ABSTRACT
In the overheated environment of a radicalized Harvard, confronted by the 1969 student sit-ins, strikes, and the spring occupation of University Hall, Stanley Hoffmann stood out as the force of impassioned moderation. He not only educated in his lectures on the political roles of Lamertine and Tocqueville in the revolution of 1848 but more importantly, he put their ideas into practice in the student and faculty meetings held in the football stadium during Harvard’s political psychodrama. Fashioned as much by the darkness of Vichy as by the saving actions of de Gaulle, Stanley was most reserved on these two crucial chapters of his own and of France’s past. It was easy enough for him to comment on and to analyze France’s pre- or post-war periods, enshrined as they were in a cortege of open-ended debates over France’s decline or renewal.
