The Intellectual and ‘La Nation’ in Jean Guéhenno’s Journal des années noires

Abstract

This article explores Jean Guéhenno’s perspectives on the role and function of the intellectual both in the context of the Occupation, and in relation to ‘la nation’, understood in the original revolutionary sense of the people constituted into the body politic. Clandestinely written, Guéhenno’s Journal des années noires seems at first blush a solitary exercise in thought and observation. Closer analysis reveals, however, that although Guéhenno takes pains to distance himself from the ambient confusion and propaganda, he understood both his writing and his career as a professor at the Lycée Henry IV to derive their full significance only as acts of a citizen in ‘la nation’. Contrasting sharply with the model of the ‘maître à penser’ or institutional iconoclast, Guéhenno’s conception of the intellectual proves to be consonant the contemporary reality of the French intellectual as observed by Michel Winock, Luc Ferry, Pierre Nora and Jacques Julliard.