The Party and the Pundits

...so strong and hypnotic was the hold of a tradition which accepted a mythical view of Communism that had very little relation to its actual aims and practices as a political movement in the 20th-century world...

...In the case of Sartre it led to a declaration of his adherence to socialism, as "the end of the beginning," and to throwing in his lot, at least metaphorically, with the French working class, for...

...Rolland even died loyal...

...The power of personal choice involved the obligation of social responsibility...

...It is against these conservative forces that the French intellectual also, by tradition, tends to align himself...

...There is undoubtedly a strongly emotional element, a kind of love-hate pattern, in his rejection of the politics of an America whose writers he once admired...

...they cannot join the ranks and speak to order...

...Sartre, on the other hand, while on many occasions expressing his disapproval of Communist acts, has reasserted time and again a sympathy for Communist movements and countries...

...the vocation of l'esprit, but society has tended to value them on their own terms, according their pronouncements an attentive, if sometimes skeptical, hearing...

...Even so, the answer is probably...

...Why did many who had remained faithful during the Trotsky controversy and the Moscow trials break with the party only when Russia signed its pact with the Nazis in 1940...

...In 1950, he supported David Rousset's exposure of the methods of the NKVD and the conditions in Russian penal labor camps...

...One might add that in no country has the link between intellectuals and the arts been closer...

...Sartre is a man of complex thought and of attitudes that often seem ambivalent...

...French intellectuals in general have been more hesitant than their counterparts in other countries to desert the party until the very last minute, until they have become completely convinced not merely of the cynicism of Communist tactics, but also that these tactics will not, even in the end, further the aims of their own revolutionary ideals...

...But an idealist, anti-bourgeois...

...in my view, baseless and unjust...

...The question, in a sense, is selfdestructive...

...Thus for many French intellectuals, as well as for millions of industrial workers and small peasants, the party still represents the most powerful and also the most authentic opposition —in the sense of a revolutionary Apostolic succession—to the forces of conservatism, to the generals, the moneyed upper class and the Establishment in general...

...Perhaps the clue really lies in the idea of the last straw...

...This peculiar French reluctance to abandon Communism once it has been accepted can only be understood in a historical perspective whose earlier phases, pre-dating the foundation of the PCF, lie outside the province of Communism and the French Intellectuals, and therefore receive only passing mention...

...Sartre the Communist would have been a different man...

...In each of these cases an element of self-deception was present...

...As Caute remarks, "the intellectual in a non-Communist state remains apparently free to withdraw his allegiance at any time...

...On the one side exists a continuous radical revolutionary tradition in France of which the PCF, quite apart from its international links, has posed as the conservator with considerable justification in the eyes of many Frenchmen...

...there were plenty of distinguished writers and academics ranged against Dreyfus in that key struggle of the Third Republic...

...by absorbing thousands of former anarchist and syndicalist militants, and by eventually gaining virtual control of the General Confederation of Labor, it could put forward a plausible claim to continue the radical traditions of the late 19th century, which in their turn stemmed from the Socialism of 1848 and the Left-wing trends of the French Revolution...

...if they adhere to French revolutionary traditions, there is no alternative party for them to support...

...of course, not complete...

...Gide for a time identified his moral revolt against colonialism and against the social distress of Europe between the wars with Communism, but he also said: "What leads me to Communism is not Marx, it is the Gospel...

...this was recently emphasized dramatically by his refusal of the Nobel prize in a manner that stressed his personal alignment with the anti-Western bloc...

...This is one reason why Camus, in the end, rejected the very idea of revolution...

...Yes...

...Why did those who had accepted all the twists of Stalinist policy and had ignored the overwhelming evidence presented after the War on the existence of slave labor camps in Russia, decide that the Hungarian crisis, in 1956, was the last straw in the burden of contradictions they had carried uncomplainingly for so many years...

...His approach toward Communism has been on the whole more rational, even if the reasons for it have at times been curious...

...Neither Gide nor Malraux became Marxists when they allied themselves with the Communists...

...What Caute's book teaches is that loyalty to Communism or even to the Communist party is a much more complex phenomenon than most of the ex-Communist writers have suggested in their exposés...

...Gide remained an extreme Christian heretic and Malraux a "tragic humanist," and their illusion lay in imagining that their points of view could be contained within Communism or expressed through it...

...Even then, a dramatic situation is often needed to jolt them into a final decision...

...The case of Sartre illustrates the conflicts in the attitude of many French intellectuals toward the Communist party in their country...

...In 1956...

...Indeed, as one gathers from studying the many instances which Caute brings forward, one of the most puzzling problems is to assess why ex-Communist intellectuals leave the party when they do...

...Reviewed by GEORGE WOODCOCK Author, "The Writer and Politics," "Anarchism," and a forthcoming history of the modern French novel In selecting France as the terrain for his study of the relationship between Communism and the intellectual...

...and in the long run his sporadic support may have been more useful to French Communism than his occasional attacks were harmful...

...This radical idealist current among intellectuals helped to establish sympathy between the heirs of Stendhal...

...Such sympathizers cannot accept party discipline in their own particular fields...

...Even in the higher strata of the intelligentsia, among writers, painters, scientists and historians...

...In certain directions, particularly in the teaching profession, the party has, over the decades, been surprisingly successful in recruiting and maintaining support...

...The dissociation was...

...Yet he refused to give even the appearance of taking sides with the West against Russia, of accepting the idea of "One Big Enemy...

...anti-Establishment trend was created, which brought intellectuals as diverse as Mallarmé and Valéry, as Octave Mirbeau and Camille Pissaro and the geographer Elisée Reclus into the orbit of the anarchist movement...

...For long periods writers like Gide and Rolland, whose fundamentally Christian attitudes divorced them from any final acceptance of Marxist dogma, remained loyal to the Communist movement...

...Sartre has never been a member of the Communist Party, and the suggestion that he is a crypto-Communist is...

...Fourier and Jaurès (though not of Proudhon, who had blotted his record forever, in Communist eyes, by openly showing his contempt for Marx...

...one must make one's choice and light for it...

...and the choice might lead one into political action as a Communist...

...For by capturing the majority of the Socialist party in 1920...

...So the question remains," says Caute, "was he a greater asset to the party outside it than inside...

...His case is more remarkable even than those of Gide and Malraux...

...Not only do French intellectuals regard one another as the guardians of an elevated vocation...

...Movements in writing and painting tend to group themselves according to theoretical attitudes, to produce manifestos rationalizing their approaches on a scale unrivaled in any other tradition, while the element of didacticism in French literature is notable: More successfully than writers in any other language, French novelists in particular have succeeded in the difficult task of producing works which make clear moral or philosophic points yet are at the same time surprisingly successful as works of literary art...

...Sartre's own Existentialist philosophy, by its rejection of determinism, by its insistence that man is no other than what he makes of himself, seemed at first sight irreconcilable with the dogmas of historical materialism...

...The most striking of all Caute's examples of the relationship between individuals and the party is undoubtedly that of Jean-Paul Sartre...

...he condemned Russian aggression in Hungary...

...as Caute notes, "Sartre shared with the Catholic idealists the premise that not only did the proletariat incarnate suffering, but that it promised, through its own emancipation, to emancipate mankind...

...The Julien Sorels and Vautrins of fiction in the 1830s herald a tendency for writers in particular to dissociate themselves from the bourgeois world...

...Communism has retained more sympathy than in other Western countries, and far more than in Britain and the United States, where the fellow-traveling of the '30s was a relatively brief phase of radical idealism...

...As a historical study it is detailed and wellplanned, without neglecting the close examination of individual cases which is so illuminating in an area where general judgments alone can merely distort...

...Balzac and Courbet and the Communists, self-styled heirs of Babeuf...

...From the party's beginnings in 1920, its history has been punctuated by the departures of individual intellectuals and, at times of crisis, of whole groups...

...But why, one often asks, were the particular moments chosen...

...Even here, however, it became possible to make mental adjustments...

...David Caute has made a choice that is doubly felicitous...

...As soon as he realized, after his visit to Russia, that he had been wrong in expecting to find his own hopes reflected there, he withdrew with the courage of an individualist whose emotional and even intellectual ties were with the Reformation and French Protestantism rather than with the Revolution...

...In 1948 he made the attempt to found an effective Third Force movement through his Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire, and he has never failed to criticize Communist actions, in France and abroad, when he felt that criticism was necessary...

...Malraux sought in Communism a framework for a personal cult of courage and self-abnegation, of man defining himself against the Absurd, and later he found a more effective framework in the elitist doctrines of Gaullism...

...An objective study like Communism and the French Intellectuals, which carefully considers what the party gains from wooing the intellectuals, and why the intellectuals often respond to that wooing, is therefore particularly timely...

...There is a strongly pragmatical element in Sartre's thinking when it comes to practical politics, and one of the main reasons for his sympathetic attitude toward the French Communists has been that, since the majority of the French workers vote for the Party, it in fact represents them, and there is no better alternative...

...The situation of the French Communist intellectual, whether a party member or a sympathizer, is in many ways more complex than that of his counterpart in a Communist country...

...but the real dilemma of freedom and necessity, seen in both philosophical and psychological terms, is far from simple and never easily resolved...

...In a more general sense, it is a revealing discussion of French political attitudes over half a century, lighting up an aspect of that country's intellectual life which we cannot afford to ignore...

...On the other side of Caute's picture, he presents a Communist party which not only has a longer record of existence and influence than any other party of its kind in Western Europe, but has also maintained a pride in the national cultural heritage and a recognition of the key role of intellectuals in French society, "employing every tactic of persuasion to bring the cream of the intellectuals into the fold and regarding their support as of major importance to the party...

...France," as he emphasizes on the opening page of this extremely penetrating study, "has no peer in her high regard for intellectuals as a class...