The death of the French intellectual Edgar Morin at the end of May was inevitable—death waits for us all, of course—yet also somehow impossible. Having reached the astonishingly lucid and active age of 104, Morin seemed immortal. This made the news of his passing so striking, as did its larger significance: Morin’s death marks the end of that exotic and exclusively French species known as l’intello (French shorthand for intellectual), an extinction event that should be marked, though perhaps not lamented.
There is a vast literature on the character and career of the French intellectual—predictably, much of it written by intellectuals—just as there is much disagreement on when this social type first appeared. Some historians reach back as far as the Enlightenment and the role played by les philosophes in their struggle against the unquestioned and arbitrary powers of throne and altar. With his usual flair, Voltaire captured their goal with his motto “écrasez l’infâme” (crush the infamous thing)—religious superstition and fanaticism. (Tellingly, the Boulevard Voltaire in Paris was on the route taken by millions of demonstrators in 2015 as they protested the massacre of the staff of the French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo by Islamic extremists. For those who could not read a map, many protestors carried portraits of Voltaire emblazoned with the words “Je suis Charlie” to make their point.)
The death of the French intellectual Edgar Morin at the end of May was inevitable—death waits for us all, of course—yet also somehow impossible. Having reached the astonishingly lucid and active age of 104, Morin seemed immortal. This made the news of his passing so striking, as did its larger significance: Morin’s death marks the end of that exotic and exclusively French species known as l’intello (French shorthand for intellectual), an extinction event that should be marked, though perhaps not lamented.
There is a vast literature on the character and career of the French intellectual—predictably, much of it written by intellectuals—just as there is much disagreement on when this social type first appeared. Some historians reach back as far as the Enlightenment and the role played by les philosophes in their struggle against the unquestioned and arbitrary powers of throne and altar. With his usual flair, Voltaire captured their goal with his motto “écrasez l’infâme” (crush the infamous thing)—religious superstition and fanaticism. (Tellingly, the Boulevard Voltaire in Paris was on the route taken by millions of demonstrators in 2015 as they protested the massacre of the staff of the French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo by Islamic extremists. For those who could not read a map, many protestors carried portraits of Voltaire emblazoned with the words “Je suis Charlie” to make their point.)
Many other historians instead argue that the modern intellectual burst onto the scene more than a century later with the Dreyfus Affair. It was at that pivotal moment in late 19th century France that the very word “intellectuel” in fact gained currency. It was used as a term of scorn by antisemites like Maurice Barrès who claimed Capt. Alfred Dreyfus was guilty of treason precisely because he was Jewish. As for the defenders of Dreyfus who demanded a retrial in 1898 (by then Dreyfus, who had been condemned to life imprisonment, had already moldered for nearly four years in solitary confinement on Devil’s Island), Barrès dismissed them as “Jews and Protestants,” “fatheads,” and “foreigners” who sowed “disorder, degeneration, and treason.”
An engraving from Le Petit Journal of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French Army officer accused of treason, in front of the Council of War in France on Aug. 20, 1899.Apic/Getty Images
Yet those same intellectuals, led by the novelist Émile Zola, gladly embraced the description. Scientists and academics, writers and artists, they were convinced that objective reason revealed Dreyfus’ innocence and that objective morality compelled then to demand justice for a man wrongly imprisoned. As Zola declared in J’accuse…!, his volcanic call to arms, “truth is on the move.” Indeed, it seemed nothing could stop the onward march of truth. Dreyfus was ultimately freed in 1899, though he had to wait until 1906 to be fully cleared.
But as Morin always insisted, truth is complex. It is telling that just as the historical reevaluation of France under Vichy was initiated not by French, but instead by foreign historians like Robert Paxton, this is also true for our understanding of les intellos. Two Brits, the late Tony Judt—who resided in the United States—and Ruth Harris, along with Israel’s Shlomo Sand, are among the historians who have revised earlier accounts of French intellectuals which, they argued, tended to be heroic and binary. The division bordered on the Manichaean, confronting the forces of light who were inspired by the abstract and universal ideals of 1789 against the forces of darkness attached to ethnic and nationalist ideals.
There were, in effect, two Frances, one whose battle cry was “equality, liberty, fraternity,” while “the soil and the dead” was embraced by the other. The principal weapon of both camps was a French specialty: la petition, or open letter, that decried this or that wrong against the nation and was signed by writers and thinkers—whose celebrity was reinforced by this act—and often printed on the first page of daily newspapers. (For example, not only did Zola’s J’accuse…! span the entire front page of Georges Clemenceau’s newspaper L’Aurore, but so too did “la liste des intellectuels” who published a letter in support of Zola the following day.)
An article from L’Aurore newspaper in which Émile Zola takes a stand on the Dreyfus Affair, dated Jan. 13, 1898.Ullstein Bild via Getty Images
Yet these two Frances had much in common. Harris has shown that while the anti-Dreyfusards were attached to the notions of blood libel and Jewish conspiracy, the Dreyfusards were no less prone to the lure of unreason and superstition. For example, many of the latter were driven less by the flimsiness of the evidence against Dreyfus than the fantasy of a Jesuit conspiracy against the Republic. Judt and Sand, on the other hand, have underscored the tragic contradiction between the humanist and enlightened ideals held by postwar intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and their consistent support of Soviet communism and Maoism. These were thinkers, the conservative intellectual Raymond Aron noted in his book The Opium of Intellectuals, who were “merciless before the failings of democracies and indulgent to the greatest crimes, provided they are committed in the name of good doctrines.” (Both Judt and Sand remind us that Morin, kicked out of the French Communist Party in 1951, was profoundly allergic to these ideologies.)
By the 1970s, the medium—and not a mastery of history and philosophy—became the message. The age of print was giving way to that of the screen, and the heroic generation of postwar intellectuals was eclipsed by les nouveaux philosophes like Bernard-Henri Lévy and André Glucksmann whose ease in front of cameras and unease with communism made them celebrities. Yet this celebrity came with a heavy price. In his recent book La Saga des intellectuels français, covering the years 1944 to 1989, the historian François Dosse states these photogenic intellos, the product of a standardized audience, “belong to the realm of the ephemeral and often insignificant.” With greater severity, Judt agreed, mocking these mediatized thinkers for their sense of “self-importance, solipsism, and slavish devotion to intellectual fashion.” Intellectuals were better off, he concluded, when their public exposure was limited to appearances at the Café de Flore.
If French intellectuals had, by the 1980s, already become actors in the society of spectacle, we are left to wonder what this means when the spectacle brought to us by television screens and televised news has shifted to the phone screen and internet feeds. The current fragmented media landscape, one that makes relentless demands for our attention, is hostile not just to the traditional intellectual, who could influence a world mediated by a relative handful of print outlets, but even to their successors who inhabited a similarly narrow range of media outlets.
It may well be that this brave new online world is hostile not just to the traditional intellectual, but to thought itself. But perhaps this is where we can turn to Morin for help; his career in many ways reflects the origin story of the French intellectual. Born as Edgar Nahoum in Paris in 1921, his parents were Jewish immigrants from Thessaloniki, a city which had been home to Greece’s largest Jewish community until World War II. (Nearly 90 percent of the community, over 50,000 men, women, and children, were eventually murdered in Nazi death camps.) A precocious student, Nahoum spent his days in libraries studying German philosophers like Hegel and his nights in cinemas studying French films directed by the likes of Marcel Pagnon.
Members of the French Young Communists League, waving French flags, parade through the streets of Paris to celebrate the end of World War ll in Europe on May 8, 1945. AFP via Getty Images
Yet everything changed, including his name, come France’s defeat and occupation by Nazi Germany in 1940. Making his way to the unoccupied zone, the 20-year-old Nahoum, who had been a pacifist before the war, soon joined both the banned Communist Party and the French Resistance. By 1944 and liberation, Nahoum had not only become a lieutenant in the Free French Forces, but thanks to his combat pseudonym, the young man became Morin. Indeed, it was as if he became a different man. As one of his biographers, Emmanuel Lemieux, remarked, it was in the crucible of war and resistance that this “vital and complex personality was forged.”
In 1951, the rebellious Morin, who was outraged by the Soviet show trials, was asked to leave the French Communist Party. At the same time, Morin was invited—thanks to recommendations of the philosophers Vladimir Jankélévitch and Merleau-Ponty—to join the prestigious National Center for Scientific Research in Paris. For the next three quarters of a century, Morin seemed to be everywhere all at once. When not being interviewed in documentaries, he was making them; when not publishing one of his more than 100 books, he was reviewing books written by others; when a seismic event occurred, like the student upheavals of 1968, he was on the ground and his book rolling off the printing press before anyone else’s. These texts, the work of an intellectuel engagé, were often themselves events that left their mark on Morin’s contemporary audience and future scholars.
This was especially true for six-volume La Méthode, or The Method, in which Morin expands on the notion of complexity. Something complex is not at all the same as something complicated. The latter approach is Cartesian, one that breaks down, analyzes, and puts the pieces back together. Complexity, however, emphasizes the intricate and vital relationships between the parts of a whole. Sustained reflection over these relationships, in turn, can lead to lasting resolutions. “It is a matter of replacing the principles that produce simplistic and obviously partisan thinking,” he observed, “with principles that make it possible to recognize, differentiate and unite complementary antagonisms.”
As Morin tirelessly insisted, the proper response to complexity is dialogue not just between the sciences or humanities, but also between nations and those who govern them at a moment where the world faces multiple crises ranging from the environmental to the political. With his death, this message captured our attention. If, as Morin believed, complexity tends to produce events that could not be predicted, perhaps our attention to this call to arms will be lasting.
