Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944 by Jean Guéhenno, translated by David Ball (Oxford University Press)

The twentieth century dealt a very harsh blow to the idea that moral clarity and courage can be learned from books. Never in history did more nations worship great books more fervently than in 1914. But over the following decades, this love for the humanities did little to prevent crimes against humanity. In fact, a shocking quantity of evil was done by cultivated men who sighed with pleasure at great novels, poetry, and music, adored the old masters, and boasted of their philosophical sophistication. Far too often they defended indefensible actions as necessary to preserve “civilization.” A taste for Kant and Goethe was no prophylactic against mass murder.

Given this dismal record, is there any point in searching for the intellectual roots of moral heroism? Surely, to explain the actions of those who have dared to take a stand against the slaughter and the tyrannies, we need to look to the mysteries of individual psychology, rather than to the content of reading lists. After all, the perpetrators had the same educations, committed the same passages to memory.

Every once in a while, however, an extraordinary document comes along to remind us that the books matter. In such a document, we can see how an individual’s preference for particular writers, and for particular themes in their works, did indeed shape an outlook conducive to moral clarity and courage. Yes, it may have been a quirk of psychology that led the individual in this intellectual direction in the first place, but what he or she found there nonetheless had a decisive effect. And while the perpetrators may have read the same books, the document also reminds us that there are better and worse ways of reading.

The diary kept by the French writer and critic Jean Guéhenno during the German occupation of France from 1940 to 1944 is one such document. Unlike most French intellectuals, Guéhenno steadfastly refused to publish openly a single word as long as France remained under the control of Germany, and of the collaborationist Vichy government of Marshal Philippe Pétain. Instead he wrote in his diary as an act of private resistance, and as a chronicle of his country’s “servitude.” For four years, with perfect clarity and often astonishing eloquence, he recorded his disgust with collaborators, his anguish at the horrors overwhelming the continent, and his belief in “my real country . . . that country which is only an idea, [which] has not been invaded and never will be.” Already fifty years old in 1940, Guéhenno did not take up arms for the Resistance. He did hold clandestine meetings with other writers, and contributed to and distributed underground magazines. And the diary itself, if discovered by the Germans, could have earned him a death sentence.

Published in full in France soon after the war, Diary of the Dark Years has long been familiar to the French public and to scholars of French history. It is not a record of Guéhenno’s daily activities, and it has little to say about the texture of life during the occupation, or about its author’s intimate relationships. Occasionally he does use startlingly vivid physical imagery, as when he describes a tree where the Germans had tied the victims of their firing squads: “It is really there. The tree has been sawed off, ripped apart by bullets at the level of a man’s heart. It was used all last winter, four or five times every week. The earth is all trampled down at the foot of the tree. It has lost its bark. It is black from the blood that has drenched it.” Mostly, though, the diary reads like a combination of a philosophical meditation and a political manifesto directed to an audience of one. Like most diaries, it can be frustratingly repetitive.