Book Review

Methods/Theory

Two years before his death, François Furet published to great acclaim Le passé d'une illusion: Essai sur l'idée communiste au XXe siècle (1995). As the title and subtitle suggest, Furet's subject is the fascination exerted by the idea of communism in the twentieth century. His book is full of keen insights, often vividly expressed. The book also reveals an intellectual historian's unwitting tendency to subsume all of history under the rubric of ideas and a historian of France's unacknowledged inclination to write European history through the French model.	1
Right at the beginning, with deft phrases, Furet invokes the revolutionary passions that have guided so much of modern European history. He seems worried that, in our more prosaic, late modern era, readers will not be able to imagine the fierce hatreds and utopian desires that animated left and right in Europe. He places fascism firmly in the revolutionary camp; liberalism seems to disappear in his history, the main results of its dominance in the nineteenth century a fractured society and bourgeois self-loathing. A faint air of an older history emanates from these beginning passages, as Furet writes of unitary categories like "the bourgeoisie" or "the nation" and presents a history that seems to emerge directly from the idea. Aside from a few political eminences and intellectuals, Furet's history is devoid of individual actors. It is Europe or France or the bourgeoisie that "thinks" or "believes" or "is obsessed."	2
Yet he does then bring matters to life, usually with a shifting triptych of intellectuals who respond to the vast conflagrations of the century: Thomas Mann, Alain, and Élie Halévy on World War I; first Boris Souvarine, Pierre Pascal, and György Lukács, then Romain Rolland and André Gide on the appeal of the Soviet Union. Later on, we encounter Hannah Arendt, Vasily Grossmann, and others. Even when the stories of writers and their paeans to Joseph Stalin and the Soviet experiment—or their subsequent disillusionment—are well known, Furet's deft portraits and incisive commentary make for enjoyable reading. Those in need of a bit of mid-day levity would do well to read his account of the visits to the Soviet Union by H. G. Wells, G. B. Shaw, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb (pp. 150–55).	3
"The universal spell of October," in Furet's view, lay in its act of pure volition, of man's invention of himself, a meaning that took the idea of communism far beyond the borders of Russia and the Soviet Union. The parallels with the French Revolution are obvious, and they fuel some of the most interesting commentary in the book. To Jacobinism, the Bolsheviks added science, the logic of history, thereby creating a powerful, politically potent synthesis (pp. 63–64). But the French parallel becomes strained by the time we reach the 1950s. To write of the post-Stalin transition as a Soviet Thermidor seems even less useful than Leon Trotsky's application of the term to the 1930s.	. . .