Robert Zaretsky: The French Intellectual Crackup
Slightly more than 250 years ago, Jean le Rond d'Alembert, co-editor of that massive monument to the Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie, opened a letter from a friend and collaborator. Big books, announced the missive, never lead to change, much less revolution: "It's the small, portable books at 30 sous that are dangerous. If the Gospel had cost 1,200 sesterces, the Christian religion would never have been established." Few people were more qualified to speak on this topic than d'Alembert's correspondent, Voltaire. Not only was he the most prestigious contributor to the Encyclopédie, but he was also the author of hundreds of pamphlets in which he railed against the enemies of reason and tolerance.
Historians will always debate the relationship between Voltaire's words—and those of his fellow philosophes—and the revolutionary events that followed soon after his death. But his remark about books large and small raises intriguing questions about intellectual life in France today.
In a recent series of nasty spats, sparked by the rise of the livre à bas prix—small, inexpensive books often piled against the cash register; the modern equivalent of the 30-sou book—opposing intellectuals have invoked the spirit of Voltaire. Everyone wants a piece of the thinker who, even when alive, was skeletal, but Voltaire's modern-day descendants are in fact precipitating the decline of their own vocation. They are no longer in the business of crushing superstition wherever they encounter it. They do not believe, as did Émile Zola, that la vérité est en marche, and that their task is to help pave its way. Instead, today's intellectuals are content to crush only one another's reputations, guaranteeing that the only thing on the march is their growing irrelevance.
The latest dust-up in Paris involves Les Intellectuels Faussaires ("The Counterfeit Intellectuals"), by Pascal Boniface. Though 14 publishers rejected the manuscript, the book is now near the top of the best-seller list in France. This is due in part to Boniface's prominence. A professor at the University of Paris and director of the Institute for International and Strategic Relations, Boniface has written dozens of books, served as a foreign-policy adviser to the Socialist Party, and, not least in the nation that gave us Michel Platini and Zinedine Zidane, is secretary general of the Football Foundation, an organization dedicated to promoting the values of tolerance and respect on the soccer field....