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NY Times, Mar. 12 2016
Once Hopeful for Harmony, a Philosopher Voices Discord in France
The Saturday Profile
By ADAM NOSSITER
PARIS — HE is the intellectual much of the French left loves to hate,
the writer whose rumpled look has racked up multiple magazine covers,
the bookish essayist turned omnipresent media star and boogeyman for
proselytizers of painless multiculturalism. Alain Finkielkraut’s mere
presence in a television studio raises temperatures and sends
accusations of racism flying.
“For the good of France, shut up, Mr. Finkielkraut!” a young Muslim
woman, a teacher from the suburbs, said recently on live television,
throwing back to Mr. Finkielkraut his own words, after a televised
harangue aimed at him several years earlier in a similar confrontation.
After several dozen books, an influential weekly radio show, frequent
interview requests and his induction in January into one of French
civilization’s holiest — albeit most conservative — shrines, the
Académie Française, Mr. Finkielkraut has no intention of shutting up.
A former philosophy professor at France’s elite École Polytechnique, he
is arguably the most visible of France’s public intellectuals. “We have
seen only you, we have heard only you, we have read only you,” the
historian Pierre Nora said, as Mr. Finkielkraut listened under the
academy’s ornate dome, during the traditional induction speech.
The national audience for Mr. Finkielkraut’s themes, returned to
obsessively and buttressed by a seamless web of references, is now
larger than ever in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 2015.
Before and after the attacks, those themes have not varied: Much of
Islam is radically incompatible with French culture and society; Muslim
immigrants represent a threat; French schools are crumbling under a
mistaken multicultural outreach; the inherited corpus of French culture
is in danger; and anti-Semitism is on the rise again, this time by way
of Islam.
Many of the 2015 attackers were French. “Hatred of France is present in
France,” Mr. Finkielkraut said in a recent interview. “What the attacks
proved is that we have a redoubtable and determined enemy.”
He has caught a national mood, bridging unease over relations with the
country’s Muslim minority with a nascent renewal of national pride after
the November attacks. Its expression by Mr. Finkielkraut has been
delivered, over many years, with all the fervor of the immigrants’ son
who has succeeded. But in Mr. Finkielkraut’s pessimistic vision this
fusion is dark-robed.
His last substantial book, “The Unhappy Identity,” was a best seller in
France — a compact lament over declining standards in schools, the
pernicious effects of multiculturalism, the oppression of women under
Islam and France’s self-alienation from its own heritage.
The book’s protest over neighborhoods where “the French feel they have
become strangers on their own turf” under the weight of Muslim
immigration led critics to put him in the camp of the far-right National
Front — a charge he rejects.
“France is on its way to disintegration,” Mr. Finkielkraut said in the
interview in his Left Bank apartment, every book-lined inch underscoring
his distrust of the Internet. The prosperous, pleasant and largely
white-populated streets outside are far from the troubled multiracial
suburbs that are his preoccupation.
“Until recently, France was successful in integrating its immigrants —
that was even its pride,” he said. “Today, it is disintegrating in front
of our eyes.” The French model of integration “doesn’t work anymore,” he
said. “Where one could have hoped for a certain harmony, it is hatred
that prevails.”
“Today, when some, like me, speak of the problem of Islam, we are
denounced as the successors of Maurras and Barrès,” said Mr.
Finkielkraut, naming two influential far-right thinkers of pre-World War
II France. “There is a refusal to think about this era on its own terms.”
MR. FINKIELKRAUT’S political roots are on the left, though.
His father was a Jewish leather craftsman, an immigrant from Poland who
survived deportation to Auschwitz after being rounded up by the French
police in 1942. Born in Paris in 1949, Mr. Finkielkraut attended the
prestigious Lycée Henri-IV school, demonstrated with other leftist
students during the May 1968 uprising, went on to teach French
literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and from 1989
taught philosophy at the École Polytechnique, from which he is now retired.
His wife, the lawyer Sylvie Topaloff, has been quoted as lamenting the
friends they have lost over her husband’s political views. Yet his ideas
carry just enough of an old tradition of left-leaning nationalism in
France — exemplified by one of his favorite authors, Charles Péguy — for
him to be acceptable to the law-and-order faction in the ruling
Socialist Party.
He writes as he speaks — carefully, precisely, with minute attention to
the complicated rules of French grammar, and in a style that is never
far from arch irony. It is as though he were taking special trouble to
avoid the constant obsession in his books and his weekly radio program,
“Répliques”: the contemporary maltreatment of the French language.
It is tradition that inductees into the Académie Française eulogize the
deceased academician whose chair they now occupy. Mr. Finkielkraut’s
detractors were delighted that he was forced to pay tribute to a man —
an obscure writer named Felicien Marceau, who did broadcasts for
German-controlled Belgian radio during World War II, before fleeing —
accused of collaborating with the Nazis.
But Mr. Finkielkraut, himself the son of a Holocaust survivor, managed
to laud the man obliquely, avoiding the trap. “The past that obsessed
him hid from him the awful newness of the event that he was living,” Mr.
Finkielkraut said at the ceremony.
In Mr. Finkielkraut’s view, Marceau was blinded to the dangers of Hitler
by the horrors of World War I; and the French left, obsessed because of
fascism with the National Front, has been blind to the dangers of
radical Islam.
The green-and-black-uniformed academy members, most of whom labor in
obscurity, were conscious that an unusual public figure was being added
to their number: The historian Mr. Nora, in the induction speech, spoke
of Mr. Finkielkraut’s “omnipresence” and noted that he was at the very
top of a “blacklist” of those challenging the French left’s May 1968
orthodoxies.
“You are the one who breaks the public omerta, who says — and very well
indeed — what the politicians can’t say, and what the journalists don’t
want to,” Mr. Nora said.
BUT the historian also hinted at a weak spot in Mr. Finkielkraut’s
armored suit of erudition, one that makes him the subject of constant
attack in the left-leaning press. He occupies the “fragile and porous
border,” Mr. Nora said, “between solid good sense and an argument that
is slightly specious.”
He also made reference to a notorious 2005 interview with the Israeli
newspaper Haaretz in which Mr. Finkielkraut derided the French national
soccer team for being “black-black-black” and not black-blanc-beur —
black-white-Muslim — as the popular saying had it.
Mr. Finkielkraut, for all of his warnings about the difficulty — if not
impossibility — of assimilating France’s approximately four million
Muslims, is not advocating their expulsion. Yet he has no practical
agenda for how to integrate them into French society.
He has little to say about the evident discrimination against Muslims in
France today, or about the anti-Muslim violence since the attacks. The
Muslim teacher who clashed with him on television, Wiam Berhouma, raised
these points to no response — before telling Mr. Finkielkraut to shut up.
For Mr. Finkielkraut, the problem is with Muslims, not with France.
“We’ve got to fix very clear rules,” he said in the interview.
“Secularism has got to prevail. And we can’t compromise on the status of
women.”
He is adamant about that last point. “Everything plays out there,” he
says. “People are telling us that problem comes from all sorts of
oppression by the West. No. The problem comes from the oppression by
Islam of women. We’ve got to help the Muslims resolve this question.”
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