Patty McCabe discusses the French ‘Intellectual’ and his twentieth century
Émile Zola, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Bernard-Henri Lévy
France is the birthplace of the intellectual; the twentieth century is the century of intellectual engagement; therefore the French twentieth century is one that belongs to the intellectual. The world of the Parisian Left Bank populated by black turtle-neck clad, Gauloise-smoking existentialists discussing the human condition over coffee in the Boulevard Saint-Germaine is an image that perhaps remains France’s greatest export. Within France, this stock character, created at the turn of the nineteenth century and now failing to adapt to the modern world, is far more problematic. Indeed, it is the very treatment of the intellectual as a stock character that is part of the problem; the endorsement of the use of the ‘Intellectual’, a timeless category, rather than the intellectual as an individual.
This sense of timelessness can be found in what an intellectual does. The French intellectual talks in terms of absolutes and universals, of the metaphysical and the speculative. These timeless truths cannot be transcended by reasons of state, by the rights of the majority over the rights of the individual. They are the public conscience, the voice of “humanity” as it is present in every human, but they are a public conscience in spite of public opinion. This wonderfully lofty ideal, that the intellectual should remain immune to the temporal passions of the masses, conducting their duty as observers who should only intervene in cases where truth and justice are at stake, was articulated by Julian Benda, in his essay La trahison des clercs (1927).
The category of the intellectual was born during the Dreyfus Affair, the trial of an Alsation Jew who was convicted on fabricated evidence with the French General Staff playing a central role in 1894. The Affair that threatened to tear France apart by placing competing visions of the nation against one another, the country of the Revolution and the Republic versus the country of Joan of Arc, became the birth pangs of the intellectual.
In January 1898 Émile Zola’s open letter addressed to the president of the Republic, Félix Faure, ‘J’accuse’, appeared across the front page of L’Aurore. Enraged by such a blatant abuse of justice, Zola’s open letter accused officers, generals, and politicians alike, framed his intervention in terms of Truth and Justice. Thus began the tradition of the intellectual as a defender of such universal abstracts, echoing throughout the twentieth century.
It is not Benda’s disinterested scholar that has become synonymous with intellectual engagement; the political climate of the mid-twentieth century required a new model. It was Paul Nizan’s committed intellectual, on the side of the proletariat as the revolutionary class, that took hold in the years following L’épuration, the postwar purge after Liberation and the collapse of the Vichy regime. Who should come to epitomise this model of commitment? It was, of course, Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘total intellectual.’
This sense of timelessness can be found in what an intellectual does. The French intellectual talks in terms of absolutes and universals, of the metaphysical and the speculative. These timeless truths cannot be transcended by reasons of state, by the rights of the majority over the rights of the individual. They are the public conscience, the voice of “humanity” as it is present in every human, but they are a public conscience in spite of public opinion. This wonderfully lofty ideal, that the intellectual should remain immune to the temporal passions of the masses, conducting their duty as observers who should only intervene in cases where truth and justice are at stake, was articulated by Julian Benda, in his essay La trahison des clercs (1927).
The category of the intellectual was born during the Dreyfus Affair, the trial of an Alsation Jew who was convicted on fabricated evidence with the French General Staff playing a central role in 1894. The Affair that threatened to tear France apart by placing competing visions of the nation against one another, the country of the Revolution and the Republic versus the country of Joan of Arc, became the birth pangs of the intellectual.
In January 1898 Émile Zola’s open letter addressed to the president of the Republic, Félix Faure, ‘J’accuse’, appeared across the front page of L’Aurore. Enraged by such a blatant abuse of justice, Zola’s open letter accused officers, generals, and politicians alike, framed his intervention in terms of Truth and Justice. Thus began the tradition of the intellectual as a defender of such universal abstracts, echoing throughout the twentieth century.
It is not Benda’s disinterested scholar that has become synonymous with intellectual engagement; the political climate of the mid-twentieth century required a new model. It was Paul Nizan’s committed intellectual, on the side of the proletariat as the revolutionary class, that took hold in the years following L’épuration, the postwar purge after Liberation and the collapse of the Vichy regime. Who should come to epitomise this model of commitment? It was, of course, Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘total intellectual.’
Dipping into Sartre’s philosophy and his politics is a guilt free exercise
The postwar period was the apogee of intellectual power with Sartre, de Beauvoir, and their circle around the journal Les Temps Moderne exercising a monopoly over French thought. With the right discredited after L’épuration, the defining characteristic of intellectual life during this period was an unbending commitment to Communism, later to Maoism and Tiermondism. This involved the endorsing of systematic murder in the name of a better future. The belief in “humanity” and what it could become became more important than present sufferings. It is this that explains the silence on the Moscow trials and conduct behind the iron curtain and the endorsement of violence on the part of the Front de Libération Nationale. An analysis of the reasons behind their unbending commitment to all-encompassing theories is far beyond the scope of this article. What such thinking does demonstrate, however, is the place of absolutes in French thought, a tradition that stems all the way back to the Dreyfus Affair and the defence of the universal abstracts.
For those outside France, this still remains the perfect expression of intellectual dominance. Dipping into Sartre’s philosophy and his politics is a guilt free exercise; it remains a wonderful example of thinkers on the left, of the intellectual’s ontological condition.
Yet, for the French this legacy is a little more complicated, combining a sense of nostalgia and self-hatred. The publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in the 1970s had an influence on Bernard-Henri Lévy (B-HL) and the New Philosophers. They levelled their accusations against Sartre and the power-worship of the left, a tradition they believed stemmed from Marx and Hegel. In this violent rejection and exposure of the crimes of their fathers is hidden a sense of guilt. Unlike those outside of France, the intellectuals of the postwar period remain intrinsic to their own identity. B-HL may virulently reject Sartre’s philosophy, but there is little doubt that it is the intellectual embodied by Sartre with which he indentifies.
For those outside France, this still remains the perfect expression of intellectual dominance. Dipping into Sartre’s philosophy and his politics is a guilt free exercise; it remains a wonderful example of thinkers on the left, of the intellectual’s ontological condition.
Yet, for the French this legacy is a little more complicated, combining a sense of nostalgia and self-hatred. The publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in the 1970s had an influence on Bernard-Henri Lévy (B-HL) and the New Philosophers. They levelled their accusations against Sartre and the power-worship of the left, a tradition they believed stemmed from Marx and Hegel. In this violent rejection and exposure of the crimes of their fathers is hidden a sense of guilt. Unlike those outside of France, the intellectuals of the postwar period remain intrinsic to their own identity. B-HL may virulently reject Sartre’s philosophy, but there is little doubt that it is the intellectual embodied by Sartre with which he indentifies.
The problem was that people no longer believed in a universal subject therefore the intellectuals had lost their authority.
This is combined with a sense of nostalgia, for the intellectual is in many ways a lieu de memoire, ‘a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community’, to quote Pierre Nora. Regardless of politics, the postwar decades made up an epoch during which the intellectual’s place in the world was not only secure but important. Their place is now uncertain. It is the media, or more correctly the democratisation of culture, that has caused this uncertainty and relates back to tension inherent between the intellectual and his sphere of operation. The disparaging remarks about the masses and the seduction of the crowd in Dreyfusard rhetoric are visible even for those who only scratch the surface. It would seem that participation in public life needs to extend beyond the pages of journals and intellectuals must now court the publicity of the television.
Is this the death-knell of the intellectual? In an article in Le Monde in 1983 entitled ‘Tombeau de l’intellectual’, Jean-Francois Lyotard stated that ‘the responsibility of “intellectuals” is inseparable from the (shared) idea of a universal subject. It alone gave Voltarie, Zola, Péguy, Sartre the authority that has been accorded to them.’ The problem was that people no longer believed in a universal subject therefore the intellectuals had lost their authority. The political climate has changed and the security provided by the grand-narratives has disappeared.
The change in political climate would suggest that the intellectuals need to alter their parameters of engagement. Perhaps this is to be found in their intervention as experts in their own field rather than as general commentators, remarking on matters that lie outside of their discipline, as suggested by Michel Foucault. The decline in the ‘master thinkers’ like Malraux, Camus and Sartre, whose opinion had legitimacy because it was theirs, explains the unease with men like B-HL and Régis Debray who claim to be Sartre’s heirs, but not without annihilating him first.
In the face of all this uncertainty, there has been a recourse to the Republic, ‘one and indivisible.’ Yet at the centre of this idea remains a commitment to universalism. The problem facing the intellectuals in France is not the defence of the Republic as the best guarantee for the rights and fair treatment of every citizen as it was during the Dreyfus Affair, but perhaps a way of drawing the Republic into the globalisation of the twenty-first century.
The polemic of the 1995 social security reforms was conducted in good old Dreyfusard rhetoric. In a letter directed to the editorial team of Espirit in April 1998, ‘Le Decembre des intellectuels française’, the followers of Pierre Bourdieu claimed those who supported the reforms sought to diminish ‘the prestige associated with the group since the time of the Dreyfus Affair’, not hesitating to proclaim themselves their legitimate heirs. Under the guise of liberalism – an ideology considered foreign and even worse, American, in France – the supporters sought to undermine the Republic by endorsing a ‘neo-totalitarianism that is called the democracy of the market’ (Serge Halimi).
Nowhere has the commitment to the universal nature of the Republic been more clearly illustrated than the affaire du foulard islamique, beginning in 1989. The legal (and unsuccessful as of March 2004) recognition of minority rights undermined the idea of the Republic, an idea that basically entails creating an overarching ‘French’ identity rooted in rationalism and that participation in this identity is as an individual, not a collective group distinct from the whole. Régis Debray, in Que vie la République (1989) called for the reinvigoration of ‘faith’ in the ‘transcendent goals’ of liberty and equality, arguing that ‘republican idealism…demands an intransigent rationalism.’ Debray is by no means alone and the illusions of multiculturalism have been exposed by Emmanuel Todd, Alain Finkelkraut, and Christian Jelen, often complimented by a comparison with the ideas of Maurice Barrès, of anti-Dreyfusard fame.
This inability to cope with multiple ways of being French has its roots in the Dreyfusards’s anticlerical programme in defence of Truth and Justice. The problem with applying the lessons of the Dreyfus Affair is that, in the words of Raymond Aron, “public affairs rarely present the simplicity, the purity of the Dreyfus Affair”. Alfred Dreyfus was innocent – there is no debate here. The circumstances which gave rise to the intellectual’s ethical engagement were perfectly suited to the application of absolutes, something that later events including the Algerian War, the left’s commitment to Communism, and France’s ability to cope with multiple identities are not. The image of the intellectual exercising moral authority in the name of humanity as it exists in each and every individual is an attractive one, yet it is not without its pitfalls; those pertaining to this ideal in the twentieth century have taught us this much. Perhaps it is time that we stop treating the intellectual as a category and begin to accept their human reality, to replace the ‘Intellectual’ with the intellectual.
Is this the death-knell of the intellectual? In an article in Le Monde in 1983 entitled ‘Tombeau de l’intellectual’, Jean-Francois Lyotard stated that ‘the responsibility of “intellectuals” is inseparable from the (shared) idea of a universal subject. It alone gave Voltarie, Zola, Péguy, Sartre the authority that has been accorded to them.’ The problem was that people no longer believed in a universal subject therefore the intellectuals had lost their authority. The political climate has changed and the security provided by the grand-narratives has disappeared.
The change in political climate would suggest that the intellectuals need to alter their parameters of engagement. Perhaps this is to be found in their intervention as experts in their own field rather than as general commentators, remarking on matters that lie outside of their discipline, as suggested by Michel Foucault. The decline in the ‘master thinkers’ like Malraux, Camus and Sartre, whose opinion had legitimacy because it was theirs, explains the unease with men like B-HL and Régis Debray who claim to be Sartre’s heirs, but not without annihilating him first.
In the face of all this uncertainty, there has been a recourse to the Republic, ‘one and indivisible.’ Yet at the centre of this idea remains a commitment to universalism. The problem facing the intellectuals in France is not the defence of the Republic as the best guarantee for the rights and fair treatment of every citizen as it was during the Dreyfus Affair, but perhaps a way of drawing the Republic into the globalisation of the twenty-first century.
The polemic of the 1995 social security reforms was conducted in good old Dreyfusard rhetoric. In a letter directed to the editorial team of Espirit in April 1998, ‘Le Decembre des intellectuels française’, the followers of Pierre Bourdieu claimed those who supported the reforms sought to diminish ‘the prestige associated with the group since the time of the Dreyfus Affair’, not hesitating to proclaim themselves their legitimate heirs. Under the guise of liberalism – an ideology considered foreign and even worse, American, in France – the supporters sought to undermine the Republic by endorsing a ‘neo-totalitarianism that is called the democracy of the market’ (Serge Halimi).
Nowhere has the commitment to the universal nature of the Republic been more clearly illustrated than the affaire du foulard islamique, beginning in 1989. The legal (and unsuccessful as of March 2004) recognition of minority rights undermined the idea of the Republic, an idea that basically entails creating an overarching ‘French’ identity rooted in rationalism and that participation in this identity is as an individual, not a collective group distinct from the whole. Régis Debray, in Que vie la République (1989) called for the reinvigoration of ‘faith’ in the ‘transcendent goals’ of liberty and equality, arguing that ‘republican idealism…demands an intransigent rationalism.’ Debray is by no means alone and the illusions of multiculturalism have been exposed by Emmanuel Todd, Alain Finkelkraut, and Christian Jelen, often complimented by a comparison with the ideas of Maurice Barrès, of anti-Dreyfusard fame.
This inability to cope with multiple ways of being French has its roots in the Dreyfusards’s anticlerical programme in defence of Truth and Justice. The problem with applying the lessons of the Dreyfus Affair is that, in the words of Raymond Aron, “public affairs rarely present the simplicity, the purity of the Dreyfus Affair”. Alfred Dreyfus was innocent – there is no debate here. The circumstances which gave rise to the intellectual’s ethical engagement were perfectly suited to the application of absolutes, something that later events including the Algerian War, the left’s commitment to Communism, and France’s ability to cope with multiple identities are not. The image of the intellectual exercising moral authority in the name of humanity as it exists in each and every individual is an attractive one, yet it is not without its pitfalls; those pertaining to this ideal in the twentieth century have taught us this much. Perhaps it is time that we stop treating the intellectual as a category and begin to accept their human reality, to replace the ‘Intellectual’ with the intellectual.