How the French Think by Sudhir Hazareesingh - review

The rise and fall of l’intellectuelle. By Andrew Neather

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How the French Think by Sudhir Hazareesingh (Allen Lane, £20)

French intellectuals may no longer hold much sway outside France but their nation remains a peculiarly intellectual one. Ideas have mattered a lot to modern French identity — far more so than in Britain. This is thus far more than a readable and erudite intellectual history: Hazareesingh, an Oxford politics lecturer, never loses sight of the task of explaining how those ideas have shaped the French mind.

It is a distinctive if contradictory tradition. There is the very French love of grand, universal constructs, and an impatience with empiricism. Yet such abstractions are expressed with the French language’s characteristic lucidity, and with the Cartesian rationality still at the heart of France’s self-image (most French people would be puzzled by the English habit of lumping them together with hot-headed “latins”.)

And it is an intellectual tradition interwoven with France’s revolutionary history, according a central role to the state and patriotism: a “fixation with the nation and the collective self”.

The first half of the book explores strands in French thought from the 17th to the early 20th century. Hazareesingh surveys the enduring hold (and adaptability) of Cartesian principles: as recently as 2009 there was a row over the final resting place of Descartes’s skull. He examines the appeal of the occult; the strong role of utopianism, from Rousseau through Fourier and Saint Simon to communism; and ideals of science, from Comte to the technocrats of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration. He traces the sharp and enduring post-revolutionary division of the country between Left and Right, and the balance of loyalties between the nation and the local, la France profonde.

This is an illuminating context for the second half of the book’s examination of how such ideas have held up in the post-Second World War era. After Vichy, the Left-Right division of the nation was as stark as ever: “la France coupée en deux”. Yet as Tony Judt has memorably shown, the communist Left’s dominance of the decade after the war also held the seeds of its own undoing, fatally compromised by Stalinism.

The alternative, Gaullism, decisively recast the French Right: patriotic but also republican. Indeed, it was driven by a sense of France’s historical mission and place in the world, not actually so very far from the republican Left. As De Gaulle put it in the famous opening paragraph of his 1954 Mémoires de Guerre — Gaullism’s Ur-text: “France cannot be France without grandeur.” Such ambition also put it, via Jean Monnet, at the very heart of the would-be EU project.

Yet since the failure of 1968, France’s intellectuals have lost their way. Jean-Paul Sartre, tribune of the Left, died in 1980, his liberal sparring partner Raymond Aron in 1983. The Eighties and Nineties saw intellectuals drift away from the Left but also from the public sphere itself.

More seriously, French intellectuals of all stripes have proved unable to counter the rise of the far Right. Marine Le Pen’s Front National appeals to some distinctively French traditions — patriotic exceptionalism, hostility to “Anglo-Saxon” culture and capitalism — but in a narrow and bitter way, part of France’s broader abandonment of its mission civilatrice as it turns in on itself.

Can French intellectuals break through their nation’s deep recent gloom? They at least have a word for such pessimism: déclinisme. Meanwhile, the Left’s reaction to this year’s Charlie Hebdo murders was framed largely in terms of republican secularism. There’s life in the power of ideas in France yet.
