Postwar

Camus first began to have doubts during France’s post-war trials and purges, when the Communists took a hard line as the Party of the Resistance and demanded exclusions, imprisonments and the death penalty for thousands of real or imagined collaborators. Then, as the arteries of political and intellectual allegiance began to harden from 1947, Camus found himself increasingly prone to doubt the good faith of his political allies—doubts he at first stifled out of habit and for the sake of unity. He handed over control of the newspaper Combat in June 1947, no longer so politically confident or optimistic as he had been three years before. In his major novel La Peste (The Plague), published the same year, it was clear that Camus was not comfortable with the hard-edged political realism of his political bedmates. As he put it, through the mouth of one of his characters, Tarrou: ‘I have decided to reject everything that, directly or indirectly, makes people die or justifies others in making them die.’

Nevertheless, Camus was still reluctant to come out in public and break with his former friends. In public he still tried to balance honest criticism of Stalinism with balanced, ‘objective’ references to American racism and other crimes committed in the capitalist camp. But the Rousset trial and the East European show trials ended any illusions he might have retained. To his private notebooks he confided: ‘One of my regrets is to have conceded too much to objectivity. Objectivity, at times is an accommodation. Today things are clear and we must call something “concentrationnaire” if that is what it is, even if it is socialism. In one sense, I shall never again be polite.’

There is here a perhaps unconscious echo of a speech at the International Conference of the Pen Club two years earlier, in June 1947, where Ignazio Silone—speaking on ‘La Dignite de l’Intelligence et l’Indignite des Intellectuels’ (‘The Dignity of Intelligence and the Unworthiness of Intellectuals’)— publicly regretted his own silence and that of his fellow Left intellectuals: ‘We placed on the shelves, like tanks stored in a depot, the principles of liberty for all, human dignity, and the rest.’ Like Silone, who would go on to contribute one of the better essays in Richard Crossman’s 1950 collection, The God That Failed, Camus became thenceforth an ever more acerbic critic of ‘progressivist’ illusions, culminating in the condemnation of revolutionary violence in his 1951 essay L’Homme revolte that provoked the final break with his erstwhile friends on the Parisian intellectual Left. For Sartre, the first duty of a radical intellectual was not to betray the workers. For Camus, like Silone, the most important thing was not to betray oneself. The battle lines of the Cultural Cold War were drawn up.

It is difficult, looking back across the decades, to recapture in full the stark contrasts and rhetoric of the Cold War in these early years. Stalin was not yet an embarrassment—on the contrary. As Maurice Thorez expressed it in July 1948, ‘people think they can insult us Communists by throwing the word “Stalinists” at us. Well, for us that label is an honor that we try hard to merit to the full.’ And many gifted non-Communists, as we have seen, were likewise reluctant to condemn the Soviet leader, seeking out ways to minimize his crimes or excuse them altogether. Hopeful illusions about the Soviet realm were accompanied by widespread misgivings—and worse—about America.[71]

The United States, together with the new Federal Republic of Germany, bore the brunt of Communist rhetorical violence. It was an astute tactic. The US was not wildly popular in western Europe, despite and in some places because of its generous help in Europe’s economic reconstruction. In July 1947 only 38 percent of French adults believed that Marshall Aid did not pose a serious threat to French independence, a suspicion of American motives that was further fuelled by the war scares of 1948 and the fighting in Korea two years later. Fabricated Communist charges that the US Army was using biological weapons in Korea found a receptive audience.

In cultural matters, the Communists did not even need to take the initiative. Fear of American domination, of the loss of national autonomy and initiative, brought into the ‘progressive’ camp men and women of all political stripes and none. Compared with its impoverished West European dependencies, America seemed economically carnivorous and culturally obscurantist: a deadly combination. In October 1949—in the second year of the Marshall Plan and just as plans for NATO were being finalized—the French cultural critic Pierre Emmanuel informed readers of Le Monde that America’s chief gift to post-war Europe had been… the phallus; even in the land of Stendhal ‘the phallus is on its way to becoming a God’. Three years later the Christian editors of Esprit reminded their readers that ‘we have, from the outset, warned of the dangers posed to our national well-being by an American culture which attacks the very roots of the mental and moral cohesion of the peoples of Europe.’

Meanwhile, an insidious American artifact was spreading across the continent. Between 1947 and 1949 the Coca-Cola Company opened bottling plants in the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Italy. Within five years of its creation West Germany would have 96 such plants and became the largest market outside the US itself. But while some voices had been raised in protest in Belgium and Italy, it was in France that Coca-Cola’s plans unleashed a public storm. When Le Monde revealed that the company had set a target of 240 million bottles to be sold in France in 1950, there were loud objections—encouraged but not orchestrated by the Communists, who confined themselves to the warning that Coke’s distribution services would do double duty as a US espionage network. As Le Monde editorialized on March 29th 1950, ‘Coca-Cola is the Danzig of European Culture.’

The furor over ‘Coca-Colonisation’ had its light side (there were rumours that the company planned to attach its logo, in neon, to the Eiffel Tower… ), but the sentiments underlying it were serious. The crassness of American culture, from films to beverages, and the self-interest and imperialist ambitions behind the US presence in Europe were commonplaces for many Europeans of Left and Right. The Soviet Union might pose an immediate threat to Europe but it was America that presented the more insidious long-term challenge. This view gained credence after the outbreak of war in Korea, when the US began to press for the rearmament of the West Germans. Communists could now blend their attacks on the ‘ex-Nazis’ in Bonn with the charge that America was backing ‘Fascist revanchism’. Nationalist hostility to ‘Anglo-Americans’, encouraged under the wartime occupation but silent since the liberation, was dusted off and drafted into service in Italy, France and Belgium—and also in Germany itself, by Brecht and other East German writers.

Seeking to capitalize on this inchoate but widespread fear of war, and suspicion of things American among European elites, Stalin launched an international Movement for Peace. From 1949 to Stalin’s death ‘Peace’ was the centerpiece of Soviet cultural strategy. The Peace Movement was launched in Wroclaw, Poland, in August 1948 at a ‘World Congress of Intellectuals’. The Wroclaw meeting was followed by the first ‘Peace Congresses’, in April 1949, conducted more or less simultaneously in Paris, Prague and New York. As a prototypical ‘front’ organization, the Peace Movement itself was ostensibly led by prominent scientists and intellectuals like Frederic Joliot-Curie; but Communists controlled its various committees and its activities were closely coordinated with the Cominform, whose own journal, published in Bucharest, was now re-named ‘For a Lasting Peace, for a Popular Democracy’.

On its own terms the Peace Movement was quite a success. An appeal, launched in Stockholm in March 1950 by the ‘Permanent Committee of the World Congress of Partisans of Peace’, obtained many millions of signatures in Western Europe (in addition to the tens of millions of signatories rounded up in the Soviet bloc). Indeed, gathering these signatures was the Movement’s main activity, especially in France, where it had its strongest support. But under the umbrella of the Peace Movement other front organizations also pressed home the message: the Soviet Union was on the side of peace, while the Americans (and their friends in Korea, Yugoslavia and Western European governments) were the party of war. Writing from Paris for The New Yorker, in May 1950, Janet Flanner was impressed: ‘At the moment, Communist propaganda is enjoying the most extraordinary success, especially among non-Communists, that it has ever had in France.’

The Communists’ attitude towards their mass movements was strictly instrumental—the Peace Movement was only ever a vehicle for Soviet policy, which is why it suddenly adopted the theme of ‘peaceful co-existence’ in 1951, taking its cue from a shift in Stalin’s international strategy. Privately, Communists—especially in the eastern bloc—had little but scorn for the illusions of their fellow-travellers. During organized visits to the popular democracies, Peace Movement supporters (overwhelmingly from France, Italy and India) were feted and honored for their support; behind their backs they were derided as ‘pigeons’, a new generation of Lenin’s ‘useful idiots’.

The Communists’ success in securing at least the conditional sympathy of many in Western Europe, and the great play that Communist parties in France and Italy especially made with their support among a cultural elite suspicious of America, prompted a belated but determined response from a group of Western intellectuals.