The idea that the French respect their intellectuals dies hard among the British. And when you wander around the streets of any French city it’s easy to see why. Rues Voltaire, Hugo and Racine tend to recur just round the corner from the equally conventional Rue Bonaparte. At municipal and state level, French government likes to claim its cultural reputation by acclaiming the glorious cultured dead. La terre et les morts, happily, includes les intellos as well as the cavalry.
London’s geographical centre, by contrast, records no Shakespeare Square, Milton Street or Dickens Place. Instead, we have Trafalgar Square — and nearby Waterloo Place. War and bloodshed — preferably of a Frog-bashing kind — is what the official mind of Britain has traditionally gone for when it wants to claim some public space for its own values.
Both France’s British admirers and her critics can seize on this fact and use it to support their case. Sensitive Francophiliacs intuit that things would go differently for them if only they could relocate away from the land of fog, mist and state-sponsored philistinism. But sceptics reckon that in France an intellectual is another name for someone who sleeps around, and suspect that the intellectuals’ public influence explains the hypocrisy, cruelty and inconsistency of French governments.
Now comes the news that France’s most famous 20th century intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre, has been relegated from the premier league by French public opinion. The poll to discover the country’s 100 favourite national figures, conducted by the television channel France 2, puts him at 96 — just behind anti-globalisation hero José Bové at 87. La Grande Sartreuse herself, Simone de Beauvoir, fails to appear at all. When it comes to its taste in intellectuals, the French, it seems, are as vulnerable as the rest of the west to showbiz values.
This year is the centenary of Sartre’s birth as well as the 25th anniversary of his death. And for most of his life he was box-office material. Small, ugly and smelly, he was the supremely useful French intellectual of the 20th century because he seemed to confirm so many prejudices about the breed. Some who met him thought the odour that emanated was goat-like. And the sex life certainly inclined in the same direction. De Beauvoir, so much the purer writer of good prose, thought her partner ”had a diabolical side to him: he conquered young girls by explaining their souls to them”.
But if Place Sartre seems some way away from arriving in Paris, the philosopher retains his importance as the last great French intellectual — the one who operated right across the waterfront in plays, essays, novels and more technical philosophical works.
He was a romantic about reason, and communicated that real lasting passion. After his time, the class of intellos succumbed to the relentless, pointless introspection of uninteresting minds. The 1970s saw the emergence of some really preposterous figures, such as Bernard-Henri Levy and André Glucksmann who were marketed as les nouveaux philosophes and remain boringly among us.
The vulgarity of their PR-directed minds made these thinkers into arch operators at turning thoughts into commodities. They jumped on the free-market bandwagon. It’s the main chance — and the camera lens — that supplies the only consistency in their careers. Their true talent consists of the ability to weave a web of words around any issue — so that the verbiage conceals and confuses rather than reveals. What really gets a showing is the self-conscious cleverness of a pointless arabesque.
Claiming the mantle of the original 18th-century philosophes who, in the name of reason, braved persecution and prosecution, seems just about the most impertinent part of the whole show. For, despite the appearance of dissent, these writers are a part of the French establishment. They are complicit in that establishment’s readiness to flatter the thinker and to fetishise his thoughts so that both can be turned into episodes in the history of taste. Which is why B-H L, like Coco Chanel’s pearls, is a confection designed for display — and is about as genuine an article as those same pearls.
The salon is the real French tradition to which the country’s current intellectual class belongs. And in a salon, ideas are not judged according to their truth but their pragmatic use in the business of managing and sustaining a career. At least Sartre showed how truth should castigate power — whether it was Stalinism in the late 40s or the US in the 50s. This failure of the post-Sartrean philosophers is just one aspect of a wider, generational collapse. Among historians there’s no successor to Fernand Braudel, and literary criticism knows no genius equal to that of Roland Barthes. And a visit to a French Left Bank bookshop is depressing, with all those rows of Gallimard books so beautifully produced and so full of vacuous wordplay. Vanity publishing with an intello twist has buried real thought and elevated the bogus. Which is why, even in the early spring sunshine, Paris is a city of the dead — a beautiful tomb for a dead culture. – Guardian Unlimited Â