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PARTISAN REVIEW
Secondly, I want to make two major distinctions to understand
the present situation. First of all, there has been a great gap, let's say
a watershed, in the relationship of intellectuals to politics in France,
between '68 and '75. You have the situation before '68 and the situa–
tion after '75 - the period between '68 and '75 was a sort of mixture of
the two periods. And the second distinction one should make is be–
tween what I call the top intelligentsia and the bulk of people who
are professional intellectuals, that is , teachers in secondary schools,
university teachers, journalists, publishers, media people . The evo–
lution of the two groups is very different.
The main issue in intellectual life , before '68, was the attitude
toward the Soviet Union.
If
you were on the right side, that is, on
the left, you were communist or at least anti-anticommunist ; the
best position was to be anti-anticommunist . Not all intellectuals
were communists, but to be a member of the Communist Party gave
a certain value to an intellectual's life ; it was something like a
n'te
de
passage.
All the well-known intellectuals of today have been , at least
between the age of 18 and 19-that's the minimum-members of the
Communist Party. Some of them remained four years , some six
years, some ten years , some came from the Resistance, some were
Jewish and were communist because they were Jewish ; some were
not but were members of the Communist Party because their fathers
were Vichyists, and they had to be communists in order to "pay" for
their fathers. You had to go through the Communist Party for all
sorts of reasons.
If
you were really an anticommunist, you were considered
either a nonintellectual, a bourgeois, a member of the Academie
Fran!;aise; or you were a former Vichyist; or you were paid by the
CIA; or you were illegitimate in some way ; or marginal . For exam–
ple, after World War Two, Malraux, as you know , wrote about art,
or was a politician, but played a small role in intellectual life. To be
an intellectual was, at the minimum, to be an anti-anticommunist.
The failure of
Preuves,
which remained marginal in Parisian life,
really demonstrated the fact that one could not be anticom–
munist-for both moral and aesthetic reasons . It was not an intellec–
tual issue, it was just morally wrong, and aesthetically not "in" to be
anticommunist. And one generation later, those who then were called
the professional anticommunists - such as my father - were just not
read. They were people one should not read , because they were
writing in the wrong newspaper or the wrong magazines.
If
you
were writing in
Le Figaro,
for example , you were not discussed,
