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PA RT ISAN REVIEW
to be a central source of supply.
Despit e everything:
there is a sort of
implicit Copernican revolution in the disquiet, the uncertainty, the
defensiveness of this little phrase. The world's sense of Paris, the French
sense of the world, are changing, and therefore have changed irre–
mediably. And this is crucial. Saving all reverence to M arie-Chantal and
Minou Drouet, this is wha t is really going on.
Please note tha t a new awareness is a poor excuse for old sim–
plifications; and if you are tempted to reduce what is happening
here to some familiar scheme of rise and fall, growth and decadence, I
beg you to proceed on your own. That is not what I mean a t all.
If
there is anything hopeful and even youthful in the present French
cultural situati on, it is a growing willingness, precisely, to see it p lain.
Only this means facing up to an old sentimental confusion which has
been built into the French psyche by generations of free, universal, and
compulsory education, administered in school and out of it by stout
anti-clerical masters, good R epublicans a ll.
Wha t happens then? The French intellectuals have identified them–
selves more profoundly than any others in the West with their country,
its power and prestige in the world. This is why the altered power
situation of France, which was not so much caused by the wa r as re–
vealed by it, becomes a theme of endless lamentations for Simone de
Beauvoir's pseudo-revolutionary Mandarins. We are no longer in the
center of things, they keep moaning, we've lost our Mission. Our country
no longer counts. The implication seems to be that these great spirits
cannot waste themselves on a second-rate country. Wel l, happily for the
Ma ndarins, there is another Nation and a new Mission, and the Com–
munists are wa iting in the wings to explain, with the h elp of the
Diamat, that the old d erkish nationalism still has a role to p lay providing
it transforms itself into its own nega tion. In other words, the proper
way to serve France, nowadays, is to betray France.
There are more intelligent reactions, of course, a nd more original
ones, to which relatively li ttle attention has been paid . Why? The a ngui sh
of the Mandarinate is
ideological,
and perh aps this explains why the
outer world, having been bereft of France during the four years of
German occupa tion, has followed the soap operas of the revolutionary
intellectuals with such breathl ess interest since the war. What was
the deep inner conflict which cas t a shadow over M erleau-Ponty's
high brow? Why did Simone de Beauvoir suffer so long in silence ?
And what were the causes of the rupture between Sartre a nd Camus ... ?
The French themselves are no longer able to muster such excite–
ment. Which is not to say that the thousands of little pressure groups,
