The Burden of Responsibility : Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century

Using the lives of the three outstanding French intellectuals of the twentieth century, renowned historian Tony Judt offers a unique look at how intellectuals can ignore political pressures and demonstrate a heroic commitment to personal integrity and moral responsibility unfettered by the difficult political exigencies of their time.

Through the prism of the lives of Leon Blum, Albert Camus, and Raymond Aron, Judt examines pivotal issues in the history of contemporary French society-antisemitism and the dilemma of Jewish identity, political and moral idealism in public life, the Marxist moment in French thought, the traumas of decolonization, the disaffection of the intelligentsia, and the insidious quarrels rending Right and Left. Judt focuses particularly on Blum's leadership of the Popular Front and his stern defiance of the Vichy governments, on Camus's part in the Resistance and Algerian War, and on Aron's cultural commentary and opposition to the facile acceptance by many French intellectuals of communism's utopian promise. Severely maligned by powerful critics and rivals, each of these exemplary figures stood fast in their principles and eventually won some measure of personal and public redemption.

Judt constructs a compelling portrait of modern French intellectual life and politics. He challenges the conventional account of the role of intellectuals precisely because they mattered in France, because they could shape public opinion and influence policy. In Blum, Camus, and Aron, Judt finds three very different men who did not simply play the role, but evinced a courage and a responsibility in public life that far outshone their contemporaries.

"An eloquent and instructive study of intellectual courage in the face of what the author persuasively describes as intellectual irresponsibility."-Richard Bernstein, New York Times

Tony Judt is the University Professor of European History at New York University and the author of several books, including, most recently, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945.

Leon Blum, Albert Camus, and Raymond Aron might seem an unlikely combination. Blum was a fin-de-siecle aesthete who became the spiritual and political leader of the French non-Communist Left in the first half of this century. Camus, best known to millions of readers worldwide for his novels "The Stranger" and "The Plague," was a wartime Resistance figure who played a prominent part in post-1945 intellectual life in France before dying tragically young in a car crash in 1960. Aron, a contemporary of Jean-Paul Sartre in the brilliant intellectual generation of interwar France, was a political theorist, journalist, and critic of Communism who made a major contribution to the recent revival of liberal thought in contemporary France. In "The Burden of Responsibility," Tony Judt offers a distinctive and original reinterpretation of the writings and public role of these three men, arguing that they have much in common. Despite the great differences in their backgrounds, their interests, and their views, all three were men of integrity who took seriously their responsibility as public intellectuals.

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