SEX, SCANDAL & FRENCH PHILOSOPHY
Luc Ferry is not well-known outside of France — at least he wasn’t until last week when he found himself sweating uncomfortably in the hot glare of a full-blown media scandal.
In France, Ferry is known as a former education minister under Jacques Chirac. He is a descendant of Jules Ferry, a famous 19th century French politician credited for founding the country’s secular education system during the early years of the Third Republic.
Luc Ferry, whose political career in high-office was short-lived, is better known in France as a philosopher. The author of many books with titles such as Homo Aestheticus and Rights: The New Quarrel Between the Ancients and the Moderns, Ferry is a familiar figure in the highbrow precincts of the French media for his articulate views on lofty themes — success, virtue, wisdom, moral truths — and in particular is appreciated for his talent for making accessible an understanding of these complex subjects.
France is perhaps the only country in the modern world where it’s possible to call oneself a “philosopher” without sounding pretentious or pompous. The status of “philosopher” in France not only commands respect and admiration, it also procures invitations to the best Parisian dinner parties and television talk shows.
The philosopher as media celebrity is a uniquely French cultural phenomenon. In the Anglo-Saxon world, the media generally seek opinions and insights from experts and pundits from a lesser calling, usually journalism. In Britain or America, only a brave few would dare fashion a public image aspiring to the exalted status of “public intellectual”. Arrogating the even higher rank of “philosopher” would be unthinkable, unless your name is Isaiah Berlin. Anglo-Saxons associate philosophy with figures like Spinoza and Schopenhauer, not someone who shows up in the green room at the studios of the BBC or CNN. In France, the guest list of a lively television show isn’t complete without a philosopher on the lineup.
Debate in the French media, while it sometimes can be tiresomely polemical, is fascinating precisely because of its high-minded intellectual pretentions. French elites are rigorous thinkers and excellent talkers. Perhaps these high standards explain why French philosophers are sought out by the media. It might also be explained by France’s engagé intellectual tradition, frequently associated with Jean-Paul Sartre (photo left). The modern French philosopher — Sartre, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, André Glucksman, Alain Finkelkraut, André Comte-Sponville — cultivates the image of an intellectual actively engaged in the drama and tragedy of his own epoch.
It could also be argued, less reverentially, that modern French philosophy has been cheapened by the glamour and celebrity that comes with media fame. There is even an expression in French — “philosophe de service” — to describe the familiar figure of the media-friendly philosopher doing the rent-a-quote rounds on the Parisian radio and TV circuit, expounding on every conceivable subject, inevitably adjusting to the media’s preference for form over substance. In France, it sometimes seems that philosophers have become indistinguishable from the regular run of pundits and journos.
Which brings us to the subject at hand: sex and scandal.
Perversely, the shocking DSK affair has put the envied status of the French philosopher into question. In the past few weeks, two of France’s best-known philosophers — Luc Ferry and Bernard-Henri Lévy — have come under fire for controversial statements in the turbulent wake of the DSK scandal.
Luc Ferry and Bernard-Henri Lévy come from two different schools of thought. It’s difficult to imagine two figures more different, except for their thick manes of dark hair (Lévy’s detractors like to remark that he’s famous for saying: “God is dead but my hair is perfect”). Ferry would be described in the Anglo-Saxon world as a moderate conservative, a view readily confirmed by his political ascension in Jacques Chirac’s neo-Gaullist government. BHL, as his media friends like to call him, is by contrast firmly anchored on the left. Born in Algeria into a rich family that moved to Paris when he was a boy, BHL studied at École normale supérieure under Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser (who tragically achieved a different kind of fame in 1980 when he murdered his wife by strangulation). BHL first came into public view in the 1970s as the self-appointed spokesman for the “nouveaux philosophes” , a group of young French philosophers who broke with Marxism. He later found friends and supporters in the Socialist clique surrounding François Mitterrand.
BHL is more famous than Luc Ferry, especially outside of France, mainly because his outspoken views generally flatter the left-liberal sensibilities of the international media. In France, Luc Ferry has benefitted from more public affection. When Ferry appears on television and radio, his style is measured, his delivery well considered, eschewing extragant postures in favour of eloquent discourse. BHL, by contrast, is an intellectual actor whose trademark style is the flamboyantly polemical gesticulation. While he has many powerful friends, BHL is widely regarded in France as an irritating narcissist. Perhaps that explains why he so energetically seeks out the Anglo-American media, where he appears to receive largely uncritical, even admiring, attention compared with the derision his name often inspires in France. His book, American Vertigo, was an attempt to emulate Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous 19th century classic, Democracy in America. At home in France, he has received more than one cream pie flung in his face in public.
I must confess bias, personal and ideological. If I had to choose between Ferry and BHL as a dinner companion, there would be no hesitation. One easily imagines that Ferry’s company would be hugely enjoyable. I also feel more philosophical affinity with Ferry. As an undergraduate I took political philosophy courses with Allan Bloom, who in those days was described, and frequently denounced, as a “Straussian” in reference to his mentor Leo Strauss. Later I enrolled in graduate school at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, a university then reputed as philosophically conservative. The prevailing intellectual climate at Sciences Po in the 1980s was strongly influenced by thinkers such Tocqueville, Max Weber, Leo Strauss, Karl Popper, and especially Raymond Aron. Aron’s The Opium of the Intellectuals was an articulate critique of the pro-communist intellectual climate prevalent in France during the Cold War. Aron (in photo above right) had recently died in 1983, but he remained the intellectual maître à penser at Sciences Po, a legacy carried forward by one of my professors, Jean-Claude Casanova. Casanova was Aron’s disciple and editor of the conservative journal, Commentaire. Today Casanova is chancellor of Sciences Po. Another professor there at the time was former French prime minister Raymond Barre. Sciences Po in those days was not the kind of place where Parisian intellectuals of the Marxist persuasion would have felt at home. In graduate seminars, there was little discussion of Sartre, and even less of Pierre Bourdieu, whose name was practically unmentionable in serious discussion.
Those were good years for BHL. The Socialists were in power under François Mitterrand, and many of BHL’s old friends were circulating in the corridors of power, not to mention the highest spheres of the Parisian media. True, Mitterrand’s government had more or less abandoned its promise to bring a “rupture with capitalism”. But there was still a vague echo of the leftish chant once declaimed proudly by Parisian intellectuals: “It is better to be wrong with Sartre than to be right with Aron”. It didn’t matter that Aron’s critique of Soviet communism had been vindicated, and that Jean-Paul Sartre had been wrong — it was more honourable to be “wrong with Sartre”. In the same spirit, it didn’t matter that there were conservative governments everywhere in the West — Margaret Thatcher in Britain, Ronald Reagan in the United States, Helmut Kohl in Germany — France was, once again, affirming its “exception” by electing Socialists, even if their policies were catastrophically misguided.
Luc Ferry would have been very much at home at Sciences Po. But it was BHL whom, ironically, I saw at the school almost on a daily basis. He used to hold court in a local pub called the Twickenham, a few doors up the road from Sciences Po on the corner of rue des Saints-Pères and rue de Grenelle (today it’s a haut de gamme boutique). Whenever I dropped by the Twickenham, I would invariably spot BHL seated on his habitual throne near the door, dressed in his trademark black blazer and unbuttoned white Charvet shirt, his long mane of hair cascading onto his shoulders (see photo above left). I never saw him alone or in deep in discussion with fellow intellectuals. He was always surrounded by an adoring gaggle of attractive female Science Po students. Needless to say, I vaguely despised BHL from a distance, more out of masculine jealousy than intellectual hostility.
To his credit, BHL has taken principled stands, and has demonstrated personal courage, on important issues despite the impression of media grandstanding. His public pronouncements on the war in Bosnia were admirable, and recently he was quick to take sides with the Libyan rebels, while jet-setting academics in the Anglo-Saxon world (Benjamin Barber and Anthony Giddens among them) were being exposed as liberally paid Gaddafi flatterers. BHL is easy to hate, but in truth he’s a complex figure not easy to decode.
Until last month, BHL had reason to see good days ahead. His old gauche caviar friend, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was well-positioned to become France’s first Socialist president since François Mitterrand. BHL, in fact, was discreetly campaigning for DSK in the run-up to the latter’s all-but-declared bid for the Socialist nomination. BHL could reasonably expect a place of honour at the court of President Strauss-Kahn. If Jacques Chirac could appoint Luc Ferry education minister, surely Dominique Strauss-Kahn could appoint BHL as minister of foreign affairs.
Friendship and ambition, as BHL doubtless knows now, can be a dangerous combination. When DSK was arrested for rape in New York, the reaction in the Parisian chattering classes was astonishing. On television for nearly a week, the French population was treated to an alarming spectacle of prominent Socialists expressing their sympathy for their friend DSK, who in their view had been the victim of either a political plot cooked up by Nicolas Sarkozy or a zealously unjust prosecution in puritanical America. BHL was one of the first DSK loyalists out of the gates. In both French and English, he angrily defended his friend and denounced his accusers.
Within a few days, however, it was becoming uncomfortably obvious, even for DSK’s most ardent supporters, that perhaps their friend was not the victim in this sordid affair. BHL’s indignant media posturing appeared grotesque and ridiculous. The famous philosopher had lent his name to what was plainly a frantic damage-control campaign. A view quickly emerged that BHL would be well-advised to keep his mouth shut. Maybe he deserved those pies flung in his face after all.
Luc Ferry, meanwhile, got caught in an even more unfortunate media trap. Invited on a popular TV chat show where the subject was DSK and the French media’s “omerta” on the private lives of the powerful, Ferry made a shocking revelation. Everyone in the Parisian media elite, he said, has known for years that a certain ex-Socialist minister had been caught in an orgy with little boys in Morocco, but the affair was never reported in the French media. Ferry’s remarks — which not only accused a Socialist cabinet minister of pedophilic acts but also indicted the entire French media for stifling the affair — instantly provoked a furore. It didn’t take long for speculation to emerge on the Web that the ex-Socialist minister in question might be Jack Lang, who finally counter-attacked to defend his reputation.
Jack Lang (seen in photo at right with BHL) was a long-time minister in the court of François Mitterrand. He is also, like BHL, a closed friend of DSK. This presented a bizarre situation that is only possible in France: the country’s best-known conservative philosopher, Luc Ferry, had made serious allegations, without providing names, against the socialist friends of France’s most-famous leftist philosopher, BHL. And what’s more, the backdrop to these allegations was the tragic downfall of the man, DSK, who was supposed to bring the Socialist triumphantly back to power. Now the same Socialists are in turmoil, struggling with confusion and shame in the DSK fallout.
But the saga is not over. Now Luc Ferry is in the hot seat. The tables have been turned on him. Ferry’s enemies on the left, it seems, discovered his Achilles Heel.
Before he entered politics, Ferry was a full-time university professor on faculty at the Université de Paris where he taught philosophy. In France, university professors enjoy the status of civil servants with all its protections and privileges. One of these privileges is what’s known as détachement, which allows a professor to take on an assignment outside the university while keeping salary and job security. It’s basically a paid, open-ended sabbatical with no career risk.
Ferry left luniversity teaching in 2002 to enter the Chirac government, and has never returned. Since stepping down as a minister in 2004, he has been on détachement as an adviser at Matignon, which is the French prime minister’s office. The optics, of course, are that Luc Ferry was given a soft landing in the entourage of the French prime minister to spare him the prospect of returning to the less grandiose circumstances of a rumpled university professor.
Ferry’s enemies, obviously benefitting from confidential information inside the left-leaning university establishment, leaked to the press that Luc Ferry had been receiving his professor’s salary despite a legal obligation since last September to show up and give lectures. Some Socialist politicians have denounced him publicly, claiming that his plum job at Matignon is a “fiction”. They are demanding that Ferry reimburse his salary to the university. The real objective, of course, is to bring discredit on Luc Ferry as part of a vengeful counter-attack following his shocking revelations about ex-Socialist ministers engaged in paedophilic orgies in Morocco.
Ferry claims he has done nothing wrong because his leave-of-absence was perfectly legal. He is threatening to sue his critics for defamation.
Ferry is undoubtedly on solid ground, but behind the strict legality of his position there are appearances. And it frankly doesn’t look good. It’s well known that the practice of détachement in the French civil service is subject to widespread abuse, even for celebrated university professors. His détachement looks like yet another privilege discreetly accorded to those close to power.
Whatever the outcome, Ferry has been terribly destabilized by this controversy. The media clearly have taken the side of his critics. More to the point, there is now no talk about BHL’s ludicrous defence of DSK, and less about the identity of the ex-Socialist minister allegedly guilty of child abuse. The focus is now on the Luc Ferry’s sin of professional hubris.
Luc Ferry and BHL have not personally clashed during any of these messy controversies. But their separate missteps reveal something troubling about the uniquely French cocktail mixing power, celebrity and philosophy. Only in France could two philosophers play the roles of gladiators in a hardball political battle less than a year from a presidential election.
Both Ferry and BHL sought media stardom and political power, and both achieved their goals. Now both have been burnt by their proximity to power. Perhaps the troubles of Luc Ferry and BHL is a warning that philsophers belong in the intellectual realm of ideas, not in the bloodthirsty arena of political rivalry.
This saga is not over. But when it is, it’s possible that one day, perhaps soon, young Parisian intellectuals will be asserting that it’s better to be wrong with BHL than to be right with Luc Ferry.
