Abstract
After the Second World War, the Liberation unifies the intellectual world in the devastated vectoring Europe countries. The few intellectuals who had collaborated or had published about the beneficial effects of the arrests against Jews had been sentenced, such as Robert Brasillach, shot on the 6th of February 1945. The images of the horrors of Nazism are discovered and generate unanimous reactions of indignation. A myth is getting born, a myth that gives a total recognition and legitimacy to intellectuals who had understood during the war the dangers of Nazism of fascism in Italy, and who had denounced it. In France, the ideal of this intellectualism is portrayed by figures as Jean-Paul Sartre, for having participated to the intellectual Resistance or by Rene Char, who wrote but also took up arms as one of the responsible of the Resistance in Luberon. However, the year 1946 sees the end of the Grand Alliance between the United States and the USSR, and Churchill does not loose time to evocate the “iron curtain” in a speech given to Fulton University on the 5th of March 1946.
As men of engagement, the European intellectual had to make a choice between the Soviet communist ideology, or the American one. And, as Jean-Paul Sartre declared in the revue Les temps modernes, in 1947: “Every anti-communist is a dog”, separating himself from some of the intellectuals who had fought against Nazism as he did, we may wonder how the intellectual world, until then united by the end of the Second World War, did turn into during the Cold War? To answer, we will first of all study to what extent the intellectual Cold War was a bipolar world, and then the mutations in the intellectual thought appeared with the Détente.
