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Gavin Bowd reviews Francois Furet The Past of an Illusion University of Chicago Press:UK£27.95 hbk

 

In 1995, while Robert Hue, newly-anointed 'national secretary' of the French Communist Party, was struggling to improve the image of French communism, Francois Furet published his definitive statement on the history of the communist idea, Le PassŽ d'une illusion. As the title suggests, Furet comes to bury communism. The book therefore constitutes the acme of his intellectual crusade since leaving the PCF in 1956: now that, with his help, the Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution has been overthrown, it remains only to destroy its ideological foundations.

The publication of this book was greeted by a media fanfare and barely demanding reviewers. This undoubtedly contributed to Le PassŽ d'une illusion becoming a best-seller, but the success of the book attested, paradoxically, to the continuing interest in the question of communism. (In 1995, the book's success found a British parallel in that of Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes - written this time by a Communist historian who chose not to leave the Party in 1956.)

The Past of an Illusion is intended to be not the history of communism, or of the USSR, but rather that of the illusion of communism, for so long as the USSR sustained it. The belief in the emancipatory promise embodied in the East had, for Furet, been artificially prolonged by the Red Army's triumph over fascism. With the implosion of the USSR, in 1991, the communist idea definitively left the stage of history.

Drawing upon theories of 'totalitarianism' expounded by Hannah Arendt and others, Furet seeks to lift the 'taboo' on the comparison between communism and fascism. Furet argues that these two ideologies are forms of 'anti-bourgeois passion'. The bourgeoisie had proclaimed, in 1789, the freedom and equality of all men, but its freedom to get rich produced unprecedented levels of material inequality. The calculated selfishness of the bourgeois attracted thus the hostility of socialists and reactionaries who refuse liberty in the name of the lost unity of mankind.

This anti-bourgeois passion is exacerbated by the First World War, which gives birth to Bolshevism and fascism. Veterans transferred to political activity the experience of the trenches: habitual violence, simple and extreme passions, subordination of the individual to the collective, and bitterness at futile or betrayed sacrifices.

Furet recognises that there are differences between communism and fascism: one is a 'pathology' of the universal, the other a 'pathology' of the national. But Furet emphasises their similarities, as anti-Christian ideologies, struggling in the present for a redemptive future. Furet traces parallels between Stalin and Hitler in their methods of repression, from the show-trials to the murders to the concentration camps, culminating in the 'anti-bourgeois' complicity of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

If communism and Fascism are two freres-ennemis, this truth is, for Furet, buried by the Second World War. The sacrifices of the Soviet people in the anti-fascist struggle make others forget the rigged trials and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, thus giving the October Revolution 'a new democratic baptism'. In the West, after the war, anti-fascism stifles any attempt to question the illusion of the new type of 'democracy' being imposed on the East.

However, the communist illusion begins to collapse with the struggle for Stalin's succession and the events of 1956. The lifting of repression wounds the two passions, belief and fear, upon which communism depends. Khruschev's denunciation of Stalin smashes the anti-fascist myth and the unity of the world communist movement. The Hungarian insurrection revives the memory of Thermidor 1794: for the first time since 1917 the spectre of Communism reverting to capitalism appears. Liberalisation in the cultural domain, illustrated by the publication of Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, accords intellectuals a role of privileged witness which they will not renounce, despite renewed repression.

Thus begins the 'endless burial of communism. If the standard of living improves in the USSR, its ideological charm withers with the help of dissidents, such as Andrei Sakharov, while its democratic deficit and economic inefficiency become obvious to the entire world. The efforts of Gorbachev to renew Soviet socialism only accelerate the destruction of the legitimacy of the communists, opening a breach for their political rivals. In 1991, the nomenklatura and the intellectual opposition are united in their attachment to the 'Western' values of human rights. With the implosion of the USSR, the communist idea disappears, without being replaced by a clear alternative and leaving ideological 'orphans' beyond its frontiers. But if the communist illusion belongs to the past and no alternative to capitalism exists, Furet insists still on the tension between liberty and equality that constitutes the 'democratic repertoire'.

The Past of an Illusion illustrates the style of historiography developed by Furet since 1956. It insists upon the political at the expense of the social forces so important to historical materialism. Furet emphasises the importance of events such as the First World War and individuals such as Stalin and Hitler: History becomes chaotic and unpredictable.

And, in this otherwise powerful and excellently-documented book, it is the emphasis on chance which can frustrate the reader and serves the anti-communist design of Furet. A recurrent word in the book is 'mystery': the 'mystery' of the First World War, the totalitarian regimes and the implosion of the USSR. This emphasis on mystery deprives capitalism of any responsibility in the history of the twentieth century. Furet makes scant reference to imperialism: its role in the First World War, its bloody atrocities after the Second, especially in its French variety, and the role of communism in the anti-colonial struggle. In the Furetian world-view, Communism becomes a 'passion', a comprehensible but murderous figure of the irrational. Communism could never be the victims' prise de conscience of their oppression. The extremely suggestive but rather abstract amalgam of Fascism and Communism hides the diversity of the territories in which the latter took root. And Furet hardly mentions the specific role of communism in the political life of France, from the Front Populaire to the Resistance, from the Reconstruction to the Union of the Left and, today, la Gauche plurielle - episodes which have all been marked by the defence and extension of democracy.

In conclusion, it is necessary to explore the ambiguity of the 'endless burial' which Furet announces. For the discourse of 'the end' has become problematic for communist and anti-communist alike: the teleological vision of the inevitable triumph of the proletariat has collided with historical reality; while the neo-liberal rhetoric boasting of a 'new world order' is undermined by persistent inequality, which gives rise to critique, of which French Communism, albeit en mutation, is one form.

Gavin Bowd is author of L'Interminable enterrement: Le communisme et les intellectuels francais depuis 1956


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