Abstract
Given its repercussions, it is unsurprising that Zola’s open letter to the President of the Republic, Félix Faure, which appeared in L’Aurore on 13 January 1898 under the heading ‘J’accuse’, provides the starting-point for this informative and concise history of the figure of the intellectual in France. Zola’s intervention not only marked a watershed in the protracted Dreyfus Affair, it also mobilized French writers and scholars in an unprecedented way. The petition calling for a revision of the case against Dreyfus, which followed the day after Zola’s open letter, was published as the ‘Manifeste des intellectuels’. Signed by writers, scientists, journalists, engineers, architects and artists, the petition signalled the rise of a new term (hitherto, ‘intellectuel’ was mainly employed as an adjective) as well as a new form of engagement: ‘die historische Innovation des Eingreifens von Zola bestand darin’, Jurt suggests, ‘dass sie auf das neue Phänomen der öffentlichen Meinung abgestimmt war’ (p. 34). Just as the debates galvanized by Zola’s intervention – not least about what legitimacy such public figures have to intervene in matters outside their area of expertise – frame Jurt’s discussion throughout, so too does the importance of this divisive case to the evolution of politics in modern France. (The term dreyfusard continued to be invoked long into the twentieth century). Zola and Bourdieu act, as Jurt’s subtitle suggests, as bookends to the study; and attention is given, along the way, to individual writers and thinkers, such as Aragon, Malraux, Gide, Camus and Sartre. But the author also places this narrative on a broader canvas, sketching out a prehistory of the intellectual that returns us to the Enlightenment period. In Jurt’s hands, Voltaire emerges as a prototype of the figure of the modern intellectual, and the Affaire Calas, as it was subsequently known, as a precursor to Zola’s cause célèbre. The book proceeds in chronological order and traces out the shifts and struggles in the engagement of intellectuals brought about by national and international political conflicts (the First World War; the October Revolution; the rise of Fascism; the Occupation; decolonization; Mai ‘68; and so on). Such events tended to polarize the intellectual field; and if the history of the Left looms large, one of the virtues of the study is its even-handed attention to the political Right (for instance, Maurice Barrès and Action française). In the process, Jurt synthesizes a wide range of recent research on the history of the intellectual in France (studies by Christophe Charle, Michel Winock and Jean-François Sirinelli, among others), although the reader might consider the lack of engagement with Anglophone works on the subject (e.g. by Tony Judt, David Drake, Keith Reader) to be a conspicuous omission. The book’s distinct approach lies, above all, with Jurt’s foregrounding of the social and political conditions of intellectual engagement; and the study is firmly situated in the line of Bourdieu’s field theory. The subsequent emphasis on the development of different media as vehicles for intellectual intervention is illuminating, as is Jurt’s discussion of the intellectual conflicts that constellated around different publishers in the 1930s and 1940s. This accessible study, written in clear and precise prose, is primarily aimed at a German readership; and its comparative dimension is, first and foremost, centred on France and Germany. But for readers of German more broadly, Jurt provides an excellent overview of the history of the intellectual in France that would be a useful resource for undergraduates and researchers alike.