POLITICS AND THE FRENCH INTELLECTUALS
597
for French opinion the international significance it enjoyed for so long
in the past; and avoid that rupture between the democratic Left and
the proletariat which the hold of Stalinism on the working cla£s would
SEem to make inevitable.
Stalinism, needless to say, is a means not to overcome but to ignore
this situation. The Communist intellectual's faith in a universal religion
allows him to surrender himself without trepidation to the great cur–
rent of history. His membership in a party proclaiming the historical
mission of the proletariat is for him a realization of that unity of the
working class and of the mind in which the young Marx saw the promise
of victorious revolution.
The number of Communist intellectuals in France is for this. reason
not surprising. (Without there being any statistics to consult, it would
seem that at least a fifth, and perhaps a quarter, of the intellectuals–
tp.achers, writers, artists-are Communists or fellow travelers. They are
the prisoners of a mythology, it will be said, and are ignorant of the
Stalinist reality. But this is no explanation at all. The truth clamors at
them from every side.
It
is plain for all to see that Soviet society is
hierarchical and authoritarian, that the Russian working class enjoys
fewer rights and liberties than any working class in the capitalist coun–
tries of the West, that intellectual and artistic obscurantism reigns
supreme in Soviet Russia, that the political police throws its Czarist
predecessor into the shade, that millions of people toil, suffer and die
in concentration camps. When these intellectuals champion ideas which
the Stalinist reality makes a mockery of, their aberration is not to be
explained by ignorance; we must rather look for the explanation of their
ignorance in an aberration.
If
they did not believe, they would know.
Why do they believe to the point of shutting their eyes against the
truth?
This is a difficult question to answer because it perhaps admits
of more than one reply. The reasons why intellectuals are converted
to Stalinism vary with the individual. Marxism, even in its Stalinist
version, provides the half-intellectual at small cost with a satisfying
explanation of the world. Neurotics who have not found a place for
themselves in the social order blame society itself for their defeat; thus
Telieved of the onus of their failure, they find in militant action a means
for expressing themselves. A writer of this kind, having known a pass–
ing fame in the Resistance, compensates for the chagrin he now feels
in dreaming that Communism will restore
him
to his rightful place.
One could go on with
this
series of individual psychological
