Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

liberalism, immoderate anti-communism and market society, always an untypical minority in France, who came to dominate Parisian intellectual fashions in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

And yet, if I did not feel at ease in Gaullist and Mitterrandist France, I could understand its continuity with my own France, the blue-white-and-red tricoloured ‘remembered hills’ of the past. In one way or another, the France of the Canard Enchaine was not yet dead. Indeed, the scandals and the growing corruption in the later Gaullist and the later Mitterrand eras revived the fortunes of this publication.

Nor did I feel at ease with the intellectual mood of the time. Like everyone on the global left, I was excited by the rebellion of 1968 but I remained sceptical. True, I was in much closer touch with French historians, who formed the core discipline of the French social sciences until the 1970s, and who supplied so many of Hamon and Rotman’s Parisian ‘intellocrats’. ² Nevertheless, in some ways I had lost touch with many of the currents of French culture and theoretical discussion after the 1960s, and, although any admirer of Queneau and Perec cannot but be sympathetic to the French intellectual tradition of playing games with language, as French thinkers increasingly moved into the territory of ‘postmodernism’ I found them uninteresting, incomprehensible, and in any case of not much use to historians. Even their puns failed to grip.

After the brief 1968 surge, in the 1970s and 1980s the left, both old and new, was clearly on the retreat in France. My opinion of the French Communist Party since 1945 had never been high, and I had long regarded its leadership under George Marchais as a disaster, yet it would be dishonest of me not to admit that its decline from the great mass Party of the French working class to a rump of less than 4 per cent of voters caused an old communist pain. And it would be equally dishonest not to admit that most of what has remained under the label ‘Marxism’ in France is unimpressive. On the other hand, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, the increasingly militant and ill-tempered anti-communism of so many of the formerly left-wing ‘intellocrats’ began to complicate my relations with some of them. Though we respected and sometimes liked each other, some of those with whom I had dealings in Paris, intellectual or social, were politically uneasy in my company, and I in theirs. Since I remained what I had been since 1956, a known, though heterodox communist whose work had never been published in the USSR, some, who might have been more Stalinist or even Maoist in their youth than I ever was, resented what they regarded as a wilful refusal to take the same road. I, in turn, found myself more repelled by the Cold War rhetoric and free market liberalism to which some of the ablest and most prestigious were drawn in the 1980s than by the straightforward return of a man like Le Roy Ladurie (a major historian by any standards) to the traditional conservatism of his Norman ancestry. Paradoxically, as Communist Parties declined, the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union and its empire collapsed, the tone of anti-communist and anti-Marxist polemic became more embittered, not to say hysterical. The late Francois Furet, a historian and publicist of great intelligence and influence – perhaps the nearest thing to a chef d’ecole of the tendency – did his best to turn the second centenary of the French Revolution into an intellectual assault on it. A few years later his Le passe d’une illusion presented the history of the twentieth century as that of the process of liberation from the dangerous dream of communism. Not surprisingly, I criticized his views.³ As a by now quite well-known Marxist historian, I found myself for a while a champion of the embattled and besieged French intellectual left.

This complicated relations further, especially since, by chance, my own history of the twentieth century, The Age of Extremes, appeared just before Furet’s book. While it was accepted on its merits and received calmly even by notably conservative reviewers in other countries, in France it was seen – at least by an influential part of the intellocrats – essentially as a work of political ideological polemics directed against anti-communist liberals. Though discussed (in its English version) in intellectual journals, it was not translated, on the ostensible grounds that it was too expensive to translate for its necessarily small market. The argument was implausible, since the book had already sold well in every other western language. Indeed, such was the curious self-absorption of the French intellectual scene in those years that French was for several years the only language of the member-states of the European Union, and indeed the only global culture-language (including Chinese and Arabic) in which the book was not published or contracted to be published. It finally came out in France in 1999, thanks to the initiative of a Belgian publisher and the active help of one of the few unrepentant publications of the left, Le Monde Diplomatique. Perhaps the ideological mood had changed since Lionel Jospin, who put less strain on the conscience of the French left than the dying Mitterrand, took over as prime minister in 1997. It was received well enough by the critics. The potential reviewers of the early nineties kept silent or had buried their hatchets. It sold rather satisfactorily, at least for a while. It brought me more personal letters from unknown readers scattered across the map of France than any of the other translations of this much-translated work. And it enabled an ancient Francophile, whose love affair with the tradition of the French left began on a newsreel truck on Bastille Day 1936, to round it off sixty-three years later with another suitably symbolic experience in the Grand Amphitheatre of the Sorbonne, once the only university of Paris, now the parent of a family, packed with Parisians who had been invited to listen to a debate on my newly published book. Very few of the people who came in sufficient numbers to crowd the enormous auditorium had read any of my books which, as the publishers who refused me always reminded me, had only had a succes d’estime in the hexagonal market. What brought them there was the fact that someone – it happened to be me – spoke frankly, critically, sceptically, but impenitently, and not without pride for those who stood for a left in which the old distinctions of party and orthodoxy no longer counted. I like to think that on this occasion I was present at a sort of re-emergence, however brief, of a Parisian intellectual left from a period of siege.

It is a suitable episode with which to end this chapter of a lifetime affair. For my generation France remains special. I can sympathize with the French sense of loss at the defeat of the language of Voltaire by the world triumph of the language of Benjamin Franklin. It is not only a linguistic but a cultural transformation, for it marks the end of the minority cultures in which only the elites needed international communication, and it hardly mattered that the idiom in which it took place was not widely spoken on the globe, or even – as in the classical dead languages – that it was not spoken at all. I can understand the retreat of a once hegemonic French culture into an hexagonal ghetto, only slightly mitigated by the popularity of ‘postmodern’ French ideologues among American graduate students, who do not always understand them. It is not that this is what Paris wants, but simply that it cannot get used to a state of affairs in which the rest of the world no longer looks to Paris and follows its lead. It is a hard fate to go from global hegemony to regionalism in two generations. It is hardest of all to discover that for most of the world none of this matters. But it matters for my generation of Europeans, Latin Americans and Middle Easterners. And it should matter to younger generations. The stubborn rearguard action of France in defence of the global role of her language and culture may be doomed, but it is also a necessary defence, by no means predestined to failure, of every language, and national and cultural specificity against the homogenization of an essentially plural humanity by the processes of globalization.

20

From Franco to Berlusconi

I

Aspiring novelists are never short of a subject. When all else fails, there’s family and autobiography. Aspiring professional historians have no built-in guide to what part of the past they want to explore, and therefore in most cases what their reputation will rest on – the Tudors, the English Revolution, seventeenth-century Spain or whatever. Usually they acquire a subject at university, give it a title to get a doctorate (or, in my day, when Oxbridge looked down on such titles, a fellowship dissertation) and in most cases stick to their ‘field’ or ‘period’ thereafter. The war had blocked my own attempts to follow this path. So it happened that my first book as a historian, Primitive Rebels, was in a field I had not previously thought much about, and indeed a field nobody else had thought about at all.¹ Essentially, it is a book based on my frequent travels in Spain and Italy in the 1950s, two countries to which my life and the fortunes of my writings have been linked ever since.

Unlike Italy – what antifascist would go there? – Spain, where I began to travel in 1951, had been part of my life for a long time – even before the Spanish Civil War, which made it part of everyone’s life in my generation. In spite of everything, after 1945 it was still a strange country for other Europeans. In the minds of most of us it still