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 writ-
ing, the strength of Cartesian and Kantian philosophical
traditions, Hegel's Protestantism, but, above all, the in-
credulity of the French toward Hegel's "strict identity of
logical synthesis and historical becoming." ³ On the con-
trary 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 pro-
gressive 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, con-
cepts, 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 disil-
lusioning 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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