SFHS 2015. Part One of Two.

This past weekend was the meeting of the Society for French Historical Studies at Colorado College. I saw a number of excellent papers and some quite cohesive panels. I’m going to do brief write-ups of only two of these panels. The first, here, is a panel titled “Education, Religion, and Laïcité in Republican France,” with papers by Linda Clark, Eleanor Rivera, and Rachel Hutchins.

Linda Clark—“Women Educators and the Politics of Laïcité: Normal School Directrices, 1879-1889”—spoke about the directrices of écoles normales for women in the first decade after the institution of generalized secondary education for women. In this period, there were approximately 180 such directrices (Clark has the exact number, but I missed it). A few écoles normales already existed, of course, but a large number of new women were needed to run the new schools that would be created under the law. Eventually, although not at first, these women would be trained at the new ENS at Fontenay-aux-Rose. Clark opened her talk with a letter sent by an archbishop to Jules Ferry in 1880. Did Ferry know, the archbishop asked, that one of his directrices was a Protestant? Ferry replied that he did, but that her religion was not important, only her professional capacity. Clark is broadly interested in this question: how laïque were these early teachers? Who were they? Clark’s paper was rich with valuable detail about this all-important group. After all, if the schools were the heart of the republican project, and the republic could survive only if it ‘won the battle’ for women, then this group—those who would run the schools to teach the teachers—was of great importance.

Clark divides her subjects into three groups. There were 17 normal schools for women in France when the new law went into effect in 1879. 10 had laïque directrices, and all these were retained as new schools were opened. This is the first group. Second are the 33 directrices appointed to newly-created schools mostly in the first year (79-80), who did not pass through Fontenay-aux-Rose. Third is the remaining majority, women who passed through the ENS at Fontenay and thus received the laique training that was, ideally, supposed to prepare them for their task.

Clark’s paper showed that, at first, Ferry and co. had to rely on more Catholic teachers, and allowed much greater latitude for the expression of Catholic doctrine on the part of these directrices. In fact, especially in the early years, Catholic directrices sometimes met with more success in effective laicization than did non-Catholics. There was great turnover in the first few years. This depended in part on regional differences, with more turnover in more Catholic areas. Vendé saw four different directrices in four years. Mostly these women were not married. The directrice had to live in the school, so some people thought they should not be married, or perhaps that it wasn’t a good idea to have husbands in the “couvent laïque.” On the other hand there are several examples of married women as directrice causing no particular difficulty or scandal.  Republicans were in principle committed to tolerance, so they noticed but accepted Catholic directrices as long as this didn’t disrupt or obstruct laicization. Religious practices on the part of directrices could be cause for dismissal—often were, although sheer incompetence was as well—but there are also cases of directrices being accused, and then defended successfully. Perhaps surprisingly, complaints came both against too radically laïque directrices and against those who were not laïque enough. By the late 1880s, there was less tolerance for Catholics. Once the ENS at Fontenay is running, dismissals because of excessive Catholicism drop off sharply. Only 1 of the 81 who went through was, ultimately, dismissed for catholic practices. 

My central take-away here was that, indeed, these directrices were an effectively laïque bunch. Compromises were made, especially at first, but the larger picture is of a surprisingly effective construction of a corps of elite teachers.

Eleanor Rivera’s paper, “Neutral Space: Laïcité and Early Third Republic Classrooms,” also examined the contested edges, we might say, of Ferry-era laicization efforts, but in a quite different mode. She uses the optic of space to inquire about how laicization worked at the level of the primary school, focusing on the Seine-inférieure. In fact what this means is a close look at very local conflicts over the signs and symbols of religion mostly within classrooms—especially crucifixes. I wonder, then, if Rivera’s framing might be different: perhaps it is not so much space as material or visual traces of religion that interests her? Or perhaps I’m over-remembering the spatial framing of her paper?

However that may be, the paper itself was a fascinating and detailed recounting of several such conflicts. Although at a different level of the French educational systems than Clark, Rivera’s paper also demonstrated the great variations according to local response that characterized efforts at laicization—and, concomitantly, the flexibility in many cases of the higher administration. Even after it became illegal to have crucifixes up in classrooms, many remained when local conditions made it difficult for the administration to have them removed without great conflict. Guidelines existed, Rivera tells us, for when and how local teachers might best take these symbols down (over a long break, quietly, quickly, and decisively). Conflicts nonetheless arose. Rivera recounted in some detail one particular sequence in which a local mayor declared his complete legitimacy—given by universal suffrage—in attempting to re-install a crucifix removed from a classroom in his town. This is interesting partly because the election of mayors was an innovation on the part of the Third Republic, and so we see here a nice dialectic of democratic legitimacy being accepted by opponents of republican policies. The broader point of Rivera’s research (at least this part of it) was that especially in primary education, teachers and administrators were willing to retain a substantial amount of Catholic paraphernalia in and around the classroom if it meant they could get the children into the school, and they could still control the curriculum.

Rachel Hutchins’ paper took us out of the early Third Republic and into the (late?!) Fifth Republic. She is interested in the uses of the term “laïcité” since 1980 in French primary school curriculum and textbooks (which are importantly different). Hutchins’ paper, too, was rich with detail and impressed upon me how little I know about recent French pedagogical debates. For instance, in the early 1980s official policy removed ‘histoire’ from the curriculum, replacing it, on the basis of reasoning drawn from Piaget and Annales historians, with direct interaction with artifacts and historical documents, but without significant framing? If this is even partly right, I’d be interested to know more. 

In any case, Hutchins’ central argument is that, especially in the textbooks that schoolchildren actually use, laïcité has undergone a process of idealization. It has been transformed, in Hutchins’ excellent phrase, “from value to myth.” She shows the differences between the official position taken in the preambles to various curricular documents and the actual content of the textbooks, which are not legally required to fit in any particular way with official curricula. An important turning-point, she argues, came as around 1985 national history returned to primary school curricula. At first, in textbooks from the late 1980s, laïcité is mentioned only briefly, if at all. By 2008, however, the main textbook for primary use on civil education gives exactly as much space to laïcité as to liberté, égalité, fraternité. Despite space also given to explicitly anti-racist messages, this way of presenting the 1905 law in fact re-enforces, and this last is a paraphrase of Hutchins, traditional nationalism in the guise of republican universalism. Hutchins even shows that Islam is handled in history textbooks so as to emphasize its warlike, conquest-oriented aspects. The crusades appear as a ‘reconquest’ on the part of Christian rulers. Muslims were commercial and scientific in the past, but not, these textbooks suggest, in the present. This part of Hutchins’ paper was very interesting, but I would have liked to see it treated in a broader way—not something, of course, there was time for in the paper.

A number of useful questions emerged from the audience. (There was a very substantial comment from Barry Bergin, but for some reason my notes from it are missing, so I won’t try to reconstruct it—suffice it to say that he raised several of the below points as well). Hutchins, for instance, who had framed the curricular changes she describes largely in terms of xenophobic or anti-immigrant discourse and the rise of the FN, was asked about other possible relevant changes. These are indeed numerous and not to be discounted in post 1968 France. Jean Pedersen asked two (related!) questions of the panel as a whole, which I shall mangle in paraphrasing. First, what is really the continuity or the difference between laïcité in 1880 and the same term today? Second, the form taken by laïcité in all these papers is subtractive (my word), that is it removed symbols or practices in order to achieve ‘neutrality.’ What about an (American) positive or inclusive model of neutrality? This last, for any number of reasons, was indeed never on the table in France. In fact, Rivera told in response a nice anecdote about a newspaper column in which this very specter was raised—a crucifix with a cross, a start of David, a ‘head of Mohammad’ (!), the mason’s level, all together—as a possible outcome of botched laicization. This appeared as an abomination in the 1880s. (And today it is left to Slavoj Zizek to become outraged (or at least worked-up) about the “coexist” bumper-stickers made out of these symbols.) Pedersen did not really get an answer to her first question—indeed it is a difficult one.

Of course, laïcité even over the long-term has been the object of an enormous amount of excellent scholarship in France. Jacqueline Lalouette leaps to mind here. It seems to me that we would be well-served to analytically separate republican anticlericalism, which has roots well before the Revolution and which played such an important role in it, from laïcité, which I would understand as a 19^th century synthesis of free-thinking and Protestant approaches to deconnecting organized or institutionalized religion from morality. It seems pretty clear that in the late 19^th century, in the run-up to 1905, Protestants played a key role in laicization, and that, at least on its face, there was nothing atheist (we might say) about laïcité. The default understanding—the rhetorical frame in the present—seems to be that laicization worked in the Third Republic, but isn’t working now, should be made to work with the same moral energy and clarity that it had in the 1880s. Certainly the papers in this panel suggest that Ferry’s project (not that it was only his) was a remarkable one. But it seems clear that to really understand the laïque schools of the 1880s, we need at least to begin with the educational policies and politics of the Second Empire. We need to think about the significance of the Paris Commune in shaping political possibilities (and fears) in the first decades of what would become the Third Republic. Republicans were not simply Enlighteners fighting obscurantist Catholics. They were also (even the more staunchly democratic among them) property-owners fighting socialists. And then if we want a bilan of the Republican school system, we’d better think very hard about the 1930s and Vichy, in particular the extent to which the latter had “Republican origins.” Hutchins’ characterization of laïcité in recent years as a “myth” rather than a “value” of the republic seems, at least from my perspective, dead on. The place that the concept—the administrative strategy—of laïcité had in the political conjuncture of the early Third Republic made it a functional part of the Republic and gave it, it seems to me, a completely different meaning than it has today. Laïcité may have been a genuine myth in the late 19th century, and today merely rhetorical cover. 

All of which is a long-winded response to three great papers, Bergin’s comment, and questions from the audience—as well, I should say, as conversation after the panel. Having just written substantially more about this than I meant to do, I’ll commit to doing the same (although at less length) tomorrow with another, quite different panel: “Beyond Determinism: Rethinking the Philosophy of History and Political Economy in Postwar France.”

Most fundamental right

This opinion piece, from the World Affairs Journal in which Pascale Bruckner defends the recent French ban on the burqua, is from a few months ago, and has doubtless been discussed elsewhere. This debate has been written about brilliantly (in very different modes, for instance, by Joan Scott and Cecile Laborde), and I haven't got anything in particular to add, except to stand back and gape at the following double-whammy:

An individual’s most fundamental right is to free himself or herself from his or her origins: Muslims should be able to leave Islam, become atheist, not observe Ramadan, or convert to Buddhism or to Christianity in the same way that Christians can fall away from their faith and shop for other forms of belief. (In fact, the French press have noted many cases of Muslim aggression against other Muslims who chose not to have children; and as for apostates, they routinely face death threats.) The burqa (or the North African niqab or the Middle Eastern hijab) is a direct challenge to the ideal of laicization since it dramatically violates the principle of equality between men and women.

An individual's most fundamental right is to be set free from their origins? This seems like a pretty clear example of the internal tensions of contemporary French republicanism coming to the fore in statements that are either obvious falsehoods or can only be taken in a radically revolutionary sense. And then there is the breathtaking association of "the ideal of laicization" with "the principle of equality between men and women." Even leaving aside the question of whether, in fact, passing a law banning a kind of clothing worn only by women is indeed forwarding this principle, the idea that French laicite means gender equality cannot possibly be more than, say, 30 years old. Certainly there was very little sense that the 1905 separation or other 3rd Republic policies to remove the Catholic Church from public life, were pursued with any acceptance of gender equality--indeed precisely the opposite is arguably the case.

The Persistence of the Marxist Paradigm

Mayer, Arno J. The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War. Pantheon Books. 1981.

The Persistence of the Old Regime is an interpretive historical essay that at its heart is an explanation for the disjunction between the promise of ‘advanced’ European civilization in the 19th century, and the 30 year war of 1914-1945 that essentially ended this civilization. Mayer’s argument, constantly reiterated, is that the aristocrats never went away. Nobilitarian structures of sociability and authority, the weight of agrarian economic power, the ‘human material’ of the aristocracy, all retained enormous importance through the 19th century. The old elite elements of the ruling classes reasserted their authority in the face of challenges in the years after 1900. In short, “the Great War was an expression of the decline and fall of the old order fighting to prolong its life rather than of the explosive rise of industrial capitalism bent on imposing its primacy” (4). Historians have been wrong to see the 19th century as that of the rising bourgeoisie, “the economically radical bourgeoisie was as obsequious in cultural life as it was in social relations and political behavior” (192). This argument relies on the mobilization of a very broad range of secondary material, but a few important names are Joseph Schumpeter, Norbert Elias, and, in a more oblique manner, Carl Schorske. The argument is something like a European-wide application of the version of the German sonderweg thesis that blames Germany’s peculiar history on incomplete modernization.

I’ve run across referenced to this book in a few places, but most often in Frederic Jameson. Mayer is clearly putting forward a radical revision of the standard Marxist interpretation of the 19th century and the causes of the First World War. The question is, to my mind, then not so much what is the contemporary historiographical importance of this book—it might well have been a provocation to the ‘new social history’ of the 1980s, but the very historical categories with which it works, such as ‘bourgeoisie’ have been by now more or less run out of the field—as it is what place it has in contemporary Marxism. Probably I have already the answer to this question: it is as a foundational work for the kind of Marxist literary analysis for which Jameson is best known. The imagine Mayer gives us of the 1890s and on provides an excellent frame in which to discuss cultural modernism. It is not, I therefore think, a coincidence that France is both a problematic case for Mayer, and for ‘modernism’ as an analytic category in the history of literature.

Since I am most interested in France, I’ll talk about it, although I don’t exactly mean to criticize Mayer here, since his scope is much larger. France is problematic in obvious ways. It was the only republic among the European great powers. The monarchy and the aristocracy had been officially dissolved with great violence during the Revolution, and were then reconstituted and once again dissolved several times. In the 1870s, one of the conditions for the possibility of the Republic was that the monarchists were divided among themselves and relatively weak. The Second Empire certainly had an aristocracy, but it was much debased. The two places Mayer can with confidence say the old aristocracy retained some power were the social world—le tout Paris—and in military and foreign affairs. For Mayer, then, Proust’s novel would be read not so much for its evidence of social change and arrivisme, but rather as a portrait of the enormous influence still wielded by the aristocracy, and the desperate attempts of the upper bourgeoisie to imitate its social betters. The empire was the provenance of the nobles and therefore at the disposal of the Catholic Church. I am willing to entertain this thesis, although I think it’s hard to deny the republicanism of the empire in the 1890s and after.

Mayer also places a classical education, literary classicism, and nationalism, in the camp of the old regime. This I don’t think can really be sustained for the case of France. Certainly, all of these were claimed by the ‘conservative bloc,’ but the école normale was simply not an institution of the old regime. It was republican through and through, which is not to say that it was not conservative—in a sense it was—but this is a bourgeois institution if there ever was one. The elites it reproduced were radically separate to anything that might with plausibility be called the nobility. They were nationalist, certainly, but the Republic survived because it was able to convince so many people that it was coextensive with the nation. Literary classicism, similarly, may have been claimed by the Maurras and his fellow travelers, but it was certainly not equal to them. The literary institutions of the Third Republic were, again, in a sense conservative, but I would call this a conservatism fundamental to any institutional structure, not at all one that points back to the aristocracy. Proust is an exception here, not a rule—and of course if he was hypnotized by the aristocrats, it is just because he wasn’t one. Mayer in general is eager to read the cultural elitism of assimilated Jews all over Europe as an attempt to get as close to the aristocrats as possible, given their basic exclusion, rather than as an investment in a genuinely alternative elite. I am inclined, in France but also Germany and Austria, to take the latter perspective. Not to be picky, but my trust in Mayer (which is to say, in the secondary accounts on which he relies) is undermined by odd miss-evaluations, such as putting Alfred Fouillée into the box of academics expounding “somewhat more orderly versions of the baleful creed of permanent struggle, elitism, and unreason” (295). Fouillée is not like Renan, de Lapouge, Haeckel, or Gumplowitz. Rather than being a grand-uncle to fascism, he is the grand-father of the welfare state. The fact that he coined the phrase, used several times by Mayer, ‘idée-force,’ with its superficially Nietzschean overtones, does not stop him from being, in fact, the 19th century philosopher of conciliation and compromise.

Although I’m less knowledgeable about this than I should be, I also found that Mayer’s account of the French economy did not exactly support his thesis. In the French context, he often slides into the use of the word ‘notable,’ rather than ‘noble,’ and indeed the two are not the same. Mayer marshals the evidence that the French economy did not have a massive heavy industry sector, was not dynamic in the way Germany or Britain’s industry was. Agriculture remained important, but also undercapitalized. Evidence of the political power of the well-to-do peasant does not, it seems to me, constitute evidence that the nobles were in control. Again, it was precisely because the Third Republic was able to convince this sector of the population to support it that it was able to survive. No doubt, I should read Herman Lebovic’s The Alliance of Iron and Wheat.

I am, in general, sympathetic to Mayer’s basic point that in order to understand historical change, we must think also about what failed to change. I am also, in the end, sympathetic to the claim that the best explanatory framework for Europe’s descent into what was manifestly an insane war is the increasingly desperate series of attempts made by the old elites to retain political power. Mayer’s argument makes the least sense to me in the realm at which I think it is in the end aimed, that is, culture. He constantly explains away instances of avant-gardism by saying that they were ‘over-perceived’ at the time. I again agree with the basic criticism that art and literary histories tend to exaggerate the contemporary importance of certain innovators (generally in the service of a teleology of one sort or another), and ignore the weight of ‘academic’ work. Still, I can’t really get past Mayer’s dismissal of the radicalism of, say, The Rite of Spring. His framework, perhaps because it is Marxist, is too ready to evacuate of revolutionary content the very real formal innovations taking place at this moment. The implication that modernism, as a style, is a sort of sublimated obeisance to the ancient aristocracy simply doesn’t convince. In the end, the question I'm left with is how much explanatory power remains in the Marxist--as opposed to that derived from Weber or Elias--part of Mayer's analysis?

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.

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.”