{"id":71937,"date":"2015-07-31T09:09:46","date_gmt":"2015-07-31T17:09:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=71937"},"modified":"2015-07-31T09:09:46","modified_gmt":"2015-07-31T17:09:46","slug":"the-last-leader-of-europe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=71937","title":{"rendered":"The Last Leader Of Europe"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Johnson writes in Modern Times<\/a>:<\/p>\n

If post-war history took the new nations of Africa and Asia down a
\nseries of blind alleys, often terminating in horror and savagery,
\nEurope’s experience offered more comfort. This was unexpected.
\nThe prevailing mood in 1945 was despair and impotence. The
\nEuropean era in history was over. In a sense Hitler had been the last
\ntruly European leader, able to initiate world events from a Euro-
\ncentric vision. He lost that power at the end of 1941. The vacuum
\nopened by his colossal fall could not be filled by European rivals. At
\nthe end of the war, the two non-European superpowers stood, as it
\nwere, on the rim of a spent volcano, peering contemptuously into its
\nstill smouldering depths, uninvolved in its collapse but glad it no
\nlonger had the daemonic energy to terrify humanity. <\/p>\n

On 26 October 1945, at the opening of the new ballet at the
\nTheatre des Champs-Elysees, the drop-curtain by Picasso was hissed
\nby the packed high-society audience. 1 That was the old Paris. Three
\ndays later, at the Club Maintenant, Jean-Paul Sartre delivered a
\nlecture, ‘Existentialism is a Humanism 5 . Here was the new Paris. This
\noccasion, too, was packed. Men and women fainted, fought for
\nchairs, smashing thirty of them, shouted and barracked. It coincided
\nwith the launching of Sartre’s new review, Les Temps modernes, in
\nwhich he argued that literary culture, plus the haute couture of the
\nfashion shops, were the only things France now had left \u2014 a symbol
\nof Europe, really \u2014 and he produced Existentialism to give people a
\nbit of dignity and to preserve their individuality in the midst of
\ndegradation and absurdity. The response was overwhelming. As his
\nconsort, Simone de Beauvoir, put it, ‘We were astounded by the
\nfurore we caused.’ 2 Existentialism was remarkably un-Gallic; hence,
\nperhaps, its attractiveness. Sartre was half-Alsacian (Albert Schweit-
\nzer was his cousin) and he was brought up in the house of his
\ngrandfather, Karl Schweitzer. His culture was as much German as
\nFrench. He was essentially a product of the Berlin philosophy school
\nand especially of Heidegger, from whom most of his ideas derived.
\nSartre had had a good war. Despite the surface enmities, there was a
\ncertain coming together of the French and German spirit. Paris was
\nnot an uncongenial place for an intellectual to be, provided he could
\nignore such unpleasantnesses as the round-up of Jews, as most
\ncontrived to do without difficulty. 3 As the Jewish intellectual Ber-
\nnard-Henri Levy was later to point out, radical, proto-fascist forms
\nof racialism were rarely repugnant to the French, not least to French
\nintellectuals: he even called it ‘the French ideology’. 4 <\/p>\n

The Paris theatre flourished under the Nazis. Andre Malraux later
\nsnarled: ‘I was facing the Gestapo while Sartre, in Paris, let his plays
\nbe produced with the authorization of the German censors.’ 5 Albert
\nBiissche, theatre critic of the Nazi forces’ newspaper, Pariser Zei-
\ntung, called Sartre’s play Huis Clos ‘a theatrical event of the first
\norder’. He was not the only beneficiary of German approval. When a
\nnew play by the pied-noir writer Albert Camus, Le Malentendu, was
\npresented at the Theatre des Mathurins on 24 June 1944, it was
\nhooted by the French intellectual elite (then largely fascist) because
\nCamus was known to be in the Resistance. Biissche found it ‘filled
\nwith profound thoughts … a pioneering work’. 6 Camus did not
\nshare Sartre’s aloofness to the war; he was in fact one of only 4,345
\nFrenchmen and women who received the special Rosette of the
\nResistance medal. But his thinking reflected the growing contiguity
\nof French and German philosophy which the Occupation promoted
\nand which was an important. strand in the post-war pattern. The
\nmost important influence in his life was Nietzsche, whom in effect,
\nthrough his novels UEtr anger and La Peste, he gallicized for an
\nentire generation of French youth. <\/p>\n

Sartre and Camus came together in 1943\u20144, protagonists – and
\neventually antagonists – in a cult centred on St Germain-des-Pres
\nwhich sought to relate philosophy and literature to public action.
\nTheir caravanserai was the Cafe Flore, itself a symbol of the
\nambiguities of French intellectual life. St Germain had been a haunt
\nof Diderot, Voltaire and Rousseau, who had congregated in the old
\nCafe Procope. The Flore dated from the Second Empire, when it had
\nbeen patronized by Gautier, Musset, Sand, Balzac, Zola and Huys-
\nmans; later by Apollinaire and later still by the circle of Action
\nFranqaise, led by Maurras himself: Sartre occupied his still-warm
\nseat. 7 Existentialism in its post-war presentation was derived from
\nKant’s ‘Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through
\nyour will a general natural law’. Our positive acts, Sartre taught,
\ncreated ‘not only the man that we would like to be ourselves’ but also
\n‘an image of man such as we think he ought to be’. Man could shape
\nhis own essence by positive political acts. He thus offered a rationa-
\nlized human gesture of defiance to despair – what Karl Popper called
\n‘a new theology without God’. It contained an element of German
\npessimism, characteristic of both Heidegger and Nietzsche, in that it
\nplaced exaggerated emphasis upon the fundamental loneliness of
\nman in a godless world, and upon the resulting tension between the
\nself and the world. 8 But for young people it was magic. It was a form
\nof Utopian romanticism with much the same attractions as the
\nRomantic movement 150 years before. Indeed it was more attractive
\nbecause it offered political activism too. As Popper complained, it
\nwas a respectable form of fascism which, needless to add, could
\neasily be allied to forms of Marxism. Camus insisted he was never an
\nExistentialist, and in 1951 he and Sartre quarrelled mortally over the
\nlatter’s defence of various forms of totalitarian violence. But it was
\nCamus’s re-creation, in modern terms, of the solitary Byronic hero,
\nwho resists fate and an alien world by defiant acts, which brought the
\ncult so vividly to life and gave it actual meaning to youth on both
\nsides of the Rhine. <\/p>\n

Thus Existentialism was a French cultural import, which Paris then
\nre-exported to Germany, its country of origin, in a sophisticated and
\nvastly more attractive guise. The point is worth stressing, for it was
\nthe first time since the age of Goethe, Byron and De Stael that young
\npeople in France and Germany felt a spontaneous cultural affinity, a
\nshared Weltanschauung. It served, then, as a preparation for a more
\nsolid economic and political harmonization, for which circumstances
\nwere also propitious. Yet this might not have come about but for two
\nfurther circumstances. The first was the final (and possibly terminal)
\nmaturing of Christian activism in politics, which for a vital genera-
\ntion became the dominant mode in Europe. The second was the
\nemergence of a group of European titans \u2014 not Byronic, not young,
\nnot romantic, not indeed heroic in any obvious still less Existentialist sense \u2014 who were to revivify the corpse of a Europe which had slain itself. Both the agency, Christianity, and the agents, Adenauer, de Gasperi, de Gaulle, were by nature abhorrent to the founders of Existentialist activism. But then history habitually proceeds by such ironies. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul Johnson writes in Modern Times: If post-war history took the new nations of Africa and Asia down a series of blind alleys, often terminating in horror and savagery, Europe’s experience offered more comfort. This was unexpected. The prevailing mood … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29693,181,13633],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adolf-hitler","category-france","category-germany"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=71937"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71937\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71938,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71937\/revisions\/71938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=71937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=71937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=71937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}