Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956

A “marvelously readable” critique of Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, and other French postwar intellectuals that “consistently entertains and provokes” (The Washington Post). The uniquely prominent role of French intellectuals in European cultural and political life following World War II is the focus of this book by the acclaimed author of Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. Tony Judt analyzes this intellectual community’s most divisive conflicts: how to respond to the promise and the betrayal of Communism and how to sustain a commitment to radical ideals when confronting the hypocrisy in Stalin’s Soviet Union, in the new Eastern European Communist states, and in France itself. Judt shows why this was an all-consuming moral dilemma to a generation of French men and women, how their responses were conditioned by war and occupation, and how postwar political choices have come to sit uneasily on the conscience of later generations of French intellectuals.

Judt’s analysis extends beyond the writings of fashionable “existentialist” personalities such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir to include a wide intellectual community of Catholic philosophers, non-aligned journalists, literary critics and poets, Communist and non-Communist alike—and asserts that what he calls the “moral irresponsibility” of those years damaged France’s cultural standing, and reflected the nation’s larger difficulty in confronting its own ambivalent past. “A forthright and uncommonly damning study of those intellectually volatile years . . . indicts these intellectuals for their inhumanity in failing to test their political thought against political reality.” —The New York Times Book Review “Brilliant . . . splendidly written.” —Foreign Affairs

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