THE ILLUSION THAT FAILED

It seems unnecessary to observe that it wasn’t always this way. In fact, even within living memory, it wasn’t this way. The English publication of The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century reminds us that it was only two years ago that Francois Furet, the leading historian of the French Revolution, died in France at age seventy. And Furet, like his intellectual precursor Alexis de Tocqueville, was someone who took history seriously — using a frank and impartial appraisal of the past to guide how we should live now.

Of course, even in his own time — when most of his peers were dedicated subspecialists or social historians — Furet was something of a throwback to the grand historiographical tradition of the nineteenth century, with its focus on politics and personal and intellectual forces. The gruff Furet, who taught at both the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, stood alone for many years in an effort to moderate pride in the French Revolution, and he became the most improbable of cultural icons. His work, which placed him at the center of French national discourse, became one of the most important forces in reshaping France’s modern understanding of itself.

In the 1960s and 1970s most French schoolchildren were spoon-fed a Marxist hagiography of the Revolution. Before Furet, the events of 1789 were presented as the inevitable clash of economic forces: a rising bourgeoisie casting aside the ancien regime that was the by-product of an agricultural society. The totalitarian violence of the Jacobin Terror of 1793, for example, was seen as a patriotic attempt to secure popular rule by unifying the state. The 1927 interpretation of the historian Albert Mathiez, parroted in textbooks for decades, simply projected Soviet propaganda onto the France of 1793, justifying the murderous tactics of Robespierre’s Committee on Public Safety as an understandable consequence of civil and foreign war.

It took great courage for Furet to confront this catechism. In numerous volumes, notably 1964’s The French Revolution (co-authored with Denis Richet), 1978’s Interpreting the French Revolution, and 1986’s Marx and the French Revolution, Furet rejected economic determinism. The 1789 Revolution, he argued, may have begun by calling for representative government in the face of a monarchy increasingly bent on consolidating power. But within four years, any hope for a liberal democracy was dashed with the Terror. Despite faulty historiographical claims to the contrary, the Terror was a response neither to class conflict (there was none between Jacobins and other revolutionaries) nor to external aggression (the most violent stage occurred after the foreign threat had receded). Rather, Furet suggested, the best explanation is to be found in the work of such nineteenth-century thinkers as Tocqueville and Augustin Cochin — who saw the Jacobins not as ordinary tyrants but as a new type of men, so enamored of certain intellectual ideals that they were willing to sacrifice their countrymen in the name of regenerating mankind.

Drawing on this powerful insight, Furet turned in his last work, The Passing of an Illusion, to the fundamental historical puzzle of the twentieth century: the lure of communism. When it first appeared in French in 1995, the book was a bestseller — in part because Furet demonstrated that he understood the Communist appeal (he had been a card-carrying member of the French party until 1956) and yet also understood how difficult it is, from the perspective of the 1990s, to grasp why anyone ever believed in the murderous ideology.

But believe they did. At the peak of the Communist illusion, not even its opponents expected it to be “erased” (as Furet puts it). As he did in his works on the French Revolution, Furet rejects class warfare as the explanation. Rather, using a mix of political philosophy and history, Furet suggests that all liberal democracies are prone to a curious mistrust of the results of democracy.

The critics of classical liberalism, Jean Jacques Rousseau first among them, had warned that the individuals created by liberalism are purely economic characters, detached from all community and the common good. And indeed, what liberalism claims as its greatest virtue — the equality of these self-interested and atomized individuals — is continuously undermined as their competition with one another leads to inequalities of property. Thus, during the French Revolution, the Jacobins (who began as bourgeois partisans of the market economy) turned against the new aristocracy of wealth and embraced what Furet describes as the most potent idea in modern democracy: the revolutionary ideal.

That ideal was born from a profound arrogance about the omnipotence of the popular will and the powerful illusion that man can create a new social contract embodying the ideal society. But it was also plagued by a profound self-doubt — for if democratic equality will always produce aristocratic inequality, the need for revolution is at best questionable. And the interplay of these two — revolutionary arrogance and revolutionary self-doubt — continued in France throughout the nineteenth century (as Furet notes in his classic, The French Revolution).

But the unprecedented destruction of the First World War, which seemed to indict the moral underpinnings of liberal democracy, quickly overcame any self-doubt about the need for revolution, and modern revolutionary arrogance was reborn in 1917 in the most unlikely of venues: Russia, the most backward nation in Europe. By appropriating the Jacobin precedent, the Bolsheviks claimed a historical analogy to the French Revolution. Lenin’s terror was excused or even lauded as the reincarnation of Robespierre’s, and Lenin’s promise of a new future for mankind in Russia seemed the fulfillment of the French Revolution’s similar promise.

Claiming to be both the highest scientific development and the highest moral sense, communism, Furet argues,

appeared to unite science and morals — a miraculous combination of two types of reason drawn from two different universes. Convinced that they are accomplishing the laws of history, militants also fight the egoism of the capitalist world in the name of the universality of man. They swaddle their deeds in a new kind of conscience, exalted as a civic virtue. . . . All Communists believed, or still believe, that they experience in advance the reconciliation of humanity with itself.

The antibourgeois sentiment and revolutionary arrogance that generated the Russian Revolution also fueled the rise of Mussolini and Hitler in the next decades. But the existence of fascism and Nazism, Furet notes, proved as fortuitous for communism as World War I had been. By the late 1920s, through Stalin’s focus on “socialism in one country” and battles with Trotsky and other former heroes of the Revolution, the Soviet Union lost much of its appeal in Western Europe. Weakened on the homefront as well by the abysmal failure of collectivization and by the purges of millions of citizens, Stalin was forced to deflect attention to the external threat: The Soviet Union was the sole bulwark against fascism, and anyone who criticized it was offering aid to Hitler.

With anti-fascism as its cause, the Soviet Union was able to attract help. Indeed, the Spanish Civil War was offered as proof that the Communists were at the forefront of the fight against the fascists, and through “Popular Front” alliances with the Western European Left, non-Communist intellectuals added prestige to Stalin’s tyranny. Even certain romantic Catholic intellectuals found Stalin’s vision of community appealing. The 1935 Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture — which sang the praises of Soviet humanism — featured such notables as Louis Aragon, Andre Malraux, Andre Gide, Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Aldous Huxley, and E. M. Forster.

Stalin had done nothing to deserve the praise of these intellectuals or the sacrifices of the international brigades in the Spanish Civil War. And his subsequent actions quickly brought the Communist cause into disrepute. If reports of show trials and mass executions could be dismissed by Western intellectuals as fascist propaganda, Stalin’s treaty with Hitler in 1939 could not. This event unmasked Stalin as an old-fashioned Russian tyrant bent on regaining the territories lost by Russia in 1918. Stalin’s alleged hatred of fascism soon gave way to support for Hitler; the humiliated parties of the Third International were hard pressed to explain why they suddenly dropped their rallying cry of anti-fascism. The doubts that had kept fellow travelers from becoming full-fledged Communists came to the fore, and many felt that they had been Stalin’s dupes.

But history came once again to the rescue of the Soviet Union, with the out-break of the Second World War and Hitler’s decision to invade Russia. Stalin was utterly unprepared to fight Hitler, having purged his elite military units in the late 1930s and ignored dozens of warnings before about the impending German attack in 1941. But he nonetheless reaped the benefits of the war. The defeat of fascism gave Marxism-Leninism a monopoly over the revolutionary spirit that began with the French Revolution, and the casualties of the war came to seem martyrs to the Marxist theology of history. With the defeat of Hitler, the Soviet Union earned unprecedented legitimacy in the West. The sacrifices of the Russian people helped cleanse the Soviets of their crimes in the eyes of the world. Communism, discredited after the Nazi-Soviet pact, was born again, and Western admiration reached its peak in the years after the Second World War.

Of course, this admiration was not shared by those in Eastern Europe who increasingly saw communism for what it was: just another name for Stalin’s totalitarian command. So how were intellectuals in Paris and Rome able to bring themselves to deny the reality of Eastern Europe, deny the Gulag, declare Stalin the genius who understood the march of history and swear that proletarian science was coming into being?

The answer lies, in part, in the unhappiness of the intellectuals of Europe at the rising Cold War struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States, which foreshadowed Europe’s own geostrategic decline. In the face of their shrinking influence, many found anti-Americanism easier to accept than anti-communism. Still scarred by the war, left-leaning intellectuals were anti-fascist, not anti-Communist. Loyal to Stalin because of “his” victory over Nazism, they mistook American anti-communism — caricatured as “McCarthyism” — as a form of the fascism that they saw as latent in liberal democracy.

Stalin had managed to prolong the power of the revolutionary idea to his own benefit, but the willful ignorance of the Western Left to the true character of Stalinism was severely shaken by Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev. By denouncing Stalin’s cult of personality and rehabilitating the “nationalist” Communists that Stalin had purged in his final years, Khrushchev was simply seeking to eliminate the excesses of Stalinism while keeping the Communist system firmly in place. But his efforts at incremental reform, like those of Mikhail Gorbachev more than three decades later, had consequences beyond his ken.

By allowing the intelligentsia to resurface, Khrushchev introduced the West to something it hadn’t known: the anti-Communist intellectual, notably Alexander Solzhenitsyn. And when Khrushchev was forced to act in the old Stalinist mold, he lacked Stalin’s prestige from World War II to support him. When, for example, in 1956, the Communists in Hungary could no longer control a workers’ uprising, he had little choice but to seize the country. Khrushchev’s actions were reminiscent of the worst days of Stalinism (including claiming the justification of “fraternal aid for the Hungarian working class battling counterrevolution”). The suppression of the Hungarian uprising deflated the Communist claim to moral superiority, and in the years that followed, the Western Left increasingly rejected the Communist idea as embodied in the Soviet Union.

The history Francois Furet lays out in The Passing of an Illusion tapers off dramatically after the Hungarian uprising, devoting just forty of its six hundred pages to the last three decades of the Soviet Union. But Furet does manage to highlight the paradoxes of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989: Communism, which claimed to be the final pronouncement of history, was condemned by history to vanish; communism is no longer the future of the liberal democracy it once claimed that it would inevitably both fulfill and supersede.

With The Passing of an Illusion, Furet has given us as his final gift a history that is comprehensive and compelling. To be sure, the book contains a few errors: Stalin did not tenaciously support Tito’s claims to Trieste, nor was the tiff with Yugoslavia first crisis of communism outside Russia (after World War I, there were coups in Budapest and Munich; in 1939, the attempt at Communist control of Finland failed). So too, Furet might have strengthened his argument by a greater focus on Western Marxism outside France, especially in Italy.

Nevertheless, the book provides an insightful and accurate account of our century’s illiberal past. And — with his warning that the end of the Soviets does not mean the revolutionary ideal will never well up again in liberal democracy — Furet’s The Passing of an Illusion provides a reminder of how the discipline of history ought to work, how it can still work in the hands of a courageous master: a frank and impartial appraisal of the past to guide how we should live now.

Kenneth R. Weinstein is associate editor of Azure in Washington, D.C.