French thought once dazzled the world. Where did it go wrong?

The French are incredibly successful at producing very smart people, whom they have exported to other economies for the last several decades, at least since the end of les trente glorieuses, or the post-War boom. French quants are famous on Wall Street and in London. Two of the most prominent researchers in deep learning, my field, are French: Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio. (Interestingly, they both pursued careers in North America.)

The author seems to be referring to philosophy when using the word "thought". Philosophy, like most of the humanities, is having a hard time in many countries besides France, so any analysis of its decline in France should examine transnational trends in university funding, department enrollment and the job prospects of philosophy majors, among other factors.

France has been in gentle decline for about 200 years, since Napoleon returned defeated from Moscow. They have not won a single war since then (spare me the air raids on Tripoli...). Their inability to conquer on the ground means they have exercised less and less influence in the world, despite having nuclear weapons and a seat on the security council. As an economy, they have slipped to 6th-largest GDP -- and third in Europe after the UK and Germany. No one talks about the death of German thought.

French was once on the language of diplomacy, but it's been on the wrong side of history even in the EU, where the accession of Sweden, Norway and Finland in the mid-90s made English much more important.

At home, the French have done little to renew their society or their elite, which is dominated by the alumni of a few elite schools. While Americans are aware of the ossified class structure of Great Britain, they remain largely ignorant of similar rigidities in France. But France is bad at helping its citizens realize their potential, and very good at employing bureaucrats to tell them "non." If they want better thinkers, they only have to look at the ridiculous layers of exclusion that they have built for themselves. Until they fix it, the best talent will surely flee.

> The French fondness for abstraction appears in its most paradoxical (and perverse) form in the absence of precise statistical information about their Maghrebi minorities, as it is illegal to collect data about ethnicity and religion in France

I don't think that's the reason at all. My guess would be it's a scar of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Tulard#The_Tulard_f...

> an over-reliance on abstraction, and a fetish for semantics

There is a domain where this is and has been a good thing: science. There is still a strong french mathematic (and more recently computer science) tradition going on, with specific fields pioneered and developed mostly in france.

Our ministry of education is actively trying to kill all that with the latest school reforms, though....

It's funny when the two collide. Sitting in Champ de Mars watching people walk by while enjoying sun, wine and a cigarette I was struck by how many Western tourists were too busy with their selfie sticks and massaging their online persona to give a fuck that they were somewhere beautiful and rich in history.

I think a big problem is that individualism, the precursor for optimal consumer behavior, has been incredibly effective at driving people to lowest-common-denominator behaviors, chiefly narcissism, and left a good chunk of the worlds population cretinized. How can French culture or any advanced culture compete?

That's where it went wrong. It took its theories too seriously, and didn't know when they were being followed to unreasonable places, and so didn't know when to stop. It followed brilliant (or brilliant-sounding) ideas without common sense, and it turned out that they didn't lead anywhere.

The French Revolution was fueled by the French intellectuals, but it led to the Terror, and then to Napoleon and a decade of war. Reality didn't match theory.

Existentialism did wonderfully at describing what was wrong with much of life, but it didn't actually give you a way to build a life. If you tried to live your life according to existentialism, you got... where?

Derrida gave us deconstructionism. But if you actually want to communicate with people, where does deconstructionism get you? (And don't bother to say that people can't communicate. Even Derrida communicated; that's how we know what he thought.)

There are also technical and reputation issues like the needless complexity of the language ( I'm better at writing English than French yet I am French) and the unconditional alignment of french foreign policies with US interests ( from which we gain absolutely nothing).

France is weak, its people is so desperate it elects mediocre leaders, the educated youth is moving abroad because there is very little future if you are not "well connected" and it's not going to change anytime soon.

One needs only tune in to French TV or radio stations to convince herself that France's obsession with public intellectuals is alive and well.

This is the country where, a year or two ago, a well regarded historian committed suicide in Notre-Dame de Paris as a political statement; and where Bernard-Henry Levy and Michel Onfray are best selling authors.

Resistance to oppression ? Meh. The very regime that created the Declaration of Rights also created the Terror and send hundred of thousands of innocent people to the Guillotine, and started a genocide in Vendee. Ideals did not live up to the fact - when it came to action, Danton and the like were all just like their former masters, violent and without mercy.

The Enlightenment was founded on two contradictory values: (1) Reverence for reason (2) Dogmatic adherence to 'liberal' values. In the name of the former, French thinkers devoted themselves to the latter with disastrous results.

Myths like human perfectibility still muddy our thinking. And 'natural rights' remain hallowed, even among atheists, who seem remarkably unconcerned about their accompanying metaphysical baggage.

I've been spending a little time trying to overcome the kind of particular anti-French thought that only growing up in the U.S. can provide. I haven't done more than dip my toes into French culture and history, but find myself both simultaneously deeply impressed and disappointed.

In many ways it feels like a more structured, more civilized parallel of the Anglo tradition I grew up in. There seems to be some kind of parallel in every kind of historic point -- but taken towards an alternate direction by the currents of French culture.

I visited Paris first, and like many tourists fell in love with the city. Then, a few years later, I visited London and was disquieted by both its familiarity as an American and its differences -- which I could only relate as a less organized version of French thought on high-civilization.

French literature really is great, French art is the work of superhumans...you almost feel transcendent, like you are riding a great wave that's forcing humanity into a future. It may sound silly, but when I watch "The 5th Element", the French vision of future New York City, unlike anything envisioned in the Anglosphere, has such a magnetic attraction, such a complete vision, I want to dive into the screen and explore this place.

So it's weird to find out about oddly, deeply, conservative parts of French civilization. They're conservative with an intensity that Fox News could never replicate. Académie française, the preservation of the architecture of central Paris, Sarkozy, various kinds of agriculture protectionism, etc. I'm sure I view these with the same kind of palm-greets-forehead many French view American politics and news media.

When I realize that the French had the first go at the Panama canal and come to appreciate the impressive accomplishments of French engineering, Minitel: a pre-internet national network, the Paris Subway system, and so on...we Americans are taught to deride many of these accomplishments and attempts at greatness because they failed or didn't take over the world...while American (or British) versions did...well, the more I learn the more I appreciate the incredible state of advancement of the French civilization in many areas.

France still leads in various areas: sophistication of Food, philosophy, arguably art...but I can't help but feel that in many ways the current civilization is a diminished version of what it once was. Walking around Paris you can't help but be deeply impressed at the beauty and sophistication...the "perfection" of the ideal of Parisian life. You really don't need more creature comforts because that kind of life is almost, objectively, "the best".

But then, as you're walking down a beautiful, gobsmackingly amazing rue, you get accosted by a homeless person, or a cheap car belches fumes on you, or you have to walk around a street "artist" who's performance art consists of painting themselves in used automotive oil or some nonsense. The ideal feels further and further out of reach, an impossible future, set down hundreds of years in the past, that humankind isn't quite ready to achieve.

London, New York, D.C. and other great Anglo cities on the other hand, seems to sit far more comfortably in their respective mediocrity. But several times daily, I find myself indebted to the fruits of French civilization.