Lies, Passions & Illusions

The Democratic Imagination in the Twentieth Century

François Furet, Christophe Prochasson, Deborah Furet

• Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780226114491
• eBook ISBN: 9780226157306
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

A critical history of 20th century political movement by the Hannah Arendt Prize-winning author of Interpreting the French Revolution. Widely considered one of the leading historians of the French Revolution, François Furet was hailed as "one of the most influential men in contemporary France" by the New York Review of Books. In Lies, Passions, and Illusions, Furet's presents a cohesive, late-career meditation on the political passions of the twentieth century, drawn from a wide-ranging conversation between Furet and philosopher Paul Ricoeur. Published posthumously, it is Furet's final statement on history and politics. With strokes at once broad and incisive, Furet examines the many different trajectories that nations of the West have followed over the past hundred years. It is a dialogue with history as it happened but also as a form of thought. It is a dialogue with his critics, with himself, and with those major thinkers—from Tocqueville to Hannah Arendt—whose ideas have shaped our understanding of the tragic dramas and upheavals of the modern era. It is a testament to the crucial role of the historian, a reflection on how history is made and lived, and how the imagination is a catalyst for political change.

INTRODUCTION

François Furet and Paul Ricoeur

A DIALOGUE INTERRUPTED

Christophe Prochasson

A former militant of the French Communist Party, which he had joined in 1949 and from which he gradually distanced himself after the repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956,¹ François Furet had always been animated by a reflection on politics anchored in his own past. He never did stop thinking about the spell of Communism and how, according to him, it blurred our comprehension of things—whether historical as in the case of the French Revolution, strictly political as in the case of the Soviet Union, or having more generally to do with Communism in its historical incarnation. He fought relentlessly against the Communist history of the French Revolution and, in keeping with this initial battle, enlarged the spectrum of his analyses to include, once the Bicentennial of the Revolution was over and the Berlin Wall had fallen, the history of the “Communist illusion.”

He set to work at the very beginning of the 1990s, gathering Communist material, reopening well worked-over dossiers, linking new studies to older surveys and preoccupations. Furet’s historiographical turning point became manifest in a long article published in the review Le Débat.² Then, in October 1990, the historian published a paper entitled “L’énigme de la désagrégation communiste” in the Notes de la Fondation Saint-Simon. This was the germ of what, a few years later, would become The Passing of an Illusion.

Reprinted by Le Figaro in the form of two articles on 21 and 22 November 1990, and by Le Débat in its November–December issue, this “Note” would establish François Furet as one of the great analysts of the end of Communism. Charles Ronsac, an editor at the publishers Robert Laffont who also happened to be François and Deborah Furet’s neighbor in Saint Pierre-Toirac in Southwestern France, encouraged him to turn the article into a more substantial book.³ Thus the author of Penser la révolution française shifted his regard to another century that seemed to resound with the tragic fulfillment of the promises contained in the revolutionary message he had studied for so many years. The “hideous book,”⁴ deemed so by the director Jean-Luc Godard in spite of his admiration for the historian of the French Revolution, was about to be born.

This was confirmed by the prepublication in a new Note de la Fondation Saint-Simon of one of the most incisive chapters, placed at the beginning of the book and entitled “The Revolutionary Passion.” In January 1995, Le passé d’une illusion appeared.⁵ It was a publishing success of the first order: seventy thousand copies were sold within a month and a half. Six months later, the book was still high on Le Nouvel Observateur’s best-seller list. In June 1996, the hundred thousandth copy was sold, and soon the book would be translated into eighteen languages.⁶

The critical reception was considerable. The book drew the attention of the popular media, literary programs on television and radio, and the principal publications of the written press, as well as that of politicians and major European intellectuals to whom Le Débat would provide a forum in a special issue of the journal.⁷ Most of the reactions were in support of the book’s theses and, more important, expressed admiration for this work as a tour de force. Indeed, some people were irritated by what they perceived to be a sure triumph, as expressed several times by Jean-François Kahn on television.⁸ Even the staunchest adversaries of the book’s contents could not deny their intellectual respect for such an imposing work: “The qualities of Le passé d’une illusion: Essai sur l’idée communiste au XXe siècle are immediately striking: the sweeping narrative is impressive, the evocation [of events] is powerful and suggestive, the analysis is stimulating and subtle, the style is both dense and incisive,”⁹ wrote Denis Berger and Henri Maler, both products of Trotskyism. The only violently negative reactions came from the intellectual Far Left. Others would add their voices, especially in the first decade of the twentieth century, during a critical backlash against the 1980s and 1990s. Furet would be among those accused and judged guilty for finishing off the great ideals that had forged the Left in the century that had just come to an end.¹⁰

How can we explain this success? There was not much left to reveal about Communism. The macabre bookkeeping that had nourished the great tradition of anti-Communist literature seemed to have passed. Although he was very careful not to hide the sinister character of the Soviet regime while describing its mechanisms of seduction, Furet’s contribution was not denunciatory. He too knew, and often affirmed with regret, that the Communist experience of earlier generations did nothing for the generations that would follow and harbor the same illusions. For this indeed was the object of the book: not to compose a historical narrative, but to explain the power of the revolutionary passion incarnated by the Communist idea in the twentieth century. Not to denounce, but to understand. The objectification of the phenomenon and, even more so, the “enigma” of its disappearance were what made this work so effective and so irritating to those who didn’t share its conclusions.

Circumstances surely played a role in the favorable reception of a work of this scope, as they had done in the brilliant success of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago twenty years earlier. A generation separates these two books, but they belong to the same ideological current. The long process of leaving Communism, which had begun by the mid-1970s and touched not only a few groups of individuals generally belonging to the intelligentsia but whole segments of “left-wingers,” came to an end with the end of the century; it was this terminal phase that interested François Furet. His book is an autopsy as well as a death certificate. The agony justifies all his audacity, as when a forensic surgeon allows himself to treat a cadaver ruthlessly. The comparison between Nazism and Communism and, worse still, the perverse dialectic they seemed to share are among Furet’s most provocative contentions.

On this point, many reproached Furet for having engaged in a dialogue with the German historian Ernst Nolte, author of a vast, three-volume study of Fascism. Nolte’s closeness to the German Right had made him all but a pariah, especially since the Historikerstreit of the 1980s, when German historians of National Socialism and Fascism squared off. The comparability of Nazism, Fascism, and Communism was one of Nolte’s most controversial themes. Furet wasn’t one to be bothered by this sort of taboo, ready as he always was to denounce the intellectual conformism that the Left, in his opinion, was too comfortable with. Perhaps the Historikerstreit brought back vivid memories of the tumultuous historiographical and political controversies over his own interpretation of the French Revolution.

He first made known his objections to Nolte’s theses in a long footnote in The Passing of an Illusion, all the more stunning since the book has very few notes.¹¹ Even while praising Nolte for having broken with the “anti-Fascist” interpretation of history that prohibited the juxtaposition of the two forms of twentieth-century totalitarianism, he expressed disagreement with Nolte’s interpretation of anti-Semitism: according to Furet, the “rational” justification of Nazi anti-Semitism is at once “shocking and false.”

The Italian Journal Liberal suggested that the two protagonists pursue their exchanges long-distance. From the end of 1995, the two historians began a correspondence that would continue through 1996. The letters were published in France and Italy in Commentaire and Liberal in the course of 1997. The entire correspondence was published in Italy that same year, the two men having met for the first time a few months earlier in 1996 during a colloquium at the Fondazione Ugo Spirito in Naples.¹² They would meet only once again at a colloquium on liberalism organized in Naples in June 1997, a few weeks before Furet’s sudden death on 12 July.

Perhaps Furet regretted this late discussion for having given the impression, most often to his adversaries, that the historian of the French Revolution felt ambivalent or had ultimately converted to a conservative position. In any case, from a reading of the interview that follows, we can glean elements that shed light on his encounter with Nolte, for which Paul Ricoeur, incidentally, did not in the least reproach him. The interview does seem like a last attempt to justify that encounter. Furet was immune to intimidation; nonetheless, while taking responsibility for his choices—the last letter he wrote to Nolte, a few days before his death, praised the “breadth and intelligent generosity” of Nolte’s historical analysis of liberalism¹³—he occasionally found that they left a bitter taste.

. . .

If the crossing of the paths taken by Nolte and Furet was not a total surprise, the encounter between Furet and the philosopher Paul Ricoeur was a lot more unexpected. Certainly, the two French academics were both affiliated with the University of Chicago, where they had been teaching regularly, Ricoeur since 1970, Furet since 1980. This proximity, however, was without consequence. The two men didn’t socialize, although they had met at the university.¹⁴ Their intellectual and political itineraries could not have been more distinct. No two bodies of work could have been more dissimilar. And although they were both intellectuals with boundless curiosity, one could not have found two men with more divergent sensibilities or centers of interest.

There is evidence of an encounter between Furet and Ricoeur on 4 March 1989, when Furet gave a lecture to the Société française de philosophie on the changing historiography of the French Revolution. In the course of the debate—which, notably, included the participation of Maurice de Gandillac, André Sernin, and Jacques Merleau-Ponty—Ricoeur posed the following questions:

I would like to ask if you apply to the course of the Revolution the same sort of thinking you have proposed for its origins. You have emphasized the political actors’ initiative and even lucidity as to the sense and implications of their actions. Following Michelet, you have also spoken of the “mystery” of the Revolution, attaching to it this great paradox of ours, namely, how you can take autonomous individuals and compose a political body, a body without a head. Is this the key to the chain of events after 1789 or the Terror? It seems that once the nation had been proclaimed sovereign, the king had become superfluous. But this was the case in September 1789. Why bring him to trial as well? Why condemn him to death? Why execute him? And why the Terror, when the external danger had been removed? So my question is this: was this outcome included in the beginning, which alone would count as an origin? Or did the course of events also come with its own discontinuities and unpredictable choices?¹⁵

Furet’s response was brief and nonetheless contained praise, if a bit conventional, for the philosopher’s work: “May I tell you, sir, what a great interest historians take in your books and especially in your thoughts on the discipline they practice.”¹⁶ For the rest, Furet responded in a few sentences, with revisions, in the analysis he developed with Denis Richet in their history of the French Revolution.¹⁷ End of conversation.¹⁸

So a small miracle was needed to bring Furet and Ricoeur together to talk to each other and engage in an examination of the Communist century. It would come from the philosopher François Azouvi, then an editor at Calmann-Lévy, the publishing house to which, along with Robert Laffont, Furet attributed the success of The Passing of an Illusion. Having published that same year La critique et la convention, a series of interviews with Paul Ricoeur,¹⁹ Azouvi wished to organize a similar encounter between the philosopher and the historian. Given the importance of Furet’s book, its exceptional success, its nature—halfway between history and philosophy—how could it not hold the attention of a philosopher like Paul Ricoeur, who never ceased questioning historians about their methods and ways of thinking and writing? Azouvi had heard Ricoeur express his admiration for The Passing of an Illusion, which he had read with pen in hand.

Still, Furet’s big book was not the kind of study on which Ricoe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Translator’s Note
• Introduction. François Furet and Paul Ricoeur: A Dialogue Interrupted
• Ideas and Emotions
• The End of a World?
• On the Nation: The Universal and the Particular
• The Socialist Movement, the Nation, and the War
• The Past and the Future of the Revolution
• The Historian’s Pursuit
• The Seductions of Bolshevism
• Critique of Totalitarianism
• Learning from the Past
• Notes