Agent provocateur: Michel Onfray

Brad Spurgeon

From The Toronto Star

CAEN, France— He is a self-described hedonist, atheist, libertarian, and left-wing anarchist. He is also France's best-selling philosopher.

At a time when a French high school teacher was forced into hiding after death threats for writing an article in Le Figaro in September calling Islam a violent, hateful religion and Christianity and Judaism non-violent, loving religions, Michel Onfray has already gone a step further: in Atheist Manifesto he dismantles and condemns as dangerous and archaic not only Islam, but Christianity and Judaism as well.
And after more than 30 books, he is finally seeing his ideas spread far beyond his native Normandy. His 2005 book, Traité d'athéologie, became a best-seller not only in France, where it has sold 230,000 copies, but also in Italy and Spain, and has sold well in other Latin countries, and even in Germany and Asia.

In the new year, it will become the first of his books to be translated into English. Published under the title Atheist Manifesto, it will arrive in Canada from Penguin in February.
Onfray has also received death threats, but far from going into hiding, he not only conducts lectures but also appears regularly on French television and radio and makes frequent appearances at philosophical forums around France and Europe.

Although he says that believing in religion's "children's stories for comfort" deflects from the real problems of existence and thus exacerbates them, he does not despise the believers. As a rebel against all manner of authority, he aims his ire at those who impose and organize religion and its ethics, morals and customs."Against the rabbis, the preachers, the imams, ayatollahs and mullahs, I persist in preferring the philosopher," he writes in the book.

"They are the ones that know there is only one world and that any promotion of an otherworld makes us lose the use and benefit of the only one that really exists. A truly deadly sin... "
He accepts only about one in seven requests for television or radio appearances, opting for those where he can express his ideas. For this story, he at first refused a spoken interview — disliking a format where snippets are often pulled from context and used inaccurately — but suggested that questions and answers be conveyed via email.

Yet he proved to be an engaging host at his home in Chambois and in Caen, along with the professors of the Université Populaire de Caen, after a presentation of the new academic year of the institution he founded in 2002. And he later even agreed to answer a few more questions for this story over the phone.
It is a year charged with significance, coming as it does before the French presidential election next spring, and Onfray has been much in the French press over the past two weeks, speaking out in an article in the left-wing newspaper Libération on the state of the far-left parties.

Onfray founded the university as a reaction to the arrival of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front party, into the second round of the 2002 presidential elections against Jacques Chirac. The idea, he said, was to fight against that happening again by "promoting and publicizing intelligence," and to try to "analyze and understand how the world functions in order to put forward alternative solutions to the contemporary negativity."

Open to anyone, with free tuition and requiring no registration, prior education, tests or other course work, the concept, like his books, is also spreading beyond his home. There are now five other Popular Universities in France and one in Belgium, all of which acknowledge Caen as their model.

Yet despite his stance on free education for all and his anarchic political ideas, Onfray is not against private property — he owns homes in both Chambois and nearby Argentan — and has a pragmatic mind for business.

When asked if the timely subject matter of the Atheist Manifesto — the war in Iraq, Sept. 11 and the fight against terrorism — is what made this his first book to be published in English, he says, "I think, frankly, it has more to do with the publishers seeing the figure of 230,000 copies sold."

That figure refers only to the hardback in France, and not the many thousands of copies sold elsewhere in the 17 foreign contracts signed by his French publisher, Grasset.
So is interest in Onfray's writing a sign that the world is shifting left, libertarian, and hedonist? In fact, Onfray defies the preconceived ideas about those very labels.

"I am a free man, even with the usual labels," he says. "That is, I am a hedonist who is free, a person of the left who is free, a libertarian who is free... someone who does not enter into the classic, habitual definitions and who simply invites that his books be read."

In the Winter 2006 issue of New Politics, Doug Ireland welcomed the forthcoming English translation of Atheist Manifesto, and called it a "scandal" that none of Onfray's other books had yet been translated into English. He calls the book "an acerbic, stylish, and erudite polemic against received religions in general and Christianity in particular," and "a powerful antidote to the tsunami of religious fanaticism that is engulfing the Western world as well as the Islamic countries."

In a selection of the year's best books in last December's Times Literary Supplement, novelist William Boyd, who read Atheist Manifesto in French, called the book "both a passionate and coolly reasoned advocacy of atheism, setting the positive values of secularity squarely against the three great monotheisms and their multitude of hates." Boyd added that it was, "a wonderful, invigorating blast of sanity delivered against the fog of high-toned mumbo jumbo we have to endure everywhere today."

Certainly, not everyone is enthralled with this approach. "His work attacking hatred is sometimes full of hatred," wrote the philosopher and author Bertrand Vergely in the French literary magazine Lire, in a mostly positive 18-page cover story on Onfray last February. "His analysis against religious fanaticism and for intelligence uses the same methods as the fundamentalists."

Gérard Oberlé, another French writer, calls Onfray a professor who has found a way to make a good living out of recycling old tales by presenting them as new ways of thinking. "And," Oberlé added, "for an atheist, I find he is a little too much of a preacher."

If it were only the Atheist Manifesto, however, Onfray might be seen as a provocateur, a one-book-wonder, or as Publishers Weekly in July referred to his book in a preview of upcoming titles, part of a "new subcategory: the "anti-religion book."