A European Revolution?

For Jouvenel and Fabre-Luce, emigration and imprisonment respectively precluded any journalistic or literary activities during the final year of the German occupation. Though a free man by October 1943, Fabre-Luce was intimidated enough to temper his incessant urge to comment on current events at least until the Germans were gone. Just how literally he took this imposed silence is illustrated by the fact that he published the fourth volume of Journal de la France on 18 August 1944, the very day the Germans were beginning to leave Paris – and almost immediately landed in trouble with the liberation authorities. ¹ In his Swiss exile, Jouvenel soon mingled with the growing French émigré community living on the north shore of Lake Geneva. He continued to work on the manuscript of his future magnum opus Du Pouvoir, but he was not to return to France for several years. At the moment of the liberation of Paris, he noted in his diary that there was ‘nothing worse’ than feeling ‘cut off from the national communion’ like he did. ² The summer of 1943 not only put an end to both intellectuals’ prior activities at a practical level, it also marked the definitive end of their anticipation of a fascist Europe under German leadership. As we shall see in this chapter, this did not mean they welcomed the post-war order or that they distanced themselves thoroughly from their earlier engagements. The French Fourth Republic, the Épuration, the domestic appeal of communism, the Soviet expansion, the Cold War and the post-war European project fundamentally changed the political context of their intellectual activities.