Dominique Schnapper
THE POLITICS OF FRENCH INTELLECTUALS
Edith Kurzweil:
D9minique
Schnapp~r,
friend and colleague, is a
professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes. She is one of sixteen
members of the Commission de la Nationalite nominated by the
French government. Among her many books are
Jewish Identities in
France, L'ipreuve du chomage, Morphologie de la haute administration
jranfaise,
and
L'Italie rouge et noire.
She also is the founder and director
of La Societe des Amis de Raymond Aron, who was her father.
William Phillips will moderate.
William Phillips:
We asked Dominique to give a short talk, leaving
plenty of time for questions and comments.
Dominique Schnapper:
I'm very impressed, because when we agreed I
would talk, William and Edith said that we would have an evening
with a few friends, and I couldn't imagine that Mrs . Rose and
Par–
tisan Review
had so many friends. So I'll give a very short talk, just to
introduce the discussion, because I have no idea what American in–
tellectuals know about French intellectuals and their relationship to
politics these days .
First of all, I think it is necessary to go back to the situation in
the fifties - not because you understand the present only through the
past, but because
Frep~h
intellectuals themselves are obsessed by the
past. The younger-
g~neration
is always playing up Sartre, playing
up Camus, playing up the former revolution, playing up the great
revolution. Just to give you an example, next May we're going to
celebrate the '68 events, and French publishers are preparing for this
occasion. It's something like the
'89
revolution. As you know, French
people still are passionate about the French Revolution; they still are
passionate about the Vichy situation . You can say anything about
any politician in France, but you can't say he wasn't in the Resis–
tance. Some horrible things have been said about Mitterrand, but
once somebody said it was not certain he had been in the Resistance,
in fact it was certain he had not, and that was enough to cause a
scandal. So I have to go back to the fifties to explain the current
situation.
Editor's Note : This discussion took place on October 7, 1987, in New York City, at
the home of Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Rose .
