intellectuals and nationalism

Many intellectuals have taken a stand against the RN and the far right in recent days. A posture against nationalism that endures over time.

This week, intellectuals like Patrick Boucheron, Franck Thilliez, Pierre Rosanvallon, and the publisher François Nyssen spoke out against the nationalist far right. They thus take up an old posture of the world of thought. It’s a story that begins during the Dreyfus affair, this Jewish captain wrongly accused of having betrayed France by providing information to Germany. On January 13, 1898, the writer Emile Zola published an open letter to defend him in the newspaper Dawn, titled I accuse. This is the beginning of the fight for the release of Dreyfus.

A few days later, professors, librarians and journalists engaged in the debate and published an article in support of Zola, and on 1^er February 1898, Maurice Barrès, a right-wing writer wrote a column on The Intellectuals Manifesto. For the first time he uses this word “intellectuals” to make fun of these people who live by their thoughts, with the implication that they don’t do much with their hands. For Barrès these “intellectuals” are the product of society’s failure to create an elite. These are “Jews”, “protestants”, “strangers”of the “simpleheads”…

Intellectuals use this name to define themselves and make it the mark of a quality in the face of nationalists deemed crude, racist and xenophobic. Thus, over the long term, intellectuals opposed nationalism. This is the same case for a Gaullist like Romain Gary, committed to Free France, against collaboration. In 1956, he had this famous formula that said it all: “Patriotism is love of one’s own. Nationalism is hatred of others.” He thinks, in fact, that nationalism led to the disasters of the Second World War, the Shoah, the destruction…

In 1970, François Mitterrand, intellectual, lawyer who entered politics, in a broadcast by journalist Michel Pollack is still on this line. He expresses his admiration for Barrès of The inspired hill but denounces “smallness”, “mediocrity” of the nationalist Barrès. In short, the analysis is the same up to the present day.

So much so that nationalist or sovereignist intellectuals, like Barrès himself or Maurras, have always had difficulty positioning themselves as such, for fear of being confused with left-wing intellectuals. Even today, a Mathieu Bock-Côté, an Elisabeth Levy, or an Ivan Rioufol have the same repugnance.