The Communist Temptation

The Communist Temptation: Rolland, Gide, Malraux, and Their Times traces the evolution of the committed left-wing public intellectual in the interwar period, specifically in the 1930s, and focuses on leading left-wing intellectuals, such as Romain Rolland, André Gide, and André Malraux, and their relationships with communism and the broader anti-fascist movement. In that turbulent decade, Paris also welcomed a growing number of Russian, Austrian, Italian, Dutch, Belgian, German, and German-speaking Central European refugees—activists, writers, and agents, among them Willi Münzenberg, Mikhail Koltsov, Eugen Fried, Ilya Ehrenburg, Manès Sperber, and Arthur Koestler—and Paris once again became a hotbed of international political activism. Events, however, signaled a decline in the high ethical standards set by Émile Zola and the Dreyfusards earlier in the twentieth century, as many pro-communist intellectuals acted in bad faith to support an ideology that they in all likelihood knew to be morally bankrupt. Among them, only Gide rebelled against Moscow, which caused ideological lines to harden to the point where there was little room for critical reason to assert itself.