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Notes
References to François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, trans. Deborah Furet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), appear in parentheses in the text. Works which examine the place of Le Passé d’une illusion in the historiography of Communism include Denis Berger and Henri Maler, Une certaine idée du communisme (Paris: Éditions du Félin, 1996); and collections of essays in M 80–1 (January–February 1996); Critique 588 (May 1996); and Le Débat 89 (March–April 1996).
Karl Marx, “The Prussian Counter-Revolution and the Prussian Judiciary” [1848], in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), vol. 8, 197. “Two months after the arrival of Hitler to power, the executive committee of the Communist International went so far as to affirm that the establishment of an open dictatorship, destroying “democratic illusions” in the masses would liberate them from the hold of social democracy and hasten Germany on the road to proletarian revolution.” Jean-Paul Joubert, Révolutionnaires de la s.f.i.o. (Paris presses de la Foundation nationale des science politiques, 1997), 18.
The dialectic of illusion/disillusion is such that all feel that they joined the party at the time of its greatest attraction. Contributors to The God That Failed (tentatively entitled “Lost Illusion”) identified this period as the 1930s.
From different political perspectives, former Communist Eric Hobsbawm and former Trotskyite Pierre Brové make a similar, although elegiac, argument about the Communist aspiration later generations can never know in the way they did. Hobsbawm presents this as an element of the sociological phenomenon that has made the Communism he knew unknowable today: “The destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that link one's contemporary experience to that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late twentieth century. Most young men and women at the century's end grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in.” Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), 3. See also Clémence Bergeal, “Rencontre avec Pierre Broué,” Diagonales Est–Ouest 51 (January–February 1998): 35.
Arthur Koestler's essay [1949], in The God That Failed, ed. Richard Crossman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 74–5. “Jacob–Koestler reflects uneasily whether he has not too hastily ceased tending Laban–Stalin's sheep, instead of waiting patiently till his ‘illusion became flesh’.” Isaac Deutscher, “The Ex-Communists’ Conscience” [1950], in Marxism, Wars and Revolutions: Essays from Four Decades, ed. Tamara Deutscher (London: Verso, 1984), 56–7.
Jean-Maurice de Montremy, “La Révolution couronne François Furet,” L’Histoire 120 (March 1989): 75.
François Dufay, “François Furet de la Révolution à l’Académie,” L’Histoire 211 (June 1997): 18.
“La Révolution et ses fantômes” [1978], in François Furet, Un Itinéraire intellectuel, ed. Mona Ozouf (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1998), 550.
Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Anti-totalitarian Moment of the 1970s (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 231–7 (quote on p. 232) presents a good overview of Furet's entry and exit from the PCF. See also Christofferson's excellent articles: “An Antitotalitarian History of the French Revolution: François Furet's Penser la Révolution française in the Intellectual Politics of the Late 1970s,” French Historical Studies 22(4) (Fall 1999): 557–611; “François Furet Between History and Journalism, 1958–65,” French History 15(4) (December 2001): 421–47.
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Paris–Montpellier P.C.–P.S.U. (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), 36–7.
Ibid., 57.
Furet took an ironic view of Socialists. “The [electoral] victory of the [conservative] UNR succeeded in doing what neither Suez nor the Battle of Algiers could do: give a bad conscience to the Socialist Party.” See André Delcroix, “Le ‘New Look’ de la S.F.I.O.,” France-Observateur (28 March 1963): 8.
A. Delcroix, “Un Lénine khrouchtchévien,” France-Observateur (14 January 1960): 22.
“The sixth congress of Communist students tolls the knell of a certain communism and initiates a new direction.” André Delcroix, “La Nouvelle génération communiste,” France-Observateur (28 February 1963): 7.
André Delcroix, “Remue-Ménage au P.C.,” France-Observateur (20 December 1962): 6–7. Michel Crouzet wrote in France-Observateur (23 November 1961): 24, that the Soviets were promoting an end to Manichean Jacobinism “which had bequeathed all the bloody sophisms which for one hundred and fifty years had justified great repressions … revolutionary morality and historical necessity”—and suggested that the French left should follow the Soviets’ lead.
A. Delcroix, “Mollet, Thorez et le Front Populaire,” France-Observateur (26 September 1963): 6.
A. Delcroix, “Aucun Français ne peut plus ignorer ça!,” France-Observateur (26 October 1961): 14–5.
“La Révolution commence” [1990], in Furet, Un Itinéraire intellectuel, 362.
François Furet, “French Intellectuals: From Marxism to Structuralism” [1967], in In the Workshop of History, trans. Jonathan Mandelbaum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 29.
Denis Richet, “La ‘Nouvelle Résistance’,” France-Observateur (15 March 1962): 22.
André Delcroix, “Vive la Paix,” France-Observateur (1 March 1962): 6. Laurent Schwartz replied with a defense of the new movements born of opposition to the war; Laurent Schwartz, “Sur Trois Divergences,” France-Observateur (15 March 1962): 28.
A. Delcroix, “Tunis: de Ben Bella à la négociation,” France-Observateur (23 November 1961): 6–7.
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 4.
François Furet and Denis Richet, La Révolution, 2 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1965–1966). Nicolas Werth, “Logiques de violence dans l’URSS stalinienne,” in Stalinisme et nazisme: Histoire et mémoire comparée, ed. Henry Rousso (Paris: Editions Complexe, 1999), 103. As a Communist, Richet had written an article with C.-G. Willard, critiquing history texts in France for pairing condemnation of the bloody purges of the “Jacobin dictatorship” and the “Bolshevik dictatorship.” “The feeling of horror which the bourgeoisie wants to generate for its own past is today used directly against the proletarian revolution”; Denis Richet, “Quand la Bourgeoisie ‘complotait’ …,” La Nouvelle critique 38 (July–August 1952): 21–2.
François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 18–9.
Furet makes frequent reference in Le Passé d’une illusion to critiques of the Bolshevik state by socialists Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg in order to show that the Left could and should have rejected it. But he presents a paucity of figures from outside the left—Elie Halévy and Raymond Aron are among the few. And he pairs the prescient Kautsky with the moderate French republican Edouard Herriot, blind to the famine in the Ukraine (147–8). Could Kautsky see what Herriot could not because he was a Marxist Socialist—or because he was German, not French?
Pierre Nora, “General Introduction,” in Realms of Memory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 5.
Ibid., 3–4.
A. Delcroix, “Pourquoi la deuxième vague a presque tout submergé,” France-Observateur (4 December 1958): 4. See Furet's analysis of the French response to the coup d’état of 1958 in terms of condemnations of non-intervention in the Spanish Civil War (“the poison of non-resistance”) and the submissiveness manifested in the Munich Accords. A. Delcroix, “Il y a vingt ans: Munich,” France-Observateur (24 September 1958): 16.
A. Delcroix, “Le Front populaire entre à la Sorbonne,” France-Observateur (7 May 1959): 14.
A. Delcroix, “Les semaines décisives,” France-Observateur (7 December 1961): 7.
Delcroix, “La Nouvelle génération communiste,” 6.
For Furet's earlier view of the Nazi–Soviet pact as the fruit of the Munich Accords, see A. Delcroix and Roger Paret, “L’été 39: Le pacte germano-soviétique,” France-Observateur (20 August 1959): 11–2.
Richard Crossman, “Introduction,” in The God That Failed, ed. Crossman, 5. Furet's reference to the Union sacrée echoed French radical socialists' critique of “the dupery of antifascism” as bourgeois or Soviet efforts to lure workers to support war in the late 1930s. Joubert, Révolutionnaires, 171; Christian Gras, Alfred Rosmer et le mouvement révolutionnaire international (Paris: François Maspero, 1971), 404 (quoted).
Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “Eclaireur de la Révolution,” Libération (17 July 1997): 4.
François Furet, “La France Unie …,” in François Furet, Jacques Julliard and Pierre Rosanvallon, La République du centre (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1988), 19.
Alain Besançon, Le Malheur du siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1998), 21.
Alain Besançon, “Nazisme et communisme, également criminels,” Le Monde (22 October 1997): 17.
François Furet and Ernst Nolte, Fascism and Communism, trans. Katherine Golsan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 16.
Ibid., 5. And Nolte in turn drew the implication from Le Passé d’une illusion that if Communism could be interpreted in terms of the illusion which advocates saw in it, and not just its criminal acts, the same should be said of fascism. Ibid., 11.
Ibid., 25.
François Furet, Alex Matheron and Michel Verret, “Psychologie et lutte de classes. Sur les ‘Communistes’ d’Aragon,” La Nouvelle Critique 13 (February 1950): 108–18.
Jeannine Verdès-Leroux, Le Réveil des somnambules. Le parti communiste, les intellectuels et la culture (1956–1985) (Paris: Fayard, 1987), 163.
In Furet's bourgeois psychodrama, there is no place for social history, like the destruction of Koestler's bourgeois family in the German inflation of World War I, which led Koestler to project a very different “personal predicament onto the structure of society at large” (The God That Failed, 18), than one finds in Le Passé d’une illusion, in which the bourgeoisie is the only fixed feature of society, swelled by the entrance of workers in the postwar economic boom.
“Entretien avec François Furet,” Les Cahiers d’histoire sociale 4 (Summer/Autumn 1995): 154.
The revolutionary impetus of bourgeois self-hatred in a society like France with a strong administrative state, could offer a variant on becoming an anti-Communist (or anti-Stalinist for Trotskyites) for the reasons one had been attracted to Communism. See André Gide's rejection of the Soviet Union, presented in The God That Failed, in terms of the damning appearance there of a new bourgeoisie rooted in a bureaucracy with the worst traits of that found in capitalist society. But this would take Furet where he does not want to go: to the pairing of Soviet state capitalism and Euro–American capitalism—converging systems which borrowed from the experiences of the other (i.e. Taylorism in the Soviet Union) and legitimated themselves by the existence of the other as the enemy; or to a Tocquevillian analysis of the Soviet Union and its successor state: the Soviet Union involved a state capitalist concentration of economic wealth and creation of an infrastructure which reached fruition in a post-Soviet state.
And in turn Furet refers to the “Bolshevik super-ego” of the French Socialist party reconstituted by François Mitterrand in 1971. “Chronique d’une décomposition,” Le Débat 63 (January–February 1995): 88.
Letter to Vera Zasulich, 23 April 1885, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 47: 280–1.
Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, 129 (quoted), 26 (quoted), 37, 58. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family, trans. Richard Dixon and Clemens Dutt (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1956), 147–54. Marx saw this illusion rooted in French revolutionaries’ belief that they were re-enacting the politics of Greece and Rome, when in fact the socio-economic basis had changed dramatically.
François Furet, “Transformations in the Historiography of the French Revolution,” in The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity, ed. Ferenc Fehér (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 270.
Furet frequently cites Rosa Luxemburg's critiques of the Bolshevik Party, but does not consider the alternative she offered, in which the means for accomplishing revolution prefigure the ends, rather than the end justifying the means, as in the Leninist model. Furet's own “illusion of politics” is that Leninism is the only form of radical political revolution and therefore that to refute Leninism is to refute political revolution. Furet can see the October Revolution only as a coup d’état directed against representative democracy. His binary opposition of representative democracy and vanguard party dictatorship, rooted in memory traditions and their refutation in contemporary France, cannot take into account revolutionary aspirations and practices of insurgent forms of direct democracy like the soviets which posed a radical challenge to both the Duma and the Bolshevik party. Furet makes frequent reference to Kronstadt and to the Workers’ Opposition in the Soviet Union, but not to the alternatives these presented. Most revealing is Furet's brief treatment in Le Passé d’une illusion of the revolutionary councils in Hungary in 1956, at the time he was moving away from the party (457). Although he has no place for the councils because they were neither totalitarian nor liberal, he cannot help casting a covetous eye on them.
Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, 58.
But did the French want to reincarnate Jacobins? Maurice Agulhon argued that nineteenth-century republicans saw the rule of the Committee of Public Safety as a “sort of parenthesis” necessary to defeat the counterrevolution. Precisely because the Jacobins had been successful, republicans believed there was no need to jacobiniser again and néo-jacobinisme never fared well in France. It was, Agulhon believed, “the culture of the Left” which had “vaccinated French society against the temptation of democratic totalitarianism.” “Faut-il avoir peur de 1989?” Le Débat 30 (May 1984): 30, 35.
Emile Malet, Socrate et la rose: les intellectuels face au pouvoir socialiste (Neuilly: Editions du Quotidien, 1983), 192. See also Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, 88, 117. Furet questions those who claim they left Communism using the same principles that led them to join the party, but in leaving the party, Furet clings to that which had always attracted him in Marx's writings: the rejection of hypocrisy. Furet concludes “The Revolutionary Catechism” with Marx denouncing “nostalgic Jacobinism as the vestige of a certain French provincialism, hoping that ‘events’ would ‘put an end, once and for all, to this reactionary cult of the past’” (Ibid., 131). Furet took pleasure in aligning himself with Marx against the Communists. He repeatedly termed Communists’ and former Communists’ defense in terms of their good intentions, as “something like the bourgeois Pharisaism disparaged by Marx.” “Communisme, Nazisme et Fascisme: ce que les mots veulent dire” [interview with Pascal Besnard-Rousseau], Revue des deux mondes (September 1995): 62; François Furet, “Sur l’illusion communiste,” Le Débat 89 (March–April 1996): 164; “Entretien avec François Furet,” 150. Furet termed the refusal to compare Soviet and Nazi atrocities “‘philistine’, (as Marx would say).” Furet and Nolte, Fascism and Communism, 64.
Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, 19, 67, 85, 88, 117. Soviet Communists and Furet shared the project of incorporating the history of the October Revolution and the Soviet Union within a party narrative, the former to celebrate the party and the latter to denounce it. The countryside and the army were sites of extensive violence in 1917, launched independently of the Bolshevik party. But the party claimed to have initiated this mass violence as part of an account it created to legitimize its rule by denying the existence of social movements outside its control. Critics latched on to the Bolsheviks’ claims in order to vilify them. “It was,” Marc Ferro explained, “the bolshevization of history by the Bolsheviks themselves which resulted in the illusion according to which it was the party that did everything.” “Marc Ferro: c’est faire trop d’honneur au parti bolchevik …,” L’Humanité (7 November 1997): 14 [interview with Arnaud Spire]; “Trois historiens autour du Livre noir,” Régards 30 (December 1997): 30. French Communist historian Serge Wolikow drew on Ferro's work to argue that Soviet official memory of the October Revolution, codified under Stalin, ignored the social movements in the countryside and the city in favor of a Leninist party seizing power and launching a social revolution. Failure to revisit this model, Wolikow believed, had crippled party-led efforts at reform in the final years of the Soviet Union. “Octobre 17 et sa mémoire,” L’Humanité (7 November 1997): 13.
Furet implicitly suggests a role for gender in the posing of alternatives to the paradoxical nature of bourgeois political rule and the Leninist response. While Communists and philo-Communists are almost all male in Le Passé d’une illusion, the women whom Furet cites in the text are disproportionately critics of Leninism. Of the women who appear on more than two pages of the English translation, eight out of ten are critics, including several heroines of Furet's account: Rosa Luxemburg, Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt and Annie Kriegel.
Claude Lefort, La Complication (Paris: Fayard, 1999), 23. This allows Lefort to differentiate Stalinists from anti-Stalinist Communists, for if both appear to anti-Communists to share the same ideology, their experience of power was radically different. The conservative anti-Communist Jean-François Revel also attributed the favorable reception given Le Passé d'une illusion by many on the left to Furet's concept of “illusion”. Philo-Communists, Revel believed, could forgive themselves for having pursued an illusion, but could not accept that they were complicit in the criminal projects of communist states. La Grande Parade (Paris: Plon, 2000), 75–76.
“Les Éternelles fiançailles des socialistes et du pouvoir” [1978] in Un Itinéraire intellectuel, 130.
“Entretien avec François Furet,” 151.
Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. W. D. Robson-Scott and James Strachey (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964), 18.
Ibid., 72.
François Furet and Manuel de Diéguez, “Dialogue sur la signification et la nature du communisme,” Commentaire 18 (Autumn 1995): 529.
“Mort, le communisme?” [interview of Furet by Jean-Paul Jouary], Regards 1 (April 1995): 21.
Furet can imagine the appeal of forms of communism surviving the end of the Soviet Union, but not the appeal of fascism surviving the end of the Nazi and Fascist regimes because he is afraid of providing a rationale for antifascism.
Furet and Nolte, Fascism and Communism, 90.
Some passages on the United States in Le Passé d’une illusion reveal the weakness of Furet's use of an historical narrative to illustrate the consequences of an underlying history of ideas. No mention is made of Pearl Harbor in explaining American entry into World War II: “American democracy needed no other reasons to fight Hitler than loyalty to its British heritage and faith in the liberal and democratic ideas of the Enlightenment” (363).
Ernst Nolte makes prescience about Bolshevism a German trait, the inverse of Furet's analysis of French susceptibility to Bolshevism. That two of the first Left critiques of the Bolshevik strategy in the October Revolution came from German socialists, Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg, becomes evidence of Nolte's thesis about Nazi practices as rooted in a fear of Bolshevism. Stéphane Courtois, “Préface” to Ernst Nolte, La Guerre civile européenne 1917–1945 (Paris: Éditions des Syrtes, 2000), 10.
Some European intellectuals, like Ignazio Silone in The God That Failed, saw the role of European Communist intellectuals as attempting to interject a Western humanitarian tradition into the Slavic brutality of Soviet rule, to offer a different Western European contribution to the Soviet Revolution than the German working class had failed to provide after 1917.
Jean-Jacques Becker and Serge Berstein, “L’Anticommunisme en France,” Vingtième siècle 15 (July–September 1987): 17.
See also Furet, “Sur l’illusion communiste,” 63.
Francois Furet, “L’utopie démocratique à l’américaine,” Le Débat 69 (March–April 1992): 84.
Ibid., 80.
Ibid., 86.
Furet characterizes American feminism as “a very bourgeois movement” and its often conflicting demands for individual achievement and collective empowerment are those which he sees the bourgeoisie as having confronted in its desire to realize its contradictory revolutionary goals in France (Ibid., 84, 85). Furet's collaborator Mona Ozouf has developed this argument. She presents American feminism as taking the place of Marxism in radical thought. Marxists had seen the French Revolution securing bourgeois power; (American) feminists see the French Revolution as offering new rights to men that were withheld from women. Furet believed French society was particularly susceptible to the appeal of Marxist thought because of its embrace of the narrative of the French Revolution, a narrative of the professed but as yet unrealized aims of liberty and equality. For Ozouf, it is precisely these universalist goals derived from the Revolution which make French culture resistant to what she interprets as the totalizing American feminist condemnation of a masculinist power structure. Thus, Ozouf argues that a liberal interpretation of gender enables France to play the leading role that the revolutionary project had previously allowed French Communists to hold in opposing the United States’ hegemonic ambitions. Women's Words: Essay on French Singularity, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
Furet, “French Intellectuals: From Marxism to Structuralism,” 29–30.
Daniel Gordon and François Furet, “Le Débat du Débat,” Le Débat 95 (May–August 1997): 187.
Ibid.
François Furet, “L’Amérique de Clinton II,” Le Débat 94 (March–April 1997): 9.
Ibid., 10.
“L’Indépassable horizon de la démocratie libérale …” [interview with Frédéric Martel], Politique internationale 72 (Summer 1996): 332.
Leon Trotsky, Our Political Tasks [1904] (London: New Park Publications, 1980), 124.
Furet was able to engage more openly with Marx after leaving the party. He defended a Marxist interpretation of colonialism in a discussion with Raymond Aron in 1961. “Les colonies: une mauvaise affaire?” France-Observateur (20 April 1961): 4–6; “Que deviendra la France après la décolonisation?” France-Observateur (27 April 1961): 13. And he could still write in 1963 that to explain de Gaulle's support (“the man who comes to reinstall his power on the taste for the refrigerator and the car”), “I believe that in the search for profound causality, Marxist analysis has lost none of its virtues.” André Delcroix, “Le ‘Cinéma’ du Général,” France-Observateur (21 February 1963): 24.
“Faut-il brûler Marx? [1975]” in Furet, Un Itinéraire intellectuel, 532.
George Lichtheim, The Origins of Socialism (New York: Praeger, 1969), vii.
Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, 87, 117.
Furet, “La France Unie….,” 59, 62. In October 2000, Russian authorities offered a variant of this, accusing French left intellectuals who criticized Russian actions in Chechnia of having never recovered from their deification of Stalin. Now “bourgeois, established, [but] nevertheless attached to the ideals of their youth,” they are unable to forgive those who “destroyed their youthful ideas.” Le Monde (12 November 2001): 2.
Gavin Boyd, L’Interminable enterrement: le communisme et les intellectuals français depuis 1956 (Paris: Digraphe, 1999), 180, 183–4. Dufay, “François Furet de la Révolution à l’Académie,” 19. Claude Mazauric, Furet's Communist historian opponent in the 1960s, resurrected nineteenth-century French “historical communism”—and Marx's critique of it as premised on “maximalist ‘illusions’” (of the sort Furet attacked in Le Passé d’une illusion). Recent critiques of the Soviet model, Mazauric continued, should take into account Russian revolutionaries’ “overinvestment” in the French model, which may have come back to the French like a “boomerang.” “Aux origines françaises du communisme historique,” Regards 5 (September 1995). Mazauric uses the boomerang metaphor here in exactly the same way as Furet had in Interpreting the French Revolution, p. 12, in a sentence Mazauric had previously quoted as evidence of Furet's politicization of his account: Jacobinisme et révolution (Paris: Editions sociales, 1984), 56–7.
“Mort, le communisme?” 22. See also “L’Indépassable horizon de la démocratie libérale …,” 330.
Edouard Weintrop, “‘En 1917, rien n’était fatal’,” Libération [interview with Martelli] (11 November 1997): 4.
Roger Martelli, Le Rouge et le bleu: Essai sur le communisme dans l’histoire française (Paris: Editions ouvrières, 1995), 94.
Ibid., 116. For Hue, French socialism had a tradition of “violent quarrels of sects and currents” and Stalin's sectarian “rhetorical formulas … fell in perfectly with a sensibility—even more, a French ‘practice.’” As for “‘the cult of the personality’,” “the ‘cult of the supreme being’ is certainly a French invention”: Communisme: la mutation (Paris: Editions Stock, 1995), 78–80: an excuse for Hue, this is damning evidence of the tainted nature of the French revolutionary project for Furet.
Boyd, L’Interminable enterrement, 176.
“Le Marxisme, une source de fraicheur et de modernité” [interview with Hue], Libération (15 May 1998): 12.
Pascal Virot, “Le Parti communiste évolue en ordre disperse,” Libération (27 March 2000): 23.
Roger Martelli, Le Communisme, autrement (Paris: Editions Syllepse, 1998), 235–43.
Ibid., 249–52. This critique was directed as much at Trotskyites as at the PCF's memory tradition itself. Trotsky's vision of the Bolshevik Revolution as an incomplete revolution thwarted by Stalin kept alive the revolutionary narrative of the incomplete revolution awaiting fulfillment, which Furet denounced. Trotskyites argue for the radical break of Lenin (and Trotsky) from Stalin, while Hue's ally, the historian Martelli, can recognize connections between Lenin's language and practices and those of Stalin (Ibid., 49–55). A return to Leninism informs Trotskyite politics, but Martelli recasts the issue by arguing that even were a return to the practices of Lenin possible, it would not respond to the politics of the twenty-first century (Ibid., 143–4). Martelli sees Trotskyites trapped by an identity predicated upon a constant reaffirmation of their prescient denunciation of Stalinism; they cannot make a “dépassement” of the old party form inherited from Lenin (Ibid., 245).
Ibid., 144–7.
Ibid., 261.
Marc Lazar, Le communisme une passion française (Paris: Perrin, 2002), 173–4.
Dufay, “François Furet de la Révolution à l’Académie,” 19.
Furet, “La France Unie…,”17, 26–7; Furet, “Chronique d’une décomposition,” 93–4. But would Feret, feeling confident that antifascism could not result in philo-Communism in the United States, approve of Paul Berman's use of “antifascist” to summon American left liberals to support the war in Iraq? Daniel Vernet, “Les ‘néoliberaux’, George W. Bush et al. guerre en Irak,” Le Monde (March 10, 2004), 15.