A couple of weeks ago I had a visit from a schoolmate I had not seen since the “good old days” of pre-Khomeini Iran.
Under the Shah he spent eight months in prison because he was supposed to be on the left. Under the mullahs he spent five years in jail on a charge of pro-monarchy activities. In other words, he was stung twice for opposite reasons.
This was his first visit to Paris, thanks to a Schengen visa obtained by bribing the consul in one of the European Union embassies in Tehran. I wondered where to take him before he leaves for Germany. As he had been one of the first Iranians to graduate as an IT engineer, I thought a prank might amuse him.
I suggested we visit the French “Silicon Valley”.
“Do they have a Silicon Valley?” he asked.
“Sure, they do,” I answered. “It is where the French discovered artificial intelligence long before Americans.”
In the following four days we had breakfast, lunch and on two occasions dinner in the Parisian “Silicon Valley”, the one-square mile chunk of the City of Light on the left bank of the River Seine. Dotted by cafés and restaurants, between the 1930s and the early 1980s it pretended to be the intellectual heart of the world. There tenured professors of philosophy, occasional journalists, self-styled saviors of mankind and loafing intellectuals preached revolution, the end of capitalism and the destruction of American Imperialism.
It was almost 100 years ago this week that the poet Andre Breton, a habitué of the cafés, published his “Surrealist Manifesto”. By rejecting reality, surrealism offered unlimited freedom that made “nonsense poetry”, “automatic writing”, paintings by Salvador Dali and Fernand Leger and films by Luis Bunuel and even Alfred Hitchcock possible.
Fifty years later it was the turn of another Left Bank café crawler, the philosopher Jean Baudrillard to declare that there was no such thing as reality.
Parisian café-crawlers invented a range of ‘isms including existentialism, feminism, and structuralism, neo-Socialism Maoism, Castroism and Third-Worldism. Louis Althuser used the Marxian method to claim that Marxism didn’t really exist.
When I first visited the square-mile in the 1960s its habitués had developed a pseudo-culture of their own. They dressed as proletarians often complete with a Lenin or Mao-style cloth cap and carried one or two books in addition to leftist journals such as Liberation, Combat, and Sartre’s periodical Le Temps Moderne.
One of them, Jean Cau, a habitué of Café Flore often came with a bagful of books which he would pull out when stuck in a table dispute.
Café gurus preached revolution as mankind’s route to salvation with one caveat: the redeeming event should happen elsewhere not in Saint-Germain des Pres. A few risked travelling whenever a revolution or at least a leftist coup d’état happened in the Third World. They were known as return-ticket revolutionaries affected by political voyeurism.
Jean Lacouture went to Vietnam to celebrate the fall of Saigon and later rushed to Phnom-Penh to welcome the Khmer Rouge and declare that they would create a new model of civilization (which they did by killing two million Cambodians).
Later, Michel Foucault rushed to Tehran to praise the Khomeinist revolt as “an explosion of spiritual energy” that would change the world. He had to grow a beard and wear a wig to escape in disguise when the mullahs launched an arrest warrant for him on a charge of pedophilia.
In May 1968, the revolution that Sartre and his ilk had preached happened under their nose. Frightened of it, most of them went into hiding and cafés pulled down their shutters.
At one point France was left with a power vacuum. President De Gaulle had fled to Germany and members of his cabinet stayed away from ministries. At that time, I wondered why the revolutionaries wouldn’t cross one of the bridges that link the Left Bank with the Right Bank where the presidential palace and all ministerial offices were located. They could have simply entered those buildings, including the Elysees Palace to raise the red flag and declare a “new dawn for mankind”. But they didn’t, allowing “tyrannical Gaullists” to come back followed by café revolutionaries.
In hindsight we know that the artificial intelligence revolution concocted in Parisian cafés only hurt gullible youths from the so-called Third World such as Iran, Black Africa, and some Arab and Latin American nations.
In the 1980s “American Imperialism” launched an intellectual attack on the Parisian Silicon Valley. A team of “thinkers” were sent to Paris to preach Ronald Reagan’s gospel against “The Evil Empire” and its café admirers in Paris.
In less than a decade the revolutionary Silicon Valley became the haunt of a new generation of Made-in-USA illusionists. Known as “les nouveaux philosophes” they preached a Manicheanism of the right against the Manicheanism of the left.
The Leftism of the Left Bank had little effect on French politics, which steadily shifted towards the right. What is left of the French left now waves the flag of Palestine rather than the Red Flag. As my old pal and I toured the cafés, we noticed the disappearance of the “golden days”.
In the cafés we visited no one had a book or a newspaper. Instead, many were on mobile phones, even when facing each other. The conversations we eavesdropped were about real estate prices, holiday destinations and gossip. Nobody wanted to save mankind from the evil of capitalism.
