FRENCH INTELLECTUALS BETWEEN THE WARS

...so did the underground Lettres Francaises...

...To tell the truth, the alliance, strange as it may appear, sometimes rose in spirit higher than the enmity...

...It was indeed, despite all its grimness and horror, a period of innocence, when the great dream of the Russian Revolution still had not been recognized—except by a handful of people whom nobody wished to listen to, and who were universally vilified—to have become a nightmare...

...L'Humanite, which had opposed the declaration of war and was published underground, asked permission of the German authorities to resume legal publication...

...One can only wonder why Lottman carries on such a personal and vindictive vendetta, which, in the eyes of any careful reader, cannot help but undermine his own credibility...

...Herbert Lottman's recent book on writers, artists, and politics, from the Popular Front to the Cold War, is a lively and valuable contribution to the social-cultural history of the recent past.* No one who grew up during this period, like the present writer, can read it without a surge of old memories and a twinge of nostalgia...

...There is never time to explore anything in depth, and the reader must take Lottman's selection of material from his extensive documentation more or less on faith...

...A key Left Bank figure during this period was Andre Gide, whose short-lived flirtation with communism catapulted him into political life, but who then became a Communist bete noire...

...The most flagrant example of such bias is his consistent denigration of Andre Malraux, against whom he carries on a never-ending if covert campaign...

...The strangest thing," he writes, "was, unquestionably, that these intransigent lovers of the human race were not surprised to meet, on the routes of capitulation, with the born enemies of their class and their ideals...

...For most of the Left Bank notables, "resistance" consisted of little more than writing occasional articles for the clandestine press that gradually sprang into being or, what was slightly more dangerous, helping in its production and distribution...

...Just who collaborated and who was in the resistance is often difficult to determine...

...Ah, that's a good one...

...Collaboration was made easier by the sympathetic Gerhard Heller, the German officer then placed in charge of French publishing, who admired French culture, deplored Nazi excesses, and often helped his French literary friends out of tight spots...

...The road to power now lies through the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, not the Ecole Normale...

...Both men were killed under mysterious circumstances, and are assumed to have been dispatched by the Soviet secret police...

...1, 1983), it is clear that Bloch considered the attitude of the left a major factor in the undermining of French morale...

...As Lottman remarks of the several literary and political generations that now clustered happily around the cafe tables of St...

...These years also saw a dawning awareness of what life really was like in Russia, although the French left fought desperately to discredit such people as Victor Kravchenko and David Rousset who dared to write openly of the totalitarian aspects of Russian communism...

...In 1935, after Stalin had given the word—through Ilya Ehrenburg in Paris—that an international organization of writers should be organized against fascism, a conference was arranged in the French capital...

...It was to take another year for Hitler to attack the Soviet Union, and during this time there was very little to choose between the attitude of the Fascist right and the Communist left in France...

...The Communist attempt to regiment French cultural life also met with stiff opposition, and soon the left was split between those willing to follow Communist dictates and those demanding the right to be allowed to think and create independently, whatever their devotion to Communist political aims...

...Not that Malraux's behavior was always impeccable...

...As an example, we may select this juicy tidbit offered in Lottman's pseudo-objective manner: "A fellow writer and fighter of these years [the 1930s] later confided that Malraux was, quite simply, devoid of political concerns...

...Not that one wishes the past it evokes—a past that includes the rise of Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, the fall of France, the almost complete conquest of Europe by the Nazis, the revelations of the Holocaust, and then the explosion of the first atomic bomb and the Cold War—to come back to life...

...But Lottman's cynicism, once again, is far from being the whole story...

...But this movement soon foundered, sabotaged by Sartre himself because of his unwillingness to be suspected of anticommunism in the effort to hold the balance between the two power blocs...

...Lottman, as we see, continues his tactics of underhanded denigration, which he repeats a bit later after recording that Malraux had encouraged Gide to resist the enormous pressure put upon him by close friends to suppress his book...

...But the terms in which he describes this unity do not, in my opinion, give a sharp enough focus to what actually occurred...

...and it was not the Germans but the Vichy government that vetoed the idea...

...But the memories of youth always have something appealing about them, if only because one remembers primarily one's innocence and illusions...

...It may even suggest that commitments were not always taken seriously, especially when the dilettantes wore the fancy dress of La Nouvelle Revue Francaise...

...At the end of the 1930s the Nazi-Soviet pact exploded like a bombshell in the midst of the anti-Fascist left, leading to widespread bewilderment and dismay...

...There is a fascinating depiction of the activities of the enormously influential but little-known Comintern agent Willi Miinzenberg, whom Romain Rolland described as "this great artist in revolutions," and who, in pre-Hitler days, had operated newspapers, magazines, and book clubs in Germany with great success...

...Zhdanov announced the party's rejection of corrupting Western influences, and the French Communists immediately joined in with an attack on American cultural imperialism...

...Even if we overlook the obvious non sequitur (are "political concerns" the same as "ideas...

...Lottman is perfectly right to use this episode as a sort of epigraph...

...The Left Bank history that seems so futile to Lottman produced ideas that have had an enormous effect on the modern world, especially in ex-colonial and Third World countries, and to discount them in the way that Lottman does is a grievous error in perspective...

...Simone de Beauvoir worked for the Radio Nationale controlled by the Vichy government, producing her own cultural program in Paris but helping in this way to gain listeners for the voice of the German-supported regime...

...After this time, however, they began to look outward and, as Andre Gide put it, acquired the conviction that they had "a right to inspect [their] neighbor's territory...

...collaborated as well as for the one that everybody resisted...

...His epilogue then places the whole history of the Left Bank as the relic of a bygone era: France is no longer the world power that it was, and the quarrels of its intellectuals have lost importance...

...To be sure, the rise of fascism and nazism did not incline one to dwell too insistently on the shortcomings of the Soviet Union...

...But one should read his book for its rich and skillfully presented material, not for his myopic interpretations...

...26—Sept...

...and fall of the committed intellectual"—and so indeed it does...

...q 108...

...Members of the staff of Je Suis Partout stood trial but received mild prison sentences, and nothing came of a plan, suggested by de Gaulle, to elect resistance writers to vacant places in the Academie Francaise, which had sheltered a number of distinguished collaborators...

...In the first place, it is not true that the political concerns of the French intelligentsia had previously lacked any international range (one thinks of the pro-Polish agitation that continued through most of the 19th century, or of Victor Hugo's protest against the execution of John Brown...

...One can also agree with him that the stretch of time he covers—between the 1930s and the 1950s—has an intrinsic unity that marks a new phase in the history of the French intelligentsia...

...Nor does he grasp the fact that, among Frenchmen, a natural solidarity continued to exist even in the midst of conflicting allegiances to what were essentially alien causes...

...Lottman states that a case could be made out, with equal plausibility, for the thesis that everybody * Shortly after writing the above lines, I came across an analysis of the same unholy symbiosis of right and left from the pen of Marc Bloch, the famous French historian of Jewish origin, who joined the active resistance and was executed by the Nazis in 1944...

...Lottman's last sentence is a quotation from Beckett's Endgame, intended to illustrate the ultimate futility of the cogitations and agitations he has been chronicling...

...The French wished the Surrealist leader Andre Breton to be invited even though he had been expelled from the French Communist party...

...but the Russians threatened to withdraw unless Breton was excluded...

...It is all too easy, and even tempting, to accept such a disillusioned conclusion, which contains a certain amount of truth so far as France itself is concerned...

...Sartre's L'Etre et le tgant was published by a Gallimard that complied strictly with the German rules for publication, and Les Mouches was first produced in the old Sarah Bernhardt theater, by this time purified of its association with a Jewish actress...

...After the Nazis came to power he shifted his activities to Paris and, in Lottman's view, "a strong case can be made that intellectual involvement in the archetypical form that it assumed in France in the years before World War II was Miinzenberg's creation...

...Many also found it difficult to swallow the purge trials being carried on in one East European country after another against Communist leaders, accused, as they had been in the prewar Moscow trials, of the most heinous crimes against the beliefs they professed to hold and that they had zealously served before their arrest...

...But when Gide met Victor Serge" Lottman adds, with his judicious air of balancing the pros and the cons, "Serge wondered what Malraux's attitude would be if he were asked to choose for or against Gide...

...He was verbal, without any real interest in ideas...

...What he gives is a sort of newsreel coverage, rather like a documentary film, of the interaction between political events and French intellectual life, singling out one or another figure to hold the spotlight for a moment but then moving on rapidly...

...One could give the 106 work any political meaning one pleased, and this lack of any concrete political significance to early French existentialism made it much easier for its representatives to write and publish...

...Such personal ties were strong, and Lottman expresses some bewilderment as he watches old friends move into opposing political camps without feeling obliged to break off their intimacy...

...From passages printed in Le Nouvel Observateur (Aug...

...Lottman ends his book rather abruptly after a brief discussion of the Camus–Sartre quarrel over L'Homme Rêvoltê, which represented the split between those willing to draw some fundamental conclusions from the existence of Soviet totalitarianism and those who regarded it only as a regrettable accidental error...

...Their disclosures resulted in libel suits, during which the testimony of witnesses for the defense (especially that of Margarete BuberNeumann, who had been in both Nazi and Soviet camps) deeply troubled the consciences of younger French Communists but did not succeed in shaking their political allegiances...

...But such unsavory personal episodes, with rights and wrongs on both sides (she refused to grant him a divorce so that he could legitimize a child by his mistress), should not have been allowed to color the depiction of his entire career...

...L'Humanite devoted a respectful obituary to Crevel as a "revolutionary writer" and attributed his death to the worsening of a recurring illness...

...Between the time of the French collapse and his own death, Bloch worked on a book called L'Etrange Defaite (The Strange Defeat), in which, from his position as a firsthand observer, he tried to diagnose the causes of the French disaster...

...It hardly seems likely, especially since the people who came to visit Paulhan would have been well known to Drieu as anti-Fascist...

...One learns, for example, that the entire French publishing industry collaborated with the Germans in one way or another, and all accepted the restrictions imposed by the occupation authorities— such as the banning of all anti-German works, and of course books by Jewish authors...

...But so powerful was the grip of communism that almost all those who had the courage to express heretical opinions waited to be expelled from the party (perhaps still hoping for grace from on high) rather than taking the initiative and resigning themselves...

...This is one of Lottman's controlling ideas...

...Since the Communist party and the Soviet Union had found it possible to come to terms with Hitler, many on the formerly anti-Fascist left felt it possible to work out their own limited form of cooperation with the German occupants...

...One should not do so too incautiously, however, since Lottman has obvious biases...

...Moreover, the French have always regarded their own internal affairs as of international importance because of the universal mission instinctively attributed to French culture in the world...

...This all too facile cynicism, on which Lottman falls back far too frequently, reveals the limits of his historical understanding, and his inability to comprehend the often tragic dilemma created by the conflict between personal and political loyalties...

...Mean something...

...He was as close to being a commissar of culture as one could find outside the Soviet Union and its bloc of East European allies, with more power over writers and artists than any official Minister of Culture could wield in a Western country...

...and this was followed in quick succession by the period of "the phoney war" and then the fall of France...

...With the invasion of the Soviet Union by Hitler, the Communist line quickly changed and the Communists resumed the active role they had previously played in organizing the French intellectuals...

...By 1951 he had decided that the French Communist party represented the proletariat, and that it was impossible to break completely with the official apparatus and its Russian mentors...

...and Lottman's narrative recounts the history of a period dominated by one such illusion...

...How many battalions did that obscure German refugee Karl Marx have as he wore the seat of his pants to a frazzle in the British Museum...

...Lottman sees his book as detailing "the rise * The Left Bank, by Herbert R. Lottman...

...Revolutionaries, or at least revolutionary leaders, read books before they seize rifles (if they do) and go out to fight...

...A revelatory sketch is also devoted to the Czechoslovak Communist Eugen Fried, known as "Clement," who, as the agent assigned by the Comintern to oversee the French Communist party, was its eminence grise for many years...

...Some notion of the complexities of the situation may be judged from the astonishing career of Jean Paulhan, who continued to work as editor for Gallimard, helped Drieu la Rochelle turn La Nouvelle Revue Francaise into a collaborationist journal, protected his anti-Semitic and pro-German friend Marcel Jouhandeau, and was saved from the Germans by the intervention of Drieu himself...

...When Malraux spoke in Moscow, as Lottman notes, "out of design or naivete [italics added], he chose this platform to challenge the principles of Socialist Realism even as they were being polished up for global dissemination...

...and what he chooses to offer as fact is often nothing but malicious, unevaluated gossip...

...it demonstrates how the French intelligentsia had become the plaything of political forces beyond its control...

...Rene Crevel, a Surrealist who had continued to write for Communist publications, tried to act as go-between...

...In addition, it has become a technological society in which scientists, engineers, and technocrats are much more important than novelists, poets, or philosophers...

...But he refused to write for the NRF because it barred Jews and other authors previously published, and his office at Gallimard's, right down the hall from Drieu's, "resembled a resistance cell...

...A few writers and intellectuals did join the Maquis to fight, and Lottman in fairness might have mentioned these exceptions...

...Malraux too, though later much more conciliatory because of his active role in the Spanish Civil War—and Soviet Russia was the only country supplying the Republicans with arms—tried to maintain a margin of independence...

...Much the same sometimes happened with friendships that arose because people frequented a particular cafe, or chanced to be invited to the same literary salon...

...Serge's hypothetical question is given the same weight as the well-attested fact of Malraux's loyal support of Gide (and this on a trip back to Paris from the Spanish front...

...The first section of the book stresses both the physical and personal contiguity of French intellectual life, concentrated within a small area of the Left Bank of the Seine and dominated by a group of people many of whom had gone to school together in the Ecole Normale...

...The resulting confusion in the order of battle," Lottman remarks wryly, "is enough to make one's head spin...

...The Communists gained control of the National Committee of Writers formed during the resistance, and Louis Aragon, the unscrupulous but highly talented ex-Surrealist turned Communist functionary, became the uncrowned king of French letters...

...To the French intellectuals, their internal political squabbles were less important than a show of national solidarity...

...Existentialism came under fierce attack, and Sartre at first was tempted by the idea of an alternate Socialist Third Way for France and Europe that would navigate between the official left (Stalinism) and the right (now represented by the United States instead of Nazi Germany...

...and it seems to me to blur rather than to illuminate the meaning of the events that he recounts...

...his refusal to grant permission for his Jewish wife to emigrate under the occupation hardly redounds to his glory...

...Friendships were struck up there in early years that lasted a lifetime, and created ties that, as Thierry Maulnier wrote, forged "that solidarity among members which seems stronger than religious or political differences...

...What is 'new, however, is that the French intellectuals were now no longer expressing their own national point of view, whether revolutionary or conservative, but choosing sides and committing themselves to ideologies that had been developed elsewhere and were not French at all...

...hat marked these postwar years, besides the superficial excitement created by existentialism as a frenetic postliberation life-style, were the tensions arising from Stalin's determination to rein in the relative cultural liberalism that had existed in Russia during the war...

...You and I, mean something...

...and the view that ideas have no power is one of those pseudo-sophisticated, "hardboiled" notions that "practical" people like to substitute for genuine thought...

...The critic of the Pariser Zeitung, the newspaper of the occupying forces, praised the play...

...Could Drieu really have been unaware, as Lottman believes, that "Paulhan was at the center of a whole world of underground resistance [publishing] activities" being carried on just a few feet away from his own pro-Fascist citadel...

...With his second section, which deals with the 1930s, Lottman gets down to his real subject...

...For after a trip to Russia carefully organized to strengthen his allegiance, he ungratefully wrote his courageous Return from the USSR, in which he revealed some of the underside of the workers' paradise...

...It is Heller who records in his diary—published in France several years ago, and which then enjoyed a success d'estime—that he wept when the brilliant, gifted, and viciously anti-Semitic Robert Brasillach, the editor of the clamorously collaborationist Je Suis Partout, advocated sending French Jewish children to concentration camps along with their parents...

...Germain des Pres in newly liberated Paris, "either they had been Communists, were presently Communists, or would become Communists...

...The purge idea petered out once the war against Germany was finished (Brasillach had been executed while the fighting was still raging), and a notorious collaborator like Celine, presently at the height of his posthumous fame in France, was able to return a free man after five years...

...anyone who can believe this about the author of Man's Fate and Man's Hope, not to mention the Voices of Silence, can believe anything...

...A whole younger generation of French intellectuals rallied to communism under the occupation, and continued to exercise a determining part in shaping the French culture that emerged with the liberation and the immediate postwar years...

...In those days, this was represented by Henry Miller and Faulkner, rather than—as we heard last year from the French Socialist Minister Jack Lang, echoing the old Communist line— by Dallas...

...The history of the "commitment" that Lottman narrates is by no means the new phenomenon that he makes it out to be...

...and he committed suicide the day after it became clear that the Russians would not budge an inch...

...Rare were those who, while still taking an active part in political life, managed to retain any genuine independence...

...He suggests that the political commitment of French intellectuals before 1930 lacked any international dimension and was limited to their own internal affairs...

...Gide, in any case, had always tried to remain his own man, and had advocated a "Communist individualism" in the message that he sent to the first Congress of Soviet Writers held in Moscow in August 1934...

...hen Lottman is not indulging his prejudices in this fashion, however, he gives a full and detailed account of the Soviet manipulation of the various writers' congresses and the organizations of intellectuals set up in France 104 to fight fascism...

...On the other side, even those without a single trace of pro-German or pro-Vichy feeling (such as the young Sartre and his friend Simone de Beauvoir) did not refuse to take advantage of whatever opportunities were offered to continue to advance their careers...

...In his later career, to be sure, Sartre devoted most of his intellectual energies to attempting to supply such a content for his metaphysical abstractions...

...He had, it is true, been ill for a number of years...

...They joined whatever existed of the underground intellectual resistance, and soon, with their superior discipline and whole-hearted dedication, succeeded in regaining their influence...

...And how could one nourish a bitter hatred against people one knew on the proFascist right who supported Hitler when the 105 Communists were in effect urging the same thing?* Lottman's chapters on the German years of the Left Bank are the best in the book because they synthesize so much little-known material and succeed in clarifying a stretch of history that has remained relatively obscure...

...103 Even though Lottman does not quite grasp this crucial point, he begins the book with a "curtain-raiser" that symbolically illustrates exactly what had taken place...

...More than 20 years later, the appearance of Solzhenitsyn on a nationwide French television program still was capable of causing a sensation—which indicates that the full impact of the truth about the Soviet camps had not even yet been fully assimilated by left-leaning French opinion...

...but none of his friends believed his health to have been that bad...

...The Communists, and many others besides, called for a purge of collaborationist writers and intellectuals, and Robert Brasillach was tried and executed...

...For the time being he became the most important (if occasionally rebellious) of the fellow107 travelers helping to advance the Communist cause on the international scene...

...Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982...

...But other voices, some with impeccable resistance records, called for clemency, partly for the personal reasons already mentioned, partly because only writers and intellectuals were being singled out for reprisals while publishers, for example, got off scotfree, as did many other groups who had actively collaborated—and not only in words but deeds...

...This single fact indicates some of the social-political confusion of the time, and why the situation of so many intellectuals under the occupation was so ambiguous...

...and the French intellectuals of the Left Bank, buffeted by a history they were powerless to influence, were drawn to one or another of these opposing political poles with irresistible force...