Le Professeur
From Vichy to Iraq with a widely cultured "citizen of Harvard"
by Craig Lambert
In Vichy France, there were few diversions; among them were Hollywood musicals and comedies, such as those starring Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby, which helped lift the spirits of French audiences. One great success was Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the story of a decent, average citizen who unexpectedly finds himself in the U.S. Senate, where he stubbornly persists in his ultimately victorious fight against a corrupt group in power. Although they controlled much of daily life, the German occupiers could not stop the French audiences from identifying with James Stewart as Mr. Smith. “They came to applaud,” says Stanley Hoffmann, who as a young boy was among those applauding.
Now 78 years old, Hoffmann has been, since 1997, Buttenwieser University Professor; he ranks as one of the world’s preeminent authorities on international relations, with specialties in French politics and history and American foreign policy. He has written 18 books and countless articles, including, since 1978, regular essays in the New York Review of Books. Having taught at Harvard since 1955, Hoffmann also founded what is now the University’s Gunzburg Center for European Studies (where his recorded voice greets callers) and was among those who created the social-studies concentration in the College. “He probably holds the record for the greatest number of different courses taught in Harvard’s Core curriculum,” says Bass professor of government Michael Sandel, who has known Hoffmann for more than 30 years, taught a course on globalization with him, and calls him a “towering figure. Stanley has voracious intellectual interests and a range of knowledge of politics, history, and culture that is unrivaled in the academic world, as far as I know.”
Portrait by Stu Rosner
Stanley Hoffmann
Rarely does a scholar’s life show such an intimate connection between personal experiences and academic pursuits as Hoffmann’s does. “It wasn’t I who chose to study world politics,” he wrote in a memoir published in a 1993 festschrift, Ideas and Ideals: Essays on Politics in Honor of Stanley Hoffmann. “World politics forced themselves on me at a very early age.”
Born in Vienna in 1928, he grew up in the early 1930s in Nice, France, with his Austrian mother (his distant American father returned to the States and had scant contact with his son thereafter). “Nice was filled with foreigners,” he recalls. “Russian émigrés, people from Central Europe who had retired to the Riviera.” In 1936 Hoffmann mère et fils moved to Paris. “My mother thought the schools would be tougher there,” Hoffmann says. “She was right. For me, it was like moving from paradise to purgatory: the sky was gray, there was no sea, and Hitler was beginning to spread his wings.” On May 10, 1940, acute appendicitis afflicted the boy just as the radio reported the German attack on Belgium, Holland, and France. “I was under the knife in between air raid sirens,” he wrote.
Hoffmann was baptized at birth as a Protestant, but his anti-clerical mother’s family fit the Nazi racial definition of Jews, and so the two of them, essentially stateless people, fled Paris. “My mother and I were two small dots in that incredible and mindless mass of ten million people clogging the roads of France,” he wrote. They finally reached Lamalou-les-bains, a tiny spa in Languedoc—and then, as the school year began, they returned to Nice, by then part of Vichy France. Once they left Paris, “my fate had become inseparable from that of the French,” Hoffmann wrote. “It wasn’t simply the discovery of the way in which public affairs take over private lives, in which individual fates are blown around like leaves in a storm once History strikes, that had marked me forever. It was also a purely personal sense of solidarity with the other victims of History and Hitler with whom we had shared this primal experience of free fall.”
In Nice, after the Germans occupied the city in September 1942, the Gestapo were around every corner. “It was three months of waiting for the bell to ring at 3 a.m.,” he recalls. “Fear never left us.” And the little family had almost no resources; Hoffmann’s mother sold her jewels and borrowed from a friend, though in the empty markets there wasn’t much to eat anyway. Although they remained without citizenship through the war, “I had one great advantage: I was a very good student,” he says. “The French were willing to forgive anybody anything if one was a good student and spoke good French.” But excursions to enjoy the music, films, and walks that the studious Hoffmann loved were made hazardous by the sudden rafles, police and Gestapo round-ups such as the one in which his only close friend, the French-born son of Hungarian Jewish émigrés, disappeared, with his mother, forever.
Carrying French documents that his history teacher had forged for them, Hoffmann and his mother returned to Lamalou-les-bains on a blacked-out night train. There, they found that 1,000 young German soldiers had encamped in the village of 800. The two groups didn’t speak to each other, but there was no Gestapo, it was perfectly safe, and there was no more fear. The villagers somehow found places for them to stay, even if it meant frequent moves as the Germans kept occupying hotels. “There was a basic decency in those French people,” he says, adding a quote from The Plague by Camus, “There is more in man to be admired than condemned.”
Throughout their ordeal, the kindness and protectiveness of so many French countrymen and teachers made an indelible impression and stamped Hoffmann as irretrievably French. The voices of the Free French and General de Gaulle on the BBC helped sustain the hope “that kept one’s soul from freezing,” he wrote. But it was not until 1972, in a review of The Sorrow and the Pity, the Marcel Ophuls film on the Occupation, that Hoffmann spoke publicly of his wartime experiences; he ended the review by recalling the compassionate history teacher who had helped their flight from Nice: “He and his wife were not Resistance heroes, but if there is an average Frenchman, it was this man who was representative of his nation; for that, France and the French will always deserve our tribute, and have my love.”
In 1944, the Lamalou-les-bains villagers flocked to see the first newsreels of the liberation of Paris. Hoffmann, who got his first look at the “tall and imperturbable” de Gaulle, has never forgotten the exhilaration of that moment. The “euphoria of a national general will was palpable,” he wrote, adding, “For the rest of my life, I was going to be stirred by the drama of peoples rising for their freedom, or breaking their chains, more deeply than by any other public emotion and by most private ones.”
Despite his prodigious scholarly output, it is difficult to categorize Hoffmann’s approach to international relations. “There is no ‘school of Hoffmann’—he doesn’t have doctrinal disciples,” says Michael J. Smith ’73, Ph.D. ’82, Sorensen professor of political and social thought at the University of Virginia, who studied with Hoffmann and later co-taught a course with him. “Stanley has a horror of mimesis; he doesn’t want you to ape what he thinks—his students are the polar opposite of ‘dittoheads.’ They aren’t people who share a set of conclusions; they share a mode of inquiry, and come to their own conclusions using the best available arguments.”
Hoffmann also is hostile to radical cures, allergic to communism and Marxism, and in fact profoundly “suspicious of anything that smacks of utopia and ideology, of a grand vision for the People with a capital P, or any millennial movement,” says his student Ellen Frost ’66, Ph.D. ’72, an international-relations scholar and former U.S. government official. (Hoffmann himself cites the French philosopher and political scientist Raymond Aron, a critic of French leftists, as a mentor, and calls him “a great anti-utopian.” Hoffmann writes that, like Aron, he naturally tends to “think against,” noting that he has had the “intellectual romps of a fox, and the convictions of a hedgehog.”)
Furthermore, Hoffmann has never been tempted by government service, either as a policy adviser or bureaucrat, explaining that he is temperamentally unsuited for such work and values his independence too highly. “When I’m in Washington, I want to take the next plane out of there,” he says. “People who come back from this Washington world take a good time to become normal again.” He observes that he has remained “too French to be a convincing American policymaker,” adding, with characteristic wit, that his Harvard contemporaries Henry Kissinger ’50, Ph.D. ’54, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Ph.D. ’53, didn’t have this problem. And unlike those two, “[M]y reaction to power is more dread than desire,” Hoffmann writes. “I study power so as to understand the enemy, not so as better to be able to exert it.”
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