siècle (1999).
370 See Aron, La Révolution introuvable: Réflexions sur les événements de mai (1968).
371 See Aron, Le Marxisme de Marx (2002).
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
505
published as Le Spectateur engagé.372 At its heart lay the distinction, taken from
Max Weber, between an ethics of commitment and an ethics of responsibility.
It also drew upon Aron’s belief that there were very few occasions which possessed
the moral simplicity and purity of the Dreyfus Affair. Aron asked of the intellectual,
therefore, not indifference or the pose of ‘l’observateur glacé’, but modesty,
moderation, lucidity, and prudence. Above all, he invited intellectuals to penser la
politique, to dream not of the attractions of a perfect society but to reflect upon the
difficult choices and decisions faced in an impure world by those who held power.
‘The great proportion of struggles’, Aron declared in 1983, ‘are of an ambiguous
character and intellectuals who wish to be exclusively at the service of the universal
ought not to participate.’373
For Aron, then, politics was never a choice between absolute good and absolute
evil but between what was preferable over what was detestable and in those
circumstances intellectuals were called upon to act responsibly and not as the
prophets of an earthly paradise. As Aron neared the end of his life and as a new
generation of thinkers began the painstaking task of formulating the theoretical
foundations of a distinctively French version of liberalism, there was ample
evidence to suggest that this was a message that had taken root and that the days
of partisan engagement in the name of abstract ideals or collective salvation were at
an end. One piece of evidence to support this claim would be the creation of the
Aron-inspired review Commentaire in 1978 under the editorship of Jean-Claude
Casanova. Another would be the launch of Pierre Nora’s Le Débat in 1980 and
its proclamation of a new age of ‘intellectual democracy’. Yet another would be the
creation in 1985 of the Institut Raymond Aron within Paris’s École des Hautes
Études en Sciences Sociales, an institution which included among its members not
only François Furet but also a younger generation of thinkers (amongst whom
could be counted Marcel Gauchet, Pierre Manent, and Pierre Rosanvallon) sym-
pathetic to liberal and social democratic goals and aspirations. Summarizing these
and other similar developments, Mark Lilla spoke of ‘the legitimacy of the liberal
age’.374
More telling still was the so-called ‘silence of the intellectuals’ that caught public
attention in 1983.375 As France’s socialist-led government ran into severe economic
problems and saw its electoral support collapse, essayist and government spokes-
person Max Gallo penned an article in France’s leading newspaper, Le Monde,
making an explicit comparison with the earlier experience of the Popular Front and
asking where the intellectuals were when the beleaguered government of the left
needed them. The answer was that they were nowhere to be seen. Moreover, as
Philippe Boggio made clear by way of response, unlike their colleagues of the
372 Le Spectateur engagé: Entretiens avec Jean-Louis Missika et Dominique Wolton (1981).
373 ‘Les Intellectuels et la politique’, Commentaire, 22 (1983), 259–63.
374 New French Thought: Political Philosophy (1994), 3–34. On the broader intellectual and cultural
developments occurring during this period see Olivier Mongin, Face au scepticisme (1976–1993): Les
Mutations du paysage intellectuel ou l’invention de l’intellectuel démocratique (1994).
375 See the columns of Le Monde in the weeks following 24 July 1983.
506
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
1930s, the intellectuals of the 1980s felt disinclined to help a government that was
suspected of complacency towards the Soviet Union and towards communism.
Aptly summarizing the situation of those Gérard Noiriel was later to describe as ‘les
fils maudits de la République’,376 not long afterwards Bernard Henri-Lévy penned
a hypothetical dictionary entry for the year 2000 which read as follows: ‘Intellectual,
noun, masculine gender, a social and cultural category born in Paris at the moment
of the Dreyfus Affair, died in Paris at the end of the twentieth century; apparently
was not able to survive the decline in belief in Universals.’377
376 Les Fils maudits de la République: L’Avenir des intellectuels en France (2005).
377 Lévy, Éloge des intellectuels (1987), 48. See also Lévy’s Les Aventures de la liberté: Une histoire
subjective des intellectuels (1991).
Conclusion
Citizenship, Multiculturalism, and Republicanism
I
When General de Gaulle wrote his war memoirs in enforced retirement during
the 1950s he began with the resounding phrase that ‘France cannot be France
without greatness.’ The post-war years did little to confirm this hope. Fearing a
return to what he dismissed as ‘the regime of parties’, de Gaulle resigned as head
of the provisional government in January 1946 and later that year the French
electorate gave its approval to a new constitution that, in nearly all essentials,
resembled that of the Third Republic. ‘Unless one considers total inertia as the
supreme virtue of a state’, Raymond Aron was later to write in 1955,1 ‘one could
not possibly approve of the Fourth Republic.’ The old problems of ministerial
instability returned and the Fourth Republic quickly became bogged down in a
series of colonial wars, bringing humiliating defeat in Indo-China and then the
prolonged agony of the Algerian conflict. Reduced to powerlessness and discre-
dited by years of failure, in May 1958 the politicians of the Fourth Republic
called it a day and had no alternative but to recall General de Gaulle to power on
his own terms.2
Those terms amounted to the creation of a Fifth Republic and a constitution
which, with its emphasis on presidential power and a subordinate role for parlia-
ment, was deeply troubling to many republicans. In 1964 de Gaulle’s inveterate
opponent, François Mitterrand, described the new regime as a ‘permanent coup
d’état’.3 Four years later, France was brought to a standstill by the student demon-
strations of May 68 and the wave of industrial strikes accompanying them. De
Gaulle momentarily lost his nerve and a year later, following defeat in a needless
referendum, he resigned from office.
These years were not, however, without their successes. The task of securing
Franco-German reconciliation was begun and was followed by the first tentative,
1 L’Opium des intellectuels (2002), 75.
2 See Michel Winock, L’Agonie de la IVe République (2006).
3 Le Coup d’état permanent (1964).
508
Conclusion
but decisive, steps towards European integration. Just as importantly, from the late
1940s onwards France began the period of sustained economic growth that, over
the next thirty years, was to transform her economy. This dramatic shift from
agriculture to industry and commerce produced a modern, urbanized, consumer
socie
ty. Once returned to power, de Gaulle successfully extricated France from
Algeria and in subsequent years carved out an independent foreign policy built
around France’s nuclear strike force. Moreover, the political institutions he gave
France produced stable and successful government, their durability receiving
decisive confirmation when the left, led by none other than François Mitterrand,
came to power in 1981.
The consequences of these dramatic developments were far-reaching. What
was being witnessed, it was argued, was the end of the ‘French exception’.4 France
was fast becoming a country that more resembled her neighbours. Two facts were
often cited as evidence of this trend. The communist party vote, although still high,
began to fall steeply. Likewise, religious observance among Catholics experienced a
sudden and rapid decline. From this it was argued that the polarization between
extremes that had for so long characterized French politics was on the point of
extinction and that there was now emerging a consensus around a set of core
democratic values. Everyone, it appeared, was a republican and, if it was possible to
speak of a prevailing ideology, it was that of the rights of man and what was
sometimes referred to as ‘the new individualism’. Stated another way, the theatre
was leaving French politics and the French (much like everybody else) were now
preoccupied with such banal and mundane issues as taxation and the price of goods
in the shops rather than the political legacies and divisions of the past. In some
people these developments induced a sense of melancholy and nostalgia for the days
of confrontation and class war, but, by general agreement, they seemed to presage
the arrival of a new, less conflictual politics that would work within the parameters
of social democracy and liberalism.
The chance to display this new reality came, somewhat fortuitously, in the
form of the bicentennial celebrations of the French Revolution. A year before,
François Mitterrand had been re-elected as socialist president of the Fifth
Republic and the left, under the premiership of Michel Rocard, formed the
government of the day. Mitterrand in particular cared deeply about the bicen-
tennial and many believed that he would seek to make it the apogee of his
political career. Moreover, it seemed as if, for the first time, the commemoration
of the Revolution could be celebrated in a spirit of quasi-consensus broadly
reflecting the stability of a constitution that had just survived its first experience
of political and institutional cohabitation. Accordingly, the Bastille Day festiv-
ities were marked by a summit of world leaders drawn from rich and poor
nations alike and by an extravagant parade down the Champs-Elysées master-
minded by the designer and artist Jean-Paul Goude and featuring a rendition of
the Marseillaise by African-American opera singer, Jessye Norman. By focusing
4 See François Furet, Jacques Julliard, and Pierre Rosanvallon, La République du centre: La Fin de
l’exception française (1988).
Conclusion
509
almost entirely upon the Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen of
1789 the official celebrations all but denied all knowledge of 1793 and in order
to do so were obliged to turn their gaze not towards the past but towards the
present and the future: hence Goude’s grandiose and outlandish spectacle.5
For the historical profession, the central questions raised by the experience of the
French Revolution could not be so straightforwardly and effortlessly evaded and
there were many, on both the left and the right, who believed that the attempt to
evoke a palatable and sanitized 1789 amounted to a silencing of the Revolution,
be it the Revolution that had slaughtered the people of the Vendée or that had held
out the messianic promise of radical social change. It was, however, François Furet
and his ‘galaxy’ of loyal and able colleagues who were to win the argument in 1989
and who were to produce its definitive historiographical statement: the Dictionnaire
critique de la Révolution française.6
The key move was Furet’s assertion, first formulated in 1978, that the ‘Revolution
is over’.7 This had several dimensions, not the least of which was a dismissal of the
long-established claim that the causes of the Revolution of 1789 were to be found in
a set of social and economic contradictions prevailing in late eighteenth-century
France. It also sought to refute the central contention of French Marxist historio-
graphy that, in the last analysis, the Revolution marked the end of the society of
orders and the arrival of the bourgeoisie to a position of political and economic
dominance. According to Furet, the Revolution was best seen not as ‘a set of causes
and consequences’ but as having ‘invented a type of political discourse and practice
by which we have been living ever since’. What gave the Revolution its unique and
universal quality was that it was ‘the first experiment in democracy’.
In consequence, Furet envisaged not just a new historiography of the Revolution
as ‘an autonomous political and ideological movement’ but also the displacement of
what he termed a ‘revolutionary catechism’ born of the conviction that France’s
own Revolution had presaged the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Specifically, this
interpretation declined to account for the Jacobin Terror in terms of the circum-
stances created by war, preferring to see it as inherent to the revolutionary process.
More generally, it was Furet’s contention that ‘The Revolution was more than a
“leap” from one society to another; it was also the conjunction of all the ways in
which a civil society, once it had suddenly been “opened up” by a power crisis, let
loose all the words and languages it contained.’8 The intellectual reference point
was not to be Karl Marx or even Jules Michelet but Alexis de Tocqueville, for it was
the latter who had come to see and define the Revolution as ‘a radical ideological
5 See Steven Laurence Kaplan, Farewell, Revolution: Disputed Legacies France, 1789/1989 (Ithaca,
NY, 1995).
6 See vol. ii by Steven Laurence Kaplan, Farewell, Revolution: The Historians’ Feud France 1789–1989
(Ithaca, NY, 1995). For an assessment of the present state of play in French Revolution studies see Michel
Biard (ed.), La Révolution française: Une histoire toujours vivante (2010).
7 ‘The Revolution is Over’, in François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge,
1981), 1–79. See also ‘La Révolution et ses fantômes’, in Furet, Un itineraire intellectuel (1999),
541–58.
8 Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, 130.
510
Conclusion
venture’.9 It was also Tocqueville who had perceived the glaring discrepancy
between ‘the intentions of the actors and the historical role they played’.
To summarize: Furet believed that France and the French had, at last, left behind
what he termed the ‘revolutionary political civilization’ and therefore that, for the
first time, it would be possible for the historian to write a history of the Revolution
that not only avoided ‘mental laziness and pious rehashing’
but also eschewed
‘identification with the actors, . . . commemoration of the founders or . . . execration
of the deviants’.10 As Furet observed, ‘No historical debate about the Revolution
any longer involves real political stakes.’11 This was a new situation, born out of
political stability, economic prosperity, and increasing social homogeneity.
In these circumstances the view that France’s revolutionary and republican
heritage was no longer relevant to present-day realities was not slow to emerge.
This has subsequently come in a variety of forms. One was to suggest that the
ideology of republicanism no longer enthused or motivated the French population.
This was so because the Republic’s principal antagonist––an intransigent Catholic
Church laying claim to an earthly authority––no longer existed in any significant
form.12 From this it was but a short step to the claim that the core republican
doctrine of laïcité was only of relevance to what Pierre Birnbaum called ‘La France
imaginée’, a France mistakenly believed to be prey to the political and religious
cleavages of an earlier age.13 A second, and more forceful, argument came in the
form of the charge that the Republic had not delivered on its promises, that it was a
charade, and that many of the citizens of the Fifth Republic were citizens in name
only. This, it was stated with increasing frequency from the 1980s onwards, was
especially the case with regard to women. All the evidence showed that, despite the
fact that women had held the same political rights as men since 1944, they
continued to be massively under-represented in positions of elected office. From
this derived the (not exclusively) feminist demand to ditch the republican attach-
ment to the equality of rights in favour of the new principle of parité.14
Similar arguments were advanced with regard to the category of citizens that came
to be known as les exclus, the excluded.15 In part this was a debate about who exactly
the excluded were. Were they the old, the unemployed, the poor, or some other as yet
undefined and unidentified part of the population? More substantively, in the eyes of
some at least, the dispute served to expose the hollow rhetoric of the republican
discourse of fraternity in what was described as ‘the new age of inequalities’.16 There
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