And God Created Bardot

The Guardian reports the death of Brigitte Bardot.

"The Task of Our Generation Is to Defeat the Totalitarianisms of the 21st Century"

"Europe is at a crucial juncture of its history. The American shield is slipping away, Ukraine risks being abandoned, and Russia is being strengthened. Washington has become the court of Nero: an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a buffoon on ketamine tasked with purging the civil service."

The Atlantic runs a transcipt of the March 4, 2025, speech by French senator Claude Malhuret.

"A Growing Sense of the Chickens Coming Home to Roost"

"But here's the catch. Le wokisme, which the French love to hate, isn't as foreign as its critics would have you believe. It actually traces its intellectual genealogy, at least in part, back to 1960s French intellectuals who analyzed and 'deconstructed' the language and the symbolism of power, kickstarting a global campus movement."

At Politico, Nicholas Vinocur notes that "France laid the foundations for campus 'woke' ideology."

"'Resentments' and Grievances"

"Since he will not have the direct debate with Macron over the issues that his supporters care about most, Mélenchon instead wants to force Macron to try, for the first time, to convince young people, poor people, working-class people, immigrants, city people, to vote for him, and not to take them for granted as he has thus far. Le Pen will surely make a play for these voters, or at least try to get them to avoid voting for Macron. Macron's chance of winning depends on his ability to convince enough Mélenchon voters to vote for him, and that means convincing them that he will be a decidedly different president in his second term than he was in his first. One thing is certain, though: If Le Pen defeats Macron, elites will blame Mélenchon's voters for failing to fulfill their role in the neoliberal order, which is to be contemptuously and continuously ignored and then called on, every five years, to save the Republic from fascism."

Moshik Temkin at Journal of Democracy surveys the French presidential election.

Nothin' Comes Out When They Move Their Lips

"Foucault's more original contributions lie in his anchoring of a philosophical account of the relationship between truth and power in a historical analysis of specific modern institutions. His wide-ranging impact, I have argued here, owes something to his insights into the ascendancy of the same professional class of credentialed experts amongst whom his theories have achieved the most traction. But the dimensions of his ideas that might offer a means of criticizing the guiding assumptions of that class have generally remained unexplored, lest they prove too potent. Right-wing critique of liberal institutions, suspicious as it is of a figure who appears to be a guiding light for the enemy side, remains unlikely to find value in his cri­tiques. They may, however, have a renewed utility for the politically heterodox across the spectrum, especially insofar as his critiques of institutions expose the limits of our dominant modes of politics."

Geoff Shullenberger at American Affairs about "How We Forgot Foucault."

"But It Is an Illumination"

"At times, Rothschild's method seems almost impressionistic. As she writes: 'The perspective of this micro- medium- macro history has been to start with the most obvious and accessible evidence about individual lives, and to follow these lives wherever they lead.' Although she has historical arguments to advance—about France's overseas expansion, the French Revolution, and the French economy—they have a secondary place in the book. What matters most is the voyage itself, as one piece of evidence leads serendipitously to another. In this lyrical Michelin Guide to a now-vanished Angoulême and its people, everything 'is worth a detour.' Some critics might see this preference for the idiosyncrasies of her subject matter at the expense of an overall thesis as a shortcoming of An Infinite History, and perhaps of the microhistorical approach in general. It is better, perhaps, to see it as a welcome challenge to a profession that has long been infatuated with different varieties of social and cultural theory. It can sometimes be a good idea to let past individuals, as much as possible, speak for themselves, rather than force their messy, irregularly shaped lives into grids borrowed from the theoretical literature."

At The Nation, David A. Bell reviews Emma Rothschild's An Infinite History: The Story of a Family in France Over Three Centuries.

"A Matter of Substance, but Also Style"

"In less apocalyptic terms, French philosophical rationalism has also been charged with creating a nation of individualists, with a crippling fetish for skepticism, and for challenging authority in all its forms. This trait has been deemed to have negative consequences of both a practical and theoretical nature. In the latter case, it has fostered a tradition of theoretical extremism (most vividly reflected in the vibrant radical movements in France both on the right and the left). It has hindered the emergence of a gradualist epistemological tradition of acquiring knowledge through a process of accumulation. And in practical matters, this French individualism has encouraged a cult of singularity and a resistance to state power: President Charles de Gaulle (himself one of France's great individualists) gave voice to this concern when he once wondered whether it was possible to govern a country that produced 246 varieties of cheese."

In a 2015 Aeon article, Sudhir Hazareesingh considers "How the French Think."

"The Soundtrack to a National Identity Crisis"

"French rap's ascent from peripheral subculture to mainstream staple began during the golden era of 90s US hip-hop. Inspired by the political rhymes of Public Enemy, rap français built its reputation on vociferous social criticism, opposing racism and police brutality. The commercial achievements of the groups Suprême NTM and Iam helped make France the largest hip-hop market outside the US, which it remains to this day."

At The Guardian, Michael Oliver looks at "the most successful French popular music movement of all time."

"Camaraderie and Comfort, Conspiracy and Chaos"

"The incidents provoked an immediate backlash from the French political class, and a spate of soul-searching articles in left-wing media about what the yellow vests were becoming. They could have saved their shock, because despite the legitimate economic pain and despair that have been highlighted by the protests, anti-Semitism, conspiracy theories, illiberal politics, and violent insurrectionism have been inextricable from the movement practically from its beginning."

Alexander Hurst at The New Republic warns that the gilets jaunes "have combined legitimate economic grievances with the worst of far-right politics."

"No System Can Remain if It Does Not Integrate the Majority of Its Poorest Citizens"

"The change is not down to a conspiracy, a wish to cast aside the poor, but to a model where employment is increasingly polarised. This comes with a new social geography: employment and wealth have become more and more concentrated in the big cities. The deindustrialised regions, rural areas, small and medium-size towns are less and less dynamic. But it is in these places–in 'peripheral France' (one could also talk of peripheral America or peripheral Britain)–that many working-class people live. Thus, for the first time, 'workers' no longer live in areas where employment is created, giving rise to a social and cultural shock."

Christophe Guilluy at The Guardian explains the rise of the gilets jaunes movement in France.

"How We Got Here"

NPR runs a "special series" on 1968.

"The Postmodernist Theorists We Vilify Did Not Cause This"

"Ironically, the urge to blame postmodernism for Trump-era politics blinds us to the explanatory value postmodernism holds for what’s happening today. It's easy to scoff at, for example, Baudrillard's book 'The Gulf War Did Not Take Place,' writing it off as just another instance of postmodernist claptrap, the denial of an objective truth so obvious as 'the Gulf War happened.' But if we bother to understand Baudrillard's thesis—that our impressions of the conflict have been warped by media framing and agitprop—it's clear that the real enemy of truth is not postmodernism but propaganda, the active distortion of truth for political purposes. Trumpism practices this form of distortion on a daily basis." 

Aaron Hanlon at The Washington Post argues that postmodernism has "actually given us a framework to understand precisely how falsehood can masquerade as truth."

And Hugo Drochon at The New Statesman describes Friedrich Nietzsche as "the philosopher of ressentiment, which seems to be driving much populist politics today."

"The Revolution That Almost Was"

"Much about our modern times can be traced back to a single summer and what changed--or more accurately, what didn't."

Julia Alekseyeva at The Nib provides a cartoon history of May 1968.

"Burning Conviction, Solidarity, Euphoria"

"Since 1968, America has gone off in a different direction than I had hoped: Reagan, Nixon, and Trump are not the kind of leaders we had in mind back then. In 1968, I would have settled for nothing less than socialism. Twenty-five years after that, something like a European welfare state would have made me happy. Today, just having a reliable subway system appears utopian. The French Revolution, however violent, uprooted the monarchy. The Russian Revolution, however perverse, produced an experiment, albeit a failed one, in economic planning. 1968 not only failed to achieve most of its goals, it set politics off in the wrong direction."

Alan Wolfe at The New Republic looks back fifty years.

"Be Reasonable–Demand the Impossible"

"If your mind was ever open to that year's mixture of subversion and confrontation, it will probably have stuck with you. Most of the time, mundane reality wins out, but from time to time, an explosive critique of modernity bursts through and demands action, even if it just as quickly recedes."

John Harris at The Guardian writes about "the essential story of 1968 and its enduring legacy."

"It Cannot Be Blindly Quoted, as a Visionary Paean to Simple Virtues"

"And yet it's easy to forget that Democracy in America was not written under President Lincoln, but under President Jackson, in the America of the Trail of Tears, and it can only feel strange that a book from this moment in time is the one frequently hailed as capturing some of America's finest characteristics. True, Tocqueville, an abolitionist, both condemned African-American slavery and Native American dispossession, and did so eloquently. Yet his democracy stops long before them, in his elegiac passages of the happy slaves at work in the fields, or in his conviction that 'the Indians will never civilize themselves, or that it will be too late when they may be inclined to make the experiment.' One would happily toil, one would quietly vanish—that was Tocqueville's shrug."

Ben Judah at The American Interest questions blithe understandings of Alexis de Tocqueville.

"It Just Requires Listening to Workers"

"In France and Germany, the retail industry offers living-wage union jobs, with stable schedules and comprehensive training programs—not because their bosses are saints, but because they apply a business model that prioritizes job quality above maximizing hours and cutting costs.                                                                                                                                       "In the United States, big corporate retailers treat employees as disposable, interchangeable widgets, and pay accordingly cheap wages. Degrading the real value of their labor pushes the workforce into a precarious cycle of economic insecurity, as well as high turnover, which is costly and unproductive for the company. European retail sectors, however, manage to avoid this cyclical exploitation, through business models and industrial policy that see a business's value as a function of how much it invests in cultivating a productive, content workforce."

At The Nation, Michelle Chen argues that "a workplace is only as good for workers as the politics of the community surrounding it."

"I Kept Finding Parallels"

"The Buddha doubted the existence of an omnipotent, benevolent God. In his doctrine of 'emptiness,' he suggested that we have no real evidence for the existence of the outside world. He said that our sense of self is an illusion, too. The Buddhist sage Nagasena elaborated on this idea. The self, he said, is like a chariot. A chariot has no transcendent essence; it's just a collection of wheels and frame and handle. Similarly, the self has no transcendent essence; it's just a collection of perceptions and emotions.
"'I never can catch myself at any time without a perception.'
"That sure sounded like Buddhist philosophy to me—except, of course, that Hume couldn't have known anything about Buddhist philosophy.
"Or could he have?"

In a 2015 Atlantic article, Alison Gopnik describes her efforts in investigating a link between Buddhism and David Hume.

"An Indigenous Creation"

"Today, deconstructive habits of mind within the academy are largely considered not so much controversial as passé. Still, there remains the question of how and why the deconstructive tradition became such a formidable pattern of thought in the United States. To answer that question, Americans might—in an ironic twist—consider the February 2014 protests in France against the legalization of same-sex marriage. Those protestors objected to the equality advanced by the new grade school pedagogy ostensibly inspired by American gender theory, above all that of deconstructionist Judith Butler. 'La théorie du genre,' according to French protestors, originated on the other side of the Atlantic. We might also consider why, as Fredric Jameson noted in 2015, Americans tend to believe the 'good tidings' of theory—including deconstruction—were brought from Europe, while Chinese literary scholars, say, consider theory an American invention. These perceptions of the origin and flow of ideas should give pause to those who consider deconstruction essentially French."

Gregory Jones-Katz in the Boston Review asserts that "deconstructive literary theory was largely" an American phenomenon.

"The Intellectual Energy Is Now on the Side of Liberalism's Opponents"

"Habituation breeds indifference. A turn of phrase that expressed a point with the help of a striking image no longer packs the same punch because we have grown inured to its literal meaning; linguists call this a dead metaphor. Driving to work in the sweet ride we bought a few months ago no longer gives us the same pleasure; economists call this hedonic adaptation. The person who once sent our heart racing enters the room and we barely notice it; grown-ups call this being married.

"Something akin to this form of habituation has happened to our most fundamental political values. The ideals of liberal democracy are all around us. We know that the people are supposed to rule and that all citizens have a right to the same basic freedoms irrespective of their race, creed, or religion. But precisely because these ideas have surrounded us in a diffuse way for so long, we have begun to forget their meaning and their grandeur."

Yascha Mounk in Slate defines "illiberal democracy" and "undemocratic liberalism" as on the rise in Europe and the United States.