French Intellectuals Between Wars

Herbert Lottman’s recent book on writers, artists, and politics, from the Popular Front to the Cold War, is a lively and valuable contribution to the social-cultural history of the recent past.* No one who grew up during this period, like the present writer, can read it without a surge of old memories and a twinge of nostalgia. Not that one wishes the past it evokes—a past that includes the rise of Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, the fall of France, the almost complete conquest of Euro...