The Magnum 1968 collection includes another picture that encapsulates at least part of my feelings at the time. (It is also, I need hardly add, by Henri Cartier-Bresson, that genius at catching the historic moment.) An elderly member of the middle class stands, with arms folded behind his back, looking reflectively at a poster-covered Parisian wall and a rough wooden door – presumably to some yard or building site. The top layer of posters has been half-stripped from the wall, leaving breeze-blocks and older movie posters half-visible. On the door there is an accumulation of political posters – a Communist Party poster on top of some text about student power, a half-torn sheet calling for struggle for a democratic society opening the way to socialism, and on top of it all a large graffito written with the basic armament of the 1968 revolutionary, the spray-paint can. It reads ‘Jouissez sans entraves’, which the editors have translated bashfully as ‘Let it all hang out’. (It really means: ‘Let nothing stop orgasms’.) We cannot tell what Cartier-Bresson’s elderly citizen made of the walls of Paris, which were the chief victims and public witnesses of the student revolt. My own reaction was sceptical. As every historian knows, revolutions can be recognized by the vast floods of words they generate: spoken words, but in literate societies words written in enormous quantities by men and women who do not usually express themselves in writing. By this criterion May 1968 was something like a student revolution – but its words record an odd kind of revolution, as anyone could see who watched the walls of Paris at the time.
The truth is that the characteristic posters and graffiti of 1968 were not really political in the traditional sense of the word, except for the recurring denunciations of the Communist Party, presumably by the militants of the various left-wing groups and factions, almost invariably descended from some Leninist schism. And yet, how rare were the references to the great names of that ideology – Marx, Lenin, Mao, even Che Guevara – on the walls of Paris!3 They would later appear on badges and T-shirts, as icons symbolizing the overthrow of systems. The student rebels reminded theorists of a long-forgotten Bakuninist anarchism, but if anything they were closest to the ‘situationists’, who had anticipated a ‘revolution of everyday life’ through the transformation of personal relations. That (and their very Gallic brilliance in devising memorable slogans) is why they became the mouthpieces of an otherwise inchoate movement, although it is almost certain that hardly anyone until then had heard of them, outside a small circle of left-wing painters. (I certainly had not.) On the other hand, the 1968 slogans were not simply the expressions of a drop-out counter-culture, in spite of an obvious interest in shocking the bourgeoisie (‘LSD tout de suite!’). They wanted society overthrown and not simply side-stepped.
For middle-aged leftwingers like me, May 1968 and indeed the 1960s as a whole were both enormously welcome and enormously puzzling. We seemed to be using the same vocabulary, but we did not appear to speak the same language. What is more, even when we participated in the same events, those of us old enough to be the parents of the youthful militants patently did not experience them as they did. Twenty postwar years had taught those of us who lived in the states of capitalist democracy that social revolution in these countries was not on the political agenda. In any case, when one is past fifty, one does not expect the revolution behind every mass demonstration, however impressive and exciting. (Hence, incidentally, our – and everyone’s – surprise at the disproportionate political effectiveness of the 1968 student movements which, after all, overthrew the presidents of the USA and, after a decent face-saving interval, of France.) Moreover, for us brought up on the history of 1776, 1789 and 1917, and old enough to have lived through the transformations since 1933, revolution, however intense an emotional experience, had a political objective. Revolutionaries wanted to overthrow old political regimes, domestic or foreign, with the aim of substituting new political regimes which would then institute or lay the foundations of a new and better society. Yet, whatever drove most of these youngsters on to the street, it was not this. Unsympathetic observers, such as Raymond Aron (seeing himself in the role of de Tocqueville commenting on the Paris of 1848), concluded that they had no objective at all: 1968 was simply to be understood as collective street-theatre, ‘psychodrama’ or ‘verbal delirium’, because it was merely ‘a colossal release of suppressed feeling’.4 Sympathetic ones, such as the sociologist Alain Touraine, author of one of the first and still one of the most illuminating books written about those extraordinary weeks, thought their implicit aim was a reversion to the pre-1848 utopian ideologies. 5 But one could not really read utopia into the general antinomianism of slogans such as ‘It is forbidden to forbid’, which probably came as close to expressing what the young rebels felt – whether about government, teachers, parents or the universe. In fact, they did not seem to be much interested in a social ideal, communist or otherwise, as distinct from the individualist ideal of getting rid of anything that claimed the right and power to stop you doing whatever your ego and id felt like doing. And yet, insofar as they found public badges to pin on private lapels, they were the badges of the revolutionary left, if only because they were by tradition associated with opposition.
The natural reaction of old lefties to the new movement was: ‘These people have not yet learned how to achieve their political objectives.’ That is presumably why, referring to the French title of my book Primitive Rebels, then recently published in Paris,6 Alain Touraine, who had every sympathy with the 1968 rebels, wrote on the fly-leaf of my copy of his book ‘Here are the Primitives of a new Rebellion’. For the purpose of my book had indeed been to do historic justice to social struggles – banditry, millennial sects, pre-industrial city rioters – that had been overlooked or even dismissed just because they tried to come to grips with the problems of the poor in a new capitalist society with historically obsolete or inadequate equipment. But supposing the ‘new primitives’ were not pursuing our ends at all, but quite different ones? Because it was so clearly and passionately on the side of the eternal losers I wrote about, my own book, available in English since 1959, had given me more street credibility among the Anglophone ‘new lefts’ than Party members usually enjoyed. Nevertheless, I was astonished and a little baffled to be told by a colleague from the University of California, Berkeley, the epicentre of the US student eruption, that the more intellectual young rebels there read the book with great enthusiasm because they identified themselves and their movement with my rebels.
Having both taught in the USA at the peak of the anti-Vietnam movement in 1967 and watched the Paris events in 1968, I wrote an equally uncomprehending article on ‘Revolution and Sex’ in 1969. If there was any correlation between the two, I pointed out, it was negative: rulers kept slaves and the poor quiet by encouraging sexual freedom among them and, I might have added, remembering Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, drugs. As a historian I knew that all revolutions have their free-for-all libertarian aspect, but ‘taken by themselves cultural revolt and cultural dissidence are symptoms, not revolutionary forces’. ‘The more prominent such things are’ – as obviously in the USA – ‘the more confident can we be that the big things are not happening’.7 But what if the ‘big things’ were to be not the overthrow of capitalism, or even of some oppressive or corrupt political regimes, but precisely the destruction of traditional patterns of relations between people and personal behaviour within existing society? What if we were just wrong in seeing the rebels of the 1960s as another phase or variant of the left? In that case it was not a botched attempt at one kind of revolution, but the effective ratification of another: the one that abolished traditional politics, and in the end the politics of the traditional left, by the slogan ‘the personal is political’. Looking back after thirty-odd years it is easy to see that I misunderstood the historic significance of the 1960s.
One reason for this was that I had been immersed since 1955 in the small and mostly nocturnal universe of jazz musicians. The world I lived in after hours in the second half of the fifties had already seemed to anticipate much of the spirit of the 1960s. This was an error. It was quite different. If there is anything that symbolizes the 1960s it is rock music, which began its world conquest in the second half of the 1950s and immediately opened a profound gap between the pre- and post-1955 generations.
It was impossible not to be aware of this gap, as when my wife and I, in Berkeley and San Francisco for a few days at the height of the ‘flower-power’ year of 1967, visited a former au pair of Andy and Julia in Haight-Ashbury, where she was then discovering herself. It was obviously marvellous for the girl, usually as level-headed a Netherlander as you could hope for, and fun to watch, but how could it be our scene? We were taken to the Fillmore, the giant ballroom throbbing with strobe lights and excessive amplification. I cannot even remember what Bay Area groups we heard – the only act that made any sense to me that night was one of the Motown girl groups – was it the Marvelettes or the Supremes? – which swung in the familiar way of black r&b. Perhaps this is not surprising. To enjoy that year in San Francisco one really had to be permanently high on something, preferably acid, and we were not. Indeed, by virtue of our age, we were a textbook illustration of the phrase ‘If you can remember anything of the 1960s, you were not part of them.’
Nor could the jazz world, with the rarest exceptions, understand rock. It reacted to rock music with the same sort of contempt as it had traditionally reacted to the Mickey Mouse music of the old pit and commercial bands. Perhaps even with greater contempt, since the men who played the most boring of barmitzvah gigs were at least professionals. Conversely, within a few years rock almost killed jazz. The generational gap between those for whom the Rolling Stones were gods and those for whom they were just a creditable imitation of black blues-singing was virtually unbridgeable, even when both sides might from time to time find themselves in agreement on some talent. (As it happens I rather admired the Beatles and recognized the fragments of genius in Bob Dylan, a potential major poet too idle or self-absorbed to keep the muse’s attention for more than two or three lines at a time.) Whatever the appearances, my generation would remain strangers in the 1960s.
And this despite the fact that for a few years in the 1960s the language, culture and lifestyle of the new rock generations became politicized. They spoke dialects recognizable as deriving from the old language of the revolutionary left, though not, of course, of orthodox Moscow communism, discredited both by the record of the Stalin era and the political moderation of the Communist Parties. Anyone who reads the best book on the 1960s written in Britain, Promise of a Dream, by my friend and former student Sheila Rowbotham, will realize that for some years it really was almost impossible for someone of her generation (born 1943) to distinguish between what was personal and what was political. It was ‘the left-wing Alexis Korner’ – I remember him, dark and quiet in Bayswater – who inspired ‘the clear-cut throbbing sexuality of the blues bands’8 such as the Rolling Stones, whose Mick Jagger wrote ‘Street Fighting Man’ after a dramatic Vietnam Solidarity demonstration in 1968 and published it in the flamboyant Pakistani Trotskyite Tariq Ali’s new radical paper, The Black Dwarf (‘PARIS, LONDON, ROME, BERLIN. WE WILL FIGHT. WE SHALL WIN’). Pink Floyd, ‘The Dialectics of Liberation’, Che Guevara, Middle Earth and acid belonged together. Not that the line was totally erased. A subsequent holder of a Cambridge economics chair proposed that principled socialist men should protest publicly against the spread of Soho strip clubs, e.g. by stripping outside them. (‘The New Left Review men had told him he was being ‘‘puritanical and old-fashioned in his attitude to socialism’’.’) Wearers of ‘the sombre ‘‘struggle gear’’, increasingly worn … on the left’ shook their heads over an equally devoted militant who came to an occupation of the London School of Economics ‘in an olive-green bell-bottomed trouser suit, bought in my September spending spree’.9 Most of this passed the older left by, even though the young British radicals – perhaps thanks to my generation of red historians – were probably more deeply impregnated with history, especially labour history, than any other. We knew most of the chief activists as fellow-protesters, pupils or friends. I did not bother to read the Black Dwarf, although I was asked to write an article for it and naturally did so. People like me were mobilized by the young for such things as Vietnam teach-ins – I was put up against the spectacularly ill-chosen Henry Cabot Lodge, former American Big Brother in Saigon in the Oxford Union teach-in of 1965 organized by Tariq Ali. Fortunately in my own college I did not face the bruising experience of a student occupation, a considerable strain on intergenerational relations, although I was invited to address a crowd of occupying forces in the Cambridge Old Schools by one of their leaders, the son of old friends. I think my suggestion that even the history of eras lost in the mists of antiquity such as the nineteenth century could be ‘relevant’ – the buzzword of the moment – disappointed them.
We did not understand how deeply even the unquestionably political ultra-left, the armed revolutionaries and neo-terrorists who emerged from the 1960s, were influenced by, indeed were part of, the ‘counterculture’. The Weathermen in the USA took their name from a song by Bob Dylan. The Red Army Faction, better known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, lived in the German version of a counter-culture of outsiders by choice and behaviour.
My age group did not understand that the student generations of the West in the 1960s believed, as we had once done, though in a manner far less easy to specify as ‘politics’, that they lived in an era when all would be changed, because around them everything was already being changed, by revolution. We, or at least congenitally pessimistic middle-aged reds such as myself, already bearing the scars of half a lifetime of disappointment, could not share the almost cosmic optimism of the young, as they felt themselves to be ‘caught in that maelstrom of international rebellion’.10 (One of its byproducts was the fashion for global revolutionary tourism, which was to see Italian, French and British left-wing intellectuals simultaneously converging on Bolivia in 1967 at the death of Guevara and for the trial of Regis Debray.)
Of course all of us were caught up in these great global struggles. The Third World had indeed brought the hope of revolution back to the First in the 1960s. The two great international inspirations were Cuba and Vietnam, triumphs not only of revolution, but of Davids against Goliaths, of the weak against the all-powerful. ‘The guerrilla’ – an emblematic word of the era – became the quintessential key to changing the world. Fidel Castro’s revolutionaries, recognizable by their youth, long hair, beards and rhetoric as heirs of 1848 – think of the famous image of Che Guevara – could almost have been designed to be world symbols of a new age of political romantics. It is difficult to recall, and to understand even now, the almost immediate global repercussions of what in January 1959 was after all a not unusual event in the history of one Latin American island of modest size. Small, scrawny Vietnamese on jungle trails and in paddy-fields checkmated the giant destructive force of the USA. From the moment in 1965 that President Johnson sent in his troops, even middle-aged non-utopians such as myself had not the slightest doubt about who would win. More than anything else in the 1960s, it was the grandeur, heroism and tragedy of the Vietnamese struggle which moved and mobilized the English-speaking left and linked both its generations and almost all its usually feuding sects. I met contemporaries and pupils in Grosvenor Square, demonstrating in front of the American Embassy. I went on marches with Marlene and our small children, chanting ‘Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi Minh’, like the rest. I was a declared sceptic about the Guevarist guerrilla strategy, which in any case proved uniformly disastrous (see chapter 21), but Vietnam remains engraved on both our hearts. Even at the very end of the century, the emotion was still there, and palpable in Hanoi, as Marlene and I watched a party of tiny, hard-bitten elderly men in formal suits, wearing their campaign medals, make their way under the trees to visit Ho Chi Minh’s home. They had fought for us, instead of us.
Apart from sharing in the campaigning for it, I had no particular connection with Vietnam during the war, nor did I visit it until a quarter of a century after victory, and then purely on holiday. On the other hand, like so many leftwingers who were inspired by the Cuban revolution, I visited Cuba several times in the 1960s, and thus, incidentally, saw a good cross-section of the world’s itinerant left. My first trip there was in 1960, the irresistible honeymoon period of the young revolution. I found myself coinciding and joining forces with two economist friends who represented that rare phenomenon, the old US Marxist left identified neither with the CP nor with its opponents: the tall Paul Sweezy, all slow-speaking New England Yankee, and Paul Baran. Since their embattled little journal, the Monthly Review, had kept the red flag flying in Cold War USA, they were welcomed by Castro and the ex-guerrillas of the Sierra Maestra. My own contacts came rather through a formidable CP leader with an exceptional gift for political adaptation, Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, whose insistence on making common cause with Fidel while he was in the Sierra Maestra paid off after the victory. Havana was still sufficiently close to the free-swinging paradise for shady tourists of the musical Guys and Dolls to radiate rumba and cultural tolerance, and the island looked sufficiently fertile to give the revolutionary regime what looked like an easy future. We agreed that it ought to have no difficulty in feeding its 10 million inhabitants, with enough left over for Cuba Libres (rum and Coca-Cola), cigars and those wonderful tiny street-corner coffees which disappeared as the economy foundered. Eighteen months after victory the honeymoon between people and revolutionary government was still tangible. Dodging radical young Americans with movie-cameras we toured the country in an optimistic haze.
My second visit, in 1962, via Prague, Shannon and Gander, was with a British left-wing delegation of the usual composition: a left-wing Labour MP; unilateral nuclear disarmers; a hardnosed, usually Party-line union leader, not without an interest in foreign nooky; the odd radical conspirator; CP functionaries and the like. A young, fast-talking African had somehow attached himself to us, claiming to represent an undefined ‘Youth Movement’ in a vaguely defined region of West Africa, whose first action on arriving in Prague was to make tracks for the Foreign Ministry where he hoped to find somebody to fund Third World revolution through him. The Cubans refused to have anything to do with him. At the time I saw him as that curious by-product of that age, a black confidence man exploiting the ignorance or anti-imperialist reflexes of white progressives: one of the Good Soldier Schwejks or picaros of the Cold War. The liberal left became familiar with, and sometimes let itself be exploited by, such figures – in Britain the highly uncongenial ‘Michael X’, halfway between a bad beginning as a West London hustler and a grim end on the scaffold in Trinidad and on the pages of V. S. Naipaul’s harsh novel, was at one time familiar at London parties. Certainly these examples of the flotsam and jetsam of a disintegrating empire were less impressive than the black militants from the USA who were soon to look to Cuba for aid, but behind the unpersuasive scams of people such as the young African there was a tragedy of uprooted lives among white aliens which I did not sufficiently appreciate. As for the delegation itself, all I can remember about it is that I found myself translating for Che who (in Fidel’s place) received us for lunch in the former Hilton hotel. (He was indeed as fine a figure of a man as he looks on the famous photo, though he said nothing of interest.) However, thanks to the invaluable Argeliers Leon, expert in the affairs of Afro-Cuban secret societies and cults and director of the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore which the new regime had just established, I was able to listen to some wonderful music in the black barrios of Havana.
My third visit was to a somewhat extravagant gathering, the Havana Cultural Congress, ‘the last episode in Fidel Castro’s affair with the European intelligentsia’, in January 1968, to which Fidel, at that point on cool terms with Moscow, had pointedly omitted to invite cultural figures from the Soviet bloc or (except in Italy, where culture and the PCI still went together), orthodox CP intellectuals. Instead, he brought in an impressive range of independent, dissident and heterodox leftists from various cultural scenes, including most of the older generation of the Parisian avant-garde political outgroups. Their most memorable contribution to the congress was to produce a politico-artistic ‘incident’, when old surrealists physically attacked the Mexican artist Siqueiros, who had once been associated with the plans to assassinate Trotsky, at the opening of an art show, though it was not clear how far this was on grounds of artistic or political disagreement. Yet the curious thing about this invasion of the past from the Latin Quarter is how little it had in common with, or anticipated, the student rebellion that was about to sweep through Paris. Nevertheless, it was an exciting occasion, though a somewhat depressing one, considering the evident mess Cuba had made of its economy. At all events it gave me the opportunity to get to know the remarkable Hans Magnus Enzensberger in his Fidelista phase, with his Russian wife, the enchanting Masha, a lost soul whose life was to end tragically in London, child of the dark night of the Stalinist Soviet Union. For her father had been Alexander Fadeyev, General Secretary of the Writers’ Union in the years of the Great Terror, that is to say a state bureaucrat drinking his way through the task of administering his friends’ lives and deaths before committing suicide in 1955.
I do not know what Fidel made of this strange influx of Europeans. He was presumably more at ease with Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, a moustached outdoor-looking figure recently expelled from both Bolivia and for good measure Peru, who was telling the Cubans ‘in a Spanish comprehensible only to an Italian’ that ‘his function as a European publisher was at an end, and he now saw himself wholly as an anti-imperialist combatant’.11 Fortunately the publishing house he had founded in 1955, equally distinguished in politics and literature, first to publish both Boris Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago and Lampedusa’s The Leopard, still flourishes. I cannot remember whether I met him on that occasion, though I had known this intense young multi-millionaire slightly since the early 1950s when he was an impassioned Communist Party activist and financier of CP culture. I remember a summery conversation with him in his office in Milan in the nerve-racking period of the international communist crisis of 1956–7, about where the movement could or should go, between phone calls arranging a weekend with a girl in some castle on the Adriatic coast. It must have been just when he was leaving the Party. His dissidence was to take him into the underworld of armed revolutionary struggle. As a teenager he had fought with the communist partisans for revolution, against fascism and against all his family and the super-rich Milan bourgeoisie stood for. The spirit of Che Guevara revived these memories. Soon after 1968 he went underground – or as far underground as a rich and socially prominent international headline-maker can go – and was killed in 1972, in obscure circumstances while attempting to blow up a high-tension pylon in Segregate, in the Milan hinterland.
Whether Fidel himself knew the charming young French-Canadian intellectuals who failed to convince me that their plan to create a new Sierra Maestra in the forests of Quebec would advance the cause of world revolution, I do not know. I suspect that someone in Cuba did. I tried to phone the most intelligent and agreeable of them repeatedly a couple of years later when I found myself in Montreal. There was no answer. Such was my lack of rapport with the spirit of the times that it only struck me much later that he must have been one of the terrorists of the nationalist Front de la Liberation du Québec who kidnapped the British Trade Commissioner and strangled a Quebec minister, perhaps one of those allowed a safe exit to Cuba in return for the British diplomat. But those were the days when even the ultras of ethnolinguistic nationalism, such as the early Basque ETA, presented themselves in the garb of international revolution.
II
For a moment in the late 1960s the young, or at least the children of the old middle classes and the new masses rising to middle-class status through the explosion in higher education, felt they were living the revolution, whether by a simple collective private exit from the world of power, parents and past or by the constant, accumulating, almost orgasmic excitement of political or apparently political action, or gestures that took the place of action. The mood of the political young during ‘that hectic spring and summer’ of 1968 was recognizably revolutionary, but incomprehensible to old lefties of my generation, and not only because the situation was plainly not revolutionary in any realistic sense. Let me quote Sheila Rowbotham, who has described it with wonderful perception:
Personal feelings removed themselves from the foreground. My sexual encounters were snatched in between meetings and somehow the customary emotions didn’t settle upon them. It was as if intimacy had acquired an almost random quality. The energy of the external collective became so intense, it seemed the boundaries of closeness, of ecstatic inwardness, had spilled over on to the streets … I thus caught a glimpse of the peculiar annihilation of the personal in the midst of dramatic events like revolution … In retrospect revolutions seem puritanical, but that is not how they are experienced at the time … Caught in that maelstrom of international rebellion, it felt as if we were being carried to the edge of the known world.12
Nevertheless, as soon as the dense clouds of maximalist rhetoric and cosmic expectation turned into the rain of every day, the distinction between ecstasy and politics, real power and flower power, between voice and action, became visible once more. Jericho had not fallen to the sound of Joshua’s collective trumpets. The political young had to consider what action was needed to capture it. Since both the older and the younger generation of revolutionaries spoke the same language, mainly in one or another Marxist dialect, a semblance of communication became possible again, especially since the activist groups broke with the vague belief in spontaneous inspiration and often returned to the tradition of disciplined vanguard organizations. In fact, however, there was still a vast gap between the old and the young left. Revolution was not on the agenda in our countries. For revolutionaries of my generation the central problem remained what Marxist parties should do, indeed what their function could be, in non-revolutionary countries. And elsewhere? Where successful insurrection or guerrilla conquest was realistically on the agenda, we – at least I – were still in favour of it.
The old instinct to be on the side of any insurrectionaries and guerrillas who talked the language of the left, however stupid and pointless, died hard. It was not until the 1980s that, confronted with the phenomenon of the Peruvian ‘Shining Path’ guerrillas – admittedly based on an ideology eccentric even on the lunatic fringes of Marxism– Leninism – I frankly admitted to myself that this was a left-wing revolutionary movement I simply did not want to win. (Fortunately good Vietnamese communists had put a stop to Pol Pot’s killing fields.) Perhaps sympathy for the rebels was no more than the intellectuals’ version of the age-old omertà of the poor, the reflex of not telling on those harried by the state and its men in uniforms. Perhaps this came naturally to the author of Primitive Rebels and Bandits, who still finds it hard to withhold admiration from embattled, even if plainly mistaken, losers. In the USA my own sympathies were with the Black Panthers. I admired their courage and self-respect. I was touched by the simple-minded Leninism of their publications, but it was plain to me that they had not the slightest chance of achieving their objectives.
With most of the organizations of insurrectionists, or rather small armed action-groups which emerged in Europe from the debris of the great rebellion of 1968, I found myself entirely out of sympathy. There was room for reasoned disagreement with their opposite numbers in the very different political situation of Latin America (see chapter 21), but in Europe their activities were either pointless or counterproductive. The only operations of this kind which might claim some political feasibility were those of separatist nationalists, Quebecois, Basque or Irish, to whose political project I was strongly opposed. Marxists are not separatist nationalists.13 In any case, one of the two most lasting separatist movements of the kind born in this period, the Provisional IRA, did not claim to be on the left at all, but, on the contrary, broke away in 1969 from the old-established (‘Official’) IRA which had turned left.
So I found myself both out of sympathy and out of contact, if only by virtue of age, with these new practical revolutionaries. Not that there were all that many. In Britain there were none, except the shortlived, ineffective anarchist Angry Brigade. In West Germany the armed action people amounted to a few dozen at most, probably relying for support on 1,500 or so sympathizers, plus perhaps another handful who moved from action in their own country to international action in anti-imperialist solidarity with some body of Third World rebels, usually the Palestinians. It was a world I did not know, unless one or other of the often very radical young West German historians of those years had some connections with them. I had no contact with the Red Brigades and their like in Italy, much the most formidable of the armed action-groups in Europe other than the Basque ETA. I doubt whether the active members of these groups numbered more than a hundred or two. For reasons I have never understood, no significant armed revolutionary groups of the left seem to have emerged from the ruins of 1968 in France, although a small but quite effective terrorist group operated for a number of years in Belgium. On the other hand, had I been in touch with such groups, I would not have asked them what they did, and they would not have told me, even if they thought I was politically with them.
And where did it all lead to? In politics, nowhere much. Since a revolution was not on the cards, the European revolutionaries of 1968 had to join the political mainstream of the left, unless, being very bright young intellectuals, as so many of them were, they escaped from real politics into the academy, where revolutionary ideas could survive without much political practice. Politically the 1968 generation has done well enough, especially if one includes those recruited into civil services and think-tanks and the burgeoning numbers of advisers in politicians’ private offices. As I write the French Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, is an ex-Trotskyist, the German Foreign Secretary, Joshka Fischer, is an ex-street-fighting man, and even the ‘New Labour’ government of Tony Blair contains, among its lesser members, more than one firebrand of those days. Only in Italy, where the extreme left retained a strong independent presence, has the mainstream left not been rejuvenated by the young 68 radicals. Is this any more or any less than the inevitable seepage of former revolutionaries from radicalism to moderation in every intellectual generation since 1848?
What has really transformed the western world is the cultural revolution of the 1960s. The year 1968 may prove to be less of a turning-point in twentieth-century history than 1965, which has no political significance whatever, but was the year in which the French clothing industry for the first time produced more women’s trousers than skirts, and when numbers training for the Roman Catholic priesthood began visibly to collapse. I always taught the students in my labour history courses that the great dockers’ strike of 1889, which is prominent in every textbook, may be less significant than the silent adoption by masses of Britain’s industrial workers, some time between 1880 and 1905, of a form of headgear recognizable as a badge of belonging to their class, the familiar peaked cap. It may be argued that the really significant index of the history of the second half of the twentieth century is not ideology or student occupations, but the forward march of blue jeans.
But, alas, I am not part of that history. For Levis triumphed, like rock music, as the badge of youth. By then I was no longer young. I had no great sympathy for the contemporary equivalent of Peter Pan, the adult who wants to stay an adolescent for ever, nor could I see myself as credibly performing the role of oldest teenager on the scene. I therefore decided, almost as a matter of principle, never to wear this gear, and I have never done so. This handicaps me as a historian of the 1960s: I stood outside them. What I have written about the 1960s is what an autobiographer can write who never wore jeans.
16
A Watcher in Politics
I
Looking back, I am surprised how little direct political activity there was in my life after 1956, considering my reputation as a committed Marxist. I did not become a figure in the nuclear disarmament movement, addressing vast crowds in Hyde Park like Edward Thompson. I did not march at the head of public demonstrations like Pierre Bourdieu in Paris. I did not save from jail a Turkish editor who had published one of my articles by offering to stand trial myself by his side, as Noam Chomsky did in 2002. True, I cannot compare with the eminence or the star quality of these friends, but even at the level of lesser celebrity, there was plenty to be done. I did not even take any active part after 1968 in the bitter political struggle within the small Communist Party between the Soviet hardliners and the Eurocommunists, which finally killed the Party in 1991, though (obviously) indicating where I stood. Essentially, apart from a lecture here and there, my political activity consisted of writing books and articles, notably for that most original of editors, Paul Barker, in his days at New Society, as a historian or a historically minded journalist, a Marxist one, which obviously gave my writings a political dimension, as did my special field of labour history. Even my most political writings of the 1960s and 1970s were only obliquely tied to current matters.
So I was not really prepared for the moment when, for the first and only time in my life, I found myself with a brief cameo part on the national scene of British politics. For about ten years from the late seventies I was deeply involved in the public debates about the future of the Labour Party and, after the beginning of what turned out to be eighteen unbroken years of Conservative government, the nature of the new ‘Thatcherism’. Most of my contributions were republished in two volumes of political writing.
It grew from a seed unintentionally planted in September 1978 in the pages of the Communist Party’s ‘theoretical and discussion journal’, Marxism Today, which was to play an unexpectedly important part in political debate in the 1980s under the recently appointed editor, a brilliant, bald, jogging, motor-race watcher, politico-intellectual entrepreneur and former university lecturer, my friend Martin Jacques. It published a lecture I had given in the annual series of Marx Memorial Lectures under the title ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted?’ It was not intended as a political intervention, but as a Marxist historian’s survey of what had happened to the British working class over the past century. I argued that the apparently irresistible though not continuous rise of the British labour movement in the first half of the century seemed to have come to a halt. It could not now necessarily be expected to realize the historic destiny once predicted for it, if only because the modern economy had changed, relatively diminished and divided the industrial proletariat. If my lecture had a political edge, it was turned against the Labour Party leadership under Harold Wilson, Prime Minister from 1964 to 1970 and again in 1974–6, who presided over a brief moment of labour revival in 1966, and did not recognize it. Nevertheless, ‘The Forward March Halted?’ amounted to a public warning that in the late 1970s the movement was heading for serious trouble.
One part of my presentation was immediately singled out for irritated criticism by Ken Gill, a member of the TUC General Council and perhaps the leading CP trade union leader, namely my comments on the sharp increase of sectionalism in the industrial movement. I had pointed out that the trade unions’ militancy, so plain in the 1970s, was essentially for their members’ narrow economic benefits, and that even under left leadership this did not necessarily indicate a resumption of the forward march of labour. On the contrary, ‘it seems to me that we now see a growing division of workers into sections and groups, each pursuing its own economic interest irrespective of the rest’. Given the new mixed economy, the group relied not on the potential loss strikes caused to employers, but on the inconvenience they might cause to the public, that is on putting pressure on the government to settle. In the nature of things this not only increased potential friction between groups of workers, but risked weakening the hold of the labour movement as a whole. Nobody could live through the strike-happy 1970s in Britain without being aware of union militancy and the tensions between unions and governments. It reached its peak in the autumn and winter of 1978–9. However, I was sufficiently remote from the political scene on the industrial labour left to be surprised to find that my lecture led to an intense and politically charged controversy in Marxism Today over the next year. Without particularly intending to, I had touched several very raw nerves. The fact that within a few months of my article the weak and struggling Labour government had been comprehensively defeated in a General Election by the Conservatives under their new militantly class-warrior leader, Margaret Thatcher, made the pain even more intolerable. By the time the last criticism of my paper appeared in Marxism Today the Thatcher era had already begun. By the time the post-electoral debate on my paper was added to the pre-electoral, and both were published in 1981 in a book jointly sponsored by Marxism Today and Verso Editions,1 the Labour Party itself had been split by the secession of the so-called social democrats, and the remaining rump of the party was struggling to survive.
In retrospect, the illusions of the mixed coalition of lefts which almost destroyed the Labour Party between 1978 and 1981 are harder to understand than the trade union leaders’ illusions of power which had undermined it since the late 1960s. Since the General Strike of 1926 the British ruling class had been careful not to seek a head-on confrontation with the unions, i.e. with the 70 per cent or so of Britons who saw themselves as workers. The golden age of the post-1945 economy had even taken the edge off the built-in anti-unionism of industrialists. For twenty years giving in to union demands had not put pressure on profits. The seventies had begun to worry both politicians and economists, but they were a triumphant period for trade union leaders, who had blocked a Labour government’s plans to limit their power, and who had twice defeated a Conservative government by national miners’ strikes. Even those union leaders who realized that there had to be some limit on uncontrolled free market bargaining, saw themselves as negotiating a ‘wages policy’ with governments from a position of impressive strength.
As it happened, the glory years of seventies unionism were also those of the trade union left. For though the CP was small, declining, politically divided between Moscow hardliners and a ‘Eurocommunist’ leadership, and harassed on the left by younger Trotskyist militants, it probably played a larger part on the national trade union scene in the 1970s than ever before, under the leadership of its formidably able industrial organizer, Bert Ramelson, whose remarkable wife Marian, a Yorkshire textile worker, had been an amateur historian herself and an active supporter of the Historians’ Group. The CP was not merely part of the 1970s militancy. With the blessing (not unqualified) of the two figures closest to national Godfathers in the TUC, Hugh Scanlon, of the Engineering Union, and Jack Jones, the former International Brigader, of the Transport and General Workers, the TUC left, largely marshalled by Ramelson and Ken Gill, co-ordinated the unions’ fight against the two Wilson governments’ attempts to clip their wings. Moreover, the long-hoped-for shift in the balance of the (still) great National Mineworkers’ Union had happened in the 1960s. Yorkshire had swung left, bringing to national prominence a – then – CP protégé, the young Arthur Scargill. Together with the always solid and Party-led bastions of Wales and Scotland, the left now outvoted the equally reliable moderate bastions of northeast England. The fifteen years after 1970 were the era of the great national miners’ strikes – victorious in 1972 and 1974, disastrous in 1984–5, thanks to the combination of Mrs Thatcher’s determination to destroy the union and the delusions of the union’s by then national leader, Arthur Scargill. By chance my lecture in the autumn of 1978 coincided with the tensest moment in relations between the unions and the Labour Party.
The illusion of trade union power under left-wing leaders and activists fuelled the even greater illusion of a conquest of the Labour Party, and hence of future Labour governments, by the socialist left. A mixed coalition of lefts within the Labour Party and ‘entryist’ revolutionaries who had joined it, had increasingly come together behind the project of winning control of the party under the banner of the increasingly radical ex-minister Tony Benn. Unlike the industrial militancy, which had substantial backing from the members of the unions, then at the peak of their numbers, the political militants reflected the decline in the political interest, votes and party membership among workers. In fact their strategy relied on the ability of small groups of militants among a largely inactive membership to capture Labour Party branches and, reinforced by the politically decisive ‘block vote’ of left-led unions at party conferences, to impose a more radical leadership and policy on the party. This was an entirely practicable strategy. Indeed, it almost succeeded. The illusion lay in the belief that the Labour Party thus captured by a mixed minority of sectarian leftwingers would somehow remain united, gain in electoral force, and would have a policy capable of standing up to the attack of Mrs Thatcher’s class warriors, whose force they systematically failed to grasp.
Consequently this illusion led to disaster. Many traditional voters – one third of the actual self-described working-class electors – were in any case abandoning Labour and voting for the Conservatives. The party split, and for some years the alliance between the new Social Democratic Party and the Liberals actually came close to gaining more votes than the Labour Party. Two and a half years after the victory of Mrs Thatcher’s Conservatives Labour had lost another one in five of its voters and no longer had majority support in any group of the working class, even the unskilled and unemployed. And this at a time when the Conservative government itself had lost votes since the election of 1979. As I wrote at the time, ‘The triumph of Thatcher is a by-product of the defeat of Labour.’ What made things worse was what I then described as ‘the sheer refusal of some of the left to look unwelcome facts in the face’.2
In short, the future, perhaps the very existence, of the Labour Party was at stake in the years following the victory of Mrs Thatcher’s Conservatives in 1979. The new Social Democrats had written it off, and aimed to replace it by an alliance, eventually a merger between themselves and the Liberals. I remember the occasion – a dinner in the house of Amartya Sen and his wife Eva Colorni – to which one of their Kentish Town neighbours came late, with apologies. Bill Rogers had just been meeting with the rest of the so-called ‘Gang of Four’ (Roy Jenkins, David Owen and Shirley Williams, all eventually in the House of Lords) to draft the declaration establishing what became, a few weeks later, the Social Democratic Party. It was joined by a substantial number of the Labour middle and professional classes, some of whom were to return to the party when it stopped pursuing its visibly suicidal course. On the other hand, the militant left, and many socialist intellectuals such as my old friend Ralph Miliband (whose sons were to become important figures in the offices of Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor Gordon Brown), also wrote off the Labour Party until the moment when it had been captured and was ready to become ‘a real socialist party’, whatever that meant. I outraged some of my friends by pointing out that they were not seriously trying to defeat Mrs Thatcher. Whatever they thought, ‘they acted as though another Labour government like the ones we have had before from time to time since 1945 were not just unsatisfactory, but worse than no Labour government … (i.e.) worse than the only alternative government on offer, namely Mrs Thatcher’s’.3 The question was, could the Labour Party be saved?
In the end it was saved, but only just, at the Labour Conference in 1981, when Tony Benn stood for the deputy leadership of the party and was defeated in a photo-finish by Denis Healey. The future of the party was not certain until after the disastrous election of 1983, when Michael Foot, who had been elected leader in 1980 (as the candidate of the left, also against Healey), was succeeded by Neil Kinnock. On the eve of his election I spoke at a fringe meeting on that occasion, organized either by the Fabian Society or by Marxism Today. Kinnock himself made a point of being there, and signing a copy of my book ‘with warm thanks’, so, if I recall, were David Blunkett and Robin Cook, then also on the non-Bennite Labour left, at the time I write pillars of the Labour government since 1997. Whatever his limitations, Neil Kinnock, whose candidature I had strongly supported, was the leader who saved the Labour Party from the sectarians. After 1985, when he secured the expulsion of the Trotskyite ‘Militant Tendency’ from the party, its future was safe.
This was the only occasion on which I actually met Neil Kinnock, apart from the time when I interviewed him for Marxism Today a little later, returning rather depressed about his potential as a future prime minister. Hence the absurdity of the habit of some political journalists for the next year or two of linking my name with his (‘Kinnock’s guru’). Nevertheless, there was a sound political reason why the name of a Marxist intellectual who was not even in the Labour Party should, at a few moments of the battle for the survival of that party, have been useful for those who wanted to save it. I had been among the very few who predicted serious trouble for Labour, which gave me some standing in the controversy. I was among the few known socialist intellectuals who were openly sceptical of the project of taking over the party and argued against its proponents with passion and (I hope) some effectiveness.7 But in those difficult times it was particularly useful for the opponents of the sectarians to be able to cite support from someone known to most activists in the party – at least to those who read books and periodicals – and with a long and incontrovertible track record on the far left as a Marxist. For in 1980 and 1981 constitutional changes had given the sectarian leftists what looked like a built-in majority within the party and thus virtually handed its fortunes over to them. The future of the party depended essentially on detaching enough activists of the Labour left from the sectarians to offset this, at least at crucial moments.
The case for doing so had to be made from the left, all the more so since until 1983 the chief alternative candidate for the Labour leadership was Denis Healey, formerly Minister of Defence and Chancellor of the Exchequer, who represented everything the left disliked, who did not try to conceal his contempt for most of them, and who had established a justified reputation as a political bully-boy. The Labour Party under Tony Blair has moved so far to the right of its traditional position that there is probably less ideological difference between Healey and myself when we meet today, old men looking back on a better past, than there has been since we first met in the student CP, but by the standards of the 1970s he was the man of the Labour right. In private life he was and is a person of charm, high intelligence and culture, underneath the battlements of his trademark eyebrows, and the author of one of the few British politicians’ memoirs that can be read with enjoyment as a book. However, the public Healey was easier to respect than to love. He would certainly have made a far better political leader than any of the other candidates, although the sectarians would have done their best to destroy him. The situation at the time was such that probably only a leader with left-wing credentials could have got the party out of its crisis.
Michael Foot, who beat him, was not constructed to be a party leader or potential prime minister, and should not have been elected to the leadership. He was and is a marvellous man. For years he and I used to meet at the Hampstead bus stop from which we travelled together, I to the university, he to the House of Commons or the office of the journal Tribune, an increasingly stooped, casually dressed old man with a limp and a fine profile, shaking his white head of hair with passion. Walking – he belonged to the generation of the great hiking British intellectuals – and public transport were his forms of locomotion. Since he became a government minister only briefly in the 1970s, the official car was not part of his ego.
He was and is a Labour politician who attracts genuine love, as well as admiration for patent moral integrity and for his considerable talents and literary culture. He had eloquence of the kind that belonged to the era of mass meetings and great House of Commons occasions, before the days of the small TV screen: the oratory of the flashing eye, the gesture, the elocution reaching to the last row. He was a highly professional journalist of great rhetorical power, superb at denouncing injustice and reaction. He was a voracious reader and easy writer of some style, never tired of singing the praises of those he admired most, Jonathan Swift and William Hazlitt. Perhaps his capacity for enthusiasm, or his unwillingness to hurt, made him too uncritical. His life of Aneurin Bevan, the great leader of the Labour left, whose parliamentary seat in the South Wales valleys he inherited and in due course passed on to Neil Kinnock, was too hagiographical, his numerous book reviews, including those of my own books, not critical enough. I cannot think of anyone who actually disliked him.
He seemed, even to his contemporaries and colleagues, to belong to an older, almost a pre-1914 generation, the first from the old dissenting provincial middle class to abandon their traditional loyalty to the Liberal Party for the cause of the workers. He was not built for authority but for opposition, a ‘tribune of the people’ who defended it against the presumption of its rulers. For almost all his career in the Labour Party he was the spokesman of the left against the leadership, although they could always rely on his utter loyalty to the movement – notably in 1964, when the left had Harold Wilson’s first Labour government with a tiny majority of three at its mercy. He was not an organization man. He lacked the unfortunately useful gifts of intrigue and horse-trading that give the term ‘politician’ a bad name, and the sense of egoism and personal ambition that drives so many of the most formidable of them. The three years of his leadership were a disaster.
Tony Benn, a good and honest man who almost brought the party to ruin, lacked neither ego nor ambition. After all, he had spent a great deal of time and energy fighting for the right to disclaim his title as a hereditary peer to win the right to shorten his name and to enter the real politics of the House of Commons. In some ways he was extremely well fitted to be what he plainly wanted to be more than anything else, namely leader of the party and, in due course, prime minister. Handsome, looking remarkably young, physically robust – politics is an exhausting game like rugby or chess – and eloquent, he was and remains one of the few faces and voices almost immediately recognizable by the general public. Even his air of eagerness, like a Boy Scout looking for an occasion to do a good turn, his trademark pipe, his proletarian preference for mugs of tea, were assets. Though he had no great political profile in the past, he was moving left in the 1970s. Had he wanted to, he would almost certainly have been able to hold the Labour Party together and see it through difficult times. He looked like winning the leadership sooner or later, and, like many others, I thought he was probably the best man for the job – until he threw it away. I interviewed him at some length for Marxism Today in October 1980, and was impressed, if not completely reassured, by his insistence that in his view the Labour Party should remain ‘a very broad church’.
Yet a few months later it became entirely clear that Benn was totally unsuited for the job. He had put his money entirely on the sectarians. In January 1981 a special conference of the party in effect handed over its fortunes to the left. The details do not matter. It was now evident that only his own political stupidity could stop Benn from becoming the leader of the Labour Party fairly soon. At this point anyone with minimal political sense, knowing how deeply the party was split, would have played the card of generosity, reconciliation and unity. Instead of this Benn issued a triumphant call for the victorious left to take over and to demonstrate its power by electing him against Healey for the deputy leadership. Whether a more conciliatory approach would have prevented the secession of the future Social Democrats, no one can tell. However, Benn’s total identification with the left sectarians made it evident to anyone who did not want the Labour Party to be reduced to a marginalized socialist chapel that its future required him to be defeated. And this was achieved, if only just. Tony Benn himself retreated to an honourable position as a backbench defender of the constitution, democracy and civil liberties and a propagandist for socialism, but his career as a serious politician was at an end.
II
Such as they were, my interventions in the political debate were almost entirely through Marxism Today. One would not have expected this modest monthly to become, in the course of the 1980s, and in spite of its association with the CP, essential reading in the media and political world – and not merely among the left. Even some eminent Conservative politicians – Edward Heath, Michael Heseltine, Christopher Patten – wrote for it or allowed themselves to be interviewed for it. A young Labour politician of no left-wing sympathies whatever, elected to Parliament in 1983, claimed he was a regular reader and allowed himself to be interviewed for it: Tony Blair. Most of the already established names who were to become major personalities of the future Labour government had their say in it: Gordon Brown, Robin Cook, David Blunkett, Michael Meacher. The journal was bitterly attacked by the hardliners within the Communist Party, which was about to be destroyed by its own internal battles and the collapse of the communist regimes, but its political leadership, firm supporters of the Prague Spring and the Italian kind of communism, gave it solid political and, of course, financial support as long as it could. (It went out of existence at the end of 1991 with the Party and the USSR.) In an era of crisis for the Labour Party the ideas for its future came from a communist journal. Its success was overwhelmingly due to the combination of political nous and journalistic flair of Martin Jacques, and not least to the decision to open its pages to writers far from the Party line, and the orthodoxies of the old socialists. Nevertheless, we also benefited by the almost total disarray of the traditional politico-intellectual universe in Britain in the Thatcher era. This chiefly affected the sectors left of centre, but even the Conservatives were exploring an unknown new territory. What must or could be done in the new era? How, even where, was it to be discussed? Marxism Today provided a space where these questions could be considered outside the established frameworks, above all because it insisted that with the arrival of Mrs Thatcher, ‘The Great Moving Right Show’ as the cultural theorist Stuart Hall called it in an article in 1979 which coined the term ‘Thatcherism’, all bets were off. The game was new. And Marxism Today said so, before the rest.
In retrospect nothing is more obvious. The Thatcher era was the nearest thing in the twentieth century to a political, social and cultural revolution – and not one for the better. Armed with the most uncontrolled and centralized power available to government in any electoral democracy, it set out to destroy everything in Britain that stood in the way of an unholy combination of unrestricted profit-maximizing private enterprise and national self-assertion, in other words greed and jingoism. It was moved not only by the justified belief that the British economy needed a kick in the pants but by class feeling, by what I called ‘the anarchism of the lower middle class’. It was directed equally against the traditional ruling classes and their mode of rule, in practice including the monarchy, the country’s established institutions, and the labour movement. In the course of this largely successful endeavour it obliterated most of the traditional British values and made the country unrecognizable. Most of my generation probably feel like an American friend who decided to settle in England in the new century after retiring from an academic career in Massachusetts, and who was asked whether he missed the USA. He answered: ‘Nowhere near as much as I miss the Britain I knew when I first came here.’ This, at bottom, was the reason for the overwhelming dissidence of, even the widespread visceral hatred of Thatcher, felt in intellectual and cultural Britain, and the increasing dissidence of the bulk of the college-educated middle class, symbolized by the spectacular refusal of Oxford University to grant her an honorary degree. Not that this prevented the ideological advance of the Thatcherite belief that the only way to run the public and private affairs of a nation was by businessmen with business expectations using business methods. What made the triumph of Thatcherism so bitter was that, after 1979, it was not based on any massive conversion of opinion in the country, but primarily, though not exclusively, on the deep division of its opponents. There was no wave of Thatcherite voting in the 1980s like that which lifted Ronald Reagan in the USA. It consistently remained a minority of the electorate. My own calls for some electoral arrangement between Labour and the Liberal–Social Democratic Alliance or, at the very least, systematic ‘tactical voting’8 by anti-Conservative electors, were (naturally) dismissed by both, although in the end the voters had more sense than the parties and voted tactically in large numbers and to good effect. What made the situation so frustrating was that neither Labour nor the Liberal–Social Democratic Alliance had an alternative to offer. Thatcherism remained the only strategy in town. In the end all we had to rely on was that it would eventually become so unpopular that it would lose against any opposition, which is indeed what happened – but only after eighteen years. We warned that much of the Thatcherite revolution might prove irreversible. In this also we were right.
On paper it was easy to analyse the situation realistically, dismissing the ‘cries of betrayal against those who insist on looking at the world the way it is’.4 In practice it was hard, since many of those against whom I wrote were comrades (or at least former comrades) and friends. Apart from myself and Stuart Hall, Marxism Today could not rely on the steady support of any established intellectuals of the old and the original (post-1956) new left. Most of the socialist and Marxist intellectuals outside the Marxism Today milieu were hostile, including such prestigious figures as Raymond Williams, Ralph Miliband and the eminences of the New Left Review. I was denounced at trade union meetings. This is not surprising. For many of them the line of Marxism Today meant the betrayal of the traditional hopes and policies of socialists, not to mention of the proletarian revolution which the Trotskyites still looked forward to. It could even look like disloyalty to the organized working class, battered with the full force of state power by a government waging class war, especially during the great national coalminers’ strike of 1984–5, which mobilized the full force of the left’s (and not only the left’s) emotional sympathy. Mine too, although it was patent that the delusions of an extremist leadership of the union, relying on the rhetoric of militancy and the traditional unionist refusal to break ranks in the middle of battle, were leading the union and the coalfield communities to certain disaster. Even we were not immune to the sheer force of the movement’s rhetorical self-delusion. Marxism Today, surveying the wreckage after the strike with a degree of realism, could not bring itself to admit the scale of the defeat.5
This, indeed, was the general predicament of socialists in Britain from the middle 1970s on. Things fell apart for moderate reformist social democrats as well as for communists and other revolutionaries. For Marxists and non-Marxists, revolutionaries and reformists, we had in the last analysis believed that capitalism could not produce the conditions of a good life for humanity. It was neither just nor in the long run viable. An alternative socialist economic system, or at least its forerunner, a society dedicated to social justice and universal welfare, could take its place, if not now then at some future time; and the movement of history was plainly bringing this nearer through the agency of state or public action in the interest of the mass of the wage-earning classes, implicitly or explicitly anti-capitalist. Probably never did this look more plausible than in the years immediately following the Second World War, when even European conservative parties were careful to declare themselves anti-capitalist and US statesmen praised public planning. None of these assumptions looked convincing in the 1970s. After the 1980s the defeat of the traditional left, both political and intellectual, was undeniable. Its literature was dominated by variations on the theme ‘What’s Left?’ I contributed to it myself. Paradoxically, the problem was far more urgent in the non-communist countries. In almost all the communist regimes the collapse of a widely discredited ‘really existing socialism’, the only socialism officially extant, had eliminated any other kind from the political scene. Moreover, it was reasonable enough for people there to place their hopes, even sometimes their utopian hopes, in an unknown western capitalism, so obviously more prosperous and efficient than their own broken-down systems. It was in the west and south that the case against capitalism remained convincing, especially that against the increasingly dominant ultra-laissez-faire capitalism favoured by transnational corporations, backed by economic theologians and governments.
Marxism Today could see that the simple refusal to acknowledge that things had changed dramatically (‘Let cowards flinch and traitors sneer, we’ll keep the red flag flying here’), however emotionally attractive, was not on the cards. Indeed, that is why the traditional Labour left, always present and significant in the party’s history, though rarely decisive, disappeared from sight after 1983. It no longer exists. On the other hand, we could not accept – until Tony Blair became leader in 1994 we could barely even envisage – the alternative of ‘New Labour’, which accepted the logic as well as the practical results of Thatcherism, and deliberately abandoned everything that might remind the decisive middle-class voters of workers, trade unions, publicly owned industries, social justice, equality, let alone socialism. We wanted a reformed Labour, not Thatcher in trousers. The narrow failure of Labour to win the 1992 election eliminated this prospect. I am not alone in recalling that election night as the saddest and most desperate in my political experience.
The logic of electoral politics as perceived by politicians whose programme consisted of permanent re-election, and after 1997 the logic of government, drove us out of ‘real’ politics. Some of the Young Turks of Marxism Today went where the power was. When, eighteen months after Labour had returned to power, Martin Jacques revived the journal for a single issue to survey the new era of Blair, one of them looked down on us – myself and Stuart Hall specifically – from the heights of 10 Downing Street, as people viewing society from the seminar room, ‘as if from the outside, without any sense of membership or responsibility’, unlike ‘intellectuals who are able to combine critique, vision and practical policy’. In short, academic or not, ‘critique was no longer enough’.6 The time had come for the political realists and the technicians of government. And both must operate in a market economy and fit in with its requirements.
True enough. But our point – certainly mine – was and is that if critique is no longer enough, it is more essential than ever. We criticized New Labour not because it had accepted the realities of living in a capitalist society, but for accepting too much of the ideological assumptions of the prevailing free market economic theology. Not least the assumption which destroys the foundations of all political movements for improving the condition of the people, and with them therefore the justification of Labour governments, namely that the efficient conduct of a society’s affairs can only be by the search for personal advantage, i.e. by behaving like businessmen. Indeed, the critique of neo-liberalism was all the more necessary, since it not only appealed to businessmen and to governments who wanted to remove their traditional suspicion of Labour, and needed a justification for appealing to middle-class ‘swing voters’, but because neo-liberalism claimed the authority of a ‘science’ increasingly identified with the interests of global capitalism, namely economics, as consecrated for almost a quarter of a century by its highest authority, the Nobel Prize for Economics. Not until the very end of the century, when it was finally awarded to Amartya Sen, and then to a vocal critic of ‘the Washington consensus’, Joseph Stiglitz, was it given again to economists known to be outside the prevailing orthodoxy; and not until (so it is understood) the electors for the Nobel prizes in the natural sciences had expressed dissatisfaction at the consistent ideological bias of what was intended to be a scientific distinction. Perhaps the bursting of the great speculative bubbles of the fin-de-siècle, 1997–2001 have finally broken the spell of market fundamentalism. The end of the hegemony of global neo-liberalism has been predicted and indeed announced long enough – I have done so myself more than once. It has already done more than enough harm.
III
In the meantime Soviet socialism was dying.
Unlike the end of the Cold War and the implosion of the Soviet Empire, the end of the USSR took place in comparative slow motion, between the time Gorbachev came to power in 1985 and its formal death in late 1991. It had its moments of headline drama – Yeltsin on the tank in Moscow resisting the attempted coup of August 1991 – but its basic action took place in the darkness of the Soviet corridors of power, such as the unpublicized but fundamental decision in 1989 to abandon the last of the Five-Year Plans (1986–92) in mid-course. As it happens, I was working on the Soviet economy at the UN university’s World Institute of Development and Economic Research (WIDER) and watched the process in the agreeable and acutely Russia-watching city of Helsinki, a few hours by land, a few minutes by air from the Soviets, where I spent some summers during those final years. If it did nothing else, it gave me an insight into the disastrous blindness of the western economists who passed through there, moving comfortably between airport, transnational hotel chain and limo, preparing to put the Russian economy to rights by the untrammelled operations of the free market, as certain of the possession of eternal truth as any Islamic theologian.
By the 1980s the idea that the socialism of the USSR or its followers was what those of us inspired by the October Revolution had in mind was dead. A case could still be made for it as the necessary counterweight to the other superpower, and with greater moral conviction as the supporter of the liberation of oppressed peoples, notably in South Africa. The Moscow regime supported the ANC struggle, financed and armed it for decades when there was no foreseeable prospect of its success or of Soviet benefit. A devotion to colonial liberation was probably the last relic of the spirit of world revolution. Indeed, what had kept me immune to the appeal of Maoism was that, in spite of its internationalist rhetoric in the days of the Sino-Soviet split, Chinese Communism and Maoist ideology seemed to me essentially national if not nationalist, an impression not weakened by a few weeks’ visit to that impressive country in 1985. Unlike the USSR, which would never have backed a movement as remote from social revolution as the thuggish UNITA in Angola, Maoist China, which advertised its vocation as the centre of global armed struggle, actually supported guerrilla movements very selectively, and almost entirely on anti-Soviet and anti-Vietnamese grounds.
We, or at least I, no longer had many hopes. My friend Georg Eisler recalls how, returning from Cuba in the 1960s, I wondered how long it would take before Havana became assimilated to Sofia. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which I remember as vividly as others do the death of Kennedy, made it unthinkable even to visit Prague again, but would one want to retire from the West even to a relatively liberal country like Hungary? The answer was no, even though, for an old central European, it was intellectually and culturally far more lively and less provincial than its radiantly prosperous neighbour, Austria.
What did old communists and the general left expect from the USSR in the 1980s except that it should be a counterweight to the USA and by its very existence frighten the rich and the rulers of the world into taking some notice of the needs of the poor? Nothing, any longer. And yet we felt a strange sense of relief, even a glimmer of hope, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985. In spite of everything he seemed to represent our kind of socialism – indeed, to judge by early statements, the sort of communism represented by the Italians or the ‘socialism with a human face’ of the Prague Spring – which we had thought almost extinct there. Curiously, our admiration was not to be significantly diminished by the tragedy of his dramatic failure inside the Soviet Union, which was almost total. More than any other single man, he became responsible for destroying it. But he had also been, one might say, almost singlehandedly responsible for ending half a century’s nightmare of nuclear world war and, in Eastern Europe, for the decision to let go of the USSR’s satellite states. It was he who, in effect, tore down the Berlin Wall. Like so many in the West I shall go on thinking of him with unalloyed gratitude and moral approval. If there is one image from the 1980s that has stayed with me, it is the multiple face of Mikhail Gorbachev on the display screens in a TV shop which suddenly stopped me in my tracks somewhere on West 57th Street in New York. I listened to him addressing the United Nations with a sense of wonder and relief.
That he would fail at home was, alas, soon obvious; perhaps even that he and his fellow-reformers were too foolhardy or, if one prefers, neither big nor knowledgeable enough about the nature of the world they were ruling, to know quite what they were doing. Perhaps nobody was, and the best thing for the Soviet Union and its peoples would have been to continue its slow descent hoping for piecemeal improvement under a less ambitious and more realistic reformer. So, as I wrote from Helsinki in a commentary on the 1991 failed coup that ended the Gorbachev era, ‘he chose glasnost in order to force perestroika; it should have been the other way round. And neither marxism nor western economists had either experience or theory that helped.’ 7 Like a crippled giant tanker moving toward the reefs a rudderless Soviet Union therefore drifted towards disintegration.8 Finally it foundered. And the losers, in the short and medium term, were not only the peoples of the former USSR, but the poor of the world.
‘Capitalism and the rich have, for the time being, stopped being scared,’ I wrote in 1990.
Why should the rich, especially in countries like ours where they now glory in injustice and inequality, bother about anyone except themselves? What political penalties do they need to fear if they allow welfare to erode and the protection of those who need it to atrophy? This is the chief effect of the disappearance of even a very bad socialist region from the globe. 9
Ten years after the end of the USSR, it is possible that fear has returned. The rich and the governments whom they have convinced of their indispensability may once again discover that the poor require concessions rather than contempt. But, thanks to the weakening of the fabric of social democracy and the disintegration of communism, the danger today comes from the enemies of reason: religious and ethno-tribal fundamentalists, xenophobes, among them the heirs of fascism or parties inspired by fascism, who sit in the governments of India, Israel and Italy. It is one of the many ironies of history that, after half a century of anti-communist Cold War, the only enemies of the Washington government who have actually killed its citizens on the territory of the USA are its own ultra-right zealots and fundamentalist Sunni Muslim militants once deliberately financed by the ‘free world’ against the Soviets. The world may yet regret that, faced with Rosa Luxemburg’s alternative of socialism or barbarism, it decided against socialism.
17
Among the Historians
What has happened to the writing of history in my lifetime? Readers not interested in this somewhat specialized subject may skip this chapter, although it is unfortunately not as academic as it seems at first sight. There is no getting away from the past, i.e. from those who record, interpret, argue about and construct it. Our everyday lives, the states we live in, the governments we live under, are surrounded by, drenched in, the products of my profession. What goes into school textbooks and politicians’ speeches about the past, the material for writers of fiction, makers of TV programmes and videos, comes ultimately from historians. What is more, most historians, including all good ones, know that in investigating the past, even the remote past, they are also thinking and expressing opinions in terms of and about the present and its concerns. Understanding history is as important for citizens as for experts, and Britain is lucky in having a powerful tradition of serious but accessible writing by experts for a wider public: Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, Charles Darwin, Maynard Keynes. Historians should not write only for other historians.
In my generation what Marc Bloch called ‘the trade of the historian’ was not taught in any systematic way in Britain. We picked it up as best we could. Very much depended on whom we encountered as undergraduate students. In my days at Cambridge there was only one teacher whose lectures, though given at nine o’clock in the morning, I attended regularly, in common with most of the bright young radical history students of that time.1 The astonishing M. M. (‘Mounia’) Postan, recently arrived in Cambridge from the London School of Economics, was a red-haired man who looked like a lively ape or Neanderthal survivor, which did not stand in the way of his impressive appeal to women, and he lectured in a heavy Russian accent on economic history. Economic history was the only branch of the subject then on the Cambridge programme which was relevant to the interests of Marxists, but the Postan lectures, with their air of intellectual revivalism, attracted even some such as the young Arthur M. Schlesinger who made no bones about his ‘lack of skill (and interest) in economic history’, not to mention his lack of interest in Marxism. Every one of those lectures – intellectual-rhetorical dramas in which a historical thesis was first expounded, then utterly dismantled and finally replaced by Postan’s own version – was a holiday from interwar British insularity, of which the Cambridge history faculty provided a particularly self-satisfied example. What other don would have told us in 1936 to read the recent French Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, not yet famous even in its own country, to invite the great Marc Bloch to lecture in Cambridge, presenting him to us, justifiably, as the greatest living medievalist? (Alas, I can remember nothing of his lecture except the image of a small pudgy man.) Though passionately anti-communist, Postan was the only man in Cambridge who knew Marx, Weber, Sombart and the rest of the great central and East Europeans, and took their work sufficiently seriously to expound and criticize it. He knew nevertheless that he attracted the young Marxists, and, though denouncing their belief in Russian bolshevism, welcomed them as allies in the fight against historical conservatism. 2 During the Cold War, when I depended on his references as my doctoral supervisor, he also helped to keep me out of jobs by pointing out to anyone concerned that I was a communist. I cannot exactly say that he was my teacher, or indeed anyone’s teacher – he formed no school and had no disciples – but he was my bridge to the wider world of history. And he was certainly the most surprising figure to be found in a senior history chair in Britain, or probably anywhere, between the wars – impressive, charming and absurd.
For Mounia Postan, somewhat improbably for a historian, was a lifelong fantasist and romancer. Without corroboration you could not believe a word of what he said. If he did not know the answer to a question – about the middle ages or the love-affairs of his students – he invented one. Since he was also very obviously an outsider in interwar Britain, whose highest ambition was to be an insider, the scope for fantasy was vast. Moreover, he lied with an utterly disarming shamelessness or chutzpah. Many years later when he was due to retire from his Cambridge chair but did not want to, he told the university that he was one year younger than his documented age, claiming that his birth record in what had then been Russia and was now Romania, no longer existed. As usual, he did not convince. As usual, people shook their heads, smiled, and said: ‘That’s Mounia!’
In some ways the greatest of his fantasies was the construction of a new identity in Britain, where he arrived from Soviet Russia via Romania in 1921. His early history was very much what one might have expected of a middle-class Jewish youth from the south-western borders of Tsarist Russia. He had studied at Odessa University until the Revolution, which he welcomed, joining a radical Marxist-Zionist group, divided only between those who wanted to go to Palestine to build a socialist society immediately, and those who wanted to organize the world revolution first. Mounia belonged to the second tendency. When Soviet power, distrustful of Zionism, was firmly institutionalized in the Ukraine after the civil war, he found himself imprisoned, he claimed for a few months, and then released. (During the Second World War this made him unacceptable to the Soviet authorities as a representative of the British Ministry of Economic Warfare.) He then came to England where, beginning as a part-time student, he made his career in the London School of Economics as a medieval agrarian historian. He did not so much conceal his background as allow the world to choose between an assortment of stories of varied continental adventure, mostly implying non-Jewishness, although no Jew who met him, and even in interwar England few non-Jews, could have been deceived for a moment. And yet, he succeeded by sheer brilliance, absurd charm, immigrant determination and not least the help of his teacher and first wife, the medieval economic historian Eileen Power (1889–1940), in climbing the peaks of his new environment, ending his life as Sir Michael Postan, married to Lady Cynthia Keppel, sister of the Earl of Albemarle. In this he was more successful than the other implausible and intellectually brilliant historiographic import from Eastern Europe, the very consciously Jewish L. B. (Sir Lewis) Namier, who got his knighthood but failed to get a chair in his cherished Oxford.
One obvious difference between the two was that one was an international figure engaged in a global field, while the other’s main historical interests were insular. At one of our first meetings Fernand Braudel asked me: ‘I understand in England there is much talk about a historian called Namier and his school. Can you tell me something about him?’ Neither he nor any other economic historian would have asked this question about Postan, if only because from 1934 on he had edited the internationally known journal in the field, Economic History Review. Moreover, while nobody outside England except a few specialists cared much that Namier had (it was then thought) revolutionized the approach to the esoteric subject of English eighteenth-century parliamentary history, all economic historians in the effective academic universe recognized Postan’s topics in medieval agrarian history as important, cared about them and were prepared to engage in debate on them across the borders of state and ideology – from Harvard to Tokyo. Unlike research on national politics of the past, economic history in those days had an accepted universe of discourse, even an accepted framework by which to judge the interest of the questions asked, whatever the disagreement about the answers.
In some ways the contrast between Postan and Namier symbolized the major conflict that divided the profession of history, and the major tendency of its development from the 1890s to the 1970s. This was the battle between the conventional assumption that ‘history is past politics’, either within nation-states or in their relations to each other, and a history of the structures and changes of societies and cultures, between history as narrative and history as analysis and synthesis, between those who thought it impossible to generalize about human affairs in the past and those who thought it essential. The battle had begun in Germany in the 1890s, but in my student days the most prominent champions of rebellion, apart from the Marxists, were in France: Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre through their review Annales. Paradoxically Bloch and Postan’s field of medieval history, which one might have expected to appeal to conservatives, actually encouraged original thinking about the past. Even the most conventional historian found it impossible to cut medieval life into neat and separable slices – political, economic, religious or whatever. It almost demanded comparisons and a rethinking of contemporary assumptions and, incidentally, cut across the borders of modern states, nations and cultures. Like ancient history, and perhaps for similar reasons, medieval history is a subject which has attracted some of the best as well as the most stuffy historical minds in my lifetime, though fewer brilliant Marxist scholars than antiquity. On the other hand, it was a field which contained a large number of figures such as my boss at Birkbeck College, the late R. R. Darlington, whose dream in life was to produce an exhaustive edition of a minor twelfth-century chronicler, and who appeared genuinely appalled when I, a young lecturer, suggested that a seminar by a South African social anthropologist then attached to the college might be of interest to students of his special paper on Anglo-Saxon England. What archives had he worked in?
Into this battle between the old and the new history young Marxists like myself at the start of their professional careers as historians, now found themselves precipitated as they joined what was still a small field, measured both in the number of its practitioners and in their output. The enormous expansion of universities old and new, and the stratospheric rise in ‘the literature’, did not get under way until the 1960s. Even in countries like Britain and France, or in fairly broad academic fields such as economic history worldwide, virtually everyone knew of, and could get to know, everyone else. Fortunately the first international congress of historical sciences after the Second World War was held in Paris in 1950. Before the war the historical establishment had ruled supreme – for by driving the best of their social sciences into emigration fascism if anything reinforced it. The innovators had at best managed to establish a foothold in a broadly defined zone of ‘economic and social history’, as in France and Britain. However, the war had so disrupted the old structures that for a brief moment the rebels had actually taken charge. The congress, organized by an Annales man, Charles Morazé, shortly but politely to be eliminated from power in the review by the rising star Fernand Braudel, was planned on heterodox lines, essentially by the French, with some input by the Italians and some from the Low Countries and Scandinavia, plus by some very uncharacteristic Anglo-Saxons: Postan himself, the Australian historical statistician Colin Clark, and a Marxist ancient historian. The Germans were, of course, virtually absent, even though it was not known at the time quite how much their eminent historians had been involved in the Nazi system. The historians of the USA attended the congress in droves – when have Americans not been keen on visiting Paris? – but they had plainly not been much consulted about the planning. Apart from one report on ancient history, and a last-minute Texan disquisition on world history as frontier history, they were kept outside the main planned sections. The Soviet Union and all its dependencies were absent, with the one exception of Poland. They all turned up in full force in 1955 after Stalin’s death, at the next international congress in Rome. Times were tense in those months immediately after the outbreak of the Korean War when the (French) President of the International Committee said gloomily that ‘the congress would provide future historians of historiography with an important record of the mentality of historians after the crisis of the second world war … while they waited for the third’.3
One innovation in which I found myself involved directly was a section on Social History, probably the first in any historical congress. In fact, there was as yet very little of it, at all events for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, nor was it at all clear in the minds of the planners what the term implied. It was obviously more than the somewhat narrow study of labour and socialist organizations which had previously had first claim on the name (that is the Amsterdam International Institute for Social History, holder of the Marx–Engels manuscripts). Equally obviously it should be concerned with labour, with social classes and social movements, and with the relations between economic and social phenomena, not to mention ‘the reciprocal influences between economic facts and political, juridical, religious, etc. phenomena’.4 To my surprise, since I had barely published my first article in a learned journal, I found myself nominated as the official chairman of the ‘Contemporary’ session, presiding over a splendid report by a crippled Marxist scholar on fifteenth to sixteenth-century Poland. I assume Postan must have proposed me, since nobody else could have. My session was attended by an odd collection of anomalies and the unestablished, soon due to move closer to the centre of the historical world. There was J. Vicens Vives, a lone visitor from Franco’s Barcelona in search of intellectual contact, who was to become the inspirer of his country’s historians. There was Paul Leuillot, secretary of the Annales, who saw himself as spokesman for Marc Bloch and Fernand Braudel, as well as myself, about to become co-founder of Past & Present. There were the often brilliant French researchers with uncompleted but vast theses, such as Pierre Vilar and Jean Meuvret, and therefore not yet integrated into the university system, who would shortly be fitted into Braudel’s new rival to the Sorbonne, the 6th Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (now Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales). There were the Marxists and their critics. In short, the face of historiography in the 1950s and 1960s was becoming visible.
The crucial point to note is that, in spite of patent ideological differences and Cold War polarization, the various schools of historiographic modernizers were going the same way and fighting the same adversaries – and they knew it. Essentially, they were against ‘positivism’, the belief that if you got the ‘facts’ right, the conclusions would take care of themselves, and against the traditional bias of conventional historians in favour of kings, ministers, battles and treaties, i.e. top-level decision-makers both political and military. In other words, they wanted a much broadened or democratized as well as methodologically sophisticated field of history. They were in favour of a history fertilized by the social sciences (including notably social anthropology), which is why the Annales broadened out from economic and social history to the subtitle Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations. When, fifteen years after the end of Hitler, a postwar generation of modernizers began to make its mark on German history, in the German Federal Republic it chose the banner of ‘Historical Social Science’.
As I have already hinted, the historical modernizers, though united against historical conservatives, were neither ideologically nor politically homogeneous. The inspiration of the French was in no way Marxist, except for the historiography of the French Revolution, which, being safely anchored in the harbour of the Sorbonne, had nothing to do with the Annales school. (Braudel once told me regretfully that the trouble with French history in his lifetime was that its two major figures, he and Ernest Labrousse of the Sorbonne, were brothers who could not get on.) In Britain, on the other hand, the Marxists were unusually prominent, and the journal Past & Present , which emerged from the discussions of the Communist Party Historians’ Group, became the modernizers’ chief medium.
17. Trafalgar Square 1961: sit-down demonstration against nuclear arms (Daily Herald, 18 September 1961)
18. Trafalgar Square 1961: historian among policemen
19. A married couple: Marlene and EH (Castelgiuliano, 1971)
20. Before the era of computers (1970s)
SOME FRIENDS: 21. (above left) Georg Eisler: Comintern child, painter, wit
22. (above right) Pierre Bourdieu: how to understand (and criticize) societies
23. (below left) Ralph Gleason: ‘Dizzy Gillespie for President!’
24. (below right) Clemens Heller: music-lover and impresario of minds
25. Latin America: with President Fernando Henrique Cardoso (Brasilia, Brazil 1995)
26. Latin America: Hortensia Allende, widow of Salvador Allende (Santiago, Chile 1998)
27. Latin America: lecturing under Orozco murals (Guadalajara, Mexico, 1997)
28. Wales: above Llyn, Arddy, Gwynedd (1980s)
29. Wales: in Gwenddwr, Powys (1990s)
30. Looking back on the Cold War: EH and Markus Wolf in discussion on Dutch television
31. An old historian
The rebel Germans, a postwar generation, were largely formed by their studies in Britain and the USA, and tended to Max Weber rather than Marx, as against the home-grown Marxism of the British Communist Party Historians’ Group. Yet we all recognized each other as allies. Past & Present acknowledged the inspiration of Annales in the first paragraph of its first issue. For Annales Jacques Le Goff (‘a reader from the beginning, an admirer, a friend, almost (if I may say so) a secret lover’ 5) compared Past & Present with his journal, while the chief of the new Germans appears to regard ‘the astonishing effect of the Marxist historians’ generation’ as the main factor behind ‘the global impact of English historiography since the 1960s’.6
At this stage history in the USA (as distinct from the US social sciences) still played a relatively minor international role. In fact, there was little real contact between it and the old world, except in fields of traditional interest to US Europeanists, such as the French Revolution, and in the fields brought with them from Europe by the German exiles after 1933. But Europeanists were a minority, distrusted as cosmopolitan Ivy Leaguers by the great bulk of generally monoglot historians whose subject was the history of the USA, a subject which, as treated by most of them, had very little in common with what historians elsewhere were doing. Only slavery was a subject that aroused international interest, but the younger historians of this subject who were to make a mark abroad were very untypical of the profession in the fifties and sixties. They included several young postwar members of the American Communist Party – Herb Gutman, the brilliant Gene Genovese and the former national secretary of the Young Communist League and subsequent Nobel Prize laureate, the endlessly ingenious Bob Fogel.
Curiously enough, this was true even of so patently global a subject as economic history, which may explain why, when an international association was founded in this field, it was basically run as an Anglo-French condominium of Braudel and Postan. Stateside historical innovations – economic history in terms of businessmen (‘entrepreneurial’ history) in the 1950s, ‘psychohistory’ (that is Freudian interpretations of historical figures) and the much more dramatic ‘cliometrics’ (history as retrospective and often imaginary econometrics) in the 1960s – found it hard to cross the Atlantic. Not until 1975 was the quinquennial World Congress of Historical Sciences held in the USA, presumably on diplomatic grounds, to balance the Moscow session of 1970.
On the whole, in the thirty years following the Second World War the historical traditionalists were fighting a rearguard engagement in a losing battle against the advancing modernists in most western countries where history flourished freely. Perhaps they would have defended themselves more effectively if the garrison of the central stronghold of traditional historical scholarship, Germany, had not been put out of action by its association with National Socialism. (The situation of historians in communist countries was not comparable to the West, but, as it happened, the Marxism to which they were officially and sometimes genuinely committed fitted in with the western modernizers more than with traditionalist, mainly nationalist, history in their own countries.) In 1970 a rather optimistic, not to say triumphalist, meeting was organized by the American journal Daedalus to survey the state of history. Except for the (defensive) spokesmen for political and military history, the gathering was dominated by the modernizers – British, French and, among the under-forties, American.7 By that time a common flag had been found for the far from homogeneous popular front of the innovators: ‘social history’. It fitted in with the political radicalization of the dramatically expanding student population of the 1960s. The term was vague, sometimes misleading, but as I wrote at the time, noting the ‘remarkably flourishing state of the field’: ‘It is a good moment to be a social historian. Even those of us who never set out to call ourselves by this name will not want to disclaim it.’8
There was some cause for satisfaction. Not least because, somewhat unexpectedly, the Cold War had not substantially interfered with developments in history. Indeed, it is surprising how little it penetrated the world of historiography, except, obviously, on such matters as the history of Russia and the USSR. Capitalism and the Historians, a volume published in the 1940s under the auspices of Friedrich von Hayek, argued that historians who pointed out the negative effects of the Industrial Revolution on the poor were systematically biased against the benefits of the free enterprise system. This led to a lively polemic which entertained students, the so-called ‘Standard-of-Living Debate’ when the left (i.e. myself, speaking for the communist historians) responded, but it cannot be said that this debate, which has continued at intervals ever since, was subsequently conducted on ideological lines. Explosive subjects such as Russia, especially in the twentieth century, and the history of communism were, of course, ideological battlefields, although the debate was one-sided, since the orthodoxies enforced in the Soviet Empire crippled both their historians and their interpretations. If one was a serious Soviet historian, the best thing was to stick to the history of the ancient East and the Middle Ages, although it was touching to see how the modernists rushed to say (within the constraints of the permissible) what they knew to be true every time the window seemed to be slightly opened – as in 1956 and in the early 1960s. I myself became essentially a nineteenth-century historian, because I soon discovered – actually in the course of an aborted project of the CP Historians’ Group to write a history of the British labour movement – that, given the strong official Party and Soviet views about the twentieth century, one could not write about anything later than 1917 without the likelihood of being denounced as a political heretic. I was ready to write about the century in a political or public capacity, but not as a professional historian. My history finished at Sarajevo in June 1914.
Luckily I abstained from twentieth-century history until it was almost over, but it went against the grain of the historiographical movement, which was away from the remote past and towards the present. Until well past 1945 ‘real’ history finished, at the latest, in 1914 after which the immediate past reverted to chronicle, journalism or contemporary commentary. Indeed, since the archives remained closed in Britain for several decades, it simply could not be written to the standards of traditional historians. In most countries, even the nineteenth century had not yet been fully absorbed by academic history departments, except by the economic historians. The great historiographical debates had not been about it, although political radicalism, not least in the form of a new passion for labour history, now drew attention to an era which had been seriously neglected by historians in a number of countries. Even in Britain, until the 1960s politicians, serious journalists, relatives and essayists wrote the biographies of the great figures of Victorian Britain, not professors. Nevertheless, the gap between past and present narrowed, perhaps because so many professional historians had actually been involved in the Second World War.
At the same time, academic history in the western sense was still largely confined to the First and Second worlds and Japan. Broadly speaking, outside these regions it did not exist, did not flourish, or continued along traditional lines, except for minorities of Marxists and (as in parts of Latin America) patches of modernist Parisian influence. Moreover, most academic history was overwhelmingly Eurocentric, or – in the term preferred in the USA – concerned with ‘Western Civilization’. The globe entered Cambridge history only as ‘The Expansion of Europe’. With rare exceptions such as Charles Boxer it was not historians but geographers, anthropologists and language specialists, as well naturally as imperial administrators, who occupied themselves with ‘non-western’ affairs. Before the war extra-European history as such interested few historians except (by reason of their anti-imperialism) the Marxists and non-European historians such as the Japanese, who were then also under strong Marxist influence. In Cambridge a succession of historians convened the so-called ‘colonial group’ of the student Communist Party (overwhelmingly South Asians). The Canadian E. H. Norman, later a diplomat and pioneer historian of modern Japan who committed suicide in 1957 under pressure from the US witch-hunters, was followed by my old friend V. G. (Victor) Kiernan, a man of disarming charm and universal, elegant erudition about all continents who also wrote on the poet Horace and translated Urdu poetry, by the Canadian Harry Ferns, whose field was Argentina and who became extremely conservative in later years, and by the brilliant, original and self-destructive Jack Gallagher, who never got up before midday and later occupied the chairs of imperial history in both Oxford and Cambridge. My own interest in extra-European history also derives from my association with that group.
Extra-western history came into its own with the decolonization of the old empires and the simultaneous rise of the USA as a world power. World history as the history of the globe emerged in the 1960s, with the obvious progress of globalization. Historians from the Third World, notably a group of brilliant Indians, spun off from the local schools of Marxist debate, gained worldwide recognition only in the 1990s. The interests of world empire as well as the extraordinary resources available to US universities made the USA the centre of the new post-Eurocentric world history and, incidentally, transformed its history textbooks and journals. How could historical perspectives remain the same? Fidel Castro brought about the systematic development of Latin American studies in Britain in the early 1960s. Indeed we understood at the time that it was influenced by suggestions from President Kennedy’s Washington that it would be convenient to supplement locally distrusted North American experts on this region with the more acceptable Europeans. (If so, the project misfired. Latin American history overwhelmingly attracted young radicals.) However, the histories of Europe, the USA and the rest of the world remained separate from each other – their publics coexisting but barely touching. History remains, alas, primarily a series of niche markets for both writers and readers. In my generation only a handful of historians has tried to integrate them in a comprehensive world history. This was partly because of the almost total failure, largely for institutional and linguistic reasons, of history to emancipate itself from the framework of the nation-state. Looking back, this provincialism was probably the major weakness of the subject in my lifetime.
Nevertheless, around 1970 it seemed reasonable to suppose that the war for the modernization of historiography that had begun in the 1890s had been won. The main railway network along which the trains of historiography would roll had been built. Not that the modernizers, at least outside the French enemies of the ‘history of events’, necessarily proposed a hegemony of economic and social history, or even a relegation of political history, let alone the history of ideas and culture. The modernizers were far from reductionists. Though they believed that history must explain and generalize, they knew it was not like the natural sciences. However, they believed that history had a comprehensive project, whether it was Braudel’s ‘total’ or ‘global history, integrating the contributions of all the sciences of man’, or, if I may quote my own definition, of ‘what history in the broadest sense is about: how and why Homo sapiens got from the palaeolithic to the nuclear era’.9 Yet within a few years the scene had changed utterly. As Braudel himself complained about the Annales he no longer directed in the 1970s, the sense of priorities, the distinction between significance and triviality, which was essential to the old project, had gone. Just so old hands from Past & Present complained about Raphael Samuel’s new History Workshop Journal (the last remote offspring of the old CP Historians’ Group), that it discovered all sorts of corners of the past interesting to enthusiasts, but showed no sign of wanting to ask questions about them. History as the exploration of an objectively recoverable past had not yet been challenged. That only came with the fashion for ‘postmodernism’, a term which was virtually unknown in Britain before the 1980s, and which, fortunately, had made only marginal inroads into the field of serious historical writing by the start of the new century. Nevertheless, sometime in the early seventies the historiographical tide turned. Those who thought they had won most of the battles from the 1930s on, now found it running against them. ‘Structure’ was on the way down, ‘culture’ was on the way up. Perhaps the best way of summarizing the change is to say that the young historians after 1945 found their inspiration in Braudel’s Mediterranean(1949), the young historians after 1968 in the anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s brilliant tour de force of ‘thick description’, ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cock-Fight’ (1973).10
There was a shift away from historical models or ‘the large why questions’, a shift from ‘the analytical to the descriptive mode’, 11 from economic and social structure to culture, from recovering fact to recovering feeling, from telescope to microscope – as in the enormously influential little monograph on the world-view of one sixteenth-century eccentric Friulian miller by the young Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg.12 Perhaps there was also an element of that curious intellectual distrust for the rationalism of the natural sciences which was to become much more fashionable as the century drew to its end. Not that one can see much of a return from structural to narrative history among academics, or to old-style political history. At any rate, as far as I know historians of younger generations in the past thirty years have so far produced no masterpiece of non-analytic narrative history to be compared to that acknowledged triumph of traditional scholarship in this genre, Steven Runciman’s The Crusades (1951–4). However, the sheer extent to which patently important matters had been concealed or passed in silence in the half-century since 1945 left a vast scope for straight, archive-based filling of gaps, or the ‘history of events’. One has only to think of the hidden continent of Soviet archives which came into public view in the 1990s, the history of the Cold War or the long official silences or public myths about France under German occupation, or about the foundation and early years of Israel.
Although the historiographical moderns who had battled so successfully against the ancients until the late 1960s were an alliance which contained the Marxists, the challenge to their supremacy did not come from the ideological right. If my generations of Marxist historians formed in the years from 1933 to 1956 had no real successors, it was not because the cold warriors gained ground in schools and history faculties – probably the opposite was the case – but because the generations of the post-1960s left mostly wanted something else. But once again, this was not a specific reaction against Marxism. In France the virtual hegemony of Braudelian history and the Annales came to an end after 1968, and the international influence of the journal dropped steeply.
At least some of the change in history echoed the extraordinary cultural revolution of the late 1960s, which had its epicentre in the universities, and more particularly in the arts and humanities. It was not so much an intellectual challenge as a change of mood. In Britain the ‘History Workshop’ movement was the most characteristic expression of the new post-1968 ‘historical left’. Its object was not so much historical discovery, explanation or even exposition, as inspiration, empathy and democratization. It also reflected the remarkable and unexpected growth of a mass public interest in the past which has given history a surprising prominence in print and on screen. History Workshop meetings, which brought together amateurs and professionals, intellectuals and workers, and vast numbers of the young in jeans, flanked by sleeping-bags and improvised creches, resembled gospel sessions, especially when addressed with the required hwyl by star performers such as the wonderful historian of Wales, Gwyn Alf Williams, a low-slung dark man whose superb management of his stammer served to underline his platform eloquence. It is typical that the first Women’s Liberation Conference in Britain (to which Marlene was taken by the females of our ‘New Left’ friends) grew out of a proposed History Workshop at the end of the 1960s. Sheila Rowbotham’s historical manifesto of feminism which followed was characteristically called Hidden from History. These were people for whom history was not so much a way of interpreting the world, but a means of collective self-discovery, or at best, of winning collective recognition.
The danger of this position was, and is, that it undermines the universality of the universe of discourse that is the essence of all history as a scholarly and intellectual discipline, a Wissenschaft in both the German and the narrower English sense.13 It also undermines what both the ancients and the moderns had in common, namely the belief that historians’ investigations, by means of generally accepted rules of logic and evidence, distinguish between fact and fiction, between what can be established and what cannot, what is the case and what we would like to be so. But this has become increasingly dangerous. Political pressures on history, by old and new states and regimes, identity groups, and forces long concealed under the frozen ice-cap of the Cold War, are greater than ever before in my lifetime, and modern media society has given the past unprecedented prominence and marketing potential. More history than ever is today being revised or invented by people who do not want the real past, but only a past that suits their purpose. Today is the great age of historical mythology. The defence of history by its professionals is today more urgent in politics than ever. We are needed.
We also have much to do. While the actual affairs of humanity are now conducted mainly by the criteria of problem-solving technologists, to which it is almost irrelevant, history has become more central to our understanding of the world than ever before. Quietly, amid the arguments about the objective existence of the past, historical change has become a central component of the natural sciences, from cosmogony to revived Darwinism. Indeed, through molecular and evolutionary biology, palaeontology and archaeology human history itself is being transformed. It has been reinserted into the framework of global, indeed of cosmic, evolution. DNA has revolutionized it. Thus we now know how extraordinarily young homo sapiens is as a species. We left Africa 100,000 years ago. The whole of what is usually described as ‘history’ since the invention of agriculture and cities consists of hardly more than 400 human generations or 10,000 years, a blink of the eye in geological time. Given the dramatic acceleration of the pace of humanity’s control over nature in this brief period, especially in the last ten or twenty generations, the whole of history so far can be seen to be something like an explosion of our species, a sort of bio-social supernova, into an unknown future. Let us hope it is not a catastrophic one. In the meanwhile, and for the first time, we have an adequate framework for a genuinely global history, and one restored to its proper central place, neither within the humanities nor the natural and mathematical sciences, nor separated from them, but essential to both. I wish I were young enough to take part in writing it.
Still, it was good to be a historian even in my generation. Above all, it was enjoyable. In a conversation on his intellectual development my friend, the late Pierre Bourdieu, once said:
I see intellectual life as something closer to the artist’s life than to the routine of the academy…Of all the forms of intellectual work, the trade of sociologist is without doubt the one the practice of which has given me happiness, in every sense of the word.14
Substitute ‘historian’ for sociologist, and I say amen to that.
18
In the Global Village
How can the autobiographer who has been a lifelong academic and author write about his professional life? What happens in writing occurs essentially in solitude on screens or pieces of paper. When writers are engaged in any other action, they are not writing, though they may be accumulating material for it. This is true even of the literary activity of men (or women) of action, such as Julius Caesar. There is plenty to be said about conquering Gaul, and, as secondary schoolboys used to know, Caesar said it very well, but there is little to be said about the process of writing On the Gallic War except, presumably, that the great Julius dictated it to some slave secretary in the intervals of doing more important things.
Again, academics spend most of their working time on the routines of teaching, research, meetings and examining. These are unadventurous and lacking in unpredictability by the standards of more highprofile living. They spend much of their leisure time in the society of other academics, a species which, however interesting as individuals, is not thrilling company en masse. Half a century ago it could be plausibly argued that an assembly of historians, such as could be seen at the annual meetings of their societies, was even less distinguishable from an assembly of insurance company executives than collections of other university teachers, but since the generation of 1968 has entered the academy, this may no longer be so.
As for students, en masse they are certainly more interesting for anyone who likes being a teacher, but mainly by virtue of their youth and all the things that go with it, such as enthusiasm, passion, hope, ignorance and immaturity, rather than because much is to be expected by facing crowds of them. Admittedly, this is not strictly true of the two institutions in which I spent most of my teaching career, Birkbeck College in the University of London and the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research (now New School University) in New York. Both, being somewhat anomalous parts of academia, have singular student bodies. Birkbeck, the successor of the London Mechanics’ Institution of 1825, remains an evening college, teaching those who earn their living during the day. One of the reasons why I spent my entire British career there, was the pleasure of teaching extraordinarily motivated men and women, usually older and hence more mature than the normal post-school student. They faced their teachers weekly with the acid test of the profession: how to keep a bunch of people interested in what is being said to them between eight and nine p.m., knowing that they have come to college after a full day’s work, swallowed a quick meal in the cafeteria, sat through one or two earlier lectures, and face maybe an hour’s journey home after I get through. Birkbeck was a good school, not least of learning how to communicate.
The peculiarity of the New School’s Graduate Faculty was its combination of heterodoxy and internationalism. The New School for Social Research itself had been founded after the Great War by educational and ideological and politically radical reformers rebelling against what they regarded as the tyranny of examinations. It found first-class people, of whom there was no shortage in New York City, to teach anything for which there was a demand, from classical philosophy to yoga. The Graduate Faculty had been set up in 1933 to provide for the academic refugees from Hitler’s Germany, followed by those from the rest of occupied Europe. It is on record as the first academic institution to give lectures on jazz and almost certainly the first to give a seminar on structuralism (by Claude Levi-Strauss and Roman Jakobson), both during the Second World War. Its reputation for heterodoxy and radicalism attracted unusual students from the USA, and even more interesting and able ones from western and Latin American countries. In the 1980s it developed a relationship with the countries about to shake off their communist regimes. The Poles, Russians, Bulgarians and Chinese joined the Brazilians, Spaniards and Turks in our classes. I once counted twenty nationalities in my own. Since they knew more about their own countries and special fields than I did, I learned at least as much from them as they did from me. There was almost certainly no more varied and stimulating a body of students anywhere.
Communication is the essence both of teaching and of writing. Fortunate the author who likes both, for it rescues him or her from the desert island on which we usually sit, writing messages for unknown recipients in unknown destinations to be launched across the oceans in bottles shaped like books. But the teacher–author speaks directly to the potential readers. Lecturing was probably still the major form of teaching in my academic generation, and in many ways lecturers relate to any room full of students as actors relate to the faces before them in the theatre except that their house lights don’t go out. We are both performers, they are what we perform for. There is nothing like lecturing to tell us when we are losing the attention of the audience. Nevertheless, the lecturer’s task is harder, for he or she expects the audience to carry away a load of specific information and ideas which they should remember and digest, and not only the emotional satisfaction of the occasion. Even a good lecturer communicates only what radiates from any other performer with stage presence, namely the projection of a personality, a temperament, an image, a mind at work – and, with a bit of luck, he or she may strike a corresponding spark in the imagination of some people out there. It is through class discussion that we establish whether we have actually communicated what we wanted to. That is one reason why, during my whole career as a university teacher, I preferred general to specialist courses. Indeed, my books on general historical subjects either grew out of student lectures or, after more specialized origins, were tested in student lectures.
The satisfaction of a teacher’s job comes essentially from relations with individuals, but these form only a small part of the very large body of men and women with notebooks in lecture theatres, the vast pile of examination scripts or term papers that fill a university teacher’s working life in the course of his or her career. And even they are part of a pretty unchanging routine. Experienced from inside, a research seminar may be unforgettable, but seen from the outside it merely looks like – and I am thinking of my own at the Institute of Historical Research in London in the 1970s and 1980 – a couple of dozen people in the late afternoon, surrounded by books, sitting along a table discussing a paper read by one of them or an outside visitor, and then going a couple of hundred yards to a pub for a drink or two. Considered as a potential movie, it is not even art-house material.
In memory the academic autobiographer’s years stretch back like the wagons on those endless freight-trains, observed from some hill as they carry containers across the American landscape. Seen in retrospect, the succession of trucks is less interesting than the changing territory through which they pass. In my case they have passed through cities and campuses in three continents – four, if the Americas count as two – though before retirement mostly on relatively brief visits, except for a semester as a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1967) and a half-year’s teaching and research in Latin America (1971), both with my family. However, a peripatetic life with small children is not ideal for academics, and eventually their schooling made it impossible. I never tested the anti-communism of the US authorities by accepting a permanent appointment in their country. If I was tempted by visiting spells at one or another of the great North American universities, Marlene’s veto stood in the way: small-town academic life was not for her. Only one such place broke her resistance, the Getty Center – then still at Santa Monica – the nearest thing to paradise for scholars, where we spent some time in 1989. However, Los Angeles can hardly be regarded as the sticks. I too had been immunized against the campus life by my own brief experience in the summer quarter at Stanford, then as now a superb university, one of the half-dozen finest in the world, but embedded in Palo Alto, sensationally boring as a community for living in. For many years afterwards I could not even bring myself to revisit this nowhere space of empty streets in which cars visited each others’ owners in beautiful homes.
The ideal arrangement for both of us was a stable metropolitan base varied by the increasingly available academic trips abroad, which the revolution in air transport made easy from the 1960s. They have taken us from Finland to Naples, from Canada to Peru, from Japan to Brazil. Our times have added the roving professor to the other profession which likes to recall the pleasures, embarrassments and absurdities of a life of changing places, but which still remains essentially the same, namely the foreign correspondent. I have had the luck to teach and live for most of my professional life in or near the centre of the two major cultural cities of the late twentieth-century world: within a stone’s throw of the British Museum in one, in a Greenwich Village office above Bradley’s, the quintessential jazz location of Manhattan, in the other. (Alas, Bradley’s folded in 1996 and New York has not been the same for me since.)
Nevertheless, careers and freight-trains do not roll across the land at an absolutely steady rate. The war had delayed the start of my own career, and the Cold War had slowed it down considerably. It continued in the doldrums, but by the middle 1960s, when other offers in Britain and abroad began to come in, this was so eccentric as to be widely regarded as scandalous. 1 Still, I had begun to publish books only in my forties, and by the time I could actually call myself ‘Professor’ in Britain, I was in my middle fifties, a time of life when most professionals have got as far as they, and the world, expects them to get in their career. At that stage for most of us the promise is in the past, and so is such achievement as it has produced. Professionally speaking, people in this position are left to face half a lifetime of endless tomorrows no better than today, apart from the gowns and ribbons – professional and maybe public honours – which (at least in the humanities) usually signify that the honorand’s future will add nothing to his or her past, except the slow decline of age. World war and Cold War saved me from all this. By an unexpected twist of fortune, they prolonged the period of youth and promise into middle age. At the same time remarriage and children gave a new start to my private life.
In fact, only the war had genuinely delayed my career – but probably no more than that of most men in my age group. (In Britain it had actually advanced the prospects of women graduates.) The Cold War of the 1950s blocked jobs and publishers’ contracts, but ‘on the street’, as the fin-de-siècle phrase has it, that is to say among the working historians, my reputation was serious from the start, certainly in the unofficial world of the younger historians. I was clearly a rising star in the rather narrower community of the Marxist ones.
Pride and intellectual vanity made me worry whether my reputation was carried only by the sympathies of the left, or rested only on the relative scarcity of Marxists to fill the niche which, since the Second World War, even conventional history reserved for this version of a recognized ‘opposition’. It is not that I minded then or mind now being identified as ‘Hobsbawm the Marxist historian’, the label which I still carry round my neck to this day, like the decanters circulating after dinner in combination rooms to prevent dons from confusing their port with their sherry. Young historians need to have their attention drawn to the materialist interpretation of history as much, perhaps even more, today, when even left-wing academic fashions dismiss it as in the days when it was being damned as totalitarian propaganda. After all, I have been trying to persuade people for over half a century that there is more to Marxist history than they have hitherto thought, and if the association of one historian’s name with it helps to do so, so much the better. What troubled my vanity was rather the fear of a mere ghetto reputation, such as that from which figures prominent inside another characteristic twentieth-century cultural ghetto, the Roman Catholic community in Britain, have so often found it difficult, even impossible, to escape. G. K. Chesterton, the dimensions of whose talent have been concealed from non-Catholics by the very closeness of his association with the Church, is a good example. (No British writer would dream of thinking about him like Italo Calvino who once said it was one of his ambitions to become ‘the Chesterton of the Communists’.) Getting good reviews from friendly critics was not the problem. The test of success was to get them from the neutral and hostile ones.
From about 1960 on it became increasingly evident that I was getting beyond a ghetto reputation. My first book, Primitive Rebels (1959), was well received in the USA, both among the historians and the social scientists. Within a few years it had been translated into German, French and Italian. My second book, The Age of Revolution 1789– 1848 (1962), aimed at a broader public, was a success. At least it impressed an established literary agent, the bulky, white-haired and moustached bon vivant David Higham, enough to ask me whether I wanted to join his stable and to offer me periodic lunches at his window table in the Etoile restaurant in Charlotte Street. As I write this both the Etoile (with much the same menu) and the table are still there, under the supervision of another protector of agents and authors, Elena, whose reputation as the queen mother of literary restaurants had been acquired earlier in Soho, and I am still under the wing of old Higham’s successor in the firm still named after him, my friend Bruce Hunter. History may move at the speed of a missile, but some continuities remain. Since The Age of Revolution was part of an international co-production series organized by George Weidenfeld, it would have been translated very quickly anyway, whatever its merits. Nevertheless the seven translations and foreign editions that appeared in the 1960s were helpful, and the book was well received everywhere. I later discovered that a notoriously poor Spanish translation in 1964 was welcomed by the rapidly growing anti-Franco movement in the Spanish universities, since, unlike most Marxist publications, it was legally available.
I published a good deal in the 1960s: a collection of earlier pieces on the history of labour (Labouring Men, 1964), a text on British economic history since the eighteenth century (Industry and Empire , 1968), a small study of the myth and reality of the world’s Robin Hoods, written in Wales as the Russians put an end to the Prague Spring ( Bandits, 1969), and in the same year, jointly with my friend George Rudé, a rather larger research monograph on the English farm-labourers’ rising of 1830 (Captain Swing, 1969). By 1971 when I finally got the official professorial title in the University of London, I was already entering the zone of academies (at least in the USA) and honorary degrees (at least in Sweden).
So by the 1970s I was an academically, if not politically, respectable and recognized figure. That decade reinforced this situation. My membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain was by then seen as little more than the personal peculiarity of a well-known historian, one of that new species the jet-plane academic. Only America refused to forget about Hobsbawm the subversive, for, until the abrogation of the Smith Act in the late 1980s, I remained ineligible for a visa to enter the USA and required a ‘waiver’ of this ineligibility every time I went there, which was more or less every year. I was a founder and active member of the editorial board of one of the most prestigious English-language historical journals, a member of the councils and committees of learned historical societies. Seminars and graduate courses in London, doctoral students, national and international, kept the new professor busy. The invitations to lectures and appointments elsewhere continued and multiplied. In my last year at Birkbeck I was simultaneously attached to establishments in London, Paris (at the Collège de France and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) and the USA (as ‘Professor-at-large’ of Cornell University). It was all the more enjoyable, even if slightly absurd, since this take-off in my professional fortunes was something I had neither looked for nor expected. One way or another, we had a splendid, if occasionally surrealist, time in the 1970s, not least (with a young family) in Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru and (without family) in Japan. It is not every academic wife who finds herself travelling thirty miles with small children and recorders on a chicken-filled bus in the Peruvian central Sierra to a joint music lesson with the children of a British anthropologist, while her husband, very very slowly – for the buildings are above 4,000 metres – inspects the records of a recently nationalized hacienda shortly to go to the country’s newly established Agrarian Archive.
Perhaps this explains why, though producing learned articles, I wrote fewer academic books in this decade – effectively only The Age of Capital (1974), which made me aware that, without having meant to, I was engaged in writing a wildly ambitious general history of the nineteenth century. Actually much of the most intensive work I did during that decade, planning and writing for an equally ambitious History of Marxism, which was published by Einaudi in Turin in 1978–82, never reached the public entirely in languages other than Italian, since the public interest in these matters dropped precipitately at the end of the 1970s. However, in the 1980s my production speeded up again, largely thanks to the wonderful conditions available in New York and Los Angeles. I published a new collection of papers on labour history (Worlds of Labour, in the USA Workers) in 1984, the third volume on the nineteenth century in 1987 (The Age of Empire 1875– 1914), and two books based on invited lectures, Nations and Nationalism Since the 1780s (what other subject was there to lecture on in Belfast in 1985?) and Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution, both in 1990. I also co-edited and contributed to a volume based on a Past & Present conference I had organized a few years earlier, and which proved to be unusually influential: The Invention of Tradition (1983). My image as I went into my eighth decade was that of an eccentric elderly grandee of the historical profession, who happened to insist that he was a Marxist, but who continued in full production.
Indeed, the history of the twentieth century I wrote in the happy conditions of the New School (where I had been teaching for a semester a year since 1984), The Age of Extremes 1914–1991 (1994), was my most successful book, both in sales and critical reception. It was well received across the entire ideological spectrum of the globe – with the single exception of France – winning prizes in Canada as well as Taiwan, being translated both into Hebrew and Arabic, into Taiwan and Mainland Mandarin, into Croatian and Serbian editions of what my generation still thinks of as the Serbo-Croat language, and into both Albanian and Macedonian. By the second year of the new century it had been or was about to be published in thirty-seven languages.
And yet, in a field as steeped in politics, its own and the world’s, as the writing of history, it would be quite unrealistic to separate the two. Much as someone in my position resented being placed into a Marxist ghetto, my reputation as a historian (and certainly in the 1960s and 1970s my sales) undoubtedly benefited from my reputation as a Marxist. Paradoxically, it was in the world of ‘really existing socialism’ that my books were not published, outside Hungary and Slovenia. The local theologians did not know what to do about a historian who could not be published as an unbeliever (‘not of course, a marxist, but worth consulting in certain respects’), nor as a Marxist, since the only ‘marxist interpretation’ they recognized was a restatement of the officially recognized orthodoxy.
In the West, and even more in what was then called the Third World, the 1960s were a good time for my kind of history, or more exactly, for the alliance of historical modernizers whose fortunes I have discussed in the last chapter. Consider the three-volume Economic Historyof Britain which Penguin Books commissioned at that time, on the advice of Jack (later Sir John) Plumb, perhaps no longer the young radical of 1930s Cambridge, but not without memories of that era: the authors were M. M. Postan, Christopher Hill and myself. Marxists, no longer in the ghetto unless they wanted to be, were, for the time being, part of the historical mainstream. At the same time a new politico-intellectual left was emerging in the universities and schools of Europe and the USA, which actively sought out people with radical credentials. That is why E. P. Thompson’s marvellous Making of the English Working Class triumphed in the middle sixties, lifting its author, deservedly but to everyone’s surprise, to international fame practically overnight. For a while older teachers complained that the students read virtually no other book. I had neither Edward’s genius and charisma nor his sales, but I also wrote on the subjects, and with the sentiments, which attracted radicalized young student readers.
Nowhere were scholarship and politics more closely linked than in the so-called Third World, where, of course, Marxism, being anti-imperialist, was not just the label for a small academic minority, but the prevailing ideology among the younger intellectuals. Brazil may serve as an example. Even during the military regime (1964–85) which had forced out of public life virtually everyone known to have associations with the left who was not in jail or driven into emigration, people like me were consulted on the staffing of a new university. And, indeed, invited to lecture, as I was in 1975 at a vaguely defined conference on ‘History and Society’ at the new university about which I had been consulted, whose student body – perhaps not surprisingly – was passionately hostile to the regime. This was no accident. The press, which devoted quite disproportionate space to a provincial academic occasion, though otherwise approximate (the Estado de São Paulo described me as ‘Irish by birth’), went out of its way to stress my ‘marxist formation’. In fact, as I was told by friendly journalists, by the middle seventies the regime was beginning to relax a little, and the entire Campinas conference was part of an operation to test how much liberalization it was willing to tolerate. What more effective test than to announce the invitation of a known Marxist, and one whose non-academic ideas were likely to be loudly applauded by the students – as indeed they were2 – and to give plenty of publicity to the occasion? This was a characteristic example of the admirable Brazilian combination of civic courage and intelligence, never accepting the dictatorship, never ceasing to press just beyond the limits of its tolerance. True the Brazilian generals were not quite so murderous as some others in Latin America but the regime was bloodstained enough, and the risks of jail and torture were real. As it happens, the opposition had calculated right: the regime was ready to cede.
It is perhaps no surprise that I may have subsequently benefited as a writer from my minimal and unconscious part in the struggle against the Brazilian military dictatorship. And indeed from the extraordinary fact, not commonly noticed by western liberals, that between 1960 and the mid-1980s, what the USA called ‘the free world’ passed through the most widespread phase of non-democratic government since the fall of fascism, typically in the form of military regimes. Intellectuals, and certainly students, were heavily in opposition to these, though sometimes silenced by sheer terror, whether in Greece, Spain, Turkey, among the usual suspects in Latin America, or in countries such as South Korea. Making available and reading oppositional literature was the obvious first step towards political democratization, as soon as these regimes gave even the slightest ground. Since the universities were the places where the non-business elite of these countries was educated – outside the USA the triumph of business schools and MBAs was still in the future – in those decades a very high proportion of those destined to go into politics, public service, academic life, journalism and the other media were made familiar with the names that stood for left-wing social and historical thought. Since the number of contemporaries with this reputation was small, our names became quite well known in reading circles, even though the actual circulation of our writings, legal or pirated, was modest. Naturally after democratization it could become much larger, though nowhere else quite as large as in Brazil, where more copies of the first edition of my history of the twentieth century were to be sold than in any other single country; though much of this was due to the help of a quite exceptional publisher, Luis Sczwarcz.
In this way the professional career of one author during and after the rise, slackening and fall of governments of the hard-line right in the west may throw light on the wider intellectual history of the ‘free world’ in the second half of the twentieth century, that is to say on the rise of the new generations of educated elites since the 1960s, brought up in the spirit of rebellion, even when they were soon to be ‘co-opted’ by (as the phrase then went), or co-opt themselves into the ‘Establishment’. That is not to overestimate the significance of reading these authors. Some were merely badges of temporary political or ideological fashion. For instance, in the years of the great student revolts of the late sixties the writings of the political philosopher Herbert Marcuse were displayed in every university bookshop of the western world – at least I saw them on the East and West coasts of the USA, in Paris, Stockholm, Mexico City and Buenos Aires. (Marcuse himself, a tanned outdoor type who might have been a retired ski instructor, did not look the part when I met him in the house of friends in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the time.) Yet within a few years his writings had returned to the underworld in which aspiring Ph.D. candidates desperately seek thesis subjects.
Whether the authors who thus became political badges in a country were aware of what was happening to their names was largely irrelevant. There are countries in which I did not even know I had readers until I discovered, as on visiting South Korea in 1987, that five of my titles were in print in (pirated) local translations. But for an Iranian friend at the New School, I would not know at all that one Ali-Akbar Mehdian, not otherwise known, had translated and published The Age of Revolution in Tehran in the spring of 1995 adding ‘Europe’ to 1789–1848, ‘probably to be able to get permission for publication’. In Brazil and to a lesser extent in Argentina, countries I knew and where I had friends, I had a shrewd idea of how such names could become familiar, though, until much later, not of the extent of this potential readership.
This takes a Marxist autobiographer into the welcome territory of technology and culture, namely the explosion of photocopiers that accompanied the enormous expansion of higher education in the West since the 1960s. This gave the new masses of teachers and students access, mostly unpaid, to fiendishly expensive imported academic texts otherwise far beyond their modest budgets and the sparse resources of their libraries. It was the Buenos Aires office of my admirable Spanish publisher, Gonzalo Ponton of Critica, which consequently guessed that there was scope for a special local edition of my work, and I discovered the extent of my youthful readership, or at least of those who had a positive reaction to my name, on a 1998 visit to Buenos Aires to promote it. Conversely, it was the systematic absence of such devices in the communist world that long limited its dissident literature to what could be laboriously typed and copied with carbon paper, or learned by heart.
No doubt there are authors – I am plainly not among them – who may trace the intellectual dimensions of the decline and collapse of communism and its consequences in a similar manner, through the fortunes of their works. It is obviously far harder to do so for two reasons. Before the fall of these regimes dissident or even heterodox literature was barely allowed above ground. There is no way to measure the impact of writings which were inaccessible in print to most readers, though this does not mean that such works might not become known in other ways. Since the end of communism the publication of serious writing about history and politics has depended on the subsidies of well-wishers such as the admirable George Soros. This tells the author little about his or her intended, potential or actual readers. Thanks to Soros, whose foundations and other benefactions have almost singlehandedly kept intellectual and scientific activities in the ex-USSR and much of Eastern Europe from being swept away by the forest fire of the so-called ‘free market’, at least two of my books, The Age of Extremes and Nations and Nationalism, have been published in a variety of the lesser East European languages, whose tiny public could never possibly have justified the enormous costs of translation. Moreover, one of them (Nations and Nationalism) is a critique of the very ethno-linguistic nationalism on which the small successor states are based, so that it is extremely unlikely that there was much pent-up demand for such critiques in the relevant bookshops of Tirana, Pristina and Skopje. However, since the world still lives in the shadow of the tower of Babel, how could I tell?
Nevertheless I have probably coped better with the Babel problem than most of my English-speaking colleagues, not least because my professional life has not only been peripatetic but multilingual. Historians, of course, need languages more than any scholars other than linguists and students of comparative literature, as very little except purely local history can be seriously studied entirely in a single language, even within most single states. Thanks to the advantage of a bilingual upbringing, a certain gift for picking up languages by talking rather than formal instruction, and the ancestral Jewish experience of moving from place to place among strangers, I have conducted my teaching, and to a modest extent my writing and radio or TV work, in various, not always well-mastered, languages. This has given my professional career a more cosmopolitan tinge than is common, not to mention a more recognized presence in countries whose radio and TV journalists can rely on a few words in their public’s language spoken into their outstretched microphone, or even a public lecture or TV conversation. Over the years the departmental office in Birkbeck grew accustomed to the multiple accents of foreigners asking for Professor Hobsbawm’s room, the non-Anglo-Saxon sounds round my table in the cafeteria, and the gradual adjustment of Peruvian, Mexican, Uruguayan, Bengali or Middle Eastern research students to London life. Not all these students were bona fide academics. In the past forty years English has become so much the universal idiom of global communication, and knowledge of French, the other international language, has declined so fast, that scholars like myself have lost much of their earlier function as interpreters and intellectual brokers. Yet that role remained important in Europe, at least during the lifetime of the generation of great monoglot French intellectuals who (with the rarest exceptions such as the brilliant and unhappy Raymond Aron) could neither speak nor understand English. I acted as translator for the great historian Ernest Labrousse at the early postwar conferences of the Economic History Society. (He warned me firmly against having anything to do with white Bordeaux, unworthy, he thought, of any self-respecting French drinker.) Except in French, I could not have established any relationship with Fernand Braudel. Even in the mid-1960s, when the next, less monoglot, generation reached maturity, it was far from fluent, as France’s premier historian, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, will confirm, if he recalls his first visit to London. Scholars from Eastern Europe once relied on French; in the 1990s their pupils at the New School had no difficulty in writing their term papers in English. And yet, even today the global village in which academics live must continue to rely on multilinguality, as any western intellectual can verify if he or she finds him or herself guideless on a street in Nanjing, Nagoya or Seoul – that is to say functionally deaf, dumb and illiterate. Someone there has to speak at least two languages.
Nevertheless, the global village is real, and since the limits of time and space have been virtually eliminated, the academic profession, having once again become what it was in the European Middle Ages, namely one of wandering, or rather nowadays airborne, scholars, lives in it. I suppose I have now lived in it for something like forty years. It is at this point that the line between professional career and private life becomes hazy, or disappears altogether. In memory the dinners for some visitor from abroad in the seasons of academic migration (as after the end of the summer term) merge with the memories of the Christmas dinners where the family was usually joined by friends, local or foreign, temporarily unattached or hostile to the seasonal spirit: Francis and Larissa Haskell, Arnaldo Momigliano, Yolanda Sonabend. Not that professors have friends only among other academics, though in the nature of things many of their friends are. Indeed one reason why Marlene and I have chosen to live in metropolitan milieus is that no university community is big enough in London or New York to dominate social life there. On the other hand, whether among academics, media people or in business, the global village is a place not so much of lives as of encounters. Each of its inhabitants has roots and most have permanence – either ‘here’ (wherever this may be, London, Cambridge, Manhattan) or elsewhere. Often, and this is new, they have multiple roots or at least multiple attachments, domestic or professional – my seasonal commute from London to Manhattan, the professional couples whose working weeks are separated by continents and oceans, united only at weekends or even more rarely.
The global village is the set of points of encounter of these entities in constant Brownian movement across the contemporary globe, expected, as in conferences and symposia, or casual and unexpected, at work or on holiday. It is the question ‘What are you doing here?’ which has punctuated my life in Santiago de Chile, Seoul and Mysore. But this is only one kind of encounter in the global village. Impermanence, isolation, unforeseen contingency in rental car, bar and hotel room with CNN are its dimensions. Even the highly organized circuits of what might be called business or professional tourism – the academic symposia in beautiful places, the Villa Serbelloni on Lake Como, the Fondazione Cini in the waters of Venice, the luxury business get-togethers within reach of beach and golf – are not the real locus of the global village. It really takes shape in the local network of human communications which fits together indigenous families, peripatetics and foreigners, arrivals, projects and departures. In short, it operates primarily through global circuits of domestic hospitality. For that is the basic pattern of life of most married academics, as of other settled professionals. The men and women who come into our houses are not ‘family’ but they are as familiar as if they were, whether they happen to come from New Delhi or Florence or whether they do so in Helsinki or Manhattan. They are part of our small everyday world. Very likely we have heard about them, they about us, even when friends bring us together for the first time, which will generally not be the last. We have the same points of reference and share the same news and gossip. We may well arrive with them from somewhere else to establish a new, permanent or semi-permanent existence in a new environment, as happened to us in my early years in the New School in the 1980s. We live among them, they among us, as neighbours.
In my case it has been an extraordinarily enjoyable life, comfortable, varied by travels, increasingly accompanied by Marlene, combining work, discovery and holiday, novelty and old friendships. Only the knowledge that people who live in poverty, the constant presence of disaster and death can also laugh, or at least tell good jokes, gives me the courage to say: it has been a lot of fun. It has not been a professional life of dramatic action, hardship or (except in the mind) of danger and fear. Like others in the small favoured minority to which I belong, I am amazed at the ‘patent contradiction between one’s own life experience … and the facts of the twentieth century … the terrible events which humanity has lived through’.3 By the criteria of professional success, it has not been unsatisfactory. It has given me more private happiness than I ever expected.
Has it been the life I had in mind when I was young? No. It would be pointless, even stupid, to regret that it has turned out this way, but somewhere inside me there is a small ghost who whispers: ‘One should not be at ease in a world such as ours.’ As the man said when I read him in my youth: ‘The point is to change it.’
19
Marseillaise
I have gone to France almost every year since 1933, except during the Second World War. The country has been part of my life for almost seventy years, indeed for longer, because my mother had begun to teach her children French at home from the elder Dumas’s Les Trois Mousquetaires, an enormous stiff-bound volume which we never finished. She and her sisters had been sent as teenagers to perfect their French at a pensionnat in Belgium. I belong to the last European generation for which French was still the universal second language. Even after a long travelling life, I have probably gone to Paris more often than to any other foreign city: and for all of us Paris was and remained the core of our experience of France.
I had first encountered it physically during a brief stopover on the way from Berlin to England in the spring of 1933. I travelled with my uncle, who presumably still had some final arrangements to make in Berlin, and must have had some business in Paris, for that city was certainly a detour from the direct route to London. I assume it must have been film business, for his later activities in Paris were based on an extensive network in the French movie scene, no doubt derived from his days at Universal, reinforced by his acquaintance with the emigrant film technicians he had known in Berlin.
As boys from families such as mine expected to go to Paris sooner or later, I was excited, but not surprised. Indeed, excited not only by Paris but also by the prospect of passing Nazi frontier controls in the company of a young and well-dressed middle-class communist called, I think, Hirsch, also going to France for undisclosed reasons, with whom I struck up an acquaintance in the train corridor and who taught me my first phrase of colloquial French (‘merde alors’). My uncle had booked us into the Hotel Montpensier in the rue de Richelieu, between the Comédie Française and the Bibliothèque Nationale, of whose existence I was then unaware; a building which introduced me to the basic pattern of French lifts in the 1930s, apparently unchanged since the early days of the Third Republic. (On his later business trips to Paris my uncle stayed in somewhat less basic establishments – during his most sanguine era, the Georges Cinq.) That evening, and perhaps the next, he took me for a stroll along the Grands Boulevards, the long stretch of cafe-lined avenues from the République in the east to the Madeleine in the west, which in those days were still the main promenade of Paris, as they had been from the days of Haussmann, pointing out the whores, who were then called grues (cranes) and the red-light district around the boulevard Sébastopol, one of whose brothels is now being preserved as a historic monument from the ravages of property development. However, I did not enter any of them until some years later, when, in the course of a night on the town with a Hungarian communist, I lost my virginity in an establishment – I can no longer recall its address – with an orchestra of naked ladies, and in a bed surrounded on all sides by mirrors. The Hungarian, Gyorgy Adam, strongly urged me to visit Hungary, where the married middle-class ladies summering on Lake Balaton were, he assured me, only waiting for fellows like us. He was subsequently jailed in the days of the Stalinist purges, but remained a convinced Marxist. The only married lady with whom I ever tested his hypothesis on Lake Balaton, many years later, was my wife with whom I spent a short vacation there in the guest-house of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, a rather charming family-type establishment in which visitors kept their own bottle of wine from one meal to the next.
The next day, alone, I went to the nearby Louvre, then still flanked by the gigantic wedding-cake of the monument to Gambetta, which did not survive the holocaust of (mainly Republican) statuary during the German occupation and since the war. I was impressed by the size of the Venus de Milo and, more sincerely, by the Victory of Samothrace and doubtless stopped before the Mona Lisa. But she did not speak my language. Another picture did, Manet’s Olympia. Perhaps it was natural that a virgin boy of fifteen should be transfixed by the cool, adult gaze of that astonishing image of a naked woman, glorying in luxe and calme, and for the moment visibly uninterested in volupté. And yet, what made my first encounter with this masterpiece so unforgettable was not the sensuality – after all, the Louvre is full of sexy nudes – but the sense that this wonderful painter was not interested in the incidental emotion but in ‘the truth’; in the stumbling words of a later generation of adolescents in ‘telling it like it is’. The Olympia is what I remember from my first visit to Paris. If I needed converting to France, Manet was the right missionary.
I was in need of information rather than conversion. For the next three years, obliged to pass examinations in French for the first time, it came from books and schoolmasters, including a French intellectual preparing agrégation or thèse, who naturally assumed he was at the cutting edge of French culture. He assured me that there were only three serious contemporary writers, namely the three Gs – André śGide, Jean Giono and Jean Giraudoux. I do not know why he favoured this selection rather than, say, Gide, Céline and Malraux. I tried them all conscientiously, and found Gide boring as, I confess, I still do. I already knew about Jean Giono, from the Vossische Zeitung in Berlin, which had published in instalments a translation of one of his rhapsodies of peasant life in upper Provence. I was so deeply moved by his casserole of sun, soil, passion and rural brutalism, that some years later on a hitchhike to the Mediterranean I made a special detour to visit Manosque in the Basses Alpes, where he lived, to pay my homage to the author – he was not there – and to dip briefly into the rushing icy waters of the river Durance, witness to his human dramas. I found that at least one other admirer had made the same pilgrimage, a not very attractive young woman of Polish immigrant parents, equally knocked out by his searing eloquence, and we compared notes chastely in the Provençal night. I still have the cheap editions of his novels of the period, but I have not had the courage to re-read them since.
On the other hand, even today I find myself from time to time re-reading the elegant Jean Giraudoux, who was then known to a wider French public chiefly as a very successful playwright of intellectual inclinations, performed by the great actor-manager Louis Jouvet. His La Guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu (The Trojan War will not take place), which demonstrated a melancholy conviction that another world war was utterly inevitable, remains a major text for students of the French establishment in the 1930s. I admired him for his soliloquies in the form of novels, especially the wonderful fireworks display of Siegfried et le Limousin, written shortly after the First World War and devoted to demonstrating both the utter incompatibility between what France meant to the French and Germany to the Germans and the complementarity of the two civilizations. Perhaps this explains why its author disappeared from French intellectual sight after Liberation, though not an unduly prominent Vichyite or collaborator. Suspended between languages and cultures like a lover between the competing objects of desire, I warmed to Giraudoux’s ability to be passionately, viscerally and intellectually French while loving Germany, especially as he made fun of both.
I did not need him to tell me about the Germans, but in Giraudoux I encountered and recognized for the first time the kind of France of which my friend the historian Richard Cobb has written better than anyone: the France of the Third Republic in which Giraudoux was rooted. The France to which I was introduced through the implausible medium of his novels was not the France of high intellectuals, confident in their superiority as only Etonians are in Britain – although as a product of the Paris Ecole Normale Supérieure he was himself a very good specimen. It was the Jacobin France I shortly discovered for myself through its very own mouthpiece, and which became the France of my 1930s, the Republic of the Canard Enchainé.
That grey four- or exceptionally six-page broadsheet of comments, jokes and cartoons, unsponsored, unsubsidized, refusing all advertisements, describing itself simply as ‘a satirical journal appearing on Wednesday’ and bought weekly by half a million frequenters of the Cafés du Sport and the Cafés du Commerce from Dunkirk to Perpignan, was perhaps the only national expression of the Third Republic. Indeed, its language, conventions, terms of reference and assumptions were so esoteric as to be largely incomprehensible to anyone not born and bred within it, at least without extensive commentary. Since General de Gaulle, whom it was to send up in a weekly ‘court bulletin’ in the classical style of the Duke of Saint-Simon’s Memoirs of Louis XIV, it has perhaps appealed more to graduates and the political in-groupies than to its original readers, the radical-socialist, socialist or even communist electors of Clochemerle (the archetypical community of the Third Republic, no longer recognizable in a country which is to abolish rural public telephones because of the spread of mobile phones in la France profonde).9 For it was an article of its and their basic faith that the Republic had no enemies on the left. (The other articles were a belief in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and Reason, anti-clericalism, an abhorrence of war and militarism, and in the virtues of good wine.) It was utterly sceptical of governments. Its readers in the 1930s liked to think they had no illusions about the rich, who exploited them and corrupted both the government, which overtaxed them, and most of the politicians and the journalists who tried to ‘stuff our brains’ (bourrage de crânes). The Canard confirmed their convictions, though, like its readers, it did not actually denounce the system. As in Marcel Pagnol’s then famous comedy Topaze, in which an idealistic schoolmaster learns that careers and wealth are not achieved by republican virtue – not even the state’s recognition of educational merit, the order of the Palmes Académiques for which he thirsts10 – corruption was not for crusading but for disenchanted laughs.
Nothing could have been further from the world of the Canard than my instructor in the ways of another France, Madame Humbline Croissant, in whose apartment by the Porte de Versailles I lived during the summer of 1936. I was on a grant from the London County Council while waiting to go up to Cambridge. Madame Croissant, a grey-haired lady of Norman origin, played the harp, took the ancient and conservative Revue des Deux Mondes, and disapproved, among many other matters, of my reading of Proust, whom I brought into her salon from the Gallimard lending library on the boulevard Raspail which I visited almost as regularly as the Dôme in Montparnasse. (The Gallimard bookshop is still on the same block today.) In her view Proust wrote bad French. On the other hand, she taught me the firm truths of the French table such as that meat and vegetables must not be placed hugger-mugger on the same plate but eaten separately, and that fish requires wine (‘le poisson sans boisson est poison’). Her social life was restricted and formal. Marvellous though her cuisine was, I fear each of us was a disappointment to the other. Her France was not mine.
Young intellectual males of my generation were lucky to encounter France in the 1930s. (The scope it provided for young women of that generation was distinctly narrower.) Historians are unenthusiastic about the France on which I first set foot in the spring of 1933 and in which I passed most of my summers between then and the Second World War. Politically, the Third Republic was on its way to the grave. Culturally, France lived on capital accumulated before the Great War, to which Frenchmen added little after 1918. Most of the great names of the interwar Ecole de Paris, native or immigrant, belonged to artists who had reached maturity and established their reputation before 1914. As A. J. Liebling, the finest American writer on boxing, New Orleans, politics and gastrononomy, has pointed out, between the wars even French haute cuisine, like Paris courtesans, was past its golden age.
And yet, this is not how it looked to us. After all, Matisse and Picasso were still in full spate, and Renoir’s son, the finest talent in French movies, was producing a masterpiece every other year. What we saw was not a country in decline, let alone on the verge of the miserable and shameful episode of the Second World War, with which the French have difficulty coming to terms even half a century later, but the France whose image had been imprinted on the educated western world since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment as the quintessence of civilization and the good life. The famous joke that when good Americans die they go to Paris – it first occurs in print in the extraordinary compendium of French intellectual distinction, the Paris Guide of 1867 – still carried full conviction; indeed, Americans (North, Central and South) were to maintain their belief in Paris as paradise longer than most other foreigners. Even Nazi Germany could not free itself from this belief. The wartime memoirs of German sophisticates, civil and military, in occupied France, however convinced of the inferior moral fibre of the defeated, suggest that the conquerors still saw themselves in some ways as Romans among Athenians. Francophile foreigners accepted the patent and still unshaken conviction of the French that their country was indeed the centre of world civilization, a ‘middle kingdom’ of the mind like China, the only other culture which shared this conviction of its own unquestioned superiority.
What was it that made us take France at its own valuation? What made us think that Paris was still in some sense the ‘capital of the twentieth century’, as it had patently been that of the nineteenth? Except for painting and sculpture, and the extraordinary tradition of the French novel, nothing in French high culture and intellectual life was, or seemed, obviously ‘the best in the world’. The literatures of other leading European languages did not feel inferior to the French. Even passionate Francophiles did not argue the superiority of Rabelais or Racine to Shakespeare, Goethe, Dante or Pushkin. French music, however original, ran second to the Austrians’. French philosophy plainly seemed inferior to German (for young people of central European background), contemporary French science lacked the sheer mass of top-class achievement of Britain and pre-1933 Germany, French technology seemed to be stuck in the era of the Eiffel Tower and the art nouveau Metro, and as for the modern conveniences of life, apart from the bidet, as yet unknown to Anglo-Saxon culture, it was surely not the state of French toilet facilities that attracted young Americans and Britons to the sort of hotels most of them could afford to live in.
At a somewhat less rarefied level, the superiority of French civilization was taken for granted. Ever since Voltaire French wit had been the model for the western world. Nobody doubted that French women’s couture and cosmetics, French wine and food, were the best in the world, French (heterosexual) sex was considered the most sophisticated and adventurous, French style and taste in all these and other matters was something to which my generation inclined to defer. Even this rested on the long-established habit of turning selected superiorities of France into a general superiority supposed to be inherent in that country. We knew very well that there were a lot of things in which France was not superior. Yet our admiration for France was quite unaffected by the fact, which young men and women of my generation from North America, central and northern Europe could hardly fail to notice, that the French way of life between the wars as yet had virtually nothing to say about outdoor activities. It was not much into communing with nature. It showed no great interest in hiking, singly or in groups, mountaineering, skiing, practising, or even watching, team games; not even football. In the 1930s an ideological interest in the open air still seemed to be confined to conservatives, ranging from social Catholics to the frankly reactionary. In return, its only national grassroots sporting passion, the Tour de France of the cyclists, aroused no interest outside France except in a few bordering countries.11
On the other hand, France had one major asset. It appeared to offer its civilization to any foreigner who wanted it. It was ours to share, and we accepted it, and this not just because Mussolini and Hitler had soiled German and Italian culture – my generation would not have dreamed of vacations in fascist Venice or Rome – because British culture was too insular, and US culture visibly belonged to a different tribe from ours. The French Revolution, the starting-point of modern world history for every person on the globe with a western education, had democratized the most prestigious and exclusive of the great court cultures, and had opened the gates of a notoriously chauvinist nation to all who accepted the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity and the French language one and indivisible. In the nineteenth-century France became not only the major immigrant-absorbing country in Europe, but also – especially between the 1830 and 1848 revolutions – the welcoming refuge for international political and cultural dissidents from all of Europe. Paris was the centre of international culture, the place to be or to have been. How else could the Ecole de Paris of the early twentieth century have become possible, in which Spanish, Bulgarian, German, Dutch, Italian and Russian artists rubbed shoulders with Latin Americans, Norwegians and, of course, the native French? In no other country was the wartime Resistance movement to rely so heavily on resident foreigners – refugee Spanish Republicans, assorted Poles, Italians, central Europeans, Armenians and Jews of the Communist Party’s MOI (main d’oeuvre immigrée – immigrant labour). My own memories of Paris before going to Cambridge are of Americans in Left Bank art galleries, German surrealists in attics, the tables of the Dôme café in Montparnasse crowded with impecunious artistic geniuses from Russia and central Europe waiting for recognition. My memories after I went to Cambridge and joined the Communist Party are of meetings with anti-fascist central Europeans in the Restaurant des Balkans in the rue de la Harpe, of the international conferences, filled with Italian, German and eventually Spanish refugees, persecuted Yugoslavs, Hungarians and assorted Asian revolutionaries, for which James Klugmann mobilized his young Cambridge loyalists.
For Hitler not only made France more than ever into an international centre, but, between 1933 and 1939, into the last major refuge for European civilization and, as fascism advanced, the only surviving headquarters of the European left. Though it did not welcome refugees and asylum seekers, being used to mass immigration unlike Britain before Munich, France made no systematic effort to keep them out. There were other places of refuge – the little Benelux countries, Czechoslovakia (until Munich), reluctant Switzerland, Denmark, where Brecht went, even, for very non-political Jews, Italy, until Mussolini introduced racism in 1938. (But not, from the time of the Great Terror, Stalin’s Russia.) They were only boltholes for the persecuted. France was different. In better times even the exiles would have gone there voluntarily. It seemed, and still seems, natural that the last great occasion before the descent into hell, when the entirety of a riven Europe still went on show, the International Exposition of 1937, should have been held in Paris. Where else? Almost certainly I am not alone in remembering it as both international and French: not only for Picasso’s Guernica and the giant German and Soviet pavilions glowering at each other, but also for the wonderful and luminous exhibition of French art, the finest I have ever seen.
And then, for a brief moment, France became not only the refuge of civilization, but the place of hope. In 1934 the native instincts of popular republican politics (union in defence of the Republic, no enemies on the left) combined with the unusually realistic sense of the passionately Francophile central European Comintern representative with the French CP, ‘Comrade Clément’, to devise the best strategy for fighting the apparently irresistible advance of fascism, the ‘Popular Front’.1 A Popular Front won the elections in Spain in February 1936. In May it won the elections in France. It brought into office the first government in French history to be headed by a socialist – the communists could not bring themselves actually to enter the Cabinet – and an extraordinary, spontaneous outburst of working-class hope and joy, the wave of sit-in strikes, or more exactly factory occupations, of June 1936. I arrived in Paris at the tail-end of this extraordinary and remarkably good-tempered victory celebration, but enough was still there a few weeks later to make that year’s Fourteenth of July unforgettable. I was lucky to see it in the best possible way: driving round Paris on a truck with a newsreel team of the French Socialist Party, photographing the great day, doubtless on film-stock sold to them by my uncle.
For young revolutionaries of my generation mass demonstrations were the equivalent of papal masses for devout Catholics. But in 1936 the anniversary of the taking of the Bastille, east of the Place de la République, was more than the greatest of mass demonstrations of the French left. (Nobody that year paid much attention to the military parade and other official government celebrations of the national holiday in the bourgeois part of the city.) The whole of popular Paris was on the street to march – or rather to perambulate between endless waits – or to watch and cheer the march, as families might cheer departing newlyweds after the marriage ceremony. The red flags and tricolours, the leaders, the contingents of workers from the victorious male strikers of Renault and the female strikers of Printemps and Galeries Lafayette, the Emancipated Bretons marching under their banners, the green flags of the Star of North Africa passed before the serried masses on the pavement, the crowded windows, the hospitably waving café proprietors, waiters and clients, the even more hospitable enthusiasm of the assembled and applauding brothel staffs.
It was one of the rare days when my mind was on autopilot. I only felt and experienced. That night we watched the fireworks over the city from Montmartre and, after I left the party, I walked back slowly across Paris as though floating on clouds, stopping to drink and dance at I do not know how many street-corner bals. I reached my lodgings at dawn.
Indeed, the Popular Front was almost designed for the young, for (through the agency of a new law under a new undersecretary ‘of sport and leisure’, Léo Lagrange) it introduced both the first national paid holidays and cheap rail fares. On the strength of the only money I was ever to win in the national lottery, 165 Francs (or about £2–3 at the 1936 rate of exchange) I bought myself a fortnight’s backpacking in the Pyrenees and Languedoc, joining the first beneficiaries of the Loi Lagrange on the night train from the Gare d’Orsay to Luchon. The trip was to bring my first and only direct contact with the weeks-old Spanish Civil War, which is described elsewhere (chapter 20). It also introduced me (through a young Czech I met on the road) to hitchhiking, a practice then still virtually unknown in Europe, except to a minority of young footloose central European Tippler (hitchhiker). It was therefore very easy, especially after I discovered that middle-class French car drivers could be kept from expressing their detestation of Léon Blum and the communists by well-timed enquiries about what they thought about Napoleon – a subject which kept them talking for up to 200 kilometres. From then on I extended my knowledge of France every year through long backpacking hitchhikes.
By the time the war broke out I, like so many others of my generation, thought I knew Paris pretty well; in some ways better than London. I was probably more at ease between Montparnasse, the Panthéon, the Pont Saint-Michel and the long stretch of the boulevard Raspail and the rue de Rennes than in any equally large chunk of central London. I could speak French sufficiently well to be beyond the stage when Frenchmen politely congratulate one on how well one speaks their language. I knew, or thought I knew, as much about the politics of France as about those of Britain, knew who were supposed to be the ‘in’ theatrical companies (Jouvet, Dullin, the Pitoëffs), had seen Renoir’s La règle du jeu when it first came out, smoked Gauloises at the corner of my mouth like Jean Gabin, and had bought both the works of Saint-Just and the speeches of Robespierre. In fact, we knew and understood very much less than we thought we did, but considering that most of us had no special academic, professional or family interest in French affairs, we felt at home in Paris. We were comfortable in France and with France.
However, there was one curious thing about the relationship with France. French people, the indigenous French rather than immigrants and more or less permanently resident foreigners, were virtually absent from it. For most of the foreigners in the 1930s, the French were physically present mainly as service-providers or extras on the permanent film-set of their country. It was not till the 1950s that my Paris became a city in which I had French friends and habitually spent my time with French people, as well as with the usual cosmopolitan community of visiting foreigners or immigrants.
The French were – indeed they still are – a remarkably formal people and their society a theatre with clearly prescribed roles and procedures. I cannot think of another country in which a notoriously womanizing, admittedly middle-aged philosopher in the 1950s still had as his stock-in-trade falling on his knees and presenting the lady with a rose. Unless officially committed to intimacy, Frenchmen still tend to sign everyday correspondence in the carefully graded flourishes of traditional deference (‘Kindly accept, Monsieur, the expression of my distinguished/ most distinguished/most devoted sentiments’). To be elected to the French Academy or the Collège de France, which still requires the formal declaration of one’s candidature, followed by the candidate’s ritual canvassing visits to all the electors, is a far more ceremonious affair than elsewhere; it is an honour and a recognized social obligation for those who have contributed to the successful academician’s outfit to attend the occasion when they are summoned to admire his ceremonial sword. Even informality is not without its obligations. When intellectuals were on the left, they believed that their status as such committed them to talking to each other in the vocabulary of Belleville. Nevertheless, it was then – perhaps it still is – difficult to enter their lives without some form of presentation. Only in France would one, calling on the great historian Ernest Labrousse at home – we knew each other quite well from economic history conferences in Britain – be kept waiting in the vestibule for the statutory ten minutes before being asked into his study and greeted affably as cher ami, cher collègue. A Professor at the Sorbonne and former Chef-de-Cabinet to Léon Blum knew what was his due. Jean-Paul Sartre was the only ex-officio ‘great French intellectual’ I ever met who seemed totally lacking in this sense of public status.
Equality itself was formalized. I knew I was accepted as an intellectual who belonged when somewhat younger French colleagues automatically addressed me as tu, as one does old boys and fellow-graduates of the Ecole Normale Supérieure or similar elite educational establishments. (Of course communists of whatever status and country, except perhaps from the German Democratic Republic, also did so automatically, but most formerly communist French historians had ceased to be in the Party by the time I got to know them well.) Not that this implied personal intimacy. Because I could not detach it from intimacy, my personal relations with Fernand Braudelwere crippled for ever after the great man, very much my senior in age as well as eminence, formally suggested that we should say tu to one another. Conversation became too difficult – rather like writing a novel without the letter e, in the manner of Georges Perec – if one could use neither the old formal vous nor the tu which resisted crossing one’s lips. I simply could not bring myself to treat him as an ordinary informal friend, rather than a graciously condescending patron, which was the role in which I had learned to admire and like him. (He played it to perfection.)
In such a country, however easy the entry to the geographical space, entry to the human space was difficult without personal introductions, or tacit recognition signals rather like those codes which – now that the traditional concierge no longer watches over the comings and goings after dark and at weekends – are necessary to visit Parisian friends in their apartment buildings. My own codes of entry were the Communist Party and association with one clan of French historians. The doors opened for me at, and through, the Paris International Congress of Historical Sciences in 1950. At this congress, described in chapter 17, I met the sort of people out of whom Braudel, the great academic entrepreneur, with his wonderful chief-of-staff, Clemens Heller, was soon to fashion the counter-establishment to the Sorbonne, the ‘Sixth Section’ of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. Today it operates as the ‘High School for Social Sciences’ in the black glass building of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, which Braudel and Heller managed to erect on the site of the former Cherche-Midi prison, facing the comforts of the Hôtel Lutetia, where the Gestapo had tortured its prisoner not long before. And the great innovation of the Maison as an official institution was not only that, thanks to Braudel, but particularly to Heller, it systematically tried to bring French and foreigners together, but above all that it recognized the importance of informality and personal talk.
It naturally helped personal relations to be on easy terms with the group of historians round Braudel and the Annales, all the more so as with the exception of the great chieftain himself, whom I got to know in the middle fifties, they were not yet great, or even significant, names with major works to their credit. In a sense our careers advanced together, and so did our social relations – at least until the curious posthumous reversion to Cold War anti-communism among French intellectuals in the 1990s. However, the academically mediated friendships did not develop fully until the 1960s, and my closer connections with the Maison, the Ecole (where I later taught for a month a year) and the Collège de France not until the 1970s. This was primarily due to the remarkable Clemens Heller.
Clemens, a large, shambling, distracted-looking man who disliked phone conversations of more than fifty seconds, apt to lapse into a macaronic mixture of languages, may best be described as the most original intellectual impresario of postwar Europe. The theatrical metaphor is suitable. Son of Hugo Heller, a Viennese bookseller and cultural entrepreneur who had the bad luck to attract the sarcasm of Karl Kraus, he began his career as a pupil in the Max Reinhardt Theatre School, before being sent to the USA after Hitler came to Austria. He returned as a US officer to launch the celebrated Salzburg Seminars, was extruded from them by the US witch-hunt, and established himself in Paris. There he and Braudel formed their extraordinarily successful partnership, to which Heller brought the profoundly cosmopolitan culture of expatriate central Europe, a smell for intellectually interesting and promising people and ideas, an international network and the ability to mobilize American Foundation money for his academic projects. France being what it is, this led him to be denounced as an agent of the CIA in due course, fortunately in vain. Music and the intellect were the guiding passions of this man of extraordinary warmth and generosity. One of the rewards of a long life has been to be his friend.
Although my friendships in the 1950s came through the Historical Congress, they were mediated through the politics of intellectuals. They did not actually come through the Communist Party, although most of the people I met were at that time still in the Party. The French CP, an organization apparently run by political sergeant-majors, had a quite extraordinary knack of bullying and then antagonizing the intellectuals its Resistance record had attracted in such quantities, which astonished those of us used to the more relaxed ways of the British and Italian Communist Parties; but then, as my friend Antonin Liehm has pointed out, being a genuine mass party between the wars, it had, like the Czech CP, stalinized itself, rather than had ‘bolshevization’ imposed on it from outside. On the defensive after 1947 it retreated into a private cultural and political universe, fortified against the temptations of the outside world in a manner which reminded me of Roman Catholic minorities in the era of Vatican One, at all events in Britain. (Having been brought up in a Catholic country, French communist intellectuals were, of course, keenly aware of the structural similarities between the Party and the Church.) It had a proletarian distrust of intellectuals. When the British Communist Historians’ Group looked for opposite numbers in France, we got no help from the PCF. The pre-war party wanted militants, not academics. Hence the 1950 Historical Congress, though attracting young Marxists, was not attended by several of the subsequently eminent and eventually anti-communist historians who were hard-line young CP activists at the time – François Furet, Annie Kriegel, Alain Besançon, Le Roy Ladurie. I did not get to know them until their post-communist days.
In fact, looking back, it now seems clear to me that the foundation of my network of friends was not so much communism as the common experience of and identification with the Resistance.
For all this decade and until the tragic break-up of their marriage, my Paris base was to be the rather basic working-class flat on the boulevard Kellerman of Henri Raymond and the enchanting Helène Berghauer. To the Raymonds I went most of my vacations, and with them I spent most of my free time. For some years after the break-up of my first marriage they were the closest thing to a family I had. When they left Paris I would travel with them in their small car to wherever we agreed to go – to the Loire valley, to Italy, wherever. When they were in town I shared it with them, going round in their company, observing the passing scene from the approved cafés such as the Flore or the Rhumerie, watching out for, and passing the time of day with, acquaintances among the intelligentsia – Lucien Goldmann, Roland Barthes, Edgar Morin. When they were absent, I stayed there alone, using it as a private desert island. The flat made up for the austerity of its equipment by the sheer sparkling high spirits of Helène, and a spectacular Lurçat tapestry that had later to be sold at a moment of financial stringency. Like Henri’s friendship with the libertine novelist Roger Vailland and the Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre, it was a relic of the Resistance, which he had joined as a very young man. (It was to get an introduction to Lefebvre that I had first been brought to the Raymonds’ flat by a young woman, also of Resistance background, whom I had met at the congress.)
A few years my junior, Henri came from what he described as a peasant family in the Orléanais, published his own and his friends’ poetry in small plaquettes or pamphlets with drawings by Helène, for which he also made me write a piece on jazz, and at that time worked for the nationalized railways. He followed Lefebvre in studying sociology and urbanism and eventually taught at the Beaux Arts, thus catching up to some extent with his older brother André, a bona fide thesis-producing academic from the start who was to become the world expert on Islamic guilds and a pillar of French oriental scholarship. Helène, both more cosmopolitan and dramatically Parisian, who had spent the war with her family in Brazil, worked hard to make herself a painter. Frankly, she was never much good, but although people did not like to say so to a charming and extremely attractive young woman, I suspect that she was too intelligent not to be aware of her limitations, and suffered accordingly. Meanwhile she earned her living by working at the Brazilian consulate. Her Polish father, with whom relations were tense, was in business, her brother was something in couture, or at least the friend of one of the first of the beautiful Japanese models who anticipated erotic multiculturalism. Perhaps this helps to explain how she managed to wear Balmain at a time when haute couture labels had not yet been licensed to every department store. Like Henri she was a communist, in a cellule in the proletarian 13th arrondissement, but she had begun on the periphery of the Palestine Jewish terrorist organization known as the Stern Gang, or at least the extreme left-wing part of it. She retained an affinity for direct action. During the period of Algerian OAS terrorism she visited me in London, while she was making purchases of timers on behalf of what she said was a left-wing anti-OAS bombing campaign. I asked where she would get them. ‘At Harrods, naturally,’ she said. Of course, where else?
Though some of the people in the Raymonds’ network were to become well known in their fields, essentially it operated on the lower slopes of the Parisian left-wing intelligentsia, although Helène plausibly claimed to be au fait with the scandals on the more elevated peaks, the gossip about literary prizes and who was on the skids in the CP leadership. It read Le Monde and sometimes still L’Humanité, but most of the people we knew (as distinct from gossiping about them) were not likely to be asked to sign those manifestos of intellectuals on public issues which were so characteristic of the times before the eminent ‘media intellectuals’ had their own regular columns in the dailies and weeklies. It was very much a pre-1968 milieu and the 1950s and 1960s saw it gradually crumble as the old left splintered and shifted over Stalin and Algeria, and the old guard of the French CP increasingly found anyone suggesting change uncongenial, especially intellectuals. My communist friends tended to move from the Party to a smaller body, the Party of Socialist Unity (PSU) and when that proved unviable, into full-time research, writing or, if they wanted to remain in politics, the old Socialist Party. Since I did not then know some of the ex-communists who were to move directly into a passionate anti-communism, or had met them only casually, I was unable to follow the tracks of their political travels.
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