ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an ideological pamphlet that deals with a few ideas out of the nineteenth century, reconsiders life and letters under the Vichy regime, and debunks a few schoolboy notions—and it has been for months at the centre of a national controversy. Indeed on the front page of Le Monde both the chief editor and the foreign editor have felt compelled to clarify their own views on the whole provocative subject. After all, “Anti-Communism” is still taken to be a kind of “visceral” phenomenon, having essentially to do with the “gut reaction” of a bourgeoisie worried about its private property. All traditions go; little remains, and there are no excuses allowed. Levy has little patience with the rationalizations that would blame the influence of party bosses in Moscow or the power of the Nazis in Berlin.
