Thu, Feb 19, 2004 page7

• French intelligentsia petition state

  PHILISTINISM Denouncing conservative authorities as anti-intellectual, French artists, academics and other professionals warned of damage to 'Gallic public debate'

  • THE GUARDIAN
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  More than 20,000 French artists, philosophers, filmmakers, scientists, lawyers, physicians and academics have signed a petition accusing the center-right government of "waging war on intelligence" and instituting "a new state anti-intellectualism."

  In a campaign bound to inflame passions in France, where penseurs are accorded the kind of respect most countries reserve for their rock stars, the signatories denounced a "coherent policy" to "pauperize and fragilize every field considered ... unproductive, useless or dissident."

  Among the better-known names to have signed the document, published in yesterday's issue of Les Inrockuptibles magazine, are the philosopher Jacques Derrida, filmmakers Bertrand Tavernier and Claude Lanzmann, theatre director Ariane Mnouchkine, novelist Marie Darrieusecq, the former Socialist culture minister Jack Lang and Danny Cohn-Bendit, hero of the May 1968 student uprising.

  The collected professions of "knowledge, thought and research" are under systematic attack from a state-sponsored philistinism intent on reducing the complexities of Gallic public debate to a series of "simplistic and terrifying" alternatives, the protesters say: "For or against Islamic veils? Left-leaning magistrates or too-tough cops? Artists -- are they idlers or profiteers?"

  Charges of anti-intellectualism are highly damaging in France, whose present-day Left Bank thinkers can draw on a rich tradition that includes the likes of Voltaire, Rousseau and Sartre.

  Paris remains one of very few places in the world where postmodern structuralists or relativist post-structural modernists can harbor realistic hopes of making it in TV.

  Sylvain Bourmeau, a journalist at Les Inrockuptibles and one of the petition's organizers, said that at one stage last week, e-mail signatures were coming in at the rate of 700 an hour.

  The magazine will publish the first 8,000 names over 17 pages this morning, he said.

  "We are aiming to mobilize all those whose work involves some kind of mediation, which in turn demands a detour via comprehension -- in other words, all that this government is currently short-circuiting in the name of political and PR efficiency," he added.

  Perhaps unwisely, the blokeish prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who prides himself on his man-of-the-people touch, has never been shy about confessing his suspicion of thinkers, savaging "those who suppose themselves to be great intellectuals" as recently as last October. His center-right government has enraged many of France's "intellectual professions" recently.

  Moves to regulate the status of psychotherapists provoked the fury of a whole generation of analysts, while fully 40,000 scientists denounced swingeing cuts in state funding and the loss of some 550 postgraduate research jobs this year.

  Lawyers, meanwhile, are up in arms at a bill passed last week which they say radically extends police and prosecutors' powers at the expense of justice and human rights, while magistrates are seething at the ruling UMP party's public criticism of the sentence handed down recently to its chairman, Alain Juppe.

  Schoolteachers walked out several times last year over plans to reorganize the state education system and cut back on classroom assistants; university chancellors threatened not to sign budgets because of "catastrophic" shortfalls in funding; and actors, musicians and dancers are still furious at reforms to their unemployment insurance which they say put the performing arts sector at risk.

  "Of course there are huge differences between all these groups," Bourmeau said.

  "But the political job we are doing here is to bring them all together and underline the basic similarities of their situations," he said.
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