Ignorance is a prelude to stupidity. No society can promote intelligence without, at the same time, demanding the effort that is essential to any form of learning. Brigitte Macron mentioned the creation of a digital platform where the French could, free of charge, discover masterpieces of all the arts. Salutary move: How long has it been since a prominent political figure said something like this? To ask the question is to answer it. Why has the methodical disappearance and concerted destruction of culture so far not interested anyone?
The writer Thomas Bernhard hated his country, Austria. His hatred came from the mediocrity, the pettiness, the pettiness of a society convinced of being cultivated because it was well brought up. In Old Masters, he writes: "Only people who can be counted on the fingers of one hand in this dreadful country can overcome this state of abasement and hatred, of oppression and indifference, of generalized coarseness, enemy of the spirit, which reigns everywhere, here, in Austria. »
Good humor was not Bernhard's first quality, and he reasoned by exaggeration. France is not Austria, but it is a part of Europe; and Europe, while being the primary civilization of the arts, maintains a degree of conformity in its relationship to culture. Under the Ancien Régime, the princes of Italy, France and Spain wanted to maintain talented artists in order to increase their prestige. François I welcomed Leonardo da Vinci, Louis XIV chose Racine as his historiographer, Voltaire was adored by Frederick of Prussia and Catherine of Russia. Hosting artists was chic. The painters, the writers, the musicians were, in their own way, beholden to power, of course, but at least they lived alongside the king, the emperor, the pope, who, by showing them consideration, gave example to the people.
Art occupied the first rank of refinement, far ahead of all kinds of commerce. The ignorant were numerous, but they were at least ashamed of being so. Individuals had the feeling, in spite of themselves, wrote Paul Valéry, of belonging "to this kind of extraordinary adventure [...] whose developments no one can foresee, and whose most remarkable feature – perhaps the most disturbing – consists in an ever more marked estrangement from the initial or natural conditions of life.
Talented artists have not disappeared, nor have masterpieces. Culture survives everything, even times when it interests no one. This is why feigned indignation, at the end of which one must always conclude that "France is dead", does not make sense. No need to be reactionary to regret the seizure of power by ideologies of all kinds, the excessive politicization, the total disinterest, practically claimed by some, for refined and useless things, in the economic sense of the term.
It suffices, to be convinced of this, to note the automatic mockery, the buffoonish laughter, the remarks full of sarcasm that the slightest cultural reference arouses in a television program, in society, or more simply in a company. Populism has its part in it. The "nerds" are seen as "snobs", a sub-category of this "elite" supposedly ignorant of "real life", who would spend their time at sidewalk cafes, reading useless books and despising the out of the world. Yes, vulgarity covered the era with its most rudimentary brutality. We speak all the more willingly of the decadence of morals because it makes it possible to silence the real decadence of intelligence.
Whose fault is it ? The disappearance of artists and writers from high society contributed to this decline. The abandonment of knowledge and research, the misery in which the university survives are not reassuring indicators. How can a country (France!) have the slightest claim to the scale of the world when it abandons fields as essential as history, literature, philosophy or even languages. When he accepts to see his researchers and his teachers working in poverty.
This is not (only) a moral issue. Even from a cynical point of view, the state would benefit from investing in intelligence. History does not give a single example of a nation, powerful, prosperous, prestigious, which would not have protected the teaching and learning of the sciences and the arts. Considering them superfluous is not only an uneducated reflex, it is still a strategic error that only ignoramuses could commit.
References :
Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters, Paris, Gallimard, 1988. First edition in German: 1985.
Paul Valéry, Mediterranean Inspirations, Paris, Fata Morgana, 2020.
* Born in 1990, Arthur Chevallier is a historian and editor at Passés Composites. He curated the exhibition "Napoleon" (2021), produced by the Grand Palais and La Villette. He has written several books devoted to the political and cultural posterity of Napoleon Bonaparte and the First Empire, Napoleon told by those who knew him (Grasset, 2014), Napoleon without Bonaparte (Cerf, 2018), Napoleon and Bonapartism (Que do I know?, 2021), or Napoleon's Women (Grasset, 2022).
