Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

and 1848, for and against the Commune. No other country had such a long and unbroken experience of bi-polar politics, underscored by the conventional historiography of the national Revolutionary myth as inculcated to French schoolchildren for many decades. Moreover France, more than any other Western nation-state, was a country whose intelligentsia approved and even worshipped violence as a tool of public policy. George Sand records a walk along the Seine in 1835 with a friend who was urgently pressing the case for bloody proletarian revolution: only when the Seine runs red, he explained, when Paris burns and the poor take their rightful place, can justice and peace prevail. Almost exactly one century later the English essayist Peter Quennell described in the New Statesman ‘the almost pathological worship of violence which seems to dominate so many French writers.’