How The French Think

How The French Think – An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People
By Sudhir Hazareesingh
Allen Lane – £20.00

          No other European country has a relationship with its ex-colonies which is               both so intense and violent, made of passion and resentment in equal                         measure, thus perpetuating the misunderstandings to the present day.

So writes the overtly well versed, gifted writer from Mauritius, Sudher Hazareesingh, in the Conclusion (‘Anxiety and Optimism’) of this exceedingly well written thesis on French scholastic thought, How the French Think – An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People.

To term the book’s three hundred and twenty-six pages as an inspiration is akin to saying there’s a lot to see in Paris. Reason being, it is idiosyncratic and inviting to read in equal measure; just as it is majestic within the occasionally fraught parameters of paradox. The latter of which (like the French themselves), being an acute and appropriate example of what is fundamentally responsible for beguiling the reader into investigating and dare I say it, embracing what is essentially a complex, albeit compelling subject matter, a whole lot further.

In the words of Albert Camus for instance (herein quoted in the chapter ‘The Skull of Descartes’ on page forty-three): ”The world in itself is unreasonable, and the absurd lies in the confrontation of this irrationality with the unrelenting desire for clarity whose call emanates from deep within man.”

The l-o-n-g line of histoire, to say nothing of French intellectualism, is a quintessentially dense oeuvre; within which it could be ever so easy to lose sight of whatever initial plot one may have had in mind at the outset (as former French Foreign Minister, Dominique de Villepin, readily notes, there is a French ”obsession with dividing things into two.” […]; such as ”opening and closure, stasis and transformation, freedom and determinism, unity and diversity, civilization and barbarity, and progress and decadence”).
There again, we are in the academically robust hands of a seasoned, focused and more than considered writer; for whom the words, clarity of vision, is tantamount to the literary job in hand.

We need only remind ourselves that Hazareensingh won the Prix du Memorial d’Ajaccio and the Prix de la Fondation Napoleon for his book, The Legend of Napoleon (Granta, 2004), and is also the recipient of the Prix d’Histoire du Senat for Le Mythe Gaullien (Gallimard, 2010). So the lucidity of How the French Think, really should come as no surprise.

Such clarity (of vision) is just one facet among many, that is regally substantiated by Patrice Higonnet, who is none other than Professor of French History at Harvard University, wherein he states: ”And no better mirror on the wandering path of French culture of yesterday and today could be found than this wise and gentle book, as learned as it is engaging, Peguy worried about what God would have to think about if the French were not there to amuse and inform him. Now we know why this might still be so.”

Indeed we do! As if there were ever any doubt!

To return to the focused framework of the author’s intent, it goes without saying that: ” […] beyond identifying the many and varied ways in which the French have represented themselves and imagined the world, my ultimate ambition here is to try to explain, as the title has it, how the French think: in other words, to make sense of their preferred concepts, frameworks and modes of thought, as well as their particular stylistic fetishes. These include such classic characteristics as a belief in their innate disposition towards creative thinking, as when the writer Blaise Pascal observed of his compatriots, ‘I do not speak of fools, I speak of the wisest of men; and it is among them that imagination has the great gift of persuasion.’ […]. ‘What is not clear,’ affirmed the writer Rivarol imperiously, ‘is not French.’ This precision could be accompanied by a certain hedonistic levity, as acknowledged by the critic Hippolyte Taine: ‘All that the Frenchman desires is to provoke in himself and in others a bubbling of agreeable ideas.’ Typically French, too, is an insouciance of manner, ‘doing frivolous things seriously, and serious things frivolously,’ as the philosopher Montesquieu put it.”

The very readable acuity of this all round prodigious book, is unsurprisingly twofold; wherein the infectiousness of an occasionally disparate subject matter, is intelligently harnessed by way of a writing that is nothing short of merveilleux.

David Marx