Geoffroy Pascal Geraud: The Genesis of Mainstream Historiography of Yugoslavia in France: "Media Intellectuals" at War in the 90's.

The armed conflicts that begun with the dismembering of socialist Yugoslavia gave rise to many reactions and mobilizations amongst French intellectuals all through the 1990's.

Despite the diversity of viewpoints, the public expression on Yugoslav issues was monopolized by a group of "media intellectuals"[1], composed of journalists, political essayists, moralists, the most active being philosophers belonging to the self-proclaimed or media-defined group of »New Philosophers«. At the same time, experts and specialists on Yugoslavia (historians, economists, etc) were marginalized, or sometimes even excluded from the public debate.

Materialized by numerous articles, books, information and political campaigns, documentaries and even movies, these repeated interventions of the "media intellectuals" durably (re)shaped the imaginary about Yugoslavia; moreover, these productions had deep influence over the contemporary making of Yugoslav historiography in France, both by revising the historiography of socialist Yugoslavia and by producing a discourse about its dismembering.

Crossing internal reading and contextual analysis, the present essay aims to identify some of the mechanisms of production, reception and circulation of such an "immediate historiography", as well as its political efficiency.

This paper will start by an overview of the political language of "media intellectuals". Special emphasis will be placed on identifying the uses and the origins of "paired concepts" (such as "Orient" in opposition to "Occident", "artificiality" of socialist Yugoslavia opposed to the transhistorical nature of entities such as "Nations" and "Europe" etc…).

Attention will also be paid to the mechanisms of "migration of ideas", i.e. the circulation processes by which political and ethnical representations carried out by the nationalist discourses produced in the Yugoslav space were echoed and universalized by the French "media intellectuals".

The last part will attempt to put into light the political economy of the mobilization of the French "media intellectuals".

Our presentation will explore the political uses of the Yugoslav conflicts in a context of restoration in both political and cultural fields in France.

It thus will be argued that, far from belonging to the tradition of "engagement" which characterized the autonomous French intellectuals from the times of the Dreyfus affair to the 1970's, the involvement of the "media intellectuals" during the Balkan conflicts can be seen a crucial moment in the process of heteronomization of the French intellectual field.

As a conclusion, this paper will invite to a comparative reflection about the consequences of the subversion or disparity of the figure of engaged intellectuals on the making of Yugoslav historiography.

On author

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[1] Translation proposed of the term defined by Pierre Bourdieu.