Guardians of an ideal

Sudhir Hazareesingh’s bold new book is built on the assumption that ‘it is possible to make meaningful generalisations about the shared intellectual habits of a people as diverse and fragmented as the French’. France, as General de Gaulle pointed out, has such a fetish for singularity that it produces 246 varieties of cheese. Can France be any more a nation of thinkers than England is of shopkeepers?

Hazareesingh, an Oxford don, brings specific strengths to this daunting task. He was born and raised in Mauritius, a former French and British colony, in the 1970s, where his father was principal private secretary to Prime Minister Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam; he was schooled on French classics; he is a historian of ideas who divides his time between Oxford and Paris; and he has a sense of humour to match his intellect. Hazareesingh’s portrait is affectionate in the fullest sense: familiar and fondly teasing.

The sharp contrast between French speculative thinking and English empiricism is captured in the classic French saying: ‘tant pis pour les faits’, roughly translated as ‘so much the worse for the facts’. Hazareesingh notes that on this side of the Channel we often bemoan the French deductive method of reasoning pioneered by René Descartes, which starts with a general, abstract proposition, then works through to a particular, sometimes specious or trivial, conclusion. The method is notoriously vulnerable to deductive fallacies of this kind: All birds have beaks. That creature has a beak. Therefore it is a bird. Gerry Cohen, Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford, outlined the pitfalls in his essay: ‘Why One Kind of Bullshit Flourishes in France.’

But French thinking is also potent. Hazareesingh begins by analysing the then foreign minister Dominique de Villepin’s speech at the UN Security Council debate about sanctioning the use of force against Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003.