On Pascal Bruckner

Pascal Bruckner is a moralist. Not a moralizer. Not a preacher, either. Even less an apostle of good intentions. To him we owe a salacious novel that shocked and scandalized, an extremely rare event in the soft, jaded Europe of the early years of this new century.¹ In short, our author is not a practitioner of the edifying genre; he dares to write essays tackling public life that do not fall under the heading of erotic literature either. He does not propose filling the holes in the ozone layer, is not planning out a tax on air travel to save the starving, and neither jogs nor bikes with a view toward preventing the polar icecap from melting.

This difficult character with a perpetual smile dispassionately sizes up well-intentioned masquerades, a worthy pupil of the "psychologists"—another name for the moralists—of the seventeenth century that Nietzsche celebrated in Human, All Too Human, as a French exception: "La Rochefoucauld and the other French masters of the examination of souls are like skillful marksmen who aim with precision at the target and regularly hit the dark center—but the dark center of human nature."

Except that in our historico-global centuries, the darkness of souls nowadays haunts confessionals, alcoves and antechambers far less than it explodes on the screen during the TV news hour and sets the five continents ablaze. Now a public matter, universal cruelty is shrouded nonetheless in the usual precautions and other deceptive euphemisms that camouflaged individual and private horrors in days gone by: denials, cover-ups, and bad faith take turns to collectively protect our desire to sleep easy and dream sweet dreams. Today's moralist, grappling with the mass media, has a lot on his plate.

The France of the late twentieth century was a nice playing field for essayists short on insolence. An impromptu and somewhat domineering "victor" of the Second World War, this country lived through the Cold War in an impassioned but protected manner. A number of her intellectuals treated themselves to participating from afar, painlessly and without sanctions, in the enthusiastic exaltations of dogmatists and the blindness of multiple world revolutions. Sartre, a brilliant mind and nimble writer, sumptuously incarnated this fellow-traveling. Then he threw in the towel, reconciled with Raymond Aron, mentor of the opposing camp, and the two joined ranks to defend, in non-partisan fashion, the rights of man on this planet. Never mind that for twenty-five years French intellectuals had thought and militated within the perspective of a Stalinism without Stalin, the abyssal absurdity which succeeding generations were left to assess.

Two axioms marked out, then, the certainties of the leftwing intellectual: 1) the anti-communist is a dog, and 2) the anti-colonialist is a saint. To the first, nothing will be pardoned, he is on principle unbearable; Gilles Deleuze will attribute my praise of Soljenitsyn and Sakharov exclusively to endeavoring to cause the right to win some municipal election or other—far more decisive in his view than fifty years of the Gulag. To the second, nothing is refused, any baseness or lie or massacre is whitewashed for the good of the Cause. "To kill a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to do away at the same time with an oppressor and an oppressed man; one dead man and one free man are left; for the first time, the survivor feels a national soil under the soles of his feet," wrote Sartre in his preface to Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth.

The second axiom, that of the immaculate infallibility of the Third World fighter, is debunked in 1983 by Pascal Bruckner in The Tears of the White Man. He starts off with a simple, unideologized finding: barely liberated from colonialism, the new masters of new independent states conduct themselves in as nasty a manner and give in to the same temptations and the same ignominies as their former masters. "No necessity other than madness or malice justifies the mass of horrors that have been committed in China, Cambodia, Iran, Uganda, El Salvador...