LETTER FROM PARIS: He Was Our Friend
Harriss, Joseph A.
LETTER FROM PARIS Joseph A. t t a r r i s s He Was Our Friend A NTI-AMERICANISM BECAME the most ubiquitous form of racism in the latter part of the 20th century. And if you don't agree with...
...His epiphany occurred during a 1969 coast-to-coast visit to the U.S...
...SEPTEMBER 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 59...
...This peculiar racism, largely envy-based, continued after 9/11, with many European chattering intellectualoids and media touching bottom with cheap shots...
...But he tended to shun that notion, as he did the label pro-American...
...He pugnaciously rubbed European noses in things they preferred to forget: "We Europeans invented the great criminal ideologies of the 20th century," he reminded, "forcing the United States to intervene on our continent twice with its army...
...He skewered leftist French thinkers from Jean-Paul Sartre to Michel Foucault for "an ideology of falsification" and accusing free societies of the flagrant flaws of totalitarian ones...
...French media immediately caricatured Revel as a hard-line conservative, or worse, a rdactionnaire...
...B UT IT WAS REVEL'S BOMBSHELL t h e following y e a r that won him worldwide recognition...
...More important than such boilerplate statements, though, is his lasting influence...
...Liberals from Paris to Palo Alto were shocked, shocked...
...And as it was translated around the world, the book got almost universally hostile reviews, despite becoming a best-seller...
...And if you don't agree with that, your argument is not with me, but with Paul Johnson, whose judgment it was in his masterful history, Modern Times...
...In The Totalitarian Temptation he tore into Europe's so-called neo-communism, "a mishmash of Marxist-Leninist and Marcusian ideas, along with third world claims that the industrialized nations are guilty of all the planet's ills...
...As his political evolution developed in the 1950s and '60s, Revel began by uncritically accepting the then-current French view of America as the land of McCarthyism and the execution of the Rosenbergs, of racism and fat-cat, stogy-smoking capitalists...
...After being taken to task for decades by him, many in the French Establishment still paid Revel tribute in death, with President Jacques Chirac praising him as "an indefatigable defender of human dignity...
...His Swedish publisher could not obtain a single television interview for him...
...Moreover, that era French media immediately caricatured Revel as a hard-line conservative, or worse, a r6actionnaire...
...might be now closing because democracies hate to take the unpleasant action necessary to defend themselves, even justifying the victory of their mortal enemies...
...his Greek publisher, setting a new record for craven political correctness, actually added a preface to the book apologizing for issuing it...
...Revel's death this past spring at the age of 82 deprived France of one of its last great free spirits, and the U.S...
...And he seemed to take pleasure in insisting that this revolution, based on individual freedom, technological innovation, and free markets, would take place not in the left's darling Cuba, but in (gasp) California...
...Because his consistent theme, first strongly articulated in his 1970 best-seller, Without Marx or Jesus, was that political democracy and freemarket economics were the only path to progress, it is tempting to consider him a conservative, what the French call a liberal...
...I recall this reflexive anti-American environment to point up the intellectual courage of Jean-Francois Revel...
...Ever eclectic, Revel's 30-odd books include such varied works as a three-volume history of Western thought, a literary history of food from antiquity to today, and a dialogue on philosophy and religion with his son, Mathieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk...
...I N A LAND OF JESUITICAL CASUISTS, Revel, with his well-fed frame, bull neck, and bullet-bald head, stubbornly stood for reasoned, fact-based analysis and, above all, intellectual independence...
...For the European left, those were heady days: vociferating against fascist American neo-colonial imperialism and the Vietnam war, denouncing American companies worldwide as bloodsuckers, treating American troops in host countries like a nuisance at best, occupiers at worst...
...For him, the search for truth was a fulltime job involving exhaustive research and firsthand knowledge...
...He was the heir of the Enlightenment, a cultivated free-thinker, a specimen rare today in France...
...He was simply too independent and original a thinker...
...Like the little boy and the emperor's new clothes, he dared tell his fellow Europeans some simple but deliberately overlooked home truths...
...Most French never did quite figure out what to 58 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTE~BER 2006 JOSEPH A. HARRISS make of Revel...
...Terrorists were justified in attacking the United States, the line went, because its ostentatious wealth and success were a provocation...
...As for his home country, Revel lectured the French that their irrational, endemic bitterness over American success was due to their loss of status-real or imagined-as a great power...
...He wrote a few speeches for a certain Frangois Mitterrand in France's 1965 presidential election...
...They gained him fame and, in France, dark accusations of proAmericanism...
...The revolution of the 20th century will take place in the United States," he stated at his polemical best in the opening sentence of Without Marx or Jesus...
...of one of the last prominent French intellectuals who refused to run with the pack of yapping anti-Americanism...
...We will all miss Revel's gutsy independence and his flair for provocative polemics...
...Revel kept hammering at his theme that today's great conflict is not between classes but between totalitarianism and freedom...
...In How Democracies Perish he tough-mindedly mused that democracy may, after all, be only a parenthesis in man's political history...
...But his most renowned works were those that took up the cudgels in favor of individual freedom...
...I was thunderstruck by how false was everything that Europeans said about this country," he later recalled, explaining his break with the organized left that stunned the hermetic French intellectual world...
...He also anticipated by several years the fiasco of the cartoons of Muhammad, pointing out lucidly that Muslims demand that "all humanity respect the imperatives of their religion, while they themselves owe no respect to any other religion...
...In fact, after attacking Stalinism in all its forms, from "pidgin Marxism" to Maoism, he early on called for nothing less than global socialism based on the decline of the nation-state and reformed capitalism...
...That was what led him to look more closely, and comprehendingly, at America than any French observer since Alexis de Tocqueville...
...Their sanctimonious criticism of America as fascist was just a bit much, he thundered in articles and books, given that the U.S...
...I fear that we shall not look upon his like here again...
...And one of France's premier columnists, Ivan Rioufol of Le Figaro, told me Revel was his model: "I adopted his method of getting the facts, calling a spade a spade, and not worrying about being politically correct...
...The notorious French hang-up on Marxism, at a time when no other developed country will have anything to do with it...
...But he was soon disgusted by Mitterrand's opportunistic rapprochement with the Communist Party...
...A man for all seasons, he was a philosopher, art critic, member of the wartime Resistance, connoisseur, bon vivant, journalist, polemicist, and member of the French Academy, the closest thing to a universal man that his country has produced in a very long time...
...was "a land that in over 200 years has never known a dictator, while Europe has been busy creating crowds of them...
...It can take place nowhere else...
...Joseph A. Harriss is a Paris-based American journalist whose latest book is About France...
...Both left and extreme right detested America because, he observed, they hated democracy and the market economy that goes with it...
...In his last book, the post-9/ll Anti-Americanism (its original French title, L'Obsession anti-Am&icaine, is more to the point), he castigated his compatriots for daring not criticize the likes of Qaddafi, Castro, and Saddam, while spewing contempt for Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush...
...Revel always thought of himself as a man of the moderate left, a socialist with a lower-case "s...
...In his way, he certainly was more important than that other candidate for the title, the endlessly self-promoting Andr~ Malraux...
...Many French are still unable to digest the reality," he commented matter-offactly, "that communism and socialism, the equivalent for them of a secular religion, failed...
...He shunned all ideologies and pre-mixed, one-size-fits-all systems of thought...
...Jose Maria Aznar, the former conservative Spanish prime minister, said he drew much of his political courage to resist pressure groups and ideological dogmas from reading Revel...
Vol. 39 • September 2006 • No. 7
