When some four million French men and women marched to declare their solidarity with the victims of the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher massacres in January, Voltaire was among them. An intellectual more than a century before the term was coined, Voltaire was quoted (“Stamp out the infamous thing!” by which he meant organized Christianity) and misquoted (“I don’t agree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.”); his busts were graced with “Je suis Charlie” banners; and hundreds of tweets roosted on the hashtag #Je suis Voltaire. And as anyone who tried to buy a copy discovered, Voltaire’s small book Treatise on Tolerance, first issued a quarter of a millennium ago, rocketed to the top of the best-seller list.
Six months later, what are we to make of the smile, as elusive as the Mona Lisa’s, that Voltaire flashes in his portraits? Ever the successful businessman, is he smiling with resignation over the royalties he can no longer pocket from the sales of his book? Ever the inveterate skeptic, is he smiling with recognition that the war on behalf of reason and tolerance is never-ending? Or, in light of the heated discussion since that January show of unity, is he smiling with the realization that his 21st-century descendants are no more capable of speaking with a single voice than were his own contemporaries?
The national consensus displayed on the boulevards of France’s cities on January 11, compared at first to the “union sacrée” of 1914, has long since collapsed into confused and conflicting claims among politicians and intellectuals. Nowhere was the dissonance more striking than in the recent brawl between Emmanuel Todd, one of the country’s pre-eminent intellectuals, and Manuel Valls, who when not lecturing intellectuals serves as France’s prime minister.
In his controversial pamphlet Qui est Charlie? (“Who Is Charlie?”), Todd lambastes what he calls the “sham” of January 11. As he told the newspaper Libération, he did not join his fellow citizens on the public squares of France’s cities that day. Instead he remained at home, thunderstruck: “I experienced this moment of apparent unanimity as if it were a totalitarian flash. It was the one moment in my life that I had the impression that it was not possible to speak in France.”
“Being a novelist or a philosopher is a certain way to put yourself at risk.”
Todd’s argument is as simple as it is incendiary: The millions of French citizens who demonstrated that day live in regions that are solidly bourgeois and Catholic, while the “peripheral” zones, heavy with marginalized classes — immigrants, lower-middle-class and blue-collar workers — never bothered to show up. Why would they? he asks. The Charlie demonstrators represented only themselves: the educated and well-to-do who, in effect, clamored for the “absolute right — duty, even — to caricature the religion of the weakest member of society.”
A sociologist, Todd also shows the French intellectual’s love of paradox by arguing that the greatest mobilizations on January 11 unfolded in regions with, historically, the deepest Catholic and anti-republican roots. As he has argued in earlier works, while the churches have gradually emptied in those parts of the country, the reactionary values they instilled remain, creating a form of “zombie Catholicism.” For Todd, January 11 represented, in effect, a horror movie for republican and secular France: The Invasion of the Zombie Catholics.
Valls was more worried by zombie intellectuals — those who maintain the guild’s reflexes but have lost the faith. In an essay in Le Monde, he derided Todd’s “inversion of values” in portraying Islamic fanatics as vulnerable, decried Todd’s “dangerous game” of pretending that the rich own the Republic, and demanded that France’s intellectuals “shed light, not confusion.” Thinkers like Todd who “have lost faith in France,” Valls wrote, are reinforcing the public’s cynicism about the nation’s future.
In high dudgeon, Todd replied that Valls had either not read his book or was stupid; possibly both. His insult echoed that of another intellectual, Michel Onfray. A few weeks earlier, Onfray, who writes more books than one suspects even his editor can read, had dismissed the prime minister as a “crétin.” The intellectual had taken umbrage at Valls’s remark that Onfray had “perdre les pédales,” or lost his bearings, when he said he preferred a “fair analysis” by a neofascist thinker like Alain de Benoist to an “unfair analysis” by a leftist thinker like Bernard Henri-Lévy. When asked whether he had spoken too harshly, Onfray replied: “I checked the dictionary. Valls is what one calls a cretin.”
From an American perspective, what is remarkable about this confrontation is not its virulence: Voltaire was, after all, far more punishing in his attacks on those, from priests to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who opposed his “party of humanity.” During the Dreyfus Affair, not only was the language of right-wing thinkers like Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras incendiary and racist, but intellectual and political leaders like Jean Jaurès and Georges Clemenceau fought duels. (So far, Valls and Todd have not gone from sharpening words to sharpening sabers.)
Instead, what is remarkable is that these rhetorical jousts between public intellectuals and political leaders exist at all. In the United States, such collisions happen only rarely — most recently Cornel West’s nearly obsessive attacks on President Obama, as described in Michael Eric Dyson’s indictment of West in The New Republic.
More important, when did an American president last ask public intellectuals to rally to his government? That is precisely what Valls did during the lead-up to local elections, in March. Worried by the powerful boost in opinion polls the terrorist attacks had given to the xenophobic and authoritarian National Front, the prime minister ran from one interview to another as if his hair were on fire. Confessing his fear over the prospect of the Front’s coming to power, the Socialist leader railed against “widespread indifference.” More troubling, he thought, was the silence of Voltaire’s successors: “Where are the intellectuals, where are the great consciences of this country who should be mounting the barricades?”
During a brief visit to Paris this spring, as well as in subsequent email exchanges, I took the measure of those supposed to man the barricades. I interviewed a number of intellectuals — including Tzvetan Todorov, Pascal Bruckner, and Thierry Pech — whose voices carry far in France, and whose silence was criticized by Valls.
This is not the first time French politicians have criticized the “silence of the intellectuals.” In fact, President François Mitterrand’s spokesperson, Max Gallo, coined the phrase in 1983. In the pages of Le Monde, he railed against those intellectuals who, so boisterous when the Socialist Party came to power two years earlier, had since fallen silent as the government reeled from one self-made economic crisis to another. It seemed as if the crew was abandoning the socialist ship of state as it approached the reefs. Cognizant that the traditional socialist nostrums for the economy no longer worked, and concerned by the presence of Communists in the government, intellectuals like André Glucksmann and Alain Finkielkraut nevertheless maintained their damning silence.
Unvarnished truth to one intellectual often smacks of ideological dogma to another.
Bruckner was also among those intellectuals upon whom the left could no longer depend during the Mitterrand era. A celebrated novelist and controversial essayist, he established his reputation in the 1970s as a leading light of the so-called “nouveaux philosophes.” This was the group of young thinkers, their words as striking as their looks, who distinguished themselves by dismantling the Marxist worldview of the French left. While some critics argue that the “new philosophers” have since become the new neoconservatives, others believe they remain progressives, faithful to the core values of the non-Marxist left.
The current Socialist government, however, has few doubts about where Bruckner falls on the ideological spectrum. Recently, after the minister of national education, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, revealed her proposed reforms of the school curriculum, Bruckner gave an interview to the conservative newspaper Le Figaro. He criticized her for wanting to replace the teaching of Greek and Latin with popular music and movies. The republican schools had once offered an “ideal of excellence,” he declared, but now they were “the vehicle of ignorance and mediocrity.” When the minister dismissed him as a “pseudointellectual,” Bruckner replied that he could just as easily call her a “pseudo-minister.” (Soon after, the government retreated on some of its proposed changes, a sign that intellectuals still matter in France.)
Before that skirmish broke out, I had the occasion to talk at length with Bruckner. When I asked him about Valls’s frustration over the silence of the intellectuals, he gave a weary smile. In France, he told me, intellectuals are in a paradoxical situation: “When they talk, everyone asks them to remain silent or to mind their own business. When they do not express themselves on every subject, the media start exclaiming, Where are the intellectuals? And every year a well-documented book is published about the disappearance of the intelligentsia.”
The predicament, for Bruckner, was not just perennial, but part and parcel of his profession: We are either “superjournalists who should be aware of everything that happens on this planet, or a moral conscience that reminds the nation of its ideals.” He sighed. “Our role, as a result, is either overestimated or despised.”
Nevertheless, he insisted that postmortems for the French intellectual are premature. Voltaire relied on his network of correspondents and literary salons, and a century later Émile Zola and the socialist tribune Jean Jaurès reached the public through newspapers and mass meetings. Now Bruckner and his peers have embraced TV and radio. Where else, he asked me, “can a philosopher be received at the table of the president, communicate by text with the prime minister, and engage himself in a TV debate with another minister?”
This might be the best of all possible worlds for intellectuals, but as for the rest of us, not always. Consider one egregious episode of intellectual overreach: Bernard Henri-Lévy, yet another founding member of the nouveaux philosophes, and his support of the Western invasion of Libya, in 2011. Whether he persuaded then-President Nicolas Sarkozy to join the action — which is BHL’s modest claim — or served as a conduit between Sarkozy and the Libyan rebels, the fact remains that the invasion was a strategic catastrophe. As The New Yorker journalist John Lee Anderson recently reported, when BHL was asked why he advocated an invasion, he replied: “Why? I don’t know! Of course, it was human rights, for a massacre to be prevented, and blah blah blah — but I also wanted them to see a Jew defending the liberators against dictatorship, to show fraternity. I wanted the Muslims to see that a Frenchman — a Westerner and a Jew — could be on their side.”
Unlike BHL, Bruckner knows that an intellectual should know better, and know more, than to give “blah, blah, blah” — not to mention the wish to be seen as a Jewish liberator — as an answer to a question of far-ranging strategic, political, and moral consequences. Rather than cite Henri-Lévy, however, Bruckner pointed to Jean-Paul Sartre as a paradigm of intellectual irresponsibility, who especially in his later years signed petitions without knowing what they concerned. Competence, Bruckner emphasized, is one of the primary requisites of the intellectual.
But so, too, is risk-taking. Leaning across the table, Bruckner confided: “A good intellectual must be méchant.” Did he, I asked, really mean “mean”? Yes and no, he replied: “If you are scared to assert your thoughts, if you are not ready to be insulted, spat on, or even threatened physically, then you should pick up another profession. Being a novelist or a philosopher is a certain way to put yourself at risk.”
As we prepared to leave the table, Bruckner looked at his beeping smartphone. Smiling, he said the message had to do with an impending court case brought against him by Les Indigènes de la République, an antiracist political organization that has taken issue with his critique of Western guilt over its colonial past. Slipping the phone into his pocket, he smiled: “Better a court summons than a fatwa.”
Méchant? I understood Bruckner’s point, but this was the last quality I’d apply to Tzvetan Todorov. I met the renowned literary and cultural critic over lunch at a small restaurant in the Latin Quarter. When I asked him what he considered an intellectual’s qualifications, he tilted his head, clasped his hands, and paused. Not surprisingly, given his pathbreaking work in semiotics and poetics, Todorov chose his words carefully. One must be not only a specialist in a particular scientific or artistic domain, he told me, but also a generalist capable of connecting to a general audience.
In his own professional trajectory, he has mastered both roles: After his early work in the rarefied field of poetics, his attention shifted to questions of the place of the other in Western societies, as well as the relationship between the diversity of cultures and the unity of the human race. Having grown up in Communist Bulgaria and settled in France in 1963, Todorov noted that his background inevitably influenced that work — most famously The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other — as well as his more recent studies of totalitarianism and democracy, including Hope and Memory: Lessons From the 20th Century, and The Inner Enemies of Democracy.
In reflecting on his own relationship to politics, Todorov echoed Julien Benda’s notion of the “clerk.” Author of the classic La Trahison des clercs, or The Treason of the Intellectuals, published in 1927, Benda defined the intellectual as someone who, uninterested in practical ambitions and untouched by the political passions of his day, practices the life of the mind. Thanks to such men, modeled after Socrates, “humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honored good.”
Todorov upholds the same ideal. The intellectual’s duty, he told me, is “to place truth and justice above party loyalty. He is not a propagandist engaged in the promotion of an ideology.”
The problem, of course, is that unvarnished truth to one intellectual often smacks of ideological dogma to another. Benda wrote his book to condemn reactionary right-wing thinkers like Maurras, who, he argued, approached the world not through the pursuit of universal truths but instead by the privileging of the French nation. That Benda himself became an apologist for Soviet Communism after World War II reveals the fragility — and danger — of such an ideal.
Is the present dissonance so surprising, then? On the one hand, Bruckner insists that his criticism of the government’s education reforms is the product of pure reflection: an activity, he writes, that always rises “above partisan divisions and indifferent to party lines.” All too predictably, Vallaud-Belkacem argues that Bruckner and his cohort are motivated by partisan and divisive concerns. They worry, she declared, that a more egalitarian school system will undermine their own privileged status.
While Todorov keeps his distance and Bruckner keeps throwing punches, other intellectuals keep open minds toward the government. Representative of a younger generation of thinkers, Thierry Pech, director of the progressive think tank Terra Nova, expressed sympathy for Valls’s efforts to mobilize his peers. “There’s a kind of defeatism in the air,” he said. Yet the problem is not that intellectuals refuse to engage; instead, the time of the “engaged intellectual” has itself passed.
Rather than resignation, Pech insisted, the times call for reinvention. Like both Todorov and Bruckner, he pointed to the Internet’s seismic impact on intellectuals’ traditional soapboxes: “The op-ed pages of newspapers now speak only to the choir.” More important, the Internet has undermined the vertical relationship between the intellectual and her readers: “Yesterday’s intellectual authorities now find themselves on the same playing field with ordinary people.”
But while Todorov and Bruckner seem to believe that these virtual matters will sort themselves out, and that the traditional intellectual will survive, Pech is less confident. Arguing that his guild must respond to the new technologies in new ways, he believes that they need to surrender the individualist model fashioned by the Voltaires and Zolas. If intellectuals are to survive, he said, their work “must take more collective and collaborative forms adapted to the Internet and social media.”
Pech’s hopes and fears reflect a more general mood in France. Many question the nation’s capacity to compete in the new world of globalization and integration. In fact, a recurrent theme, if not obsession, of the cultural and industrial elite has been the country’s economic, diplomatic, and artistic decline. So much so that, predictably, a small literary industry has been built on the subject of le déclinisme.
Along with so much else that has made for French “exceptionalism,” the future of her intellectuals, once one of her glories, might now seem in peril. But note that Voltaire himself feared at times that his struggle against the “infâme” would falter and fail. And Zola, in the darkest moments of the Dreyfus Affair, wrote that he lived “in mortal fear of the abyss into which France was falling.” The challenges that confront today’s intellectuals, while great, are no greater than those their predecessors overcame. One almost suspects that as long as future generations continue to write books devoted to the twilight of France’s intellectuals, the sun will continue to shine on them.
Robert Zaretsky is a professor of world cultures and literatures in the department of modern and classical languages and the Honors College at the University of Houston. His latest book, Boswell’s Enlightenment, was recently published by Harvard University Press.
