Past Imperfect

...The editorial pages were rife with phrases like "capitalist tyranny," and it was common practice in the thirties to offer a critique of society in terms of Hobbesian chaos...

...Resentment toward the United States was virulent for the wartime bombing, its de facto occupation during the Liberation, and the spectacle of wad-of-bills-carrying G.I.s gaily strolling the boulevards of a vanquished and destitute nation...

...Concerning Sartre—who would write in the 1950s, "I have looked, but I just cannot find any evidence of an aggressive impulse on the part of the Russians in the last three decades"—we may come to two conclusions: (1) that his philosophy, an exercise in the abstract par excellence, was even more personal than is yet realized...

...For many, Kravchenko's former party status and belated escape from the Soviet Union rendered his authenticity suspect...

...Anti-anti-Communism was rabid in the pas d'ennemis a gauche vapors of the hour, and the left had begun to claim loudly for itself the moral force of evolution and progress...

...Eleven of the fourteen defendants in the Slansky trial were Jews, and everybody understood the rhetoric of the prosecution's charges of "nationalism" and "Zionism...

...sometimes they were simply cretins...

...Francois Mauriac publicly demanded that Sartre make a statement...

...When we read of Simone de Beauvoir deriding Shane and High Noon as war propaganda, or a hostile Pierre Daix claiming American cinema to be analogous to the work of Leni Riefenstahl, it all seems like so much Village Voice clatter ab origine...

...The Moscow show trials became widely known from another ignored bestseller, Arthur Koestler' s Darkness at Noon, yet so implausible were they in their horror that they had relatively little impact...

...For him, the woman's decision to ignore the disease invalidates the authenticity of her existence...

...Sartre, in Truth and Existence (1948), had tried to illuminate the place of truth in existentialism...

...Arguing that if one placed one's bets on the dream of a meaningful history of change and struggle, and assuming that Communism was the legitimate mechanism for that change, the purges were small beer, a necessary cost in the achievement of a realized dream...

...When Victor Kravchenko published his autobiography in 1946, detailing the horrors of the labor camps in Stalin's univers concentrationnaire, he was roundly vilified...

...and (2) that, as Robert Conquest might have it, he was a f---ing fool...

...Camus was at least near a truth...

...Merleau-Ponty, in direct reply to Darkness at Noon, wrote Humanism and Terror, in whichhe adduced the possibility that the show trials were "not only wise but historically just...

...Even for those who had seen the show trials of the thirties for what they were, Stalin's defeat of the Nazis seemed incontrovertible evidence that the Soviet Union was on the side of the correct and proper...

...Tony Judt's remarkable new book, Past Imperfect, is a horrifying etiology of the moral blindness of a generation of French intellectuals who discoursed about justice in the abstract while ignoring it in practice, and who proclaimed themselves moralists even as they were sweeping Stalin's horror under the carpet...

...That said, he left for Vienna just days after the mass execution to attend the Communists' "World Congress of Peace...

...It was this intellectual climate that first spawned what Judt calls the "distributive justice" of moral equivalence...

...there were "Trotskyists, revolutionary syndicalists, and aging surrealists, who sought somehow to maintain a radical position compatible with opposition to communism...

...Conquest, of course, was only one among many whose tales of Soviet atrocities found an unreceptive audience...

...When several years ago a publisher suggested to Robert Conquest that The Great Terror, his well-known book on the Stalin purges, be brought out again under a new title, the author offered as an alternative I Told You So, You F---ing Fools...

...there was the simple acceptance of those, like Louis Aragon, who were Communist party members and flatly denied all reports of Stalinist terror...

...Indeed, the Red Army's heroic performance at Stalingrad provided the Soviet Union with an almost unimpeachable moral currency...

...But for all Jude s genealogical fair-mindedness, one wishes for just a bit of vitriol...

...Wage labor being the same as mass murder, it was therefore absolutely illegitimate for Westerners to pass judgment on the interior proceedings of Stalin's reign...

...What this meant, ultimately, was the rationalization of terror—not only in pursuit of the Marxian dream of history's fulfillment, but also in accord with the French intellectual's new claims to prominence in public life...

...Sartre, of course, was the primus inter pares of French thinkers...

...After a couple of weeks," Jacob Burckhardt once remarked, "even the wittiest of books gets abandoned in Paris...

...No such credit came to the Allies, alas, as Judt points out...

...Thus, when Sartre later referred to Stalin's terror as the "midwife of history," he was merely bringing his metaphorical gift to bear on what the fellow-travelers already "knew...

...In the muddle of the Third Republic, intellectuals of every stripe were proM. D. Carnegie is a writer living in Rhode Island...

...Sartre declined, admonishing that the "problem of the condition of Jews in the Peoples' Democracies must not become a pretext for propaganda or polemic...

...In 1950, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre wrote: "You cannot deny (with the necessary nuances) that colonies are the labor camps of the democracies...

...He offered as his sole example the experience of a woman who knows she has fatal tuberculosis and yet ignores it...

...While this rhetoric had the fortunate effect of shifting the focus of many intellectuals to the anticolonial movement, and thus keeping their energies away from further Communist apologizing, it nevertheless tells of a warp in Western intellectual life that has yet to unbend itself...

...S artre's irresponsibility was only the most egregious...

...and there was the most complicated and ultimately revolting response of all, that of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Mounier, and others who devoted themselves not to condemning or defending the works of Stalin but to explaining them...

...It is easy to forget the strength of Stalin's claim on the French imagination...

...Theirs was the altogether more troubling task of acknowledging honestly (as they saw it) the realities of the Communist experience in all its horrors, and yet so explaining the latter as to be left with an experience and a project worthy of their dreams and defensible in their own philosophical and ethical language...

...There was the simple rejection of those, like Raymond Aron, whose public force was and had been insubstantial...

...j udt has written a spectacularly damning work of scholarship that will curdle the blood of those who have wandered happily through the pages of twentieth-century French literature...

...But by any standard, French intellectuals' romance with Communism was preternaturally persistent...

...After the publication of his well-known philosophical essay on the Jewish question, reports were arriving of the Soviet persecuti on of Jewish Communists, as well as the deportation and murder of Yiddish writers...

...n this environment, Judt maintains, / there were four possible intellectual responses to Stalinism...

...The vileness of fascism notwithstanding, liberalism and its material realization in American hegemony were widely perceived to be the real spiritual and political enemies of postwar France...

...This might have allowed him to conclude that sometimes the writers in question were neither formulating languages nor positing utopias nor validating philosophies...

...Small errors of fact were magnified into evidence of general misrepresentation...

...in the decade after the book's first appearance in France, I Chose Freedom sold over 500,000 copies...

...It was he who galvanized intellectuals with his claim that writing was action...

...For many," Judt writes, "Hitler's lightning victory constituted the verdict of history, a judgment upon the inadequacy and mediocrity of contemporary France, much as Stalingrad would later be seen as history's (positive) verdict upon Communism...

...foundly dissatisfied with life in democratic France...

...Thus Sartre, who had spent the war rolling his career along merrily under the German occupation, could remark after the purge and execution of the Czech Rudolf Slansky and thirteen others: "Perhaps we live in a situation in which the injustice against one person no longer seems to apply...

...Though originally intended for a French audience, and a scholarly one at that, the book is fine reading...

...This fantastical account was a frequent touchstone for French apologists...

...Just as the Inquisition did not affect the fundamental dignity of Christianity," wrote Andti Malraux, "so the Moscow trials have not diminished the fundamental dignity of Communism...

...There is an excellent section on, the continuing legacy of French intellectual life, as well as a keen overview of the language of rights in France, and how it has come to differ so greatly from its Anglo-American counterpart...

...In a culture where it was common enough to find editorials in the daily paper ruing the advent of the automobile and modern refrigeration, the mighty American machine was anathema...

...What they sought was a plausible and convincing account of otherwise incomprehensible events, an account that could maintain the illusions of the postwar years and sustain the radical impetus supplied by the Resistance and its aftermath...

...And as late as 1953 Albert Camus, by then no apologist for Communism, denounced Kravchenko as a capitalist "profiteer...

...T he rise of Vichy occasioned a wholesale discrediting of the intellectual right, which had shared with the left a yearning to see France reconstituted along radical, non-bourgeois lines...

...But when his voice might have mattered most, he was perfectly content to keep his pipe in his mouth...

...Main and the National Revolution were eventually seen to be shallow and hopeless, and as the anti-fascist movement gained in solidarity, criticism of the Soviets, such as there was, became suspect...

...That the book was first published in America led to charges that the entire work was mere Washington-manufactured propaganda...