Anti-intellectualism in French Political Culture

Abstract

1981: in his Manuel de savoir-vivre à l’usage des rustres et des malpolis the humorist Pierre Desproges deploys his biting wit to lampoon the world of the French intellectual:

Like the Richter scale or the Centigrade thermometer, the intelligence of man can be located on a sliding scale. At the highest point is found the intellectual, who is clearly an exceptional being. The word ‘intellectual’ is derived from the latin ‘intel’ which means ‘everybody’ and from ‘ectualus’ which means ‘I am not’. It follows that ‘intellectual’ literally means ‘I am not like everybody else’. In fact, the intellectual is an exceptional being who spends his time thinking and meditating for other people. But how can we recognise an intellectual? In terms of external appearance the intellectual wears overalls and braces when he goes to eat a crab salad at La Coupole. At first sight we might be inclined to think that the intellectual dresses in this way in order to make fun of the working class. This is incorrect because in general he has never been close enough to a worker to know what he wears ... Whilst he has rarely set eyes on a worker (there are very few of them at La Coupole) the intellectual writes things that are full of generous sentiments and incomprehensible words on the condition of the working class, typically he then solves the crisis in San Salvador in an article written for a professional magazine, then he examines the role of the West in the Third World food crisis, then he has a second crab salad, then for the seventh time he goes to see the English language version of Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow because the work of the second assistant set designer seems to him to be better researched than that in the French version and where, in any case, Maurice Chevalier speaks in French, a very vulgar language (for an intellectual a vulgar language is a language that people understand.¹