Patterns of Prejudice from Henri Massis to Walter Bedell Smith

Abstract

Astolphe de Custine’s collection of letters La Russie en 1839, first published in France in 1843, was rediscovered by Henri Massis in 1946. Massis re-introduced Custine’s by then long forgotten letters on Russia to the French public. Once American Cold Warriors such as George Kennan and General Walter Bedell-Smith discovered the book, they promptly promoted it to the status of the most prophetic book on the “Russian soul.” Denounced as “fictional,” by many nineteenth-century writers and by a host of twentieth-century scholars, Custine’s book was accepted as canonical by a large reading public and, more importantly, by successive generations of us policy makers. This article contributes to the historiography of Cold War propaganda by looking first at the context in which the book was initially resurrected by Massis, and then by analyzing the ways in which Cold War propaganda constructed its “relevance,” “actuality” and “prophetic” character. The article begins by taking a look at the way in which Massis, the first popularizer of the book, fitted it into his own ideological pattern. In a second movement, the article analyzes the ways in which the book functioned in the post-wwii ideological context, seeking to discover if the alleged relevance of the book had anything to do with the survival into the postwar world of the European Right’s interwar tangle of received ideas and patterns of prejudice.