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Intellectuals against money
The competition between left and right bank was always present in Paris. The deep thinking part of the nation, like philosophers and writers, is supposed to live on the left bank, preferably in the shadow of the Sorbonne. They are the "intellectuals", social specie difficult to define, which is very respected in France. How many times don't you hear:"What does the intelligentsia think about that?" The French intellectual has also another purpose: to lecture the others about their flaws.
The France that makes money lives on the right bank, where the Exchange (La Bourse) works. After the results of daily horse racing the exchange reports is the most popular radio program. The Bourse is the thermometer of France.
When imagination tried to seize power, with the for me still legendary May 1968 student uprising, it was of course on the left bank, in and around the quartier Latin that it started. When the new revolutionaries crossed the Seine and tried to arson the Stock Exchange, France panicked. Everything was already on fire since weeks but now it meant business.
Today the new reality destroyed imagination and only thinks about making money. The right bank tastes its sweet revenge. To live, to dress, eating and dating is perfectly possible now on the right bank. That's why the left bank has something back from the discrete charm of
intellocratia, not to confuse with bourgeois intelligentsia. Just to name something: the yearly literature prizes may be given on the right bank, but the decisions are take a few hundred meters around the
Saint-Germain church on the left bank.
Two French journalists, Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman, authors of the book "Generation", about May 1968 and the definitive biography of Yves
Montand, "Tu vois, je n'ai pas oublié", gave a few years ago a route description of what hey call "expedition through
high-intellocratia" in their book " Les Intellocrates". A promenade along thinkers and their editors, from Montparnasse until
Saint-Germain and Saint-Michel. In the same time we will pick up some Americans.
But that's for next article.
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