History lessons?(Notes & comments: June 2006)(Jean-Francois Revel's works)(Obituary)

When the French philosopher Jean-Francois Revel died on April 30, the world lost an important voice for political and intellectual sanity. Revel's books Without Marx or Jesus and How Democracies Perish are modern classics, as is The Totalitarian Temptation, whose title epitomizes one of the most virulent moral pathologies of our time.

In his book Anti-Americanism (a chapter of which appeared in our October 2003 issue), Revel noted that "culture becomes decadent when it takes to running down other cultures while heaping praises on itself." We thought of that observation when we read in the London Times about Histoire/Geschichte, a new history textbook commissioned in 2003 by Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroder. The book, which will be on the official curriculum in France and Germany beginning in September, was designed to give students "a common vision of postwar history." But guess what? That "common vision" is systematically anti-American. Surprised? The Times quotes Guillaume Le Quintrec, the leader of the French team of historians, who described Histoire/Geschichte as "unashamedly pro-European ideology" underwritten by distrust and resentment of the United States. The book, which opens in 1945, presents the Cold War as a ...