Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [184]
Sartre’s rift with Camus had also widened. After Camus returned to France from South America, his play Les Justes appeared in December 1949 at the Théâtre Hébertot, where his Caligula had proved such a great success in 1945.Les Justes, which dealt with revolutionary violence in tsarist Russia, marked a further step away from his communisant contemporaries. Some saw the play as a veiled attack on the Resistance, but Camus’s target was clear: the idea that revolutionary violence could be justified by the vague promise of a better future. The next step away from Sartre was his essay ‘The Rebel’, which came out two years later. It constituted a direct attack on intellectuals who allowed political considerations to corrupt their artistic integrity.
Sartre did not believe that a writer could ever stand aside politically. In his case, political commitment was already subordinating art. He was patronizing about Camus’s scruples and refusal to swim with the progressive tide of history. ‘I only see one solution for you,’ he concluded, ‘the Galapagos Islands.’
The final break did not come until 1952. Sartre saw Camus in the bar of the Hotel Pont-Royal and warned him to expect a savage review of ‘The Rebel’ by Francis Jeanson in Les Temps modernes. The editorial committee had refused to censor what had been written.
Camus replied to the article on 30 June. Ignoring Jeanson, he addressed his letter to Sartre – as ‘Monsieur le Directeur’. In particular, he attacked ‘the intellectual method and attitude’ of the piece. His arguments may have lacked philosophical rigour, but he posed enough well-directed questions to render his opponents very uncomfortable. ‘One does not decide the truth of a thought according to whether it is right-wing or left-wing.’ He pointed out the fundamental contradiction of existentialists justifying a system which was totally opposed to the idea of the responsibility of the individual.
‘Such a polemic,’ commented Raymond Aron, ‘would hardly be understood outside France and Saint-Germain-des-Prés.’ There, more than anywhere else, progressive intellectuals continued to turn a blind eye to Stalinist methods. Some acknowledged them, but justified them. Others, like Simone de Beauvoir, acknowledged them and dismissed them as irrelevant. She argued that if you made an issue of them, you must be a supporter of American capitalism. She accepted that, though she disliked Kravchenko, the trial had undoubtedly proved that labour camps existed in the Soviet Union. Yet she revealed herself in a passage describing the American writer Richard Wright: ‘With his eyes shining from misguided fanaticism, he was breathlessly recounting stories of clandestine arrests, betrayal and liquidation – no doubt true – but one did not understand either the point or the scope of what he was saying.’
This new trahison des clercs was firmly in the Jacobin tradition: an intellectual terrorism justifying physical terror. Stalin’s regime might be pitiless, his apologists argued, but all revolutions had a terrible majesty. What mattered was that the Soviet Union’s stated philosophy was on the side of human justice. Against this, the United States offered no ideological or social programme except economic freedom, which simply meant the freedom to exploit others.
Those who were not sealed inside bubbles of morally vacuous theory might have fallen for the wartime appeal of a party of martyrs. But they could not blind themselves to the suspicion that the terrifying sacrifices which had fuelled the Soviet system had been wasted and were still being wasted. No Utopia could be built on a mass graveyard.
Part Four
THE NEW NORMALITY
30
Americans in Paris
American Paris