RAYMOND ARON
31
It was not I who was frightening but the world as it appeared to me
between 1935 and 1939, and as it was, as we know today. I was never
cold, but I often gave that impression . Why? Because of my reticence? Be–
cause I maintained distinctions between teaching and friendship ? Because I
followed Spinoza's advice "not to ridicule human actions, not
to
deplore them
or curse them, but to understand them"? Some or all of this was true, proba–
bly in addition to something else that was more mysterious. The statements I
made when young, in the course of the I930s, may have expressed a kind
of intellectual delight, the awareness of having dissipated clouds and come
close
to
the truth. If nostalgia for the beliefs I was attacking had been
perceptible beneath my negations, my voice might not have been made cold
by analysis but warmed by the rebellion, futile as it may have been, of con–
sciousness against reality.
When I wrote
La
tragedie algerienne,
Fran<;ois Mauriac came up with
the same adjective as my student at Saint-Cloud. Why? A choice had to be
made between war and peace, between the preservation of French
sovereignty and the Algerians' right to independence; this dilemma had to be
presented
mercilessly.
The analysis was neither warm nor cold, but it was
either true or false. To be fair, on another occasion, Fran<;ois Mauriac
thanked me with a warm letter for a lecture I delivered to several hundred
Catholic students.
There remains the serious accusation that I was demobilizing. Was this
true throughout my life? This should not be true, since I have not devoted
myself exclusively to the austere task of science. I may have been demobi–
lizing for my students at Saint-Cloud between 1935 and 1939.
9
But what
opportunity did I have to do better? Fauconnet left me the choice between
"desperate or Satanic"; the "Cloutard" and his friends considered me terrify–
ing. I shook their certainties, I revealed to them the mortal danger that was
upon us. I argued for a democracy which, even in its decrepitude, was better
than the totalitarian regimes. "We are fighting for
Paris-soir
against the
Viilkischer Beobachter,"
Jean Cavailles said one day, not in despair, but
mockingly, and he was one of the purest heroes of the Resistance. I did not
open for my listeners the path to revolutionary salvation. Was I wrong,
when salvation bore the name of Stalin?
Have I been "demobilizing" since the war? It was indeed necessary to
demobilize the believers, militants, fellow travellers of Stalin, Khrushchev, and
Brezhnev. I devoted a good deal of time to this operation for mental health.
Facts and fashions, not my arguments, have now tended to discredit the
revolutionary hope that communism claims to embody. But, although the
9. Not for all of them, particularly not for the Catholics.
