From Sarajevo to Vichy: French Intellectuals and the Wages of Commitment in the Balkans

Abstract

From Sarajevo to Vichy: French Intellectuals and the Wages of Commitment in the Balkans Richard J. Golsan IN A RECENT ARTICLE assessing the impact of the war in the former Yugoslavia on France's intellectual community, Emmanuel Wallon asserts that not since the Dreyfus Affair has a single event so profoundly affected traditional political allegiances and alignments as well as prevailing notions of civic responsibility as the conflict in the Balkans. Wallon adds that the nature and intensity of the commitments of any number of intellectuals confirm that for these individuals the issues raised by the conflict greatly surpassed strictly political concerns.1 Indeed, in his detailed account of his own engagement on behalf of Bosnia, Le Lys et la cendre, Bernard-Henri Levy describes the manner in which his involvement affected his worldview, his emotions, his friendships and even his self-image. By the time the Dayton peace accords were signed, Bosnia had become for Levy a seconde patrie, and he describes his passionate involvement on behalf of the Bosnian people as une histoire d'amour.2 If political considerations of the moment do not suffice to explain the intensity and duration of the commitments of Levy and many others including Alain Finkielkraut, Pascal Bruckner, Edgar Morin, André Glucksmann, Annie Lebrun and Jacques Julliard, what was it about the Balkan conflict or the manner in which it was perceived that made it such a cause célèbre among many of France's most visible intellectuals? Even Levy, while describing the passion of his own commitment to Bosnia, notes that the country whose cause he espoused "n'était pas de mon genre" (Le Lys, 10). Indeed, as Wallon observes, the Parisian sound and fury aroused first by the war in Croatia and especially by the brutal conflict in Bosnia were disproportionate both to a traditionally limited French interest in the area and the modest size of the countries involved (376). Tony Judt, for one, attributes the French intellectuals' engagement in part to their abiding concern for broader issues which were central to the Balkan conflict and especially to the Bosnian war. These include the defense of the rights of the individual and of ethnic minorities—above all VOL. XXXVII, NO. 2 79 L'Esprit Créateur the right to self-determination—and an outspoken faith in the ideal of "Europe," which, as Judt insinuates, remained nevertheless fairly vague and ill-defined in the writings Finkielkraut, Levy, et al. devoted to the conflict. Judt also asserts more cynically that the defense of the breakaway republics—and especially Finkielkraut's championing of Franjo Tudjman's Croatia—coupled with assaults on the Serbian cause, put the French intellectuals in their favorite position, that of opposing the stance of their own government.3 If not overtly or systematically pro-Serb, François Mitterrand remained at best largely neutral throughout the conflict . As Bernard-Henri Levy recounts in Le Lys et la cendre, Jacques Chirac, for his part, refused to intervene until late in the game.4 Judt cites other motives for the engagements of the intellectuals as well. These include the opportunistic urge to be where the spotlights are as well as a desire to make amends for the errors of an earlier generation of French intellectuals, the majority of whom wrongly championed the communist East European dictatorships in the forties and fifties despite the horrors perpetrated by these regimes. This particular line of reasoning is of course in keeping with Judt's own assessment of that earlier generation as described in Past Imperfect,* but it also coincides with the view expressed by Finkielkraut in Comment peut-on être Croate? According to Finkielkraut, those Western Marxist intellectuals spared the terror of the Eastern Bloc were nonetheless blinded by it ideologically, even to the point of branding as reactionary bourgeois its dissidents seeking asylum in France.6 Finkielkraut's own engagement on behalf of Croatia clearly derives in part from his acute awareness of his predecessors' cecity. As he remarked in a 1994 essay in Le Messager Européen, for the sins of the fathers, today's French intelligentsia "éprouve le besoin irrésistible de se faire pardonner."7 The motives Judt offers to...