Modern French History
In the 1970s and 1980s Judt was a historian of modern France. Marxism and the French Left: Studies in Labour and Politics in France 1830–1981 collects several previously unpublished essays on the 19th and 20th centuries, ending with a discussion of Mitterrand. In Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956, Judt moved away both from social history towards intellectual history, and from endorsement of French Marxist traditions to their critique. In Past Imperfect, he castigated French intellectuals of the postwar era, above all Jean-Paul Sartre for their “self-imposed moral amnesia”. Judt criticized what he considered blind faith in Joseph Stalin’s communism. In Judt's reading, French thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre were blinded by their own provincialism, and unable to see that their calls for intellectual authenticity should have required them to interrogate their own attachment to communism and criticize the Soviet Union for its policies in postwar eastern Europe. This was in some sense a criticism from within, using French sources and polemical style against famous French intellectuals. Judt made a similar case in some of his more popular writings. For instance, following the recognition by then President Jacques Chirac, in 1995, of the responsibility of the French state during the Collaboration, on the anniversary of the Vel' d'Hiv raid, he claimed in an op-ed published by The New York Times that:
"people like Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault were curiously silent. One reason was their near-obsession with Communism. While proclaiming the need to "engage", to take a stand, two generations of intellectuals avoided any ethical issue that could not advance or, in some cases, retard the Marxist cause.
Vichy was dismissed as the work of a few senile Fascists. No one looked closely at what had happened during the Occupation, perhaps because very few intellectuals of any political stripe could claim to have had a "good" war, as Albert Camus did. No one stood up to cry "J'accuse!" at high functionaries, as Émile Zola did during the Dreyfus affair. When Simone de Beauvoir, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida entered the public arena, it usually involved a crisis far away – in Madagascar, Vietnam or Cambodia. Even today, politically engaged writers call for action in Bosnia but intervene only sporadically in debates about the French past."
Read more about this topic: Tony Judt, Writings, European History
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