Marie-Pierre Ulloa. Francis Jeanson: A Dissident Intellectual from the French Resistance to the Algerian War. Translated by Jane Marie Todd. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007. x + 359 pp. Chronology. Notes. Archival Sources. Bibliography. Index. $60.00. Cloth.

Abstract

Marie-Pierre Ulloa. Francis Jeanson: A Dissident Intellectual from the French Resistance to the Algerian War. Translated by Jane Marie Todd. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007, ? + 359 pp. Chronology. Notes. Archival Sources. Bibliography. Index. $60.00. Cloth. Situated in the vortex of French life from the late 1940s through the 1960s, Francis Jeanson (1922-2009) whirled among existentialists, Marxists, and anticolonialists, exercising a considerable influence that has been noted but understudied by scholars. Thus Marie-Pierre Ulloa's book is timely and appreciated. Although the book is biographical, Jeanson 's life serves as a locus for an erudite study of one of the most tumultuous eras in modern French history. Indeed, this is the principal value of this work, although it leaves questions regarding how Jeanson weathered the storm. Born in Bordeaux to a bourgeois and broken family, Jeanson lived a relatively comfortable life in Occupied France. He earned his Diplome d'Etudes Superieures in 1943 and then, faced with forced labor conscription, he joined the Resistance and opted for the Free French in North Africa. Jeanson crossed the Pyrenees, endured Francois t prison camp internment, and finally reached Morocco only to be caught up in the Giraud-de Gaulle rivalry. He hoped to see significant action, and late in the war he cleared mines and recovered abandoned munitions in Alsace. Ulloa argues that the contribution to the Resistance of fugitives from France and Spanish internees has been neglected or forgotten; indeed, Jeanson himself participated in that amnesia (52), regarding his service as insignificant compared to the Maquis resistance in France. The personal engagement, however, was clearly an intrinsic influence on the impressionable young intellectual. Immediately after the war Jeanson was not allowed to take the aggregation in philosophy because of tuberculosis, which ended his prospects of a teaching career. Instead he pursued the life of an intellectual functionary (55). His philosophical articles in the review La France Interieure disseminated the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and the success of his book Probleme moral et la pensee de Sartre drew him even deeper into existentialist circles. Eventually he succeeded Merleau-Ponty as managing editor of Les Temps Modernes. Jeanson is principally renowned for explaining existentialist ideas and making them accessible to the public. He was also one of the few intellectuals (Thomas C. Anderson is another) to undertake an in-depth examination of Sartrean ethics. A highlight of Ulloa's book is the polemic stemming from Jeanson 's review of Camus's L'homme revolte (The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt). Although Camus was termed Sartre's henchman (107), Jeanson had expressed earlier reservations regarding Camus's absurdism in La France Interieure. Jeanson 's criticism was principally ideological, and by the time he wrote this review his Marxism, like that of Sartre's, had become more evident in his writings. For example, he now found Camus's condemnation of Communism intolerable, an example of how revolutionary idealism leads to nihilism. …