Tony Judt The burden of responsibility : Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French 20th C, Introduction

© 1998 by The University of Chicago

Judi, Tony.

The burden of responsibility : Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French twentieth century / Tony Judi.

PREFACE / VII

INTRODUCTION / 

ONE / LEON BLUM AND THE PRICE OF COMPROMISE

TWO / ALBERT CAMUS AND THE DISCOMFORTS OF AMBIVALENCE

THREE /RAYMOND ARON AND THE WAGES OF REASON

FURTHER READING / 183

INDEX

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PREFACE

These essays were originally conceived for the Bradley Lectures at the University of Chicago, and I am grateful to the Bradley Foundation and to Professor Robert Pippin. chair of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, for the opportunity they afforded inc to develop some of my thoughts on France and French intellectuals.

New York University generously gave me leave to work on this and other projects, and some of that leave was spent in 1995 as the guest of the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (IWM) in Vienna, where my stay was supported in part by a grant from the Volkswagen Foundation. 1 am grateful to these institutions for their support, and to the director of the IWM, Professor Kryzstof Michalski, for his unfailing hospitality. My editor at the University of Chicago Press, T. David Brent, has been tolerant and supportive despite having had to wait rather longer for this book than originally anticipated.

Versions of the essays on Albert Camus and Raymond Aron were pre­sented at Northwestern University, Michigan State University, McGill University, and the University of Vienna, as well as at the University of Chicago itself, in public lectures and in seminars. Audiences and partici­pants at these events, and my own students at the Institute of French Stud­ies at New York University, offered many criticisms and suggestions, and this is a better book for their contribution. Its idiosyncracies and errors are of course my own.

In quoting from the work of my three subjects I have taken the liberty of translating them anew in almost every case, rather than using existing English-language versions. Where this is not the case, I have indicated as much in the notes. Full reference to the original source, and some sugges­tions for further reading, can be found in the notes and in a short biblio­graphical note, "Further Reading," at the end.

This book is dedicated to the memory of François Furet. It was at his invitation that I initially agreed to prepare these lectures, and with his en­thusiastic encouragement that 1 devoted them to Slum, Camus, and Aron. Furet was an admirer of all three men, though his links, intellectual and personal, were of course clgsest to Raymond Aron. He directed the insti­tute in Paris named after Aron, and when he died he was at work on a study of Alexis (IC Tocqueville, perhaps Aron's favorite French thinker. But Furet was in some measure the natural heir of Slum and Camus no less than Aron. His scholarly work on the history of the French Revolution, rejecting first the Marxist interpretation and then the newly conventional "cultural history," assured him academic opposition on both sides of the Atlantic. His courageous condemnation of the political cant of his age, whether "anti-anti-Communist" or "multicultural," made him political en­emies in France and abroad. And his growing influence upon public under­standing of the French past aroused his opponents to paroxysms of resent­ment, notably on the occasion of the bicentenary of the Revolution, when attacks on Furet and his "school" took on a markedly personal and ad homi-neni character.

All this would have been very familiar to the men to whom these es­says are devoted. Like them, François Furet was a public intellectual whose qualities as an "insider" did not prevent him being treated at various times and in various circles as an outsider and even a renegade. Like them, he went against the grain, in Fureifs case twice over: first by undermining and recasting the history of the Revolution, France's national "foundation myth," and then by publishing, late in life, an enormously influential essay on Communism, the myth (or illusion, in Furet's words) of the twentieth century. Like them, he was at times better appreciated abroad than at home. And like them, his influence and ideas have triumphed over his critics and will surely outlast them. It has been widely observed that there was not and is not a Furet school of French history. But then there is no Aron school of French social thought, no Camus school of French moral­ists, no Slum school of French social democracy. These men did not stand for some contending version of French intellectual or political engage­ment; they stood, in the end, only for themselves and what they believed. And that is why, in time, they have come to stand for much of what is best in France.

..Jstory is not written as it was experienced nor should it be. The inhabi­tants of the past know better than we do what it was like to live there, but they were not well placed, most of them, to understand what was happen­ing to them and why. Whatever imperfect explanation that we can offer for what took place before our time depends upon the advantages of hind­sight, even though that same hindsight is itself an insuperable impediment to complete empathy with the history we are trying to understand. The shape of past events depends upon a perspective taken in place and in time; all such shapes are partial truths, though some acquire a more lasting credi­bility.

We know this intuitively because it best describes the protean profile of our own lives. But the moment we recognize that it is also true for others, and that their version of our life is also partly plausible, we are forced to concede that there may be an infinity of possible explanations of multiply intersecting and overlapping individual pasts. For social and psychological convenience we live with a recognized common version of the trajectory of individual lives—our own and those of our friends, colleagues, and ac­quaintances. But this lowest common denominator of identity works in large measure because we do not, most of the time, have good reason to interrogate the narrative we have assigned to ourself or to others. Except at moments of unusual crisis we don't engage in intrusive experimental questioning of our present relationship to the person we once were; and for most of us such efforts to unpack the nature and meaning of our pasts take up a very small share of our waking hours. It is easier, and safer, to proceed as though these matters were settled. And even if we did choose to wonder, incessantly and unhealthily, who we were and are and how we came to be that way and what we should do in the light of the conclusions we reach from such self-investigation, nothing very much would change in our rela‑

tionship to most other people, whose own worlds would continue largely unaffected by such narcissistic musings on our part.

But what is true of individuals is not true of nations. The meaning to be assigned to a common history, its implications for relations within and between states in the presen, the moral and ideological standing of alter­native and mutually exclusive accounts of collective behavior and deci­sions in the distant or recent past, are the most contested of all national terrains; and it is the past that is almost always at issue, even when the present or future is ostensibly under discussion. In many places the nation itself exists in large measure just by virtue of such quarrels; there is no one agreed or conceded version of the collective past that can come out of such efforts to instrumentalize it, because it IS the very disagreements themselves that constitute the fundamental identity of the community.

This is a distinctively modern affair. In empires, states, and communi­ties of the more distant past there were not, under normal circumstances, competing sources of political authority, nor were there incommensurable accounts of who might exercise power and why. History, as a source of pres­ent legitimacy, was unitary—and thus, in the sense that we now experience it, was not history at all. Most people who have at one time lived on this planet had no autonomous access to their history. Their version of how they came to he what they were was parochial and functional, and was inseparable from the larger story as told by those who ruled over them—a story of which they were in any case only vaguely aware. So long as power and authority remained the monopoly of a family, a caste, an estate, or a theocratic elite, the dissatisfactions of the present and even the expecta­tions for the future remained in thrall to a version of the common past that might sometimes be resented but faced no subversive competition.

All of this changed with the revolutionary upheavals that gave rise to politics as we now know it. In order to render credible and legitimate the claims and promises of a postrevolutionary order, it was necessary to estab­lish that, just like the men and the order that they had displaced, the new­comers had a story to tell about the history of the society and state they wanted to rule. And since that story had above all to justify the uniquely disruptive course of events that had brought about this change, it needed not only to assert its own claim but to disqualify utterly that of the old order. Modem political power thus rested upon a particular assertion about history; as a result, history became political.

This development is usually and rightly associated with the era of the French Revolution, and more precisely with that Revolution itself. For not only did the French revolutionaries themselves understand quite well the fundamentally disjunctive nature of their undertakings; their heirs and op­ponents respected that intuition by treating the Revolution itself as the proper and primary terrain for historical dispute. Whoever "controlled" the understanding of the French Revolution controlled France, or at any rate was in a position to set the terms of disputes over political legitimacy in post-Revolutionary France. The meaning of French history in the decade that followed the "seizure" of the Bastille in 1789 provided the essential coordinates of political theory and practice not just for Marx and his suc­cessors but for Tocquevilk and the liberal descent as well as for Joseph de Maistre and his counterrevolutionary heirs. And not only in France—the "proper" interpretation of the French Revolution set the ideological agenda for radical and reactionary speculation throughout the world for much of the two centuries that followed.

But it was in France that the Revolution happened, and it is not alto­gether a matter of chance that the most enduring and divisive effects upon the practice of politics and public life have been felt in the Revolution's place of birth. France is the oldest unitary nation-state in Europe. The rev­olutionaries of the late eighteenth century thus already had a lot of history to claim. Since then, the events of the Revolution and their domestic con­sequences have provided a uniquely rich loam from which to harvest dis­sent, disagreement, and division, all made more contentious and conflicted for being fought out on a territory and over a population whose geographi­cal, institutional, and linguistic identity was long since confirmed and fixed.

The contrast with France's European neighbors is quite striking. The divisions and enmities within Germany or Italy that led to civil conflicts and political disasters either predated the coming of a nation-state or were pathologies of early statehood. To be sure, there are German and Italian disputes about the status and interpretation of the common past, and some of these resemble French disagreements. But they frequently concern not intra-German or intra-Italian pasts but diverging understandings of local or regional pasts that only quite recently became part of a single national German or Italian history (to considerable regret, in some instances). Fur­ther east and southeast the national past before 1939. or 1919, or 1878

6 INTRODUCTION THE MISJUDGMENT OF PARIS 7

often had and has only a "virtual" existence, and historical disputes are fought out over terrain that is not so much political as mythical, though none the less bloody for that.

France, then, is distinctive. It is symptomatic that it should be the only country that has seen the appearance of a major series of scholarly publica­tions devoted to its own tieux de tnémoire—those "sites of memory" that collectively represent the national understanding of its own heritage. Of even greater symbolic interest is the fact that whereas La République and La Nation are dealt with in four medium-sized volumes, the editor felt con­strained to devote three huge tomes to Les France, with the largest section being given over to "Conflicts and Divisions," It would be hard to conceive of a similar scholarly monument to the common historical memory of any other European nation-state, difficult to see why it would require six thou­sand pages to achieve its purpose, and highly unlikely that quite so much of that space would have to he devoted to explaining the pasts that divide its citizens.' It is the tension between the intuitive obviousness of French unity and the depth and endurance of the quarrels that have divided France in modem times that is most characteristic of the country and its past.

In the twentieth century the three most widely remarked-upon symp­toms of France's disunited condition have been the enduring quarrels within and between the families of the political Left and Right; the regime of Vichy and its polluting impact upon the national moral environment for decades to come; and the chronic instability of political institutions, reproducing that of the previous century just as the latter in its turn had echoed and played out the political and constitutional struggles of the rev­olutionary decade itself. In the forty years from the end of World War One through the Algerian war, France experienced four different constitutional regimes, running the gamut from parliamentary republic to authoritarian gerontocracy; in the third of these regimes, the Fourth Republic, there was on average one government for every six months of its brief, fourteen-year life.

All three of these symptoms of what observers and historians took to calling the "French disease" derived directly from contested understandings of the past in general and the French Revolutionary legacy in particular. Left and Right were terms whose use and application dated from the ideolog‑

x See Pierre Nam, ed., Les Lieux de rnemorre, 7 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1984-92) ical topography of the revolutionary assemblies; divisions within these two families orbited around variant interpretations of the lessons to be learnt from that Revolution and the degree of one's fervor for it or against it. Typically, the dispute between Socialists and Communists in France hinged on mutually exclusive claims to the inheritance and mantle of the "unfin­ished" business of the bourgeois Revolution; and it was appropriate that one of the few themes on which the denizens of Pétain's "National Revolu­tion" could initially agree was their wish to unmake the Revolution and its heritage. As for French inability to construct a stable and broadly accept­able system of parliamentary or presidential rule, it had very little to do with the nature of French society, which for much of the period was distin­guished by its self-sufficient, conservative stability. What was unstable was the consensus on how to govern this society, a result of the serial discredit­ing of alternative constitutional models and forms of political power be­tween 1789 and the advent of the Third Republic a century later.

The quarrels of Left and Right and the related problem of political instability seemed to many observers during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century to he the most important and urgent of France's difficul­ties, just because their roots lay so deep in competing political memories and versions of the "true" French path. To participants themselves, of course, it was not the instability or the conflicts that caused trouble, but rather the intractable refusal of their political opponents to see the world their way. As for ideological quarrels, these seemed to their protagonists to be so obviously of the first importance that attention to other concerns was at best casual and fleeting. Today this appears odd, a curiosity of a time long past. But just a few decades ago, French public life was occupied and preoccupied with doctrinal language and quarreling to the occasional near-exclusion of anything else. This was true of the ideological Right until its discredit in the abyss of Vichy, and would remain true of the Left well into the 1970s.

There are, though, other ways of thinking about France's recent his­tory, less dependent upon the lens and language of the revolutionary past. The conventional institutional chronology, with its turning points in io, 1944-46 and 1958,  is vulnerable to the charge that it underestimates the direction and timing of social and economic transformation. An alterna­tive narrative would emphasize remarkable social continuity—and accom­panying economic stagnation—from the mid-nineteenth century into the

8 INTRODUCTION THE MISJUDGMENT OF PARIS 9

early 195os. France remained—above all in the self-perception of its in-habitants—a rural, agricultural society, with an uncommonly low rate of population growth and a marked preference for continuity over the sorts of changes that were transforming its neighbors in the same era.

From one perspective this propensity for preserving the past in the face of a threatening present—reinforced by the experience of World War I, which propelled the nation into two decades of nostalgic denial—served the country well. France survived the interwar depression without the eco­nomic collapse and accompanying political paroxysms experienced by other continental states. But from a different angle the national inclination to blinkered archaism, the distaste for modernization and reform, contrib­uted to the coming of Vichy, whose promise of  return to premodern values and institutions echoed all too reassuringly the instincts of the political class and the electorate alike. And it was not the postwar Fourth Republic per se but rather new international realities and opportunities, recognized by a younger generation of bureaucrats and administrators in spite of the ignorance of their political masters, that propelled France after the mid. fifties into an unprecedented onrush of economic, demographic, and so­cial change.

Another version of the years 1930-70 has France caught in a three-way struggle between a timid and unadventurous society, an incompetent and divided political class, and a small core of civil servants, scholars, and businessmen, frustrated at the country's stagnation and decline. In this per­spective the Popular Front of 5936, whatever its ideological patina, was above all a first, faltering step toward the overhaul of the country's eco­nomic institutions and system of government. Doomed to misfire in the supercharged political atmosphere of the thirties, the drive for change was paradoxically picked up again by some junior participants in the Vichy "ex­periment." Under the cover of the National Revolution and the abolition of parliamentary constraint upon administrative initiative, they over­hauled parts of the local and national governing apparatus—their efforts bearing unacknowledged fruit in the achievements of the modernizing ministries of the next decade. Only after 1958 with the Fifth Republic—and even then occasionally against the wishes of its founder—did social change, administrative renewal, and political institutions come into line, with the result that France was able to overcome its "disease" and experi­ence "normal" economic and political life.

What most strikes the historian of today is how little the contemporary sense of France's dilemmas and choices in the first two-thirds of our century was affected by any of these alternative narratives. The contrast between archaism and modernity, a theme in scholarly (and especially foreign) anal­yses of France from the late forties on, was rarely mentioned by French politicians or public commentators. And when it was invoked, it was often in order to praise the country and its people for having avoided the disrup­tions that had brought such sorrow to France's neighbors, and whose ulti­mate risks and outcome could be seen with frightening clarity across the Atlantic.

Similarly, it occurred to very few French public figures to speculate on alternatives to the conventional Left/Right, republican/authoritarian dis­position of the French past and present. This was partly through a lack of imagination, but mostly because persons who entertained such thoughts had tended to end badly. Even the most imaginative and critical republi­cans of the late nineteenth century were not disposed to think kindly of constitutional revision, despite the manifest shortcomings of the Third Re­publican system of politics and government, for fear of association with the praetorian goals of Marshal MacMahon, General Boulanger, and (still a fresh memory) Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. Their trepidation was con­firmed after 1918: many of the most intelligent (and politically frustrated) interwar critics of doctrinal and political rigidity in France—as else-where—notoriously ended up in the fascist or neofascist camp.

Right-wing thinkers and politicians, in a roughly parallel process of reasoning, regarded almost any concession to the representatives of the radical Republican tradition as a harbinger of compromise with extreme acohinism and thus a betrayal of their own past loyalties—an illusion en­couraged both by moderate socialists who chose to present themselves as true revolutionaries, and by Communists whose legitimacy depended upon their aggressive claim to have inherited all that was most extreme in the language and ambitions of the Revolutionary tradition. Even after the Oc­cupation of 1940-44, and the discrediting of a large part of the conserva­tive political inheritance, the political Left was no better placed to exorcise its demons. Once Pétain and Vichy had refreshed people's memories of the dangers of unrestricted presidential authority, especially when exercised by former general officers, it took another generation before most French poli­ticians and political analysts could think clearly about the advantages of

10 INTRODUCTION THE MISJUDGMENT OF PARIS II

efficient executive authority, and learn to distinguish it in principle from a permanent coup d'etat.

In twentieth-century France, then, history and memory conspired to exclude any sustained attention to what now appear to have been the country's true dilemmas—one of them being precisely the intolerable bur­den of competing pasts. The contribution of intellectuals was significant in this respect. It is not necessary here to describe once again the prominence of intellectuals in the public life of twentieth-century France; the point has been made well and often enough by intellectuals themselves, who in re­cent years have been the most assiduous and enthusiastic narrators of their own contribution to the national story. But it is not by chance that most histories of intellectual life and writings in France cleave quite closely to the conventional narrative of political history: for it was intellectuals who contributed more than most to the self-understanding of modem France in just those conventional terms.

One reason for this is that the history of intellectual participation in public life was circumscribed by just those occasions when it seemed in­cumbent on writers, teachers, and thinkers to choose sides, to align them­selves with one or other side in the great national conflicts. To he for or against Dreyfus; to be an international socialist or an integral nationalist in the years before World War 1; to be Fascist or anti-Fascist in the thirties; to stand with Resistance or Collaboration during the Occupation years; to choose between Communism and "capitalism,' East and West, in the Cold War; to favor decolonization or the defense of empire; to advocate radical antiauthoritarian politics (at home and abroad) or firm presidential gov-eminent; and always and everywhere to be Left or Right: these were the terms in which intellectuals defined themselves and thus contributed to defining and confirming French public debate for most of the past century. The very idea of an intellectual who did not think in these terms, or chose to transgress them, or to disengage from such public identifications altogether seemed a contradiction in terms.

Even the best-known critique of intellectual engagement, Julien Ben-da's 1927 essay La Trahison des clercs, trails its coat in this respect. Benda's principal target was the nationalist writers and publicists associated with Charles Maurras's Action francaise. We tend to forget today how prominent this school of thinkers was, from the early twentieth century through 1940, and how much it thus seemed to Benda that an attack on intellectuals for betraying their proper role of detached seekers after truth must begin with the leading thinkers of the Right. But Benda did not wish to suggest that public engagement itself was wrong, simply that it should be the outcome of independent reasoning in good faith.

What was wrong with Maun-a.s and his followers was that they began with the hypothesis that France and the French nation came first and must always be put first, a premise that (in Benda's view) vitiated any effort at dispassionate individual reflection and moral choice. With the experience and example of the Dreyfus affair always in mind. Benda argued that the task of the intellectual is to seek justice and truth, to protect the rights of individuals—and then to proceed accordingly when it came to aligning oneself with one side or another in the great choices of the age.

But once justice, truth, and rights themselves fell victim to ideological definition in the course of the thirties, Benda's distinction lost its meaning and lacked any detached point of reference—as we may see from Benda's own emergence after the Liberation as a resolutely engaged fellow-traveler of the Left, defending the show trials in Stalinist eastern Europe on just the same grounds that he had once castigated in the moral "relativist?' of the nationalist Right. What had then seemed the height of cynical irresponsi-bility—the alignment of some of France's best-known writers behind the cause of the nationalist Right to the exclusion of any concern with the truth about individual cases—now became the very definition of responsi­ble engagement when attached to a similarly exclusive resort to collective authority now advanced by the internationalist Left.

Most twentieth-century French intellectuals, then, are not a very in­structive guide to what was happening in the France of their times, since so much of their writings merely reflected back into the public sphere the country's own long-standing political divisions. With the abusive assis­tance of hindsight, however, we can perhaps recast the chronology of intel­lectuals and politics alike, availing ourselves of the notion of responsibility with which intellectuals from Zola to Sartre were indeed familiar, but as­signing it a distinctly different and more normative meaning from that con­ventionally employed in histories of intellectual behavior, where it is taken as synonymous with "engagement."'

2. This topic is adumbrated in my earlier hook, Past Imperfect (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Pres. l992), but only in relation to a group of writers whose "irresponsibility' (in this sense) was my concern there. The subjects of the present hook rook the notion of responsibility altogether more seriously, which is why they are so interesting.

12 INTRODUCTION THE MISJUDGMENT OF PARIS 13

From the end of World War I until the middle of the 1970s, French public life was shaped and misshaped by three overlapping and intersecting forms of collective and individual irresponsibility. The first of these was political. Reading the history of interwar France, one is struck again and again by the incompetence, the insouciance and the culpable negligence of the men who governed the country and represented its citizens. This is not a politi­cal observation, in the partisan sense, but rather a cultural one. The députés and senators of all parties, the presidents, prime ministers, ministers, gener­als. civil servants, mayors, and party managers, from Communists to mon­archists, displayed a striking lack of understanding of their times and their place. The policies they advocated—when they had something to advo-cate—were partisan in the narrowest sense, which is to say that they drew only upon the traditions and interests of a narrow segment of the commu­nity and made no serious effort to appeal beyond that segment when pre­senting themselves for election or appointment.

Why this should have been so is an interesting question, since France had not lacked for imaginative and forceful national leaders in earlier years. The Third Republic before 1918 had brought forth Gambetta, Ferry, Jaurès, Poincaré, and Clemenceau. But the ossification of political institutions, re­inforced by the national trauma of World War I, gave to the interwar Re­public a petrified quality, like a rabbit caught stunned and motionless in the headlights of history. In domestic affairs the country was torn between a yearning for the (misremembered) prosperity and stability of the prewar years and a promise of reform and renewal to be paid for our of German financial penance. Halfhearted postwar attempts at radical change, backed by widespread mass pressure for improved working conditions and social services, fell victim to a polarized political culture in which any institu­tional or economic reform was treated as a zero-sum game and thus energet­ically and effectively opposed by a coalition of presumptively threatened interests. The rhetoric of the Popular Front, and the response it aroused in its nervous, credulous opponents, took this polarization to ever greater heights.

As for foreign policy, this rested first on the illusion of French postwar power (itself drawing on the no-less-illusory proposition that France had somehow emerged from the war a victor); then, when the withdrawal of the Americans and the disengagement of the British left the French diplo­matically vulnerable, on the fond hopes of collective security through the League of Nations; and finally, the League having proved a rubber crutch, upon a retreat by the French military and political leadership not so much to a position of hopeful appeasement (which implies a degree of strategy and initiative) as to one of disabused pessimism—of which the most telling symbol was Edouard Daladier returning from Munich in 1938, aware that he had abandoned Czech and French national interests alike and expecting a torrent of patriotic abuse, only to be greeted upon his return, to his utter amazement, by cheering crowds of his relieved fellow-citizens. The defeat­ist, cynical, weary response of the French governing elite to the German military victory in 1940 was inscribed in the way they had governed the country for the previous two decades. The tired relief with which many of its elected representatives abandoned the Republic in July 1940 was at first a shock to some observers, but upon reflection they did not find it so very surprising.

The political irresponsibility of the rulers of Vichy France is well docu­mented now, depending as it did upon a wilful refusal to look honestly at their own weakness, the true aims of the occupiers, or the increasingly pre­dictable consequences of their initiatives and concessions. But no less re­markable was the continuing inadequacy of a significant part of the politi­cal class after the war, despite much talk of renewal and some serious efforts to implement it. The damaging political tactics of the French Communist Party were a distinctive problem, since by its very nature the PCF operated under criteria of responsibility and rationality that were not determined by French national interests or local political considerations. But the failure of the Socialists to rethink their doctrine and program, the widespread in­ability on all sides to recognize the changed and reduced place of France in a postwar world, the chronic parliamentary divisions and bickering, and the disastrously inadequate response to demands for independence in French colonies, all bespeak a continuing political failure to think disinter­estedly about the national interest.

That postwar France was saved from its political leaders, in a way that it could not be saved a decade earlier, was thanks to major postwar changes in international relations. A member of NATO, a beneficiary of the Mar­shall Plan, and increasingly integrated into the nascent European commu­nity, France was no longer dependent upon its own resources and decisions

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for its security and its prosperity, and the incompetence and errors of its rulers cost it far less than they had in earlier days.

If the era of political irresponsibility in France lasted from 1918 to 1958, the age of moral irresponsibility may be said to have begun in the mid-thirties and endured forrhe best part of four decades. At first sight, this seems an odd proposition, at least so far as it concerns intellectuals. Surely, between antifascist engagement, wartime resistance, postwar politi­cal idealism, and anticolonial agitation, the French, or at least some of them, were never more morally involved and committed than in these years. But the difficulty with that response is that it treats of this era of "engagement" exclusively in the terms in which it was experienced, nota­bly by those whose writings at the time and since have set the contours for our understanding of their behavior.

The most unambiguous example of apparent "moral responsibility" is that of intellectual antifascism in the thirties. It certainly represented a moment of political commitment on behalf of the forces of good against those of evil, as understood by those who made that commitment. But there were considerable numbers of men and women, including not a few intellectuals, who were as committed to fascism, whether in Italy, Spain, or even France itself, and for some of the same reasons. And since some of them would later reprogram themselves as intellectual anrifascists during and after the war, we do well to recall that what most characterized intel­lectual "responsibility" in pre—World War II Europe was not commitment to the Left, but commitment per se.

It is because the victors write the history that the degree of intellectu­als' engagement before World War II on the side of Integral nationalism or ideological fascism was rather forgotten for many years following the fascist defeat. Knowing this, and knowing the extent of the political and intellec­tual emigrations from Left to Right before 1940 and from Right to Left after 1942, we might do better to think of political engagement as a charac­teristic of the whole period.'

. Many intellectuals themselves had good reason to Ignore, or rewrite, the history of their own commitments in earlier days. This is far from being a distinctively French story, of course—witness the troubled (and until recently largely unacknowledged) his. tory of writers in interwar Romania, most of them admirers and advocates of the most unpleasant sorts of fanatical and anti-Semitic nationalism. This would not matter so much had not some of them—Cioran and Eliadc most notably—been so successful in presenting themselves to the West after the war in a quite different light.

In that light, the concept of moral irresponsibilit-y begins to make sense. It could take many forms. According to Jean-Paul Sartre's own version, in his notebooks from the "phony war" period, he spent the interwar years culpably unaware of what was happening around him, clinging to the apolitical pacifism born of World War I. Hence his later hyperengage-ment, a reaction above all to the risk of once again missing the vessel of History as it steamed past him in the night. Sartre's motives may have been personal, but the pattern was widespread. Adrift and uncertain in the storms of the thirties, some intellectuals and public figures avoided or neglected to cast in their lot with the defense of democracy; some made choices, but the "wrong" ones; others made the "right" choices, but late.

For any of the decisions thus taken, moral criteria were certainly in play. Men and women who declared themselves "defenders of Western civi­lization" or "antifascists," "resisters," "progressives," "anti-imperialists," and the like were making a moral judgment about the world and their responsi­bility in it, even if the particular political community to which they affili­ated preferred to legitimate its claims in historical, or economic, or aes­thetic terms and officially abhorred "moralizing." But once the decision was taken, the moral initiative was almost always abandoned, at least for a while. Political engagement, on any side, carried a price: the duty to pursue the logic of one's choice, in the face not just of opposition but of the unwel­come company in which one traveled and the troubling actions of one's own side.

This was the situation of intellectuals who went to Spain after 1936 and saw a little too well what their Communist or Franquist allies were doing of idealists for national renewal who saw the National Revolution of Laval and Pétain at close quarters; of resisters who watched the inadequate, partial, and often unjust score-settling that followed the Liberation of France; of fellow travelers who tried to swallow the defense offered for show trials and gulags in the socialist homelands; of anticolonialist writers who explained away the dictatorial and corrupt regimes that replaced ousted imperial authorities; and of ers-mondLsces of the sixties and seventies con­strained to understand and justify Mao's Cultural Revolution and Pol Pot's Cambodia.

One can, of course, recite a litany of examples of men and women who retained the intellectual courage and moral initiative to bear witness against the betrayal of their commitment: Georges Bernanos, for example,

16 INTRODUCTION THE MISJUDGMENT OP PARIS 17

or Margarete Buber-Neumann, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, lgnazio Si-lone, and Czeslaw Milosz—entries from the Almanach de Gotha of Euro­pean intellectual integrity in our times. What is perhaps harder to accept is that many of the better-known French intellectuals, not to speak of the lesser known, never made it onto this list.

I have written of intellectuals because they mattered in France, and because the moral liabilities that followed in the wake of political engagement were most readily associated with intellectuals, given their own emphasis upon the ethical dimension of their choices—and the presentation of such decisions as choices. But the abandonment of indivi­dual judgment and initiative, in the name of political responsibility—to a collective or political allegiance that comes over time to eviscerate and undermine the very notion of any distinctively moral responsibility at all—is not necessarily an attribute of intellectuals alone. Others were no less exposed to risk: Politicians, civil servants, soldiers, teachers, students were all vulnerable, in those years more perhaps than before or since.

There is, however, a distinctively intellectual sort of irresponsibility, which seems to have marked the whole period under consideration, though reaching its apogee in the postwar decades. This has less to do with the public choices intellectuals made, or the moral mess they got themselves into because of those choices, than with the very business of being an intel-lectual—the things that scholars, writers, novelists, journalists and others chose to think about and to invest their energies in understanding. And this brings us back to my earlier observation about the propensity of twentieth-century intellectuals in France to reflect and echo in the most conventional way the political and cultural fissures and conflicts around them, rather than contributing to the redirection of national attention on to other, more promising tracks.

The problems facing France in the first two-thirds of this century were camouflaged from common view for many reasons, some of which I have tried to suggest. But they were not inherently obscure, and their pathologi­cal symptoms were manifest, as any conventional account of recent French history can show. Foreign policy, military policy, economic policy were fre­quently adrift, often incompetent, and aggressively and destructively con­tested for much of this period. The constitutional dilemma distorted public life. The doctrinal divide—where ideological warfare substituted for atten­ tion to local realities, so that everything was politicized while few paid seri­ous attention to politics—monopolized analytical attention. The radical fallacy—in which the search for ultimate solutions displaced sustained attention to the costs of economic or social stagnation or the limits upon political action—continued to captivate writers and polemicists until the very eve of François Mitterrand's election to the presidency in 1981.

Why did most intellectuals pay so link attention to such matters until quite recently? In part, to be sure, because for the first half of this century public intellectuals were predominantly men of letters: novelists, poets, es­sayists, philosophers, whose contribution to public debates was often in­versely proportional to their knowledge of the matter under discussion. But in the course of the 19505 the literary intellectual was steadily replaced by the social scientists—historians, sociologists, anthropologists, psycholo-gists—without any obvious gain in the quality of public conversation. Whatever specialized knowledge might have been contributed by the grow­ing prominence of men and women with academic expertise in various disciplines was neutralized by the expectation that, as intellectuals, they should he able to speak about anything. Moreover, their continued engagement on one side or another of a politicized and divided culture meant that, however dispassionate the analytical objectivity they applied to their own work, their public pronouncements were keyed to a polemic in which expertise took second place to political or ideological affilia­tion.

In any case, the scholarly world itself was far from immune to polemi­cal and doctrinal alignments, so that the most prominent, and thus influential, representatives of the academic community were not neces­sarily the subtlest practitioners of their disciplines. The distorting effect of this process was most evident in and around 1968. when the visibi­lity and influence of certain prominent participants in debates over education, the media, and the national condition were a function of their popularity and their appeal to fashion inside the politicized academy itself.

The counterexamples to this pattern—scholars who concerned them­selves with the contemporary problems of France, who brought formal ex­pertise to bear on the analysis of national dilemmas or processes that others had not even noticed, and whose work prompted public recognition—were

18 INTRODUCTION THE MISJUDGMENT OF PARIS 19

rare enough that their most influential writings form unusual and curious features in the national intellectual landscape, like windswept menhirs on a Breton hilltop J.-F. Oravier's Paris et ledésertfrançais (iç), Henri Men-dras's La Fin des paysans (1967), Michel Crozier's La SocWL6 bloquée (1970). And even so it is unlikely that these or comparable works were much read by the better-known Parisian intellectuals.

This situation changed after the mid-seventies. The topics that had once excited and monopolized intellectual attention no longer seemed to matter very much, or had been damaged by the changed political climate, where the threshold of tolerance for violence and terror had been markedly lowered in the aftermath of the gauchiste fantasies of the late sixties. There followed, to be sure, an interlude during which the electronic media feasted on intellectuals' own absorption with the crimes and errors of men and ideas they had once idolized; but for most of the past two decades the more interesting thinkers in France have been seriously engaged with the choices and difficulties facing the country and the world they now live in.'

This book is about three Frenchmen who lived and wrote against the grain of these three ages of irresponsibility. They were very different men and would have been surprised to think of themselves as a group, yet they have something rather distinctive in common. All three played an important role in the France of their lifetime but lived at a slightly awkward tangent to their contemporaries. For much of his adult life each was an object of dislike, suspicion, contempt, or hatred for many of his peers and contempo­raries; only at the end of their long lives were Leon Blum and Raymond Aron, for quite different reasons, able to relax into the comfort of near-universal admiration, respect, and, in some quarters, adulation. Camus, who had experienced all three by the age of thirty-five, died twelve years later an insecure and much-maligned figure; it would be thirty years before his reputation would recover.

All three were cultural "insiders"; but their views and their pronounce­ments were frequently at odds with their time and place. And in certain

. Those French intellectuals who have nothing of interest to say on these matters now typically say It to—and fur—Americans. crucial respects they were also "outsiders." Blum and Aron were Jews. Though neither saw any reason to deny this, they made little of it; Aron, however, became more conscious of his Jewish identity and troubled by it as he advanced in years. But their Jewishness was not a matter of indiffer­ence to their many enemies, and in Blumn's case his unsolicited role as a lightning rod for modern French anti-Semitism makes his trajectory cen­tral for any understanding of this most neglected of national political pas­sions. Camus came from Algiers, which made him an outsider in more than one sense in the world of Parisian left-wing intellectuals where he found himself after his arrival in France early on in the war. He also lacked the mandarin educational credentials that defined and distinguished the lead­ing edge of the French intelligentsia whose hero and spokesman he never­theless, briefly, became.

But despite these marks 01 difference and distinction, and others that I discuss in the essays that follow, all three men forged a place for them­selves at the heart of modern French public life. Blum was not only a pres­ence on the fin de siècle Parisian literary scene and a reasonably prominent Dreyflisard intellectual by the age of twenty-six; he was also of course the leader of the French Socialist Party throughout the interwar era, the prime minister of a Popular Front government on two occasions in 1936 and 1938, the most important political enemy of the Vichy govern­ments, condemned to prison, trial, and deportation, a postwar prime minister, and France's most respected elder statesman until his death in 1950.

Raymond Aron outshone his intellectual contemporaries at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in the twenties (Sartre among them) and was the most promising young French philosopher of his generation until the war years, spent in London with the Free French, interrupted his academic progress. After the war he reestablished an academic career that culmi­nated in a chair at the College de France while writing dozens of books and essays and many thousands of daily and weekly articles for Le Figaro and L'Express. When he died in 1983, having just published his intellectual memoirs at the age of seventy-eight, he was perhaps the best-known writer, essayist, sociologist, political commentator, and social theorist in France.

Albert Camus, despite his modest "colonial" origins and unfashionable provincial education, rose from obscurity to nearly unequaled political Ce‑

20 INTRODUCTION THE MISJUDGMENT OF PARIS 21

lebrity in postwar Paris thanks to two novels (L'En-anger and La Peste) an essay (Le Mythe de Sisyphe), and his editorials in the new postwar daily Combat. He was widely regarded as the peer, companion, and counterpoint to Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir—what he lacked in intellectual fire­power he more than made up In charisma and moral credibility, having played a real and not merely "virtual" part in the Resistance. Despite a falling out with the Sartreans and his growing isolation from the main­stream left intellectual community over Communism and Algeria. Camus's standing abroad continued to grow, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957. His death in a car accident two years gave an iconic dimension to his relativek short life (he was born in 1913), and even though it has taken the French a long time to rediscover him, he is now widely regarded in France, as he has long been elsewhere, as a national treasure.

In the essays that follow, however,! have chosen to highlight the trou­bled, conflicted nature of the relations that Blum, Aron, and Camus main­tained with the France of their time. In part this is because what makes these three men interesting is their shared quality of moral (and, as it hap­pens, physical) courage, their willingness to take a stand not against their political or intellectual opponents—everyone did that, all too often—but against their "own" side. They paid a price for this in loneliness, in reduced influence (at least for much of their life), and in their local reputation. which rarely matched the one they had gained among friends and admirers abroad. In a country where the pressures of political and intellectual con­formity were unusually strong during their lifetimes, this willingness to court unpopularity—among politicians, the public, fellow left-wingers or one's intellectual peers—was a rare and attractive characteristic and would alone justify writing about them.

But there is another, and from the perspective of French history a more compelling, reason to devote some attention to these three men. The par­ticular grain against which they went, the current they sought to reverse or at least to challenge, was irresponsibility as I have defined it; the propensity in various spheres of public life to neglect or abandon intellectual, moral, or political responsibility. There is a paradox here that their many critics and enemies would have been the first to notice. Was it not precisely Leon Blum whose almost religious identification with the goals of the Socialist movement contributed to the political divisions and instability of interwar

France, by his insistence on placing the interests of a political party over those of the country? Was it not Albert Camus who reduced himself to silence by his refusal to take sides in the Algerian imbroglio and thus stood apart from the most divisive and morally wrenching crisis of postwar France? And did Raymond Aron not take a near-monastic vow of noninvolvement in public affairs, the better to comment dispassion­ately upon them, with the result that his cool realism lacks direct engage­ment with some of the difficult choices that Frenchmen faced in his life­time?

The charge against Awn is unfair, as I argue in the essay on him, though the implicit association of "engagement" with "responsibility" is a clue to the age. Camus most certainly did suffer terribly and lost many friends and admirers through his refusal to support Algerian independence (which was matched by his equally well attested opposition to the practices of French colonialism). But his Algerian dilemma followed upon a decade of openly avowed and deeply unfashionable disagreement with prevailing intellectual opinion: on postwar score-settling, on the death penalty, on the idea of "revolution," and on the practice of Communism. His Algerian silence drew upon the same instinctive sense of moral obligation —including the duty to be quiet when you have nothing to say—that had shaped these earlier pronouncements and engagements. That it should have had unfortunate and easily misinterpreted outcomes was something about which he could do little; Camus's version of responsibility (in contrast with that of Aron) entailed dismissing that sort of considera­tion.

The case of Blum is more complex. His contribution to the political crisis Of 19305 France is indisputable; precisely because of his great influ­ence over the inflexible Socialist Party of his era, he should have known better than to encourage all its worst instincts for political irresponsibility and detachment. Since the Socialist Party was by 1936 the largest political organization in France, BIum's failure to lead it away from sectarian habits and toward postdoctrinal political alliances and programs inevitably makes him partly responsible for the political denouement to which the Socialists' earlier mistakes contributed.

The trouble is that Blum's role in the Popular Front and its subsequent downfall has distorted discussion of his broader contribution to public life. He was, after all, the only prominent French Socialist to have the courage

22 INTRODUCTION THE MISJUDGMENT OF PARIS 23

openly to abandon pacifism, collective disarmament, and appeasement in the face of the international realities of the late thirties. He was one of a small group of French Socialists who opposed Main from the start, and he used his consequent incarceration to rethink, at the age of seventy, a substantial part of his long-held socialist beliefs—without abandoning the moral premises and social critique that had brought him to those beliefs in the first place.

In this he was quite distinctive, as he was in his long-standing interest in constitutional and governmental reform and in his post-1945 efforts to renew the French Left and refound it upon modem and rational principles. His failure in these matters, in contrast to his better-known shortcomings as prime minister in 1936, speaks well of him, since it shows just how much he was thinking and working against the mental and institutional habits not just of his own past but of a whole political tradition. Blum, I shall suggest, made many mistakes. But it was his special quality to be able to see them as mistakes, to acknowledge them and to attempt a public recasting of his political heritage, sometimes at great personal risk and always at the cost of a popularity and public success that could have been his. That sense of political responsibility was in short supply in his generation of politicians and statesmen, which is also why many of them disliked and resented him so intensely.

In addition to the qualities of courage and integrity already alluded to above, Blum, Aron, and Camus have something else in common. They were all anti-Communists. In itself this is uninteresting—there were many anti-Communists in France, and anti-Communism, however justified, hardly constituted in itself a distinctive stance, much less it guarantee of responsible behavior. It is the way in which they were anti-Communists that makes them helpful to an understanding of their country and their times.

Blum, whose speech at the December 1920 Congress of the Section Francaise de l'lnrernarionale Ouvrière (SF10) where the Leninist scission was consummated is still one of the best accounts of just what distinguished Lenin's revolution from the venerable tradition of European social democ­racy, was a political anti-Communist. From the start he was uncomfortable with the Russian Revolution. A socialist, he felt, could not condemn a revolution made in the name of socialist ideals, and for this misguided rea­son he refused all his life to treat Communists as the enemy, even though they saw in him little else. But Leninism was a mistake, he insisted—at best a throwback to earlier, well-forgotten traditions of insurrection and dictatorship, at worst an invitation to install terror and repression as the central principles of postbourgeois government. Communism would be­tray both its ideals and its followers, he noted with some prescience in 1920; and in so doing it risked bringing down with it the whole worthy edifice of socialist achievements and aspirations. As he wrote in 5941, Leninists in other lands could only ever be spokesmen for the interests of the Soviet Union—he famously dubbed the French Communists a "foreign nationalist party"—and were thus condemned to betray the interests of their own country as well as those of their supporters and voters.

Blum's absolute clarity on the Communist question—Raymond Aron, who was otherwise not very charitable toward what he regarded as Blum's moralizing naiverés, conceded that with regard to Communism he had been "clairvoyant" from the very start—made him the political anchor for a Socialist vessel swaying unsteadily among competing currents. In Blum's view the non-Communist Left must never, ever, concede the political game to the Communists or (which came to the same thing) agree to a reunifica­tion with an unrepentant Communist party. But nor could the Socialists reject their past and quit the ideological terrain altogether. If Communists were claiming the inheritance of the French Revolution, Socialists must insist that they, too, were its legitimate heirs. communism was not the enemy—unlike many younger Socialists Blum recognized that in the circumstances of interwar France one could not identify the Commu­nists as one's primary enemy without moving de facto across the political spectrum to the far Right—but it had no legitimate claim upon the Left either.

This was an impossible position to sustain in practice—made worse by the Socialists' need to distinguish themselves from the Radical republicans by insisting on their own revolutionary credentials—and the doctrinal contortions he engaged in to shore it up made Blum vulnerable to critics at the time and since. But without it, without Blum's leadership and ex­ample, the French Socialists would almost certainly not have recovered from the split of 1920, and the shape of interwar French history would have been quite different and not necessarily healthier. The French Communists were absolutely right to see in Leon Blum the principal moral and political

24 INTRODUCTION THE MISJUDGMENT OF PARIS 25

impediment to their monopoly of radical politics in France—both in the thirties and again from 1945 to 1948. Blum intuitively appreciated that preserving French Socialism from the Scylla of Communism and the Charybdis of absorption into the Radical center was the necessary condi­tion for the maintenance of a democratic public space in republican France. Few of his fellow Socialists understood this, and his political oppo­nents gave him no credit and begrudged his every achievement. In an age of distinctly irresponsible politicians and politics, Leon Blum bore the bur­den of political responsibility almost alone.

Albert Carnus's anti-Communism was driven by quite different consid­erations. He had passed briefly through the Communist Party in Algeria in the mid-thirties, but by the time he arrived in France in 1940 he was im­mune to the political appeal of organized parties of any kind. To he sure, in the immediate post-Liberation months Camus, like most other participants in the Resistance coalition, was unwilling to attack the PCF, convinced that cooperation with Communists was necessary for a postwar renewal of French public life and institutions. In his case, however, this suspension of disbelief did not last very long. But when Camus broke with the bien pen.sanr progressive consensus in France—first in his private notes, then in a series of articles and essays, and finally in L'Homme réeolté (1951), his major critique of the revolutionary illusion—it was for a quite distinctive reason.

What Albert Camus found distasteful and ultimately intolerable about the "anti-anti-communism" of his friends and colleagues was its moral ambivalence. One could not, he felt, claim to have entered upon a pub­lic existence, to have taken a stand in history, on grounds that were in­evitably moral—however camouflaged by talk of "necessity" or circum-stance—and then focus the lens of one's judgment upon one-half of humanity alone. If discrimination and repression was wrong, then it was as wrong in Moscow as in Mississippi. If concentration camps, a regime of terror, and the aggressive destruction of free peoples constituted the crimes of Fascism, then the same things were no less reprehensible when under­taken by one's "progressive" comrades. Camus knew perfectly well how such hifocalism could be justified—he had offered justifications of his own in earlier years. But the linguistic, intellectual, and ethical contortions—the silences and half-truths—that were required were ultimately beyond him.

Thus, while Camus was sympathetic to the Blumist idea that Commu­nism was a political crime against the non-Communist Left, a polluting agent that would ultimately corrode all decent forms of radical politics, this was not what drove his determination to speak out against it. He simply could not tolerate the hypocrisy of his own side, having devoted some of his life and much of his writing to exposing the equal and opposite hypocrisy of his and their enemies. It was this refusal to take up sides and use his judg­ment to dampen his intuitions that made Carnus seem so pridefully stub­born, as well as politically naive.

Forced to choose, as it seemed to him, between political engage­ment and ethical consistency he finally opted for the latter, to his own discomfort and social disadvantage. It was a choice made more out of acknowledged psychological necessity than from calculated analytical premises—another reason why it seemed so at odds with its times. Camus's contemporaries had come to Communism, or to "progressive" positions, from what they habitually understood as historical logic or political necessity; when they abandoned the Party, or their efforts to befriend it from outside, it was often on similar grounds. Some could not accept the perverted reasoning of the show trials; others were offended by Soviet foreign adventures; others still found Leninist doctrine less con­vincing the closer they looked. Camus was different—he looked in the mirror of his own moral discomfort, disliked what he saw, and stepped aside.

Raymond Aron certainly saw through the hollow pretensions of Com­munism's utopian promise, and he had no peer when it came to revealing the ideological and moral contradictions at the heart of intellectual "en­gagement." Indeed, L'Opium des intellectuels was credited after the fact by many French intellectuals with having first opened their eyes to the unsus­tainable inconsistencies of their own convictions. But Aron was indifferent to the moral dilemmas of intellectual political affiliation—the very obses­sion with the subject itself seemed to him a symptom of the French disease. His own anti-Communism had quite different sources. As a student and admirer of Marx he had no quarrel with those who took a sustained interest in nineteenth-century social theory. The problem was that most French leftists, starting with Sartre, had no such sustained interest and were in fact grotesquely ignorant of the very theories they purported to defend and il­lustrate.

26 INiI('iI'i <iIi'i'. Tilt.' MISJUDGMENT OF PARIS 27

In short they were not 'erti ti', or konsequeru as the Germans say, and it was this lack of intelkctujl seriousness that Aron found most grievously wrong with French public discussion. French intellectuals talked about books they had not read, they advocated doctrines thes' did not understand, and they criticized the policies of their rulers while lacking any reasoned alternative of their own to propose. This would have been bad enough if a dilettantish propensity among scholars and essayists to write first and think later had been confined to their OWfl self-regarding communities. But in France such men and women had an audience that extended beyond their own circle of friends and admirers; in Aron, opinion what they were engaged in was thus not merely self-indulgent but intellectually irresponsible. The task of the Observer, of the commentator and the engaged thinker, was first of all to understand the world as it was—a point brought home to Aron by his own observations of the terrifying course of events in early 1930S Germany.

The wilful failure of his colleagues and friends to do just this seemed to Aron, in 1932 and for the rest of his life, the height of reckless­ness. The state of the world in Aron's lifetime did not allow, in his view, for speculative musings upon ideal solutions, for the search for itlrimare resolution in eXOtIC locales or hyperrarional ahrrac-hulls trom metaliisioric.iI premises. Aron knew whereof he spoke:

his own eark interests had led him to devote a lot of thought

to the phili suirluic.II uindcrpinmiines and paradoxes of just stilt

of reasoning. ite. But, he dcvi it cJ III, public career to the undersi ,ui iding and cri t Iquic of the iinc 'it iti rt,uhl c 111111kitiiiC of pol it ie,*i and CI,111111111ic reality—and to the skillful exj''sumie of the vapid and irresponsible escapism of his peers. Communism, for him, combined both concerns; It was the problem of the age—and an escape from the problems of the age.

It is on account of their unconventional relationship to their times that Leon Blum, Albert Camus, and Raymond Aron are of intercr today. They were, in Hannah Arendi's felicitous description of other "awkward" figures in the European past, "men in ii.uik tines" TIWV were not ni.urLinal hguircs hid illc\ been, their intluenci' nsiuil,l hive been Ii—and their in ter,.'sI ti ,u huusr,'ruaru of France i'iurresiiinduiilv 'muller. Biii hey were mis‑

undersu it'd iii huiui I let iii it' tIlt' ,hct cc 11),11 ii tel ihouwk us 'tinetmmes

understood so much better than their contemporaries what was happening around them. The appreciation and self. understanding of their uutuiumiutiilmty, like the owl of wisdom, came only at dusk. We, too, can perhaps find in these men some assistance in understanding the times through which they passed.