“How the French Think”

Here are some parts that I have marked in my copy of the bookHow “ the French Think: An Aﬀectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People” by Sudhir Hazareesingh.

Alexandre Dumas

1.“My deeper immersion in the intellectual life of France has impressed upon me the powerful inﬂuence of literature in both reﬂecting and shaping the nation’s mindset – one of the striking features of French culture. Voltaire’s Candide and Rousseau’s Nouvelle Heloise were essential vehicles for disseminating Enlightenment ideals of autonomy and authenticity, just as in the nineteenth century Alexandre Dumas’s novels gave the French people more of an impression of their royalist past than all the historians of the age.”

2.“French thought is pervaded by religious concepts, images and metaphors. Though secular in its public institutions and the collective beliefs and practices of its people, France continues to live under the shadow of its once-dominant Catholicism.”

3.“These include such classic characteristics as a belief in their innate disposition towards creative thinking, as when the writer Blaise Pascal observed of his compatriots, ‘I do not speak of fools, I speak of the wisest men; and it is among them that imagination has the great gift of persuasion’. ‘What is not clear,’ aﬃrmed the writer Rivarol imperiously, ‘is not

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French’.”

Hippolyte Taine

4.“The critic Hippolyte Taine: ‘All that the Frenchman desires is to provoke in himself and in others a bubbling of agreeable ideas.’ Typically French, too, is an insouciance of manner, ‘doing frivolous things seriously, and serious things frivolously’, as the philosopher Montesquieu put it – but also a contrarian and impertinent tendency, as when the historian Ernest Lavisse noted, ‘We are not born to be docile or respectful’.”

5.“The French have a habit of structuring public debate around a small number of recurring themes: opening and closure, stasis and transformation, freedom and determinism, unity and diversity, civilization and barbarity, and progress and decadence.”

6.“As Bishop Bossuet once sternly told the heir to the French throne, ‘He who ignores the laws of grammar spurns the precepts of reason’.”

7.“There is also the association, in the French republican tradition, of the idea of citizenship with learning: the philosopher Condorcet wrote that the ‘ﬁrst duty of society towards its citizens is public education’.”

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Michael de Montaigne

8.“The French ardently embraced Montaigne’s maxim: ‘There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees’.”

9.“French thought (in its most creative moments) has succeeded in harmonizing apparently opposing values.”

10.“I will argue that French thought over the past four centuries is distinctive in five key ways. Firstly, in its historical character (by which I mean both its substantive continuities over time and its references to the past as a source of legitimation or demarcation). Secondly, French thought stands out in its fixation with the nation and the collective self, which provide an enduring focus of public debate and the philosophical underpinning of assorted conceptions of the good life. It is, thirdly, striking in its extraordinary intensity (ideas are believed not only to matter but, in existential circumstances, to be worth dying for), and, fourthly, in the belief that communicating specialized forms of knowledge to a wider public is an integral feature of intellectual activity. Finally, French thinking is notable for its constant interplay between the themes of order and imagination – or, to put it in terms of specific thinkers, between the cold linearity of Descartes and the unbridled expansiveness of Rousseau. Just as fundamentally, I will assume in this book that it is possible to make

www.capitalideasonline.com Page - 3 “How the French Think” meaningful generalizations about the shared intellectual habits of a people as diverse and fragmented as the French – a nation whose fetish for singularity de Gaulle once summed up derisively by citing the country’s production of two hundred and forty-six varieties of cheese.”

11.“But, arguably, the most important cultural function of the salon was its refusal to be tied down by what we would call disciplinary boundaries.”

12.“French intellectual constructs are speculative in that they are generally the product of a form of thinking which is not necessarily grounded in empirical reality. This ﬁnds expression in the classic French saying Tant pis pour les faits and in the celebrated Gallic attachment to the deductive method of reasoning, immortalized by Descartes, which starts with a general, abstract proposition and then works through to a particular conclusion or proposition.”

Rene Descartes

13.“In the opening of his Politique radicale, in which he paid fulsome tribute to Descartes, Jules Simon was just as emphatic: ‘I believe only in my own reason, I submit only to its evidence. Prophecy, tradition, majority have to appear before my reason, as before their supreme judge’.”

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14.“For Taine, a critic of the French Revolutionary tradition, this Cartesianism had exercised its baleful influence far beyond the confines of pure rationalism: Rousseau and his disciples had fallen under the influence of this mode of reasoning, as they had deduced an entire set of political institutions from an abstract theory of human nature.”

15.“In his Propos, short and pithy pieces published in the French press and aimed at a general audience, Alain elaborated a practical moral code which drew heavily on Cartesian maxims; he often repeated that there was something Cartesian in every man. Among the values celebrated in this ethic were the spiritual quality of freedom; the importance of self- understanding and containing one’s negative passions; the avoidance of irresolution and the cultivation of self-conﬁdence; the quest for happiness through optimism; the intellectual rewards of solitude; and, above all, the formation of judgement through patient and careful reﬂection.”

16.“Alain’s rationalism, too, was highly metaphysical. He likened the justiﬁcation of republicanism to Descartes’ geometry: ‘an a priori truth and an established rule, to which experience has to be bent’. Yet this apparent dogmatism was tempered by a strong dose of individualism, also inspired by Cartesian scepticism. Thus Alain’s concept of ‘civic distrust’, the cornerstone of his political philosophy, was an extrapolation of Descartes’ method of doubt. He believed that citizens should constrain their rulers not by trying to govern in their place but by subjecting their utterances and deeds to systematic scrutiny – in the same way as a logician would treat a philosophical proposition. This ‘power of refusal’ (and this, too, was very Cartesian) was to be forged away from large gatherings, where individual judgement could too easily be swayed by wider groups. Rather, it was ideally exercised by the ‘solitary’ citizen, ‘seeking not to harmonize his thought with that of his neighbour’. Alain’s conception of citizenship was an original synthesis of Cartesianism with republicanism: ‘If we wish a public life which is worthy of Humanity, the individual must remain the individual

www.capitalideasonline.com Page - 5 “How the French Think” everywhere. Only the individual is capable of thought’.”

17.“In 1941, in a powerful echo of Taine’s view, an article in La Nouvelle Revue francaise lambasted what it termed the ‘Cartesian ideal of clarity’ for its perversion of French thought since the eighteenth century:

Rousseau was Cartesian in his commitment to the social contract and the ideal of democracy, no less than Voltaire in his cold desire to emancipate man by ‘Enlightenment’. The Revolution of 1789 was Cartesian, even more so than Descartes, in dedicating disaﬀected churches to the goddess of Reason, and in founding its future order on new political constructs, cleansed of traditionalist superstition. Likewise, our socialists have insisted on forfeiting their patriotism so as to embrace an abstract ideal of humanity, in which reason would moralize the economy and produce international peace.

The consequences of this intellectualist mode of reasoning had been devastating: the French had become obsessed with individualism, which had corroded both public and private spheres; the defeat of 1940 had been a direct consequence of the blindness of French elites, which stemmed from their fetish for a priori reasoning.”

18.“Henri Mougin claimed that the scientiﬁc contribution of Cartesianism stemmed less from Descartes’ substantial discoveries than from his method, which rested on a distinct epistemology: ‘The unity of intelligence is both the symbol and the instrument of a larger unity: the unity of thought’. This went to the heart of the French communist conception of reason, which was fundamentally monistic and made no distinction between the human and natural sciences.”

19.“Many of these themes were reﬂected in Mercier’s novel, but also more generally in the

www.capitalideasonline.com Page - 6 “How the French Think” political thought of the later Enlightenment, within which, by the time of his death in 1778, Rousseau occupied a pre-eminent position. References to his works and his principal ideas were frequent in the early years of the French Revolution, notably in the concept of the sovereignty of the people, the idea of the general will as the inalienable foundation of the political order, the sense of a fraternal community united by shared moral ideals, the belief in the human capacity to overcome selﬁshness and materialism and the vision of citizenship based on civic equality and moral autonomy.”

20.“This incorporation of scientiﬁc elements into visions of the good life has been a constant feature of the modern French way of thinking.”

21.“Voltaire stressed the importance of building a complex picture of the world from simple, observable elements.”

Benjamin Jowett

22.“In his subsequent works in the 1840s and 1850s Comte moved away from this ‘scientiﬁc’ positivism, placing greater emphasis on morality (which even displaced sociology as the most important discipline) and the institution of an elaborate ‘Religion of Humanity’, complete with

www.capitalideasonline.com Page - 7 “How the French Think” its institutions, cult and festivals, and dogma. From being its antithesis, religion now became the culmination of his science. How was this apparent contradiction to be explained? For the Victorian classicist and Master of Balliol Benjamin Jowett, the answer was simple: Comte ‘was a great man but also mad’. For many of his erstwhile admirers, notably John Stuart Mill, Comte’s later philosophy was an authoritarian aberration, marred by the abandonment of his progressive impulses to a ‘mania for regulation’. More sympathetic commentators have pointed out that the rupture was less brutal than it seemed, as Comte had from the outset underscored the importance of common ethical and spiritual values in the positivist order. Indeed, Comte’s evolution makes better sense if it is appreciated that his conception of science was in no way Promethean. Despite the elevated status he accorded to mathematics, he did not believe it could play a useful role in understanding the complexities of human society, and he thought that there were clear limits to what the physical sciences could explain. More generally, he was suspicious of the specialized pursuits of scientists, and sought to devise a system of popular scrutiny to prevent their work from becoming too esoteric – an echo of the Jacobin suspicion of the speculative sciences in the early 1790s.”

23.“These ambiguities in the Comtian heritage, and in wider French thinking about science, were reflected in Ernest Renan’sL’Avenir de la science. The book was written in 1848, during a phase of socialist and republican ebullition and an undimmed confidence in France’s status as a leading power. Although critical of Comte for underestimating ‘the infinite variety of human nature’, Renan remained broadly faithful to his conception of science: hence his affirmation that the nineteenth century had been an age of progress; his belief in reason and in the perfectibility of human nature; his view that science was ‘the first need of humanity’ and that its primary purpose was to explain man to himself; and his prediction that, in the long run, through its capacity to provide an experience of beauty and truth, science would become a new ‘religion’. Renan’s mimetism even extended to elaborating his own law of three stages, which culminated in a quasi-Comtian platitude: ‘Life is not absolute unity or

www.capitalideasonline.com Page - 8 “How the French Think” multiplicity, but multiplicity in unity, or rather multiplicity resolving itself in unity’. The work was published only in 1890 – by which time Renan’s world view had become considerably less sanguine. Although he stood by his contention that the real quality of a civilization lay in the depth of its popular education, Renan no longer believed that this universalistic ideal was achievable, or indeed desirable. Abandoning his commitment to cultural egalitarianism, he also conceded that higher forms of knowledge would forever remain the preserve of an elite. More fundamentally, he had now come to the painful realization that science could not provide happiness or absolute truth – merely preserve man from error.”

24.“From the early days of the Gaullist era, this technocratic ideal was contested and satirized – as in Jean-Luc Godard’s ﬁlm Alphaville (1965), a dystopic portrait of a computer- governed world in which the rules of logical science have triumphed, and individualism, emotion and poetry have been banned. Sociologists blamed technocratic thinking for the dysfunctions of the French decision-making system, notably its conservatism, its incapacity to innovate and its propensity to allow special interests to triumph over the common good. In the later twentieth century the organization and funding of scientiﬁc research in France also came in for scathing criticism, particularly with respect to its excessive bureaucratization, its cultural constraints on innovation, its lack of transparency and, above all, its siphoning of elites into the Grandes Ecoles.”

25.”The more generic features of the French style of thinking – the occasionally strident and hyperbolic quality of its rhetoric; the tendency to legitimize arguments by appealing to ﬁctionalized pasts; the willingness to attribute complex symbolic meanings to the most mundane of social practices; the capacity to generate eccentric conceptual combinations; the resort to essentialist arguments, notably about what constitutes the ‘true’ France; and the construction of visions of the good life around the idealization (and demonization) of particular social groups.”

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26.“According to the logic of this ‘rhetoric of reaction’, schemes for radical social and political change were undesirable because they could not be implemented (the futility argument), because they endangered the gains already accomplished (the jeopardy claim), or because they were likely to produce consequences opposite to those intended (the perversity thesis).”

Lionel Jospin

27.“In the late twentieth century the socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin thus sought to distinguish between a ‘market economy’ (which was necessary and valuable) and a ‘market society’ (whose inegalitarian ism was socially and morally destructive)’.”

28.“’The bourgeoisie,’ declared Francois Mitterrand towards the end of his life, ‘always chooses its self-interest, or what it believes to be its self-interest. Its patriotism is merely conditional’.”