The Realists

An “intellectual,” according to an indispensable volume published in France two years ago, the “Dictionnaire des Intellectuels Francais,” is one who intervenes in the public debate not because he or she has expert knowledge or experience of the issue but by virtue “of the reputation acquired in another domain.”

That is not intended to be a sarcastic or dismissive definition but a dispassionate one. The French historically have regarded their writers to be custodians of the conscience of their society, a notable tribute to their art and the mind though not always one of which the writers concerned have proven worthy.

Of the three subjects of “The Burden of Responsibility,” all of whom had immense influence on the political life of France in their times, only Raymond Aron can be said to have possessed “expert” credentials in political matters, and that was not an expertise acquired in the university but by a lifetime’s immersion in the world crisis provoked by the great totalitarian movements of the mid-20th century. Even then it may be argued that he was really a moralist--but so were Albert Camus and Leon Blum. In that lies the great interest of the roles they played in France from the 1920s (in Blum’s case) to the 1980s (in Aron’s case).

Tony Judt wrote an earlier book on French intellectuals of the postwar period (“Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956”), dealing with those whom he saw as irresponsible figures, notably those, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, who were compromised by their intoxication with totalitarian utopias.

All are well-known to those interested in modern France, and in their time were international figures. Sartre’s existentialism influenced a postwar generation throughout the West, as did the novels and plays of Camus, who won the Nobel Prize for literature. The two friends’ confrontation over the significance of Marxism and the relationship of intellectual and proletariat was as intensely followed in American as in Continental politico-intellectual circles and was emblematic of the moral as well as political divisions of the postwar West.

This little book, a companion work to “Past Imperfect,” consists of thoughtful essays about three men who assumed the burdens of responsibility, as Judt puts it: Blum (1872-1950), who led the first government of the Popular Front in 1936; Aron (1905-1983), scholar and political commentator; and Camus (1913-1960), novelist, playwright and journalist.

Blum’s political action began with the Dreyfus affair. He became an active politician only at the time of World War I, when he was in his 40s. Before, he had been an official of the Conseil d’Etat, France’s constitutional court, but he was really a man of letters: critic, essayist and poet--a combination of careers perhaps possible only in France.

When the world war threw him into politics, he became the principal author of the Socialist Party program of 1919, and until his death he intellectually dominated French Socialism. In 1936, he led the Socialists into a union with the Communists and other leftist parties to establish the Popular Front government, which for the first time imposed a 40-hour workweek and paid annual vacations (incidentally creating what today is the biggest industry in the world, tourism). Business leaders and the political right insisted that such measures would forever ruin France’s international competitiveness and economy--which, of course, they did not.

Aron was the other Judt subject who became a professional in political matters, although he began his academic career as a philosopher and later became a sociologist. With the war, he joined the Free French in London and was put to work as a writer, first for the Free French newspaper in London (while guarding his distance from Charles de Gaulle, of whom he never approved). When the war ended, he wrote for Combat and then for many years for the leading conservative daily, Le Figaro. When that paper veered to the extreme right in the late 1970s, he moved to the weekly magazine L’Express.

In the 1950s, his important polemical work “The Opium of the Intellectuals,” directed against the influence of Marxism and the fellow-traveling intelligentsia of the period--notably against his classmate and friend at the Ecole Normale Superieure, Jean-Paul Sartre--caused him to be unjustly attacked in the dominant Marxisant politico-intellectual circles as an enemy of the worker and apologist for U.S. foreign policy.

In France, this disapproval weighed on him until nearly the time of his death, even though he had determined admirers. Outside France, where his books were widely translated, he won an unparalleled reputation for wisdom, balance and intellectual integrity. This found echo in France only in the 1980s, when the left was finally compelled to abandon its illusions about the Soviet Union. He is now generally recognized as a representative of that tradition of rationality, political insight and mesure, or balance, that includes Alexis de Tocqueville and Michel de Montaigne.

Aron was above all a realist who invariably put himself in the place of the person with responsibility in order to consider what actually might be done rather than what it might be desirable to do. He said in his memoirs that the principles that he tried to serve were objectivity, so far as possible; the interests of France; and “the rules, ambiguous as they may be, of political morality.”

His reputation today nonetheless suffers from the fact that he was a great man in an ephemeral trade. He wrote books that were important in their time, but he seemed to lack the generalizing power necessary to an analysis that redefines a major problem and wins an enduring influence. This was the other side of his salutary skepticism about grand historical theories. His great contemporary influence was exercised through his commentaries in the press, and there is no intellectual work more perishable than the newspaper column.

Aron was a classmate of Sartre at the most important of French educational institutions, L’Ecole Normale Superieure, and was his intellectual challenger throughout his professional life in a symbolic perpetuation of their school rivalry, an obsession that did him no good. Aron was the reasonable man resisting the destructive ideological influence of Sartre, the very embodiment of the guilty bourgeois intellectual in search of justification through his identification with a working class of which he knows nothing.

This was a peculiarly French combat, a product of the phenomenon of Normale and French grandes ecoles, where the intellectual formation and commitments, and friends, made in an elite school can dominate a lifetime. (In France, the obituaries of eminent men invariably begin with the words “Ancien eleve [graduate] de L’Ecole Normale Superieure” or “. . . L’Ecole Polytechnique” or whichever grande ecole the great man attended, a phrase omitted only in the rare cases where the great man is not a product of the grandes ecoles system.)

One may think Aron was actually diminished by this long engagement with what today seems an unworthy foe. Sartre now is history for the French, politically embarrassing history. Aron is survived by the quarterly he founded, Commentaire, and by those whom he taught and inspired.

Camus, whose father was killed in World War I, was brought up in Algeria by an illiterate mother and benefited from the friendship of a teacher who recognized his abilities. He studied philosophy at the university in Algiers, became a journalist, and, in 1942, published his novel, “The Stranger,” and the essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” which made his reputation. Tubercular, and therefore barred from military service, he went to France for treatment at the start of the war.

Notwithstanding his philosophical essays (“Sisyphus” and “The Rebel”), Camus was fundamentally an artist, drawn into political engagement by circumstances and proximity. He began writing for the clandestine newspaper Combat, becoming an editor in 1943 and its editor in chief after the Liberation. His political engagement then was to a liberal left, which opposed him to the dominant political current on the left, represented by Sartre, which held that the Communist Party and Soviet government were authentic representatives of the working class and must be supported whatever their aberrations.

All three of these men belong to history, however, which is the weakness of Judt’s book: Their stories have been told again and again, particularly the story of Sartre and Camus, with its glamorous stage-setting of existentialism, Saint-Germain des Pres jazz clubs, the Deux Magots, the Cafe Flore. The cafes are now obligatory stops for American and Japanese tourists who would not know an existentialist from a Trappist, and Saint-Germain des Pres is a fashionable shopping area.

One cannot say that this is a book about “the French 20th century.” It is about two decades of that century, an admirable account and also an excellent introduction for those coming to the subject, complete with “further readings.”

A score of wars among intellectuals and philosophes and mai^tres a penser have occurred since then. There are no intellectual figures in France today who exercise as much influence as Sartre and Camus did in the 1940s and early 1950s (although many keep trying the role). The French today expect artists and writers to play a far greater role in forming the national conscience than they play in any other country, and France still is the place where an artist’s or writer’s death leads the newspaper front pages and is the top item on the television news.

My own view is that Camus is the most interesting of the three men Judt discusses and the one whose reputation is most likely to survive. In political matters, he was afflicted with the disabling ability to see both sides of a question. This is very rare and makes him an unparalleled witness to his times. This was true especially with respect to the rebellion in Algeria, when he was attacked and ostracized by the Paris intelligentsia because he refused to support the Algerians’ cause.

He knew too much; he knew that colonialism was no longer sustainable, but he also accurately foresaw the wasteland that independent Algeria has become. At the time he fell silent on the subject and when criticized said that “when speech can lead to the remorseless disposal of other people’s lives, silence is not a negative attitude.” It is a reproach as relevant today as it was then.