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

On the day Stalin died, March 5, 1953, tens of thousands of Frenchmen filed by Communist Party headquarters in the Place du Colonel Fabien in Paris, which had been draped in black for the occasion, to pay their respects. The Communist daily L’Humanité bellowed the well-known Communist slogan “Staline, l’homme que nous aimons le plus” and went on to eulogize their “guide,” “le petit père des peuples,” as though he were God. This latter-day adoration by the faithful suggests a cult-like veneration which is only possible in a totalitarian dictatorship where artists and writers have their part to play in the glorification of the nation’s leader. As Louis XIV stated to Le Brun and members of the French Academy: “Messieurs, je vous confie la chose la plus importante du monde: ma gloire.” But the fundamental difference between Louis XIV and Stalin is that only the latter resorted to systematic terror. Nicolas Fouquet, Louis’s intendant des finances, who embezzled millions to offer himself a fashionable château, Vaux-le-Vicomte, almost won the court case against him on charges of embezzlement and finished his days in jail, not in front of a firing squad. Bukharin, Kamenev, Radek, Zinoviev, and, of course, Trotsky, as well as numerous other leading figures in the Soviet Communist Party, to say nothing of millions of civilians, were not so lucky.

The Stalin cult in France accelerated after the dictator’s fifty-fifth birthday, in 1935, the year that Barbusse published his groundbreaking but idolatrous biography of Stalin, and reached a peak in the early Cold War period when it dominated the cultural landscape of the Communist left. “Stalin became godlike: infallible, clairvoyant, and heroic,” and magically was added to the Communist trinity of Marx, Engels, and Lenin (14). Sobanet points out that France was no stranger to the personality cult: Louis XIV, Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon III, Pétain, De Gaulle: all were indefatigable self-promoters, but none enjoyed the same power base as Stalin and therefore did not have the same impact.

The book under review examines the contributions of four French authors--Henri Barbusse, Romain Rolland, Paul Éluard, and Louis Aragon--to the Stalin cult in France. All four promoted Stalin as the savior of humankind, all the while accommodating sudden policy changes, such as the Popular Front strategy in the 1930s and the Molotov-Ribbentrop defense pact in 1939, which led to World War II. They also promoted a more nationalistic view of France. French Communism moved from being indebted to the Soviet Union to the status of Communist pioneer thanks to a novel and more favorable interpretation of Robespierre’s contributions during the French Revolution, the Paris Commune in 1871, and the Communist Resistance during World War II. Initially, the legacy of Robespierre had been exported to the fledging Soviet Union, but now was repackaged and returned to sender, where the French Communist Party dutifully announced a new vision of the French Revolution in which the ideals of liberté, égalité, and fraternité were associated with the victory of the bourgeoisie and the defeat of the egalitarian aspirations of the Revolution during Thermidor (79–80).

Engels proclaimed that he had learned more from Balzac than anyone else, and especially historians (26). Stalin himself fancied himself a literary man, wrote verse in his native Georgian in his youth, and got punished in seminary for reading French working-class classics by the likes of Hugo, Balzac, Maupassant, and Zola. Now, French up-and-coming writers of the 1920s and 1930s could confer prestige and legitimacy on Communism.

The first chapter is likely the most in-depth study ever of Barbusse’s Stalin 1935 biography, showing how it was indebted to Soviet sources and therefore a prime example of propaganda. Sobanet demonstrates that other biographers of Barbusse (Duchatelet, Denizot) were wrong to say that he was not a Stalinist (151).

Chapter 2 looks at Romain Rolland’s...