Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956

Judt argues that the postwar French intellectual community engaged in a sustained moral failure: it overwhelmingly supported or excused Soviet communism while ignoring or rationalizing its crimes. He explicitly frames the book as 'an essay on intellectual irresponsibility.' Judt rejects the excuse that this pro-Soviet stance was an understandable product of the times. He treats it instead as an active choice rooted in bad faith, double standards, and a refusal to test political ideals against political reality. The book targets not only communists but also non-communist apologists and fellow travelers.

Sartre serves as the book's central villain because his prestige, talent, and influence made his political judgments consequential. Judt documents how Sartre moved from a 'Third Way' socialism to open enthusiasm for the Soviet future as news from the East grew worse, without a coherent rationale for the shift. He accuses Sartre of philosophical inconsistency, moral dishonesty, and a willingness to stigmatize consistent critics of Soviet tyranny. For Judt, Sartre embodies the pattern of applying radically different moral yardsticks to East and West, and of allowing commitment to trump truth.

Both books share a starting question: why intellectuals are merciless toward democratic failings but indulgent toward crimes committed in the name of good doctrines. Aron's 1955 book, however, was a contemporary polemic by an insider engaged in live political combat. Judt's work, written decades later, is a retrospective moral history with access to archives and memoirs. Judt also extends his analysis beyond the famous Existentialists to include a wider community of Catholic philosophers, non-aligned journalists, and literary figures. Yet the sensibility is similar, and Judt acknowledged Aron as a hero of the period.

The reception diverged sharply across the Atlantic. In the United States, the book received a laudatory front-page review in The New York Times Book Review and praise from Foreign Affairs, which called it a 'brilliant, relentless analysis.' In France, however, the response was largely hostile. Judt was accused of questionable historiographical legitimacy, inaccuracy in the treatment of sources, and hidden partisanship. French reviewers resented what they saw as an 'Anglo-Saxon' outsider judging their national tradition. This bitter controversy became part of the book's reputation and contributed to Judt's fame as a controversialist.

A frequent misconception treats the book as a claim that most French intellectuals were card-carrying Communists. Judt explicitly acknowledges that most were not. His charge is subtler: that non-communist intellectuals acted as apologists for a system that terrorized the masses it claimed to liberate. The failure was not membership but complicity—a refusal to speak clearly about what was known, and a habit of reserving harsher judgment for the United States than for the Soviet Union. This distinction between being a Communist and being an apologist is central to the book's moral argument.

Past Imperfect is the book that made Judt's reputation as a public intellectual and marked his turn from social history toward intellectual history and political critique. The themes it introduced—the moral failures of intellectuals, the tension between commitment and truth, the critique of French abstraction—recur throughout his later work. Postwar, his magnum opus, is a broader synthesis that largely avoids such direct moral indictment, while Ill Fares the Land returns to polemic in defense of social democracy. Reviewers noted that Past Imperfect established Judt as a historian whose work carried unusual immediacy.