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section of the population with a secondary or higher education, which regarded it as a central event in world history.
    For socialists it had initially been a fundamental point of reference, but as they became mass movements it faded into the background. The Marseillaise gave way to socialist anthems and, as Furet observes, ‘neither Jaurès nor Kautsky expected “the great night” any longer’ (p. 34). In European countries where a real revolution was expected, France remained a constant precedent, model and standard of comparison, as in Russia. And yet, let us not misinterpret the prominence which references to the French Revolution enjoyed after 1917 in the intra-marxist discourse for, against or within the Russian Revolution. For almost all who were attracted to communism outside France, Jacobins and Thermidor were either unimportant or relevant only because they were part of the Russian Revolution’s discourse. It was, as Furet recognizes (p. 104), the
fact
of the Russian Revolution and not its pedigree which turned men’s minds to communism. Incidentally, it brought Western revolutionaries, hitherto critical of marxism, which they identified with peaceful moderation, to rediscover it as an ideology of revolution and, in doing so, to bring about the rapid decline of anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism – except, for a while, in Spain. In short, between 1917 and 1989 the Russian Revolution swallowed or obscured the French Revolution in most parts of the world. Moreover, in the large partsof Europe – Great Britain, Germany, Scandinavia – where marxist or any other kinds of socialist beliefs were rare among intellectuals, and even rarer in the milieux from which most of them came, even the French revolutionary history that formed part of socialist culture was not well known.
    In France, of course, matters were different. Here the reference to 1789–93 was and remained central to the ‘idée communiste’. Perhaps its role was also crucial in Italy, but Furet’s book unaccountably neglects the only other west European country which produced, and – under another name still maintains – a mass communist party.
The Pure Choice of Communism
    These observations raise more general doubts about Furet’s method of writing his ‘essai sur l’idée communiste’, that is the history of ideas and intellectuals in the twentieth century. Even if we leave aside the question of how far the history of ideas can properly be confined to those who write about them, we must ask how far either ideas or intellectuals can be divorced from their specific historical contexts and situations. In seeking to concentrate on the philo-communism of intellectuals, Furet has sought to side-step this problem by assuming that the intellectuals ‘lived the communist revolution as a pure choice, or rather, if one prefers, as a belief separated from their social experience, a negation of themselves . . .’ (p. 143–44).
    Yet this was patently not the typical case in the era of catastrophe for nineteenth-century liberal bourgeois society which saw the rise of both the USSR and the international communist movement from 1914 to the aftermath of World War II. Then the sense of a civilization in the convulsions of profound crisis, a world beyond restoration or reform by old procedures which were visibly failing, formed part of the social experience of intellectuals in many parts of Europe. To choosebetween ruin and revolution – for Right or Left – between no future and a future, seemed, not an abstract choice but a recognition of how serious the situation was. As Furet recognizes – perhaps more clearly in the case of the Right than the Left – an apocalyptic view of the German situation in 1931–33, such as Spengler’s, was not prima facie absurd (p. 233). In less emotional terms the Hungarian who was to become the Comintern’s chief