John Peter QuiñoneroSEGUIRCorresponsal in Paris Updated: Save Send news by mail electrónicoTu name *

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Has died Marc Fumaroli (Marseille, 1932 – Paris, 24 June 2020), the greatest of the literary critics, the French of our time, a humanist exceptional that it considered that the culture is threatened by state bureaucracies and the market of the nothings “artistic”.

a university Professor, academic, specialist emeritus in French culture classic, several of his essays contributed to change the course of our perception of the place of the culture in western societies of the late TWENTIETH century and early TWENTY-first century.

His classical training and his early writings began by reviewing the canons of modernity literary.

since the eighties of the last century, his essays were enshrined in an essential way to criticize the new “perversions”, bureaucratic and mercantilist, which threaten the culture, the literatures and the spiritual life, in a very broad sense.

When triumphed the “culture of State”, the culture put in the service of the “ceremonies at consecration of political power”, Fumaroli published one of his most famous books, “The cultural State” (1991), a frontal attack on the State of culture under the presidency of François Mitterrand (1981 – 1995). Fumaroli insisted on a central point: the State is “lost” and “corrupted” the culture, when the political power, through their bureaucracies, becomes the culture in a “tool” to the advertising service of the political shift, always willing to pay for with grants and perquisites the “services rendered” by artists and creators willing to become “lackeys” submissive to the bureaucracy ideological shift.

Years later, in 2009, Fumaroli published another book of criticism, much greater, ” Paris-New York round trip “. With the precision of an entomologist, the great humanist trained in the classics canon of French, denouncing the uprooting and the ravages of a contemporary art lost in the wilderness of the avant-garde dead. Fumaroli insisted on several central issues: the deviant, between the bureaucracies and ideological bureaucracies commercial, the successive artistic schools contemporary devoured each other, leaving as the only trace deserts of cold ashes, sold at the price of gold.

Appealing, always, the great art and classical culture, Fumaroli is also devoted part of his time and of his work to denounce the “aimlessness” of reforms to schools, colleges and universities that began to undermine the foundations of the basic culture: threatening the teaching of the Greek and the Latin; by introducing elements of “ethnic” and “multicultural” of origin as diverse as incoherent and corrupting; converting schools and universities into “barracks” where they spread the ignorance of the masses…

That dimension of the great polemicist of the most profound debates of the culture, the art and the life of the spirit, in our time, did not prevent him, at all, to continue its work of research, of the SIXTEENTH and SEVENTEENTH centuries, culminating with another monument, “ Chateaubriand: poetry and terror ” (2003)… through the more in-depth analysis of one of the patriarchs of the prose is contemporary French, Fumaroli we reminisced and remembered as the contemporary Terror (an ideological and terrorist) takes its roots in fanaticism, ideological theorists French of “the Terror State” (Saint-Just, Robespierre); and as a good part of modern poetry, from Romanticism, is a “combat”, literary, moral, and spiritual, in defense of the freedom of the creator, the artist, the poet, the mystic… heroes of our time, threatened by the uprooting of bureaucratic and ideological.