The Memory Chalet by Tony Judt

Author:Tony Judt
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781101484012
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2010-10-20T10:00:00+00:00

Back in 1970 the École boasted quite a few self-styled “Maoists.” One of them, a talented mathematician, took pains to explain to me why the great Bibliothèque des Lettres should be razed to the ground:” Du passé faisons table rase” (“let’s make a clean slate of the past”). His logic was impeccable: the past is indeed an impediment to unrestricted innovation. I found myself at a loss to explain just why it would be a mistake all the same. In the end I simply told him that he would see things differently in years to come. “A very English conclusion,” he admonished me.

My Maoist friend and his colleagues never did burn down the library (though a halfhearted attempt was made one night to storm it). Unlike their German and Italian counterparts, the radical fringe of the French student movement never passed from revolutionary theorizing to violent practice. It would be interesting to speculate why this was: the rhetorical violence certainly attained a considerable pitch in the year I was there, with Maoist normaliens periodically “occupying” the dining hall and covering it with slogans: les murs ont la parole. Yet they failed to make common cause with similarly “angry” students down the road in the Sorbonne.

This should not surprise us. To be a normalien in Paris in those days conferred upon you considerable cultural capital, as Pierre Bourdieu (another normalien ) would have put it. Normaliens had more to lose than most European students by turning the world upside down, and they knew it. The image (imported from Central Europe) of the intellectual as rootless cosmopolitan—a class of superfluous men at odds with an unsympathetic society and repressive state—never applied in France. Nowhere were intellectuals more chez eux.

Raymond Aron, who arrived at the École in 1924, wrote in his Mémoires that “I have never met so many intelligent men gathered in such a small space.” I would second that sentiment. Most of the normaliens I knew have gone on to glorious academic or public careers (the outstanding exception being Bernard-Henri Lévy, of whom I suppose it might all the same be said that he too fulfilled his promise). But with certain notable exceptions they remain strikingly homogeneous as a cohort: gifted, brittle, and curiously provincial.

In my day, Paris was the intellectual center of the world. Today it feels marginal to the international conversation. French intellectuals still generate occasional heat, but such light as they emit comes to us from a distant sun—perhaps already extinct. Symptomatically, ambitious young Frenchmen and women today attend the École Nationale d’Administration: a forcing house for budding bureaucrats. Or else they go to business school. Young normaliens are as brilliant as ever, but they play little part in public life (neither Finkielkraut nor Glucksmann, Bruckner nor Kristeva attended the École). This seems a pity. Intellectual sheen was not France’s only trump card but—like the language itself, another waning asset—it was distinctive. Are the French well served by becoming just like us, only a little less so?

Thinking back

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