Sudhir Hazareesingh - How the French Think: An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People

Copyright 2015 by Sudhir Hazareesingh

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Designed by Jeff Williams

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hazareesingh, Sudhir.

How the French think: an affectionate portrait of an intellectual people / Sudhir Hazareesingh.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-465-06166-2 (e-book)

1. Philosophy, French. 2. FranceIntellectual life. I. Title.

B1801.H39 2015

194dc23

2015022738

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Karma, who makes everything beautiful

CONTENTS

I began observing French public life as an adolescent in my native island of Mauritius in the 1970s, when I was drawn to the countrys culture, history, and politics by a variety of influences. First, my secondary school, the Royal College Curepipe, where we were served a copious diet of French classics, from Molire and Racine to Saint-Exupry, Gide, hell is other people Sartre, and the inevitable (and already somewhat irksome) Camus. The family setting was essential, too, notably because of my father, Kissoonsingh, a Cambridge-and Sorbonne-trained historian who worked as principal private secretary to the prime minister of Mauritius, Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam. He cultivated close ties with politico-literary elites in France and Africa, in particular the Gaullist writer and Frances first minister of culture Andr Malraux and the Senegalese president Lopold Sdar Senghor. Another inspiring figure was my brother, Sandip, a devotee of Napoleonic history, thanks to whom I plunged with relish into all aspects of the emperors legend.

There was also the French cultural attach in Mauritius, Antoine Colonna, a close friend of the family who was a native of Corsica (and thus a living link with the mythical birthplace of the emperor). Antoine provided us with subscriptions to French weekly periodicals such as Le Nouvel Observateur, Le Point, and LExpress, enabling me to remain closely attuned to French political and intellectual life. The French like to divide things into two, and the bifurcation of the time was between those who gathered around the liberal president, Valry Giscard dEstaing, and those who favored the left-wing parties of the Union de la Gauche. My sympathies were very much with the latter, especially with the Stalinist French communists, whose valiant past and unrelenting dogmatism appealed to my adolescent sensibility. I absorbed the writings of communist economists on the noxiousness of state monopoly capitalism, devoured the poems of Louis Aragon and Paul luard, and idolized communist martyrs and heroes such as Gabriel Pri, the antifascist campaigner who was executed by the Nazis at the Mont-Valrien fortress in 1941, and the Resistance leader Henri Rol-Tanguy, who launched the insurrection against the occupying forces in Paris in August 1944 from his underground bunker in Denfert-Rochereau. Yet I remember reading Giscards pamphlet Dmocratie franaise with quiet fascination; indeed, I could not help admiring its clinical elegance and programmatic ambition.

Just as vital in nurturing my Francophilia were television shows such as Bernard Pivots Apostrophes, which introduced me to the contemporary French literary scene and allowed me to savor its delicately rarefied atmosphere. I vividly recall a discussion between Pivot and the writer Marguerite Yourcenar in 1979 about whether good and evil were necessary. The exchanges were not particularly profound or conclusive. But it all sounded wonderful. Even though there was something slightly comical about all this preciosity, especially when viewed from the hazy distance of a little tropical island in the Indian Ocean, no one else at the time could rival the French in terms of sheer intellectual energy and panachenot the United States, still mired in its post-Vietnam maelstrom, and especially not Britain, with its industrial strife, shambling public finances, and bitterly factionalized Labour Party. In hindsight, my lifelong passion for the politics and history of France was clearly a product of those heady years.

Since the early 1990s, while teaching at Oxford, I have also lived in Paris for part of the year, and I associate with a variety of intellectual communities, from those within institutions of higher education and the editorial boards of journals and publishing houses to research networks, literary juries, and historical associations. These sustained interactions grant me an excellent vantage point from which to observe French thinking in all its glories, complexities, and idiosyncrasies. I thus came to realize that French traditions of thought are translated into concrete ways of life in which ideals and values are affirmed through social, cultural, and academic ritualsfestivals, anniversary celebrations, rentres littraires, demonstrations, marches, petitions, even doctoral examinations. The intimate connection between thought, practice, and performance is vividly brought home to me whenever I am invited to serve on a doctoral jury in France and observe the magnificent rhetorical style of my French colleagues.

My deeper immersion in the intellectual life of France has impressed upon me the powerful influence of literature in both reflecting and shaping the nations mindsetone of the striking features of French culture. Voltaires Candide and Rousseaus Nouvelle Hlose (The New Hlose) were essential vehicles for disseminating Enlightenment ideals of autonomy and authenticity, just as in the nineteenth century Alexandre Dumass novels gave the French people more of an impression of their royalist past than all the historians of the age. More recently, there are few more illuminating pathways into the complex experiences of occupation, resistance, and collaboration in France between 1940 and 1944 than Joseph Kessels Army of Shadows, Vercorss Silence of the Sea, and Louis-Ferdinand Clines Castle to Castle. These literary works underscore, too, some of the key (and admirable) elements of the French spirit: a willful predisposition to deviate from the beaten path, a cult of sentiment and mystery, and a resistance to all conformism.

The principal aim of this book is to identify the cultural distinctiveness of French thinkinga cosmology that is as much a matter of content as of temperament, style, and idiom. As we shall see, French thought is pervaded by religious concepts, images, and metaphors. Though secular in its public institutions and the collective beliefs and practices of its people, France continues to live under the shadow of its once-dominant Catholicism. I was already aware of this in Mauritius in the 1970s when I began to immerse myself in French political and intellectual culture: good and evil were not only subjects of literary and philosophical discussion but also concepts that were regularly used in political intercourse. Indeed, one of the classic works I first encountered, toward the end of the decade, was Alain Peyrefittes