"Where have all the intellectuals gone?", Pete Seeger might sing in 2007 had he been French. Since the affaire Dreyfus a century ago, intellectuels de gauche (leftwing intellectuals) have been a central part of the French political landscape. From the group around Jean-Paul Sartre and his others after 1945, to the debates around Stalinism and the Algerian war in the 1950s and beyond, the drumbeat of intellectual argument has also been a constant accompaniment of France's election campaigns.
The debates have always included intellectuels de droite (rightwing intellectuals) too, even if they found it hard to escape from the infamous shadow of Robert Brasillach or Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who gloated over France's defeat in 1940 and eyed Adolf Hitler with anti-Semitic admiration. But from the late 1940s, well respected figures such as Sartre's long-time nemesis, Raymond Aron (1905-83) came to represent a serious alternative to leftwing orthodoxy.
It was easy to be de gauche when the right was in power, even if some joined General Charles de Gaulle when, in the name of France grandeur, he sided against the United States in the1960s. It was a harder, less glamorous choice when the left came to power in 1981 with President François Mitterrand and had to cope with the compromises - sometimes unsavoury - that government often demands. This is the ground on which one of Mitterrand's intellectuals, the prolific journalist, novelist and historian Max Gallo - briefly the government's spokesman in 1983-84 - had criticised the "silence of the intellectuals", before moving towards the nationalist left represented by former minister Jean-Pierre Chevènement. Now, Gallo, whose most recent books include Fier d'être Français (Proud to be French) and L'âme de la France (France's soul) is leaning closer to rightist presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy, who wants to save his country's "national identity" by being tough on immigrants and immigration.
The fall of the Berlin wall and the disintegration of the Soviet block in 1989 was a watershed for French intellectuals. According to historian Michel Winock, the intellectual world, which worked mostly on a binary mode - pro vs anticommunist - has progressively disintegrated. This probably explains why a number of former intellectuels de gauche has now changed sides, a reflection and symbol of the move to the right of French society. They include philosopher André Glucksmann; in an op-ed published in Le Monde on 30 January 2007, he followed his support for President Bush over the war in Iraq by championing Nicolas Sarkozy as "the only candidate today who has sided with this France with a heart" - giving as examples Sarko's denunciation of the martyrdom of Bulgarian nurses in Libya and the massacres in Darfur, while, "sunk in her narcissism (...) what does the left answer? Not much, alas!"
The writer Jean-Marie Laclavetine replied to this in the same newspaper on 6 February: "Your youth was devoted to horrible idols (the Great Helmsman, Mao Zedong) but your past aberrations haven't stopped you pretending to educate the people. Like yesterday, you need a powerful man to flatter, a bad guy to hate and complacent ears to pour your vast theories into". The polemics go on. Alain Finkielkraut, another well known intellectual and philosopher, now says he is "appalled at the present state of the left" while claiming, like Gallo, that he had not yet decided to vote for Sarko.
Patrice de Beer is former London and Washington correspondent for Le Monde.
Among Patrice de Beer's articles in openDemocracy:
"Paris in flames: the limits of repression"
(November 2005)
"France's immigration myths"
(9 February 2006)
"Law and disorder in France"
(March 2006)
"France's crisis after crisis"
(April 2006)
"The Ségolène phenomenon"
(May 2006)
"Indigènes: enlarging France's history"
(October 2006)
"Ségolène Royal: the power of difference"
(November 2006)
"French politics: where extremes meet"
(4 December 2006)
"Nicolas Sarkozy, the American candidate"
(20 December 2006)
"France's immigration politics"
(12 February 2006)
"Why is the left so gauche? "
(26 February 2007)
"François Bayrou, the extreme centre's champion"
(12 March 2007)
"France's telepolitics: showbiz, populism, reality" (2 April 2007)
The populist crunch
Régis Debray, the former leftist icon - he joined Che Guevara in the Bolivian jungle - now turned into an expert on religion, regrets that the word "career" has now replaced "character" in a France where the political world has slid to the right. But, while remaining on the "left", he has not sided with its champion, the socialist Ségolène Royal. This is also true of another media-friendly intellectuel de gauche, Bernard Henri-Lévy, whose main contribution to the campaign has so far been a column ("One evening with Ségolène") in February 2007 in the weekly Le Point which ended with this cryptic sentence: "I leave her, perplexed as ever, but with the feeling that people - first of all myself - have been unfair to this woman who, anyway, doesn't look like the image she has given of herself".
In the context of modern recent French history, the current presidential campaign leading to the two-round election on 22 April and 5 May 2007 appears like an anachronistic blot: presidential candidates have chosen actors, singers or showbiz and sports icons rather than the usual intellectual figures as their cheerleaders, and the general public doesn't really care whether this or that intellectual is siding with this or that candidate. Sarkozy has co-opted ageing but ever popular singer Johnny Halliday, despite the fact that he has moved to Switzerland to pay less tax, and Royal, the female rap singer Diam. Quelle horreur! In a democracy ruled by opinion polls, the internet and the media, where candidates, concentrating on daily and local issues rather than on the big picture, want to relate directly to "real people" while voters want direct contact with candidates, what's left to intellectuals? Their vision can't compete with the prevalent populism, as no candidate can compete with the vast culture and writing ability of a de Gaulle or a Mitterrand.
While Ségo repeats that all voters are "experts" and voters consider they know best the society in which they toil, real experts, traders in skills or ideas, have been far too often shunted aside and their roles reduced. Pierre Rosanvallon, sociologist and founder of the leftwing think-tank La République des Idées still believes that intellectuals have a role to play: "One should not downplay the place ideas can have in a society. But it would be absurd to overestimate the individual role of intellectuals", he wrote in Le Monde on 22 March.
The role of the new intellectuals should then, argued Rosanvallon, be to provide a toolbox to decipher the society where they live, but certainly "not to add another touch of phantasm to reality nor some ideology to the prevalent disarray (...) It is, on the opposite, to remove these phantasms and suggest a deeper and more longsighted understanding of things".
The one-issue ideacrat
One problem might be that intellectuals of today are not those of yesteryear, especially those intellectuels de gauche, a breed the French have been so proud of and whose influence has spread around the world, including in prestigious American universities (notably Jacques Derrida, building for decades the image of France as the Mecca of ideas). Besides, in a world torn by so many dramatic issues, where the dividing line between left and right, good and evil, national and international are ever changing and more and more blurred, and where a global vision is even more difficult to achieve, it is easy to find oneself siding with one camp on Darfur and another on Iraq or the Israel-Palestine conflict. Thus the appearance of what might be called "one-issue intellectuals" - in the manner of "one-issue parties" - whose visions revolve around a particular problem, like human rights, which, however justified, supersedes all others and governs a person's visions on all others; or of other types of intellectual who can change their stance according to the flavour of the day and media exposure.
No one could be more critical of intellectuals than Michel Winock, according to whom "the difference with those of yesterday - Sartre, (Albert) Camus, (Maurice) Merleau-Ponty (1908-61), Aron - is that they wrote works, whereas those you see today on the forefront are 'professionals' of a good cause. Search for their writings! (...) Since Bourdieu's death, beacons don't shine anymore, only candle-ends".
The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) whom Winock invokes here was a genuine intellectuel de gauche, close to the far left, who fought against the increasing role of the media in society; he has had his post-mortem revenge both on a Socialist Party too reformist for his taste and its 2007 presidential candidate: "For me, Ségolène Royal, we instantly know she is not de gauche" he said in an interview filmed in 1999, released in 2006 by a "left-of-the-left" blog. But then, was not Bourdieu himself more a polemicist than the guide French intellectuals had been during the 20th century?
