One of the main characteristics of the category of intellectuals in France is their quality of witnesses and often guarantors of a certain memory, that is to say, in essence of historical episodes in which they have been acting themselves. This function constitutes the French notion of "intellectuel" itself - we should use the inverted comas to mark the difference between "intellectuel" and intellectual, which acquired a banalized and ahistorical sense in the international sociological literature. The notion of "intellectuel" then is essentially historical and only varies in its relative invariance through memory or through rehistoricization. The "intellectuels" in France are then at the crucial point which separates memory and history [see the classical analysis of Maurice Halbwachs, La mémoire collective (Paris, PUF, 2eme édition, 1968) especially pp. 76-77]. 

As always when speaking of memory and history, we have to start out with words, their meaning and changes in meaning, as signs of other, deeper changes. 

        The word "intellectuel" did not even exist before the 1890s and when it entered the language it was usually written either in italics or with a capital initial, as if to underline that the reference was to one or several extraordinary, uncommon, individuals. The word became common the day after Zola published, in the journal "L'Aurore" the famous letter passed down to posterity under the title J'Accuse, although its actual title was "Open letter to the President of the Republic." The next day a protest letter was published, signed by a number of academics, men of letters, artists, journalists, students and individuals with no particular titles to their names, all approving of the Zola's letter, and demanding a revision, or a new trial for captain Dreyfus. This protest, simply called "protest" by the newspapers became "The Protest of the Intellectuals" in an article by Maurice Barres, and this is when the term acquired general currency. The "intellectuels," like many artistic or political movements, have been baptized by their adversaries. It is important to note that the word started out as an insult. To be "intellectuel" meant to be "dreyfusard", that is a person who pretends to uphold things that the majority of the French refuse. We find here also the idea of dissidence, and of questioning of the power that be, which give the word its particular flavor. The essential characteristics of the intellectuels are defined by the tactics of the Dreyfus Affair: 1. First the deliberate scandal, a manner of fighting outside the /social and political/ norms, because Zola based his allegations on a simple intellectual reconstruction, starting from a few indices. The allegations fell under the accusation of defamation, since Zola attacked the highest authorities in the state. 2. The collective dimension, which had the immediate task of proving that Zola was not a mad man, since he had behind him so many scientists, university professors, members of the Institut, professors to the Sorbonne, all reasonable and well adjusted people. The birth act of the intellectuals is grounded in this collective affirmation. The intellectuals do not count as a force one by one, they do count collectively, if they associate themselves for a collective action. It is interesting to note that the anti-dreyfusards also adopted dreyfusard tactics: to the "Ligue des droits des hommes" of the dreyfusards, they created the "Ligue de la Patrie française", they signed collective letters etc. The intellectuals form in this way two parties which oppose one another on everything except the fact that it is legitimate to form an intellectual party. 

        Thus the conflict of values was also defined at this time. The particular affair - of the Dreyfus affair - generated so much collective enthusiasm and, conversely, so much collective disapproval because it questioned values that were/are part of the French political memory, while at the same time giving them a new historical sense, in a precise context. In a way, the Dreyfus affair reactivated the centennial debate on the French Revolution: between those who believed in the rights of man, and for whom the rights of an individual are superior to the reason of state, and those who, on the contrary, remained loyal to the monarchical idea of the State being superior to everything because it, the State, provides the cement of the nation. It is a fundamental debate: who should come first, the individual or the nation, the individual or the state? It also draws the line between a France tied up with a political ideal, hence with a political regime, and France as an eternal entity. The intellectuals on both sides are defending, and are conscious of defending fundamental values, and by this very fact, to be the speakers for two historical traditions which cannot be reconciled. Which explains why this debate will be reactivated periodically, in other, completely different, historical circumstances. The question will no longer be if a particular individual is innocent or guilty, but each time the same systems of values will face one another, and coalitions of intellectuals will defend these values with identical arguments. 

        Even so, very soon after the Dreyfus affair, the theme of the end of the intellectuals and of their treason began to appear in the political debate. The dreyfusards came to power, and many of their former friends noticed that the dreyfusards, so attached to principles and to the French revolution did not waste any time in betraying these principles (id. Clemenceau, director of "L'Aurore" in 1898, minister of the interior in 1906, jailed the leaders of the CGT union and ordered that workers be shot at). It seemed that the Affair had become nothing more than a good stepping stone for arrivists. In this way appeared, very soon, the three themes of the treason, perversity and death of the intellectuals, which will be come forth again and again all along the 20th century. 
 
 

The avatars of a dialectic 
 
 

It is now necessary to see how these patterns of apogee and decline of the intellectuals maintained and renewed themselves during the 20th century, going from passive memory to active history. 
 
 

1. Until the 1960s the number of potential intellectuals remained relatively small. Until this period we have not witnessed the "mass-intelligentsia". For instance, the demographics change from 30,000 students in 1900 to 80,000 in 1935, especially due to the feminization of the student body. In 1960, there are 194,000 students. The same goes for all the intellectual professions, so the specific elitist characteristic of the intellectuals does not disappear until 1960. 

2. The second important fact is the fracture of the 1914 war. This war represented a great blow for the intellectuals since they started out by being pacifists, as they were by principle hostile to the power of the army. The pacifist ideal took a beating as intellectuals on both sides rallied almost unanimously behind the Sacred union. [cf. Christophe Prochasson, Anne Rasmussen, Au nom de la patrie (Paris, La Découverte, 1996) and Christophe Prochasson, Les intellectuels, le socialisme et la guerre (1900-1938) (Paris, Le Seuil, 1993)] Still, at the end of the war, the pacifist ideas, which reconnect with the first generation of the dreyfussards, find again an audience proportional with the enormous sacrifice of the young generation of intellectuals. (For instance, half of the students of the Ecole Normale Supérieure died in the trenches.) 

3. Dreyfusisme owes much of its renaissance to the Russian revolution. For many intellectuals, the Russian revolution, especially the February 1917 phase, is a repetition of the French Revolution, a distant outcome, even the accomplishment of the French revolution. Lenin himself claimed the heritage of Robespierre and the Commune. For the sympathizers, the Russian revolution gave new meaning to the revolutionary ideal. 

4. Another phenomenon is the endurance of an extreme right current between the wars, embodied by the Action française, which attained the peak of its influence during this period. Its ideology rests both on a recurrent denunciation of eternal dreyfusisme and a rallying effort against what the right wing called "intellectual bolshevism." Immediately after the war, a right-wing manifesto titled "For a party of intelligence" openly challenged the appeals of Romain Rolland, co-signed by many French and foreign intellectuals in favor of an "internationale of the spirit" - or of the mind - une internationale de l'esprit. One can see here the continuation of the Dreyfus era appeals and counter-appeals. 

5. The last important factor is a progressively severe crisis of the political class, very similar to the political crisis of the 1890s. Thus, the intellectuals feel it is their mission to play a political part, since the politicians do not play their own part. 
 
 

Appearance of new criteria 
 
 

There are, however, a number of new criteria that explain why the memory of past roles played by intellectuals cannot be reactivated in the exact same terms. 

1. The first change concerns the notion of elitism, of which the dreyfusards had been often accused: by signing petitions, by styling themselves as representatives - even if not elected - of public opinion, they pretended to form a new ruling elite. During the inter-war period, the left-wing intellectuals abandoned much of their elitism and advocated a move towards the people, with proposals of recruiting the new elites, the new rulers, from the popular classes. 

Conversely, elitism is appropriated by the other intellectual camp, heirs to the anti-dreyfusards, for whom barriers must be maintained, lest we settle for a regime of mediocrity. 

2. Another notable change is the progressive organization of intellectuals as a social group. Before, the engagement came spontaneously, as the need arose so to speak. Now, that is, in the inter-war period and after the war, there are card-carrying party intellectuals, who defend precise positions and lose some of their autonomy in order to achieve collective efficiency. Again, the dialectic of memory and history resurfaces: must one remain loyal to the founding memory of the group, or adapt to the new historical conditions which fatally marginalize isolated individuals - in short must one abandon the atemporal fight for values for the sake of historical necessity, take sides rather than stand up for individual rights? When the answer was in the affirmative it was denounced by Julien Benda as treason - the famous treason of the clerks, or intellectuals - la trahison des clercs. 

3. A third innovation is brought about by the changes in the media. During the Dreyfus affair intellectuals needed to mobilize just the printed press. With the radio and the cinema, there will be a cleavage between the intellectuals who do have access to the new media and those who are reduced to voicing their opinions in closed circles. 

4. Finally there are the debates within the intellectual circles themselves: what are the new causes which the intellectuals must support? The link with the Dreyfus affair is evident in the way intellectuals rallied behind the Front populaire. A number of former active dreyfusards (Paul Langevin, Alain) signed the "Appeal to the workers" of March 5, 1934 - pleading for the union between the democratic forces [(in fact, Stalin's change in strategy had permitted the union between socialists and communists, a political move ignored by the intellectuals in question, who tended to have a rather idealistic view of the Front populaire)]. For our topic it is important to note that the dreyfusard values are maintained: the platform of the Front populaire read "bread, peace and freedom" - peace and freedom were dreyfusard values (two out of three here!). In the opposing camp, at the far right (Charles Maurras, Léon Daudet, Henri Massis) there is a symmetrical revival of xenophobia and anti-semitism, especially against Léon Blum. The same programs are clashing: on one side, democracy, on the other, an authoritarian regime; on one side, pacifism - on the other, the cult of the army as the last bastion against the interior and exterior enemy. 

        This is a period of extreme tension: the political polemics become extremely violent; very shortly the fights will no longer be carried out with pens but with real weapons. During the war, the settling of accounts turns into a real manhunt: Paul Langevin, for instance, is put under house arrest, Victor Basch is assassinated by the Milice, Jewish and left-wing academics are widely persecuted. The left-wing camp itself answers in kind with the purge of the collaborators in 1944-45 - the execution of Robert Brasillach, the trial of Maurras, and the black list distributed by the National Writers’ Committee. The intellectuals' civil war turns into a reciprocal exclusion of the other camp from the intellectual and political space. There is a great temptation of the prêt-`a-penser (adopting ready-made system of values) following a party line of the least evil: anti-fascism or anti-communism. The intellectuals, who should have served as points of light for the formation of systems of values are themselves confused and divided even within the two grand classical traditions - hence, again, after the war, the theme of the decline and death of the intellectuals makes a come-back. 
 
 

1945-50: Sartre and the Communist Party 
 
 

        Still, the late forties and the fifties were called - wrongly - the golden age of the intellectuals. Wrongly, because intellectuals define themselves by their autonomy, while it is during this period that intellectuals give up most of their autonomy in the interest of partisan positions. This "golden age" went down in history as the Sartre years. The explanation can be found in the political circumstances. As in the 1890s, as in the 1930s, the political class is criticized for the unmet expectations that emerged, this time around, from the Resistance and the Liberation. Consequently, there is a part for intellectuals to play, because, as in the previous periods, intellectuals reach the peak of their influence in times of political and ideological crisis. The new generations are looking for new master thinkers and they found one in the person of Sartre. As Anna Boschettia and Pierre Bourdieu noted, Sartre is the "total intellectual": he joins in his person the functions of Zola and Bergson, he is the most famous writer of his times, but also a professional philosopher who earned the highest academic titles; he is not only a man of letters and a philosopher, but also a journalist and a radio personality, a playwright and a screenwriter, plus director of the magazine, Les Temps modernes. He fills the entire stage. He is four persons in one and can address millions. 

        However, circumstances and personality alone cannot explain why Sartre was able to serve as spokesman for a majority of intellectuals, notably among the young generations. The deep wounds of the war also played a part. The civil war of the intellectuals eliminated the right-wing altogether, either by physical elimination, or by moral indignation, leading to the unchallenged domination of the left-leaning intellectuals, the heirs to the dreyfusards. Since they are in a dominant position, they can go even further than the dreyfussards and divide themselves along ever more complex lines. Without real adversaries until the Algerian war, they can claim absolute positions, and go the distance to revolutionary radicalism. Sartre, in calling his magazine Les Temps Modernes affirmed that a new era was opening, when everything needed to be rethought from the ground up. 

        Another notable element is the very powerful influence of the Communist Party, which also promotes radicalism, because the Communist Party presents itself as a revolutionary party. The intellectuals attracted by the Communist Party are animated by a new revolutionary romanticism, and by the imperative of placing themselves in the anti-fascist camp, even if that meant forgetting or dissimulating the crimes and the aberrations of the communist regime - or this is, at least, the way these intellectuals rationalized their engagement after the fact. See for instance the testimony of Jean-Pierre Vernant, communist since 1932, critical communist since 1958, who quits the party in 1970: "For someone of my generation, to be communist meant thinking that we were about to enter a period of decisive confrontations with the forces of evil. And not only our individual destiny was at stake. The most intransigent enemies of fascism were the communists, and they were the only ones capable to oppose fascism with an equally powerful organization and military discipline." Even though he was aware of what was going on in the Soviet Union, his faith did not waver, because: "I did not grapple with the problem of democracy in the Soviet Union, I only believed what was in the Texts: Marx texts, they were the reality." [cf. J.-P. Vernant, Le trou noir du communisme, in Entre mythe et politique (Paris: Seuil, 1996), 579. See also Maurice Agulhon, who confirms this interpretation.] Such testimonies abound. 

        Finally, there was the political crisis of the traditional left wing parties (radical and socialist) which becomes ever more visible as it goes hand in hand with the process of decolonization. During the 19th century, the dreyfusards defended colonization, as France was supposed to bring civilization to Africa and Asia. In the 1950s, the heirs to the dreyfussards exposed colonization as an infringement upon the colonized peoples’ human rights. In the name of the memory of the group, the intellectuals can now assign themselves a new mission, not only to liberate THE people, but to emancipate the PEOPLES - of the colonized countries - a transfer that appears in full light during the Algerian war. 

        Some intellectuals assimilate the Algerian affair to the Dreyfus Affair, which is not, however, an automatic transfer. There is indeed an analogy in the events themselves: some intellectuals believe that France, by getting engaged in colonization, has betrayed the ideal of the revolution. So, those intellectuals who denounce the use of torture and the excesses of the colonial government reconnect with the tradition of the dreyfusards - defending the rights of the innocent against the state. But history marches ahead, and introduces new fractures in this neo-dreyfusard camp: there is another tendency, supported by Sartre, of those who sign the appeal of the 121, for whom the Algerian revolution is a fragment of the world revolution, which will not bear fruit thanks to the proletariat - as communists have previously believed - but by the insurrection of the proletarian peoples of the entire world. The revolutionary intellectuals must then help these proletarian peoples, just as the dreyfusards helped educate the masses, or as the resistants fought the Vichy regime. As the Algerian war coincided with the moment when many intellectuals distanced themselves from communism, those who wished a militant engagement found in anti-colonial activism a good substitute for communism, what is called in France le Tiers-mondisme. This substitute to the old faith also screened out all critical retrospectives of the previous blindness, which explains why the 1956 events in Poland and Hungary did not suscitate the debates that they should have provoked among intellectuals. Sartre himself, fellow traveler until 1956, does break with the communist party, but in his Critique de la Raison dialectique continues to proclaim the insurmountable character of Marxism. So, he remains a prisoner in the logic of all or nothing, politically transferred on behalf of other causes: after Algeria, Cuba, Vietnam, the Maoist revolution. The return to a vision of human rights, in the dreyfusard tradition, will have to wait until the mid-1970s. 
 
 

The new trials of the intellectuals 
 
 

    Since the end of the 1970s the dominant cliché is that intellectuals are destined to silence, to decline, to quixotisme or to professional isolation. Three grand factors are responsible for this dominant pessimism: 

1. The domination of the new mass-media, the implied decline of the traditional writing press, which in turn makes it difficult to have a complex public debate. Even if they had a new message, the intellectuals would not be able to bring it forward because, as a rule, they do not have access to the means by which one can influence public opinion. 

2. The second change would be the erosion of the very notion of intellectual - in the primordial sense of "intellectuel". There had never been so many intellectuals in the sociological sense of the word, because there had never been so many individuals with university degrees, but never so few "intellectuels" in the sense of the Dreyfus Affair, since very few have the means of mobilizing the public opinion. Besides, there is a legitimacy problem that goes hand in hand with this expansion of elitism. To whom and for whom do intellectuals speak, since elitism itself might well be at odds with the defense of democratic values? So, elitism is secured for themselves by the right wing intelligentsia and rejected by the left-wing intellectuals. 

3. The third predicament is to be found within the crisis of the debate itself. Is there still a real debate? After disowning all the causes they had endorsed in the past, many intellectuals on the left are now practicing an apolitical masochism of the "what ever for?" type (`a quoi bon? ) Engagement itself is bound to lead to the perversion of ideals. But by limiting themselves to unanimist and anodyne causes, intellectuals are in danger of betraying the notion of dissidence which defined the first intellectuals. Can one define the opposing system of values beyond the preservation of a minimal republican consensus? Certainly on this latest point the past decade has contradicted the prophets of silence, which brings us to the present day renaissance of the "intellectuels." 

        The analogy of end of centuries /fins de siecle/ can put this pessimism into perspective. At the end of the nineteenth century, as economical interests were taking over the press, a multitude of small magazines emerged to provide space for alternative debates. Similarly, at the end of our century - since the 1980s - a multitude of alternative intellectual networks emerged - local radio stations, journals of various associations, militant or para-academic magazines, on line publications - whose part in the formation of an alternative public opinion is probably underestimated through the censorship of the dominant media. 

        Second, the central debate in France has become again, as a century ago, the problem of national identity in relation with the political development of the far right, the surge in xenophobia, the new problems of religious pluralism versus the secular character of the state and the weakening of the traditional nation state. Dreyfusards and anti-dreyfusards could easily find their spiritual heirs in the two camps most in evidence today. On one side, an entire political current employs anxiety in face of the future, very similar to the nationalism and anti-semitism fin de siecle. On the other side, an anti-racist current uses the memory of the inter-war precedents, which culminated in the institutional racism of Vichy, in order to rally a skeptical public opinion, aware of the shortcomings of the dominant parties. 

        In this way, the crucial questions to which intellectuals, before and after the Dreyfus Affair attempted to give an answer, are asked again: France, as a nation, must close itself up or must remain open? What is left of the funding values? Should the immemorial tradition of the Middle Ages and the Ancien Regime become the only common national foundation able to resist "globalization", meaning cultural Americanization - which is the argument of a new right, less and less discrete in its attempt at conservative revolution? Maybe, on the contrary, it is imperative to reevaluate the founding act of the French revolution and its potential universalism, in spite of the confused and ambiguous debates proposed on the occasion of its Bicentennial. The parallelism with the central debate of the Dreyfus affair is reinforced by similar discussions in Germany, centered round the evaluation of the Nazi past and national identity before and after unification. If this debate continues to amplify, as it seems, the "intellectuels" could find again their original function, temporarily lost on behalf of the experts, of the party intellectuals and of the devastating anti-intellectualism of the economic doxa. 

        The second favorable factor is linked, paradoxically, with the uncertainties of the international situation. The national anxiety and the revival of nationalist impulses, in France and other places alike, are fed by the social crisis and the damages resulting from neo-liberalism and international competition. However, there is another cause, namely the fact that the discourse on Europe has been monopolized by the few who reduce Europe to the sole virtues of an economic market, the benefits of which remain hard to discern by the rank and file Europeans. As clerks of the universal - fonctionnaires de l'universel (Pierre Bourdieu), responsible for the transmission and development of European cultures, the intellectuals who think they have a responsibility to challenge both neo-nationalism and unbridled neo-liberalism, must invent and put forward a common cultural project able to fill this new public space (paradoxically barren, in spite of the overflowing streams of empty discourses.) The imperative of building a Europe whose universal meaning can match the universalistic notion of the republican France would require that the different constituent parties of Europe agree on a shared common culture. In this way we could reclaim a Europe whose deeper meaning, dreamt by certain 19th century intellectuals, could push back the antagonisms and the stereotypes that come between different European nations, and which are quite viable still, as recurrent political crisis make it clear. We will have a Europe without citizens as long as we have a Europe without a shared multinational culture, that is without an educational system offering a minimum of common denominators and common ideas. Such an educational system could lead to the revival of the cosmopolitan ideal of the Enlightenment, only linked, this time around, to a new political project. The new political project is necessary since all the states within Europe are either of modest size, or founded on the principle of one culture dominating the minorities - domination that comes more and more under attack (see the American debates on multiculturalism). 

        The two ideologies that have troubled the French intellectual tradition, the communism and the tiers-mondisme, have almost entirely disappeared as poles of attraction. If we place them in the long view evoked here, it appears that these two ideologies were in fact foreign to the intellectuals, indeed superimposed on the French debate. They seemed to give intellectuals a new function, a new role, a new ideal. Their decline brings the discussion back to a type of debate that intellectuals can easier manage on their own. 

        However, a shared cultural and political project presupposes a plan of collective work, which sets the agenda for the future: critical reevaluation of previous intellectual confrontations, their shortcomings included; re-reading of the last two decades of European history; reflections on the ways of integrating the second Europe, cut-off until recently, but which legitimately reclaims the place it had in the cultural exchanges during the inter-war period; programs of actions meant to influence the politicians, who tend to have not only very limited, utilitarian cultural aspirations (materialized in the cultural industries), but also contradictory ambitions, divided along several possible visions of Europe - Gaulliste, Germanic, Anglo-Saxon etc. Stepping out of the French space, it is apparent that all European intellectuals face the divisions produced by the politics and the culture specific to their initial national space, hence the difficulty of dialogues such as the one which brings us together here. 
 
 

Relevant bibliography 
 
 

Christophe Charle, La République des universitaires (Paris: Seuil, 1994) 

Christophe Charle, Paris fin de siecle, culture et politique (Paris: Seuil, 1998) 

forthcoming: The European Way, H. Kaelbe editor (Oxford: Berghan, 1999)