by Tony Judt
Moreover France, more than any other Western nation-state, was a country whose intelligentsia approved and even worshipped violence as a tool of public policy. George Sand records a walk along the Seine in 1835 with a friend who was urgently pressing the case for bloody proletarian revolution: only when the Seine runs red, he explained, when Paris burns and the poor take their rightful place, can justice and peace prevail. Almost exactly one century later the English essayist Peter Quennell described in the New Statesman ‘the almost pathological worship of violence which seems to dominate so many French writers.’
Thus when the elderly Radical Party politician Edouard Herriot, president of the French National Assembly until his death in 1957 at the age of 85, announced at the Liberation that normal political life could not be restored until ‘France has first passed through a bloodbath’, his language did not sound out of the ordinary to French ears, even coming as it did from a pot-bellied provincial parliamentarian of the political center. French readers and writers had long since been familiarized with the idea that historical change and purgative bloodshed go hand in hand. When Sartre and his contemporaries insisted that Communist violence was a form of ‘proletarian humanism’, the ‘midwife of History’, they were more conventional than they realized.
This familiarity of revolutionary violence in the French imaginaire, together with sepia-tinted memories of the old Franco-Russian alliance, pre-disposed intellectuals in France to greet Communist apologetics for Soviet brutality with a distinctly sympathetic ear. Dialectics helped, too. Commenting on the Slánský trial for Sartre’s Temps Modernes, Marcel Péju reminded his readers that there is nothing wrong with killing one’s political enemies. What was amiss in Prague was that ‘the ceremony with which they are killed [i.e. the show trial] seems a caricature of what it could be if this violence were justified in a Communist perspective. The charges, after all, are not prima facie implausible.’
French intellectuals visiting the Soviet bloc waxed more lyrically enthusiastic than most at the sight of Communism under construction. Thus the poet and surrealist Paul Eluard, addressing a (doubtless bemused) audience in Bucharest in October 1948: ‘I come from a country where no-one laughs any more, where no-one sings. France is in shadow. But you have discovered the sunshine of Happiness.’ Or the same Eluard in Soviet-occupied Hungary, the following year: ‘A people has only to be master in its own land and in a few years Happiness will be the supreme law and Joy the daily horizon.’
Eluard was a Communist, but his sentiments were widespread even among the many intellectuals and artists who never joined the Party. In 1948, following the Czech coup, Simone de Beauvoir was sure the Communists were on the path to victory everywhere: as her contemporary Paul Nizan had written many years before, a revolutionary philosopher can only be effective if he chooses the class that bears the Revolution, and the Communists were the self-anointed representatives of that class. Engaged intellectuals were obliged to take a stand on the side of progress and History, whatever the occasional moral vicissitudes.66
The importance of the Communist question for intellectuals in France was also a consequence of the ubiquitous presence of the French Communist Party (PCF). Though never as large as the Italian party (with 800,000 members at its peak), the PCF in the immediate post-war years was even more electorally successful, with 28 percent of the vote in 1946. And unlike the Italians the French Communists did not have to face a unified center-right Catholic Party. Conversely, the French Socialist Party, thanks to its long inter-war experience of Communist tactics, did not align itself unquestioningly with the Communists in the early stages of the Cold War (though a minority of its members would have liked to see it do so). And so the PCF was both stronger and more isolated than any other Communist party.
It was also peculiarly unsympathetic to intellectuals. In marked contrast to the Italians, the PCF had always been led by hard-nosed, blunt-minded Party bureaucrats, exemplified by the ex-miner Maurice Thorez who ran the Party from 1932 until his death in 1964. For Stalin, Thorez’s most important quality was that—like Gottwald in Czechoslovakia—he could be relied on to do what he was told and ask no questions. It was no coincidence that, having deserted from the French army during the phony war of 1939-40, Thorez spent the next five years in Moscow. The French Communist Party was thus a reliable if somewhat rigid satellite party, a serviceable vehicle for declaiming and practicing the Stalinist line.
To the post-war student generation, looking for leadership, direction, discipline and the promise of action in harness with ‘the workers’, the PCF’s very rigidity had a certain appeal, at least for a few years: much as its Czech or Polish counterparts initially inspired enthusiasm among their peers further east. But to more established French intellectuals, the fervor that the PCF’s cultural commissars brought to the imposition of orthodoxy in the turgid pages of the Party daily L’Humanité and elsewhere posed a daily challenge to their progressive beliefs. Writers or scholars who threw in their lot with the PCF could not expect, like Vittorini in Italy or the Communist Party Historians’ Group in London, to be allowed any leeway.67
For this reason the affinities of the Parisian intelligentsia are our soundest guide to the fault-lines of faith and opinion in Cold War Europe. In Paris, as nowhere else, intellectual schisms traced the contours of political ones, at home and abroad. The East European show trials were debated in Paris with special intensity because so many of their Communist victims had lived and worked in France: László Rajk had been interned in France after the Spanish Civil War; Artur London had worked in the French Resistance, was married to one prominent French Communist and was the future father-in-law of another; ‘André Simone’ (Otto Katz, another Slánský trial victim) was widely known in Parisian journalistic circles for his work there during the thirties; Traicho Kostov was well-remembered from his days in Bulgarian foreign service in Paris—his arrest in Sofia actually made the front page of Camus’s Combat.
Paris was even the site for two influential political trials of its own. In 1946 Victor Kravchenko, a mid-level Soviet bureaucrat who defected to the US in April 1944, published his memoirs, I Chose Freedom. When these appeared in France in May of the following year, under the title J’ai choisi la Liberté, they caused a sensation for their account of the Soviet purges, massacres, and in particular the Soviet concentration camp system, the Gulag. In November 1947, two months after the Cominform meeting in Poland where PCF leaders had been raked over the coals for their failure to toe the new Soviet hard line, the Party’s intellectual periodical Les Lettres françaises ran a series of articles asserting that Kravchenko’s book was a tissue of lies, fabricated by the American secret services. When the paper repeated and amplified these charges in April 1948, Kravchenko sued for libel.
At the trial, which lasted from January 24th to April 4th 1949, Kravchenko brought forward a stream of rather obscure witnesses in his support; but the defendants could flourish a sheaf of depositions from major French non-Communist intellectuals: the Resistance novelist Vercors, the physicist and Nobel Prize winner Frédéric Joliot-Curie, the art critic, Jean Cassou, Resistance hero and director of the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, and many others. These all attested to the impeccable Resistance record of the French Communist Party, the indisputable revolutionary credentials of the Soviet Union, and the unacceptable implications of Kravchenko’s assertions—even if true. In the judgment Kravchenko was awarded a single franc of insultingly symbolic damages.
This ‘moral’ victory for the Progressive Left coincided with the first round of major show trials in Eastern Europe, and the adoption of intellectual positions for and against the Soviet Union—as Sartre had begun to insist a few months earlier, ‘One must choose between the USSR and the Anglo-Saxon bloc.’ But for many critics of the Soviet Union, Kravchenko had been a less than ideal spokesman. A longtime Soviet apparatchik who had chosen exile in the USA, he held no appeal for those anti-Communist European intellectuals, perhaps the majority, who were as con
cerned to keep their distance from Washington as they were to deny Moscow a monopoly of progressive credentials. With such a person, wrote Sartre and Merleau-Ponty in January 1950, we can have no feelings of fraternity: he was the living proof of the decline ‘of Marxist values in Russia itself’.
But another trial proved harder to ignore. On November 12th 1949, four weeks after the execution in Budapest of László Rajk, David Rousset published in Le Figaro littéraire an appeal to former inmates of Nazi camps to assist him in establishing an enquiry into Soviet concentration camps. Basing himself on the Soviet Union’s own Code of Corrective Labor, he argued that these were not re-education centers as officials asserted, but rather a system of concentration camps integral to the Soviet economy and penal system. A week later, again in Les Lettres françaises, the Communist writers Pierre Daix and Claude Morgan accused him of inventing his sources and caricaturing the USSR in a base calumny. Rousset sued for defamation.
The dramatis personae in this confrontation were unusually interesting. Rousset was no Kremlin defector. He was French; a longtime socialist; a sometime Trotskyist; a Resistance hero and survivor of Buchenwald and Neuengamme; a friend of Sartre and co-founder with him in 1948 of a short-lived political movement, the Rassemblement démocratique révolutionnaire. For such a man to accuse the Soviet Union of operating concentration or labor camps broke sharply with the conventional political alignments of the time. Daix, too, had been arrested for Resistance activities and deported, in his case to Mauthausen. For two left-wing former Resisters and camp survivors to clash in this way illustrated the degree to which past political alliances and allegiances were now subordinated to the single question of Communism.
Rousset’s witness list included a variety of highly credible first-hand experts on the Soviet prison system, culminating in dramatic testimony from Margarete Buber-Neumann, who testified to experience not only in Soviet camps but also in Ravensbrück, to which she had been sent after Stalin handed her back to the Nazis in 1940, part of the small change of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Rousset won his case. He even had some impact upon the conscience and consciousness of his contemporaries. Following the announcement of the verdict in January 1950, Maurice Merleau-Ponty confessed that ‘the facts put altogether into question the meaning of the Russian system’. Simone de Beauvoir felt sufficiently constrained to insert in her new roman-à-clef, Les Mandarins, a series of anguished debates between her protagonists over the news of the Soviet camps (though she flatteringly re-adjusted the chronology to make it seem that Sartre and his friends had been aware of such matters as early as 1946).
To counter Rousset and his like—and keep ‘progressive’ intellectuals in line—Communist parties exercised the moral lever of ‘anti-Fascism’. This had the appeal of familiarity. For many Europeans their first experience of political mobilization was in the anti-Fascist, Popular-Front leagues of the 1930s. For most people the Second World War was remembered as a victory over Fascism, and celebrated as such in France and Belgium especially in the post-war years. ‘Anti-Fascism’ was a reassuring, ecumenical link to a simpler time.
At the core of anti-Fascist rhetoric as deployed by the official Left was a simple binary view of political allegiance: we are what they are not. They (the Fascists, Nazis, Franco-ists, Nationalists) are Right, we are Left. They are reactionary, we are Progressive. They stand for War, we stand for Peace. They are the forces of Evil, we are on the side of Good. In the words of Klaus Mann, in Paris in 1935: whatever Fascism is, we are not and we are against it. Since most of the anti-Fascists’ opponents made a point of defining their own politics as above all anti-Communist (this was part of Nazism’s wartime appeal to conservative elites in countries as far apart as Denmark and Romania), this tidy symmetry worked to the Communists’ polemical advantage. Philo-Communism, or at least anti-anti-Communism, was the logical essence of anti-Fascism.68
The Soviet Union, of course, had every interest in directing attention to its anti-Fascist credentials in the post-war years, especially once the US replaced Germany as its enemy. Anti-Fascist rhetoric was now directed against America, accused first of defending revanchist Fascists and then, by extension, described as a proto-Fascist threat in its own right. What made this Communist tactic particularly effective, of course, was the widespread and genuine fear in Europe of a revival of Fascism itself, or at least a surge of neo-Fascist sympathy out of the ruins.
‘Anti-Fascism’, with its sub-text of resistance and alliance, was also related to the lingering favorable image of the wartime Soviet Union, the genuine sympathy that many Western Europeans felt for the heroic victors of Kursk and Stalingrad. As Simone de Beauvoir put it in her memoirs, in a characteristically sweeping claim: ‘There were no reservations in our friendship for the USSR: the sacrifices of the Russian people had proved that its leaders embodied its wishes.’ Stalingrad, according to Edgar Morin, swept away all doubts, all criticisms. It helped, too, that Paris had been liberated by the Western Allies, whose sins thus loomed larger in local memory.
But there was more to intellectual Russophilia than this. It is important to recall what was happening just a few miles to the east. Western intellectual enthusiasm for Communism tended to peak not in times of ‘goulash Communism’ or ‘Socialism with a human face’, but rather at the moments of the regime’s worst cruelties: 1935-39 and 1944-56. Writers, professors, artists, teachers and journalists frequently admired Stalin not in spite of his faults, but because of them. It was when he was murdering people on an industrial scale, when the show trials were displaying Soviet Communism at its most theatrically macabre, that men and women beyond Stalin’s grasp were most seduced by the man and his cult. It was the absurdly large gap separating rhetoric from reality that made it so irresistible to men and women of goodwill in search of a Cause.69
Communism excited intellectuals in a way that neither Hitler nor (especially) liberal democracy could hope to match. Communism was exotic in locale and heroic in scale. Raymond Aron in 1950 remarked upon ‘the ludicrous surprise . . . that the European Left has taken a pyramid-builder for its God.’ But was it really so surprising? Jean-Paul Sartre, for one, was most attracted to the Communists at precisely the moment when the ‘pyramid-builder’ was embarking upon his final, crazed projects. The idea that the Soviet Union was engaged upon a momentous quest whose very ambition justified and excused its shortcomings was uniquely attractive to rationalist intellectuals. The besetting sin of Fascism had been its parochial objectives. But Communism was directed towards impeccably universal and transcendent goals. Its crimes were excused by many non-Communist observers as the cost, so to speak, of doing business with History.
But even so, in the early years of the Cold War there were many in Western Europe who might have been more openly critical of Stalin, of the Soviet Union and of their local Communists had they not been inhibited by the fear of giving aid and comfort to their political opponents. This, too, was a legacy of ‘anti-Fascism’, the insistence that there were ‘no enemies on the Left’ (a rule to which Stalin himself, it must be said, paid little attention). As the progressive Abbé Boulier explained to François Fejtö, when trying to prevent him from writing about the Rajk trial: drawing attention to Communist sins is ‘to play the imperialists’ game’.70
This fear of serving anti-Soviet interests was not new. But by the early fifties it was a major calculation in European intellectual debates, above all in France. Even after the East European show trials finally led Emmanuel Mounier and many in his Esprit group to distance themselves from the French Communist Party, they took special care to deny any suggestion that they had become ‘anti-Communist’—or worse, that they had ceased to be ‘anti-American’. Anti-anti-Communism was becoming a political and cultural end in itself.
On one side of the European cultural divide, then, were the Communists and their friends and apologists: progressives and ‘anti-Fascists’. On the other side, far more numerous (outside of the Soviet bloc) but also distinctly heterogeneous, w
ere the anti-Communists. Since anti-Communists ran the gamut from Trotskyists to neoFascists, critics of the USSR frequently found themselves sharing a platform or a petition with someone whose politics in other respects they abhorred. Such unholy alliances were a prime target for Soviet polemic and it was sometimes difficult to persuade liberal critics of Communism to voice their opinions in public for fear of being tarred with the brush of reaction. As Arthur Koestler explained to a large audience at Carnegie Hall, New York, in 1948: ‘You can’t help people being right for the wrong reasons . . . This fear of finding oneself in bad company is not an expression of political purity; it is an expression of a lack of self-confidence.’
Genuinely reactionary intellectuals were thin on the ground in the first decade after the war. Even those, like Jacques Laurent or Roger Nimier in France, who styled themselves as unashamedly of the Right, took a certain pleasure in acknowledging the hopelessness of their cause, fashioning a sort of neo-Bohemian nostalgia for the discredited past and parading their political irrelevance as a badge of honor. If the Left had the wind in its sails and History on its side, then a new generation of Right-wing literati would take pride in being defiant losers, turning the genuine decadence and death-seeking solipsism of inter-war writers like Drieu la Rochelle and Ernst Jünger into a social and sartorial style—thereby anticipating the ‘young fogeys’ of Mrs Thatcher’s Britain.
More representative, in France and Britain at least, were intellectual conservatives whose dislike of Communism had changed little in thirty years. In both countries, as in Italy, actively Catholic intellectuals played a prominent part in anti-Communist polemics. Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene succeeded Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton in the space reserved in English cultural life for gifted, dyspeptic Catholic traditionalists. But where English conservatives might rage at the vacuity of modern life or else retreat from it altogether, a French Catholic like François Mauriac was drawn quite naturally into polemical exchanges with the political Left.