JEAN-FRANÇOIS REVEL

La Tentation Totalitaire

1977

THE NEW YORK TIMES commissioned me in 1977 to write a profile of Jean-François Revel. Having written a column for ten years or so in the weekly magazine L’Express, he was a ringleader of French intellectual life, holding the fort with Raymond Aron, his colleague on the magazine. I spoke of “his steady and witty onslaught against humbug in all its forms.” He had committed himself to defending one of the simplest and most urgent propositions, that “democracy is diminishing to the point of extinction, and this ought not to pass unchallenged.” Now was the time for all good men to come to the aid of freedom and sanity.

La Tentation Totalitaire (translation unnecessary) is a polemic against what he considered a permanent infatuation with Stalinism. Appeasement of Hitler had been a mistake for which Europe had paid a very great price. Appeasement of Soviet Communism was a mistake of the same order and it came in numerous forms, for instance Euro-Communism, Finlandisation and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The words “Americans Go Home” repeatedly chalked on the walls in French cities or the hundreds of thousands demonstrating against the positioning of cruise missiles in what was then West Germany, made no distinction between fear and hope. Across the continent, the slogan “Better red than dead” became believable and popular because of, or in spite of, the crafty implication that surrender to the Soviet Union was the pathway to survival and peace. For reasons too profound for psychological treatment, Revel warned, free human beings wish, at least with some part of themselves, to be relieved of their freedom, even if they will have to be sorry for it afterwards.

Jean-François inscribed this book, “Pour David Pryce-Jones, en souvenir de nos agréables entretiens à Paris, bien amicalement J-F Revel le 2 Septembre 1977” (translation still unnecessary). He encouraged me to ring him up whenever I was in Paris. He looked for dragons to slay, and he slew them, occasionally taking me as a spectator. At one literary gathering, he did not let the film director Agnès Varda get away with saying that she never read Solzhenitsyn because he was on the Right. One other time, we were at his publishers. In the hall of the building, a writer of some fame greeted him but he did not reply, because as he later explained, the man had been a collaborator in the war. “He has the look of someone who enjoys life too much to want to spend it picking fights,” was my way of saying in the profile that he had long since given up bothering about his waistline in favor of good food in good restaurants. The most unlikely of the dozen or so books he signed for me is Un Festin en Paroles (Putting banquets into words), published in 1979 and nothing less than a history of gastronomy, or as he expressed it on the title page, “Pour Clarissa et David, cette promenade littéraire à travers l’archéologie de la cuisine.” A few days after publication of the profile, I received a telegram. “Merci pour ce magnifique article stop je vous promets de maigrir sans maigrir amitiés Jean-François,” which might go into English as “I promise to thin down without thinning down on friendship.”