l'internationale apres stalineby lilly marcou

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L'Internationale apres Staline by Lilly Marcou Review by: David Felix The American Historical Review, Vol. 85, No. 2 (Apr., 1980), pp. 386-387 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1860587 . Accessed: 25/06/2014 08:25 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Oxford University Press and American Historical Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The American Historical Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 195.34.79.79 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 08:25:46 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: L'Internationale apres Stalineby Lilly Marcou

L'Internationale apres Staline by Lilly MarcouReview by: David FelixThe American Historical Review, Vol. 85, No. 2 (Apr., 1980), pp. 386-387Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1860587 .

Accessed: 25/06/2014 08:25

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Oxford University Press and American Historical Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to The American Historical Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.79 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 08:25:46 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: L'Internationale apres Stalineby Lilly Marcou

386 Reviews of Books

of the French fleet led to the attack at Mers-el-Ke- bir, which Thomas recognizes as inevitable but calls a blunder that "poisoned all future dealings be- tween London and Vichy" (p. 46).

The book, in addition to discussing London's Vichy connection, also deals with the two other branches of British foreign policy: assisting the Free French movement in hopes that General de Gaulle would be able to rally the French Empire and nego- tiating with General Weygand, Vichy delegate gen- eral in North Africa, to try to coax North Africa into the war on the Allied side. "British policy vacil- lated between these three alternatives without find- ing a solution in exclusive pursuit of any of them," Thomas observes (p. 55).

Britain and Vichy falls into two parts: Britain's Vichy policy and Britain's response to the Vichy policy of the United States. Thomas shows that al- though the Americans shared Britain's overall aims, they were more eager to strike a deal with Vichy and were much more antipathetic to de Gaulle, so much so in fact that London feared that Roosevelt intended to make the Vichy regime the basis of the postwar government of France. Furthermore, while the British, after the defeat of Hitler, wanted to re- store France to her status as a great power, the Americans wanted to keep the country weak and subservient. That American interests were not served in this way was due less to British objection than to the evolution of forces over which neither country had any control, for example, the murder of Admiral Darlan and the political skill of de Gaulle himself.

Both the British and Americans pursued policies that they hoped would better help them fight the war against Germany, but, as Thomas's study shows, the best course of action during a time of war might have the worst possible consequences af- ter that war is over.

Britain and Vichy is a well-written study by one who has complete mastery of his resource materials. In handling well a difficult subject Thomas has maintained the high standards of the admirable "Making of the 20th Century" series in which his volume appears.

W. LAIRD KLEINE-AHLBRANDT

Purdue University

LILLY MARCOU. L'Internationale apres Staline. Paris: Ber- nard Grasset. 1979. Pp. 316.

When the fall of Khrushchev shook their doctrinal certainty, the Communist parties, as Lilly Marcou sees them, were "confrontes 'a une realite diverse, diffuse, glissante, imprevisible" (p. 181). Most people find reality as insecure as this all of the time,

but Communists are different, and the historian has turned poet to capture their pathos. Other illumi- nations of this kind guide the reader through a labyrinthine passage of a dozen years in the history of world communism. The subject is the progression of international conferences, the "International" af- ter the three Internationals, that tried to maintain unity following the death of Stalin and the dis- appearance of the Cominform. It is important, but only the touch of the poet keeps it from being pro- foundly dull.

The conferences declined from a tour de force of unity in 1957 to an admission of disunity in 1969. The Soviet Union was struggling against the spirit of national autonomy, in particular that spirit as an instrument of China's competitive claim upon world Communist leadership. At the first confer- ence, China was supporting Russia; at the second, in 1960, it was reducing "le role dirigeant du Parti communiste de l'Union sovietique a une role histo- rique et honorifique, plus que politique" (pp. 111- 12); at the third and last conference, China was the enemy. To the author this split helped provide the conditions for the appearance of Eurocommunism, with its gentler, more reasonably hopeful promise.

One might object to the rigor of Lilly Marcou's self-discipline in keeping to the main issues and their protagonists. Her characters, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Mao, Togliatti, Hoxha, Thorez, and oth- ers, are as select and lordly as the dramatis personae of a Racine play, and she might have inquired fur- ther into their social objectives and relation to the silent masses.

In her scholarly restraint, the author is more ob- jective than her intent, which was to proceed, on the recommendation of Claude Levi-Strauss, from a "lecture de gauche . .. avec l'ame de la pensee dia- lectique" (p. 14). Supplementing exhaustive re- search among the documents with interviews of liv- ing, talking participants, she has discovered as many of the essential facts as possible and let them tell the story without tenderness for her own gau- chisme.

Properly seeking more enlightenment from his- tory, Lilly Marcou goes back a century to examine Karl Marx's management of the First International. She finds in it a model resolution of the conflict be- tween centralism and autonomy (p. 23). This en- courages her hopefulness about the effects of the weakening of Soviet international control and the concomitant rise of Eurocommunism. But her abil- ity to distinguish factuality from myth-making, evi- dent throughout this study, lets her see the "force mythique" in Marx's International (p. 14). That mythical element has hidden the centralizing prin- ciples and iron will of Marx the leader, who broke up the organization rather than lose control of it to

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Page 3: L'Internationale apres Stalineby Lilly Marcou

Modern Europe 387

anarchists and other elements demanding auton- omy. Plus qa change....

DAVID FELIX

Bronx Community College, City University of New York

JOHN LUKACS. 1945: Year Zero. New York: Doubleday. 1978. Pp. 322. $8.95.

For John Lukacs, 1914 was the beginning of the end and 1945 the end of the end of the old era. A Euro- pean-centered world was finally destroyed as bar- barous Oriental hordes moved in from the East and well-intentioned, but naive, Americans marched in, a little too slowly, from the West. Lukacs's chatty series of essays is always literate, often provocative, and sometimes wrong. He devotes separate chapters to the main personalities of 1945-Hitler, a vulgar, brutal, shrewd nationalist; Churchill, who was al- most always correct except when it came to his un- derstanding of American policy; Roosevelt, weak- ened but with his Wilsonian illusions still intact; Stalin, a scheming, suspicious nationalist; and Tru- man, "a national blessing" (p. 134) who quickly grew with his job. He offers also an analysis of American opinion in his "Year Zero" and concludes with a moving memoir of Hungary in 1945 as the Nazis withdrew and the Russians took over.

Aside from the chapter on public opinion, Lukacs presents little evidence that he has spent much time with primary sources or even recent monographs. Further, his interpretations are not new. He covered the same ground in his A History of the Cold War (1961). According to Lukacs, the Cold War did not begin because of calculated Soviet or Russian impe- rialism. Stalin moved into a vacuum, and when the Americans did not react early on, as Churchill hoped they would, the Russian leader naturally made the most of the opportunity. If only a line had been drawn in 1942, the Iron Curtain would have clanked down much further east.

Yet this book is worth reading for the variety of penetrating insights Lukacs presents and for his ability to capture in a few phrases the dominant characteristics of an individual or a nation. Perhaps he overemphasizes the ethnic factor, whether it is the Oriental nature of the Russians or the multi- national character of the United States. Character- istically, he was disturbed to find that Americans considered Hungary an Eastern European and not a Central European state.

Lukacs can be nasty, as in his gratuitous slur to countryman Gyorgy Lukacs (p. 297n) or in his con- tention that Communists in Hungary were gener- ally ugly. Moreover, some of his notions are bizarre as in his claim that little has changed since 1945

with Norman Mailer still our "principal literary fig- ure" (p. 242 n). He is surely off base in his impres- sionistic survey of magazine opinion, which is not informed by the latest scholarship. Even if we have to put up with an occasional bit of Nabokovian word play, however, it is worth waiting for such lines as these that describe Roosevelt: "When an American seductionist goes to the Caucasus he'd better bring plenty of money" (p. 93). 1945, as with much of Lukacs's work, makes for interesting, if ex- asperating, reading. He has much to say that merits attention from those who seek to explain the origins of the Cold War.

MELVIN SMALL

Wayne State University

ALAN KREIDER. English Chantries: The Road to Dis- solution. (Harvard Historical Studies, number 97.) Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1979. Pp. xi, 279. $20.00.

It was long believed that the effect of the Henrician and Edwardian Reformation at the parish level would always be beyond our ken due to lack of source material, but recently a new generation of historians has been showing what can be done, largely by using records that have long been known and used in other contexts. In-the days when the dissolution of the monasteries loomed large, with in- terest centering on the dispersal of their great es- tates, on crown finance and administration, and on local power politics, the chantries with their tiny en- dowments seemed small beer indeed. But for the or- dinary early-Tudor parishioner chantry priests were more familiar figures than abbots and their dis- appearance more noticeable on the local scene. Fol- lowing in the footsteps of Christopher Kitching, Alan Kreider has provided the first treatment of the subject on a large scale. Eschewing the actual sup- pression of these essentially "intercessory institu- tions," the pensioning of their priests, and the sale of their prup .y, he concentrates instead on at- tempting to discover what part chantries played during their two centuries of active life and on the run up to their dissolution.

Making full use of the chantry certificates and a great many other sources, Kreider is able to answer more fully than will ever be possible for monasteries the question as to the function of chantries in local society and hence the extent to which they were missed. Although they were established essentially to pray for the dead, Kreider finds that their priests performed a variety of other functions, acting as schoolmasters, auxiliary parish clergy, and dis- pensers of poor relief. He then proceeds to devote two chapters to the national debate concerning the

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