by Tony Judt
Communism in the UK, then, was a political abstraction. This in no way inhibited intellectual sympathy for Marxism, among the London intelligentsia and in the universities. Bolshevism had from the outset held a certain appeal to British Fabian Socialists like H. G. Wells, who recognized in the policies of Lenin and even Stalin something familiar and sympathetic: social engineering from above by those who know best. And the British mandarin Left, like their contemporaries in the Foreign Office, had little time for the travails of the small countries between Germany and Russia, whom they had always regarded as something of a nuisance.
But whereas these matters would stir heated debate across the English Channel, Communism did not mobilize or divide intellectuals in Britain to anything like the same extent. As George Orwell observed in 1947, ‘the English are not sufficiently interested in intellectual matters to be intolerant about them.’ Intellectual and cultural debate in England (and to a lesser extent in the rest of Britain) was focused instead upon a domestic concern: the first intimations of a decades-long anxiety about national ‘decline’. It is symptomatic of the ambivalent mood of post-war England that the country had just fought and won a six-year war against its mortal enemy and was embarked upon an unprecedented experiment in welfare capitalism—yet cultural commentators were absorbed by intimations of failure and deterioration.
Thus T. S. Eliot, in his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), asserted ‘with some confidence that our own period is one of decline; that the standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago; and that the evidences of this decline are visible in every department of human activity.’ Motivated by comparable concerns, the British Broadcasting Corporation began its Third Programme on the radio in 1946: a high-minded, high-cultural product explicitly intended for the encouragement and dissemination of ‘quality’, and directed at what in continental Europe would be thought of as the ‘intelligentsia’; but whose mix of classical music, topical lectures and serious discussion was unmistakably English in its studious avoidance of divisive or politically sensitive topics.
The British were not uninterested in European affairs. European politics and letters were regularly covered in weekly and periodical magazines, and British readers could be well-informed if they wished. Nor were the British unaware of the scale of the trauma that Europe had just passed through. Cyril Connolly, writing in his own journal, Horizon, in September 1945, had this to say about the contemporary European condition: ‘Morally and economically Europe has lost the war. The great marquee of European civilization in whose yellow light we all grew up, and read, or wrote, or loved, or traveled has fallen down; the side-ropes are frayed, the centre pole is broken, the chairs and tables are all in pieces, the tent is empty, the roses are withered on their stands . . . ’
But notwithstanding this concern for the state of the Continent, British (and especially English) commentators stood a little aside; as though the problems of Europe and of Britain, while recognizably related, were nevertheless different in crucial respects. With certain notable exceptions,63 British intellectuals did not play an influential part in the great debates of continental Europe, but observed them from the sidelines. Broadly speaking, affairs that were urgently political in Europe aroused only intellectual interest in Britain; while topics of intellectual concern on the Continent were usually confined to academic circles in the UK, if indeed they were noticed at all.
The situation in Italy was almost exactly the opposite. Of all the countries of western Europe, it was Italy that had most directly experienced the plagues of the age. The country had been governed for twenty years by the world’s first Fascist regime. It had been occupied by the Germans, then liberated by the Western Allies, in a snail-paced war of attrition and destruction that had lasted nearly two years, covered three quarters of the country, and reduced much of the land and its people to near-destitution. Moreover, from September 1943 to April 1945 the north of Italy was convulsed in what amounted in all but name to a full-scale civil war.
As a former Axis state Italy was an object of suspicion to West and East alike. Until Tito’s split with Stalin, Italy’s unresolved border with Yugoslavia was the most unstable and potentially explosive frontier of the Cold War, and the country’s uneasy relationship to its Communist neighbor was complicated by the presence in Italy of the largest Communist Party outside the Soviet bloc: 4,350,000 votes (19 percent of the total) in 1946, rising to 6,122,000 (23 percent of the total) in 1953. In that same year the Partito Communista Italiano (PCI) boasted a paid-up membership of 2,145,000. The Party’s local influence was further strengthened by its near-monopoly of power in certain regions (notably the Emilia-Romagna, around the city of Bologna); the support it could rely on from Pietro Nenni’s Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI);64 and the widespread popularity of its subtle and thoughtful leader, Palmiro Togliatti.
For all these reasons, intellectual life in post-war Italy was highly politicized and intimately tied to the problem of Communism. The overwhelming majority of young Italian intellectuals, including even some of those tempted by Fascism, had been formed in the shadow of Benedetto Croce. Croce’s distinctive blend of Hegelian idealism in philosophy and nineteenth-century liberalism in politics had provided an ethical reference for a generation of intellectual anti-Fascists; but in the post-war circumstances it seemed manifestly insufficient. The real choice facing Italians appeared as a stark alternative: politicized clericalism—the alliance of a conservative Vatican (under Pius XII) and the US-backed Christian Democrats—or else political Marxism.
The PCI had a special quality that distinguished it from other Communist parties, East and West. From the outset, it had been led by intellectuals. Togliatti, like Antonio Gramsci and the Party’s other youthful founders of twenty years earlier, was markedly more intelligent—and respectful of intelligence—than the leaders of most of the other Communist parties of Europe. In the decade following World War Two, moreover, the Party openly welcomed intellectuals—as members and as allies—and took care to tone down those elements in Party rhetoric likely to put them off. Indeed, Togliatti consciously tailored Communism’s appeal to Italian intellectuals with a formula of his own devising: ‘half Croce and half Stalin.’
The formula was uniquely successful. The path from Croce’s liberal anti-Fascism to political Marxism was taken by some of the Italian Communist Party’s most talented younger leaders: men like Giorgio Amendola, Lucio Lombardo Radice, Pietro Ingrao, Carlo Cassola and Emilio Sereni, all of whom came to Communist politics from the world of philosophy and literature. They were joined after 1946 by men and women disillusioned by the Action Party’s failure to put into practice the aspirations of the wartime Resistance, signaling the end of hopes for a secular, radical and non-Marxist alternative in Italian public life. ‘Shamefaced Crocians’, one writer called them at the time.
Presented as the voice of progress and modernity in a stagnant land, and as the best hope for practical social and political reform, the PCI gathered around itself a court of like-minded scholars and writers, who gave to the Party and its politics an aura of respectability, intelligence and even ecumenicalism. But with the division of Europe, Togliatti’s strategy came under growing pressure. The criticism addressed by the Soviets to the PCI at the first Cominform meeting in September 1947 revealed Stalin’s determination to bring the Italian Communists (like the French) under tighter control; their political tactics were to be more closely coordinated with Moscow and their latitudinarian approach to cultural affairs was to be replaced by Zdanov’s uncompromising thesis of the ‘two cultures’. Meanwhile, with America’s brazen but successful intervention on behalf of the Christian Democrats in the elections of 1948, Togliatti’s post-war policy of working within the institutions of liberal democracy began to seem naïve.
Whatever his doubts, then, Togliatti had no option but to exercise tighter control and impose Stalinist norms. This provoked public dissent among some Party intellectuals, who had hitherto felt at liberty
to distinguish between the Party’s political authority, which they did not question, and the terrain of ‘culture’ where they prized their autonomy. As Vittorini, the editor of the Communist cultural journal Il Politechnico, had reminded Togliatti in an Open Letter back in January 1947, ‘culture’ cannot be subordinated to politics, except at its own expense and at the price of truth.
Togliatti, who had spent the 1930s in Moscow and had played a leading role in the Comintern’s Spanish operations in 1937-38, knew otherwise. In a Communist Party everyone took their instructions from above, everything was subordinate to politics. ‘Culture’ was not a protected zone in which the Soviet writ need not run. Vittorini and his companions would have to accept the Party line in literature, art and ideas, or else leave. Over the course of the next few years the Italian Party cleaved more closely to Soviet authority and Vittorini and many other intellectuals duly drifted away. But despite Togliatti’s unswerving loyalty to Moscow, the PCI never altogether lost a certain un-dogmatic ‘aura’, as the only major Communist Party that tolerated and even embraced intelligent dissent and autonomy of thought; this reputation would serve it well in later decades.
Indeed, Togliatti’s critics on the non-Communist Left were consistently wrong-footed by the widespread perception at home and (especially) abroad that the PCI was not like other Communist parties. As Ignazio Silone would later acknowledge, Italian Socialists and others had only themselves to blame. The close relations between Communists and Socialists in Italy, at least until 1948, and the consequent reluctance of non-Communist Marxists to criticize the Soviet Union, inhibited the emergence in Italian politics of a clear left-leaning alternative to Communism.
But if Italy was unusual in Western Europe for the relatively simpatico quality of its Communists, it was also of course atypical for another reason. The overthrow of Mussolini in 1943 could not obscure the complicity of many Italian intellectuals in his twenty-year rule. Mussolini’s ultra-nationalism had been directed, among other things, against foreign culture and influence; and Fascism had blatantly favored ‘national’ intellectuals by applying to literature and the arts autarkic policies of protection and substitution similar to those imposed against more commonplace foreign products.
Inevitably, many Italian intellectuals (especially younger ones) had accepted support and subsidies from the Fascist state: the alternative was exile or silence. Elio Vittorini himself had won prizes in Fascist literary competitions. Vittorio de Sica was a well-known actor in Fascist-era films before becoming the leading exponent of post-war Neo-Realism. His fellow Neo-Realist director Roberto Rossellini, whose post-war films were distinctly Communist in their political sympathies, had just a few years before made documentaries and feature films in Mussolini’s Italy with help from the authorities, and his was not an isolated case. By 1943 Mussolini’s rule was the normal order of things for the many millions of Italians who had no adult memory of any other peacetime government.65
The moral standing of the vast majority of Italian intellectuals in the post-war years thus mirrored the rather ambivalent international position of the country as a whole, too uncomfortably implicated in its authoritarian past to take center stage in post-war European affairs. In any case, Italy had long been oddly peripheral to modern European culture, perhaps because of its own centrifugal history and arrangements: Naples, Florence, Bologna, Milan and Turin each formed little worlds of their own, with their own universities, newspapers, academies and intelligentsias. Rome was the source of authority, the fount of patronage and locus of power. But it never monopolized the nation’s cultural life.
In the end, then, there could be only one place for a properly European intellectual life in the years after World War Two: only one city, one national capital whose obsessions and divisions could both reflect and define the cultural condition of the continent as a whole. Its competitors were imprisoned, had destroyed themselves or else were parochially absorbed. Ever since the 1920s, as one European state after another fell to the dictators, political refugees and intellectual exiles had headed for France. Some had remained during the war and joined the Resistance, where many had fallen victim to Vichy and the Nazis. Some had escaped to London, or New York, or Latin America, but would return after the Liberation. Others, like Czesław Miłosz or the Hungarian historian and political journalist François Fejtö, did not emigrate until the Soviet coups in Eastern Europe forced them to flee—at which point it seemed only natural that they would go straight to Paris.
The result was that, for the first time since the 1840s, when Karl Marx, Heinrich Heine, Adam Mickiewicz, Giuseppe Mazzini and Alexander Herzen all lived in Parisian exile, France was once again the natural European home of the disinherited intellectual, a clearing house for modern European thought and politics. Postwar Parisian intellectual life was thus doubly cosmopolitan: men and women from all over Europe partook of it—and it was the only European stage on which local opinions and disputes were magnified and transmitted to a wide, international audience.
And so, despite France’s shattering defeat in 1940, its humiliating subjugation under four years of German occupation, the moral ambiguity (and worse) of Marshall Pétain’s Vichy regime, and the country’s embarrassing subordination to the US and Britain in the international diplomacy of the post-war years, French culture became once again the center of international attention: French intellectuals acquired a special international significance as spokesmen for the age, and the tenor of French political arguments epitomized the ideological rent in the world at large. Once more—and for the last time—Paris was the capital of Europe.
The irony of this outcome was not lost on contemporaries. It was historical chance that thrust French intellectuals into the limelight in these years, for their own concerns were no less parochial than anyone else’s. Post-war France was as much taken up with its own problems of score-settling, scarcity and political instability as any other country. French intellectuals re-interpreted the politics of the rest of the world in the light of their own obsessions, and the narcissistic self-importance of Paris within France was projected un-self-critically onto the world at large. As Arthur Koestler memorably described them, post-war French intellectuals (‘the Little Flirts of Saint Germain des Prés’) were ‘peeping Toms who watch History’s debauches through a hole in the wall.’ But History had afforded them a privileged perch.
The divisions that would characterize the French intellectual community in later years were not immediately in evidence. When Jean-Paul Sartre founded Les Temps Modernes in 1945 the editorial board included not only Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty but also Raymond Aron, reflecting a broad consensus around left-wing politics and ‘existentialist’ philosophy. The latter label also encompassed (rather to his discomfort) Albert Camus, at the time close friends with Sartre and De Beauvoir and, from his column on the editorial pages of the daily newspaper Combat, the most influential writer in post-war France.
All of them shared a certain ‘résistantialiste’ attitude (though only Camus had taken an active part in the Resistance itself—Aron was with the Free French in London and the others made their way more or less untroubled through the Occupation years). In Merleau-Ponty’s words, the wartime struggle had overcome for French intellectuals the dilemma of ‘being versus doing’. Henceforth they were ‘in’ History and must engage with it to the full. Their situation no longer afforded intellectuals the luxury of refusing to commit themselves to political choices; true freedom consisted of accepting this truth. In Sartre’s words, ‘To be free is not to do what one wants, but to want to do what one can’.
Another lesson that Sartre and his generation claimed to have learnt from the war was the inevitability—and thus in certain measure the desirability—of political violence. This was far from being a distinctively French interpretation of recent experience: by 1945 many Europeans had lived through three decades of military and political violence. Young people all across the continent were inured to a level of public brutal
ity, in words and actions, that would have shocked their nineteenth-century forebears. And modern political rhetoric offered a ‘dialectic’ with which to domesticate calls for violence and conflict: Emmanuel Mounier, editor of the magazine Esprit and an influential presence on the Christian Left, undoubtedly spoke for many in 1949 when he asserted that it was hypocrisy to oppose violence or class-struggle when ‘white violence’ was practiced on the victims of capitalism every day.
But in France the appeal of violent solutions represented more than just a projection forward of recent experience. It was also the echo of an older heritage. Accusations of collaboration, betrayal and treason, demands for punishment and a fresh start did not begin with the Liberation. They recapitulated a venerable French tradition. Ever since 1792 the Revolutionary and counter-Revolutionary poles of French public life exemplified and reinforced the two-fold division of the country: for and against the Monarchy, for and against the Revolution, for and against Robespierre, for and against the Constitutions of 1830 and 1848, for and against the Commune. No other country had such a long and unbroken experience of bipolar politics, underscored by the conventional historiography of the national Revolutionary myth as inculcated to French schoolchildren for many decades.