Abstract

“The Poles are fighting not only for themselves, but for us as well” declared Le Goff. All through the two day conference on the Polish situation, the question of the exemplary nature of Solidarity kept cropping up. “A revolution which could help us to liberate ourselves from the Revolution” said Domenach, former editor of Esprit, as if invoking some definitive vaccine against an omnipresent virus. In an impassioned address, Pierre Emmanuel saw Solidarity as somehow redemptive of a French Left guilty of “eternal compromise” — a Left by now so hackneyed that “to the normalized man of the East corresponds the trivialized man of the West.”