The Virtual Stoa

And my goodness the Paris academic bookshops are wonderful. I could spend a lot of time and a lot of money in the Vrin shop, or in the basement at Compagnie. Well, I did. But I would have spent even more of both if I hadn’t succeeded in restricting my attention to the Stoics / Augustine / Hobbes / Rousseau sections of the shelves.

It’s a good thing, for example, that I managed to resist the temptation to buy (for 320 euros) the Dictionnaire de Port-Royal (here, and scroll down), as I almost certainly wouldn’t have been physically able to cart it home. (Maybe next time.)

I should know the answer, but I don’t, and people I’ve asked don’t know the answer, either. What does the French Senate do, how is it (s)elected, and would it matter one way or the other if it didn’t exist?

(Fortunately, I’ve never had to teach introductory French politics, so I don’t feel too guilty at not knowing the answer to this one. I’ll probably google for it after posting this and the surrounding bits and pieces. But if anyone wants to leap in, please do.)

Concentrating on being in Paris also meant catching up with some dead socialists, with visits to the cemeteries at Père-Lachaise and Montparnasse. (This site is great, by the way.)

Père-Lachaise has (among others) Louis Blanc, Louis-Auguste Blanqui, Pierre Bourdieu, Édouard Daladier, Jules Guesde, Jean-François Lyotard, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the Imre Nagy memorial, Marceau Pivert, Claude Henri de Saint-Simon, Maurice Thorez (died 11th July, and therefore a casualty of the Hiatus of the Stoa), Oscar Wilde, Richard Wright, and, no doubt, many more, as well as being home to the Mur des Fédérés and the site of many moving monuments memorialising the dead of the Nazi camps and various résistants.

(Question: there’s almost no Jewish iconography on the memorials to the Jewish dead. I assume that’s got something to do with French republicanism, but if anyone’s got any specific details on just why those monuments look the way they do, I’d be very interested to hear them.)

Montparnasse, which I hadn’t visited before, and which is also delightful, is home to what remains of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as (moving beyond the bounds of socialists proper) Tristan Tzara, Emile Durkheim, Alfred Dreyfus and – much more recently – Susan Sontag, whose grave is marked by flowers, but has no headstone set in place just yet. Perhaps one is on the way.

Concentrating on being in France meant, among other things, paying even more attention than usual to the Tour de France.

Blognor Regis did a terrific job of covering the Tour, and so did the T de F blog. I’m confident all my readers were assiduous in keeping up to date with those sites, so there’s little for me to add here.

French cycling appears to be in an even worse way than usual: no Frenchman finished in the top ten in either the CG or the points competition; the only French riders to make big headlines were Christophe Moreau (above all for his pursuit of Rasmussen with Jens Voigt on the second day in the Vosges) and David Moncouti� (above all for his stage win — the only French stage win — in Dignes-les-Bains, suitably enough on Bastille Day). The Tour needs its local heroes, and it’d be good to have a few more of them, especially now Richard Virenque’s no longer around.

Tragedy is never too far away from cycling, and the saddest cycling news in July came not from the Tour itself, but from Germany, where the Australian women’s cycling team was hit by a car while training, and Amy Gillett was killed. Aussie Cadel Evans made a heroic effort to win the following stage to Pau by way of an inadequate memorial gesture, but was beaten in the final sprint by Oscar Pereiro (who rode a terrific tour, and deserved the prize for “combativit�”). This was around the time, too, that the Tour was marking the tenth anniversary of the death of poor Fabio Casartelli, who crashed on the descent from the Col de Portet d’Aspet in 1995.

I’m already looking forward to next year’s race. There’s been a bit of this kind of thing, but it doesn’t bother me. It’ll be good for the Tour to kick off without one overwhelming favourite. Potential winners include Jan Ullrich (who won the Tour in 1997), Alexandre Vinokourov (especially if he learns how to ride more consistently over three weeks), Ivan Basso (especially if he learns how to go on the attack), Alejandro Valverde (especially if he can find a way of getting to the end of the race) and Mickael Rasmussen (especially if he learns how to time-trial, if that’s a verb). Next year’s teams are beginning to take shape: Vino, for example, has just signed up with Liberty Seguros, and we’re all waiting to find out what the new line-up at Discovery is going to look like in the post-Armstrong era.

As the man said, Vive le Tour!

Thanks to those who enquired after my health:, and especially to one correspondent who wondered whether I’d stopped blogging, and observed that “It would be a shame if your last post was about Horkheimer of all people”. I’m pleased to report that I haven’t, so it wasn’t.

There was only rather slow dial-up internet access where I was staying in Paris. And when the bombs went off on 7 July, I was more interested in using the short periods I was online each day for catching up on news reports than for saying anything in particular in this space. I’m not sure there was a great deal to say, anyway, and everyone else seems to have said it.

And for the rest of the month, it was more fun to concentrate on being in France.

Max Horkheimer, Frankfurt Schoolman and co-author of Dialectic of Enlightenment; born 14 February 1895, died 7 July 1973.

To the splendid Pitt Rivers Museum.

Aneurin Bevan, Welsh socialist and founding father of the National Health Service; born 15 November 1897, died 6 July 1960.

Otto Bauer, Austro-Marxist, born 5 September 1881, died 5 July 1938.

From the North-West Evening Mail:

The Party in Westmorland and Lonsdale is embarking on the task of choosing a prospective parliamentary candidate in a bid to win back the marginal seat at the next opportunity.They believe former MP Tim Collins will not put himself forward to stand again in the seat which covers most of the South Lakeland area…

My goodness.

Mansoor Hekmat, founder of the Worker-Communist Party of Iran, born 4 June 1951, died 4 July 2002. There’s a tribute here an obituary here, and an archive of some of his writing here.

I’m writing from Paris, where I’ll be spending most of July.

By pure coincidence (yes, really), I travelled out here on the first day of the Tour de France, and I’ll be at the Gare du Nord to catch my train home while the riders are busy circling the Champs Elysées at its very end, and in between, I’ll be reading a lot of copies of L’Equipe.

There is an internet connection where I’m staying (as well as a magnificent panoramic view of the centre of the town from this 13th-floor apartment, which I’m told will provide splendid views of Bastille Day fireworks), but it’s a slow dial-up, and I suspect I’ll be doing and thinking about other things, so expect light-to-non-existent postings at the VS, and go and read other people’s pages instead.

If any Virtual Stoa reader would like to get hold of a pretty extensive run of the fine US leftwing journal Monthly Review (Paul Sweezy et al eds.), please email me. The period covered is 1969-1994 or so, with a couple of missing years along the way. All issues in good condition, virtually unmarked, except for library stamps and “cancelled” stamps on the covers, or just inside, that kind of thing. Around 250 issues in all.

(Why do I have this? The university’s been getting rid of duplicate runs of journals in the social sciences as it amalgamates some of its library holdings; I put in a request for the old copies of MR, and they ended up sending me both duplicate sets by mistake. If I return the ones I don’t need, they’ll just be put on the skip. So I thought I’d try and get rid of them this way.)

(If you’re the lucky reicipient, then it’s up to you to arrange collection from me, which may not be possible any time soon, as I’m leaving the country tomorrow morning, and won’t be back until 24 July. So be patient.)

UPDATE [3.30pm]: Freebie offer over. They’ve been claimed.

Joshua Nkomo, Zimbabwean nationalist, born 1918, died 1 July 1999.

Mikhail Bakunin, Russian anarchist, born 30 May 1814, died 1 July 1876. Archives here and here.

Ed Harriman’s piece in the new LRB on how the occupying authorities in Iraq are behaving like the prudent stewards of the country’s resources that we all expected them to be.