Régis Debray – the Last Oracle of the French Republic

Abstract

The article examines the main themes of the work of Régis Debray, one of the most important French philosophers and writers of our time. Debray is familiar to Russian readers primarily as an associate of Che Guevara and a theorist of the Cuban revolutionary movement, as well as the author of works on mediology – a science he himself created on the study of the transmission of ideas and sym­bols. Central to his mature and late work are the ideas of sacred in human com­munities, the conditions of the emergence, transmission and disappearance of re­ligious, national and other forms of sacrality, and the related evolution of world civilizations. Debray is recognized by his peers as one of the most perceptive an­alysts of French political culture, and his article, Are you a Democrat or a Re­publican?, written in the year of the bicentennial of the French revolution in 1989, anticipates the processes that will unfold over the next thirty years. Debray describes these processes as a gradual desacralization of the Republic, the emas­culation of its basic principles and its transformation into “a common Anglo-Saxon democracy”. As a result, the “one and indivisible secular Republic” is falling apart into communities, each of which establishes its own shrines. The dissolution of France’s particular republican model is taking place in the background, and as part of a more global process of the decline of European civilisation and its dissolution into Western Atlantic civilisation.