Postwar

63

The best-known of course was Arthur Koestler—but then he might as readily be described as Hungarian, or Austrian, or French or Jewish.

64

The PSI in these years was unique among West European Socialist parties in its proximity and subordination to the Communists—a pattern much more familiar in Eastern Europe.

65

In De Sica’s Sciuscia (made in 1946 and set in that same year) the director of a boys’ prison not only gives the Fascist salute—a habit he cannot break—but alludes with undisguised nostalgia to the low crime figures back in Mussolini’s time.

66

Despite his own misgivings about Soviet cultural policy, Paul Eluard refused to criticize Zdanovism in front of the working-class comrades of his local Party cell. As he explained to Claude Roy, ‘Poor things, it would just discourage them. One must not upset those taking part in the struggle; they wouldn’t understand.’

67

Francois Fejto, living in Paris, noted some years later that whereas the Italian Communists gave a warm, if guarded, welcome to his history of Eastern Europe, the PCF condemned it as the work of just another renegade.

68

Thus Emmanuel Mounier, in Esprit, February 1946: ‘Anti-Communism… is the necessary and sufficient crystallizing force for a return of Fascism.’

69

Likewise, the cult of Mao in the West reached its zenith at the height of the Cultural Revolution, just when and just because Mao was persecuting writers, artists and teachers.

70

In these years ‘progressivism’, as Raymond Aron mordantly observed, consisted in ‘presenting Communist arguments as though they emanated spontaneously from independent speculation.’

71

These sentiments are unintentionally caricatured in this report from a child’s first class with a Communist primary teacher, in Prague, April 1948: ‘Children, you all know that in America people live in holes dug in the ground and are slaves for a few capitalists, who take all the profit. But in Russia everyone is happy, and we in Prague are very happy too, owing to the government of Klement Gottwald. Now children, repeat loudly with me: “We are very contented and approve the Gottwald government”.’

72

‘We were intolerant of idiocy in the domains we knew well ’, wrote the French poet Claude Roy, who joined the PCF during the war after an earlier romance with the far Right Action Francaise, ‘but forgiving of crimes in matters of which we knew little.’

73

Luc Sante, The Factory of Facts (1998), p. 27.

74

She was not alone in her Victorian allusions. The British Prime Minister at the time, Winston Churchill, used to remind audiences that he had ridden in the last cavalry charge of the British Army—at Omdurman in the Sudan—in September 1898.

75

In high-school history textbooks the message of Franco’s ascent to power was unambiguous: ‘The future of Spain united, after three centuries, to the destiny of the past!… The ancient procession has not ceased… Along its path advance the dead and the living, bursting with Christianity, in which a world disoriented and in catastrophic convulsions centers and anchors itself… This is the grand task that God has saved for the Spain of today… An