François Furet
Few places in Europe are now more grotesquely misnamed than the Left Bank of Paris. Previously home to Chanel-style Maoists, tousled existentialists and insurrectionary students, its cafés are nowadays thronged with remorseful Trotskyites, recovering Stalinists, fake philosophical gurus and right-wing mystics. The Parisian stampede from Left to Right has outdone the rush to the Titanic lifeboats. Since the failed student insurgency of 1968, the French intellectual trend has been from Marx to Nietzsche, Leninism to libido, Bolshevism to black leather. Repentant Marxists declare consumerism to be the consummation of history, while those who once dug up the paving stones for barricades now dig up dirt on Jean-Paul Sartre.
The nation which invented the idea of revolution for the modern age now prefers to be known as the one which gave the world the word 'bourgeois'. Unlike the unphilosophical English, the French have not simply been content to swap their utopian visions for humdrum political realism. Instead, right-wing reaction has taken as exotic a form as their discarded revolutionism. Being French, you need some wild-eyed metaphysical theory of why not to grant your workers a wage increase, rather than just a dash of English pragmatism. Rather than tamely supporting the Gulf war, you declare instead, like the postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard, that it never actually took place. The strong libertarian tradition in France can swing either towards revolution or anti-political irrationalism, and the surrealists trod a thin line between the two.
In this kind of culture, radical scepticism is only ever an inch away from conservative cynicism. The country which boasted one of the largest Communist parties in Europe is now scrambling to deconstruct every political doctrine. Revolution lives on, but in the snares of language and the subversions of the unconscious, not in anything as drearily prosaic as promoting the interests of the underprivileged.
François Furet served his time in the Communist Party as a young historian, and despite being one of the so-called Forty Immortals of the the French Academy, died shortly after the French publication of The Passing of an Illusion in 1995. Since then, the book has enjoyed the kind of worldwide celebrity which one might expect of a volume from the pope announcing his conversion to Queer Theory - although this is the first English translation.
Furet's book presents itself as a history of Communism, which would amount in effect to a history of our century. Seventeen years into the century, the first workers' state in history came to power, and collapsed 11 years before the end of it. But this is not in fact a history of world communism, formidably erudite and wide-ranging though it is. It is rather an ingeniously perverse attempt to prove that communism and fascism are the Laurel and Hardy of twentieth-century politics, as inseparable as they are quarrelsome.
This, one might consider, is something of a tall order. Fascism and communism obviously have a number of features in common: dictatorships, one-party states, myths of salvation, the manipulation of the masses. But any attempt to regard them as blood brothers must inevitably run aground on a series of inconvenient facts: the Soviet Union's heroic role in helping to destroy Nazi Germany; the Communists' hatred of racism, imperialism and big business, all of which fascism exultantly embraced; fascism's murderous hostility to the working class movement, and so on. These are hardly trivial differences, and one looks with mildly sadistic interest to how Furet is going to explain them away.
But Furet is not prepared to let a little matter like political beliefs upset his elegant equations. 'The emancipation of the proletariat versus the domination of the Aryan race,' he informs us, 'mattered little' as a distinction, a point that was perhaps insufficiently appreciated in the Warsaw ghetto. 'Bolshevism and fascism occurred in succession, gave rise to one other, imitated and fought one another... and were products of the same history.'
This is not quite what the logicians would call a knock-down argument. Cliff Richard and the Stones occurred in succession too, Las Vegas imitates the Taj Mahal, and Pol Pot was a product of roughly the same history as Mother Teresa. But the fact that communism and fascism fought each other is for the resolutely cross-grained Furet conclusive evidence of their complicity. 'The two opposing regimes were closely linked, for fascism was in many ways a response to the threat of the proletarian revolution.'
But Furet is not content to let the case rest there. Swept deliriously away on the wings of wild-eyed theorising, he approvingly quotes the view of a German scholar that Nazism was even more Bolshevik than Bolshevism. Nazism 'most clearly embodied Bolshevik ideology' because it was 'pure nihilism', and thus lacked actual Bolshevism's 'distant attachment... with the universalism of reason'.
One can imagine a number of intriguing variants on this line of argument. Eating pork is the purest form of vegetarianism, since it lacks vegetarianism's attachment to not eating meat. Furet's own book is fascist, since fascism is the purest embodiment of the irrationalism it betrays. There is a flagrantly false syllogism at work here. Communism was totalitarian and so was fascism, ergo communism is fascist. The Queen of England is female and so is Sinéad O'Connor, ergo England is ruled by a flakey Irish priestess.
For most writers, the term 'anti-fascist' is a positive one. Not so for Furet. 'Anti-fascism,' he suggests, 'was little more than a ploy by which communism cynically won itself credit in the eyes of gullible Western liberals'. All those butchered Soviet soldiers in the Second World War presumably come down to that. Stalinism was indeed a monstrosity, and in our own time has discredited socialism almost beyond repair. But Marx was no more responsible for Hitler than Plato was responsible for Terry Wogan. And one should beware a scholar who, convinced that individual rights in the United States 'have always enjoyed an almost sacred respect', puts in a good word for McCarthyism.
To order this book, call Observer CultureShop on 0500 500 171
