Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

by Eric J. Hobsbawm

  A few years my junior, Henri came from what he described as a peasant family in the Orléanais, published his own and his friends’ poetry in small plaquettes or pamphlets with drawings by Helène, for which he also made me write a piece on jazz, and at that time worked for the nationalized railways. He followed Lefebvre in studying sociology and urbanism and eventually taught at the Beaux Arts, thus catching up to some extent with his older brother André, a bona fide thesis-producing academic from the start who was to become the world expert on Islamic guilds and a pillar of French oriental scholarship. Helène, both more cosmopolitan and dramatically Parisian, who had spent the war with her family in Brazil, worked hard to make herself a painter. Frankly, she was never much good, but although people did not like to say so to a charming and extremely attractive young woman, I suspect that she was too intelligent not to be aware of her limitations, and suffered accordingly. Meanwhile she earned her living by working at the Brazilian consulate. Her Polish father, with whom relations were tense, was in business, her brother was something in couture, or at least the friend of one of the first of the beautiful Japanese models who anticipated erotic multiculturalism. Perhaps this helps to explain how she managed to wear Balmain at a time when haute couture labels had not yet been licensed to every department store. Like Henri she was a communist, in a cellule in the proletarian 13th arrondissement, but she had begun on the periphery of the Palestine Jewish terrorist organization known as the Stern Gang, or at least the extreme left-wing part of it. She retained an affinity for direct action. During the period of Algerian OAS terrorism she visited me in London, while she was making purchases of timers on behalf of what she said was a left-wing anti-OAS bombing campaign. I asked where she would get them. ‘At Harrods, naturally,’ she said. Of course, where else?

  Though some of the people in the Raymonds’ network were to become well known in their fields, essentially it operated on the lower slopes of the Parisian left-wing intelligentsia, although Helène plausibly claimed to be au fait with the scandals on the more elevated peaks, the gossip about literary prizes and who was on the skids in the CP leadership. It read Le Monde and sometimes still L’Humanité, but most of the people we knew (as distinct from gossiping about them) were not likely to be asked to sign those manifestos of intellectuals on public issues which were so characteristic of the times before the eminent ‘media intellectuals’ had their own regular columns in the dailies and weeklies. It was very much a pre-1968 milieu and the 1950s and 1960s saw it gradually crumble as the old left splintered and shifted over Stalin and Algeria, and the old guard of the French CP increasingly found anyone suggesting change uncongenial, especially intellectuals. My communist friends tended to move from the Party to a smaller body, the Party of Socialist Unity (PSU) and when that proved unviable, into full-time research, writing or, if they wanted to remain in politics, the old Socialist Party. Since I did not then know some of the ex-communists who were to move directly into a passionate anti-communism, or had met them only casually, I was unable to follow the tracks of their political travels.

  Inevitably the breakdown of the Raymonds’ marriage changed the pattern of my visits to Paris. In any case from 1961 on my life was transformed by the partnership of Marlene. However permanent the passion, like jazz, Paris could no longer be the same for a then middle-aged man with wife and, eventually, children. And in any case she had, and made, her own friends in France, quite apart from the ones we had, or from then on acquired together. Moreover, since 1957 I had acquired another couple of close Parisian friends who remain our friends to this day: Richard and Elise Marienstras. The Raymonds and I had decided to travel to a small seaside town in the Gargano peninsula of Italy – the ‘spur’ that sticks out of the ‘boot’ of Italy into the Adriatic – on the strength of a novel set there, La Loi, recently published by the then still communist or recently communist writer Roger Vailland, whom Henri had known since Resistance days. There on the beach were the Marienstrases, he a tall broad-chested blond, she tiny, thin and dark, en route for a spell as secondary-school teachers in Tunisia, by then independent but still educationally linked with the French schools system. Never were French intellectuals more involved in North Africa than in the 1950s, when Tunisia and Morocco won their freedom and the Algerians were fighting for theirs. So we had plenty to talk about. In any case, ever since the early nineteenth century the Maghreb has played a major role in the imagination of French painters and writers, but equally so as an intellectual stimulus to the young agrégés who went there as teachers, that is to say as future academics: Fernand Braudel among historians and Pierre Bourdieu among sociologists, to name but two. The Marienstrases’ academic interests were not Mediterranean or Oriental, but Anglo-Saxon, which provided another link. Richard was to become the major French authority on Shakespeare, and Elise was to establish a reputation as a historian of the USA.

  Both were from Polish-Jewish families, fortunate to survive in the unoccupied zone of wartime France. Richard had joined the armed Resistance in the south-eastern hills at the age of sixteen, an experience he recalled as the only time in his life when nobody cared, or even asked, whether he was Jewish. Many years later he was deeply moved when, being the only intellectual among his surviving and now ageing Resistance comrades, he was asked to make the commemorative speech at their fiftieth anniversary dinner somewhere in the Rhône valley. Though they were naturally on the left, Marxism did not attract the Marienstrases, but proud of secular, emancipated, diaspora Judaism, neither did Zionism. Theirs was, or perhaps increasingly became, a minority position among French Jewry which in their lifetime, thanks mainly to the massive exodus from formerly French North Africa, became the largest Jewish community in Europe and, since the end of the USSR, in any country of the old world.

  There was a third, more academic, reason why my relationship with Paris changed in the 1960s. The convergence between what the French historians were doing in Annales and we in Past & Present was becoming obvious. From about 1960 I was increasingly drawn into Parisian academic life, and especially towards the new academic empire of Fernand Braudel. Indeed, in the 1970s I joined it for a while officially as an associate directeur de recherche for part of the year at the new Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. In short, from 1960 on academic engagements increasingly set the rhythm of my, or rather our, visits to Paris.

  In a way these changes went together. When I first went to Paris after marrying Marlene, whose knowledge of the academic world was negligible, the Braudels, justifiably charmed by her, invited us to lunch at their apartment and Fernand won her permanent goodwill by assuring her that being a good husband was an essential element of being a good historian. On such occasions grandees of French intellectual life are not on oath, but since they know how to make the statements proper to the occasion in a manner suggesting sincerity without condescension, all of us were satisfied. Conversely, she was the hostess in London both to Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie when he stayed with us after I had invited him to a seminar in London and, many years later, to the philosopher Louis Althusser in one of his manic phases, not long before he killed his wife in one of the subsequent depressions. As in other academic households, personal and professional relations were not clearly separable.

  Unlike in the France of the Third and even the Fourth Republics, I no longer felt at ease in the France of de Gaulle and his Gaullist successors, or in the France of Mitterrand, the France that developed a new kind of public rhetorical jargon where politicians called their country the ‘Hexagone ’, talked of ‘la France profonde’ and showed their energy by forging ahead ‘tous azimuths’, in which Paris became one gigantic gentrified bourgeois ghetto, the largest in Europe, where the street-corner bars were shut at weekends because the old people of Paris could no longer afford to live there, although they worked there on weekdays. Except for the great hole in the centre left by the emigration of the markets and filled by Richard Rogers’s Beaubourg, the city remained more or less recognizable until Presiden
t Mitterrand filled and surrounded it with his architectural dinosaurs. (The General, knowing that his place in history was secure, had disdained trying to preserve his memory by monumental architecture.) Paris remains as wonderful a city as ever for the tourist, but it is hard for a historian to get used to the fact that the left can no longer elect more than the odd councillor in the home of the Paris Commune, unless the corruption of the right-wing municipal administrations has temporarily become too scandalous. On the other hand, nobody living in Britain could fail to appreciate the advantages of French postwar modernization, which supplemented the unchanging quality and variety of French food-markets and cooking with the TGV and a superb system of public urban and suburban transport.

  I learned, at first reluctantly, to appreciate the greatness of the General and to develop a taste for his style. I learned, with even greater reluctance, to respect Mitterrand. Neither could have flourished in the Third Republic. Both came out of the milieu of what the Third Republic would have (rightly) called ‘reaction’. De Gaulle was a man of the right, but one for whom the Republic, including its left, was an essential part of that ‘certain idea of France’ which he recreated after the war. He was the first French politician since 1793 whose France had a place both for the monarchy and the Revolution. Indeed, he was presumably not entirely displeased to be compared with Louis XIV, who would have addressed his servants much as de Gaulle addressed the publisher who edited his memoirs, when the man admitted to a rather un-Gaullist past between 1940 and 1944. ‘I take it,’ said the great man (who may well have had the relevant files looked up), ‘that you have been inside one of my prisons.’ Both the personal pronoun and the plural are very much de Gaulle.12

  Since his death there has been much criticism of the ambiguities and complexities of François Mitterrand’s career. Yet it cannot be denied that it moved leftwards with surprisingly little discontinuity, from the pre-war ultra-right through Vichy and the Resistance to a political progress that turned him into the builder and chief of a reconstructed Socialist Party which recaptured control of the left not by isolating the communists in the usual Cold War manner, but by bringing him to power in alliance with them. In both Third and Fourth Republics politicians would have moved in the opposite direction. He and de Gaulle belong to an era – no, both were architects of the era – when French politics ceased to be essentially a battle about the great Revolution whose memory divided the left from the right, though both men knew in their bones that the Revolution was as central to the France they ruled as the American Constitution was to the USA. In this they were more realistic than the ideologists of moderate liberalism, immoderate anti-communism and market society, always an untypical minority in France, who came to dominate Parisian intellectual fashions in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

  And yet, if I did not feel at ease in Gaullist and Mitterrandist France, I could understand its continuity with my own France, the blue-white-and-red tricoloured ‘remembered hills’ of the past. In one way or another, the France of the Canard Enchainé was not yet dead. Indeed, the scandals and the growing corruption in the later Gaullist and the later Mitterrand eras revived the fortunes of this publication.

  Nor did I feel at ease with the intellectual mood of the time. Like everyone on the global left, I was excited by the rebellion of 1968 but I remained sceptical. True, I was in much closer touch with French historians, who formed the core discipline of the French social sciences until the 1970s, and who supplied so many of Hamon and Rotman’s Parisian ‘intellocrats’. 2 Nevertheless, in some ways I had lost touch with many of the currents of French culture and theoretical discussion after the 1960s, and, although any admirer of Queneau and Perec cannot but be sympathetic to the French intellectual tradition of playing games with language, as French thinkers increasingly moved into the territory of ‘postmodernism’ I found them uninteresting, incomprehensible, and in any case of not much use to historians. Even their puns failed to grip.

  After the brief 1968 surge, in the 1970s and 1980s the left, both old and new, was clearly on the retreat in France. My opinion of the French Communist Party since 1945 had never been high, and I had long regarded its leadership under George Marchais as a disaster, yet it would be dishonest of me not to admit that its decline from the great mass Party of the French working class to a rump of less than 4 per cent of voters caused an old communist pain. And it would be equally dishonest not to admit that most of what has remained under the label ‘Marxism’ in France is unimpressive. On the other hand, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, the increasingly militant and ill-tempered anti-communism of so many of the formerly left-wing ‘intellocrats’ began to complicate my relations with some of them. Though we respected and sometimes liked each other, some of those with whom I had dealings in Paris, intellectual or social, were politically uneasy in my company, and I in theirs. Since I remained what I had been since 1956, a known, though heterodox communist whose work had never been published in the USSR, some, who might have been more Stalinist or even Maoist in their youth than I ever was, resented what they regarded as a wilful refusal to take the same road. I, in turn, found myself more repelled by the Cold War rhetoric and free market liberalism to which some of the ablest and most prestigious were drawn in the 1980s than by the straightforward return of a man like Le Roy Ladurie (a major historian by any standards) to the traditional conservatism of his Norman ancestry. Paradoxically, as Communist Parties declined, the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union and its empire collapsed, the tone of anti-communist and anti-Marxist polemic became more embittered, not to say hysterical. The late François Furet, a historian and publicist of great intelligence and influence – perhaps the nearest thing to a chef d’ecole of the tendency – did his best to turn the second centenary of the French Revolution into an intellectual assault on it. A few years later his Le passé d’une illusion presented the history of the twentieth century as that of the process of liberation from the dangerous dream of communism. Not surprisingly, I criticized his views.3 As a by now quite well-known Marxist historian, I found myself for a while a champion of the embattled and besieged French intellectual left.

  This complicated relations further, especially since, by chance, my own history of the twentieth century, The Age of Extremes, appeared just before Furet’s book. While it was accepted on its merits and received calmly even by notably conservative reviewers in other countries, in France it was seen – at least by an influential part of the intellocrats – essentially as a work of political ideological polemics directed against anti-communist liberals. Though discussed (in its English version) in intellectual journals, it was not translated, on the ostensible grounds that it was too expensive to translate for its necessarily small market. The argument was implausible, since the book had already sold well in every other western language. Indeed, such was the curious self-absorption of the French intellectual scene in those years that French was for several years the only language of the member-states of the European Union, and indeed the only global culture-language (including Chinese and Arabic) in which the book was not published or contracted to be published. It finally came out in France in 1999, thanks to the initiative of a Belgian publisher and the active help of one of the few unrepentant publications of the left, Le Monde Diplomatique. Perhaps the ideological mood had changed since Lionel Jospin, who put less strain on the conscience of the French left than the dying Mitterrand, took over as prime minister in 1997. It was received well enough by the critics. The potential reviewers of the early nineties kept silent or had buried their hatchets. It sold rather satisfactorily, at least for a while. It brought me more personal letters from unknown readers scattered across the map of France than any of the other translations of this much-translated work. And it enabled an ancient Francophile, whose love affair with the tradition of the French left began on a newsreel truck on Bastille Day 1936, to round it off sixty-three years later with another suitably symbolic experience in the Grand Amphitheatre of the Sorbonne, once the only universit
y of Paris, now the parent of a family, packed with Parisians who had been invited to listen to a debate on my newly published book. Very few of the people who came in sufficient numbers to crowd the enormous auditorium had read any of my books which, as the publishers who refused me always reminded me, had only had a succès d’estime in the hexagonal market. What brought them there was the fact that someone – it happened to be me – spoke frankly, critically, sceptically, but impenitently, and not without pride for those who stood for a left in which the old distinctions of party and orthodoxy no longer counted. I like to think that on this occasion I was present at a sort of re-emergence, however brief, of a Parisian intellectual left from a period of siege.

  It is a suitable episode with which to end this chapter of a lifetime affair. For my generation France remains special. I can sympathize with the French sense of loss at the defeat of the language of Voltaire by the world triumph of the language of Benjamin Franklin. It is not only a linguistic but a cultural transformation, for it marks the end of the minority cultures in which only the elites needed international communication, and it hardly mattered that the idiom in which it took place was not widely spoken on the globe, or even – as in the classical dead languages – that it was not spoken at all. I can understand the retreat of a once hegemonic French culture into an hexagonal ghetto, only slightly mitigated by the popularity of ‘postmodern’ French ideologues among American graduate students, who do not always understand them. It is not that this is what Paris wants, but simply that it cannot get used to a state of affairs in which the rest of the world no longer looks to Paris and follows its lead. It is a hard fate to go from global hegemony to regionalism in two generations. It is hardest of all to discover that for most of the world none of this matters. But it matters for my generation of Europeans, Latin Americans and Middle Easterners. And it should matter to younger generations. The stubborn rearguard action of France in defence of the global role of her language and culture may be doomed, but it is also a necessary defence, by no means predestined to failure, of every language, and national and cultural specificity against the homogenization of an essentially plural humanity by the processes of globalization.