Shlomo Sand - The End of the French Intellectual: From Zola to Houellebecq

Im an intellectual myself, Lambert said. And it annoys me when people make that word an insult. They seem to think that an empty head means theyve really got balls.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins, 1954

What we do know is that speech is a power, and that a group of people, somewhere between corporation and social class, are well enough defined by the fact that to a varying extent they wield the nations language.

Roland Barthes, Authors and Writers, 1960

The last forty years have seen the publication in Paris of several dozen books and articles on the presence and status of intellectuals. It will not demonstrate much originality on my part if I maintain that nowhere else have so many works been devoted to intellectuals and the intelligentsia. True, debate about the intellectuals is not exclusively French; a number of studies of the subject may be found in other countries. But in terms of quantity, their production is far from equalling the Parisian crop.

It is not an easy task to search for the cause in specifically French factors. Many have tried to do so, appealing to circumstances and factors arising from political philosophy, ethics, history and sociology. Only a small minority of these works are at all convincing. The majority of scholars and commentators have adopted the idea that the age of great intellectuals is over, supplanted by the age of summaries. This hypothesis may indeed be well founded, and it is something I shall re-examine. But first of all, we must recognize the halo of nostalgia that surrounds these long elegies over the classic intellectuals. After all, we all grew up in the immense shadow of these great figures! If we are wise, we are aware that our own shadows will be smaller and more short-lived. It might even be said, perhaps wrongly, that we who remain are like the mannerists at the end of the Renaissance, which we are trying vainly to preserve, imitate, or even plunge back into.

I am not certain this little book will make a real contribution to deciphering the double enigma of the intellectual: the specificity of France, and the disappearance (or not) of great intellectuals. But having long been bothered by these questions, I felt the need to put my fragmentary reflections in order. In the following pages, my intention is not to write the nth history of intellectuals in France. There are already enough of these, and exemplary ones at that. I simply wanted to cast a few beams of light on certain periods and forms of discourse, selected in this brief particular history.

A mandarin self-portrait

All writing bears in its recesses signs from which a self-portrait can be sketched, but it is clear that the autobiographical dimension will be all the more prominent in any account of intellectuals. There will be nothing surprising, therefore, about finding in the discussions of the present book indications of a personal

To start with, a confession! I am today a historian by profession, but my desire to become an intellectual goes back a long way. I dreamed of it already in my youth. More precisely, like many others, I had the ambition early on to be a writer; in other words, to write stories. I grew up in a home where neither of my parents had finished primary school and they were barely literate. Yet both of them loved to read, and my father was in the habit of respectfully caressing the few books in his library. His relation to the written word was one of veneration, perhaps a belated echo of a childhood in a Jewish family in Eastern Europe. And as himself a communist, he repeated to me more than once Lenins motto: Learn, learn, and learn again! It is understandable then that I detested learning and hated school; I was expelled from high school at the age of sixteen.

In actual fact, my passion for reading stopped me doing my homework. Even at school, I hid away to read during classes, to the point that more than once the teacher sent me out of the room. The fine and varied literature that I read was almost all in translation: from classic works by Jack London, Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens, to detective stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and Georges Simenon, not to mention fascinating pornographic books. I also appreciated the biblical stories that contained all three genres. Thanks to this daily reading, as well as my night-time dreams, I managed to escape for a moment from the poor immigrant quarter of small-town Jaffa, and joyously sail off to magical countries.

One book, however, played a decisive role in my trajectory, substituting for the nave model of the writer, as I conceived this in my early youth, the figure of the intellectual that I would go on to worship in the following years. In due course, I came across Simone de Beauvoirs famous novel The Mandarins, published in 1954 and translated into Hebrew at the end of the decade. It was towards the mid-1960s that I read it, though I no longer remember the exact year. However, I have kept a clear memory of its extraordinary characters, who moved between literary writing, journalism and political action, between sexual freedom and humanist morality. I was bowled over by the romantic levity of the world of those who lived from writing, by the idealization of their intellectual commitment in the service of just causes, and against the enchanting backdrop of the City of Light.