The Prestige of French Intellectuals
The prestige of the French intellectual begins at the very moment in which the prestige of the clergy fades. It is a matter of a substitution. It was during the eighteenth century that the power of people who think, those who played no small part in the revolution, started to increase. Théodore Zeldin remarked that, in the middle of the eighteenth century, censorship became laxer, and at the same time the prestige of men of letters grew. France shares the following specificity with Russia: the influence of thinkers in everyday and political life. The two countries also share revolutionary violence. There is a link between a profound attraction for thought and the pretention to remake the world.
As was the case in Russia before the revolution of 1917, in France before 1789, the intellectuals had been, along with all of society, kept away from any political decisions by an autocratic power. They ignored the political situation and believed that it was written in books. They, thus, produced utopias that would exaggerate violence so as to bring it to fruition. Thus, autocratic power reproduces itself. French centralism, by preventing subjects from performing economic and political actions, accentuated the abstract character of speeches and debates. Intellectuals were purely speculative on this, and their glosses were chimerical. In a centralized country, a revolution more easily produces utopias: in France in 1789 and in Russia in 1917. Tocqueville’s analysis in this regard is corroborated much later by Solzhenitsyn’s analysis concerning Russia (in The Red Wheel ). Both here and there, the elite who had access neither to economic affairs nor to projects concerning political freedom (the administrators were not political) had to confine themselves to pure speculation, all the more because of their absolute lack of concrete reference points. They based their demands on an imaginary society. This produced ideological, and thus bloody, revolutions.
The crumbling of the people into a separate multitude, typical of all absolute powers, gives rise to a profound individualism, off of which literature feeds. The intellectual is first and foremost an “I,” or, to put it more politely, a conscience. Well, these intellectuals play a crucial, and quite a precise, role in the history of French political development: in every era, they are the champions and the heralds of autocratic power.
In the eighteenth century, economists and especially philosophers were the first to question the government in order to shake it to its foundations. However, it is astonishing to see that these intellectuals had no interest in civil liberties, be they, for example, the Physiocrats or Voltaire. Generally speaking, the intellectuals in this era preferred enlightened despotism. What was important for them was the prince’s competence instead of civil liberties: they were Platonists. Voltaire’s adventure with Frederick the Great is very similar to Plato’s with the tyrant, Dionysius of Syracuse: it was the same desire (and delusion) for the philosopher, which was to make the autocrat good so as to achieve a perfect regime. For many of them are utopians, persuaded that they could erase a tragic human past and remake a new nation. A utopia is necessarily egalitarian, and eighteenth-century France was the cradle of Soviet communism. Speaking about the intellectuals of the time, Tocqueville wrote: “Not only do they hate certain privileges, diversity itself is odious to them: they would adore equality even in servitude.” It is true that French thought mistrusts freedom, which it translates into anarchy and inequality.
Together with Destutt de Tracy’s movement of “ideologues” (the science of ideas) at the time of the revolution, with Saint Simon’s desire to turn intellectuals into a new clergy capable of implementing a politics guided by science, with Auguste Comte or utopians such as Fourier or Proudhon, a vast current emerged at the dawn of modernity to defend a Platonic style of autocracy. The twentieth century represents the continuation of this process. Starting at the dawn of the twentieth century, the majority of French intellectuals sided either with fascism or with communism. One could cite countless examples. Naturally, there were, among them, many honest people on both sides who changed their minds once they realized the danger of the ideologies in question. But, on the whole, they did a great deal of harm. A number of them defended either Hitler or—more often—the fascisms and corporatisms of the interwar period, Mussolini or Salazar. Convinced of the dramatic decline of the West, they were expecting renewed spiritual and moral vigor from these regimes. The defeat of National Socialism in 1945 and the discovery of its crimes brought along with it the downfall of the entirety of rightwing thought, from the extreme right to the moderate right. Henceforth, just being conservative was enough to be called a Nazi and to have one’s voice silenced for good. But communism, which was on the winning side, was triumphant. In France, the postwar period was the golden age of Marxism. Without any exaggeration, it could be said that in the 1970s almost all French intellectuals were Marxists of one stripe or another—Stalinists, Maoists, Trostkyites, and so on. Conservative intellectuals (Raymond Aron, Julien Freund) were rare and generally ostracized. Sartre wrote that “Marxism is the unsurpassable horizon of our time” and that “every anticommunist is a dog.” This was not an issue of an opinion or a conviction, but rather an ideology, one that was convinced that it alone held the truth, and, as a result, it was intolerant. The Tel Quel group, which, with Philippe Sollers, went to Maoist China in 1974 to praise the most monstrous regime of the time, and Jean Lacouture’s shameful defense of the genocide in Cambodia all call to mind André Gide’s trip to the USSR in 1936. At this juncture, one would be embarrassed even to speak of “intellectuals.” Who are these so-called thinkers, who are incapable of the slightest Cartesian doubt, but who spend their lives lying and cheating in order to come to the aid of sinister regimes? After the Second World War, a quarter of the students at the École Normale Supérieure, the citadel of France’s great minds, were members of the Communist Party. This is how Raymond Aron came to call his book L’opium des intellectuels [The Opium of the Intellectuals]: he says that French intellectuals are perpetually in search of a religion (since the erasure of Christianity) and that their unanimous Marxism combines all the characteristics of intolerance and verbal fanaticism that can be found in religions. Aron’s book was written in the 1960s: sixty years later, we could replace “Marxism” with “wokism.”
France is a country that is particularly smitten with ideologies. It prefers ideas to reality. Tocqueville, who knew the extent to which extreme ideas are dirty bombs, described France as “the most brilliant and dangerous nation in Europe, more capable of genius than common sense.” The French Revolution, unlike the American Revolution, sought much less to reform the country than to create a new humanity. The French Enlightenment, unlike the American or Scottish Enlightenment, sought concrete freedom much less than triumphant reason. In France, Marxism was so entrenched that it was necessary to wait until the fall of the Berlin Wall for it to fade away: only universal ridicule could put an end to it, but certainly not the lucidity of our brilliant brains. The 1981 election campaign was still dominated by the “Common Program,” a memorial to farcical Marxism.
The French Revolution resembled a religious revolution, in that it aimed at regenerating the human condition far more than at replacing a dynasty or a government. With the French Revolution, we probably have before our eyes the birth of what one would later call an ideology: a kind of immanent religion, a religion on account of its eschatological and fanatical aspect, immanent because happiness on earth replaces Christian salvation. The year 1789 will produce 1917. It will be remembered that Lenin and Trotsky constantly compared their actions to those of the protagonists in 1789. But it is necessary to go much further: France, in the twentieth century, with its ideological proselytizing, has educated many of the world’s tyrants, and the most bloodthirsty at that. Pol Pot, to name but one, was educated by Parisian communism. In the words of the postwar philosopher Georges Gusdorf, France created the figure of the “philanthropist terrorist.”
At the turn of the twentieth century, lonely leftwing intellectuals gradually transformed their Marxism into cultural leftism on the one hand and into ecologism on the other hand. It still is an issue of ideologies, which are threatening and intolerant pseudoreligions. They produce new censors who abuse and ostracize. The tendency of the French intellectual is this aspiration to become a guru, to dominate power with mind, which can even lead to a predominant influence, such as when Bernard Henri Lévy persuaded Nicolas Sarkozy to undertake the war in Libya; and the disastrous consequences of that are well known.
Solzhenitsyn has clearly shown how both the French and Russian revolutions were prepared, nurtured, and inspired by intellectuals (The Red Wheel; Revolution et mensonge). In both countries, both equally centralized and deprived of intermediary governing bodies, thinkers were ideologues who were less worried about conquering freedoms than about recreating human reality—that is, making utopias real; hence, the terror on both sides. The fact that France has, in every era, nurtured cohorts of ideological or totalitarian intellectuals is not a trivial characteristic, like a certain taste for food or for the opera. It is a trait that responds to the rest: to a political system of Platonic obedience, in which thinking from on high is done for the immature people. Today, when France is governed by Emmanuel Macron, a typical young recruit of the republican mandarinate, you will not find a salon in Paris where they do not whisper: “The people know nothing, we have to make decisions for them.” Ideological moments (the revolutionary period at the end of the eighteenth century or the Marxist period in the twentieth century) are merely the excesses of this national inclination.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Prosperity and Torment in France: The Paradox of the Democratic Age (University of Notre Dame Press, 2025). It is part of an ongoing collaboration with the University of Notre Dame Press. You can read other excerpts from this collaboration here. All rights reserved.