French Writers and the Politics of Complicity: Crisis of Democracy in the 1940s and 1990s (review)

Richard Golsan’s book presents an intriguing contribution to the ongoing debates on the past and the present state of the French Republic of Letters. It is remarkable in its attempt to push a step further the discussion surrounding the Vichy syndrome to acknowledge present-day notions of intellectual complicity with authoritarian regimes and their ideologies. The design of the study, albeit a bit too schematic in its structure, challenges us to compare how the writers Henry de Montherlant, Alphonse de Châteaubriant, and Jean Giono lent their aesthetic powers to the Nazi cause in the first part of the twentieth century with how the intellectuals Alain Finkielkraut, Régis Debray, and Stéphane Courtois supported revisionist thought and totalitarian regimes in the Balkans in the latter part of the century.

Golsan understands very well that this comparison is charged with difficulties: “Some readers will find the linkage of the two time periods initially puzzling, if not implausible. After all, in historical and political terms, the France of Philippe Pétain and of collaboration with the Nazis would appear to have absolutely nothing in common with the Fifth Republican France of the Socialist François Mitterand and the Gaullist Jacques Chirac” (p. 7). He also understands that given these historical differences his comparative design must rely on a strong conceptual foundation, for which he turns to the terminological groundwork offered by the legal philosopher Christopher Kutz.

To be sure, additional complications derive from an incongruity in Golsan’s choice of authors: whereas the first three chapters offer succinct portrayals of fiction writers collaborating with Nazi Germany and Vichy France during World War II, the last three chapters reconstruct the ideological strategies three intellectuals thinkers (a philosopher, a medialogist, and a historian) devised to give credence to the anti-democratic and xenophobic regimes in East Europe or to Holocaust denial. Here, many readers may expect a discussion that not only recognizes commonalities in some of the underlying motives, hopes, and beliefs that led these six men to walk down a wrong path of history, but that also recognizes the differences between the intrinsically ambiguous power of figurative language which a fiction writer may use and the cogent evidence-based and critically reviewed argument which a trained historian or philosopher must espouse.

And yet, it must be stressed that despite all of these caveats, Golsan’s book presents a challenge in which French (or, for that matter, European) cultural studies needs to engage—not despite all the difficulties involved in the project, but because of them. Golsan’s case studies should be praised: they are well researched and well argued, his analytic language capable of teasing out subtleties in the demagogical rhetoric employed by his subjects while capturing in general terms the historical and political contexts in which Finkielkraut, Debray, or Courtois have made their erroneous, misleading points.

Even more praiseworthy is the very trajectory of Golsan’s underlying argument as its opens up the discussion of the use and misuse of “the memory of Vichy and Nazism as a hermeneutic device and moral compass in the intellectual discourse of 1990s France” (p. 164).