In his commentary accompanying last month's list of 100 global intellectuals to mark Prospect's tenth birthday, David Herman demoted Paris as the centre of world philosophy. But he failed to go beyond that and add the deeper truth: that even if Paris is no longer the capital, France profonde remains the cradle of French thought. Not because great thinkers experienced enlightenment here, but because scarcely literate paysans, my neighbours' families, escaping abject rural poverty, left here for Paris and there discovered a talent for running cafés. The great left bank cafés—Lipp, Flore and La Coupole, around whose tables the intellectual reputation of Paris was built—were all owned by people from here. Who else but Auvergnats and Aveyronnais would have tolerated scruffy individuals spending all day and most of the night covering tables with books and reams of paper, for the price of two coffees? Down here, the tradition lives on: the cafés-philo are a most surprising success in my heavily depopulated region.
For the French have not lost their passion for ideas. Earlier this year, the Nouvel Observateur, a stylish left-leaning weekly, celebrated its 40th birthday with 25 grands penseurs du monde entier. That the editors of both Prospect and the Nouvel Observateur should mark a birthday by celebrating international thinkers shows a kindred spirit, although it is the differences that stand out.
The entire anniversary issue of the Nouvel Obs was given over to its 25 great thinkers—in France that's enough to sell copy. Each was honoured with a 1,500-word essay, a flattering full-page photograph, an interview and an itinéraire bibliographique. Some might assume that the French list would lean heavily on French thinkers: but not so. In fact, deliberately there were none. Only seven names were common to both magazines (Slavoj Zizek, Martha Nussbaum, Antonio Negri, Peter Sloterdijk, Richard Rorty, Amartya Sen and Michael Walzer). The English thinker chosen by the Nouvel Obs, Simon Blackburn, was not on the Prospect list (although I am reliably informed he came close to the final cut).
"For a European," says Pascal Engel, professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne and major contributor to the French magazine's birthday special, "a penseur is neither philosopher, academic nor intellectual. He has a working knowledge of philosophy, but in France the great intellectual cannot be a university teacher—indeed, teaching is seen as death to true thinking."
While perhaps reflecting the greater rigidity of thought in French universities, this is quite opposite to the Anglo-American concept of an intellectual, who is usually immured in and dependent upon a university. "The French are seduced by the romance of having broken free of academe, of being marginal," continues Engel. Some might see that glorification of the marginal, of being heroically opposed to everyone else, as a national characteristic.
Whatever his intellectual speciality, it is de rigueur for the French penseur to cut ice as a Kulturkritik—usually a doorstopper on Flaubert does the trick. On the other hand, French thinkers don't concern themselves with genetics, the environment or pure abstractions like ethics. "There is no French equivalent of Richard Dawkins and no chair of moral philosophy. When my students get excited about ideas in the contemporary world," says Engel, "it's not bioethics that interests them, but politics. In France, people are fascinated by political philosophy. But the major difference," he continues with regret, "is that today almost no French thinker is a rationalist. Voltaire, Rousseau, Zola were truth addicts. Now, no public intellectual would dare stand up for the ideals of reason, truth and argument."
In fact, according to Engel, today's French thinkers are more likely to express themselves through songs, films or television chatshows. As Michel Houellebecq has shown, any writer, singer or filmmaker (Houellebecq is all three) can be classed as a thinker: the key is to embody revolt. Many a fading film star has become a born-again penseur simply by intoning a dozen existential songs, then launching the album from a left bank café. "There is a ready-made career for the media intellectual in France, a prefabricated posture," says Engel. The template was of course cut by Sartre, indiscriminately scribbling lyrics for Juliette Gréco then megaphoning striking car-workers about the joys of life under Stalin—and finally writing a doorstopper on Flaubert. The current incarnation is Bernard-Henri Lévy, whose magnum opus was a doorstopper rehabilitating Sartre.
Whether or not media dumbing-down has done for French thinking, it is certainly true that the left bank cafés are now tourist traps, their gentle Aveyronnais owners bought out by multinationals. For Engel, Paris is now "un rêve qui a disparu." He speaks perhaps with a personal sense of loss. Having spent 25 years teaching analytical philosophy at the highest level in the erstwhile capital of thought, he is moving to Geneva, where he finds "the intellectual atmosphere more cosmopolitan and open."
