Revolution and the Republic
Page 108
was, in particular, a growing awareness that the young unemployed, often from
9 See in particular ‘Tocqueville and the Problem of the French Revolution’, ibid. 132–63.
10 See in particular ‘Tocqueville and the Problem of the French Revolution’, 11.
11 Ibid. 82.
12 See Marcel Gauchet, La Religion dans la démocratie: Parcours de la laïcité (1998).
13 La France imaginée: Declin des rêves unitaires (1998).
14 See Françoise Gaspard, Claude Servan-Schreiber, and Anne Le Gill, Au pouvoir citoyennes:
Liberté, égalité, parité (1992) and Joan Wallach Scott, Parité! Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French
Universalism (Chicago, 2005).
15 See Jacques Donzelot, Face à l’exclusion: Le Modèle français (1991) and Serge Paugam,
L’Exclusion: L’État des savoirs (1996).
16 Jean-Paul Fitousi and Pierre Rosanvallon, Le Nouvel ge des inégalités (1996). See also
Rosanvallon, La Nouvelle Question sociale: Repenser l’État-providence (1995) and, more recently,
Alain Ehrenberg, La Société du malaise (2010).
Conclusion
511
immigrant backgrounds and living in the suburbs of the big cities, les banlieues, were
being failed by the traditional republican strategies of social integration––most
conspicuously, the republican school system with its ethos of civisme and universa-
lisme––and that what was taking place was the effective ghettoization of large sections
of France’s urban population. A very low level of voter turnout in elections in these
areas was just one of the pieces of evidence cited to justify this conclusion.
This was an argument that was only to intensify with the general conflagration
that engulfed most of France’s major towns and cities in the autumn of 2005.
Whilst there was no general agreement about the causes of the widespread looting
and car-burning that night after night filled French television screens and left
French politicians searching desperately for responses, these dramatic events were
sufficient to raise grave doubts about the effectiveness of France’s costly model of
welfare provision. What is more, those involved in this debate shared an acute
awareness that the republican ideal of social solidarity was under serious threat.17
A further, and related, challenge has arguably come from what is taken to be
the process of economic globalization. France’s distinctive model of social provi-
sion has had its counterpart in a form of economic management that, to date, has
remained remarkably impervious to the demands of economic liberalization
witnessed over the last two decades or more. During this time (the recent world
economic crash notwithstanding) the French economy has been consistently
outperformed by its major competitors. High levels of unemployment, mounting
public debt, and low levels of economic growth have been just three of the most
obvious manifestations of recent economic failure. More than this, virtually all
attempts at reform (be it with regard to public service pensions, moves towards
a more flexible labour market, or in the universities) have been met by (usually
successful) protests and demonstrations. Not without some justification, economic
commentator Nicolas Baverez chose the title of La France qui tombe for his study of
France’s economic ills.18
A similar argument was advanced with regard to the forces of cultural globaliza-
tion. Speaking of the values of the Republic, it was argued, only made sense for as
long as France continued to possess a distinct national identity and voice. But was
this any longer the case? In a widely read volume entitled La Défaite de la pensée,19
Alain Finkielkraut argued that the malaise afflicting France had its origin in the
internationalization of culture and in the fact that France was becoming ever more
17 For a selection see Yann Moulier Boutang, La Révolte des banlieues ou les habits nus de la
république (2005); Véronique Le Goaziou and Laurent Mucchielli (eds.), Quand les banlieues
brûlent : . . . Retour sur les émeutes de novembre 2005 (2006); Hugues Lagrange and Marco Oberti
(eds.), Émeutes urbaines et protestations: Une singularité française (2006); Alain Lefebvre and Dominique
Méda, Faut-t-il brûler le modèle social français? (2006); Alain Renault, Modèle social: La Chimère
française (2006); Pierre Rosanvallon et al., La Nouvelle Critique sociale (2006) and the special issue of
Cahiers Français, 330 (2006) devoted to ‘Le modèle social français’. For a critique of the French model
see Timothy B. Smith, France in Crisis: Welfare, Inequality and Globalisation since 1980 (Cambridge,
2004). See also Peter Hall et al., Changing France: The Politics that Markets Make (London, 2008).
18 Nicolas Baverez, La France qui tombe (2003). See also Baverez, Nouveau Monde, Vieille France
(2006); Jacques Julliard, Le Malheur français (2005) ; and Pierre Lellouche, Illusions gauloises (2006).
19 Alain Finkielkraut, La Défaite de la pensée (1987).
512
Conclusion
hostile to high culture and ever more consumerist and hedonist. Seen from this
perspective, France was increasingly uncertain of herself. Her national specificity
had been eroded; her language was under threat; her republican political culture had
been enfeebled; and her role in the world had been diminished. What did it mean to
speak out in the name of France and the Republic in the age of the ubiquitous
baseball cap and in an age of declining national sovereignty and prestige?
The response of France’s politicians to these numerous challenges has largely been
to repeat the republican mantras of the past. Whilst there have been calls for
constitutional reform and some have even gone so far as to advocate a move to a
Sixth Republic, for the most part riots and increasing lawlessness have been met by
renewed calls for solidarity and invocations of national identity rather than innovative
programmes of affirmative action and employment quotas.20 Job losses and the
relocation of industries outside France have elicited the rhetoric of ‘economic patriot-
ism’ and ‘national champions’ and not an embrace of the demands and opportunities
provided by a global market.21 Certainly, there has been no eagerness to recommend
the practices of what remains a much-despised ‘Anglo-Saxon’ model.22
The same might be said of the response provided by France’s intellectual commu-
nity. Cast adrift from their traditional moorings and wounded by the deceptions of
the present, many of France’s public intellectuals found comfort in what at times
amounted to a nostalgic reaffirmation of a golden age of republicanism.23
I I
In November 2002, for example, the Parisian intellectual and academic world
experienced one of its periodic fits of ill-humour when, to great controversy, the
normally amiable and unassuming figure of Daniel Lindenberg suddenly found
himself catapulted to notoriety, his 90-page pamphlet Le Rappel à l’ordre becoming
front-page news in Le Monde.24 The precise details of what, at one level, amounted
to something of a family quarrel need not be dwelt upon: suffice it to say that
Lindenberg’s text was published in a collection edited by Pierre Rosanvallon and
that, with only thinly disguised contempt, it dis
missed many of Rosanvallon’s
friends and acquaintances from the Institut Raymond Aron as the ‘new reaction-
aries’. There was, indeed, much that was contentious about Lindenberg’s analysis.
Placing the diatribes against mass tourism of controversial novelist Michel Houel-
lebecq alongside the more sober reflections upon democracy of Pierre Manent and
Marcel Gauchet was at best contentious. However, Lindenberg’s serious point
20 See e.g. the speech made by President Jacques Chirac on 14 Nov. 2005.
21 This was the view expressed by Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin on 25 Sept. 2006.
22 See my ‘France and the “Anglo-Saxon” Model: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives’,
European Review, 14 (2006), 537–54.
23 See e.g. the official publication Guide républicain: L’Idée républicain aujourd’hui (2004).
24 Daniel Lindenberg, Le Rappel à l’ordre (2002); ‘Les “Nouveaux Réactionnaires”: Enquête sur le
paysage intellectuel’, Le Monde (22 Nov. 2002). Lindenberg returned to this theme with the more
substantial Le Procès des Lumières (2009).
Conclusion
513
was that many of those who had until recently embraced the causes of anti-
totalitarianism and anti-Marxism were now adopting the ‘corrosive’ language of
order, authority, and tradition. The targets of their attacks, Lindenberg suggested,
were May 68, the rights of man, the belief in equality, mass culture, a multiracial
society, tolerant sexual mores, and . . . Islam.
What did this strange episode reveal about the situation of political thought in
contemporary France? Since the waves of strikes in protest at proposed reform of
the social security system that brought France again to a standstill in the late
autumn of 1995, the Parisian intelligentsia has been widely perceived as being
split into two camps. On the one side have been those who supported the plans for
reform and who, more generally, have recommended a break with the state-centred
or Jacobin structures of the past. Broadly associated with three of the most
influential reviews of the day––Commentaire, Le Débat, and Esprit––it has been
this intellectually diverse group that has not only brought about the rediscovery
of France’s own liberal tradition but which has also shown itself to be open to the
recent arguments and debates within the tradition of Anglo-American philosophy.
If the latter has entailed a somewhat belated reading of such major thinkers as
Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, and Karl Popper, it has also involved a thorough
engagement with the work of John Rawls, Michael Walzer, Charles Taylor, and
Richard Rorty amongst others.
On the other side has been a reinvigorated radical left associated above all with
the camp of the late Pierre Bourdieu. The precise nature of this radical left has been
the subject of much discussion.25 It is heterogeneous. It is built less around political
parties than around a range of single-issue organizations (for example, Les Comités
des sans-papiers and Les restos de Cur) as well as a set of clubs and associations
(for example, Pétitions and Copernic, the last of which was explicitly set up to
oppose the reformist Fondation Saint-Simon). It has sought (some would say,
successfully) to dissociate itself from the incubus of the repressive Marxist-Leninist
regimes of the past. It took a leading role in articulating opposition to the invasion
of Iraq. In the eyes of critics such as Pierre Rosanvallon, it represents a ‘distrust’ of
modernity, a ‘vague’ anti-establishment ‘radicalism’, a ‘moral posture’ of ‘resis-
tance’, and ‘a culture of criticism rather than a culture of action’.26 For its members,
however, this new radicalism draws its strength from the real problems experienced
by modern society and from the need to defend the ‘French model’ from the
destructive intrusions of the emerging technocratic world economic order. To cite
Pierre Bourdieu, what was involved was ‘the defence of a civilization associated
with the existence of public services, a republican equality of rights, the rights to
education, to healthcare, to culture, to knowledge, to art, and, above all, to work’.27
The disagreement between these two groups came fully out into the open in
April 1998 with the publication of Le ‘Décembre’ des intellectuels français, a text
25 See Bernard Poulet, ‘A gauche de la gauche’, Le Débat, 103 (1999), 39–59, and Philippe
Reynaud, L’Extrême Gauche plurielle: Entre la démocratie radicale et révolution (2006).
26 ‘L’Esprit de 1995’, Le Débat, 111 (2000), 118–20.
27 Contre-feux (1998), 30.
514
Conclusion
authored by five of Bourdieu’s supporters and directed (venomously) against the
editorial team of Esprit. Littered with the jargon of Bourdieu’s sociological method,
it claimed that the supporters of the 1995 reforms, endowed with ‘mediatic,
political, and bureaucratic capital’, not only stood for ‘moral conservatism’ but,
in doing so, had abandoned the ‘autonomy’ of the intellectual and had sought to
diminish ‘the prestige associated with this group since the Dreyfus Affair’. For their
part, the authors of the text did not hesitate to take up the mantle of their
Dreyfusard forebears. Armed with their ‘intellectual and scientific capital’, the
task of the intellectuals, it was argued, was to act as ‘an autonomous collective
force’. Faced with a ‘conservative’ revolution resting upon ‘xenophobia’ and the
values of ‘the traditional order’, their duty was to embody ‘a necessarily vigilant and
critical resistance’.
It was therefore no idle coincidence that 1998 also saw the republication of
Paul Nizan’s Les Chiens de garde and that the ‘actualité’ of its criticisms of France’s
intellectuals was there reaffirmed in a preface written by another of Bourdieu’s
allies, the journalist Serge Halimi.28 Several months earlier the same author had
made the identical point, but with more telling effect, with the publication of his
Les Nouveaux Chiens de garde.29 The force of the criticism was that France’s
dominant intellectuals, far from voicing lucid and independent criticism, were
floating about in ‘an ocean of conformist thought’ and were serving the status
quo through their constant endorsement of ‘the neo-totalitarianism that is called
the democracy of the market’. Reverence before power and prudence before capital,
Halimi claimed, were their watchwords. Taken together, the charge was that the
intellectuals who had supported the government’s proposed (and ultimately aban-
doned) reforms were the purveyors of pro-market ‘pensée unique’ and the unwit-
ting architects of a neo-liberal dystopia.
For their part, the targets of this criticism responded with undisguised scorn,
ridiculing the claims of the Bourdieu ‘clan’ to exist as a marginalized and dominated
faction in French intellectual life and as the very embodiment of ‘an elevated moral
and political conscience’ characterized by ‘courage’ and ‘selfless dedication’. Not
only did they dismiss this resort to a Dreyfusard rhetoric of heroic intellectual
action, but they also pilloried the self-identification of Bourd
ieu with the earlier
model. ‘It is striking to note’, Joël Roman and Olivier Mongin wrote, ‘that the
political commitment of Pierre Bourdieu reproduces exactly the most obsolete form
of commitment in French history: that of the scientist who, in the name of his
science, denounces this or that reality and supports this or that initiative.’30
Bourdieu had, in fact, been working towards this position for some time. Unlike
many of his contemporaries, he had never passed through the French Communist
Party nor did he participate in the gauchisme of the May 68 generation. Indeed, in
the early 1960s he had worked as Raymond Aron’s research assistant. However,
it was Bourdieu who telephoned Michel Foucault in December 1981 to solicit his
28 Paul Nizan, Les Chiens de garde (Marseilles, 1998).
29 Serge Halimi, Les Nouveaux Chiens de garde (1997).
30 ‘Le Popularisme version Bourdieu ou la tentation du mépris’, Esprit, 244 (1998), 158–75.
Conclusion
515
support for a petition in defence of Poland’s Solidarity movement. It was when
Bourdieu reflected upon this experience after Foucault’s death that he not only
spoke of the need for intellectuals to enjoy ‘the most complete autonomy vis-à-vis
all other powers’ but also recognized that, if they were not ‘the spokesmen of the
universal, even less of a “universal class”’, they often had ‘an interest in the
universal’.31 This theme was continued by Bourdieu in a lecture he gave in 1989.
There he spoke of ‘the need to keep the most autonomous cultural producers from
the temptation of the ivory tower by creating appropriate institutions to enable
them to intervene collectively under their own specific authority’. This autonomy,
Bourdieu stated, was under threat from the State, from the world of finance, and
from the growth of technocratic control. By way of response, Bourdieu called for
the creation of an ‘International of Intellectuals’, ‘a large collective of intellectuals
combining the talents of the ensemble of intellectuals’.32 This project was given
flesh in 1993 with the creation by Bourdieu and others of a Parlement international
des écrivains. Described by Bourdieu as ‘a critical countervailing force’, it was to be
modelled upon the Encyclopedists of the eighteenth century.33