The Obstructed Path by H. Stuart Hughes

Author:H. Stuart Hughes [Hughes, H. Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Europe
ISBN: 9781351478212
Google: iGVQDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-09-29T01:31:24+00:00

CHAPTER

5

The Marriage of Phenomenology and Marxism

THE DEFIANCE OF DEATH, the imprint of one’s passage through history by the recording of lofty deeds—these were not the only manifestations of the heroic ideal in the years of war, occupation, and Resistance. There was also the thirst for social justice. As the war went on and the rigors of Nazi rule deepened, the forces opposing it drew closer together and became more conscious of the moral goals they had in common. As the moment of France’s liberation approached, the question of how new this new France would be took on a bitter urgency. Under the menace of deportation, torture, or summary execution, the activists of the Resistance began to cross the barriers that had separated class from class; sharing similar fears and hardships, they talked of a republic which would at last make real the word “fraternity” that had figured so long and so platonically in the national motto—a republic “pure et dure,” honest and compassionate, but implacable toward traitors and the exploiters of the poor.

Thus regarded, the Resistance ranked along with the Dreyfus Case and the First World War as the third great spiritual revolution which the French had traversed in a half century. And like its two predecessors, the experience disappointed those who had hoped that the nation as a whole would be transfigured by it. Quite predictably its effect was restricted to an elite drawn in disproportionate numbers from intellectuals and militants of the working class. On these, however—and more particularly on intellectuals—its effect was decisive; like the Dreyfus Case two generations earlier, the Resistance provided a criterion of reference, the base point from which to judge past and future. Under this kind of scrutiny, the ideologies of the Right collapsed, and with them the verbal elegance that their leading spokesmen had cultivated. In the perspective of the Resistance, such refinements had a suspicious ring: they seemed calculated to obscure with polite turns of phrase a world of misery and social strife. The writing that emerged from the Resistance tried to mirror in all its crudeness and honor a human reality which the sufferings of war had disclosed.

For at least a half decade after the war’s end, the writers who had been résistants dominated the literary and philosophical landscape. In their minds and in the minds of their followers, an anti-fascist record alone counted; the parallel and contemporaneous experience of service at Vichy had best be forgotten as a shameful hiatus in the nation’s history. In such circumstances fair-mindedness could hardly be expected. Yet to lump together as unprincipled reactionaries all the intellectuals who had rallied to Marshal Pétain was to refuse to understand the special kind of self-abnegation which had led a minority of men of good will to serve a cause that in the end brought them only disrepute. At Vichy there was a little of everything, even of Socialism in its pacifist guise. More especially in the period in which the Marshal had enjoyed a quasi-independence from

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