young Marxists in the 1920s paid tribute to the German dialectician. Among the reasons suggested by Koyré for the lack of interest in Hegel were the obscurity of Hegel's writing, the strength of Cartesian and Kantian philosophical traditions, Hegel's Protestantism, but, above all, the incredulity of the French toward Hegel's "strict identity of logical synthesis and historical becoming." ³ On the contrary for French rationalists, history was separate from reason or logic, which was eternal, outside time. If this was the situation, how can we account for the abrupt turn to Hegel in the 1940s?

In the eyes of many converts to Hegel, the catastrophic defeat of France in 1940 had discredited liberal-bourgeois intellectual and political traditions, leaving the nation in a conceptual vacuum. The only moral force left in France, on the eve of the Liberation, came from the Resistance movement, which had been dominated by politically progressive groups. In the estimate of Henri Lefebvre, "after the Liberation, there was no longer... bourgeois thought calling itself such." ⁴ The experience of the war and the Resistance "transformed the basic givens of intellectual life in France: the themes of reflection, the problems, concepts, and attitudes." ⁵ After 1944, there was a longing for basic renewal, social, political, and intellectual. With a combined socialist and Communist vote reaching a majority, intellectuals harbored the dream of imminent and radical social transformation. During the hopeful but finally disillusioning post-war years, the "decisive philosophical event" was the discovery of the Hegelian dialectic. ⁶ There were thus direct links between the collapse of the old bourgeois world, the expectations of socialism, and the emergence of interest in Hegel.

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