The funeral of communism will last for thirty years, prophesied François Furet in 1995. "The funeral procession will be accompanied by an immense crowd", he added, "and there will be much weeping. Even young people will join the cortege, trying here and there to give it the air of a rebirth." Hopes of a rebirth were vain, for the faith in communism was irretrievably tattered, but the funeral would last for years because "anti-communism remains more than ever a damnable heresy . . . more universally condemned in the West than in the great days of victorious anti-fascism." Furet was not thinking only of France; he explained that in the United States the revisionist mourning party would prolong the funeral indecently, laboring as diligently as the Holocaust deniers but ever so much more respectably.
Jean-François Revel has lately demonstrated how prescient Furet was, in a polemical tract called La Grande parade, where parade is a fencing term for a parry, meaning in this case the desperate riposte of those who refuse to let communism go into what communists themselves used to call the dustbin of history. After glancing at Revel's account of this French fencing, we shall see that the same parry and thrust are being deployed in English over communism's corpse, notably in the work of the veteran historian Eric Hobsbawm.
Revel says that, whereas in the early 1990s communism and anything like it was definitively proven to be a failure, a vast historical catastrophe, by 2000 we were confronted with a resurgence of excuses, attenuations, forgetfulness and plain misrepresentation, all in favor of a renewed belief in socialism. "The years 1980 to 1990 were the decade of the admitted collapse of communism, as well as the relative and acknowledged failure of democratic socialisms. The years 1990 to 2000 will have been the decade of largely successful efforts to obliterate the lessons of those historic experiences."
