“At every meal that we eat together, freedom is invited to sit down. The chair remains vacant, but the place is set,” wrote the French poet and Resistance fighter René Char. Char hadn’t wanted to publish his work during the war. It was a time to stay low. But he had carried on writing throughout, pressed up tight against terror and death. As the Fourth Republic took shape, he wanted to put his experiences on the record and so published Hypnos, from which this aphorism is taken, in 1946. Until quite recently, I’m told, it was a tradition in the French countryside to lay an extra place for an unexpected guest, or perhaps a returning friend or family member. In the darkest days of the Nazi occupation, the place was set for freedom. Char and his comrades could not know when or how freedom might turn up. While some, such as those who belonged to the communist FTP (Francs-Tireurs et Partisans), had definite ideas about the kind of freedom they were fighting for, many more experienced the presence of freedom simply in their determination not to yield to domination.
The American historian Timothy Snyder is no poet, still less an active combatant, but almost 80 years on he too has written a book about freedom at a moment when its future is both in doubt and, for that reason, wide open. Co-opted by political cynics and their rich friends, on the one hand, “freedom” has been squeezed of meaning, becoming a tatty banner in an apparently worldwide battle with no purpose other than to keep on generating fear, outrage and terror in pursuit of power. Yet precisely because of the horrors perpetuated under this banner, there is a new awareness of freedom, even if it is perceived simply, and for many starkly, as an empty seat.
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