Revolution and the Republic

by Jeremy Jennings

  general.’180 On this account the list of similarities was truly extensive. Both sought

  to carry the revolution abroad; both were led by men drawn from the former ruling

  classes; both relied upon the population of the cities and especially the capital; both

  had succeeded in winning over the peasantry; and both placed the rights of society

  over those of the individual. More than this, the ‘two dictatorships’ were ‘eminently

  realistic’ and both, in the ‘interest of public safety’, were prepared to compromise

  their principles. Both Lenin and Robespierre, Mathiez wrote, wished to see the

  177 See Nicole Racine, ‘Pacifisme, socialisme et communisme naissant’, Communisme, 18–19

  (1988), 34–49. On the phenomenon of inter-war pacifism see Norman Ingram, The Politics of

  Dissent: Pacifism in France 1919–1939 (Oxford, 1991).

  178 Boris Souvarine, Éloge des Bolsheviks (1919), 5.

  179 Albert Mathiez, Le Bolchévisme et le Jacobinisme (1920).

  180 Ibid. 3–4.

  434

  Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism

  suppression of the death penalty but both were prepared to use it as ‘a means of

  government’. Both were in favour of freedom of the press but both had suppressed

  the newspapers of the opposition. In brief, both saw that ‘the end justifies the

  means’ and for both that end was ‘the happiness of the masses’. ‘History’, Mathiez

  concluded, ‘never repeats itself exactly; but the resemblances revealed by our

  analysis of the great crises of 1793 and 1917 are neither superficial nor fortuitous.

  The Russian revolutionaries are intentionally and knowingly imitating the French

  revolutionaries. They are animated by the same spirit. They move among the same

  problems in an analogous atmosphere.’181

  Blessed with such a favourable intellectual environment, a rapidly ‘bolshevized’

  French Communist Party (PCF) had little difficulty in convincing its adherents

  that the USSR was the home of socialism, that Moscow (in the words of the PCF’s

  general-secretary) was a ‘holy city’, and that a terrestrial Eden and ‘superior

  civilization’ was in the process of creation.182 As time went on, there appeared to

  be no shortage of evidence to support these claims. Between 1917 and the Second

  World War no less than 125 (for the most part uncritical) accounts of visits to the

  Soviet Union were published in France alone. The list is even longer if the

  numerous novels inspired by the Soviet experience are included. Unfortunately,

  there is little indication that many of their writers went beyond Moscow (in some

  cases, beyond the Kremlin and the Hotel Lux!) or that they spoke Russian and

  hence were able to free themselves from the influence of the Bolshevik propaganda

  machine.183 Nothing was left to chance by the Soviet authorities. Laid on for André

  Gide, for example, was a swimming pool full of handsome young soldiers from the

  Red Army and even homosexual encounters were prearranged in order that Gide

  could be blackmailed if necessary.184 When Jean-Paul Sartre visited the Soviet

  Union in 1962 he was given the curvaceous Lena Zonina as his guide.185 A whole

  series of front organizations (the most prominent of which was Les Amis de l’URSS)

  designed to enhance the image of the Soviet Union as the land of peace and

  progress complemented the PCF in its self-appointed role as the sole, authorita-

  tive source of information on the subject. When, after the Second World War,

  the achievements of the Red Army at Stalingrad and the sacrifices of the Russian

  people were translated into ideological ascendancy in such diverse fields as art,

  literature, philosophy, and even science, there seemed little that could shake the

  hold of the Soviet myth over French public and intellectual opinion.186 As Robert

  Desjardins remarked in The Soviet Union through French Eyes: ‘Any person daring

  to level criticism against the Soviet Union was automatically accused of playing

  181 Albert Mathiez, Le Bolchévisme et le Jacobinisme (1920), 22.

  182 Quoted in Dominique Desanti, Les Staliniens (1975), 34.

  183 See Fred Kupferman, Au pays des Soviets: Le Voyage français en Union soviétique 1917–1939

  (1979) and Sophie Curé, La Grande lueur à l’Est: Les Français et l’union soviétique 1917–1939

  (1999).

  184 Herbert Lottman, The Left Bank (Boston, Mass., 1982), 113–15.

  185 Carole Seymour-Jones, A Dangerous Liaison: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (London,

  2008), 411–29.

  186 See Jeannine Verdès-Leroux, Au Service du parti: Le Parti Communiste, les intellectuels et la

  culture (1944–1956) (1983).

  Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism

  435

  into the hands of the class enemy and labelled as a member of the imperialist

  and fascist camp.’187 Even the existence of the gulag—firmly attested after 1945

  by the accounts provided by escaped German and Polish prisoners—could be

  denied with apparent sincerity (and not only by the PCF itself but by others such

  as Jean-Paul Sartre).

  Once transformed into a replica of its Soviet counterpart, the PCF became the

  French section of the international communist movement.188 Defining itself as

  the party of the French working class, it was rebuilt according to the twenty-one

  conditions that determined membership of the Comintern189 and was committed

  to a rigid conception of Marxism-Leninism. Closely controlled from Moscow, it

  was run on democratic-centralist lines and came to establish a panoply of factory

  cells, trade unions, newspapers, clubs, and associations. Frequently seen as a society

  within a society,190 the PCF succeeded in establishing its own distinctive style, a

  language (the famous langue de bois), a culture, and an identity all of its own.191 It

  was into this worldview that the party activist would be drawn, accepting its rules,

  its discipline, and its objects of veneration, and so much so that no life seemed

  possible outside its confines.192

  To what extent this ideological and organizational framework led inevitably to a

  willing embrace of the dictates of Stalinism is open to discussion (and touches upon

  questions that relate to the entire history of Marxism in the twentieth century), but

  there can be no doubt that the PCF fell victim to the personality cult: Stalin was at

  once the father figure, spiritual leader, sage, and undisputed expert in all fields of

  knowledge, the very exemplar of all that was finest in communist man. ‘Comrade

  Stalin’, acting party secretary Jacques Duclos told the PCF’s 1953 national confer-

  ence in a speech of deep emotion mourning their terrible loss, was ‘the greatest man

  of his age’.193 If the party’s own leader, Maurice Thorez, received similar adulation

  and devotion, behind the reverence for Stalin lay a continued worship of the Soviet

  Union as the home of socialism. Surrounded by its enemies (and hence meriting

  unqualified loyalty), the USSR was the very model of a proletarian nation, a

  laboratory in which a new world of prosperity and emancipation for all was being

  forged, a civilization superior in every respect to that of capitalism, be it in the fields

  of art, literature, housing, science, or healthcare. No praise seemed too excessive for

  its heroic leade
rs and people.

  An uncritical stance towards the Soviet Union constituted only one part of

  French communism’s ideological identity. Another key ingredient was an un-

  abashed nationalism. From the time of the Popular Front of the 1930s, if not

  187 Desjardins, Soviet Union through French Eyes, 13.

  188 See Nicole Racine and Louis Bodin, Le Parti Communiste Français pendant l’entre-deux-guerres

  (1972). For an account of the PCF’s later history see D. S. Bell and Byron Criddle, The French

  Communist Party in the Fifth Republic (Oxford, 1994).

  189 These conditions covered party organization, doctrine, and strategy.

  190 See Annie Kriegel, Les Communistes français (1968).

  191 See Georges Lavau, A quoi sert le Parti Communiste? (1981).

  192 See e.g. Edith Thomas, Le Témoin compromis: Mémoires (1995).

  193 Bernard Legendre, Le Stalinisme français: Qui a dit quoi? (1944–1956) (1980), 66–8.

  436

  Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism

  before, the PCF did not hesitate to articulate passages of astonishing lyricism in

  praise of France, her natural beauty, her moderate climate, her civilized culture, her

  generous people, her industrial ingenuity, and even the richness of her food and

  wine.

  To this, as was illustrated by such texts as Thorez’s La Mission de la France dans

  le monde,194 was added the universalist message of France as the country of

  progress, liberty, and peace. Such a description necessarily entailed a particular

  vision of the course of French history and this inevitably involved fixing upon an

  interpretation of the French Revolution. Viewed from the prevailing orthodoxy

  within the PCF, the Revolution of 1789 was a bourgeois revolution marking the

  passage from feudalism to capitalism and the victory of a new industrial class over

  the aristocracy of the ancien régime. In ideological terms it denoted the triumph of

  the Encyclopédistes and of the philosophy of materialism. Yet, following the reading

  provided by Jean Jaurès, the Revolution was also seen to contain the potential to

  effect a transformation from political democracy to social democracy, to a society of

  justice and fraternity and one dominated by the masses. To that extent the

  communists were able to portray themselves as the descendants of the revolution-

  aries of the eighteenth century and as defenders of the ‘great principles’ of the

  Revolution, and it was this stance that allowed Thorez to place the PCF at the

  forefront of those celebrating its 150th anniversary in 1939.195 More than this,

  1789 also represented the moment when France affirmed herself for the first time

  as a nation. From here it was but a short step to an identification of the interests of

  the working class with those of the nation as a whole and then to a designation of

  any challenge to the independence of France as a direct threat to the French

  proletariat.196 Patriotic rhetoric of this kind was a prefiguration of communist

  participation in the Resistance during the Second World War. In short, at the heart

  of communist ideology were to be found the twin symbols of the red flag and the

  tricolour.

  Where did writers, philosophers, and intellectuals more generally fit into this

  picture?197 As the heir to the long-established tradition of ouvriérisme, the PCF

  gloried in the celebration of proletarian values and identity. From this perspective,

  the party leadership was to remain under the control of its working-class activists

  and bourgeois intellectuals were not to be trusted to represent the workers’ inter-

  ests. Nevertheless, the PCF saw the utility of intellectuals in its struggle to displace

  bourgeois cultural hegemony and to defeat its capitalist enemies. The various

  mechanisms used by the PCF to control a group of people it viewed with

  undisguised suspicion were long ago laid bare by David Caute,198 but not everyone

  194 Thorez’s La Mission de la France dans le monde (1937).

  195 See Thorez, ‘Vive la grande Révolution française’, Œuvres choisies en trois volumes, ii.

  1939–1950 (1966), 125–53.

  196 See Marc Lazar, ‘Damné de la terre et homme de marbre: L’Ouvrier dans l’Imaginaire du PCF

  du milieu des années trente à la fin des années cinquante’, Annales ESC, 45 (1990), 1071–96.

  197 See Sudhir Hazareesingh, Intellectuals and the French Communist Party: Disillusion and Decline

  (Oxford, 1991).

  198 David Caute, Communism and the French Intellectuals (London, 1964).

  Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism

  437

  was expected to adopt the esprit du parti later demanded by Central Committee

  member Laurent Casanova in Le Parti Communiste, les intellectuels et la nation.199

  Indeed, the PCF often preferred its intellectual sympathizers to remain outside the

  party and to play the role of compagnon de route or fellow-traveller. Nevertheless,

  the result was the imposition of a deadening uniformity, with whole swathes of

  French intellectual and artistic life—not least the historiography of the Revolution

  of 1789—reduced to stultifying orthodoxy. If the disciplines of history and

  philosophy were particularly affected, science too was not untouched by the

  absurdities of a crude dialectical materialism.200 Worse still was the slavish subser-

  vience and bad faith witnessed with every dramatic change in party line. With one

  or two notable exceptions, independent and original socialist thought effectively

  died during these years, those remaining outside the orbit of the communist party

  being subject to sustained vilification.

  The power and influence of the PCF over intellectual opinion in France was

  at its height during the Fourth Republic (1946–58). These years were also ones

  of considerable electoral support, with the party regularly securing between 25 and

  30 per cent of the popular vote. Now, with the advent of the Cold War, to an

  uncritical admiration of the USSR was affixed an equally fervent anti-Americanism.

  In the communist imagination, the United States stood for consumerism (Coca-

  Cola), philistinism (the English language), economic imperialism (the Marshall

  Plan), and barbarism (germ warfare in the Korean War).201 ‘The awakening of the

  sleepwalkers’, according to Jeannine Verdès-Leroux,202 began in the mid-1950s

  and with the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and Khrushchev’s denunciation

  of Stalin before the XXth Congress of the CPSU it became increasingly difficult

  to sustain a positive image of the USSR and, indeed, of the French Communist

  Party itself. For their part, many among the leftist intelligentsia drifted off into one

  or other variety of gauchisme, their faith in the Soviet Union conveniently replaced

  by a new-found enthusiasm for the oppressive regimes of Mao’s Communist China

  or Fidel Castro’s Cuba.203

  For the leadership of the PCF (as well as for many of its adherents) the Soviet

  myth endured for almost as long as the Soviet Union itself, its leader Georges

  Marchais famously describing the achievements of the USSR as being ‘generally

  positive’ as late as the PCF’s 23rd National Congress in 1979. How that myth

  was sustained and how it remained a powerful motivating force is itself a

  fascinating topic and says much about the human need for th
e certainty of ultimate

  victory, not to mention the capacity for self-deception. How, against all the

  199 Laurent Casanova, Le Parti Communiste, les intellectuels et la nation (1949).

  200 See Michael Kelly, Modern French Marxism (Oxford, 1982) and Bud Burkhard, French Marxism

  between the Wars: Henri Lefebvre and the ‘Philosophies’ (New York, 2000).

  201 See Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley, Calif.,

  1993), 15–69.

  202 Verdès-Leroux, Le Reveil des somnambules.

  203 See Jeannine Verdès-Leroux, La Lune et le Caudillo: Le Rêve des intellectuels et le régime cubain

  (1959–1971) (1989) and François Hourmont, Au pays de l’Avenir radieux: Voyages des intellectuels

  français en URSS, à Cuba et en Chine (2000). See also Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: French

  Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution and the Legacy of the 1960s (Princeton, NJ, 2010).

  438

  Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism

  evidence, the passion for communism managed to retain its hold over so many

  French intellectuals for so long is an even more intriguing question. To the factors

  already cited might be added not only the laudable struggle against fascism

  but also the conviction held by many after the Great Depression that capitalism

  had no future. François Furet, in one of the most important books published in

  France over the last twenty years,204 accepted both of the above explanations but

  added an important psychological explanation: the intellectual’s love of commu-

  nism was a form of bourgeois self-hatred. The ‘communist idea’, he argued, was

  sustained by an unremitting scorn for the ugliness and mediocrity of bourgeois

  society and for the bourgeois as an individual. Whatever the explanation, French

  intellectuals of the left failed in their responsibility to tell the truth about Soviet

  totalitarianism.205

  Then, with astonishing speed, everything changed.206 The language of revolu-

  tionary politics virtually vanished in the space of less than a decade. Its last gasp was

  Althusserian Marxism. In brief summary, Louis Althusser, the leading philosopher

  within the PCF, effected a brilliant reformulation of Leninism in order to prevent

  the de-Stalinization of the party from degenerating into a revival of the humanist

  language of democratic rights and social democracy. To that end, history had to be