Accolades continue to be piled upon the historian Tony Judt, following his untimely death in August 2010. For the Guardian, he was ‘a fearless critic of narrow orthodoxies’, ‘a great historian’, ‘a brilliant political commentator’. For the New York Review of Books, ‘a source of inspiration’, who sought to ‘embrace difference’—‘like Isaiah Berlin’—within historical accounts that were ‘harmonious, convincing, and true’; like Camus, Blum and Aron, Judt knew what it was to bear the intellectual’s ‘burden of responsibility’. To the Economist, he was ‘erudite and far-sighted’, ‘a meticulous intellect’—‘an intellectual with a capital I’. More circumspectly, the New York Times saluted his ‘deep suspicion of left-wing ideologues’.footnote¹ In June 2011 a Paris conference, jointly organized by the nyrb and ceri SciencesPo, celebrated Judt’s ‘scholarly rigour, elegance of style and acuteness of judgement’. Morally, he was ‘fearless’, ‘prophetic’, a new Orwell; intellectually, he was ‘formidable’, possessed of a ‘forceful lucidity’; as a historian of French political life, happily ‘inoculated against the revolutionary ideas that had been the stock in trade of the intellectual engagé’.footnote² To what extent are these plaudits confirmed by a sober examination of Judt’s work, held to the normal scholarly standards of intellectual coherence and empirical plausibility? What follows will offer an evaluation of his writings, as the necessary precondition for an adequate assessment of his contribution as historian, publicist and scholar.

Tony Judt was born in 1948, the son of Jewish immigrants, and brought up in lower-middle-class circumstances in London’s south-west suburbs. ‘Coming from that branch of East European Jewry that had embraced social democracy’, he would explain, ‘my own family was viscerally anti-Communist.’footnote³ Educated at a small South London private school, he served as national secretary of a Labour Zionist youth organization before going up to King’s College, Cambridge in 1967. Post-graduate study took him to the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he seems to have acquired his life-long distaste for Marxist intellectuals; and thence to southern France, where he undertook doctoral research on the history of French socialism in the Var. His first two books would draw extensively on this work: La Reconstruction du Parti Socialiste, 1921–1926 was published in Paris in 1976; Socialism in Provence, 1871–1914, a ‘study in the origins of the French left’, appeared three years later.footnote⁴ The mid-70s was a time of heightened establishment concern in France at the prospect of a joint Socialist–pcf election victory, in the aftermath of the Portuguese revolution. This background informs the central preoccupation in both Judt’s books with why France had failed to produce a reliable social-democratic party, on the Anglo-Nordic model. Unlike its solidly anti-Communist counterparts, the British Labour Party or German sdp, the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (sfio) had never quite shed the lexicon of Marxism and still appealed to a notion of socialism even after 1945, when its political practice was otherwise quite ‘acceptable’. The themes of his doctoral research would prove to be central to much of Judt’s subsequent career.

Judt’s first book, The Reconstruction of the Socialist Party, examined the re-establishment of the sfio after its historic split at the 1920 Congress of Tours, where a large majority of the delegates had opted for the Third International and moved to found the Parti Communiste Française. In Judt’s view, it was the presence of a militant pcf to its left that forced the sfio leadership to compensate for its reformist political practice with verbal commitments to socialism. The sfio rank and file insisted that the party ‘remain what they had made it’; any attempts to dilute its message would have played into the hands of the pcf. As Judt put it:

The way was narrow: a too marked rapprochement with the pcf could allow the more radical and rigid party to destroy it, but too sharp a break from the communists could lead to the loss of elements who had remained in the sfio only on the condition that it retained a revolutionary Marxist position.footnote⁵

The 1920 split had not cleanly separated reformists from revolutionaries, as happened in other northern European socialist parties after the Bolshevik Revolution; instead, a section of the left remained with the rump sfio led by Léon Blum, constituting a majority of its membership. Apart from a small, right-wing faction, all the sfio delegates rejected collaboration in bourgeois governments and advocated the dictatorship of the proletariat. Judt reported that Socialist mayors were obliged to get party approval before inaugurating Monuments to the Fallen, a sharply divisive issue for the party in the aftermath of the Great War. The sfio leadership initially hung back from rejoining the reconstituted Second International, preferring to support the Union of Vienna, the ‘2.5 International’ established by the Austro-Marxists, although it duly signed up in 1923. Rank-and-file attitudes exercised a decisive restraint on the sfio’s parliamentary leadership: in 1924 Blum and his fellow deputies were obliged to lend only external support to the Radical government under Edouard Herriot—as it pursued a programme of austerity at home, imperial war in Morocco and military occupation in the Ruhr—since the party membership would not tolerate full participation. Here was an example of the high price paid by the sfio for the ideological ‘rigidity’ necessary for its survival, given the ever-present pressure from the left exercised by the pcf.footnote⁶

The Reconstruction of the Socialist Party was rapturously received in liberal-Atlanticist circles in France, where it was published by the National Political Science Foundation with a fulsome preface by the ex-Communist Annie Kriegel, whom even Judt was later to describe as having gone from ‘full-blooded party dogma to conservative anti-Communism’.footnote⁷ Its warnings of the baneful effect of the pcf had obvious lessons for those tempted by the Union of the Left in the mid-70s. Anti-Communism had been the standard ideology in the Anglophone world all through the Cold War; but in France it only really became a doxa in the mid-70s. Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago was translated in 1974 and François Furet’s influential Rethinking the French Revolution was published in 1978. In this context, Judt’s hostile account of the pcf’s influence in the 1920s was the perfect calling card; a long-existent Anglo-American anti-Communism converged felicitously with a rising French one.

Judt’s second book, Socialism in Provence, 1871–1914, tracked back to a time before the baneful influence of the Comintern had been felt, aiming to rescue a vision of the modern French left as ‘neither a victime du marxisme nor the latest in a succession of crypto-Jacobins’.footnote⁸ Drawing again on his doctoral research in the Var, Judt argued that the areas of late-nineteenth-century Socialist success were districts where small peasant proprietors were predominant, rather than sharecroppers or day labourers. The collapse of agricultural prices in the last decades of the nineteenth century had radicalized this layer. Picking up on Eric Wolf’s idea of the ‘middle peasant’, Judt suggested that their relative economic autonomy gave small proprietors the capacity for independent action, while their vulnerability to market conjunctures, especially after the turn to viniculture, made them supporters of state protection for agriculture. Early Socialist programmes spoke directly to smallholder interests; initially, the Var peasants were ‘responding to an ideology which appealed to them in class terms’ in lending the party their support. Subsequently, this attachment would congeal into an unbreakable political tradition: ‘voting for the Socialists formed part of the “historical” character of Provençal life, long after the sfio had ceased to perform any obvious function on behalf of the local population and had indeed lost much of its revolutionary character and programme.’footnote⁹ In sum, material interests explained the rise of socialism, culture its perdurance.