How the French Think: An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People
By Sudhir Hazareesingh, Basic Books, 352 pages, $30
Soon after the end of the Second World War, André Siegfried, a political scientist, wrote the preface to a book on French spiritual values. “Absent France from the stage, [and] a certain way of approaching problems is lost: everything becomes commercial, administrative, practical, but one then looks for something more fundamental, without which Europe would not be herself, nor the Western world the cradle of human civilisation,” he wrote. “... Wherever she goes, France introduces clarity, intellectual ease, curiosity and, at the end of the day, a subtle and necessary form of wisdom.”
Siegfried was no chauvinist. He understood and admired Britain, the United States and other English-speaking societies. But in this preface Siegfried displayed an indestructible, absolute certainty about the brilliance and indispensability of France’s contributions to Western ideas and ways of thinking that was typical of French intellectuals in the first half of the 20th century.
At the time Siegfried wrote, such convictions were by no means misplaced, notwithstanding the fact that France had just undergone the most searing trauma of its modern history: military defeat in 1940 and four years of Nazi occupation. But, as Sudhir Hazareesingh says in his thoughtful, stimulating and witty historical survey of French thought, Siegfried’s words appear, 70 years on, “as a last piece of French bravado, the dying echo of a tradition of confident universalism whose constitutive elements have slowly dissolved”.
In Hazareesingh’s view, France today produces a “diminishing cultural imprint across the globe”, a retreat that can be measured by “a phenomenon that would have startled the likes of Rousseau, Victor Hugo and Sartre: the absence of interest in contemporary French thought among progressives across the world”. Yet France, and even more so central Paris, contains a higher concentration of intellectuals than any developed country. Their role in public life — on television, in publishing, at literary festivals, at summer schools — testifies to the seriousness with which the French take ideas.
Hazareesingh, a Mauritius-born historian who teaches French politics and international relations at Balliol College, Oxford, is the author of several fine works on French history, including “The Legend of Napoleon” (2004) and “In the Shadow of the General” (2012), a book about Charles de Gaulle’s place in the French imagination. Like the late Tony Judt, a British historian with a deep knowledge of French political thought, Hazareesingh believes that the study of ideas must be grounded in their historical context.
For example, postwar French Marxists and Gaullists, though from opposite sides of the political spectrum, “both shared a contempt for capitalism and Anglo-American mercantilism”. Both attached enormous importance to national sovereignty and freedom from foreign oppression. Both also inspired in their followers an almost religious certainty that their political creeds were incontrovertible truths.
These common traits evolved out of the experience of 1940-44, a period that was crucial in redefining the French self-image. But they also reflected a philosophical tradition dating to René Descartes (1596-1650), who emphasised the logical certainties supposedly provided by rigorous deductive reasoning. What Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), a pioneering sociologist, once said is surely true today: “Every French person is to some degree, whether consciously or not, a Cartesian.”
Anyone who doubts Durkheim’s insight should consider the immortal words spoken last year by Christian Gourcuff at the end of his final season as manager of FC Lorient, a French football club. The 4-4-2 formation in which he lined up his team was, he asserted, “Cartesian”.
The passion for abstract argument that is a legacy of Descartes matured, over the generations, into a love of paradox and, often, an impatience with evidence-based discussion that give French ideas their distinctive quality. “I think, therefore I am,” Descartes famously wrote. Jacques Lacan, a 20th-century psychoanalyst, put a characteristically cryptic gloss on this axiom: “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think.”
All this is not to suggest that France has no tradition of empirical thought or pragmatic political ideas of a kind more usually associated with Britain or the US. Hazareesingh has much to say about Jean Monnet, a most practical thinker who became a founding father of the European Union, and, from the pre-1914 era, Jean Jaures, a socialist who showed there was no reason why French progressive thought should always be Utopian or detached from social realities.
It is disappointing that Hazareesingh devotes little attention to Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), who has a good claim to be the inventor of the modern essay, and whose arguments for common sense and moderation are as fresh today as they were in the late Renaissance.
But Hazareesingh finds space for some authors less familiar to English-language readers, such as Louis-Sébastien Mercier (1740-1814), who in his novel “The Year 2440” imagined a rationalist Utopia in which everyone speaks French, the language of “universal reason”, and the charms of French women have won the day over “the melancholic character of the English”.
As this indicates, Hazareesingh cannot resist having fun with his subject — a forgivable form of relief after wading through the theories of, say, Jacques Derrida, the deconstructionist famous for his “elliptical propositions” and “unerring capacity for mystification”.
Hazareesingh mentions that Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French President who is preparing to fight an election in 2017 to win back his job, once misnamed Albert Camus, the existentialist author, “Stéphane Camus”. Scarcely less embarrassing was Sarkozy’s confusion of Roland Barthes, the philosopher, with Fabien Barthez, the World Cup-winning goalkeeper.
Hazareesingh also tells a story about Yves Roucaute, a political scientist. His fulminations against Anglo-American materialism prompted him, in a 2012 book, to praise the purchase of a sandwich as an unconscious but deeply symbolic act of homage to the French café, that “remarkable school of equality ... extraordinary school of liberty ... prodigious school of fraternity”.
Some contemporary French intellectuals, Hazareesingh says, might be well-advised to abandon such pretentiousness and instead confront dangerous ideas such as those of the far-right National Front. But as the title of his delightful book stresses, he is, in the end, paying affectionate tribute to France’s long love affair with ideas. “One thing is certain,” he concludes: “the French will remain the most intellectual of peoples, continuing to produce elegant and sophisticated abstractions about the human condition.”
–Financial Times
