Posted on 04/30/2006 5:47:16 PM PDT by Borges
Jean-Francois Revel, a philosopher, eclectic writer and a journalist whose commentaries on the state of France and the world were for years a mainstay of the French media, died Sunday, his wife said. He was 82.
Revel, who also was a member of the noted Academie Francaise, died at Kremlin-Bicetre Hospital, just south of Paris, said his wife Claude Sarraute, a former journalist herself. The cause of death was not immediately revealed.
Revel, author of about 30 books whose subjects ranged from poetry to gastronomy to politics, became known in later years for his conservative position and pro-American stance as editor-in-chief of the newsweekly L'Express and commentator at that magazine and later at rival Le Point.
One of his latest books, published in 2002, was entitled L'Obsession anti-americaine. Son fonctionnement, ses causes, ses inconsequences (The Anti-American Obsession. Its Functioning, Its Causes, Its Inconsequentialness).
Among other books in his assorted collection of works is Le moine et le philosophe (The Monk and The Philosopher), published in 1997, in collaboration with his son Matthieu Ricard, himself a Buddhist monk who is close to the Dalai Lama.
Revel, known as a bon vivant with gourmet tastes, was appointed one of the 40 so-called immortals of the Academie Francaise, a watchdog of the French language, in 1997.
Revel "was a free spirit (whose) works trace a singular, fertile, indispensable path," Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said.
In his statement, Villepin said Revel "was one of the first to relentlessly denounce Soviet totalitarianism."
Jean d'Ormesson, a fellow "immortal" at the Academie Francaise, called Revel "one of the great intellectuals of our time" and his death "a great loss for the Academie Francaise and for the country."
Born in Marseille on Jan. 19, 1924, Revel obtained a degree in philosophy, then taught French in several high schools, including in Mexico and Florence, Italy. While a prolific writer, he got a late start in his literary career. Starting in 1960, he was employed at three publishing houses, until 1978.
He joined L'Express in 1966, staying there until 1981. He then became a commentator at Le Point and several radio stations.
D'Ormesson, speaking on France-Info radio, noted Revel's "very interesting" political path, moving from Socialist thinking to liberal economic views.
Rest in peace, monsieur. Revel's book "How Democracies Perish" was one of the foundation stones in the building of my own conservative worldview during the 1980's.
You beat me to it! "How Democracies Perish" was a major influence on my conversion to conservatism as well!
France hasn't done much for the world lately. But it did produce Revel. That's something.
“The great misfortune of the twentieth Century is to have been the one in which the ideal of liberty was harnessed to the service of tyranny, the ideal of equality to the service of privilege, and all the aspirations and social forces included under the label of the "Left" enrolled in the service of impoverishment and enslavement. This immense imposture has falsified most of this century, partly through the faults of some of its greatest intellectuals. It has corrupted the language and action of politics down to tiny details of vocabulary, it has inverted the sense of morality and enthroned falsehood in the very center of human thought.”
The Flight From Truth: The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information
1991, Random House Jean Francois-Revel
"What is ideology? It is a triple form of dispensation: intellectual, practical, and moral.
The intellectual dispensation consists of retaining only facts favorable to the thesis one is defending, even, if necessary, inventing them, and of denying, omitting, or forgetting others to keep them from becoming known.
The practical dispensation suppresses the criterion of effectiveness in judging policies, depriving setbacks and failures of all refutational value. One of the functions of ideology is also to fabricate explanations that absolve it. Sometimes the explanation is no more than a mere affirmation, an act of faith: "It is not to socialism that one should impute the difficulties encountered In their development by socialist countries," wrote Mikhail Gorbachev in Perestroika. Reduced to its logical armature, this sentence amounts to saying, "It is not to water that one should impute the problems of humidity that afflict flooded countries."
Finally, for the ideological protagonists the moral dispensation abolishes all notion of good and evil; or rather, for them it is the service due to ideology that replaces morality. What is crime or a vice for the common run or mortals is not one for them. The ideological absolution for murder and genocide has been dealt with at length by historians. The point is less often made that ideology sanctions bribery, nepotism, corruption. So lofty is the idea that socialists have of their own morality that, listening to them, one is almost ready to believe that they make corruption honest by indulging in it and that their virtue is untarnished when they succumb. "
From The Flight From Truth - The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information. Random House, 1991
Revel was brilliant. He understood how the world works and he understood the failings of the leftist intelligentsia.
Rest in peace.
Revel's "How Democracies Perish" was brilliant and provided great insight on the pathologies of the Left.
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