Andrew Sobanet

French Writers and the Politics of Complicity (review)

In a thought-provoking and well-researched new book, Richard Golsan explores the politics of complicity in two heterogeneous groups of French writers. Focusing on the 1940s and the 1990s, Golsan analyzes problematic stances taken by select intellectuals in highly charged, and often high-stakes political environments. His goal, broadly, is to analyze choices and activities that he characterizes as complicitous with undemocratic policies and regimes. With chapters on Henry de Montherlant, Alphonse de Châteaubriant, Jean Giono, Alain Finkielkraut, Régis Debray, and Stéphane Courtois, Golsan’s book covers a wide range of contexts and varying degrees of intellectual complicity. Cautious to avoid the “twin dangers of demonization and apology,” Golsan paints portraits of those writers as they grapple with the dominant domestic and international situations of their respective eras. And for Golsan, political commitment led those intellectuals in unsettling directions. The author and editor of numerous books and special issues on the intersection of culture and politics, Golsan adeptly portrays the contexts in which these intellectuals engaged in what he labels complicity with undemocratic politics. The book’s first three chapters focus on the Vichy era and the last three chapters deal with salient events on the French intellectual scene during the 1990s. At first glance, those two time periods could not appear to be more divergent. After all, France in the early 1940s was a broken and defeated country, partially occupied by Nazis and partially self-governed by a far-right-wing collaborationist regime. In the 1990s, by contrast, France was a democratic nation prospering in the context of a peaceful and rapidly evolving European community. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to choose for comparison two more distinct decades in the twentieth century. Recognizing that his readers will find—initially, at least—the linkage of those two time periods puzzling, Golsan explains that, in the 1990s, the memory of “Vichy, Nazism, and the Holocaust provided a constant frame of reference through which contemporary crises were interpreted” (7). Analysis of the discursive and rhetorical use of Vichy-era events is therefore crucial, Golsan argues, to understanding more fully political and historical reference points in the 1990s. Reviews

Henri Barbusse, official biographer of Joseph Stalin

This article represents the first sustained critical analysis of Henri Barbusse’s Staline (1935), the first official biography of Joseph Stalin. The author traces Barbusse’s evolution from a Goncourt-winning pacifist writer in the immediate post-World War I years to his position as a Stalinist propagandist at the end of his life. This article reads Staline as propaganda in the service of Stalin’s personality cult, examining its overarching themes, its narrative mechanics, its reception and its legacy. Staline ultimately presents a case study of the dangers of complicity with the extreme left in the interwar period.

Silence in the Court and Testimony Behind Bars Juvenile Defendants and the French Judicial System

This article addresses salient questions in literature and anthropology centring on the politics of writing, readership and representation in a context marked by highly charged public debates on the nature, causes and perpetrators of youth violence. It critically examines and juxtaposes two sets of texts, one set produced by incarcerated youths in a writing workshop at a juvenile detention facility in Bordeaux, and the other taken from court transcripts at juvenile trials in the Paris Palace of Justice. The workshop texts, written under the guidance of novelist François Bon, allow rare access to youths’ familial milieux and to their understanding of their own place in a cycle of marginality. The texts taken from court trials privilege the voices of prosecutors, judges and attorneys who speak for, about and over the voices of young defendants. The texts produced by juvenile inmates are confronted with and speak to the plight of the young defendants.

Ideology and Fictional Construction: Victor Serge's Les Hommes dans la prison

ronically for a man who spent the majority of his adult life writing and whose output is as diverse as it is vast, Victor Serge’s closest brush with r the French literary canon is an appearance aboard the Cdpitaine PaulLernc.de in the opening pages of Claude Livi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques. That is not to say chat Serge’s career as a writer was one of utter futility and that his very lengthy bibliography is devoid of literary merit. But the marginal status of Serge’s literary corpus in posceriry’s memory certainly recalls the peripheral quality chat Serge’s life took on as he experienced exile after exile in country after councry, until tie was legally stateless at the time of his deach in November 1947. Victor Lvovich Kibalchich (alias Victor Serge) was born in Belgium to inipoverished Russian Cniigri parencs 51 years prior co that maritime encounter with Levi-Scrauss in 1341. Despite his Slavic roots and his conscant meanderings (after leaving Belgium, he lived in a number of locales including France, Spain, Russia, and Mexico), as a writer, Serge was almost invariably French. All of his novels, his poetry, and his autobiographical texts were written in French, as were the vast majority of his historical works, not to menrion the bulk of his journalistic production. Livi-Straws’s paragraph-long snapshot shows us Serge traveling with his son, Vlady, and AndrC Breton en rotire to Mexico from Marseilles, leaving France, Serge’s mentally ill wife, Liuba, and Nazi pursuers behind for good. LkviStrauss admits being taken aback ac what he refers to as Serge’s nionklike appearance, given his past as a Russian revolutionary and the expectations one might have of a man who had engaged i n allegedly subversive accivities. Oddly enough, in accordance with LCvi-Strauss’s observations, after that trans-Atlantic voyage Serge did indeed spend his final years in Mexico leading a monastic existence in poverty and relative isolation, writing, as he dejectedly remarks in his Carnets, “pour le seul tiroir” ( I 17).’ Given the inarginaliry chat characterized Victor Serge in life and that marks his place in literary history, i t seems fitcing that che Library of Congress placed his first novel, Les Hommes dans Lz prison-as well as its English translation, Men in