The Memory Chalet (11 page)

Why does this sort of thing get so much more respect in Paris? It would be hard to imagine an American or English director making a film like Éric Rohmer’s
Ma Nuit chez Maud
(1969), in which Jean-Louis Trintignant agonizes for nearly two hours over whether or not to sleep with Françoise Fabian, in the process invoking everything from Pascal’s bet on the existence of God to the dialectics of Leninist revolution. Here, as in so many French films of that era, indecision rather than action drives forward the plot. An Italian director would have added sex. A German director would have added politics. For the French, ideas sufficed.

The seductive appeal of French intellectuality is undeniable. During the middle third of the twentieth century, every aspiring thinker from Buenos Aires to Bucharest lived in a Paris of the mind. Because French thinkers wore black, smoked Gitanes, talked theory, and spoke French, the rest of us followed suit. I well remember meeting fellow English students in the streets of the Left Bank and switching self-consciously into French.
Précieux
, to be sure, but
de rigueur
.

The very word “intellectual,” thus flatteringly deployed, would surely have amused the nationalist writer Maurice Barrès, who first invoked it derisively to describe Émile Zola, Léon Blum, and other defenders of the “Jewish traitor” Dreyfus. Ever since, intellectuals have “intervened” on sensitive public matters, invoking the special authority of their scholarly or artistic standing (today, Barrès himself would be an “intellectual”). It is no accident that nearly all of them attended just one small, prestigious institution: the École Normale Supérieure.

To understand the mystery of French intellectuality, one must begin with the École Normale. Founded in 1794 to train secondary school teachers, it became the forcing house of the republican elite. Between 1850 and 1970, virtually every Frenchman of intellectual distinction (women were not admitted until recently) graduated from it: from Pasteur to Sartre, from Émile Durkheim to Georges Pompidou, from Charles Péguy to Jacques Derrida (who managed to flunk the exam not once but twice before getting in), from Léon Blum to Henri Bergson, Romain Rolland, Marc Bloch, Louis Althusser, Régis Debray, Michel Foucault, Bernard-Henri Lévy, and all eight French winners of the Fields Medal for mathematics.

When I arrived there in 1970, as a
pensionnaire étranger
, the École Normale still reigned supreme. Unusually for France, it is a residential campus, occupying a quiet block in the midst of the 5th arrondissement. Every student gets his own little bedroom off a quadrangle set around a park-like square. In addition to the dormitories, there are lounges, seminar and lecture rooms, a refectory, a social science library, and the Bibliothèque des Lettres: a magnificent open-shelf library unmatched in its convenience and holdings.

American readers, accustomed to well-stocked research libraries in every land grant university from Connecticut to California, will have trouble grasping what this means: most French universities resemble a badly underfunded community college. But the privileges of
normaliens
extend far beyond their library and bedrooms. Getting into ENS was (and is) quite extraordinarily taxing. Any high school graduate aspiring to admission must sacrifice two additional years being force-fed (the image of geese comes to mind) an intense dose of classical French culture or modern science. He then sits the entrance exam and his performance is ranked against all other candidates, with the results made public. The top hundred or so are offered places in the École—along with a guaranteed lifetime income on the understanding that they pursue careers in the state employ.

Thus, in a population of 60 million, this elite humanist academy trains just three hundred young people at any one time. It is as though all the graduates of all the high schools in the US were pumped through a filter, with less than a thousand of them securing a place at a single college distilling the status and distinction of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, Chicago, and Berkeley. Unsurprisingly,
normaliens
have a high opinion of themselves.

The young men I met at the École seemed to me far less mature than my Cambridge contemporaries. Gaining admission to Cambridge was no easy matter, but it did not preclude the normal life of a busy youth. However, no one got into the École Normale without sacrificing his teenage years to that goal, and it showed. I was unfailingly astonished by the sheer volume of rote learning on which my French contemporaries could call, suggesting an impacted richness that was at times almost indigestible.
Pâté de foie gras
indeed.

But what these budding French intellectuals gained in culture, they often lacked in imagination. My first breakfast at the École was instructive in this regard. Seated opposite a group of unshaven, pajama-clad freshmen, I buried myself in my coffee bowl. Suddenly an earnest young man resembling the young Trotsky leaned across and asked me (in French): “Where did you do
khâgne
?”—the high-intensity post-lycée preparatory classes. I explained that I had not done
khâgne
: I came from Cambridge. “Ah, so you did
khâgne
in England.” “No,” I tried again: “We don’t do
khâgne
—I came here directly from an English university.”

The young man looked at me with withering scorn. It is not possible, he explained, to enter the École Normale without first undergoing preparation in
khâgne
. Since you are here, you must have done
khâgne
. And with that conclusive Cartesian flourish he turned away, directing his conversation at worthier targets. This radical disjunction between the uninteresting evidence of your own eyes and ears and the incontrovertible conclusions to be derived from first principles introduced me to a cardinal axiom of French intellectual life.

B
ack 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 on my time at Normale Sup’ I am reminded of the engineer (a graduate of the École Polytechnique, Normale’s counterpart in the applied sciences) who was sent by his king in 1830 to observe the trials of George Stephenson’s “Rocket” on the newly opened Manchester- Liverpool railway line. The Frenchman sat by the track taking copious notes as the sturdy little engine faultlessly pulled the world’s first railway train back and forth between the two cities. After conscientiously calculating what he had just observed, he reported his findings back to Paris: “The thing is impossible,” he wrote. “It cannot work.” Now
there
was a French intellectual.

XIV

Revolutionaries

I
was born in England in 1948, late enough to avoid conscription by a few years, but in time for the Beatles: I was fourteen when they came out with “Love Me Do.” Three years later the first miniskirts appeared: I was old enough to appreciate their virtues, young enough to take advantage of them. I grew up in an age of prosperity, security, and comfort—and therefore, turning twenty in 1968, I rebelled. Like so many baby boomers, I conformed in my nonconformity.

Without question, the 1960s were a good time to be young. Everything appeared to be changing at unprecedented speed and the world seemed to be dominated by young people (a statistically verifiable observation). On the other hand, at least in England, change could be deceptive. As students we vociferously opposed the Labour government’s support for Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam. I recall at least one such protest in Cambridge, following a talk there by Denis Healey, the defense minister of the time. We chased his car out of the town—a friend of mine, now married to the EU high commissioner for foreign affairs, leaped onto the hood and hammered furiously at the windows.

It was only as Healey sped away that we realized how late it was—college dinner would start in a few minutes and we did not want to miss it. Heading back into town, I found myself trotting alongside a uniformed policeman assigned to monitor the crowd. We looked at each other. “How do you think the demonstration went?” I asked him. Taking the question in stride—finding in it nothing extraordinary—he replied: “Oh I think it went quite well, Sir.”

Cambridge, clearly, was not ripe for revolution. Nor was London: at the notorious Grosvenor Square demonstration outside the American embassy (once again about Vietnam—like so many of my contemporaries I was most readily mobilized against injustice committed many thousands of miles away), squeezed between a bored police horse and some park railings, I felt a warm, wet sensation down my leg. Incontinence? A bloody wound? No such luck. A red paint bomb that I had intended to throw in the direction of the embassy had burst in my pocket.

That same evening I was to dine with my future mother-in-law, a German lady of impeccably conservative instincts.

I doubt if it improved her skeptical view of me when I arrived at her door covered from waist to ankle in a sticky red substance—she was already alarmed to discover that her daughter was dating one of those scruffy lefties chanting “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh” whom she had been watching with some distaste on television that afternoon. I, of course, was only sorry that it was paint and not blood. Oh to
épater la bourgeoisie
.

F
or real revolution, of course, you went to Paris. Like so many of my friends and contemporaries I traveled there in the spring of 1968 to observe—to inhale—the genuine item. Or, at any rate, a remarkably faithful performance of the genuine item. Or, perhaps, in the skeptical words of Raymond Aron, a psychodrama acted out on the stage where once the genuine item had been performed in repertoire. Because Paris really had been the site of revolution—indeed, much of our visual understanding of the term derives from what we think we know of the events there in the years 1789-1794—it was sometimes difficult to distinguish between politics, parody, pastiche . . . and performance.

From one perspective everything was as it should be: real paving stones, real issues (or real enough to the participants), real violence, and occasionally real victims. But at another level it all seemed not quite serious: even then I was hard pushed to believe that beneath the paving stones lay the beach (
sous les pavés la plage
), much less that a community of students shamelessly obsessed with their summer travel plans—in the midst of intense demonstrations and debates, I recall much talk of Cuban vacations—seriously intended to overthrow President Charles de Gaulle and his Fifth Republic. All the same, it was their own children out on the streets, so many French commentators purported to believe this might happen and were duly nervous.

By any serious measure, nothing at all happened and we all went home. At the time, I thought Aron unfairly dismissive—his dyspepsia prompted by the sycophantic enthusiasms of some of his fellow professors, swept off their feet by the vapid utopian clichés of their attractive young charges and desperate to join them. Today I would be disposed to share his contempt, but back then it seemed a bit excessive. The thing that seemed most to annoy Aron was that everyone was having
fun
—for all his brilliance he could not see that even though having fun is not the same as making a revolution, many revolutions really did begin playfully and with laughter.