There are two tendencies among the French political class which, from a Polish perspective, are undoubtedly drawbacks. These are anti-Americanism and Russophilia. They have been evident at least since the days of Charles de Gaulle. When this statesman was President of France in 1959-1969, he led France out of the military structures of NATO and, at the same time, sought rapprochement with the USSR.

This de Gaulle legacy is alive and well in la République regardless of political option, as evidenced by the views of the contestants in this year’s race for the Elysée Palace (just compare the nationalist Marine Le Pen with the socialist Jean-Luc Mélenchon).

It is therefore worth appreciating the work of those opinion-forming Frenchmen who are not burdened by anti-Americanism and Russophilia. The historian Alain Besançon belongs to this group. He will celebrate his 90th birthday on 25 April 2022.

Today in Poland Besançon is known rather in narrow circles of people interested in the history of Russia, but in the 1980s his books and texts (among them “Anatomy of Spectre” [“Anatomie d’un spectre”] or “A Short Course in Sovietology” [“Court traité de soviétologie”]) circulated via samizdat, that is, the ‘underground’ press). In this sense, one could say that, as a prestigious expert on the USSR, he somewhat served as a mentor for the intelligentsia of Solidarity (Polish trade union).

Conflict with the political environment of “Wyborcza”

On the threshold of the Third Polish Republic, however, his analyses became troublesome for Poles who had found their way from the anti-communist underground to the positions of power. Besançon was not familiar with the slogans about “socialism with a human face”, which were still circulating towards the end of the People’s Republic of Poland. The French historian was not enthusiastic about perestroika (he did not get a “gorbasm”). He considered what was happening in Central Europe at that time to be a spectacle directed by the apparatchiks of the communist parties, which was supposed to let them transition to this new reality unscathed.

WAR IN UKRAINE

It is worth mentioning the angry exchange that took place between Besançon and Adam Michnik in 1990. In an interview for the “Solidarity Weekly”, the Frenchman harshly evaluated the Polish transformation. Above all, he attacked the Round Table Agreement as a force impeding the dismantling of real socialism and Poland’s independence from the Soviet Union. He spoke of the “Solidarity-Communist alliance” as a “double monoparty”. He pointed out that in the late 1980s, Polish dissidents – and he mentioned Michnik among them – were fooled by Mikhail Gorbachev and Wojciech Jaruzelski, who threatened that if the Communists in the Eastern Bloc countries lost their rule completely, chaos would reign, threatening catastrophe.

The editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza published on its pages a sharp retort under the telling title: “You lost, Alain”, triumphantly praising the agreement with Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR). Besançon hit back. In the magazine “Orientation to the Right” (“Orientacja na Prawo”), he denounced Michnik’s concessions to Jaruzelski’s team.

Who was right in this dispute, history showed, for example, a dozen years later in the Rywin affair. At the end of 2002, Poles learned that the Democratic Left Alliance’s “power group” wanted to corrupt the Agora company in order to gain full control over the media in Poland. In this way – as Cezary Michalski, a publicist still sympathising with the right wing at the time, brilliantly put it in the bi-monthly magazine Arcana – “a state of one party and one newspaper” was being built. Thus, one can conclude that in 1990 Besançon was right.

The French historian fell foul of the establishment of the Third Polish Republic at a later time as well. One can recall how in 2010, after the Smolensk catastrophe, he commented critically on the behaviour of the Polish authorities towards Russia. In an interview with "Rzeczpospolita" daily he accused Polish politicians of submissiveness towards the Kremlin – he even expressed surprise that they took Vladimir Putin’s tears shed over the wreckage of the Tupolev plane as sincere. In his opinion, the attitude of these people could lead to Poland ceasing to be an advocate on the international arena for countries such as Ukraine or Georgia.

In this case, too, it turned out very quickly that Besançon was right. The conference of Tatiana Anodina at the beginning of 2011 in Moscow was enough. The chairwoman of the Interstate Aviation Committee – the institution which investigates air accidents in 10 (initially 12) former Soviet republics – tried in a humiliating way to blame the Polish pilots for the crash. Moreover, it did not help Ukraine or Georgia that between 2008 and 2010, Poland’s ruling politicians courted the Kremlin, seeing in Putin someone they described, among other things, as “our man in Moscow”.

No illusions

If Besançon did not succumb to the anti-Americanism of many of his compatriots, it was because he had shed his illusions about Russia. And it is safe to assume that he once had them, because in his youth he even briefly belonged to the French Communist Party, a group subordinated to his comrades in Moscow. But by the age of 24 he had already realised the fraud he had fallen victim to. And he set about researching the Soviet system. And when he saw the USSR as a threat to the West, the presence of American troops in Europe must have appeared to him as an obvious necessity.

As far as Besançon’s attitude to the US is concerned, there is more to it than geopolitics. In socio-economic terms, the French historian’s option can be characterised as “Anglo-Saxon” liberalism, which is the ideological basis of globalisation, of which America has long been the main guardian.

Besançon’s writings reveal not only a rejection of the Soviet model, but also an impugnment of various “third way” concepts, including the social doctrine of the Catholic Church. This is all the more intriguing because the historian is a declared Catholic, and a rather traditional one at that – deeply concerned with the challenges facing the Church after the Second Vatican Council.

In Besançon’s conviction, capitalism is not an ideological construct, but a natural order to which the alternatives are only various dangerous pipe dreams.

However, the historian has got it all wrong. The global financial crisis of 2007-2009 revealed the weaknesses of liberal economic solutions. It proved that depriving states of their regulatory functions can lead astray. There is nothing utopian about the observation that this is the state of affairs and that we need to think about correcting it.

Successors to the iconoclasts

If Besançon’s books and texts are worth returning to today, it is because they deal with topics that go beyond Sovietology. This is the case, for example, with the historian’s interest in the interplay of religious currents, art and politics from antiquity to the present.

For example, according to Besançon, such 20th-century avant-garde painters as Wassily Kandinsky or Kazimir Malevich, breaking with the figurative representation of reality, turned out, whether they wanted to or not, to be distant heirs of the iconoclasts (“icon breakers”). They were an influential religious movement in Byzantium in the 8th and 9th century, which, referring to the Old Testament, considered the cult of icons as idolatry and demanded a ban on creating images.

Besançon’s diagnosis of the maladies of European civilisation can be summarised as follows: the most perverse religious, philosophical, political and cultural proposals are those that tempt, in the name of noble ideas, to strive for the improvement of nature or to fight against it. Meanwhile, the human incarnation of God is their contradiction. The earthly pilgrimage of Jesus Christ was not an ascent above nature, but an acceptance of participation in it, including going to Golgotha. Thus icons are in Christianity important signs of God’s presence in the world.

When abstraction prevails over the concrete, things get dangerous. This can be seen, for example, in situations where politicians consider theory to be more important than people. And this does not apply to “real socialism” only.

Certain phenomena in the history of the world repeat themselves. This is where the successors to the iconoclasts come from. It may seem that it is not a problem if they give vent to their visions on canvas. The point is that culture, politics and religion are closely interlinked. And the effect of that is, sometimes, an intellectual ferment – producing dreamers, disgusted with nature, who want to give man the role of demiurge.

– Filip Memches
– Translated by Jan Ziętara