Paris_ City Guide (Lonely Planet, 7th Edition) - Lonely Planet [27]
Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre’s lifelong companion, applied existentialist concepts to the predicament of women in French society. There is no essential ‘female’ or ‘male’ nature, she opined in her seminal work Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex), published in 1949. According to Beauvoir, women’s status as the perpetual ‘other’ relegates them to remaining ‘objects’ of the subjective male gaze.
Sartre and de Beauvoir were strong advocates of communism until 1956 and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Disillusionment with communism and with the political engagement implied by existentialism led a new generation towards the social science called structuralism. Coined by the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, structuralists believe that sociological, psychological and linguistic structures shape individuals. Individuals do not shape themselves as the existentialists believe. Beginning as a scientific method for studying differences between cultures, structuralism soon came to represent a rejection of all the universal ideas – reason, progress, democracy – that had held sway since the Age of Enlightenment.
As a poststructuralist, Michel Foucault rejected the idea that it was possible to step outside the ‘discursive practices’ that claim to reveal knowledge and arrive at an ultimate truth. The search for knowledge cannot be separated from the power relationships that lie at the heart of every social and political relationship.
Jacques Derrida, first published in the influential Tel Quel Click here in the 1960s, introduced the concept of deconstructionism. This concept suggests that outside language there is nothing to which we can refer directly, since all language is indicative only of itself (il n’y a pas de hors-texte – there is no subtext). So knowledge outside of language is literally unthinkable; it is not a natural reflection of the world. Each text allows for multiple interpretations, making it impossible to find certainty in textual analysis. But deconstructionism posed an obvious paradox: how can one use language to claim that language is meaningless?
In recent decades French philosophers have returned to political commitment and moral philosophy. Bernard-Henri Levy was an outspoken critic of the war in Bosnia and made several films on the subject in the 1990s. Known as France’s No 1 ‘anti-anti-Americanist’, Levy’s recent (and most popular work in English) is American Vertigo: Travelling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville (2006), in which he follows in the footsteps of his compatriot and forerunner, Alexis de Tocqueville, crisscrossing America and commenting on the state of the union. André Glucksmann’s Ouest contre Ouest (West against West; 2003) looked at the Iraq war and the paradox that those groups for and against the war both claimed to be inspired by the same principles. In fact he was one of the few French intellectuals to back the invasion of Iraq. He supported Sarkozy in the 2007 national elections.
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PAINTING
The philosopher Voltaire wrote that French painting began with Nicolas Poussin, the greatest representative of 17th-century classicism who frequently set scenes from ancient Rome, classical mythology and the Bible in ordered landscapes bathed in golden light. It’s not a bad starting point.
In the 18th century Jean-Baptiste Chardin brought the humbler domesticity of the Dutch masters to French art. In 1785 the public reacted with enthusiasm to two large paintings with clear republican messages: The Oath of the Horatii and Brutus Condemning His Son by Jacques-Louis David. David became one of the leaders of the French Revolution, and a virtual dictator in matters of art, where he advocated a precise, severe classicism. He was made official state painter by Napoleon Bonaparte, glorifying him as general, first consul and then emperor, and is best remembered for his Death of Marat, depicting the Jacobin propagandist lying dead