Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956

8. The Sacrifices of the Russian People: A Phenomenology of Intellectual Russophilia

CHAPTER EIGHT The Sacrifices ofthe Russian People A Pherwmenology ofIntellectual Russophilia La fli consiste acroire ce que fa mison ne croitpas. Faith consists in believing what reason will not believe. Voltaire In order to appreciate the beliefsystem ofpostwar intellectuals, we need to grasp that what is at issue here is not understanding, the cognitive activity usually associated with intellectuals, but faith. To react as people did to the impact ofcommunism in the years following 1945, they had first to accept unquestioningly a certain number of the fundamental tenets of what amounted to a civic religion. But merely to say this is not enough; we have next to ask why a particular community should find one such belief system more plausible, more convincing, than any other. In the chapters to come I shall argue that the sources ofintellectual behavior in these years, the reasons determining the peculiar sympathy shown towards Stalinism in all its excesses, are to be found in a network ofFrench intellectual practices. These may be thought ofas overlapping orbits, each reaching out a little further into national political and cultural traditions. 153 154 THE TREASON OF THE INTELLECfUALS My hypothesis is thus as follows: at the center lay the will and the desire to believe in communism. Around this article of faith were wrapped various layers of argument deriving from specific Communist achievements in the recent past. In the next orbit was to be found a certain style of reasoning, a sort of epistemological double vision, which made it possible to explain Soviet behavior in terms not invoked for any other system or persons; this discourse, although especially applicable to the Communist case, did not derive from it and has older historical and philosophical origins and objectives. The same is true of the next layer, a long-standing habit of mind, hostile to various manifestations of modernity and individualism, which is sometimes referred to, in misleading shorthand, as "anti-Americanism." At a further remove, but still within the galaxy ofestablished cultural practices, there was the peculiar combination of preeminence and self-hatred that has marked the intellectual as a public figure in modern France and contributed to ambivalence in the fuce of a proletarian politics. Finally, and providing all the above with their political and ideological anchor, there was the indigenous antiliberalism of the French republican intelligentsia. In what follows, I shall try to show how each of these conventions of French intellectual life played a part in the shaping of the postwar mind. All faith entails denial as well as affirmation. The true believer, when fuced with empirical or logical evidence in apparent contradiction with the demands offaith, has no reasonable choice but to deny what he or she sees, or hears, or thinks. How fur this causes a problem will depend upon the strength of the individual's commitment-and the demands of his or her own intelligence. For Communist and non-Communist intellectuals alike, denial in this sense took two forms. In its simpler version , it meant refusing to believe that certain things had been done, that certain institutions existed, that certain people had suffered or died. For intellectuals who had thrown in their lot with the Communists and identified with them without reservation, this was obviously easier since the authority for such denial came from above. Autonomous intellectuals , however progressive and philo-Communist, could not look to the party as the source for their own opinions and were thus compelled to construct such denials for themselves. But in other respects the process was fundamentally similar. In its most acute form, it would find Sartre announcing in the early fifties, "I have looked, but I just cannot find any evidence ofan aggressive impulse on the part ofthe Russians in the last three decades." A decade later his companion could still find nothing of THE SACRIFICES OF THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE 155 truth or interest in the writings ofKravchenko (or Koestler)-"They are just telling stories."1 But by the sixties Sartre and de Beauvoir were no longer a reliable guide to general opinion. More typical, perhaps, was the earlier reaction ofsome to the Lysenko affair. Here the issues were prima facie clear-cut, in that even the most sympathetic ofWestern scientists were unwilling to give unconditional credence to the claims ofa Soviet breakthrough to a new science of genetics. Esprit, like many other contemporary reviews, devoted considerable space to Lysenko in 1948. In the...