Intellectual History as History of Engagement? The French Scholarship

Few intellectual histories of France by non-French authors in recent years have produced the bitter polemic that Tony Judt's Past Imperfect: French intellectuals (1944–1956) elicited. Published in French at the same time as the English edition in 1992, the book was held to account for its questionable historiographical legitimacy, alleged inaccuracy in the treatment of sources, and not-so-hidden partisanship, even if it also received some positive reviews from authoritative specialists in the field in important national newspapers. Nevertheless, the general tone and content of the French academic reviews were largely negative, and in many ways this response was unsurprising: how could a study arguing that a certain dominant (and still alive) Jacobin philosophical tradition was characterized by a “marked absence of a concern with public ethics or political morality” be read otherwise? Further, in an often caustic style, Judt accused the postwar French intellectuals of being seduced by totalitarian tendencies. Such charge, not surprisingly, provoked a pointed defence of the intellectual and historiographical national sensibility, which was not above resorting to Continental stereotypes against the “Anglo-Saxon” cultural model. Nor was the negative reception surprising to Judt, who positioned himself explicitly in the text as an outsider, belonging to a different intellectual tradition. It is useful to remember this uproar today as one considers new books by Gisèle Sapiro and François Dosse, as it illustrates three important issues in a lively academic register: the continuity of a French approach to intellectual history, its difference from Anglo-American traditions, and a possible—although mediated—angle for understanding the nature of this French particularism, through the discussion of the historiographic projection of the idea of intellectual status.