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both more eclectic and less assured . Last fall
Critique,
which always
had a more international orientation, devoted a whole issue to Anglo–
American philosophy, a subject which never before evoked the least
interest in Paris. Two eminent but quite traditional American histori–
ans, David Brion Davis and Michael Kammen, gave a seminar this year
at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Despite their
inductive approach it was well-received, though the French would
scarcely have sat still for it even five years ago.
France still has its celebrity intellectuals like Foucault, Lacan, and
Derrida, but they occupy a much smaller place on the home scene than
in the American image of Paris. Deconstruction is very much a back
number in Paris just when it is going into orbit as a full-scale academic
gig in the United States, cut off entirely from the political and cultural
ferment which gave rise to it. When I first arrived I was surprised to
encounter Sinologists, Americanists, anthropologists, feminists and
others working in a variety of ways largely invisible from the States.
This is not merely a problem of who happens to be translated. Tzvetan
Todorov, one of the few true structuralist critics, who now claims to
have given up literary criticism for historical writing, cited the neo–
Tocquevillean social anthropo logist Louis Dumont as an example of a
stimu lating French thinker ignored in America though his major
works have long been available in English.
The decline of French Marxism is a subject unto itself because its
significance reaches far beyond the intellectual sphere. Structuralism
was a methodology but Marxism was a faith: a motive for action as well
as a world outlook that linked staid academics, party functionaries,
activist students and intellectuals, and substantial numbers of workers
and their unions. The decline could be traced to everything from
Khrushchev 's de-Stalinization speech, which was strongly resisted by
the French Communist Party, to the disappointments that followed the
1968 uprising, to the writings of Solzhenitsyn and his slick admirers,
the so-call ed New Philosophers, whose work had a disproportionate
impact in a country that had never acknowledged certain elementary
truths about the Soviet state.
One especially important cause was the renewal of orthodoxy in
the Communist Party under Georges Marchais after its brief flirtation
with Eurocommunism. Since the P.C.F. deliberately scuttled the
Union of the Left in 1978, on the brink of likely victory in the
parliamentary elections, the party has lost many of its remaining
intellectuals. Others who stayed refused to support Marchais's presi–
dential candidacy this year . With its workers restive, its faithful voters
