Post-War Writers' Memoirs in Romania and France: A Study of Mentalities

Ms. Net wanted to find out if there was what she terms a "collective identity of the intelligentsia" of Romania and France between 1945 and 1989. She conducted her research on a corpus of memoirs from both cultures, and in the process, uncovered some fundamental differences, which she presented in the form of a 178 page manuscript in English, and also on disc. One of the most basic appears to be that French memorialists rarely deal with social, historical and political changes and events. Ms. Net regards these writers as shutting their eyes to reality, and attempting to preserve the past. They are interested in their personal history, and in the genesis of their own works. According to Ms. Net, this tendency is so marked that she doubts whether 20th century French writers share the dominant mentalities of their times. In her opinion all this points to the fact that the French intelligentsia are "trying hard to preserve their cultural hegemony" a task which she maintains has always been an essential aspect of the identity of the French intellectual. In Romania, of course, the situation was very different. To take an example: many Romanian memoirs speak about the campaigns to improve the lot of women, while at the same time recognising and analysing the way that this was simply a "cover" for promoting the most incompetent people, men and women alike. They also express frustration at the way access to information was blocked due to the media being government controlled. Ms. Net concludes, eventually, that, in general, intellectuals, more than any other group in society, ensure the continuity of the dominant mentalities in a given cultural space. Consequently, she feels, we must revise the idea - or myth as she calls it - that intellectuals represent the avant-garde in a given society. Specifically, she concludes that petty bourgeois, patriarchal and elitist mentalities are still prevalent in France. The truth is, she reflects, that intellectuals are always true to their nature, no mater when and where they are living.