DOMINIQUE SCHNAPPER
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way they were governing the country. The differences over policy
were more technical than ideological. There was no reason for in–
tellectuals to get involved in the question of whether a banking
system should be more or less public, or more or less private. These
were not questions for a great moral debate of the kind French in–
tellectuals like . What divides the two groups - I'm still talking about
the top intelligentsia - are two issues: the attitude toward the Third
World and the attitude toward immigrants. These are the last issues
one can quarrel about - where one can get those long lists of
signatures, one of the typical features of French intellectual life,
signatures of well-known intellectuals in
Le Monde
or in
L£berat£on.
I know some of you have read the recent book by Simone de
Beauvoir,
Ad£eux. A Farewell to Sartre,
in which she wrote about
Sartre's last years. He was ·signing three times a day, for a poet in
Latin America, for a politician in South Africa, against the action of
the police in a meeting in the South of France . The signature of an
intellectual is important to Parisian life. When you are a young in–
tellectual, to be asked to sign means you are part ofthe group, you're
getting into intellectual life. Weli, now you may get a few signatures
on South Africa and on attitudes towards immigrants. But neither
for the Third World nor for South Africa is there any real passion,
because most people agree. The right wing is not in favor of South
African policy. And about the "I:hird World, French intellectuals
don't get terribly excited. On the immigrant problems, except for a
few partisans of Le Pen, of course, most intellectuals agree that the
immigrants should be kept in France because they have been
brought up there . We should try to assimilate them as we have
assimilated all the other immigrants. The real discussion is whether
it will be difficult to do it with a Moslem population, whether the
Moslem population is indeed different from the other waves of im–
migrants. But that is not terribly exciting either. The left and the
right are both divided on the issue: some on the right think thai: we're
going to assimilate the Moslems like all former
immigi-~mts,
and
some on the left don't. So for the top intelligentsia there is rtothing to
debate about strongly.
As for the millions of professional intellectuals, the image is
very different. All of them are still under noncritical, Marxist in–
fluence. They're not for the Soviet Union, that's still the great
change; they are very strongJy for the socialist government; they are
against Barre and Chirac, whatever they do; they are in favor of na–
tionalization, whatever the technical reasons are; they are in favor of
