Revolutionaries (5 page)

The relations of intellectuals and communist parties have been turbulent, though perhaps less so than the literature would suggest, for the prominent and articulate, with whom it mainly deals, are not necessarily a representative sample of the average and the inarticulate. In countries like France and Italy, where the party has long been and remains the major force of the left, it is likely that political behaviour (e.g. voting) is much stabler than the turnover of party membership – always rather large – would indicate. We know this to be so among workers. Unfortunately the difficulties of finding a workable sociological definition of ‘intellectuals' have so far deprived us of reliable statistics about them, though the few we have suggest that it applies to them also. Thus party membership at the École Normale Supérieure dropped from 25 per cent after the war to 5 per cent in 1956, but the communists obtained 21 per cent of the votes at the Cité Universitaire in 1951 and 26 per cent in 1956.

Still, whatever the general trend of political sympathy among intellectuals, there can be no doubt of the stormy path of those who actually joined communist parties. This is normally
ascribed to the increasing conversion of these parties, following the Soviet lead, into rigidly dogmatic bodies allowing no deviation from an orthodoxy that finished by covering every conceivable aspect of human thought, thus leaving very little scope for the activity from which intellectuals take their names. What is more, unlike the Roman Catholic Church, which preferred to keep its orthodoxy unchanged, communism changed it frequently, profoundly, and unexpectedly in the course of day-by-day politics. The ever-modified
Great Soviet Encyclopedia
was merely the extreme example of a process which inevitably imposed great and often intolerable tensions on communist intellectuals. The unpleasant aspects of life in the
USSR
also, it is argued, alienated many of them.

This is only part of the truth. Much of the intellectuals' difficulty arose from the nature of modern mass politics, the communist party being merely the most logical – and in France the first – expression of a general twentieth-century trend. The active adherent of a modern mass party, like the modern
MP
, abdicates his judgment in practice, whatever his theoretical reservations or whatever the nominal provision for harmless dissent. Or rather, modern political choice is not a constant process of selecting men or measures, but a single or infrequent choice between packages, in which we buy the disagreeable part of the contents because there is no other way of getting the rest, and in any case because there is no other way to be politically effective. This applies to all parties, though non-communist ones have hitherto generally made things easier for their intellectual adherents by refraining from formal commitments on such subjects as genetics or the composition of symphonies.

As Mr Caute sensibly points out the French intellectual, in accepting broadly the Third or Fourth Republics has had to do so despite Versailles, the domestic policy of the Bloc National, Morocco, Syria, Indo-China, the regime of Chiappe, unemployment,
parliamentary corruption, the abandonment of republican Spain, Munich, McCarthyism, Suez, Algeria.

Similarly the communist intellectual, in opting for the
USSR
and his party, did so because on balance the good on his side seemed to outweigh the bad. Not the least of Mr Caute's merits is to show how, for example in the 1930s, not only hard-shell party militants but sympathizers consciously refrained from criticism of Soviet purges or Spanish republican misdeeds in the interests of the greater cause of anti-fascism. Communists did not often discuss this choice in public. It could be quite explicit in the case of non-members who deliberately opted for the communist side, or against the common adversary, such as Sartre. It may be that not only the proverbial gallic logic but also the background of Roman Catholicism (shared, in different ways, alike by believers and unbelievers) made the idea of adhering to a comprehensive party with mental reservations more readily acceptable in France than in the Britain of a hundred religions and but a single sauce.

Still, all allowances made, the way of the party intellectual was hard, and most of the actively committed ones had a breaking-point, even those who joined the party in the stalinist period and largely because of its stalinism, i.e. because they welcomed the construction of a totally devoted, disciplined, realistic, anti-romantic army of revolution. Even this Brechtian generation, which deliberately trained itself to approve the harshest decisions in the war for human liberation, was likely – like Brecht himself – to arrive at the point where it questioned not so much the sacrifices as their usefulness and justification. Unthinking militants might escape into the self-delusion of the faithful, to whom every directive or line was ‘correct' and to be defended as such because it came from the party which was by definition ‘correct'. Intelligent ones, though capable of much self-delusion, were more likely to retreat into the posture of the advocate or civil servant whose private opinions are irrelevant to his brief, or
the policeman who breaks the law the better to maintain it. It was an attitude which grew easily out of the hard-headed party approach to politics, but one which produced a breed of professional bruisers of intellectual debate.

Mr Caute is understandably hard on these intellectual apparatchiks, ready at a moment's notice to find the tone of sincerity for the potential ally or to blackguard him as an ‘intellectuel-flic', but never to pursue the truth. The French version of them is indeed an especially disagreeable one, and the book is largely dominated by the author's disgust with them. One can hardly fail to sympathize with him. Aragon's gifts as a writer are towering, but irrelevant to one's feelings about his intellectual gutter-journalism, and there are plenty of others whose personal talents command no respect. Nor can they be excused because gutter-journalism is an old habit among committed French intellectuals of other political tendencies also. Yet two important questions should not be obscured by this distaste.

The first is about the object of the exercise. If it was to gain support for the party among intellectuals, as Mr Caute assumes, then the public activities in the 1950s of MM Stil, Kanapa, Wurmser,
et al
. were quite the worst way of setting about it, because they merely isolated the party among them; and intelligent party men knew this. The truth is rather that two motives conflicted: that of extending the influence of the party and that of barricading a large but isolated movement, a private world within the world of France, against assaults and infiltrations from outside. In periods of political expansion, such as those of Popular Front and Resistance, the two aims were not mutually exclusive; in periods of political stagnation they were. What is interesting is that in such periods the French party chose (as the Italian never quite did) the second aim, which was essentially to persuade the comrades that they did not need to listen to the outsiders who were all class enemies and liars. This required both a constant barrage of reassurance and an
adequate supply of orthodox culture for internal consumption, and Mr Caute has not perhaps paid enough attention to this attempt at systematic cultural autarchy, though he has noted some of its symptoms. It implied the attempt to make the party artist or writer economically independent of the outside world. It also implied that at such times Aragon's outside reputation, like Belloc's for prewar English Catholics, was valuable as an asset within the movement, rather than as a means of converting outsiders.

The second question is the crucial one of how communist policy can be changed. Here again the Roman Catholic parallel (of which French communists were more aware than Mr Caute allows) is relevant. Those who have changed party orientation have not been men with a record of criticism and dissidence, but of unquestioned stalinist loyalty, from Khruschev and Mikoyan to Tito, Gomulka and Togliatti. The reason is not merely that such men in the 1920s and 1930s thought stalinism preferable to its communist alternatives, or even that from the 1930s criticism tended to shorten life among those domiciled in the
USSR.
It is also that the communist who cut himself off from the party – and this was long the almost automatic consequence of dissidence – lost all possibility of influencing it. In countries like France, where the party increasingly
was
the socialist movement, leaving it meant political impotence or treason to socialism; and for communist intellectuals the possibilities of settling down as successful academic or cultural figures was no compensation. The fate of those who left or were expelled was anti-communism or political oblivion except among the readers of little magazines. Conversely, loyalty left at least the possibility of influence. Since the 1960s, when Mr Caute's book ends, it has become clear that even hard-core intellectual functionaries like Aragon and Garaudy were more anxious than he allows to initiate policy changes. Nor ought their arguments or their hesitant initiatives to be judged by the standards of liberal
discussion, any more than the behaviour of the reforming prelates before and during the Vatican Council.

However, to see the problem of communism and the French intellectuals chiefly as one of the relations between party and intellectuals, whether from the party's or the individual intellectual's point of view, is to touch it only at the margin. For at bottom the issue is one of the general character of French politics, of the secular divisions within French society, including those between intellectuals and the rest. It may be argued that party policy in general and in intellectual matters could have been more effective, particularly in certain periods such as the 1920s and the 1950s. But such arguments can, if they are to have value, be based only on the recognition of the limits imposed on the party by a situation over which it had little control.

We cannot, for instance, make sense of the ‘dilemma' of the communist intellectual in a proletarian party unless we recognize that the causes which have mobilized French intellectuals most fully have, since 1870, rarely been popular ones. One of the genuine difficulties of the Communist Party during the Algerian war, as of the Dreyfusard socialist leaders in the 1890s, was the fact that their rank and file was largely out of sympathy with Dreyfus or the
FLN.
Why this was so requires analysis. So, more generally, does the failure of the entire French left since 1870 – and perhaps since before 1848 – to achieve political hegemony in the nation which it created during the great Revolution. Between the wars governments of the left (1924, 1936–8) were as rare in Jacobin France as in conservative Britain, though in the middle 1930s it did look for a moment as though the left might resume its long-lost leadership. One of the crucial differences between the French and the Italian Communist Parties is that the Italian Resistance, like the Yugoslav, was a national movement led by the left, whereas the French Resistance was merely the honourable rebellion of a section of Frenchmen. The
problem of breaking out of minority opposition into national hegemony was not only a communist one.

Aragon's
La Semaine Sainte
, underrated in Britain and unmentioned by Mr Caute, is essentially the novel of such secular divisions among Frenchmen – even among those who ‘ought' to be on the same side. This is probably one reason why French critics of all parties, whose political nerve it touches, have overrated it. The aim of the French left has always been to become a movement of both workers and intellectuals at the head of the nation. The problem of the Communist Party has arisen largely from the extreme difficulty of achieving this ancient Jacobin object in the mid-twentieth century.

¹
David Caute,
Communism and the French Intellectuals
, London, 1969.

The Italian Communist Party is the great success story in the history of communism in the western world, or that part of the world in which such parties are not in power. The fortunes of the various
CPS
have fluctuated, but in the course of the half century or so since most of the European ones were founded few have substantially improved their international ranking order or (what is much the same thing) transformed the character of their political influence in their native country. There have been some rare cases of ‘promotion' from a lower to a higher division of the political league, as, presumably, the Spanish
CP
which was relatively insignificant until the Spanish Civil War,
¹
and some obvious cases of relegation such as the
CP
in Western Germany, which never recovered from the blows received under Hitler. But by and large, though their strength and influence have fluctuated, most of the communist parties at least of capitalist Europe have never played in their countries' political First Divisions, even when they emerged at the end of the last war with the prestige of their unparalleled record in the resistance. On the other hand some of them, such as the French and the
Finnish, have always been major political forces, even at the worst points of their careers. How far this is true of the world as a whole is more difficult to assess, but need not concern us here.

The Italian
CP
is one of the rare examples of unquestioned ‘promotion'. Before fascism it was never more than a minority party within what was admittedly a rather left-wing socialist movement: somewhat over a third at the Congress of Livorno (1921). As the dust of the split settled down it became rapidly clear that it represented a comparatively modest minority, whatever the revolutionary sympathies and possibilities of the rest of the socialist movement. In 1921 it polled less than a fifth of the socialist vote, in 1924, despite the socialist decline, the proportion was still almost three to one against it. Its own percentage of the popular vote never reached 5 per cent. Since the war it has emerged increasingly as the major force within the left, as the effective ‘opposition' in a
de facto
two-party structure of politics, and, what is more, it has gained strength steadily and almost without interruption.
²