Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956

Tony Judt

2011-01 · NYU Press

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Swept up in the vortex of communism, French postwar intellectuals developed a blind spot to Stalinist tyranny. Albert Camus, who had been an authentic moral voice of the Resistance, pretended not to know about the crimes and terrors of the Soviet Union. Jean-Paul Sartre perverted logic to make an apologia for the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Simone de Beauvoir called for social change to be brought about in a single convulsion, or else not at all. Foolish French thinkers, suffering self-imposed moral anesthesia, defended the credibility of the show trials in Stalinized Eastern Europe. In a devastating study, Judt, a professor of European studies at New York University, argues that the belief system of postwar intellectuals, propped up by faith in communism, reflected fatal weaknesses in French culture such as the fragility of the liberal tradition and the penchant for grand theory. He also strips away the postwar myth that the small, fighting French Resistance was assisted by the mass of the nation.

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Tony Judt was born in London, England on January 2, 1948. He was educated at King's College, Cambridge University and the École Normale Supérieure, Paris. He taught at numerous colleges and universities including Cambridge University; St. Anne's College, Oxford; the University of California, Berkeley and New York University. He was the author or editor off over fifteen books including Ill Fares the Land, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, and Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, which won the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award. He was also a frequent contributor to numerous journals including The New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic, and The New York Times. He was diagnosed with ALS in 2008. He died on August 6, 2010 at the age of 62.