Matthew Campbell
September 29 2019, 12:01am,
The Sunday Times
“Jealous” male French intellectuals have provoked uproar by turning on Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old, Swedish climate activist, for not being like the sexy Swedish girls of their youth.
As environmentalists were applauding her speech to the UN last week, Bernard Pivot, 84, president of the Goncourt Academy, which awards the nation’s top literary prize, caused outrage with reflections about the relative sexual merits of English, Swedish and French girls.
“In my generation, boys would run after les petites Anglaises or les petites Suédoises: they had a reputation for being less stuck-up than French girls,” said Pivot. “But I can imagine adolescent me being scared stiff of Greta Thunberg.” He called her the “furious Swede”.
France’s Left Bank “intellos” are a breed apart. Pivot, a household name and host of various cultural television programmes, has 1m followers on Twitter. Many were appalled by his comments.
“Luckily you are a species on the way to extinction,” said Yasmina Bennani, a TV producer.
“Easy on the Beaujolais, Bernie,” quipped Bruno Masure, a fellow presenter. Another of his followers branded Pivot a “fat misogynist pig”.
François Beaudonnet, a TV journalist, accused him of picking on “an autistic adolescent” — Thunberg has Asperger syndrome — adding: “That’s classy.”
Pivot, a grocer’s son, was by no means the only “intello” upset by the young Swede. Michel Onfray, 60, a philosopher and author of 100 tomes with titles such as Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism and Islam, called Thunberg a “cyborg” and her student followers a “herd of sheep bleating the catechism inculcated in them by adults”.
“She makes you think of those silicon dolls heralding the end of humanity, the post-human era,” he wrote. “She has the face, age, sex and body of a cyborg of the third millennium, her envelope is neutral, she is, alas, where mankind is heading.”
Then Alain Finkielkraut, 70, a philosopher famous for his critique of relativism, weighed in. One of the “immortals” of the Académie Française, whose members police the French language, he derided Thunberg’s “abstract warnings” and “puerile discourse” about cutting carbon emissions.
“There are better things to be done,” fulminated Finkielkraut, a veteran of the May 1968 student protests, than “bowing to a 16-year-old child”. He added: “Ecology deserves better.”
Pascal Bruckner, 70, a self-styled “new philosopher”, also fired a broadside,
accusing Thunberg of flaunting her autism “like a title of nobility” and having a “scary” face.
Most of the intellos are scarcely known outside the Gallic world — and that, say their critics, is what upsets them most.
“They are jealous of Thunberg,” says Olivier Esteves, a professor at Lille University. “Jealousy often expresses itself in a fairly irrational way, a bit like what you see in the playground.”
Thunberg herself has been on a whirlwind tour of the Americas, where she denounced the inaction of world leaders at the UN, and critics were as cutting as the French. “She is not a victim of climate change but of crappy parents who would allow her to be a pawn in a political game,” tweeted Graham Allen, a political commentator.
Donald Trump also mocked her in a tweet: “She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.” Thunberg now has the American president’s words as her self-descriptive profile on Twitter.
Shrugging off the attacks, she wrote: “The haters are as active as ever, goin
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