If the era of political irresponsibility in France lasted from 1918 to 1958, the age of moral irresponsibility may be said to have begun in the mid-t… - Tony Judt

Eurocommunism was thus a contradiction in terms, despite the best efforts of its spokesmen.

Perhaps the real difficulty facing anyone seeking intellectuals at the highest political levels in England is that the intellectual agenda which drove ideologically-configured political movements in continental Europe was quite absent in London.

From the end of World War I until the middle of the middle of the 1970s, French public life was shaped and misshaped by three overlapping and intersecting forms of collective and individual irresponsibility. The first of these was political. Reading the history of interwar France, one is struck again and again by the incompetence, the insouciance and the culpable negligence of the men who governed the country and represented its citizens. This is not a political observation, in the partisan sense, but rather a cultural one.