92
PARTISAN REVIEW
least among its intellectuals, more ex-Communists than Communists,
exactly as in the U .S.!
One often hears the question : What can one do with people who
came to Communism not in the period of revolutionary struggles and
intoxicating illusions, but in the period of cold terror and the most
abject abasement? It is too easily forgotten that these people have
experienced Communism and the revolution only in the form of Stalin–
ism; and in their search for the hardest core of unflinching opposition
to the all-corrupting bourgeoisie they found only the Soviet Union and
the Party, i.e., Stalin and his henchmen. Hatred of the bourgeoisie and
of bourgeois democracy is more deep-seated in many French intellectuals
than love of the proletariat. The intellectuals, whether scientists in
poorly equipped laboratories or underpaid teachers, have the feeling
that they are on the bottom rung of France's social ladder, whereas
justice and reason would seem to require that they play a more impor–
tant part in social life than, say, the subsidized beet sugar producers.
This makes them susceptible to the radical rejection of an order in
which everything can be criticized in words, but which in fact remains
that mixture of disintegration and stagnation which democracy, as it
functions in France, appears to them to be. Why in such a . "cold"
society even the Communist Party, in the low state to which it has
sunk, could seem to them a warming, sheltering "community," and
this not merely a "militant community," but a truly mystical "life com–
munity," the object of envy of many socially-minded Christians-this
question why is not one that can be answered in a short article; but it
is a fact that the Party has been just such a community to them. It
is precisely because the Party was so ruthless, so uncompromisingly
opposed to the bourgeois society, precisely because it caused the bour–
geoisie to tremble and because it defended deeds of horror and identified
itself with terrorism, that it became a power in which one could seek
refuge even if one secretly feared it. Finally many intellectuals were
driven to the Party for reasons that are quite unromantic and un–
mystical-not only because it spoke in the name of a better future, but
because it is a power in the present world. Until Budapest no actor,
no movie director, indeed no wardrobe attendant in the Comedie Fran–
<;aise dared to take a position openly against Communism. In addition
to its attraction, there was also the factor that it was an institution
which, within the framework of the existing order, was itself a power
to be reckoned with.
Budapest has mobilized against this power-in France as elsewhere
-the far greater power of the unorganized, diffuse detestation of Com-
