For more than two centuries, France imagined that its political and intellectual traditions spoke for humanity as a whole. This belief shaped the French mind through a universal grounded in reason, abstraction, sameness, and neutrality. It informed republican institutions, justified empire, and defined France's voice in the world. The twenty first century reveals the limits of that universal. Postcolonial plurality, social inequality, and ecological crisis expose how abstraction can erase difference and how neutrality can conceal vulnerability. The universal that once anchored the French mind now unsettles it. This book traces the making and unmaking of that tradition and argues for a renewed universal rooted in responsibility, recognition, and interdependence. It envisions a remade French mind capable of speaking to humanity through attention and care rather than through sameness and abstraction.
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