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"Intellectuals -- France -- Political activity"
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French intellectuals against the left
In the latter half of the 1970s, the French intellectual Left denounced communism, Marxism, and revolutionary politics through a critique of left-wing totalitarianism that paved the way for today's postmodern, liberal, and moderate republican political options. Contrary to the dominant understanding of the critique of totalitarianism as an abrupt rupture induced by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, Christofferson argues that French anti-totalitarianism was the culmination of direct-democratic critiques of communism and revisions of the revolutionary project after 1956. The author's focus on the direct-democratic politics of French intellectuals offers an important alternative to recent histories that seek to explain the course of French intellectual politics by France's apparent lack of a liberal tradition.
eBook
Sartre Against Stalinism
Most critics of the political evolution of Jean-Paul Sartre have laid emphasis on his allegedly sympathetic and uncritical attitude to Stalinist Communism due, to a large extent, to their equation of Marxism with Stalinism. It is true that Sartre was guilty of many serious misjudgements with regard to the USSR and the French Communist Party. But his relationship with the Marxist Left was much more complex and co tradictory than most accounts admit. This book offers a political defence of Sartre and shows how, from a relatively apolitical stance in the 1930s, Sartre became increasingly involved in the politics of the Left; though he always distrusted Stalinism, he was sometimes driven to ally himself with it because of the force of its argument.
eBook
Generation Stalin : French writers, the fatherland, and the cult of personality
\"Generation Stalin is the first comprehensive exploration of the instrumental role of French writers in the creation and propagation of Joseph Stalin's cult of personality. Focusing on the four most prominent writers affiliated with the French Communist Party (PCF) -- Henri Barbusse, Romaine Rolland, Paul Eluard, and Louis Aragon -- Andrew Sobanet traces the rise and evolution of the Stalin cult in France from the late 1920s through the 1950s. Barbusse was the author of the first official biography of Stalin, and the work served as a prototype for the dictator's official biographies into the early Cold War period. The PCF was one of the most important Communist parties, and these writers helped in significant ways to shape Stalinist propaganda in the international Communist sphere, including within the USSR. Fundamental to Generation Stalin is an exploration of complicity with authoritarianism on the part of PCF-affiliated writers, who were often cast as intellectual and moral guides. Sobanet provides analysis of how these writers used a variety of genres -- biography, novel, drama, film, poetry, essays, reportage -- to support dictatorial leadership. Focusing on French nationalism and the French \"culture of commemoration\" used to reinforce party doctrine, Generation Stalin analyzes what it was to be a French Stalinist\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The burden of responsibility
Using the lives of the three outstanding French intellectuals of the twentieth century, renowned historian Tony Judt offers a unique look at how intellectuals can ignore political pressures and demonstrate a heroic commitment to personal integrity and moral responsibility unfettered by the difficult political exigencies of their time. Through the prism of the lives of Leon Blum, Albert Camus, and Raymond Aron, Judt examines pivotal issues in the history of contemporary French society—antisemitism and the dilemma of Jewish identity, political and moral idealism in public life, the Marxist moment in French thought, the traumas of decolonization, the disaffection of the intelligentsia, and the insidious quarrels rending Right and Left. Judt focuses particularly on Blum's leadership of the Popular Front and his stern defiance of the Vichy governments, on Camus's part in the Resistance and Algerian War, and on Aron's cultural commentary and opposition to the facile acceptance by many French intellectuals of communism's utopian promise. Severely maligned by powerful critics and rivals, each of these exemplary figures stood fast in their principles and eventually won some measure of personal and public redemption.
eBook
The Ethiopian Campaign and French Political Thought
Yves Simon was one of the preeminent Thomistic philosophers and
political theorists of the twentieth century. He saw it as a moral
duty to understand human reality and to use philosophical analysis
to examine contemporary politics when they embodied philosophical
errors or vicious ideologies. In The Ethiopian Campaign and
French Political Thought , Simon extracts principles from the
1894 Dreyfus Affair in France and applies them to Italy's 1935
invasion of Ethopia. As Simon's analysis shows, the relatively
obscure events leading up to the Italian invasion had larger
implications for Europe and the world, perhaps even paving the way
for Vichy France's collaboration with Hitler's German New
Order.
This book, available for the first time in English, offers an
interesting case study of such ethical concerns as just war theory
and pre-emptive war, and is of particular relevance in our modern
political climate.
eBook
French intellect against the left
In the latter half of the 1970s, the French intellectual Left denounced communism, Marxism, and revolutionary politics through a critique of left-wing totalitarianism that paved the way for today's postmodern, liberal, and moderate republican political options. Contrary to the dominant understanding of the critique of totalitarianism as an abrupt rupture induced by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, Christofferson argues that French anti-totalitarianism was the culmination of direct-democratic critiques of communism and revisions of the revolutionary project after 1956. The author's focus on the direct-democratic politics of French intellectuals offers an important alternative to recent histories that seek to explain the course of French intellectual politics by France's apparent lack of a liberal tradition.
eBook
The Burden of Responsibility
Using the lives of the three outstanding French intellectuals of the twentieth century, renowned historian Tony Judt offers a unique look at how intellectuals can ignore political pressures and demonstrate a heroic commitment to personal integrity and moral responsibility unfettered by the difficult political exigencies of their time.
Through the prism of the lives of Leon Blum, Albert Camus, and Raymond Aron, Judt examines pivotal issues in the history of contemporary French society—antisemitism and the dilemma of Jewish identity, political and moral idealism in public life, the Marxist moment in French thought, the traumas of decolonization, the disaffection of the intelligentsia, and the insidious quarrels rending Right and Left. Judt focuses particularly on Blum's leadership of the Popular Front and his stern defiance of the Vichy governments, on Camus's part in the Resistance and Algerian War, and on Aron's cultural commentary and opposition to the facile acceptance by many French intellectuals of communism's utopian promise. Severely maligned by powerful critics and rivals, each of these exemplary figures stood fast in their principles and eventually won some measure of personal and public redemption.
Judt constructs a compelling portrait of modern French intellectual life and politics. He challenges the conventional account of the role of intellectuals precisely because they mattered in France, because they could shape public opinion and influence policy. In Blum, Camus, and Aron, Judt finds three very different men who did not simply play the role, but evinced a courage and a responsibility in public life that far outshone their contemporaries.
\"An eloquent and instructive study of intellectual courage in the face of what the author persuasively describes as intellectual irresponsibility.\"—Richard Bernstein, New York Times
eBook