French Intellectuals: End of an Era?

...This movement, which appeared in the mid-eighties, broke with more conventional antiracist organizations by specifically appealing to the young...

...The school question is inseparable from the problem of immigration, and provokes the same passionate responses, as in the "Islamic Scarf" case of 1989...

...Public schooling—free and mandatory — was was intended to create the citizens of the future by offering, in principle, the same chances to each child, regardless of social origin...

...A national-populist extreme right wing, notably Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front, began to gather strength, capitalizing on the fears of those threatened by social change...

...The Image of the Intellectual In the context of these transformations, the French intellectual has been forced to change...

...The idea of a sociology deploying scientifically tested methods and field research was foreign to them...

...In mid-summer 1981, Max Gallo, spokesman for the recently elected socialist government, touched off a controversy in the pages of Le Monde with an article on the "silence of the intellectuals," whom he criticized for their lack of enthusiasm for the new venture of the left...

...One even senses the danger of a French version of "political correctness" and the substitution of personal antagonisms or name-calling for intellectual exchange...

...The project of the generalist yields more and more to specialization (to borrow Foucault's distinction), a development reinforced by cultural fragmentation, the increasing separation of power and politics from the life of ideas, and the ever-growing importance of the market and money...

...In the early eighties people began to be concerned about urban decay...

...In his recent book La France aux francais, Pierre Birnbaum has reminded us of the intensity of the "war of the two Frances," one republican, the other traditional, that has raged ever since the beginning of the Third Republic...

...French Jews became more visible and more assertive...

...Translated from the French by JOHN ALZALONE 252 • DISSENT...

...At the same time, new social movements among women and ecologists were beginning to mark off their own specific identities...

...But it does mean that the conditions that fashioned the French model of the Great Intellectual are no longer with us today...

...they began talking, often in exaggerated terms, about ghettos and the lack of safety in the cities...

...Second, immigration into France, especially of North Africans, was transformed from an issue of employment to one of repopulation...

...There was no longer any doubt that a new era had begun in France, foreshadowed several years earlier by the intellectuals' belated acknowledgment of the Gulag, by the impressive welcome given Solzhenitsyn in 1974 by the "New Philosophers" (which also marked the end of Marxism as a mode of thought and the central reference point for political action), and finally by the many articles and books devoted to the crisis or malaise of the intellectuals...

...It is always tricky to posit any direct connection between ideas on the one hand and social change on the other...

...It is unable to grasp that these identities are often the only source of meaning for socially and economically excluded groups...

...But this image is no longer valid...

...What counts now is not social relationships, but the lack of them...

...In one sense it embodied a universal project: it proclaimed a message of progress, reason, and the rights of man and the citizen to the entire world...

...National republicanism is marked by a sharp tension originating in the age-old contradictions of the French concept of the nation...

...De Gaulle's famous declarations about peoples' rights of self-determination were issued in this spirit...

...and by the weakening of the socialist and communist allegiances to which many Jews had subordinated their Jewish identity...

...This doesn't mean that classical intellectuals have simply exited the scene by one door, yielding their place to professional social scientists, who are entering by another...

...Published in Le Monde, it was accompanied by a long article on "the confusion of ideas," delineating the ways in which the far right supposedly manipulated the Parisian intelligentsia...

...The republican orientation, in its "pure" form, denies any place in the public sphere for particular cultural identities...

...Social conflict is no longer rooted only in the opposition between exploiters and exploited...

...Two additional changes complicated these developments...

...it strengthened a xenophobic face, closed in upon itself...

...It appeals to the classical model of integration that is now under threat...

...The spatial dimensions of this transformation appeared clearly with the onset of the urban crisis...

...This was manifest most clearly in education and the welfare state...

...Intellectuals first reacted to these changes by criticizing the extreme right and giving their support to groups like SOS-Racism...

...There are other examples of intellectual agitation: debates about the "Americanization" of French national culture and its penetration by the values of mass consumerism...

...by the emotions caused by the Six Day War...

...Intellectuals, on the left and on the right, have often argued about the idea of the nation...

...The Great Intellectual is, at least for now, anachronistic...

...The right to be different made a forceful entry into political and intellectual life...

...At the same time, the workers' movement was experiencing its historic decline as the unions entered chronic crisis...

...This message was broadcast strongly during the end of the colonial era: "modernity" would be brought to those who had previously been the victims of exploitation and condescension...

...Now immigrants were defined by other identities—as Muslims, Turks, Arabs, and so on...

...Radical self-affirmation by various minorities can engender radical responses from the majority—a reassertation of conservative traditionalism...

...But since the seventies, their international stature has sharply waned in the wake of the deaths of those—beginning with Andre Malraux, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Foucault— who seemed the highest embodiment of a figure so typically French, the Intellectual...

...All this called into question the classical model of integration into the French nation and Republic...

...For decades French intellectuals captured the world's imagination through their writings and debates...

...School directors, in turn, seek to make their schools distinct from one another, in direct contradiction of the republican model...

...Intellectuals of the classical model tended to scorn the social sciences...

...Many intellectuals of the left were unable to appreciate the claim that France bore a universal message, since they cast themselves first and foremost as internationalists...

...he was perceived as someone destined for quick assimilation or as a transient figure, an unmarried male who worked in a factory, lived in a residence hall, and went back home as soon as he'd saved enough money...

...Previously the immigrant had been defined by his inferior place in the system of production...

...The republican state is now experiencing deep problems...

...This conflict was rooted in the relations of production, but it shaped social, political, and intellectual life well beyond the confines of the shops and factories...

...Historians interested in the memory of the nation—what Pierre Nora has called "les lieux de la memoire" (places of memory)— are pursuing new fields like the history of immigration to France...

...Finally, the democratic orientation can open the way to pluralistic excess and a destructive babel of identities...

...it has become a matter of inclusion and exclusion...

...The writings of Pierre Bourdieu, Christian Baudelot, and Rene Establet on the sociology of education contended that the school system actually reproduced and deepened social inequality...

...A third orientation, following Debray's terminology, might be called democratic...

...The national republican orientation can degenerate into racism and xenophobia...

...It proposes to combine universal values long associated with French republican idealism— values such as reason and democracy—with a policy of tolerance toward cultural, religious, and ethnic minorities...

...This in turn provoked the departure from the movement of many Jewish intellectuals...

...Class conflict gave intellectual life its shape: one was either for the workers' movement or against it...

...Finally, the French nation during this period can be described in terms of a dual orientation...

...More generally, Louis Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas argued that the function of the state was to preside over the replication of the unequal relations of production, and Michel Foucault popularized the notion that every sphere of society was permeated by multifaceted "disciplinary" powers...

...This latter perspective, represented by such mainstream conservative politicians as Charles Pasqua and Philippe Seguin, probably is shared by the majority of French citizens these days, if we are to judge by the weak reaction to recent restrictive measures on immigration and the nationality code enacted by Balladur's conservative government and inspired by nationalrepublicanism...

...but it's a fragile, porous barrier, which can quickly be transformed into a sieve...

...And they are the favorite target of Le Pen-style national populism, which denounces the "exorbitant" 250 • DISSENT French Intellectuals benefits they enjoy from public authorities, the advantages they take of the welfare state, and the more-or-less fundamentalist communities that hold them together...

...A second orientation, which can be called "national republican," seeks to uphold a French identity that it believes is menaced by the internationalization of economy and culture, as well as by the unification of Europe...

...The republican ethos was defined by a universalism that extolled egalitarian values...

...But in recent years a growing group of researchers has focused on producing concrete information on the great social and cultural issues confronting France...

...And the welfare state was supposed to compensate for the most severe social inequities by helping the unemployed, ensuring public health and medical progress, and extending access to such pro 248 • DISSENT French Intellectuals grams to one and all...

...Within France, universalism was linked to an ethos of economic, cultural, and political progress: the modernization of the infrastructure and of the means of production, the development of education and the extension of democracy...

...And it is likely that attitudes toward international politics, whether about the war in former SPRING • 1994 • 251 French Intellectuals Yugoslavia, the North-South dichotomy, the construction of Europe or relations with the United States, will soon evolve— indeed they are already evolving—from these different orientations toward the internal problems of French society...

...All this was at odds with the type of nationalism that, during the last two centuries, has been based upon opposition to modernity, upon an appeal to an antirepublican, largely xenophobic, and often anti-Semitic Catholic France...

...This idea was quickly put to rest when it became clear that a movement was forming on the far right that was capable of mobilizing broad electoral support—through largely xenophobic, racist and anti-Semitic appeals...

...debates about the French language and its decline on the world scene...

...Several basic attitudes are emerging...

...The change was brought about by the arrival of Algerian Jews, which reinvigorated the Jewish population in France...

...Their own concerns, whether religious or cultural, whether pertaining to Israel or antiSemitism, brought them into the streets to demonstrate...

...The essential fact, however, is that the classic figure of the French intellectual—who was identified with knowledge and reason, with justice and a sense of history, with the people and the revolution—is fading...

...An industrial society, a republican state, and a nation at once universal and specific: broadly speaking, this ensemble defined the space within which debate was organized in this country until the seventies—the space in which the liveliest and most meaningful confrontations on social questions took place...

...Taken together, these three orientations outline a new intellectual map in which the classic left-right opposition is being reinvented...

...On this turf, the right is traditionally better placed than the left, although there are leftists with this orientation...

...In the last twenty years, all of this has changed...

...Seen in universal terms, France is associated with the themes of democracy and human rights...

...controversies surrounding nationality, the politics of immigration, and the policies to be adopted regarding Islam, which is now becoming the second religion in the country...

...the political system was organized around the opposition of left and right, with the left bloc supposedly representing working-class demands...

...The welfare state has been weakened by rising unemployment and healthcare costs and the aging of the population...

...The worst crises are no longer those of exploited workers, who now almost seem to occupy a privileged position—one they want to protect— but rather those of men and women deprived of work...

...In these discussions there is a real risk that superficial quarrels will displace real debates about ideas, just as the collapse of socialism and communism have made it difficult to pose substantive problems about the nature of our society...

...Democracy thereby remains capable of accommodating very diverse demands and interests, even if they carry little electoral weight...

...Many consumer, family, cultural, and even sporting associations defined themselves through their opposition to capitalism...

...During the Persian Gulf conflict, for example, some of SOS-Racism's leaders opposed French participation in the anti-Iraq alliance, out of sensitivity to the opinion of young North Africans, the children of immigrants to France...

...they denounced the opposing stand as a "Munich of the republican school...

...In the late 1970s, some intellectuals had begun to argue that France, after an era of grand causes, of heroic social and political conflicts and collective mobilization, had entered a period of social emptiness, atomization, narcissism, post-modernity...

...In May 1968, the student movement sought to give its struggle a meaning extending beyond the university by holding out, in fragile hands, the flag of revolution to the workers...

...In some cases they have accused each other of allowing themselves to be used by the far right...

...Postwar French society was industrial, dominated by the conflict between the employers and the workers' movement...

...Now it sometimes seems as if the extreme right holds a virtual monopoly on the definition of the nation...

...If they retain any social conscience, they must concern themselves with the fate of the excluded, of those who have not only been deprived of work and of a place in the relationships of producSPRING • 1994 • 249 French Intellectuals tion, but of any capacity for social action beyond periodic riots...

...At about the same time, regional movements in the Midi, in Brittany, and in Corsica began asserting themselves: they denounced "internal colonialism," the Jacobin heritage of a strong centralized French state, and the threat to their cultural and especially linguistic identity...

...either a Marxist, a non-Marxist, or an anti-Marxist...

...Taking advantage of measures aimed at reuniting families, they elected, for the most part, to remain in France, and became a significant, and often the most impoverished, sector of the excluded, inhabiting dilapidated districts and suburbs...

...Here again, the French model of integration was called into question...

...In this case, however, the exhaustion of the classic French intellectual and the reshaping of intellectual life are clearly tied to the transformations of French society and its international context...

...At the same time, each of the three main orientations is susceptible of being radicalized in disturbing ways...

...In July 1993 forty intellectuals signed an "Appeal to Vigilance," a statement about the dangers posed by the far right...

...The consequence may be intercultural clashes, and the type of violence that is the hallmark of social disintegration...

...During the period known as the "Trente glorieuses"— the name Jean Fourastie gave to the first thirty years after World War II— France could best be described as a "national society," a relatively integrated whole consisting of three elements: society, the state and its institutions, and the nation...

...Near the end of this period the state became the object of pointed criticism by intellectuals...

...Consequently, intellectuals can no longer define themselves in terms of a social movement bearing a universal message...

...Still, most of them, without necessarily realizing it, behaved as if they were bearers of a universal message—which they might not have borne so readily had they belonged to a different nation...

...France can no longer present itself as a universal nation, for it lives a specific life, with a particular identity that often feels threatened...

...seen in the perspective of "difference," the singularity of an inward-looking French nation is stressed...

...Political science has greatly developed the study of the far-right National Front, and sociologists have pursued new types of research on Islam, new religious phenomena, the urban crisis, the problems of the educational system, and the rise of racism and xenophobia, among other areas...

...Industrial society has given way to a society that people like Alain Touraine began calling "post-industrial" as early as the late sixties, when it became clear it could no longer be described solely on the basis of the older structural conflict...

...Certainly, the traditional image retains its power, even if one is not overcome by nostalgia for Malraux or Sartre...

...not the relationship of domination to exploitation, but the growing separation between the excluded and those who "belong" —who continue to work, .to earn a salary, and to consume...

...Intellectuals have also chastised the media for providing a forum for the National Front and its leader...

...First, French Jews began to break with a formula in place since the Revolution, according to which one was a Jew in private, but not in public...

...This new situation has considerably weakened the universal, democratic face of French identity...

...This issue emerged within SOS-Racism and its intellectual supporters, who have often promoted a multicultural, multiracial society at the risk of encouraging a dangerous identity dialectic...

...a Communist party member, a "fellow traveler," or else an adversary of the party...

...Today no one would seriously claim that by casting off its chains, the proletariat will liberate all humanity...

...The educational system increasingly functions like the marketplace: parents with money can place their children in the "good" schools, where immigrant children are few...

...Ethnic and communal suspicions arose among broad sectors of the French people...

...Some, like the signers of an appeal published in the weekly Nouvel Observateur, demanded that any marks of religious or ethnic distinction be forbidden in the public schools...

...The principal of a junior-high school in Creil refused to allow three Islamic girls to attend class in their scarves, which they said was required by their religion...

...War broke out over secularism in the schools, and intellectuals participated broadly...

...it is faithful to traditional republican ideals and, in its leftist versions, to social democratic projects and the values of the welfare state...

...In political terms, the conservative government's embrace of this outlook represents a barrier to the radical national populism of the National Front—why go to Le Pen if a party in power speaks like this...

...It distributed a yell9w hand-shaped badge saying "Hands Off My Pal" throughout the country, organized huge rock concerts, and pursued various media strategies to spread its message...

...This leads to the third element in our analysis, the national question, which was posed anew in France beginning late in the sixties...

...Hence the desire to protect French culture and the demand, expressed by Paris in the GATT negotiations last fall, that the cultural domain be an "exception" to the rules of international commerce...

...And because of colonialism, they frequently devel oped a hatred for their own nation, of a kind most memorably expressed by Sartre...

...One orientation can simply be called "republican," as Regis Debray has suggested...

...Reshaping the Intellectual Sphere French intellectual life is changing radically, as attention focuses on new social problems...

...During this period, the French state was inspired above all by the ideal of republicanism...