In spite of its criticisms targeting American ‘imperialism’ (an imperialism that lacks the slightest imperium), it is therefore completely natural for the European ‘New Left’ to manifest such an irrepressible attraction for this America that presents it with such a faithful tableau of its aspirations.
This attraction is not a recent one. One might as well date its beginnings to the delusions of young Lafayette.914 In France, the Liberation’s entire intellectual Left had a diet of American jazz, novels and films. It was a time when Marceau Pivert, Pierre Monatte, Roger Hagnauer and Alfred Rosmer reproached Daniel Guérin915 for displaying ‘excessive severity’ in his book entitled Où va le people américain?916 (Julliard, 1950). Following the ‘snags’ of the Cold War, decolonisation was supposed to give the intelligentsia the opportunity to rediscover eternal America, under the banner of ‘Kennedyism’ and the new society.
More recently, sociologist Edgar Morin returned in a state of elation from his sojourn in Californian ‘communities’. He states that what he has found there is an ideal, one that he defines in the following manner: ‘Neo-Rousseauism, a need for Christian purity, childlike warmth, libertarian tradition, utopian communism, and a “Kathmandian” rejection of the West’ (Journal de Californie,917 Seuil, 1970).
Mr Jean-Marie Domenach barely brushes against paradox when affirming that ‘nowadays, the United States is the world’s greatest communist country’ (Esprit, October 1970). In fact, as specified by Mrs. Annie Kriegel,918 the communists, whatever the case, ‘are quite fond of America in their own way, [since] they feel that they are in tune with the aspirations, the needs and the expectations that govern the persistent use of the New World metaphor (Communismes au miroir français,919 Gallimard, 1974). She then goes on to add: ‘Whether access into the Promised Land is channelled through migration or through conversion, it was necessary, in both cases, for these people to tear themselves away from the old land of Sin and Misdeed; it was necessary them to personally choose and elect a new way of existing in this world. The emigrant and the communist share the same brutal experience — that of rupture’ (ibid.).
‘In the course of colonialisms, it is above all by not being American today that we will avoid becoming Russian tomorrow’, Jean Cau writes (in Pourquoi la France,920 Table ronde, 1975). This is because a people that has lost its own soul is no longer capable of defending its physical freedom.
Now that Moscow has disappointed the ‘New Left’, it is Washington that has taken over. Marx plus Jesus equals ‘Coca-Cola Marxism’.
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Ni Marx ni Jésus, an essay by Jean-François Revel. Laffont, 263 pages.
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Questioned by Psychologie magazine in September 1972, Mr Revel declared: ‘Just like many other supporters of the French Left in the wake of the Liberation, I had assumed that there would be a process that would extend the Resistance and enable us to introduce into Western Europe the famed “open socialism”, meaning the synthesis of political and social democracy, a synthesis that would neither be embodied by American-style capitalism nor by Soviet socialism. Twenty-five years later, I found myself compelled to desist this hypothesis. Considering the current situation of the political and social forces in Western Europe and in light of the intellectual degradation that afflicts the European Left, I now regard this state of affairs as an even less attainable endeavour than it was twenty years ago’.
This evolution seems to have culminated in a book in which Jean-François Revel vivaciously denounced the thought that the notions of ‘socialism’ and ‘liberty’ could ever be connected in the long-term (La tentation totalitaire, Laffont, 1976).
Regarding the United States and the American mentality, I recommend having a good look at the synthesis presented by Mr Robert de Herte and Hans-Jürgen Nigra and entitled Il était une fois l’Amérique, which was published in the opinion column of Nouvelle école (issues number 27–28, autumn–winter 1975); as well as at Mrs Elise Marienstras’ essay entitled ‘Les mythes fondateurs de la nation américaine’921 (Maspéro, 1976).
In his inaugural speech on 20th January, 1977, American President ‘Jimmy’ Carter insisted on starting his presidential term under the sign of humility. Having quoted at length the ‘eternal admonishment’ of the prophet Micah found in the Bible, he proceeded to reaffirm his conviction that the United States was under the obligation to promote an egalitarian ‘world order’, one that would testify to the fact that ‘America’s democratic system is a model’. Alluding to the ‘American ideal’, he made the following declaration to his interlocutors: ‘Let us create together a new national spirit of unity and trust. Your strength can compensate for my weakness, and your wisdom can help to minimize my mistakes. Let us learn together and laugh together and work together and pray together, confident that in the end we will triumph together in the right’. Finally, he insisted on America’s ‘special obligation’: ‘…to take on those moral duties which, when assumed, seem to be invariably in our own best interests’. The President’s programme elicited the following commentary: ‘Our young President did not make a rallying plea, he did not propose great aims nor suggest any “new dreams”. Far from adopting the words of a leader, he made less mention of powers than of the very limitations of presidency, including his own’ (Le Monde, 23rd–24th January, 1977).
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The Intellectual Party
As explained by Jean Cau in Les écuries de l’Occident,922 ‘the intellectual party forgives everything (one’s absence of talent, blathering, unintelligibility, vanity, stupidity, mendacity, lack of culture, pretentiousness, privileges, overpaid job, logorrhoea, and even overflowing bank account), under the condition that the person does not commit the supreme crime, id est as long as they do not reveal the fact that today’s Leftist intellectuals constitute a mob, a sect, a church, a party’.
Fifty-year-old Mr Georges Suffert, the former editor-in-chief of Témoignage Chrétien and current assistant manager of Point who previously collaborated with France-Observateur and L’Express, has committed this ‘supreme crime’. In a pamphlet entitled Les intellectuels en chaise longue,923 he denounces the reign of cultural terrorism established by fashionable ideologies.
It was to this very book that Mr Jacques Médecin, the Deputy-Mayor of Nice and future Secretary of State for Tourism, alluded on 27th September, 1974, when addressing around seventy writers and anti-Marxist researchers that had gathered in Nice on the occasion of the 2nd International Congress for the Defence of Culture. It was a message in which he declared: ‘A cabal of devout individuals has been growing a new Inquisition from seed. There is no salvation outside their church, they say. Class struggle has been adorned with the grace of divine Revelation, with the Trinities varying from chapel to chapel; they have evolved from Freudo-Marxism and Marxist Freudism by crossing the Boulevard Saint-Germain. We are no longer living in the era of a France governed by “200 families”; ours is, instead, a time when 200 intellectuals launch trends and fashions from within their Parisian cenacle’.
It was Charles Péguy who first coined the expression ‘intellectual party’ in an article published in Cahiers de la quinzaine924 (1906). Four years later, he wrote the following in Notre jeunesse:925 ‘The debate does not revolve around an old France that is said to have ended in 1789 and a new one that allegedly began that same year. It is, in fact, a much deeper issue. The actual debate concerns two things: on the one hand, all of ancient France — meaning pagan France (the Renaissance, the humanities, the culture, and ancient and modern literature, whether Greek, Latin or French); heathen and Christian France; the traditional and revolutionary France; the monarchic, royalist and republican France — and, on the other, its counterpart and opposite, namely a primary sort of domination that managed to establish itself around 1881 and is not actually the Republic, despite claiming to be so; it is a parasite that feeds off the Republic and is the latter’s most dangerous foe; what I am referring to in this instance is, specifically, the domination o
f the intellectual party’.
At that time, the use of the noun ‘intellectual’ was already common practice. It is encountered with Paul Bourget926 as early as 1882 and with Barrès in 1888. Its origin, however, is to be primarily sought in the work of a rather forgotten writer, Henry Bérenger (1867–1952), who authored L’aristocratie intellectuelle927 (1895) and La France intellectuelle928 (1899). In his very first novel, entitled L’effort929 (1893), Bérenger writes: ‘The intellectual is threatened by a fearsome malady: analytical excess may pulverise his spirit to the point where his self seems nothing more than an illusory unit to him, a point of intersection where thousands of various elements meet and that lacks any and all reason to exist. To perceive oneself as an illogical illusion is to deny oneself. […] Self-negation is the abstract form of suicide’.
Systematic Opposition
It was probably because he had read Bérenger that Clémenceau930 chose to give the petition released in L’Aurore on 14th January, 1898 the title Manifeste des intellectuels,931 a petition which, in the wake of Zola’s J’accuse,932 gathered the signatures of Dreyfus’933 partisans (see William M. Johnston’s The Origin of the Term ‘Intellectuals’ in French Novel and Essays of the 1890s in Journal of European Studies, vol. IV, 1974, pages 43–56).
‘Intellectuals’ thus found themselves in the hot seat at the very outset. One has since encountered analogous criticisms in various forms with Julien Benda (La trahison des clercs,934 1927), Georges Suarez (Peu d’hommes, trop d’idées,935 1928), Henri Béraud (La croisade des longues figures,936 1930), Georges Bernanos (La grande peur des bien-pensants,937 1931), Marcel Aymé (Le confort intellectuel,938 1949), Raymond Aron (L’opium des intellectuels,939 1955), etc.
There are two criticisms that surface over and over again under the quill: the intellectuals’ passion for pure ideas and their attitude of systematic opposition.
‘Words are not what they refer to’, the logicians of the early 20th century remind us. It is a lesson that is quickly forgotten. In Socrate fonctionnaire940 (Laffont, 1970), a work where he proceeds to denounce the ‘voluptuousness of words and the worship of hollowness’, Mr Pierre Thuillier, section editor at La Recherche, writes the following: ‘Many more or less “revolutionary” students extend, each in their own way, the verbal mandarinate, believing themselves to be the holders of sacred words’. Verbal alchemy captivates intellectuals just as light attracts butterflies.941
Drieu used to say: ‘If we are no more than literary hacks, how could people ever take our words seriously?’
In Les mots942 (Gallimard 1964), Mr Jean-Paul Sartre confesses: ‘Long have I mistaken my quill for a sword. I am, however, currently aware of our helplessness. No matter: I still produce books and shall continue to do so’.
Never before has the number of published words contrasted so much with their genuine value as it does today. It only takes a few years for almost all of them to seem flat and banal. An author that is praised one day falls into obscurity the next, as soon as the spotlights of fashion cast their beams upon others instead. It matters not, however: when words and the things they refer to become one and the same, a headlong rush remains possible. Mr Suffert writes: ‘The more the intellectual party is mistaken, the more it develops. It fears neither the rebellion of those in minority, nor reality’s implacable judgement. If the facts prove it wrong, it simply separates itself from the great minds that have shown their lack of intuition and flair, promoting those members that have managed to remain relatively clearsighted and displayed sufficient wisdom not to target the party itself. And then it all starts anew’.
Education itself does not resolve anything: knowing is not synonymous with understanding. And as written by Mr Jean Baechler, knowledge even remains ‘the privilege of well-educated men, cultivated individuals, and all those who manifest some sort of superiority, excellence or eminence in the intellectual field. This serves as an explanation for the supreme paradox of modernity: the most intelligent people are also the stupidest. The intellectual community has fallen prey to a kind of schizophrenia, in which the constant development of knowledge and intellectual agility go hand in hand with an equally developed loss of one’s sense of reality and common sense. One thus displays ever greater subtlety in expressing utter nonsense’ (Qu’est-ce que l’idéologie?,943 Gallimard, 1976).
The Week of Marxist Thought that took place from 16th to 22nd January, 1974, focused on the following topic: ‘Morality and Society’. During the debates, the president of the Judeo-Christian Friendship Association, writer Jacques Madaule, declared: ‘One cannot conceive of a culture that is not in a state of crisis, for a culture that would not experience such a state would be a dead one’.
Mr Jean-Luc Chalumeau,944 to whom we owe the existence of an overview of contemporary French thought, also defines the intellectual as a man of criticism and refusal. ‘In France, most of the intellectual movement is geared towards criticising the established order’.
An Open Letter
It is thus not a matter of passing judgement, but clearly one of criticising. The intellectual takes on a censor’s role under the condition of pronouncing nothing but condemnations. Approbation is repugnant to him, as it seems incompatible with his function. To approve would create an impression of decay; he would perceive himself to be ‘silly’ or ‘banal’. And, above all, such an attitude would rob him of his stardom. The intelligentsia thus comes across as ‘the eternal not’ (das ewige nein) which Goethe spoke of. Relying solely on the resources of its intellect and not those of its sensibility, it permanently dissects reality so as to turn it into Pilpul.945
Perhaps favoured by the very French taste for contestation, this conception of mental existence finds its philosophical alibi in the views advocated by the Frankfurt School: in Adorno’s946 eyes, any positive action thus acts as the accomplice of the existing system, and it is only the absence of action and systematic criticism that allows one to evade such complicity. It is a doctrine of questioning, one that conceals a genuine instinct of destruction, as well as a certain powerlessness: if the mind cannot create, let it at least bring about the collapse of what others have created.
However, there are perhaps further causes behind the hypercriticism of the intelligentsia: the separating mental attitude espoused by intellectuals, for instance, one that leads them, in an almost spontaneous manner, to present life as being problematic, to display a preference for analysis over synthesis, philosophy over worldview, and concept over image. Incidentally, Mr Jean Baechler has remarked that intellectuals are all the more prone to attacking the whole of society and undermining the foundations of the social consensus as they themselves are ‘least likely to constitute a community that would unite around a unanimous belief’. He adds: ‘This congenital incapacity has to do with the inevitable perception of the plurality of possible solutions or beliefs, but also with the systematic pursuit of both distinction and originality’ (op. cit.).
In August 1925, Aragon, Breton, Eluard, Artaud and other writers of the same tendency sent Paul Claudel947 an ‘open letter’ which the intellectual party seems to have turned into its very own charter: ‘We whole-heartedly wish for revolutions, wars and insurrections to come and destroy this western civilisation whose vermin you defend all the way to the Orient. We consider this destruction to be the intellectually least unacceptable state of affairs and seize this opportunity to publicly dissociate ourselves from all that is French either by words or by action’, they declared.
About half a century later, in May 1970, Mr Roland Barthes, one of the thought leaders of literary neo-structuralism, issued the following declaration: ‘Taking into account the current historical state of affairs, I doubt that one has any other option but to destroy’.
The notions of selection, competition, confrontation, hierarchy and inequality have become so unbearable to the intellectual party that the sole fact of mentioning them suffices to plunge its members into a kind of hysterical trance. In the name of some implausible peace
and disincarnate justice, all that the intelligentsia expresses is its febrile desire to witness the disappearance of everything that Europe has created. It consequently resorts to psycho-dramatics: by organising petitions in support of the Larzac948 or Chilean refugees, it conducts a transference, which compensates for its own frustrations.
In December 1942, Drieu la Rochelle wrote in the Nouvelle revue française magazine: ‘Many years ago, I was asked to sign a kind of manifesto or petition that was supposed to contribute, in the name of literature, to the release of a young literary hack from prison, a man who had been incarcerated for allegedly committing a minor criminal offense. I refused to do so, because I did not, first of all, know the man in question, and secondly, because I could not comprehend why he was suddenly asking to be rescued, although he had previously desired and sought adventure’.
Nowadays, intellectuals are fighting alongside the Vietcong in the rice fields, gleefully retracing Guevara’s footsteps in the Bolivian jungle, sword fighting against the multinational hydra, and foiling the traps set by Pinochet’s henchmen — all of this without ever bothering to set foot outside their own homes.
Some might deem this commotion meaningless; but this is not the case when it is an inherent part of a subversive strategy.
‘Cultural Power’
It is no coincidence at all that the works of Antonio Gramsci are currently being republished. For Gramsci was one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party and the main theoretician behind the cultural seizure of power that took place during the 1920s.
Systems and Debates Page 46