Reflections of a partisan: Julien Freund (1921-1993).
Gary Ulmen
Julien Freund was a French intellectual. Intense and introspective, he was never without a cigarette, as though there was some relation between tabacco and thought. But Freund was not typical. He did not live in Paris and was not embroiled in its various idiosyncratic polemics. Most of his life was spent in or about Alsace-Lorraine, until the end of WWI a German imperial territory (Elsass-Lothringen), consisting of the former French province Alsace (with its capital Strasbourg), and the German Lorraine (with the capital and fortress of Metz). This particular land had long been a pawn in struggles between France and Germany -- a characteristic Freund appreciated not only in his regional concerns[1] but also in his incidental writings on Alsatian cuisine.[2] His name, like the town where he was born on January 9, 1921 (Henridorff) is half French and half German. His outlook also bore this kind of dual citizenship. Unlike his French mentor, Raymond Aron, he was short in physical stature. Like his German mentor, Carl Schmitt, however, he more than made up for it in intellectual stature.
Having passed his baccalaureate in 1938, Freund enrolled in the Philosophy Faculty at the University of Strasbourg (the same university from which Schmitt received his Doctorate of Jurisprudence in 1910, at age 22).[3] Unfortunately, Freund had to interrupt his studies and did not receive his doctorate until he was 47. The eldest of six children, following the death of his father he had to help support his family. But the decisive factor was the German occupation. In July 1940, an incident provoked by the young Freund led to the death of a German soldier. As a result, Freund had to report to the German military commander several times a week. After the upheaval of November 11, 1940, he was marked by the Gestapo but succeeded in escaping to the free zone of France. In June 1942, he returned to his alma mater at Clermont-Ferrand and completed his degree. In January 1941 he had joined the resistance movement Liberation founded by Emmanuel d'Astier de la Vigerie (1900-1944) and the logician, Jean Cavailles (1903-1944), Freund's teacher.[4] In March 1942 he became a member of the "Groupes Francs de Combat," which carried out a series of actions against the Vichy regime and French collaborators.
These partisan activities landed Freund in prison on June 27, 1942 at Clermont-Ferrand, then in Lyon, where he was a co-defendant with Emmanuel Mournier (1905-1950), founder of the journal Esprit and the movement by the same name. After he was acquitted in June 1944 he rejoined the resistance and eventually became a soldier at the Basses-Alpes and finally in the Department de la Drome, where he participated in panzer assaults on the outskirts of Nyons. He participated in the liberation of Strasbourg in November 1944. Toward the end of his life, he said that his education "in the life of the underground, of the partisan," had become a subject of reflection and then a concern with the study of war.[5]
In 1986, in discussing his partisan activities, Freund said he first entertained the notion of joining the Communists, but rejected their abstract ideology in favor of the true partisans' grounding in a particular territory.[6] At that time he was not altogether aware, however, of the fundamental changes the concept of the "partisan" as a paradigmatic political figure of post-French Revolution Europe had undergone as a result of its instumentalization by Marxist-Leninist Realpolitik. Later he learned from Schmitt's "theory of the partisan" that Lenin, "the professional revolutionary of global civil war," had turned the "real enemy into an "absolute enemy."' In so doing, he had also corrupted the new political figure of the partisan from a pre-modern defender of local autonomy, particularity and otherness (against Napoleonic expansionism first and Western imperialism later) into an agent of that very same pseudo-universalism it originally opposed --this time identified with communist ideology rather than the French Enlightenment. Not only did Lenin instrumentalize the concept of the partisan, he also destroyed the traditional limitation of war achieved with the jus publicum Europaeum. From a localized struggle among states, "war became absolute war and the partisan the agent of absolute enmity against an absolute enemy."[8] It became a universal "class struggle" where the enemy (inimicus) -- an opponent to be treated as an equal in a legitimate conflict where two "rights" confront each other-- became a foe (hostis) -- a demonic figure to be exterminated everywhere by whatever means.[9] This, however, entailed a distortion[10] of the true concept of the partisan which, according to Schmitt, "has a real but not an absolute enemy" and has a "tellurian character," i.e., he defends a piece of land with which he has an autochthonous relation."[11]
Schmitt sought to explain the new political phenomena of wars of liberation (connected with anti-colonialism) and how this had altered international law.[12] The Marxist-Leninist strategy of world revolution, which seemed practically invincible during the three decades after WWII (but which underwent an irreversible decline following the involution of the Cuban, the Chinese and other Third World revolutionary movements) had succeeded precisely because of the instrumentalization of the figure of the partisan. At the time Schmitt wrote, the contradiction betwalso used to organize class events and I am learning, slowly some days, that I do not have to do all of the work when it comes to planning and carrying out classroom events and functions. In fact, I am observing how much more the children enjoy activ ities when they make the plans and do the work. I am discovering that the increased involvement by the other things, by its opposition to the new pseudo-universalism of "human rights," liberal democracy's bureaucratic centralism, and the therapeutic state.
In an international context in which the partisan was identified exclusively with anti-fascist movements during WWII -- a politically heterogeneous movement subsequently distorted and redefined as primarily "communist" -- Schmitt traced the origins of the concept of the partisan back to the Spanish and Prussian anti-Napoleonic struggles of 1808-1813 (culminating in the Spanish Reglamento de Partidas y Cuadrillas of December 28, 1808 and the Prussian Landstrum of April 21, 1813)when the partisan first appeared as a paradigmatic tellurian figure. It was the birth of a territorially-grounded concept of political identity contraposed to the universalistic pretenses of the French Revolution understood as the Ideenkleid for the new :republican French imperialism. Tracing these ideas back to Clausewitz' 1909 critique of Fichte, Schmitt's contraposition of local particularity and autonomy to Enlightenment universalism and French imperialism prefigured what is finally coming to the fore as the main political confrontation between New Class universalism tied to the traditional 19th century political formation (the nation-state, which becomes weaker the more it attempts to become what Schmitt called the "total state"), and postmodern populism predicated on territorial particular-ism and the pre-communist figure of the partisan. Already at the end of WWI "conventional war between states, predicated on European international law" was obsolete, soon to be replaced by "a global civil based on revolutionary class straggle,"[13] but now there is a new political conflict in the form of regionalism, postmodern federalism and the vindication of direct democracy within territorially-defined communities against central state power increasingly perceived as a distant, foreign domination by an illegitimate New Class elite. To use another set of Schmittian concepts, it is the vindication of the primacy of legitimacy over a reified legality which has degenerated into a new mode of domination. [14]
Every knowledgeable Schmittian, said Freund, knows the sense in which Schmitt examined the "theory" of the partisan as a Zwischenbemerkung to the concept of the political.[15] Schmitt's intention was not to provide a general theory but only a concept useful for jurists. "Power as regularity provides grounds for a legal concept; power as irregularity, only for a theory. Theory is an undetermined idea, but no concept."[16] For Schmitt, the figure of the partisan is an archetype of irregularity who seeks to vindicate a prescriptive legitimacy against a positivistic legality. As an irregular fighter, the partisan occupied the same ground as the jurist because law is also tellurian -- it is only for a particular land. The terrorist fights less for land than for an idea. As Freund noted, for Schmitt terrorism was not a genuine political problem but only an instance of the criminalization of politics. Schmitt never attempted to develop a philosophy of history. His problem was to determine the historical presuppositions of concrete situations. The Marxist-Leninist instrumentalization of the figure of the partisan not only signalled the transition from armed to bellicose peace but also the criminalization of war, which created the danger "that one might no longer be able to speak of an enemy or enmity and both would be outlawed and damned in all forms before the task of destruction can begin."[17] The leitmotif of all Schmitt's work culminates in his theory of the partisan: the problem of the state of exception and of the relative antinomies between norm and decision[18]
In June 1946, disgusted with political corruption and having tried his hand at journalism, Freund began teaching philosophy first at the College de Sarrebourg (October 1946-September 1949), then at the Lycee de Metz (October 1949-September 1953) and the renowned Lycee Fustel de Coulanges de Strasbourg (October 1953-September 1960). In 1948 he married the younger daughter of the painter Rene Kuder (1882-1962). In October 1960 he was appointed to the Centre Nationale Recherche Scientifique. The end of his contract coincided with the defense of his doctoral dissertation at the Sorbonne on June 26, 1965. In addition to his patron, Aron, his other examiners were Paul Ricoeur, Jean Hyppolite and Raymond Polin. Also that year, Freund began teaching at the University of Strasbourg. He subsequently founded a Center for Research and Study in the Social Sciences (1967), an Institute of Polemology (1970), a Laboratory of Regional Sociology (1973), and the Revue des Sciences Sociales de la France de l'Est (1972). In 1975 Freund lectured at the University of Montreal, but refused other long-term offers from German and American universities in order to concentrate on his work (although he did deliver guest lectures in Germany, Greece, Italy, Belgium, etc.).
In August 1988 Freund retired to the village of Ville. There he wrote Philosophie philosophique[19] in which he explained his earlier works[20] and their interrelation. His partisan experiences in the French resistance are the reason why his magnum opus, L'essence du politique, is in some sense an attempt to understand the nature, function and finality of "eternal politics."[21] According to Freund, the fundamental categories of politics are: command and obedience, public and private, friend and enemy. He began with the given -- the relation between politics and society, and the antagonisms inherent in social relations. But his most important contribution to what he called the "philosophy of politics" lies in exploring its presuppositions. Elsewhere he said he had wanted to be a "theoretician," as all great philosophers had been. He wanted to recover "the specificities of the freedom of reflection essential to the constitution of humanity."[22]
More precisely, Freund understood the essence of philosophy as having to do with the freedom to choose presuppositions. Here he was not attempting to out-Schmitt Schmitt but rather to pursue the question of politics beyond the "juridical" dimension and provide it with a wider "philosophical" base. This base, however, had nothing to do with abstract universalism. As with the particularity of the partisan, metaphysical presuppositions also exhibited a kind of tellurian specificity. As nomological projections capturing the: particular idiosyncrasies of the communities within which they were deployed, these metaphysical presuppositions ultimately constituted the basis of that particular community's specificity. Enlightenment universality cannot be articulated conceptually because the conceptual dimension is always necessarily one-sided. Thus it can only be lived and approximated in the particularity of concrete situations of determinate communities.
While in Ville Freund completed a "philosophy of economics," published posthumously under the title L'essence de economique.[23] There he argued that economics replicates the same pattern as politics. His approach remained the same, but this work lacks the systematic character of L 'essence du politique. Politics was the core of Freund's work. Ultimately, for him politics is the responsibility to determine a community, to situate it in a particular area and to assure internal harmony and external protection. The three key factors for this intellectual partisan were the freedom of choice, the ability to decide, and the tie to the land. He sensed he was at the threshold of a new age[24] beyond the nation state, but he did not live long enough to experience all the implications of the end of the 20th century and the prefiguration of a possible translation of his partisan outlook into a new nomos of the earth.[25] Had he been able to pursue all the implications of Schmitt's theory of the partisan at a time when the end of the Cold War also meant the end of the corrupted concept of the partisan into a tool of the class-struggle, he may have found himself in the unexpected company of postmodern populists in pursuit of political arrangements beyond the traditional state. Freund may not have gone beyond Schmitt in prefiguring new forms of political existence, yet his article on Schmitt's political thought demonstrates both the clarity of his perception and his debt to his German mentor.[26]
Notes:
[Telos; Winter95 Issue 102, p3, 8p]