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  • How the French Think: An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People by Sudhir Hazareesingh
  • Michael Kelly
How the French Think: An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People. By Sudhir Hazareesingh. New York: Basic Books, 2015. xii + 322 pp., ill.

This brilliant and erudite portrait of French élite thought over four centuries has deservedly received wide attention in the quality press in the UK and France. It is a dazzling kaleidoscope of ideas to enchant the cultivated reader, narrating the rise and fall of a deeply contradictory culture that aspires to be universal but is pulled between science and mysticism, between a glorious past and an uncertain future, between optimism and pessimism. Sudhir Hazareesingh uses a broad brush to identify some enduring currents of French intellectual life: the Cartesian rationality based on clear and distinct ideas and logical deduction; the Saint-Simonian search for illumination through mystical and spiritual forces; the Fouriériste fascination with utopias of equality and fraternity; the Comtean drive to find scientific explanations for the workings of the natural and physical world; the revolutionary struggle between left and right for the soul of the nation; and the Republican patriotism that harnesses regional and local specificities to national commonality. These traits are traced from their origins to their consolidation during the Third Republic, citing an accumulation of contributors who will be familiar to only a few specialists. Following a brief interlude, which introduces Charles de Gaulle and the French Communist Party as reference points and perhaps as guiding spirits, the second half provides a series of portraits of particular intellectual movements: the structuralists, post-structuralists, and their entourage, including Jean Monnet; the existentialists of the Sartre years and other committed intellectuals; the shifting focus of historians from the French national story to la longue durée and back again; and the ignominious ‘closing of the French mind’ as intellectuals have recently slumped into le déclinisme and ethnic nationalism. The final chapter depicts the French élites as torn between anxiety and optimism, but struggling with ‘a tradition of confident universalism whose constitutive elements have slowly dissolved’ (p. 257). It looks for silver linings to the darkening clouds, and finds them in a buoyant cultural life, domestic contentment in French homes, some internationally recognized experts (for example, Thomas Piketty), and the enduring intellectual tradition of ‘elegant and sophisticated abstractions about the human condition’ (p. 269). The book is a tour de force in the French tradition that it describes, with sweeping generalizations, peremptory judgements, and a sprinkle of salty gossip. It is a very masculine account, and neglects powerful feminist thinkers. It has little time for Catholic intellectuals who have been influential over much of the timespan under consideration, or for the more recent Muslim and secular thinkers who do not preach decline. Hazareesingh acknowledges that the élites do not restrict themselves to ideas ‘made in France’, but does not explore the long traditions of engagement with British, German, Italian, Russian, and other thinkers. Hazareesingh’s downbeat story is exhilarating, and chimes well with the current mood of the Parisian élites, but it is not the only story that there is to tell. [End Page 483]

Michael Kelly
University of Southampton
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