The End of the French Intellectual

From Zola to Houellebecq

Shlomo Sand, David Fernbach

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781786635082
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786635105
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Internationally acclaimed Israeli historian Shlomo Sand made his mark with books such as The Invention of the Jewish People and The Invention of the Land of Israel. Returning here to an early fascination, he turns his attention to the figure of the French intellectual.

From his student years in Paris, Sand has repeatedly come up against the "great French thinkers." He has an intimate knowledge of the Parisian intellectual world and its little secrets, on which he draws to overturn certain myths attaching to the figure of the "intellectual" that France prides itself on having invented. Mixing reminiscence and analysis, he revisits a history that, from the Dreyfus Affair through to Charlie Hebdo, seems to him that of a long decline. As a long-time admirer of Zola, Sartre and Camus, Sand is staggered to see what the French intellectual has become today, in such characters as Michel Houellebecq, Eric Zemmour and Alain Finkielkraut. In a work that gives no quarter, and focuses particularly on the Judeophobia and Islamophobia of the elites, he casts on the French intellectual scene a gaze that is both disabused and mordant.

PART ONE:

Intellectuals in the
Torment of the Century

CHAPTER 1

The Dreyfus Affairs: Human
Rights or Author’s Rights?

Nothing is worse than these gangs of semi-intellectuals. A semi-culture destroys instinct without replacing it with a conscience. All these aristocrats of thought insist on maintaining that they do not think like the common herd.

Maurice Barrès, ‘La protestation
des intellectuels’, 1 February 1898

The sociology of intellectuals is certainly the weakest point in all sociology, and for good reason: in this case, intellectuals are both judge and judged.

Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Les intellectuels dans
le champ de la lutte des classes’, 1985

Having grown up and been educated in Israel, I heard about the Dreyfus affair at an early age. In every pedagogic presentation on anti-Semitism in history, the ‘affair’ was used as irrefutable proof of the eternal hatred of Jews, with the conclusion that this persecution could only cease when Jews were gathered in their homeland. Some years later, having begun to examine the history of Zionism more systematically, my view of Judeophobia in nineteenth-century France became rather more complex.

The tragic figure of Bernard Lazare captured my attention at the very start of my research. This Parisian intellectual who originally detested the Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe became both the first Dreyfusard and the first French Zionist. But he was also one of the very first to be disappointed by the turn that the victory of the political Dreyfusards took, and by the way that political Zionism developed. I originally intended to write a new biography of this unusual libertarian, a close friend of Charles Péguy and Georges Sorel, but in the end I decided to confine this to a short article.¹

Despite having been drawn throughout my life to revolutionary romanticism, my interest in social history took the upper hand, and deciphering the ‘mystery’ of the ways in which intellectuals intervened in the public sphere seemed to me more urgent than continuing to write biographies of radical figures. The Dreyfus affair is often regarded as the ideal type of intellectual mobilization. Yet this mythologizing of the ‘affair’ raises two problems. Firstly, the mobilization of intellectuals in the Dreyfus affair was neither so pure nor so unanimous as is generally maintained; and secondly, study of the majority of other ‘affairs’ involving intellectuals, whether in France or in other countries (the First World War, the rise of fascism, McCarthyism, etc.), shows that it would be wrong to see the Dreyfusards as the absolute embodiment of the intellectual.

Besides, study of writings devoted to the Dreyfus affair, and more particularly those that propose an overall synthesis of it, gives the impression that this was one and the same continuous historical event, starting in 1894 with the arrest of an officer suspected of treason, and ending with the official recognition of his innocence in 1906. This narrative, like every good plot, contains a beginning, a middle and an end, with all the ingredients of a great dramatic construction. In the wake of a biased trial, held in an atmosphere of collective hysteria, an accused man was wrongly convicted and deported to a distant prison. Discovery of the truth triggered the entry onto the stage of an enlightened ‘cavalry’, in the manner of a Hollywood western, and the liberation of the victim.²

In this chapter, I shall formulate a number of questions that deal with the character of this cavalry; on its constitution and on the causes that led it to intervene in this judicial drama.

Two affairs?

Should the Dreyfus affair really be viewed as a single narrative? Is it not necessary to unpack and rearrange the chain of events into at least two affairs, in order to clarify the nature of the public outburst that made a conventional military trial into a historical event with global repercussions? The first affair was the trial of Dreyfus at the end of 1894: a judicial farce accompanied by a strong wave of Judeophobia. The second affair began three years later, in January 1898, with the publication of Émile Zola’s ‘J’accuse’ and the petitions of support that followed this. The three years that elapsed between these two events appear as blank pages, or rather black ones, in the history book of the Parisian agora. Presentation of the affair as one and the same event is the fruit of a republican imaginary that sought to inculcate a memory in conformity with its system of values.

It would clearly be absurd to deny the existence of a link of some kind between the two events. The second could not have happened without the first, at least not in the forms of development that it underwent. Without the second, the first would not have become a major event in the history of France, but remained confined to an episode, albeit important, in a different national history. Yet the two events marked the birth of two absolutely distinct historical phenomena.

The first affair played a role in the creation of political Zionism, and it is not just a matter of chance that in 1895 Theodore Herzl wrote Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) in Paris. This does not mean that Herzl wrote his manifesto because of the Dreyfus trial, nor that Western Europe was the birthplace of Zionism. The non-fortuitous element in the writing of this essay in Paris is bound up with the fact that it required a strong wave of Judeophobia in the City of Light for a decisive epistemological break to be produced in the worldview of intellectuals of Jewish origin in Central and Eastern Europe. A majority of the intelligentsia in Eastern Europe looked to Paris as a beacon in the history of progress and Enlightenment. Those who began to lean towards Zionism drew a double conclusion: first of all, that the anti-Semitic Dreyfus affair (the first affair) prefigured their ‘tomorrows’; and second, that the persecution of an officer of Jewish origin, even one perfectly French by language, culture and personal identity, proved that Jews the world over, and not only those in Eastern Europe, belonged to a distinct and eternal ‘ethnos’. From this historical moment, the project of inventing a Jewish nation ‘existing’ for close to four thousand years took shape.

Among ‘Israelites’, on the other hand, as French citizens of Jewish ancestry defined themselves at this time, even in the wake of the trial and the wave of Judeophobia very few saw themselves as part of the same people as the Yiddish speakers in Eastern Europe. They scarcely expressed any solidarity towards the latter, and there was even a detectable hostility on the part of Parisian Israelites towards immigrants who had fled to France from the pogroms of the Russian Empire. Very few of these French Israelites rallied to Zionism.³

It was the second Dreyfus affair, in 1898, that founded the modes of intervention of intellectuals in modern political life, and made Zola’s ‘J’accuse’ the intellectual manifesto par excellence in Western democracy’s culture of protest. And if this was the first time in history that secularists of Jewish origin founded an independent political national movement, it also saw the first appearance of scholarly elites in the form of an organized and autonomous group. ‘Zionism’ and ‘intellectuals’ – an interesting coincidence! After some hesitation, both terms appeared as nouns in the early 1890s, though each only acquired its full meaning in the context of the two affairs. Is this only a coincidence? Was not the Zionist movement, at least initially, founded by an intelligentsia, and in the main a very young one?

On 14 January 1898, following the appearance of Zola’s famous article, the newspaper L’Aurore published a number of petitions demanding that the persecuted officer be retried. The signatories included writers, artists, professors, lawyers, architects and other academics. On 23 January, Georges Clemenceau, at this time the paper’s editor, referred to these signatories with the little-used term intellectuels – the word even being printed in capitals in his article. On 1 February in Le Journal, a paper with a larger circulation, Maurice Barrès replied ironically with an article titled ‘The Protest of the Intellectuals!’ For Barrès, national bard and cultural herald of the young generation of the 1890s, the term had a pejorative connotation. It was soon adopted by the petitioners and their supporters, to the point of rapidly entering common currency in the cultural civil war that divided Paris and then France, eventually leading to the rehabilitation of the condemned man.⁴

New concepts generally appear when the need for them makes itself felt. When phenomena previously unknown appear in a particular historical context, the ideological vocabulary sports a new terminology, which is in turn a stimulus to developments. Yet the significant involvement of new words in historical development takes place within ‘scientific handcuffs’, which the passing historian habitually refers to with such serious terms as ‘process’, ‘balance of forces’, or ‘social structures’.

Before attempting a slightly more ‘scientific’ history, it is necessary to clarify a term that is today perceived as synonymous with ‘intellectuals’ and has already been mentioned in the preface. ‘Intelligentsia’ was a word used widely in Russia from the 1860s. It referred principally to a cultural elite, made up of literati who did not belong solely to the nobility, who were dissatisfied with the existing state of affairs, and who felt a moral obligation to change this.⁵ The term was subsequently applied to the educated stratum as a whole, and this was how it was introduced into Germany in the early 1890s. Despite its Latin origin, however, at the turn of the century it was still rejected by the French language as foreign. In the past, the French cultural elite had never been very receptive to expressions imported from other languages. It is also possible that ‘intelligentsia’ had a sense that was too collective for the taste of the individualist Parisian scholar, whereas in the term ‘intellectuals’, the accent placed on the autonomy of the subject counterbalanced the group effect. Whatever the reason, if the ‘intelligentsia’ was born in the political climate of an autocratic regime, the ‘intellectual’ was invented with the gradual formation of a public sphere in the capital of a liberal democracy.⁶

What then was new about the political engagement of writers, artists and academics, to produce this linguistic marker? What differentiated the supporters of a retrial of Dreyfus, who blamed the army general staff, from their famous forebears, from Voltaire to Victor Hugo, who had likewise intrepidly challenged the powers that be, yet without being referred to as ‘intellectuals’?

The ‘scientific’ intellectual

We should remember first of all that the last quarter of the nineteenth century saw the prestige of science reach an apogee. Almost all knowledge claimed to be ‘science’. Marxian socialism itself adopted scientific guise, just as Émile Zola did not hesitate to present himself as a ‘doctor in moral sciences’.⁷ The tormented romantic genius had everywhere given way to the ‘scientist’. This cultural atmosphere contributed to the rise of naturalism in literature, and to the formation of what are today called the ‘social sciences’. There was a certain homology between the notion of ‘scientist’ and the still vague term ‘intellectual’. Why not gratify those who supported Émile Zola with an aura of rationality and scientific truth?

The appearance of the term ‘intellectual’ was also bound up with political changes in French society in the late nineteenth century. Petitions signed by writers, artists and academics were a new phenomenon, which needed a new name. There had certainly been precedents, particularly in England, where petitions had been used for political aims since the first half of the century. In France, the phenomenon appeared at the turn of the 1890s, when writers and artists signed a petition against the construction in the heart of Paris of a ‘monstrous Eiffel tower’, and a protest circulated against the persecution of anarchists.⁸ But it was at the time of the second Dreyfus affair, in 1898, that the petition became the characteristic expression of a new type of collective intellectual. This practice, though it did not remain exclusively Parisian, spreading across France and crossing borders to proliferate in liberal democracies, played a fundamental political role in the French cultural world, with scarcely an equivalent in other national cultures.

It is hardly surprising that the practice of petitioning grew in France, the birthplace of political democracy. The intervention of literati in the public arena had a historical precedent in the eighteenth century, when great thinkers came together to write the Encyclopédie. In Paris at that time, ‘men of letters’ formed the habit of gathering in a number of competing salons, each with a particular field of debate. The appearance of organized parties in the late nineteenth century and the presence of an urban crowd, especially in Paris, on the occasion of almost all political crises, also served as a model, implicit but decisive, for grouping together intellectual elites in a common context specific to them. This was the time when literary and artistic modernism began to find expression, in Paris, in the form of societies with a self-defined identity, while petitions, reviews and associations led by men of letters sought to occupy the public sphere, thus supporting recourse to the neologism of ‘intellectuals’.

From political change to socio-cultural change: the Second Industrial Revolution, along with the development of mass democracy, contributed to the appearance of compulsory education, to the rising influence of written communication, and to a new cultural morphology of Western society. France witnessed the proliferation of producers and distributors of symbols at a rate comparable to the accelerated development of the division of labour. The number of writers, scientists, journalists and teachers increased in every Western European country in the last quarter of the nineteenth century; in proportion, the growth in the number of intellectuals was well above the rate of demographic growth.

These producers and distributors of cultural symbols appealed to their particular status in the social scale, and their primordial role in the shaping of national consciousness, while beginning to claim for themselves a greater autonomy, both from the state and from the economic forces that dominated the market.

This relative autonomy, without being synonymous with independence for universities, newspapers, or literary and artistic institutions, did undoubtedly strengthen the capacity of a section of cultural producers and agents to set, by and for themselves, the rules governing the balance of forces in their institutions. A still more important fact is that, thanks to the decline in illiteracy and with an ever-growing number of citizens speaking and reading the national language fluently, many writers could begin to live from the sale of their books and be far less dependent on the state apparatus. They felt increasingly protected by a growing community of attentive sympathizers.

But what impelled these literati, who came from every circle and current of thought, to intervene suddenly in the public arena and forcefully challenge the political and military authorities? How did writers, poets, painters and academics become ‘intellectuals’, in the France – or, more precisely, the Paris – of 1898? What incited them to emerge from their comfortable ivory tower, which had only just been consolidated, in order to plunge into harsh polemics, and sometimes even street brawls?⁹

These questions are not easy to answer. At first sight, it might seem far easier to decipher the motives of intellectuals than those of other people, who do not leave so many traces behind them. The abundance of written indications, however, hides as much as it reveals. The history of intellectuals is the only history in which the actors explain themselves, in which each of them writes about their fellows, whereas we have scarcely any testimonies about intellectuals on the part of any other social group.

Reasons for engagement

The most traditional explanation is to attribute the intellectual mobilization to the extreme sensitivity of producers and distributors of culture and knowledge to an ideal of ‘justice’. In the image of the Hebrew prophets of antiquity, or Voltaire at the time of the Calas affair, those writers who were convinced of Dreyfus’s innocence, such as Émile Zola and Anatole France, rose up against injustice. Moral duty forms part of the intellectual’s self-definition and is one of its hallmarks. The idea that intellectuals are guided by a kind of human generosity, and ready to fight for universal values, follows from a particular conception of their social status. Perceived as independent figures, not in thrall to the interests of a particular social class or any government apparatus, intellectuals frequently appear as the ‘just’ of modern times, and the standard-bearers of morality.

This explanation, however, has a number of weak points. Starting with the fact that there were very few injustices that aroused such vigilant intervention as that of Zola in 1898. And even if we restrict ourselves to the Dreyfus affair, it is notable that intellectuals were far from being unanimously mobilized against arbitrary power and raison d’état. Many intellectuals kept their distance from the fray, and many others, probably as numerous as the champions of a retrial, took the side of the political and military institutions. Maurice Barrès, Auguste Renoir, Edgar Deg...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedcation
• Contents
• Preface: The Intellectual as Object – a ‘Selfie’?
• Introduction: The City and the Pen
• Part One: Intellectuals in the Torment of the Century
• Part Two: Islamophobia and the Intellectuals’ ‘Rhinoceritis’
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Index