Contenu du sommaire : Repenser le réalisme socialiste

The notion of « socialist realism » appears in France in December 1932 but only causes an actual critical production after the Convention of soviet writers, between 1934 and 1936. In order to understand what it meant then, one must analyse the meaning that the few writers and journalists (mostly communists, Aragon, Nizan, Fréville, Sadoul) gave it. One must also put it back in a larger history, the reflection on the conditions of the development of a revolutionary literature in France. It is observed that this debate, rich and productive during the late twenties, doesn't find any real prolongation in socialist realism : on the contrary, a very militant conception against proletarian literature takes place. When the commitment of the years 1934-1937 isn't made around literary debates any longer, only Aragon's initiative and the articles he writes then, provide socialist realism with a deceptive presence in the late thirties' French literary field.

Tristan Rémy is, along with Henry Poulaille, one of the prominent workers of the movement for proletarian literature in the thirties. He is not directly involved in the building of the proletarian position and keeps a critical distance towards the movement, as much as a greater freedom to evolve. More definitely influenced by Marxism than other authors of the movement, he tries to impose a militant definition of the proletarian literature and to structure the group. Close to the Communist Party and the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists (AEAR) in the mid-thirties, he evolves toward socialist realism and publishes one of the first novels about the Popular Front in 1937 (La Grande Lutte). His style, initially marked by poetic realism, is atypical in the proletarian movement : not much tempted by autobiography, Rémy shows however a liking for novelistic invention. His evolution toward socialist realism, partly dependent of his place in the literary field, reveals a wish to elaborate a popular and militant literature that is also to be found in his early novels.

To Jean-Richard Bloch, one of the prominent intellectuals of the Front Populaire and fellow traveller of the communist party, socialist realism is not at all necessary to the policy of « defence of culture » which he advocates in that time of union, in the name of a revolutionary humanism, notably in two contributions in 1936, his essay Naissance d'une culture and his attempt at « total show », Naissance d'une cité, one of the emblematic works of the Front Populaire along with La Marseillaise by Renoir. On the contrary, one may say, for a writer who clearly opposed, as soon as the Moscow Convention in 1934, the « monologism » of socialist realism, the experiment carried out in 1936 represents the most achieved research in the reconciliation between art and the People which doesn't yield anything on esthetical modernity or on the revolutionary dimension of the social movement.

The study of communist literature, more obviously than any other, implies a close association of internal and external analysis insofar as each work is the result of a double strategy by the author which takes into account not only the logic and the battles of wills of the literary field but also the system of positions characteristic to the PCF. By comparing five edifying stories at a moment when the claims of socialist realism become an issue for communist writers (1934-1937), in particular with regards to their relation with the proletarian myth that symbolically structures the communist world as a biocracy, this article proposes to objectivize these double strategies and these hierarchies which organize communist writers.

This article proposes a study of Paul Nizan's texts about his trip to the USSR in 1934 and of their preliminary versions, of the precise context of their composition inside the general bounds of the « back from USSR » with the imperatively militant testimony that is linked to it, and of the themes chosen to describe or evoke the Soviet Union, particularly Central Asia and Caucasus. This allows to seize an important moment in the Communist writer's itinerary. We approach, with this research for a committed writing of reality, the complex mechanic that links political obedience and freedom of writing, and allows Nizan to draft what can be defined as a « socialist realism of testimony ».

La Querelle du réalisme, published at Louis Aragon's initiative, following the debates on painting organised in may 1936, expresses the echo met by the theme of realism on the French artistic scene during the Thirties. In the context of the Front Populaire, that theme was exploited in many different ways by plastic artists who emphasised, more than the precise content of the notion, the necessity of not being absent from the struggles of the present, of contributing to a policy of spreading and educating the People. The circumstances of 1936 gave way to a gathering of painters and writers, at the initiative of the Communist Party. The Party fails however in its attempt at adapting the principles of a communist aesthetic in France, in spite of Aragon's talent for propaganda and of the interpretation he gives of a « French realism ». Most artists reject any united theory of creation, any attempt at subordinating art to a political conception, following the example of Fernand Léger, advocate of a « new realism », reconciling the people with modern art.

During the short term of the years of the Résistance, the PCF (French Communist Party) entrusted the complete reorganisation of its practices to a specific management which didn?t exist before the war. It is soon faced with an alternative. On one hand, Georges Politzer?s choices for L?Université Libre during the fall of 1940 : the organisation into categories of intellectual serving a Résistance that the PCF wants united around the working class ? a « Front national » (may 1941). On the other hand, the project proposed by Aragon during the summer of 1941 : a « mouvement des intellectuels » concerning only the Nation?s Résistance and the leadership of which would belong to the writers ? ergo « Les Lettres Françaises ». In the spring of 1943, the mixing of these possibilities leads to the founding of a « Union française des intellectuels » with a fluctuating status. In the spring of 1944 the northern preference prevails favouring the autonomy within a particular movement of the Résistance, the « FN ». However, after the Liberation, the « Direction des intellectuels communistes » agrees with Aragon?s option on the emancipation of a « Union nationale des intellectuels » subordinated solely to the national council of the Résistance.

The article analyses the evolution of the concepts of literature and the organisation of writers ? and intellectuals ? in the French Communist Party from the second World War to the Cold War. The experience of German occupation leads to a change in the conception of the role of intellectuals within the PCF. Before the war, the prevailing model of commitment was the Dreyfus case : the mobilisation of the intellectuals mainly consisted in the charismatic support they were bringing to the defended cause. In the context of opposition to the occupying forces and to the Vichy regime, it was required of intellectuals that they put their art or their practice at the service of the cause to be defended. With the « smuggled » poetry, Aragon develops a formal model that becomes quite popular. At the same time, on the French Communist Party?s initiative, an intellectual Resistance takes place, organised by professional category (writers, artists, musicians, doctors, etc.). Kept after the Liberation, these professional associations born underground were federated in 1945 into the National Union of the Intellectuals (UNI). The war heritage thus governs the adaptation of socialist realism in France from 1947 onwards. It notably allows the Party?s intellectuals to defend, in the name of their speciality, their relative autonomy regarding the judgement of their practice against the tendency of worker control that intends to subordinate art to the approval of the workers and their representatives.

The corpus of the studied works is the novels written by communist writers, during the early years of the Cold War (1948-1954), published by the Party's editions, and considered by communist critics as representative of socialist realism. They are therefore novels of ideas, of a political nature, indissociable from the communist vision of the world, and, notably of its stalinist variant. A double criteria of differenciation, both thematic and cultural, leads to classify them in four categories, depending on, first, wether they deal with immediate and recent history, or on the other end, wether they tell a story about the struggle of a heroe already blessed with the right values and the truth (the militants), or the initiatory path of characters who are, at the beginning far from the Good and the True. The novels are studied, one by one, in a synthetic way, the « Cold War novels », and the « Resistance novels », then the « struggle novels » and the « progress novels ».

The development of socialist realism in plastic arts in France, under the influence of the French Communist Party, in the context of the beginning of the Cold War, has been as brief as intense. It reveals the tensions and the contradictions of a project of a politically-inspired art, closely linked to the goals and rhythm imparted by the Party, strong with its ability of attracting numerous intellectuals and artists. The political circumstances, the evolution in the orientations of the national and international communist movement, and more prosaically the internal struggles for power, determine, in fine, the various steps of this « French socialist realism ». Moreover, it illustrates one of the singularities of the PCF on the national political scene, as a promoter of a specific cultural policy embedded in the necessities of the ideological struggle of cold war. This esthetical and political phenomenon also sheds light on the particular forms of the commitment of these « the-Party- artists » who conceive their creative activity as inseparable from political action.

With the loyalty to his communist commitment and the topics of his first publications, Pierre Courtade (1915-1963) can indeed be considered as a socialist realist writer. That is certainly why he has almost totally disappear from the history of French literature. But an attentive rereading of his texts, Elseneur (1949) in particular, shows how much socialist realism was, for him, seen as a living problem and not as a dogma to be observed. Elseneur explores the margins and the limits of the novelistic genre by an author who is unsure of which form would be best to express his genuine commitment. He tries to do right with the party's demands and with his sensitivity as an anglicist intellectual. Between realism and allegory, far from the novel of ideas, of positive heroes and worker control, fiction suggests an « initiatory story » of the « phoney war » strangely similar to the novel on which Julen Gracq is working at the same time : Le Rivage des Syrthes (1951). The fact that this novel could have been written by an « organic intellectual » of the French Communist Party just after the war shows that the author's situation of enunciation was not as stilted as we tend to think today.

How can it be explained that Louis Aragon, the major introducer of the notion of socialist-realism in France and the major author to proclaim this label on the literary scene during thirty years or more, is so rarely put in the category of « socialist-realist » ? The article tries to answer this question by studying how – both in a voluntary and constrained manner – Aragon uses that label from the Thirties to the Sixties. He starts by showing the deadlocks and the contradictions in a question usually badly termed or evacuated. He then approaches the problem in terms of credibility of a venture aiming at vowing the meaning of the « literary movement », and after having done so, comes back on the moment of origin of the Thirties when every condition seems to be met to achieve the success of a new literary label : favourable context, ability to mobilise writers, assets and competencies to initiate a rewriting of the history of literary modernity. On the other end, thirty years later, the situation is quite different and Aragon then stands in a defensive position to claim socialist realism. In order to understand this persistence, it is notably necessary to measure the role of literary labels in the way the author builds the coherence of his development and his place in literary history.

Immediately after World War II, the literary field is dominated by the conflict between two groups both interested in imposing their vision of the relations between literature and politics : on one side, the Communist Party's writers, who had joined the ranks of socialist realism ; on the other side, the believers in « committed literature », such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Roland Barthes. This article aims at showing how these authors used socialist realism as a foil, in order to make commitment accepted as a conception of literature half way between a sterile esthetical purism and propaganda writing. Between 1944 and 1953, discursive and rhetorical strategies aiming at downgrading socialist realism thus take place, ; these strategies have largely contributed to forge the traditionally accepted representation of socialist realism : denunciation of its aesthetic paradox and, at the same time, assimilation of formalism ; underlining an aesthetic conformism supposedly betraying the conservative aspect of stalinist communism.

In spite of the rather exceptional literary and political « standardisation » of the socialist-realistic works, their international circulation operated, in a both quantitative and qualitative contrasted way. The intensity of the flows of translation of these works thus depended on the position occupied by the literature and the « source » and « target » countries, both within the international literary space and within the system of international political relations. When the importation of the socialist-realistic canon was carried out from the Soviet Union, East-European countries – satellized in a literary as well as a political point of view – held a position dominated independently from the scale of circulation of their socialist-realistic works. If the twentieth Convention of the PCUS in 1956 didn't modify this hierarchy, it disrupted however the political conditions of production, distribution and reception of socialist realism.

Pierre Courtade's novel La Place rouge (The Red Place), published in 1961, at a time when socialist realism has ceased to be an obligation for communist art producers but without providing an aesthetic alternative, is, first of all, an individual attempt to get out of socialist realism. But that novel, its reception, the particular position of its author within the French Communist Party – critical when inside the Party, loyal when outside – also allow to understand how the producers ‘schemas as well as the recipients', shaped by the socialist realist episode, prevented that novel and its author to have a strictly literary recognition. These constraints materialize notably through literary « smuggling », indecipherable for anyone ignorant of the rules of coding and decoding.

The establishment of socialist realism in Romania after World War II has led not only to the restructuring of the Romanian literary space, but also to the relative loss of its autonomy, because of its subordination to political guidelines. The promotion, assimilation and functioning of socialist realism were asserted during about twenty years, thanks to the creation of new literary institutions, subordinated to the Communist party. To recount the establishment of socialist realism in Romania is of course to study the cultural and political transformations which allowed the setting of the imported model, to observe the institutional paths of its spreading and its achievements in the Romanian context.

The Soviet cultural policy, known as « jdanovian », takes place in the authoritarian post-war context and aims at two objectives : first, the strengthening and the centralisation of the Soviet cultural field under the symbolic authority of socialist realism, secondly, the cultural and ideological integration of nationalities following the territorial reorganisation in 1940. This article proposes a socio-historical analysis of the literary institution in Soviet Moldavia under jdanovism. This case-story allows to account for the two aspects of the jdanovian campaign mentioned above. The single literary model promoted by this institution at the time, – socialist realism – is conceived as a model of thinking and behaving, even of identity. The tensions between the political power and the writers during the jdanovian period, and, at another level, among the writers themselves, have as main stake the monopoly of legitimate symbolic violence which supposes – precisely within the context of Soviet Moldavia – the definition of the Moldavian identity, through the formal and ideological normalisation of socialist realism.

Right after the war, the Belgian Communist Party enjoyed a particular popularity among artists and intellectuals. The revolutionary surrealists, who were to become the founders of the Cobra movement, put their art at the service of the Party, even though the latter tolerated them without really supporting them. But, as the Party's popularity quickly decreased in Belgium, it had to put up with these artists. However, in spite of an increasingly weak position among the population, the Belgian Party was going to have to adapt to its French equivalent : in 1949, Claude Morgan asked the editorial committee of the Belgian edition of Les Lettres françaises to join the ranks of Socialist realism. This marks the break-up with Cobra and the beginning of the union with the group Forces Murales which, within the Belgian Party, will play an equivalent role as Aragon in France. But, when one takes a good look at it, the art of Forces Murales is closer to Édouard Pignon's than to André Fougeron's. Is there really then such a thing as Socialist Realism in Belgium ? And if there is, how will Forces Murales react to a style opposite to theirs ? The establishment of Socialist Realism in Belgium shows to what extend the Belgian Communist Party had to impose outside orders (coming from Paris, not from Moscow), with the risk of promoting an art not in accordance with the Soviet standards since no Belgian artist was totally in line with these patterns.

If, as Cicourel suggests, one of the major mechanisms of the maintenance of social order dwells in the collective memory underlying individual representations, it is then possible to suppose that the security concern in France is not as recent as political speeches declare today. They are actually based on the reactivation of social schemas in which an expression like « the fear of the gendarme » – this uncontested figure of authority in the19th and 20th centuries – is a good example. This remembrance of the past, which goes along with the growth of return to the « countrye » origins of suburban cities, shows that social anxieties come as much from a feeling of degradation as from a biased apprehension of present problems, as the ethnography of G., an ordinary city of eastern suburbs, reveals.