From Inquiétude to Revolution

Abstract

decade following the stabilization of the franc in 1925, this group of young intellectuals set themselves apart from their compatriots by their rejection of the status-quo. In the closing years of the 'decade of illusion', the calm of the '20s that preceded the stormy '30s, the 'children of the century' sought only escape from the society and culture they had been thrown into at birth. They wanted nothing to do with a people condemned to what they believed to be perpetual stagnation. They fled to avoid being dragged down into the quagmire of lifeless conformity that, in their eyes, enveloped bourgeois society. By the turn of the decade their attitude had changed, not towards the society and culture which they still rejected, but towards their own place as intellectuals within it. I shall trace this generation's movement from inquiet escapism to a theoretical commitment to revolution to the moment when it ceased to be a generation. The shift from social 'refusal' to engagement, though grounded in and expressive of the historical situation, is not absolutely and solely determined by it. As Sartre, a member of this generation, has written, 'History makes man, [but] man makes history'.l Intellectuals are in and of history, but not as passive 'subjects' of its 'objective' forces. Even to speak in such terms is to distort reality for the sake of ideological rigor, analytic purity, or narrative clarity. We are not the first to refer to this group of French intellectuals as a generation. In The Historian's Craft, Marc Bloch uses France between the world wars as an example of a society whose generations are clearly demarcated according to the 'social environment' in which