The new intellectuals

The abolition of the propédeutique, whether scientific or literary, is a choice we still regret. The choice of specialization in the first year of university immediately raised problems of reorientation. There is also a question mark over the place of human sciences in the faculties: the texts do not say what it will be. The Faculty of Letters, swollen with new students, was no longer professional, training only future teachers. Dean Grappin of the Nanterre faculty of arts denounced the idea of an overly classical general culture, as arts studies were intended to train not only teachers, but also future workers in the tertiary sector.

These new students are often lost in the universities. With the explosion in student demographics came an explosion in psychological disorders in the student environment (the Bureau d'aide psychologique universitaire opened in 1956). The university environment is pathogenic for students. The children of the wealthy classes, like the new students from the middle classes, are on the margins. "After the policeman and the priest, the student is the most universally despised", declared the Strasbourg Situationist brochure in autumn 1966.

Why bring up these facts in a literature lecture? Because students and teachers form the new intellectuals, the readership of newspapers, books and magazines, and the audience for films. When do these new students, petty-bourgeois rather than heirs, enter the world of literature? When did he become a character in a novel? What is the 1966 equivalent of L'Éducation sentimentale, Le Bachelier or Le Disciple? There are students in Beauvoir's work, but they are not "new intellectuals". The new novelists, the hussars, the tel que liens are not students, or if they are, it's still law school, like ^{nineteenth-century} writers. Bonjour tristesse does feature a student, but he's in law school and on vacation. He's an heir, not a scholarship student.

Le Clézio'sProcès-Verbal could well be the first novel of the new student (Le Clézio was one of the last propédeutes, studying literature at Nice and then Aix, a little older than the "new intellectuals"). His hero is a student (though not explicitly so). The novel reflects the anxiety of parents who did not go to university about the new graduates. In the end, the student is committed to an asylum and interrogated by medical students. They find it hard to believe that he is ill; in fact, he is simply sick of university.

The novel of the year, Les Choses, also comes to mind. Perec is also a little older, but his experience is comparable. After the propédeutique, he never finished his history degree. His characters soon stopped their studies (Sylvie took only two certificates out of four) and became psychosociologists ("by necessity, not by choice"), all the while reading enormously. They belong to a generation that has settled into the temporary.

These two examples testify to student alienation, to the student condition, to university patients, to failed students, victims of brutal massification, and to the cultural aspirations of these new strata.

Excerpt from JT, 9/11/1965. InA archives.