Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956

12. Liberalism, There Is the Enemy: On Some Peculiarities of French Political Thought

CHAPTER TWELVE Liberalism, There Is the Enemy On Some Peculiarities ofFrench Political Thought Nous sommes paifaitemmt capabks de foire un culte national de Phorreur et de jouir sous Ie spasme desguillotines. Nous l'avons toujours su, n'est-ilpas vrai? Nous n'en parlonsjamais, nousjurerions mbne du contraire: mais les prophetes du fonatisme, c'est chez nous qu'ils se sont /eves Iespremiers. We [French] are perfectly capable of making a national cult of the horrific and writhing in pleasure at the thud ofthe guillotine. Haven't we always known this? We never speak ofit, indeed we swear the contrary: but it was among us that the prophets of fanaticism first surfaced. Pierre Emmanuel At the heart ofthe engagement ofthe 1940s and 1950s there lay an unwillingness to think seriously about public ethics, an unwillingness amounting to an incapacity. An important source of this shortcoming in the French intelligentsia was the widely held beliefthat morally bindingjudgments ofa normative sort were undermined by their historical and logical association with the politics and economics ofliberalism. It was a widely held view that liberalism, with its political language based on individuals 229 230 THE MIDDLE KINGDOM and their rights and liberties, had utterly failed to protect people against fascism and its consequences, in large measure because it provided them with no alternative account ofhumanity and its purposes-or at any rate, no alternative account sufficiently consistent and attractive to fight offthe charms and dangers ofthe radical Right. Faced with nazism and the Occupation , intellectuals had been forced, so it was argued, to find their guidelines and their political community elsewhere. The liberal hour had passed. At first sight, this is a strange position to associate with the postwar intellectual. It is one more frequently encountered in studies of the mood between the wars, when liberalism and democracy were unfashionable , as much the enemy as fascism (or communism) itself. It might have been expected that the experience ofwar and occupation, ofindividual and collective resistance, would place a premium upon rights and freedoms . Superficially, this was indeed the case. But once political and moral theorists were again faced with circumstances in which liberties and justice were threatened, they responded in ways that suggest little had changed. Fascism had been defeated and communism was now the ally, albeit an uncomfortable one. Liberalism, however, remained the enemy. To understand why this was the case we have to make a brief detour through the history of modem French political thought. At this point it might be objected that most French intellectuals were not political theorists and historical debates about liberalism were for the most part alien to their experience and concerns. This is correct; very few postwar writers took a direct interest in political ideas as such. Their concerns were primarily literary, philosophical, or artistic. Yet everything they said and wrote was either politically charged or else open to political exploitation , and this was universally acknowledged. Indeed, it is precisely in these years that the claim was widely advanced that all intellectual and artistic life just is political, and that to deny this is bad faith. Moreover, the distinction between the political and the nonpolitical collapses at this point: political thought, political argument, is not some rarefied and exotic species of cogitation that attends to a circumscribed subset of human activity, ofinterest only to its practitioners. It is the very language in which all public activity is described, criticized, or proposed, and the terms of political discourse thus establish the vocabulary for all interventions in the public sphere. This is especially the case in France, where the identity of intellectuals has long been shaped by the place they occupy in the public life ofthe nation and where the distinction between the political and the nonpolitical is both arbitrary and artificial. Matters are further complicated by the peculiar weakness ofthe liberal tradition in French life, which means that to discuss it entails addressing LIBERALISM, THERE IS THE ENEMY 231 oneself to an absence. The public space in modern France has been occupied by many contending actors and ideas, but liberals and liberalism have not been prominent among them. Thus we may say ofMerleauPonty or Mounier, as ofMauriac or Benda, that their nonpolitical concerns , whether metaphysical, literary, or moralist, are deeply rooted in generations ofdebate over the place ofCatholicism in human affairs; in a century ofradical political speculation; and in many decades ofargument over the desirability or necessity...