Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956

Conclusion: Goodbye to All That?

Conclusion: Goodbye to All That? Longtemps 1WUS n)awnspoint compris fa revolution dont nous sommes les tbnoins; bmgtemps nous Pawns prisepour un ivenement. Nom ttwns dans Pertru-r: c'est une epoque; et malheur auxgCnirations qui assistent aux epoqu&s du montie! For a long time we did not understand the revolution we are witnessing ; for a long time we took it for a mere event. We were wrong: it is an epoch, and woe to those generations present at the epochs ofthe world! Joseph de Maistre Time is a distorting mirror. The 1940s and 1950s seem a very long way away, part of another world. The intellectuals of those decades came from a different France. For all their sophistication, they grew up in and responded to a provincial, introverted culture shaped by the Great War and its aftermath. The little world ofLeft Bank Paris was symptomatic in its way of the France ofla Madelon and Clochemerle, a France that was about to transform itselfalmost beyond recognition and at a pace and in directions beyond the comprehension ofmost ofits own educated elite. 293 294 CONCLUSION The "TI-ente Glorieuses" ofthe French intellectuals,I the decades during which they basked in the glow of national and global admiration and emulation, span the years 1945 to 1975; but the leading figures of this generation were all born in the period running from the end ofthe Dreyfus Affair to the outbreak of World War I, and the culture they represented , the concerns and assumptions that informed their lives, were already waning even as they emerged into the spotlight of their public careers. Sartre, Mounier, and their cohort appear in retrospect as the Indian summer ofan older French civilization, their heirs and epigones mere glowing embers in a banked fire. Furthermore, the revolutions in eastern Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union have removed and obliterated whatever had remained ofone ofthe main political and ideological pillars ofpostwar European life. During the seventies and eighties it was still possible to engage polemically with the fellow-travelers ofthe forties and fifties, calling back across the decades to remind them oftheir ill-judged commitments and marshaling in evidence the continuing repression of dissidence and opposition within the Soviet bloc. Since the events of 1989 such polemics seem redundant, even ill judged. Who, now, takes seriously the promises ofMarxism, the assurances ofeven modest utopian futures? Yet here, too, the acceleration of history contributes to the hazards of intellectual time-travel: for in France more than elsewhere, it is only very recently indeed that such promises and assurances began to lose their interest. The myth ofrevolution, the moral leverage of 1917, were alive and well and living in Paris not only in 1956 and 1968, but also in 1981. It is thus very tempting to treat ofthe events and people in this book as history, not only in the obvious and respectable sense that they form part ofour past but also as something well and truly behind us. The context ofthe postwar years was distinctive. The intellectual monopoly exercised by Les Temps modernes was unique, as its competitors (La Ne£ IlArche, Ten-e des hommes, and many others) fell by the wayside; the special standing ofEspritwithin the Catholic intelligentsia and beyond, with sales in the tens ofthousands, was not to be sustained. The intellectualas -hero is a dying genre and nothing is easier today than to dismiss the experience ofpostwar French intellectuals, buried under a heap ofhindsight , piled high with moral indignation. Few would now dissent from Elio Vittorini (writing in 1958) in his assertion that from 1944 to 1956, all French intellectuals had at least one lie by which they lived and 1. The phrase is that ofJean-Fran~ois Sirinelli, Genfm,tion intellectuelle (Paris, 1988),638. GOODBYE 10 ALL THAT? 295 wrote.2 But that was then, it is said, and this is now. Thking our cue from Vaclav Havel, we "live in truth." Things have changed, it is said; we were blind and now we see. The past is another country, and they did things differently there. Things have assuredly changed. Not only is France no longer the center of the world, but claims to that effect are no longer part of the cultural baggage of French thought. Within France the state continues to play an extraordinarily important role in public and private life, but it is now commonplace to hear doubts expressed on the practical...