French Intellectuals in the Americas During World War II

Pronouncements by French writers, publishers, artists, and other cultural figures living in the Americas during the period between the fall of France in 1940 and the end of World War ii in 1945 offer enlightenment on the war period and illustrate a range of responses, pragmatic and idealistic, to the conflict and its consequences. These statements and their effects are, obviously, one aspect of the activism of French intellectuals in the twentieth century. The figure of the committed French intellectual, in the modern sense, dates from the late 1800s, particularly the years of the Dreyfus case, although Voltaire and others furnish precedents. The French noun intellectuel was coined and launched by Maurice Barrès in 1898. Such famous nineteenth-century figures as Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo, and Louise Michel offer models of the intellectual in exile.

The wartime expatriates' situation obviously differed from that of intellectuals remaining in occupied France, who had to deal directly with, oppose, and often compose with, Vichy. (François Mitterrand, later the Socialist president, asserted: "Everybody was at Vichy." Or, as Robert Brasillach put it, "We all slept with Germany, more or less.") For both groups the field of action involved what Vincent Sherry, writing of an earlier war, called (in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the Great War), the "totalizations of view—the exaggerations … the hate campaigns, the cartoon enemies, all in all, the mechanism of oppositional thinking and the bogus extremities it effected." Between 1940 and 1945 the enemies were not only those who had invaded and occupied France but sectors of the French themselves: oppositional thinking was installed at the heart of patriotism itself, within the very definition of Frenchman. This attitude carried over into exile communities. While some expatriates pursued creative work unrelated to the war and occupation, others bore witness through speaking, journalism, tracts, or publishing. Some pursued both courses. A very few played a military role.

Even when writers remained aloof, the cultural was also political, explicitly or implicitly. For the French, culture is often politicized, as, for example, under Francis I and Louis xiv: art, music, and letters were aspects of power, often underwritten by the state, viewed as contributing to the national imago—the nearly mythic picture that rulers wished to project. In modern times, especially following the Franco-Prussian War, the identity of culture and nation has been exceptionally strong. After the defeat in 1940, France, for many, was her culture. With the army beaten and pride injured, culture was crucial; to maintain it was to support the nation, no longer sovereign but an idea. One spokesman identified the "true duty of France" as preparation for "the return of our nation to the first rank of world literature." Georges Bernanos spoke of the irreplaceable image and culture of France as alone capable of reviving heroism and combating the defeatist spirit. Roger Caillois wrote "Duties and Privileges of French Writers Abroad"—specifically to maintain an "organic solidarity" with other exiles and writers in France. The voice of the poet and diplomat Alexis Léger (Saint-John Perse) in Washington was called "the disembodied voice of France lost in the night." Charles de Gaulle voiced his belief in the "exceptional and eminent destiny" of his nation. After his stirring message of 18 June 1940, which posited a France outside of France (an ideal entity), he spoke, in 1943, of the need to group "the intellectual and moral forces of Free France." This was part of a larger verbal strategy, half mystifying and half genuine, to insist on French superiority and distinction in the face of defeat. Harold Macmillan commented that the French entertained "the pathetic belief that by insisting verbally upon France's greatness they can make her in fact great again."

Three aspects of the topic deserve examination, even if they elude full description: 1) the political and literary contexts in which authors wrote or spoke; 2) the audiences to which statements were directed and their dissemination to those audiences; 3) their effects or "performative" value, beyond testimonial. Hans Robert Jauss showed years ago how the original context of a...