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’.