Lynn Hunt

There is no doubt an art of political slander, as Robert Darnton terms it, and in many places something like what Charles Walton calls a ‘culture of calumny’. But in what ways are they particular to a time and place? How different, for example, are the charges of lesbianism and Machiavellian manoeuvring levelled against Hillary Clinton from those published two centuries earlier...

Thanks to David Mamet’s new play Oleanna, the distracted, bumbling and self-regarding male professor has now become the archetypal victim of political correctness. Mamet’s John is victimised by Carol, the ultimate female intellectual mediocrity who gets her revenge on his patronising didacticism by turning him in to the university tenure committee on grounds of sexual impropriety. Professors beware: the stupid, the lazy and the obtuse among the young now have shadowy but powerful ‘groups’ helping them to get back at their supercilious, ironic and knowing elders. The stakes in the perennial tug-of-war between students and professors have risen to dizzying new heights.

In 1989, François Furet was frequently hailed (or criticised, depending on the context) as the ‘king’ of the Bicentenary of the French Revolution. He seemed to be everywhere, on television, in the newspapers, and adorning the pages of almost every glossy magazine. Foreign reporters featured him in pieces on the celebration. Even his absence from the international scholarly meeting at the Sorbonne in July of that year merited a comment in Le Monde. Furet’s elevation marked the apparently definitive defeat of the Marxist interpretation as the dominant paradigm in studies of the French Revolution, a defeat which coincided with the collapse of Eastern bloc Communism. Historiography and world politics seemed to reinforce each other in uncanny fashion in the home of the revolutionary tradition, and it was as if the historian Furet had proved prescient about the future as much as the past.