French Writers and the Politics of Complicity

Abstract

Reviewed by: French Writers and the Politics of Complicity Andrew Sobanet Golsan, Richard J. French Writers and the Politics of Complicity. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Pp. 216. In a thought-provoking and well-researched new book, Richard Golsan explores the politics of complicity in two heterogeneous groups of French writers. Focusing on the 1940s and the 1990s, Golsan analyzes problematic stances taken by select intellectuals in highly charged, and often high-stakes political environments. His goal, broadly, is to analyze choices and activities that he characterizes as complicitous with undemocratic policies and regimes. With chapters on Henry de Montherlant, Alphonse de Châteaubriant, Jean Giono, Alain Finkielkraut, Régis Debray, and Stéphane Courtois, Golsan’s book covers a wide range of contexts and varying degrees of intellectual complicity. Cautious to avoid the “twin dangers of demonization and apology,” Golsan paints portraits of those writers as they grapple with the dominant domestic and international situations of their respective eras. And for Golsan, political commitment led those intellectuals in unsettling directions. The author and editor of numerous books and special issues on the intersection of culture and politics, Golsan adeptly portrays the contexts in which these intellectuals engaged in what he labels complicity with undemocratic politics. The book’s first three chapters focus on the Vichy era and the last three chapters deal with salient events on the French intellectual scene during the 1990s. At first glance, those two time periods could not appear to be more divergent. After all, France in the early 1940s was a broken and defeated country, partially occupied by Nazis and partially self-governed by a far-right-wing collaborationist regime. In the 1990s, by contrast, France was a democratic nation prospering in the context of a peaceful and rapidly evolving European community. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to choose for comparison two more distinct decades in the twentieth century. Recognizing that his readers will find—initially, at least—the linkage of those two time periods puzzling, Golsan explains that, in the 1990s, the memory of “Vichy, Nazism, and the Holocaust provided a constant frame of reference through which contemporary crises were interpreted” (7). Analysis of the discursive and rhetorical use of Vichy-era events is therefore crucial, Golsan argues, to understanding more fully political and historical reference points in the 1990s. [End Page 154] Golsan uses the introduction of his book to situate and explain the terms that will form the basis of his analysis, most prominently “collaboration” and “complicity.” The former term, of course, applies to the writers of the 1940s, and the latter mainly to the intellectuals of the 1990s. There are, to be sure, varying degrees of collaboration and complicity here, a fact that is acknowledged by the author. After all, one does not easily lump together in the same study a noted and influential intellectual like Alain Finkielkraut and a loathsome character like Alphonse de Châteaubriant. It is far simpler to speak of complicity with dangerous far-right-wing ideals when discussing Vichy-era authors than when analyzing the work of these intellectuals from the century’s final decade. Golsan is careful to nuance his position vis-à-vis the latter, but in the final analysis, he argues, each of the contemporary thinkers can be deemed complicitous with ideals that are counter to liberal-democratic values. He writes, “With the possible exceptions of Debray’s support for the Serbs in Kosovo, the three positions taken [by Finkielkraut, Courtois, and Debray] certainly have their merits: they can be considered reasonable and even just causes….Be that as it may, all three commitments also implicated their authors in intellectual positions and political ends hardly in keeping with democratic principles” (14). Golsan’s stated intention in his analysis of Montherlant, Châteaubriant, and Giono is “neither to excuse nor exonerate but to make their complicity more readily comprehensible by recognizing the flaws, errors and blind spots of these figures and how these led to the choices they made and the historical perspectives they adopted” (10). Such analysis strikes at the core of the most important issues in World War II studies, particularly in France, a country in which Primo Levi...