Charlie Hebdo
Cultural guerrilla warfare

A controversy provoked by the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) student union has shaken up the little world of British universities over the last few weeks. The union published a document entitled "Decolonising SOAS: Confronting the White Institution". The document wants "white" philosophers to be taught in the school only if such teaching recalls "the colonial context within which the 'enlightenment philosophers' developed their thinking". The Daily Mail summarised the problem thus: "Students from a University of London college are demanding that philosophers such as Kant and Plato be dropped from the curriculum simply because they are white."

In this day and age, when questions of identity are highly sensitive, the students' demand immediately brought everything into a ferment. However, even if the course concerned can justify devoting a little more time to African and Asian thinkers, and thus a little less to Europeans, the way the demand is formulated makes it seem like an act of cultural guerrilla warfare.

Culture has become a battle ground and less and less a place for debate. Those who control culture and its teaching will shape tomorrow's society. At least that's the opinion of many here in France, when people say that the national story should be rewritten, like a political programme. Publishers Seuil have just brought out A World History of France , written by 122 historians. According to left-wing daily Libération the authors' ambition was to write a story different to that traditionally told by our old history books. An "exhilarating national counter-history", headlines the newspaper's front page.

Everyone is excited by the famous "national story".

The prefix "counter" inevitably recalls the military theories developed in the 1950s to fight the revolutionary movements of the period, using terms like "counter-insurgency" and "counter-revolutionary". More recently, Michel Onfray has written a counter-history of philosophy. "Counter" is fashionable. So now it's history's turn to undergo a "counter-offensive", more precisely the famous "national story" that everyone is so excited about. The right wants to bring it back to life. The left wants to give it the coup de grace. The cultural guerrilla war has only just started.

This isn't a new exercise. There have been many attempts to write another history, each in reality conforming more closely to the convictions of the person holding the pen. And at its most retrograde, the right has never had to be asked twice to deconstruct a history of France that it finds too modernist. The French Revolution was the first victim: the Vichy regime did its best to dismantle not only its political aftermath but also its very history. We already had an "exhilarating national counter-history" so long ago...

After the War, the far right produced another "exhilarating national counter-history", this time directed against the Resistance. De Gaulle was the sword and Pétain the shield. The ultra-reactionary right took every opportunity to rewrite history, devaluing the French Revolution, slandering the Popular Front and marginalising the Resistance. When at university I remember meeting a student, a great reader of Pierre Chaunu, accredited historian of Le Figaro in the 1980s, who explained to me with relish that the victory at Valmy wasn't really a victory, but a simple stroke of luck due to the fact that the Prussian soldiers had gorged themselves on soft fruit the day before, and were ill at the moment of the battle the next day. The French Revolution owed its salvation to a vulgar Prussian attack of diarrhoea.

Since then, I have always been suspicious of people with pretentions to writing "new history", pompously self-proclaiming it "counter-history". And even more wary of their apostles.

We know very well that history is not a block to be taken or left, whatever Clemenceau may have said about the French Revolution. Nothing is black; nothing is white. And the view point changes the story. It is enough to read Amin Maalouf's The Crusades Through Arab Eyes to convince yourself. No need to call it "counter-history".  It is enough to say "Through Arab Eyes", and things are clear from the start.

New battlefields have seen the light of day. After religion, it's culture's turn to find itself in the firing line. "When I hear the word 'culture', I draw my revolver", wrote Nazi author Hanns Johst. And today, when I hear the words "national story", what should I do? Draw my revolver or write my "counter-history"?