In a successful tribute to the work of Pierre Grémion, eleven intellectuals capture the evolution of democracy, intellectual life, relations between West and East and the modernizing State in France. A nuanced portrait of a France that has remade itself.
Rare are the collective works which retain a common thread despite the diversity of the texts. This work succeeds where others fail, by bringing together the contributions of eleven researchers, American, English and French, who brilliantly analyze contemporary France based on the fertile work of Pierre Grémion. Thanks to his work on the modernization of the French state, the role of intellectuals in public life and France’s relations with the United States and the two Europes, Grémion established himself, according to Philippe Urfalino, as “ one of the authors who contributed the most to the intelligence of post-war France “. This “ political historian with a background in sociology » distinguished himself in the art of “ show what is undone “, or the wear, perhaps irreversible, of “ the French political universal “. Now this homage possesses the qualities that we recognize in Grémion: without leading either to the “ morose delight nor nostalgic tension » the eleven texts bring to light “ blindness, failures and erasures » which shed light on politics and culture in France. One might think, upon reading them, that the time of Gaullian greatness is over, but also of the great committed intellectual, of the communist utopia, of the East-West division, of the Jacobin State, etc. However, as some essays suggest, the picture is not so simple.
France in an impasse ?
Thus, there is reason to wonder if current France is really in an impasse. To this question, Stanley Hoffman offers the most conventional answer. Compared to American democracy, French democracy is afflicted with several evils: the disconnect between the elites and the general public, the weakness of civil society, the allergy to compromise, the rhetorical force of the lawyers of the status quo and the lack of political and educational authority. Hoffman even admits his nostalgia for the Gaullian verb. The Harvard professor nevertheless credits France with being less mired in conformism and less obsessed with work than the United States.
More original, Suzanne Berger challenges the very idea of an impasse. She recalls how the current situation is analogous to that of 1957: the same pessimism, the same feeling of standing still. Berger argues that intellectuals tend to favor explanations positing integration and stability, as if only massive shocks precipitate change. Close to the Marx of Eighteen Brumaireshe prefers to think that political change is possible in the absence of extraordinary men. An apparent impasse often conceals a precarious balance. To see only the structural constraints, the weakening of the nation-state or the weight of history we would neglect new facts, such as the coming to power of a new generation born after 1945. For Berger, France today does not lack resources to face the future ; However, she acknowledges, it may be that the optimism of minimal means is not enough.
The British Jack Hayward is interested in the avatars of the Jacobin State, long analyzed on the premise of a “ Peripheral France paralyzed by a hypercentralized state “. However, Grémion was able to demonstrate that French dirigisme relied on the autonomy of notables, cultivating informal and horizontal links with the State which minimized change. The decentralized dirigisme practiced between 1964 and 1982 revealed a weak State, where decisions taken in Paris ratified local arrangements. If Grémion illustrated the strength of the nobility system, he did not foresee that decentralization would come to formalize the role of notables. The Deferre law of 1982 set up a highly entangled maquis, thanks to which the State handed over to the departments and regions the task of managing the shortage. Without strengthening the associative fabric, decentralization has multiplied the peripheral levels, at the risk of encouraging endemic corruption among elected officials. According to Hayward, the pursuit of decentralization under the Jospin and Raffarin governments does not seem to have put a stop to the collusion between the elites that this noble system encourages.
France divided between its worlds and its utopias
Another central question of this book is the fight against communism and revolutionary utopia among French intellectuals, shared between the United States and the two Europes. Marc Lazar shows that despite the decline of communism, the progressivism which had marked the French left in the good old days when the PCFSartre and the university’s associates, recomposed itself at the turn of the 1990s. Rather than disappearing, as Grémion had once thought, it was reborn in the form of a left of the left which denounced globalization , neoliberalism and “ social liberalism “. If the old progressivism cultivated distrust of the State, the new one defends the public service and the nation-state against Europe ; sociologically, it relies on a significant part of public service voters, unfaithful to the PCF and at P.S.. By cultivating the preeminence of the State and radical change, this new left reactivates the past “ believing in charting a route to the future » estimates Lazar.
Volker Berghahn looked at one aspect of American cultural diplomacy during the Cold War era, namely the action of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) to which Grémion devoted one of his books. Bringing together intellectuals such as Aron, Russell, Croce, Jaspers, the CCF had to be refounded, after the revelation of its links with the CIAand took a new name before disappearing in 1977. Berghahn highlights the internal tensions of the organization, and in particular the philosophical conflict which separates Europeans and Americans, through the ambivalent figure of Pierre Emmanuel. Against American optimism imbued with pragmatic liberalism, European intellectuals remained attached to a pessimistic vision of modernity.
Pierre Hassner and Jacques Rupnik examine East-West relations. The first tries to understand the reasons for the breakdown in dialogue between intellectuals from the two Europes since 1989. It is clear that this breakdown is fueled by the eclipse of intellectuals, the European idea and representative democracy. Paradoxically, disenchantment with Europe is not matched by increased confidence in the future of nations. The breakdown in East-West dialogue can also be explained by geopolitical and intellectual differences. While anti-Americanism is asserting itself in the West, intellectuals in the East have more confidence in the United States than in Europe in the face of a feared Russia. In the West, pacifism and anti-imperialism prevail ; in the east, with some exceptions, support for American power prolongs anti-totalitarianism. Hassner believes that these differences have reached their limit and that a trans-European dialogue can be born, to imagine a world where “ Europe itself is no longer central “.
Rupnik examines the Paris-Prague relationship, revealing the new European order in XXe century. If this relationship enjoyed a golden age before the Second World War, it declined thereafter, to the point that the Prague Spring dug a large gap between the French and the Czechs. The Prague Spring was driven by the desire for freedom against revolutionary totalitarianism ; the Parisian spring combined revolutionary myth and libertarian ambitions. The Parisian May put a new generation in power ; the Prague spring sacrificed an entire generation. The exile of Czechs certainly reestablished bridges between the two capitals and the velvet spring of 1989 temporarily sealed the reunion. But new misunderstandings soon resurfaced. The Franco-German duo or the French dream of a Greater Europe are going badly in Central Europe. Seen from Prague, France even appears as a country in decline with old struggles.
THE “ spiritual power ” In France
Olivier Mongin and Goulven Boudic study the metamorphoses of “ spiritual power “. Mongin tests the hypothesis of a lasting eclipse of intellectuals in our era of progressive modernization studied by Grémion. THE “ Thirty Glorious Years » had a cultural component, which Mongin restores by depicting the humanist intellectual who works in the “ institutional block » formed by the trio The World-Spirit-Thresholdwhich is opposed by the progressive, hegemonic bloc. Even in this first block the figure of the Great Writer weakens, surviving only through style. Attacked by structural philosophies and sixty-eighter radicalism, the humanist world imploded after 1968. The revolution dismissed resistance, structure the story, the event the historical link. The anti-humanist intellectual imposes formalism and the cult of the event, and thus accelerates the disappearance of the Great Writer. Mongin is categorical: the “ spiritual power ” French “ runs empty », incapable of thinking about globalized capitalism and placing it in a historical cycle. Condemned to repetition and disconnection since 1981, it evokes a religious power communicating with the universal.
Boudic enters the internal history of the magazine Spirit whose unity proceeds, in addition to an intellectual content, from the dynamics of a “ friendship collective » who was distinguished by his style, that is to say the way in which he “ manages » his dissensions. The aura of founder Emmanuel Mounier would therefore not alone explain the cohesion of the magazine, which only resorted to expulsion once.
Media and research. End of the French exception ?
Finally, what remains of French exceptionalism, particularly in the areas of state relations with the media and university research ? After the war, France, unlike Germany and Great Britain, nationalized the control of information, making it a sensitive public service.
Thus Antoine de Tarté reconstructs the transition from a system of public monopoly on radio broadcasting, then on television, to that of liberal pluralism. May 1968, he observes, precipitated the questioning of public broadcasting, which lost its credibility, and accentuated the divorce between the State and the press. ; the public monopoly ended up weighing on the State itself, so much so that under Giscard a first reform introduced a partial liberation of the audiovisual sector, quickly contested by the generation of May 1968. Then, in 1983, the socialists concretized the abolition of the public monopoly. This liberal pluralism, while it puts France in line with several Western democracies, also recalls the regime of press freedom under the IIIe Republic. Sarkozy’s latest reforms in audiovisual matters have only accelerated in France what we observe elsewhere: the “ disappearance of public communication service “.
In the field of university research, France has been able to better maintain its specificity, not without some difficulty. Catherine Vikas examines the recent modernization of CNRSthe largest agency of this type in Europe, created between 1988 and 1994 under the leadership of its general director François Kourilsky. Despite the efforts undertaken to decompartmentalize disciplines, reform management and decentralize research in order to assert the strategic capacity of the organization, the last fifteen years of CNRS have weakened its foundations.
This reveals France located between three worlds. She is herself a whole world… which has neither really fallen into another, nor been shipwrecked. If today’s France has let go a little of some of its passions, its myths and its State, it is because it has remade itself, rather than been defeated, following paths that remain still to be marked.