Raised at the Sarkozy school, Gérald Darmanin learned to handle the Kärcher of words, to “marble” the vocabulary, sometimes to take out the big red stain. Also he knows very well what he is doing when he attacks the “intellectual terrorism”. The expression is old, it flourished in the 1970s to denounce the “thought police” of Marxist ideologues. Its strength is perhaps due to its slightly oxymoronic character. By launching it, the Minister of the Interior kills two birds with one stone: he delegitimizes the intellectual world (a classic of the right); it justifies the anti-terrorist arsenal used against environmental activists mobilized against mega-basins. These militants whom he had qualified a few months ago, it is no coincidence, to“eco-terrorists”.
That Gérald Darmanin uses this expression when he threatens to cut off supplies to the League of Human Rights is no coincidence either. The LDH falls under this “far left intellectual terrorism” endorsed by the minister. It was born at the same time as the word “intellectual”: at the time of the Dreyfus affair. Moreover, the expression “intellectual terrorism” also appeared at this time, dethroning the “speaking tyranny” of Montaigne.
The sequel after the ad
Thus the anti-Dreyfusard newspaper “La Vérité”, on June 3, 1894, denounces “this intellectual terrorism by which liberalism sometimes succeeds in reigning. Discourage contradiction, persuade the adversary that he is defeated in advance and that he only has to submit”. At the end of the 1930s, the same expression was chosen by the newspaper “Le Temps” to translate a passage from “Mein Kampf” where Hitler evokes the “spiritual terror” that Social Democracy (then Marxist) imposed on the bourgeoisie.
“The League of Human Rights belongs to the republican heritage”
After the war, the expression became commonplace. In “le Monde” of May 18, 1968Jean Lacouture was delighted to see, in the then agitated lecture halls, the students inventing through free debate “the antidote to generations (…) of intellectual terrorism”. In political discussions, one sometimes hears the expression “no intellectual terrorism, comrade!” “. It targets Stalinist or Maoist militants. “Every anti-Communist is a dog”said Sartre, “intellectual terrorist” in chief.
Right-wing essayists then seized on the expression. They try to demonstrate that the left is now seeking to impose itself as the “good camp” by qualifying all those who do not follow it as “fascists”. At the start of 1973, the leader of the New Right, a melting pot of ethnodifferentialism and identities, Alain de Benoist, enters the campaign against intellectual terrorism: “The witch hunt is practical: it guarantees good consciences. There is worse than hijackings: hijackings, with “bomb” blackmail too. » Many others, Gaullists or liberals, got into it: Maurice Druon, Jean-François Revel… And later, Pierre-André Taguieff and Jean Sévillia would take up the torch.
In the press, the use of the expression reached its peak at the turn of the 1980s. Often to designate anything and everything. The most Parisian of Americans, Susan Sontag, then had fun defending her: “Intellectual terrorism is a central, respectable form of intellectual practice in France. (…) : it is the “Jacobin” tradition of brutal affirmation and shameless ideological reversal; the mission of constantly judging, formulating an opinion, anathematizing or exalting without measure; a taste for extreme positions, reversed according to circumstances, and deliberate provocation” (see “Scripture itself. About Roland Barthes”, Christian Bourgois, 1979).
Just for fun “deliberate provocation”let him have the last word.
