Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956

13. Gesta Dei per Francos: The Frenchness of French Intellectuals

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Gesta Dei per Francos The Frenchness ofFrench Intellectuals Ce n'estpas qu'ily ait chez nous beaucoup moins de sots qu'ailleurs. Mais mhne nos imbeciks sont, je cmis, mieux avertis que ceu.x des autres pays. Ilair qu'on rr:spirr: en France, l'atmosphere, est, silose dirr:, une atmosphere critique. It isn't that we have fewer fools than anyone else. But even our fools are, I believe, better informed than those ofother countries. The atmosphere in which we breathe in France is, dare I say it, a critical one. Fran~ois Mauriac The circumstances and attitudes described in this book are peculiarly French. The history of Parisian intellectuals in the postwar years, their collective myopia in the face ofStalinism, is distinctively and unmistakably a French history. But to what extent, in what respects, is it uniquely French? In the terms in which I have discussed the intellectual community after 1945, the historical, circumstantial, and personal issues that helped define postwar political engagement were all rooted in the local experience; but some ofthat experience was common to other countries 246 GESD\ DEI PER FRANCOS 247 and other cultures. The impact of World War I on liberal society, the appeals offascism and communism, the illusions and disillusions of the thirties, World War II, Occupation, Resistance, purges, and the Cold War are part ofthe history ofmodem Europe and marked the memory and behavior of men and women everywhere. The moral and political dilemma posed by Stalinism in postwar Europe affected intellectuals in every land. Furthermore, the capacity to respond to this dilemma in strange and ethically incoherent ways was by no means confined to the French. Such respected denizens of a liberal culture as Bernard Shaw or the English historian G. D. H. Cole wrote the most awful drivel in defense of the Soviet Union. It was Shaw who announced that workers in the Soviet Union loved their Stakhanovite, shock-working comrades, whereas the English proletariat would quite properly oppose any such practices in their factories; Cole, in a pamphlet published as early as 1941, maintained that sovereign states that proved unable to defend themselves in war had no right to exist. It would be better, he said, to let Hitler keep all ofCentral and East Europe than to reestablish the little nation-states there; but best of all would be to allow a victorious postwar Soviet Union simply to absorb Poland, Hungary, and the Balkans.! Among the successors to these interwar fellow-travelers was another Englishman, Arnold Kettle, who wrote in the Manchester Guardian in 1958 with reference to Soviet control of cultural life, "One of the essential differences between a socialist and a capitalist society is that in the former the burden of full responsibility is accepted by its leaders.... Responsibility involves error and abuse; but it is nonetheless a higher, more humane attitude than irresponsibility."2 Sartre said it better, but the argument is identical. Things were no different among the radical intelligentsia across the Atlantic, where a non-Communist Marxist economist like Paul Sweezy had gone to enormous lengths to explain and justifY the show trials in Prague, describing the ''violent anti-Zionism" ofthe Soviet bloc as tragic but inevitable and justified by U.S. actions; Sweezy and a colleague even attempted a quantitative comparison ofsocialist and capitalist violence, from which they concluded that the USSRand the Peoples' Democracies 1. See Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims (Oxford, 1981), 139. G. D. H. Cole, Europe, Russia, and the Future (London, 1941), quoted in Serban Voinea, "Satellisation et liberation ;' Revue socialiste 105 (March 1957): 226. 2. Kettle quoted by Hollander, Political Pilgrims, 733. 248 THE MIDDLE KINGDOM emerged far superior.3 Also widespread among Anglo-American intellectuals was the belief that their distaste for Communist practices was a result of their own privileged position. They might not wish to live under communism, but they wanted to believe that this was evidence of their own weakness, not ofcommunism's defects. This was a widespread point of view in the thirties, but it can be found as late as 1977. Thus Mary McCarthy mused on the charms ofpost-Stalinist Communist life: Socialism with a human face is still my ideal. Living under such a system would require quite an adjustment, but it would be so exciting I hope one would be willing to sacrifice the comforts ofa life that one has become extremely used to. I think...