Manchester Guardian Weekly August 7, 1983 Living with the enemy; FRENCH AND GERMANS, GERMANS AND FRENCH,

by Richard Cobb (University Press of New England, 10.95). BYLINE: by John Rosselli SECTION: BOOKS; Pg. 22 LENGTH: 769 words

WHAT if Britain had come under enemy occupation? Who would have collaborated? Some such thought must have crossed many minds among those who have seen films about occupied France like the magnificent The Sorrow and the Pity, or, more recently, The Last Metro. Think then of an historian like Richard Cobb. Not only has he in France a "second identity"; he is outstanding in seeking to enter sympathetically into the minds of ordinary people in the past. Enforced absence from France in 1940-44 leaves him feeling for ever deprived of a vital experience. In this book he tries to make up for it by an effort of the creative imagination. The first two chapters contrast the experience of the industrial North-east of France -the coal and textile region around Lille -- in two world wars both of which brought lasting German occupation and cut if off from the rest of the country. The remaining two deal with collaborationism in Paris during the second world war. They range widely over the effects of territorial fragmentation in both wars, the Vichy regime as the emanation of a Southern France that had for centuries been ruled from the north, the continuity between the virtual civil war that was French politics of the later thirties and the actual civil war of 1943-45. A persistent theme is the role played in collaborationism, particularly at its least virulent, by basic human needs for food and sex. It is not a systematic work. "The survival of private worlds and private values even in the midst of public calamities" -- that is what interests Cobb, himself, as he says, an extreme individualist. He therefore looks out novels, personal testimony, a German-language newspaper produced in Lille in the first world war from whose pages a market woman leaps out telling the occupiers "Nix beurre, nix fromage, nix oeufs, rien, rien, rien!" He uses his imagination to call up the northern working girl, her German lover sleeping beside her and on the chair his belt, the clasp inscribed "Gott mit uns."

Some pages read like the work of a novelist, at times of a great novelist. The Lille area, turned by occupation towards its Belgian hinterland, evokes Simenon. There are extraordinary passages on the sounds of war -- the nocturnal rumble of trains that meant weapons going to the front, or parcels of naked corpses heading back for the lime pits. Elsewhere Cobb sets going flights of imaginative reconstruction: of the few days spent in Paris by German soldiers on the way to probable death on the eastern front, the photographs of the Eiffel Tower that will outlive them and the hotel sheets changed every few days as a fresh batch arrives: the rats that invade the capital, noisily overturning dustbin lids; the basque beret as a symbol of Vichy France. We are not far from certain pages of Virginia Woolf -- the account of the great frost of London, say, which likewise unites a piercing eye and ear for detail with a fanciful evocation of the past. There is, again, a novelist's insight in Cobb's understanding of the role of habit. People collaborated, often, because they were doing a job and the natural thing was to go on. "What was a waiter to do, if not to wait?" After four years the barman who knew without being told what each of his German customers would want to drink was genuinely distressed to see them go. That is not to say that the book should be taken on trust as a rounded picture of life under enemy occupation. Cobb's insight into French society goes together with prejudice, more or less openly stated. His extreme liberal individualism at times comes close to rejecting all explanations that deal in ideas or in forces larger than "the naked human being underneath". What is the evidence for suggesting that homosexuals in general (as against some wellknown individuals) became collaborators? Jokes about the way shorts got shorter in many youth movements of the time are not that. Again, it does not seem good enough to dismiss writers like Montherlant, Cocteau, or Drieu la Rochelle as "mediocre", "adolescent nihilists of the right", fantasts clinging to the inventions of a perverted childhood. Among people who flirted with or embraced fascism were -- unfortunately -- some remarkable writers, and some gifted politicians, too. Cobb's kingdom is the police routine that ended in putting Jews on trains bound for the death camps, the search for "chunks of undiscovered private space" that had a German deserter stumbling round the countryside, trying in vain to shed his telltale boots. There he is unmatched. Journal of the History of Sexuality January 2012 Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post-World War I Reconstruction in France BYLINE: Tumblety, Joan

SECTION: Pg. 179 Vol. 21 No. 1 LENGTH: 2106 words DATELINE: United States BOOK: Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post-World War I Reconstruction in France (Nonfiction work) Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post-World War I Reconstruction in France. By AMY LYFORD. Berkeley: university of California press, 2007. Pp. 251. $55.00 (cloth). This book explores the imagined fragility of male bodies in France in relation to the work of surrealist writers, artists, and photographers working in Paris after the First World War. The works of Louis Aragon, Andre Breton, and Man Ray--among the more famous--and Lee Miller and Andre Kertesz-- among the lesser studied in this context-are interrogated for evidence of ruminations on the vulnerability of manhood. For Lyford, these surrealists made "a concerted effort to undermine France's 'return to order' through active interrogation of the concept of masculinity" (7). In this task she has drawn on a wide corpus of printed and unpublished texts and images and has made good use of archival material, notably, the Lee Miller archive in East Sussex, England, and the holdings on Andre Kertesz at the Mission de la patrimoine photographique in Paris. The book engages with scholarship on the "visual turn," the legacy of the First World War, interwar sexology and gender, and surrealist art and literature. Lyford also presents a pleasingly bold and original analysis that makes a mostly convincing case for the ways in which surrealists considered the fragile nature of masculinity. Some of the connections drawn between surrealist imagery and wider cultural anxieties about male "lack" hinge upon a Freudian analysis of the "fetish" and may thus appear speculative or reductionist to some readers. But that ought not to detract from what is a sustained, searching, and at times stunning analysis of images and texts. In the introduction, Lyford casts the 1920s as a time when ideas about masculinity underwent "intense pressure" (2). She suggests that the robust and muscular male figures that featured widely on postwar publicity campaigns to promote national reconstruction must have seemed ironic to many given the large numbers of war mutilated and asks how that "disconnect" informed surrealist practice. Indeed, Lyford argues that surrealists sought to point to the illusory nature of traditional masculinity and to offer a politically charged "critique of the bourgeois sex-gender system in France," in effect, a critique of consumer culture and the bourgeois nation itself (4). Is there a link, she also asks, between surrealists' deformation of the female form and the mutiles de guerre? The rest of the book explores precisely how that connection might be made, how surrealist representations of women might serve to reflect views about manhood shaped by corporeal anxieties arising from awareness of contemporary male dismemberment. She draws on but seeks to move beyond the work of feminist scholars such as Xaviere Gauthier who have dismissed surrealist art as misogynist for the symbolic violence it wrought upon the female form. One way in which Lyford offers nuance to these feminist readings of the gendered art of surrealism is by reminding us that surrealists' oft-stated admiration of hysterics--the latter's allegedly closer connection to the unconscious and its desires--was itself potentially emasculating, since

hysteria had for at least a generation been tagged as female. But her arguments go much further than that. The first chapter reassesses surrealist use of the well-known nineteenthcentury text by the comte de Lautreamont, Les chants de Maldoror, which was further popularized toward the end of the First World War. That author's comment about a person being "as beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella" became in the 1920s an emblem of surrealism for its absurd juxtaposition of disparate elements, and indeed Salvador Dali designed illustrations for the 1934 edition. Yet Lyford reminds us that the rest of this text in fact recounts a series of vile and excruciating tortures inflicted upon male bodies by a vengeful God and wonders how far this presentation of a fragile masculinity may have destabilized interwar audiences-including the surrealists themselves--at once battered with images of ideal manhood and conscious of the physical disability on the street. She argues that Man Ray's published photographs of mannequins at the 1925 Exposition internationale des arts decoratifs posited those smooth bodies in a deliberately ironic way, as "humanoid symbols of post-war progress," mocking official attempts to cement a national narrative of reconstruction by suggesting that "the ideology of regeneration was in large part a fantasy" (41). Chapter 2 presents especially evocative material about the likely effect on their later work of Breton's and Aragon's war experiences as trainee physicians in the Val-deGrace military hospital in Paris. Both men had worked there after September 1917 (Lyford claims they used to read aloud passages of the comte de Lautreamont's book to each other during their training), and both were privy to the collection of medical iconography, surgical instruments, prosthetics, and plaster casts of war-injured bodies displayed in its museum. However shocking such exhibits, Lyford convincingly argues, the way in which they were exhibited to the public placed them within a "therapeutic narrative" (52) where their presentation managed to underscore the technological triumphs of scientific progress harnessed by the French state and its power to rebuild the lives of physically damaged men. She surmises that the "savvy viewers" of Breton and Aragon no doubt developed a surrealist way of seeing these artifacts that undermined such a narrative of progress. She holds, for example, that Breton may have been pointing to the likely failure of this rehabilitation process in his 1924 manifesto, a work that made much of the image of "the man cut in two by the window"--an expression inscribed in the language of trauma. The third chapter explores the work of immigre photographer Andre Kertesz, a friend of Man Ray and Brassai in the 1920s. Lyford notes the poignancy of his melancholic photographs of men in the public spaces of Paris, including amputees who may well have been war veterans. Lyford offers an intriguing analysis of Kertesz's well-known photographs of nude women whose bodies are distorted by the use of funhouse mirrors. Our reading of these images as misogynist, Lyford argues convincingly, should be shaped by a greater understanding of their context. Indeed, it is significant that Kertesz had initially experimented with distortion techniques on his own and other (clothed) male bodies and that the published versions of the photographs of women were cropped for publication in the soft-core erotica magazine that commissioned them in 1933, removing both male figures and distorting mirrors. In other words, Kertesz may have intended to capture the artifice of the distortion, and it was the commercially driven photographic editing process that determined the objectification of the women in the

pictures. The deforming male gaze that has been so widely criticized by feminist critics is thus seen in a different light. It is not so much that Lyford discounts the apparent misogyny of such surrealist visions of the female body but rather that she wants to overlay these artistic works with other explanations for what they might mean. More tenuous, however, is the claim (through a Freudian reading of the "fetish") that Kertesz's artistic vision involved a displacement of his own sense of bodily anxiety onto the bodies of the women he photographed. Chapter 4 considers Lee Miller as both subject and object of surrealist photography; developing the idea that in her own work Man Ray's disobedient muse sometimes mimicked and sought to subvert her lover's oeuvre by underscoring the instability and constructedness of his artistic masculine persona. At the same time, Lyford allows for Ray's own desire to destabilize his gendered self through self-portraiture. In a particularly satisfying analysis, she offers an extended reading of a photograph depicting Ray standing in a white bathrobe in a bedroom that features a nude portrait of Miller on the wall. In short, the author argues that here Ray stages a complex and contradictory self that portrays both traditionally masculinist postcoital triumph, in which the nude image of Miller functions as sexual conquest, and a display of an anxious and feminized man wearing a woman's robe and striking a pose reminiscent of the female models in Ray's own fashion photography. As Lyford puts it, Ray shows "how a man might recognise the fictional quality of the ideal image of internal masculinity" (143). In the short final chapter, Lyford examines a set of photographs taken by Man Ray in 1926 of American music-hall drag artist Van der Clyde, who performed on the Paris music-hall circuit as Barbette, an acrobatic dancer whose "real" sex was only revealed at the end of each show. In this reading, Ray's photograph--which presents a seminaked Barbette in full (female) wig and makeup strapping down his loins--deliberately sought to show that Barbette's femininity relied on "suppressing Van der Clyde's manhood rather than on producing a visibly female sexual organ like a breast" (174). Since it appeared within a book of portraits of key surrealist leaders (themselves framed as heroic grands hommes), its publication had the effect of offering a critique of traditional masculinity and celebrated the gender ambiguity inherent in Barbette's act. Ray's willingness to subvert gender hierarchies in this way is then contrasted with the views of the famous surrealist turned fascist writer, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle. Drieu reviewed Barbette's act and expressed a deep ambivalence toward its subversion of gender identities: Drieu was caught between admiration of the "trim physicality" (177) of Barbette and disgust at the "effeminate man" who revealed himself as the author of the performance. Lyford points to the sustained influence of surrealism on the development of Drieu's supranational "fascist aesthetic." But Lyford goes much further, arguing that this connection makes "surrealism's aestheticisation of gender instability and Drieu's brand of fascism ... closer than one might want to think" (183). The idea of surrealism's role in fascist discourse is briefly repeated in Lyford's conclusion, where she suggests that the surrealist use of tropes from advertising (for example, in the Bunuel/Dali film L'age d'or), medicine (in the artistic deployment of prostheses), and pornography (in Man Ray's erotic photography) in the end did not revolutionize attitudes to gender and sexuality but rather led unwittingly to an "institutional consolidation" of bodies as commodities in the consumer culture of the bourgeois order, and worse: "Surrealism actually delivered the unconscious to the technocrats by reconstructing the gendered

human subject. As we know, such social regulation was to become a powerful weapon in the hands of fascist ideologues" (188). The conclusion takes to an extreme the author's tendency to reduce the artistic expression that forms her object of study to the (sometimes quite unknown) intentions of the artist and, furthermore, to read it in terms of a wider cultural or political influence (or effect) whose purchase remains to be established. For one thing, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle is hardly a representative figure for attitudes to gender on the radical Right. Indeed, the nature of the analysis in the book at times made me query the epistemological foundations of art criticism, to question how far the demonstrable--or even likely--cultural functions of the particular composition of an image or text ought to be conflated with the quite different problem of authorial intention. The jump between the two is sometimes made only by a Freudian leap of faith. More important, I wish that Lyford had done more to draw the picture of surrealism's alleged failures and the emergence of fascism more finely, since these arguments remain underdeveloped. Still, for this reader what emerges most strongly from the book is a series of clearly expressed and provocative arguments about the ways in which surrealist creations can be interpreted as subversive musings on sexuality and how they drew attention to the constructed and fragile nature of masculinity in this period. JOAN TUMBLHTY University of Southampton Copyright 2012 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press) The Washington Times January 7, 1996, Sunday, Final Edition Allure of dictators ; Why intellectuals are attracted to the excesses of totalitarianism BYLINE: Stephen Goode SECTION: Part B; BOOKS; Pg. B8 LENGTH: 1290 words

Bernard-Henri Levy was one of the new generation of writers labeled the "new philosophers" who emerged in France in the early 1970s. Enormously influenced by Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago," these young men expressed their disgust with totalitarianism right or left and saw in the Soviet Union the same evils that had long been attributed to Nazi Germany: the ruthless extermination of millions and the creation of a vast and barbaric bureaucratic state whose only purpose was to carry out the will of its own leader.

Mr. Levy has written before on the moral perversity of intellectuals involved in the creation and perpetuation of fascism and communism. In his new book, "Adventures on the Freedom Road," he takes up the whole gamut of French intellectuals in the 20th century, from Emile Zola and Charles Peguy at its outset to Louis Althusser at the end. Using the first person plural, Mr. Levy writes, "We undertook our investigation with a view to unraveling the mystery of a group of people, all now deceased." He traveled to Moscow and Beijing. To Algiers. Those intellectuals still alive he interviewed. He talked to friends and intimates of the ones who had died. The mystery Mr. Levy seeks to unravel is why many French intellectuals in the 20th century lent their intellectual and moral support to totalitarianism, whether of the left or the right - even after the brutish, evil face and practice of both systems were apparent for all to see. He shows that there were Frenchmen of the right who couldn't believe that the Nazis were carrying out their "final solution" just as there were leftists who refused to hear anything bad about the Soviet Union or argued that everything Stalin did was justified since he had his eyes set on ultimate justice and equality. Mr. Levy describes fascists such as Charles Maurras, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle and Louis-Ferdinand Celine as well as men of the left such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault. He recognizes that France itself is partly to blame for their perversity, particularly the compulsion he sees on the part of the French intellectuals he writes about to be at least a bit outrageous in order to stand out in a crowd. "France is a funny country where one achieves renown by straying from the straight and narrow, adds to one's mythology by being associated with evil, and enhances one's stature by indulging in minor betrayal," he writes. But there were deeper problems. Mr. Levy argues that French intellectuals fell victim to the same two allures, whether they proclaimed communism or fascism. One was "the urge for purity." The other was "the cult of youth." The urge for purity led Nazis to purge nations of Jews and Gypsies. It caused communist leaders to exterminate everyone who stood in the way of the progress of history and the creation of a classless society. As for the cult of youth, Mr. Levy quotes both fascist and communist writers talking about "the new man" their ideologies promised to create. "You have only to look at the Leni Riefenstahl or Soviet propaganda films of the 1920s and 1930s to see" the centrality of the cult of youth to both left and right, Mr. Levy says. The thread that unites his intellectuals, left or right, is their nihilism, which most of them share to some degree. Mr. Levy comes down especially hard on surrealism, the movement that symbolizes for him the retreat from tradition and rationalism that marks so much of French intellectual life in this century.

He quotes the 28-year-old novelist Louis Aragon, one of the founders of surrealism, haranguing a crowd of students in Madrid in 1925, seven years before Aragon joined the Communist Party (to remain in it the rest of his long life): "We shall destroy the civilisation that is dear to your hearts and which formed you like fossils in schist; we, the defeatists of Europe, condemn the western world to death. The land is tinder dry and ready to be set ablaze." Mr. Levy, in what is the most unforgettable portrait in this book, shows a similar nihilism lurking deep in the heart of Drieu la Rochelle, who passionately supported Hitler, at least until 1944. He shows that Drieu supported the German dictator because he believed the revolution Hitler would bring to Europe would be so total that the old order would disappear entirely. When it became apparent that Nazi Germany would lose the war, Drieu began to consider throwing his support to the Soviet Union, hopeful that Stalin would be the man to complete Europe's destruction. As Mr. Levy sees it, one of the dangers of nihilism is the cultivation of the new simply for the sake of its being new. The struggle to create an avant-garde, and be always at its head, sends modern man grasping for any kind of gods, just to remain at that forefront: "Were the totalitarian mentality by any chance ever to return, it would use the avantgarde as an extremely seductive, harmless and banal channel of communication." While agreeing that the symbol of the collapse of communism is the destruction of the Berlin Wall, Mr. Levy argues that the real last gasp of the system was Pol Pot's Cambodian regime a decade earlier, responsible for the slaughter of one-third of the Cambodian people. By the time of Pol Pot, "communism had been reduced to training and discipline; it was a way, amongst others, of herding people, though to them [the communists] it was the best way." Mr. Levy writes that he would like to impose a rule on future generations to "avoid such things ever happening again." He suggests that people of the future "have nothing to do with anyone who publicly calls into question, at least from a philosophical point of view, the notion of original sin." He recommends that at the least "the rudiments of theology . . . be introduced into civic lessons in secular State schools." Why? Because, Mr. Levy concludes, the doctrine of original sin "remains the best means of curbing the aspirations of those who defend the will to purity." When we recognize human frailty we are unlikely to expect perfection. Mr. Levy knows, however, that because original sin does describe the human condition we cannot trust man to learn from history and avoid the errors of the past. He believes that totalitarianism will continue to hold allure, that "the initial version of communism, with its ideals, its purity, and its messianic vision of a new man, had more than one trick up its sleeve, and that its cult of purity and youth could still have a certain appeal. "It could gradually and discreetly begin to seduce people again, and God forbid, reverse all the changes which have taken place." He concludes: "I wouldn't rule out the possibility that it might again one day become a terrible reality, though that is indeed a nightmare."

This is a powerful book, written in a seductive, personal style and skillfully translated and edited by Richard Veasey. It is Mr. Levy's own argument with the intellectual tradition he stands in, and his coming to terms with it. There may be too many French writers discussed whose names mean little to contemporary readers, but the cautionary tale about the mischief intellectuals can do will come across to readers of any nationality. Stephen Goode is a senior writer for Insight. The Scotsman December 30, 1995, Saturday France's most reluctant revolutionary BYLINE: Robert Carver SECTION: Pg. 14 LENGTH: 1239 words FRENCH intellectuals have always intellectuals have al taken themselves seriously, deploring frivolity about the big issues. Bernard-Henri Levy bears a triple burden of history - French intello, an ex-communist, and Jewish: the full weight of the events of 1789, 1870 and 1941 fall heavily upon him, that is, the Revolution, the defeat of France by Prussia, and the murder of Europe's Jews under the Nazis. Born in 1948, he is one of the nouveaux philosophes, that is one who has passed through Marxism via Structuralism and out the other side into a form of humanist scepticism. Like his colleague, Glucksmann he has, by 1991, arrived at the antitotalitarian position Orwell and Koestler reached in the late 1940s after The God that Failed was published. This volume is an easy-to-digest confection comprising pensees, interviews and miniprofiles run up as a TV series sequel book. In Britain we have Lord Clark of Civilisation on telly talking about pictures; the French get Levy on Sartre, Malraux, Camus, Aragon, Breton and Althusser. Given Levy's predispositions, it's not hard to predict who gets it in the neck - any communist or fellow-traveller. Only Camus and Malraux come out of Levy re-evaluation with any moral authority. The title of this volume in French is Les Aventures de la liberte, a clear play on Sartre's cycle of novels Les Chemins de la liberte. 'Adventures' implies adventurers and Levy's critique of the whole leftist-revolutionary intellectual tradition embraces fascist intellos as well, such as Drieu la Rochelle, who supported the Nazis out of 'revolutionary' rather than 'reactionary' sentiment.

To read this book from the British-American empirical perspective is to enter into a wholly alien universe where devout Catholic mystics like Althusser are converted suddenly to extreme Marxism by a lover who becomes his wife - whom years later Althusser strangles to death in an act charitably ascribed as 'madness'. This is all simply far too operatic for our cooler blood. Just as Malraux offered to save Drieu la Rochelle's bacon in 1944 by offering him a post in the Resistance, so Jacques Chirac bent the law to allow the 'Marxist' Althusser, (then Levy's professor at the ecole Normal), to escape a trial for murder by being declared insane. The sense of a secular priesthood looking after its own is marked throughout this study. The ideological differences are really theological disputations: caste is what matters, "a new aristocracy", as several members call the Communist Party cadres approvingly. Levy does indeed diagnose the conditions of the French intellectual as that of a secular priesthood, called upon to arbitrate between ideals such as Truth, Liberty and Justice and the institutions of the State. What he does not seem to see is the underlying thread of opportunistic power-seeking. Malraux's sudden volte face from fellow-traveller to Gaullist minister; Drieu la Rochelle's assumption of power at the Nouvelle Revue Francaise, an organ he had been debarred from before the defeat in 1940; Cocteau's cavorting at the German Embassy and in Nazi salons during the Occupation. The French obsessions with becoming 'modern' - catching up with Germany and reversing 1870, with 'purity' and 'creating a new man'-are wholly absent in the BritishAmerican mental landscape. Once again, reading this revisionist philosopher's history of his country's thinkers, I was reminded of the gulf that exists between the countries which had a successful Protestant reformation, and thereby eventually installed freedom of conscience and effective checks and balances on State power - and those like France which did not. The idea of a British writer instituting a rival Church, complete with rigid dogma, hierarchy, an index of banned books, ex-communication and so on, is simply absurd. Yet this is exactly what Andre Breton did with the Surrealist movement. Seen through the eyes of a secular Protestant descendant of the 1688 Revolution, all French intellectual endeavour seems a long and unsuccessful attempt to limit or at least hijack the power of the State, or else to substitute it with some sort of permanent revolution a la St Just or Che Guevara. Since Robespierre, all French intellectuals have been tempted by the possibilities of supreme government power. It was not for nothing, for example, that Regis Debray used the soubriquet 'Danton' as his nom de guerre in Bolivia with Che. Nor, I suspect, was Malraux's choice of 'Colonel Berger' (Colonel Shepherd) entirely without guile. It is ironic but not at all surprising that two French Jews, Levy and Glucksmann, should be the heretics who have called into question the whole validity of the orthodox French revolutionary-intellectual tradition. Marx, Lenin, Castro, Che and Mao were each coopted over the years as honorary Frenchman, as revolutionary assimiles; having failed to achieve either a lasting imperial or international capitalist hegemony, the French cadres have made revolution, philosophy and 'history' their own shadow imperium.

Levy and his generation know that all this is over. The Catholic-Marxist wife-murderer Althusser was 'the last revolutionary'. Foucault, in an interview with Levy, dared to suggest the unspeakable: "What if the whole revolutionary tradition was completely wrong?" Roland Barthes speaks with complete defeat about 'intellectuals being waste matter, like the organic waste produced by a body after digestion.' It is clear the current mood is frankly nihilistic. The failure of Nazism and Communism and the bankruptcy of the revolutionary tradition in France leaves Frenchmen in a world dominated by Anglo-American capitalism and culture and with the threat of a new, rising capitalist dynamic in Asia. In Europe France is political animateur of a European Union which is wholly un-unified, and facing severe structural economic crises. To all of this Levy has nothing positive to suggest. This book is singular evidence that despite cosmetic changes nations and peoples face the same existential and even geo-political dilemmas throughout history. Can France ever reform itself, rather than be continually convulsed by revolutions after autocratic ancien regimes have been finally overthrown after much struggle? Gradualism is simply not a Latin tradition. When someone suggested that Sartre be imprisoned, de Gaulle replied: "On n'embastille pas Voltaire" ("One doesn't put Voltaire in the Bastille"). Levy is now cast as the Voltaire of the intello-revolutionary establishment, the darting sceptic who demolishes with wit and bravura. Bearing in mind the fate of Dreyfus, with whom he starts the book, what Levy's own fate would be in a born-again nationalist Le Pen France, itself perhaps not too far away, is less certain. The unspoken subtext of this intriguing book is "Just how far can a French intello who is also Jewish be secure in feeling really French?" It was the French Christian writer Brasillach, Levy reminds us, who told the Germans in 1941 "not to forget the little ones either" when the French Jews were shipped to the gas chambers; and the Germans took him at his word and deported the children too. Not surprisingly, the only intellectual who gets a completely clear bill of health from L_vy is Herzl, the founder of Zionism and advocate of a national home for the Jews. The Times December 16, 1995; Saturday Pretentious, Moi? BYLINE: Kate Muir SECTION: Features LENGTH: 3203 words

THE INVESTIGATION commences into why France considers itself a country of great intellectuals, and Britain merely one of minor academics. The site of the inquiry is a grand stone building on Boulevard St Germain, home of Paris's most prominent intellectual in every sense. Up the marble staircase, the double doors are answered by an Asian butler in a white Nehru jacket. He shows me into the salon, for Bernard-Henri Levy, author of the definitive book on the French intellectual as a species, is occupied elsewhere on the telephone. The butler silently unlocks an enormous wooden cabinet to display a collection of hundreds of onyx and marble eggs turquoise, emerald, coral - each perched on a silver bird's-feet stand. He bows out of the doors. Has Madame - Levy's actress-model wife, Arielle Dombasle - given instructions that all visitors must appreciate the eggs for five minutes on arrival? I stand cowed by the opulence of the room, which is half-chapel, half-brothel and the size of a tennis court. There is a religious painting so vast that steps lead up to it. The windows are beswagged beyond belief. There are rich reds and oranges, enormous sofas, antiques, silver, a multi-armed brass Shiva and an outbreak of little Louis-something gilt chairs. In the bookcase: early leather-bound editions of Racine and Les Chateaux de France. Levy is, of course, one of France's best-known lefties, but he is not living rough. The doors burst open and the high priest of France's "new philosophers" makes his entrance. Author of an early iconoclastic book on communism, a series of philosophical works, one play, two novels of ideas, maker of respected documentaries and a propagandist film supporting the Bosnians, Levy has also collaborated with Francoise Giroud on a controversial book about men, women and love. He was recently voted one of the ten men with whom French Elle readers would most like to have an affair. Why? Today, with his fashionable bobbed haircut, his usual D'Artagnan-style floppy white shirt open to within inches of the navel, slim black trousers and ankle boots with dinky buckles, he is in full finery - a Fabio with faculties intact. Lesson number one: Academics wear tweed. Intellectuals wear costume. We pass into Levy's booklined study. "The antiques are my wife's," he says. "I need only my books." There we discuss his portrait of the French intellectual, Adventures on the Freedom Road, just published in Britain. He pats the sofa beside him invitingly. In 1991, when the book was first published in France, Levy declared the intellectual on his (certainly not her) last legs. Intellectuals with great causes, such as Sartre, Malraux, Althusser and Zola, were dead and pretty well unreplaceable. Besides, by putting their ideas into action, many of the supposed great intellectuals had made grave errors of political judgment. Worse still, Levy believed that "the new, more democratic era was witnessing the wholesale demise of the intellectual", that the thinkers of the Nineties had become enfeebled, displaying caution and pragmatism in place of a message.

But then, the war in Bosnia changed all that. Levy says he has witnessed a renewal of energy and conviction among French intellectuals who have attempted to intervene in the situation. Particularly himself. Indeed, Levy's views on Bosnia are considered so important by the French media that his declarations often make the front page. His weekly column in Le Point magazine has a devoted if irritated following, and he is one of television's favourite talking heads. His campaigning cinema documentary Bosna! was the toast of Cannes last year, and brought the Bosnian cause to a wider audience. Thus it is not surprising that Levy credits himself, and a cadre of intellectual fellow travellers, as having played an essential role in bringing about the ceasefire and the meeting between presidents Clinton and Chirac in November. There is no suggestion that the muscle of the American Air Force, or the characteristic determination of Chirac, may have had some pull on the Serbs. "No," says Levy, "the intellectuals have won. We were right to support the Bosnians, who have a just cause. Intellectuals in France have taken up their classic prophetic position once again. And for the first time, rather than blindly supporting a great cause, there has been a marriage of conviction and responsibility. There is a certain pragmatism, a willingness to see reality." Lesson number two: Academics give credit. Intellectuals take it. That said, Levy's Bosna! was a worthwhile project, heart-wrenching and horrifying something that no one else seemed to have the time, inclination or money to make. The film, co-directed by Alain Ferrari, was partly financed by French television, and partly by Levy's father, who made his fortune in timber. "I hope Bosna! contributed to protest and knowledge in France and Europe," says Levy. Certainly, without the constant campaigning by Levy and his like in newspaper columns, French people would have found it easier to ignore Bosnia. Levy's film-making foray into Bosnia was more successful than his political one. Last year he revived the dormant intellectual tradition of taking action with his "Europe begins at Sarajevo" movement of prominent intellectuals during the European elections. They stood as MEPs, with the aim of flushing out the main parties' positions on Bosnia, but as soon as they showed signs of succeeding in the polls, Levy pulled out. The reality of daily life in Strasbourg was too horrifying to contemplate. "Sensationalist and demagogic," complained the French press at the time of his advance and retreat. "I regret that now," says Levy. "We should have stayed with it." Jean Cocteau once said that France was a country in which most writers were failed politicians and most politicians failed writers. How does Levy feel about that? "I'm not a politician, I have no desire to sacrifice my life to politics, but there is for me an unformulated longing for involvement. When I made Bosna! it was not just political - it was a work of art as well." Levy leans forward to make his point, and I am rewarded with a full view of what has been described as "the finest decolletage in all Paris". It is extremely hard to concentrate on matters at hand. Instead of asking Levy the question uppermost in my

mind - whether he waxes (since his chest has been described by previous correspondents as hairy) - I instead ask him to define thedifference between the French intellectual and the British academic."In France, academics are professionals, conformists," says Levy with disdain. "But intellectuals here, particularly those in my book, are exotic, bizarre, strange. Perhaps it is a French speciality. Your George Orwell, Isaiah Berlin - they're something else: they're more pragmatic, they don't want to guide humanity and they're not obsessed by the idea of purity which has plagued the French intellectual." The problem with French intellectuals in this century, according to Levy, is that many of them considered themselves to be the successors to priests, particularly as the roles of church and state separated. French people, too, seem to have a need and respect for the intellectual that the British reserve only for footballers. Levy dates the French love affair with the intellectual to 1898, when the writer Emile Zola wrote J'Accuse and gathered support from other intellectuals during the Dreyfus Affair. For the first time, Levy suggests, "intellectual" was used as a noun rather than an adjective, and it became a title of distinction. Nowadays, France refers to its favourite brains by the nickname les intellos, rather than les intellectuels. In headlines and conversation, Levy is cosily referred to by his initials, BHL. Lesson number three: Academics have titles. Intellectuals have brand-names. Moving along swiftly from Zola, Levy's complaint is that most of the great French intellectuals of this century placed passion above wisdom and lacked unbiased judgment. "Brown or red, fascist or communist, they were obsessed with perfection and purity - that is the origin of all the follies of the 20th century. They all wanted to make a clean break with history, start anew, changing man so as to bring out the deepest aspects of his nature." Changing man often involves returning to the ideologically unscarred young, from the Red Guards to the Hitler Youth, and Levy suggests that an obsession with youth is a sign of totalitarianism, but also warns that youth movements themselves carry within them seeds of danger. He condemns intellectuals such as Sartre who tended to worship youth above age. Levy lists the errors of some of the misguided intellectuals who indulged in this search for purity. The novelist and journalist Pierre Drieu la Rochelle became a convert to fascism, spoke glowingly of the Nuremberg rally of 1935, and collaborated with the Nazis during the occupation. Later, the communist Louis Aragon suggested that France would be improved if it had Russia's secret police. Sartre is condemned for providing tacit support for the terrorist bombing of the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics in 1972. Finally, and weirdly, as the philosopher Michel Foucault was dying of Aids, he WX announced his deep admiration for the Ayatollah Khomeni. The only intellectuals who get Levy's approval - other than himself - are Andre Malraux, who fought with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, and Albert Camus in the wartime resistance. As for the rest: "The intellectual whose fate was linked to that of ideologies that are now defunct has not emerged unscathed." Still, says Levy, many

of these intellectuals may have been crazy and misguided, but sometimes great errors produce great books. Has Levy - the sensible, professional intellectual - produced great books? Fortunately, it is a question he can answer with a completely straight face. "That will be decided after I am dead." He pauses grandly. "But this is an important book for me. It's the book in which I've said the most about who I am. It's a way of saying which thinkers are my ancestors or friends. It's my intellectual and spiritual genealogy." Levy says he wrote Adventures on the Freedom Road to mark his coming of age - he is 47, and would probably like the media to take note of that. He still bears the heavy burden of being described as a former enfant terrible, referring to his days on the barricades in 1968 (as a student of that great French oxymoron, the Ecole Normale Superieure), as well as his stand as a nouveau philosophe. Although he continues to shout and stir, adulte terrible does not have the same ring. Still, it is the slightly ridiculous aspects of Levy - his self-proclamation, his grandeur, his rebel bourgeois stance and the stylish way he delivers his opinions, as much as the opinions themselves - which make him an intellectual, not a scholar. Levy and his cohorts leaven and broaden French life by their presence, tweaking serious public discussion on to a higher plane. What if Levy had remained cloistered, dedicating himself to his philosophical writings instead of scampering from medium to medium like a Renaissance man? Would he have written greater books? "No, nothing would have changed, because when I write, I once again become obscure, uncertain, a beginner, hostile to outsiders and what they represent." On a typical day when he is working, he says, he gets up at 5am and works through until 2am, seeing no one. At the moment, he is writing a diary for publication about his campaigns in Bosnia and Paris. "Normally, I would not see journalists. This is a bad time for me, but it is easier if they are charming, intelligent women," he says, smiling cheesily. In his book, he talks about wanting to write an open letter to his enemies, settling scores with people, including "my worst enemy, namely myself; not the real me or the one who writes my books. The character I have in mind is that other version of myself who has been turned into a puppet by the media, who is unbearable, sometimes obnoxious." But surely that is because he has courted the media? "Oh, no. It is the media that courts me. But there is also intrinsic pleasure for me in these antics involving the media," confesses Levy, who is sussed enough to wear cotton shirts on television, and Christian Dior Monsieur silk ones elsewhere. Levy is just lucky he is a man, because if he were a woman intellectual he could not combine a low cleavage with maintaining his high reputation. There is a strong antiLevy camp, led by a man who describes himself as a "Belgian satirist" who has thrown custard pies twice at the philosopher, once at the Cannes film festival. Levy was more inclined to punch than to laugh; humour is not his strong point. He has also been caricatured by the media as the "Philosopher Prince", "One-third Rambo, two-thirds

Rimbaud", but he does provide good material, torn as he is between a genuine passion for worthwhile causes and a genuine desire for self-publicity. Being a philosopher, Levy has had some philosophical thoughts on the subject, beginning with Marcel Proust's essay Contre Sainte-Beuve. Proust wrote that he had two selves: his social self who dined or was seen around town, and his deep, profound self, who suffered for his work. "Nowadays, there is a third self, a third ego - the image of yourself in the media. So I am three - Bernard... Henri... Levy." The holy intellectual trinity. He says that today's intellectuals "must live with both feet in our century" and feel the obligations of the world, part of which is the right to free speech, nowadays conducted mostly within the media. Naturally, Levy is unstinting with his time when his opinion is required by the French people. Lesson number four: Academics give talks. Intellectuals have chat shows. The most shocking example of the intellectual succumbing to the talk-show format is Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who, along with the grumpy Mrs Solzhenitsyn, presented a weekly slot on Russian television. Fortunately for his credibility, the show has been pulled. For poor Levy, this is yet another fallen idol, since he entitled one of his chapters: "The towering and exemplary figure of Alexander Solzhenitsyn." Al-though, sadly for the British, Levy has not updated his book to note such changes of heart, he has published a paper in France criticising his former hero for becoming, in this order, positivist, ideological, a Slavophile, a Russian nationalist and anti-democratic. It is not easy staying in the mercurial Levy's intellectual top ten. Perhaps the climate, at least in the West, is no longer conducive to being a proper intellectual. If Francis Fukuyama's The End of History is to be believed, capitalist democracy will soon be the world norm. And under steady democracy, although writers and literature thrive, intellectuals become dull, flaccid, self-important little people. "It is a tautology that intellectuals need despotism to flourish," says Levy. There are new adversaries with energy comparable to communism, like nationalism, populism and fundamentalism. "It may not be the end of history as Fukuyama has suggested, but the return of history which may cause intellectuals to go through a metamorphosis which will restore their status." Levy always sees the worldwide political picture. Local injustices pass him by. For instance, he considers the feminist movement to be part of the uprisings of 1968, when, he says, "women had a simple and cheery demand to make", that of equal rights. The fact that Betty Friedan struck the first blow for feminism back in 1963 is of no importance to him. But then Levy sees women in what might kindly be called the traditional French manner. In his conversations in the book with Giroud he said: "I am personally convinced that there is no female eroticism without at least a touch of masochism." When he answers his portable phone in the middle of the interview, he alludes to the belle demoiselle from The Times to his caller. He is warm to me, cold to the male photographer.

So were there no female intellectuals in this last century in France? From his book, one would think not. "Who?" says Levy, while covering himself with "this is a subjective book". I list a few - Simone de Beauvoir, Gertrude Stein (who at least lived in Paris), Marguerite Duras. Levy picks up on the word Duras. "She is an intellectual, true, but the problem for Duras is I don't esteem her, neither for her literature nor her politics." If the semiologist Roland Barthes gets a mention, what about Luce Irigaray, who has done a feminist deconstruction of the language? Levy looks nauseated. "The problem with this woman is, frankly, I have never heard of her." Women are discussed in Levy's book as muses for the great men who live with them. He suggests that women preferred to achieve immortality by becoming the object of a man's myth or writings, rather than be the author themselves of some minor work. Ernest Hemingway, he notes, changed women for every novel. Lesson number five: Academics have wives. Intellectuals have muses. Sartre once said that he became a writer to compensate for his ugliness and to seduce pretty girls. Levy, although undoubtedly handsome, is still in the business of seducing pretty girls too. "In my life, women are, and have been, essential, of course." Pictures of his third and present wife, Arielle Dombasle, adorn his bookshelves, featuring a cleavage similar to his own. Dombasle is an enormous, Jerry Hall-like entity of 37, with ravishing looks and long blonde hair. Photographs of her wedding to Levy in 1993 were all over Paris Match. She has been in a number of average films, including Pauline a la Plage, and is regularly interviewed in magazines such as Elle about her beauty routine. She still takes her teddy bear to bed. Does Levy have to sacrifice his private life for his public one? "Sacrifice?" he says indignantly. "I don't like the word, I don't like the act. Arielle is the heart of my life. She is more important to me than the books that I write, the films that I make, the plays I create." Good to know that when it comes to the crunch, an intellectual will lay down his work for his muse. This willingness to throw all intellectual worth away fits in nicely with the theories of the aforementioned Barthes, who deserves the last word. This final lesson on the subject of the intellectual comes, oddly enough, from a magazine interview Levy did with Barthes in the late Seventies. BHL: Intellectuals used to think of themselves as "the salt of the earth". Barthes: I would be more inclined to describe them as the "waste products" of society. That's to say they are of no use unless they are rehabilitated... fundamentally, waste products have no use and, in a certain sense, neither do intellectuals. BHL: So, in your view, the intellectual is totally useless? Barthes: "Useless but dangerous. Every strong regime wants to get him to fall into line. The danger he represents is symbolic. He's like a disease which has to have an eye kept on it."

The Irish Times November 25, 1995, CITY EDITION Treason of the clerks Adventures on the Freedom Road: The French Intellectual in the 20th Century by Bernard-Henri Levy, trans. Richard Veasey Harvill 415pp, Pounds 20 in UK BYLINE: By RICHARD KEARNEY SECTION: WEEKEND; Pg. Supplement page 8 LENGTH: 954 words

FRANCE is one of the few countries where the word "intellectual" is still a term of honour rather than abuse. But Bernard-Henri Levy is determined to change that. Levy sets out to show how the great ideas of the turn of the century gradually turned to ashes over one hundred years of disillusionment, which saw the failure of the popular front, the collaboration with the Nazi occupation, the collapse of revolutionary utopianism after 1968, the end of communism, the demise of the prophets Sartre, de Beauvoir, Barthes, Lacan, Althusser It is a long litany of seduction and betrayal. Levy tells a good story even if not always accurately. The narrative begins at the end of the last century with the Dreyfus affair. This event saw legions of writers, artists and thinkers entering the public arena in defence of a common case. It was the first time the word "intellectual" was used as a noun rather than an adjective. Zola, not Voltaire, inaugurated the notion of the ecrivaln engage. Passionate outrage became the badge of literary honour. Commitment to a great cause, rather than the private pursuit of imagination, became the priority of the writer - so Levy's theory goes. The problem was not, of course, the justness of the cause (Dreyfus was manifestly innocent). It was the abuse of the role of the "public intellectual" witnessed in subsequent generations. Levy's list is as long as it is scathing. The main headings include the surrealists' advocation of nihilism in response to the first World War the fascination of certain writers like Drieu, La Rochelle and Bibasillach with l'Action Francaise, Vichy and fascism and, finally, the gullible championing of communist regimes such as those in China and the USSR by French Marxists existentialists and structuralists. Communism was the grandest of the grand illusions. Talented writers such as Aragon, Breton and Eluard fell under the Stalinist spell and remained entranced for longer than was conscionable. Several knew the horrors but excused them in the name of a secular utopia. "In spite of the terrible errors and crimes," as Romain Rolland put it, "I look to the child, the new-born babe they are the hope of the future". At the height of the show trials, Aragon was in Moscow pretending nothing was amiss. And when Kravchenko

had the effrontery to flee the Stalinist paradise and denounce the Gulag he was derided as a "fascist" by Aragon's newspaper. Moreover, when Camus published The Rebel in 1952, challenging not only historical messianism in general but Marxism in particular, he was condemned as a liberal lackey by his close friends, Sartre and de Beauvoir. The disillusionment with Communism became irreversible after the Hungarian uprising and the famous report on Stalin's crimes in 1956. So what did the French intellectuals do? According to Levy, they found a new messianic cause for their "will to purity" in tandem with the collapse of French colonialism in Algeria and Indochina "thirdworldism". Despite its good intentions, this new ideology led to its own errors of judgment. Sartre defended the terrorist massacre of the Israeli athletes in the Olympic Village in Munich. Foucault hailed Khomeini's Iranian revolution as "the most modern expression of revolt". Certain disciples of Althusser applauded the purification campaigns of the KhmerRouge. Levy concedes that once confronted with the terrors which followed such upheavals, the intellectuals began to doubt their own mania for ideological purity. And as the revolutionary stars waned, one by one, culminating in the moment in June 1989 when a young man stood alone and defiant in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square, French intellectuals began to rediscover ideas which they had hitherto considered outdated democracy, morality, the Rights of Man. Having traversed the dark night of the century, a more sober democratic era emerged at last, testifying to the "demise of the intellectual". levy's narrative is impassioned but not impartial. He selects his materials to suit his story. Which means, in effect, he tells but half the story. Levy highlights the incidents which compromised French intellectuals but is slow to acknowledge their many feats of courage. Apart from Cam us, we hear nothing of those countless French intellectuals who consistently resisted the ideological lure, such as Rene Char, Vidal Naquet, Emmanuel Levinas or Paul Ricoeur, who never betrayed democracy. who never deemed the morality of human rights redundant, who never fell for the megalomaniac temptation of Grand Illusions. Nor do we hear anything, in this story, of the ideological errors oft non-French intellectuals the ultra-nationalism of German romantic thinkers from Fichte to Heidegger the litany of compromises made by many Soviet intellectuals under-Stalin the fascination of countless English-speaking writers - Pound, Eliot, Yeats, Lewis for fascist ideologies and so on. Levy's obsession with the evils of French intellectuals is, in fact, a subtle form of cultural racism. Besides, Levy's thesis is not new. Since Edmund Burke's critique of the French Revolution, attacks on the political consequences of Gallic ideologies have been commonplace. Our own time, indeed, has seen a rash of such writings, from John Carey's The Intellectuals and the Masses to Paul Johnson's The Intellectuals. Levy's narrative, though intriguingly crafted, is little more than a footnote from the besieged Bastille itself.

The final irony must be, however, that the same "new philosopher who penned these four hundred pages denouncing the political role of French intellectuals, is now celebrated in Paris as a leading campaigner for Bosnia. Plug ca change... The Times October 26, 1995, Thursday Treason in the cafes BYLINE: Roger Scruton SECTION: Features LENGTH: 932 words

ADVENTURES ON THE FREEDOM ROAD, By Bernard-Henri Levy, Harvill, Pounds 20. Roger Scruton on a critique of French intellectuals Isuppose I am typical of my generation of Englishmen, in having received an education which was largely apolitical. The modern books that most impressed me during adolescence Eliot's Four Quartets, Leavis's Revaluation, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations seemed to me to have no political message. My teachers at school and university made no show of their political opinions, and only occasionally hinted at what they might be. By the time of graduation I had lighted on my intellectual heroes Wagner, Eliot, Joyce, Schoenberg, Wittgenstein and Rilke but admired them for reasons which had nothing to do with politics, thinking them to be far above such mundane concerns. It was a rude shock to find myself in Paris, surrounded by contemporaries who spent their days throwing stones at policemen, their evenings studying Althusser, and their brief moments of leisure trading paradoxes from Foucault's Les Mots et les choses. I read the works which my French contemporaries took with them to the barricades, and was amazed. Those clean white paperbacks seemed to contain no arguments, no observations of reality, no history or criticism, but only words words arranged according to a political agenda, and regardless of their sense. And always it was the same agenda. The writer was locked in combat with something called the bourgeoisie; this thing had been in power for a long time since 1789 to be precise and was the fount of all oppression. The writer, however, had won through the written word a path to liberation and his message was being made available to the reader. Whether Sartre in Saint Genet, Foucault in the Histoire de la folie, Barthes in L'Ecriture degre zero, the writer had one thing of overriding urgency to convey: all forms, all manners, all morals and structures are merely the instruments of bourgeois dominion, and all is permitted to the one who wishes to smash them down.

This stuff was in due course to infect the English and American universities. At the time, however, it merely persuaded me to side with the French bourgeoisie, with de Gaulle as their representative, the police as their defenders and Valery as their poet laureate. It also prompted certain questions which refused to go away. When we English speak of an ''educated'' person, or a ''scholar'', we generally mean someone who stands above the melee of political life. When the French speak of an intellectual, they mean someone who is fighting in the midst of it, but with words rather than deeds. How did this phenomenon of the intellectual arise, and how should it now be judged? Those are the questions which Bernard-Henri Levy addresses in this book, and consideration of them is surely long overdue. Levy traces the story back to the Dreyfus case, and Zola's famous declaration J'accuse. Not all of Zola's successors, he points out, have been on the Left. There was Charles Maurras and Action Francaise, Drieu La Rochelle and the Nazis, and a host of lesser figures who rushed to join the Resistance during the last months of the occupation. Nevertheless, the majority of those who have adopted the life of the French intellectual have consecrated that life to some political cause usually leftist, revolutionary and offensive to the decencies of Catholic France. In the course of doing so they have produced more disgusting apologetics for tyranny than have soiled the entire history of literature and Levy documents with devastating effect some of the worst of them. In my day the hero was Mao and not a word could be uttered in 1968 against this mass murderer, whose imbecile writings were being sold by the thousand on the Boulevard St Michel, and whose prison uniform, imposed on the Chinese as a token of their enslavement, was willingly adopted by their Parisian contemporaries as a sign of ''liberation'' from the ''structures''. Sartre was particularly poisonous in encouraging this idolatry which he passed on to the Cambodian students who were to return home to participate in the ruin of their country. Later Foucault was to sing the praises of the Iranian ''revolution'' under Ayatollah Khomeini, while before my day the idol had been Stalin, Lenin or Trotsky. Levy is himself a French intellectual and was for a time prone to the disease that he describes. He is softer on his contemporaries than I would have been, is still persuaded as I am not that the Republican cause in Spain was the right one, and remains wedded to the conception of ''human rights'' that animated the French Revolution and which is, in my view, at the root of leftist apologetics for tyranny. He seems to recognise that Sartre, at least, was engaged in open warfare not with the bourgeoisie, but with the God of Jews and Christians, whose impertinent sovereignty leaves so little room for His earthly competitors. But Levy does not draw the obvious conclusion. His narrative is short on explanations, and peters out in anecdote whenever they are truly required. This may be because Adventures is also ''the book of the film'', containing passages of dialogue with survivors that no doubt made more sense when part of the original television series than they do on the page. While he has done a valuable service in collating so much information, Levy has not really looked beyond the symptoms of the ''intellectual disease'' to its underlying cause perhaps because that would have required him to look more deeply into his own heart. The Globe and Mail (Canada)

August 12, 1995 Saturday How fascism took hold in Voltaire's land Ideas propounded by men of letters at turn of century translated into world of French politics. FRENCH LITERARY FASCISM: Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture BYLINE: ERNA PARIS; GAM LENGTH: 1081 words Review by ERNA PARIS DURING the half-century that has elapsed since the collapse of Nazi Germany, fascism has often been dismissed as an aberration from the rational Enlightenment values that presumably define Western culture - a facile and distinctly comforting belief that has undoubtedly made it easier for us to distance ourselves from the horrors of our century. Now, a scholarly expedition into the literary works of extreme right-wing, nationalist writers in France suggests that the intellectual origins of totalitarianism are as indigenous to Western thinking as ideas about its opposite, democracy; and that far from being isolated in the presumably separate world of literature, the ideas propounded so relentlessly by these men of letters during the late 19th and early 20th centuries translated directly into the real world of French politics. In any discussion of modern fascism, France is an exceptionally interesting study; for although the Revolution and the Enlightenment both were born there in an explosion of radical ideology and action, only one century later a fabricated case of treason that was based not on ideals of liberty and equality, as one might have expected, but on older values of cultural and religious homogeneity, tore the nation apart. Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish target of this sound and fury, eventually became irrelevant to the internecine fracas, for he was only a symbol of the perennial question: What are the philosophical, ethnic and religious criteria of "nationhood"? In other words, who is and who is not "French"? That the nationalist struggle at the heart of the Dreyfus Affair remains unsettled in our own day becomes apparent every time the subject of the Second World War, the collaboration of the Vichy regime with the occupying Nazis, or the deportation of French Jews arises. That the antiSemitic, pro-Nazi policies of Vichy were supported, at least passively, by the majority of the French population is historically no longer in doubt except, it seems, in France itself where postwar propaganda depicting a nation of heroic resistants still holds sway. How did fascism take hold in the land of Voltaire and the Revolution? In this study of the relationship between literature and the emergence of fascist politics, David Carroll, a professor of French at the University of California, illuminates the cultural connection, or what Walter Benjamin once called "the aestheticizing of politics." Writers such as

Robert Brasillach, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Edouard Drumont and LouisFerdinand Celine, among others, were cultivated men with well-articulated views about society and culture. What they shared was a vision of the nation as a living, cultural entity with identifiable characteristics. Once the community had been properly "defined," everything that did not fit their description was rejected as "foreign." The extremist-nationalist writers and journalists of France (many of whom became active, pro-Nazi collaborators) designated Jews as the prototype of the foreign and the "non-French." As Carroll writes, "The specific role played by literature and literary figures is the formation of a national identity that is rooted in the representation of Jews as foreign, menacing others." Drumont, Brasillach et al created, or "imagined," the cultural and religious character of their nation, and elaborated their fantasies in language so strong that an early review of Celine's Bagatelle pour un massacre (published in 1938) claimed the author's true intention was "to incite people to murder." However, this sort of criticism was uncommon. To learn that the great Andre Gide tried to explain away Celine's antiSemitic ravings in the name of literary "creativeness" says volumes about just how banal and unremarkable racist "solutions" had become immediately prior to the war. The daddy of nationalist, literary anti-Semitism was Drumont, author of the fabulously successful book, La France Juive (Jewish or Judaized France), first published in 1885. Drumont laid the foundation for the modern, political use of anti-Semitism by identifying "Frenchness" in opposition to the supposedly rootless Jew. According to Carroll, Drumont created a collage that included the anti-Judaic heritage of traditional Christianity, the racism of the emerging anthropological sciences, and the "Judeo-phobic anticapitalism of popular and socialist levels of society." A year after its publication, La France Juive was in its 145th edition. This astonishing popular success was not lost on a younger generation of right-wing intellectuals whose work also was situated in "a certain idea of France." Carroll explores how aspects of classical humanism as well as theories of modern esthetics that defend ideas about the autonomy and "integrity" of literature became models for xenophobic nationalism. In sum, the nation was envisioned as self-contained and centrally controlled - like a homogenous work of art - in a tradition that estheticized force and idealized totalitarian ends. According to Carroll, the French writers described in this book saw fascism as a way of restoring the political and cultural values of the classical past, which they believed had been destroyed by modernity, and which were, they thought, a more profound expression of rational "Man" than anything produced by democracy or liberalism. My only reservation about this interesting and clearly written book

concerns this last connection, since most of us think of ancient Greece as the cradle of democracy, not fascism. Carroll is not wrong, but he assumes too deep a knowledge of the anti-democratic implications of some of Plato's writings, for example. Nor does he explain that the term "fascism" derives from Rome, not Greece. Rome was the strongly ordered society where magistrates' attendants carried bundled rods (fasces) with which to control those who stepped out of line. That said, what stands out is the author's critical intelligence and principled fairness. Although Carroll clearly detests the writings of his subjects, he never loses sight of his project, nor does he diminish the impact of his findings by veering into polemic. Readers interested in the always contemporary debate surrounding anti-hate legislation and freedom of expression will find French Literary Fascism a fascinating, instructive read. Erna Paris is the author of Unhealed Wounds: France and the Klaus Barbie Affair. Her next book, The End of Days: A Story of Tolerance, Tyranny and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain, will be published in September by Lester. The Sunday Times (London) March 6, 1994, Sunday The politics of strut BYLINE: Frederic Raphael SECTION: Features LENGTH: 1211 words

The Birth Of Fascist Ideology by Zeev Sternhell with Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri, Princeton University Press Pounds 19.95 pp338. Speed is the essential characteristic of the 20th century. When, having visited Russia after the Bolshevik revolution, Lincoln Steffens said, ''I have seen the future and it works'', he was promising that time itself could be advanced by political means. The Communist party, it was argued, had a proprietorial finger on the fast-forward button and only fascists and enemies of the working class would seek (in vain) to interfere with the pressure they applied to it. Now, of course, we have not only seen the future, we have also observed that, in the long run, it did not work. That it did not work in the short run either was ignored by large numbers of gullible Westerners. Between the wars, the left affected to regard fascism as the main menace to the blissful delivery of the future. The defeat of Hitler

and his pathetic side-kick, Mussolini, seemed to vindicate Marxist-Leninism. Who dared to deny the providential heroism of the Red Army? By 1945, nothing seemed less likely than any renaissance of fascism. It was worse than wicked: it had failed to deliver the goods. Its advocates were pariahs; the worst of its officials, unless particularly useful to one or other of the victorious allies, were punished and their doctrines anathematised by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Fascism was dead and some fascists were buried. It was convenient to forget that as many intellectuals of canonic stature Pound, Eliot, Yeats and Shaw had flirted, or got into bed, with it, as had ever cosied up to communism. Zeev Sternhell is an Israeli academic who, in the early 1980s, became world-famous in France when he accused the venerable political analyst Bertrand de Jouvenel of having been on the pro-Nazi bandwagon. The resulting libel action was graced by the last public appearance of Raymond Aron, who testified that it was ''unhistoric'' to put de Jouvenel, who had abandoned Doriot's French Fascist party in 1938, in the same bag with Drieu la Rochelle or Robert Brasillach, who had supported Nazism a outrance. Having thus rebuked Sternhell, the magisterial Aron got into a taxi and died. Sternhell's new book proves him to be unchastened, both in his zeal to root out the origins of fascism and in his conviction that French political theorists, in particular Georges Sorel, played a fundamental part in the evolution of a doctrine that has again begun to fascinate some of those whose wardrobe is in need of new ideological streetclothes. More than antiquarian curiosity impels us to share Sternhell's interest in the social doctrines that made violence an integral and excitingly theatrical element of reactionary politics and which, not by accident, recruited eager populations to its banner. The events in the former Yugoslavia suggest not only that the politics of strut are not dead, but also that the bourgeois world can respond with compromising dither, not to say complicity, when well-armed monomaniacs shake their fists. What is remarkable in his new book is the degree to which Sternhell refrains from the faults of which Aron accused him. His scholarship is, no doubt (and properly), fired by a certain rage, but anger is a fuel here, not a method. The Sternhell team is patient and, to a surprising degree, sympathetic with the founding fathers of a political theory which, we come to realise, was not a mindless aberration but emerged, in large part, from prophetic analyses of the flaws in classic Marxism. The perception that the Marxist future would not work long preceded both the outbreak of the first world war and the Bolshevik revolution. Fascism, however addled in its prescriptions and however crass its practice, derived both from paranoid fantasies about Jews and Freemasons (Franco was the longest-running believer in those), and from a trenchant diagnosis of the wishful thinking in Marxism. Its contradictions had already been detected by the end of the last century, most vigorously by Sorel, but also by the economist Vilfredo Pareto and a number of unfoolish Italian academics. If the right advice had been taken, one comes wincingly to realise, the 20th century might have been called off in good time. Sorel was a crackpot of a rare order. Without professorial dignity or practical political experience, he preached a revolution against the hateful bourgeoisie in which the General Strike had an almost mystic significance. Like many fascists, he was up in

arms as literally as he could manage without leaving his study in Boulogne-sur-Seine against the Enlightenment; he detested Socrates (in his eyes, the sponsor of sceptical individualism), Rousseau and the fable of man's perfectibility. Having been a fervent Dreyfusard, he grew disillusioned with Parisian politics after the use that the ''moderate'' Left made of Dreyfus's vindication. Sorel's ideas were fantastic, but he did locate a sore spot in bien-pensant socialist internationalism. In due course, the collapse of ''working-class solidarity'' in 1914 seemed to confirm that nations, not classes, constituted mankind's natural fighting units. Since as Heracleitus had argued in the fifth century BC war was the father of all things, socialism (whatever that meant) could come only through the bonding effect of belligerent nationalism. Fascism, too, wanted to put its foot on the accelerator: Marinetti, its futurist prophet, announced in 1909 that both space and time had been abolished. All that was needed to procure a sublime millennium was a quick bloodbath. Mussolini emerges here as something more than the mountebank that it has become convenient to assume him. Derided in 1944 by Benedetto Croce (who had voted for him 20 years earlier, as Heidegger did for Hitler) as ''just a poor devil, ignorant and unintelligent'', the young Duce clearly sought a genuine solution for Italy's problems: a national ideology, he concluded, would cement her recently achieved ''unity'' and procure an economic leap forward that would allow her to catch up with the muchfeared Germans. Mussolini's later catastrophic alliance with Hitler was an act of wicked consistency: gulled and intimidated as he may have been in the 1930s, he had always argued that Italy had to be allied with whoever was going to win a world war. The Birth Of Fascist Ideology is not an easy read, but its detail deserves and rewards close attention. The problem of human motivation and the place of myth in society cannot find answers in pan-European banalities and parochial narcissism. The selling power of the swastika, on books and films, suggests that the symbolism of domination has a tenacious hold on that combination of fear and vanity which we call the public imagination. Is it a sign of maturity or of cultural penury that democratic politics are now more a matter of managerism than of Big Ideas? Is it healthy that voters attach more importance to choosing between Tesco's and Sainsbury's than between Labour and Conservative? The world is still pregnant with a lot of rough beasts; it remains to be seen towards what Bethlehem, their hour come round again, they are slouching to be born. The Guardian (London) April 18, 1991 Arts Diary: Does power lobotomise the soul? BYLINE: By GILBERT ADAIR LENGTH: 888 words THE 18th-century aphorist Chamfort writes somewhere that one would have to swallow three live toads for breakfast if one wished to be certain not to encounter anything more

repulsive during the course of the morning. These days, with a copy of Kitty Kelley's biography of Nancy Reagan at hand, one can dispense with the toads. Nancy Reagan is clearly a woman of no distinction whatsoever, a woman with a brain the size and colour of a small cancerous pea, and Kelley's biography of her, though naturally unputdownable, is nearly as sleazy as its subject. It's the sort of book which has one consulting its illustrations time and time again simply to check up on the faces of the fascinatingly horrible individuals one has just been reading about. (Earlier, and far better, examples of the genre were James Fox's White Mischief and Indecent Exposure, David McClintick's account of the Begelman forged- check scandal.) But I read it in (rather schizophrenic) tandem with another book which was also concerned with recent sociopolitical history, and it was the chasm between them, both in relation to the texts themselves and to their raw material, that proved so instructive.

The other book was French, Bernard-Henri Levy's Les Aventures De La Liberte, a racy, discursive chronicle of the relationship of the Parisian intelligentsia with the century's major political upheavals, beginning with Zola's involvement in the Dreyfus case and concluding, in a properly melancholy fashion, with the collective malediction of the Seventies and Eighties that contrived, like the curse of Tutankhamen, to decimate an entire generation of intellectual bonzes (Sartre, Foucault, Barthes, Lacan, Althusser et al) within a single decade. Levy (something of a joke in certain quarters, one has to say) rose to prominence in the late Seventies as one of the so-called nouveaux philosophes who anticipated the death throes of Communist ideology by contending that the Gulag was not an aberration of Marxist practice but had always been as implicit in Marx's own theories as Auschwitz had been in Hitler's. And if, as metaphysics, his book is not exactly Kant's Critique Of Pure Reason, it does strike me as a brilliant specimen of a kind of polemical journalism that barely exists over here. These French intellectuals took some gruesomely wrong turnings in their allegiances, they were frequently tainted by opportunism, by unconscious (and conscious) antisemitism and even by latent Fascism, with whose seductive trappings two or three of them 'flirted', as they say. But they genuinely, critically, engaged with history; and when they made mistakes (and it can be argued, though not by me, that many of them were 'right to be wrong' when they were, just as it can be argued that knee- jerk antiCommunists were 'wrong to be right'), they paid for them, sometimes with their lives: Drieu la Rochelle committed suicide, Brasillach was shot, etc. What one finds most startling, however, is the direct and congenial contact they were able to have with the politicians of the day. Claudel, Giraudoux and Saint- John Perse were all co-opted into the diplomatic service, Malraux was de Gaulle's Minister of Culture, Regis Debray is a close associate of Mitterrand. And even those who remained hostile to the codified institutions of power were generally respectful of and friendly towards their representatives, whom they treated on a (more or less) equal footing.

To be sure, a comparable (if incomparably less dazzling) tradition of intellectual dissidence existed in both Britain and the United States, but it has almost completely atrophied. More to the point, considering the calibre of either nation's recent administrations, the notion of any reputable British or American thinker ideologically aligning him- or herself with them is laughable. And even if a columnist is supposed to provide answers, I would like to ask a question, a no doubt stupid question to which I have nevertheless no ready answer. Why, of late, have we elected such intellectual boobies? EVERY village has its idiot, but how could Americans twice elect Ronald Reagan President, the idiot of the global village? Why, instead of making joshingly coded allusions to his deficiencies, did no American journalist, even those to whom his policies were anathema, ever call him a moron and be done with it? Why always the language of moderation with such an immoderately awful person? And Thatcher? How could we listen to her and not write her off once and for all as a dangerous buffoon, an educated Idi Amin Dada, our very own Idi Amin Mama? (When she offered her interpretation of the Good Samaritan parable, one so wanted to do as Woody Allen did with Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall and suddenly confront her with Jesus.) Except in terms of the power she wielded, how could we take her pretensions as seriously as we did? And Bush, finally? Bush, who goes fishing while hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees starve? How can he live with that responsibility? I simply ask the question: How, realising what he has done, can he not want to kill himself? I would, and I'm no saint. But he goes fishing, and smiles his vacuous photo-opportunity smile at the photographers. What does power do to these people? Does it lobotomise the soul? The Observer March 24 1991 People (Interview): J'accuse la creme de la creme - A man debunking generations of French intellectuals and now declaring them dead / Bernard-Henri Levy BYLINE: ROBIN SMYTH SECTION: Pg. 55 LENGTH: 1398 words THE golden age of French intellectuals is being relived in France by viewers of a weekly TV series in which the great shades, from Zola to Sartre, emerge again from their studies to fight the battles of their fellow citizens. At the same time a 500-page book covering the same ground Les Aventures de la Liberte is being widely debated in newspapers and magazines. Both the four-part TV series of which we have now seen two and the intentionally subjective and impressionistic book are the work of Bernard-Henri Levy, the 42-year-

old former enfant terrible of the young intellectuals of the 1970s who called themselves Les Nouveaux Philosophes. What gives the multi-media reassessment of the great intellectuals its zest is that it is heavily pejorative. The intellectuals now for Levy an 'extinct species' are shown as, with a few honourable exceptions, pushovers for any passing ideology. Ten years ago young Levy was rapped over the knuckles by his elders for his book Ideologie Franaise, an exuberant swipe at the totalitarian underpinnings of French culture in the first half of the century. Since then he has won serious recognition as a novelist (The Last Days of Baudelaire) while continuing his missions as an intellectual troubleshooter which have taken him to Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Afghanistan and East Germany. There are still critics who see compulsive self-advertisement in the multi-media presentation which draws full advantage from the author's handsome hawk-like face speaking into the camera according to the estimation of an unfriendly eye 11 per cent of the time. But in his Left Bank office he is both a publisher and the editor of a literary and current affairs review La Regle du Jeu he tells us of his astonishment at the book's favourable reception. His main charge that the great intellectuals placed passion above wisdom and were the last people to go to for unbiased judgment is now well accepted. What is new is the sobriety of Levy's assessments and his determination not to be influenced by any extraneous considerations except when all the evidence has been weighed an invincible personal affection for the writer under examination. The modern French intellectual was born on the morning of 13 January, 1898, when Emile Zola's 'J'Accuse' on the front page of L'Aurore turned the tide against the antisemites and the military commanders in the Dreyfus affair. And the golden age ended in April 1980 as a crowd of 50,000 unknown mourners took over the funeral of Jean-Paul Sartre. In these 82 years an imposingly gifted body of writers interrupted their work to place their judgment and eloquence at the service of a country plagued by invasion, foreign occupation and colonial war. Romain Rolland, Andre Gide, Andre Breton, Drieu La Rochelle, Andre Malraux, Franois Mauriac, Louis Aragon, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Michel Foucault France has been widely envied for having such a think-tank to draw upon in a philistine age. Levy is struck by the intense violence of the intellectuals who emerged from the First World War, and by their contemptuously offhand rejection of the democratic principles by which they lived. He asks: 'How could certain intellectuals defenders of Dreyfus or later arrivals in that camp 30 years later defend executioners like Stalin and do so in the name of the same values ?'

Democracy had been put on one side for so long that intellectuals had lost interest in it. 'They weren't necessarily against it,' Levy says. 'They thought it would continue in France, but out of habit and inertia.' What interested them much more, whether they turned Left or Right, was the cult of youth: 'One of the ruling passions of the twentieth century which has fuelled modern dictatorships is the passion for youth for the new man and the new world. I don't say that all youth cults lead to fascism, but where there is a worship of youth fascism is not very far away.' The violence of the new intellectuals was not only political. Andre Breton and the Surrealists surrounded themselves with such an atmosphere of moral terror that one of their most talented adherents, Louis Aragon, embraced Stalinism primarily to be allowed to write his novels in peace rather than submit his work to the Surrealist witchhunt. Political blindness led to unforgivable excesses. Levy points out that Drieu La Rochelle, the most considerable French convert to Fascism who committed suicide at the Liberation, not only applauded the Nazis' Nuremberg rally in 1935, he toured the recently-opened Dachau concentration camp and praised its 'admirable comfort and frank severity'. Robert Brasillach, the only French intellectual to be executed for collaboration after the war, publicly advised the Nazi occupation authorities when they came to weed out the Jews 'not to forget the little ones'. Under the Communist yoke, Louis Aragon said that what France needed was the Russian secret police. His life as a writer before his conversion to Moscow he saw as comparable to that of a 'common criminal'. The philosopher Michel Foucault, towards the end of a life cut short by Aids, became to the horror of his left-wing admirers a fervent advocate of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Albert Camus and Franois Mauriac, the Catholic novelist who outraged establishment Catholics by his choice of the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War and his denunciation of French torture in Algeria, are the heroes of this story. They showed exceptional lucidity and courage, Levy thinks. He regrets that the Algerian-born Camus, who had been in the front rank of the struggle against dictatorship, was at the end of his life unable to accept the idea that an independent Algeria could sever its colonial links with France. But he praises Camus's consistent refusal to accept Sartre's finding of extenuating circumstances for Communist crimes. And he writes of Camus: 'How rare it is to find a writer who can hardly ever be faulted for lack of nobility or warmth of heart.' A third hero for Levy is Andre Malraux. The author of La Condition Humaine, who commanded an international air squadron against Franco early in the civil war, came closest to the romantic ideal of a warrior-intellectual who can exchange his pen for a machine-gun. But Levy admits that there are shadows over Malraux's record. The darkest is his silent connivance in the brutal extermination by his Communist friends of their anarchist allies in Catalonia. Then there was his astonishingly late adherence to the Resistance in 1943, accompanied by an equally mysterious conversion from Marxism to Gaullism.

Levy sees Malraux's companion in the early years of the Occupation, Josette Clotis, as partly to blame for his delay in taking sides. They lived in a luxurious borrowed Riviera villa where Josette made no secret of her low opinion of leftists, resistants and Jews. However, none of this more than scratches Levy's belief that Malraux was 'one of the most appealing characters in this story'. He is far less sure about Sartre: 'There are great, but also pathetic and shameful things in the life and work of Sartre. He was shameful in his justification of terrorism after the attack on the Israeli athletes at Munich in 1972. 'He was pathetic when after 1968 he trotted in the wake of young Maoist militants whom he saw, because they were young, as bearers of the spirit of the world. They told him to stop work on his study of Flaubert. What use is Flaubert? they said. 'But Sartre's greatness survived in the stubborness with which he resisted his young mentors and kept working on Flaubert. He went at it, writing alone in a corner with sulky determination until the work was finished. That was the great and attractive side of Sartre.' When one of the intellectuals was really in trouble, ideological barriers had a way of melting. Levy tells of a wartime meeting between Malraux and his friend Drieu La Rochelle. On the terrace of Malraux's Riviera villa Drieu, seeing defeat ahead, asked if Malraux would accept him in his Resistance brigade. Malraux accepted on condition that Drieu, whose face was by then widely known, agreed to change his name. Nothing came of it and Malraux failed to save Drieu from suicide. But it goes to show that, as Levy says, caste solidarity could surface through the strongest antagonisms. Manchester Guardian Weekly April 1, 1984 'Totalitarianism is a product of nationalism, not socialism' BYLINE: By Alian Rollat SECTION: LE MONDE; Pg. 13 LENGTH: 2182 words DATELINE: March 11/12 HIGHLIGHT: The historian Zeev Sternhell took part in symposium, organised in Paris on March 3 and 4 by ISER (Socialist Study and Research Institute) and the French Socialist Party on the subject of "The extreme Right and its secret abettors." During his stay in Paris, Prof. Sternhell agreed to answer our questions on some of the ideological views currently propagated by the Opposition in France.

IN ITS fight against the left, the opposition usually maintains that socialism contains the seeds of totalitarianism within itself. Le Club de l'Horloge (a far right think tank headed by Yvan Blot, who is a member of the central committee of Jacques Chirac's Rassemblement Pour la Republique -- RPR) goes so far as to equate socialism with fascism. And it makes use of your writings to buttress this argument, by recalling, for example, that Marcel Deat (who began his political career in 1932 as a socialist member of parliament and wound up founding the Rassemblement National Populaire, a fascistic and collaborationist group and becoming a secretary of state in the Vichy government during the second world war) was considered a potential successor of Leon Blum before he turned national socialist; that Jacques Doriot was a Communist leader before founding the Partie Populaire Francais (PPF) in 1936 (he championed collaboration with the Germans during the war, helped form the Legion des Volontaires Francais contre le Bolchevism -- LVF -- and fought for the Germans on the Russian front); that Mussolini was a socialist activist before he set up the Italian Fascist Party and so on. Is there any basis for this argument? It is a distortion both of my writings and of historical truth. Racism is admittedly a combination of nationalism and socialism, but of certain types of both. This form of nationalism is anti-Jacobinic, anti-humanistic nationalism that is closed and hard. It is nationalism for a closed community, that of the land and the dead, that is, a nationalism in which only the people springing up from the same land and having the same blood take part. In other words, for a Barres or a Maurras or any other fundamental nationalist, a Jewish immigrant or an Arab immigrant, the one coming from Eastern Europe and the other from North Africa, could never become French because their brains are not like a Frenchman's, or because -- to borrow Drumont's phrase (Edouard Drumont, a Catholic journalist, who inveighed against the power of money, especially Jewish money, and in 1892 founded a nationailist anti-Semitic paper, La Libre Parole) -- they have not "sucked the wine of the homeland." Jacobinic nationalism, on the other hand, considers that the Jew from Romania or the Arab from Algeria can, by voluntary choice of nationality, become French by acceding to the French language. The form of socialism that could end up in fascism is in truth dissidence from socialism, rejection of Marxism and democratic socialism. The socialism that hinges on nationalism is a socialism that rejects democracy and the principles of the 1789 Revolution, it is a national socialism for the nation in all its classes collected together. Doriot became a fascist because he spurned Marxism, and Mussolini, because he rejected social democracy. They both came from socialism and both slipped out of it. There is then no historic inevitability that makes socialism the womb of fascism. No. This would amount to saying that the dissidents represent the socialist movement in its entirety, whereas they have been rejected by this movement. Why did they drift into fascism? Because these men, in France and elsewhere, became convinced in their intellectual development that conventional orthodox socialism had no solutions for the crisis in modern society. I have pointed out on a number of occasions that it would be possible to write the history fascism as the history of Marxist revisionism, for these men came to the conclusion that the driving force of history was not class but nation, and they accordingly concocted this synthesis of national socialism.

It should be remembered that in the last decade of the 19th century when these schisms began to appear, an unprecedented economic expansion was getting under way in Europe which posed problems for the socialist movement -- which was part of the Marxist mould -- because it turned out that the social problems could be resolved by economic progress. The first division separated the socialists who continued to be revolutionaries from those who went along with the idea that bourgeois society could endure for a long time by accepting the rules of the game: change could only come about through universal suffrage. They were the French and German social democrats. A second schism split those who continued being revolutionaries. Those who wanted to carry out the proletarian revolution, to do so with a professional revolutionary avant-grade were the Leninists and Bolsheviks. Those who wanted to carry out the revolution making use of the revolutionary force they discovered -- the nation, which replaced class -- they wanted to carry out a national revolution. These were the revolutionary syndicalists and Sorelians (after Georges Sorel, a 19th century French pamphleteer who, coming under the influence of Proudhon, Marx, Nietzsche, Bergson and William James, denounced the moral, social and economic decadence of the bourgeoisie and advocated an ethical socialism and revolutionary syndicalism). Mussolini was one of them. Sorel had been a consistently fierce critic of the 1789 Revolution, which he considered a bourgeois, not a proletarian, revolution. In fact, Leninists and Sorelians came to the same conclusion -- the proletariat would never carry out the revolution. So it is these revolutionaries who went their two separate ways. The others, the vast majority, have remained socialist and democratic and, in fact, condemn themselves to impotence in many respects because they accept democratic rules. It is therefore historically fallacious to say fascism stems from socialism and not nationalism. The question is whether there wouldn't have been fascism without socialism, but that's another matter. It could be said that without socialism as a historical phenomenon there would not have been fascism, but there would not have been fascism either without liberalism or capitalism. It must be pointed out that Bolshevism and Leninism are a deviation of Marxism, just as the history of fascism could be written as the history of marxist deviationism. The French right, especially the Club de l'Horloge, also holds today that socialism, fascism and communism have a shared mystique based on the cult and efficacy of the state at the service of creating a society destructive of individual liberties. That really surprises me, for anyone with the least knowledge knows that Marxism is based on the idea of the negation of the state. In Marxist thinking, the state must disappear -- this is just as true for socialists as for communists; the state is a stopgap, its existence is temporary. But let us get back to reality. The state is an instrument that permits influencing social realities, it permits taking up the defence of certain social categories. There isn't a state that does not intervene. In liberal thinking, it is said the state does not intervene. But if

it does not intervene, it means it is invervening in favour of those who are already in a strong position. In socialist thinking, the state intervenes in favour of those who need state intervention. But it is untrue that the socialist conception of the state leads to totalitarianism. What does totalitarianism mean? It means that everything is political and that the state intervenes in every aspect of human existence, which is in any case practically impossible, except in a police state. Democratic socialism cannot dream of such an intention because, in its view, the state is an instrument in the hands of individuals, whereas in totalitarian thinking, the individual exists only to serve society and the state. In Nazi fascist thinking, the state is an end in itself: it exists for serving the state, and the individual disappers vis-a-vis the nation or the race. Socialism and liberalism agree in the sense that they both assert the primacy of the individual vis-a-vis the community, whereas fascism gives primacy to the community. Socialism has yet to spawn a totalitarian state. The same ideologues maintain that for socialists and fascists egalitarianism is dogma, that individuals compared with society ought to be as egalitarian as possible, that this conception leads to denial of "the right to differ", and that socialism, fascism and communism ultimately have a common enemy -- the bourgeois, the individual attached to liberties. What do you think of that? I've never heard anything like it. This is the work of intellectual forgers. Here they are claiming that socialists and fascists are anxious to reduce social inequalities, but no fascist regime has attempted to reduce social inequalities.Fascism is an elitist system, the fascist state is generally run by a leader. The right to be different? In socialist thinking there is never any question of a single labour union, but in fascist thinking there is. What a hotchpotch. It's as if someone said there was no democracy in socialism.This is precisely what is important: the socialists who rejected liberty moved towards Leninism and Bolshevism, the others moved towards fascism. As for the bourgeois and the "individual attached to liberties", they are two completely different things. What do you think of the expression "red fascism" used by the right about the Communist Party? It's a phrase used by Drieu La Rochelle (French writer, who embraced a succession of causes without finding any satisfaction in them. In the end, hankering for law and order, he espoused fascism and collaborated with the Germans, finally committing suicide in 1945) and Brasillach also spoke of a "vast and red" fascism. (Robert Brasillach, French writer and critic, became editor in chief of the anti-Semitic paper Je Suis Partout and wrote enthusiastically about Nazi Germany, was condemned to death and shot after the Liberation.) This was a '30s theme which was used to establish a link betwen regimes that were anti-liberal, anti-democratic and anti-socialist. In this connection, it might be said that the big difference between communist totalitarianism and fascist totalitarianism is that fascism is theory applied, that is a system in which there is very little difference between theory and practice; whereas with communism, the application falsifies or deforms theory, and there is a bigger gap between theory and practice. That's why it is possible to retreat from communist totalitarianism or try to do as in Hungary

or Czechoslovakia That's why I think it is not certain there won't be changes even in the Soviet Union. Do you know that the opponents of the Socialists and Communists are occasionally making themselves out to be the "new republicans"? That's precisely what the fascists used to say in the '30s: we are real republicans, we are continuing the revolution. Mussolini always made himself out to be a product of the Risorgimento, the continuator of Mazzini and Garibaldi. The Club de l'Horloge is a continuation of this. It is spreading ideas that were fascist ideas between the two wars. What should be remembred is that socialism sees itself as the continuator of 1789 because it goes further. It is trying to do what the liberal revolution has not succeeded in doing -- enable all individuals to attain their full potential. Socialism is trying to redress social inequalities. If you like, the difference between social democracy (we must not be afraid of this discredited word, which is a technical term signifying that socialism is primarily democratic) and liberalism is that liberalism is political democracy, whereas democratic socialism reaches beyond political democracy towards forms of democracy and social justice. Do you think, as (First Secretary of the Socialist Party) Lionel Jospin does, that "one of the fundamental elements of the collusion between the right and the extreme right stems from the ideological death of Gaullism"? All that's left of Gaullism is, in fact, is its least sympathetic aspect -- a kind of authoritarianism. You seem surprised at the way political ideas are developing in France. What surprises me is to note how these phoney ideas are getting a hold on the traditional right. The political aim appears to be to discredit the entire left, including advanced liberal thinking. Out with any ideas of the welfare state, everything aimed at utilising society's collective power for the individual's welfare . . .Until now the republican consensus of the Dreyfus affair held together because of the alliance of a liberal right and a democratic socialism. The old ideas are making a comeback against the background of an economic crisis and a lack of confidence in oneself. If the Club de l'Horloge represents the French right's ideology, then it means that there is no traditional right any more. This is something now and it is worse than Le Pen (Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the far-right Front National). Democracy can only be either liberal or socialist. SUBJECT: HISTORY (90%); POLITICAL PARTIES (90%); POLITICS (90%); RESEARCH INSTITUTES (90%); COLLEGE & UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS (79%); CONFERENCES & CONVENTIONS (77%); WORLD WAR II (74%); LANGUAGE & LANGUAGES (71%); RACE & RACISM (65%); Manchester Guardian Weekly February 6, 1983

Correction Appended The roots of fascism in France; "Ni Droite ni gauche: l'ideologie fasciste en France," by Zeev Sternhell. Le Seuil, 405 pp, Frs 99. SECTION: LE MONDE; Pg. 12 LENGTH: 1286 words HIGHLIGHT: Emmanuel Todd talks to Zeev Sternhell Israeli intellectual and Labour Party executive Zeev Sternhell's new book, an analysis of fascism in France between the wars, upsets a number of ideological cliches. It doesn't offer the classic vision of a fascism secreted by the Right or by big money to counteract the rise of a revolutionary Left. Nor does it present an angelic Left, sagely divided into reformist Socialists and reactionary Communists, for whom fascism was simply an external rival. Sternhell suggests that men and ideas of the Left contributed largely to the elaboration of fascism. Between 1890 and 1940 even the most respected human sciences, psychoanalysis and sociology, more or less consciously promoted the emergence of an antiliberal, anti-egalitarian ideology. Teeming and sometimes loosely organised, "Ni droite ni gauche" is an important, controversial work which raises as many questions as it answers. On behalf of Le Monde, historian Emmanuel Todd asked the Polishborn Sternhell to explain his view of fascism.

Is a fascist a man of the Right? He's neither a conservative nor a reactionary. Thierry Maulnier put it very aptly: "Conservative, there's a word which gets off to a very bad start." The fascist is a revolutionary in the sense that he wants to overthrow the established order, which is liberal democracy. This is one of the basic reasons that the real fascists in between-thewars France split with Action Francaise. The fascist is obsessed by an ideal of modernity and youth: he wants to produce a new man, a lover of sport and backpacking who lives in a new town regenerated by futurist architecture. He admires Le Corbusier, Marinetti, and Gropius. He likes motors, machinery, and speed. What was the Left's role in shaping fascism? Let's begin with Italy. In the peninsula, the revolutionary syndicalism of the turn of the century was the veritable backbone of fascism. The great majority of revolutionary syndicalists followed Mussolini. They remained faithful to him until the end. But in all

countries, at the ideological level, the contribution of the Left to fascism took the form of a revision of Marxism, a questioning of materialism. The Left started with the observation that the proletariat was no longer the revolutionary class and that, if you want revolution, you must elaborate a conception of socialism as an eternal idea independent of social or economic structures and the historical moment. Here the name of Georges Sorel must be cited -- the fundamental ideological link between revolutionary syndicalism and fascism -- but also Roberto Michels, Eduard Berth, and Antonio Labriola. On the eve of 1914, the Proudhon Circle, where socialism and nationalism mingled, was the place where the actual concept of fascism was worked out. It was born of an encounter between Sorelians and Maurassians united in the same desire to overthrow bourgeois and liberal democracy. On the theoretical level, French fascism was very much in advance of Italian fascism. Thinking in terms of men instead of ideologies, what was the specific contribution of the French Left to fascism between-the-wars? It furnished at least half the grey matter. Marcel Deat and Paul Marion came from the Section Francaise de l'Internationale Ouvriere (SFIO), Jacques Doriot from the Communist Party, Bertrand de Jouvenel from the Radical Party. Henri de Man was one of the leading lights of the Belgian Labour Party. As for people from the Right, we no longer think of scarcely anybody but Robert Brasillach or Maulnier and, to some extent, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle. You stress fascism's ideological importance as a factor in the impermeation and demoralisation of French political society, but willingly admit its political insignificance properly speaking. What is it that inhibited the development of fascism as a political force in France? Very obviously, the Right. That's why I made a detailed study of the case of Georges Valois, one of the first true fascists in France, and whose Faisceau movement was consciously and systematically torpedoed by the conservative Right in the years 19251927. The Right set all its leagues against Valois -- the Millerand League, the Patriots League, the Patriotic Youth -- in a really spectacular campaign of intimidation. The Right refused Valois its money and its men. It accused him of being an agent of the police. Action Francaise did to this fascist what it later did to Leon Blum, but worse. In Europe fascism succeeded only where the Right was weak. The French Right, settled into a society in which the speed of modernisation was slow, enjoyed a force and stability which allowed it at all times to do without fascism's political support. Aren't you exaggerating the logic of individual behaviour? You often say that the revision of Marxism implicates this or that evolution, the passage to fascism this or that particular individual. This could appear slightly odd in today's France, where the latest revision of Marxism led Maoist intellectuals to the New Philosophy, that is, to a rediscovery of liberal values. We have to put ourselves in the context of the times and begin with the concept of revisionism, which today has only one significantion but which, in practice, had two from 1890 to 1940. There is the revisionism we know, that of Jean Jaures, Filippo

Turati, Eduard Bernstein, which leads to fascism. Hence the complexity of the itineraries involved. Marxism associates the proletariat and revolution. Once you observe that the proletariat is abandoning the revolutionary ideal, you have a choice between going along with the proletariat -- in the case of Bernstein -- or going along with the revolutionary ideal, in the fascists' case. Your previous book, "La Droite revolutionnaire," was about the pre-fascists of the years 1885-1914. Your new one is about the fascists of 1920-1940. One gets a vague impression in reading it that the latter interests you less, that they appear less original to you. At every level, French culture in the 1920s and 1930s was less rich than at the turn of the century. Paris had ceased to be the world centre for letters, the arts, the social sciences -- and political and ideological life. Emile Durkheim and Charles Peguy were dead. Henri Bergson no longer attracted a following. Cultural life took a provincial turn. Max Weber and Freud were little known and much misunderstood. The heirs weren't up to their forebears. Emmanuel Mounier was no replacement for Peguy. Maulnier and Brasillach couldn't replace Barres. Durkheim had no successor. Maybe Henri de Man was up to Sorel, but he was a cosmopolitan Belgian educated in Germany who spoke four languages. You claim that the new social sciences paved the way for fascism. This is a bit bizarre, surely. Not at all. Even if Durkheim and Freud were bourgeois liberals personally, their theories sapped democracy's confidence in itself. The social psychology of the times stressed man's irrationality and the role of unconscious motives and instincts. It destroyed the model of individual and rational consciousness constructed by 18thcentury philosopheres, and on which liberal and democratic ideals were explicitly based. You say very little about Germany, which was nevertheless one of the places where the fascist ideal was fulfilled. I establish a very strict distinction between fascism and Nazism. Fascism isn't interested, like Nazism, in the problem of biological determination, or the concept of racial predestination. Italian fascism wasn't racist. There isn't a trace of anti-Semitism in Valois or among the fascists who came from the left. People like Deat and Doriot discovered anti-Semitism late in the game. It was an idea they borrowed from Nazism. Anti-Semitism isn't a necessary component of the fascist system. Why did you decide to concentrate on France? First of all, undoubtedly, for sentimental reasons. Between Poland and Israel, I spent four years in France at Avignon in the Lycee Mistral. But above all, French history is the most interesting, even more interesting than German history. It's colourful and contradictory. France is the only country which carried out a major liberal revolution. It has been the great ideological laboratory of Europe in the 20th century, fascism included, whose conception would have been impossible without the combination of the two traditions of French socialism and French nationalism. It's because France at the

beginning of the century was the only great liberal and egalitarian society which was able to work out an ideological challenge to the ideals of liberty and equality. he New York Times April 4, 1982, Sunday, Late City Final Edition WHAT DID SARTRE DO DURING THE OCCUPATION? BYLINE: By MARVIS GALLANT; Mavis Gallant is a writer who lives in Paris. Her latest book was ''From the Fifteenth District: A Novella & Eight Short Stories. SECTION: Section 7; Page 3, Column 1; Book Review Desk LENGTH: 2799 words

THE LEFT BANK Writers, Artists and Politics From the Popular Front to the Cold War. By Herbert R. Lottman. 319 pp. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. $15.95. PARIS has two left banks, real and metaphorical, lower- and uppercase. Lowercase left bank consists of six wards, or arrondissements, inhabited for the most part by petit bourgeois families whose taste, conversation and preoccupations are at a great remove from the intellectual and literary squabbles, the style and the manner we still associate with ''Left Bank.'' Uppercase Left Bank - as a place, not a frame of mind - is relatively small. The south side of the Seine is shaped something like an open fan; if you were to pick up the fan, your thumb would rest on that most evocative of metro stops, St.Germain-des-Pres, while the ball of the thumb would more than cover the clutch of streets that comprise the physical and allegorical center, the substance and title of Herbert R. Lottman's new book. As the subtitle suggests, we are on a guided tour of the 1930's and 1940's as seen from the Sixth Arrondissement, where, it must be said at the outset, history was discussed but never decided. We know the way-stops by heart and can shuffle them into order: Popular Front, Spanish War, Occupation, Liberation, the first edge of the cold war. Names crowd one another; we attach to the better known a face, an attitude, sometimes a voice: the three Andres - Gide, Malraux and Breton - Sartre and de Beauvoir, Camus, Aragon, Cocteau, Ilya Ehrenburg, Robert Brasillach, Arthur Koestler. They do not have to be convivial, dead or alive, to jostle one another across the page. Sometimes a name bobs up to no particular purpose. We learn that it was in Andre Chamson's apartment that Andre Gide met the Radical Socialist leader Edouard Daladier. Well, what happened? Did Daladier say anything worth repeating? And can Gide possibly have listened? There cannot be many readers who have not made the trip before, or who have never taken a look at the momuments. The only point in undertaking a survey again would be if there were anything unexpected to be found; the Left Bank intelligentsia and its

shenanigans and ambiguities have been as thoroughly scrubbed out as the Bloomsbury group or Berlin in the 1920's. However, Mr. Lottman, author of the only full biography of Albert Camus in any language, is a scrupulous and patient cicerone, singularly unnasty considering some of the people he has to deal with. As a rule he lets them speak for themselves through their works, journals and correspondence (the inclusion of the critic Paul Leautaud's crabbed diaries is particularly welcome) and through a number of interviews with survivors, quoted indirectly. When he adds a comment, it has the tone of a whisper. ''What did he actually do?'' he asks of Sartre during the Occupation. To put the question is to state an opinion, of course. (''Went on with his work'' is the answer, but that is not what is meant by ''do'' in that particular context. The answer, then, has to be ''Nothing much.'') Of Ernst Junger, supposedly shocked after a conversation with the dementedly anti-Jewish Louis Ferdinand Celine (Celine complained that the Nazis were not getting rid of Jews fast enough), he remarks, ''Still, one wonders if Junger really had to cross the Rhine to meet such people.'' Of Malraux, who had assured the Liternaturnaya Gazeta that his next novel was to be about Soviet workers in the oil fields, Lottman murmurs, ''Perhaps he really thought he would do that.'' It is hopeless to chip away at the Malraux monument, and Lottman, sensibly, does not try. He merely serves him up, whiling away the war with his stunning mistress at La Souco, the villa in the south of France that Dorothy Bussy had lent him. With the villa came a manservant who cooked delicious meals and wore white gloves to wait on table. (Dorothy Bussy was Lytton Strachey's sister and Gide's translator. As a footnote to ''The Left Bank,'' when she reclaimed her house there was not a bottle in the wine cellar, and some of the art hanging on the walls had disappeared.) In the meantime, Malraux's Jewish wife and their child were in hiding, short of money and sometimes of food. When, in 1942, Malraux arranged a meeting with his wife, it was only to ask for a divorce so that he could marry his pregnant mistress. A divorce would have left Clara Malraux without even the token protection of an Aryan husband, and she had to refuse. During their conversation Malraux observed that he was sick of lost causes (he meant the Spanish War) and would approach the Resistance only after the Americans had landed. Troubled times promote callous behavior, particularly when it looks as if the trouble will last. Lottman has praise and, one feels, genuine affection for Pablo Picasso. Although he ate heartily in black-market restaurants and never turned away an art lover in uniform, Picasso did sign a petition in favor of Max Jacob - aged Jewish poet, artist and Catholic convert -who had been interned at Drancy, the French-run camp near Paris. His co-signers were all bigfish collaborators or those apolitical minnows that always seem to swim along with the Right. Ironically, they had been Jacob's peacetime cronies. The appeal came to nothing and Jacob died soon after. (Across his identity paper, which was returned to a member of his family, is scrawled ''No ration card,'' in itself a death sentence.) Early this year the composer Henri Sauguet, interviewed by the Paris daily Liberation, recalled how he and a few of Jacob's friends had asked Picasso to intervene directly with the Germans. Picasso, said Sauguet, ''frequently received l'Occupant in his studio'' and had ''powerful connections.'' ''I can still see the scene. Picasso was eating lunch. He heard us out and replied, 'Max is an angel. He'll fly over the wall.' ''

What seems incredibly hard of heart, in retrospect, was probably no more than lack of imagination. The imagination of creative genius has nothing to do with putting oneself in another's place. Lottman, quoting Arthur Koestler, describes how a Frenchman would greet a political refugee, embrace him ''and leave him shivering in the street''; and, as he points out, a writer such as Hemingway who did not need a free meal was more likely to be asked to dinner than a penniless novelist who had just escaped from Hitler. Koestler's Frenchman, given the fact that he was ready to embrace an anti-Nazi refugee in public, might well have turned to active resistance when the time came; on the other hand, he may just as easily have retired to a cafe and written a one-act play. It would be interesting, though dispiriting, to trace the course that led directly to postwar fame, prosperity and intellectual authority. Which was the best starting gate - a terrace overlooking the Mediterranean, a regular table at the Cafe Flore or a life put at risk? A chapter titled ''Everybody Collaborated'' begins: ''If one were to tabulate the memoirs of those years, one might conclude that nearly everyone in Paris resisted the Germans during the occupation. But it is also possible to make the case that 'everybody collaborated.' '' There were so many, in fact, that to have called them to account later would have emptied publishing houses, theaters, literary reviews, not to speak of cafes and drawing rooms. ''The Left Bank'' is particularly illuminating on publishers and publishing. During the Occupation the French published a yearly average of 6,379 titles, a staggering figure when compared with the American wartime average of 9,452 titles, given the difference in populations, the amount of paper available and the relative difficulties of production at that time. The year the Germans took over the whole of France, 1943, was a peak season, with close to 8,000 titles on the lists. The French publishers' association could issue a statement about its ''civilizing mission'' while accepting a blacklist of authors and a ban on Jews, even as subject matter. Calmann-Levy, a house founded in 1836, was placed in the hands of an ''Aryan committee.'' ''During their tenure, the French carpetbaggers ... sold off everything of value,'' including letters from Flaubert, both Dumas's, Sainte-Beuve and George Sand. Louis Aragon, publishing a novel early in the war, ''permitted Gaston Gallimard to change his unsympathetic German characters into Dutchmen.'' ''We are collaborating, and that is a guarantee of survival,'' said Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, who took over the Nouvelle Revue Fran,caise during the Occupation and ran it as a FrancoGerman literary organ. IN the dismally uneven settling up that followed the war, collaborating publishers, who still had stocks of paper allotted by the Germans, went on as before, while the impoverished underground press, emerging after the Liberation, could not even reprint publications that had been clandestinely produced during the Occupation. A writer's future depended not so much on what he had written but on that impalpable Paris mixture of gossip and rumor, of likes and dislikes, on swimming too deep or too close to the surface. The writer might be jailed, or exiled, or find that his publisher - as a rule, even more deeply involved with the enemy - suddenly had no time for him. Drieu La Rochelle, having lost his ''guarantee of survival,'' shot himself; Robert Brasillach, the writer for the political weekly Je Suis Partout, was shot by a firing squad, thereby wiping out the sins of a good many contemporaries. Some, who had survived by applying every form of ambiguity human conduct can devise, came out of it as leaders of a new generation. Some changed camps, on tiptoe; others went on smiling and changed salons. (''Arrest Cocteau?'' a French police official is supposed to have said.

''C'est une danseuse.'') A new blacklist of authors appeared. Sartre and de Beauvoir approved. ''Vengeance was vain, they felt, but certain people had no place in the new world they were trying to build.'' That use of ''certain people'' should have made the blood run cold, given the history of the year before, but the Left Bank was in favor. Left to Right, from one decade to another, an extreme of political whim (the basis, sometimes, of authority) seems to represent no more than an efficient cleaning squad. But then, they had been calling for new brooms since the 30's - Hitler's broom, Stalin's broom. To Charles Maurras, who saw the German victory as ''the divine surprise,'' the broom was to sweep away democracy and the Jews. In a mindless conversation that Lottman cites, a journalist from the revolting Je Suis Partout sees, in the Cafe Flore, ''an incredible assembly of Jews and halfbreeds,'' and Leon-Paul Fargue confides that he hopes for the defeat of France, for it will mean getting rid of the Jewish playwright Henry Bernstein. It must have been difficult to decide how thick the line ought to be around the clean new world. Probably one impassable frontier should have been traced against those who had turned someone in, given a name. Marcel Jouhandeau's wife, Elise, once wrote a letter to the Germans, denouncing the editor and publisher Jean Paulhan as a secret resister and friend of the Jews. (Referring to the incident, Lottman mentions only ''the wife of a writer,'' perhaps in a tactful desire to spare her memory.) The Jouhandeaus are dead and so is Paulhan. The only person living is the German officer who received the letter and hushed the matter up; had he not done so, Paulhan might have died in a concentration camp and Elise Jouhandeau might have been asked to explain. Perhaps not; sleeping with a German officer seems to have aroused more postwar indignation than betraying a friend. No wonder those who were punished were bitter at having been singled out. REMARKING on literary salons, Lottman writes, ''These formal meeting places are among the most difficult for us to recreate today because they are the most removed from contemporary behavior.'' One of the last, which crept (one cannot say flourished) well into the 60's was haunted by writers, minor and major, who had enjoyed ''the divine surprise.'' It took a great wrench of the imagination to see these soft-spoken, often witty, usually kind, immensely cultivated people, now down on their luck - they resembled, on the whole, an assembly of clothes moths - as maniacs preaching destruction. But they were, and had been - or something near to that. The French have a way of swarming onstage, dashing headlong into the scenery and then complaining about the damage. English-speakers who, as a rule, sit tight and hope the theater will hold together, may feel they are watching ideological warfare set to Offenbach. The trouble is that the actors mean it; they can, they do, bring the sets crashing down. Actors who seem only to be playing dead will never rise again. In life, as in art, a magisterial ''He deserved it'' (to lose his job, to be ostracized, to have his reputation besmirched, to be deported or, when the times allow it, to be shot) is still a Left Bank curtain line. Rereading ''The Left Bank,'' with the first helping of information absorbed, one is struck by two things: an almost entire absence of women (this has to do with France, not with Mr. Lottman) and a feeling that a great amount of energy and intelligence was often expended to no purpose. The 30's come to a dead stop, like an overwound alarm clock. All those speeches, those petitions drawn up and circulated, the meetings organized and attended, the marches and demonstrations, the traveling and talking and to-ing and froing - from an idea to its denial, from feud to denunciation, from break to banishment,

from statement to rebuttal, from the Salle de Geographie to the Mutualite, from the Sorbonne to ''the all-purpose building at 44 rue de Rennes ... where one could hold a public rally or a secret cell meeting,'' from a table at the Flore to another at the Deux Magots -seem to remain static, a kind of tragic entertainment, tragic because of the times. Think of the 1930's, when the to-ing and fro-ing extended to Moscow and Berlin; when all those Cominternmanipulated congresses, fostered with so much good will, some good faith and such a lot of voluntary blindness, soaked up the vitality of an entire intellectual class. (No great literary work was produced in those years, Lottman reminds us.) What if the passion, oratory and persuasiveness had been expended on something closer to home? Votes for women would have been a good start, but as an issue it barely interested anyone. (The Left was against feminine suffrage, on the grounds that the women of France, in the hands of the clergy, were bound to vote Right. The dismaying thing is that intelligent women swallowed this.) There were children's prisons, and children working in mines and textile factories. The unspeakable urban slums, the lamentable hospitals were left to right-wing writers, such as Celine, to describe. Almost up to the war, France was the only country still transporting prisoners to overseas penal colonies. One never hears that Malraux or Gide or Aragon - let alone Sartre - ever applied for mortality statistics to that branch of the civil service elegantly called Service de Deportation. When Jean Zay, Leon Blum's Minister of Education, was tried by the Vichy Government on a trumped-up charge of desertion, ''deportation'' was automatically added to his sentence; it had never been removed from the books. (Lottman refers to Zay in a different context. Soon after being sentenced, he was dragged out of his cell by French fascists and murdered.) WOMEN exist in ''The Left Bank'' as wives or mistresses, passing the petits fours and keeping their mouths shut. Simone de Beauvoir is the first woman to have anything to say, and by the 50's, where the narrative ends, hers is still a lone voice. (Whether the voice would have been heard at all without Sartre's to accompany it remains unanswerable.) In one unexpected side trip, Lottman takes us to Marguerite Duras's apartment. The war is over. Women can vote. She is a member of the Communist Party and will remain one until expelled. Friends and fellow members meet, in her St.Germain-des-Pres flat, to talk and argue. ''Actually, she contributed little to the discussions, for women did not participate much in those days. But she did the cooking, wrote her books, and had a baby. In retrospect, she decided that the silence that custom imposed on women had helped make a writer of her.'' We are not told how and why. Lottman concludes with a melancholy quotation from Samuel Beckett's ''Endgame,'' which must be his own way of expressing an opinion on what has gone before: ''Mean something! You and I, mean something! Ah, that's a good one!'' Manchester Guardian Weekly March 28, 1982 French anti-Semitism -- alive and kicking; "Edouard Drumont et Cie; antisemitisme et fascisme en France", by Michel Winock. Seuil, 215pp, Frs 70.

BYLINE: by Henri Guillemin SECTION: LE MONDE; Pg. 13 LENGTH: 1083 words

WITH perfect candour, Michel Winock makes no secret that his new book is a collection of eight articles published here and there during the past ten years. To gather them under the above title is somewhat artificial; it's hard to see what Chapter One, "Un avant-gout d'apocalypse; l'incendie du Bazar de la charite" (originally published in June 1978 in L'Histoire), has to do with Drumont's relationship to the question of "French Catholics in the face of fascism". And if the long chapter devoted to "Une parabole fasciste: 'Giles' de Drieu La Rochelle" (from Mouvement Social, July-September 1972), is very good -- dense and penetrating -- it is only distantly related to what we have taken on the strength of the title as an inquiry into Drumont and his destiny. It's worth taking some trouble to know something about a man like Edouard Drumont, a journalist and politician of influence, to have at least an inkling of the answers to the three questions which Sainte-Beuve calls curcial in understanding the reality of a person: questions pertaining to money, sexuality, and political and religious ideas. I would in particulr like to know whether Drumont was a "believer", which would surprise me given his frenzied personality. I counted on Winock to inform me; too bad he hasn't. But when all is said and done, this collection of articles is anything but negligible, if only because of the documents it puts before our eyes. Moreover, Winock has the merit of trying to locate Drumont's specific contribution to anti-Semitism, which he certainly did not create but for which he was one of the most malignant propagandists. Did you know -- I learned it from reading this book -- that the slogan "France for the French" (which stubbornly continues to reappear on the nation's streets thanks to an extreme Right which remains more or less attached to the principles of Charles Maurras and his Action Francaise movement) comes directly from Drumont's daily, La Libre Parole? It was even the paper's subtitle. Yes, says Winock: three "conglutinate" elements went to make up Drumont's anti-Semitism, the anti-Judaic heritage of the Christian tradition, the Judeophobic anti-capitalism of a certain populist left wing, and a racism derived from so-called scientific anthropology. We know this Christian heritage only too well: in the atrocity line it has dabbled with just about everything Nazism prided itself on. Luckily, things have changed. Left-wing anti-Semitism ("the socialism of imbeciles", as the German politician August Bebel put it) broke out most flagrantly under Louis-Philippe with Alphonse Tous-senel's 1845 pamphlet "The Jews Kings of the Age". The name Rothschild continued to fascinate and blind; this fascination ended up tarring the great non-Jewish manipulators of money, the Casimir-Periers, the Laffittes, and the Schneiders, with the same heinous brush applied to the celebrated Frankfurt banking

dynasty. And Drumont, like others, tried to win over at least part of the burgeoning working classes to the cause of his anti-republican enterprise, linking them surreptitiously to clerical interests on the one hand and on the other to a pseudopatriotism more concerned with using the army to protect the rich than to defend the nation's territory. On the anthropological side, note what Ernest Renan said in 1855: "The Semite race compared to the Indo-European represents an inferior combination of the human race." Nor should it be ignored that there existed and still exists an anti-Semitism which is basically anti-Christian. Winock reminds us of Gustave Tridon's "Molochism juif" (1884), a declaration of war on Judeo-Christian monotheism. The contempt the Jews professed for Voltaire, and his aversion for them (in his eyes they were the "opprobrium of humankind"), is due mainly to his view that from their "detestable superstition" emerged the "Christicale" band. The loathing and execration of "Judeo-Christianity" is once again in full ferment today. It's galling to think that despite the fact that France had the honour in 1791 to set about emancipating the Jews (though Napoleon, of course, acting in character, instituted repressive measures in their regard in 1806) -- it's galling, yes, and painful and cruel to think that our nation submitted under Petain to the shame of the monstrous Jewish laws passed in 1940 and amended in 1941. They are a sickening blot on our national history, but before Vichy, and for years, frightful miasmas had spread across France. In the April 7, 1938, issue of Candide one could read these unbelievable words by historian Pierre Gaxotte concerning Leon Blum: the Jew Blum's name "curdles the blood" of the French; "he is evil, he is death". When you think of what was going on in Germany under Hitler, you can only shudder when you read the following phrase, published in "Les Decombres" in 1942 by Lucien Rebatet: "Jewry offers the unique example in the history of humanity of a race for which collective punishment is the sole justice." I have three more things to note about this heterogeneous but nonetheless valuable book: first, Zola was really the first non-Jewish man of the Left in France to challenge the imbecility and ignominy of anti-Semitism. Second, anti-Semitism is far from dead in France, but it assumes succession of masks. The Right found itself to be almost pro-Semitic during the Algerian war because we were dealing with Arabs demanding independence, and Israelis and Arabs were enemies. Then there was the joy bestowed on "honest folk" at being able to consider the state of Israel -- a staunch Western ally. But the only too legitimate Palestinian resistance provides the old hatred of the Jews a chance to resurface under a new guise. Third and last, I felt a slight shock when I suddenly found myself confronted here with a short piece by Pierre Drieu la Rochelle from Les Nouvelles Litteraires of February 2, 1934, in which he recalled the French youth of 1913. It couldn't be denied, wrote Drieu, that in the France of those days there was "on the fringes of Action Francaise and Charles Peguy" what he called "the nebulousness of a kind of fascism". Drieu contented himself with registering what he considered obvious and irrefutable. He was wrong and confused (something for which Peguy is largely to blame) in his frenzied diatribes

against democracy and in his hatred, an incredible hatred bordering on hysteria, of Jean Jaures. Manchester Guardian Weekly December 13, 1981 The Left Bank -- those good old, bad old days; "La Rive gauche, du Front populaire a la guerre froide," by Herbert R. Lottman. Translated by Marianne Veron. Editions du Seuil, 392pp, about Frs 69. BYLINE: by Michel Contat SECTION: LE MONDE; Pg. 13 LENGTH: 870 words

IT ALL began in March 1935 with a volley of slaps administered by Andre Breton to Illya Ehrenburg in a Montparnasse cafe on the eve of the Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture. A year earlier, Ehrenburg, Paris correspondent for Izvestia, had published a book in which he called the surrealists "lay-abouts and faggots". Hence the altercation, following which the Soviet delegation threatened to withdraw from the Congress if Breton were allowed to speak. Rene Crevel, out of loyalty to both surrealism and communism, unsuccessfully attempted a reconciliation at the Closerie des Lilas. Already depressed by his struggle with tuberculosis, he went home and took his life. In an article in the Nouvelle Revue Francaise, Marcel Jouhandeau suggested that Crevel's communism was behind his suicide, an insinuation which landed Jouhandeau in hot water with both Breton and Breton's enemy, Louis Aragon. We've known ever since Montesquieu's "Persian Letters" that nothing is more illuminating than an outsider's view of local customs. Herbert Lottman, an American scholar who has lived in Paris for 25 years, casts a Persian eye not on contemporary intellectual life but on the period from the 1936 Popular Front to the Cold War. Lottman has already turned out a voluminous biography of Albert Camus (1978) in which he rounded up facts both major and minor with maniacal precision, treating the writer's life as though he were dealing with an engineer or a dentist. In "La Rive gauche" (written in English as "The Left Bank" but published first in France), this irritatingly myopic "Anglo-Saxon" approach -- "facts, facts, facts", in contrast to the Gallic emphasis on "words, words, words" -- works wonders. "La Rive gauche" would seem to have been destined primarily for an American audience, and it therefore rounds up pretty much everything that's known about the period. Lottman has distilled his information into a brisk, limpid narrative spiced with anecdote. For anyone who didn't live through those years or knows little about them, the book provides a useful synthesis perched somewhere on the fence between history and literary criticism.

He doesn't claim to judge the period but rather superimposes our own on it in order to show up constant factors and analogies. He portrays ideological trends as thoroughly as possible, leaving it to the reader to draw his own conclusions. Why the Left Bank? Because in this enclave formed by Montparnasse, Saint-GermaindesPres, and the Latin Quarter was concentrated a cultural authority unequalled in international prestige. Dominated by Andre Gide and Andre Malraux, then by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, the Paris intelligentsia of the Rive Gauche was at its zenith from the 1930s to the early 1950s, not omitting the four years of the German occupation. Lottman notes that he has laid particular emphasis on the left-wing intelligentsia because Catholics and conservatives exerted very little international influence. In the eyes of the world, then, the Left Bank was left-wing, even though in its publishing houses, like Gallimard or Grasset; in its cafes, like Lipp or the Flore; and in its schools, like the Ecole Normale Superieure in the Rue d'Ulm, Right and Left mingled and even interpenetrated. Lottman observes wideeyed the practical solidarity which linked people totally opposed in everything except their living standards. Thus the indestructible friendship between Malraux and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle assured them mutual protection when the tides of war turned against one and then the other. Similarly, Drieu coexisted at Gallimard with Jean Paulhan, the former quite likely to be chatting with a German officer, Gerhard Heller, while the latter, in the office next door, worked on an underground newspaper. The same Heller, hostile to Drieu's ideas, would then drop in to say hello to Paulhan, whom he knew to be working with the Resistance! Fascism and communism were the poles round which all intellectuals clustered. Attracted to communism through an increasing conviction that fascism had to be stopped at any price, Gide was nevertheless exemplary in his refusal to let himself be duped concerning the realities of the Soviet regime. The detailed story of the various pressures which surrounded his trip to the USSR constitute what is surely the most fascinating passage in the book. Opened with a slap, "La Rive gauche" ends on another quarrel, the one between Sartre and Camus. The USSR, which continued to incarnate both hope and fear, was the main bone of contention now that fascism was out of the way. Today we see what communism and fascism have in common: terror and servitude. Why is it that in re-reading the story of an epoch in which these horrors peaked, we, peaceful inhabitants of the Left Bank during a period in which hope reconciles socialism and freedom, feel a kind of nostalgia for those agitated and sometimes ridiculous times? Is it because we're becoming tired of the stagnant delights of narcissism? Is "commitment" on the horizon again -- with a prospect of slaps and quarrels inspired by some cause other than the me. me. me of today's Left Bank? Manchester Guardian Weekly October 18, 1981 A LOOK BACK IN ANGER; When intellectuals compromise

BYLINE: by Gilbert Comte SECTION: LE MONDE; Pg. 13 LENGTH: 1195 words

VERY EARLY on in his seven-year presidential term, in 1974, Valery Giscard d'Estaing invited a number of respected writers to dinner; although more interested in society badinage and talk of the hunt, his purpose on that occasion was to discuss intellectual matters with them. When news of this hardly world-shaking event reached the ears of Serge Qudadruppani, who was only 23 at the time, he was so shocked at the way the writers in question had debased their profession that he resolved to find out if the often unhealthy relationship between the French intelligentisia and their rulers followed any pattern, and if so what it was. On the assumption that the best way of setting about his task was to go to the written word, Quadruppani burrowed among the archives, especially those covering the terrible 20 years from 1925 to 1945. In his frantic search for lasting or fleeting complicity with Nazism, Stalinism, or, at a more modest level, Petainism, he jumbles everyone together -- those who blackened their record disastrously, those who went astray without realising it, and those who penned a compromising but insignificant paragraph here or there. Who do we find, then? Henri de Montherlant, Roger Garaudy, Dominque and Jean Desanti, Lucien Rebatet, Robert Brasillach, Andre Gide, Louis Aragon, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Francois Mauriac, Paul Claudel, Simone de Beauvoir, Alfred Fabre-Luce, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Marcel Jouhandeau, Denis de Rougemont, Francois Mitterrand, and many others, pell-mell: blackguards, the lot of them! Yes, I'm afraid iconoclastic zeal can somethimes go too far . . . Much of the material quoted by Quadruppani will not be new to readers familiar with modern hostory. The spiciest pieces already appeared in the "Nouveau Dictionnaire des Girouettes" (A New Dictionary of Weathercocks) which was secretly distributed after the Liberation. Even so, Quadruppani, a scholarly, conscientious writer who has done his homework, comes up with some startling discoveries: and one or two myths that have been kept carefully shrouded in falsehood are unlikely to survive the battering he gives them. The way the Communists took the wrong road remains a tremendous mystery. How did courageous men, who had already freed themselves from the social and intellectual conformism of their age, come to connive, whether consciously or unconsciously, at a series of abominable "official" untruths? One fellow traveller was Romain Rolland, who, after rightly feeling disgusted at nationalist propaganda during the First World War, did his very best ten years later to hush up Panait Istrati's revelations about the

Stalinist terror. His lying, convoluted letter to the Romanian writer must stand as one of the alltime monuments to hypocrisy. While in Berlin Goebbels was burning books he considered pernicious, at least 50 per cent of Parisian anti-fascist intellectuals placed on their private index works by Anton Ciliga, Leon Trotsky, Victor Serge and Boris Souvarine, which they knew to be "blasphemous".Twenty years later, Jean-Paul Sartre still saw the Soviet Union as a bastion of freedom. And when the wool was finally pulled from his eyes, he went on, at the time the Gang of Four were running riot, to hail Mao as the moraliser of Marxism. The hurly-burly of the interwar years, when Sartre's tastes was being formed, did not exactly encourage intellectual sangfroid. Manifestly, Quadruppani both deplores and delights in the flood of rubbish produced by his illustrious predecessors. Here is an example of what could be written in the prevailing atmosphere of delirium: Leon Blum, who was later to lead the Popular Front, gingerly made allowances for Nazism, admitting that he preferred its "spirit of change, renovation and revolution" to the military feudalism of its conservative rivals. He went on: "If I had to examine the problem purely in terms of historical evolution, I would say that I would be even more disappointed and depressed if Kurt von Schieicher, not Hitler, won." It is easy for Quadruppani to condemn such unfortunate predictions, or to poke fun at a cagey article by Raymond Aron on the Third Reich, for he has the enormous benefit of hindsight. Born when the war was already over, he attained adulthood at a time when history had already made up its mind about Hitler and Stalin. As always, it was more difficult for contemporaries to perceive the truth: apart from the historian Jacques Bainville, whom Quadruppani seems not to have read, few Frenchmen understood as early as 1920 the direction that German history was likely to take. Leon Blum got things wrong more than once.Others were successively curious, attracted, indulgent and finally enthusiastic. It would surely be fairer to make a distinction between the solitary error caused by incomprehension on the one hand, and pig-headed recidivism on the other; instead, Quadruppani serenely lumps everyone together. A few unfortunate lines penned by Raymond Aron earn him a place in this anthology, while no mention is made of the many books and countless articles that the philosopher has contributed to the cause of freedom. Only someone who had a completely clean record himself could collect the 200 or so pieces in this collection without taking people, circumstances or politics into account. Quadruppani is much too young to have even been exposed to the risk of praising the interwar dictators. Like other keen antifascists and anti-Stalinists, he was born at a time when the half-heartedness of political feelings in general made it impossible to go too far, to commit the irreparable mistake. It was more difficult for the preceding generations. Militant altruism was perverted by the reigning temporal monotheisms and by the absolute nature of their promises. When a wild wind is blowing from every quarter, it is difficult for anyone to keep balance.

It is singularly unfortunate that the man who is bringing these sins to book belongs to the first generation since 1789 that has grown to adulthood without having experienced foreign invasion or civil war. It is a generation obsessed by Hitler and Stalin, because denunciation of their crimes is the only pursuit open to the historian of a period during which nothing happened. Twelve years after Nikita Khrushchev had officially denounced Stalinism at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, the hotheads of May 1968 were still, with the benediction of antifascist patriarchs, paying homage to the tyrant Mao. Quadruppani alludes to those heady times but does not linger on them. Nor does he take his inquiry up to more recent years, when those of his generation went very wrong over Vietnam and the massacres in Kampuchea. Although clearly intended to be pitiless, his case for the prosecution often seems to be aimed only at the dead or at members of the intellectual Establishment. When justice takes precautions like that, can it still rally call itself justice? "Les Infortunes de la Verite" (The Misfortunes of Truth), by Serge Quadruppani. Published by Editions Olivier Orban, 261pp, about Frs 62. Manchester Guardian Weekly April 19, 1981 A German in Paris 1940-1944; "Un Allemand a Paris 1940-1944," by Gerhard Heller and Jean Grand. Le Seuil, 216pp, about Frs 55 BYLINE: by Bertrand Poirot-Delpech SECTION: LE MONDE; Pg. 13 LENGTH: 1474 words

WHETHER it did so out of Nazi contempt for French culture, or because victory came quicker than expected, it's still hard to believe that in 1940 the Third Reich could have chosen a citizen as "unreliable" as Lieutenant Gerhard Heller to rule over the intellectual life of a defeated France. The man who was to spend four years as the watchdog of French literature, if possible winning French writers over on behalf of Ambassador Otto Abetz, was himself suspect. Heller of course felt close to his fellow countrymen, though in the case of attacks against Germans his reflexes weren't knee-jerk. In regard to the Jews, he had been brainwashed by Nazi propaganda and felt that persecution was explained by their exaggerated "colonisation" of European cultural life -- but he was openly anti-Nazi. He managed things so that he never had to swear allegiance to Hitler; with the "Kristallnacht" in November 1938 and the burning of the synagogue in Potsdam, his birthplace, he had switched for good to the side of the victims. Thanks to rheumatoid arthritis and a bad heart, he didn't have to go into the army or shoulder a gun, though he

was made a lieutenant because guards had to salute a man in his position. He replaced the standard revolver with a wooden pistol, and as often as he could he went out in civilian clothes. He had completed his study of French with two years at the University of Toulouse in 1934-1935, and he read and frequented France's foremost contemporary authors. Perfectly bilingual and Francophile to his fingertips, he was "crushed" by France's downfall in 1940. He returned to France as a lover, a "protector", anything but an enemy, and resolved to spare her the worst. First as Sonderfuhrer of the PropagandaStaffel, then as cultural attache to the German embassy, he tried to get round the socalled "Otto List", banning works by Jews, Freemasons, Communists, and "antiGermans." He took pride in the fact that the 9,348 titles issued in France in 1943 broke the world publishing record for that year. He promoted the reappearance of the Nouvelle Revue Francaise without exerting any pressure and with full understanding of why its publisher, Gaston Gallimard, hesitated.He organised two literary expeditions to Germany without manifesting the least surprise when some writers refused to go along. He was even embarrassed that others proved so eager.He got the censors to authorise Jean-Paul Sartre's "Les Mouches", concealing from his superiors the play's disapproving references to Vichy. He gave his enthusiastic imprimatur to Francois Mauriac's "La Pharisienne" and to Albert Camus's "L'Etranger". On occasion he rendered small services: he procured Marcel Jouhandeau a permit to visit the Creuse; he tried to get security restrictions lifted on sailing instructions for Tierra del Fuego for Jean Giono; he persuaded the authorities to free the son of the writer Jacques Chardonne, and he headed off the arrest of Jean Paulhan. His life-long regret is that he failed to do the same for Jean Cayrol, Robert Desnos, and Max Jacob (Cayrol survived; the others died). The exemplary behaviour of this honorary "resistance worker" aggravates the reader's disappointment -- to put it mildly -- in the attitudes of the French he dealt with. First there were the profiteers and society figures who weren't in the least put off by the idea of consorting with a German officer whose affability might be hiding other motives, and whose brothers-in-arms were perpetrating the most hideous crimes. This lapse in taste, curious for aesthetes, was forgiven them in most cases. One forgets. Along these lines, Heller shows that Pierre Drieu La Rochelle was morbidly attracted to strength, not weakness; he even qualified Heller as "cowardly" in his diary. It's sadder to see Chardonne praising collaboration, or Jouhandeau exuding his notorious anti-Semitism in front of a Wehrmacht lieutenant. And one is frankly ashamed to think of Robert Brasillach lamenting Heller's liberalism and suggesting, like Celine, that "all Jews, even small children," should be killed. "I knew writers in the resistance less well," Heller admits candidly, as though to excuse himself. It's not surprising. But at least he became a friend of one of the most admirable of them, Jean Paulhan, founder of the Writers' Centre, Les Lettres Francaises, and Editions de Minuit, and who stood up almost alone to the excesses of the postwar purges. The German made Paulhan his "master", a kind of father. It was thanks to him that Heller got rid of any lingering anti-Semitism, and that he himself chose to

"collaborate" with the French occupiers in Germany, notably by founding the reviews Lancelot and Merktur. For 35 years, this witness to France's shame kept silent.He didn't have the documents he needed; in 1948 he was unable to find the papers he'd buried in August 1944 somewhere under the Esplanade des Invalides: some bulldozer had undoubtedly scooped them up into the rubbish bins of history. He preferred to labour obscurely as a translator until Jean Grand and Editions du Seuil persuaded him to tell his story in the wake of so many others less serene. It is crucial not only in relation to the history of the Occupation but also from the human standpoint and for the more general reflections it inspires. The fact that last year Heller received a German award, the Baden-Baden translators' prize, and a prize from the Academie Francaise confirms that Abetz's former cultural attache conducted himself as nobly as his conflicting demands allowed him. Without betraying his kinship to his compatriots, he managed to serve the spirit of France, often against its own representatives. For that it wasn't enough simply to love French culture: Arno Breker's past as a Montparnasse bohemian didn't prevent the sculptor from becoming an intimate of Hitler. To undergo the "shame" of seeing France a subject nation, to regret the swastika banners in the Chamber of Deputies, to help some of the November 11, 1940 demonstrators escape arrest, to brave the suspicions of his superiors, to force Abetz's hand, to destroy hostage lists, to read the underground press, to warn writers in danger: in short, to comport himself as a "resistance worker" among collaborationists, Heller, like his friend the writer Ernst Junger, had to have forged himself an ideal of a cultural fatherland set above all fatherlands, a prefiguration of what are today called human rights. In a time of all-out war, when states exploit the loyalty among fighters in the same camp to its fullest, such an idea has its contradictions. Heller lived them in the flesh, stricken by rheumatic paralysis in the image of his torment. When he suffered too much from it all he sought refuge in Paris's swimming pools, where because of his perfect accent people took him for what he was in the depths of his heart: one of them. On other occasions he would take a copy of Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" and read it in the Cafe Flore dressed in civilian clothes: much later, Simone de Beauvoir wrote, mistakenly, that she'd never seen a German enter her favourite cafe. As in an episode from a Patrick Modiano novel, a banker's son offered Heller a secret room with a secret exit near the Champs Elysees. Like the hero of Vercors's celebrated "Le Silence de la mer," Heller had an idyllic "brief encounter" with a Paris gamine, whom he met and sheltered in the lobby of his hotel one night when she was caught out after curfew. He was never permitted to touch her, and when she vanished he never saw her again. Occupation by foreign troops definitely brings the best and the worst to the surface. Recollecting the years 1940-1944 makes one shudder to imagine how our intelligentsia might react if it happened again. Everything suggests that one is born collaborationist,

as one is born and remains Stalinist, and that the obsession to publish overrides civic courage or simple prudence. The one sure thing is that taking an apolitical stance under such circumstances results in more harm than it avoids. Even Jouhandeau claimed that he wasn't involved in "politics". There's a risk of concentrating only on what Paul Valery called "eternal verities" in his response to Heller's question -- posed in 1943! -- about the writer's disdain for current events. Another danger consists in minimising the resources of the human spirit. Valery once insisted that "We intellectuals can't do a thing against the authorities!" Yet he was a champion of the mind. He forgot the subversive effect culture can have against the stupidity of tyrants. He was sinning against the hopes raised by Heller, Antigone's heir, a wooden pistol stuck in his holster and his head filled with the literary fruits of liberty. Manchester Guardian Weekly March 15, 1981 'LEGEND OF THE CENTURY'; Good for a Laugh; "La Legende du Siecle", by Bertrand Poirot-Delpech. Gallimard, about Frs 49. SECTION: LE MONDE; Pg. 13 LENGTH: 1291 words HIGHLIGHT: Jacqueline Piatier talks to Bertrand Poirot Delpech IT'S NOT EASY for a literary critic to publish a novel. He waits for those blows below the belt, for revenge to take its toll, or, at the other extreme, for self-serving praise. Reviewed in his own paper, the critic isn't in an ideal position either. Anything you read about him written there is going to look as though friendship or power played a role. Our own critic Bertrand Poirot-Delpech published his sixth novel a few weeks ago. You're either a writer or you're not, and Bertrand is. He's better than ever in "La legende du siecle," a scathingly funny book which moves at a lightning pace as it throws our past in our faces. You have to laugh to keep from crying. Satire? More like a coconut shy with the hero as main target. Ironically, Bertrand has lent him a pen so that he can write his memoires. Ithiers Saint Mars de Locquenay is almost the only fictional character in the book: the people he meets are called Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Andre Malraux, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Gide, Aragon. The book is a panorama of the political and literary 20th century and an Identikit portrait of the ruling class. Farce mingles with history, hilarious parody with deeper themes, lying fantasy with bitter fact. But there's little point in my telling you how much pleasure I've derived from this parade. Our joint occupation of Le Monde's literary pages poses a problem -- so I asked Bertrand to explain what he was trying to do.

Would you call "Legende du siecle" a satire? Absolutely. I was even thinking of subtitling it a "sotie," as Gide did his "Paludes," which I've found so sustaining. A soite was a kind of 15th- and 16th-century satirical farce or social allegory. It is perfectly applicable, but it's not a word many people use any more. A satire of what? Somebody once said that history is written by the victors. That's true within a country too. In France, the same caste has ruled and told its own story for several generations. This caste is embodied by my narrator, Locquenay, an indolent country squire who's bestirred himself only to be born, buy the latest model sports cars, and meet the politico-literary upper crust from the '30s to the present. Having him write his "memoires" also provided an occasion for me to play on this overworked genre -- which does more to falsify history than to clarify it. His age, 80, and the current triumph of his class spur him to open up without the scruples he once might have had about the cynicism of his class, their lack of foresight, their triviality, and their good old elitist tendency to fall in line with the moral order. He's a novelistic incarnation, in part, of "new philosopher" Bernard-Henri Levy's "Ideologie Francaise". Unless the book is primarily pastiche and farce? Only apparently. Lots of details which seem apocryphal are true. President Albert Lebrun putting wine into bottles in 1936 and not managing to cork his cask is one of my earliest childhood memories. Many remarks are authentic and simply taken out of their context. But really, we can surely lie about them, they've told so many lies about us! Usually pastiche aims only at producing a literary likeness. In my case, I've tried to parody entire personalities, including their vocal tics, which define them more and more, putting this likeness to the service of intentions which go beyond it. Moreover, Locquenay and his friends aren't just puppets. Take Fernand Bonnier de la Chapelle, a symbol of tortured idealism. Or the Italian Carla, Mussolini's suicidal mistress, a fantastic victime of the "times". You seem, in fact, to have a tender spot for these two characters. What are their relations to the narrator himself? Locquenay is only episodically a flesh and blood characher. I don't conceal the fact that I make him a puppeteer and a grotesque; the book demands it. It proceeds from my conviction that the ruling class has done so much talking and strutting, and gone back on its word so often, that the only thing left to do is laugh at them. We've read so much about those "charming childhoods at the chateau with the dear farmers roundabout". How can we take their hifalutin thoughts seriously when as soon as things take a turn

for the worse -- as in 1940, the centre of Locquenay's life and the novel -- our puppets begin to go back on their word, come unstrung, and hurl cowardly accusations at their underlings? Is your "legend" intended to reestablish the truth? We've never had so many ways to feed history into the archives, and we've never falsified it so much: the chapter on the Occupation, for instance, is always being rewritten.I don't claim to restore the truth, but to point the finger at the lies and doubletalk of our rulers. They exhort us to "try harder!" while among themselves they deliver assaults of aesthetic nihilism, faithless ambition and faded panache.I don't think they have anything more to say, having monopolised the conversation for so long. I know something about this to a certain extent since it's obviously the world I come from, that I'm immersed in. And without resorting to working-class demagoguery or the cult of the proletariat, I'm convinced that the classes excluded from power for so long have plenty to do and say. This conviction seems to be embodied in the character of Petit Roger. Petit Roger is the farmer's son at the Locquenay chateau. He rides bicycles with the narrator around 1914. Later he earns his living as a cyclist and becomes a self-educated man. Before dying from cancer which renders him aphasic -- not by coincidence! -- he helps Locquenay write his memoirs. He reveals his own poor man's truth in dribs and drabs but under the control and in the name of Locquenay. He has had two things stolen from him: his life and his memory. Without his class, history would neither be made nor written. You're putting forward a political proposition? That's quite a tall order! It's a question of pointing out with a smile some of the swindles perpetrated by the dominant culture: the claim that a scholarship student and an heir to a fortune share equality of opportunity, that medical care is extended on an equal basis (disproved by the reception afforded Petit Roger when he checks into hospital), the appeals to a humanist consensus, Mother Nature, and all that. You see class collaboration as a kind of deception? Obviously. Every time the rulers appeal to goodwill, family, fatherland, "our common lot", it always conceals self-interested mischief. Servants know this by instinct, it's the most obvious fact they're born with. I don't rely on political theorists in this case but on the great tradition of stage comedy from Moliere to Beaumarchais and Marivaux to Brecht, on writers like Hugo, Maupassant, Zola, and Mirabeau. Our society has become more skilful at hiding class barriers, but this is another of the century's legends. Petit Roger finds out too late, just as he's dying. The delusion of collaboration between the classes materialises in the Locquenay cemetery -- and in this fool's bargain of a book! In which everything finally self-destructs, even the pleasures of style, even the author!

Right. At the end Petit Roger gives the recipe for the moralist charm cultivated by Locquenay's pen. Then he shows how impossible it is now to write in a "popular style". It's easier to imitate Malraux than Celine. So-called spoken language remains an affectation got up to counter refined language, therefore still dependent on it. In brief, artists lie as much as the people in power? Gide said, "We always write to hide something." All the writers who turn up in this book say, as they did in real life, "If you only knew!" But writers have a right to lie. It's even a duty. Political leaders lie stupidly, cravenly, unimaginatively, and pack us off to the front when things don't work out. In my book, they all come to grief on the shoals of sex, which was often the case. I think that the filthy pleasure of disposing of others' lives is always a juvenile or senile deviation of the libido, never adult. But writers enrich us. They're saved by the pleasure they afford. And if sometimes they do go off the track -- like Drieu and a few others the novel doesn't regard untenderly -it's because they allowed themseleves to be diverted from the essential by the people in power and their sinister machinations. Is the pleasure to be got from this book in aid of commitment then? I'm a rotten historian. When I was small I used to draw moustaches on the portraits in my history books. I still believe in thumbing my nose because I think this is an attitude that's missing. Michelet says that the historian must learn disrespect first of all. France pays lethargic respect to the established verities and values. If this book inspires readers to mistrust them again, I'll be overjoyed. I'd also like to destroy another myth, the one which says style and humour belong to the right wing. One day Mauriac asked me, "When will you ever stop disrupting things?" Never, I hope! -There is the Drieu hypothesis: Drieu La Rochelle understood as early as 1943 that he had chosen the wrong side and that Hitler would lose. He knew that he could, if he wanted to, go over to the other side at any time. (Hadn't Andr Malraux offered, in the summer of 1944, to welcome Drieu, under an assumed name, into the Alsace-Lorraine brigade and thus allow him to redeem himself?) But Drieu found it more suitable, more in keeping with his self-image, to follow his mistake to the end and to pay for it, a dandy who turns his own death into his supreme political achievement. Yet that doesn't hold water either, because it takes a little greatness (a dark greatness, but a greatness just the same) to think that way. And I have difficulty crediting Saif with any sort of greatness. One must resist the temptation to elevate a criminal who is probably very ordinary. -The Spectator June 4, 2011

Hall of mirrors; BOOKS BYLINE: Rupert Christiansen SECTION: Pg. 32 LENGTH: 846 words And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-occupied Paris by Alan Riding Duckworth Overlook, ?0, pp. 399, ISBN 9780715640678 After the Nazi occupation of Paris was over, Sartre famously said - somewhat hypocritically, given his own slippery behaviour - that the only possibilities had been collaboration or resistance. Alan Riding's new study of the episode forcefully reminds one that it was never that simple: objectively researched and soberly balanced though the book is, navigating its moral maze leaves one queasy with mixed feelings. Where should the line be drawn, what constitutes collaboration or resistance, were the Petainistes craven defeatists or merely right-wing nationalists - and would our own intellectuals and artists have done any better? There are no clear answers, as the tragic farce of the post-war epuration and its attempt to apply some judicial measure to the chaos of unverifiable accusation and counter-accusation miserably proves. The Nazis regarded Paris as ripe for the picking, a city mired in its own degeneracy, both moral and political, weakened by 34 governments in 22 years and 'infested' with Jews, Bolsheviks and perverts. Hitler knew that he was unlikely to face mass insurrection. He could count on a lot of passive support among the French right-wing, with its post-Dreyfusian tendency to anti-Semitism and fear of Bolshevism. So Paris was not something he needed to crush and lay waste. Rather the opposite - it was also a glittering prize, a treasure trove which the Nazis treated with a mixture of rapacity and respect. Works of art were brazenly looted, but Hitler approached its monuments in a spirit of envious awe too, exemplified by his only visit to the city - a secret morning's tour of the sights in the company of Speer and Breker, during which the Fuhrer oohed and aaahed with almost childish naivete. Goebbels understood that the best way to secure the Occupation was to keep everyone concerned happy, and to rule with a relatively light touch. Some of the Nazis' marginally less vicious cronies, such as Otto Abetz and Gerhard Heller, were put in charge, and apart from a strict (but not absolute) code of Aryanisation, the level of submission required was relatively unexigent. You could go about your daily business, and it wasn't hard to avoid trouble. Writers continued to publish, actors to act and

dancers to dance, their horizons and activities more limited by selfcensorship than the threat of the jackboot. Comedians and chanteuses could get away with satirical doubles-entendres in the night clubs, and the forces of the Wehrmacht were encouraged to relax and enjoy the glamour of la ville lumiere, from its brothels to its opera houses. Among the French intelligentsia, outright collaboration was rare, but a degree of accommodation common. At one end of the spectrum were a few avowed fascists such as Robert Brasillach and Drieu La Rochelle, who in effect joined the Nazis; at the other end, heroes of resistance such as Rene Char (who survived) and Marc Bloch (who didn't). Riding is more interested, understandably, in the great majority who inhabited the large grey area in between, where a sort of shrugging of shoulders was the norm, and attentisme, the vague hope that the Americans would come to the rescue, the nearest most people got to resistance. Old-school Catholics such as Montherlant thought that France's defeat was her own fault, while Cocteau dandyishly quipped that 'at no price should one let oneself be distracted from serious matters by the dramatic frivolity of war'. They duly carried on regardless, allowing their plays to be performed in collaborationist circumstances and attending receptions and salons where they would rub shoulders socially with 'civilised' Germans. Stars with a high popular profile such as Maurice Chevalier, Edith Piaf, Serge Lifar and Sacha Guitry were later excoriated for their contact with Boches and in some cases their sponsored and publicised visits to Germany. Their defence, often justified, was that they had thereby managed to protect Jewish colleagues and even negotiate the release of prisoners of war. Whether those who remained silent were any less complicit, let alone heroic, is another unanswerable question. Riding provides a useful encyclopedia rather than a fresh interpretation of the story, although he incorporates material from interviews he has conducted with various late survivors. His perspective is broad, perhaps too broad - the scope of the book extends way beyond Paris into Vichy, and there are times when one begins to weary of so many names and so much information. But the impression of muddle and confusion isn't misleading; Riding makes it all too plain that for the cultured class, the Nazi Occupation was a sort of Hall of Mirrors, where the pulling of a few influential strings could turn a Romanian Jew like the Comedie-Francaise tragedian Jean Yonnel into a honorary Aryan and where Sartre's clearly subversive Les Mouches and Huis Clos played to audiences packed with German officers out to enjoy themselves at French expense.

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SUBJECT: WORLD WAR II (90%); ARTISTS & PERFORMERS (89%); JEWS & JUDAISM (66%); ACTORS & ACTRESSES (64%); SINGERS & MUSICIANS (60%) GEOGRAPHIC: PARIS, FRANCE (90%) FRANCE (90%) LOAD-DATE: June 2, 2011 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH GRAPHIC: Arletty, at the height of her popularity, in Marcel Carne's 1942 film, Les Visiteurs du Soir. She co-starred with Jean-Louis Barrault in Les Enfants du Paradis, also directed by Carne and shot mainly during the Occupation, but was disgraced after the war for having had a German lover The New Republic February 10, 2011 THE NEW NORMAL

BYLINE: David A. Bell SECTION: Pg. 32 LENGTH: 2816 words AND THE SHOW WENT ON: CULTURAL LIFE IN NAZI-OCCUPIED PARIS By Alan Riding (Alfred A. Knopf, 399 pp., $28.95) BY THE GHASTLY standards of World War II, the history of France from 1939 to 1944 was a sideshow. Poland, with a smaller pre-war population, suffered at least ten times as many wartime deaths. The Soviet Union, four times larger in 1939, had fully forty times more losses. French cities, in comparison with Polish or Soviet or German cities, survived the war relatively unscathed. The French civilian population experienced hunger, cold, privation, and considerable political persecution, but not widespread starvation, imprisonment, and slaughter. France's Vichy regime willingly deported seventy-six thousand Jews to the extermination camps--a terrible figure that is nonetheless little more than one percent of the Jews murdered in the Holocaust. The fact that the war still looms, justifiably, as the most important event in modern French history simply underlines the unfathomably catastrophic nature of what took place farther east, particularly in the East Central European areas that Timothy Snyder has recently dubbed the "bloodlands." Yet the fact that France's war was comparatively fathomable makes it oddly more approachable than the events to the east, or in the Pacific. It inspires less sheer horror, and more empathy and fascination. It is easier to put oneself in the place of a French Jew, caught in a game of cat and mouse with the French and German authorities, than in that of a Polish or Ukrainian Jew, quickly and brutally herded to the slaughter. It is easier to imagine oneself a French Christian, torn between the paths of collaboration, resistance, and passivity, than a Nazi, trained from childhood to the vocation of murder. It is little wonder that even today, even in the United States, so much film and fiction about the war is set not in the places of greatest destruction, but in France (as in Alan Furst's novels, or Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds). In the imagined moral landscape of that dreadful time, Vichy France occupies a murky, unsettling, and endlessly intriguing middle ground. Right at the heart of the murk were France's intellectuals and artists. Even before the war, their German and Soviet counterparts had been largely silenced, imprisoned, killed, or enlisted as totalitarian propagandists. During the war, the Polish cultural elite was systematically murdered by the Nazis. But the French--at least those who were not Jewish--had the luxury of debating at length, in relative safety and comfort, what role to take after the German victory. Should they support the Germans and the collaborationist Vichy state? Join the Resistance? Flee the country? Try, in one way or another, to remain aloof from politics? The occupation presented endless grounds for dramatic confrontation and moral agonizing.

True, for some figures, passionate conviction overrode moral distress. To an openly fascist writer such as the troubled and talented Robert Brasillach, the fall of France was an unmixed blessing that washed away the Third Republic he had notoriously denounced as "an old syphilitic whore, stinking of patchouli and yeast infection." Now, he believed, the country would finally manage to cleanse itself of corruption--especially Jewish influence. Brasillach had an astonishing capacity to delude himself about fascism, describing it in 1941 as "a non-conformist spirit, anti-bourgeois with an element of irreverence." On the other side, writers such as Albert Camus joined the Resistance and edited the underground paper Combat. Jean-Paul Sartre published in Combat and contributed to Resistance activities as well, although he spent much of the war writing Being and Nothingness. Like many other intellectuals, including Andr Malraux, he waited for clear signs of Allied victory before committing himself wholly to the cause. But most cultural figures could not avoid a constant procession of moral dilemmas, large and small. Was it acceptable to publish an apolitical article in a collaborationist magazine? What about giving a manuscript to a publishing house that had purged its list of Jewish and left-wing authors so as to stay in business? Some insisted that the cultivation of German officials was justified--on the grounds, say, that the connections could be used to protect vulnerable colleagues. Many agreed that theatrical life needed to continue, even though scripts and casts required approval from the German propaganda bureau, which banned Jews from all productions. Sartre submitted to these conditions for the production of his plays The Flies and No Exit, but later claimed (with some justification) that they carried anti-German messages. The writer Jean Guhenno, who wrote only for underground periodicals until the liberation, commented acidly on the most common rationalization for continuing to publish: "The species of the man of letters is not one of the greatest of human species.... He would sell his soul to see his name in print.... It goes without saying that he is full of good reasons. 'French literature must continue.' He believes that he is French literature and thought and that they will die without him." Lending it all additional drama was the fact that France's cultural elite, despite ferocious ideological cleavages, was at bottom a strikingly homogenous and close-knit group. There are no conflicts quite as fraught as familial ones. The small, elite ather to his child in 1943. The collaborationist Ramon Fernandez never informed the authorities about the Resistance meetings hosted in his apartment building by his neighbor and fellow writer Marguerite Duras. Such actions helped some collaborators to escape harsh punishment after the liberation--but not in Brasillach's case. His egregious treason-including denouncing opponents in his collaborationist paper and demanding their arrest--earned him a death sentence. Not surprisingly, French cultural life during the war remains an irresistible subject, not just in France, and not just for professional historians. Recent work on it includes surveys by Michose of the best European museums." Furniture from no fewer than sixty-nine thousand French Jewish homes was shipped to the Reich. Meanwhile, although the fascist writer Drieu La Rochelle managed to have the Germans release his friend Jean Paulhan, whom they had arrested as part of a Resistance network, most other figures in Paulhan's situation could not count on similar luck--especially the Jews. After arresting Marc Bloch, the Vichy police turned him over

to the Gestapo, who tortured and shot him. The Gestapo also arrested Maurice Halbwachs and deported him to Buchenwald, where he died of dysentery. The most famous Resistance network of scholars and writers, based at the Paris Museum of Man, was broken up, with many of its members tortured and killed. The museum lost twentyeight members of its staff during the war, including seven executed together in 1942. Yet in a sign of the influence attributed to intellectuals, these seven hoped for reprieves until the very end, because of appeals by Paul Valry and two other writers. Overall, as Riding notes, the German policies only reinforced the already large sense of self-importance among French artists and intellectuals, and helped them to justify virtually any decision in the name of their duty to French culture. The wholly admirable resolution by Guhenno not to publish during the occupation--or even to look at a German soldier--was itself a deeply literary gesture. And if he did not consciously write his famous private journal for postwar publication, he composed it in a highly literary manner ("I am going to bury myself in silence. I must keep quiet all that I think"), and published excerpts soon after the liberation. Sartre went so far as to claim, in an unwittingly damning interview in the 1970s, that his writing had done as much for the Resistance as acts of anti-German sabotage: "Our job was to tell all the French, we will not be ruled by Germans. That was the job of the resistance, not just a few more trains or bridges blown up here and there." On the other side, a collaborationist writer such as Marcel Jouhandeau could justify his visit to the First European Writers' Congress in Weimar with the words, "I would like to make my body a fraternal bridge between Germany and us." Such words were pompous. They were not, however, entirely delusional. Writers and artists did indeed have an extraordinarily prestigious and important place in French society, and their actions mattered for the country's self-image in a way that the actions of businessmen, say, did not. (Not surprisingly, the sordid story of French business under the occupation has received far less attention than the story of French culture.) Despite Riding's title, illustrated on the cover by a photograph of music-hall dancers, everyone knew that cultural life in occupied France amounted to much more than a "show." FOR RIDING, as for most previous writers on the topic, the prestige of French culture matters above all because of the moral burden it imposed: we are back to Vichy as morality play. "The real question, then," he writes, "was not if but how these influential voices exercised their power." And while not as sharp in his verdicts as some of his predecessors, Riding ends up taking a critical tone throughout most of the book, highlighting his subjects' least admirable behavior. Most of them did behave less than gloriously. There was the actor Maurice Chevalier, who gave the Nazis a propaganda coup by performing in Germany, and who, in Paris, ostentatiously got onto the Mtro so as to share Parisians' burdens but rode just five stops and then returned to his chauffeured car. There was Coco Chanel, who took a German lover and schemed to regain control over her company from the Jewish family that had taken a majority interest in the 1920s. And there were Guitry and Jean Cocteau, who happily socialized and cooperated with the Germans. Cocteau even wrote a fatuous essay that compared Hitler's tame sculptor Breker to Michelangelo. Riding also traces the expertly serpentine strategies followed by Sartre as he struggled to remain free of the taint of collaboration while still promoting his career and keeping his skin intact. Riding criticizes Sartre for the "simplistic" and "romanticized" position, expressed in a later

interview, that "every French person had the free choice to be part of the resistance, in their heads anyway, even if they actually did nothing, or to be an enemy." Yet Riding ends up making some fairly broad and simple judgments himself. The judgments are certainly defensible. But in the end it is hardly surprising that France's cultural elite behaved as they did. After the twentieth century, no one should still need to be disabused of the notion that artists and intellectuals are moral exemplars. Sartre, in one of his more introspective moments, remarked after the war (in contradiction to the passage that Riding cites) that "the whole country both resisted and collaborated. Everything we did was equivocal; we never quite knew whether we were doing right or wrong; a subtle poison corrupted even our best actions." Like Sartre's other musings on the war, this one is self-serving--and also insulting about the genuine heroes of the Resistance, such as Marc Bloch. Still, it points to the obvious fact that most French artists and intellectuals operated throughout the war in a fog of fear and confusion, and were guided mostly by self-interest. The more interesting question is the way their story relates to the overall history of the war and the occupation. Here, unfortunately, Riding falls back on a clich: "Probably no other country better illustrates the perils assumed by a population that is educated to revere theories: it becomes fertile ground for extremism." Familiar and comforting as the idea will be to an American audience, it gets the story almost entirely wrong. To state the obvious but often overlooked point: the French Third Republic, undermined though it was by the ideological struggles of the 1930s, did not fall victim to French extremism. It fell victim to German extremism. In fact, throughout modern times, for all the attraction of French intellectuals to the ideological extremes, French politics have been defined just as much by competing attempts to occupy the ideological center. The French historian Pierre Serna has keenly observed that in fact, since the end of the French revolutionary terror, nearly every single French regime has tried to position itself as a centrist one, representing order and security against ideological passion. The largest exception is the regime brought to power not by the French themselves, but by an alien invader: Vichy. It was Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union--and not France-that proved "fertile ground for extremism." Even among the intellectuals, few remained under the spell of the extremes throughout the war. Before 1939, faced with the spectacle of the corrupt and deeply ineffective Third Republic, artists and writers had flirted readily with the competing totalitarian ideologies--arguably, advocacy of the extremes gave them a way to attract attention and followers, and thereby enhance their cultural and political prestige. This, too, is an enduring feature of French culture. But during the occupation, selfish motivations quickly trumped most ideological ones. As Riding notes, genuine and shameless fascists such as Brasillach were more the exception than the rule among collaborators. And Communist intellectuals did not fully engage with the Resistance until after Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, at which point the party line demanded common cause with the "bourgeois democracies." Only after the war, under a new selfproclaimed republic of the center, could French cultural life reclaim its vocation as a theater for the performance of ideological extremism, this time with a heavily communist tinge. But, in the end, the most noteworthy thing about France's cultural elite during World War II was not the group's unremarkable moral shortcomings, or even its shifting

ideological strategies, but its simple good luck. It was good luck that France occupied a different place from Poland in the Third Reich's plans; good luck that enough Germans still saw enough value in French culture to accord it a place in Hitler's new order; good luck that France was a battlefield for a matter of months, in 1940 and 1944, rather than for years on end. Tempting as it is to tell the deeply fascinating French story on its own, it needs to be set in this broader context. As historians such as Timothy Snyder have been urging, the events of the 1930s and 1940s in Europe must be seen as part of a single history. So let us not forget, even while charting the moral dilemmas faced by figures such as Sartre and Guhenno, that across much of Europe in this period the most common fate of artists and intellectuals was a bullet in the back of the head. French artists and intellectuals hardly escaped from the war unscathed. They had to contend with the chaos of the invasion in 1940, the material privations of the occupation, and the multiple dangers Riding describes. The Jews among them suffered terribly, and disproportionately. But overall, more than a few of these men and women prospered. Some of them produced masterpieces. And most of them, unlike their counterparts farther east, survived to argue another day. National Review June 17, 2002 Theater of Blood BYLINE: By DAVID PRYCE-JONES SECTION: Books, Arts & Manners; Vol. LIV, No. 11 LENGTH: 1202 words

The Road to Verdun: World War I's Most Momentous Battle and the Folly of Nationalism, by Ian Ousby (Doubleday, 400 pp., $30) Verdun is one among other rather inconspicuous towns in the hilly French countryside between the rivers of the Meuse and the Rhine. The place has entered history as the site of one of the most atrocious of the many set-piece battles of the First World War. In the course of the 1916 fighting at Verdun, according to accepted figures, the French suffered 378,777 casualties, of whom 162,430 were killed or missing; the German dead or missing were comparable, about 143,000 out of 330,000 casualties. That same year, the battle of the Somme in northern France in fact claimed more victims, but the yearlong slaughtering at Verdun has served to symbolize the struggle between France and Germany in the way that the battle of Stalingrad in World War II symbolized the struggle between Germany and Soviet Russia. At Verdun, as also at Stalingrad, the fighting covered a terrain of a few miles at most, and of no real military significance. In dispute were several forts and lesser

fortifications. German strategists had the obvious possibility of bypassing these prepared French positions, while French strategists could equally well have fallen back to a stronger defensive line. Possession of Verdun and the surrounding hills and woods could have no bearing on the final outcome of the war. Yet both sides were inflexible, opting for the tactics of concentrated artillery barrages followed by bayonet charges, or what the unfortunate men at the front referred to as butchering, meat-grinding, a version of Dante's Inferno. Ian Ousby was a historian who died shortly after completing the manuscript of this book. The relationship between France and Germany was his special concern, and he was exceptionally well read in French sources -- which is the strength of this excellent and absorbing book. Among Frenchmen who served at Verdun were the young Charles de Gaulle; the writers Georges Duhamel, Jean Giono, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, and Pierre Mac Orlan; the historian Louis Madelin; and many other gifted observers. (John Dos Passos arrived late in the day as a stretcher-bearer.) Drawing upon vivid memoirs and diaries and fictional accounts from these and many other witnesses, Ousby has evoked the frontline in all its horrific detail. He revives from the historical record a number of heroes. One in particular was Colonel Emile Driant, a parliamentary deputy who warned that France was ill prepared for the coming ordeal, but then found himself facing the brunt of the opening German attack, whereupon he was killed. Soon the once bucolic landscape was transformed. Corpses came to seem matter-of-fact. One French captain described how the earth itself became slippery with human flesh. Patriotism motivated the soldiers, as Ousby makes clear, which accounts for the immense pathos of their self-sacrifice. In February 1916 Marshal Petain was given command. He instituted a conveyor-belt system of rotating units up to the front for short stints. Unimaginative and stolid as he was, and relieved of his command before the German campaign faltered to a close at the end of 1916, he nonetheless acquired a reputation as "the victor of Verdun." How were the French able to delude themselves into the belief that Verdun had to be held at all costs, and that bloodletting on this appalling scale was heroism rather than idiocy? In a lengthy section at the heart of his book, Ousby skillfully illuminates the interplay of ideas and politics that decided the fate of the nation. Hitherto having fought only colonial wars, the generals had no conception of the changes technology had brought to modern warfare. They held that "elan" -- the foolish doctrine, propounded by Henri Bergson, that spirit counted for more than matter -- would be decisive. They had only to attack. The French are widely stereotyped as people in the grip of Cartesian logic, but Ousby has no trouble showing how from the mid-19th century onwards emotion had swamped reason in France. French politicians and intellectuals alike saw themselves engaged with Germany in a Darwinian struggle for survival. In the disastrous war of 1870, France had lost the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. This was the direct consequence of the fatuous political and military pretensions of the Emperor Napoleon III. Only a few French intellectuals, such as the great historian Hippolyte Taine, accepted that the French were responsible for their own misfortune. The opinion-making elite in general took its lead from another great historian, Jules Michelet -- a liberal who romanticized France as the source of enlightenment, grace,

and culture, as opposed to Prussian Germany, depicted as the home of efficiency, militarism, and inhumanity. The fantasy took shape of a feminine France facing an ugly German rapist. Real German wartime barbarities vivified these deep-seated fears. Ousby quotes many French intellectuals who promoted such false and destructive selfperceptions, and the worst of them in his view was Maurice Barres, already one of Captain Dreyfus's chief persecutors. It was nationalism as molded by the likes of Barres that exploited the soldiers' patriotism and converted Verdun into a cause with quasireligious overtones. The road on which Petain marched his troops up to the front became the Voie Sacree, or Sacred Way. There could be no debate in such a context about military strategy, and no recourse to simple calculations of profit and loss. So the men were condemned to die. German intellectuals, for instance the historian Heinrich von Treitschke, were no less nationalist than Barres and his kind. German unification and victory in the war of 1870 had inspired self-confidence, and corresponding contempt for the French. Though not himself present at Verdun, the famous writer Ernst Junger spoke for many Germans when he said that killing Frenchmen was what he had enjoyed about the First War. Verdun was the only front where the German general staff -- apparently themselves infected by elan -- encouraged mass assaults. Among young officers present was Heinz Guderian, later Hitler's favorite Panzer general. Pondering the Verdun experience, Guderian devised the blitzkrieg tactic that was to make his reputation. If Ousby's book has a weakness, it is that he does not examine the Germans and their motivation with the thoroughness he devotes to the French. The myth that Verdun was a great national success -- its sentimentalization and sacralization -- prevented the French from examining the painful facts about themselves, their leadership, and their society. Ousby breaks off his narrative at this point, but every reader will be aware of the historical irony that only a few years later the French were not prepared to resist a very much more sinister and imperialist Germany. The costs of that failure were too high: Petain, supposedly "the victor of Verdun," was the man who in 1940 proposed and then consummated the outright surrender of France to Germany -- and this is a legacy that has not yet finished its malignant work in the European Union now taking shape. New Statesman April 9, 2001 Action man; Known to thousands as 'Le Maitre', Charles Maurras was an intellectual giant of the French canon. A formidable journalist and polemicist, he was also a man of violent words, a philosopher of fascism. By Carmen Callil BYLINE: Carmen Callil LENGTH: 3039 words

In the years following the Second World War, General de Gaulle orchestrated a mythology about the role of France after its defeat by Germany in June 1940. His vrai

France was entirely and always opposed to the German occupiers, and the minuscule size of the Resistance and of his own Free French army was obscured. It is now many years since the French rejected this Gaullist myth and faced up to their past. Journalists, historians and academics have minutely chronicled the collaboration of France with Nazi Germany. The Catholic hierarchy has acknowledged guilt and, once Francois Mitterrand was dead, the new president, Jacques Chirac, also apologised. Some lacunae remain, however. One of these is the role of the French intellectual in those years. Not so much the literary fascists - Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Robert Brasillach, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle; they, like all the writers of genius or talent who collaborated, have been brought forth and dissected, as have the artists, actresses and singers, poets and film stars, entertainers and sportsmen who enthused about Germany. Less attention has been paid to the French philosophers of fascism. Foremost among these was Charles Maurras, whose works and whose movement, Action Francaise, and its newspaper shaped the minds of the French generation who collaborated with Nazism. Maurras was a poet, a philosopher, a writer of elegant, classic French, a formidable journalist and polemicist, and thus an intellectual giant within the French canon. He represented everything that was then, and is still, held to be France's great gift to the world - its culture and civilisation. Attending to Maurras today would involve recognition that this gift could be, and was, as racist and perverted as Hitler's Aryan obsessions. Outside academe, Maurras is not attended to. None of his works is in print in English, and only three in French. Maurras was born on 20 April 1868 in Martigues, then a picturesque fishing village on the edge of the Etang de Berre in the Bouches-du-Rhone, near Marseilles, a strange, watery end-piece of France. He was christened Charles Marie Photius, the last name well chosen for the life he was to lead, Photius being a noble and learned patriarch of Constantinople in the ninth century, a distinguished teacher of classical and Christian prose, and a noted instigator of controversies and disputations. Maurras's father was an irreligious tax collector, his mother a pious royalist. When Charles was six, his father died and the family moved to Aix-en-Provence, where Maurras was educated amid priests. At the age of 14, he almost entirely lost his hearing, and entirely lost his belief in God. Maurras moved to Paris in December 1885 and plunged into the world of letters. On his arrival, he was disturbed to find the street names of Paris so foreign and Jewish. There were, he observed, too many names with too many Ks, Ws and Zs. Later, during the German occupation, Maurras campaigned successfully to change many of them. He wrote lyrical poetry and essays on aesthetics for various periodicals and studied the philosophy of Auguste Comte, the French positivist philosopher. He took on Comte's ideas about order, individualism and scientific reasoning, and added to them his vision of authority and hierarchy, the classical values of ancient Greece and Rome. This civilisation, absorbed and reinterpreted by the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, lived at the time only in the Latin races. Of these Latin races, the classical tradition of France, with Paris as its centre, was the greatest the world had ever seen, and this inheritance was indigenous to France, to la France seule, France alone. For

Maurras, the great disaster was the French revolution of 1789. So firm was his belief that everything engendered in 1789 was an aberration, an outcome of English and German influences with Jewish overtones, that he refused to call the revolution 'French'. Any claim that Germany might have a Kultur of any value was also rejected. Not for Maurras the blue flowers of Novalis. Though Maurras felt himself to be quintessentially French, he had much in common with the Cambridge Apostles. He spent his life almost entirely among men, usually those who held him in high regard as a teacher and guru. He did not marry and kept no mistresses, making use of women for sexual encounters as required, if at all. He feared the destruction of beauty, and he feared effeminacy. He transformed this fear into literary theory. For him, romanticism was the expression of selfish individualism and also had something of the woman in it. 'Woman's tendency is to exaggerate what she is, much more than to correct and embellish it. She discovered, from the beginning, the aesthetic of Character, to which was opposed that aesthetic of Harmony which the Greeks invented and brought to perfection, by the fact that male intelligence was dominant amongst them. The Greeks made the general and rational sense of the beautiful the principle of their whole civilisation, which has been prolonged by Rome and Paris. Other peoples, East and West, that is all the Barbarians, have kept to the principle of Character, as revealed by feminine sentiment.' This crucial exposition, though it centres on women as a source of sensibility rather than sense, was in fact the key to all Maurras's ideology in the public sphere. What women represented, in this instance, were all those who could not participate in his French, Hellenic, classical vision. They became the unsubmissive of this world; they became foreigners, Jews and communists, the English and the Germans, resistants and Gaullists and, in due course, a large proportion of the French people. On occasion, Maurras condemned the republic as 'Protestant and Jewish', but for him the republic was primarily a woman, lacking 'the male principle of initiative and action'. The 'Dreyfus affair' began in 1894, when the Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus was wrongly accused of selling national secrets to Germany, and those who defended his innocence - Dreyfus was framed - lined up against the representatives of France's ancien regime - Church, army, conservative France. In the early years of the affair, Maurras was writing for the royalist Gazette de France, which sent him to Athens in 1896 to cover the first modern Olympic Games. There, he observed the crowds demonstrate national frenzy, and learnt that France could be outdone by despised foreign countries. He contemplated the great beauties of ancient Athens and the democratic falsities that had destroyed them and that were now destroying France. Maurras returned to France a monarchist, and this ideology was to synthesise his earlier beliefs into the political philosophy by which he became known: integral nationalism. Two years later, in January 1898, Emile Zola published his famous defence of Dreyfus, 'J'accuse'. In September, Maurras published 'The First Blood', an article analysing the affair, in which he insisted that the innocence of one individual, Dreyfus, was of no importance when prejudicial to the good of the patrie. Thus, in confronting Zola, the emblem of everything in literature he most detested, Maurras moved his aesthetics of the right into politics, which, he said, he entered 'like a religion'. Now it was politique d'abord - politics before all else.

In January 1899, Maurras met Henri Vaugeois, a philosophy professor, and the journalist Maurice Pujo of the anti-Dreyfusard Comite d'Action Francaise (whose son Pierre runs what is left of the movement today). Both these men were republicans. The first public meeting of Action Francaise took place on 20 June 1899 with an audience of 15 people. The first edition of the fortnightly Revue de L'Action Francaise appeared three weeks later. In 1905, the Ligue d'Action Francaise was formed, the organisational and fundraising body of the group. The Institut d'Action Francaise followed, holding its first congress in 1907, and, on 21 March 1908, the first issue of the daily paper Action Francaise was published. By 1903, a small intellectual coterie had transformed itself into a powerful and vociferous movement. From a minority of one, Maurras had converted his colleagues to his monarchist point of view. The royalism Maurras espoused, his integral nationalism, divided France into pays reel and pays legal. The latter represented parliament and democracy, the 'grotesque masque' imposed on the real life of the people. Monarchy, the mother of the nation of France, was his pays reel, the true France, reigning supreme above democratic chaos. Confronting the tyranny and anarchy of democracy with a reasoned presentation of royalism based on order, Maurras reconquered the intellectual territory for monarchism. Maurras was a man of paradox. Opposed to modernism, with its democratic emphasis on the individual, his approach to politics, literature and philosophy was intellectual and scientific, and thus modernist. For a classicist, his passion for a king and monarchy was a romantic illusion of the first order. His stubborn insistence on his own infallibility was a form of independence quite out of kilter with his anti-individualism. Maurras is in many ways a black mirror of George Bernard Shaw, whose zeal to educate, journalistic output and span of life - Shaw, 1856-1950; Maurras, 1868-1952 - were almost identical. Maurras, however, had no wit (although his French admirers claim it for him), and definitely no irony. Even though Maurras considered the idea of a 'Jewish Christ' unpalatable, his Catholic childhood and monarchist creed automatically led him to approve and acclaim the Catholic Church, whose views on authority and hierarchy he shared. The French Church appreciated this alliance for many years, printing articles from Action Francaise to disseminate to its flock, and using their arguments in sermons. The Church hierarchy gave Maurras, his movement and his newspaper active and loyal support in public and in private. As Pius X told Maurras's mother: 'I bless his work.' This Catholic inheritance also led Maurras to a lifelong hatred for, and persecution of, Jews, Protestants, Freemasons and meteques, a word invented by Maurras, and speedily absorbed into the French language, to describe all foreigners who lived in France. This concept of the meteques was Maurras's Aryanism. Outsiders could never become French; only the French could understand, intuitively, the essence of France. The journalistic genius of Action Francaise was Leon Daudet, a man of much charm and a consummate master of yellow journalism. In his large, front-page daily column, 'Politique', Maurras also exhibited a fine line in invective, defamation and slander. Encased always in an armour of intellectual respectability, Action Francaise turned the language of hatred into common currency and enthusiastically encouraged physical violence. Murder, assassination, the use of riots and explosives, marches and

demonstrations - all were advocated by Action Francaise in its war against the French state. The paper was very successful. It was well written, often anecdotal and gossipy. In the years before the First World War, the Ligue d'Action Francaise spread throughout France with its rituals and meetings, dinners and banquets, student groups, public lectures, books and pamphlets. Maurras was, crucially, a talented propagandist who understood the theatrical potential of public events. In November 1908, the young royalists of the movement, the Camelots du Roi, went on to the streets to sell the newspaper and, as wandering bands armed with bludgeons and lead-tipped canes, to do the dirty work for Action Francaise. Vetted for homosexuality, the Camelots prepared for the revolution at an athletics training ground on an island in the Seine. They policed Action Francaise meetings, disrupted the meetings of almost everyone else, and forcibly prevented theatre performances, lectures and court cases. They defaced statues of prominent Dreyfusards all over France and were also much given to surprising their enemies by slapping their faces in public. By 1915, Action Francaise had over 300 sections, and the circulation of the news-paper ranged between 40,000 and 150,000 copies, with its many other publications reaching an even greater number of readers. Analysing its support is as mystifying as studying the reasons why such a vast percentage of the German people supported Hitler. Support came from the nobility, the rich and the urban poor, the petite bourgeoisie and the Catholic bourgeoisie, from lawyers, doctors and engineers, and from their wives. Its automatic bailiwick was the army, the conservative right and the Church. (One abbe sent a donation of five francs 'for a rug made out of the kike's skin that I can put beside my bed and step on in the morning and evening'.) For Maurras, the Russian revolution of 1917 was 'German and Jewish', and therefore the headquarters of Marxism was not Moscow, albeit much hated, but Berlin, hated more. A communal fear of the Bolshevik terror, socialism and modernism kept the French Catholic Church and Action Francaise together until 1926, when, with the advent of the less accommodating Pope Pius XI, the Vatican banned its unruly competitor, dismaying its thousands of Catholic adherents. But by then, it was too late the language of Action Francaise had entered the Church Militant, and the bonds between Catholicism and Maurrassianism bore fruit in the words and deeds of the men of Vichy. Although a man of violent words, Maurras never took action himself. He ensured the longevity of Action Francaise by refusing to permit it to change or to move beyond incitement to revolution. Action Francaise did not become a political party, and stopped short of armed insurrection. The Depression came, political scandals abounded. When riots broke out on the streets of Paris on 6 February 1934, Maurras was to be found at the office, writing. Followers began to ebb away. Numerous other leagues, replete with Maurrassian malcontents and activists, were to dominate the political scene in the last days of the Third Republic. Some of his political followers left to form the underground terrorist group La Cagoule. Lucien Rebatet, Robert Brasillach, Maurice Bardeche, Georges Blond, Thierry Maulnier and hundreds of others of the French intellectual world, apostles of Maurras and Action Francaise, went on to create a collaborationist and pro-Nazi alternative to the Vichy state in Paris, regurgitating Maurrassian words as Maurrassian deeds.

A greater cataclysm for Maurras was the parliamentary victory of the Popular Front in May 1936. This grouping of the Radical, Socialist and Communist parties was formed in 1935, in the aftermath of the 1934 rebellion, and its leader, Leon Blum, was Jewish. 'La France sous le Juif!' was the Action Francaise headline. Later, in 1936-37, Maurras spent eight months in jail for incitement to murder Blum and a hundred other deputies. With the German occupation of June 1940, Maurras took the paper to Lyon. By this time, he had adapted his hatred of Germany in favour of submission to Marshal Philippe Petain, whom he hailed as his king. In the earlier days of the Vichy state, Petain, surrounded by men of Action Francaise, called for a 'national revolution', and his authoritarian regime became the incarnation of Maurrassian ideas of order, hierarchy and authority. Raphael Alibert, a Catholic convert and fellow traveller of Action Francaise, was Petain's first Minister of Justice and instituted the first Statut des Juifs in October 1940. Xavier Vallat, a Catholic member of Action Francaise, was the first commissioner for Jewish affairs in the Vichy government, and thus the first to implement Vichy's anti-Jewish legislation and to arrange for the despatch of Jews to Auschwitz. From 1940-44, the Jews of France were stripped of civil rights. Their property was confiscated, they were denied education and work, were confined in concentration camps and, in the occupied zone, had to wear the yellow star. Of these Jews, 75,721 were deported, mostly to Auschwitz, of whom only 2,800 survived. Maurras encouraged even stronger action: 'The barbarous occupation of 1940 would not have taken place without the Jews of 1939, without their filthy war, the war they undertook and they declared: our occupiers were introduced by them, it was the Jews who launched us into catastrophe.' The newspaper named names, hunted down enemies, and called for hostages, resistants, Jews and Gaullists to be shot: 'If the death penalty is not sufficient to put a stop to the Gaullists, members of their families should be seized as hostages and executed.' For these activities, Maurras was arrested in Lyon in September 1944, two weeks after the final issue of Action Francaise. His trial began on 25 January 1945 and culminated in a sentence of national degradation and life imprisonment in isolation. He was 77. He remained in prison until 1951, and died in a private clinic in Tours on 16 November 1952. Maurras called his sentence the revenge of Dreyfus, but it was not. It was punishment for the deaths and torture of ordinary men and women, most of them French. The British often express envy for the honour bestowed upon the intellectual in France. But contemplating Maur-ras, the warrior and Jesuit priest of the word, suggests that mythologies about culture and intellect can be as self-deceiving as anything else. Thousands of his fellow citizens called Maurras 'Le MaItre'. He was acknowledged to be the outstanding French thinker of his time, whose words influenced the literary, intellectual and political affairs of France. Today, the opposite is true: it is Maurras's own words which have silenced him - that and his fear of the men and women among whom he lived, and who were not as he wanted them to be. In that way, Maurras was a child, a dangerous child of his time.

Carmen Callil's Darquier's Nebula: a family at war, about the family of Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, the second commissioner for Jewish affairs in Marshal Petain's Vichy government, will be published by Picador and Knopf in 2003 -The European concern to "stand up" to America has undistinguished cultural and political antecedents. It figured prominently, for example, in the writings of Werner Daitz, the head of the Third Reich's Central Research Institute for National Economic Order and Large Area Economics, and of Vichyite apologists such as Drieu La Rochelle and Francis Delaisi. Obviously, current Euro-integrationists draw no inspiration from such distasteful precedents, but these disreputable forms of antiAmericanism still lurk on the extremes of European politics and have the capacity to impinge on the center at times of tension and crisis. The main home for such sentiments remains France, where they are espoused by both pro- and anti-European forces--and, indeed, sometimes expressed at the very top. Thus, Georges-Marc Benamou in Le Dernier Mitterrand quotes the late French president as having said in his latter years: "France does not know it, but we are at war with America. Yes, a permanent war, a vital war, an economic war, a war without death. Yes, they are very hard the Americans, they are voracious, they want undivided power over the world." -The National Interest 1993/1993 FALL Gauche and Sinister; Review of Olivier Bernier, Firework at Dusk: Paris in the Thirties (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1993); and Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals 1944-56 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) BYLINE: Anthony Hartley LENGTH: 4272 words

France and Frenchmen, it may be said with some confidence, are incomprehensible for anyone insufficiently aware of their intellectual traditions. Those traditions, embodied in the works of great writers, are one of the glories of European civilization. From Montaigne onwards runs the line of brilliant moralists, whose concentration on the behavior of individuals in society enlarged the knowledge of human nature, laid the foundation for the achievements of a Balzac or a Stendhal, but also provided rather inadequate generalizations concerning the character of those who dined only intermittently at the top table of French culture. The importance for France of the development, during three centuries, of a classically clear and analytically subtle use of language to communicate ideas both within and outside the country cannot be overestimated. For more than two centuries French writers, painters, and architects made European culture, and the consciousness of this rayonnement de la culture franc

aise has remained to this day and explains the exaggerated and sometimes ludicrous importance attached to the spread of francophonie. This consciousness of cultural mission affected French writers, giving them a comforting idea of their own importance. For their message was not restricted to purely aesthetic impressions. From the philosophes of the eighteenth century emerged an intellectual caste, which saw its role as that of a kind of lay clergy, censoring or applauding the behavior of the world at large, defending the persecuted and denouncing the powerful. From 1789 onwards, they were carried into passionate partisanship by the Revolution and the myths and ideologies it spawned. It follows that the "intellectual" and his significance for society are understood differently in France from what is the case in other countries, though there is some relationship to the "intelligentsia" that developed in Russia. French intellectuals, however, were neither nihilists nor "superfluous men," but part of a cultivated and prosperous bourgeoisie, supplying their fellow citizens with ideas and striving to provide those elements of idealism that would elevate them above the mere pursuit of material wealth. It was no accident that the historian Ernest Renan, considering the disaster of the Franco-Prussian war, should have entitled his great essay "The Intellectual and Moral Reform of France." But their contribution had its limits. After 1918 the intellectuals were as exhausted as the failing Third Republic, about whose ills they had little to say that was relevant. Old ideological quarrels--soon to be renewed by the foreign examples of communism and fascism--were pursued with diminishing vigor and increasingly stale phrases. Some intellectuals departed into a dream world, which they valued for its power to entrance or to shock. Few drew attention to the real problems of France: its economic condition, the changes wrought by new technology or the modernization of what still remained a Napoleonic state administration. Throughout the Thirties, French industry was crucified on Poincare 's "strong franc." From 1930 onwards production sank and only regained growth in the Fifties under the influence of industrial modernization advocated and carried out by Jean Monnet. After 1955, France's economic success was to be carried forward by technocrats and the new academic race of "e narques" (graduates of the Ecole Nationale d'Administration). The traditional intellectual class had little to do with it. Olivier Bernier's book is hardly an adequate account of the decline of the Third Republic. It is, in fact, something of an "Oh! la , la " view of these years. First nights, vernissages, dress shows, and incessant parties form the background. Political intrigue and scandal go on to the soft, delicious sound of society hostesses hitting the mattress with this week's lover. Against this glittering background scurried the dark and doomed figures of the politicians, occupied with the incessant formation of governments, whose shifting majorities ensured that they achieved little. Paris and Parisian fashion were still a huge success, a "caravan-serai for the noble foreigner," as Pe guy, a Catholic poet and a French nationalist, put it, but what of France? The men of the Third Republic were hardly capable of dealing with the problems history had left them. They thought much about the "blue line" of the Vosges, but they could not match either Germany's birthrate or its industrial strength, and the Russian revolution had destroyed the European balance of power. Attempts to redress it through diplomatic expedients such as the Little Entente were to prove useless. The tragedy was that many of France's political leaders were intelligent and honorable men. Le on Blum

and Paul Reynaud were both patriotic and, to some extent, clear-sighted politicians. They did their best with France--Reynaud was the one finance minister who, just before 1939, managed to reverse the stagnation of industrial production--but they could not make it into a modern country (37 percent of the work force were still engaged in agriculture in 1938). The "popular front" government, headed by Blum, was undermined by its own economic ignorance, as the introduction of the forty-hour week increased the decline of French industry. (Keynes was only translated during the war and it took some years after that for his theories to become familiar to French officials). In the late Thirties even the right-wing extremists of the day looked backwards to old controversies. There were individuals who might be called fascist, but there was no mass totalitarian movement. As Rene Re mond has pointed out, French society was too traditional, unemployment too modest, to provide material for the kind of explosion that brought the Nazis to power in Germany. The nearest the "Leagues"--the small rightwing groups that proliferated in the 1930s--came to a genuinely totalitarian party was Jacques Doriot's Parti Populaire Franc ais (PPF). The Paris of fashion shows and first nights continued on after 1940 under the German occupation, as a sort of gruesome parody of itself, as anyone can see who cares to read Ernst Ju nger's diaries of the time. Blum and Reynaud were in prison awaiting their trial at Riom. Meanwhile the world of the intellectuals had changed. The ideological disputes became fiercer and the stakes higher. By the end of the war the small band of writers committed to a German victory were disillusioned and dispersed. The literary critic Brasillach was executed; Drieu La Rochelle, the novelist, committed suicide; the greater writer Ce line fled to Denmark. Those who had joined the Resistance or simply opposed Vichy and the occupier, on the other hand, were pushed further to the Left, living under the shadow of what seemed the most uncompromising left-wing force available: France's Communist Party. The years after 1945 were dominated by a wellworn political recipe: no enemies on the Left. Tony Judt's book Past Imperfect is a subtle and well-written account of the intellectual de bacle which resulted from this situation. During the ten years or so when intellectual fashion was dominated by Sartre and his allies, many a French writer ended up in the dead end of Marxist dialectic with all that this implied in the way of sophistry and polemical brutality--but also of tedium and loss of spontaneity. As it became clear that the post-war world would be divided into two camps, France's left-wing intellectuals tried to perceive some "third way"--the most notable attempt being that of the Catholic philosopher E tienne Gilson. Meanwhile, however, the balance was held unequally between the two superpowers. Excuses were made for the Soviet Union, as disturbing stories percolated back from Eastern Europe--were not the Moscow trials, after all, simply an instance of the revolutionary justice France had known under the Jacobins?--but no such indulgence was displayed towards the United States. Not only was it unashamedly capitalist, but it was also engaged in the cultural ruin of France--"Cocacolonisation" in a brilliantly polemical phrase. In 1952 an editorialist in the left-wing Catholic review Esprit wrote: "From the outset we have denounced in these pages the risk posed to our country by an American culture that attacks at their roots the originality, the mental and moral cohesion of Europe."

Some curious facts were adduced to support this conclusion, American consumption of aspirin being cited to show how unfit the United States was for world leadership! Oddly enough, left-wing Catholic intellectuals were, if anything, rather more viscerally hostile to America than the communists themselves--presumably because they entertained that residual longing for a hierarchical rural society which had made them for a short period support Pe tain and the Vichy government. To exculpate Soviet communism, to justify ignoring the best-selling Kravchenko (I Chose Freedom) and David Rousset's revelations about what was not yet called "the Gulag," every kind of excuse was made. The French working class must not be disillusioned; "Billancourt must not be driven to despair," as Sartre wrote of the famous working class suburb of Paris. In any case, nothing could be done about Eastern Europe, so why not direct one's protests to injustices nearer to home? Moreover, to "betray" Soviet communism would give comfort to "reactionaries," "ex-collaborators," and "men of Vichy," who were even now raising their heads again. Also, after the searing events of the war, there was a taste among French intellectuals for violence and the short shrift meted out by revolutionary tribunals. Emmanuel Mounier, the editor of Esprit and the acknowledged guru of this left-wing Catholic movement, wrote about communist show trials, quoting Andrei Vyshinski with approval: "The psychology of the accused, his personal destiny pale before the collective destiny, because at the moment the latter is facing life or death." This is a return to Saint-Just--"Those who attach any importance to the just death of a King will never found a Republic"--but it is nonetheless deeply shocking. Mounier and his disciples, after all, proclaimed themselves Christians for whom individual lives and souls should matter. Judt's account of disbelief in, and indifference to, what was going on in Russia and Eastern Europe is especially damaging for the Esprit movement. No wonder that publication of the book's French edition has excited anguished protests. But the damage done to the judgment and reputation of those non-Communist French intellectuals, who were fascinated by the Party and thrilled to feel that Marxist history was on their side (or that they were on its!), went further than the practice of moral double-dealing. As the Fifties progressed, the most constant topic of intellectual debate appeared to be the minute nuances of the attitude to be adopted by writers or artists towards events in the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe. A pattern was established which repeated itself with monotonous regularity. As the debate grumbled on, some event would stand out--rebellion in Budapest, a trial in Prague--which could be used as the occasion for "taking a stand" or "clarifying one's position." Then intellectuals, with a shudder of pleasure, could don the garment of penitence or the armor of dialectical apology. Mouths that had remained closed could be opened to make the grand gesture of admitting some measure of the truth. Others could confess/assert their lasting fidelity to the Party and the Soviet Union. What a bore these constant posturings and apologias were! In their narrow, but not uncomfortable, world, French intellectuals indulged themselves in days and nights of discussion, whose phrases became increasingly divorced from what was going on in the world outside. If Marxism, as Raymond Aron suggested, was the "opium" of the intellectuals, then it is not surprising that the doings of its addicts failed to grip those outside the den. Drug addicts are notoriously boring to the world outside their obsession. The penalty for such self-indulgence was to become less and less relevant to

a France, where economic prosperity was growing and bringing about social changes unforeseen by Marxist theory. The left-wing intellectuals discussed by Judt ended the Fifties out of date; even the Algerian war, where many of them played a courageous part, gave them only a brief extension of their lease on life. Finally there was the great spasm of historical memory in 1968 when barricades were planted in the Latin Quarter in the positions they occupied under the 1871 Commune, and the decorous corridors of the Sorbonne were encumbered by wild-eyed girls giving themselves to their tousled lovers under banners proclaiming the New Age: "We fear nothing; we have the pill!" All in all, a modernized eroticism was probably the most durable effect of the "events of May." It is hardly surprising that the intellectual Left should have become what Sartre described as "the great carcass on its back, riddled with worms." Its demise was quite largely of Sartre's own doing, but he showed little sign of realizing this. Moreover, a pervasive intellectual dishonesty and a diet of Byzantine disputation and denunciation had a disastrous effect on the creativity of French literature itself. It is symbolic that Sartre himself should have been unable to complete his three volume novel Les Chemins de la Liberte . During the Fifties the most striking work of fiction was a distinctly "uncommitted" novel Le Rivage des Syrtes by Julien Gracq, a surrealist and an admirer of Stendhal. Without embarking on a discussion of the decline of French literature over the last two decades, it is possible to wonder whether this did not have something to do with the sterility of much of French intellectual life between 1945 and 1960. The talents of these "committed" writers were unquestionably planted in a dry place, and something of their aridity seems to have been passed on to the practitioners of the "new novel." However this may be, there is little doubt that the standing and international reputation of the French intellectual world suffered from the sophistry and ideological brutality that were common in the Paris of the Fifties. Professor Judt describes--and it is one of his most interesting points--the disillusionment felt by East Europeans on finding their plight ignored and their sufferings explained away in a country which they had been accustomed to regard as the source of intellectual freedom. In 1968 the reformers of the Prague Spring were described by members of the Parti Socialiste Unifie (PSU)--a group led by the young Michel Rocard, later to become Mitterrand's prime minister--as "consenting victims of petit-bourgeois ideologies." More recently Milan Kundera wrote: "Having for a long time been the nerve-centre of Europe, Paris is still today the capital of something more than France. Unfortunately, I think it is the disappearing capital of a disappearing world." We do not yet know if there will be lasting effects from President Mitterrand's apparent eagerness to recognize the old Communist conspirators after the August 1991 putsch against Mikhail Gorbachev, or from the boorish behavior towards Boris Yeltsin of JeanPierre Cot, the leader of the Socialist group in the European parliament. But neither incident will have done much for the universal mission of French culture in countries east of the Elbe. It seems that something of the old spirit of rejection of East European dissidence still lingers, and France has lost a cultural clientele which once looked towards Paris with admiration.

Political gestures apart, the narrow sectarianism displayed by France's post-war intellectuals has left damaging traces, harming the reputation of French writing and lessening its attraction for readers living outside France. At a time when successive French governments have been making great efforts to maintain the status of French as an international language and resist the anglophone invasion of traditionally francophone areas, much of the contribution made by French intellectuals to the great debates of the second half of the twentieth century has appeared provincial and rebarbative to foreigners. This seems a gratuitous piece of self-injury. French culture has an immense amount to give to any reader who steeps himself in it--not least a clarity of language which makes a new subject more easily understood in French than, say, in English or German. Yet this asset was squandered when recent writers, sinning against the genius of their medium, achieved the considerable feat of making French prose opaque. Those intellectuals who were willing to abandon the great traditions of the French moralists to indulge in nagging dispute and pernicious casuistry have helped to restrict the role in the world of their own culture and language. So why did these writers waste their talents and compromise their integrity in this way? The answer is complex. Old habits of thought, ideological battles, and bitterness engendered by the war years, the changed position of France in the world--all these played a part. Professor Judt has analyzed the problem acutely, but everyone interested in French history will have their own reflections on what is a more important matter than may appear in the age of Disneyland and fast food. The French language has long been known to adapt itself particularly well to the use of abstract concepts. The classical revolution in the seventeenth century carried written French away from the multiplication of concrete terms and grammatical confusion, which marked it--like other European languages--during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. What it lost in richness, it gained in cogency. It developed a tendency towards generalization and categorization which made it an ideal vehicle for exposition and the communication of diplomatic exchanges. International affairs lost in comprehensibility when the precise definition of meaning possible in French was replaced by the confusedly rhetorical evocation of undefined concepts that has become the stock in trade of English-speaking diplomacy. However, for all the advantages of an aptitude for generalization, this habit of mind succumbs easily to one danger. Abstraction leads away from the harsh reality of the individual case. It is one thing to talk of "breaking eggs to make an omelet" or "revolutionary justice." It is quite another to see a head fall--even if it is that of a "fascist" or an "agent-provocateur." The nature of Stalinism is more vividly illustrated by an anecdote like that of the dictator's bodyguard amusing him with an imitation of Zinoviev being dragged to execution than by the horrifying, but less immediate, impact of the statistics of those murders. In the decade after 1945, French intellectuals fell into this trap of a generalization which sanitized raw fact and placed an anaesthetizing distance between them and the fate of victims, whom they might otherwise have had the weakness to pity. Events took place, not in the real world, but in a universe of makebelieve where to lose an argument was the most serious misfortune possible. It was a looking-glass world. Why worry about those dim and distant shapes subsiding into their mass graves in the name of historical inevitability?

In addition, ever since 1789, French intellectuals had been accustomed to use a type of rhetoric formed by Revolution or Counter-Revolution. It was, of course, not entirely serious. When Pe guy announced that "the policy of the Convention is Jaure s in a tumbril, and the roll of a drum to cover that great voice," he was not proposing to execute the great Socialist leader--though he may have been read by Raoul Villain, who went on to assassinate Jaure s--but using revolutionary imagery, and, incidentally, exposing the tenuous reality behind it. Phrases like "public safety" or "enemies of the Republic" were commonplace in speeches by mildly left-wing deputies. Why should they not be? The most authoritative historians of the day, Aulard and Mathiez, were ready to take a lenient view of massacres committed in defense of the Republic. Similarly, on the Right, Charles Maurras wrote for years as if he was a public prosecutor demanding the heads of his opponents, and, during the Vichy period, what began as rhetoric ended as reality. The unreality of the ideological battle among French intellectuals was never better illustrated than by Maurras's exclamations at his trial for treason in 1945: "It is Dreyfus's revenge!" Polemical exchanges between ideological contenders in France, with their showy rhetoric and the cliche s drawn from a violent history, were to a large extent shadowboxing, though anti-clericalism and "integral" Catholicism could inject venom into the argument. French intellectuals had become used to judging, not real situations, but the myths that they themselves had constructed. Only this can explain how it was possible for them to talk, say, of refusing to drive the working-class to despair by criticism of the Communist Party without bursting into laughter. That "working-class" was as much a construct of their own myth-making as anything else. Something too must be attributed to self-satisfaction. To lay down the law from an attic flat in the Latin Quarter was a tempting mission in life. How satisfying to feel oneself the defender of the march of history. No wonder that a certain complacency crept into the writings of Sartre and his followers--the complacency of the members of a small sect who knew that they were right and whose erratic crises de conscience only made their election surer. For their constant discussion of their own motives and their casuistical dismissal of inconvenient facts bore witness in their own eyes to their moral concern. For men like Sartre or Mounier the game was fascinating. In any case, it was played out to the end of their lives. Finally, it has to be said that if between 1945 and 1955 French intellectuals were constantly unwilling to look facts in the face when the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe were concerned, this was due in part to mere ignorance of foreign countries. Just as, during the Thirties, many British politicians could not imagine what Nazi Germany or its leader were like, so French intellectuals had no imaginative understanding either of Russia or of the nature of an oriental despot like Stalin. (Of course, neither had they much idea of other countries; one of the more laughable sections of Simone de Beauvoir's novel Les Mandarins deals with a left-wing writer's life in Chicago). This isolation, physical and intellectual, reinforced by the war, made it easy for them to take their "facts" from official Communist documents or from the admiring chorus of French communist publicists. Personal experience was confined to France, the France of a highly educated, narrowly based elite. Sartre and his friends had not the least idea of Eastern Europe--one doubts if those who went, say, to the Wroclaw Cultural Conference for Peace in 1948 ever took a stroll in the town. They had never seen Stalin's secret police at work, nor would they listen to anyone who had.

Professor Judt's story is a melancholy one. It deals with men, often endowed with great talents, who condemned themselves to impotence through the indulgence of their own fantasies. By abandoning intellectual standards and moral decency, they did great damage to France's reputation and its position as a center of European culture. Paris, of all cities, should not have been the place where indifference was shown to the fate of European writers who had admired its cultural life and who, in their struggle for freedom of expression, felt they were entitled to a word of support from its famous names. Sartre is often described as the "last" French intellectual, and perhaps this is true enough if we understand the word in the social sense traditionally attributed to it in French culture. Certainly he and his friends cast enough discredit on this particular vocation to discourage others from wishing to follow in their footsteps. Fortunately this is not the last word that can be said about intellectual life in France during the Fifties. There were individuals who did not succumb to ideological orthodoxies and showed courage and common sense in the repudiation of contemporary fashion. Franc ois Mauriac and Raymond Aron were two writers who looked at facts as they were and impartially denounced inhumanity wherever it occurred. History will assign to Aron a particularly important place in that modernization of French intellectual habits which has taken place over the last decades and has included a farreaching revision of the way France's history is perceived and taught. Not since the "Orle anists" of the mid-nineteenth century, to whom Pe guy refused a place in the true tradition of France, have so many facts, as distinct from opinions, been brought to light about the present and past of the country. In the Fifties, Aron and other intellectuals stood for honesty and a refusal to excuse oppression. That they also stood for modernity and a renewal of French thought became apparent later. As so often in French history, a few just men saved the reputation of France and the future of its cultural influence. That is a story that deserves to be set beside Professor Judt's depressing dissection of self-deception and evasion. Newsweek May 17, 1982, UNITED STATES EDITION What They Did in the War BYLINE: WALTER GOODMAN SECTION: IDEAS; Pg. 92 LENGTH: 1014 words Today's Western European intellectual practices a risk-free profession. Not only does he have tenure, but his battles are conducted in the letters columns of publications read by people who abhor blood sports; a writer may lose face, but not his head. Just a couple of generations ago, however, as an evocative and cautionary new history* of French intellectual life in the 1930s and 1940s reminds us, ideas were matters of life and death. In the years leading up to World War II, regulars at the Left Bank cafes of Paris drank deeply of anti-fascist spirits brewed in Moscow and served up by the Red

Front. This communist party was followed by a succession of grim mornings-after, beginning with the Stalin-Hitler pact. For the first months of the German occupation of northern France, a good communist had to be a good collaborator. When the Germans invaded the Soviet motherland, the good communist, like the surrealist poet Paul Eluard, became a good Resistance fighter. *"The Left Bank." By Herbert R. Lottman. 319 pages. Houghton Miffin. $15.95. Star: For France's non-Jewish literary luminaries, the occupation of Paris, heart of the intellectual universe, put their principles to rigorous tests. (The only test for Jews was to get out of reach of the Germans.) Andre Gide had been the brightest star of the Red Front until he returned from a visit to Russia in 1936 to report that Stalin was oppressing everyone, not only homosexuals, as he had feared. He became an instant unpersona non grata, no longer fit for an anti-fascist platform. Ilya Ehrenburg, Stalin's gift to culture, called him a "wicked old man." But he was not so wicked as to accept the invitation of the collaborator Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, after the Germans moved in, to "Come to Paris. The man who traveled to Moscow can certainly travel to Paris." Instead, Gide traveled south, ending up in French North Africa, where, already in his 70s, he survived the war in a circumspect manner. (On his return to Paris in 1945, he was at once attacked by Louis Aragon, the French Communist Party's hard-line cultural commissar; the party remembers.) Gide's co-star on the Red Front circuit, Andre Malraux, a younger and more adventurous figure who fought in the Spanish Civil War, retreated to a Riviera villa, complete with spectacular views and a butler. If he was a bit laggard about joining the Resistance, it may have been due to his young mistress, Josette Clotis, who saw his leftist pals as "pederasts, crackpots, people who need to get tight, to take drugs, to sleep around, to go through psychoanalysis." Malraux would re-enter Paris as a colonel with the Free French forces. One decision that faced anti-collaboration writers was whether to permit their works to be printed in occupied France. The well-established Malraux refused, but many, including the unknown Jean-Paul Sartre, could hardly say no. His consort, Simone de Beauvoir, did a bit more than that -she produced cultural programs for the Petain government's Radio Nationale. Her justification: "It all depended on what one did there." An early Sartre-Beauvoir gesture at resistance got nowhere, and they spent the war writing their books at the Cafe de Flore, which was better heated than their apartment. They would grow bolder after the liberation; attacking the American occupiers of Europe was a lot less chancy than attacking the German occupiers had been. It was during the war that both Sartre and Albert Camus, who was active in the Resistance as editor of the underground newspaper Combat, enjoyed their first successes. Sartre's play, "The Flies," opened to praise from the newspapers of both the German occupation and the French underground, and his "Being and Nothingness," along with Camus's "The Stranger" and "The Myth of Sisyphus," were put out by a publisher who had made a coexistence deal with the Germans. It was easier for such noncollaborators to get published in Paris than in Vichy because of an unsung German lieutenant named Gerhard Heller, who loved French books more than he loved German book burners. As a propaganda officer in Paris, he saved a number of intellectuals from

trouble, and even approved printing works by Louis Aragon and his friend Elsa Triolet, who was not only a communist, but also a Russian and a Jew. It was a muddled time; there were collaborator cafes and resister cafes, and you couldn't always predict who would move from ideas to action -or in which direction. Francois Mauriac, who had hobnobbed with conservative Catholics and royalists before the war, became the only member of the Academie Francaise to engage "body and soul in the underground." Picasso, attacked by collaborationist painters like Maurice de Vlaminck, lived comfortably in Paris, enjoying black-market meals. He kept mum on politics and was courted by German officers. That this "protected institution" had a reputation as a symbol of antifascism is a tribute less to his actions than to the Communist Party's heromaking mills. Confused: When the Germans marched into Paris, the atmosphere was one in which "everybody collaborated"; when the Americans arrived, the line became "We all resisted. " The record of heroism and hypocrisy, of courage and compromise, prompts one to wonder which of today's European intellectuals would collaborate if the Russians were to appear in their countries. An invidious question. Let us resist it, and take from the confused scene the memory of Jean Paulhan, editor of the Nouvelle Revue Francaise, pre-eminent Left Bank literary journal, until he was ousted by collaborators. (Despite this, he opposed purging them from French literary life after the liberation.) During the occupation, Paulhan's office at the Gallimard publishing house was a center of resistance activity. A modest effort, he granted afterward, but better than nothing: "You can squeeze a bee in your hand until it suffocates. It won't suffocate without stinging you. That's precious little, you will say. But if it didn't sting you, bees would have become extinct a long time ago."