Why the French Left hung together
M.R.D. Foot
Past Imperfect by Tony Judt
University of California Press, £20.00, pp.358 There seems to be something volcanic in the history of modern France. Since the great eruption of 1789-94, nothing there has ever been quite stable; and the upheaval of German occupation from 1940 to 1944 unsettled the cast of mind of
French intellectuals yet again. Tony Judt, who is professor of European studies at New York University, examines in this powerful and provocative book why it was that so many of them were so slavishly pro- Stalinist in the decade that followed the war against Hitler.
Without exception, they were in favour of resistance; though few of them indeed, Camus always accepted, had played any dangerous or prominent part in the actual resistance field. They tended to regard their Anglo-American rescuers — particu- larly the Americans — as a fresh occupying authority, against whom it would be one's duty to resist, with whom one ought to take care not to collaborate; the excesses and eccentricities of McCarthyism in the USA provided a convenient excuse for rigid anti- Americanism. Yet the excesses and brutali- ties of Stalinism seem to have left French intellectuals not merely unmoved, but still adoring: there is something nauseating about the contortions they went through to prove to each other that all must necessari- ly be for the best in the best of all possible Soviet worlds.
Tony Judt maintains that they did so to keep up their own self-esteem, to rescue themselves from the feeling that they ought to have run greater personal risks during the war; and proposes a more profound reflection as well. He believes not only that they were anxious 'to give themselves a clean social and political conscience', but that totalitarianism derives, precisely, from 'that universalist vision of republican democracy that still bedazzles so many French thinkers'.
The slogan of `no enemies on the left' had helped the supporters of Dreyfus to cohere during the great Affair, that domi- nated the lives of the parents of Sartre's generation; and continued to have tremen- dous pull on characters as diverse as Jean Moulin (who died horribly in German hands) and Andre Malraux who survived to preach over ashes, supposedly Moulin's, laid up in the Pantheon. This slogan meant that one could not afford to fall out with the communists, because if one did, one would imperil the republic. The result was what Judt calls 'moral bifocalism'. This is not the same as moral relativism; a moral bifocalist applies one set of standards in one direction, and a different one in anoth- er. That was how one could believe that Lysenko was a sound biologist, while one denounced Senator McCarthy.
He brings home his charges with great effect, against both Christian and anti- Christian thinkers. Even Emmanuel Mounier's journal Esprit looked benignly on the theory of communism; and it was some time before the practice of commu- nism, in the recently conquered (liberat- ed') countries of eastern Europe that had fallen within Stalin's empire, persuaded the bulk of the French intelligentsia that per- haps they had backed the wrong horse after all. Not only did the show trials in Czechoslovakia and Hungary fail to dismay some of their leaders, they elicited strong statements in support of the regimes that in retrospect look so oppressive. Judt is per- suasive in explaining why. The Soviet inva- sion of Hungary in 1956 marked a turning-point; only the most gullible remained pro-Soviet after that.
In an engaging aside, in his closing para- graph, Judt remarks that
There will be French intellectuals for many years to come; all of them will say foolish things some of the time, and some of them will say foolish things all of the time.
This is the way clever men and women behave; part of the human condition. The French moreover believe that they have a divine right to be cleverer than the rest of us; part of the European tradition. 'It isn't that we have fewer fools than anyone else', Mauriac once wrote; Tut even our fools are, I believe, better informed than those of other countries.'
This book is not only written in clear and sprightly English, it is beautifully produced, in legible Galliard type, with the footnotes where they belong — at the foot of the page; and the list of further reading at tbe back, instead of being set out in the usual dry table, is as well written and as clearlY argued as the rest.
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