Intelectuales franceses y las elecciones

Hola, siempre me ha interesado analizar las posiciones políticas de los intelectuales, algo que revela algunas claves de su pensamiento. Hace tiempo publiqué un post sobre las posiciones de los intelectuales en México respecto a las elecciones que dieron como ganador a Felipe Calderón:

http://martintanaka.blogspot.com/2006/10/sobre-las-elecciones-en-mxico-y-los.html

Ahora encontré un artículo en una revista trotskista (ojo) que habla de un grupo de intelectuales franceses (los "nuevos filósofos") que apoyan al candidato de la derecha, Sarkozy. Quisiera ver la lista de intelectuales que apoyan a Royal... Estos "nuevos filósofos" empezaron en la izquierda, pero ahora están en la derecha... Glucksmann, Bruckner, Finkielkraut, entre otros.


Prominent French intellectuals rally to presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy
By Stefan Steinberg 3 March 2007

With less than two months to go to crucial French presidential elections, a number of prominent French intellectuals have declared their support for the right-wing presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy (UMP—Union for a Popular Movement).

A number of these intellectuals, who are loosely associated with the movement of so-called “new philosophers,” are routinely described in the press as “leftist,” although they broke with any form of leftist or socialist politics a long time ago. Nevertheless, the fact that such figures as the writer and nouveau philosophe Andre Glucksmann, author Pascal Bruckner and Max Gallo, a novelist and former spokesman for former French president Francois Mitterrand, are now openly backing Sarkozy’s campaign is of considerable significance.

Andre Glucksmann announced his backing for Sarkozy in a commentary for the daily Le Monde in which he proclaimed that new thinking was coming from the right. For its part, the left is “stewing in narcissism,” Glucksmann continued. Referring to Sarkozy’s main rival in the presidential campaign, Socialist Party (PS) candidate Ségolène Royal, Glucksmann declared that “the left’s emptiness was even greater than her own.”

The writer and “new philosopher” Pascal Bruckner, author of the recent book, Must One Be Ashamed of Being French?, stated that he had initially liked Ms. Royal but was disturbed by the comment made by her partner, Francois Hollande, the leader of the Socialist Party, who said, “I do not like the rich.” Now, Bruckner, according to press comments, has decided that Sarkozy is “brilliant and brave.” Roger Hanin, an actor and author, has also declared in favour of Sarkozy. Hanin is the brother-in-law of late Socialist president Francois Mitterrand, Royal’s mentor. Hanin said he still “worships” Mitterrand, but did not trust Royal.

Another nouveau philosophe, Alain Finkielkraut, paid tribute to Sarkozy as the only candidate who was facing up to the “disasters” afflicting France in education, the environment and anti-social behaviour. In an interview with Libération, Finkielkraut lambasted Royal’s “manifest incompetence,” declaring that he felt closer to Sarkozy.

Finkielkraut also slammed “the official left,” which in his opinion “is convinced that it embodies the Party of Good in the face of the party of Pétain” (the leader of France’s wartime collaboration state). At this time, Finkielkraut evidently prefers to ditch the “Party of the Good” and side with Pétain-Sarkozy.

Spurred on by the initiative of these figures, a group called “La Diagonale” has gathered the signatures of 1,000 so-called leftists who plan to vote for Sarkozy—including some members of the Socialist Party.

Up to now, the most prominent of the “new philosophers,” Bernard Henri-Lévy, is playing his cards close to his chest. He does not understand Glucksmann’s decision, Lévy says, but in the same breath defends Sarkozy against charges that he is a “fascist and a bastard.” In his typical opportunist fashion, Lévy declares that the main criterion for an intellectual in choosing his presidential candidate is “timing.”

Lévy recently wrote effusively in the Wall Street Journal of his highly enjoyable dinner with Ségolène Royal, but after establishing close links to Francois Mitterrand, Lévy has been associated more recently with such conservative figures as former prime minister Edouard Balladur and the current French president, Jacques Chirac.

In taking up the cause of Sarkozy in the upcoming presidential elections, Glucksmann and others are responding directly to the appeal made by Sarkozy himself during his acceptance speech at the UMP convention on January 14.

In a speech ringing with phrases and references traditionally associated with authoritarian and Bonapartist forms of rule, Sarkozy made gushing invocations of nationalism in which he condemned the class struggle and made corporatist calls for the unification of all true Frenchmen—whether of the right or left. “My France,” he declared, “is that of all Frenchmen, who basically do not know if they stand on the right, the left or the centre because they are, above all, of good will.”

In the course of his speech, he spelled out key elements of his programme. Sarkozy made clear that his vision of the French nation is based on the necessity for discipline in schools and society as a whole, together with the acknowledgement by the individual citizen that in exchange for rights each must accept and fulfil his or her obligations to the state.

Sarkozy’s formulation of the relation between the state and its citizens recalls the criticisms raised by the nineteenth century French conservative historian Ernest Renan, who despaired that France was “nearly losing all memory of a national spirit.” Advising Napoleon III to accept “the truly conservative programme,” Renan condemned in his essay La Revue des Deux Mondes (1869) “the idea of the equal rights of all men, the way of conceiving government as a mere public service which one pays for, and to which one owes neither respect nor gratitude, a kind of American impertinence.”

While Sarkozy is enthusiastic about introducing US-style neo-liberal politics into France and has established some close links with American political circles, his vision of a strong corporatist state in which the individual yields his or her rights for the greater good of the nation shares much in common with theorists such as Renan, who was praised later in the twentieth century by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini as an important pre-fascist thinker.

It is no coincidence that the preface to Sarkozy’s newest book Testimony has been written by Gianfranco Fini, the leader of Italy’s post-fascist Alleanza Nazionale (National Alliance—NA).

Who Are the New Philosophers?

[Ver el texto completo en: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/mar2007/fran-m03.shtml]

ACTUALIZACION (7 de marzo)

Ver también : "Parisian impostures", de Gregory Elliott, reseñando el libro de Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (Berghahn Books: New York and Oxford 2004, £15, paperback, 294 pp). En: New Left Review 41, sept-oct 2006.

http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:XD-zRAceEC0J:newleftreview.org/%3Fgetpdf%3DNLR27508+%22Parisian+Impostures%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us