Accidents Happen: François Ewald, the “Antirevolutionary” Foucault, and the Intellectual Politics of the French Welfare State

Abstract

In January 2006, Jerome Monod, a close advisor to then President Jacques Chirac, bestowed France’s highest award, the Legion d’Honneur, on Francois Ewald, a prominent French intellectual. Monod’s praise only barely concealed how unlikely it was, given their respective careers, that such an occasion would bring them together. A successful businessman, Monod had established himself as a counselor to France’s political elite. Ewald’s career had followed, to put it mildly, a somewhat different trajectory. After studying philosophy, he threw himself into the revolutionary politics that crystallized around the student and worker strikes of May 1968. Through his activism, he met the philosopher Michel Foucault, whose studies of madness and deviance appealed to the contrarian sensibilities of the sixties generation. By the seventies, Foucault, teaching at the College de France, the summit of French academic life, had appointed Ewald as his assistant and was supervising his doctoral dissertation. Following the philosopher’s death, Ewald became the de facto executor of his intellectual estate, coediting a major Foucault anthology, overseeing the publication of his lectures, and founding a center dedicated to his memory. Needless to say, it was not these accomplishments but later and less revolutionary endeavors that earned Ewald his medal. By the early 1990s, Foucault’s student had become the house intellectual of the French insurance industry and an ideological standard-bearer of the Medef, France’s primary employers’ organization. Those attending Ewald’s award ceremony were thus treated to a singular piece of oratory, in which a captain of industry, praising a former Marxist, wondered aloud: “What happened inside of you