Silenced for Your Safety: Wokeism Study Shakes French Academia
Despite attempts by the progressive Left to prevent its publication, a research book on the influence of wokeism on French universities has finally been published by Presses Universitaires de France. It has been enthusiastically received by critics while embarrassing the progressive intelligentsia. The book, commissioned by the prestigious publishing house Presses Universitaires de France, was due to be released in early April but was met with a smear campaign orchestrated by a handful of left-wing intellectuals who attempted to prevent its publication on the grounds that it promoted “Trumpist” and “pro-Putin” clichés. The manoeuvre delayed its release, but did not prevent it: the collective work by professors Pierre Vermeren, Emmanuelle Hénin, and Xavier-Laurent Salvador finally hit bookshops on Wednesday, April 30th. On the day of its official release, the premises of the Presses Universitaires de France were vandalised in protest—proof that the danger denounced by the authors, namely the presence of a woke ideology in the university that does not tolerate dissent, is not a figment of the imagination but a reality.The essay, entitled Face à l’obscurantisme woke (Facing Woke Obscurantism), has all the makings of a book that will provoke the ire of the left-wing intellectual caste. While pamphlets denouncing wokeism have been legion in recent years, this time it is a different undertaking, as it comes from eminent academics and takes the form of a high-level scientific work. Presented as a rigorous collective research effort, it offers a scrupulous analysis of the influence woke ideology exerts on all fields of French academic research, with supporting evidence. The book is voluminous: no less than 460 pages, involving 26 renowned researchers. The professors behind the book paint an uncompromising picture of woke ideology as it currently infects universities. Far from being an intellectual war machine on the scale of the Marxism and Maoism of yesteryear, wokeism is characterised by a profound poverty of reasoning and a consummate art of argumentative contradiction. “To continue to demand women’s rights while claiming that women do not exist is quite something,” points out Hénin. “We are in the midst of ideological madness, but more profoundly, we are in the midst of a scientific counter-revolution,” she concludes alarmingly in an interview with Le Figaro. For the authors, wokeism, as the title of their book suggests, is less an ideology than a new form of obscurantism, revelling in newspeak that assaults the ears with meaningless buzzwords like totalitarian slogans. The methods of wokeists are denounced as much as the vague content of their system of thought. Wokeism at university is now embodied in terror and censorship. The cancellation of conferences and intimidation of professors, as shown by the Bergeaud-Blackler and Balanche cases, create an atmosphere of communitarianism and separatism in which militant minorities happily thrive. But there is more to it than that, as Hénin points out in the introduction to the study. Today, woke ideology has spread to all governing bodies at the international level, from the UN to the European Union. The authors denounce that European institutions are now fully committed to a form of militancy that sees them pouring millions into associations infiltrated by LGBT lobbies or, in the height of contradiction, the Muslim Brotherhood. This is one of the key conclusions of the energetic investigation carried out by these tenacious researchers: the religion of wokeism provides a financial windfall that is a godsend for a cash-strapped research community, which sees it as a vital means of ensuring its survival. The book is being published at a time when France is eager to open its arms wide to American researchers fleeing Trumpism. The problem is that the academics seeking asylum in France come precisely from the departments that have made woke propaganda their credo. Their arrival in French universities therefore risks only reinforcing the trend analysed by Vermeren and his colleagues. Some welcome this, dreaming of turning France into the ultimate ‘woke nation’ in opposition to Trump’s America, in the words of Pierre Valentin, himself an essayist on the subject and contributor to the book. Fortunately, the mobilisation in favour of the essay’s publication and its expected editorial success prove that not everyone in the French intellectual community is ready to be swept up in this madness.
