Bertrand de Jouvenel

Bertrand de Jouvenel des Ursins (31 October 1903 – 1 March 1987) was a French philosopher, political economist, writer, and political polemicist. Jouvenel was among the very few French intellectuals to pay respectful attention to the economic theory and welfare economics that emerged during the first half of the 20th century in Austria, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This understanding of economics is shown by his work The Ethics of Redistribution. After World War II he was rehabilitated and went on to teach at the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, the University of Manchester, Yale University, the University of Chicago, and the University of California, Berkeley.

Jouvenal was the son of Henry de Jouvenel, of the 'Four-Power-Pact'.

Bertrand de Jouvenel was impressed by the famous riots of the anti-Parliamentary leagues which occurred in Paris on 6 February 1934. He became disillusioned with traditional political parties and left the Radical Party. He began a paper with Pierre Andreu called La Lutte des jeunes (The Struggle of the Young) while at the same time contributing to the big right-wing newspaper Gringoire, for which he covered the 1935 Nuremberg Congress in Germany at which time the so-called 'Nuremberg Laws' were passed. He began frequenting royalist and nationalist circles, where he met Henri de Man and Pierre Drieu la Rochelle.

Werth writes: "young men like Bertrand de Jouvenel and Stanislas, Comte de la Rochefoucaud, were fascinated by Hitler 'dynamics' and believed in the virtues of a Franco-German Alliance." He was in favour of Franco-German rapprochement and created the Cercle du grand pavois, which supported the Comité France–Allemagne (Franco-German Committee). Here he became friends with Otto Abetz, the future German ambassador to Paris during the military occupation 1940-44. In February 1936 Jouvenel interviewed Adolf Hitler for the journal Paris-Midi, for which he was criticised for being too friendly to the German Chancellor. That same year he joined Jacques Doriot's Parti populaire français (PPF). He became the editor-in-chief of its journal L'Émancipation nationale (National Emancipation), wherein he is said to have supported fascism. He broke with the PPF in 1938 when Doriot supported the Munich Agreement. After the French military defeat in June 1940 Jouvenel stayed in Paris, under German military occupation, and published Après la Défaite, calling for France to join Hitler's 'New Order'. He fled to Switzerland just before the plutocratic Western Allies took Paris in later 1944.

Later in his life, Jouvenel's views shifted back to the Left. In 1960, he complained to Milton Friedman that the Mont Pelerin Society had "turned increasingly to a Manichaeism according to which the state can do no good and private enterprise can do no wrong." He was sympathetic to the student protests of 1968 and critical of the Vietnam War. He also expressed support for the Socialist François Mitterrand, who, ironically, had been a notable Civil Servant for the French State.

In 1983 the Polish Jew Zeev Sternhell published a book, Ni Droite, ni Gauche ("Neither Right nor Left"), accusing de Jouvenel of having had 'fascist' sympathies in the 1930s and 1940s. De Jouvenel, obviously having selectively forgotten the decade ending in 1945, immediately sued claiming nine counts of libel, only two of which the court upheld. However, Sternhell was neither required to publish a retraction nor to strike any passages from future printings of his book.

Sources

• Mauthner, Martin, Otto Abetz and His Paris Acolytes – French Writers Who Flirted with Fascism, 1930–1945, Sussex Academic Press UK, 2016, ISBN: 978-1845197841.