Renan on decline and reform

Renan, Ernest. La réforme intellectuelle et morale.


It is 1871, France has just lost a war and fallen into civil war and socialist revolution. Frenchmen cannot help but look at the surrounding ruins and wonder what brought them to this point, and what should be done next.

Renan thinks basically that materialism and democracy have brought France to its current state of crisis. The Capetian dynasty made France, preceded it, and France therefore in a sense committed suicide when it killed the king. Since the turmoil of the Revolution, France has sought to replace the king with one dynasty or another—first the Bonapartes, and then the renewed Bourbons. Although Renan remembers the July monarchy with fondness (that, not coincidentally, was the period of his own youth), it was also the scene of creeping materialism that manifested itself in the 1848 revolution and Republic. The folly of universal suffrage was made plain to the idealistic republicans, but not before France had chosen a new monarch, Louis-Napoleon. The Second Empire was a period in which France’s wealth grew vastly, and its moral and intellectual strength (virility) declined just as much. The decadence of this kind of life is not unpopular, and if the Emperor had avoided war, it could have lasted indefinitely.

Yet the era of nations is also that of struggle between nations. France, in its pride and virility, had defeated and humiliated Prussia at the beginning of the 19th century, and now Prussia has taken its revenge. Prussia’s defeat made it strong and disciplined. France, in its materialism, had grown weak. Hence the collapse of the government, of any force of order, hence, that is, the moral defeat following the military one.

The reforms that must be undertaken should be modeled roughly on those that Prussia undertook after its defeat. Most famous here are Renan’s views on the intellectual failure of France. He wants the French to bring back autonomous, competing universities (he’s not the only one), which, he says, were a French idea to begin with, and so would in no sense be copies of German models. More interesting to me is his swipe at representational government. Of course his preference is for a return to the monarchy, but he is willing to admit that once a people has enjoyed a right for a generation—even one such as universal suffrage, with very dubious benefits—that right cannot simply be taken away. Clearly, though, simple election of an assembly by universal suffrage would result in mediocre and worse than mediocre leadership. This kind of election means the advent of the politician, whose only skill is to be elected.

There must be, Renan says, a two-house system. Of course there must be an assembly that represents the population qua population—although even here he thinks that where single men get one vote, married men get two, and married men with children yet more, since Renan’s view is that women already have too much influence in politics as it is. There must also be a house that represents the ‘moral individuals’ that make up the state. This means something like the constituencies. The teachers will be represented as teachers, the bureaucrats as bureaucrats, and so on. Large cities, whose people are already represented, will themselves get representatives. This is, I must say, a remarkable vision of society reflected, or transmuted, into an assembly.

It is also radically at odds with the traditional view that the political culture of France is hopelessly caught in a Jacobin trap. Renan is a liberal. He refers to himself in this way, and has some liberal positions, such as the right to free speech (though not free assembly). But he is a liberal who has become obsessed with order. Democracy, he says, makes of the population a heap of sand—nothing can be built with that. I suppose the answer is that he is not a liberal Republican, but a liberal monarchist who probably prefers Guizot, and Guizot’s ‘moment,’ to any conceivable republican one. Order, for Renan, is built to an extent on the clear-eyed recognition of hierarchy.

Renan thinks in terms of millennia and the vast movement of races. He looks back to the 5th century Germanic invasions for parallels to the current situation, and is pleased to explain a great deal by national, racial, character. It would be interesting to investigate how deep Renan’s racial thinking in fact penetrates into his political thinking (such as it is). It is the right of strong nations to conquer weaker ones, and perhaps, he is willing to hazard, the Latin peoples have lost entirely what warrior spirit they absorbed from their contact with the naturally warrior-like Germanic peoples. After all, some races are suited to servitude (the Chinese are good with their hands and have no honor, which I suppose is meant to signify that they are good for industrial labor, and the Africans are strong and good-natured, and so well suited for agriculture). Perhaps the revenge of France will not be on the battlefield at all. Indeed, Renan works himself into such a frenzy of possibility that by the end of the essay, with the possibility of a global conflict between two models of nationhood (the German and the American) looming on the horizon, he suggests essentially that France will be remembered for its tact and politesse, as the salt of the earth, that which gives taste to an otherwise bland world…small consolation, it seems to me.

It would be easy to read this little essay as a sort of traumatic symptom. The trauma is plain enough, and the thing is full of what seem like contradictions. At one moment he is lamenting the lost possibility of a triumvirate of nations, France, England, and Germany, united to stave off the terrible threat of Russia—at the next moment he is asserting that the real enemy is the Germano-Slavic spirit. The preface suggests that the defeat of France and the victory of Prussia should be seen as the natural consequence of France’s previous victories. The first sentence of the essay itself says that one cannot find (admittedly, rigorous) cosmic justice in the wheel of historical fate. Later in the essay, though, he comes back to the theme again, dressed this time in pseudo-science: France defeated Prussia in 1807, and let the flame of Prussian pride, which comes back to France in 1870, perhaps to help France regenerate itself in the same way…

In the end, it seems to me that if Renan moved through a republican phase, and his scientism in 1848 is something like it, then after the war he returns to the political opinions that his masters held in his youth. We have a racialized version of the elitist liberalism of the July monarchy—making hecatombs of the benighted masses on the altar of reason. Equality is the greatest virtue, and finds its expression in science, but only the best have access to it. I read Renan because he was important, and because his French is beautiful. The sentences are so often quotable, worth writing down and memorizing for use at a dinner-party; which is, after all, both the fault and virtue of French culture, according to Renan. His writing has an ironic distance from itself, even his political attitudes are, as it were, always at a remove, always posed with an awareness of their contingency. Yet I find him distasteful. His honesty amounts to accepting the consequences of his own superiority, or his belief in it. No wonder he was disowned by later generations.

Science as Religion

There is a common rhetorical practice of comparing something, a form of politics, or of literary criticism, to a religion. The comparison is always pejorative, and always works because no one is every sure what religion means. The word stands for whatever sort of foolishness is to be indicated at any particular moment. So it is under advisement that I say that I have decided one can, in fact, talk about science as a religion in the 19th century.

Two books have brought me to this point. Ernest Renan’s L’avenir de la science, and Claude Bernard’s Introduction à l’étude de la médicine expérimentale. The first was written in 1848-9, and not published until the 1890s. It represents the record of a sort of conversion experience for which, I am certain, an analogue or description could be found in James’ Varieties of Religious Experience. Renan kept the manuscript with him, and mined passages and ideas from it over decades as, in fact, the progress of events stripped from him the transparent faith in the power (or perhaps efficacy) of critical, which is to say scientific, investigation. ‘Science’ meant something very different to the readers of this book in 1895 than it did when the book was written. It was indeed partly to remind people of that past that Renan had the thing published. At that time, reasoned investigation of man and nature seemed a force able to pull down the great wall of superstitions surrounding society and allow Humanity to enter the realm of its full potential. This messianic form of Enlightenment was not at all uncommon in the first half of the 19th century (no doubt “messianic Enlightenment” is not a great way of describing it, but I think the sense of continuity with Enlightenment projects of the previous century is must be retained). Renan describes the overwhelming experience of criticism, of the sense that a tool has been put into one’s hands that is able to dissolve nearly everything that one believed to have been solid. So this messianic Enlightenment is not only a social program, but a kind of emotional experience and discipline.

Here is the link, or rather the contrast, with Bernard’s Introduction, that makes the two books interesting together. Renan was a man of letters, but at a time when philosophy and literature and science and history could all still be boxed together. Bernard, in fact older than Renan, was professionally formed as what we, today, would call a research physician. His Introduction, published in 1865, comes toward the end of his life. If science is a messianic faith for Renan in 1848, ready at any moment to alter the world radically, it is for Bernard a way of living within the realm of appearances. Doubt and modesty are at the core values of Bernard’s experimental scientist. What I find most compelling is how effectively Bernard encloses this doubt within a higher faith. The very condition of existence of the scientist is faith in the absolute determinism of the physical world allied with the realization that this determinism will probably never be fully understood; faith in actual absolutes, doubt and modestly in the claims one makes on, for, and toward them. This is a recipe for living. If Renan’s young scientist is not exactly arrogant, it is only because he is himself too crushed by the power of reason. Bernard’s scientist, on the other hand, has never said anything that he knows to be absolutely true, and is ready to submit every opinion to the criteria of experiment and reason.

The intellectual position of the two scientists is similar. They are both committed to the practice of true knowledge about the world, which is governed by immutable laws that are in principle knowable. Their emotional, or perhaps subject, positions are radically different, as are the relations they imply between the scientist and the rest of the social world. For Renan it is the scientist’s duty to proselytize in the cause of reason. Bernard’s scientist is, it seems to me, unlikely to be very interested in engaging with society. No doubt this difference could be ascribed to their respective vocations: Renan was an historian above all, and Bernard a physiologist. Yet we can imagine without difficulty a Bernardian social-scientist. Let us put this differently: Renan’s scientist is, it seems to me, outside the problematic Max Weber describes in “Science as Vocation,” whereas Bernard’s scientist is firmly within it. Emotionally, however, Bernard’s scientist is the more firmly grounded. He or she (Renan’s science is strongly gendered—Bernard’s is not) is able to find a firm footing only on that which floats between two absolutes that are, in themselves, not graspable; on the one hand, there is the absolute determinism of the objective world, to which we have only relative access, on the other hand there are the absolutes of our subjective existence, to which we have access, but which we cannot bring into the objective world other than partly.

Renan and Bernard both describe modes of comportment determined by one’s understanding of a reality that is somehow at once beyond this world and within it: reason. Their conception of reason and its presence in the world is, I think, similar. The ‘conclusions,’ or modes of comportment, they draw from this same reason separate them. Why do I say this makes 19th century science like a religion? Because the two writers belong in different tents within the same house, because they draw inspiration, emotional sustenance, and rules for living from the same source, but differently. That this constitutes a religion (rather than a sect) is evidenced by the difference itself.

Jennifer Hecht, in The End of the Soul, describes a group of free-thinking atheists in early Third Republic France who, she says, erected a certain kind of science in the place of religion to the extent that they have recreated Catholic burial rites in the form of autopsy procedures. This is the Society for Mutual Autopsy. They pay dues. They have meetings. When a member dies, the society removes that person’s brain and performs an autopsy on it to further science. Hecht takes as evidence that this is a recreation of religious rites that they continue to perform autopsies even when there is no possible scientific benefit. Although Hecht’s functionalism bothers me (she seems to assume that there are a set of basic human needs, and that Catholicism having been removed, a new procedure must be found to fulfill these needs), the historical situation she describes seems to warrant her assertion that the ceremonies of Catholicism, and their emotional meaning, were transferred to these ‘scientific’ procedures, so that, we might say, the meaning of the ritual became dissociated from its significance.

Hecht may point to her atheists as enacting a religion of science, but it is neither Renan’s nor Bernard’s. To allow the emotional significance of the autopsy procedure to over-run its scientific importance would be, for both, to have replaced science with superstition. It would mean leaving the house of science. So I would suggest that Hecht’s atheists are really still Catholics, something like inverted versions of Charles Maurras, who supported Catholicism for political reasons while refusing ‘belong’ to it himself.

Renan and critique

Le premier sentiment de celui qui passe de la croyance naïve à l’examen critique, c’est le regret et presque la malédiction contre cette inflexible puissance, qui, du moment où elle l’a saisi, le force de parcourir avec elle toutes les étapes de sa marche inéluctable, jusqu’au terme final où l’on s’arrête pour pleurer.

Ernest Renan, L’avenir de la science. Pgs 152-3

It has been argued by Ian Hunter [In Critical Theory in 2006 with responses more recently] that there is something like a tradition of ‘university’ metaphysics, critical in rhetoric and conservative in essence, that includes most saliently a node around Hegel. I wonder if Renan fits into this tradition. Certainly he seems to in this quote, which I think might, with a change in tone and level of irony, be put in the mouth of a 25 year old discovering ‘critique’ today, just as Renan was in 1848 when he wrote this. Although it rings of pseudo-history to me, I wonder if there is something to the psychological continuity associated with 'scientific' and 'critical' philosophy.

Renan's Priere sur l'Acropole

Prière sur l’Acropole, by Ernest Renan, is a well-carved jewel. The profession of faith—part prayer, part manifesto—is no longer very familiar to us as a form, but I think that it still made a great deal of sense when this was published in 1876. Some of W.E.B. du Bois’s texts, actually, sound quite similar. Probably this is not coincidental. The text is available from gallica, in a remarkable 1899 illustrated edition which deserves a commentary of its own as an art object and a commentary on its time—I wish I could hold a copy in my hands, the images don’t come out well online.

It seems to me that I have read a great deal recently about paradoxes, or constitutive ambiguities, inscribed at the center of republican ideology. Renan, agonized and weary, but still deeply engaged, is clearly articulating, and even self-consciously claiming, several irreconcilable positions here. Athens and Jerusalem; democracy and aristocracy; the historicized absolute.

Let me try to summarize. There are three long paragraphs of introduction, or preface, in which Renan says that he was never much given to thinking about his own past. At first, “L’impérieux devoir qui m’obligea, durant les années de ma jeunesse, à résoudre pour mon compte, non avec le laisser aller du spéculatif, mais avec la fièvre de celui qui lutte pour la vie, les plus hauts problèmes de la philosophie et de la religion, ne me laissait pas un quart d’heure pour regarder en arrière.” And then, “jeté ensuite dans le courant de mon siècle, que j’ignorais totalement...” he became deeply engaged with scholarship, committed, as it were, especially in his trips to the Levant, to the historical recreation of the biblical past. Then, in 1865 (as a point of reference, a few years after the publication of his enormously popular Vie de Jésus), he comes to Athens and experiences a totally new “sentiment de retour en arrière.”

He finds that Athens is a revelation as much as Jerusalem, though perhaps more beautiful. “...voici qu’à côté du miracle juif venait se placer pour moi le miracle grec, une chose qui n’existé qu’une fois, qui ne s’est jamais vue, qui ne se reverra plus, mais dont l’effet durera éternellement, je veux dire un type de beauté éternelle, sans nulle tache locale ou nationale.” This is interesting—the perfect universal, nothing particular about it. It makes France and the whole modern world seem barbaric. This reads to me, so far, like unsurprising and (to be bold) vulgar classicism.

Interestingly, Renan described this perfect world in terms of a perfect public—already, always, again, this is classical republicanism—“un public tout entier composé de connaisseurs, une démocratie qui a saisi des nuances d’art tellement fines que nos raffinés les aperçoivent à peine.” This is the very picture of republican fantasy.

The final lines of the preface, though, cast all this typical adoration of classicism in a more problematic light. He says, “Les heurs que je passai sur la colline sacrée étaient des heurs de prière. Toute ma vie repassait comme une confession générale devant mes yeux. Mais ce qu’il y avait de plus singulier, c’est qu’en confessant mes péchés, j’en venais à les aimer ; mes résolutions de devenir classique finissaient par me précipiter plus que jamais au pôle opposé.” That is, the very greatness of the classical pushes him back to what he has known, and to the greatness of his roots—indeed, of Jerusalem. Looking back over the old papers from this trip, he says, he finds the following text, which will be the main text of the Prière. The implication is that it was written, as in a trance, in 1865, and on the Acropolis.

Henriette Psichari, whose CNRS-published monograph from the 1950s is an excellent and ‘genetic’ treatment of the Prière, argues that it was finished, at the very least heavily edited, after the 1870 war. Renan notoriously wrote things and left them in his desk publishing them years later (indeed, with L’Avenir de science, nearly 50 years later).

Psichari has some very useful commentary on the text, not all of which I have read. For instance, she points out that the “laid petit Juif, parlant le grec des Syriens” is Saint Paul (which I should have been able to figure out on my own), and that there was a small scandal because many people felt it was both theologically inappropriate and an empirically unjustifiable leap of imagination to claim that he was ugly. Apparently Renan claimed that he had textual evidence.

I’m interested in the historical relativism Renan deploys here. It manifests throughout the text. The goddess of reason can never understand, Renan writes to her, the magic that barbarians have made with their cantiques, their hymns.

Along the way, as part of a series of supplications, we get the essential republican goal: “Démocratie, toi dont le dogme fondamental est que tout bien vient du peuple, et que, partout où il n’y a pas de peuple pour nourrir et inspirer le génie, il n’y a rien, apprends-nous à extraire le diamant des foules impures.” It is a matter of faith that everything good comes from the people, and a matter of fact that they are impure. A god of some sort must intervene and extract the diamond from the impure foules—a loaded word at this time, I should think. This is a crucial republican ‘moment,’ to follow Nord and more recently Spitz’s way of talking. I wonder how far one would need to go to find similar knots of democracy, religious morality, mysticism, and sociology? Probably not far.

I’d like to quote the last several paragraphs of the thing in full, but I will refrain. Suffice it to say that Renan expresses the impossibility of escaping a relativism that borders on fin-de-siècle decadence. The terms in which he does this would bear scrutiny, I think, but here is the conclusion: “Une littérature qui, comme la tienne, serait saine en tout point n’exciterait plus maintenant que l’ennui.”

Remarkably, it is the size of the world, its great diversity, which ultimately defeats the classical goddess of reason. He says, “Le monde est plus grand que tu ne crois. Si tu avais vu les neiges du pôle et les mystères du ciel austral, ton front, ô déesse toujours calme, ne serait pas si serein ; ta tête, plus large, embrasserait divers genres de beauté.” Now, one often reads that the philosophes of the previous century were driven into philosophical crisis by the spectacle of human diversity presented to them (through print) by the new world. Michèle Duchet has a wonderfully nuanced account of the modes in which this happened. So I wonder what it means that here, Renan does not mention other people. The northern ice and the southern sky—suitably sublime images?—are his reference points here. Why? It may seem a leap, but I wonder if this is 19^th century racism rearing its head. When we’re talking about universal beauty, it isn’t even worth discussing non-Europeans.

I’ve written too much here already, but this is a wonderfully dense text. I will leave the final lines, much in need of interpretation, largely to speak for themselves. I will point only to the remarkable indecision and uncertainty that they reveal. The next step, which I may take, will be to do some reception work, at least of a preliminary sort, and see how wide my reading is from that of the 1870s.

“Un immense fleuve d’oubli nous entraîne dans un gouffre sans nom. O AMIBE, tu es le Dieu unique. Les larmes de tous les peuples sont de vraies larmes ; les rêves de tous les sages renferment une part de vérité. Tout n’est ici-bas que symbole et que songe. Les dieux passent comme les hommes, et il ne serait pas bon qu’ils fussent éternels. La foi qu’on a eue ne doit jamais être une chaîne. On est quitte envers elle quand on l’a soigneusement roulée dans le linceul de pourpre où dorment les dieux morts.”