Renaud Camus on the Destruction of Western Education

For anyone still thinking this Government does not have a problem with free speech, the Home Office’s absurd decision to ban the French writer Renaud Camus from entering our shores ought to be an eye-opener. As Steven Tucker’s two recent articles in the Daily Sceptic have shown, Camus’s talk of a “Great Replacement” is both wider and more subtle than the many critics who have not read the book think it is.

There is much more to Camus, however, than the partly misunderstood The Great Replacement (2011).  Two of his other works – The Great Deculturalisation  (2008) and De-civilisation (2011) – offer a devastating critique of early 21st century French culture and education. I first came across Camus eight years ago when putting together a book arguing for a traditional ‘liberal’ education based on the transmission of Matthew Arnold’s “the best that has been known and thought”. Camus came across as a writer in the same camp as other educational conservatives such as T.S. Eliot, Michael Oakeshott, Hannah Arendt and Mario Vargas Llosa whose ideas I was studying. What they had in common was a vision of education as the passing on of a cultural inheritance from one generation to the next and a rejection of the idea that it might be used as a vehicle for promoting contemporary causes.

At a time when Bridget Phillipson, the Secretary of State for Education, is threatening a new “modern, inclusive and innovative” school curriculum – we all know what those words are likely to mean – and one of our leading exam boards has urged putting diversity and climate change at the heart of this curriculum, it would be good to try and see through Camus’s acerbic lens what our current elites’ ideas about education can tell us about the underlying forces at work in our society.

Camus’s key thesis is that, since the late 18th century, the custodians of high culture and civilisation have been what he calls la classe cultivée – by which he means  the highly educated and ‘cultured’ parts of the bourgeoisie – and that the education system, even when eventually opened up to other social classes, took this class as its model, aiming to pass on ‘the best’ to ‘the rest’. This, however, was only sustainable when the dominance of ‘the best’ was unchallenged. With the creeping egalitarianism of what he calls ‘hyperdemocratic’ societies ‘the rest’ begin to set the tone for the whole of society. Camus is not opposed to democracy, but to the extension of the democratic and egalitarian spirit to all other aspects of life in ways that are culturally and educationally disastrous.

School in this increasingly egalitarian world ceases to be ‘a place apart’ in which one is inducted into worlds very different from home and in which one may need to unlearn some of the things learned at home. In an egalitarian society the barriers around the school are broken down and the world of the outside majority ends up setting the tone. When schools put ‘the disadvantaged’ at the centre of their concerns (as egalitarianism demands) the transmission of high culture inevitably takes second place.

Egalitarianism also requires, says Camus, that ‘those who have’ must have what they have taken from them in the interests of the majority. He does not expand on the point, but would recognise the Labour government’s decisions to cancel funding for Latin classes, remove freedoms from academy trusts and make parents of children in private schools pay twice as textbook examples of what he has in mind.

Camus’s thesis that the collapse of a country’s traditional class system inevitably leads to deep educational and cultural decline is over-simplified big picture stuff – shared by others such as T.S. Eliot,  Mario Vargas Llosa and the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben – but nonetheless a useful heuristic device which, like other grand theses (such as the Marxian dialectic on which it draws) illuminates connections that might otherwise pass unnoticed while failing to fit every situation to which one applies it. 

In Camus’s hands it explains a great deal.

First, it helps to explain the nature of the new technocratic class that has superseded the old classe cultivée. It is a class full of what he calls the ‘tragic human type’ that is immensely proud of the number of diplomas it has accumulated since it left school but which lacks any deep culture. Instead of leaders steeped in France’s cultural traditions – de Gaulle and Mitterand setting good examples by their enthusiasm for writers like Chateaubriand and Voltaire respectively – one has politicians like Sarkozy and Macron. For Camus the nadir of the new elite was reached when Sarkozy in 2007 made his first visit as President of France to the USA and, under the cupola of the Capitol in Washington, invoked Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe “to underline the affinity of his generation… with the United States”. Never has cultural proletarisation “been so strikingly manifested”, observed Camus, “as on this occasion from the mouth of a head of state of an old nation of great and high culture”. As for Macron, Camus sees him as the epitome of the derided ‘Davocracy’, the globalist movement committed to wiping out national distinctiveness.   

Second, Camus shows how the collapse of the old culture leads to a general dumbing-down of the whole of society. The old culture, whatever its faults, meant manners, restraint, self-control, respect for the achievements of the past and an acceptance of authority. Its collapse has created problems for adult-child relationships in families and in schools. It has led to infantilism and a loss of seriousness. Why else, he asks, has Versailles been reduced to a place full of “Bugs Bunnies, petites souris (little mice) and Manga robotic heroes”?

The changes, he points out, are most noticeable in the use of the word ‘culture’, which has now been reduced to its basic meaning of that which is common to a whole society. The idea of a type of culture which is an aspiration has disappeared. This is illustrated in the role of ministers of culture now seen as a portfolio dealing with sport, digital technology and mass entertainment, not with ‘high culture’. When de Gaulle appointed France’s first Minister of Culture in 1959, he gave the post to André Malraux, famous novelist, art historian and public intellectual. In 2014 under François Hollande the post went to Fleur Pellerin, graduate of the prestigious Sciences Po and ENA, one of Camus’s diplômés sans culture (culture-free graduates), who admitted on appointment she had not read a single book during the preceding two years. 

Camus often refers to this cultural desert in which he thinks we now live as the dictatorship of the petite bourgeoisie. This is where my hackles start to rise. Having had a happy lower middle class childhood there is nothing I hate more than the haut bourgeois disdain for ‘the little people’ prevalent among sections of the technocratic and progressive elite by whom we are currently ruled, as it was among some members of the old elite. Camus, however, deploys stereotypes of the petit bourgeois not to sneer at lower social classes but to draw attention to characteristics he sees as prevalent throughout societies that have culturally pushed aside their traditional elites. The new elites, he argues, are as pervaded by petit bourgeois attitudes as the rest of society, maybe even more so.

Among petit bourgeois characteristics, in addition to egalitarianism and infantilism, he also includes a lack of courage, a demand never to be offended, a preoccupation with what people say rather than what they do, a sense of victimhood, a euphemisation of discourse, a pervasive sentimentalism, a refusal to listen to anyone who counters one’s basic beliefs, and a deep distrust of freedom of expression. It is ironic that some of these unattractive characteristics are the very ones likely to have led our Home Office to cancel him.

What then ought we to do to escape from this dictatorship of the lower middle class? Camus does not give us a plan. He is not that kind of writer. All we get in De-civilisation is a reference to the small political party he has set up which advocates the creation of a corps of specially trained educators who will go out and teach France’s cultural heritage to those capable of receiving it but unlikely to acquire it at home. This sounds remarkably like a proposal to set up grammar schools. We had these once in England but most were closed down by the UniParty long ago.

In an interview last autumn, Camus said:

I have almost never been read – at least by those who attack me – and I have been dragged through the mud, defamed, ‘wokipediafied’, blamed for all the sins of the world, dropped by all my publishers, refused appearances everywhere in the media, summoned before all the courts, heavily fined, and even sentenced to prison (a sentence subsequently suspended).

Let’s hope that with the support of the Free Speech Union the ban on his entry into this country is lifted. Perhaps some bold person might invite Renaud Camus to an event over here at which we could ask him to help us respond to the Government’s draft curriculum proposals that ought to be coming our way soon.

Dr Nicholas Tate is the author of The Conservative Case for Education. He was a member of France’s Haut Conseil de l’évaluation de l’école 2001-2007, an advisory body to the French minister of national education.