Jean-Fran?ois Revel,.1924-2006

...It is less natural and newer that the targeted civilization should not only judge that its defeat is justified, but provide its partisans as well as its adversaries with ample reason to regard all forms of self-defense as immoral, or at best superfluous and useless, if not downright dangerous...

...Another thaw will come, and the majority of men and women will again believe with all their hearts in freedom...

...The "Declaration of the 121" was the last time the radical modernists, whose trajectory had begun in the 1920s, would play a leading role in French political life...

...One, given the innocuous title The French when it was printed here in 1966, was a scarifying examination of political spinelessness in the face of Gaullism...

...When fresh, more objective histories of the 20th century are written, free of the burden of political correctness, I believe the line of conduct followed in France by individuals like Revel, who remained wary of political power even as they attained great influence, will be seen as the standard against which all others should be judged...

...Aside from the grim realities he forced us to confront, Jean-François Revel remained a man, above all, of humor and protest...

...I fear we shall see few or no more men like him, who were worthy to compare themselves with Orwell but would never do so, out of modesty...

...He seemed not to know the difference, and was pleased to have had the opportunity to see the West Coast...

...These eloquent phrases were written toward the end of a Cold War to whose successful resolution Revel contributed so much, but which also proved that some enemies of democracy would perish before democracy itself...

...But because liberty was paramount, he became a fierce anti-totalitarian...

...Therein he indicted the generation that produced the New Left...

...The text by Breton, under the title Flagrante Delicto, blasted an alleged forgery of a poem by Rimbaud...

...In American terms, Revel more resembled the art critic Hilton Kramer than the journalist Whit-taker Chambers...

...Or so we are now told...

...I remember one afternoon in 1968, when I sat in the attic at the headquarters of the Beat Generation, the City Lights Book Shop in San Francisco, where the latest shipment of little books from France had just shown up...

...Written by the literary philosopher Maurice Blanchot and the cultural critic Claude Lanzmann, who became famous for his nine-and-a-half-hour documentary film on the Holocaust, Shoah, the declaration was also signed by Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, the actress Simone Signoret, and a few other stars of the same magnitude...

...by STEPHEN SCHWARTZ JEAN-FRANÇOIS REVEL, who died at 82 on April 30, was a rarity in the landscape of leftist intellectuals turned conservative...

...Revel was a lifelong enemy of this new spiritual ice age...

...colors have faded into gray, passion and commitment have vanished, and few have the stomach for great battles over principle...

...High modernism in culture, based on experiment and protest, was more important to him than the renewal of the political, religious, or social values of the past...

...His next incendiary device was a book called The Totalitarian Temptation, issued in French in 1976 and in English the year afterward...

...I remember with great appreciation my discovery of Revel's work, and my encounter with him, and the necessary moral challenge embodied in The Totalitarian Temptation...

...Revel became the first French neoconser-vative not over policy matters, but as a defender of intellectual nonconformity and of a radical vision of personal freedom...

...This new work was less provocative but was simply and grimly cautionary...

...Péret's work was a devastating attack on the French surrealists who turned into Stalinists, in a confrontational idiom that remains shocking today, since the writers Péret castigated—like the versifier Paul Éluard—have become icons of world poetry...

...green title Libertés ("Freedoms...

...The series, bound in brown wrapping paper and including polemics by the French surrealists André Breton and Benjamin Péret, caught my attention...

...In the full flight of '60s rebellion, I first saw Revel's name on a set of pamphlets he edited in Paris with the everStephen Schwartz is a frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...He was among the most outspoken critics of Charles de Gaulle's semi-monarchical rule, beginning in 1958, and his name was included, alongside those of Breton and other surrealists, among the signers of a document still famous in France, the 1960 "Declaration of the 121 on the Right of Disobedience in the Algerian War...

...That communism shall have been more clever and effective in its offensive would only be one additional example of one power being a better strategist than the other...

...Truth to tell, finding anything attractive about America made him too disturbing to be heard at the University of California at Berkeley or San Francisco State University, those centers of revived Stalinism...

...The left never again attracted people with the talents of a Revel, and few among the neoconservatives with which he was identified, either in France or on our shores, could match him in passion and eloquence...

...He followed that seven years later with How Democracies Perish, in which he described democracy as the first system in history which, confronted by a power that wants to destroy it, accuses itself...

...A kind of entropy has taken over the world of the mind...

...but when, we cannot tell...

...He never confused democratic ideals with the crude violence of leftist propaganda...

...I discovered, all those years ago, that two of Revel's books had come out in English—both of them wise and acidulous, both forgotten today...

...They are still appropriate in today's struggle against Islamofascism...

...Revel possessed impressive credentials as a cultural revolutionary...

...But all changed completely in 1970, when Revel published Without Marx or Jesus, a tribute to "the new American revolution" that shocked his old comrades of the radical left...

...But for Revel, it was an early step in a new journey...

...I hope then that the courage and greatness of Jean-François Revel will not have been forgotten...

...Already the idea that there was once a left that put truth before political expediency, and democracy before the incitement of the mob, seems a legend as distant as the early victories of Napoleon, if not an impossibility, like the alchemical production of gold...

...The distinctive mark of our century is the humility with which democratic civilization agrees to disappear and works to legitimize the victory of its mortal enemy...

...We who follow on his path will be lucky if any of us can, finally, be compared to him...

...Without Marx or Jesus made Revel internationally famous, not least in the United States, and I met him on his book tour, when he spoke at a community college in San Francisco...

...An earlier and even more obscure work, As for Italy, had appeared in English in 1959 and was brutal in its demolition of the cultural and spiritual pretensions of the heirs to the Roman legacy...

...Both men saw a direct progression from dissent within the left to denunciation of a left that believed it could survive without internal controversy and thus without accounting for the crimes committed in the name of socialism and liberation...

...i began following his work early on, and his open break with the left at the end of the 1960s was as stunning as that of the Mexican poet and Nobel laureate in literature octavio Paz...