La Guerre des ecrivains 1940-1953 (review)

Sapiro, Gisèle. La Guerre des écrivains 1940-1953. Paris: Fayard, 1999. Pp. 807.

The fate of the intellectual has been a central concern of cultural critics in recent years. Historians, philosophers, sociologists, and literary critics are asking what cultural forces forged the intellectual, what contingencies gave the intellectual the authority to speak, and what it meant to be an intellectual in a century marked by violent political divisions. In France, where intellectuals have been closely associated with State power and national crises, the interrogation of the role of the intellectual is invariably linked to questions of responsibility and justice. No moment in French history more clearly embodied this than the four years of Nazi occupation and Vichy government collaboration. More than any other moment in the century, it was a period where the intellectual could not not be committed. As Gisèle Sapiro reminds us, quoting Michel Leiris, it was a period when intellectuals seemed incapable of holding their tongues. The years of the Occupation and the postwar purge, during which writers of both sides paid with their lives for what they had written, have provided a particularly fertile ground for reflections on the role and status of the intellectual. In the voluminous and brilliant La Guerre des écrivains, Gisèle Sapiro returns to this period in [End Page 116] order to investigate, from a sociologist’s perspective, the composition of the intellectual field from 1940 to 1953, the year of the last amnesty for writers condemned of collaboration. Her goal is to move from the traditional study of the intellectual as a messianic figure to an analysis of writers she calls “intermediary cases” and of the institutions that gave these writers some of their authority. Gisèle Sapiro’s study reopens the dossier on the intellectual’s responsibility during the Occupation, but contrary to many contemporary studies, it offers neither a confirmation nor a revision of the verdicts that the purge courts and later generations brought on collaborationist–or even attentiste–writers. Rather, La Guerre des écrivains is a cool reflection on the myriad factors that shape a writer’s political commitment.