Soon after the end of the second world war, André Siegfried, a political scientist, wrote the preface to a book on French spiritual values, reports The Financial Times.
“Absent France from the stage, [and] a certain way of approaching problems is lost: everything becomes commercial, administrative, practical, but one then looks for something more fundamental, without which Europe would not be herself, nor the Western world the cradle of human civilisation,” he wrote. “ . . . Wherever she goes, France introduces clarity, intellectual ease, curiosity and, at the end of the day, a subtle and necessary form of wisdom.”
Siegfried was no chauvinist. He understood and admired Britain, the US and other English-speaking societies. But in this preface Siegfried displayed an indestructible, absolute certainty about the brilliance and indispensability of France’s contributions to western ideas and ways of thinking that was typical of French intellectuals in the first half of the 20th century.
At the time Siegfried wrote, such convictions were by no means misplaced, notwithstanding the fact that France had just undergone the most searing trauma of its modern history: military defeat in 1940 and four years of Nazi occupation. But, as Sudhir Hazareesingh says in his thoughtful, stimulating and witty historical survey of French thought, Siegfried’s words appear, 70 years on, “as a last piece of French bravado, the dying echo of a tradition of confident universalism whose constitutive elements have slowly dissolved”.
In Hazareesingh’s view, France today produces a “diminishing cultural imprint across the globe”, a retreat that can be measured by “a phenomenon that would have startled the likes of Rousseau, Victor Hugo and Sartre: the absence of interest in contemporary French thought among progressives across the world”.