France mourns philosopher:
Europe
French philosopher a former Maoist who veered to the right after condemning the crimes of communism, has died at the age of 78, his son said Tuesday.
The passionately political thinker rose to prominence in the 1970s alongside Bernard-Henri Levy as one of France’s “New Philosophers”, who broke with Marxism after street protests brought the country to the brink of revolution in 1968.
“My first and best friend is no more,” wrote Raphael Glucksmann on Facebook, describing his father as “a good and excellent man”.
Strongly influenced by the Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s account of his time as a political prisoner in “The Gulag Archipelago”, Glucksmann railed against Soviet totalitarianism in his book “The Cook and the Cannibal” (1975), setting him on a collision course with left-wing existentialist intellectuals led by Jean-Paul Sartre.
But despite their differences, Glucksmann managed to persuade Sartre to join with France’s then leading rightwing thinker Raymond Aron in campaigning for the Vietnamese “boat people” as they fled its communist regime in their thousands in 1979.
His friend, the writer and philosopher Pascal Bruckner, who has followed a similar path from left to right, told French radio that Glucksmann would be remembered for “delivering the staggering blow against communist thinking in France.
“At the time he had an enormous number of enemies, of people opposing him, but he held on,” he said.
“His ideas weren’t just passing thoughts, they were real engagements which he physically stuck to every day.”
Levy, known in France as BHL, said he had been shaken by his death. “He was the only one of my contemporaries with whom I had the feeling of sharing the same fears about the world,” he told AFP. (AFP)