PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS AND CULTURAL POLICY IN FRANCE

Abstract

The notion of the public intellectual in France represents a form of extra‐governmental cultural politics in its own right. This article begins, however, by exploring three sets of reasons that can account for the aversion of French intellectuals under the Fifth Republic to involvement in State cultural policy processes. These are: the historical counter‐examples represented by intellectuals’ involvement in the policy apparatuses of the Vichy regime and the French Communist Party; the positive tradition of laicity, or of a realm of free inquiry politically set off from the political field; and the often detrimental effects on academic prestige of involvement in policy processes. It then traces the incentives and institutional channels through which some public intellectuals have nonetheless been brought into the processes of cultural and educational policy development over recent decades. It concludes by suggesting how intellectuals may be conceived not simply as architects or critics, but also as objects of cultural policy.

KEYWORDS:

• public intellectual
• French cultural policy

Notes

1. Their definition in French runs as follows: “Dans notre ouvrage, l’intellectuel sera donc un homme du culturel, créateur ou médiateur, mis en situation d’homme du politique, producteur ou consommateur d’idéologie” (Ory & Sirinelli 1992 [1986], p. 10).

2. The committee’s Report on Public Instruction was presented to the Assembly on 20 and 21 April 1792. A fuller exposition of Condorcet’s educational policy thinking can be found in Condorcet (1994 [1791]).

3. It may be worth underlining that the principles I am isolating here combined in complex ways in the concrete existence of individual intellectuals. Both the psychologist Henri Wallon and the eminent physicist Paul Langevin were members of the French Communist Party. After many years of close association, Langevin had finally decided to join in 1944 (after, among other things, the execution of his son‐in‐law and the deportation to Auschwitz of his daughter, both communists) (Caute 1964, p. 156).

4. When one reads certain foundational texts of the “republican” tradition in French education, such as Condorcet (1994 [1791]), or Langevin and Wallon (2004 [1946]), one is struck by the somewhat artificial nature of recent divisions between “republicans” and “pedagogists” in French educational debates.

5. For Aristotle on “habitus”, see Nichomachean Ethics, ii.4, 1105 b; and on the ruler’s Prudence, Politics, iii.4.17–18, 1277 b (both cited by Maclean 1993, pp. 6, 10). I capitalize “Prudence” to distinguish it from its dominant sense of “caution” in contemporary English. The Greek term phronesis signifies “practical wisdom” or “common sense”, and the term might also in such discussions carry the notion of foresight. Cf. Nichomachean Ethics (Aristotle 2004) notes at pages 150, 312. My thanks also to Ingrid de Smet for enlightenment.

6. For a discussion of such intellectuals in English, see e.g. Jennings (1997, pp. 75–79).

7. I engage much more fully with Kingdon’s “multiple streams” model of the policy process in Ahearne (2006).

8. On Malraux’s role in the “invention” of cultural policy, see Urfalino (2004 [1996], pp. 39–108). Urfalino also underlines the complementary and contrasting role of another intellectual, Malraux’s friend Gaëtan Picon, in this process. For discussions of Malraux as minister in English, see Looseley (1995, pp. 33–48) and Lebovics (1999).

9. For an extended treatment of the relations between 1960s cultural policy and State planning (including the role of Dumazedier), see Dubois (1999, pp. 189–231). For Dumazedier’s thinking on “cultural development”, see e.g. Dumazedier and Ripert (2000 [1966]).

10. See also Ahearne (2004, pp. 10–11).

11. See the comments of Duhamel’s cabinet director, Jacques Rigaud, in Duhamel (1993, p. 10).

12. For an extensive discussion of the two notions, see the reference in note 7 above.

13. For further indications regarding such an “ecology”, see Ahearne (2004, p. 72).