I Didn't Have Time To Write A Short Response So I Wrote A Long One Instead

There were two very interesting pieces in The New Yorker about the falling out between those two major figures in 20th century French literature,  Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre.  The first by Adam Gopnik,  Why We Love Camus,  the second by Richard Brody, Camus and France’s Algerian Wars.  Both are interesting to the, I'd imagine, diminishing number of people who care about mid-20th century existential philosophy and the Paris intellectual scene, though I would agree with the point that, as a writer, Camus was more interesting than Sartre, I don't find either of them especially convincing as thinkers or their articulated substitutes for a morality their materialist-atheist philosophy negated at all convincing.  There are lots and lots of these kinds of cultural fights in which a false dualism is set up with the pseudo-moralistic requirement of choosing one side or the other.  In the case of the falling out of Sartre and Camus there is no requirement that anyone choose either of them because, while there are understandable points in favor of one over the other, both of them had serious moral and intellectual positions that prove only that any of those preferable points probably had better advocates.   

I've been intending to write about this but current politics and my daily life don't let me do the background research and looking up citations remembered to do that. 

I think the most important part of the two pieces is Brody's articulation of just how entirely fucked up France and French intellectual life was in the aftermath of the Nazi occupation, though I would reject the bifurcation of that divide into those reactionaries, nominally and hierarchically Catholic on the one hand and communist-existentialist-atheist on the other.  There was a lot more going on in France at the time though in fashionable Parisian intellectual circles, it made things easier to ignore those.  There was a very real, very active and, as time would prove, more durable movement of what might be called a Christian left, though I don't think that Anglicization of it is very helpful - like the rest of it it has to be taken on its own terms and not translated.   One of the swampier manifestations of that I remember is the often flung around lefty accusation that this one or that one was a crypto or proto-Nazi philosophy.  That accusation made by some Marxists against Emmanuel Mounier's Personalism, that it was proto-Nazi in effect,  is the one that springs to mind.  History, that material god of Marxism has ironically proven, as Marxism aged under use it turned out to actually be the more likely precursor of fascism and neo-Nazism than the inter-war French articulation of Personalism.  That was more likely to produce the Christian, non-governmental anarchism of The Catholic Worker movement, both Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin were highly influenced by Mounier. 

Brody said something along the same lines here:

In “The Rebel,” Camus writes (in Philip Mairet’s translation):

He who dedicates himself to the duration of his life, to the house he builds, to the dignity of mankind, dedicates himself to the earth and reaps from it the harvest that sows its seed and sustains the world again and again. Finally, it is those who know how to rebel, at the appropriate moment, against history who really advance its interests.

In English, this can come across as merely sonorous. In France in 1951, the real meaning was barbed and apparent: only a moral idiot would give his allegiance to the Communist Party in the name of the coming revolution. Camus spotted the catch in Sartre’s account of fellow-travelling as a leap of faith. The only practical way to unlock the next guy’s chains, on Sartre’s premise, is to kill the guy next to that guy first, since he’s the one chaining him up; kill all the jailers and everyone will be free. This sounds great, Camus saw, until you’ve killed all the jailers and all you have is other jailers. There is no difference between dying in a Soviet camp and dying in a Nazi camp. We should be neither executioners nor victims; it is madness to sacrifice human lives today in the pursuit of a utopian future.

As people who have read this blog will know, the moment I realized that people murdered by Stalin were as murdered as those murdered by Hitler was a major turning point in my life.   I think the point made about why the anti-colonialist Camus, an Algerian-French pied-noir, whose mother labored as a servant, cited her as his reason for not officially joining in the Parisian sided of the anti-colonial struggle that the likes of Sartre probably did more to wound than to aid, that he chose his mother over the rights of self-determination by Algerians, is far more a sign of his limitations.  It reminded me of the minor figure in American literature Hannibal Hamlin Garland whose radicalism faded into marketable sentimentalism as soon as he could provide his mother with economic security.  

More generally these two pieces are useful for their brief introduction into how completely screwed up French politics continued to be after the liberation, something which, since even most of those with college credentials in the United States' idea of France goes not much further than what they saw in Casablanca and a few other American made movies, can be a rather startling revelation.

Camus wanted a better Republic. What he got was the Fourth Republic. De Gaulle is often given credit for the myth of the Resistance, which is no more of a myth than the American myth of emancipation; i.e., it really did happen, you just have to leave a lot of other stuff out to make what happened sound like it was mostly good. But he also created another myth: that of the failure of the Fourth Republic, in order to prove the necessity of his Fifth. In fact, the Fourth Republic, far more parliamentary than the Presidential-monarchical Fifth, was no more than normally corrupt and inefficient, and did a terrific job of moving France from paralysis to prosperity from 1945 to 1958. It foundered exactly on the insoluble problems of decolonization, about which it could be no wiser than its constituent parts.

and

The dissolution of the Fourth Republic and the return to power of General Charles de Gaulle was something close to a military coup. As Adam writes, the Fourth Republic was democratic and, in many ways, progressive, but it was unstable: France had twenty Prime Ministers between 1947 and 1958, some only serving several days. Its leaders waged war in Algeria, unleashing the army’s cruel might against Algerian insurgents and their sympathizers, but French military leaders there nonetheless feared that its will was weak. In May, 1958, rebels in the French army overthrew the French civil authorities in Algiers, then took Corsica and were preparing to do the same in Paris—to install an actual military dictatorship. Their condition for not doing so was the return to power of de Gaulle as head of state in a centralized Presidential government. Thus the Fifth Republic (the current French regime) was founded.

I think this, along with the horrific, violent and turbulent history of late 18th and 19th century France after the Revolution is worth thinking about among those idiots who want to take the romantic fantasy of revolution as a royal road to radical change.  As well as an example of how minds informed mostly by movies, Hollywood or other, end up as ignorant as those who went for some other, less reputed strain of pop-culture instead of watching Bogey and Bergman.   Whatever democracy France has managed to carve out of the wreckage of its post-revolutionary history, it wasn't because of that revolution.  That's something that can be said of that other great example of a "successful revolution," The United States, where we are in the process of losing everything gained by the post-revolutionary struggle for democracy, today. 

The most amusing part of it is the part about how the final coup de grâce in the partnership of these two vedettes. these two giants of post-war intellectual French philosophical scribbling was what Camus said about Sartre's arm chair.  I'll let you read the articles to find out what that was.  I don't often laugh out loud when I'm reading stuff but I did when I found that out.