JEAN-FRAN(:OIS SIR1NELLI
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proto-Communists or proto-Maurrasians: the poli tical center of gravi ty,
as we shall see, lay elsewhere. But at the same time it is accurate to speak
of the tragic history of a generation which, born at the turn of the cen–
tury, was immensely fortunate in being spared all but a couple of years of
World War
I.
This history is anything but innocent: the perils brought by
the thirties, then the ordeal of the War and the Occupation brought with
them the first series of breakers that would cause the destinies of many
schoolmates of Sartre and Aron to founder. In this crisis this generation
came to prominence as the new guard of forty-somethings that take up
the course begun by the Liberation and occupy center stage, with Sartre
soon becoming its leader. Yet here again history soon moves on, as the
East-West split and the subsequent wars of decolonization introduce a
new line of cleavage. It is this second series of rifts that will eventually
scuttle the Sartre-Aron friendship. Indeed, the two men then find them–
selves the intellectual figureheads of competing, newly-formed camps.
Hence the intellectual generation of 1905, of which Jean-Paul Sartre
and Raymond Aron ultimately become the eponymous heroes, was divid–
ed by a series-indeed, an entire network-of fault lines that ultimately left
little opportunity for friendship. As Aron notes in 1956 at the age of fifty,
"the fact that no friendships in our generation could stand up to divergences
in political opinion, and that friends,
if
they were not to part ways, had to
undergo political changes together, is both understandable and sad."
This excursion into the notion of a generation was necessary for a jus–
tification of our choice of Sartre and Aron as subjects. Obviously,
intellectual history is marked with many other duels, particularly during
the Cold War; it is just that Sartre and Aron were exactly the same age, that
they were friends and, even more importantly, emerged from the same
intellectual mold. From that point on, the comparative history of their
respective courses through the century is more than <?ne of a shattered
friendshi p; it is the reflection of the dominant ideological phases of twen–
tieth-century France.
Certain precautions are called for in examining a subject as dense as
this one. First, one must keep in mind that this period of history, chrono–
logically close as it may be to our own, still belongs to another epoch,
before the advent of the "videosphere," to use Regis Dubray's term. This
was an age when intellectuals, through their debate, helped to clarify the
stakes in the larger national debates. Furthermore, the enterprise of retro–
spective imagination requires all the more effort as a result of the
dissolution of the grand global ideologies and the concomitant dislocation
of the moral credit and influence once wielded by intellectuals.
This meant more than a mere rearrangement of the furniture. Sartre
and Aron exchanged roles: while Sartre gradually came to take up a
