POLITICS AND THE FRENCH INTELLECTUALS
601
nlg the very essence of Western civilization. In a time when everyone
must stake his life on the political chance, he needs an absolute faith to
screw his courage to the sticking point.
Technological fanaticism, when combined with the notion of a
messianic proletariat and the rational fulfilment of history, offers the
intellectual a way out of his difficulties. The myth remained abstract
until Stalin came to give it flesh and blood. Having become the dogma
of a church, Stalinism attracts the intellectuals of a country formed
in the mould of Catholicism. They join a rival church that seems to
them to be carrying forward the tradition of the Enlightenment-with–
out ever suspecting, as they do the work of anti-culture, that they are
betraying not only their own country and Western civilization, but the
very ideas by which they are animated.
Even more characteristic of the situation of the French intellectuals
than the number of Stalinists is the host of theoreticians of Neither–
Nor. (I mean here "neither the United States nor the Soviet Union,"
and not the equal rejection of Communism and Gaullism. It is absurd,
though not uncommon, to confuse the two. The parliamentarians of
the Third Force-neither Communism nor Gaullism-have plainly
chosen to stand with the West.) The number of intellectuals who have
more or less clearly taken this position is large: Jean-Paul Sartre and
the leading existentialist writers, Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir,
Albert Camus (though he uses different arguments and gives a different
meaning to the position), Claude Bourdet and the whole editorial staff
of
Combat,
Andre Breton and the survivors of Surrealism, repentant
Stalinists wishing to find an excuse for themselves in the unworthiness
of the opponent of the Soviet Union, etc.
The majority of these devote the biggest part of their energies to
fighting anti-Communism. (When David Rousset resolved to come out
against Communism, most of his friends, who are still faithful to their
brand of Neither-Nor, excommunicated him.) Their favorite argument
IS
best translated by the vulgar expression, "You are another." Merleau–
Ponty, in his essay on Communism, uses page after page to show that
the bourgeois democracies are guilty of war, colonial exploitation, and
unemployment, and do not therefore represent the cause of justice
against violence, or the truth against the lie, but only one kind of
oppression against another. Put in this solemnly philosophical and self–
righteous way, the argument is incontestable. There is nowhere on this
earth an absolute good ranged against an absolute evil, but only varying
degrees of good and evil.
