Search results for ""author tom conner""

The Communist Temptation: Rolland, Gide, Malraux, and Their Times traces the evolution of the committed left-wing public intellectual in the interwar period, specifically in the 1930s, and focuses on leading left-wing intellectuals, such as Romain Rolland, André Gide, and André Malraux, and their relationships with communism and the broader anti-fascist movement. In that turbulent decade, Paris also welcomed a growing number of Russian, Austrian, Italian, Dutch, Belgian, German, and German-speaking Central European refugees—activists, writers, and agents, among them Willi Münzenberg, Mikhail Koltsov, Eugen Fried, Ilya Ehrenburg, Manès Sperber, and Arthur Koestler—and Paris once again became a hotbed of international political activism. Events, however, signaled a decline in the high ethical standards set by Émile Zola and the Dreyfusards earlier in the twentieth century, as many pro-communist intellectuals acted in bad faith to support an ideology that they in all likelihood knew to be morally bankrupt. Among them, only Gide rebelled against Moscow, which caused ideological lines to harden to the point where there was little room for critical reason to assert itself.

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The Emergence of the French Public Intellectual provides a working definition of "public intellectuals" in order to clarify who they are and what they do. It then follows their varied itineraries from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to the nineteenth century. Public intellectuals became a fixture in French society during the Dreyfus Affair but have a long history in France, as the contributions of Christine de Pizan, Voltaire, and Victor Hugo, among many others, illustrate. The French novelist Émile Zola launched the Dreyfus Affair when he published "J'Accuse," an open letter to French President Félix Faure denouncing a conspiracy by the government and army against Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who was Jewish and had been wrongly convicted of treason three years earlier. The consequent emergence of a publicly-engaged intellectual created a new, modern space in intellectual life as France and the world confronted the challenges of the twentieth century.

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French Intellectuals at a Crossroads examines a broad array of interrelated subjects: the effect of World War I on France's intellectual community, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the rise of international communism, calls for pacifism, the creation of an "Intellectuals' International of the Mind," the debate over the myth of the disengaged intellectual, the apolitical group of "intellectuels non-conformistes," and, finally, the challenges of surrealism. Together, these developments reflected the diversity of intellectual commitment in France in the uncertain and troubled 1920s and 1930s. The interwar period also witnessed France's relative decline, as expressed in a move from a mood of immense relief coupled with a feeling of debilitating fatigue to an inward-looking, pessimistic, and defeatist outlook that presaged World War II and national collapse.

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