Content area
Full Text
Marie-Pierre Ulloa, Francis Jeanson: A Dissident Intellectual from the French Resistance to the Algerian War, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007).
Francis Jeanson is remembered for his organization of a network of French men and women who provided services to the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) in France during the Algerian War, including sheltering and transporting FLN militants and, most famously, conveying money that the FLN collected from Algerians in France so that it could be used to fund the FLN war effort. Jeanson believed that the independence movement in Algeria could serve to spark revolution in France, and that his network could provide the memory of an "other" France that would be necessary for amity between France and an independent Algeria. While Jean-Paul Sartre conceived of written and spoken interventions in the public sphere as the primary acts of the engaged intellectual, the Sartrean Jeanson came to see engagement as demanding other forms of action as well, and this is how he is recalled, or forgotten, in French intellectual life. Although Jeanson castigated André Malraux during the Algerian War for not being what he had once been, a few years later Malraux turned to Jeanson and gave him a voice in the formulation of the cultural policy of the Fifth Republic. Malraux recognized Jeanson as an engaged intellectual over and above his assessment of the acts in which Jeanson had engaged. However, Jeanson has now become more difficult to handle than he was when Malraux was choosing advisers. In 1962 the French state amnestied military personnel for heinous acts committed during the Algerian War. A generation later these crimes, whose commission cannot be punished, but whose celebration can, emerged to haunt the French. Malraux's ability to embrace Jeanson the activist without embracing Jeanson's actions and their consequences during the Algerian War remains problematic. Memory is an act of engagement as well.
In 1947, Sartre contributed a preface to Jeanson's first book, a study of Sartre, and this, in the words of Marie-Pierre Ulloa, "established [Jeanson's] reputation, because he was the chosen one" (62). Indeed, in this study of Jeanson, first published in French in 2001, Ulloa suggests it was Jeanson's relation to Sartre that is the key to understanding Jeanson. Jeanson...