I've made mention of the idea of a French Hegel. Hegel means dialectics, or the balancing of opposites, or two opposed things, as suggested in Rene Magritte, Hegel's Holiday, oil on canvas, 1957.
Magitte's painting is a misreading of dialectics.

Magritte fails to capture negativity that drives the opposites to some sort of "resolution" or development. Hegel is about negativity, becoming and development as much as he about the balancing of opposities. Hegel's dialectical conception of progress, which allowed for conflict and reversal, provided a way to break with the positivist vision of a steady, linear progress.

Magritte's painting is a misreading. Maybe Hegel on holiday is a joke about no negativity in Hegel? The positive idealist Hegel? Magritte did not paint "ideas" since the purpose the painting was not the philosophy. It was the inherent poetry and mystery of the image.Magritte paints images not ideas.

And the French Hegel? How did the philosopher's understand Hegel?

My references to the French Hegel can be found here here and here and here.

My interpretation of the French Hegel is that it involves the conservative Encyclopaedia Hegel. The core of this interpretation focuses on logic, which to establish a systematic way of deducing the logical consequences of a set of concepts.This is the Hegel who has to to be rejected as part of the rejection of rationalism. The Encyclopaedia Hegel is the stuffy, super rationalist Hegel, who employs the unified Platonist notion of a closed, rigorous, totalizing reason. The emphasis is on the closure of the Hegelian dialectic in abolute knoweldge and the gobbling up all difference in negativity. Bataille certainly sees Hegel in terms of a closed rationalist system and he rebels against it in terms of inner experience.

Usually, the idea of the French Hegel refers to the renaissance of French philosophy in the 1940s and 1950s, which took up motifs from the Alexandre Kojeve's reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in his lectures at the Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes between 1933 and 1939. Kojeve reads Hegel, 'after Heidegger' and he finds Hegel's ontology of nature indefensible; reads Hegel in terms of History; and as a philosophy of death.

Kojeve's lectures gave an existential reading of Hegel, influenced by Jean Wahl and Koyre, that emphasised the earlier Phenomenology over the later, more conservative Encyclopaedia Hegel as the super rationalist.Kojeve's lectures built Hegel's system on the 'master-slave' dialectic - the Lordship and Bondage section, where the desire that is directed towards another desire is necessarily the desire for recognition, which then engenders history, and moves it.

Kojeve renders as "master and slave" and as the interaction of dominant Self and subordinate Other.

Kojeve reads Lordship and Bondage as 'fight to the death for pure prestige,' for 'recognition' by 'the other'. The man who became master was willing to 'go all the way'. Yet although the master has the pleasure, he does not yet have the satisfaction of recognition by an equal: mastery is ultimately 'tragic' and 'an existential impasse'. It is the slave, who through work "negates given being" who overcomes the world: "the man who works transforms given being … where there is work there is necessarily change, progress, historical evolution".

Now this review of Bruce Baugh's French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism, gives us another indication of the Hegel of the Phenomenology of Spirit. What is this Hegel? How does Baugh interpret the French reading of Hegel's Phenomenology that is different to Kojeve's?

Robert Bernasconi says that:

"Baugh's contention that unhappy consciousness and not the master-slave dialectic is the central reference point for French readers of Hegel is not to be understood as referring to those few pages at the end of the fourth chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit that describe what Hegel calls 'unhappy consciousness.' What Baugh has in mind under that title is that experience of a self divided against itself..."

A 'self divided against itself' captures the way surrealism relies on the unconscious forces ofdesire more than the conscious mind. A 'self divided against itself'makes a lot of sense of Klossowski and Bataille.The latter thinks of his life as an abortive condition or open wound as constituting a refutation of Hegel's closed system.

On this account the French reception of Hegel may be read as a succession of criticisms against the subject of desire; or the Hegelian conceit of a totalizing impulse which, for various reasons, has lost its plausibility. A close reading of the relevant chapters of the Phenomenology of Spirit reveal that Hegel's text is less totalizing than presumed.