In late 1949, French intellectual David Rousset issued an “Appeal” to survivors of Nazi concentration camps, demanding that they come together to investigate the existence of a parallel “concentration camp universe” in the Soviet Union.Footnote 1 Rousset, an ex-Trotskyist who had been a political prisoner in Buchenwald and Neuengamme and later authored two celebrated books on the Nazi camps, insisted that he was motivated neither by anticommunism nor by the desire to intervene in Cold War geopolitics. Rather, memory dictated that he could not stand by while fellow men endured the same abjection he had once experienced. In his “Appeal” and other venues, Rousset charged fellow survivors with the duty of intervening on the world stage by bearing ethical witness to the concentration camp as a limit-case of incommensurable human suffering. Focusing in visceral, “apolitical” language on the common wretchedness of victims, not on any structural or ideological similarities, he propounded a distinctive thesis of totalitarian equivalence between Nazism and Soviet communism.Footnote 2
If the “Appeal” was intended to spur action among survivors as well as loud controversy among Rousset's fellow left-leaning intellectuals, it succeeded on both counts. Over the following year, former Nazi camp deportees came together under Rousset's guidance to form the International Commission of Inquiry against the Concentration Camp Regime (CICRC), an organization that would spend the better part of the 1950s scrutinizing detainment conditions in the communist world and also in the West. Meanwhile, the “Appeal” sent shockwaves through the French intellectual community, prompting impassioned reactions from Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty; progressive Catholics; prominent camp survivors such as Claude Bourdet, Louis Martin-Chauffier, and Germaine Tillion; and a number of communist writers. From the latter group, Pierre Daix—himself a Mauthausen survivor—vehemently denounced Rousset's project as “a new ideological basis for the mobilization of peoples to continue Hitler's war” against the USSR and asserted that the evidence in the “Appeal” was fabricated.Footnote 3 This contention gave Rousset the pretext he desired to wage a public-relations battle over the issue of the camps; in December 1949 he sued Daix and his editor for defamation, resulting in a high-profile trial in late 1950 that Rousset eventually won. For his part, Sartre was so perturbed by the “Appeal,” especially its suggestion that the imperative to bear witness to extreme suffering could transcend politics, that he responded to Rousset's claims in four different texts written or cowritten between 1950 and 1961.
Given the furor over the “Appeal” and the sustained attention that contemporaries such as Sartre and Hannah Arendt gave Rousset, it is striking that later historians and critics have done little to examine the content and language of his polemical condemnation of the Soviet camps.Footnote 4 What limited notice Rousset's anti-Soviet writings have received in recent decades comes primarily from those who seek to praise his focus on the Gulag as a foil to the attitudes of other French intellectuals. Tony Judt, for instance, though he certainly never bestowed on the “Appeal” anything approaching the level of consideration he gave to Albert Camus's and Raymond Aron's condemnations of Soviet terror, described Rousset in flattering terms on multiple occasions and regretted that Sartre “learned little” through confronting him.Footnote 5 Critic Tzvetan Todorov and historian Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, meanwhile, have both engaged in more sustained—though still impressionistic—attempts to honor Rousset's moral fortitude in contrast with what they perceive as the shortcomings of others. Todorov compares Rousset, with his program for future-oriented “action,” with those Nazi camp survivors who instead sought to “remember, reiterate, brood over, or keep alive the past.” He also measures Rousset's “courageous act” against the choices made by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, who, in failing to condemn the Soviet camps, provided “an overwhelming illustration of [their] political irresponsibility.”Footnote 6 Le Cour Grandmaison, meanwhile, lauds Rousset for placing forced labor rather than genocide at the heart of the Nazi project; this, he writes, rendered available “universal” and thereby politically mobilizing readings of the camps. While other French intellectuals participated in “a vaster political strategy: to forbid all comparison between the Nazi and Soviet camps,” Rousset bravely bucked the trend.Footnote 7
Todorov and Le Cour Grandmaison are right to suggest that David Rousset's contributions ought to be better incorporated into our understanding of postwar French intellectual history. However, as Carolyn J. Dean and Samuel Moyn have pointed out, to treat Rousset as a model of ideal survivor comportment is troubling for its implied criticism of the behavior of other survivors as well as its tacit acceptance of Rousset's distorted understanding of key components of Nazi criminality.Footnote 8 The problems that Dean and Moyn indicate might be considered symptoms of the lingering tendency to portray postwar French intellectual controversy as a morality play, peopled by a cast of reckless, “irresponsible” philocommunists on the one hand and a lonesome band of ethical archetypes on the other. By confounding arguments about historical significance with arguments about moral stature, this approach poorly accommodates certain varieties of intellectual and ideological nuance—and Rousset, in his unsettling complexity, his disruptive tangle of allegiances and ideas, provides us with a particularly promising opportunity to attempt a different mode of analysis.
This article therefore seeks not to lionize Rousset for his stance on Soviet state violence but rather to analyze the full (and at times troubling) dimensions of his attempt to articulate a basis for engagement grounded in absolute identification with victims’ experience of dehumanizing trauma. Given Rousset's iconoclasm in late 1940s France, it is certainly tempting to classify him as an anachronistic beacon of later sensibilities—as, for example, when Todorov suggests that the CICRC was “something like Amnesty International avant la lettre.”Footnote 9 But, in truth, such comparisons misrepresent Rousset—and, by extension, mischaracterize opposition to his work from contemporaries. The features of his project most deserving of historians’ attention are precisely those that set it discomfitingly apart from today's dominant discourses about politics and human suffering: Rousset's imperious demand for unqualified identification with victims rather than mere sympathy or empathy; his focus on limit-case abjection as opposed to injustice in general; his ceaseless rhetorical claims that he was operating “above” or “beyond” politics (even as he colluded with Cold War governmental agencies); his distinctive understanding of the “lessons” of the Nazi camps, centered on forced labor and not on genocide; and his studious avoidance of the language of universal human rights.
Though much of the attention that the “Appeal” received was a result of Rousset's identity—he was viewed in France as having provided the single most important literary representation of the Nazi camps and hence enjoyed the status, in the words of his friend Gérard Rosenthal, of “a witness among witnesses”—it was not this alone that gave his anti-Gulag campaign its contemporary significance.Footnote 10 By asserting an absolute, “apolitical” identification with victims on the basis of his own traumatic experience, Rousset confronted his leftist confrères—particularly the noncommunists among them—with a fundamental and uncomfortable question concerning the relationship between global human suffering and political judgment. Their responses, in turn, hinged not merely on the well-founded suspicion that Rousset's activities were supported by pro-American agencies but also on substantive objections to his claim that bearing witness to extreme, limit-case suffering through identification with victims was a sufficient aim for the postwar noncommunist left. In attempting to analyze their conflict with Rousset in a way that goes beyond a rubric of responsibility versus irresponsibility, sight versus blindness, the point is not to appeal to “historical context” to explain away the failure of many postwar French leftists to condemn the Gulag and other forms of Soviet state violence. It is, rather, to examine how they and Rousset attempted, in different fashions, to address the particular difficulties inherent in tethering politics to a coherent, global ethical project in the early Cold War period, well before human rights became a widely accepted language on the left.Footnote 11 Looking more closely at both Rousset's rhetoric and the outraged protests of his contemporaries sheds new light on the contentious, multivocal nature of French political and ethical debate at this extraordinary historical juncture.
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David Rousset was born in 1912 to a religiously observant Protestant family of modest means in Roanne. When his father's bicycle business failed, the family moved to Paris and his father took a job as a metalworker at Citroën; the young adult David found that he preferred Gide to his parents’ Bible and eventually took courses in philosophy and literature at the Sorbonne.Footnote 12 As a student in the tumultuous early 1930s, he quickly became politically engaged, joining the tiny Trotskyist movement populated by men such as Pierre Naville, Yvan Craipeau, and Gérard Rosenthal. They followed Trotsky's 1934 entriste dictate that French followers should militate from within the Socialist Party to create a front unique but were expelled by the Socialists in July 1935 as leaders cleared the way for their electoral alliance with the Parti communiste français (PCF). Upon the 1936 founding of an independent Trotkyist party, the Parti ouvrier internationaliste, Rousset joined the Political Bureau and was assigned to work on colonial questions, a task that put him in regular contact with North African nationalist Messali Hadj. He also participated in the subsequent founding of the Trotskyist Fourth International in 1938.
When France fell, Rousset entered into clandestine resistance along with his comrades, attempting to foment dissent and desertion among the German occupying forces. He was arrested by the Gestapo on 12 October 1943 and held in Fresnes prison near Paris, which he would later describe as “paradise” compared to the camps, until January 1944.Footnote 13 He then passed the next fifteen months in Nazi concentration camps and satellite camps in Germany, including first Buchenwald and later Porta Westfalica, Helmstedt, and finally Neuengamme. He survived, and returned to France in May 1945; during his convalescence, he began work on a series of articles about his experience for Maurice Nadeau's newly founded Revue internationale. These would be republished in 1946 as the slim Renaudot prize-winning book L’Univers concentrationnaire, whose title subsequently became common currency in France for describing the “world” of the camps. In 1947, he published a much longer, lightly fictionalized “novel” about camp denizens, Les Jours de notre mort. Both books received a magnificent reception and propelled Rousset into loftier intellectual circles than those in which he had moved prewar: most notably, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty became friends and occasional collaborators. Excerpts from Les Jours de notre mort appeared in Les Temps modernes, along with several other pieces by Rousset, and he was interviewed for the short-lived Temps modernes radio program.Footnote 14 In 1949 Sartre even published a rambling volume of his political conversations with Rousset and Gérard Rosenthal, titled Entretiens sur la politique. Rousset gave press conferences, speeches, and lectures, commanding immense respect despite—or perhaps in part because of—his devastated physical appearance. One admiring report exclaimed, “Stocky, powerful, a black patch on his left eye, his teeth ravaged but without it affecting his pronunciation, he speaks with authority—and what authority! That of a survivor.”Footnote 15
To understand Rousset's later attack on the “concentration camp universe” in the Soviet Union, it is necessary to be familiar with his representation of the Nazi camps in L’Univers concentrationnaire and Les Jours de notre mort. Although readers at the time admired the disjointed, “modernist” style of these books, some dimensions of Rousset's work now appear surprisingly conventional in comparison to other survivor literature. This is because he insisted that one could locate redeemable, recoverable meaning or value in what camp inmates had undergone. Rousset placed the deportation experience in an intelligible and, indeed, traditional narrative of Bildung and heroic sacrifice. Survivors, he wrote, possessed valuable and otherwise inaccessible knowledge of human nature: in the hellish pits of Buchenwald and Neuengamme, human beings had been revealed in their naked, unvarnished essentials. Those who had taken part in this process were now “set apart from others by an experience impossible to communicate”;Footnote 16 they alone possessed a “dynamic awareness of the power and beauty of the sheer fact of living, in itself, brutal, entirely stripped of all superstructures.”Footnote 17 Moreover, unlike “normal men,” they understood, with heavy hearts, that “everything is possible.”Footnote 18 Indeed, Rousset was adamant that the features of human nature that had been revealed to him in the camps made it obvious that “under a new guise, similar effects could reappear tomorrow.”Footnote 19
Rousset depicted the concentration camp as an obscene, Ubu-esque world where mechanisms of terror and suffering functioned to render inmates abject: intense bodily suffering, unending physical exhaustion, degradation that relentlessly stripped away dignity and civilized norms, life reduced to biological processes—all of this produced “the total dissolution of the individual,” Rousset wrote, not merely his physical death.Footnote 20 His account was, however, essentially a political and sociological one, which ultimately had little to say about the traumatizing effects of imprisonment on individual subjects. He instead laid great emphasis on the life-and-death internal hierarchies of camp society, with its “aristocrats” and “plebes,” its national groups and political parties, and devoted much attention—like other French writers in this period—to describing prisoners’ own implication in the brutality.Footnote 21 Rousset's portrayal of camp life was heavily influenced by Marxist and Gramscian concepts: he analyzed relations among prisoners and guards in terms of “class,” and moreover accounted for the very existence of the camps as a product of a capitalist world in crisis. He therefore emphasized forced labor unto death, not gas chamber extermination, as the single most paradigmatic feature of Nazi evil.
Rousset was well aware of Hitler's slaughter of Europe's Jews. Indeed, in 1948, with the aid of the staff at France's new Centre de documentation juive contemporaine, he assembled a documentary volume on Nazi anti-Semitism and prewar persecution of Jews.Footnote 22 Nevertheless, he memorably insisted that the difference between extermination camps and concentration camps had been “not one of nature but only of degree.”Footnote 23 The Nazis’ representative inmates, for him, would always be antifascist political prisoners engaged in forced labor, those who “became slaves of the SS uniquely because of their convictions and their commitment to them. Voilà the new fact, historically speaking, whose sociological importance is considerable and which introduces into modern history a new procedure of dehumanization.”Footnote 24 This perspective was not a controversial one in the late 1940s: at this juncture almost no voices in mainstream French discourse placed genocide at the heart of the Nazi project. However, Rousset's failure to acknowledge the particularity of the Holocaust should not be glossed over as a “product of his times.” Rather, this elision was essential to his intellectual project: it permitted him to situate Nazi violence as a new but historically intelligible development in a history driven by class struggle, to paint antifascist “politicals” such as himself as Hitler's primary victims, and to locate universalizable “lessons” in his experience. This in turn would make possible his “totalitarian” interpretation of twentieth-century history and his condemnation of the “concentration camp universe” in the USSR.
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Rousset's postwar political evolution was fast-paced. He broke with the Trotskyists in 1947, then helped to found a short-lived “movement” called the Rassemblement démocratique révolutionnaire (RDR), intended as a supra-party “assembly of free men for revolutionary democracy” that rejected alignment with either the US or the USSR.Footnote 25 The RDR gained the vocal support of Sartre as well as the involvement of other luminaries like Camus and members of Emmanuel Mounier's Esprit team.Footnote 26 The statement of purpose Rousset drafted for the group called for France to exit its “current capitalist barbarism” but resist aligning itself with the Soviet Union, where the existence of forced labor demonstrated that men could remake relations of production and yet retain “forms of exploitation often more ferocious than those of capitalism.”Footnote 27 In the pages of the organization's journal La Gauche, Rousset took militantly leftist positions on domestic politics: he supported the 1948 French miners’ strike “without reserve” despite the PCF's leadership, for instance.Footnote 28 But increasingly he focused his attention on the failings of Soviet communism: in August 1948 he alluded to “concentration camps and forced labor” in the USSR,Footnote 29 and in December of that year he threw down a direct challenge to fellow deportees who remained in the PCF. “In the name of which political explanations,” he asked, could they excuse “the existence of concentration camps in the Soviet Union? . . . One cannot construct a future of emancipation with tortured slaves from concentration camps!”Footnote 30
Rousset's claims joined a growing cacophony of voices charging publicly in France that a constellation of forced-labor camps existed in the USSR.Footnote 31 Soviet defector Victor Serge had begun publishing on forced labor in venues like Esprit in 1937, Albert Camus insisted on the existence of Soviet concentration camps in La Gauche in 1948, and the topic had even been broached in the pages of Les Temps modernes.Footnote 32 Perhaps most importantly, in 1947 the US government helped facilitate the French publication of I Chose Freedom, a sensationally damning account of the Soviet system by a defector to America named Victor Kravchenko. As the book became an immediate best seller in France, PCF intellectual André Wurmser attacked it in the pages of Les Lettres françaises, charging that it was a fabrication of American Secret Service agents. Although the accusation was, as Irwin M. Wall puts it, “at least a half-truth,” Kravchenko subsequently sued Les Lettres françaises for defamation.Footnote 33 With his pompous haut fonctionnaire mannerisms Kravchenko was easy for French leftists to dismiss as a dupe of the Americans—and indeed, suspicions that he was working throughout the trial with the US State Department through the American Embassy were entirely justified.Footnote 34 Nevertheless, several of the more sympathetic witnesses in the case—notably Margarete Buber-Neumann—testified vividly to the existence of a Soviet concentration camp archipelago and persuaded at least some observers.Footnote 35
It was in the wake of the Kravchenko case—and in the wake as well of the collapse of the RDR, under the weight of Cold War imperatives and its own ideological contradictions—that Rousset offered his 1949 “Appeal” to fellow survivors. The piece, published on the front page of Pierre Brisson's conservative, pro-Atlantic Alliance Le Figaro littéraire, was titled “Help the Deportees in the Soviet Camps: An Appeal from David Rousset to the Former Deportees of the Nazi Camps.” It was addressed to “former political deportees” and their major organizations, to “all those who, having survived the concentration camp universe, bore witness to it [en portèrent le témoignage].”Footnote 36 Rousset also called by name upon prominent “political” survivors such as Louis Martin-Chauffier, Jean Cayrol, Agnès Humbert, Robert Antelme, Eugen Kogon, Rémy Roure, and Claude Bourdet. Amassing a variety of evidence for the existence of forced-labor camps in the USSR—he drew especially on the portion of the Soviet Labor Codex dealing with “corrective labor”—he issued a resounding call to his fellow survivors in the first person plural. Together, he announced, they were responsible for investigating whether other men now suffered the horrors that they had once endured. Based on inmates’ common experience of bodily suffering, Rousset drew a categorical equation between the Nazi and Soviet camps, flattening out distinctions to paint them as a single undifferentiated landscape of victimization (a move predicated, as we have seen, on downplaying Nazi extermination camps).Footnote 37 To know that he must bear witness to the Gulag, Rousset insisted, a former Nazi camp inmate did not need any sophisticated political analysis. He needed only to understand that the Soviet homme concentrationnaire was undergoing an experience of grinding, slow physical destruction just like “ours”:
He is hungry. All of the illnesses brought on by physiological misery work on his body. He is frightened. He lives in the same wooden barracks as us, or under a tent, or in earthen houses that are dark as caves. His destiny is enclosed by the same barbed wire, the same watch towers. He toils until well beyond the endurance of his muscles under the menace of dogs and guns. Like us, he wears squalid rags, like us he has neither the means nor the time to wash. He wakes up—he, too—before daybreak, and in the evening, upon the exhausted return of the work brigade, he gets in line, an endless line, at the entrance of a hospital without any medicine . . . I tell you that I am summing up literally hundreds of reports, and that there exist thousands of them.Footnote 38
Based on this universalizing vision of the human body disintegrated and humiliated by “the camp,” Rousset obstinately, explicitly dismissed the notion that the Soviet camps were different from the Nazi ones because they had different ends: “For the inmates, this difference is empty [vaine], because the same living conditions drive them unavoidably to that particular death which was ours, the dirty and despairing death.”Footnote 39 According to the language Rousset employed in the “Appeal” and in subsequent writings—language that heavily featured the word même (“same”)—the suffering of Soviet victims was not merely like that of Nazi camp victims but was collapsed into it, an indistinguishable extension of that single entity, the “concentration camp universe.” The helpless souls in the Gulag did not simply deserve French survivors’ sympathy—they demanded their unqualified identification.
In Rousset's vision, therefore, the responsibility that the Nazi camp survivor possessed toward the Soviet camp inmate was boundless, and grounded in a remembered bodily experience to which the survivor was forever called to bear witness. Rousset did not hesitate to employ a quasi-sacralizing invocation of shared traumatic memory as he sought to awaken his fellow survivors’ consciences: near the end of the “Appeal,” for example, in a deeply unsettling paragraph, he wrote, “I would like each one of us to take himself back: imagine that we are, again, reunited on the large plaza of Buchenwald, under the lights and under the snow, to hear the orchestra and to wait to be counted.” This frightening exercise was intended, first of all, to persuade survivors that, in epistemological terms, they alone possessed the painful knowledge with which to evaluate the Soviet camps: “The others,” Rousset wrote, “those who were never concentrationnaires, can plead poverty of imagination, incompetence. Us, we are the professionals, the specialists.” But, even more importantly, it was intended to force recognition of ethical responsibility through total identification with the suffering of others, “the millions of men [who] are what we were yesterday.” To bear witness, eternally, was the duty and the “difficult privilege” of yesterday's victims: “The gift that has been given to us, this permission to live (whereas logic would have had us in the mass grave) can only have one meaning: we are the witnesses before other men . . . This is the price that we must pay for the surplus of life that we have been granted.”Footnote 40
Such language calling on survivors’ traumatic memory, in all its immediacy—and, moreover, playing heavy-handedly upon their guilt at having escaped alive when so many perished—appears disconcerting today but did not, in itself, render the “Appeal” unique in the late 1940s. References to survivors’ special duties (devoirs), directly born, paradoxically enough, from having already suffered so greatly, were a staple of postwar French discourse among former political prisoners.Footnote 41 Like an insistence on “lessons” learned in the camps, the language of devoirs placed survivors’ experience in an intelligible framework of meaningful sacrifice, of suffering that in the end had some purpose. Thus in designating deportees as a kind of moral elect, Rousset played into an existing set of tropes. Indeed, other survivors with anticommunist sympathies had already suggested well before Rousset's “Appeal” that they might possess “duties” toward those in Soviet forced-labor camps.Footnote 42
Rousset's innovation lay elsewhere, in two senses. First, he employed the discourse of devoirs not in a circular or speech to fellow survivors but in a widely disseminated general-readership periodical. His “audience” of Nazi camp survivors—the omnipresent “we” in the text—was a rhetorical device, not a reality. The “Appeal” performed a call-to-arms of survivors, but its language of common suffering was directed to a far broader audience. Rousset thus implicitly offered to general readers a narrative of recent history in which the Nazi camps and the forms of limit-case physical and psychic violence they had visited upon their victims constituted the overwhelmingly central event of the war years, the one from which “lessons” for the future could be gleaned. This, in turn, rendered feasible a global comparison between the Nazi and Soviet regimes, on the basis of the possession of “camps,” despite the existence of such inconvenient facts as the USSR's staggering sacrifices in the service of defeating Hitler and the preponderance of communists in the interior French Resistance.
Second, Rousset insisted that the sole—and quite deliberately minimal—imperative in a post-Buchenwald world was to prevent the recurrence of that particular limit-case of dehumanization. This was an imperative that existed beyond politics as conventionally understood: ideological commitments were rendered irrelevant by the existence of the camps. It was also well beyond everyday ethics: he would no longer be speaking, Rousset explained, of “injustice in general, but of this precise injustice that we call concentrationnaire.”Footnote 43 This was because “the concentration camp” represented an incommensurable wrong, one he later would call “the worst evil, which is incomparable with other political evils that humanity can fear.”Footnote 44 Rousset did not claim (as some of his followers would) that fighting the Soviet camps was desirable because it would in fact help to create a socialist world more quickly. But neither did he celebrate the freedoms available in the capitalist bloc: he was happy to admit that the West was a “bad, mediocre world” full of injustices and sorrows.Footnote 45 He simply professed no further interest in addressing all the world's woes. From the perspective of the survivor–witness, concentration camps revealed the triviality of other problems—including economic injustice—and the superfluous nature of projects intended to address them. From now on, Rousset claimed, instead of fighting for a revolutionary utopia like others on the French left, he would work to set one single, deliberately modest boundary to human debasement.
Although this insistence was to some extent rhetorical flourish—Rousset would permit himself by the mid-1950s to speak out again regularly on myriad global and domestic issuesFootnote 46—nevertheless, from the moment of the “Appeal” forward, he consistently defended the claim that other concerns remained secondary compared to the camps. Indeed, during France's Algerian War, he would tie himself in rhetorical knots (and compromise the impact of the CICRC's remarkable 1957 investigation of detention centers in Algeria) to explain why even torture, “as serious as it is,” was nevertheless not an abuse in the same league as camps.Footnote 47 As he stated during the Lettres françaises trial,
This experience of concentration camps became, for a certain number of men in Western Europe, the decisive experience. It is the criterion that is beyond all ideological or political criteria; it is the essential criterion. There where camps exist, there cannot be the least future for man . . .Footnote 48
Thus camps had to be eliminated from the face of the earth. If his campaign succeeded, Rousset proclaimed, “It will be established that in our society the only impassable frontier is this extreme limit, the refusal to allow the world of the camps.”Footnote 49 And this, minimal as it was, would be enough.
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As we evaluate Rousset's “Appeal” and interpret his subsequent activities, the Cold War agenda of the US and its allies provides one indispensable context. This is not simply a matter of Rousset's relatively well-known role as a member of the Executive Committee of the anticommunist, covertly CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) beginning in June 1950. Tony Judt has argued that it is difficult to demonstrate any definitive untoward American influence on CCF participants, since the majority were unaware of CIA backing and “did not need official American encouragement to take a hard line against Communism.”Footnote 50 This is debatable, but in any case Rousset's entanglements with Cold War strategists went considerably further than mere participation in the CCF; nor were they unwitting. Irwin M. Wall has shown that Rousset was in regular contact with the American Embassy in Paris in 1949;Footnote 51 more substantively, John Jenks's work on the covert Cold War-era propaganda service of the British Foreign Office (the Information Research Department, or IRD) reveals that its agents maintained a long-term, intensive association with Rousset. Having first been alerted to the Soviet Corrective Labor Codex by his friend Corley Smith, Britain's counselor to the United Nations’ Economic and Social Council, Rousset quietly requested Foreign Office help on the same day he filed suit against Les Lettres françaises. He subsequently relied on the IRD for a wide range of services: organizing press conferences, clinching publication deals, gathering documentation and securing witnesses for the trial, and so on. Peter Tennant, a British information officer stationed in Paris, proudly reported to his superior in December 1949 that Rousset's lawyers were “profoundly grateful” for the IRD's assistance. According to Jenks, Rousset continued to keep up close working relations with the department into the mid-1950s.Footnote 52
If Rousset's project cannot be accounted for without taking such alliances and intrigues into consideration, however, neither can simply pointing to his affiliations provide an adequate explanation of the content of his intervention: the terms in which Rousset couched his “Appeal” were conspicuously unusual in comparison to much anticommunist language of the period. First, Rousset's emphasis on limit-case abjection stood in contrast to heavily rights-centered discourses used in the late 1940s against the USSR by other, generally more conservative, French anticommunists. During the Kravchenko trial the previous year, for example, centrist politician René Pleven had proclaimed, “This trial is not any longer that of Kravchenko against Les Lettres françaises, it is that of the Rights of Man against the Reason of State.”Footnote 53 The French national committee of the CCF, a group called Les amis de la liberté that included such figures as Gabriel Marcel, Paul Claudel, Claude Mauriac, Jules Monnerot, Jean Paulhan, and Rémy Roure, asserted that the Soviet system constituted “the negation of the elementary, imprescriptible, sacred rights of the human person.”Footnote 54 In the pages of Preuves, the monthly French journal established by the CCF in 1951, contributors regularly referred to rights: Swiss-born writer Denis de Rougemont, for example, once minutely enumerated all of the rights that men enjoyed to the west of the Iron Curtain (“the right to circulate, to work, to strike . . . the right to applaud or to boo according to one's taste, to listen to the radio station one prefers and to turn it off if one is bored, without being denounced by the neighbors . . .”) and that the Soviet bloc cruelly denied its peoples.Footnote 55 The British IRD's own anti-Gulag statements also employed the language of rights, charging the Soviets with using prisoners “as forced labor in conditions denying to them the basic human rights.”Footnote 56 In contrast, Rousset, despite his involvement with every one of these institutional entities, avoided using the terms “human rights” or “rights of man”: he continually referred to “the human” or “man,” but not as a rights-bearing entity, only as a figure capable of great suffering.Footnote 57 It was his own and others’ experience of trauma going beyond the “extreme limit,” not a reasoned appeal to rights, that produced the call to bear witness.Footnote 58
Second, Rousset's project was remarkable for its claim that the issue of the camps existed on a plane that superseded politics and, moreover, involved matters of limit-case bodily suffering that made political concerns irrelevant. This assertion was at the center of the storm of reaction the “Appeal” unleashed in France. Indeed, to twenty-first century eyes, it appears that an astonishing proportion of the French debate during the “Rousset affair” centered not on the crucial question whether the Soviet Union did or did not possess forced-labor camps, but instead on the seemingly more peripheral issue of whether it was really possible for Rousset (or anyone) to identify with human suffering in an apolitical register. If contemporaries’ suspicions regarding Rousset's pro-American alliances were correct, it is nevertheless still striking to note that questions about the accuracy of his charges were consistently overshadowed by discussions of his strange claims to be operating above or beyond politics. Could Rousset possibly be telling the truth, readers demanded, when he insisted that his concern for Soviet victims was grounded in his own experience of the Nazi camps, not in cynical partisanship?
His supporters insisted that he was. Léon Blum, for example, the aging figurehead of the Socialists, celebrated the “Appeal” for its supposed disinterestedness:
The action of David Rousset and the men who have responded to his appeal is situated outside the parties and, in a sense, above them . . . At the origin of David Rousset's initiative, there is not and there never has been any political machination. There is simply the revolt of those who were the victims, the sufferers, the witnesses of the Hitlerian abomination, who cannot tolerate the idea that it could go on in other places, or under other names.Footnote 59
Rémy Roure of Le Monde, one of the prominent survivors who most enthusiastically supported Rousset's campaign, insisted that the action Rousset was taking was situated uniquement upon the “the human plane,” not “the political plane.”Footnote 60 Rousset's friend Georges Altman waxed poetic on the subject in Franc-tireur: “Here is a grave, tragic question that goes far beyond any polemic, any political quarrel . . . a question which is at the very heart of human life today and which especially touches those who, having emerged from hell, fight for a better world.”Footnote 61
For French Communist Party members, however, Rousset's disavowal of political motives was laughable: they viewed his “Appeal” as hackneyed anti-Soviet propaganda by a Trotskyist, rendered all the more infuriating by the fact that Rousset—supported by the likes of Léon Blum—claimed loftier intentions. In the communist world view, such detachment was an impossibility, since there was nothing “outside” the political realm. As one party member and camp survivor put it, “The ‘apoliticals’ . . . are a race that has never seen the light of day on this earth.” Those who claimed to be above politics simply “want to make us carry out their politics.”Footnote 62 Communist intellectuals responded angrily to the “Appeal”: for example, writer Robert Antelme, a colleague Rousset had singled out by name, wrote to him privately “with black rancor . . . terrible rancor” to complain that the Appeal was “pitiful, truly sinister,” and “before all else a particularly grievous manifestation of anticommunism.”Footnote 63 Meanwhile communist-dominated survivors’ organizations, including the amicales of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, as well as an important umbrella group called the Fédération nationale des déportés et internés résistants et patriotes (FNDIRP), officially rejected the “Appeal” as an anti-Soviet provocation.Footnote 64 Noncommunists—including leading figures such as the Père Michel Riquet—defected from the FNDIRP as a result of the organization's intransigent opposition to Rousset's campaign, forming a new group, the Union nationale des associations de déportés, internés, et familles de disparus (UNADIF). Echoing Rousset's language of apoliticism, they announced their intention to “bring together . . . all the Victims of the deportation resolved to continue to take action outside any of the preoccupations of partisan politics.”Footnote 65
It was the intellectuals at Les Lettres françaises who mobilized the most public communist counterattack against Rousset. Pierre Daix, as a fellow Nazi camp survivor, was selected to serve as the chief antagonist. The headline of his initial response laid out the stakes: “Pierre Daix, Identification Number 59,807 at Mauthausen, Responds to David Rousset.” Daix—summoning his own authority as a survivor—ridiculed the notion of an apolitical, purely ethical concern about Soviet violence to dismiss Rousset as an anticommunist warmonger. All choices were political; one was either for the Soviet Union or one was against it (and thereby a supporter of capitalist exploitation). The correct “lesson” to have brought away from the camps, Daix asserted, was precisely a political one: the camps were a product of degenerate late capitalism, and thus served as further evidence for the need to struggle for socialism. Indeed, had it not been the communist inmates who had organized resistance to the guards at Buchenwald? “Monsieur Rousset,” Daix charged, “has ‘depoliticized’ the Nazi camps. He has turned them into an entity for which Man with a capital M [l’Homme avec un grand H] was responsible.”Footnote 66 And this, of course, not out of any genuine “apoliticism”—such a thing did not exist—but out of a profoundly political desire to mystify and obscure.
Left-leaning intellectuals who were not Communist Party members latched critically onto Rousset's claims to apolitical motives as well, but their challenges differed significantly from those offered by figures like Daix: they elaborated not a point-blank denial of Rousset's veracity, but rather a philosophical rebuttal of the value of an ethics that purported to exist “beyond” political considerations. This was because, unlike party members, noncommunists were generally unwilling to deny the presence of forced-labor camps in the USSR. Indeed, the most significant noncommunist critique of Rousset, that by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty in a January 1950 joint editorial in Les Temps modernes, frankly acknowledged the likely existence of an expansive Soviet camp system and even considerably overestimated the imprisoned population, asserting, “What we say is, there is no socialism when one citizen out of twenty is in a camp.”Footnote 67 Nevertheless, they were indignant at their former friend and colleague Rousset, with whom “our collaboration [is] today definitively terminated.”Footnote 68 While recognizing the fundamental accuracy of Rousset's accusation, they “absolutely disapprove[d]” of the fact that he had voiced it in the terms he did, rejecting the premise that there existed a space “outside” Cold War politics to engage in such a response to suffering.Footnote 69 In an echo of the argument Merleau-Ponty had elaborated in his 1947 Humanisme et terreur, they asserted that in focusing on Soviet state violence—and doing so in a bourgeois venue such as Le Figaro littéraire—Rousset had offered “absolution” to “the capitalist world,” rendering its own crimes invisible.Footnote 70 They rejected Rousset's claim that the duty to bear witness to limit-case human suffering rendered political judgment superfluous: in their eyes, socialism and capitalism remained the fundamental categories with which to view the world, the underlying bases for engagement. Thus they were particularly displeased with Rousset's insistence that Soviet and Nazi camps ought to be compared since they produced the same kinds of suffering bodies: this was ideologically fraudulent, since “we have nothing in common with a Nazi and we have the same values as a communist.”Footnote 71 Ends, in other words, mattered.
Sartre and Merleau-Ponty not only rejected the notion that responding to extreme human suffering was more important than the struggle against capitalist injustice, they also disputed the claim that limit-case experiences of trauma such as the one Rousset had undergone provided any “lessons” to guide future behavior. Having been a victim of violence did not provide one with special insight into the legitimacy of future violent acts, they asserted. Rousset's supporters “will say that the concentration camp experience, absolute of horror, compels the man who has survived it to look first to the country that prolongs it.” But, in fact, “the truth is that even the experience of an absolute like the horror of the concentration camp cannot determine a political position. The days of life are not the days of death [Les jours de la vie ne sont pas les jours de la mort].” Rousset, the author of Les Jours de notre mort, in other words, had not been absolved from the need to approach problems in political terms by what he had experienced in the camps; he had not been transformed in a way that gave him claim to more profound solidarities than other men possessed. “When one comes back to life,” Sartre and Merleau-Ponty wrote, “for better or for worse, one begins again to reason, one chooses one's loyalties . . . One always forgets death when one lives.”Footnote 72 This flat rejection of identifying with abject sufferers as a meaningful alternative to reasoned political engagement was the heart of their critique of Rousset; to underline the fact, they titled their editorial “Les jours de notre vie.”
Six months later, evidently still troubled by the issues Rousset had raised, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty again published an editorial criticizing him. This piece, “L’adversaire est complice,” was even more explicitly concerned with explaining why an “apolitical” approach to human suffering was not feasible. Here, while defensively reminding readers that they were not communists, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty insisted that one could not responsibly condemn a given form of political violence on ethical grounds simply because it produced suffering. Violence, they wrote, even in limit-case forms such as concentration camps, could not definitively be classed as illegitimate by invoking the experience of victims. Responding to the charge that they should have written about the Soviet camps sooner—before Rousset forced their hand—Sartre and Merleau-Ponty responded that they had not been aware of the extent of the Soviet forced-labor system until early 1950. “It is certainly cruel,” they wrote,
to tolerate the camps so long as they’re not too populated. But ultimately, all of the regimes that history has shown to us, or now shows us, tolerate or admit horrors . . . [Trotsky] knew, from having governed, and from having made the revolution in 1917, that Revolution brings horrors with it, that political judgment is a statistical judgment, and finally that the political question is to know what, of the horror and of the worthwhile, tends to predominate in a system, and what the direction [sens] of the system is.Footnote 73
Thus, against Rousset, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty assumed that there was a necessary opposition between experience and judgment and that an appeal to ethics was merely a mask for a dubious politics. As a result, to use one of Sartre's favorite expressions, one must choose. They therefore rejected the notion that one always ought to bear witness against extreme suffering, and insisted instead on the exercise of political and historical reason.
Though Merleau-Ponty abandoned this position in the early 1950s, Sartre continued to carry on the argument with Rousset over the next decade, as one continues to worry an aching tooth. Notably, his famous 1952 open letter to Albert Camus ending their friendship dwelt extensively and uncomfortably on the Rousset affair. Now an open PCF sympathizer (he had become a fellow traveler earlier that year), Sartre shifted his line of attack, ridiculing the notion that Rousset and his supporters actually experienced any sort of identificatory response to the suffering of Gulag inmates. Citing French racism, he questioned the very premise—central to later human rights and humanitarian discourses—that men were really able to address suffering across national borders. He insisted, for example, that “it is difficult for a Frenchman to put himself in the place of a Turkestani” imprisoned in a Soviet camp, and (here curiously joining Rousset in conflating empathy or sympathy with identification) concluded that it was therefore highly unlikely that this prototypical Frenchman could “experience sympathy for this abstract being which is a Turkestani seen from here.”Footnote 74 Indeed, he suggested, very different feelings were likely brewing among Rousset's followers. “I have seen the anticommunists rejoice in the existence of these prisons,” he wrote. “Be serious, Camus, and tell me if you please what emotion the ‘revelations’ of Rousset could have evoked in the heart of the anticommunist. Despair? Affliction? The shame of being a man? Go on, go on!” Rousset's appeal to a visceral brotherhood of shared experience was disingenuous and exploitative. In any event, Sartre claimed, a meaningful response to human suffering demanded not compassion for victims but political action that could transform the world, eliminating exploitative human relations. “It seems to me,” he wrote, “that the only way of coming to the aid of the enslaved over there is to take the side of those who are here.” For Camus, who refused to “take sides,” “I see only one solution: the Galapagos Islands.” In other words, there was no meaningful space “outside” geopolitics and ideological conflict from which to bear witness to global suffering. “Apolitical” solidarity with abject victims everywhere was a false option.Footnote 75
* * *
Rousset responded vigorously to such criticism, insisting that there was indeed a criterion for meaningful action that went beyond politics and could transcend borders. He labeled this superior value “human life,” defining it as a bare dividing line between human and animal existence that concentration camps were designed expressly to erase. Rousset's formulation of “human life” cannot be comfortably assimilated to later human rights discourses: he continued to avoid any language of individual rights, to insist that he was interested not in various violations of human dignity and freedom but only in one form of extreme victimization, and to ground his argument in an absolute, distinction-collapsing identification with current victims based on his own experience of le même trauma. “We,” he wrote pointedly in response to Sartre and Merleau-Ponty,
were introduced to dehumanization not by discourse but by life . . . Politics expresses the power of our interests and the weakness of our imagination. We know today, for the living future, that interests are nothing without life, and that it is not possible to live where the meaning of the human that we hold ceases to be intelligible . . . Certain people have written that the concentration camp experience does not determine a politics. Of course—it signifies much more. In today's world—so far have we been dragged along by the debacle—it denounces that which cannot be accepted; that which tolerates no pact, no compromise, under pain of death. Into a society suffocated by political sophisms, the concentration camp experience thrusts the human, all too human, fighting desperately to exist.Footnote 76
Rousset, along with his lawyers Théo Bernard and Gérard Rosenthal, employed similar rhetoric at his defamation trial against Daix and his editor Claude Morgan, which finally began in November of 1950 as the Korean War brought US–Soviet tensions to new heights. The case, tried in the Seventeenth Correctional Chamber of the Seine, became a full-blown media spectacle, generating widespread reportage: according to Rousset's press-clipping agents, from November 1950 to its conclusion in January 1951 the trial was discussed forty-nine times in Le Monde, fifty-two times in Le Figaro, thirty-two in France soir, thirty-six in L’Aurore, and thirty-eight in Combat. The communist press was even more voracious: seventy-three articles in L’Humanité dealt with the trial, fifty-eight in Ce soir. Nor was the case neglected by the provincial press: there were twenty-nine articles in Nord-matin, twenty in La Croix du nord, thirty-three in Toulouse's La Depêche du midi, and seventeen in Marseille's Le Provençal.Footnote 77 Both sides tried to make the most of the media spotlight by ignoring the narrow issue of defamation in favor of broader targets. Daix later remembered that he, Morgan, and their lawyers Paul Vienney and Joë Nordmann “did not fight to win the trial, but to totally obstruct the exposés of the anti-Soviet witnesses” by suggesting that they were motivated by “resentment and political hatred.”Footnote 78 As for Rousset, he not only proffered a veritable parade of internationally culled witnesses testifying to the existence of Soviet labor camps but spoke at length to insist that at stake in the courtroom was “a question of humanity.”Footnote 79 Yes, other forms of oppression existed, Rousset blithely acknowledged, mentioning prejudice against blacks in the US, but the camps alone stood as “the greatest evil, that which in any case must be destroyed.” His experience gave him no choice but to take this position, “because I was a concentration camp slave, because I lived through this misfortune, because it has become the obsession [hantise] of my life, because it is the greatest misfortune that man can know . . . incomparably worse than all others.”Footnote 80
After triumphing in court in January 1951, an outcome essentially guaranteed by Daix and Morgan's refusal to defend against the defamation charges, Rousset moved forward with the project outlined in the “Appeal”: establishing a commission of Nazi camp survivors to investigate concentration camps that might still exist, particularly in the USSR.Footnote 81 Already in January 1950, he had formally constituted a French Commission of Inquiry against the Concentration Camp Regime; later in the year this became the CICRC, with headquarters in Brussels and delegates from France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Spain, Norway, Denmark, and the Saar protectorate. Several French survivors became heavily involved with the CICRC, most notably Rémy Roure, the Père Riquet, respected Ravensbrück survivor Germaine Tillion, and Neuengamme/Bergen-Belsen survivor Louis Martin-Chauffier, a Catholic writer and ex-fellow traveler. In Brussels in May 1951, the group held a mock trial of the USSR for the crime of concentration camps, filling all roles in the simulated courtroom with Nazi camp survivors. (Rousset himself was prosecutor; Tillion served as a judge.) The newly founded CCF organ Preuves congratulated the group on the “irrefutable proof of its objectivity” provided throughout these theatrical proceedings.Footnote 82 The British Foreign Office, too, took great advantage of the mock trial for its own anti-Soviet propaganda, well pleased with the outcome of its agents’ efforts with Rousset.Footnote 83
Interestingly enough, the CICRC did not simply fade away in the early 1950s as a completed publicity stunt. The group, which in 1952 gained official “B” level consultative status with the UN's Economic and Social Council (permitting it to make public reports both to that council and to the Commission on Human Rights), remained astonishingly active throughout the 1950s.Footnote 84 It produced not only multiple “white book” studies on camps and forced labor in the USSR and communist China, but also works on detention conditions elsewhere, from Greece and Spain to French Tunisia and French Algeria. These were also documented in the organization's journal, Saturne. Rousset himself continued to insist that he was a man of the left and, more specifically, an anticolonialist. Indeed, it appears his stubborn insistence that the CICRC carry out its 1957 mission to examine detainment centers in Algeria cost the organization key financial backing, ultimately contributing to its collapse.Footnote 85
Surveying the CICRC's investigative activities, especially its involvement with the UN Commission on Human Rights, it may appear plausible to assimilate the group to later organizations such as Human Rights Watch, and Rousset himself to later proponents of universal rights. After all, certain aspects of his 1949 position—most importantly his rejection of revolutionary socialism in favor of attempts to bear witness to and mitigate suffering across national borders—have become normalized on the French left. Even L’Humanité, the communist daily that had once argued he was trying to start a third world war on behalf of bloodthirsty Americans, offered him a long, respectful eulogy upon his death in 1997 under the banner “Death of a Great Witness.”Footnote 86
But treating Rousset as a clear-eyed pioneer or an early prototype of now-favored discourses obscures the full dimensions of his intellectual project. Specifically, it masks the fact that despite its reliance on the familiar language of “witnessing,” Rousset's initiative was on several counts exceedingly strange by late twentieth- or twenty-first-century standards. Most evidently, his “Appeal” cannot easily be squared with positions that take the Holocaust as their starting point and the vow of “Never Again!” as their touchstone: his universalizing comparison of the Nazi and Soviet camps was fundamentally premised on treating the genocidal aspect of the Nazi crime as a small piece of a larger puzzle, distinct in “degree” but not in “nature.” Nor is it legitimate to see Rousset as a ground-breaking advocate for human rights: the language of individual human rights was certainly available in France in the late 1940s, and the fact that Rousset did not avail himself of it should be interpreted not as an oversight but as a choice. He did not object to concentration camps because they violated inmates’ “rights” but because they produced what he proclaimed—based on his own experience—to be an incommensurably egregious form of abjection, essentially unrelated to other abuses (even torture). Still more to the point, based on the haunted memory that “we carry in our flesh,” he asserted absolute, unqualified identification with the victims of this suffering and demanded the same of other survivors: according to Rousset's schema, ethical action was primarily spurred by the agonizing recognition of one's self, in its entirety, in the body-in-pain of others.Footnote 87 Such language is not favored by contemporary human rights campaigns. These may seek to evoke profound sympathy for the suffering of others, a sense of shared responsibility, and even solidarity with victims’ pain, in the form of hunger strikes and so forth; they may also invoke “memory” (of Auschwitz, of Rwanda). But they ultimately ground their appeals in a set of principles, not in experience or in demands for total, traumatizing (or re-traumatizing) identification with victims. Our recognition of these disjunctures between Rousset and later proponents of “witnessing” should serve to underline the degree to which the development of contemporary human rights and humanitarian discourses has been not a smooth, inevitable progression from the ashes of World War II to the present but rather a contingent, disjointed process involving multiple lineages.
Rousset's case also helps to highlight the fact that self-consciously ethical argumentation functioned in postwar Western European intellectual debate neither as a purely cynical device with which to mask anticommunist commitments nor as a transcendent alternative or “outside” to Cold War politics. If we ought to recognize that the specific forms of human suffering that Rousset associated with “the concentration camp universe” were indeed the hantise of his existence, and that his opposition to the Soviet camps can hardly be qualified as mere opportunism, we nevertheless should be attentive to his relationship with agencies such as the British IRD, whose broader propaganda campaign against the Gulag was unequivocally intended to promote the Atlantic Alliance. In other words, Rousset's ethics and his Cold War politics cannot be disentangled. Nor can those of his opponents. Intellectuals like Sartre and Merleau-Ponty are often cast as having privileged the political to the detriment of the ethical in this period, but this is a misleading formulation: in fact these actors, like Rousset, were deeply concerned with politics and with ethics, and struggled uncomfortably under the pressures of the Cold War to reconcile them. Those on all sides arrived at formulations that today appear partial at best, troubling or shocking at worst. We can approach the debates among them all more fruitfully if—without suspending such judgments—we cease trying to see such figures as direct precursors to or uncomplicated models for our own period and instead examine them on their own terms. The temptation of “looking for heroes in postwar France,” to borrow Neal Oxenhandler's phrase, is a powerful one.Footnote 88 But the case of David Rousset suggests that the French intellectual landscape of the late 1940s and early 1950s, particularly around vexed issues such as victimhood, suffering, and memory, may ultimately become clearer to us if we resist it.
