Reforming French Culture. Satire, Spiritual Alienation, and Connection to Strangers by George Hoffmann (review)

Chapter 3 skips ahead to the Cold War and Paul Éluard, who, despite being a prominent Surrealist, eventually joined the Stalin cult. He wrote and narrated the film L’homme que nous aimons le plus, a flattering birthday celebration of the dictator. Readers should beware that Stalin was no friend of Surrealism. The First International Writers Conference in Paris in 1935 had banned the Surrealists, whom Communists had long considered pornographers and sexual perverts. The only Surrealist to be admitted to the Communist Parnasse was Aragon, who made amends for his Surrealist deviations early in his career, publicly embracing Stalin and becoming a pillar of Communist orthodoxy in France for decades to come. He is the subject of the fourth and last chapter, on Aragon’s unfinished roman fleuve, Les Communistes (1949–1951, 1966). It shows the vagaries of Communist historiography by showing how important historical events are constantly reinterpreted according to the politically correct position. Aragon participated in every Communist coverup, but paradoxically, was also key to promoting deStalinization in France thanks to his fame. We already knew about the Stalin cult; what this highly readable and thoroughly researched book does is “reshape our understanding of how French writers supported Stalin, the USSR, and international communism” (33). Sobanet brings to life a time not long ago and makes numerous parallels with our time, which should give us pause. No country is immune from the personality cult, as the reigns of Xi Jinping, Putin, and Kim JongUn suggest.