by Tony Judt
Throughout Mauriac’s long post-war engagement with public affairs (he wrote regularly for Le Figaro into his eighties—he died in 1970 aged 85) his arguments were almost always cast in an ethical vein—first with Albert Camus over the propriety of the post-war purges, later with his fellow conservatives over the war in Algeria—of which he disapproved—and always with the Communists, whom he abominated. As he explained to the readers of Le Figaro on October 24th 1949, the French Communists’ justification for the Budapest show trial—then under way—was ‘une obscénité de l’esprit’. But Mauriac’s moral clarity about the crimes of Communism was accompanied in these years by an equally moralized distaste for the ‘alien values’ of American society: like many European conservatives, he was always a little uncomfortable about the alignment with America that the Cold War required of them.
This was not a problem for liberal realists like Raymond Aron. Like many other ‘Cold Warriors’ of the European political center, Aron had only limited sympathy for the United States—‘the U.S. economy seems to me’, he wrote, ‘a model neither for humanity nor for the West’. But Aron understood the central truth about European politics after the war: domestic and foreign conflicts were henceforth intertwined. ‘In our times’, he wrote in July 1947, ‘for individuals as for nations the choice that determines all else is a global one, in effect a geographical choice. One is in the universe of free countries or else in that of lands placed under harsh Soviet rule. From now on everyone in France will have to state his choice.’ Or, as he put it on another occasion, ‘It is never a struggle between good and evil, but between the preferable and the detestable.’
Liberal intellectuals, then, whether of the continental persuasion like Aron or Luigi Einaudi, or in the British sense like Isaiah Berlin, were always distinctly more comfortable than most conservatives with the American connection that history had imposed upon them. The same was true, curious as it may seem, of Social Democrats. This was in part because the memory of FDR was still fresh, and many of the American diplomats and policy-makers with whom Europeans dealt in these years were New Dealers, who encouraged an active role for the state in economic and social policy and whose political sympathies fell to the left of center.
But it was also a direct consequence of American policy. The AFL-CIO, the US intelligence services and the State Department saw moderate, trade union-based social democratic and labor parties as the best barrier to Communist advance in France and Belgium especially (in Italy, where the political configuration was different, they vested their hopes and the bulk of their funds in Christian Democracy). Until mid-1947 this would have been an uncertain bet. But following the expulsion of Communist parties from government in France, Belgium and Italy that spring, and especially after the Prague coup in February 1948, west European Socialists and Communists drew apart. Violent clashes between Communist and Socialist workers’ unions, and between Communist-led strikers and troops ordered in by Socialist ministers, together with the news from eastern Europe of Socialists arrested and imprisoned, turned many Western Social Democrats into confirmed foes of the Soviet bloc and ready recipients of covert American cash.
For Socialists like Léon Blum in France or Kurt Schumacher in Germany, the Cold War imposed political choices which were in one respect at least familiar: they knew the Communists of old and had been around long enough to remember bitter fratricidal battles in the grim years before the Popular Front alliances. Younger men lacked this comfort. Albert Camus—who had briefly joined and then quit the Communist Party in Algeria during the 1930s—emerged from the war a firm believer, like so many of his contemporaries, in the Resistance coalition of Communists, Socialists and radical reformers of every shade. ‘Anticommunism’, he wrote in Algiers in March 1944, ‘is the beginning of dictatorship.’
Camus first began to have doubts during France’s post-war trials and purges, when the Communists took a hard line as the Party of the Resistance and demanded exclusions, imprisonments and the death penalty for thousands of real or imagined collaborators. Then, as the arteries of political and intellectual allegiance began to harden from 1947, Camus found himself increasingly prone to doubt the good faith of his political allies—doubts he at first stifled out of habit and for the sake of unity. He handed over control of the newspaper Combat in June 1947, no longer so politically confident or optimistic as he had been three years before. In his major novel La Peste (The Plague), published the same year, it was clear that Camus was not comfortable with the hard-edged political realism of his political bedmates. As he put it, through the mouth of one of his characters, Tarrou: ‘I have decided to reject everything that, directly or indirectly, makes people die or justifies others in making them die.’
Nevertheless, Camus was still reluctant to come out in public and break with his former friends. In public he still tried to balance honest criticism of Stalinism with balanced, ‘objective’ references to American racism and other crimes committed in the capitalist camp. But the Rousset trial and the East European show trials ended any illusions he might have retained. To his private notebooks he confided: ‘One of my regrets is to have conceded too much to objectivity. Objectivity, at times is an accommodation. Today things are clear and we must call something “concentrationnaire” if that is what it is, even if it is socialism. In one sense, I shall never again be polite.’
There is here a perhaps unconscious echo of a speech at the International Conference of the Pen Club two years earlier, in June 1947, where Ignazio Silone—speaking on ‘La Dignité de l’Intelligence et l’Indignité des Intellectuels’ (‘The Dignity of Intelligence and the Unworthiness of Intellectuals’)—publicly regretted his own silence and that of his fellow Left intellectuals: ‘We placed on the shelves, like tanks stored in a depôt, the principles of liberty for all, human dignity, and the rest.’ Like Silone, who would go on to contribute one of the better essays in Richard Crossman’s 1950 collection, The God That Failed, Camus became thenceforth an ever more acerbic critic of ‘progressivist’ illusions, culminating in the condemnation of revolutionary violence in his 1951 essay L’Homme révolté that provoked the final break with his erstwhile friends on the Parisian intellectual Left. For Sartre, the first duty of a radical intellectual was not to betray the workers. For Camus, like Silone, the most important thing was not to betray oneself. The battle lines of the Cultural Cold War were drawn up.
It is difficult, looking back across the decades, to recapture in full the stark contrasts and rhetoric of the Cold War in these early years. Stalin was not yet an embarrassment—on the contrary. As Maurice Thorez expressed it in July 1948, ‘people think they can insult us Communists by throwing the word “Stalinists” at us. Well, for us that label is an honor that we try hard to merit to the full.’ And many gifted non-Communists, as we have seen, were likewise reluctant to condemn the Soviet leader, seeking out ways to minimize his crimes or excuse them altogether. Hopeful illusions about the Soviet realm were accompanied by widespread misgivings—and worse—about America.71
The United States, together with the new Federal Republic of Germany, bore the brunt of Communist rhetorical violence. It was an astute tactic. The US was not wildly popular in western Europe, despite and in some places because of its generous help in Europe’s economic reconstruction. In July 1947 only 38 percent of French adults believed that Marshall Aid did not pose a serious threat to French independence, a suspicion of American motives that was further fuelled by the war scares of 1948 and the fighting in Korea two years later. Fabricated Communist charges that the US Army was using biological weapons in Korea found a receptive audience.
In cultural matters, the Communists did not even need to take the initiative. Fear of American domination, of the loss of national autonomy and initiative, brought into the ‘progressive’ camp men and women of all political stripes and none. Compared with its impoverished West European dependencies, America seemed economically carnivorous and culturally obscurantist: a deadly combination. In October 194
9—in the second year of the Marshall Plan and just as plans for NATO were being finalized—the French cultural critic Pierre Emmanuel informed readers of Le Monde that America’s chief gift to post-war Europe had been . . . the phallus; even in the land of Stendhal ‘the phallus is on its way to becoming a God’. Three years later the Christian editors of Esprit reminded their readers that ‘we have, from the outset, warned of the dangers posed to our national well-being by an American culture which attacks the very roots of the mental and moral cohesion of the peoples of Europe.’
Meanwhile, an insidious American artifact was spreading across the continent. Between 1947 and 1949 the Coca-Cola Company opened bottling plants in the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Italy. Within five years of its creation West Germany would have 96 such plants and became the largest market outside the US itself. But while some voices had been raised in protest in Belgium and Italy, it was in France that Coca-Cola’s plans unleashed a public storm. When Le Monde revealed that the company had set a target of 240 million bottles to be sold in France in 1950, there were loud objections—encouraged but not orchestrated by the Communists, who confined themselves to the warning that Coke’s distribution services would do double duty as a US espionage network. As Le Monde editorialized on March 29th 1950, ‘Coca-Cola is the Danzig of European Culture.’
The furor over ‘Coca-Colonisation’ had its light side (there were rumours that the company planned to attach its logo, in neon, to the Eiffel Tower . . . ), but the sentiments underlying it were serious. The crassness of American culture, from films to beverages, and the self-interest and imperialist ambitions behind the US presence in Europe were commonplaces for many Europeans of Left and Right. The Soviet Union might pose an immediate threat to Europe but it was America that presented the more insidious long-term challenge. This view gained credence after the outbreak of war in Korea, when the US began to press for the rearmament of the West Germans. Communists could now blend their attacks on the ‘ex-Nazis’ in Bonn with the charge that America was backing ‘Fascist revanchism’. Nationalist hostility to ‘Anglo-Americans’, encouraged under the wartime occupation but silent since the liberation, was dusted off and drafted into service in Italy, France and Belgium—and also in Germany itself, by Brecht and other East German writers.
Seeking to capitalize on this inchoate but widespread fear of war, and suspicion of things American among European elites, Stalin launched an international Movement for Peace. From 1949 to Stalin’s death ‘Peace’ was the centerpiece of Soviet cultural strategy. The Peace Movement was launched in Wrocław, Poland, in August 1948 at a ‘World Congress of Intellectuals’. The Wrocław meeting was followed by the first ‘Peace Congresses’, in April 1949, conducted more or less simultaneously in Paris, Prague and New York. As a prototypical ‘front’ organization, the Peace Movement itself was ostensibly led by prominent scientists and intellectuals like Frédéric Joliot-Curie; but Communists controlled its various committees and its activities were closely coordinated with the Cominform, whose own journal, published in Bucharest, was now re-named ‘For a Lasting Peace, for a Popular Democracy’.
On its own terms the Peace Movement was quite a success. An appeal, launched in Stockholm in March 1950 by the ‘Permanent Committee of the World Congress of Partisans of Peace’, obtained many millions of signatures in Western Europe (in addition to the tens of millions of signatories rounded up in the Soviet bloc). Indeed, gathering these signatures was the Movement’s main activity, especially in France, where it had its strongest support. But under the umbrella of the Peace Movement other front organizations also pressed home the message: the Soviet Union was on the side of peace, while the Americans (and their friends in Korea, Yugoslavia and Western European governments) were the party of war. Writing from Paris for The New Yorker, in May 1950, Janet Flanner was impressed: ‘At the moment, Communist propaganda is enjoying the most extraordinary success, especially among non-Communists, that it has ever had in France.’
The Communists’ attitude towards their mass movements was strictly instrumental—the Peace Movement was only ever a vehicle for Soviet policy, which is why it suddenly adopted the theme of ‘peaceful co-existence’ in 1951, taking its cue from a shift in Stalin’s international strategy. Privately, Communists—especially in the eastern bloc—had little but scorn for the illusions of their fellow-travellers. During organized visits to the popular democracies, Peace Movement supporters (overwhelmingly from France, Italy and India) were fêted and honored for their support; behind their backs they were derided as ‘pigeons’, a new generation of Lenin’s ‘useful idiots’.
The Communists’ success in securing at least the conditional sympathy of many in Western Europe, and the great play that Communist parties in France and Italy especially made with their support among a cultural elite suspicious of America, prompted a belated but determined response from a group of Western intellectuals. Worried that in the cultural battle Stalin would win by default, they set about establishing a cultural ‘front’ of their own. The founding meeting of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was held in Berlin in June 1950. The Congress was planned as a response to Moscow’s Peace Movement initiative of the previous year, but it coincided with the outbreak of war in Korea, which gave it added significance. The decision to hold the meeting in Berlin rather than Paris was deliberate: from the outset the Congress was going to take the cultural battle to the Soviets.
The Congress for Cultural Freedom was formed under the official patronage of Bertrand Russell, Benedetto Croce, John Dewey, Karl Jaspers and Jacques Maritain, the French Catholic philosopher. These old men conferred respectability and authority upon the new venture, but the political drive and intellectual energy behind it came from a glittering middle generation of liberal or ex-Communist intellectuals—Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron, A. J. Ayer, Margarete Buber-Neumann, Ignazio Silone, Nicola Chiaromonte and Sidney Hook. They, in turn, were assisted by a group of younger men, mostly American, who took responsibility for the day to day planning and administration of the CCF’s activities.
The CCF would eventually open up offices in thirty-five countries worldwide, but the focus of its attention was on Europe, and within Europe on France, Italy and Germany. The goal was to rally, energize and mobilize intellectuals and scholars for the struggle with Communism, primarily through the publication and dissemination of cultural periodicals: Encounter in Britain, Preuves in France, Tempo Presente in Italy and Der Monat in Germany. None of these journals ever reached a large audience—Encounter, the most successful, boasted a circulation of 16,000 copies by 1958; in the same year Preuves had just 3,000 subscribers. But their contents were of an almost unvaryingly high quality, their contributors were among the best writers of the post-war decades, and they filled a crucial niche—in France especially, where Preuves provided the only liberal, anti-Communist forum in a cultural landscape dominated by neutralist, pacifist, fellow-traveling or straightforwardly Communist periodicals.
The Congress and its many activities were publicly supported by the Ford Foundation and privately underwritten by the CIA—something of which nearly all its activists and contributors were quite unaware until it became public many years later. The implications—that the US government was covertly subsidizing antiCommunist cultural outlets in Europe—were perhaps not as serious as they appear in retrospect. At a time when Communist and ‘front’ journals and all sorts of cultural products were covertly subsidized from Moscow, American backing would certainly not have embarrassed some of the CCF writers. Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron or Ignazio Silone did not need official American encouragement to take a hard line against Communism, and there is no evidence that their own critical views about the US itself were ever toned down or censored to suit the paymasters in Washington.
The US was a newcomer to culture wars of this kind. The Soviet Union established its ‘Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Nations’ in 1925; French, Germans and Italians had been actively underwriting
overseas ‘cultural diplomacy’ since before 1914. The Americans did not begin to budget for such activities until just before World War Two, and it was only in 1946, with the establishment of the Fulbright Program, that they entered the field seriously. Until the autumn of 1947 American cultural and educational projects in Europe were directed towards ‘democratic reorientation’; only then did anti-Communism become the primary strategic goal.
By 1950 the US Information Agency had taken overall charge of American cultural exchange and information programs in Europe. Together with the Information Services Branch of the US Occupation authorities in western Germany and Austria (which had full control of all media and cultural outlets in the US Zone in these countries), the USIA was now in a position to exert huge influence in Western European cultural life. By 1953, at the height of the Cold War, US foreign cultural programs (excluding covert subsidies and private foundations) employed 13,000 people and cost $129 million, much of it spent on the battle for the hearts and minds of the intellectual elite of Western Europe.
The ‘fight for peace’, as the Communist press dubbed it, was conducted on the cultural ‘front’ by the ‘Battle of the Book’ (note the characteristically militarized Leninist language). The first engagements were undertaken in France, Belgium and Italy in the early spring of 1950. Prominent Communist authors—Elsa Triolet, Louis Aragon—would travel to a variety of provincial cities to give talks, sign books and put on display the literary credentials of the Communist world. In practice this did little to promote the Communist case—two of the best-selling books in post-war France were Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (which sold 420,000 copies in the decade 1945-55) and Viktor Kravchenko’s I Chose Freedom (503,000 copies in the same period). But the point was not so much to sell books as to remind readers and others that Communists stood for culture—French culture.