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BETWEEN HUMANISM AND TERROR: THE PROBLEM OF POLITICAL

VIOLENCE IN POSTWAR FRANCE, 1944-1962

A Dissertation

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School

of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

by

Emma Kathryn Kuby

January 2011

© 2011 Emma Kathryn Kuby

BETWEEN HUMANISM AND TERROR: THE PROBLEM OF POLITICAL

VIOLENCE IN POSTWAR FRANCE, 1944-1962

Emma Kathryn Kuby, Ph.D.

Cornell University 2011

As the wartime German occupation of France came to a close in 1944, the French Resistance became a symbol of the heroic use of violence for a just political cause. The subsequent reconstruction of a republican France, which involved a protracted and sometimes bloody campaign to bring collaborators to justice, further cemented popular support for the selective use of political violence - even violence by non-state actors, even violence that targeted civilians - if it could be associated with memory of the struggle against Vichy. In this climate, leading postwar intellectuals on the French Left such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre articulated some of the most striking justifications for political violence, including revolutionary “terror," in the history of twentieth-century thought. But despite their prominence, these figures did not represent the views of all left-leaning French thinkers: over time, the use of violence in politics became the object of increasing unease and contestation, particularly as the exigencies of the liberation faded, Cold War fears grew, and new forms of “terror" - labor militancy, the Soviet gulag, torture and terrorism in the Algerian War (1954-

1962) - came to the fore of political debate.

This dissertation is an attempt to retell the history of France"s postwar intellectual Left in a way that reintegrates those who decided between 1944 and 1962 that violence was not a legitimate means of effecting political change. Drawing on an extensive source base of published and archival materials, I show that the position that violence should be used to help build a more just society was maintained by some intellectuals on the Left but was substantively challenged by others. These latter figures - notably Albert Camus, David Rousset, and Jean-Marie Domenach - used what they self-consciously deemed “ethical" arguments to reject even those acts of violence committed for the sake of highly desirable ends. Their new discourses also drew on the memory of World War II, but instead of emphasizing Resistance heroism they stressed the suffering of victims. Meaningful action, they declared, need not involve violence: it could, rather, be a matter of “bearing witness" to violent assaults on bodily integrity and human dignity. iii

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Emma Kuby was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. She received her A.B. with honors in 2003 from Brown University, where she majored in History and Gender Studies. After a fellowship year in Paris, she began her graduate studies in History at Cornell

University, earning her M.A. in 2007.

iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people provided indispensible help and support as I developed, researched, and wrote this dissertation. I would first of all like to thank my committee. Dominick LaCapra, my chair, has been both a constant intellectual inspiration and an unwavering ally to me over the years. I am enormously fortunate to have worked with him. Steven L. Kaplan was likewise instrumental to the project from beginning to end in countless ways; I am especially grateful for his guidance in Paris and for his comprehensive, incisive commentary on each chapter draft. Natalie Melas has been forthcoming with her time and forthright with her ideas, providing particularly important help as I wrote the final two chapters. With characteristic generosity, Carolyn J. Dean did me the great kindness of serving as an outside reader and, as always, offered staunch support coupled with searching and insightful critique. Many thanks are also due to my larger intellectual community of friends and interlocutors at Cornell University. In particular, this project was nurtured by Cornell"s extraordinary European History Colloquium. I am abidingly grateful to all those who offered comments and questions at various stages of the project, especially Vicki Caron, Holly Case, Duane Corpus, Abi Fisher, Franz Hofer, Kate Horning, Isabel V. Hull, Taran Kang, Ada Kuskowski, Marie Muschalek, Ryan Plumley, Guillaume Ratel, Camille Robcis, Peter Staudenmaier, Michael Steinberg, Robert Travers, Rachel Weil, John Weiss, and Emma Willoughby. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Peter Holquist, in whose Soviet History seminar I developed the initial germ of the dissertation. I also benefited from comradeship and conversation with Christopher Cantwell, Gregg Lightfoot, Julian Lim, Peter Schmelz, Sarah Senk, Melanie Steiner, Rebecca Tally, and Zac Zimmer. Graduate students who completed their degrees before I began the dissertation project, especially Chris Bilodeau, Ben Brower, Mary v Gayne, and Heidi Voskuhl, provided me with a model of impassioned, meticulous inquiry; I thank them as well. Finally, I could not have successfully navigated the dissertation process without the help of the Cornell History Department"s Graduate

Coordinator, Barb Donnell.

Outside of Cornell, other French and American scholars gave me valuable commentary or practical assistance at various stages of the project: I particularly wish to thank Laird Boswell, Suzanne Desan, Elizabeth Everton, Brigitte Gaïti, Mark Meyers, Philippe Minard, Samuel Moyn, Sandra Ott, Christophe Prochasson, Mary Louise Roberts, Gisèle Sapiro, and Florence Tamagne. This project would have been impossible without the generous assistance of many archivists and librarians in France. I am grateful to the hard-working staffs at the Archives Départementales of the Allier and the Gard, the Archives Nationales in Paris and Fontainebleau, the Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Archives d"Histoire Contemporaine, and the Institut Mémoires de l"Édition Contemporaine. Denis Tranchard at the Archives Départementales de l"Allier, Françoise Adnès at the Archives Nationales, and Dominique Parcollet at the Archives d"Histoire Contemporaine went out of their way to offer me specialized assistance. Thanks as well to the family of Jules Moch for their permission to access his archives. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the financial support that I received to complete the research and writing of this dissertation. A Mellon Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation funded my first year of graduate study, permitting me to begin developing my research agenda. From within Cornell, grants including the Peace Studies Fellowship, the Walter LaFeber Research Assistance Award, the Bowmar Fellowship, the Barrett Fellowship, and the Sicca Fellowship from the Institute for European Studies all helped fund different stages of research and writing. I also wish vi to thank David J. Zucconi and the supporters of the Zucconi Fellowship at Brown University: this post-undergraduate award allowed me to live in France for the first time in 2003, sparking my love of French history. My deepest debts are to the people who lived with this dissertation day in and day out for many years. The love of my parents, Pam and Mark Kuby, has sustained me from the beginning. I am profoundly grateful for our closeness and for their support. As my brother Will Kuby and I both worked toward our doctorates in History over the last several years, our already strong bond of friendship and camaraderie grew; I am thankful for his help and relish the fact that we share so much. Finally, I wish to thank my husband Brian Bockelman, who has been with me for every step of the journey. Indeed, one of the primary joys of this project has been the chance to hold a constant conversation about history, intellectuals, politics, and violence with a fellow historian as engaging and gifted as Brian. I thank him for having pointed me toward “les mots justes" many times over - but most of all I thank him for his generosity, his kindness, and his love. vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Biographical Sketch iii

Acknowledgements iv

Table of Contents vii

Introduction 1

1. Summary Judgments: Retributive Violence in the Reconstruction of Postwar France, 1944-1946 29

2. “Yesterday"s Duty Would Be a Crime Today": Cold War, Domestic Crisis, and the French Debate on Political Violence, 1947-1948 97

3. Politics as Violence: The “Black Legend" of the Épuration and the Reframing of the French Resistance, 1947-1952 146

4. The David Rousset Affair: The Soviet Gulag and the Nazi Camp Survivor as Witness to Suffering, 1949-1953 190

5. Cold War Adventures in Humanism and Terror: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Albert Camus, and the Question of Revolutionary Violence, 1946-1955 243

6. “Proof in Hand": Bearing Witness to Torture and Terror in the Algerian War, 1954-1958 311

7. The War Comes Home: Jean-Paul Sartre and the French Intellectual Left, 1958-1962 377

Conclusion 454

Bibliography 460

1

INTRODUCTION

"Is there any other problem besides that of violence?" Such was the question the Parisian journalist Jean Daniel posed to himself as he lay in a hospital bed in late

1961, during the final months of the Algerian War (1954-1962). Daniel, Algerian-born

and a significant figure in the anti-colonialist French Left, had been wounded that summer by stray paratrooper gunfire in Bizerte, Tunisia while covering the rampant devastation of North Africa for the weekly journal L'Express. To distract himself while he recovered from his injuries, Daniel began to fill a notebook with diverse reflections on French political, cultural, and intellectual life since World War II. Though this sprawling effort into personal and political memory took him in many directions, a single, insistent theme haunted his entries. Whether he was writing about Albert Camus or Charles de Gaulle, decolonization or the theater, there was only one real subject to consider about postwar France: political violence. 1 Surveying the works that major French intellectuals had produced over the previous fifteen years, it would seem that Daniel was not alone. Left-leaning French writers and philosophers in particular had been preoccupied since the end of World War II with the "problem" of the use of violence for political ends. Although conventional warfare between states had served as a backdrop for much of their adult lives, these intellectuals were especially concerned about violent acts between governments and their own citizens, such as torture, political executions, police repression, bombings, revolts, and insurrections. These kinds of political violence 2

1 Jean Daniel, La Blessure; suivi de Le Temps qui vient (Paris: Grasset, 1992), 55: "Y a-t-il un autre

problème que celui de la violence?"

2 I necessarily maintain a certain flexibility in defining "political violence" since the actors whom I

study employed the concept in multiple, shifting, and often contradictory ways. In general, however, "political violence" in this work can be taken to signify acts of physical constraint or destruction undertaken by both state and non-state actors with the intent of either altering or sustaining the 2 posed urgent questions for a generation that believed in social revolution but had been shaken by the cataclysms of the European twentieth century. Could such acts ever be justified? On what grounds? Was extralegal political violence necessarily illegitimate? Was it "terrorism"? Did society require normative limits concerning the use of violence, even if that violence was employed for the ultimate good of the collective? And if one refused to justify violence, what means of political action remained? These kinds of questions served as starting points for some of the most famous and enduring works of the era: Albert Camus's Les Justes (The Just, 1949) and L'Homme révolté (The Rebel, 1951), Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Humanisme et terreur (Humanism and Terror, 1947) and Les Aventures de la dialectique (The Adventures of the Dialectic,

1955), Jean-Paul Sartre's plays Les Mains sales (Dirty Hands, 1948) and Le Diable et

le bon dieu (The Devil and the Good Lord, 1951), and his explosive 1961 preface to Frantz Fanon's Les Damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth). From a variety of perspectives, all these texts considered whether or not moral problems arose when people used lethal violence in an attempt to alter their collective circumstances for the better. Such concerns began to dominate French intellectual production in 1944, when Germany's wartime occupation of France came to an end. As France's collaborationist Vichy government (1940-1944) collapsed, the French Resistance became a symbol of the heroic use of violence for a just political cause. Whereas Vichy officials had dubbed the interior Resistance a "terrorist network," large segments of the postwar

prevailing arrangements of collective life in a given community. This intent need not be "pure," wholly

rational, nor even fully consciously articulated, and it need not represent a desire to intervene in

institutional politics at an exalted level. I do not, however, include under the rubric of "political

violence" acts of physical force such as hooliganism and domestic violence that are deeply "political" in

the sense of having to do with power relations but whose perpetrators do not directly seek to influence

the rules or composition of the polity. Nor do I consider what is sometimes called "structural violence."

My definition is especially influenced by the arguments laid out in C.A.J. Coady, Morality and Political

Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 3-8, 21-42. 3 French public saw the outcome of the war as a vindication of resisters' use of sabotage, executions, and guerilla warfare to help achieve national liberation. 3 The subsequent reconstruction of a republican France, which involved a prolonged, sometimes bloody campaign to bring collaborators to justice, further cemented popular support for the selective use of political violence - even violence by non-state actors, even violence that targeted civilians - if it could be associated with the legacy of the

Resistance struggle.

Intellectuals on the Left were especially inspired by the immense moral prestige that the Resistance now enjoyed. In the immediate postwar moment, figures as diverse as Camus, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, André Mandouze, Claude Bourdet, Louis Martin-Chauffier, and Julian Benda advocated violence as a means of achieving an irrevocable, "revolutionary" rupture with the passive, feminized "decadence" of prewar French politics - a politics that they believed had produced France's 1940 rout and then the collaborationist politics of the Vichy era. These writers hoped that the Resistance would prove to be only the first stage in a process of radical change and renewal. The new battle cry of Combat, the journal for which Camus wrote, became "From the Resistance to the Revolution!"

4 Camus and others explicitly accepted the

3 The real military contribution of the French Resistance to France's liberation is a contested topic; most

historians agree that it was modest in comparison to the role played by the Allies. But the notion that

France had helped to free itself from German occupation was postwar orthodoxy, and of immense moral and political importance in the reconstruction of the country. See Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 554-558; Henry Rousso, Le

Syndrome de Vichy, de 1944 à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 1990). It is also important to underline that

postwar admiration for the Resistance was not simply a continuation of wartime attitudes - during the

Occupation, much of the populace agreed with Vichy and the Germans that the kinds of violence the armed Resistance was engaged in constituted acts of "terrorism." However, the interior Resistance enjoyed an immense wave of retroactive legitimation at the liberation. Pierre Laborie, L'Opinion

française sous Vichy (Paris, Seuil, 1990), 285-329 and "Opinions et représentations: la Libération et la

construction de l'image de la Résistance," in Les Français des années troubles, de la guerre d'Espagne

à la Libération, rev. ed. (Paris: Seuil, 2003), 253-265, esp. 265.

4 This phrase - "De la Résistance à la révolution" - served as the motto and the daily banner for Combat

beginning on August 21, 1944, the first issue published openly after years of clandestine publishing under the Occupation. 4 fact that this "revolution" would demand bloodshed. Pacifism and non-violence, influential ideologies in the interwar period, now held little appeal; both had been discredited by the shameful memory of France's role in appeasing Hitler in 1938. Arguments for non-violence struck postwar intellectuals on the Left as morally suspect excuses for either passivity or frank collaboration with evil. In light of experience, they agreed that those who hoped to fight injustice and who dreamed of creating a better world should, in Julian Benda's words, be "armed with a broadsword, and determined to make use of it..." 5 The postwar period, here defined as the eighteen years between the Liberation of Paris and the end of the Algerian War, provided numerous further occasions for intellectuals to debate whether such violent means were indeed necessary and legitimate. Immediate postwar discussions of political violence revolved around the retributive state and extralegal violence involved in the "purge" (épuration) of collaborators from the French body politic. Later in the 1940s, in the midst of intense economic hardship and massive, uncommonly bloody Communist-directed strike waves, left-leaning intellectuals turned their attention to the politics and morality of both workers' violence and a state repression that took up the banner of "republican legality." Meanwhile, as the Cold War took form and a weakened France, dependent on Marshall aid, confronted a world dominated by the two superpowers, intellectuals on the Left also felt compelled to consider "revolutionary violence" in the Soviet context, from the Stalinist USSR's execution of "traitorous" political elites to the gulag. Finally, with the onset of decolonization and especially Algeria's long war for independence from France, these writers turned their attention to the myriad forms of

5 Julien Benda, "Justice ou amour? La trahison des laïcs," Les Lettres françaises 47 (17 March 1945):

"Pour nous, notre idéal est bien la paix, mais c'est la paix par la justice, celle-ci étant armée du glaive et

décidée à s'en servir..." 5 violence employed by the French military and police (torture, collective repression, mass deportation, summary execution, attempted insurrection), the Algerian independence fighters (guerilla warfare, terror attacks on civilians, reprisal killings), and hard-line civilian defenders of French control of Algeria (bombings, assassinations, kidnappings). Intellectual historians have long emphasized the post-1944 French Left's preoccupation with political violence, and particularly with violent revolution. Written just after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Tony Judt's

1992 book Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 paints a portrait of an

"irresponsible" left-leaning postwar intelligentsia fascinated by Soviet communism and all too willing to shed "the blood of others" in the name of future-oriented political goals.

6 Among the "charmed circle" that orbited around Sartre's journal Les

Temps modernes and Emmanuel Mounier's Esprit, he writes, "anything that qualified under the heading 'revolutionary' was necessarily to be supported and defended." 7 Judt charges that "the attractions of violence, the seductive appeal of terror in all its forms" exerted unprecedented force over French intellectual life in the period, and that not until the 1980s "did the idea take root that revolutionary terror might be an object of study rather than of emulation or admiration."

8 François Furet, meanwhile, argues

that the postwar French intellectual Left, communist and non-communist, defended the state terror of the USSR "tooth and nail," inspired by "anti-liberal passion" as well as "a hidden taste for power that could be joined to a masochistic passion for force." 9

6 Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1992), 307 and 99. The book was published simultaneously in French as Un Passé imparfait: les

intellectuels en France, 1944-1956, transl. Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat (Paris: Fayard, 1992).

7 Ibid., 302 and 40.

8 Ibid., 297. Judt places this shift "between the fall of Pol Pot and the celebration of the bicentennial of

the French Revolution."

9 François Furet, Le Passé d'une illusion. Essai sur l'idée communiste au XXe siècle (Paris:

Laffont/Calmann-Lévy, 1995), 480-482.

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