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What Would Satre and Derrida Make of France In Flames?
Philosophers and the race question.
The Republic of France has produced more philosophers than France, Britain, the Netherlands, Germany and the United States of America altogether.
While you can argue with credibility that Hegel and Kant are much more influential than Diderot, Montesquieu, Derrida, Foucault, Satre and Voltaire due to what Karl Marx did in reproducing their ideas and the ensuing global impact in Russia, Germany and China, there isn’t a country like France whose identity is inextricably linked to its thinkers or as the natives would say, its philosphes.
The grandiloquent term which summed up the revolution and the overthrow of the aristocracy —Fraternite, Liberte et Egalite owes a great deal to the leading intellectuals of the 18th century.
The supreme paradox of the republic of France is that for all of its fine words, it is nothing but a thieving, corrupt and profoundly racist empire.
Its magniloquent rhetoric has never got in the way of its imperial misadventures in Haiti, India, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, Ivory Coast, Togo, Congo, Cameroon and the Central African Republic and nor has its hypocrisy got in the way of tying these countries to an arrangement which is nothing more than economic bondage till this very day.