The Travail of French Intellectuals

...Whatever their doctrines or despair, they have refused to evade moral dilemma and ambiguity, in this living by the ethics of the existential philosophy to which their searches gave popular, though perhaps transitory, currency...

...No other force seemed to many intellectuals so totally com mitted to the cause of social justice...

...These writers made anguish into adventure and uncovered simple truths and virtues, but offered no exit from obstructed paths...

...Both erudite and unwilling to keep to established scholarly methods, they attempted with much success to achieve a more imaginative, more human resurrection of the past —and in so doing made possible a deeper understanding of society and culture in all times...

...All of the men Hughes examines are moralists above all...

...Jacques Maritain and Gabriel Marcel found a religious center through conversion to Catholicism...

...the immediate is graspable while the ultimate ends are indeterminate...

...Formerly most French writers, whatever their other differences, had been confident that there is logical order in human affairs, with reason making men masters of their history...

...Cold War hostility, dogmatic declara tions, and justifications of Stalinist policy made the work of these men incomprehensible to or ne glected by non-Communists...

...He does not find that the way has been discovered, but that French writers had by 1960 broken from their confining traditions...

...Its militant stance was particularly well-suited to the times and the men involved, given the background both of France's Jacobin and Blanquist tradition of popularly-based revolution and of that tradition's reaffirmation in the Resistance...

...Much of their work seems narrow in scope: Bloch wrote a book on the medieval belief that kings had a miraculous abilily to heal scrofula, Febvre wrote a work on the religious disbelief of Rabelais...

...Divine ordinance in authoritative doctrinal interpretation provides a comfortable foundation for the philosopher...

...THE CRISES and calamities which beset France provided the needed stimulus for reformulation of ideas...

...He gives no great weight to his concluding emphasis on French social science, but his hint of a yearning for something solid to grasp suggests something of the plight of intellectuals everywhere...

...They continued the moralists' quest, with Stalinist doctrine creating only limited hindrance to their main efforts...

...THOUGH FRANCOPHILIA REMAINS COMMON among American intellectuals, few are at ease with the intricacies of French intellectual life...

...Yet such highly specific themes were employed by them to discover major sociological insights...

...Both BOOKS Vichy traitors and exploiters of the poor were condemned, while the need for social justice took on renewed urgency...

...It is a quite remarkable book, in form a history of the development of ideas, yet not systematic in its exposition either of a history or of the ideas themselves...

...Yet they were not content to rest there, going on instead to take part in a Catholic intellectual revival which contributed to massive changes in the Church's position on social issues...

...Neo-Marxists think of their ideol ogy less as instrumental doctrine than as the basis for fresh understanding of the possibilities for man's growth...

...France's classical literary and philosophical traditions remained strong in the decade after the war, and among intellectuals self-satisfaction with the country's cultural situa tion corresponded to more general illusions about the strength of the nation...

...Yet, in sketching the process by which those bonds were broken, Hughes exposes a struggle which may well have been worth more than the substantive accomplishments he points to...

...The major area of intellectual involvement, however, was Marxism, almost invariably through association with the Communist party...

...We applaud where they speak to our own condition or in a language common to men of ideas everywhere, but much of what they say is a puzzle—or is taken for what it is not...

...Hughes states his central theme simply at the outset...

...Upon liberation from restraints in the post-Stalin era, these initial explorations in existential phenomen ology have made possible a revitalization of Marx ist philosophy...

...he prefers the social scientists– especially the social historians, with their redefinition of history as "retrospective cultural anthropology...

...The middle chapters of The Obstructed Path deal with men who discovered answers but went on in restless searching...

...Similarly, Claude Levi-Strauss has used anthropological studies of South American savages to extend knowledge of man's most fundamental attributes, and to provide a foundation for systematic development of social theory...

...Left Catholicism was strengthened and there the tolerance for Marxism was extended, Emmanuel Mounier's Left Catholic review Esprit becoming a major focus of intellectual activity...

...The Communist party was bound by Stalinist rigidity and so, in varying measures, were its intellectuals...

...Clashes of opposed values and forces, never far from center stage in so divided a nation, themselves assumed primary significance...

...Moved by the Resistance experience, men of ideas went on to further development of embryonic prewar philosophical tendencies...

...Then what matters most may be the personal style with which one confronts such experience: the ethic of heroism finds renewed validity...

...Lacking conventional elements of continuity, the book should be disjointed but in fact is tightly knit...

...Roger Martin du Gard, Georges Bernanos, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and Andre Malraux figure here in the moralists' endless quest for sustenance through some kind of heroic ethic...

...As this moral stance in combination with prewar tendencies in phenomenology evolved into what was to be called existentialism, revived Catholic thought found the newly fashionable philosophy congenial...

...Moral despair and commitment despite ambiguity, so important to the heroic ethic, also had a natural place in the Catholic tradition...

...Yet we can see from Hughes's essay, which concentrates in particular on Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, that there is much more in their Marxism than partisan polemic and apologia...

...Faced by the insoluble dilemmas of the human condition, they seize upon substantive scientific results, as morsels of partial satisfaction, with more eagerness than on reflection they might think suitable...

...Inevitably judgments will differ on how far French intellectuals have moved toward "a way out," but there can be little doubt that they have broken down many of the barriers which at one time seemed virtually insurmountable...

...In Hughes's treatment the renewal of French social thought derived early and potent stimulus from the work of such historians as Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre...

...In the despair of the 1930's this confidence was dissipated, and the world seemed incoherent, incomprehensibly in random movement and perpetually tragic...

...they also made it impossible for subtle, selfcritical intellects to be easily satisfied...

...What emerges from Hughes's neatly constructed treatment is more than a synthesis of ideas: it is a sensitive understanding of the French intelligentsia...

...Here life becomes an adventure without final objective...

...The legacy of the Resistance for national life overshadowed everything in the first postwar decade...

...In a humane science coupled with deep moral concern, having "poetry at its core," he sees the most hopeful direction in quest of a "way out" from obstructed paths...

...Too often elegance of expression belied vacuity of content or disguised fruitless trips over well-worn routes—and that ele gance no longer so readily attracted admiration of audiences outside France...

...It is no small achievement that the "new" Catholics, Marxists, and still more heterodox men of ideas have come close enough to share in mutually profitable intellectual exchanges...

...Thus the Party and its members' aspirations could be both universal and authentically French, a combination of quali ties itself characteristic of French tradition...

...To salvage something from the shambles of conflict and the absurdities of a life's experience could be the chief goal...

...We enjoy the clarity, logic, and verve of contemporary writing in France, but much of it remains obscure to us because we are not pricked by many of the nettles that so persistently plague the French intelligentsia...

...By another path, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin also went from specific scientific investigations to broad social philosophy...

...but perhaps in the ambiguity of unresolved issues and the pain of confronting them lies more of the essence of human experience than ordered knowledge and rational theory can ever convey...

...Heroic ideals came into play most substantially in the World War II Resistance movement, in which many French intellectuals were deeply involved...

...The general import of existentialist ideas may be in doubt, but The Obstructed Path serves as further evidence for the supposition that for sustaining vigorous intellectual life this kind of restless, unfettered search is more important than is attaining final answers...

...Joseph Clark...

...fraternity" and "moral commitment" assumed new definition and significance in consequence, and the former standards and arbiters of a moral universe were repudiated...

...The Obstructed Path ought to relieve this situation...

...At least this is preferable to avoiding the dilemmas through exclusive concentration on morally neutral matters, or by adopting a total ideological system...

...The motif of an `obstructed path,' of blind alleys and blocked vistas, of faltering and stalemate, and of an increasingly desperate search for a way out, pervades the thinking of French men of all types and intellectual interests through nearly a half century following the outbreak of the First World War...

...An abundance of biographical material contributes not only to its entertainment value but also to exposing the preoccupations of French intellectuals which often are not clear to observers elsewhere...