Berkley Center

From the United States—better yet, from Georgetown—mired in the opulence and fatuousness of upper-class American affluence, I felt, before I came to France, as though my interpersonal experiences here and with all Europeans would be, perhaps because of the romanticism, the emphasis on life over work, quality over efficacy, more profound and meaningful than the acquaintances one makes over a red Solo cup in Village B. And of course arguably the only country with an active Habermasian public sphere, a public respect for philosophy, the humanities, and the secular search for meaning should have in due course some kind of base of human connection, shouldn’t it? What is it that constitutes the difference between American and French authenticity?

Four days ago, France marked the birthday of one of its greatest philosophers and writers, Albert Camus. He was at once a writer, footballer, journalist, activist, and friend of Sartre, De Beauvoir, and the Paris-based second generation of existentialists. So few words can not do the man and his oeuvres justice, but suffice it to say that what Camus stood for was sincerity and authenticity, a frankness with the world and with oneself.

But Camus had another side as well, best evidenced by the criticisms of his French contemporaries. He was a good-looking man, and knew it—for all his genuine political efforts, Camus was a student of the Hollywood image. He was often compared to Dean Martin, clad in long overcoats and suits with clipped, dark trim ties, smoking a cigarette, his hair slicked back like a French Sinatra. Camus was popular in the United States—perhaps more popular than Sartre; he knew how to please, he gave homage to the historical institutions of the artist, and he accepted his Noble Prize grudgingly, praising his contemporaries, but he was honest about this periodic glibness. Sartre, on the other hand, stretched his radicalism; he supported Stalin’s communism despite the gulags—indeed, this is what constitutes the largest rift between the two thinkers. And he rejected the Nobel Prize in literature, for the personal reason, laughably pretentious to an American: “I always decline official distinctions”; and the “objective” reason: achieving socialism would be, for him, a larger victory.

And so is the contrast between the American and the French social experience. At a Georgetown party, for example, the presumption of intellectualism is little to naught; Americans are at least frank about our periodic shallowness. The French are Sartre—they must at all times stand fast to a shown-visage of those images that constitute the French cliché. They try too hard to seem well-read, genuinely interested in culture with a capital “c”; they dress as though attending a debate at the Sorbonne;and they smoke, because, well, they always decline good health decisions. For the same reason that hipsters are inherently ironic without realizing it, so too are many French: the rejection of dominant ideology and style itself becomes the dominant ideology and style.

On a personal level, the French will eventually deeply accept you and become your good friends, but this takes a certain amount of time. And before, the conversation simply changes themes and drinks, and adds a feigned sincerity. In the United States, like Camus, we are from the start authentic about our periodic lack of authenticity. There is no grand search for meaning on the track to a six-figure career at Deloitte, just a pragmatism of apathy. Disappointments from broken promises do not form when no grandiose promises are made; there is no hard fall from unrealized dreams if one has only mild, shoulder-shrug-inducing aspirations, or if dreams are constituted only in starting bonus figures. Better to have a single- sided adherence to consumerist, capitalist ideology than one that purports to reject and critique it whilst at its base doing precisely the same. Better to be completely unaware than to feign concern, than to, for example, chuckle at Georgetown’s Occupy Wall Street than to inauthentically join a similar movement at the University of Strasbourg before finding a job in the field you criticized.

There is genuine intellectualism and passion in both countries, of course, but the point is thus: in the United States, at least, like Camus, we know when to be honest about inauthenticity.