Francis Jeanson: A Dissident Intellectual from the French Resistance to the Algerian War (review)

Situated in the vortex of French intellectual life from the late 1940s through the 1960s, Francis Jeanson (1922-2009) whirled among existentialists, Marxists, and anticolonialists, exercising a considerable influence that has been noted but understudied by scholars. Thus Marie-Pierre Ulloa's book is timely and appreciated. Although the book is biographical, Jeanson's life serves as a locus for an erudite study of one of the most tumultuous eras in modern French history. Indeed, this is the principal value of this work, although it leaves questions regarding how Jeanson weathered the storm.

Born in Bordeaux to a bourgeois and broken family, Jeanson lived a relatively comfortable life in Occupied France. He earned his Diplôme d'Etudes Supérieures in 1943 and then, faced with forced labor conscription, he joined the Resistance and opted for the Free French in North Africa. Jeanson crossed the Pyrenees, endured Francoist prison camp internment, and finally reached Morocco only to be caught up in the Giraud-de Gaulle rivalry. He hoped to see significant action, and late in the war he cleared mines and recovered abandoned munitions in Alsace. Ulloa argues that the contribution to the Resistance of fugitives from France and Spanish internees has been neglected or forgotten; indeed, Jeanson himself "participated in that amnesia" (52), regarding his service as insignificant compared to the Maquis resistance in France. The personal engagement, however, was clearly an intrinsic influence on the impressionable young intellectual.

Immediately after the war Jeanson was not allowed to take the aggrégation in philosophy because of tuberculosis, which ended his prospects of a teaching career. Instead he pursued the life of an "intellectual functionary" (55). His philosophical articles in the review La France Intérieure disseminated the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and the success of his book Problème moral et la pensée de Sartre drew him even deeper into existentialist circles. Eventually he succeeded Merleau-Ponty as managing editor of Les Temps Modernes. Jeanson is principally renowned for explaining existentialist ideas and making them accessible to the public. He was also one of the few intellectuals (Thomas C. Anderson is another) to undertake an in-depth examination of Sartrean ethics.

A highlight of Ulloa's book is the polemic stemming from Jeanson's review of Camus's L'homme révolté (The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt). Although Camus was termed "Sartre's henchman" (107), Jeanson had expressed earlier reservations regarding Camus's "absurdism" in La France Intérieure. Jeanson's criticism was principally ideological, and by the time he wrote this review his Marxism, like that of Sartre's, had become more evident in his writings. For example, he now found Camus's condemnation of Communism intolerable, an example of how revolutionary idealism leads to nihilism. When Sartre entered the fray following Camus's sharp response to Jeanson's review, matters became sadly personal. Later, despite the irreconcilable relations, Jeanson, whose personal history shared many similarities with Camus's (tuberculosis, growing up without a father, participation in the Resistance) regretted never having told Camus how much he admired La Chute (The Fall).

According to Ulloa, Jeanson believed that "true engagement was acting and not just stating" (99) and Algerian decolonization gave him the opportunity to live his core belief. (One wonders if his antipathy to Algerian colonialism unconsciously affected his anti-Camusian perspective.) Jeanson knew Frantz Fanon and wrote the introduction to Peau noir, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks), although unfortunately Ulloa does not discuss this in detail here. She also does not explore the rather strained personal relationship between the two writers, a topic that Jeanson discussed in interesting detail in his postscript to the 1965 edition of Peau noir, masques blancs.

Jeanson's engagement in the Algerian War featured the controversial formation of an intricate logistical...