Raymond Aron, the Atlantist prosecutor.

Raymond Aron was born in 1905 to an old Jewish family from Alsace (in the eastern region of France). A distant relative took care of Louis 16th health. His family tree reflects a relationship with Emile Durkheim, founder of French sociology, and with his cousin, anthropologist Marcel Mauss. He studied at the Teacher Training College and graduated together with Sartre, Canguilhem and Nizan. Raymond Aron was both a socialist and a pacifist.

During the 1920s he participated, almost unnoticed, in the studentss political life at the Latin Neighborhood (in Paris). He went to Germany where he worked as reader at the Cologne University and was recruited by the French Institute in Berlin. He witnessed the intensification of anti-Semitism and Adolf Hitlers seizing of power.
In 1933, he returned to France and joined the Social Documentation Center run by Celestin Bouglé. By chance, he became the successor of Marcel Déat, future founder of the National Popular Regrouping, a collaborating movement under German occupation. The Center, located in Ulm Street, received credits from the Rockefeller Foundation.

There, Raymond Aron met Robert Marjolin, an economist trained in the United States thanks to a scholarship arranged by Rist and Bouglé, the two permanent contacts of the Rockefeller Foundation in France [1].

The first steps in London

After the demobilization, Aron left France and settled down in London. Since the very beginning, he established contact, through his friend Robert Marjolin, with Jean Monnets team. Right away, he was recruited by André Labarthe, to whom General de Gaulle had entrusted the mission of creating the Resistances magazine - La France Libre. Aron would become one of the most dynamic editors of this magazine.

The magazine allowed him to develop ideas which would be the leitmotiv of his political commitment during the Cold War. In an article published in 1944, Raymond Aron injected a primitive form in the antitotalitarian rhetoric that turned into nearly the official discourse of anticommunist intellectuals. Thus, the three main “pagan” trends were presented as three representations of the ideal type of “secular religion”.

Aron was mainly outstanding for his open criticism to General de Gaulle, especially in his article published in 1943 entitled “L’ombre de Bonaparte”. His relationship with Labarthe was cordial. What Aron did not know yet was that the man in charge of La France Libre was later on considered, especially by Atlantist Henri Freney, suspect of working as Soviet agent for the Harry Robinson network.
In London, Raymond Aron met future Cold War allies. He frequently attended the “Reform Club” whose hosts were Lionel Robbins and Friedrich von Hayek -the one who prepared the creation of the Mont Pelerin Society. Karl Mannheim then proposed him to work at the London School of Economics and Political Studies, a prestigious bastion of liberals (Mises and Hayek) financed by the Rockefeller Foundation.

During the war, Arons commitment to General de Gaulles movement was not noticeable enough so as to win him the Generals favors, who did not appreciate the young intellectuals criticism. Aron, who considered the Vichy collaborating regime as a «parenthesis in history» never condemned the National Revolution.
Throughout his life, he sometimes defended Petains followers, especially during the controversy derived from the book by Bernard-Henri Lévy entitled L'idéologie française. Lets see Arons opinion in this regard: {«That collaborators are traitors? Yes. That advocators of the National Revolution are traitors? Of course not. Those who now regret, calmly, that the purge has not reached all advocators of the National Revolution are acting as instigators of a civil war. Not even in 1941, I let myself be swept along by such mean passions»} [[Raymond Aron, Memoires, 50 ans de réflexion politique, Julliard, 1983, p. 175]]. {{{Journalism and politics}}} At the time of the Liberation (when the nazi troops were expelled from France during the Second World War), dismayed by his own University failures, Raymond Aron devoted himself to his journalistic and political activities. He wrote in Point de vue, Combat and, above all, in Le Figaro, run by Pierre Brisson, former collaborator of Lucien Romper who died, this latter, after his appointment as Minister of the French State [[«L'État français» is the name given by French Philippe Pétain to the administrative dictatorial regime he created after declaring the abolition of the French Republic and when he was collaborating with the Nazi occupation of his country during the Second World War]] in 1943. The political line of the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro was openly in favor of the United States. Raymond Aron, anticommunist and advocator of the Atlantic Alliance and the European construction, gained an indisputable legitimacy in the columns of this newspaper. He was one of the main four columnists, together with André Siegfried, professor of the Institute of Political Studies in Paris; François Mauriac, who followed him to the Congress for Cultural Freedom; and André François-Poncet, who replaced General Koenig as head of the occupation authorities and was, later on, appointed Ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany. At the same time, Raymond Aron had his first political experience when appointed, during the Liberation times, as cabinet director of André Malraux, Minister of Information. He worked with Jacques Chaban-Delmas, Manès Sperber and Jean Lecanuet. He entrusted the IFOP, recently created by Jean Stoetzel, veteran of the Alexis Carrel Foundation [[«Uriage, l'école des cadres de la Collaboration», by Denis Boneau, Voltaire, April 23, 2004]], to carry out opinion polls. In 1947, he became member of the RPF. During the Lille Congress, he was asked to present a paper on what General de Gaulle called «the association»(the capital/labor division in the core of a company), the key concept of the «third economic way» predicted by de Gaulle. {{{Cold War and political reflection}}}. Raymond Arons political thinking is deeply rooted in the historical context of the Cold War. The main objective of his publications was to attract neutral intellectuals, that is, those who did not belong to the Communist Party but showed some kind of sympathy for Marxist ideology, what Aron described as “a favorable prejudice towards the Soviet Union”, in a work submitted to the Mont Pelerin Society.
His work entitled L’Opium des intellectuels constituted a testimony of his will to convince the non-communist left.

In that piece, Aron, inspired in the thesis of the New York Intellectuals, announced the end of ideologies and urged intellectuals to brake up with socialism.For the author, the United States, as champion of world freedom in front of communist parties that «with or without the International, with or without the Kominform, represented a permanent conspiracy aimed at opening a road to Russian-Soviet imperialism», represented the Grand schisme, the benevolent empire struggling for freedom: «The American leading class did not want the hegemony vested on it when the industrial power of the American Republic became a military force [...] Soviet diplomacy has provoked a containment will as a reaction, the attempt to stop its rivals expansion has not provoked a domination will, save when that term is used to design efforts to extend the free trade open zone»} [[Raymond Aron, Le Grand schisme, Gallimard editions, 1948. p. 25, France]]. Raymond Aron acted as the intellectual intermediary of American diplomacy in France. Friend and advisor of Henry A. Kissinger, who considered him as his guide, [[«Nobody has intellectually influenced more on me than he himself. He was a benevolent critic when I was holding official posts. His approval encouraged me, the critics he sometimes made to me stopped me», Henry Kissingers quote, in website Catallaxia, Libéralisme alternative]] and of George Kennan, father of the «containment» doctrine, Aron represented, undoubtedly, the best support available to American cultural services in France.