Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [188]
Equality itself was formalized. I knew I was accepted as an intellectual who belonged when somewhat younger French colleagues automatically addressed me as tu, as one does old boys and fellow-graduates of the Ecole Normale Supérieure or similar elite educational establishments. (Of course communists of whatever status and country, except perhaps from the German Democratic Republic, also did so automatically, but most formerly communist French historians had ceased to be in the Party by the time I got to know them well.) Not that this implied personal intimacy. Because I could not detach it from intimacy, my personal relations with Fernand Braudelwere crippled for ever after the great man, very much my senior in age as well as eminence, formally suggested that we should say tu to one another. Conversation became too difficult – rather like writing a novel without the letter e, in the manner of Georges Perec – if one could use neither the old formal vous nor the tu which resisted crossing one’s lips. I simply could not bring myself to treat him as an ordinary informal friend, rather than a graciously condescending patron, which was the role in which I had learned to admire and like him. (He played it to perfection.)
In such a country, however easy the entry to the geographical space, entry to the human space was difficult without personal introductions, or tacit recognition signals rather like those codes which – now that the traditional concierge no longer watches over the comings and goings after dark and at weekends – are necessary to visit Parisian friends in their apartment buildings. My own codes of entry were the Communist Party and association with one clan of French historians. The doors opened for me at, and through, the Paris International Congress of Historical Sciences in 1950. At this congress, described in chapter 17, I met the sort of people out of whom Braudel, the great academic entrepreneur, with his wonderful chief-of-staff, Clemens Heller, was soon to fashion the counter-establishment to the Sorbonne, the ‘Sixth Section’ of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. Today it operates as the ‘High School for Social Sciences’ in the black glass building of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, which Braudel and Heller managed to erect on the site of the former Cherche-Midi prison, facing the comforts of the Hôtel Lutetia, where the Gestapo had tortured its prisoner not long before. And the great innovation of the Maison as an official institution was not only that, thanks to Braudel, but particularly to Heller, it systematically tried to bring French and foreigners together, but above all that it recognized the importance of informality and personal talk.
It naturally helped personal relations to be on easy terms with the group of historians round Braudel and the Annales, all the more so as with the exception of the great chieftain himself, whom I got to know in the middle fifties, they were not yet great, or even significant, names with major works to their credit. In a sense our careers advanced together, and so did our social relations – at least until the curious posthumous reversion to Cold War anti-communism among French intellectuals in the 1990s. However, the academically mediated friendships did not develop fully until the 1960s, and my closer connections with the Maison, the Ecole (where I later taught for a month a year) and the Collège de France not until the 1970s. This