The Ecole Libre at the New School 1941-1946

Social Research, Winter, 1998 by Aristide R. Zolberg

By all accounts, the Ecole quickly emerged as a prominent feature of the New York cultural landscape. Providing a focus for the patriotic efforts of French-speaking intellectuals throughout North America, within a few months it mustered a faculty of over sixty instructors, offering some two hundred courses to nearly one thousand students (NSA, Ecole Libre Programs, 1942-46). For the 1942-46 period as a whole, slightly over one hundred persons served on its faculty. However, the majority of them offered only occasional lectures, and despite the institutions's formal accreditation within the French system of higher education, it failed to develop into the university for students in exile that Gohen had dreamed of. As of 1943, there were only a few male bacheliers preparing one of the required certificats de licence while awaiting to be drafted into the Free French forces, perhaps a dozen in letters, two or three in law, and none at all in science (Aglion, 1984, p. 131).

In retrospect, it appears that much like its host institution at the time, the Ecole Libre functioned primarily as an "open university" for intellectually minded adults. Although some of its faculty also engaged in innovative research and organized a number of specialized institutes, they were spread over a broad range of fields within the social sciences and the humanities, and did not constitute themselves into an equivalent of the contemporaneous graduate faculty, a more focused body with which they had very limited, and not very cordial contact. This was in part because of the very different university traditions the two groups carried with them into exile, along with lingering national antagonisms, even between victimized Jewish coreligionists. Reportedly, as late as 1944, Georges Gurvitch viewed the graduate faculty as a breeding ground of pan-Germanism, and the professors there as pan-Germans, who had barely made room for their poor French relatives, whereas the Germans resented the fact that the French speakers refused to join the projects they had initiated, and were reluctant to teach in English (Krohn, 1993, pp. 84-85, 255).(9) Moreover, whereas the Germans by then thought of themselves as permanent exiles, with no choice but to serve the United States, the French and Belgians saw themselves as only temporarily displaced persons, at the call of their respective governments in exile that carried on the struggle for liberation.

Many of the French and Belgian activities were oriented to the post-war period, and predicated on a speedy return to the homeland. For example, in 1944, Mirkine-Guetzevitch sought support from the Rockefeller Foundation for a "Franco-American Commission for the Study of the Reform of the French State," which was in the process of collecting information regarding American achievements in the sphere of democratic governance for forwarding to the committee of the French National Assembly charged with drafting a new constitution. However, it provided a major political forum for the French-speaking community in New York by hosting a growing stream of intellectuals and officials representing the French and Belgian governments in exile. These lectures and meetings were well publicized in the several newspapers serving New York's French-speaking community throughout the war.