In search of the lost or.., p.8
In Search of the Lost Orient, page 8
At the end of the 1970s, the spirit of ’68 was fading, and there was the rise of the Left and the hope that it would take power—with the idea that it would change everything via state control and massive nationalizations. In the municipal elections in Dreux in 1978, we all backed Françoise Gaspard to defeat the incumbent mayor Jean Cauchon. But when the Left came to power in the cities, the Socialist Party went about municipalizing everything. The cost—though it was not perceived immediately—was that a large swath of informal conviviality was siphoned off by the Socialists in power through the hiring of leftist activists into the local, regional, and national public service—activists who then started behaving (without always being aware of it) like perfect little technocrats, even apparatchiks. The informal spaces I evoked earlier began to wither, and there was no one from the younger generation willing to take the baton. In 2013 the Cercle Laïque de Dreux was led by the same team that was in place in the 1970s, in other words a handful of individuals who had always refused to be turned into an institution such as my friends Jean-Pierre Dubreuil and Louis Papillon. If renewal has happened, it’s been elsewhere in offbeat places. For example, young Maghrebis in certain neighborhoods have become educators, but in a different context and sometimes with a religious dimension. These mutations would, of course, be interesting to study further.
So you were disappointed by the Left in power?
I saw several of my former high school students join the Socialist party, pass into the ranks of power, and become professional politicians. The Socialist Party will never recover from that—the thirst for promotions and social climbing, the faster the better. Money was not yet the principal motivator, but it would be soon. Most came back to earth fairly quickly, but at the time there was a strong spirit of revenge for the political defeat suffered in May 1968. There, in the spring of 1981, we held the power—finally! In small cities, everyone knows everyone else, and personal relations easily become clientelism and are obviously a key to political action. Some young party members became parliament aides, project leaders, city hall employees, and so on. They hitched their wagon to state power and entered the bureaucracy. Françoise Gaspard, for example, who would be much talked about later, when the National Front became her adversary in a face-off with national implications, thought (and she was not the only one) that culture should not remain in the camp of the opposition. Consequently, there occurred the municipal takeover of cultural life and a drying up of the civil society at the very moment that this term was becoming fashionable. At the time, I wrote an essay published by Esprit demonstrating how the notabilisation (upgrading) of the managers of the Socialist Party led inevitably to the desiccation of the civil society.10 The piece led Françoise Gaspard to threaten the journal’s director, Olivier Mongin, with a lawsuit for defamation—a fact that nicely confirmed the misguided direction that my piece was underlining. The oppositional Left had become the establishment Left and was single-mindedly preoccupied with managing the state. And by taking itself seriously, it ended up obsessed with seriousness.
Françoise Gaspard was, I think, an énarque (graduate of France’s École nationale d’administration) and had passed the agrégation in history. How did she end up in Dreux?
She did not end up in Dreux. It’s where she was from! She grew up in a well-to-do Dreux family of leftists and Freemasons. Therefore, she could live her arrival in power as revenge after a parenthesis among the Christian-Democrats. Except for the Communist Party, the Left in Dreux was never very far to the left, but it had a strong Masonic tradition, and this Freemasonry still exists in fact. As I said earlier, Dreux was a typical city in western France, divided between two networks of social life: the laïque (secular) and the catho (Catholic). But the border got blurred even though the incantatory discourse around laïcité remained strong, and the concept of laïcité gradually became shorthand for opposition to the rise of Islam.
Private education in Dreux was represented by the Lycée Saint-Pierre-Saint-Paul—pretty clearly in the Catholic camp—but the actual Catholic content became diluted and the school simply stood for le privé (the private) in opposition to the public schools that were allegedly going to hell because of violence and the baisse de niveau (lower level) of scholastic achievement. At the end of the 1990s, there was an effort mounted on the right to revive a “Cathosphere,” where one wouldn’t have to take off one’s cross and put it in a pocket. A handful of parents with traditional tendencies, or worse, requested that the teaching at that school become once again truly Catholic, but demographically they were never able to find enough people to support such a revival.
So if I understand you correctly, on religious matters Dreux also played an important role in forming your thinking in this area that you would go on to develop later?
It would require examining stratifications older than the nineteenth century and the Third Republic to understand the religious sociology of the city. Dreux played an important role at the time of the religious wars. It was a center of the Ligue catholique. The city was besieged by Henry IV, and the population fought against the royal power. Later there was a complete change of paradigm that has been studied by Emmanuel Todd: the devout Île-de-France of 1600 turns atheist by 1800, and the decline of the Church in Dreux during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is very striking. The decreasing number of priests after 1968 explains perhaps the absence of the Catholic Church in this city in the 1970s and ’80s on the question of immigration, and the strong presence of the cercle laïque (secular circle). Today, Ali Bouharb, an assistant Muslim military chaplain, puts on his CV that he was trained by the Cercle Laïque de Dreux. The Catholic Church regained visibility starting in the 1990s, when the generation of Lustiger priests arrived.11 But for twenty years, there was a Catholic chasm—only one full-time priest, no doubt doing his best, rather leftish, open to everyone, but with no significant influence either socially or religiously.
As for Protestantism, it was present in a village near Dreux, Marsauceaux, that had survived all the oppressive measures imposed by Catholics during the Wars of Religion and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes; but the situation was a bit like with the Catholics: the church was empty until the arrival ten or so years ago of evangelicals who recruit largely among immigrants from Africa and the Antilles. What’s bizarre is that there is also in this region a tradition of Protestant sects such as Seventh-day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses whose regional headquarters are in Dreux. There is also a Pentecostal church that predates this recent multiplication of churches. Today Dreux is also home to a center of Tabligh, a pietist Muslim movement. In truth, given its rich historical past and its gradual integration into the greater Parisian metropolitan area, the city was a good observation deck from which to view French society.
You alluded to the second wave of immigration in the 1960s. In the ’80s, Dreux becomes a leading city for the implantation of the National Front, the high point being the tension resulting from the election in September 1983 of the Gaullist RPR candidate Jean Hieaux, who had allied with the National Front, beating out Françoise Gaspard by a few votes.
Dreux and the surrounding area specialized in emerging industries and subcontracting (furnaces, auto parts, televisions, electronics). There was a need for highly qualified technicians and an unspecialized array of ordinary workers. At the start of the 1960s, the immigration to Dreux was massively working class, especially of Moroccan origin, and already included many families. High-rise apartment buildings were built to house the families, something that was considered a luxury at the time. When I moved out of my little country house, I myself lived in one such subsidized housing development, or HLM (habitation à loyer modéré, or moderate rent housing). It was undeniably a step up, with central heating, a bathroom, and overall better hygiene. This new housing made possible the integration of the wave of immigrants of the 1970s that would see the population of Dreux go from twenty-one thousand inhabitants in 1962 to thirty-three thousand in 1976—an increase that would, of course, affect everything else. While there was a true mix of ethnicities in the 1970s, the high-rise buildings—in particular the Chamard towers—came to be occupied exclusively by immigrants. Like everywhere else, the middle-class “white” population left them and then left the neighborhood. The buildings and accompanying services became run-down, juvenile delinquency increased, and feelings of insecurity increased as well. One of my friends, who ran a bar in the city center, was predicting already in the late ’70s that the Left would get knocked out over the question of insecurity. Dreux encapsulated the entire history that’s now become the standard tale of immigration since the 1960s. Whereas the 1960s generation was strongly integrated, the following generation would find itself in serious difficulty and react with an array of strategies. But starting in 2000, one could witness a new phase beginning: a bourgeoisie of immigrant origin moves into the city center. Doctors, journalists, lawyers, engineers, and professors with a certain mixture of backgrounds and lifestyles begin to take center stage. The weddings announced in the newspaper testify to a stable number of mixed marriages (around 20 percent), but unlike in the 1980s, young women of Maghrebi origin are marrying native Frenchmen.
Chapter 8
OUT OF SCHOOL
How did the experience of a May ’68 lifestyle, even if somewhat displaced, tie in with your thinking about questions of culture?
What I took from that experience was more a reflection on the norm than about culture. Or more precisely, the relation that culture maintains with norms and codes. Later I saw clearly why culturalism had attracted me in the early years of my traveling: for a culturalist, alterity is all the more fascinating as it seems comprehensible—more decodable at any rate than other alterities such as the woman, for example. At that time, I’d also decided to undergo psychoanalysis. I remember that my analyst was surprised by my desire to go to Afghanistan. He asked me what I was going to do there. I replied, “Over there, codes can be described in an explicit way. One learns a culture like one learns a grammar. I eventually know what the gestures and body language mean, whereas in France I don’t know them and I can’t figure them out. Everything is random here.” It should be recalled that at the time it was a period when everything seemed possible, but as a result that liberty blurred or destroyed the codes. Even though they existed of course—no one could do just anything.
Sexual freedom, for example, did not open up a general permissiveness as much as simply the possibility or not of sleeping together—and thus introduced an uncertainty. Today this liberty exists, but in code, or with reinvented codes that did not exist in the 1970s. Naturally, I don’t rule out that other uncertainties cropped up, like the less clear blurrier role of fathers, for example. Back then it was freedom—or its limits—that had to be endlessly reinvented. In our community, as in many others, the question arose about whether it was necessary to establish a set of rules about doing the dishes, and so forth. Not far from us there was a community of Trotskyists whom we loved to mock because in their entryway they had hung a sign that read, “Comrade, remember your chores!” We had always refused this type of law. Except, look what happened—our community fell apart! The lack of a norm and rules made it so that we were forced to constantly invent new forms of relations. This required interminable discussions—we’d spend the whole night talking and bickering.
Did you feel the demand for recognition from homosexuals?
It was the time when homosexuality was just beginning to be publicly affirmed. But this recognition merely enshrined homosexuals within the category of human beings like any other, by including their sexuality within the norm of all sexuality (a banalization that would end logically with the recognition of marriage for all). What struck me more was the emergence of a diffuse tolerance—in the name of the desiring nature of the child—of what would later be called “pedophilia.” It should be remembered that, at the time, few people saw clearly what the problem was, even among those opposed to open and predatory pedophilia practiced by adults with authority over children (teachers, priests, or other educators). There were communities with children and although, of course, their mothers did not allow them to become targets of predatory pedophilia; they did tolerate a precocious sexualization of their behavior, their nudity in the house, the absolute refusal of all discipline, having sex in front of the children, etc. There was a constant call to lift prohibitions and taboos—a word frequently repeated with a sharply negative connotation of course. One was supposed to refuse the law that orchestrates sexual repression by maintaining an atmosphere of peace and love underwritten by the theories of Wilhelm Reich that everyone knew chapter and verse. In the letters to the editor of Libération, people would wax poetic about the “desiring child.” Later, the childhood stories of the children of ’68 recalling such goings on would appear—but to denounce them. I have in mind, for example, the fine account given by Virginie Linhart.1 What people didn’t see was that this libertarian atmosphere could be a favorable terrain for real pedophiles, all the more since the line between predators and adepts of free love was not exactly clear to say the least. What was overlooked was the reaction these children would have as grownups. People had adopted a very idealistic vision, a transparent vision, of sexuality, but one that corresponded more with our fantasies than with any reality. I would add that there’s probably a link between the imaginary construction of a liberated sexuality and a certain puritan (or simply conservative) reminiscence that is quite strong today.
What’s your conclusion then?
It led me to think about the speed with which a paradigm (an ensemble of representations and norms about a specific object, in this case sexuality) can completely change within a single short generation. Many things associated with the post–May ’68 era are today incomprehensible and come in for moral judgments—as does the machismo of the 1950s or the racism of the 1930s. How can one speak of cultural continuity when one is confronted with such wide qualitative leaps? How can one think of it in terms of an immutable or immobile ethics? Ought one to revert to an ideology of progress, even though that ideology has been seriously put into question by all the crimes committed in the name of that alleged progress? One sees the problem each time some old story resurfaces, like, for example, the one that was talked about in the spring of 2014: an assassination that happened forty years earlier in which the IRA leader Gerry Adams was supposedly involved, the same Gerry Adams who later plays an important role in negotiating the peace accords in Northern Ireland. The question that always arises with crimes against humanity is that of transitional justice, which oscillates between the very Christian notion of pardon in exchange for a confession, and the legal notion of imposing—or not—a statute of limitations, with, in between, the pathetic but sincere and for me very significant declaration, “I didn’t know (that X was wrong or X was happening), but you cannot understand what I am saying because you cannot understand those times.” How does one conceive of an ethics without moralism, and how does one think in political terms about that which derives from ethics?
And the teaching of philosophy in all this?
By the end of the 1970s, I had the feeling that I’d just about covered it. Inevitably, the teaching had become rather repetitive after a number of years. I’d had my fill of the communitarian and convivial leftist bubble. It burst, as I said, with the arrival in power of the Left, first with the municipal elections and then in 1981 with Mitterrand’s arrival at the Élysée Palace. It was necessary to finally get out of the cozy, low-rent utopia I’d built for myself and confront the reality of power. Each of us remembers how very quickly the constraints of the real were decisive.
Were you a conformist professor with no past?
I believe I was generally considered a good professor who respected the philosophy curriculum as it was laid out and who assiduously prepared high school students for their baccalaureate exams. I was certainly thought of as something of an anarchist, including in school matters. I sometimes held class in cafés, I would take my students to Paris, and I did things that rattled the administration. But I was also untouchable because at that technical lycée I was the youngest professor and the only one to have the agrégation. My relations with the principal were, it’s true, somewhat ambivalent. She herself was a nonconformist with a strong personality, and she had a slightly maternal attitude toward me. The tension between my generation of teachers and the administration centered around the inspection process. One can be a responsible teacher who respects the exigencies of l’Éducation nationale (following the curriculum, prepare the bac, etc.) and yet balk at some of the bureaucratic rituals. How and how far may one contest those rituals? At the time, the battle zone was inspections. Ought one to refuse to have one’s teaching inspected? If so, was one going to cease all evaluation of the professors? What about grading the students? I always hated assigning grades.
It so happens that Monsieur Lechat, my first inspector, an old man near retirement age, told me the exact day and hour he would be coming a full week in advance, and everything went fine. He practically treated me like his colleague. How could one resist such amiable treatment? But my anti-inspection cohort criticized me for allowing myself to be taken in! The next time around my inspector was none other than Madame Dina Dreyfus, whom I spoke of earlier and whom I considered to be a grand personage that everyone respected. She also told me ahead of time when she would be coming. When she entered my classroom, she addressed the students, telling them that “your professor and I are peers.”2 It was priceless! This second inspection also went very well.
My third inspection happened the year after my first contact with the mujahideen, which took place in July and August of 1980. A rather unlikeable character arrived late without greeting anyone and sat down in the front row without a word. Therefore, I asked him to leave. He rose, blank-faced, and went immediately to the principal’s office to send off a telegram demanding my immediate dismissal. I was immediately informed of this by the principal and in turn prepared my counterattack: a letter to the head of the inspection bureau, Jacques Muglioni, in which I told him that I had just ejected Monsieur l’Inspecteur so-and-so from my classroom and explained why I had done so. I went on about how I had been a philosophy professor for seven years; that a good philosopher must never identify with his social role, nor take himself too seriously, which is what this particular inspector had done; and therefore, he was, in my eyes, not qualified to hold the title of philosopher and even less qualified to judge a philosophy class. I rounded this out with a little more blah-blah and a quote from Montaigne, and, hop, I mailed the letter off.
