WALTER LAQUEUR
387
the issues close to his heart, for instance, the destruction of his political
enemies at home, the murder of the Jews, rearmament, foreign policy,
and the conduct of the war, power was concentrated in his hands, and
no one could possibly deviate for any length of time from the guidelines
he set. And if Hitler did not make certain important decisions, all that
matters is that he
could
have made them and would have been obeyed.
The breakdown of the Soviet Union had a certain impact on the
field of Soviet studies. It led (within modest limits) to a spring cleaning,
causing a rethinking of earlier approaches to the Communist regime that
were clearly wrong. Students of fascism, on the other hand, have suffered
no such trauma. If the disappearance of the DDR had any impact, it was
that of reinforcing the nationalist arguments. Neither right nor left see
any urgent need to reconsider their theses about subjects such as Nazi ra–
tionalization and modernization , and it would be unrealistic to expect a
quick change in this respect.
Of all the postmortems on Communism, Francois Furet's
Le
passe
d'une illl/sion,
a book-length essay on the Communist idea in the twenti–
eth century, is the most noteworthy so far and has attracted much atten–
tion well beyond France . Furet teaches history both at the Sorbonne
and at the University of Chicago. He is known for his pioneering work
on the French Revolution which has greatly contributed to our re–
assessment of it. Together with Denis Richet, Pierre Nora, and others, he
assaulted (and defeated) the Jacobinian orthodoxy which had dominated
French historiography for almost a century. He also showed how this
treatment of the French Revolution (including the Terror) influenced
the reception of the Russian Revolution (including the Purges and the
Terror.) His new book contains much of great interest about Commu–
nism and fellow travelers in France between and after the two world
wars. Furet writes in part from the vantage point of an insider; he was a
member of the Communist Party from 1949-1956. He writes that he
now looks at his blindness "sans indulgence mais sans acrimonie." Much
of his book seems to me eminently sensible, and some is brilliant, but I
do have some disagreements with its arguments.
The central part of Furet's book is devoted to the relationship
among Communism, fascism, and anti-fascism, and it is in this context
that questions and doubts arise. Is it really true that the European left (as
Furet writes) was anti-fascist but not anti-totalitarian? This was almost
correct with regard to France after World War II, what with the
predominance of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and their like . But France is not
quite Europe, even though French intellectuals sometimes tend to think
