As debate rages in the United States over the Iraq intelligence failures, the current controversy in France is the “war on intelligence.” But this debate has little to do with weapons of mass destruction or al Qaeda. From teachers to architects and theater workers to jobless Ph.D.'s, members of France's intellectual class are attacking the conservative government of Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin for neglecting them.

In the past year, part-time performing artists have canceled the country's top arts festivals and booed France's culture minister at the Césars (the French equivalent of the Academy Awards) to protest unemployment insurance reforms. Archaeologists complain about their weakened supervision over construction projects, and lab directors lambaste the government's refusal to disburse scientific funding. But the war's coup de grâce was orchestrated by the music and culture magazine Les Inrockuptibles, an upscale French version of Rolling Stone targeted at readers concerned with social justice, post-materialism, and hipness. In February, the magazine united France's malcontents through a petition titled “Appeal Against the War on Intelligence.”

“All the sectors of learning, research, thinking, all the producers of knowledge and public debate, are today the target of a massive attack by an anti-intellectual government,” stated the magazine's editors in the petition. They warned of “the development of … a policy of impoverishment and insecurity aimed at everything that is considered useless, dissident or unproductive in the short term.” The essay implied that this conflict could threaten France's sacrosanct policy of exception culturelle (cultural exception), which employs quotas to promote French films and music in an attempt to fortify French culture...