{"id":1836,"date":"2012-06-30T00:00:10","date_gmt":"2012-06-30T00:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stafforini.com\/quotes\/?p=1836"},"modified":"2012-06-30T17:56:35","modified_gmt":"2012-06-30T17:56:35","slug":"tony-judt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stafforini.com\/quotes\/?p=1836","title":{"rendered":"Tony Judt"},"content":{"rendered":"

To understand the mystery of French intellectuality, one must begin with the \u00c9cole Normale. Founded in 1794 to train secondary school teachers, it became the forcing house of the republican elite. Between 1850 and 1970, virtually every Frenchman of intellectual distinction (women were not admitted until recently) graduated from it: from Pasteur to Sartre, from \u00c9mile Durkheim to Georges Pompidou, from Charles P\u00e9guy to Jacques Derrida (who managed to flunk the exam not once but twice before getting in), from L\u00e9on Blum to Henri Bergson, Romain Rolland, Marc Bloch, Louis Althusser, R\u00e9gis Debray, Michel Foucault, Bernard-Henri L\u00e9vy, and all eight French winners of the Fields Medal for mathematics.<\/p>\n

When I arrived there in 1970, as a pensionnaire \u00e9tranger<\/em>, the \u00c9cole Normale still reigned supreme. [\u2026] The young men I met at the \u00c9cole seemed to me far less mature than my Cambridge contemporaries. Gaining admission to Cambridge was no easy matter, but it did not prelude the normal life of a busy youth. However, no one got into the \u00c9cole Normal without sacrificing his teenage years to that goal, and it showed. I was unfailingly astonished by the sheer volume of rote learning on which my French contemporaries could call, suggesting an impacted richness that was at times almost indigestible. P\u00e2t\u00e9 de foi gras<\/em> indeed.<\/p>\n

But what these budding French intellectuals gained in culture, they often lacked in imagination. My first breakfast at the \u00c9cole was instructive in this regard. Seated opposite o group of unshaven, pajama-clad freshmen, I burdied myself in my coffee bowl. Suddenly an earnest young man resembling the young Trotsky leaned across and asked me (in French): \u201cWhere did you do kh\u00e2gne<\/em>?\u201d\u2014the high-intensity post-lyc\u00e9e preparatory classes. I explained that I had not done kh\u00e2gne<\/em>: I came from Cambridge. \u201cAh, so you did kh\u00e2gne<\/em> in England.\u201d \u201cNo,\u201d I tried again: \u201cWe don\u2019t do kh\u00e2gne<\/em>\u2014I came here directly from an English university.\u201d<\/p>\n

The young man looked at me with withering scorn. It is not possible, he explained, to enter the \u00c9cole Normale without first undergoing preparation in kh\u00e2gne<\/em>. Since you are here, you must have done kh\u00e2gne<\/em>. And with that conclusive Cartesian flourish he turned away, directing his conversation to worthier targets. This radical disjunction between the uninteresting evidence of your own eyes and ears and the incontrovertible conclusions to be derived from first principles introduced me to a cardinal axiom of French intellectual life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Tony Judt, The Memory Chalet<\/em>, London, 2010, pp. 114-116<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To understand the mystery of French intellectuality, one must begin with the \u00c9cole Normale. Founded in 1794 to train secondary school teachers, it became the forcing house of the republican elite. Between 1850 and 1970, virtually every Frenchman of intellectual distinction (women were not admitted until recently) graduated from it: from Pasteur to Sartre, from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1263],"tags":[1265,1264,1799],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stafforini.com\/quotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1836"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stafforini.com\/quotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stafforini.com\/quotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stafforini.com\/quotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stafforini.com\/quotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1836"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.stafforini.com\/quotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1836\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1837,"href":"https:\/\/www.stafforini.com\/quotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1836\/revisions\/1837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stafforini.com\/quotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stafforini.com\/quotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stafforini.com\/quotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}