My generation of French writers has a powerful image, dated June
1979, etched forever in our memories: that of an exhausted Jean-Paul
Sartre climbing the steps of the Élysée Palace alongside Raymond Aron,
his former friend and longtime intellectual opponent, both escorted by a
tall, long-haired young philosopher named André Glucksmann. French
president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing waited for them at the top. He had
heard their demands and was ready to open the French borders to more
than 100,000 refugees fleeing the Communist regime in Vietnam in
makeshift rafts, much like the Syrians of today.
This essential moment in French intellectual history, and in European
public life—inspired by Glucksmann—came to represent the end of extreme
ideological conflicts and recognition of their absurdity when immediate
and real evils confronted the conscience. Symbolically, it marked the
end of Marxism, a worldview that had helped forge the young Glucksmann,
and which Sartre had supported his entire life. Glucksmann was a leading
voice of an emerging generation of thinkers, the New Philosophers. His
writings not only renounced Marxism but also accused it of providing a
theoretical foundation for some of the large-scale massacres of the
twentieth century. Aron had always made this charge, though less
forcefully. French classical liberals, alongside Aron, tended to be
pessimistic, worried about the likelihood of the USSR’s eventual victory
over democracy. But Glucksmann—similar to neoconservative Americans in
this regard—believed Communism could be beaten with human rights,
pitting morals against suffering.
André Glucksmann, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Raymond Aron in 1979
From then on, across a range of essays (including for
City Journal, to which he regularly contributed) and books (including
The Master Thinkers, on the roots of totalitarianism in German thought, and his autobiography,
Une rage d’enfant),
Glucksmann became the voice of all victims of every totalitarian
ideology, up to and including Islamism, which he identified as a form of
fascism in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks in New York. But
another opponent of human rights also reared its head, one that
Glucksmann had not predicted: cultural relativism. The West chose not to
intervene in support of the Chechens while the Russians were crushing
them because, well, the Russians aren’t like us, you see. We could never
impose our humanist ideals upon them. Glucksmann found himself at a
loss before this hypocrisy, which, more often than not, served as a mask
for realpolitik. He refused ever to accept realpolitik or moral
evasions. The West, he lamented, tended to rally to the cause of human
rights when faced with weak regimes but stood idly by when confronted
with powerful governments, such as those of the Russians or the Chinese.
Glucksmann was a historical exemplar of public morality—and also of
the relative inefficiency of this morality. A quote from French poet
Charles Péguy comes to mind: Moralists, he said, “have clean hands but,
in a manner of speaking, actually no hands.” Glucksmann kept his hands
clean until the end, yet without indulging in self-deception. He was a
righteous, pure man—a rare man.
Guy Sorman, a City Journal
contributing editor and French public intellectual, is the author of many books, including Economics Does Not Lie.
