- PARIS -- More than 20,000
French artists, thinkers, film-makers, scientists, lawyers, doctors and
academics have signed a petition accusing the centre-right government of
"waging war on intelligence" and instituting "a new state
anti-intellectualism".
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- In a campaign bound to inflame passions in France, where
penseurs are accorded the kind of respect most countries reserve for their
rock stars, the signatories denounced a "coherent policy" to
"pauperise and fragilise every field considered ... unproductive,
useless or dissident".
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- Among the better-known names to have signed the document,
published in today's issue of Les Inrockuptibles magazine, are the philosopher
Jacques Derrida, film-makers Bertrand Tavernier and Claude Lanzmann, theatre
director Ariane Mnouchkine, novelist Marie Darrieusecq, the former Socialist
culture minister Jack Lang and Danny Cohn-Bendit, hero of the May 1968
student uprising.
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- The collected professions "of knowledge, thought
and research" are under systematic attack from a state-sponsored philistinism
intent on reducing the complexities of Gallic public debate to a series
of "simplistic and terrifying" alternatives, the protesters say:
"For or against Islamic veils? Left-leaning magistrates or too-tough
cops? Artists - are they idlers or profiteers?"
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- The charge of anti-intellectualism is a highly damaging
one in France, whose present-day Left Bank thinkers can draw on a rich
tradition that includes the likes of Voltaire, Rousseau and Sartre.
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- Paris remains one of very few places in the world where
postmodern structuralists or relativist post-structural modernists can
harbour realistic hopes of making it in television.
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- Sylvain Bourmeau, a journalist at Les Inrockuptibles
and one of the petition's organisers, said that at one stage last week,
email signatures were coming in at the rate of 700 an hour. The magazine
will publish the first 8,000 names over 17 pages this morning, he said.
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- "We are aiming to mobilise all those whose work
involves some kind of mediation, which in turn demands a detour via comprehension
- in other words, all that this government is currently short-circuiting
in the name of political and PR efficiency," he added.
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- Perhaps unwisely, the blokeish prime minister, Jean-Pierre
Raffarin, who prides himself on his man-of-the-people touch, has never
been shy about confessing his suspicion of thinkers, savaging "those
who suppose themselves to be great intellectuals" as recently as last
October. His centre-right government has enraged many of France's "intellectual
professions" recently.
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- Moves to regulate the status of psychotherapists provoked
the fury of a whole generation of analysts, while fully 40,000 scientists
denounced swingeing cuts in state funding and the loss of some 550 postgraduate
research jobs this year.
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- Lawyers, meanwhile, are up in arms at a bill passed last
week which they say radically extends police and prosecutors' powers at
the expense of justice and human rights, while magistrates are seething
at the ruling UMP party's public criticism of the sentence handed down
recently to its chairman, Alain JuppÈ.
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- Schoolteachers walked out several times last year over
plans to reorganise the state education system and cut back on classroom
assistants; university chancellors threatened not to sign budgets because
of "catastrophic" shortfalls in funding; and actors, musicians
and dancers are still furious at reforms to their unemployment insurance
which they say put the performing arts sector at risk.
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- "Of course there are huge differences between all
these groups," Mr Bourmeau said. "But the political job we are
doing here is to bring them all together and underline the basic similarities
of their situations."
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/france/story/0,11882,1150451,00.html
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