Tony Judt's Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956
Wolin, Richard
PAST IMPERFECT: FRENCH INTELLECTUALS, 1944— 1956, by Tony Judt. University of California Press, 1992. 358 pp. $30.00. There are many who will view Tony Judt's Past Imperfect as a rearguard...
...The Republic's fall was greeted by many French men and women with glee, and the Vichy regime was naïvely celebrated as a "National Revolution" that provided the opportunity for a new beginning...
...Moreover, for over two decades the French have been engaged in a vigorous "coming to terms with the communist past" at home and abroad...
...After all, this was the land where the publication of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago in the early 1970s resonated like a bomb blast...
...The political radicalism of the earlier generation has transmuted into cultural pseudoradicalism...
...Moreover, in a book that is so much concerned with the political morality of the existentialists (or the lack thereof), there is inexplicably no discussion of Sartre's important 1947-48, six-hundred-page project for an existentialist ethics, Cahiers pour une morale (recently published by the University of Chicago Press as Notebooks for an Ethics...
...But this resistantialiste premium on "action" also resulted in a problematical resuscitation of the French revolutionary tradition: of the belief that, so tainted were all inherited (read: liberal democratic) political values and parties that only a revolutionary effacement of their legacy could produce the desired renewal...
...As Judt points out, many of the most vociferous advocates of postwar activism—Sartre, de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, and Mounier—were among those who had a weak record as Resistants...
...That's true, but that doesn't make their position any less right or compelling (the group's residual Trotskyism also puts Judt off...
...In the words of former Prime Minister Edouard Herriot, as a prelude to national regeneration, "France must first of all pass through a bloodbath...
...It was unloved by those on both the right and the left, with capable supporters from the center few and far between...
...But despite all the inflammatory, neoJacobin rhetoric, the number of collaborators who were actually executed was remarkably small...
...For where Eastern European intellectuals abetted a lawless regime, their Western equivalents—fortunately spared the responsibilities of power—can only be accused of gross naivete and incredibly poor judgment...
...For one of the great services Judt has performed has been to embed his political expose in a larger narrative concerning the longstanding deficiencies of French political culture...
...It is against this historical background that Judt weaves his saga of intellectual culpability...
...In the Czech case, beginning in 1948, some two hundred thousand Communist party members were purged during a mood that culminated in the notorious show trial of former party secretary-general Rudolf Slansky, along with thirteen cohorts, ten of whom were Jews...
...Such relatively minor carping notwithstanding, one can safely say that it is thanks to the integrity of an Anglo-American scholar that the French have been properly chastened concerning their recent past...
...Why, then, all the fuss about the political myopia of a near-forgotten generation of French intellectuals, among whose chief offenders one would have to include Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Emmanuel Mounier, the founding editor of that venerable organ of the Catholic left, Esprit...
...Thus, although the litanies concerning the virtues of Marxism have all but vanished, in Paris today there still reigns a brand of cultural radicalism, a style of philosophical chic, that is loath to associate with anything as pedestrian as democracy, political liberalism, or the language of human rights...
...Judt reminds us of just how tenuous the political legitimacy of the Third Republic was in the 1930s, especially among the intelligentsia...
...This fashionable genre of Kulturkritik, instead of denouncing the sins of capitalism and "bourgeois roaders," now rails against the tyranny of "binary oppositions," "logocentrism," "consensus," the "code," "discursive regimes," and so forth...
...The Parisian spirit of philosophical anarchism may have internalized the anti-authoritarian ethos of May '68...
...The political tenor of the decade was well captured in a remark made in 1937 by the fascist writer Pierre Drieu La Rochelle: "The only way to love France today is to hate it in its present form...
...Instead, the glory of Stalingrad seemed a confirmation of communism's intrinsic worth, and the PCF was more than happy to bask in its glow...
...And following its brief honeymoon with the newly elected Socialist government in 1981-83, the French Communist party's fortunes have plummeted dramatically...
...This was a logic from which communism, as the self-proclaimed heir to the Jacobin tradition, profited greatly...
...With good reason he speculates, "Many of the most adamantly resistantialiste of France's postwar intellectuals were compensating for what in retrospect they may have felt had been the shortcomings in their own role during the war...
...After all, the moral condemnation of French intellectuals for their utter credulity about communism in the late 1940s and the early 1950s is about as challenging as shooting fish in a barrel...
...Plausible as they may seem, most of the foregoing objections would fail to do justice to the merits of Judt's important study...
...Moreover, the emphasis on revolution as a categorical imperative of modern politics harmonized well with the Manichean "us versus them" ethos of the Resistance...
...Thus, while in The Ghosts of Stalin he condemned the repression of Imre Nagy's breakaway soviet republic in Hungary, he insisted that the Soviet invasion had left the progressive nature of communism unimpugned...
...The events of war and occupation had served to cure even the aestheticist, free-floating intelligentsia of their alienation from politics and history as realms of "unfreedom...
...It was in the wake of these sensational revelations that a spirit of strong, left-liberal anti-communism emerged—the so-called "new philosophy" of Andre Glucksmann, Bernard-Henri Levy, and others—leaving true believers few and far between...
...Impressive as Judt's efforts to unmask left-wing pieties and delusions are, the execution of his argument has its flaws...
...By a strange twist—which seems less strange after reading Judt's narrative—a traditional left-wing hostility to the values of political liberalism has been preserved in a sublimated, cultural guise...
...Of course, there are important distinctions to be kept in mind...
...The manner in which the procommunist intelligentsia reacted to reports concerning the Soviet camps was highly indicative...
...Another oversight is the omission of a sustained discussion of Merleau-Ponty's formidable 1955 treatise, The Adventures of the Dialectic, which remains one of the most powerful philosophical indictments of Bolshevism ever written (especially its devastating last chapter, "Sartre and UltraBolshevism...
...Instead, they are to be found in his appreciation of certain "peculiarities" of French historical development...
...The notion of a regenerative purge of traitors and counterrevolutionaries, of course, had a dubious place of honor in the French revolutionary tradition...
...However, the strengths of Judt's book do not lie in its orientation toward the present...
...If one scans the writings of the reigning Parisian avant-garde—that is, the texts of the successors to Barthes, Lacan, and Foucault such as Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Francois Lyotard — one discovers a continuation of the politics of illiberalism by other means...
...yet it has stopped short of assimilating the basic political lessons of the critique of totalitarianism: namely, a renewed appreciation for the values of the civil libertarian and democratic traditions...
...Once again, historical memory proved short and selective—the "collusion among tyrants" of the Hitler-Stalin pact was quickly forgotten...
...The well-nigh unanimous intellectual support for the postwar political purges among the newly Stalinized regimes of Eastern Europe is another scandalous episode...
...He fails to give enough credit where credit is due to those dissident voices on the left who, already in the 1950s, had proffered critiques of Stalinism that today remain exemplars of the genre...
...It was a position that he would maintain as late as the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956...
...What is significant about Merleau-Ponty's awakening, however, is that it begins in the years 1949-50...
...In an exposition of Sartre's 1943 philosophical magnum opus, Being and Nothingness, we read the following: "every 'en soi' collides with another 'en soi,' since each is a sovereign and 'total' source of meaning about the whole of experience...
...First, there were the intemperate demands for wholesale retribution against collaborators—demands for "political justice" —raised by the ex-Resistants...
...388 • DISSENT Sartre, however, remained unmoved...
...There are many who will view Tony Judt's Past Imperfect as a rearguard action...
...Here, I'm thinking of the intellectuals around Socialisme ou Barbarie, such as Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort, and Arguments, such as Edgar Morin and Kostas Axelos...
...Not until decades later would their cutthroat behavior vis-à-vis competing factions of the Resistance come to light...
...It is the "pour soi"—Iltre humain or human being—that is the ultimate "source of meaning" in Sartre's early philosophy...
...It suffered an ignominious denouement with the "strange defeat" of July 1940—a collapse SUMMER • 1993 • 387 that, to many, served as a confirmation of the Republic's inherent inability to govern...
...Simone de Beauvoir was of a similar mind, ominously observing that "certain men did not have a place in the world we sought to construct...
...The European conflagration had thus caused the "transcendental illusion" of freedom shared by Sartre and others before the war to die a hard death...
...There are also many who will accuse Judt's rather prosecutorial study of seeking to promote a type of "lustration" of long-dead French intellectuals—the intellectual equivalent of the ban on ex-communists from political life in the states of Eastern Europe...
...Appropriately enough, he characterizes his study as "an essay on political irresponsibility...
...Thus, strangely, it was the communists alone who managed to emerge from the chaotic era of war, resistance, and collaboration with their honor unscathed...
...As Judt shows, left-wing intellectuals, by virtue of their blind trust in the "necessities of History," proved capable of justifying every kind of excess...
...In 1952 he could observe: "We may be indignant or horrified at the existence of these camps...
...Of course, throughout Eastern Europe the purge of potentially disloyal communists had been preceded by a ruthless elimination of socialists, clergy, and other political undesirables...
...Such peculiarities, which Judt attributes to a "vacuum at the heart of public ethics in France," played a key role in ensuring that the intellectual hostility directed toward the Third Republic in the 1930s was, after the war, maintained toward the Fourth...
...The mood of the liberation era was captured by Sartre's celebration of "engagement" in his treatise What is Literature...
...It was the Resistance that fostered the political ennoblement of the French Communist party (PCF), according it a legitimacy it had previously been unable to attain...
...For Merleau-Ponty, such revelations inspired a reversal of the course he had charted since his abysmal 1946 defense of the Moscow trials, Humanism and Terror...
...Intellectuals on both the left and the right "felt a distaste for the lukewarm and were fascinated by the idea of a violent relief from mediocrity...
...that is, well in advance of the more common jumping-off point, 1956, which saw both Khrushchev's attack on the "crimes of the Stalin era" at the Twentieth Party Congress and the October Hungarian Revolution...
...The political myopia he seeks to unmask manifests itself in a variety of ways...
...After all, this was the pusillanimous regime that had failed to intervene on behalf on the republican cause in Spain and that had countenanced the shame of Munich...
...Yet for Sartre the "en soi" refers to inert matter or "things...
...deficiencies that continue to haunt French intellectual life to the present day...
...Especially tragic was their refusal to speak out against the indiscriminate "cleansings" in Hungary and Czechoslovakia...
...When confronted with evidence concerning the Soviet univers concentrationnaire in 1950, he would write that such facts "put altogether into question the meaning of the Russian system...
...Finally, while Judt's talents as a historian are outstanding, his credentials as an analyst of philosophical texts show their weakness at times...
...As the French might say, plus ca change...
...Judt argues that the Socialisme ou Barbarie group remained relatively uninfluential...
...In other words, scandalous though the camps might be, Sartre elected to view them as an excrescence that in no way threatened the essence of communism or the Soviet system...
...From now on, existential freedom was to be realized in the world, or it would not be realized at all...
...we may even be obsessed by them, but why should they embarrass us...
...At present, it is little more than a quaint anachronism...
...But I suspect that such a discussion would have been too much at odds with the thesis of Judt's book, which focuses entirely on the political myopia of left-leaning intellectuals...
...It was, after all, Lefort who had called Sartre to account in the pages of Les Temps modernes with his essay "Le Marxisme et Sartre" (1953), which provoked a lengthy, unconvincing reply from Sartre himself...
Vol. 40 • July 1993 • No. 3
