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IN THE SHADOW OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMP: DAVID ROUSSET AND THE LIMITS OF APOLITICISM IN POSTWAR FRENCH THOUGHT*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 March 2014

EMMA KUBY
EMMA KUBY*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Northern Illinois University E-mail: ekuby@niu.edu
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Abstract

In 1949, French intellectual David Rousset publicly called on Nazi camp survivors to bear witness to the existence of a “concentration camp universe” in the Soviet Union. Rousset, a former Buchenwald internee and an influential author, demanded that his fellow survivors identify in unqualified terms with the suffering of Soviet prisoners. Even as he colluded with Cold War governmental agencies, Rousset claimed that the imperative to oppose concentration camps existed “beyond” political or ideological commitments. This essay analyzes the arguments about suffering, politics, and memory made by Rousset and his contemporary critics, notably Jean-Paul Sartre. It responds to Rousset's admirers who have overlooked distinctive aspects of his project: his rhetoric of apoliticism, his demand for complete identification with victims, his exclusive interest in limit-case abjection as opposed to injustice in general, his interpretation of the Nazi camps that centered on forced labor rather than on genocide, and his avoidance of the language of human rights.

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Articles
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , April 2014 , pp. 147 - 173
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

This essay has benefited from the incisive comments and questions of many readers, including participants in the Cornell University European History Colloquium and the University of Wisconsin French History Group. I particularly wish to thank Brian Bockelman, Laird Boswell, Carolyn J. Dean, Peter Holquist, Isabel V. Hull, Steven L. Kaplan, Dominick LaCapra, Samuel Moyn, Mary Louise Roberts, Peter Staudenmaier, and the three anonymous reviewers for the journal.

References

1 David Rousset, “Au secours des déportés dans les camps soviétiques. Un appel de David Rousset aux anciens déportés des camps nazis,” Le Figaro littéraire, 12 Nov. 1949. This text is reproduced in Rousset, David and Copfermann, Émile, David Rousset: Une vie dans le siècle, fragments d'autobiographie (Paris, 1991), 198–209Google Scholar, and also Lignes, 2 (May 2000), 143–60.

2 Rousset's depiction of the Nazi camps was influential for Hannah Arendt, but their approaches to Nazi–Soviet commonality differed significantly. Arendt, moreover, was adamant that shared experiences of suffering provided no basis for a post-1945 “political community” among survivors. See Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism, rev. edn (New York, 1973), 436–55Google Scholar, 441.

3 Pierre Daix, “Pierre Daix, matricule 59.807 à Mauthausen, répond à David Rousset,” Les Lettres françaises, 17 Nov. 1949.

4 However, see Wieder, Thomas, “L'Affaire David Rousset et la figure du déporté: Les Rescapés des camps nazis contre les camps soviétiques (1949–1959),” in Bruttmann, Tal, Joly, Laurent, and Wieviorka, Annette, eds., Qu'est-ce qu'un déporté? Histoire et mémoires des déportations de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale (Paris, 2009), 311–31Google Scholar. Numerous works provide brief overviews of the controversy. Christofferson, Michael Scott, French Intellectuals against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (New York, 2004), 32–35Google Scholar, is especially clear. See also Emma Kuby, “Between Humanism and Terror: The Problem of Political Violence in Postwar France, 1944–1962,” Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 2011, 190–242. More has been written concerning Rousset's major influence on postwar French understandings of the Nazi camps: see Azouvi, François, Le Mythe du grand silence: Auschwitz, les Français, la mémoire (Paris, 2012), 101–35Google Scholar; Moyn, Samuel, “From L’Univers concentrationnaire to the Jewish Genocide: Pierre Vidal-Naquet and the Treblinka Controversy,” in Bourg, Julian, ed., After the Deluge: New Perspectives on the Intellectual and Cultural History of Postwar France (Lanham, MD, 2004), 277–324Google Scholar; Moyn, A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France (Waltham, MA, 2005), 52–7; Annette Wieviorka, “L’expression ‘camp de concentration’ au 20e siècle,” Vingtième siècle, 54 (April–June 1997), 4–12; and Wieviorka, Déportation et génocide: Entre la mémoire et l'oubli (Paris, 1992), 182 and 285–6.

5 Judt, Tony, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956 (Berkeley, 1992), 113–16Google Scholar; Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York, 2005), 214–15.

6 Todorov, Tzvetan, Mémoire du mal, tentation du bien: Enquête sur le siècle (Paris, 2000), 161–72Google Scholar, 167, 163, 164. Todorov also discusses Rousset in Todorov, Tzvetan, Les Abus de la mémoire (Paris, 1995), 43–9Google Scholar; Todorov, Tzvetan, “Une éducation concentrationnaire,” Lignes, 2 (May 2000), 71–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Le Cour Grandmaison, Olivier, “Sur L’Univers concentrationnaire,” Lignes, 2 (May 2000), 41–2Google Scholar.

8 Dean, Carolyn J., Aversion and Erasure: The Fate of the Victim after the Holocaust (Ithaca, 2010), 80–89Google Scholar; Moyn, A Holocaust Controversy, 167.

9 Todorov, Mémoire du mal, 164–5.

10 Déclaration de M. Gérard Rosenthal, Stenotypie (Cabinet Bluet), fasciscule 4, Cour d'appel de Paris, 11ème chambre, Audience du 10 juin 1953. F Delta 1880/56/3/2, Fonds David Rousset, Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine, Nanterre, France (hereafter Rousset BDIC).

11 See Moyn, Samuel, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA, 2010), 71–83Google Scholar.

12 Further biographical detail on Rousset's early years, as well as his trajectory after the 1950s, can be found in Rousset and Copfermann, David Rousset.

13 Rousset and Copfermann, David Rousset, 61.

14 The “fragments” of Les Jours de notre mort appeared in Les Temps modernes, 6 (March 1946), 1015–44, and Les Temps modernes, 7 (April 1946), 1231–61. Other pieces by Rousset included “La signification de l'affaire Dotkins–Hessel,” Les Temps modernes, 6 (March 1946), 1084–88; “Humour noir,” Les Temps modernes, 32 (May 1948), 2092–100; the excerpt “Nos positions politiques (interview publiée dans Le Semeur),” Les Temps modernes, 34 (July 1948), 189–91; and an 18 June 1948 interview between Sartre and Rousset, “Entretien sur la politique,” Les Temps modernes, 36 (Sept. 1948), 385–428. This interview never aired because the Temps modernes show was cancelled; a transcript appears in Rousset and Copfermann, David Rousset, 89–97.

15 D’Astorg, Bertrand, “Réflexions d'un survivant,” Esprit, 139 (Nov. 1947), 691–6, 69Google Scholar.

16 Rousset, David, L’Univers concentrationnaire (Paris, 1946), 182Google Scholar. Some critics have made a great deal of Rousset's reference here to incommunicability, along with his claim that he wrote Les Jours de notre mort (Paris, 1947) as a novel rather than as nonfiction “out of distrust of words” (ibid., 11). But these turns of phrase are better understood as commonplaces or clichés, as indeed they already were in the mid-1940s: Rousset was never overly troubled by the problems involved in representing trauma.

17 Rousset, L’Univers concentrationnaire, 184.

18 Ibid., 181.

19 Ibid., 186–7. Samuel Moyn sees this insistence on Rousset's part as a precursor to contemporary radical political theory, notably that of Giorgio Agamben: he calls Agamben “Rousset's most significant if unwitting disciple today.” This formulation neglects a difference between Rousset's assertion that “concentration camps,” wherever they exist, are the same sort of thing (and, now that they have been invented, will always remain a possibility) and Agamben's assertion that Auschwitz is “everywhere”: these may both be “universalizing” appropriations of the Nazi project but they are otherwise significantly distinct. Rousset rejected any formulation that even vaguely endorsed the idea that Auschwitz was “everywhere”: indeed he insisted that drawing analogies between the forms of injustice, violence, state control, and suffering present in capitalist society and the Nazi camps or the Soviet Gulag was a dangerous conflation of what was, to his mind, the single most essential distinction in the post-1945 world. His crusade against “the camps” was not metaphorical and was not an element of a broader critique of modernity. See Moyn, A Holocaust Controversy, 160.

20 Ibid., 109.

21 In “Le peuple nu,” Lignes, 2 (May 2000), 13–25, Alain Brossat overlooks the intensely hierarchical dimension to Rousset's depiction of camp society and insists that Rousset shows us an undifferentiated peuple-masse. Brossat appears to be approaching Rousset through Georges Bataille's reading of him, which strongly reflected Bataille's own interest in themes of abjection and limit-transgression. See Bataille, Georges, “Réflexions sur le bourreau et la victime,” in Bataille, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 11 (Paris, 1988), 262–7Google Scholar.

22 Rousset, David, Le Pitre ne rit pas (Paris, 1948)Google Scholar.

23 Rousset, L’Univers concentrationnaire, 51. Moyn, A Holocaust Controversy, 52–63, provides an important discussion of this issue. Donald Reid analyzes the similar position of one of Rousset's key allies in “Germaine Tillion and Resistance to the Vichy Syndrome,” History and Memory, 15 (2003), 36–63, 45.

24 Rousset, “Le sens de notre combat,” in Paul Barton [pseud.], L’Institution concentrationnaire en Russie (1930–1957) (Paris, 1959), 7–32, 15.

25 “Appel du RDR,” Franc-tireur, 27 Feb. 1948.

26 The original comité d'initiative included Rousset, Sartre, Georges Altman, Paul Fraisse, Daniel Bénédite, and Roger Stéphane, among others. See Ariane Chebel d'Appollonia's overview in Histoire politique des intellectuels en France (1944–1954), vol. 2, Le temps de l'engagement (Brussels, 1991), 110–16. On Sartre's short-lived high hopes for the RDR see also Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre (Paris, 1985), 390–407.

27 Rousset, David, “Notre programme,” La Gauche, 1 (15–30 May 1948)Google Scholar.

28 Rousset, David, “D’abord, gagner la bataille,” La Gauche, 7 (Oct. 1948)Google Scholar; see also Sartre, Jean-Paul, Rousset, David, and Rosenthal, Gérard, Entretiens sur la politique (Paris, 1949)Google Scholar.

29 Rousset, David, “Non! La Résistance n’avait pas voulu ça!” La Gauche, 5 (Aug. 1948)Google Scholar.

30 Rousset, David, “La révolution doit se réaliser dans la pratique démocratique des travailleurs manuels et intellectuels,” La Gauche, 10 (Dec. 1948)Google Scholar.

31 The best historical overview of this phenomenon remains Rigoulot, Pierre, Les Paupières lourdes, les Français face au goulag: Aveuglements et indignations (Paris, 1991)Google Scholar.

32 See Serge, Victor, Destin d'une Révolution: U.R.S.S. 1917–1936 (Paris, 1937)Google Scholar; Camus, Albert, “Réponses à Emmanuel d'Astier de la Vigerie,” reprinted in Camus, Actuelles: Ecrits politiques (Paris, 1950)Google Scholar; Serge, Victor (posthumous), “Pages de journal,” Les Temps modernes, 44 (June 1949), 973–93Google Scholar, and 45 (July 1949), 71–96; and Lefort, Claude, “Kravchenko et le problème de l'URSS,” Les Temps modernes, 29 (Feb. 1948), 1490–1516Google Scholar. Other important voices included Boris Souvarine and Arthur Koestler.

33 Wall, Irwin M., The United States and the Making of Postwar France, 1945–1954 (New York, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 151.

34 See ibid., 151–4; Malaurie, Guillaume and Terrée, Emmanuel, L’Affaire Kravchenko (Paris, 1982)Google Scholar; and Rioux, Jean-Pierre, “Le procès Kravechenko,” in Dioujeva, Natacha and George, François, eds., Staline à Paris (Paris, 1982), 148–69Google Scholar. For an example of disdainful contemporary treatment of Kravchenko on the “progressive” French left see Albert Béguin, “La bonne affaire Kravchenko,” Esprit, 155 (May 1949), 699.

35 Le Procès Kravchenko contre les Lettres françaises: Compte rendu des audiences d'après la sténographie (Paris, 1949), 701–3, provides the lengthy witness list.

36 Rousset's “Appeal” was directed only to “political” deportees—for whom deportation now provided impeccable evidence of antifascist credentials—but he did not disdain the support of “racial” deportees. Indeed he privately demanded it, in troubling terms. In a 17 July 1950 letter to Julius Margoline, he asserted that Jewish survivors had an obligation to support his initiative since “they less than anyone can compromise with the concentration camp system . . . Such a compromise would be fatal for all of us, but above all, perhaps, for the Jewish people. I allow myself to add, because you and I understand one another on these questions, that such an attitude of ‘neutrality’ on the part of our Jewish friends would not only risk being utterly misunderstood, but could become—at least in today's sick Europe—an argument in favor of anti-Semitism. I am among those who have always fought to affirm their solidarity with persecuted Jews, but who demands today that there be this complete solidarity among former victims, Jewish or not.” F Delta 1880/56/1/2, Rousset BDIC.

37 He did occasionally point out differences between the two—but only to suggest that the Soviet system was still more extensive than the Nazi one, or as evidence that testimonies he produced about the Gulag were not (as communist critics charged) deviously retitled pieces by Nazi camp survivors. Cf. Margarete Buber-Neumann, “Qui est pire, Satan ou Belzébuth?” Le Figaro littéraire, 25 Feb. 1950.

38 Rousset, “Au secours des déportés.”

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid.

41 Lalieu, Olivier, La Déportation fragmentée: Les anciens déportés parlent de politique, 1945–1980 (Paris, 1994), 32Google Scholar. See also Lalieu, “L’invention du ‘devoir de mémoire,’” Vingtième siècle, 69 (2001), 83–94.

42 The Père Michel Riquet, for example, raised the issue repeatedly within the Fédération nationale des déportées et internés résistants et patriotes and in “A quelques inquiets,” La Croix, 21 Sept. 1948.

43 Rousset, “Au secours des déportés.”

44 Déclaration de M. David Rousset, Stenotypie (Cabinet Bluet), fasciscule 1, Cour d'appel de Paris, 11ème chambre, Audience du 3 juin 1953. F Delta 1880/56/3/2, Rousset BDIC.

45 Rousset, David, Bernard, Théo, and Rosenthal, Gérard, Pour la vérité sur les camps concentrationnaires (Un procès antistalinien à Paris)(Paris, 1990), 243–4Google Scholar.

46 Notably, Rousset passionately defended the 1956 Hungarian uprising. His Fifth Republic political career—he identified as a gaulliste de gauche and represented l'Isère in the Assembly from 1968 to 1973—involved him in numerous partisan debates.

47 Rousset, “Le sens de notre combat,” 21 and 27. Rousset was explicit that French torture in Algeria was a crime. But in insisting that, ultimately, the most pressing question to be posed about the French military's waging of the conflict was whether detention conditions for Algerian prisoners merited the label concentrationnaire, he and other CICRC members virtually guaranteed in advance that the organization's findings—which in fact included extensive documentation of torture—would be reported in the French press under headlines like “Algeria: ‘No Concentration Camp Regime,’ Certifies the Delegation of Former Deportees,” Le Populaire, 27–8 July 1957.

48 Stenotypie, “Audience Vendredi 1 décembre 1950, 17ème chambre correctionnelle,” 82. F Delta 1880/56/2/1, Rousset BDIC; reproduced in Rousset, Bernard, and Rosenthal, Pour la vérité, 39. I henceforth cite Pour la vérité instead of the archival transcript.

49 David Rousset, “Les camps de concentration seront mis hors la loi,” Le Figaro littéraire, 4 March 1950.

50 Judt, Postwar, 223.

51 Wall, The United States and the Making of Postwar France, 153; cf. Rousset and Copfermann, David Rousset, 109.

52 Jenks, John, British Propaganda and News Media in the Cold War (Edinburgh, 2006), 138–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Rousset also maintained connections with AFL organizer and CIA agent Irving Brown. See Stonor Saunders, Frances, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London, 1999), 68–9Google Scholar, 88; Smith, Giles Scott, The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA, and Post-war American Hegemony (New York, 2002), 96–7Google Scholar and 106; Coleman, Peter, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New York, 1989), 6–7Google Scholar, 37, 49.

53 René Pleven, “Ce qu’ils pensent de l'affaire Kravchenko: René Pleven,” Combat, 4 March 1949.

54 Les amis de la liberté, “Appel à ceux qui veulent rester libres,” 7 May 1951.

55 Denis de Rougemont, “Mesurons nos forces,” Preuves, 2 (April 1951). The piece was excerpted from Rougemont's brochure Les Libertés que nous pouvons perdre (Paris, n.d. [1951]).

56 Parliamentary Undersecretary Christopher Mayhew addressing the UN Economic and Social Council, Oct. 1948, cited in Jenks, British Propaganda and News Media in the Cold War, 137.

57 In certain instances, later in the 1950s, he did refer to humanity as possessed of certain inherent “freedoms.” For example, Rousset, “Le sens de notre combat,” 26.

58 Rousset, “Les camps de concentration seront mis hors la loi.” Rousset's language was not “humanitarian” (in the contemporary sense) any more than it was rights-based: he was uninterested in providing direct aid to the USSR's victims, whom he viewed as political prisoners in no way analogous to those beset by natural disasters or other misfortunes.

59 Léon Blum, “Quand les staliniens plaident coupable,” Le Populaire, 7 March 1950.

60 Statement of Rémy Roure, transcript of “Conference de presse donnée par M. David Rousset mardi 15 novembre 1949.” F Delta 1880/53/2, Rousset BDIC.

61 G.A. [Georges Altman], “Oui ou non, l'univers concentrationnaire existe-t-il en U.R.S.S.?” Franc-tireur, 11 Nov. 1949.

62 André Leroy, “Trois points marqués contre les diviseurs,” Le Patriote résistant, 26 March 1950, emphasis in original.

63 Letter from Robert Antelme to David Rousset, n.d., and attached copy of response to be published. (The latter would appear in Le Figaro littéraire on 19 Nov. as “J’accepte sous conditions.”) F Delta 1880/53/4, Rousset BDIC. Antelme was already moving away from the party at this point.

64 See F.-H. Manhès, “Lettre ouverte du president de la FNDIRP à David Rousset,” Le Patriote résistant, 27 Feb. 1950. On the Auschwitz group, see Lalieu, La Déportation fragmentée, 90–95. The Buchenwald group's condemnation was communicated to Rousset in a 16 Nov. 1949 letter from the Bureau of the amicale. F Delta 1880/53/6, Rousset BDIC.

65 UNADIF (signed by Michel Riquet and Edmond Debeaumarché), “Mise au point,” 27 Nov. 1950. Folder “Manifestations 1950–1951,” 19860581, Art. 24, Archives nationales, Fontainebleau, France. Two federations of French political survivors existed in 1949, the second called the Fédération nationale des déportés et internés de la Résistance (FNDIR). The FNDIR, dominated by noncommunists, offered its “total adhesion” to Rousset's proposal. When UNADIF was formed, FNDIR members also joined it without leaving the FNDIR. On the complicated history of hostilities between the FNDIR and the FNDIRP see Lagrou, Pieter, The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945–1965 (Cambridge, 2000), 225–34Google Scholar.

66 Daix, “Pierre Daix, matricule 59.807 à Mauthausen.”

67 Merleau-Ponty, M. and Sartre, J.-P., “Les jours de notre vie,” Les Temps modernes, 51 (Jan. 1950), 1155Google Scholar.

68 Ibid., 1165.

69 Ibid.

70 Ibid., 1163. Many critics attacked the choice of publishing in Le Figaro littéraire: as Ian H. Birchall points out, Rousset could easily have used Altman's Franc-tireur. Birchall, Sartre against Stalinism (New York, 2004), 110. See also Blandin, Claire, “Les interventions des intellectuels de droite dans le Figaro littéraire: L’invention du contre-engagement,” Vingtième siecle, 96/4 (2007), 179–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

71 Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, “Les jours de notre vie,” 1161.

72 Ibid., 1168.

73 T.M.[Sartre, Jean-Paul and Merleau-Ponty, Maurice], “L’adversaire est complice,” Les Temps modernes, 57 (July 1950), 5–6Google Scholar, emphasis in original.

74 Sartre, “Réponse à Albert Camus,” Situations, vol. 4 (Paris, Gallimard, 1964), 105. This piece was originally published in Les Temps modernes, 82 (Aug. 1952), 334–53.

75 Ibid., 107. Sartre's would revisit the Rousset affair yet another time in 1961, in seemingly aporetic terms, in his remembrance essay for Merleau-Ponty, “Merleau-Ponty vivant,” Les Temps modernes, 184–5 (Oct. 1961), 304–76Google Scholar.

76 Rousset, “Les camps de concentration seront mis hors la loi.”

77 “Coupures de presse concernant le procès David Rousset c/ ‘Les Lettres Françaises.’” F Delta 1880/56/1/3, Rousset BDIC. For an exposition of the trial see Thomas Wieder, “David Rousset contre ‘Les Lettres françaises,’ 1949–1951: Les anciens déportés des camps nazis et les intellectuels français face au Goulag,” unpublished thesis, IEP de Paris, 2001.

78 Daix, Pierre, J’ai cru au matin (Paris, 1976), 257Google Scholar. See Joë Nordmann's trial recollections in “David Rousset contre les Lettres françaises. Après coup (Entretien),” Lignes, 2 (May 2000), 110–14.

79 Rousset, Bernard, and Rosenthal, Pour la vérité, 99.

80 Ibid., 244.

81 The journal did appeal, unsuccessfully.

82 P.P. [Paul Parisot], “Les camps soviétiques ont été jugés à Bruxelles,” Preuves, 4 June 1951, 23. See also Grémion, Pierre, “Preuves dans la Paris de guerre froide,” Vingtième siecle, 13 (1987), 64–6Google Scholar.

83 See Jenks, British Propaganda and News Media, 142–3.

84 Thomas Wieder documents the organization's activities in “La commission internationale contre le régime concentrationnaire 1949–1959: des rescapés des camps nazis combattent les camps de concentration,” unpublished thesis, Paris-I, 2001.

85 Rousset, David, “Propos sur l'heur et le malheur des temps,” Saturne, 19 (Jan.–March 1959), 5–6Google Scholar.

86 “David Rousset: mort d'un grand témoin,” L’Humanité, 15 Dec. 1997.

87 Déclaration de M. David Rousset, Stenotypie (Cabinet Bluet), fasciscule 1, Cour d'appel de Paris, 11ème chambre, Audience du 3 juin 1953. F Delta 1880/56/3/2, Rousset BDIC.

88 Oxenhandler, Neal, Looking for Heroes in Postwar France: Albert Camus, Max Jacob, Simone Weil (Hanover, 1996)Google Scholar.