." It was pointless to expect from such a belief system any coherent account of human b.:havior, bur that did nor excuse us from demanding it. To do as Merlcau-Ponty hld done, to make a pact \vith Marxism-Leninism for one's own ends, was cynicll. 19 Mauriac reached his conclusion in 1946, Camus acknowledged his own disillusion in 1948, Domenach waited until 1955. Countless others dropped away or rediscovered their innennost convictions at various points within these years. The mlnner in which doubt or disgust finally entered the soul varied widely. What was furly universal was the extcmal trigger, and this was frequently some nt.:ws or event from eastern Europe or the Soviet Union itself. For writers like Claude Aveline, Jean Cassou, M~uril.e, MbHoIm politUfues, 365. 18. Camus, unu-Il", vol. 2 (Paris, 1964),286. This was written in 1949, following the R.ajk trial. 19. lean-Marie Domenach, "Lcs IntcUcctucls et Ie communismct &prit, July 1955, 1205, 1210.

17.

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THE BLOOD OF OrHERS

and Pierre Emmanuel, the break octween Stalin and Tiro, and the subsequent attlcks on Tito by the Communist movement, proved indigestible, nor least because Tito's own regime- repressive, Stalin ist , and a model of sovietization- had been much admired by Western intellecruals until that time. 20 For Merle:Ill-Ponty, Vercors, and a few others, it was the Rajk trial, further abetted by the revelations about Soviet camps- although in Merlcau-Pomy's case it took the outbreak of the Korean war to elicit from him an open statement of his jXlsitioll. 21 Curiously, the worst trial of all, that of Shinsky and his associates in 1952, did not in fact produce many defections; most of those who could no longer find it in themscl\'es to account for these things had already left the fold. The Czech trial was particularly mysterious to mall)" in its timing, its obscure purpose, and its unprecedented r,lcism . As a result, although much attention was paid to it in the French press, few could make an)' sense of it. What the SJansky trial seemed to show, in a way that the Moscow trials and the subsequent indictments of Kosta v, Rajk , and the rest never could, was the essential impossibility of ascribing rational meaning or historical purpose to Communist terror. No Merlcau-Ponty came forward in 1953 to offer a hypothetical para-Hegelian defense of the indictment ofSLinsky and his colleagues. No SUCCC-"50r to Mounier appeared, offering an exculpation wrapped in a critique. There was no Cassou or Vercors to declare that this was too much, no Rem)' Roure or Louis Martin-Chaufficr to speak out against the suppression ofevidence. All that remained was to protest or remain silent. Protest was made casier by the f.J.ct that the Sl3.nsky trial was almost exactly contemporary with that of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in the United States, and in the word~ of Jean-Marie Domenach, "There is more to this than coincidcnce and surf.J.ce rcscmblances."ll An appeal for dementy on Shinsky's behalf was drawn up and then combined with an identical appeal for mercy on behalf of the Rosenbcrgs. The resulting petition was then sent to Presidents Truman and Gottwald. Among those who signed were Domenach and Albert Beguin of Esprit, erstwhile fellow-traveling intellectuals and artists from Louis Martin-Chaufficr to Gerard Philippe, the Gaullist Claude Mauriac, Jean Cocteau, and others

20. See Claude Ro).., Now (Paris, 1972), 415; and Jean Cassau, ~ l.a Rcvolution ct 1a &prir, December 1949. 21. Maurice Merlc:IU·Ponty, ~Maf"llisme et supcrsrition ,~ Us 1tmp! IIIlJIizmn 50 (December 1949). 22. Domenach, ~t:AntisCm itismc !"CStc Jogique,~ F..spnt, lanuary 1953.

n'rit':,~

lODAY TH[NGS ARE CLEAR

[49

besides. The petitioning telegrams specifically disassociated themselves from any political affiliation and emphasized their common oppositio n to the death penalty for political offenses. Even so, there were those like Mm: Bcigbeder who preferred not to speak OU[ against the Czech judgmenu (and some more fumous names are absent from the list of signatories); but such hcrcrogcnwus and apolitical appeals would have been unimaginable a few sho rt yt."ars before. H After the Slansky trial (and the anti-Semitic hysteria that followed it, culminating in the "Doctors' Plot" in Moscow the following spring) , support tor communism was more tacit than open, marc residll3l than deeply felt . The events of 1956Khrushchev's "revelations," the Polish revolution, and H ungary- provided an exit from the dilemma of the left-wing intellectual; but the real break had already occurred. In thi~ sense, 1956 \\l3.S a delayed response; it represented a sort of time-lapse in sensibilities, a decent imerval between the death offuith and deparrure from the church.24 Most fell ow-travelers, as their later recollections and memoirs suggest , passed through these years in a sort of twilight zone, in which their thoughts and their words bore only a tangential relationship to one another. Many of them would doubtk'i,s have agreed with Mounier, in one of his last pieces of writing: "'One day this notion of objective guilt will have to be addressed directly."25 For Mo unier that day ofrcckoning was mercifully avoided through his untimely death , but most others who were not thus spared still preferred to avoid the question. And yet Mounier had been right, for packed tightly within this phrase was the uneasy conscience and moral cowardice of an intellectual generation. The "objective guilt" of Petain, Laval, and Brasillach had been ex tended to Bukharin, Tukhachevsky, Petkov, Kostov, R3jk, and SIansky, together with millions of ano nymous victims and capitalism itsclf. Behind this anodyne little error there lurked tile spiritual cancer of modern thought. Intellectuals are no bener or worsc than other pt.'Ople. They arc not even very different. They livc in communities; the), seek the respect and fear the disapproval ofother.;; they pur.;ue careers, they desire to impress, and they fC\'ere power. In the years from World War II until 1956, in the intellectual community of Paris, the pressure to conform to a certain view ofthe \vorld was tremendous, morc perhaps than it had been before 23. For deni[s of Idcgr'llms and signatories, SCe ibid. , 147, n . I; and L'Ob=mtru,., 4 December [952. On Rcigbcder's stance, see l'ran~ois Ma unac, Blot-Notes (Paris, [958), 27 December [952. 24. For a further discussion "fthe sign ifia ncc of thc cvents of [956, sec ch apter 14. 25 . Mounier, ~Jouma[ ~ plusieurs voix,'" 1-4'"f, January [950, [32.

ISO

THE BLOOD OF OIl-IERS

or since. It is not surprising that we should find so few dissenting voices in the crowd, even on such deeply human issues as persecution, violence, and death. What is perhaps a little more surprising is that on these issues ahm>e all, there was remarkable harmony. The events in Soviet East Europe aroused much attention and heated discussion in France bur gcner.lted remarkably little moraJ light. There was a fundamental confomlism abom the response to the show trials that remains curious even arrer one has exhaustively mapped out the context. On those unusual occasions on which someone said something different, or having said something different then remained faithful lO his new position, the change of mood was dramatic . To pursue the earlier metaphor of the conversation, it \vas as though a guest had suddenly insulted the hostess, or pronounced the fuod inedible, or told a rude slOry. The exceptions to this rule were men like Mauriac or Rernanos, who resembled country pastors at a supper party, their dour clmhes and grim pronouncements no longer a surprise and even half-cxpected. As to people Like Raymond Aron, they would not have been welcome across the threshold in the fir,;t place. Camus, who succeeded in making himself an unwelcome presence in just such a way arrer 1949, captured this aspect of the era in one of his notebooks. For many year,;, he like everyone else pretended not to know (or tried not lO think) abom the crimes of the Soviet Union and excused, also like evefyone else, the repetition and perfection of these crimes in Stalin's European satellites. This was the more comfortable position and compatible with his fOrmef role as spokesman of the antiFascist Resistance and its revolutionary dreams. And then, almost as though it came as a sudden insight into the intolerable burden such a silence imposed, he ceased to censor himself and declared that he would forthwith speak his mind. Camus was no commonplace intellectual, neither in his insight nor in his honesty, and he managed to be about a quarter of a century ahead of his time. But in this case he spoke for the problem of the age: One of my regrets is to have conceded too much to objectivity. Objectivity, at times, is an accommodation. Today thing; are dear and we must call something "concentrationnairc" if that is what it is, even ifit is socia[jsm . In one sense, I shall never again be polite. UI 26. Camus,

~n,

voL 2

(~

1964), 267.

PART THREE

The Treason of the Intellectuals

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Sacrifices of the Russian People A PhemJm£nfJ/qiry ofl"tIII1Ikrna 90 (May 1953): 1775.

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THE TREASON OF THE INTaLECnJALS

Communists, knowi,ltJ that he would say nothing aboU[ Jewish victims of Communist persecution.'" According to Simone de Bcauvoir, all of this was a source of much agonizing for her partner, and we can probably believe her. Sartre, she reported, "never recovered from [n'cncaissa pas]" thc Prague trials, the Moscow "doctor.;' plm," the anti-Zionism of the PCF. He promised Mauriac that he would reply in his own time, a promise that he was able to abandon thanks to the death of Stalin . In mher words, as de Bcauvoir concludes, the dep:uture of Stalin spared him the embarrassment of spoiling his relationship with his new-found Communist fiiencls. 45 Sartre the existentialist might have argued that there arc wor.;c thin~ in life than embarrassing one's fnend~ or even oneself and that there are moments in history when an individual just must speak om, make a commitment to a position, and live the consequences. But Sartre the anti-anti-Communist thought otherwise. Once again , as in 1936. 1940, and throughout the Occupation year.;, he missed the opportwlity to act decisively, to be consistent in his moral engagement . But that was his private tragedy. Anti-anticommunism , and everything it entailed, was the tragedy and dilemma of a generation . 44. $;on"" qu,c..J by M _A Bumicc, J.e

7WJdeme (I umtrmpomine 28 (January_March 1981): 204.

AMERICA HAS GONE MAD

189

already "old Europe," rich in ideas, in heriugc, in culture and understanding. Either Europe's furore lay in America (in which case all the worse for Europc), or else the struggle for the preservation of the values ofthe spirit would have to be undertaken against America . These sentiments were reinforced and given new significance by the Great War, which, in revealing the terrifying destructive power oftechnical and economic resources, also made ofmodemity an exponentially more frightening and immediate vision. Moreover, there were now \"ery good grounds for a!>SOCiating modernity and the monopoly of material resources with the U nited States; of all the great powers, it alone emerged unscathedindeed, strengthened- from the experience of conBict. The resented beneficiary of the war, it was now the I13.turai target of both radical ideology and cultural pessimism. But in the years after World War I "America" as the symbol of modernity, materialism, and bourgeois self-satisfaction became synonymous with a larger and more abstract urger of suspicion, "the West." Here, too., a background remark is nccessary. This was by no means the first occasion on which European intellecruals had formed a suspicious, dismissive dislike for their own world and looked longingly at some mysterious other. The fuscination for China and with things Chinese had swept some Westem nations during the eighteenth century, and in the nine4 teenth century many English, Germans, and French had been dnwn into "Orientalism," the admintion for a half4understood. mysterious world south and cast of the Meditcrranean .o Russia, too, had become a source of curiosity for some Western writers in these years. Although it did not follow axiomatically that an interest in Asia must be accompanied by dismissal oCthe Western heritage, there was a natural inclination to adopt for oneself the attitudes of non-Europeans towards the European world . Thus the nineteenth-cemury czarist historians who cultivated the Slavophile dismissal of "the ronen West" were echoed by Western admirers. Until 1917, however, the flow of Westem self-hatred was damned by the unappealing and manifestly unsatisfactory forms of government and social order that held sway ncarly everywhere else in the world. It was one thing to admire the Slav sou! or prefer Chinese art or Islamic theology; it was guite something else to imagine that the political future of humanity lay in the Forbidden City or the Sultan's harem . The Russian Revolution changed all that. Accompanied in short order by the secularization of Turkey, the rise of Arab and Indian nation6. Edw:o.rU Said, OrientRlirm (New York, 1978).

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THE TREASON OF THE INTELLECruAL.'i

alism, the emergence o f Japan as a regional power, and the rumor.> of revolution in Chi na, it seemed to suWSt that if thc East containcd a mystcry, it was thc riddlc of thc futuI'C, nor thc cnigma of thc past. Young radicals ofthc twcntics, cvcn if nor thcmselves Communists, saw in the upheavals to the East an energy and a promise altogether missing from an exhausted, static Europe. In his fir.>t significanr work, the t\venry-five-year-old Andre Malraux captured the mood of his generation perfectly, as he compared the West unfuvorably to the promises of a once-exotic East. The Surrealists, too, were caught up in the emhusiastic \,ision of Western decline (in Spenglcr's sense) and the coming 3.ge of the East; this is Louis Aragon , speaking a year before the public3.tion of Malraux 's 1A Tt'1Iflitum de I'Occi.dcm: "Western world, you arc condcmncd to dic. Wc arc Europe's defeatists . . .. May the East, your terror, at last respond to our plcas."7 During the t\vemies, in the period of nonpolitical, cultural radicalism that marked the immediate post\\'af generation, most inteUectuals had little use for communism and their interest in the East was largely aesthetic and theoretical. Certainly the East was somchow fresher and more promisi ng than thc West, but the exact sociohistorical attributes of East and West remained elusive. The end of the decade and the fir.>t signs of rhc "nonconformists" of thc thirties saw an increasingly precise formulation of the critiquc of Western ci\'iJi7..ation, with a growing usc of the \vord Americ(l as a shorthand for 3.11 that was undesirable or disturbing abom Western life. This critique took \'arious distinct forms, each more political and extreme than the previous one. In the fir.>t place there was America-the-modern , the crude outrider of history. In many novels, '-'\Says, and films from t he l3.te nventies 3.nd early thirties, the United States appear.> sometimes as metaphor, somerimes as example of everything that is amiss or foreboding about the present. In Mort de III pemie bom;gcoise (a title that could stand for many in these )'ear.» , Emmanuel Berl treated the rise of American \X'wer and influence as synonymous with the deeline of all that was worth saving in Western cultufC-"America is multiplying its territory, where the values of the West risk finding their grave." HTwo ycar.> earlier, Andre Sict..fried had published a work dcvoted to thc Unitcd States, in which he saw thc

7. Ar~gon '1110ICd by P;ClTC A~I;cr, Errimim fm"fa is ~ (PYis. 1978), 89. s.,c also Andrt ,\hlraux , u. TrnlRril", de I'Onidrnl ( raf i~, 1926). 8. Emm~nu cl Rerl. Mon de In prnsk b,ntwmW (1929; ",prim Par;', 1970), 76-n.

AMERICA HAS GONE MAD

191

country much as Chaplin would depict it in Modern Times, a land where people are reduced ro automarons, a horrific depiction of the future of us

all; "We Westerners must each firmly denounce whatever is American in his house, his clothes, his soul."'" At first reading, this sounds likc simple anti-Americanism, and the same is true of Bcrl's writing as well. But the clue lies in Sicgfiied's suggestion that we inspect our own behavior first. "America" is us, or rather it is a part of us, everything that threatens the past, irs values, its spirir. This may sound reactionary but clearly was intended to convey quite rhe opposite message. Bcrl was young and an outspoken radical. So were Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu, whose Le Orncer amiricain, published in 1931, was part of a critical diptych; the other half was IXauience de Ia nIltumfm1lfllise, also published in 1931. Taken together, the!>C essays constitute not only a critique of productivism, anonymity, and modernity but also that demand tor a moral, almost a sentimental revolution that gave this generation so much in common with its Fascist contemporaries abroad. Like Georges Duhamel's Scenes de /a J>ie filtrlYt, published in 1930, they saw in anything and everything American the evidence of a collap!>C of the specificities, the variety and depth, that had been the beauty and virtue of Westem culture. Without them, it lost its redeeming features and was rotten , two-dimensional, ripe ror revolution. Some ofthcsc writers, Roben Aron and Arnaud Dandieu in particular, saw in "industrialism" the special sin of modernity and thus in American production techniques the epitome of the modem world in all its naked shame. This of course distinguished them from some Fascists and all Communists and connected them much marc immediately to the sentimental fringe of reactionary politics. In France, as in Germany or Russia, there was an intimate relationship, forged in the Romantic era, between opposition to industrial society and nostalgia for earlier forms of authority and order. The counterpoint to this, utopian socialism and its variolls offspring in the anticapitalism of fin-de-slecle ruralists, was never as strong or popular, having been soundly dcfeated by urban socialist parties with their roots in an industrial labor movcment. Thus those who saw ill America the scourge of modern production and technology tended to be either implicitly conscn'ative or else politically marginal. But this did not prevent them spc,1king for a significant intcllccrual 9. Andrt Siq;fiicd, Us EtRts-Unis d'lIu~rrI'hUl; quo ted ill Willock, NlltimJlllisme., 57.

IInrisimi~, r1~,

192

T HE TREASON OF THE INTELLECI1JALS

constituency. Even Raymond Amn in these years could quote with approvaJ Bertrand Russell's assertion that the great task of the epoch was humanity's struggle against industrial civiJization. lo In this context, the othenvisc awkward figure of Antoine de SaintExupCry fits right in . Despite his own fuscination with modern machinery, he looked upon industrial society a."f"im, 28 October 1948.

AMERlCA HAS GONE MAD

201

only be to the advantage of the Americans. Thus, according to Simone de Beauvoir, Mendes-France and "Ie mendcsisme" sought merely to "improve" capitalism and colonialism from a technocratic perspective. They were but puppets. Looking back in her memoirs, she was still asserting from the vantage point of the early sixties, " It was in fact nothing but a spruced-up Right."n As to France's participation in a reconstructed Europe, "the European myth" was dismissed as nothing more than an American ploy to fCStore German power as a counrenveight to the k:gitimate authority and inAuence of the Soviet Union in the East. The failure of the Liberation was now firmly if anachronistically placed on Washington's doorstep. Hardly had a humiliated and exhausted France fought its way out of one occupation than it was subjected to another, more complete, more damaging, and against which a spiritual resistance was thus morally incumbent upon all. It is perhaps worth noting that such anti-American sentiment was most &cquent in the intellectual milieu. One opinion poll of 1953 found that the highly educated segment of the French population \vas also the one most likely to be critical of the United States, which is perhaps to be expected but merits reAection. After all, economic problems and political uncertainty were universal, and the pm....er and privileges of the United States were as obvious to the least-infonned worker as they were to the most sophisticated scholar or journalist. The shadow of America \vas everywhere in these years. Nowhere was this more abundantly obvious than in the film industry, commonly cited by critics as evidence of the American invasion. During the Vichy years, French films had dominated the domestic market for the first time since World War 1, American and other foreign entertainment being largely banned. But from 1946 the importation of American films (including many third-r:atc productions, which had accumulated during the \var years) grew apace: in the first six months of that year just 36 American films were distributed in Fr:ancc; for the equivalent period in 1947 the number had reached 338. For most of the decade ro come, American-made films constituted over 50 percent of the roral numocr in dblriburion and ~curcd around 43 percent of the viewing public. Most of these films had no redeeming value (the American cinema of the thirties had been distinctly better), and many of them were extr:aordinarily banal and simple-minded . Where they were nor str:aightfurwardly nationalistic or anti-Communist, 33. Simone de lkauvoir, LA liwre da arti Communist.: sc mcfie justcmcnt de l'inteUcctud isolt." Jean Lacroix, ky ~+;I dCllx dc'mocr.!t;C;S>" 354-55. 23. Mou n;cr, "P"'b"llC," EspriT, Man.:h 1948,364.

216

THE TREASON OF THE INTELLECIlJALS

sense ofisolation and exclusion that preceded [his comminnem and was to follow it. If intellectuals signed away their critical faculties to give some meaning to their "litde private histories,'" 17 they nonetheless retained in nearly every case a degree of real autonomy in their own professional sphere. Very few artists, playwrights, scientists, historians, or philosophers of this era who paid lip service to the Communist project and scomed its critics ever let it invade the sanctuary of their work. In the case of those who were still young, like the sociologist Edgar Morin or [he historians Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Maurice Agulhon, or Fran\,ois Furet, it might be argued that they were saved by their youth. But older scholars like Georges Lefebvre also managed to maintain academic integrity even as they PUt their conclusions at the service of the revolution. Picasso and Fcmand Uger, Joliot-Curie and Jean-Pierre Vemant remained faithful to their artistic and scientific callings while striving resolutely to defend the most absurd official positions of their Communist colleagues and allies. This points to a curious neutral region in intellectual sympathy for Stalinism and may offer a further clue to the nature of that sympathy. In order to develop this argument it is necessary to establish certain distinctions. Leading, successful, influential figurc.~ in the intellectual community were rarely to be found in the Communist party. Aragon is an exception, and the prominent use made of him by the party is symptomatic of his unusual standing. Most older party intellectuals were either second-rate perfonners in their field or else intellectuals only in the broadest, generic sense- schoolteachers, journalists, provincial pro-fcssors, librarians, and the like. Thus when the party demanded conformity in the intellectual sphere- whether in the interpretation of events, adherence to aesthetic "principles,'" or the selection of fictio nal subject matter, it was not placing too great a burden on most of its own inreUechlal membership. Conversely, it was in no position to enforce such standards on outsiders and conspicuously failed to do so. Second, most intellectuals who joined the rCF, including those who would later make prominent careers in their field, were very young at the time. The typical Communist intellectual in 1950 was a man or woman in his or her twenties. Vulnerable to party pressure, these people were nonetheless not yet established figures, and they were on the periphery of the Communist movement. If [heir work did not always confonn to the mandated 27. Cl1udc Roy. Moi, l' (Paris, 19(9), 464.

WE MUST Nor DISILL USI ON THE WORKERS

21 7

norms, it did not matter very much. The older generation of established writers, scholars, and artists did not join the party, on the whole. Like Mounier, Camus, Sartrc, Merleau-Ponty, and theiT colleagues, they initiaUy maintaincd a fiiendly distance, supporting communism fOT their own reasons. Their work as novelists, playwrights, philosophers, or historians had begun well before the Liberation , and theiT aesthetic, as distinct from thcir politicaJ , identity was in no way dependent on or related to the workers' movement. Even when, as with Sartrc, this was a source of regret, they did nOt and could not change it. At mOSt they ceased producing artistic or scholarly work and confined themselves to political activism. More commonly, they did both, in a tense and contrndictory juxt.tposition . In this book I am concerned chiefly with these well-est.tblishcd people and much less with their younger colleagues. The latter, together with the lesser intelligentsia of the party rank and file, form the subject oOeannine Vetdes-l.croux's important work, and their history is a different one.28 The Communist parry itself had an interest in exaggetating the support it received from intellectuals, for a number of reasons: like Czechoslovakia, Poland, or Russia itself, Frnnce is a country in which the politicaJ and cultural role of the intelligentsia is a prominent and recognized fuct of public life. As the putative heir to the best traditions of the nation, the PCF laid claim to this inheritance as to others. Furthermore, the prominence of the Parisian intellectual community in poslWar Frnnce was indisputable, and the Commun ists had every reason to seek to cxtend their intluence into such circles. But the party's interest in, and pressure on , intcllcx:tuals varied somewhat according to their activity. Those whose work related directly to the subject matter of Communist discourse (histo rians, sociologists, economists) were of curiously little concern, despite the tact that historians especially thronged to the party in considernble numbers. Novelists, painters, and sculptors, on the other hand, were of much greater value to the party, as pure inrellectuals whose symbolic presence at public meetings and in front organizations was especially highly valued. None of this was wholly new. In the thirties it had been common for people like Gide, Rolland, or Malraux to act in a similar capacity as cultura.! guarnntors for the Communist line, and the Spanish civil war had shown that intellectuals could be both engaged and retain their creative 28. See Jeannine Verdes-Leroux, AM servia Ii.. f'4rti (Paris, 1983); and fA, Rivri/dQ_ ,,,.."'lilies (Paris, 1987).

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219

In practice, Communist and non-Communist intellectuals alike devoted little real attention to the aesthetic or epistemological implications of the "two camps" theory. Those who took Lysenko half seriously were never professional scientists, much less biologists. Andre Stil provoked nothing but silence in the community of painters. Picasso was so unconcerned as to provide a decidedly inappropriate portrait of Stalin for a Communist journal, and his "caricature" was officially rejected and reproved . Le.r Temps modernn, characteristically, responded to things it found embarrassing by ignoring them. From 1948 until 1956 there is astonishingly little space in its pages devoted to events in the Peoples' Democracies, and even less to the cultural policies of communism . Simone de Bcauvoir, in her memoirs, docs reprove her earlier self for excess of"idcalism" in her CSS3yS of the fOrties and regrets her f.Lilurc to be more down-to-earth and "realist" in her language.31 But she is indulging this mild and rare self-criticism in the name of ouvriirismeJ not socialist realism, an important distinction . On the whole, the cultural dimension of Stalinism was something with which French intellectuals were least at ease, just because it came closest to things they knew and cared about: "We were more intolerant of idiocy in areas we knew well than of crimes in those of which we knew little." 32 In contrast with contemporary Italian intellectuals of the Left, the French did not openly insist that the axis of progress/reaction in culrure is not the same as in politics; thc..-y merely kept their moughts to themselves. 33 This moral dishonesty may not reflect well upon them in retrospect-and it should hardly be accounted a matter of pride to have dissented from totalitarianism over bad art but not over mass murderbut it did allow practicing artisrs, novelists, and the like to maintain their professional integrity while adhering to the progressive line in public affain. This seemed all the more important in that many in the postwar generation were drawn together and to the side of the Communists by a further consideration, a theme of surpassing urgency, a grid through which all contemporary politics were viewed and which lent a distorted image to everyth ing it touched - the issue of "pcace." From one point of view it is odd to find tbe theme of "peace" at the heart of contemporary debate. This is because the memory of 1938 was 31. Simone de Bcauvoir, LA Rnu Us ,husn {Paris, 1963}, 80-81 . 32. Claude Roy, Ntnlitical ideas of their revolutionary predecessors, but for a very particular purpose. For a republic [0 work, its citizens and their representatives must be "'one and indivisible" (Sieyes); the body of the king was [0 be replaced by that of the Assembly. Universal manh<XXI suffrage would ensure that all active (meaning adult male) citizens were a part ofthis collective sovereignty, while the education and enlightenment of this citizenry would guarantee t hat reason alone sufficed to bridge whatever ~p remained between private and public interest. The experience of 1793 remained a warning against too vigorous a pursuit of the logic of power implied by such a theory, but this was no reason [0 exclude the Jacobins from the republican pantheon- a point explicitly made by the first generation of republican historians who, starting with Aularcl, treated Danton and (later) Robespierre with due respect. The Third Republic would in time accord rights to its citizens in a number of ways- the right to a free press, to an elementary education, to their own property (for married women, hitherto excluded from this privilege), [0 strike and [0 fonn unions. But the Rights of Man (or citi7..ens) were nowhere enshrined in the Constitution, nor did they form any part of the politics or language of republicanism. They were, instead, collapsed into the long-cstablished and now unstated premise of republican thought, that the virtuous Republic simply \l¥JS the final embodiment of interests and rights \vithin a society. To establish a separate set of articles in which to list the distinct rights and prerogatives ofthe individual would thus have been, in such a concepcion, redundam. TIliscondusion was reached, in part, through a roml of verbal substi-

tution. With growing frequency as the century dn:w to a close, writers and politicians ceased describing France as a political space within which distinct and conflicting interests might compete for power and spoke instead of the political nation as a single being, compounded into a unique and morally unimpeachable whole. France, as Michclet had put it, was "a great political principle." Already, under the Second Empire, Victor Durny, Louis Na\X>iL"on's education minister, had written to his employer, " France is [he moral center of the world." lr was the late

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nincteenth-century republicans who first deployed to the full the idea that France stood for something, proselytizing an ideal of civic virtue and implicitly denying any potential or actual diffcrcnces or divergences within the nation itself. If there was a goal to which fin-de-sicclc republicanism strived, it was thus the creation of "Frcnchncss," an identity whose self-ascribed moral superiorit:y would compensate for the gloomier aspects of recent history. The republicans' success in securing thcir regime and the manner in which this success was achieved altered the French politicallandscapc. A universal and undifferentiated democracy replaced the ideal of liberty as the subtext of mainstream republican language. This unconcem for rights and liberty had no significant impact umil the crisis of the 1930s, when the central weakness of the republican consensus was tragically revealed. But it did mark the final decline ofthe liberal tradition of the early nineteenth century. The latter never recovered from its association with the reign of Louis-Philippe and the conflict with socialists and republicans into which this link had embroiled it. But even before 1848, liberal thought in France had been undennined by its explicit rejection of the Jacobin era; it had thereby rendered itself incompatible with the republican institutional vision of later years, whose own lc...-gitimacy derived from the Rt!volution of 1792 and after. Furthennorc, the major political question facing nineteenth-century France concerned institutions- what sort of political or constitutional regime to establish and how to make it stick. Once their dream of an English-style constitutional monarchy foundered on the rocks of social division in the mid-1830s, liberals had nothing to offer in this discussion. What is more, fears of social turbulence had pushed liberals of the Guirot generation towards an ambivalent sympathy for a strong executive po\ver. As a result, French liberals of the Ikstoration generation and after were unable to commit themselves to the utilitarian or ethical individualism oftheir British contemporaries. The French polity seemed to them to have inherited such a fragile and divided nation that social stability rather than individual rights took first claim on their anentioos. This was not unreasonable from their perspective, but it led them to a series of political positions and alliances that isolated them from the sort of popular support that would have lx"Cn necessary to translate liberal instincts into political influence. FoUowing the collapse of "their" regime in 1848, French liberals were pushed aside first by republicans and then by the Empire: in both cases the renewed emphasis on institutional solutions to social problems placed the spotlight on a debate to which

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liberals could no longer usefully contribute. After 1871, the one contribution that liberalism might still have made to constitutional debates, through a defense of the rights and liberties of the individual in the face of the assault of republican universalism , was precisely the one that their social conservatism and political marginality inhibited them from making. In these circumstances, the spotlight placed by the Dreyfus Affitir upon the defense of rights proved brief and at ypical. Despite the legacy ofa renewed if temporary interest in righrs among politicians of the Left, and (he birth of the Ligue pour la defense des droirs de I'homme, the central concerns of French political language soldiered on unaltered. It was not until 1946 mat me language of rights was once again inserted into a French constitutio nal document, and only in 1971 did a constitutio nal court for the first time decb.rc that righrs thus enshrined in a constitution should have the status of positive law rather than be regarded as statemenrs of benevolent and general intent. IJ What was missing, then , in the political language of contemporary France were thc central premises, the building blocks of a liberal political vision . The French radical tradition of reflection about the relationship between state and society was dominated by a combination of republican premises and Marxist projections, confbting the capacities of the state and the interesrs of the individual. Quite absent was the liberal assumption of a necessary and desirable space bern'cen the two, between the individual and the collective, the private and the public, society and state. To me extent that political thought in France did treat of this space, it was seen as an undesirable incoherence, a messy and contingent inheritance to be resolved away. The conception of politics as the sphere of activity within which people negotiated their differences withour any expectation offully resolving o r ultimately abolishing them, though central to early ninetccnth-century liberalism , was missing from mainstream republican and socialist thought. In these circumstances the unconcern for righrs made perfect sense- righrs being precisely those concepts that persons in society claim in their protection, to fill the gap between the desirable and the real in public affitirs. Between this etiolated quality of modern French political thought and the moral condition of IX'liticizcd intellectuals there was a close and influential link. When Marcel PCju published his lengthy analysis ofthe 11. Sec Jean Ri\"cro, 14 Libntb publilfua (Puis, 1974), \"01. I, 14 [)roja ik /'h_IW,

96--141.

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Shinsky trial he took care to claim that "liberal thought," in contrast to that of the Marxists, was inherently mendacious and mystificatory, unable to confess to the gap beN/cen its principles and its practices and thus in no position to criticize such gaps in others. Like Louis Dalmas a few years before, he was willing to find offense in Communist actions but not on liberal grounds, vitiated by the hypocrisy of Western behavior.12 This obsession with "unmasking" the "fuIse" morality of libernlism runs like a thread through the writings of the postwar years. ll PCju and his contemporaries took it for granted that if there was a gap between the proclaimed intentions and actions of a Western thinker o r politician, this could only be because the person in question was either the victim of an illusion or else just lying. That the human condition might simply entail such imperfections, that the "hypocrisy" in question was the homage of vice to virtue rather than evidence of a pathological social condition , was not an explanation many round appealing . What was thus effectively excluded from the progressive intellectual's epistemological universe was the category of "liberal intellectual," occupying the political and social space between a utopian future and a nostalgically reclaimed past. Such a space did not exist in France. For this the Left was not wholly to blame. 1~ Ever since Dreyfus, and following Maurice Bams, the nationalist Right had treated the tenn inte/lectulll with contempt, reserving it for their opponents on the Left, who in tum were happy to adopt it for their own. Moreover, Left and Right alike shared a vision of the intellectual as someone defined by a search for truth in abstractions; distaste far the confusions and rcalities of public life; and fuscination with the exotic, the aesthetic, and the absolute. It was precisely such a view of the intellectual that would lead Sartre and his generation to seek to merge and lose their identity as intellectuals in the great flow of History. What neither Left: nor Right could readily imagine was the notion of an intellectual attrncted to the untidiness and the compromise of liberalism or the defense of the individual and individual rights for their own sake. From the point of vit'w of Sartre, for whom plurnlism was the very source of alienation, the problem and not the solution, this was absurd and could only describe a hack, a servant of the 12. MuccI PCju, uHicr el 3ujourd'hui: 1..: Sens du prod'S Slinsky,~ pMt I, Us Tml/JJ

modn-7Ies 90 (M~y 1953): 1777; ~nd lnuis Ihlmas, .. Rttkxions sur k communismc yougvslave," I=t 3, W TtmfJJ modn-7Ies 55 (M~y 1950): 1970. 13. Sec, for e~mpJc, JCer (london) in February 1948.

C H APTER FOU RTEEN

Europe and the French Intellectuals The fusponsibi/ities of Power

Dam Ies annm aU /i, pcinture ituit

During the rears when painting was systematically destroyed in the USSR dam Its dhnocmtits popu/i,ires, reus and the peoples' democrncies, you pririez ~m nom RUX tMnifotes qui lent your name to sutements glorifyglorifoient Ie Pigime de Smlim. . . . Vo,", ing Stalin's regime... . Your weight counted in the balance, and t(X)k pqid1 pesait dan! /a bRfmlU et omit l'apoir II ceux ifUi, a 1'£.Jt, tie rou/aimt away hope from those in the East who ,",ranted not to submit to the fJIU Ie roumatrc a l'abrunie. Personne ne absurd. No one knm.vs what consepeut dire qudJes consiIfuences Ilumit pu aroir ~m protismtilm catigurique a quences a categorical protest from tuu5 ••. con,", Ir prr:x# de RAji, p"r you might have had ... against the e:amplr. Si rom Ilppui donni a /i, tn'Tmr Rajk trial, for example. If rour supcompmit, rom inditPtation Rumit rompti port helped the terror, your indignation would also have mattered. Czcslaw Milosz (Open letter to Pablo Picasso, 1956)

systimarUJutmmt ditruire m UR5S et

The special status enjoyed by French intellectuals after World War II carried with it peculiar responsibilities. This privilege (or burden) v.'aS recognized by French and fore igners alike, although in slightly differing tenns. For Parisian writers, it consisted of the du ty and the right to speak 275

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2n

ticians turned narurally to Paris, which became a sort of dearing house for modem thought . l What was true for professors was no less true for politicians, especially those of the far Left. Thousands of young Central European Com· munisrs ended up in France, either by going there directly or else after a stint in the International Brigades fighting in Spain . Anna Losonczy's father (a future victim ofthc post·1956 repression in Hungary) studied for a year in Bcsan'fon before returning to Hungary upon the outbreak of war. Vlado Clemenris was active as a militant in the Confederation generalc du travail (CG1) at Noyelle (near Lens) on the eve of the war; and Artur London, his fellow victim in the Shinsky trial of 1952, was one of many hundreds of Czech, German, and Hungarian Communisrs who came to the French Resistance via service in Spain. Laco Holdos went from Franco's prisons to internment in France, thence to Buchenwald as a deported resister, after which he returned to his native Czechoslovakia where he spent year,; in prison during the fifties as a victim of Communist terror. His trajectory is emblematic but not atypical. 1 Even after the reestablishment of democracy in Western Europe and the imposition of communism in the East, the special place of France was not lost. Exiles, voluntary or otherwise, found their way to Paris and chose the medium of French and the French intellectual press to tell their story and argue their case. Indeed, in the 1970s and 19805, the dis-sident and exiled intelligentsia of eastern Europe would play the role of catalyst in galvanizing and shaping French reactions to cvenrs in the Soviet zone. l In the forties and fifties , however, their influence was dis-tinctly dimmed, confined to the margins, and ostentatiously ignored by the dominant circles of the time" This raises a curious question. If writ· ers like Milosz, Eliade, and their peer,; were so unable to convince or influence their French contemporaries of the malevolent significance of the Communist experiment, why did they persist in the effort? In Britain I . On [he em ig:ru ion ofCcn t.-..l -Europcan intellectuals, iniruUy to )'""nee and then to the United Stllles or in some cascs directly to America, sec H. Stuart Hughes, 1'b~ ,s,.. O1a'fgt (New York , 1975); Marlin Jay, Tht fM/atiu11maei""tiI;m (Boston, 1973); and Jay, Pm...._t E.>dlu (New York , 1985). 2. Sec Anna Losonczy, interview, NwwiU AIkmootiR: 11 (September 1988); An:ur London, VA""" (Paris, 1968); Karol Bartoscl::, Rt:nc GaJissot , and Denis I'cscharuki, cds., Dr l'P:il" [,. Rima"," (Paris, 1989), 231 , n. 5. 3. Jcan-Maric Domcnach , E"'fUitl: lin' Iu idles ctm_pomj~ (Paris., 1981), 59. 4. ~Parlons de to ut , sauf de ccs choses qui concernent Jes petits peuplcs ct au sujet desqueUes nous avons ~ la consiglle de no us tain:." Fr:In~is Maunac , lou"",l, vol. 5 (Paris, 1953), 17 January 1946.

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in the name of humanity, to pronounce upon the human condition and ro be understood in this sense even when engaging in apparently local debates. For outsiders, it meant that choices made or refused in Paris would have an impact and receive an echo in far-away places and be read, quoted, and misquoted by an audience far greater than that accorded any other intellectual community. The asymmetry ofthcsc perspectives produced a curious incongruity: unrestrained either by political repression or cultural modesty, the French forged a community of words distinguished by irs unique mix of political urgency and moral airiness. Risking few consequences for their actions, French intellectuals in the postwar decade suggest a community marked by a shortage of historical gravity. Bur for their audience, especially the unusually attentive one cast of Vienna, every word weighed heavily in the balance. For the dissident intelligentsia of Europe, France had long exercised a very special attraction; although England was the safest country of exile during the nineteenth century, the secure shelter for defeated rebels from Marx to Kossuth, France was the natura] home of the disinherited intellectual. By living in France and addressing themselves to the French in their own language, writers like Heine, Mickk'Wicz, Mazzini, and Herzcn could make their cause known to a wider audience and, through the medium of Europe's common language, make of that cause something universal. The special significance of the French Revolution had given the centrality of France- already an established feature of ancien regitm Europe- an extra dimension, to which the glittering urbanity of nineteenth-cenrury Paris added a further gloss. This unique French status might have been expected to diminish with the rise of Germany, the relative eclipse of France (before and arrer 1914) and the establishment of nation-states in the old imperial heartlands of thc continent. The intellectuals of Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia now had their own concerns, which they did not need to project onto the inrernational stage by way of Paris, and their linguistic and cultural horizons were increasingly bounded more by Berlin and Vienna than by Paris. But the rise of fascism, the extinguishing of democracy through most of central and southern Europe, focused attention once more on France, which in the thirties was again swollen with imellecrnal and political exiles and emigrCs from much ofEuropc. Franee (00 figured prominently in the cultural life even of those Europeans not yet constrained to leave their homeland: with the Nazi scizurcof power in 1933 and the Catholic coup d'etat in Vienna a year later, Czech structuralists, Austrian logicians, and German aesthe-

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or the U nited States, the potential audience for such people was always greater, and more sympathetic, just as it was for the liberal intelligentsia of France itself. Considering how few of them took seriously the voices from the East, why were the intellectuals of France always the favored object of attention? To answer this question is to grasp something essential in the sociol· ogy of European intellectual history. When the intellectuals from Poland or Hungary sought to explain to the West why the survival of culture is so crucial in their country, why poetry or music matters so, and why the intellectual is at once vital and vulnerable in the national culture, it was only in France that they found or expected to find immediate empathy and understanding. The magnetic appeal of France for East European intellectuals thus went beyond the accident of exile, resistance, or Latin brotherhood (as in the Romanian case); in Paris, the dissident thinker was in familiar sUITOundinw>. Il was thus natural for the intelligentsia of half of Europe [Q appeal to the luminaries of Parisian cultura1lifc-and to take very seriously the response or silence that met their words. The widespread indifference of French intellectuals to the suffi::rings of their contemporaries in Prague, Buciape-mtJw (Paris, 1985), 65.

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uneasy conscience would later salve their memories. No such excuse could be offered lOr those in Paris who made the same misrakes. Hen; once again, thcre entered the problem of asymmetry. Eastern European intellectuals had long known all about France, as mey knew all about Germany, England, or Italy.7 Western European culture was EUrvjJMn culture; Western European political history was the spinal column ohhe continent's past, whereas the cultural and political monuments of the other half of Europe lay hidden from view. East European intellectuals treated Voltaire, Diderot, Balzac, Hugo, and Anatole France (not to speak of RobespiclTC, Blanqui, and Clemenceau) as part of their OMI cultural baggage; but the converse was never the case, and they knew it, 8 Thc secondary, marginal status of the cultures and peoples of East Europe was a painful truth but an accepted one. So long as the poets, musicians, novelists, and philosophers from Viloa, Lvov, Prague, Budapest, and Bucharest could enter into the universe of the French, they forgave the intellectuals of Paris for their failure to make equivalent gestures in response. But what characterized the situation aftcr 1945 ..I,'as precisely this, mat the French closed the intellectual fronticrs. The community of the universal intellectual was redefined to exclude those who were victims of Stalinism, consenting or otherwise. Eastern European writers undersmod this too- as noted above, they had themselvcs at first been tempted to make similar distinctions. What seemed unforgivable and inexplicable was the failure ofthe French to see what they- Poles, Czechs, and others- now saw. For the intelligentsia of Europe's eastern half was now doubly excluded: deprived of its own national culture by tht,. Communists and forbidden entry into Europe'S universal culture by the latter's own accredited guardians. Hence the embittered, resentful, saddened tone ....':im which East Europe's intellectuals spoke of and to the French, even as they persisted in the effort to capture their attention. Some of this tone can be attributed to political memorics of prewar political betrayal- it was Edouard Benes who announced in October 1938, "'In the eyes of history my great error will have been my loyalty to France."'9 But fur the mOSt part, the phenomenon is essentially that captured by Milosz as early as 7. Sec MiJ05z, "L'Occident," in I"mIPn 33 (November 1955). 8. As Jeannine Verdes-Leroux remarks, Us Uttres fi"A11f4isa was more widely read in East Europe than it was in France, and more influential. Sec u RJrriI ria _ ....mbHla (P;oris, 1987), 330-31. 9. Bcna quoted by Jean-&ptistc OuJU5Clk, fA DmuIma, 1932- 1939 (I'His, 1979), 364.

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281

now become simply repressivc, thc ordinary form of inefficient, corrupt, sterile totalitl.rian power. Revisionist intellectuals like Kolakowski gave up the effort [0 speak to the regime in its own voice and left: its ideologues to their own Orwellian devices. This process unfolded at varying rates, most rapidly in Poland, slowly in Czechoslovakia, for reasons having to do with the initial degree ofenthusiasm and terror in each country. With the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, communism, and with it the socialist dream itself, lost its final foothold in the ersrwhile leftist intelligentsia of eastern Europe, leaving behind a wasteland of cynicism that would eventually and slowly be replaced by a new generation of opponents whose arguments were grounded not in a humanist socialism but in human rights and the demand for a stl.te of law. U In the West, however, and especially in France, events took a different rum. There, too, communism began to loosen its control on the uto-pian imagination, its appeal polluted by Khmshchev's revelations and the sight oftl.nks in the streets of Budapest. But the declining charms of Muscovite communism in the West were not accompanied by any diminution in the Stl.tus of Marxism, nor in any loss of affection for the radical vocabulary that had carried thc hopes of the postwar Left. East and West thus begotn to diverge abmptly, to the point that the DubCek reforms of 1968, the " Prague Spring," met uncomprehending, even hostile reactions from some sections of the French Left.13 Nor did the French or other Western intellectuals pay very much attention to the "normalization" that followed DubCek's full; only after 1974, and then tOr reasons of their own that had little to do with the course of events in the Soviet bloc, did the Parisian intellectual community once again begin to look eastward, mis timc with a modicum of sympathy if not undel"Stl.nding. 14 The years 1956-74 thus represented a lost opportunity for French intellectuals. Stl.rting from a shared. premise- that November 1956 marked the end of an era in which communism had dominated the radical imagination- they moved not closer to their eastern European 12. Stt Tony Jud! , "Dilemmas of Dissidence: The Polities of Opposition in EastCentral Europe;' FAstn.s E""'fJP'I! l'rIliM lind So.:iaiu 2 (Spring 1988).

13. Thusccra.in members ofthc Parti Socialistc unilic, on thc I'r:Iguc ~formcrs; "Victimes oonscntantes des ideologies petites.boutgcoises (humanisme, libertc, justice:, progrts, sutf~ universd sccrc:t)"; see A. Sadiou et aI., Omtriburion /lU prob~ de 14 conrtnI&litm tI'UI! l'Iu1i ~kninim du type _ _u (Paris, 1969), quoted in Grfmion, l'Mis-~, 79. 14. See Tony Judi, "The Rcdiscoo,'Cty ofCcmnl Europe," in Stephen GraubMCd on the catL-gory of generations, this is either self-cvident- each succeeding cohort naturally brings a new set of conccrns and experiences to the fore- or else it is made to 20. For ~ ~JSOnal account of th e so-aJlcd "'()~ .... tion Sevent y Thousand m ust be productive," sec: Jo Langer, UI1l' SRiRm il Bmtlr/am (I'aris, 1981). 21 . For a .... ther O\'l:llIutcd accoum of this S)'Tldromc. see I':Lscal Bru ckner, u So»!qlot tie /'homme bflm& (Paris, 1983) . 22. Sc:~, in particular, the wort ofJcan - Fr:ln~ois Sirinelli, "Generations intcUectucUes," Us Q.hin> de /'IHTP 6 (NOVl:mbcr 1987); and Jcan-Pio::l1l: ruoux , "La Gucrn: d'AlgCric CI k:s imdlccmcls fr.mo;:ais." Us (Ahin> de f'lHTP 10 (Nm'l:mbcr 1988).

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carry too great a bunien of explanation. After all, there had been new generations before the Algerian one; the "'Hussards" around Roger Nimier in the early fifties reacted against the then-dominant tisistnntia/isme by resorting to an apolitical nihilism, skeptical of all amhority and commitment. Why was theirs not the moment of change, the point at which postwar concerns gave way to newer, less ideologically charged oncs?23 The "Algerian generation" was perhaps fortunate, both in the moment of its appearance and the moral clarity of its cause, but to see it as a major turning point is to concede rather tOO much. Like the Communists and cx-Communists of the preceding generation, those who came to political awareness with the onset of the colonial crisis had an interest in claiming that something definitive happened in 1956, but the evidence of subsequent years suggests otherwise. At most, we may say that when intellecruals of this period would come to reflect upon their own tr.tjeetory, they would find good reasons for dating their own illusions or disillusions from this year. But good reasons are not always good history. To understand the meaning of 1956 in French political culture and in relations between French and other European intellectuals, it is thus perhaps more helpful to ask not what changed but what remained the same. In the first place, the intransigent self-confidence of the postwar intelligentsia survived largely unscathed the experience of the Stalinist years. Were this not the case, the wilder shores of tierr-mondisme and A1thusscrian Marxism of the mid-sixties could never have been reached. The remarkable moral self-assurance behind the idea that they were the conscience of humanity continued to inhabit not only Sartre and his friends but even transmitted itself to some of the younger intellectuals of the Algerian generation, for whom an anti-French position at this time could be articulated as a vari:l.I1t and continuation of the anti-Western vocabulary of the postlvar decade; in raking a stand over torture, the rights of Arabs, or the claims of colonial peoples in general it was possible to be unabashedly anti-French in the name of a cause over which one need feci no qualms of moral conscience. Such was not the position of Raymond Aron, Fran'fois Mauriac, or their successors, who stopped well short of advocating mutiny or seeking a French defeat. But among the signatories ofthe " Petition des 121" 23. For the '"mood H of the Huss.uds gcnerJ.tion:md their uti tude tov.'aI"ds the en~­ menr ofthcir cJde~ sec " P:.ul ct Jean- r~ul ," in J;lCquCS Laun:nr , U< A"....".. 50 (P:.ris, 1989), 13--65.

EUROPE AND THE FRENCH INTELLECI1JAl.S

287

m 1960, encournging soldiers to refuse to bear anns against Algerian nationalists, were to be found not only the predicrnblc names of Sarrre, de Bcauvoir, Lanzmann, Claude Roy, Marguerite Dum, and Vercors, but also Pierre Vidal-Nacquet and Jcan- Fran~ois Revel, not to speak of Dionys Mascolo and Andre Breron.1-t For tbe Algerian imbroglio also raised new questions. If France was now the aggressor, repressing the legitimate rights and claims of indigenous peoples in the name of higher French interests, what remained of the universal values hitherto associated with the nation? To be a patriot for France in 1958 risked bringing one into conflict with the very goals of human emancipation for which postrevolutionary France was said to stand. In a curious way, Algeria, fur from constituting an insuperable hurdle, thus helped ease the transition away from the previous arn.chment to universalist projections of a "certain idea of France." The language of liberation, of revolution, was now released from its national shackles and could travel freely, arn.ching itself to the most exotic of foreign visions. After the adventure of Algeria, which for all its drama was very much an intellectual success, French intellectuals could reenter the international arena, with a renewed sense of the global meaning of their concerns and purged of their earlier sins without having ever had to acknowledge them. The "concessions" (Camus) shown [awards foreign lands claiming ro realize the intellectuals' own dream were now so fur forgotten as to be subject to renewal and rebirth. 25 The Algerian episode and the domestic constitutional crisis that accompanied it also helped accentuate another long-standing feature of the French intellectual landscape. This was the utter alienation of the intelligemsia nOt only from the political cultu re of France bur also from the social changes the counrry was undergoing in these very yean;. 1956 may be best known fOr its emblematic status in the history of communism, but it also fell right in the middle of the most complete and rapid socioeconomic transfonnatioll France had ever experienced. The modemi7.ation of the economy begun a few years earlier was gath ering pace; the move from countryside to town was in full flow; the astonishing population boom wa~ working its way through the instirutions of education, soon to reach the universities where it would explode; the

24. For dcQils, $n social or historical detail; in his 1981 essay on French intellectual life, Jean-Marie Domenach managed to give an account of the decline of Marxism couched exclusively in terms of high moral inadequacy and grand paradox, with no mention of the social or ecanomic fuilures that constitute the efficient cause of communism's fall from grace. The only difference between Domenach's critique of Marxism and his own and others' defense of it thirty years before is the insertion of negative abstractions in place of the positive ones that detetmined his earlier desire to believe. H Similar observations apply to the critique of Marx and Marxism that so preoccupied discussion during the decade foUowing the publication in French of the Gufllg Arr:hipelllgo. The "new philosophers" and their successors added little if anything [Q the arguments of Albert Camus in IlHomme rivolti; the energetic if somewhat undisciplined linking of Marx, Hegel , Rousseau, the Terror, Russian nihilism, and Stalin into a single unprepossessing package was both the strength and the weakness of Camus's work, and Francis Jeanson'sobservation that Camus wassimply attacking Hegcl for the "original sin" of deifying Man, could as well be made of Glucksmann and his successors. 2' Jeanson had motives of his own for dismissing such an approach, but it docs have rcallimitations. Like analogous recent critiques of othcr German theorists, it disposes efficiently enough of a whole category of worldviews, but through an approach whose terms of reference leave little hope for any positive or productive alternative description of the human condition.M In these circumstances we shouJd not be surprised to find that a number of French writers in recent times have been falling back on another "deep structure" of French intellectual practice, the faith in republican universalism. As French society struggles to integrate a growing minority of persons of different color, fuith , or nationality, conflicts over education, religious practices, and ethnic affiliations have come to [he fore. 24. JQn·M:.Iri 17-23 NOI'cmber 1989.

Suggestions for Further Reading

In what follows I have noted some of the more important, or useful, works dealing with French intellectuals in the period covered by this IxXlk. This subject has generated a subsrantiallitcraturc, bQ[h because of its intrinsic importance and because intellectuals arc a subject of perennial fuscination to themselves and to olle another. r have not tried to prescnt an exhaustive survey of the secondary literature, much less discuss the primary sources I have used, which would require a whole book in itself. Instead I have confined myself to books in French and English

directly pertaining to the material treated in this study. Those readers seeking further reading in particular topics arc rcfcm:d [0 rhe notes of the prescnt book and to the " Indications bibliographiqucs" in Pascal Ory and Jcan-Fran~ois Sirinelli, Les Intellectuels en Fmnce, tU l'ajfojrr I>rr;yfos '1M jflUr! (Paris, 1986). For a detailed list of works dealing with intellectuals ofthe Left in the years from 1956 to the present, a theme not covered in this book, see the bibliographies in Tony Judt, Marxism and the French Left (New York, 1986), and Sunil Khilnani, The Decline of the Intellectual Left in Fmnce, 1945- 1985 (Cambridge, Mass., forthcoming).

a

Intellectuals and Politics

On the general qm:stion of the public role of intellectuals in our time and the moral dilemmas raised by writers' and artists' participation in social 321

GOODBYE 10 All.. THATI

317

Here roo, then, and in the very act ofsenling the score with a tradition of high Gennan thought deemed responsible for the tragic deviations of two generations ofFrcnch thinkers, a new generation of French intellectuals is reforging the chains of its own cultural dependence- if that is what it really was. Heidegger, who was by no means the only German philosopher to nore thar "when the Freneh begin lO think rhey speak Gennan," thus has the last laugh . The very complexity and sophistication of French intellectuals' self-analysis has become its own selfdefeating naivete, with the overabstract hislOrical account of past errors not o nly eomlXnsating for the disappointments of the prescnt but depriving contemponries of the skeptical distance necessary for a true appreciation of their own condition. In the end, of course, that condition is nOt uniquely French. The loss of the great fuiths, secular and religious alike, the apparent opacity of history and social relations, and the absence ofa story for intellectuals lO tell are contemporary commonplaces. Marcel Gauchet's version oCthe postMarxist dilemma- "The more we are led to acknowledge a universal validity lO the principles of Western modernity, the less we are able to ground them in a hislOry of progress of which they represent the fulfillment"36-app lies with equal force to the present state of moral and political thought in Britain, the United States, Gennany, and c1sewhere. 37 It was part of Marxism's special appeal that it posited a simple causal relationship betwL'Cn understanding, action, and outcome. Whoever mastered History in theory was sure to control it in practice; human well-being would inL'Vitably ensue. In such a way of thinking, the role of the intellectual was crucial, and it is incontrovertible that modem tyranny not only gave the intelligentsia a privileged place bur ....'as in certain important respects a tyranny of the intelligcntsia .18 Where the tyrnnt embodies reason, rhe role of the inrellecrual beeomes vital in the transmission of that reason [Q the people 36. M:uo::I Gauchet, in u J:Jtmr so (Mar-August 19811): I6/!. 37. Sec, furcx::lmplc, John Dunn, Westan PtJlitialThturyin the Faa of/hi FMture (Cambridge, 1979), an d Rnhjn~ MOikm Politicllf Theury (Cambridge, 1985); R.ichanJ Rorty, PhiloJuphy llnd the Mirrorof Nllture (Princeton, 1979); and Jurgcn H abcrmas, The Theury of COmlllunimtive Au Jon, 2 voJ.. (Bolton, 1984, 1989), and Mom} Omsciof.snns lI"d COm· lIIunia.riPe Action (Cambridge, Mass ., 1990). 38. Stt Nicola Chiaromonte, The U""", ofOmKioumm lind DIll" Essays (New York , 1976), and ~e """ ffT.Ikre (Milan, 1971). For a difl'cn::nt but compatible a~count,.sec Grorgc Konr.td and ivan S7.clcnyi, The Inrel/a:fHllu on the RbIId IlJ Class Thwtr (New York., 1979).

G<XlDBYE 10 ALL THAT?

319

more than intellectuals elsewhere, and there will be those who listen to what they have to say about it. This is a form of power, which is why it is so appealing, and such verbal actions have consequences. The most that one may ask is that those who thus engage themselves in the public arena, and who place on the scales of political o r moral choice [he weight of their intellectual prestige, do so \\~th more care, coherence, and responsibility than their predecessors, and that they measure the meaning and impact of the things thl1' say and how they express them. "No one," wrote Montaigne, "is exempt from talk.ing rubbish. The misfortune lies in the way it is said,".w 40. ~I'c r5OfJne n'cst exempt de dire des ndaiscs. U: milheur cst de Ies ricuscment."

~

cu-

3111

CONCLUSION

in whose name it is applied . Where o nce he or she sought to scourge tyr.tnts, the modem intellectual finished by interpreting and serving them. Far from representing a deviation from the ideal- his own and that of o thers-Sartre is indeed, as was once believed, the very essence of the twentieth-century intellectual. For the intellectual must, as Sartre wrote, betray, ifhe is [0 be true to his calling. Efforts by Sartre's heirs to overcome this inherited trai[Orous role will only succeed if they can agree [0 abandon the very qualities that made twentieth-cenrury intellectuals what they were. In the light of prescnt longings for a recovery of the intellectuals' prestige, such an enlightened exercise in self-interested modesty seems unlikely. The belief, born of the special circumstances of the Dreyfus Affuir, that the ontological condition of the intellectual in modern times is that of a \\1tness for freedom and progress is thus distinctly misleading. At best , in Andrt Chamson's words, "The duty of the writer is to be to rmelHed." In practice, the writer o r seholar who aspires to that public position which defines intellecruals and distinguishes them from mere scribblers h3S ahvays had to choose between being the apologist for rulers or an advisor to the pcople ;~9 the tragedy of the twentieth century is that these two functions have ceased [ 0 exist independently of one another, and intellectuals like Sartrc who tho ught they were fulfilling one role were inevitably drawn to play both. If their successors, in France as elsewhere, are truly to put this past behind them, it will not be eno ugh to recognize past mistakes. It will also be necessary to accept that entailed in the very meaning for modem society of the term inte/.l.ectual arc a number of roles that writers and scholars today may no longer wish to fulfill; indeed, a rrfosal to occupy the post of the (engaged) intellectual may be the most positive of the steps modern thinkers can take in any serio us effort to come to temlS ,vith their own respo nsibility for our common recent past. T his will be harder in France than elsewhere, for reasons that I hope I have succeeded in illustrating in the course of this book. No one should suppose that Parisian culture is about to divest itself o f all those qualities that constirute at once its gre:\[ appeal and futal weakness. There wiU be Fre nch intellectuals for many years to come; aU of them will say foolish things some of the time, and some of them will say foolish things all of the time. Thc...l ' will on periodic occasions be drawn fO grand theory 39. A distinction wc owc 10 Saint-Simon.

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SUGGFST10N$ FOR FURTHER READING

and political movements, see Philip Rieff, cd ., On IntelJectJlals (New York, 1969), notably the contributio n by J. P. Nettl, "Ideas, InteUcc· tuals, and Structures of Dissent"; Bruce Mazlish, The Rrvolutionary Ascetic (New York, 1976); Lewis Coser, Men of Ideas: A Socioltyi.st's View (New York, 1965); and Edward Shils, The Intellectualsand the Powers and Other Essays (Chicago, 1972) . Useful studies of the opinions and activi· ties of intellectuals in various contexts include Paul Hollander, Political Pir.rnms: Trm'ttls of Wemm Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, Chinn, and Cuba, 1928- 1978 (Oxford, 1981); James Wilkinson, The IntellectUill lWinnnte in Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1981) ; David Came, The Fe/lew Tmvelkrs: A Postscript to the Enlightenment (NL-W York, 1973); Stlnlcy Weintraub, The Last Great CAuse: The bltellectuals mui the Spanish Civil War (London, 1968); and Alistair Hamilton , The Appeal of ffiscism: A StJldy of Intellectuals a1ui Fascism, 1919-1945 (New York, 1971). For a broad-ranging discussion of the cohort of European intellectuals who passed through the experience of the Fin;t World War, see Robert Wahl, The Genemtion of 1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979).

French Intellectuals (General)

In addition to the synoptic and rather breathless survey by Ory and Sirinelli already noted, see the works ofH. Stuart Hughes: Omscioumess mui Society: The &-orienmtion of European Social Thought, 1890-1930 (New York, 1958), and Tbe Obstructed Path: Fmu:h Socml ThOl~ht in tbe Yean of J::Jespemtioll, 1930-1960 (New York, 1968). Unfortunately, the second of these, which is devoted exclusively to FI'.1nce, is also the weaker. The best overall account of intellectuals and politics in postwar France is now Ariane Chebel d'AppoUonia, Histoirt poliriqlle des intetJec· tuels en Fmnce, 1944-1954, 2 vols. (Brussels, 1991). For a morc literary survey see John Lough, Writera,ui Public i,1 Fmnce: From the Middle AF to the PrtSent Day (Oxford, 1978). A racy but generally reliable account of the world of intellectual Paris can be fowld in H erbert Lonman, Tile Left Bank (London, 1982). The early years of the modem intellectual community in France arc analyzed in a more scholarly fushion by C hristophe Charle, NaiSSImcedes " intellectuels": 1880-1900 (Paris, 1990); and Antoine Campagnan, u, Troisieme Rifmb/UJue des lettrn (Paris, 1985); and, with attention to a more restricted theme, by Paul BCncmn, Histoirt

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323

des mots: "Culture" tt «civilisation" (Paris, 1975). For the dose relationship between elite educational institutions and the imellectual community they spawned, see Robert J. Smith, The Ecole normnle Iuphieure and the Thirrl fupublic (Albany, 1982); and Jean-Frnnc;ois Sirinclli, Gtntmtion inullectuelk: Kbaglleux et 1JOrInRliros dans l'mtrt-dela-gJlems (Paris, 1988), though the latter is marred by excessive devotion ro the organizing concept of its title. Among the many recent essays dealing with the intellectual condition in modem France, the fOllowing arc of more than passing interest: Franc;ois Bourricaud, lL Bricolage idio/qjUJl4e: EIsai mr Ies intelkctuels et Ies passUms dbnccmtiques (Paris, 1980); Jean Bclkhir, Us Inte//ectuels et Ie pouroir (Paris, 1982); Jean-Paul Aron, Les Motiernes (Paris, 1984); Louis Janover, La Intelkctuels foce a Phiswire (Paris, 1980); Herve Hamon and Patrick Rotman, Les IntelJocmus: b:pidimm m IJt1llte jllte//igtntsu, (Paris, 1981); Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Aauiemicus (Cambridge, 1988; orig. Paris, 1984); and Regis Debray, Teachers, Wn·tm", Celebrities: TIle i1ltelkctlUlls ofMtXkrn Annce (London, 1981 ; orig. Paris, 1979). The journallL Mat, in its fiftieth issue (May- June 1988), provides a dct::.liled chronology of postwar French intdlcctual and cultural history under the title "Notre Histoire: Matcriaux pour scrvir a I'histoire inrcllectuelle de Ia France, 1953- 1987." Special mention should be made of twO earlier contributions of a different order: Louis Bodin, La Intellectuels (Paris, 1964), olle of me first serious attempts by a practicing historian to study the place of intellectuals in French society;, and George Lichtheim, Marxism in Modern France (New York, 1966), which cove~ an a!;mnishing range in a short space and remains, nearly thirry years arrer its appearance, the most valuable single work on its subject .

The Thirties The " nonconformist" intellectuals of the thirties were studied~and defined~by Jean-Louis Loubet del Baylc, Us Non-amformims des amiks 30 (Paris, 1969). Sec also the ambitious bur tendentious synthesis in acv Stemhcll, Neither Right twr l.Lft: Ftucist Itkol@ in France (Berkeley, 1986) . An account ofintellecrual commitment in politics, based on a number of ease studies from these yean, can be fOund in David Schalk, The SpectMJffl of Political E~t (Princeton, 1979); while the

3H

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTIlER READING

philosophical ambiance of the pcriod is ably dissected by Michael Roth, {md History: Appropriatictu of Htgel in Twentieth-antury Fmnce (Ithaca, N.Y. , 1988), a book that deals with postwar thought as well . For Georges Bat.J.ille and his circle, see Jean-Michel Besnier, fA Politique de Pimpossible: Ubltelkctuel entre rtvolte et ~t (Paris, 1972); and Denis Hollier, The College of Sociolqjy (1979; reprinr Minneapolis, 1988). For more general background, see also Maurice Nadeau, Hiswirr: dtl surrtalislne (Paris, 1970) . On the little groups of the official and u nofficial Left in the Popular From era, see Geraldi Leroy and Anne Roche, l.es Ecrirui,1S It Ie From popufairr (Paris, 1986); and D. Bonnaud-Lamone and J-L Rispail , eds., lntelkctuel(s) des annies tTetlte (Paris, 1990). For the Communists, see Jean-Pierre Bernard, u Parti Commtmiste .frn1ifl1is et Ia fjtlcstio'l /ittemirr, 1921-1939 (Grenoble, 1972) . Kmm';~

Resistance and Collaboration

Some of the best accounts of the mood of France and French intellectuals in the aftermath of defeat are to be found in the memoirs and autobiographies listed below. Of contemporary commentary, the best is that of Marc Bloch, StnU!!Jl Deji:at (London, 1949), invaluable in this as in so many respects. On the Uriage circle of moral renovators, see Pierre Bitoun, LeJ Hommes d'Uringe (Paris, 1988), and Antoine Dclestre, Uringe: Ufle Com,mmauti rt une kfJie dnm fa tourmnlte, 1940-1945 (Nancy, 1989), as well as works by H ellman and Winock cited below. For the intellectual Resisranee sec the general study by James Wilkinson already cited (under « Imellcctuals and Politics,,); Roderick Ked,vard, Resistlmce i,1 Vichy Frrmce (Oxford, 1978); Kcdwlrd and Rq,rcr Austin, cds. , Vichy Fmme mm the Resistmue (London, 1985); and Jacques Dcbll-Bridel, La Risiftlmce iflte/fatuelle (Paris, 1970), though the latter should be used with caution, given the author's Gaullistparti prisand his o\'ctsanguinc aecount of popular anriPetainism . The older work by Henri Michel, Les Ommnts de pemir de Ia Risismnce (Paris, 1962), is still informative and reliable. For intellectual collaboration, see Pascal Dry, Les CoJlabomteurs (Paris, 1977); C laude Levy, " Les Nouveaux Temps" et J'idioksie de fa co/Jabomtion (Paris, 1974); and the collective work edited by Gerhard Hirschfeld and Patrick Marsh , lAlllabomtion i,1 Frrmce: Politics and Culture du,,·~ the Nazi Oaupation, 1940-1944 (Oxford, 1989). Despite the recent spate of interesting studies of the Viehy years, there is still no outstanding general

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325

work covcring thc intcUcctual (ifc of occupicd Francc. But sec Christian Faure, I.e Projet culturel de Vichy (Lyon, 1989); Gerard Loiseaux, 1A Littbuture de fa dijaiu et de fa tol/abomtitm (Paris, 1984); and an interesting case study by Jean-Michel Guiraud, La Vie inUlkctllelle et a~ If Marseille ii l'epoque de Vichy et JOI4S I'octllpation (1940-1944) (MarseiUe, 1987) . O n Fascist intellccruals see Pierre-Marie Dioudon nat,Je suis par(Qut, 1930-1944 (Paris, 1973); and W. R. Tucker, The fustist Fgo: A Po/irim/ Biogmphy of Rnbert Bmsi/lach (Berkeley, 1975).

The Purge The srudenr of postwar cvcnts is altogether bettcr served. For a gencral account of the tpmfltum, see Peter Novick, Thc /Vsistmue J~ Vichy: The Pu'lJ' ofCollabomwrs in Libernted Frruue (New York, 1968). A more popular but well rt."SCarched account can be found in H erbert Lottman, The Pu'lJ' (New York, 1986). Robert Aron's massive work, Histoire de l'ip"rntion, 3 vols. (Paris, 1967- 75), suffers from the same prejudices as his Histoire de Vichy (Paris, 1954) and should be read with critical care. For the treatment of writcrs and artists, see Pierre Assouline, IlEpllrntum des inte//arm/s, 1944--45 (Brussels, 1985); and in part, Philippe Bourdrel, IlEpurntion sa~: 1944-45 (paris, 1988). Jean Paulhan's cautio nary essay, Lettrr IWX directnm tk In Risisflma (1951; reprint Paris, 1987) can still be read with profit. On the conta[ of thc.sc l."Vcnts, see Gl.'Orgcs Madjarian, Conflits, pOllvoin, et J(Xuti a In Libbati(m (paris, 1980); and Fred Ku pferman, l..eJ Premiers &twx jOlm, 1944--1946 (paris, 1985).

Philosophy and Politics in Postwar France The iilerature on "existentialism and poutics" is enormous and for the most part useless. Although much of the French writing exhibits a marked parti pris for or against its subject, British and North American scholarship, especially that ofthe sixties and seventies, tended to take the claims of post\var French intellectuals altogether roo scriously and somewhat out of context. For this reason books like that of Mark Poster, ExistaltialisJ Marxism in Pommr Fnmce (princeton, 1975), although reasonably reliable as guides to the thought itself, show little apprecia-

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tion of French circumstances or the larger historical developmems from which postwar philosophical debate emerged . ModmJ Fnnch Marxism, by Michael Kelly (Oxford, 1982), docs a better job with the philosophy but is even less concerned with the circumstances of its production. For these pufJXJSCS the reader is better advised to refer to the work by Michael Roth, already cited {"The Thirtiesj, or that of Vinccm Descombes, Modern French Philosophy (Cambridge, 1980; orig. Paris, 1979, I.e Mimeet Pautre) . For the writings ofMerleau-Ponty, see Kerry Whiteside, Merkau-Ponty and the Foundation of an Existentialist Politics (Princeton, 1988). Studies of Sartrc are too numerous to cite, and the reader should refer to the bibliography in Annie Cohen-Solal's biography (see below), as well as that in Judt, Marxism and the French Lift. Among the most useful general accounts arc Anna Boscheni, Sartn' (t " Les Temps modernes" (Paris, 1985); and Michel-Amoine Burnier, Les Existmtialistes et fa polit:iqm (Paris, 1966), although the fanner is spoiled by its obsession with modds of "cultural force-fields" derived from the work of Pierre Bourdieu . Burnier has also published a dyspeptic little book, I.e TestQ,ment de Sartn' (Paris, 1983), which gleefully cites the great man's many contradictions and political gaffes. The issues dividing Camus and Sartre are laid out by Eric Werner in De fa vrolenaau totnlitnrisnu: Essaisurfapensiede Camus et Sartrr (Paris, 1972), with an avowcd preference for the person and opinions of the fonner. There arc some good discussions of Camus in Jean-Yves Guerin, cd., OJmus a fa politique (Paris, 1986). For the circle around Mounier there is now a growing Literature, much of it controversial. Michel Winock's Histoirt politique de fa m>Ue "Espn't/' 1930-1950 (Paris, 1975), is infonnative but hopelessly handicapped by a sympathy fOr its subject that frequently blinds the author to the implications and incoherence ofMounier's writings. John H ellman's dispassionate study, Emmanuel Mounin' and the New OI-tholic Left, 1930-1950 ([oronto, 1981), lacks Winock's sophistication bur takes a proper critical distance. Bernard-H enri Levy's aggressive account of Freneh Catholic thought in the twentieth century, which reduces it to a sort of moralizing neofuscism and trcats dismissivcly of popular icons like Charles Peguy and Emmanuel Mounier, is unreliable and simplistic as intellectual history; bur it has yet to provoke a satisfuctory defense from Mounier's defenders. Curiously, Mounier's philocommunism in the postwar years tends to confinn at least a parr of Levy's interpretation . Sec Bernard-Henri Levy, IJMio/cgie fratIfRise (Paris, 1981). For a study of the wartime emergence of a Catholic strain in the Resistance, see Renee

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327

BCdarida, "ThtwignAge Chrttien," 1941-1944 (Paris, 1977); me concerns and house style of Le M01uU, the m05t influential posrwar daily and one deeply influenced by the eth05 of social Catholicism, are sympathecically recounted in Jacques Julliard and Jean-Noel Jeanneney, «Le Mamie" de Bmw-Mery, ou Ie mirier d'Alces~ (Paris, 1979).

Intellectuals and Communism

The obvious starting point for anyone sccking to understand the troubled relations between inteUectuais and communism in postwar France is still the book by David Came, Ommumism and the Frmch In~Jlectuals, 1914-1960(London, 1964), although it is beginning to show its age. The standard accounts ofintcllcctuals' relations with the reF are now those of Jeannine Verdes-Leroux, Au servia du parti: Le Parti Commtmisre, Jes intel1ectuels et Ja culture (1944-1956) (Paris, 1983), and Ie Rirejl des SOfflnnmbules: Ie Parti Communisre, Ies intellecNlels, et In culture (1956-1985) (Paris, 1987), although they deal only with those who were party members. The farther reaches of self-abasement are chronicled in Bernard Legendre, Le Smlinisme Jm11fRis: ~i a dit 'fum, 1944-1956 (Paris, 1980); and analyzed in Natacha Dioujcva and Fran'Tois George, Smline II Paris (Paris, 1982). To understand just what it was that Sartre and his contemporaries were responding to, sec, fOr example, Laurent Casanova , Le Parti Comm uniste, les intellectuels, et fa nariml (Paris, 1949). For an appreciation of the motivation and ambivalence of inteUectual feUowtravelers, memoirs and autobiographies are the best source (see below); among contemporary polemics and commentaries, those of cominuing interest include Pierre Navillc, llIntellectilel communiste (Paris, 1956), which deals with the problem of Same; Denys Mascolo, Lettrt polonaise sur In, mistre intellectuelle en Fmna (Paris, 1957); and Jules Monnerot, La SlJcwkyie du ccmmunisme (Paris, 1949). The two classic analyses of the emotional and imellcctual process by which intellectuals come to accept and embrace communism both date from this period : Czeslaw Milosz, The CAptive Mind (New York, 1953); and, supremely, Raymond Amn, The Opium ofthe Intellectuals (London, 1957; orig. Paris, 1955). Sec also Marxism in Modem FmnceJ by George Lichtheim (already cited) and the

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same author's various essays coUected in From Marx to Hegel (New York, 1971).

The Totalitarian Dilemma

There is no general account of the complex interactions, suspicions, and misunderstandings that have marked thc relations between French intellectUals and the countries under Soviet domination in the years 1945-89. But see Peter Deli, De BudRpm II Pmgue: l..eJ Surmuts de la Gauthe fmnpiise (Paris, 1981), and Pierre Gremion, Pnris-Pmgue: La Gauche foa au rt:nOU1Jt',RU a la rfpression tl:hkoslomqueJ, 1968- 1978 (Paris, 1985), both of them covering the period after 1956, lnd Evelyne PisierKLmchner, cd ., l..eJ lntn'ptitRtions du Stlliinisme (Paris, 1983). For a brief discussion of the East European syndrome in French progressive thinking, sec Tony Judt, "The Rediscovery of Central Europe," in Stephen Graubard, cd., EAstern Europe . .. Centm/ Europe . .. Europe (Boulder, Co., 1991). For the show trials and political purges of the forties , see George Hodos, Show Trials: Stalinist Pu'lP in &rtern Europe, 1948- 1954 (New York, 1987) . The " French connectio n" is discussed in the memoirs of one of the Czech victims, Artur Londonin, The OmftssWn (New York, 1970); sec also Fran~oi s Fejto, who wrote extensively on eastern European developments for the French press at this time. See his Mimoins: De Budapest a Paris (Paris, 1986). For attitudes rowards the Soviet Union, sec M . Cadot, La Russie dIIns la vie intellectuel/e fmnpiise (Paris, 1967) ; Lily Mareou , ed.,llURSS vue de gauche (Paris, 1982); Fred Kupferman, Au pays des Soviets (Paris, 1979); Christian Jelen, I1Aveugltmtnt: Us Stxialistes et fa tMis.satut du mytlJe MViJtiqt«: (Paris, 1984); and the various general works cited at [he beginning of this essay. Concerning the events covered in this 1xx>k the foUowing an: also of interest : Guillaume Malauric, I1AJfoin: Kmvr:henko (paris, 1982); Dominique L:court, ProletnriRn Sciena? The Gut- qfl.!JSSnlko (London 1977; orig. Paris, 1976); Denis Buican, Lyssmko etle LJ!se1Ikism (Paris, 1988); and David Rousset , Gerard Rosenthal, and Thea Bernard, Pour fa vbiti sur /es camps co"cmtmNmmains (un prom antistalininl Paris) (1951 ; revised edition Paris, 1990). Examples of the Communist party line as espoused and prese nted by its own intellectuals can be found in Dominique Desanti, Masques et visages de Tiro et des sims (Paris, 1949); and Pierre Daix , Pourquoi David Rowset It im'mti /es camps soviitiqlles (Paris, 1949).

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329

Anti-Americanism The best introduction to the troubled theme of French attitudes towards America is Denis Lacarne, Jacques Rupnik, and Marie-France Toinet, cds., l!Amhique dAns /es rites (Paris, 1986), which can be supplemented with David Strauss, Menace in the Wm: The Rise of Frrnch AntiAmericnnism in Modnn Timn (Westport, Conn., 1978). Contemporary French attitudes are also discussed in Karl Deutsch, cd., France, Grrmany, and the Western Alliance: A Study of Elig A.ttitudes on European 11ItFgration and WorU Politics (New York, 1967). For a historical survey, see Jean-Baptiste Durosclle, La Frrmce et /es tmts-Unis tks or!qines a naf JOUT! (Paris, 1976). The subject is also discussed in the works on the thirties listed above, as well as the general studies by Caute and H oUander. Because anti-Americanism not only mcant dislike of the United States but also functioned on occasion as a blanket metaphor and excuse for antimodemism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and collective insecurity, these books might be supplemented with Ralph Schor, UOpinion JrrmpUse et /es hmngers, 1919- 1939 (Paris, 1985); Rene Girault and Robert Frank, eds., fA Puismna frntlfllise en question, 1945-1949 (Paris, 1988); and Michel Winock, Natibttalism£, antisimimme et foscisme en Frana (Paris, 1982). On French anti-Semitism see also fA Frana rt fa questWn Juive (Paris, 1981); Jeffrey Mehlman , Ltgacks oj Anti-Semitism in Frana (Minneapolis, 1983); and Pierre Birnbaum, Un Mythr politU]ue: 1A "Ripublique JuiveJJ (paris, 1988).

Liberalism, Republicanism, and Rights For a survey of French political thought since the Revolution , see Jacques Droz, Hiswirr: des doctri,1rS politiques (11 France (Paris, 1971), or the older but still informative work by Albert Thibaudet, La ldies politiqfl~s en Frana (paris, 1927). Roy Pierce, Contmlporary Frrnch Political Thought (Oxford , 1966), is useful but dated. The collection of short essays edired by Pascal Dry, NOU'JIt/k Histoire des idks politiques (Paris, 1987), is of distinctly variable quality. For the history of republicanism in France, see Claude NicoUet, UId« rtpublicaine en Fra,IU: Essai d)hismire critique (paris, 1982); and Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, Philosophic politique (Paris, 1985), vol. 3, Des droits de I'homme a Pidie rCfmb1icni,le. Fran\ois Furet's

330

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

History of Frrmce published by Hachene, fA Rivoltl1770-1880 (Paris, 1988), has many acute observations on this subject, as docs Cbude Lefort in L'Im'NItion dbtu>cmtUJlle (Paris, 1981). On the subject of rights and their usage in early French republican language, see Marcel Gaucher, fA Rivolutifm des Droitstk PHomme (Paris, 1989); and many ofrhe contributions to Fran"ois Furet and Mona Ozouf, cds., Critical Dictimmry ofthe FmlCh Revolution (Cambridge, Mass. 1989; orig. Paris, 1988), notably in chapter 4 . The most accessible survey of the place of rights in French constimtional thought, from a rnthcr legalistic perspective, is Jean Rivero, Us Liberth pllbl;qua (Paris, 1974), vol. 1, Us Droirs de l'homme. On the troubled history of liberalism and liberal thought in France there is now a growing litcrarun:: of excellent quality, prompted by recenr shifts in the French political and intellectual mood. For general aceounrs from a French perspective, sec Pierre Manent, Hismin: inull«uulle d" libbnlisme: Dix Lefons (Paris, 1987); and Andre Jardin, Hitmi" du Jibi· mlisme poJitiqtte: De In crise de PabSOJlftirme Ii Ia OmstiUltum de 1875 (Paris, 1985). For the carly years of Frcnch Liberal thought then:: arc a number of spcciali7-cd studies: Georges Gusdorf, Les Sciences humaines ella pensie oaidnltaie (paris, 1966-1985), vol. 8, fA Omscima rivolutionnairr: Les 1diokYlles; Stephen Holmes, BmjRmin Constantmld the MakitjJJ ofModern Libemlism (New Haven, Conn., 1984); Piem: Roscnvallon, Le Mommt Gllizot (Paris, 1985). Also pertinent is Jcan-Claude Lamberti , Toe'll/mile et /es tinlX dhtwcmties (Paris, 1983). volume in the

nt."'V

tion: De Ttl7JOt

aJules fury,

Algeria and After

A number of historians arc cum:ntly at work preparing studies of the impact of the Algerian War on the French intellectual community. In the meantime, the best coverage is provided by the essays in ]ean·Piem: Rioux and Jcan-Franr;:ois Sirinelli, cds., La Guem d:A.fob* et /es intellechuis frnnp.is (Brussels, 1991), and in Rioux, ed., La Guem d:A.fob* et /es frnnp.is (Paris, 1990). The motives of those who intervened actively on the side of the Algerian nationalis[S arc described in Herve Hamon and Patrick Rotman, Les Poneun de mlises: fA Risismnce frnnp,ise fa Guem d'Af9b'ie (Paris, 1982). See also Andre Rezler, L'lntellecrueleontn: PEumpe (Paris, 1976). For the signatories of the various petitions in these years

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331

(but also covering the whole period since Dreyfus), sec Jean- Fran~ois Sirinelli, Intellecmels et passions firulfaises: MIIniflstes et petitions at, JOfr tiecit (Paris, 1990). For a broad but not very imaginative survey of the whole period, see Paul C. Sorum, IntellechlRls and DecoJonjzatiml in Fmnce (Cbapel Hill, N .C. , 1977). There is no synoptic history of the French intellectual community in the Fifth Republic. For the New Left of the sixties and after, see Arthur Hirsh, The French New Left: A'I hltellectual History from Sarm ttl Gorz (BostOn, 1981), or Keith Reader, Intellechl4ls and the Left in Fmnce since 1968 (London, 1987), neither of which is better than serviceable. A superior work but on a more restricted t heme is Sherry Turkle's PsycbotU/alytic Politics: Frrud's Fret/CIJ &volutum (London, 1979). French contributions have tended to the dismissive (sec, for example, Serge Quadruppani, Olm/qJue du prtt-ivpenstT fintlf4is dcpuis 1968 [Paris, 1983]), or the chatty (Pascal Ory, llEntre-DNlx-Mai: Histvirt crtlt"rtJIe de fa France, mAi '68~mai '81 [Paris, 1983). An exception to this is rhe work. of Luc Ferry and Alain Renaur; see their 68~88: [tinhnirr de l'individt, (Paris, 1987) and LA Pmste 68 (Paris, 1985), although all of their work is shaped by rigid interpretive paradigms and is for the most part restricted to the arena of philosophy. Those interested in Foucault, Dcrrida, and their thought may be further informed by Allan Mcgill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, H~ Foucault, Derridn (Berkeley, 1985), and Mark Poster, Foucault, Marxism, and HistlIry: Mode of Prodtu:tian venus Mode of In.fornmtion (Cambridge, 1984); for enlightenment they would do better to tum to John Sturrock, Strru:tumlism and Since: From UviStrauss to Derrida (Oxford, 1979), and Jose Guillhermc Mcrquior, f0ucault (Berkeley, 1985), and the same author's excellent discussion of this and much else in From ?mgtu: to Paris (London , 1986). Among the essays and arguments that have marked French thought since 1968, the following are emblematic: Jean-Pierre Faye, umgl1ges tom/itaim (Paris, 1972); Andre Glucksmann, TI,e Master Thinkrrs (Brighton , 1981 ; orig. Paris, 1977); ScOlard-Henri Levy, fA Barharie it: visage humnin (Paris, 1977); Jacques Julliard, La mute it: Rousseau (Paris, 1985). All these, in their various ways, manage to place the blame fur the emergence of totalitarianism and tOtalitarian styles of thought upon the original sins of the great holistic thinkers of the late Enlightenment (Rousseau, Hegel, and so on) and their Romantic-cra heirs. For a bright account of one of the joumalistic forums in which their vi!..'ws reached a wider public and became the new orthodoxy, see Louis Pinto, llIntelligena en action: au NOtMI Ohsermteur" (Paris, 1984).

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SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

Biographies, Autobiographies, and Memoirs

The most comprehensive study of Sartre's life is that by Annie CohenSolal, Sartre, 1905-1980 (Paris, 1985). What she lacks in philosophical acuity, Ms. Cohen-Solal more than makes up for in energy and infonnation. See also Ronald Hayman, Sartrt: A BiqJmphy (New York, 1987). For Simone de Bcauvo.r, see Deirdre Bair, Sim(lnt de Beauvoir (New York, 1990). Camus is weU covered by Herbert Lottman's camus (Garden City, N.Y., 1979). Neither Maurice Merleau-Pomy nor Raymond Aron has yet been the subject ofa satisfactory biography. This may reflect both the more riJ,,'orous quality of their work and the less eventful shape of their private lives- they do not lend themselves to chatty, inronnative narratives. For Merleau-Ponty, see Andre Robinet, Merkau--Ponty: Sa Vie, son oeuvre (Paris, 1970); for Raymond Amn we must await the promised study by Ariane Chebcl d'AppoUonia. Emmanuel Mounicr receives a near-hagiographical treatment from Jean-Marie Domenach, Emmllnml MOlfnier (Paris, 1972); for a more dispassionate analysis but limited to his thought and writings, see GCr:J.rd Lurol, MOlmier 1. Genese rU In persQ; on existentialism, M.; on industrialism, 191- 92; and ~beralism, ~ 314n32; mcmoin; of, ~ on Merleau-Pomy, ~ on Mounier, ~ on Nuism, ~ rejection or Communism, !lZ. on role: of France, ~ on Soviet labor camps, 115- 16; visit to Berlin, 'Iii Amn , Robert , 121 kpaf1 de '" Fmnu (journal), 1M Associ.nion des ecriwins ct :mistes revolutionnaircs, 218 Astin de la Vigcric, Emmanuel d~ Q±.. 115

m

m

335

336

INDEX

Avdine, Claude, 1AZ Us Arnm,,= de '" dwl«tiIJue (Mcrlc:auPonty), ~ 3Un26 B:lboulene, le:!.n, l44. B:lcikk, K:lrol, 28 B:l1k;J.n Fcdcr.nion, lU2 &musse, H enri, l.66 B:lnts, Maurice, Mb 253. B:lrthes, Roland , !lQ, lID Rauilic, GCOI'g($, '&. M:08.5 Rayet, Albert, ll!J; and )(n\'Chenko alfur,

m

ill BeaUfKt, k:!.n, J..S6,o5Z Beigbcdcr, M:!.tc, I.i2 Benda. Julicn, SO- 51, g ~ ~ anti. Amcricanism of, on colLobor.l.tors, 91- 92; and Dreyfus Affair, 142-43; and role of Catholicism, 231 Bend, Edouard, 2Z9. Beraud, Henri: Kduction of sentence, ~ trial of, ~ Qi. 62 Berd)':!}"q,>a, 2Z CI~udd , Paul, 12; and trioll of Bnsillach, O
z..

341

censo~hip

of, 30-31; during World II, 2.5. Intellectuals, ufi-wing, b. 1M.. ill International Brig;odcs (Spain), m Internationalism, 1M Italy, post,,"'!r intdlenWll life of, 268::Z1 W~r

Jacob, Madeleine, 112n21 Jacobini. Zb ~ ~ lamet, Qaude, 213 Jap.tn, emergence of, 1.89. Jaurb, Jean , ~ 2.5.1 Jcomson , F.-..ncis, ,!!!. 312- 13; on capitalism , !Z!; on role of hisTory, 122 Je lUis J'IlrrDUl (journal), ~ IH.. 65. Jesuits, pedag.>gi~w habitS uf, 252 Jews : associ.. ion w;,h modernit y, 193-94; deportment of, 181-82; F",nch, JJ1.; mign.tion from Eastem Europe, ;lib persecution of, !Q[, 106-7, !.!Q; in the Sm-Kt bloc, l.85. Johnson , Samuel: 011 F",nch intell":lu:Us,

m

ill JoJiot-Curie, Fr&lerk , ll:!, lli;. and Kra,·chenko affair, ill Joseph II (emperor of Austria), 2.i9. Journalists, collaborating, 65. Journals: coll3bo~tionist, @.; Communist , !.§2.i IOreign contributors to, If!; influence o f, ~ ~ Italian, llb in pre-",..r F.-..nce, !L. and rejection of communism , 282.. Sa aw Press, French Joun:nc1 , Bcn.... nd dc, :g, 6i JuUiard , Jacq ues, .IDS Justice : distributi\"e, !.ZJ.; Libe~tion concepts of, 91_98; re'>'olutionary conccptS of, 2H8. KaLandra, Za\'is, J,U

Kant, Immanuel: de Bcauvoir on,

g n

,W lO W Nco- Kant ians, G dosing day" of, 2!t dkCt on intellectuals, !.Q, 26-27, ~ ~ hardships of, ~ Parti Communiste fran~s during, 152 Ondour, ma" murders at, 51 Orientalism, L82 Ouwihimu: (...urkerism), M&. 202 Ozouf, Jacques, 302

Pacifism, pre-war, m, g, 220 Paris: as cuTturu center, ~ I!!Q, ll!!... as expatriate center, ~

m

m

>=

Parri Govern ment (Italy, 1945), ~ 262 Parrot, Louis, !Ill Parti Communiste franrolls (PCF), I1I. !1!!.. ffi ~.M2.; after V.l:>rld War II , Mt and Alg.:rian crisis, ~ and anri-Amcricanism , 199-200; anriZionism of, ~ attraction of Catholics to, 87-88; banning of, !Zl!..; campaign 3gi1inst Ma~haJJ Plan, g credibi lit y of, 289- 90; and failu/'C of Popular front of 1936, ll.;. fall of, ~ intellectuals in, 216-17; and imcmational Communism, ~ intolerance of dissent, 11[; in Kn\'~enko aff.tir, !.!1; legitimacy of, ~ Mauriac's uiricism of, ZQ.; narionaJism of, 159-«1; during the Occupation, lli'l; pe~ution by Dabdier, ~ n:sponse to intclic on MaumlS, ~ membc:rship in Comite national des ccrivains, QL on the PCF, !QQ.; on pcrllOnaJ identity, ~ philO6Ophical writings of, 79- 82; political views of, 83-84; preeminence of, on the proletariat, ~ !11. 212-13; OIl the puq,'I:, ~ 2Zi rCoKtion a~nst, ,!Qi; during th~ Resistance, R. ~ ~ and Resist.lna,: intellectuals, M; and the responsibility of the writer, !:!.. ID6.;. on role of history, 122-23, !1Q; on role oflitcr.ltun;:, ~ and SFle. ~ and Sm~et labor camps, !Th. ~ !Zl!..; on Srnlin, llJ..; on treason, ~ view of n;:...oIution, 1Q; on violence, 125- 26, ~ visit 10 Berlin, & visit 10 Cuba, ~ visit [0 Prague, ~ visit to Vilna, 2211 smw de '" vie futun ( Duhamel), l.2.l &hlumbcrgcr, jean, 6Z Schmitt, Carl, !L l.65 Smt ou barlMrie (journil), ill!., 282 Socialist realism, 128 Socialists: C:u:ch, i£. ~ and demise of Third Rcpub~e, !Q.; Fn::nch, ib ltllian, !QJ.; in postwar era, 162-63; trials of, 106 Socialist Unity !'arty (East Gcnnany), l63 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 3 Son::l, GC, !QJ, L48 St:tlingrad, .iege of, ll, !.M.. l6Z Stalinism, ~ ~ ~ MQ, ll1.; in Central Europe, b 101_ 16; de Rougemont on, ~ disenchantment with, ,ill!; European knowledge of, !Ql; Fn::nch response to, 117- 19, 145-50; and M:lrxism , ~ postwar ,~cw of, l.02:o3 State and society, French (Oncept of, M!., H2

347

iks juifi (Vichy govcrnment), 21 Stil, Andre, 2l9. Swckholm Appeal (World Pe.:lce Congress), i l l Strikes (1936), I1l Style, import.lncc of, ~ SUJrez, Georges, Z1 Sudeten Germans, cxpul~ion of, 26Z Suez cri~is, ~ 28..3 Suffering, human: problem of, ~ Suffngc, universal manhood, 2J9. Sum:al ism, Zl!., ill!., 2Q6 S"'