WASHINGTON — I hope the great restaurants of Paris held a
moment of silence early this week upon hearing of the death of the
distinguished French philosopher and journalist, Jean-Francois
Revel. They should have. He was certainly the greatest gastronome I
have known. He was also that rare French intellectual who admires
America, and something more: he did not flinch from the evidence in
any intellectual debate, whether it be a debate over communism,
terrorism, or the tomato.
In one of his many learned disquisitions on food and the history
of food, Revel noted that for centuries the French would not eat
tomatoes. At one point they considered them poisonous. Ah well, at
one point they had the same horror of that stupendously esculent
provender served between the magnificent Golden Arches. Now that
the French have had some time to think about it, many chic
Parisians even eat their Big Macs with a tomato elegantly slapped
aboard. Revel was ahead of his time.
I met him in the mid-1970s and knew him for his journalism. His
three-volume history of Western thought was beyond me, but his
journalism, appearing in the French magazine L’Express and
also in English publications, was learned and lively. His French
was clear and understandable even to an American with only a couple
of years of college French. He was enormously erudite, gruff, and
sardonic. During the Cold War when his fellow Europeans in large
numbers idolized Castro and Mao, Revel mocked them all. To him the
evidence was clear. Behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains was tyranny
and economic futility. In America there was hope. In his 1970 book,
Without Marx or Jesus: The New American Revolution, he
notified anti-American leftists that the great revolution of the
20th century would come from America where the American notions of
democracy and economics would overwhelm the “Socialist
revolution.”
Revel had been a man of the left in his youth, and by the time I
knew him he was still unsure about some of the values that are now
considered conservative, at least here in America. In the late
1970s he was unsure about Ronald Reagan, but seeing the President’s
resolution against communism he came to admire him. He was also,
contrary to what some of the obituarists are saying, unsure about
Milton Friedman and Friedman’s brand of free-market economics.
Actually, he was slower to accept Friedman than he was to accept
Reagan. This was typical. For the intellectual of the left it was
always easier to reject communism and accept anti-communism. To
reject socialism was more difficult. In America Norman Podhoretz
showed the same reluctance.
To my surprise at some point in the 1980s Revel found himself
persuaded by Friedman. When I asked him why, he responded that the
free-market economy had provided the “evidence” of its superiority.
Again, Revel was an empiricist. I have always wondered why in the
West, given all our putative admiration for freedom, reason, and
boldness, more intellectuals did not follow the path of Revel in
France or of the neoconservatives in America, that is to say the
small band of liberal Democrats who broke with liberalism when it
slipped into its narcissistic fantasy world in the early 1970s.
I suppose the answer is that intellectuals are no more
independent-minded or courageous than members of any other social
group. They are as much conformists as members of Rotary —
notwithstanding all their boasts to independence and high
intellect. Revel was living proof that an intellectual could break
with the herd.
When I lived in Bloomington, Indiana, alongside the campus of
Indiana University in the 1980s Revel visited with me for a couple
of nights. He was astounded by the wealth of the university but put
off by the smug conformity of the faculty. One afternoon we passed
the undergraduate library that then held three million books.
“Three million books,” he enthused. But I lamented, the
professoriate all think alike. “It is the same in Paris,” he
responded, shaking his head. Nonetheless, somehow he was admitted
in 1997 into the Academie Francaise, where he was numbered among
the 40 “immortals” who maintain the standards of the French
language.
After visiting the library I took my friend to a nearby French
restaurant, where my thick-set rubicund friend immediately ordered
a vin rouge and fois gras. Soon we had the
restaurant’s French-born proprietor at our table, delighted to find
the great Revel in his humble Midwestern restaurant. But
Jean-Francois reminded him that he was famous for his
pro-Americanism. On through the fois gras and poulet
roti he advanced. Then came the salade verte and the
mousse au chocolat. At the end of the meal, by the time we
had exhausted every subject of the day, the great gastronome spied
a fellow diner’s mousse that had not been touched. “Are
you finished with it?” Revel inquired. Given the right-of-way, the
philosopher pounced on it. I hope he maintained that gusto to the
end.
