Why France lionizes the man who challenged everything

Final year high school students in a literary or humanities stream spend eight hours a week studying "philo" - one of the subjects they must pass to earn a diploma.

That means that some of them have at least a clue what philosophers are talking about when they take to the public square.

When Oliver Feltham began working on his doctoral thesis in philosophy, he recalls, his fellow Australians' general reaction was, "You must be stupid. What's the point in doing that?"

So he moved to France, where he was not disappointed. "Here when I explained what I was doing, people were excited", he says. "They'd ask me which philosopher I was studying."

Indeed, nobody is surprised when a French philosopher expresses himself on an issue of public import.

Jean-Paul Sartre took a position on everything; Michel Foucault was vocal in support of prisoners' rights; and Derrida used to give clandestine seminars in Communist Czechoslovakia and spoke in favor of illegal immigrants, after initially shying away from the limelight.

In the US, it's more common to hear a comedian or musician discuss politics. "NBC is not going to ask a philosopher's opinion about anything, and Time magazine is not going to ask one to write a column," says Tom Bishop, a professor at New York University.

But the new generation of philosophers who dominate the French airwaves today spend more time commenting on international affairs than they do philosophizing.

Bernard-Henri Levy (known by the simpler moniker, "BHL"), Andre Glucksmann, and other young(er) Turks who rose up against "French Theory" can be found regularly on television or in the columns of Le Monde or The Wall Street Journal, pontificating about terrorism, the war in Iraq, and other subjects of the day.

"With the 'new philosophers,' intellectual production has been replaced by a moralist stance," complains Mr. Cusset. "They lecture rather than come up with concepts, and they have been absorbed by the media. Their causes are good, but it is not the role of the philosopher just to adopt causes - he should create concepts."

Whether such concepts influence practical politics very much is open to question, regardless of the respect that well-known philosophers enjoy in France.

Mr. Glucksmann and his friend Bernard Kouchner developed "the right of humanitarian intervention" - a humanitarian version of President Bush's preemptive-strike doctrine - which justified European involvement in the Kosovo war to avert ethnic cleansing.

But almost all of the media-savvy French philosophers supported the war in Iraq last year, and nobody in France paid them the slightest heed.

Philosophers do, however, still spark considerable public interest in France.

On Thursday, a new book about Mr. Levy is coming out, "The ABC of BHL," which promises to dish the dirt on France's most famous philosopher.

Its publishers expect a best seller. Only in France.

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