Histoires croisées: François Furet,Ernst Nolte and a Comparative History of Totalitarian Movements

Abstract

The global political avalanche that accompanied the breakdown of the Soviet Union swept away the European discursive landscape, with its strict right-left divisions. In its wake, a renaissance and reorientation of debates about totalitarianism can be observed. First, more emphasis is placed on the utopian content and other elements of totalitarian ideologies, which explain the enthusiasm they evoked. Second, there has been a shift of interest from totalitarian regimes to total-itarian movements. Third, recent research has been marked by an expansion of the comparative apparatus, which allows the analysis of reciprocal perceptions, imitations and learning processes between totalitarian movements. François Furet and Ernst Nolte have been among the most prominent combatants in the arena of historical politics. There can be no doubt that their stances in the debate on totalitarianism were deeply influenced by the Cold War. Nevertheless, it is argued in this article that they also contributed to the recent reorientation of these debates. The impulses towards a comparative history of totalitarian movements yielded by Furet and Nolte were particularly intense in the second half of the 1990s, when the two historians met and influenced one another. The article starts with Furet’s interpretation of Jacobinism, which can be understood as a paradigmatic analysis of a totalitarian movement. The second section compares Furet’s and Nolte’s vision of the Russian Revolution. While the French historian sees 1917 as a re-enactment of the French Revolution, his German colleague’s chief concern is to interpret the Russian Revolution as something wholly novel. The last section of the article focuses on Furet’s and Nolte’s view of National Socialism. In this context, the mutual influences but also the fundamental differences between the two are most obvious. In ‘Le passé d’une illusion’, Furet adopts Nolte’s history of interactions between communism and National Socialism without sharing Nolte’s provocative assumption of a ‘causal nexus’. It is above all Furet’s critical and creative reading of Nolte’s ‘Der europäische Bürgerkrieg’ that points the way towards a comparative cultural history of totalitarian movements.