POLITICS AND THE FRENCH INTELLECTUALS
605
The two groups I have considered are indisputably minorities, very
active ones but minorities still. Most French intellectuals are neither
Communist nor neutral. Without being pro-American, they are more
hostile to the Soviet Union than to the United States. They belong to the
Western party and are, in the language of the Stalinists, "accessories to
the Marshallization of Europe," though unwillingly so, or at least with
a bad grace. What gives French intellectual life its exceptional character
at the present time is not only the number of intellectuals who are
Communists or partisans of Neither-Nor, it is the readiness with which
non-Communists echo the arguments of the one group or the other.
Even in the "Marshallized press" the proposals for the Atlantic
Pact called forth a spate of articles suggesting neutrality as a way of
getting round the necessity for the pact.
Le M onde
is fond of defend–
ing a policy of neutrality for France, Germany, and Europe, without
refusing to publish an article opposing this policy in its adjoining
columns. I know an editor of a large newspaper of moderate tendency
who is more convinced than the Stalinists that a Communist victory is
inevitable. In the depths of his Christian soul, however, he is less con–
cerned with fighting to prevent this disaster than with the necessity of
bearing witness to the faith, after it has taken place, by martyrdom
or a revival of the mendicant orders.
A conviction of the eventual downfall of the bourgeoisie or of the
liberal social order; a repugnance to being enlisted on the side of the
Americans or in an anti-Communist crusade; the philosophy of history
that the Communists use to justify their actions; the sentiments that
find expression in the ideology of Neither-Nor-all these things go to
shape the thoughts or attitudes of many French intellectuals who in
principle support the present government of France. Between Sartre on
the one side (who is impatient of all distinctions or degrees in evil and
who never denounces the Soviet concentration camps without denounc–
ing in the next breath the oppression of the Negroes
in
the United
States or of the Africans by the Europeans), and Andre Malraux on
the other (who in the present juncture recognizes only one enemy),
there are all the various intermediate positions. Most of those who in
public spurn both the United States and Russia admit in private to
there being differences between the "monsters." When all is said and
done, I do not know a single neutral intellectual who, should there be
an American occupation, intends to seek refuge in the East. But I
know a great many who will go looking to the West for refuge in the
contrary event.
How are we to classify the intellectuals not belonging either to the
