Raymond Aron’s War: A ‘History of the Present’ (1940–1944)

Abstract

Raymond Aron’s exile in Great Britain during the Second World War was a less-known yet formative part of his career, during which he co-founded the journal La France libre. The articles he published between 1940 and 1944 in La France libre from London have previously been studied in a fragmented manner, but they have not yet been analyzed as a whole. This essay examines Aron’s articles compiled in Volume I of the Chroniques de guerre ( ‘From the Armistice to the National Insurrection’). Volumes II and III of Aron’s wartime articles merit their own separate analyses. The first objective of this essay is to present the theoretical contributions made by Aron in Volume I of his La France libre articles, with regard to a ‘history of the present.’ It argues that Aron adopted an ingenious approach to analyzing the history of the war as it unfolded, building upon his own philosophy of history from the Interwar. The second objective of the essay is to show that Aron’s wartime writings also marked his shift from being a scholar to entering “ l’engagement”: committing to political stances. In this regard, his anti-Gaullism in London has been generally overstated relative to his far more elaborate stances on contemporary French history. Revisited, Aron’s wartime articles thus help complete the picture of his career.