A deep malaise

Here is a detail that says a lot. In the French translation of this latest book by the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand, the title was followed by a question mark. In the English translation there isn’t one. The author is making a statement, not asking a question. The French intellectual is dead, finished, a thing of the past.

If this is supposed to be polemical, it is an epic failure. Even if Paris still retains its unique aura, everyone knows that it no longer rules the intellectual and artistic world: the likes of Zola and Sartre seem to have produced no weighty legitimate heirs. So what will The End of the French Intellectual tell us that we haven’t already heard?

I’ve lost count of all the books on this subject, or the end of French cuisine or simply the end of France. It’s a profitable genre in itself, and an interesting one to decipher. When written by someone French, these works usually reveal a defeatist mentality, filled with existential malaise. The many such essays since the late 1990s have led a fashion known as déclinologie.

When written by a foreigner, they more often demonstrate some deep-rooted fascination that has grown bitter. Although partly educated in France, as a doctoral student in the late 1970s, Sand belongs in the second category. Here he writes of his amours de jeunesse with the bile and bad faith of a spurned lover.

Let’s begin with Sartre, one of Sand’s Left Bank idols whom he now hates himself for having loved. ‘The discovery of Sartre’s rather unheroic action during the German Occupation created the first cracks in my image of him,’ he explains. Was it unheroic to have escaped death at the hands of the Nazis? It’s a strange way to describe someone who simply survived the war in one piece.