France is inconceivable without the
baguette
, Mont Saint-Michel and the Eiffel Tower.
And without another figure as typical and topical as those mentioned: that of the intellectual.
It is part of the landscape, as Audrey Hepburn's character knew, which in the musical
Funny Face
, she sang upon arriving in Paris: “I want to visit the den of thinkers / like Jean-Paul Sartre.”
It was 1957 and the author of
Being and Nothingness
was an international star.
More information
Piketty, the last great French intellectual
From Zola, at the end of the 19th century, to Piketty today, passing through Sartre himself, Beauvoir, Foucault, Bourdieu, the relevance that the writer, the philosopher, the university student who, in addition to cultivating his specialty, intervenes in public life.
To talk about what he knows.
And what he doesn't.
Intello , as
it
is called for short, has been presumed dead several times in recent decades.
Dead and buried.
And yet, he refuses to die.
Intellectuals like Michel Onfray appear on the front page or are interviewed in prime time to offer their opinion on current events.
Politicians like President Emmanuel Macron try to clothe themselves with an intellectual aura, because they believe they know that, without theory, without a vision that explains everything and gives it coherence, nothing makes sense.
There are those who believe that in this time of viral lies and obscurantist threats they are more necessary than ever.
“Seeing what we see in France, and around the world, I think there is still a role for intellectuals,” says François Dosse (Paris, 73 years old), historian of ideas and author of
The Saga of French Intellectuals.
1944-1989
, recently published in Spanish by Akal, in translation by Juanmari Madariaga, Francisco López Martín and Ana Useros Martín.
But everything is more complicated today than in the golden age of intellectuality.
“As Paul Ricoeur said,” Dosse explains, quoting the philosopher whose biography he is the author, “today we choose between more complex and less Manichean options than before, and things are no longer between black and white, but between gray and gray, Although there are nuances, it is in the gray.”
Thomas Piketty, photographed at the Paris School of Economics, on November 4. Manuel Braun
There is an extensive bibliography on intellectuals.
Critical essays, such as
Intellectuals
, by the British Paul Johnson, who concluded in 1989: “One of the lessons of our tragic century, which has seen so many millions of innocent lives sacrificed in pursuit of plans to improve the lot of humanity, is: ' Beware of intellectuals.”
The French historian Michel Winock ended The Century of the Intellectuals
in the 1990s
with an epilogue in the form of a question: “The end of the intellectuals?”
With the two volumes of
The Saga...
, Dosse has perhaps written the definitive story.
He has the credentials.
Biographer of Ricoeur and scholar of structuralism.
Marked by May 68, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, he lived in Prague, and his studies at the experimental university of Vincennes.
And more: it was he who put one of his outstanding students at the Institute of Political Studies in contact with Ricoeur, to help him prepare his work
History, memory, oblivion
.
The student's name was Emmanuel Macron.
Only in France could that happen, only in the country of intellectuals, one of the few where it has prestige.
Still.
It is a story that comes from the Enlightenment and the Revolution.
Also, according to Dosse, of “the strong secularization.”
“The intellectuals put on the habits of priests, and exercised their role,” he explains, “with that somewhat prophetic role of telling society its evils and difficulties, and the solutions it can provide.”
Dosse has distanced himself from his former student, whom he viewed with sympathy upon coming to power in 2017. He said in 2022, after publishing
Macron or the Lost Illusions
: “I relate him to Lucien de Rubempré, the hero of
The Lost Illusions
, the Balzac's novel, who to be successful is willing to say anything, to become a chameleon who defends one position in the morning and another in the afternoon.
The philosopher Michel Onfray, in February 2018.Bruno ARBESU/REA
Through the more than a thousand pages of
The Saga...
, ancient ideological and personal battles parade (the epic breakups of Sartre, with Camus or with Merleau-Ponty), fashions and currents, historical earthquakes (the invasion of Hungary in 1956, 1968, the gulag, 1989...), the glaring errors (Sartre with communist totalitarianism, Foucault with Khomeini's Iran...) and background music: ideas move the world.
A lost world?
Pure archeology?
“Yes and no,” Dosse answers in the living room of his Paris apartment.
An idea of the role of the intellectual has disappeared: “What marked this period is a belief in a sense of history, a direction of history towards a more emancipated, more just society.
The person who embodied this belief was Sartre.
"He was the figure of the prophetic intellectual, capable of having a total, universal vision."
The sinking leaves us alone with the present.
And with the past, elevated to an object of worship and a political weapon, or a museum piece.
The overabundance of memory and the instrumentalization of the past.
“Presentism is both what is present and also the entire past, which becomes present: there is a melancholic relationship with history,” says Dosse.
“The absence of a future has the effect of excessive memory and commemoration.
What I call acute
commemorationitis
.”
In the duel of the future
The historian believes that “we live in mourning for the future.”
But he adds that, with the pandemic, the doors of the future, which had been closed for some time, were reopened: “The future has returned among us, but it is no longer that of splendorous dawns, but that of catastrophe.”
And that is where, he believes, intellectuals can once again play a role.
No longer to promise splendorous dawns, but, quoting Camus, to “prevent the world from falling apart”, a greater task, in reality, than “remaking it”, according to the author of
The Plague
.
Therefore, in his opinion, the figure of the intellectual has not lost its meaning.
No longer the “prophetic” one, but the one he describes as “specific.”
That is, the specialist in a field of knowledge, not a generalist, but who today could be the biologist, the economist, the astrophysicist... What happens with the specific intellectuals of the 21st century is that "they have less visibility, they no longer speak on behalf of a totality.”
If he wrote a third volume, the cover could be a
collage
(there are no longer global stars: the photo on the cover of the first volume is Sartre; that of the second, Foucault).
“The role of these intellectuals today is to transmit and metabolize their knowledge so that public opinion and wise
knowledge
come together,” says Dosse.
“The greatest task is to once again provide a horizon of expectations, of hope.”
The alternative is disturbing.
The author of
The Saga...
believes that “a society without a project, a society in which the individual has no project, is a senile society that expects no other event than disappearance.”
He concludes: “If a society in crisis is told that it has no project or future, what does it do?
She withdraws into herself, into an imaginary identity, and into hatred of the other.
It is a fertile ground for international fascism.”
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