RAYMOND ARON
367
Giraudoux was in complete accord with Petain or the Vichy government
on the subject of "nationalist anti-Semitism." The reference to a book
written during the war by a Frenchman in the United States does not suf–
fice to prove the truth of the anecdote about Maurras's encounter with a
female astrologer, who is said to have invited the old doctrinarian to col–
laborate with the Germans (which, moreover, Maurras did not do).
My remarks suggest a reproach of a certain gravity. Without even
being aware of it, Mme. Arendt affects a tone of haughty superiority re–
garding things and men. She abuses the adjectives "grotesque" and
"farcical." She seems to try hard not to see the dramas of conscience that
tore at men who were Dreyfusards out of concern for truth, and conser–
vatives or militarists out of conviction. As interpreted by Mme. Arendt,
the Dreyfus Affair leaves an equivocal impression on the French reader:
an excess of rationalization on the one hand and a disdain for simple
mortals on the other makes for the presentation of a grimacing humanity.
Picquard and Clemenceau are about the only ones to escape her histori–
an's rigor. English readers have the same difficulty recognizing their own
country's imperialists in the images Mme. Arendt has offered them. Her
mixture of German metaphysics, subtle sociology, and moral vituperations
ends up exaggerating the qualities and the faults of men and regimes (are
all men truly unhappy in a totalitarian regime?), substituting for real
history a history that is at every moment ironic or tragic. The Jews are
persecuted at the very moment they have lost all real influence; South
Africa is conquered at the very moment it no longer holds any strategic
worth; superfluous individuals and superfluous capitals go off in quest of
that most superfluous of goods, gold.. . . Each one of her theses probably
contains an element of truth. Yet they could be expressed in a way that
would remove from each one, through the cunning of reason, a part of
the disproportionate credence that Mme. Arendt seems ready to give
them.
In the first two parts of her book, Mme. Arendt writes as an historian
and a sociologist. She multiplies explanations for events in accordance
with their circumstances. Weare inclined to accept her explanations in
their particulars rather than as a whole. In the book's third part, her
method changes. Totalitarianism is not to be explained by social or eco–
nomic data.
It
is rather a regime, one unprecedented in history whose
essence itself needs to be grasped. In order to understand the behavior of
Hitlerites and Stalinists, one must grasp their ideology and not allow
oneself to be taken with shallow, pragmatic interpretations. For example,
the requisitioning of transportation during wartime for the extermination
of the]ews is absurd if the primary goal was victory. The collectivization
of agriculture in the Soviet Union is absurd, in light of the fact that it en-
