Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine – Esprits d'Europe (Spirits of Europe)

It is to a strange reflection that Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine invites us in these times of a globalized Europe—disoriented and dominated by the circulation of merchandise—a reflection almost outmoded, since it addresses itself, through the evocation of three major thinkers of Central Europe in the second half of the twentieth century (the Pole Miłosz, the Czech Patočka, and the Hungarian Bibó), to the spirit of resistance they manifested in the bygone days of Nazism and Communism.

Bygone days indeed, for the commemorative omnipresence surrounding Nazism now seems to screen out authentic cognitive approaches—historical or memorial—which was not the case at the beginning of the 1980s, at the irruption of “the era of memory.” Bygone days for Communism too, for it no longer seems to stir public opinion much: those have done their work well who never wanted to examine their Stalinist past and who today indulge with delight in the denunciation of an ultra-liberal Europe, or those who hastened to draw an equals sign between Communism and Nazism without seeing that the differences between the totalitarianisms outweighed the resemblances. The result is there, in any case: everything seems to have been said, written, about what marked Europe throughout the twentieth century, about the worst ordeals that European societies have known. So what is the point of recalling these old struggles borne by Central European thinkers, known only to the initiated and about whom the rest could not care less?

What can the solitude of a Czesław Miłosz possibly evoke for us today—Miłosz who, choosing to remain in Paris in 1951 instead of returning to the socialist Poland he represented at the Polish embassy—he who had chosen to serve the Communist regime in opposition to the capitalist Poland of before the war!—meets in the City of Light only incomprehension and polite silence? France will not know how to keep this 1980 Nobel laureate who, living by expedients, would end up a professor of literature in the United States. Albert Camus alone will have extended a hand to him.

And what is one to say of Jan Patočka, that Czech philosopher who, at the age of seventy, agreed to become one of the three spokesmen of Charter 77 and who died from the after-effects of the long interrogations conducted by the political police?¹ His commitment, principally ethical, founded on the primacy of the individual conscience, will in fact address the very essence of the political, for it is by confronting the Communist dictatorship with the negation of its own rights—so democratic on paper!—that the dissidents of the 1970s would be able to conquer spaces of freedom. Must all this be harped on? Alas, yes. One need only refer to a few rereadings of history, to a few new amnesias, to be convinced of it. Thus, for some, the fall of Communism is supposed to have given way to the exclusive dictatorship of the market (let us make a clean sweep of still-Communist China, or of Cuba…). For others (or the same), it is the media that are supposed to be creating a new dictatorship, producing an official history in which any reflection on the past would banish whatever causes dissensus: “A past,” writes Ignacio Ramonet, for example, “expurgated, purified, washed of all that might today cause trouble /…/ There is little difference between this new ‘official history’ and State censorship in non-democratic countries.”² Fortunate still that the author put this “official history” in quotation marks, but the tendency to forget certain dictatorships seems to be under way, in any case on that side of the political chessboard…

And why summon up István Bibó, the least known of the three thinkers, and yet the author of an essential work, Misère des petits États d’Europe de l’Est (The Misery of the Small States of Eastern Europe)?³ Bibó, born in 1911 and dead in 1979, made himself known through two exceptional stances: he was one of the leaders of the Hungarian insurrection of 1956, which earned him six years in prison, and the author of a memorable text, written in 1948, on the responsibility of the Hungarians in the deportation of the Jews of Hungary. A long reflection of two hundred pages, unique in Europe at that time, at the end of which all discussion of Judeo-Hungarian relations during the war was halted by the Stalinist leaders, who, through a policy of “red assimilation,” wished to evacuate any debate on the extermination of the Hungarian Jews. For what Bibó pointed to was not only the active role of the Hungarian fascists and the Hungarian gendarmerie, but also, if not above all, the consent of entire swaths of Hungarian society to the anti-Jewish laws, a royal road to social advancement. Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine reminds us, indeed, that the antisemitic legislation “had allowed numerous representatives of the petty and middle bourgeoisie to make a career at the expense of their Jewish fellow citizens.”⁴ These strata would grow familiar, Bibó writes, “with the idea that work and enterprise were not the only means of providing for one’s needs, that it now sufficed to cast a covetous eye on another’s means of subsistence, to demonstrate the person’s Jewish ancestry, thereby depriving him of his job or dispossessing him of his shop, possibly having him shipped off to an internment camp.”⁵ Bibó is one of the rare thinkers of his country to have questioned the mechanisms that led a handful of SS men, aided by Hungarian auxiliaries, to send several hundred thousand Jewish fellow citizens to Auschwitz in the space of a few weeks in the spring of 1944.

Through these committed witnesses to the worst criminal enterprises of the twentieth century—to whom are added, among others, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and the philosopher Karel Kosík—Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine does not intend merely to restore exemplary trajectories; she pleads above all for a non-forgetting of ethics in political relations. This plea comes very opportunely to remind us that the enlargement of the European Union to the East does not signify only an economic and financial “leveling up,” but also the contribution, to the European basket, of a sum of values, of acts of courage and resistance. At the foundations of “the European spirit,” she tells us, there is this transcendence of singular postures that know, against all odds, how to say no to the most extreme dominations. A spirit absent at this moment, and one that would be needed as much by those who blandly manage the European edifice as by those who do not know what to put in place of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In a word, to keep the spirit of dissidence, in particular against the lie, the worst of dictatorships.

Notes