Cultural Amnesia (8 page)

There had always been plenty of intellectuals ready to pay lip service to the virtues, but they doubted
the strength. Because, from the French viewpoint, liberalism had been able to do so little in staving off the Nazi brand of totalitarianism, it was thought that only another brand of absolute
power—the Soviet brand—could fill the vacuum. The erroneous view that the Red Army had won the war all on its own helped to reinforce this illusion. In Czechoslavakia, in 1948, the
same misguided humility led the whole liberal intelligentsia to abdicate from its responsibilities in advance. It never came to that in France, but it came close enough. At this distance it is
hard to conjure up just how thick and poisonous a miasma of bad faith a man like Aron was trying to fight his way through, and just how honest, patient and brave he had to be in order to do so.
He succeeded in the end. Though the French will probably go on thinking proudly of Sartre as the Victor Hugo of political philosophy—the most mentions, the most mistresses, the biggest
funeral—Aron’s name is nowadays quite often invoked by those who believe that there is an alternative to getting everything brazenly wrong. The alternative is to get a few things
modestly right. Bernard-Henri Lévy will probably not find it expedient to drop his posturing slogan that it was better to be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron, but to the extent that
Levy’s political arguments are considerable, he sounds like Aron, not Sartre.

Aron is consequently the best reason for continuing to think of Paris as a capital city of political philosophy. As a Jew,
he would not have survived the German Occupation long had he remained in France. Any possible illusion about what the Nazis were up to had been removed for him when he stood beside the historian
Golo Mann in the Berlin Opernplatz in 1933 and watched the storm troopers burn books. But when the Nazis reached Paris, Aron exemplified the one advantage of being a designated victim. His moral
choice was made for him, and he could spend the war in London, with a relatively clear conscience. Sartre and Camus were only two of the many thinkers about politics
who, being
gentiles, could stay in Paris and think about politics there if they chose. It was a dubious privilege. The Nazis, operating with a subtlety rare for them, managed to corrupt nearly everyone in
the Parisian literary world to some degree. The essential trick was to offer the intellectuals the opportunity to continue their careers if they kept their protests suitably muted. The first
result was a widespread but tacit collaboration. The less common, overt collaboration could safely be denounced when the Germans packed up and ran. Claiming to be the instruments of
l’Épuration
(the Purification), self-appointed tribunals—“tribunal” is always a bad word in French history—dealt out the
punishment. Such blatant collaborators as Robert Brasillach and Pierre Drieu la Rochelle had been asking for it, and one way or another they got it. But many of the denouncers had themselves
collaborated in a less flagrant way. A pervasive sense of having been implicated, however passively, led to the second result: a long silence that really amounted to a cover-up.

What really happened under the Occupation is a story that, even sixty years later, is still coming out. For decades it
didn’t come out at all. The first accounts of any scope didn’t appear until the 1980s, and the general conclusions have not yet been fully drawn. But one of them should be that the
Propaganda Abteilung (Propaganda Division, also often called the Propaganda Staffel) succeeded in its main aim. Apart from the brave few who went underground and fought at the risk of their
lives, the French intellectuals gave the Nazis little trouble, and were morally compromised as a consequence. Not even Camus, a writer whose stature depended on his very real capacity for
translating his ideals of authenticity into action, was entirely untouched. But at least Camus had the grace to admit that his Resistance activities had not amounted to much, and at least he had
the humanity to deplore the excesses of the post-Liberation witch-hunt against the more shameless collaborators. Sartre, whose underground activities had never amounted to anything except a
secret meeting on Wednesday to decide whether there should be another meeting the following Tuesday, not only claimed the status of Resistance veteran but called down vengeance on people whose
behaviour had not really been all that much more reprehensible than his own. The sad truth was that he, even more conspicuously than Camus, owed his wartime fame as a
writer
and thinker to Nazi tolerance, for which a price had to be paid. The price was to lace one’s eloquence with a judiciously timed silence. The trick was to pay up and make it look like
compulsion. So it was, but only if you considered your career as indispensable—something artists find it all too easy to do. They are even encouraged to, in the name of an ideal.

When you consider the mental calibre of the people involved, Paris under the Occupation thus becomes the
twentieth century’s premier field of study in which to reach the depressing conclusion that even the most liberal convictions buckle very easily under totalitarian pressure, unless there
are extraordinary reserves of character to sustain them. The further consideration—that to deplore the absence of such fortitude might be illiberal in itself—is more depressing still,
but should be faced. Apart from permanent outsiders such as homosexuals, petty thieves, and the very poor, only young people on their own had a real opportunity to be brave under the Occupation,
and even they had to be saints to take it when death was the likely result. Behind the Nazi show of tact in Paris was the threat of absolute violence. The threat rarely had to be made actual. The
threatened were too smart. Their smartness was well-known to the Nazis who ran the show, some of whom were great admirers of French culture. Receptions were held regularly at that most
fashionable of restaurants, the Tour d’Argent. French cultural figures who turned up met Nazis who seemed well aware that Cocteau was more refined than anything they had at home. Cocteau,
who attended more than once, was slow to realize that once should have been enough.

Wartime Paris was a moral crucible. Aron was out of it, and we don’t even have to ask ourselves how he would have
behaved had he been in it. (We have to ask ourselves about ourselves, but not about him.) He would have been dead. Untouched and untainted in England, he could prepare his comeback. He came back
as a commentator in the newspapers and magazines, deploying his rare gift of making a nuanced, learned and unfailingly critical analysis attractive as journalism. Because of him, the advocates of
the seductive fantasy that the imperialism of the West was the most ruthless imperialism affecting Europe did not have it all their own way. But it took a long, hard slog before the illusion
began to be dispelled that somehow Sartre was the serious
thinker about politics and Aron the dilettante. At the heart of the anomaly was the almost universally shared
assumption that those who favoured the declaredly progressive consensus were working for the betterment of mankind, while those who believed that liberal democracy was a better bet were working
against it. Helping to make Aron even more unpalatable to the entrenched pseudo-left was his expertise in sociology: he actually knew something, for example, about how industries ran, how houses
got built, and how ordinary people earned the money to pay for their groceries. A respect for humble fact is one of the qualities that keep his prose permanently fresh. He could, alas, be very
grand. All too often, and especially towards the end, he was a bit too fond of drawing himself up to his full height. But he never lost contact with the earth. He never lost sight of the
imperfection that debars mankind from utopia.

Communist interpretation is never wrong. Logicians will object in
vain that a theory which exempts itself from all refutations escapes from the order of truth.

—RAYMOND ARON,
L’Opium des intellectuels
, P. 144

After World War II, Raymond Aron was the French philospher who did most to offset the more famous
Jean-Paul Sartre’s support for communism. Albert Camus tried to offset it also, but his scholarly qualifications were held to be dubious. Nobody doubted Aron’s. From the moment he
published
L’Opium des intellectuels
in 1955, the French left-wing thinkers knew that they had a real fight on their hands. They didn’t give up
easily. Some of them still haven’t. Aron was obliged to go on plugging away at the same theme. He had already said, before the war, that the Communist version of socialism was a secular
religion. What remains puzzling is why he said so little about it while the war was on. Self-exiled to London, he wrote a long series of brilliant articles for the Free French periodical
La France Libre
, which were collected after the victory into three books, nowadays themselves collected into a single volume,
Chroniques de guerre
. In the entire text, Stalin is mentioned exactly twice, and neither time derogatively. Writing in the same city at the same time, George Orwell
risked his reputation
and income by insisting on a distinction between the Red Army, which was making such a great contribution to defeating Hitler, and the lethal regime
behind it, which was bent on the extinction of all human values. Why did Aron not do something similar?

Perhaps the best answer is that he considered himself debarred from attacking an ally. Most of the
damning analysis he made of Hitlerite tyranny could have been transferred with equal validity to Stalin, but for Aron to have explicitly done so would have detracted from his first object as a
French patriot and as a Jew—the defeat of Nazi Germany. As it happened, Aron underestimated the effects of Vichy’s enthusiastic collaboration with the occupying power on the Jewish
Question. (In reality, there never was such a question, hence the capital “Q”: an early instance of falsification through typography.) Never a true pessimist, although always
pessimistic enough to be a realist, Aron was not equipped by temperament to guess that a Final Solution was under way. But he had no illusions about the essential barbarity of Nazi anti-Semitic
policies and the general nihilism of the assault on humanism by the psychotic authoritarian right—he hadn’t since well before the day he stood with Golo Mann and watched the Nazis
burn the books. As a man who loved France, he condemned the Vichy regime first of all for the false patriotism which allowed it to participate in the Nazi attack on the very thing that made
French civilization what it was: its humanist heritage. Hence his reluctance to make distinctions between the various columns of the Resistance, one of the most prominent of which, after June
1941 at any rate, was Communist. He believed in de Gaulle, but not enough to disbelieve that the Communist
résistants
had earned a hearing.
Nevertheless, after the Liberation, he could be heard—and can still be heard, in “
L’Avenir des religions séculaires
” (The
Future of the Secular Religions), one of the last chapters of
Chroniques de guerre
—reminding himself and his readership that, despite the immense
prestige won by the Red Army for Stalin’s regime and the people of the Soviet Union, a system of belief which confused the desirable and the inevitable was still a dogma.

As the war came to an end, Aron, who was always a liberal more on the left than those on the left were liberal, was
convinced that some form of socialism would be bound to prevail in all the European countries.
He just didn’t want any of those forms to be totalitarian. When it became
rapidly more apparent that a different view prevailed in the Kremlin, he prepared himself to write
L’Opium des intellectuels.
Acting more from
artistic intuition than solid study, the scholastically unqualified but piercingly sympathetic Camus anticipated Aron’s central precepts by four years with the relevant chapters of
L’Homme révolté
(
The Rebel
), but Aron’s is incomparably the more coherent work. Camus had
appropriated much of his knowledge of Soviet reality from Arthur Koestler, along with the warm attentions of Koestler’s wife. Aron had done his own research, in a colder archive.
Camus’s book was part of his romance, along with the vilification that it attracted. (The starting gun for the vilification was fired by Sartre, who tried to counter his upstart
protégé’s arguments by discrediting his qualifications: a reflex among established gurus that we should learn to look out for.) Aron’s book was an impersonal treatise
much harder to criticize in detail. The English translation,
The Opium of the Intellectuals
, was meticulously carried out by the doyen of London literary
editors, Terence Kilmartin, who did for Aron’s prose what he later did for Proust’s—he caught its measure, which in Aron’s case was always, throughout his career, the
measure of sobriety, comprehensive sanity, and a sad but resolute acknowledgement of history’s intractable contingency. Kilmartin himself thought that Aron in his old age overdid the last
quality. One day in the Black Friars pub near
The Observer
’s old location at the foot of Ludgate Hill, and long before I knew that Kilmartin had been
the English translator of
L’Opium des intellectuels
, I was loudly praising Aron—at that stage I had read about three of his books out of
thirty—when Kilmartin warned me that my new hero had become, in his declining years, so cautious about social innovation that he was “a bit, um,
right
wing.
” Kilmartin remained “a bit left wing” until his dying day: a proper ideal for a generous man, and one to copy.

In the course of the last forty years, the only part of the world
that has enjoyed peace is the continent divided between two zones of political civilization both of them armed with atomic bombs.

—RAYMOND ARON,
Les Dernières Années du siècle
(THE LAST YEARS OF THE CENTURY), P. 68