ROGER SHATIUCK
411
I pair Breton's intransigence with one of the most straightfor–
ward speeches in the whole five days. Gaetano Salvemini was an Ital–
ian historian and socialist deputy whom Mussolini had exiled and
stripped of his citizenship. What Salvemini said sounds very elemen–
tary. But remember, the atmosphere of the Congress was such that
almost every speaker began with the symbolic greeting, "Comrades."
Salvemini had been fighting fascism with word and deed probably
longer than anyone else attending the Congress.
If
you give the
namefascism
to all bourgeois societies; if you close
your eyes to the fact that fascism means bourgeois society with
something added, that is, a bourgeois society which has sup–
pressed the very possibility of cultural freedom; if you apply the
same treatment to two different forms of society- then you run
the risk of allowing in nonfascist societies the destruction of frag–
ments of intellectual liberty that are not sufficient but that never–
theless have great value . We do not greatly appreciate light and
air as long as we have them . To understand their value, we have
to lose them. But the day we lose our freedoms, we shall not eas–
ily win them back.
Confronted by fascist-type bourgeois societies, we Italians
and Germans have had to take a position of radical negation. In
nonfascist bourgeois societies, radical nihilism is a dangerous
thing. Do not scorn your freedoms; rather defend them stub–
bornly, while declaring them inadequate and struggling to
develop them .
The freedom to create is constrained in nonfascist
bourgeois societies. In fascist-type bourgeois societies it is totally
suppressed . It is partially suppressed in Soviet Russia. Trotsky's
History of the Russian Revolution
cannot be read in Russia. It is in
Russia that Victor Serge is held prisioner. . ..
The sudden sucking-in of breath at those naked words must have
been audible for some distance. Antifascism could take many forms,
but the Congress did its best to disguise that fact. Salvemini was
later appointed Lecturer in History at Harvard - over President
Lowell's objections.
The last pair is Gide and Malraux. Both spoke Saturday night,
on the individual. Picking up a sentence out of the preface of
Malraux's novel,
Days of Wrath,
Gide developed a history of French
literature in which it is Diderot and Rousseau who, after the privi–
leged forms of classicism, brought back the turbulence and the
popular feeling missing since Rabelais. Admirable as it has been, the
