The twentieth century was for intellectuals the century of red and brown fascism from which few thinkers were unscathed... Many philosophers put their intelligence at the service of two barbarities. However, in this renunciation of reason, there were refractory consciences. While the PCF signs the German-Soviet Pact (August 23, 1939 - June 22, 1941) and makes the policy of collaboration with the German occupier a priority decided by Moscow, Georges Politzer, a Jew and a communist, inaugurates the resistance intellectual since 1939 and then the armed resistance, before dying in 1941 under the bullets of a firing squad. Against Bergson, whom he places on the side of the warmongers and the occupier, he celebrates a Descartes who inaugurates the philosophy of the Enlightenment concluded by Marx and Marxism.

Nizan, also a communist, is averse to the Pact: he understands it as far as the USSR is concerned, which defends its survival, but as far as the PCF is concerned... A Marxist secretly disappointed by the Soviet Union, Nizan finds in Epicurus what Marx , Marxism and Bolshevik Russia do not offer him: reasons to live knowing that we will have to die... Camus, for his part, was a communist for as long as the Party's struggle for decolonization lasted: when the PCF obeys Moscow, which declares the fight for decolonization null and void with the purpose of highlighting the anti-fascist struggle, in 1937, he leaves the Party he had joined in the summer of 1935. He opposes brown and red totalitarianism in the name of libertarian socialism silenced and ridiculed by Sartrean critics, who only know of socialism its Caesarian and barbed wire version.

Simone de Beauvoir and her companion Jean-Paul Sartre built a legend in the antipodes of their experience during the war: we find no trace of their resistance proclaimed everywhere, instead we have compelling evidence to the contrary... Beauvoir passes overlook the Resistance – but also the feminism she criticizes in The Second Sex. Finally, feminism will do more for this book than it has done for it. The PCF will rage against this book that, refractory in this sense, deconstructs male domination...