The Ecole Libre at the New School 1941-1946

Social Research, Winter, 1998 by Aristide R. Zolberg

   was henceforth divided into two camps: on one side, those who wished to
   preserve its character as a free institution, on the other those who wanted
   to turn it into a propaganda bureau in the service of the Algiers committee
   [that is, the Gaullist government in exile] (Fritsch-Estrangin, 1969, pp.
   163-66; Rutkoff and Scott, 1986, pp. 158-59).

The writer asserts further that the crisis deepened with the subsequent appointment of Paul Rivet as president. However, in his memoirs, Levi-Strauss suggests instead that the conflict opposed "those who considered themselves thoroughly French," opting to dissolve the school and return to France after the war, to foreign-born colleagues who were recently naturalized or who were still aliens, wanting to keep the school going because they were uncertain as to their fate in postwar France. He reports that although the Russian-born Koyre felt "ardently French," he hesitated to take a stand between the two camps, so that Levi-Strauss replaced him as representative of the French camp and, presumably, as the voice of Gaullian authority (Levi-Strauss and Eribon, 1988, pp. 68-69). The latter interpretation is quite credible because Koyre and Levi-Strauss were on the same side politically, but divided by the distaste of Jews who considered themselves French de source ("by origin"), like Levi-Strauss, for fellow Jews of immigrant origin, like Koyre, echoing the prejudices of German Jews in Germany as well as in America toward newcomers from Eastern Europe. This cleavage probably overlapped to some extent with another differentiation, between those who anticipated being reintegrated within the French academic hierarchy because they possessed the appropriate credentials, and those who were more marginal and hence regarded the United States as an alternative.

Concurrently, the Ecole was tom asunder by the Algiers-based French Committee for National Liberation's move to transform it into a propaganda organ under its direct control. Supported by Levi-Strauss and Koyre among others, the move was strongly opposed by Maritain and Mirkine-Guetzevitch on grounds of academic freedom, as well as by the whole Belgian contingent for whom it represented a French takeover of a binational institution. As a result, "the Ecole staggered in its third year, its courses depleted, and without any effective leadership" (Nettelbeck, 1991, p. 178).

As France and Belgium were being liberated in late summer 1044, the Ecole was sharply divided between those who wanted it to continue as an American-based institution and others who thought there was no further need for it, and this conflict determined the subsequent fate of the institution (Rutkoff and Scott, 1986, p. 170). In his capacity as secretary general, Levi-Strauss was recalled to France for consultations in the fall of 1944. The anthropologist, who by his own account had little contact with colleagues other than Koyre and Jakobson, and in his published memoirs expressed contempt for most of his fellow academic exiles, proposed to fold the Ecole into a broadened Alliance Francaise. But his idea failed to gain support, and in the spring of 1945 he returned to NewYork as the cultural counselor to the French Embassy--a clear indication of his political standing, as de Gaulle was then at the peak of his power--with orders to close down the school. The French government terminated its annual subsidy, and the New School, facing financial problems of its own, was in no position to aid those who wished to go on.