Commentaire went on to become the anchor journal of the liberal Right, distinguished not only by its intellectual avoirdupois, but its international horizons—a function in part of its close connexions, under the direction of Raymond Barre’s chef de cabinet, with functionaries, politicians and businessmen, as well as the academy. Two years later it was joined, and soon outpaced, by a partner in the liberal Centre. Le Débat, launched in a sleeker format by Pierre Nora under the auspices of Gallimard, had a more ambitious agenda. Nora opened the journal with a programme for intellectual reform. In the past, French culture, steeped in humanist traditions, had been dominated by an ideal of rhetoric that had led from the role of the instituteur to the cult of the great writer, and had permitted every kind of ideological extravagance. Now, however, the legitimacy of the intellectual lay in positive knowledge certified by the competent institutions—essentially, the university. This change could not do away with the agonistic tensions inherent in intellectual life, but it confronted intellectuals with a new set of tasks: not only to promote democracy in society at large, but to practice it within the sphere of thought itself, as a ‘republic in letters’. The aim of the new journal would thus be to organize what was still a rarity in France, genuine debate. The ground for that had been cleared by the demise of the three major schemas for understanding history, operative since the eighteenth century. The ideologies of Restoration, of Progress, and of Revolution were now all equally dead, leaving the road at last open for the modern social sciences. Le Débat would stand for ‘information, quality, pluralism, openness and truth’, and against every kind of irresponsibility and extremism.7
Addressing the perennial French query, ‘Que peuvent les intellectuels?’, this manifesto did not touch directly on politics, beyond indicating that a ‘complete democracy’ was to be found in the United States, not in France. When Mitterrand took the presidency a year later, Nora struck a cautious note, stressing the personal character of his victory. Although not suspect of any tenderness towards totalitarianism, would this former ally of the Communists draw the necessary consequences of the ‘great change of mentality in the past four years that has turned the image of the Soviet regime upside down’, and adopt the requisite foreign policy to confront the principal enemy?8 These were concerns shared by Esprit, a journal that had once been the voice of an anti-colonial and neutralist Catholic Left, but which on the retirement in 1976 of its post-war editor Jean-Marie Domenach had repositioned itself as a frontline fighter in the anti-totalitarian struggle. In these years, as Nora would later note, Commentaire, Le Débat and Esprit formed a common axis of what would have elsewhere been called Cold War liberalism, albeit each with its own inflexion and constituency.
Of the three, Le Débat was the central creation. Not simply as the house journal of Gallimard, with resources beyond those of any rival, but because it represented a real modernization of styles and themes in French intellectual life. Extremely well edited—in time Nora turned over its day-to-day running to Marcel Gauchet, a transfuge from the Socialisme ou barbarie wing of the far Left—the journal devoted its issues to a generally temperate exploration of three main areas of concern: history, politics and society, with frequent special numbers or features on a wide range of contemporary topics: the biological sciences, the visual arts, social security, the institutions of heritage, post-modernism and more. If it was less international in horizon than it originally set out to be, it was rarely parochial. It was never, of course, an impartial forum for objective debates, as its prospectus had suggested, but it would have been a duller affair had it been. It was, on the contrary, an urbane machine de guerre.
Behind its political project stood one commanding figure. Nora’s brother-in-law was the historian François Furet, whose Penser la Révolution française—published just at the political crossroads of 1978—had in no time made him the country’s most influential interpreter of the French Revolution. From a wealthy banking family, Furet had been formed in the post-war Communist Party at the height of the Cold War, when it included a group of future historians—among them Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Maurice Agulhon, Jacques Ozouf—to rival its British counterpart. In France too, it was the Twentieth Party Congress in Moscow and the Hungarian Revolt that broke up this nursery of talents. Furet left the Party at some point after 1958 and while pursuing—initially fairly conventional—historical research, became a regular contributor to France-Observateur, the independent left weekly that was the principal organ of opposition to the Algerian War, and to De Gaulle’s rule in the Fifth Republic. In 1965 he co-authored, with another brother-in-law, an illustrated history of the French Revolution designed for a general readership, which argued it had been ‘blown off course’ (dérapée) by a series of tragic accidents in 1792, destroying the liberal order at which it had originally aimed, and ushering in Jacobin dictatorship and the Terror instead.9
Thirteen years later, Penser la Révolution française was a more potent proposition—an all-out assault, invoking Solzhenitsyn and the current political conjuncture, on the catechism of Marxist interpretations of the Revolution. Furet offered instead the insights of two liberal-conservative Catholic thinkers, Tocqueville in the mid-nineteenth century and Cochin in the early twentieth, as the keys to a real understanding of the ‘conceptual core’ of the Revolution: not the interplay of social classes, but the dynamics of a political discourse that essentially exchanged the abstractions of popular will for those of absolutist power, and in doing so generated the terrifying force of the new kind of sociability at work in the revolutionary clubs of the period. Delivered with great polemical verve, this verdict led, logically enough, to a pointed taking of distance from the Annales school—its facile notion of mentalités ‘often a mere Gallic substitute for Marxism and psychoanalysis’—as no less incapable of grappling with the upheaval of 1789 and what followed. Needed was rather an ‘intellectualist history that constructs its data explicitly from conceptually posed questions’.10
Furet’s major application of this credo, which appeared in 1988, was a large political history of France from Turgot to Gambetta, conceived as the playing-out over a century of the explosive dialectic of principles released by the attack on the Ancien Régime.11 Whereas in his earlier writing he had maintained that with Napoleon’s coup d’état in 1798, ‘the Revolution is over’, he now extended its life-span to the final fading away of monarchism as an active force under the Third Republic, in 1879. Only then were republic and nation finally reconciled, and the original goals of 1789 realized in a stable parliamentary order. The tormented path from starting-point to terminus, threading its way through the commotions of 1815, 1830, 1848, 1851 and 1871, was to be traced as a working-out of the tensions and contradictions of the first historical experiment in creating a democracy.
The motor of Furet’s history is essentially a genealogy of ideas. But he was not an intellectual historian in the sense that Pocock or Skinner have given the term. Although he was capable of acute insights into thinkers who interested him, there is scarcely any detailed textual scrutiny of a given body of writing in his work, and no attention to languages of discourse in the Cambridge tradition. Ideas are treated rather as stylized forces, each of them embodied in particular individuals, around whom a narrative of high political conflicts is woven. Furet was also fascinated by ceremonials as the public symbolization of ideas, and La France révolutionnaire 1770–1880 is studded with set-piece descriptions of them, from the coronation of Napoleon to the funeral of Thiers. At the other pole of his imagination were personalities, and here he had an outstanding gift for mordant characterization. Out of this trio of elements—ideas: rituals: persons—Furet produced an unfailingly elegant, incisive story of the making of modern France, largely cleansed of its social or economic dimensions, and all but completely insulated from its imperial record abroad, which issued into an utterly focussed contemporary political conclusion. He was not a great historian, of the calibre of Bloch or Braudel. But he was an exceptional force in
French public life in ways they were not.
For his historical work was part of a larger enterprise. No modern historian has been so intensely political. There was a virtually seamless unity between his work on the past and his interventions in the present, where he was an institutional and ideological organizer without equal. He owed that role to his person, a mixture of the dashing and the reserved. There was—a foreign colleague once observed—a hint of Jean Gabin in his taciturn charm. As early as 1964, he was orchestrating the merger of a declining France Observateur with a more right-wing stable of journalists from L’Express, and picking the necessary editor to ensure that the periodical to be created out of the fusion would have the correct politics. As Jean Daniel, who still presides over Le Nouvel Observateur—for four decades the unfailing voice of Centre-Left proprieties—recollected twenty-five years later: ‘I will not forget the pact we made; the choice in favour of his controversial theses on the Revolution and on Marxism which he proposed to me; and the surprise on his face at finding me an accomplice already so primed and determined to be at his side. I want to record the debt I owe him, and his family of thought, for the real intellectual security they gave me’.12 This disarming confession, from one of the most powerful journalists in the land—Daniel even adds, in all innocence: ‘One day we all found ourselves, without knowing it, running behind Augustin Cochin because Furet was pushing us in the back’—could have been echoed by many another kingpin of the Parisian establishment in the years to come. The network of Furet’s connexions and placements was eventually referred to in the press simply as ‘the galaxy’.
If the Nouvel Observateur gave Furet a central base in the media, his control of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, which he helped to create out of Braudel’s old sixième section, and of which he became director in 1977, put him in command of the most strategic institution of the academy, bringing a research elite together across disciplines in the Rockefeller-funded building on the Boulevard Raspail, freed from the teaching burdens and administrative tares of the French university—‘like going to the cinema without paying for a ticket’, as he cheerfully put it. The launching of Commentaire and Le Débat, in both of which he was active from the start, supplied him with flanking positions in the world of journals. Then, after Mitterrand’s accession to power, he helped create in 1982 the Fondation Saint-Simon, an alliance of insider intellectuals and industrialists formed to resist any socialist temptations in the new regime, and guide it towards a more up-to-date understanding of market and state. Bankrolled by big business—the boss of the Saint-Gobain conglomerate was a moving spirit along with Furet, who acquired a seat on the board of one of his companies—the Fondation operated as a political think-tank, weaving ties between academics, functionaries, politicians; organizing seminars; publishing policy papers; and last but not least, hosting dinners every month for Schmidt, Barre, Giscard, Chirac, Rocard, Fabius and other like-minded statesmen, at which common ideas were thrashed out over appropriate fare.
Two years later, Furet set up—or was granted—the Institut Raymond Aron, as a committed outpost of anti-totalitarian reflection, of which he became president, that in due course would be integrated into the fold of the EHESS itself. Then in 1985 he extended his range with a transatlantic connexion, taking up a seasonal position with the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, where he secured financial backing from the Olin Foundation to pursue research on the American and French Revolutions. The Bicentennial of 1789 was looming, and Furet voiced fears that this would become an occasion for the Mitterrand regime, in which Communist ministers still sat, to organize an official consecration of the mythologies of Jacobinism and the Year II of the Republic. With his colleague Mona Ozouf, he set to work to make sure this did not happen.
On the eve of the potentially risky year, a huge—twelve-hundred-page—Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française appeared, covering Events, Actors, Institutions and Ideas. Its hundred entries, written by some twenty carefully selected contributors, supplied a comprehensive rebuttal of left-wing legends and traditional misconceptions of the founding episode of modern democracy.13 The overwhelming impact of this admirably designed and executed compendium of moderate scholarship removed any danger of neo-Jacobin festivities in 1989. The fall of communism in the East offered further, conclusive vindication of the original impulse of the Revolution, against its ensuing perversions. When the Bicentennial arrived, Furet was the unquestioned intellectual master of ceremonies, as France paid homage to the inspiring principles—duly clarified—of 1789, and turned its back at last on the atrocities of 1793–4.14
To dispatch the wrong past, and recover the right one, was part and parcel of the country’s overdue arrival in the safe harbour of a modern democracy. In tandem with the Dictionnaire critique, Furet co-authored in the same year La République du centre for the Fondation Saint-Simon, subtitled: ‘The End of the French Exception’. After the absurd nationalizations of its first phase, Mitterrand’s regime had put paid to socialism by embracing the market and its financial disciplines in 1983, and then buried anti-clericalism by bowing to the demonstrations in favour of Catholic schools in 1984. In doing so, it had finally made the country a normal democratic society, purged of radical doctrines and theatrical conflicts. France had now found its equilibrium in a sober Centre.15 So entire did liberal triumph seem that on the tenth anniversary of his journal in 1990, Nora—rejoicing that the ‘leaden cape of Gaullo-Communism was now lifted from the nation’—could announce with Hegelian satisfaction: ‘The spirit of Débat has become the spirit of the epoch’.16
In Britain, the early nineties saw the breakdown of Thatcher’s rule and the passage to a less strident neo-liberal agenda, under the atonic stewardship of Major. In France, the trend was in the opposite direction: the dominance of a market-minded consensus reached its height in the early years of the second Mitterrand presidency. The gains of the front of opinion articulated by François Furet and his friends were there for all to see. France was finally delivered of its totalitarian temptations. The shades of the Revolution had been laid to rest. The Republic had found its feet in the safe ground of the Centre. Only one heritage of the past had yet to be thoroughly purged of its ambiguities: the Nation. This task fell to Pierre Nora. In his editorial on the tenth anniversary of Le Débat in 1990, Nora had hailed the ‘new cultural landscape’ of the country, and within another couple of years, he completed his own monumental contribution to it. Originating in a seminar at the EHESS in 1978–80—the same conjuncture as Le Débat itself—the first volume of Les lieux de mémoire came out under his direction in 1984. By the time the last set appeared in 1992, the enterprise had swollen to seven volumes and some 5,600 pages, mustering six times as many contributors as the Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française, from a more ecumenical range of scholars. Its aim, Nora declared in his initial presentation of the project, was an inventory of all those realms of remembrance where French identity could be said to have symbolically crystallized.
Under this capacious heading, 127 essays—most of high quality—surveyed a bewildering pot-pourri of objects, ranging from such obvious items as the Tricolour, the Marseillaise and the Panthéon, through the forest, the generation and the firm, to conversation, the industrial age, and mediaeval lineages, not to speak, obviously, of gastronomy, the vine and Descartes. What united them, Nora explained, was their status for his purposes: ‘unlike all the objects of history, realms of memory have no referent in reality’—they are ‘pure signs, that refer only to themselves’.17 The post-modern flourish is not to be taken too seriously. For what these signs actually referred to were, variously, the Republic, the Nation or just Frenchness at large. But since these too were symbolic, the exploration of them that Les lieux de mémoire offered would be a history of France ‘to the second degree’—one concerned not with causes, actions or events, but rather effects and traces.
That did not mean it was less ambitious than its pr
edecessors. The Annales had sought a total history, in reaction to the narrowness of traditional political narratives. But since symbols united material and cultural facts, and the ultimate truth of politics could well lie in its symbolic dimension, the study of realms of memory converted politics into the register of a history paradoxically more totalizing than the Annalism it might now be replacing.18 What had made this possible was the abandonment of visions of the future as a controlling horizon for interpretations of the past, in favour of a consensual support for institutions of the present. At a time when the French were no longer willing to die for their country, they were ‘unanimous in discovering their interest and affection for it’, in all the diversity of its manifold expressions. It was as if ‘France was ceasing to be a history that divides us to become a culture that unites us, a property the shared title to which is treated as a family inheritance’.19 Escape from traditional forms of nationalism, such as that regrettable pair, Gaullism and Jacobinism, far from weakening sentiments of national belonging, had strengthened them as the French entered into the healing domains of common remembrance.20
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