202
PARTISAN REVIEW
them a perfectly neutral attribute, something that merited neither
praise nor condemnation. He was above all French and strongly felt
that there ',vas no room for any dual allegiance. Between France and
Israel one had to choose, and for him there never was any hesitation.
Having come of age in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair, Aron always
chose to see it not as the symbol of French anti-Semitism and the
central episode in France's subterranean fascist heritage (a thesis
Bernard Henri Levy would develop in his
Ideologie Franfaise)
,
but in–
deed as proof that French society was steeped in Republican virtues.
There was an "Affaire" after all, rather than complacent silence .
Aron commented on Nazi Germany as a Frenchman and wrote less
than he might have wished on the topic, precisely because he did not
want his critiques of the regime to be construed as the product of his
Jewishness. Such self-censorship lay at the heart of many a French
Jew's relation to the French State.
Aron tried to believe for a long period that Vichy France's
treatment of the Jews was the direct result of German pressures . The
gradual discovery of Vichy's eagerness to anticipate German wishes
and to do one better profoundly wounded him. Yet Aron could
never share the younger generation's militant Jewishness which
came to the fore in the 1970s and their delving, almost with delecta–
tion, into France's murky past in search of anti-Semitic demons.
Aron's tirade against de Gaulle for his reference to the Jews as "a
peuple dominateur" stemmed more from his vision of what a head of
state should and should not say, and a quasi-academic analysis of
the weight of words in provoking anti-Semitism, than from any major
reconsideration of the French past. For Aron, France's democratic
identity was a given; he chose to skip over the wounds of the past
thanks to the cold rationality of his ultimately eschatological view of
history. Any notion of ethnic identity, of a Jewish lobby, or of a par–
ticularistic cause clashed with what was Aron's fundamental
seure de
l'Etat
and even J acobinism. It was thus more than symbolic that his
last act before dying was to testify on behalf of a French thinker, Ber–
trand de Jouvenel, who had flirted with pro-German sentiments and
corporatism in the 1930s, in a libel suit against an Israeli historian
bent on showing J ouvenel's fascist and anti-Semitic ou tlook as proof
of the impurity of French culture.
Aron's relationship to the United States was always complex.
Dubbed as the lackey of American imperialism by the Left Bank in–
tellectuals at the height of the cold war, criticized by the Gaullists for
