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PARTISAN REVIEW
general elections. Whether to count undergraduates of, say, departments
of veterinary medicine is a moot point. (It has been different in the third
world.) It is even more doubtful now, eighty years later, when universi–
ties produce twenty or thirty times as many graduates, or even more.
But whether intellectuals are defined in a narrow or wider sense does
not greatly affect their political orientation. Very few non-Jewish intel–
lectuals left Germany after Hitler came to power (or Italy under Mus–
solini). The record of the French intelligentsia during the Nazi period
was no page of glory.
Collaboration in the smaller West European countries was less
marked. But there had been sneaking admiration for fascism (more for
Italian than German) even in the
1920S;
the ambivalent attitude of
G. B. Shaw, H. G. Wells, and others is well known. To the extent that
there was a critical attitude it was directed against democracy, and in
particular the parliamentary system, which was widely believed to have
failed . There were appeals for strong leadership and contempt for polit–
ical parties. Anti-Americanism was not confined
to
the extremists;
Robert (no relation to Raymond) Aron and Arnaud Dandieu wrote a
book in
1931
entitled
The American Cancer,
which gave rise to a whole
literature along these lines.
A swing to the left came in the wake of the world economic crisis, the
rise of fascism, and the emergence of the Soviet Union as a world power.
There was support for Spain and protests against the dictators. But to
support the Soviet Union at the time of the great purges and the blatant
cult of personality of Stalin was not easy for intellectuals, and it became
less easy with every year that passed. After the Hitler-Stalin Pact only
hardliners could muster the enthusiasm to stick by the party line.
During World War II a great deal of sympathy for the Soviet Union
was generated in France, Italy, and the United States. The Soviet Union,
after all, played the decisive part in the war against Nazism. But credit
rapidly dwindled as Stalin pushed the Soviet sphere of influence west–
wards and, more important, perhaps, as it appeared that the great dawn
of freedom which so many had expected in the Soviet Union did not
materialize after the war.
Why did this bother French and Italian intellectuals much less than
Americans? Germany was an exception at the time because it was in the
forefront of the Cold War. Britain was less affected by the wave of pro–
Sovietism than France and Italy, partly perhaps because of the less ide–
ological character of British society, partly because there was no bad
conscience with regard to collaboration and passivity during the war,
and partly because Britain still tried to playa role in world politics and
