ANNIE COHEN-SOLAL
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working on a grand scale in a magnificent setting and in what
amounted to a virtual Embassy of my own. My deputy was Anne
Minor, a lawyer who had sought refuge in the United States. She
worked tirelessly to ease those tensions. I tried hard to stay above
the fray, and was a poor cultural counselor, as little involved as pos–
sible. Finally, there was an incident with General de Benouville.
After that, I told myself that I was ill-suited for this kind of busi–
ness. I had just finished writing
Les structures eLementaires de La
parente,
and returned to France.
Other French intellectuals of Levi-Strauss's generation had a variety of
experiences during the war-participation in the Resistance, exile, depor–
tation, death. Nizan and Cavailles were dead. Desanti and Merleau-Ponty
had moved to the unoccupied zone and fought in the Resistance; Ray–
mond Aron had gone to London. His six years in the United States had
set Levi-Strauss apart. Armed with a very diverse and innovative intellec–
tual perspective, he came back to the French social sciences to note an
even wider gap between France and the United States. Its education, orga–
nization, resources, and men were all dilapidated. Even the Durkheimian
school of sociology had been decapitated. The old generation was gone.
Whatever intellectual baggage Levi-Strauss had acquired in the
United States could never have been acquired without the war. As it
was, few would have been able to take advantage of this extraordinary
situation. Levi-Strauss's intellectual character, much like his origins in
the intellectual bourgeoisie, was curious, flexible, and versatile. He had
both a solid understanding of his French identity and an incredible
receptivity for everything new. By surrendering to the city's organic
maelstrom and achieving symbiosis with its urban chaos, he had been
professor, researcher, cultural administrator, anthropologist, and collec–
tor; and he thrived on the many bridges that linked worlds as yet uncon–
nected in France. New York had offered him a wealth of experiences
and encounters and had opened up a range of possibilities.
Was it easy for Levi-Strauss to come back to France with this Amer–
ican model in mind, at a time when the majority of French intellectuals'
sympathies were with the communists and stubbornly resisted every–
thing American? Was it comfortable to be an unconventional intellec–
tual, too idealistic for Americans, too innovative for the French, too
literary for some and too erudite for others?
In
Paris, after the interest
for structuralism had passed, he had to face its adversaries. He stated:
"Educated people in France have bulimia; they have gobbled up struc–
turalism. This rejection of structuralism was accompanied by a return
