Free Cultural Amnesia by Clive James Page B

trouble, and were morally compromised as a consequence. Not even Camus, a writer whose stature depended on his very real capacity for
    translating his ideals of authenticity into action, was entirely untouched. But at least Camus had the grace to admit that his Resistance activities had not amounted to much, and at least he had
    the humanity to deplore the excesses of the post-Liberation witch-hunt against the more shameless collaborators. Sartre, whose underground activities had never amounted to anything except a
    secret meeting on Wednesday to decide whether there should be another meeting the following Tuesday, not only claimed the status of Resistance veteran but called down vengeance on people whose
    behaviour had not really been all that much more reprehensible than his own. The sad truth was that he, even more conspicuously than Camus, owed his wartime fame as awriter
    and thinker to Nazi tolerance, for which a price had to be paid. The price was to lace one’s eloquence with a judiciously timed silence. The trick was to pay up and make it look like
    compulsion. So it was, but only if you considered your career as indispensable—something artists find it all too easy to do. They are even encouraged to, in the name of an ideal.
    When you consider the mental calibre of the people involved, Paris under the Occupation thus becomes the
    twentieth century’s premier field of study in which to reach the depressing conclusion that even the most liberal convictions buckle very easily under totalitarian pressure, unless there
    are extraordinary reserves of character to sustain them. The further consideration—that to deplore the absence of such fortitude might be illiberal in itself—is more depressing still,
    but should be faced. Apart from permanent outsiders such as homosexuals, petty thieves, and the very poor, only young people on their own had a real opportunity to be brave under the Occupation,
    and even they had to be saints to take it when death was the likely result. Behind the Nazi show of tact in Paris was the threat of absolute violence. The threat rarely had to be made actual. The
    threatened were too smart. Their smartness was well-known to the Nazis who ran the show, some of whom were great admirers of French culture. Receptions were held regularly at that most
    fashionable of restaurants, the Tour d’Argent. French cultural figures who turned up met Nazis who seemed well aware that Cocteau was more refined than anything they had at home. Cocteau,
    who attended more than once, was slow to realize that once should have been enough.
    Wartime Paris was a moral crucible. Aron was out of it, and we don’t even have to ask ourselves how he would have
    behaved had he been in it. (We have to ask ourselves about ourselves, but not about him.) He would have been dead. Untouched and untainted in England, he could prepare his comeback. He came back
    as a commentator in the newspapers and magazines, deploying his rare gift of making a nuanced, learned and unfailingly critical analysis attractive as journalism. Because of him, the advocates of
    the seductive fantasy that the imperialism of the West was the most ruthless imperialism affecting Europe did not have it all their own way. But it took a long, hard slog before the illusion
    began to be dispelled that somehow Sartre was the seriousthinker about politics and Aron the dilettante. At the heart of the anomaly was the almost universally shared
    assumption that those who favoured the declaredly progressive consensus were working for the betterment of mankind, while those who believed that liberal democracy was a better bet were working
    against it. Helping to make Aron even more unpalatable to the entrenched pseudo-left was his expertise in sociology: he actually knew something, for example, about how industries ran, how houses
    got built, and how ordinary people earned the money to pay for their groceries. A respect for humble fact is one of the qualities that keep