This paper seeks to explain the Cold War reception of the concept of totalitarianism in France in comparison with its reception in West Germany, the United States, and Italy. The paper argues that the political instrumentalization of the concept has been key to its reception, perhaps even more important than developments within communist countries. Variations in its reception can largely be accounted for by variations in the politics that it served. In the case of the United States and West Germany, the instrumentalization of the concept largely followed developments in Cold War international relations. Thus the concept was at its height in the United States and West Germany in the 1950s and saw its fortune decline during the years of détente and with the crisis of American Cold War foreign policy during the Vietnam War. And, in the United States at least, the concept revived in the early 1980s in sync with a renewal of Cold War tensions, despite the fact that by most objective measures the communist world conformed less to the model of totalitarianism than in the past. In West Germany the concept of totalitarianism's reception was additionally complicated by the work that it did on the Nazi past. The equivalency that the theory of totalitarianism established between Nazism and communism downplayed the significance of the former and served to exculpate the West German elite and institutions by minimizing their role in and personal responsibility for the Nazi régime. As a consequence, when the 1960s generation questioned the Nazi past of their parent’s generation, the concept of totalitarianism was an inevitable casualty.

In Italy and France, by contrast, domestic politics was much more important to the concept's reception than the international politics of the Cold War. In both countries domestic communist parties were the key issue in the debate on totalitarianism, and in both countries, the concept of totalitarianism made little headway after World War Two because of the weight of national communist parties in domestic politics and particularly among intellectuals. In the 1970s and 1980s, the concept of totalitarianism enjoyed great success in France while it made little headway in Italy. This difference is also largely explicable by domestic politics. The Italian Communist Party protected itself from the charge of totalitarianism by its relative moderation and growing independence from the Soviet Union after 1956, which culminated in its "historic compromise" of the 1970s. Further, in Italy, the concept of totalitarianism lacked appeal on the Right because its comparative dimension threatened—quite in contrast to the situation in West Germany—to implicate Italian fascism and the Italian elite in the crimes of Nazism. In France, the failure of the French Communist Party to distance itself from the Soviet Union or to pursue a moderate politics after 1956 opened it to the charge of totalitarianism, while the revision of received ideas about World War Two did not help the communists who were charged with manipulating the resistance tradition to their benefit. It was fear of what the French Communist Party might do in government that led to the 1970s critique of totalitarianism as the PCF approached political power within the Union of the Left. The domestic political origins of the French critique of totalitarianism of the 1970s can be seen in its focus on ideology (which, it was claimed, was the means through which the communists controlled the Left), its total disregard for the existing literature on totalitarianism, and its failure to discuss Nazism.:

This paper further develops arguments outlined in the presenter's book French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (New York: 2004)