Raymond Aron
POLITICS AND THE FRENCH
INTELLECTUALS
The situation of the French intellectuals has changed more
in the last .ten years than in a hundred.
French writ,ers, artists and philosophers never doubted in the
past that their work or thought, such as it was, had a universal signific–
ance. The course France elected to pursue, either in its domestic affairs
or in the conduct of its foreign policy, was of immediate concern to
the world. Since 1945, however, French intellectuals have come to realize
that their country is no longer, in the material sphere, a power of the
first rank. French culture has not lost its luster to the same degree; but
French policy and the political opinions of the French intellectuals no
longer count for anything beyond the borders of the country. In 1910
or even in 1930, when a writer praised or condemned a pacifist policy,
he spoke directly to our statesmen, asking them to take the initiative in
convoking this or that international conference, to adopt a friendly
or hostile attitude to yesterday's enemy or to the potential enemy
of tomorrow. The pacificism of our French intellectuals today is like
that of the Belgian or Dutch writers in 1938. Citizens of a country
wedged between great powers and sure to be occupied by one side or
the other in case of war, they have good reason to dread its corning. But
history hardly troubles itself about persons and peoples who let them–
selves be reduced to the role of objects.
The traditional dividing line between the French intellectuals
was identified with the parliamentary and above all electoral division
of the French nation into Left and Right.
It
is of course true that the
political content of these two terms has been considerably modified
since 1789. In the degree that social questions have displaced purely
political controversies, the republican but conservative bourgeoisie have
changed camps. Everybody knew that the liberals and Socialists of the
Left were at odds in their conceptions of the social and economic order.
Nevertheless the intellectuals, like the French electorate generally,
nostalgically cherished the notion of a united Left against the Right.
Nothing in the Popular Front called forth so much real enthusiasm as
this. France seemed caught up again in the controversies to which it had
been accustomed for a century and a half: the rational reconstruction
of society as against the upholding of tradition, liberty and equality as
