French Identity
La Nouvelle Revue Française recently circulated a little survey to writers around the world: “Apart from the trio great wines/high fashion/perfume, do you think that any perceptible symbols of French identity still exist? Do you agree with the idea that the decline of French literature abroad began with the nouveau roman? What do you expect from France in all fields?” I can’t resist the temptation to respond publicly.
Any concerns about the “identity” of a human group make my hair stand on end, because I’ve become convinced that behind them always lurks a conspiracy against individual freedom. Of course I don’t deny the obvious fact that a group of people who speak the same language, were born and live in the same region, face the same problems, and observe the same religion or customs have certain things in common, but I do deny that this common denominator defines each of them fully, abolishing or relegating to an insignificant second place what each member of the group calls specifically his own, the collection of qualities or personal traits that sets him apart from everyone else.
The concept of identity, when it is not used on an exclusively individual scale and is intended to represent a conglomerate, is reductive and dehumanizing, a magic ideological filter that extracts all original and creative human traits, anything that hasn’t been imposed by inheritance or geographic location or social pressure but has come out of the ability to resist those influences and counteract them with free acts, independently conceived.
It is perhaps possible that cultures still survive in remote corners of the Amazon, Borneo, or Africa that are so isolated and primitive and so anchored in the prehistoric-era ritual repetition of daily acts that the individual hasn’t properly been born and the social group exists as a self-absorbed, compact, and undifferentiated whole, allowing the tribe to survive when threatened by wild beasts, thunder, and the world’s many magic forces. The only traits that really count are those that are shared, and they overwhelmingly prevail over the minimal differences of each tribe member. In this little humanity of clone-like beings, the notion of collective identity—a dangerous invention that is the foundation of nationalism—would possibly have reason to exist.
But even this hypothesis seems doubtful to me. The testimony of ethnologists and anthropologists who have studied the most isolated and archaic communities is generally conclusive: as necessary and important as common customs and beliefs are for the defense of the group, the margin of initiative and creativity its members maintain in order to distinguish themselves from the whole is great, and individual differences prevail when they are examined in their own terms and not as mere epiphenomena of the collective.
When one speaks of “French identity,” clearly one is referring not to an archaic and isolated community, a superstitious tribal kingdom that neither trades nor mixes with the rest of the world and relies on elemental survival tactics—the only domain in which “the social” may be considered historical reality and not an ideological trap—but to a highly civilized and modern society upon which language, tradition, institutions, ideas, rites, beliefs, and practices may have imprinted a collective personality, a sensibility and idiosyncrasy borne uniquely and nontransferably by every French woman and man, a kind of metaphysical substance that unites all of them in an exclusive and exclusionary way and is subtly expressed in their deeds, dreams, greatest undertakings, and smallest pranks, which because of their origin are all indelibly stamped as “French.”
Surveying my own surroundings, I compare the French women and men I know, admire, love, or hate; I consult my memory as an inveterate snoop, my nearly seven years of life in Paris, my vast readings in French, and my ravenous curiosity about everything good and bad happening in France, and I swear that I don’t get even a hint of the “identity” that is supposedly capable of transubstantiating Flaubert and the Maid of Orléans, Chrétien de Troyes and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the chef Paul Bocuse and Father Charles de Foucauld, Paul Claudel and Jean Genet, Pascal and the Marquis de Sade, the liberal essays of Jean-François Revel and the racist demagoguery of Le Pen, the wine-sodden clochards of the Place Maubert-Mutualité and the witty little nonagenarian countess of the 16ème who once asked Jorge Edwards, “Chilien? Et c’est grave ça?” into a single being or an indissoluble ontological entity.
All of them speak French (though fairly different kinds of French), of course, but aside from this obvious linguistic likeness, an extremely long list of differences and contradictions could be drawn up that would make clear the artificial nature of any reductionist effort to see them as interchangeable, their well-defined and irreducible individual personalities dissolved into a single social entity that represents all of them and of which they are at the same time offshoots and mouthpieces. It is clear, too, that it wouldn’t be difficult to find a lineage or dynasty of kindred spirits for each of them that crosses the boundaries of Frenchness and stretches into the most far-flung and diverse regions of the world. Then it would become clear that each one of them, while still being French—and precisely because his or her native culture stimulated a capacity for individual emancipation from the flock—was capable of constructing an individual identity over the course of a lifetime of grandeur or infamy, hard work or luck, intuition or knowledge, secret appetites and inclinations; in other words, a lifetime of being many other things than what he or she was as a result of the most precarious and miserable of circumstances, birthplace.
For simplicity’s sake, we can say that France has probably contributed more than any other European culture to the emancipation of the individual from sheep-like servitude, to breaking the ties that bind the primitive to the social whole; in other words, to developing the freedom that allows human beings to stop being cogs in a social mechanism and to become sovereign entities, able to make decisions and set about inventing themselves as free and autonomous beings, creators of themselves, more various and richer than anything social coordinates or collectivist labels—religion, nation, culture, profession, ideology, and so on—could suggest about their “identity.” This was brilliantly demonstrated by Sartre in The Family Idiot, his oceanic study of Flaubert, in his attempt to discover “what, at this point in time, can we know about a man?” At the end of the third volume, all that is clear from the inconclusive inquiry is that the Norman scribbler, who lived such a seemingly routine and stable life, was really a bottomless pit, a dizzying abyss of complex cultural, psychological, social, and family histories, a tangle of personal choices that eluded all generic classification. If this process of individualist differentiation was already so advanced a human condition in Flaubert’s time, by now the elective reality by which individuals are shaped is probably stronger than it has ever been: although we keep referring to things as French—or Spanish or English or German—in order to understand each other, and primarily out of mental laziness and ideological cowardice, these abstractions are becoming ever more useless and confusing. They are references that tell us nothing about concrete individuals, except in the bureaucratic and administrative sphere, and this sphere de-individualizes and dehumanizes the human being, turning him into a specimen and voiding everything specific and particular about him.
That France has contributed more than any other culture to the creation of the sovereign individual is probably true, and exposing the collectivist fallacy that expressions like “cultural identity” obscure, thereby demonstrating why many of us love and admire French culture, is valid, but only if we also acknowledge that France is represented not just by the formidable libertarian, universalist, and democratic tradition encompassing the Declaration of the Rights of Man, Montesquieu and Tocqueville, the nineteenth-century utopists, the poètes maudits, surrealism, and Raymond Aron but by obscurantist, fanatic, nationalist, and racist traditions as well, which may also be claimed by Francophiles around the world, along with the panoply of writers and thinkers notable for championing them (from Gobineau to Céline, Gustave Le Bon to Charles Maurras, Robespierre to Drieu La Rochelle, and Joseph de Maistre—who wrote in French, although he wasn’t born in France—to Robert Brasillach). Like all great cultures, French culture has no accompanying identity, or, rather, it has many contradictory ones; it is a crowded marketplace with fruits and vegetables for all tastes: the revolutionary, the reactionary, the agnostic, the Catholic, the liberal, the conservative, the anarchist, and the fascist.
The anguish about a supposed decadence of French literature seems alarming to me, not because it signals a real problem but because I detect in it symptoms of nationalism, of which one of the worst aspects is cultural. True, in the last twenty or thirty years no novels or poems seem to have been written in France comparable to those by its greatest creators, but in the field of the social sciences—the historical, philosophical, anthropological, or political essay—important books have appeared that have been read and discussed by half the world, like the recent ones by François Furet, Jean-François Revel, Alain Besançon, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and a good number of others. And isn’t France’s cultural pride sufficiently nourished by the Olympian and undisputed reign of the terrible trinity—Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida—over almost all the liberal arts colleges of the United States and a good part of Europe and the Third World?
In fact, what might seem to justify alarm is not the state of letters and thought in France—they are flourishing—but the country’s cultural politics, which for some time has been showing marked signs of provincialism, not to say bêtise. Although the French government’s recent posturing and campaigns (on both the left and the right, let us not forget) in support of the “cultural exception” intended to protect French film and television industries from Jurassic contamination, and the warlike administrative tirades against anglicisms that might erode the beautiful language of Racine, could without doubt be said to derive from a native tradition, they have seemed shameful to many of us because they recall not Molière or Descartes or Baudelaire but Monsieur Homais’s idea of culture or the clowning of the Grand Guignol. But not even this should worry us too much, because it is evident that what there is of truly universal and lasting value in the language and letters of France will survive the worst efforts of functionaries who believe that cultures are defended with censorship, obligatory quotas, customs regulations, and bans and that languages must be shut up in concentration camps and guarded by flics and mouchards disguised as lexicographers.