JEAN-FRAN<;::OIS SIRINELLI
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rounds in a daydream, taking no notice of things as they are, or detached
from this reality-or worse, when he is sleepwalking. In this view, Aron
thought history while Sartre dreamt it. Such reproaches, made recently, are
all the more powerful, since this man was, for decades, the quintessential
French intellectual. When Leonid Pliouchth, for example, reproaches
French scholars for their "self-hypnosis" regarding the Soviet Union, he
adds this commentary to his criticism: "To my eyes, Sartre symbolizes this
perversion of the mind, the rejection of reality and refuge-taking in a
political dream; the mass of words in the face of reality and pretty speech–
es are no more than theater, since reality is masked." On the other hand,
adds Pliouchth, "for myself, and for many dissidents, the thought of Camus
is courageous, though tragic. Camus is truth; Sartre falsification."
Fifteen years after his death, the case of Sartre continues to exert a
powerful presence, and analysis often swings between hagiography and
polemic. In any case, this implicit debate in the matter of his relationship
with history has no application to the years of his youth: whether a lucid
and vigilant guardian in the face of oppression or an irresponsible som–
nambulist, the issue only comes up in the period where Sartre has already
evolved into an intellectual
engage.
This was preceeded by long years of
profound civic inactivity. This prolonged political abstinence is itself a his–
torical exhibit: the Young Sartre, or the Non-temptation of History.
The task of the historian is to attempt to exhume the scraps of the past
and make sense of them without, in doing so, holding his hat in his hand,
or venting invective from his lips. In the same way that Marc Bloch
entreated scholars of the French Revolution with a vigorous
"Robespierrists, Anti-Robespierrists, we cry 'Mercy!' Tell us simply: who
was Robespierre?" We may soberly ask the same question with regard to
their political involvements, about Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Aron,
without driving some to despair or inspiring others to rapture. The histo–
rian of great intellectuals may strive to work in good conscience without
being immediately suspected of Pantheon-building or its opposite; this is,
in fact, a further goal to be set for ourselves, inasmuch as a history of intel–
lectuals is laden wi th ideological baggage. The historian who lowers his
guard risks yielding his place to the moralist.
To execute a serene history-not to say a sterile one-is never an easy
task, but especially not when one is working on Jean-Paul Sartre and
Raymond Aron in an era when their aura remains powerful, and where
one or the other of them continues to embody the posthumous quintes–
sence of one of two opposing camps in the recent history of intellectuals.
This is because the chronological proximity of the object presents the
problem of sympathy, particularly for the historian. This last element, in the
etymologically strict sense of the word, cannot be dispensed with,
