WILLIAM PHILLIPS
365
Intellect~/als ,
who in the fifties reversed his earlier pure stand and said that
it was necessary to follow the Stalinists in the fight against fascism. I was
in Paris for a few months during that period, and while I was part of a
small, beseiged community that included Raymond Aron, Albert Camus,
Manes Sperber, Saul Bellow, Czeslaw Milosz, H.
J.
Kaplan, Mary
McCarthy, and Robert Rousset, I actually was not aware of many of the
worst grovelling statements made by French intellectuals.
The rationalizations, deceits, falsifications, and lies ranged over a
wide area of debased apologetics. The list includes almost every variety of
intellectual abdication. Among the modes of argument used by Sartre
and the other French Stalinists were: the apotheosis of history, of which
the Communists were of course the embodiment; the virtues of violence
and revolution; the sacred mission of the workers; the presumed lack of
viable political alternatives; the contempt for the bourgeoisie; the her–
itage of the French Revolution; the dismissal of liberalism; the admira–
tion of Stalin's power; the belief that despite the faults of the
Communists and the Soviet regime, they were the only viable carriers of
human liberation; and of course the justification of the means by false
ends . Judt also points out the lack of confidence in themselves, and in–
deed, the self-laceration of the French intellectuals, and the double stan–
dards they applied to the Soviet Union and to the Western democracies.
Judt says that the Soviet apologists did not include all the educated
classes and the intelligentsia as a whole, only the most famous and ar–
ticulate. However, I must say that my impression during my stay in Paris
was that I was in a Moscow suburb. Perhaps this impression was created
to some extent by the fact that the Communists controlled the CGT,
the largest French union of workers. However, it is clear that though
the Stalinization of the intellectuals was much more extensive in France
than in the United States, many of the same false arguments were used by
the Stalinist supporters in this country. What was missing here was any
corresponding take-over of intellectual life similar to that which had
occurred in France , the strength of the tradition of the French
Revolution, and of course French rhetoric. Lacking too in America was
the same kind of control of the large labor unions, a point that Judt
strangely does not play up.
Clearly, Judt's exhaustive analysis of the French intellectual situation
in the fifties is of enormous historical interest. But its lessons are also per–
tinent today. For many of the current liberation movements employ ar–
guments similar to those used by the French Stalinist intellectuals. As
Trotsky once said of Stalin, they assume what they have to prove. They
assume, for instance, that simply being on the left is by definition more
moral, truer, more viable, and that, accordingly, anything on the conser-
