Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 - download pdf or read online

By Tony Judt

The uniquely widespread function of French intellectuals in eu cultural and political existence following international struggle II is the focal point of Tony Judt's most modern booklet. He analyzes this highbrow community's such a lot divisive conflicts: the right way to reply to the promise and the betrayal of Communism and the way to maintain a dedication to radical beliefs whilst confronting the hypocrisy in Stalin's Soviet Union, within the new japanese ecu Communist states, and in France itself. Judt exhibits why this used to be an all-consuming ethical predicament to a iteration of French women and men, how their responses have been conditioned by means of battle and profession, and the way post-war political offerings have come to sit down uneasily at the judgment of right and wrong of later generations of French intellectuals.
Judt's research extends past the writings of stylish "Existentialist" personalities similar to Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir to incorporate a large highbrow neighborhood of Catholic philosophers, non-aligned newshounds, literary critics and poets, Communist and non-Communist alike.
Judt treats the highbrow dilemmas of the postwar years as an unfinished heritage. French intellectuals haven't totally come to phrases with the gnawing experience of what Judt calls the "moral irresponsibility" of these years. the end result, he indicates, is a legacy of undesirable religion and confusion that has broken France's cultural status, particularly in newly liberated japanese Europe, and which displays the nation's greater trouble in confronting its personal ambivalent prior.

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Additional resources for Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956

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Younger ones, however, ignorant of the past or anxious to put it behind them, saw in the party a political movement responding £0 their own desire for progress, change, and upheaval. lII It helped that communism asked of its sympathizers not that they think for themselves, merely that they accept the authority of others. For intellectuals who sought so passionately to melt into the community, communism's relative lack of interest in their own ideas was part of its appeal. Moreover, and it was the most important part of the attraction, com~ munism was about revolution.

This point is captured symbolically in the reading matter fuvorcd by the leadership at Uriage, which ranged from Proudhon to Maurras but took in Marx, Nietzsche, and ptguy, among others, along the way. Any and all critiques of bourgeois materialism were welcomed, while democracy in all its parliamentary fonns was a source of steady condemnation and ridicule. 7 Wherc the intellectuals at Uriage eventually parted company from the Vichy regime was in the latter's increasingly collaborative stance and the growing evidence that the National Revolution was at best an illusion, more likely and increasingly a cynicaJ facade for persecution, dictatorship, and revenge.

Latn:: a E[ienne Borne," 22 February 1941, in 0tNrm, vol. 4 (Paris, 1961-63), 694--95. IN THE LIGHT OF EXPERIENCE 31 Antoine dc Saint-Exupery, wcre writCIS living, or appearing to livc, the demands of their literary creations. With the defeat of France all this changed. e to say, publish, or perform whateVer they wished. They risked, always in theory and often in practice, persecution and punishment fOf their ideas. Many of them were brought fAce to fAce fOr the first time with the need to think through the relationship between their private thoughts and their public livcs; in the midst of a humiliating national tragedy, even the most solitary writers could not help but feel affected by the fate of the community.

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