But the French aversion to conventional forms of civic association does not necessarily mean privatization. On the contrary, the paradox of this political culture is that the very low indices of permanent organization coexist with exceptional propensities for spontaneous combustion. Again and again, quite suddenly, formidable popular mobilizations can materialize out of nowhere. The great revolt of May–June 1968, still far the largest and most impressive demonstration of collective agency in post-war European history, is the emblematic modern example that no subsequent ruler of France has forgotten.
The streets have repeatedly defied and checked governments since. In 1984, Mauroy fell from office after his attempt to curb private education unleashed a massive confessional mobilization in defence of religious schools—half a million rallying in Versailles, a million pouring onto the boulevards of Paris. In 1986, protests by hundreds of thousands of students, from universities and lycées alike, fighting riot police in clashes that left one young demonstrator dead, forced Chirac to withdraw plans to ‘modernize’ higher education. His government never recovered. In 1995, Juppé’s schemes to cut and reorganize social security were met with six weeks of strikes, engulfing every kind of public service, and nation-wide turbulence, ending in complete victory for the movement. Within little over a year, he too was out of power. In 1998, it was the turn of truckers, pensioners and the jobless to threaten Jospin’s regime. Aware that such social tornadoes can suddenly twist towards them out of a clear sky, governments have learnt to be cautious.
Signs of this characteristic duality, the coexistence of civil atomization and popular inflammability, can be found in the deep structures of much French thought. They form one of the backgrounds to Sartre’s theorization of the contrast between the dispersion of the ‘series’ and the welding of the ‘pledged group’, and the quicksilver exchanges between them, in his Critique de la raison dialectique. But the most distinctive effect of the problem they pose has been to produce a line of thinkers for whom the social bond is basically always created by faith rather than reason or volition. The origins of this conception go back to Rousseau’s insistence—revealingly at variance with his own voluntarist construction of the general will—that a civil religion alone could found the stability of a republic. The derision into which the Cult of the Supreme Being fell after the overthrow of the Jacobins did not discredit the theme, which underwent a series of conservative metamorphoses in the nineteenth century. Tocqueville became convinced that dogmatic beliefs were the indispensable foundation of any social order, especially democracies like America, in which religion was more omnipresent than in Europe. Comte conceived the mission of positivism as the establishment of a Religion of Humanity that would anneal the social divisions tearing the world of the Industrial Revolution apart. Cournot argued that no rational construction of sovereignty was ever possible, political systems always resting in the last resort on faith or force. In some ways most radically of all, Durkheim reversed the terms of the equation with his famous notion that religion is society projected to the stars.
What all these thinkers rejected was the idea that society could ever be the outcome of a rational aggregation of the interests of individual actors. The branch of the Enlightenment that produced the utilitarian tradition in England became a dead bough in post-revolutionary France. No comparable way of looking at political life ever developed. Constant, whose assumptions came closest to it, remained a forgotten half-foreigner. In the twentieth century, the same underlying vision of the social re surfaced between the wars with a semi-surrealist tint, in the theories of the sacred proposed by Roger Caillois and Georges Bataille at the Collège de Sociologie. In the late twentieth century, this intellectual line has seen yet further avatars in the work of two of the most original thinkers of the Left, at odds with every surrounding orthodoxy. In the early eighties, Régis Debray was already advancing a theory of politics as founded on the constitutive need, yet inability, of every human collectivity to endow itself with internal continuity and identity, and in consequence its dependence on an apex of authority—by definition religious, understood in a broad sense—external to it, as a condition of its vertical integration.
In this version, set out in Critique de la raison politique (1981), the theory sought to explain why nationalism, with its characteristic cults of the eternity of the nation and the immortality of its martyrs, was a more powerful historical force than the socialism for which Debray had once fought in Latin America. By the time of Dieu, un itinéraire (2001), it had become a comparative account of changes in the ecologies, infrastructures and orthodoxies of Western monotheism, from 4000 BCE to the present, which took religion as an anthropological constant for all times: however protean its historical forms, the permanent horizon of any durable social cohesion. Far from such speculations leading to any reconciliation with the status quo, they long continued to be accompanied by political interventions held scandalous by the Parisian consensus—not least scathing comment on NATO’s war on Yugoslavia, still a touchstone of bien-pensant sensibility in Paris as in London today. Perhaps in absolution, Debray has since compromised himself by preparing the ground for the Franco-American coup in Haiti. But the establishment can scarcely count on him.
A comparable case is France’s most incisive jurist, Alain Supiot. Drawing on the work of the maverick legal philosopher Pierre Legendre, Supiot has renewed the idea that all significant belief-systems require a dogmatic foundation by focussing its beam sharply, to the discomfort of their devotees, on the two most cherished creeds of our time: the cults of the free market and of human rights.41 Here too, the logic of the argument, in each case brilliantly executed, is ambiguous: demystifying, yet also normalizing, each as the latest illustration of a universal rule, a necessity beyond reason, of human coexistence itself. A French habit of mind is at work here. The fact that the genealogy of such claims is so distinctively national does not in itself, however, disqualify them: any general truth will have a local point of origin. But the predicament they point to is an archetypally French one. If singular agents will not associate freely to shape or alter their condition, what is the pneuma that can unexpectedly transform them, from one day to the next, into a collective force capable of shaking society to its roots?
For the guardians of the status quo, these are thoughts of the small hours, quickly dispelled in the sunlight of an exceptional morning in French history. ‘Never has the country been economically so powerful nor so wealthy’, Jean-Marie Colombani rhapsodized in the year 2000. ‘Never has the dynamism of the country equipped it so well to become the economic locomotive of Europe’. There was better still: ‘never has there been in France such a palpable “happiness in living’’ as at this threshold of the twentieth-first century’.42 Bombast of this kind often has a nervous undercurrent. Much of the book which ends with this peroration is devoted to warning of the damage done to a healthy French self-understanding by critics like Debray or Bourdieu. In fact, the editor of Le Monde could have looked closer to home. The ebbing of the liberal tide in France has left a variety of unsettling objects on the beach.
Among them is the remarkable success of the daily’s antithesis in the monthly that bears its name—Le Monde diplomatique having about as much in common with Colombani’s paper as, in the opposite direction, today’s Komsomolskaya Pravda has with the original. Under the editorship of Ignacio Ramonet and Bernard Cassen, it has been a spirited hammer of every maxim in the neo-liberal and neo-imperial repertoire, offering a critical coverage of world politics in sharp contrast with Le Monde’s own shrinking perimeter of attention. Enjoying a readership of some quarter of a million in France, Le Monde diplo has become an international institution, with over twenty print editions in local languages abroad, from Italy to Latin America, the Arab world to Korea, and a further twenty on the internet, including Russian, Japanese and Chinese: in all, an audience of one and a half million. No other contemporary French voice has this global reach.
The journal, moreover
, has not only been a counter-poison to the reigning wisdom, but an organizer as well. In the wake of the Asian financial crisis of 1997, it set up ATTAC, an ‘association for popular education’, which today has branches throughout the EU, to stimulate debates and proposals unwelcome to the IMF and the European Commission. For any periodical, an organizational function exacts a price—typically, reluctance to shock its readers, of which the journal has not been free. Yet its animating role has been remarkable. In 2001 Le Monde diplomatique and ATTAC were instrumental in creating the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, launching the ‘alter-globalization’ movement that would become a principal rallying-point of protesters against the neo-liberal order across the latitudes. Here, on an unfamiliar transnational stage, France resumed something of its historic place as vanguard land of the Left, acting as the ignition for radical ideas and forces beyond its borders.
A similar interlocking of national and global effects can be found elsewhere in the gauche de la gauche that has emerged in the past decade. The moustachioed figure of José Bové symbolizes another side of it. Who could be more archetypally French than this Roquefort-maker from the Larzac, foe of GM and McDonald’s? Yet if alter-globalization has international heroes, the charismatic farmer who founded a Peasant Confederation at home and helped create Via Campesina at large, active from the Massif Central to Palestine and Rio Grande do Sul, is among them. Characteristically, the French media put up with him so long as they could treat him as a piece of harmless folklore. Once he had the temerity to criticize Israel, it was another matter. Overnight, he became a bête noire, a disreputable demagogue giving the country a bad name abroad.
The role of Pierre Bourdieu in these years belongs to the same constellation. Son of a postman in a remote village of the Béarn, in the borderlands with Spain, his trajectory bears many similarities to that of Raymond Williams, son of a railwayman in the marches of Wales, who was aware of the kinship between them. They shared steep ascents from such backgrounds to elite positions in the academy, and then feelings of acute alienation within the oblivious worlds of the cumulard and the high table they had reached, that made each steadily more radical after he had won an established reputation. Even the typical complaints made of their prose—in the eyes of critics, sharpened by political hostility, a laboured, reiterative heaviness—were of a likeness. For both, the central experience that set the agenda of a life’s work was inequality. In Bourdieu’s case, the finest pages of the Esquisse pour une auto-analyse he wrote just before he died are his recollections of the bruised bleakness of his schooldays in the lycée at Pau.43
After induction into sociology in Algeria—it is striking how many leading French intellectuals were, in one way or another, marked by time in the colony: Braudel, Camus, Althusser, Derrida, Nora—Bourdieu developed work along two major lines, study of the mechanisms of inequity in education, and of stratification in culture. These were the enquiries—Homo academicus, La distinction, Les règles de l’art—that made him famous. But in the last decade of his life, dismayed by what neo-liberal governments had done to the poor and the vulnerable, he turned to the fate of the losers in France, and the political and ideological systems that kept them there. La misère du monde, which appeared two years before the social explosion of late 1995, can be read as an advance documentary for it. When it came, Bourdieu took the lead in mobilizing intellectual support for the strikers, against the government and its watchdogs in the media and the academy. Soon he was to be found in the forefront of battles over illegal immigration, in defence of the sans-papiers, becoming the most authoritative voice of unsubdued opinion in France. Raisons d’Agir, the intellectual guerrilla he created to harry the consensus, specialized in flanking attacks on press and television: Halimi’s Les nouveaux chiens de garde and Bourdieu’s own Sur la télévision were among its grenades. He was planning an Estates-General of social movements in Europe when he died. His friend Jacques Bouveresse, France’s leading semi-analytic philosopher, an attractive but very different kind of thinker, has paid him perhaps the best tribute, not only in writing well about him, but contributing Schmock (2001)—pointed reflections on Karl Kraus and modern journalism—to a common enterprise.
Bourdieu’s intransigence was a refusal to bend within the social sciences. But a similar sensibility can be seen in the better French cinema of recent years: films like Laurent Cantet’s L’emploi du temps, or La vie rêvée des anges of Eric Zoncka, that show the cruelties and waste of Colombani’s vivre heureux. France also saw perhaps the most ambitious attempt so far to trace the overall shape of the mutations in late twentieth-century capitalism, in a work whose title deliberately recalls Weber’s classic on its origins. Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme (1999), by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, links industrial sociology, political economy, and philosophical enquiry in a sweeping panorama of the ways in which relations between capital and labour have been reconfigured to absorb the cultural revolution of the sixties, and engender new dynamics of profit, exploitation, and emancipation from all residues of the ethic that preoccupied Weber. This critical synthesis so far lacks any Anglophone equivalent. But, not unlike Bourdieu’s work, it also suggests a strange asymmetry within French culture of the past decades. For although its theoretical object is general, all its empirical data and virtually all its intellectual references are national. Such introversion has not been confined to sociology. The involution of the Annales tradition after Bloch and Braudel offers another striking illustration. Whereas British historians of the past thirty to forty years have distinguished themselves by the geographical range of their work, to a point where there is scarcely any European country that does not count among them a major contribution to the sense of its own past, not to speak of many outside Europe,44 modern historians of repute in France have concentrated overwhelmingly on their own country. Le Roy Ladurie, Goubert, Roche, Furet, Chartier, Agulhon, Ariès: the list could be extended indefinitely. The days of Halévy are over.
More generally, if one looks at the social sciences, political thought or even in some respects philosophy in France, the impression left is that for long periods there has been a notable degree of closure, and ignorance of intellectual developments outside the country. Examples of the resulting lag could be multiplied: a very belated and incomplete encounter with Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy or neo-contractualism; with the Frankfurt School or the legacy of Gramsci; with German stylistics or American New Criticism; British historical sociology or Italian political science. A country that has translated scarcely anything of Fredric Jameson or Peter Wollen, and could not even find a publisher for Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes, might well be termed a rearguard in the international exchange of ideas.
Yet if we turn to arts and letters, the picture is reversed. French literature itself may have declined in standing. But French reception of world literature is in a league of its own. In this area, French culture has shown itself exceptionally open to the outside world, with a record of interest in foreign output no other metropolitan society can match. A glance at any of the better small bookshops in Paris is enough to register the difference. Translations of fiction or poetry from Asian, Middle Eastern, African, Latin American and East European cultures abound, to a degree unimaginable in London or New York, Rome or Berlin. The difference has structural consequences. The great majority of writers in a language outside the Atlantic core who have gained an international reputation have done so by introductory passage through the medium of French, not English : from Borges, Mishima and Gombrowicz, to Carpentier, Mahfouz, Krleža or Cortazar, up to Gao Xinjiang, the recent Chinese Nobelist.
The system of relations that has produced this pattern of Parisian consecration is the object of Pascale Casanova’s path-breaking La république mondiale des lettres, the other outstanding example of an imaginative synthesis with strong critical intent in recent years. Here the national bounds of Bourdieu’s work have been decisively broken, in a project that uses his concepts of symbolic capital and the cultur
al field to construct a model of the global inequalities of power between different national literatures, and to illuminate the gamut of strategies that writers in languages at the periphery of the system of legitimation have used to try to win a place at the centre. Nothing like this has been attempted before. The geographical range of Casanova’s materials, from Madagascar to Romania, Brazil to Switzerland, Croatia to Algeria; the clarity and trenchancy of the map of unequal relations she offers; and, not least, the generosity with which the ruses and dilemmas of the disadvantaged are explored, make her book kindred to the French élan behind the World Social Forum. It might be called a literary Porto Alegre. That implies a beginning, with much fierce argument and discussion to come. But whatever the outcome of such criticisms or objections, The World Republic of Letters—empire more than republic, as Casanova shows—is likely to have the same sort of liberating impact at large as Said’s Orientalism, with which it stands comparison.
The New Old World Page 24
