Generation Stalin: French Writers, the Fatherland, and the Cult of Personality by Andrew Sobanet (review)

French writers’ complicity with authoritarian and totalitarian regimes arguably reached its height under the German Occupation, when Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Robert Brasillach and others cast their lot with the Maréchal Pétain, would-be savior of an “eternal France,” or with Hitler himself. After the Liberation, the purge of collaborators opened the way for the résistancialiste myth of victorious nation united under De Gaulle and for a renewed postwar literary culture. Decades of Vichy-related scholarship all but obfuscated another, perhaps more resilient personality cult that held French writers in its thrall: that of Josef Stalin. Launched in 1935 by onetime pacifist Henri Barbusse’s final work, Staline: un monde nouveau vu à travers un homme, and nourished by such leading lights as Romain Rolland, Paul Éluard, and Louis Aragon, a Gallicized “Stalin cult” would endure well beyond the Soviet leader’s death in 1953. Writers loyal to the Parti communiste français did not simply venerate Stalin from afar; in the press, at rallies, in pamphlets, plays, poems, and novels, they made pointed contributions to that cult even as a growing body of evidence, which Khrushchev would air in his “secret speech” of February 1956 (13), discredited portrayals of the Soviet leader’s generosity, military acumen, theoretical brilliance, and all-around infallibility.

Recounted in this cogent and sharply focused study is, if not a missing chapter in the history of the institutional French left, then a more expansive and damning account of writers’ encomiastic deference to the Soviet leader and to Cominform doctrine than any previously available. Sobanet’s scrupulous research—incorporating not only period sources like L’Humanité, Clarté, and Monde but also files from declassified Soviet archives—lets us grasp the peculiar and stubborn enthusiasm these secular moral guides brought to Stalin’s person and historic legacy. Generation Stalin is necessary, and necessarily revisionist, work in that critical monographs and biographies heretofore have largely depicted writers’ embrace of the Soviet leader as limited in scope (Éluard’s Stalinism coincided with his twilight years, 1947–1952) or as minor compromises in the otherwise noble pursuit of justice and internationalist egalitarianism (Rolland). Marked in France by lavish birthday celebrations orchestrated by PCF General Secretary Maurice Thorez—a charismatic figure who inspired his own personality cult (25–26)— Stalin worship was part and parcel of the domestication of international communism to French patriotic ends. It prompted broad re-evaluations of what historical figures from Hugo to Jaurès could rightly signify.

Across four chapters of contextualized close analyses Sobanet singles out generically disparate works. Taking cues from Moscow to compose his “official” biography of 1935, Barbusse balances the family man of humble Georgian origins against the superhuman “Man of Steel” who inherited Lenin’s mantle; the book’s distortions, omissions, and exaggerations are measured against Boris Souvarine’s fact-based critical account, Staline: aperçu historique du bolchévisme, published just three months later (78). The object of chapter 2, Romain Rolland’s stage play Robespierre, penned in 1939 to mark the sesquicentennial of the French Revolution, casts the Jacobin not as the dictatorial architect of the Terror but as an enlightened martyr who sacrifices his lofty ideals (and his Jacobin peers) the better to consolidate the nascent Republic. Rolland’s character study allegorically “serves as a means of justifying—not critiquing—Stalin’s exercise of power [. . .] as well as means-to-end violence in general” (143). A less sanguine advocate for bloodletting, former surrealist Paul Éluard similarly imagines violence in the pursuit of peace, a trope that recurs in communist apologia: it is the imperialist and individualistic West that is destructive, in contrast to the East and its utopia of “solidarity, hard work, and plenty” (165). Central to this third chapter is Éluard’s involvement in commemorating Victor Hugo the revolutionary—a proxy figure for Stalin—and in authoring the script to the short...