Ayn Rand, the Dollar Pasionaria

The REASONS for SUCCESS. Published in 1957 in the United States with over 10 million copies sold, Ayn Rand’s libertarian epic “Atlas Shrugged” has finally been translated into French.

With over 1,000 pages, it certainly is of epic-length — yet quite successful nonetheless. “Atlas Shrugged,” now available in French under the title “La Grève,” meaning “the strike,” has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide. It is a true epic in praise of economic liberalism and individualism, signed by a woman who appeared on a 1999 U.S. Postal Service stamp, but of whom we know little.

Ayn Rand (1905–1982), born Alisa Rosenbaum, was raised in a petty bourgeois Jewish family from St. Petersburg. She fled Soviet Russia and settled in the United States in 1926: first in New York and then in Hollywood, where she became a screenwriter and author of plays including “Night of January 16th,” which was directed by the French actor Robert Hossein 10 years ago under the name “Coupable ou non coupable (Guilty or not guilty).”

She then became known as Ayn Rand and published two huge best-sellers: “The Fountainhead” (1943), translated in 1981 by the Plon publishing company under the title “La Source Vive,” and “Atlas Shrugged” (1957), which opens with the famous phrase, “Who is John Galt?”

John Galt is the protagonist of this fresco, written under the effect of amphetamines, which wanders between science fiction, drama and political agenda. In a world composed of nothing other than “people’s democracies,” John Galt is a rebel who no longer wants a state-owned America. He therefore calls on citizens to “go on strike” to “stop the engines of the world” and make a new start based on sound free-market ideology. After many adventures, wacky inventions and sentimental setbacks, the hoped for new heaven arises: “He raised his hand and over the desolate earth he traced in space the sign of the dollar.”

In his essay on Ayn Rand, Alain Laurent lifts the veil on this strange author who arrives in France half a century after being published in the U.S. and helps us to better understand why the author of this global best-seller had not yet been translated in the land of Colbert.

The philosophy behind “Atlas Shrugged” would make Nietzsche look like a collectivist. Ayn Rand swears by selfishness, capitalism and existential rationality, which she clusters together under the name of “objectivism.” Next to her, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan — who is among her fans — would almost come off as a Marxist.

The timing of the publication in France is interesting, given the winds of change turning from the impact of the economic crisis, even if the refrain “Who is John Galt?” remains a sort of code word for tea party activists in the United States. In France, we have never really asked, “Who is Ayn Rand?” But we can now answer the question …