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Darwin contra Rousseau: Evolutionary narrative and the discourse on the social bond in nineteenth-century France

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Darwin contra Rousseau: Evolutionary narrative and the discourse on the social bond in nineteenth-century France

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Content DARWIN CONTRA ROUSSEAU
EVOLUTIONARY NARRATIVE AND THE DISCOURSE ON THE SOCIAL BOND
IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE
by
Shoba Sadagopan
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(FRENCH)
May 2003
Copyright 2003 Shoba Sadagopan
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90089-1695
This dissertation, written by
Shoba Sadagopan___________________________
under the direction of her dissertation committee, and
approved by all its members, has been presented to and
accepted by the Director of Graduate and Professional
Programs, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
/
Director
Date May 16. 2003
Dissertation Committee
P r o f., P eggy Kamuf Chair
frior A . Accampo
P r o f . P e t e r T. S ta r r
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1 1
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Abstract ii
2. Introduction 1
Part I: Darwin contra Rousseau
3.Giraffes and Ancestors: Rousseau, Lamarck and Darwin 25
4. L’Arbre de Monsieur Taine: Darwin contra Kant 93
Part II: Degeneration and Regeneration
5. AuRebours 144
6. Solidarity, from the Mechanical to the Organic 174
7. Epilogue 224
8. Works Consulted 234
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Ill
ABSTRACT
As the title indicates, my thesis pertains to evolutionary narrative in
nineteenth France in the context of the discourse on the social bond. For a
number of thinkers and writers ranging from Hippolyte Taine in the mid
century, to and Charles Maurras at the fin-de-siecle, Rousseau was the source
of the recurrent revolutions that beset France throughout the nineteenth
century. My dissertation is focused on the way these conservative thinkers,
especially Hippolyte Taine, used the language of the organic, and in
particular that of evolutionary theory, known in France as Lamarckian
transformisme, to oppose the idea of the social contract. In Part I, Giraffes
and Ancestors, I trace evolutionary theory back to Buffon and Rousseau, and
show how Rousseau's influence is discernible in Lamarck's privileging of will
and intention. I then discuss Darwin's Origin of Species and the social-
Darwinist reading of evolutionary theory in France. I discuss the role played
by Taine in developing evolutionary narrative in disciplines outside the
natural sciences, particularly within the French Right. In Chapter II, L’Arbre
de Monsieur Taine I take up the metaphor of the tree used by Darwin in the
Origin, and show how it reappears in Taine's historical work and Barres' Les
Deracines.
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IV
In Part II, Degeneration and Regeneration, I examine another strand of
the organicist discourse, that of degeneration. In Chapter III, A Rebours, I
show how bio-medical theories of degeneration and heredity articulated by
the psychiatrists Prosper Lucas and Benedict Morel used transformiste
notions to account for a range of social ills. I then show how the two strands
converge in Taine's account of the Jacobin conquest in his Origines de la
France contemporaine. I also discuss Max Nordau's reading of J-K
Huysman's A Rebours in his work Degeneration. I then consider the
regenerative value brought to organicist discourse by Emile Durkheim in his
early work. I discuss the notion of organic solidarity that he articulates in De
la Division du travail social as a counter to what he calls anomie, social
disorder; I also suggest that Durkheim’s silence on Marx and the Paris
Commune of 1871 is a way of neutralizing class struggle. Finally I discuss
the movement known as solidarism where many of the reforms suggested by
Durkheim were translated into reality.
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Introduction
Charles Darwin's Origin of Species appeared in 1859, almost fifty years after
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's Philosophie zoologique. Darwin was by no means the first
to have considered the hypothesis of the transmutation of species. Although it is
Lamarck who is associated with the theory known in France as transformisme, the
sources of such thought go back to the eighteenth-century naturalist Georges Louis
Leclerc Buffon and the thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau. With the Philosophie
zoologique. Lamarck took a position against fixisme. the view that species had been
fixed at Creation. There was then a great resistance to the idea that species might all
have evolved out of other species.
However, with the publication of Darwin's Origin, this resistance to
evolutionary theory, though still present in the scientific establishment, weakened in
other circles. The Origin of Species was translated into French in 1862 by Clemence
Royer, a self-proclaimed Lamarckian. Most importantly, Royer read the Origin in
anthropological terms, although Darwin had carefully left man out of the picture.
Royer, in her preface to the Origin, reveals a clear anti-Rousseau bias, and the
influence of the thinker Arthur Gobineau is very discernible in her interpretation of
Darwin. Gobineau himself later claimed that in his Essai sur l'inegalite des races
inhumaines (1853-1855) he had anticipated Darwin. Royer's translation had an
immediate impact on writers such as Taine and Renan.
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In this dissertation, I will argue that the acceptance of Darwin's theory by
certain thinkers and writers in mid-nineteenth century France is inextricably bound
up with the rupture of the social bond that the revolution of 1848, and later, the Paris
Commune of 1871, enacted. Darwin’s theory was revolutionary in many ways. He
not only clearly articulated the view that species transmuted into each other; he also
made the individual an object of study. The hypothesis I present here is that
Darwin’s individual provided writers who had an anti-Rousseau bias with the
concept of a genealogical individual that they could oppose to the Rousseauist
individual. I draw attention to the fact that Darwin’s first translator, the anti-
Rousseauist Clemence Royer, was instrumental in promoting a social-Darwinist
reading of Darwin.
For liberals as for conservatives, the June days of 1848 recalled the Terror,
mob rule, and the destruction of all traditional bonds that held society together. The
working-class uprisings of 1848 and 1871 once again placed the crisis of the
Republic on the agenda: between the republican ideals, shaped by the Enlightenment,
and the actual demands by the working class that these ideals be translated into
tangible rights, there was such a gap that no democratic constitution could bridge it.
No compromise was conceivable between a Thiers and a Blanqui. The consensus
that had existed between the bourgeoisie and the working class in 1789 had broken
down irrevocably.
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Thinkers such as Toqueville and Fustel de Coulanges saw the Jacobin spirit
as the source of the recurring Revolution. And since the Jacobins claimed to have
been inspired by Rousseau, the finger of blame was pointed at the author of Du
Contrat social. From Tocqueville to Fustel de Coulanges, Taine and Renan, there
was a shared perception that it was Rousseau’s abstract notion of the individual,
entering into a social contract with other abstract individuals that had led to the
Terror. These thinkers felt the need to counter this Rousseauist idea with a concept of
the individual who was rooted in society, who had an ancestry and a patrie. In other
words, the individual had a genealogy that linked him through the family to the
nation, which itself was rooted in the past.
What these thinkers shared in common was the belief that it was universal
suffrage that was responsible for the Terror. For was it not the general will that had
led to the Terror and the excesses of the Revolution? Was it not the all-powerful
State created by the social contract that had unleashed the Terror and deprived the
individual of his liberty while at the same time claiming to act in the name of his
sovereignty? This State, artificially constituted through a voluntary social contract of
abstract individuals, had succeeded in destroying society itself and all the traditional
bonds that held it together. The conservative thinkers agreed on one point: it was
Rousseau and his philosophy that had led to the Terror and the renewed possibility of
its specter haunting France. As Jacques Donzelot has pointed out: “Au depart est
Rousseau, sa haine de la societe, sa volonte de faire tout reposer sur l’individu, mais
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un individu abstrait, car pense hors de ses liens effectifs et de son commerce
spontane” (L’Invention du social, 61).
It is this fiction of the abstract individual, who freely entered into a social
contract in order to create this State, that had to be destroyed: the idea of the social
contract had to be countered with a theory of society in which the social bond was
organic, in which the individual was part of a lineage, with indissoluble links to
family, property, religion. In other words, with a genealogy.
By turning to history, these thinkers were, in a sense, trying to rewrite the
present. By affirming that nation and patrie were one, with a lineage that went back
to antiquity, by arguing that inequality between classes had always existed because
this was the way the French nation was constituted, they could assert that the social
contract was not for France.1 Only such a conception of history, the nation, and the
individual could neutralize the concept of the state and the individual as articulated
by Rousseau.
Prior to Darwin, the language of the organic had existed, but its use by
Balzac was part of a literary project in which art was to imitate life. At the mid
century, theories of degeneration associated with mental illness began to emerge.
Prosper Lucas published D e l'heredite (1847). A decade later, M orel published his
Traite des degenerescences (1857-1860). While writers such as Taine assimilated
the notion of heredity, they did not exploit the potential of these theories for the
counter-revolution.
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I propose to argue in this thesis that two key concepts in Darwin’s theory
allowed thinkers and writers such as Fustel de Coulanges, Taine, and Renan to use
the language of the organic in defining the social bond contra Rousseau. The two are:
1) that the individual had no volition and 2) the individual as having a genealogy and
an ancestry, going back through species, genus, order, and class.
In Part I, in the chapter entitled “Giraffes and Ancestors,” I will sketch the
broad outlines of evolutionary theory and trace its history back to Rousseau. The
resistance to transformisme in the early nineteenth century was due primarily to the
dominant figure of Cuvier, who had insisted that species were fixed. Lamarck paid
dearly for having upheld his transformist views, and died in poverty and obscurity.
His ideas did not go completely unheeded however. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire took up
where Lamarck left off and the result was the famous querelle des analogues
between Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier, with resonances across Europe. The argument
here is that of all the modem precursors of evolutionary theory, Buffon, Goethe,
Herder, and Kant included, Rousseau is of the greatest importance. I believe that his
influence is palpable in Lamarck’s Philosophie zoologique (1809). The young
Lamarck was said to have accompanied Rousseau on his herborations in the 1770s,
but beyond this material fact, I shall establish textually that Rousseau’s notion of will
and intention as articulated in the Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de
l’inegalite des hommes (1755) was to shape Lamarck’s theory.
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Specifically, I will argue that Lamarck’s citing of the giraffe as an instance of
will and intention is traceable to Rousseau’s Discours. I will situate the now-famous
giraffe controversy, the bone of contention between Lamarckians and Darwinians, in
its historical context: how Darwin and Wallace both balked at the idea that the
giraffe developed its long neck because it wished to reach foliage at the tree-tops.
This chapter is essentially about Darwin contra Lamarck, and Rousseau (intention,
will). For Darwin, will was completely absent in the evolutionary process. It was
accidental variation, which Darwin called “natural selection,” that led to one species
prevailing over another in the struggle for life. Variation itself was observable in the
individual and individual variation was the key to Darwin’s theory. As Michel
Foucault has pointed out, it is this crossing of an epistemological threshold, by
considering the individual a legitimate object of study that makes Darwin’s theory
revolutionary.2 This revolutionary effect of Darwin's theory is observable not merely
within the natural sciences as such, but has philosophical implications that are wide-
reaching.
Darwin, who claimed to have been inspired by Malthus, was schooled in the
empirical tradition, although he had practically no philosophical formation
whatsoever. His overt adherence was to Baconian principles, but it is the lack of any
philosophical claim that opens his theory to a variety of readings. Thus, in England,
as Gillian Beer has pointed out in Darwin’s Plots, implications of Darwin’s theory
were drawn by writers such as George Eliot and Thomas Hardy from the idea of
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variation and randomness, the “entangled bank” and the multifariousness of life. I
propose to argue that in France, because of the endemic problem of the Revolution, it
was the notion of the individual as a variation of the species that presented an
alternative to thinkers opposed to Rousseau.
Yet, though the language of the organic was prevalent before Darwin’s
Origin of Species, it had the value of analogy and metaphor, no more. The more
profound idea of genealogy, of the individual as determined by ancestry only came
to the fore with Darwin’s theory. Neither for Lamarck nor for Geoffroy Saint-
Hilaire, even less for Cuvier, was the individual of any consequence. Species were
all in the natural sciences in France. It took the English amateur Darwin, and a
near-accidental voyage on the Beagle to come up with a theory based on individual
variation and for evolutionary narrative to acquire the importance it did in the assault
against Rousseau’s volonte and the individu, ideas which were held to be the source
of revolutions. Individuals coming together voluntarily in a social contract would
restructure society. The importance Lamarck attached to will and intention is at least
one reason why his theory was less easily accepted. Darwin’s focus on the
individual in the natural sciences and his later tracing of man’s ancestry to other
species is what led to the language of the organic assuming new significance.
In Chapter I, I shall begin with a brief account of evolutionary theory,
including Buffon's own views on the transmutation of species, articulated a century
before Darwin’s time. I then discuss Lamarck's transformisme and I will specifically
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show that Darwin’s rejection of volition was due to what he saw as a fundamental
flaw in Lamarck’s theory. In discussing Lamarck's theory, I shall show how
Lamarck's theory of volition has its sources in Rousseau, in particular the now-
famous instance of the giraffe that was firmly rejected by Darwin and Wallace. I
shall also discuss the importance of Darwin's theory in relation to the emergence of
the individual as the object of study.
Having defined the Darwinian individual, I trace Darwin’s influence in the
work of Fustel de Coulanges, Renan, and Taine, whether it is indirect, in terms of the
use of language (origins, genealogy, roots) as in the case of Fustel de Coulanges, or
direct, as in the case of Taine, whose use of the opposition individual/species is a
recurring motif. I situate nineteenth-century perceptions of the Enlightenment and
the importance of evolutionary theory in the discourse on the social bond in France.
Darwin’s notion of the individual in the animal kingdom as having a genealogy
going back through species, genus, class, has resonances in Fustel de Coulanges' La
Cite antique (1864) as an argument against Rousseau’s “individual.” I do not suggest
that Darwin's theory was a direct influence, but as Gillian Beer has stated, ideas pass
more easily into the mind when unread (Darwin's Plots, p 4). This unconscious
reading is very palpable in La Cite. I discuss the importance of ancestry and lineage
in La Cite antique where the individual, family, and property are indissolubly bound.
I draw out the anti-Rousseau implications of Fustel's account of antiquity.
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I show how the language of the organic, of evolutionary theory in particular,
had already permeated discourse in disciplines outside the natural sciences, such as
history, philology and literature. I focus on the work of Taine and Renan. Prior to the
Commune, Taine and Renan were already of a positivist bent of mind. They were
instrumental in bringing the notion of science into the prevalent discourse in the .
With the Origin of Species, evolutionary narrative provided a scientific basis
for the concept of the individual with a genealogy. Now, it was science itself that had
proved Rousseau wrong.4 Taine actually cites Darwin in an early work, Histoire de la
litterature anglaise (1863). These two thinkers were already steeped in the language
of scientism before the publication of the Origin. In the case of Renan, Herder, and
Goethe, two major precursors of evolutionary theory, were direct influences. It was
Goethe who, in his last works, laid bare the significance of the quarrel between
Etienne Geofffoy St. Hilaire and Cuvier in 1830, thereby drawing wide attention to
the revolutionary implications of transformisme. Renan is the most overtly
evolutionary of the writers I discuss in this chapter. From a diffuse scientism in La
Vie de Jesus (1863), he moves on to explicit evolutionary narrative in Marc-Aurele
(1882). In the Preface to Marc-Aurele, Renan states that his Histoire des origines du
christianisme is an attempt to trace the embryogeny of Christianity. In the
intervening period, the events of the Paris Commune had occurred. Renan wrote the
Dialogues philosophiques at Versailles, during or after the semaine sanglante. The
anti-Rousseau stance adopted by Renan in his La Reforme morale et intellectuelle
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(1871) and the evolutionary narrative of the Origines converge in the Dialogues. I
discuss the Dialogues in the context of Renan's larger scientism.
As Donzelot has remarked in L’Invention du social, it was Hippolyte Taine
who was by far the most vehement critic of Rousseau. His massive Origines de la
France contemporaine, written in the aftermath of the Paris Commune, often reads
like a tirade against Rousseau. As with Renan, Taine’s early scientism develops into
evolutionary narrative which in turn converges with the political position on the
Paris Commune adopted by Taine. The search for the “origins” of the present
disaster was indistinguishable from the search for the origins of any phenomenon. In
the section on Taine, I trace Taine's development as a thinker, from his inclination
towards empiricism to his increasing preoccupation with the physiological. I discuss
the early collection of essays, Les Philosophes francais du dix-neuvieme siecle, in
which Taine attempts to resolve the conflict between rationalism, known as
spiritualisme in France, and empiricism, a polarity that had been sharpened in the
way Victor Cousin presented the different schools of thought in his lectures at the
Sorbonne. Taine’s scathing critique of Cousin in these essays is as much an attack on
reason, and rationalism as on Cousin personally. The search for a method in the
sciences led Taine to make a move from the empirical to the genealogical. As early
as the Histoire de la litterature anglaise. Taine had stressed the importance of race,
milieu, and moment in the formation of a nation's culture. In the aftermath of the
Paris Commune, the genealogical comes to the fore in the monumental Origines de
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la France contemporaine. If, philosophically, Taine had taken the anti-rationalist
position in his Philosophes. in the Origines. the attack on Reason is a political attack
on the Enlightenment, Rousseau in particular, and the Revolution. Against the raison
raisonnante of the Enlightenment, Taine opposes the prejuge hereditaire which he
calls la raison qui s'ignore. I conclude Chapter I with a brief discussion of Taine's
position on reason.
Taine and Renan were the leading intellectual figures in the latter half of the
nineteenth century. Today they have been largely discredited, partly because of their
right-wing inclinations. Taine’s Origines de la France contemporaine is considered
by some historians to be a counter-revolutionary tract rather than a piece of
historiography.5 Yet, to ignore Taine’s importance in the formation of a generation
of intellectuals and writers who moved progressively to the right- -in the case of
Charles Maurras, to the extreme right and 1 ’Action Francaise- - is to underestimate
the importance of the Enlightenment, or rather, the shadow it cast on the nineteenth
century, in the emergence of an anti-rationalist political trend that was to shape
perceptions of the French nation as such. The writers Barres and Bourget, deeply
influenced by Taine, overtly used evolutionary language, describing themselves as
"struggle-for-lifers."
In Chapter II, “Darwin contra Kant, 'L'Arbre de Monsieur Taine,”’ I
take up a metaphor used by the writer Maurice Barres as the title of a chapter in Les
Deracines and show how the confluence of evolutionary narrative and the anti-
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Rousseau thrust of Taine’s thinking was turned against Taine himself. On Barres’
view, Taine and his generation did not go far enough in their battle against the
Enlightenment. In Les Deracines. Barres takes it upon himself not only to critique
Rousseau and Kant, but Taine’s failure to do so fully. Barres, in a sense, completes
the task that Taine had set himself. His ingeniousness consists in doing so in a
double-edged manner. He takes up the metaphor of the tree that Taine had used in
the Origines and explores its multifarious possibilities to come up with a critique of
Kant, and of what he perceives to be Taine’s revisionism regarding the
Enlightenment.
I believe that the metaphor of the tree can be traced ultimately to Darwin. The
complexity in Barres’ use of Darwin’s metaphor lies in the fact that he mocks
Taine’s use of it to attribute to him Kantian and Rousseauist leanings, whereas Taine
had originally used the metaphor to critique Rousseau. I shall begin with a
descriptive account of the chapter from Les Deracines , which is essentially a
fictionalized version of real-life events. Taine seeks out the young Roemerspracher
(in real life, it was Charles Maurras) because he was impressed by an article that the
young man had written on the aging philosophe.6 He asks the youth (in real life, Paul
Bourget) to accompany him on his daily constitutional to the square des Invalides
even as he advises Roemerspracher to form an association with his peers. He pauses
before a young plane tree and waxes eloquent on the virtues of the tree which he
describes as a “federation bruissante.” I also show how the tree becomes an occasion
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for Barres to critique the Enlightenment and Taine’s generation, a critique that is
central to the novel. At the same time, since Barres and his generation- -Bourget, the
younger Daudet and Maurras- -were enthusiastic social-Darwinists, I weave the
argument through the metaphors of the tree, the sap, and the roots to Darwin’s own
use of the metaphor and demonstrate that Barres and his generation went one step
further than Taine, not only in their irrationalist positions but in their use of
evolutionary narrative to do so.7 I conclude the chapter with a few remarks on how
evolutionary narrative, amid growing fears of rootlessness and disintegration, in late
nineteenth-century France at least, had begun to merge with theories of degeneration.
In a parallel development with evolutionary theory, various bio-medical
theories of degeneration had begun to inform discourse on the social bond. Any
notion of degeneration or regeneration was alien to Darwin’s theory, which allowed
only for extinction. This distinction was obliterated by most thinkers in France. As
Patrick Tort has pointed out, the theory offered in the 1871 The Descent of Man was
only implicit in the 1859 Origin of Species, from which man is completely absent.
French readers of Darwin assimilated the two works and erased the nuances and
implications not only in the works themselves, but in Darwin’s own shift of position
from the Origin to the Descent of Man.8
For the intellectuals who succeeded Taine and Renan, Darwinism and Social
Darwinism meant the same thing. With Spencer becoming an increasingly influential
thinker, Darwin’s theory was assimilated to Social Darwinism. Parallel to this
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assimilation of evolutionary theory, there was an increasing preoccupation with
degeneration as a biological account of social disorder. The major works on this
subject were Prosper Lucas' De l'heredite (1847-50) and Benedict Morel's Traite des
degenerescences (1859). Lucas, who worked at the Hopital Bicetre, wrote a decade
before Darwin's Origin of Species was published. Transformisme was not a
hypothesis that had been accepted yet, Cuvier's fixisme still being the dominant
school of thought. Lucas' theory is of great importance, since he grafts his own
clinical studies of morbidity on to transformiste theories, making it possible for
Taine to use the language of degeneration in his account of the Jacobins in the
Origines when he discusses the Terror. In Lucas' theory of heredity, a sickly species
reproduces itself. His position on transformisme is that species are fixed, and the
various anomalies he writes of are due to a particular species being sickly. Morel's
theory of degeneration is more general and diffuse for he sees degeneresence
pervading all aspects of life and extending into several domains, as the full title
indicates: Traite des degenerescences. physiques, morales et intellectuelles
The bio-medical theories of heredity and degeneration put forward by
Prosper Lucas and Benedict Morel quickly found their way into political and social
discourse. Foremost among the thinkers and writers who used the language of
degeneration was, as I have said, Taine. Zola is known to have modeled his Rougon-
Macquart cycle on Lucas' De l'heredite.
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In Chapter III, " A rebours," I take up another recurring motif in Taine and
show how it is drawn from contemporary theories of degeneration for use against the
Jacobins in a physiological account of the Terror. If philosophically, the Jacobins
were formed by Rousseau, they were biologically pre-determined to play a certain
role in history. The motif I take up is the phrase a rebours. (spelled by Taine as au
rebours). which, along with similar expressions, for example, au contraire. is used to
account for the Jacobin psyche. It is also the title of the novel by Huysmans that
caused a sensation and led to the author’s break with Zola. I show how the same
concept, a rebours. can acquire political significance when a bio-medical explanation
of social strife and political extremism is sought, while remaining g a purely genetic
concept when aberrant individual behavior in a bourgeois/aristocratic milieu is the
object of study. The notion of a rebours as used by Taine is indicative of how deeply
evolutionary narrative had penetrated all discourse. The evolutionary theory is
Lamarckian here rather than Darwinian, in that it allows for the possibility of
regression. As organs are atrophied through disuse, so also, on Taine's view, are
certain faculties of the mind.
Huysmans’ novel A Rebours. apparently does not have any political
content. However if one turns to Max Nordau's reading of the novel in Degeneration.
one sees the larger social and cultural ramifications of degeneration. Max Nordau, a
clinical practitioner, was bom to a Hungarian Jewish family in Vienna and moved to
Paris where he trained under the psychiatrist Charcot. His 1893 work, Degeneration.
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is a synthesis of the various bio-medical theories of degeneration. Among others, he
cites Taine as an authority. His work is also a scathing critique of emerging
modernist trends in culture which he considers symptomatic of degeneration. Among
the degeneres he castigates is Huysmans. Huysmans’ self-conscious over-playing of
artifice is as much a response to the mal-de-siecle as it is a “coup terrible au
naturalisme,” to use Zola's phrase. The central character of A Rebours. Des
Esseintes, the last of an inbred aristocratic line, finds intellectual and cultural life in
Paris dissatisfying and meaningless. He withdraws to a retreat at Fontenay-aux-
Roses near Paris, and in his life-style, does everything a rebours. Having furnished
his house in the most unnatural way, with mechanical fish in an aquarium and a
gilded tortoise for company, he reflects on contemporary art and literature, passing in
review the work of Flaubert, de Goncourt, and Zola among others. Nordau fails to
see that Huysmans’ A Rebours is a tongue-in-cheek critique of contemporary trends.
He sees in Des Esseintes only symptoms of the degenerescence afflicting European
society.
The bio-medical theories of degeneration that informed discourse in the
latter half of the century merged with fears of national decline and social
disintegration after France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian war in 1870. The Third
Republic emerged from the humiliation of Sedan. With the declaration of the Paris
Commune, the consensus between the bourgeoisie and the working-class broke
down. For the bourgeoisie, the Paris Commune of 1871 once again raised the specter
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of revolution. The ferocity with which the Communards were crushed during the
semaine sanglante made it clear that the republicans in power meant to keep a firm
hand on power.
But this did not prove to be quite the case. The Republic led a precarious
existence, even with most Communards dead or exiled. If, during the annee terrible
(1870-1871), the threat had come first from the Prussians, and then the working-
class, in the first years of the Republic the threat came from within: Bonapartism was
a force to be reckoned with, while the royalists, with the support of the clergy, were
attempting a comeback. With the boulangiste crisis, the republicans felt more
threatened than ever. These fears, however, merely reflected at the political level the
sense of disintegration that had come to permeate French society. The crisis of the
Republic, ever endemic, now became a crisis of society itself. The theories of
degeneration that had come to dominate discourse were now internalized as the fear
of national degeneration increased. The falling birth rate, the growing individualism
brought on by increased industrialization, and the increasing militancy of the
working-class fueled these fears. National decline, following the defeat in the
Franco-Prussian war, became synonymous with cultural and social decline. At the
same time, theories of regeneration began to emerge, in an attempt to lay the
foundations for reform and the elusive consensus that successive revolutions had
made impossible. Thinkers and writers in the Third Republic tried to address these
problems in various ways. Taine, as we have seen, devoted himself to the Origines.
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seeking a causal explanation of the present crisis in terms of the past. Renan
immediately proposed a remedy in La Reforme morale et intellectuelle. Such
discourse on order and consensus was enmeshed with policy as it was being shaped.
The argument for reform, first made by Renan, and taken up in several articles
published in the Revue des deux mondes and the Revue philosophique was
institutionalized through the introduction of reform in higher education. At the same
time, since it was felt that the superiority of German science was responsible for the
Prussian victory, promising scholars were sent to German universities.9 The
University was re-structured so as to be wholly in the service of the Republic. Chairs
and courses were created for scholars and teachers whose political positions, while
vaguely liberal, were almost symmetrical with the Republicans in power. Renan’s
call for colonization in La Reforme as a remedy for France’s woes was echoed in
articles appearing in the Revue des Deux Mondes. This was concurrent with the
increased ferocity with which the major European powers engaged in the scramble
for colonies.
In Chapter IV, Solidarity: from the Mechanical to the Organic. I consider the
effect of the annee terrible on the episteme, especially in the science of
historiography and in the new science of sociology. I begin by briefly examining the
responses to the annee terrible by intellectuals such as Renan, Taine, and Fustel de
Coulanges and the direction taken by these thinkers and writers after 1870-71.1 also
trace the discourse on the social bond in the Revue philosophique^ which, among
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19
other periodicals of the time, played an important role in bringing together various
social theories from England and Germany. Theodule Robot as editor of the Revue,
and author of De l'heredite (1885), was instrumental in fostering a climate in which
physiological accounts of human behavior came to play an increasingly important
role. In the pages of the Revue one may see how theories of degeneration intersected
with theories of regeneration, of society as an organism.
I focus on the early work of Emile Durkheim and his theory of organic
solidarity. Durkheim realized that it was not only Rousseau, but Marx, who had to be
countered. The idea of will, intention, and volonte generale (Rousseau) and class
struggle (Marx) had to be replaced by a theory of society in which the social bond
was perceived as organic and therefore indissoluble. Durkheim, as against Taine, for
instance, privileges the regenerative aspects of organicist discourse. I trace the
sources of Durkheim's early work, to certain German thinkers such as Tonnies and
Schaeffle and show how he put forward with a theory of society and the social bond
that would deal both with class struggle and the individualism that utilitarian
philosophy promoted. With the division of labor, there is greater social cohesion,
because, instead of the mechanical solidarity that prevails in primitive societies
through resemblance, there is organic solidarity where the individuals relate through
function to form the whole that is society. I shall discuss the notion of solidarity that
Durkheim theorized, first in articles and reviews published in the Revue
philosophique and then in De la Division du travail social (1893). I argue that
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Durkheim’s theory of organic solidarity was essentially directed at the notion of
class struggle.
In particular, I discuss the concept of anomie as articulated in the section on
abnormal forms of the division of labor. The term anomie which can variously be
translated as disorder or disintegration was used to describe a wide range of social
ills including class struggle. Durkheim developed this concept more fully in Le
Suicide (1897) and since then it has become an important concept within sociology.
Philippe Besnard has provided an exhaustive account of the concept in L'Anomie et
ses usages, basing himself largely on Le Suicide. For the purposes of this
dissertation, I limit myself to what Durkheim calls “the anomic division of labor,”
under which category which he brings in class antagonisms. He is careful not to
mention Marx when he discusses the question of class struggle, but actually cites
him as an authority (source not indicated) when he discusses the third abnormal form
of the division of labor, the one that occurs when there is not enough work for the
worker because of an uneven distribution of work. I suggest that by citing Marx as
an economist, Durkheim neutralizes his importance as a proponent of class struggle.
I conclude the chapter with a few remarks on the movement called
solidarisme. The Radical Democrat politician Leon Bourgeois invented the doctrine
of solidarism which he theorized in Solidarity (1896). Bourgeois attempted to put
into practice the different notions of solidarity that had been articulated by
Renouvier, Fouillee, and others. Solidarism, which soon became the official credo of
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the republicans, was a movement that sought the middle ground between the claims
of the liberals, on the one hand, and the socialists on the others. Solidarism was
associated with various cooperative movements. It represented a policy of reform,
reparation, and regeneration. As Judith Stone has pointed out, Bourgeois was quick
to see that the falling birth rate was one major source of the fear of national decline.
The idea of regeneration that underpins the notion of solidarity and solidarism was
translated into the political and social spheres in the form of legislation. A number of
laws were passed in an attempt to improve the condition of women. These included
the reduction of the working day and free primary education. By fostering an image
of women as nurturing mothers, the Republicans hoped that the birth rate would not
fall further. The consensus which had been sought between the liberals and the
socialists was eventually achieved through reform and through cooperatives such as
the Ligue nationale de la prevoyance et de la mutualite and the Alliance cooperative
intemationale. If, in Durkheim's theory of organic solidarity, class struggle was
neutralized, in practice, the various societes de secours mutuels and cercles
populaires sought to neutralize class struggle by involving the worker in the process
of capitalist production. The result was that with increasing reform, the prospects of
revolution receded.
Although I argue that historiography and sociology had ideological
underpinnings, it does not follow that the sciences that developed followed the
ideological course of the thinkers who had made them possible. This is particularly
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true of Durkheimian sociology. In a brief epilogue, I situate the legacies of some of
the thinkers I have discussed and show how divergent they had become. I point to
the fact that Durkheim had distanced himself from Fustel de Coulanges while
Charles Maurras and L’Action ffanfaise claimed him as their own.
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Notes
’As early as in 1851-52, while a student at the Ecole Normale Superieure, Fustel de
Coulanges wrote in a fragnent entitled “De la classe eclairee d’une nation” that there
was an elite that fate had favoured by way of privilege and intellect whereas it was
given to the crowd, the inferior class, to toil (Fonds Fustel de Coulanges,
Bibliotheque nationale de France, Travaux d’Ecole Normale, 1851-1852, carton 20).
His best known work, La Cite antique (1864), is written in the same vein.
Michel Foucault. Pits et Ecrits. II, 32-33. Foucault points to the fact that it was
Darwin’s consideration of the individual as a legitimate object of study and his
basing observations on individual variations that make his theory revolutionary.
•5
This was largely due to Cuvier’s fixisme, although his opponent, the naturalist
Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire did not pay any more attention to the individual as
such. Curiously it was Buffon who, a century before, had said: “II n ’existe
reellement dans la nature que des individus.” (“Discours sur la maniere d’etudier et
de traiter l’Histoire naturelle” (1749) I, 38). In the Histoire naturelle generate et
particuliere though, Buffon says that individuals are nothing in themselves, but have
value in that they belong to collections of similar individuals. (Cited by Isidore
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in Histoire naturelle generate des regnes organiques II, 270-
271). Saint-Hilaire also cites Rousseau who echoes Buffon in his Dictionnaire des
termes d’usage en botanique in the entry for Aphrodite and adds the remark: “Est-ce
une simple rencontre avec Buffon?”
4 Renan's position on Rousseau is ambivalent. In 1848, he held fairly liberal
positions. After 1871, he turned against Rousseau. Cf. Chapter I, p. 67 below.
5 McClelland, Introduction, The French Right. 16.
6 Barres, in Mes Cahiers has an entry which says that it was Anatole France. (Mes
Cahiers, ). Jean Borie, however states that it was MaurrasTLes Deracines. )
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2 4
7 Maurras was in fact a self-proclaimed rationalist in his later work. On this point,
one must be careful to distinguish between Barres’ irrationalism and Maurras’ claims
to be in favor of Cartesian rationalism. I believe however, that since Maurras pits
Descartes and Pascal against the German Kant, his later claims notwithstanding, he
is within the Barresian tradition of a blind irrational nationalism. Cf. La Republique
ou le roi for the correspondence between Barres and Maurras.
8 In the preface to the second edition (1874) of The Descent of Man. Darwin
underplays the importance of natural selection and adopts a position closer to that of
Lamarck in the matter of constant use and disuse of organs. (The Descent of Man.
9 Apart from Emile Durkheim, Camille Jullian, also a pupil of Fustel de Coulanges
was sent to Germany to study historiography, cf Hartog, Fran?ois, Le Dix-neuvieme
siecle et l’histoire. 198.
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Part I: Darwin contra Rousseau
Chapter I: Giraffes and Ancestors: Rousseau. Lamarck, and
Darwin
Evolutionary theory did not come into being with Charles Darwin's Origin of
Species. Long before Darwin, various notions of evolution had been articulated in
the works of Georges-Leclerc Buffon, Darwin's grandfather Erasmus Darwin, Robert
Chambers, Charles Lyell, Montesquieu, Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
Immanuel Kant, Johann-Gottfried Herder, Johann-Wolfgang Goethe, and Jean-
Baptiste Lamarck.1 The term “evolution” itself was used in eighteenth-century
England with quite a different connotation from what it has today. It was more or
less synonymous with ontogeny, the development of an individual from the embryo
stage to the adult. Naturalists who had expressed ideas about evolution as it is now
understood were concerned above all with the transformation of species, that is,
phylogeny.
In France the question of the transformation of species was known as
transformisme. It is Jean-Baptiste Lamarck who is associated with this theory
although in the Philosonhie Zoologique (henceforth, Philosophies written in 1809,
he used neither the term transformisme nor the term evolution. The question o f the
transmutation of species had arisen over half a century earlier in the context of the
system of classification then in place. The great Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus
had devised a system of taxonomy that had been widely accepted as the norm.
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Among other things, he had laid down that the individual was not an object of
scientific interest.2 Therefore, all the precursors of Darwin were concerned primarily
with the transmutation of species. Present-day natural scientists consider Buffon to
be the first real precursor of both Lamarck and Darwin. Buffon took the position
against Linnaeus, in the Histoire naturelle generate et particuliere. that classification
was arbitrary. Buffon occupies an unusual position in the eighteenth century not only
because he was a precursor of evolutionary theory, but also because he was an
important influence on the thinkers of the Enlightenment, Rousseau and Kant most
significantly. The fact that he was a naturalist did not exclude the possibility of his
reflecting on philosophical questions. Likewise, thinkers such as Rousseau, Diderot,
Kant, Herder and Goethe chose to ponder questions of natural science.4 Diderot, in
fact, cites Buffon when he explicitly takes a position on the transmutation of species,
on the possibility that man could hypothetically have evolved from other species, a
hypothesis that Buffon firmly rejected. Diderot, however, raised this hypothesis in
the context of method in the sciences, which was also Buffon's starting point.5
Buffon's concern was the same as that of some of the Enlightenment
thinkers: how do we know what we know, what faculty is there in us that allows us
to cognize objects outside of us, objects that are material? In the Histoire naturelle
de l'homme. Buffon is dealing with the same philosophical question that Kant was
faced with: the function of reason in the cognitive process. Hume gave reason a back
seat, thereby driving Kant to re-instate it even as he rejected the rationalists' claims
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on behalf of reason6. Buffon was preoccupied with the same question as Kant, but
from the standpoint of natural science; his concern was with man's place in the
natural order. In Buffon, the discourse on reason overlapped the question of the
transformation of species because he wished to draw a line very firmly between man
and other species, between the organic existence of man and his capacity to reason.
In so doing, he inadvertently opened the way for a transformisme that was gradually
to be made explicit by Rousseau and finally would emerge in Lamarck's theory.
The influence of Buffon on Rousseau has been the object of study by Jean
Starobinski and others, but as Amor Chemi has pointed out in “Degeneration et
depravation: Rousseau chez Buffon,” this influence is conceived in anthropological
terms. Chemi himself focuses rather narrowly on the idea of degeneration as a motif
that recurs in Rousseau's work.7 For the purposes of my argument, I would like to
trace Buffon's influence on Rousseau specifically in the matter of transformisme.
since the latter was to influence Lamarck. From the standpoint of evolutionary
theory, the question is not one of whether Rousseau too demarcated a metaphysical
frontier between man and animal, as Starobinski would have it, but of how notions
such as nerfectibilite and the individu. which occur in the Histoire. were developed
by Rousseau with a different connotation and were later to become the basis of
Lamarck's theory. The very metaphysical frontier between man and animal that
Rousseau drew- -freedom- -when read with Buffon's argument against Linnaeus- -
nature consists of individuals- -led to the possibility of Lamarckian theory. Where
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Rousseau opposes instinct to freedom, Lamarck crosses that very metaphysical
frontier in the opposite direction by attributing will and intention to animals. I would
like to show how Buffon, precisely because he wished to differentiate between man
and animal, allowed Rousseau to turn the key to a theory of the transmutation of
species.
Buffon and Rousseau
Buffon, in his approach to natural history, started with the problem of
method. He believed in observation and experience and critiqued the idea of systems
Above all, he rejected attempts to see too much order in nature, to impose arbitrary
laws on natural laws. In so doing, he was addressing problems of taxonomy and the
arbitrary classifications that were then in place, largely due to the system introduced
by Linnaeus in 1735. In the "Discours sur la maniere d'etudier" which prefaced
volume one of the Histoire naturelle (1749), he was concerned with refuting
n
Linnaeus, for whom the system and taxonomy was all. In arguing against the
system, Buffon was really trying to say that no general method could operate in the
natural sciences and that only close observation and experience could help us know,
and only partially and unevenly at that, the processes in Nature. In the perception of
nature being chaotic rather than ordered, Buffon anticipates Darwin, even though, in
volume two, in the section on Histoire naturelle de l'homme. published the same
year, he explicitly rejects evolutionary theory. There is a physical resemblance
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between man and other animals, particularly quadrupeds, but, he adds, "toutes ces
ressemblances sont exterieures et ne suffisent pas pour nous faire prononcer que la
nature de l'homme est semblable a celle de l'animal." To affirm this, he posits an
inside, a sens interieur and an outside, that is matter. Since we cannot know what
goes on in the mind or interieur of an animal, we can begin at least by knowing
ourselves:
Nous sommes done certains que la sensation interieure est tout a fait
differente de ce qui peut la causer, et nous voyons deja que s'il existe des
choses hors de nous, elles sont en elle-memes tout a fait differentes de ce que
nous les jugeons. (Histoire naturelle, 432-433)
He goes on to argue that it is reason, sometimes described as the sens
interieur and sometimes ame that constitutes the absolute barrier that separates man
from all other species. There is a tension in the Histoire between the arguments used
to refute the system (of Linnaeus) and the desire to locate reason on the frontier
between man and the regne animal. This tension is most perceptible in the passage
alluded to by the naturalist Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and cited by Michel
Foucault in a somewhat different context.9 Having elaborated the manner in which
the sens interieur operated, Buffon goes on to explain why he has addressed the
matter in the first place:
Mais je crains de m'etre deja trop etendue sur un sujet que bien des gens
regarderont peut-etre comme etranger a notre sujet, des considerations sur
fame doivent-elles se trouver dans un livre d'Histoire naturelle? J'avoue que
je serois peu touche de cette reflexion, si je me sentois assez de force pour
traiter dignement des matieres aussi elevees, et que je n'ai abrege mes
pensees que par la crainte de ne pouvoir comprendre ce grand sujet dans
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toute son etendue: pourquoi vouloir retrancher de l'Histoire Naturelle de
l'homme, l'histoire de la partie la plus noble de son etre ? pourquoi l'avilir
mal a propos et vouloir nous forcer a ne le voir que comme un animal, tandis
qu'il est en effet d'une nature tres differente, tres distinguee et si superieure a
celle des betes, qu'il faudroit etre aussi peu eclaire qu'elles le sont pour
pouvoir les confondre?
II est vrai que l'homme ressemble aux animaux par ce qu'il a de
materiel, et qu'en voulant le comprendre dans remuneration de tous les etres
naturels, on est force de le mettre dans la classe des animaux; mais comme je
l'ai deja fait sentir, la Nature n'a ni classes ni genres, elle ne comprend que
des individus; ces genres et ces classes sont l'ouvrage de notre esprit, ce ne
sont que des idees de convention, et lorsque nous mettons l'homme dans l'une
de ces classes, nous ne changeons pas la realite de son etre, nous ne
derogeons point a sa noblesse, nous n'alterons pas sa condition, enfin nous
n'otons rien a la superiorite de la nature humaine sur celle des brutes, nous ne
faisons que placer l'homme avec ce qui lui ressemble le plus, en dormant
meme a la partie materielle de son etre le premier rang .(Buffon, Histoire
naturelle generate et particuliere, 436-437; emphasis added)
Beyond reaffirming Cartesian dualism in this passage, between body and
soul, between the etre organise and the essential nature of man, Buffon is making a
philosophical claim. In stating that taxonomy is an act of the mind, that notions of
class and genus are just arbitrary categories imposed on the natural world, Buffon
points in the direction of empiricism. In so doing, he sets free the individual. What
exists in reality is the individual, regardless of which species it belongs to. By
depriving classification of any ontological basis, Buffon can posit the essential
nature of man as the only reality in nature: "nous ne changeons pas la realite de son
etre." In order to this, he has to first oppose the individual to class and genus as
constituting the only reality in nature. The very argument used against Linnaeus
allows for the individual to emerge center-stage. As we shall see, in Rousseau, this
individual, first conceived as opposed to species, in the Discours sur l'origine et les
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fondements de l'inegalite parmi les hommes (1755), becomes the autonomous
individual of Du Contrat social. Rousseau, in his Discours, synthesized certain
basic notions drawn from Buffon but towards a transformisme that Buffon explicitly
rejected. The latter's position in the Histoire Naturelle is exactly the opposite of the
one taken by Darwin over a century later, as we shall see below. What is curious is
that even as he declares that there are only individuals in Nature, in the Histoire
naturelle de l'homme, Buffon introduces the notion of species as if species too had an
ontological basis. If class and genus were arbitrary categories, species seem to have
some intermediary status, because what Buffon wished to argue was that man is
different from animals. He could not argue this by pitting an individual human being
against an individual beast. He had to argue that man is of a different species
altogether, by virtue of the fact that he can command and domesticate animals, that
he has the capacity to speak, because he has the capacity for thought, for a train of
ideas, the ability to connect one idea with another.1 0 Any perfectibility in animals,
such as the bee, for instance, comes mechanically, through repetition. Man alone is
capable of increased perfectibility, and infinite variation. In pointing to the difference
between man and other animals, the apes in particular, Buffon says that it is the
ability to speak and communicate thought that distinguishes man from them.
Animals do not have the capacity to think:
Mais on ne les a jamais vu s'entretenir ou discourir ensemble; ils n'ont done
pas meme un ordre, une suite de pensees a leur fa9on, bien loin d'en avoir de
semblables aux notres; il ne se passe a leur interieur rien de suivi, rien
d'ordonne, puisqu'ils n'expriment rien par des signes combinez et arrangez;
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ils n'ont done pas la pensee, meme au plus petit degre. (Histoire Naturelle. II,
439)
And again: "C'est done parce qu'une langue suppose une suite de pensees, que les
animaux n'en ont aucune"(II, 440). He spells out clearly what it means to think, the
capacity to reason: "l'homme est un etre raisonnable et l'animal est un etre sans
raison" (444). Once he has made this point clear, he is not averse to allowing for a
transformisme within human kind. What Lamarck and Darwin were later to argue for
species as such is present in Buffon as variation and transformisme within the human
race. In the chapter on "Varietes dans l'espece humaine," Buffon undertakes an
extensive description of all the human races to show how races overlapped and
flowed into each other. He concludes:
Tout concourt done a prouver que le genre humain n'est pas compose
d'especes essentiellement differentes entre elles, qu'au contraire, il n'y a eu
originairement qu'une seule espece d'hommes, qui, s'etant multiplie et
repandue sur toute la surface de la terre a subi differents changements par
l'influence du climat, par la difference de la nourriture, par celle de la
maniere de vivre, par les maladies epidemiques, et aussi par le melange varie
a l'infini des individus plus ou moins ressemblans (Histoire naturelle. III,
529-530).
This point was to be taken up and elaborated by both Kant and Herder later
in the century in Kant's Idea of a Universal History (Idee zu einer allgemeiner
Geschichte in weltburgerlicher Absichte. 1785) and in Herder's Outlines o f a
Philosophy of the History of Man (Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der
Menschheit (1784). Nearly all the elements of Lamarckian and Darwinian theory are
present here, but the metaphysical barrier that Buffon erects between man and animal
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necessarily excludes the idea of evolutionism. Buffon allows for a parallel
development in the animal world, with the same sort of gradations, but this barrier,
this frontier called reason, this capacity for a striving towards perfection excludes the
transformist hypothesis. It is this idea of perfectibility, conceived very differently by
Rousseau, not related to reason as such, that paves the way for Lamarck's theory.
In Rousseau's Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inegalite parmi les
hommes, the idea of perfectibility converges with the idea of degeneration and
deterioration to produce a double movement in the history of man. Where for
Buffon, man resembled animals in his organic being, for Rousseau, the analogy
extends into the mental and social realm. He was after all concerned with the origins
of inequality, which he locates at the point where man passes from the etat de nature
to the etat social. Man in the savage state is closer to the animal world than he is to
civilized man. By the constant use of analogy, Rousseau speaks of man and animal
as if they were interchangeable species, even though nominally, he too maintains a
metaphysical frontier between the two. What he affirms for man becomes the source
of Lamarck's transformisme and Darwin's own theory of variation and natural
selection:
II est aise de voir que c'est dans ces changements successifs de la constitution
humaine qu'il faut chercher la premiere origine des differences qui
distinguent les hommes, lesquels d'un commun avis sont naturellement aussi
egaux entr'eux que l'etoient les animaux de chaque espece, avant que diverses
causes Physiques eussent introduit dans quelques-unes les varietes que nous
y remarquons. En effet, il n'est pas con9evable que ces premiers
changements, par quelque moyen qu'ils soient arrives, aient altere tout a la
fois et de la meme maniere tous les Individus de l'espece; mais les uns s'etant
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perfectionnes ou deteriores, et ayant acquis diverses qualites qui n'etaient
point inherentes a leur nature, les autres resterent plus longtemps dans leur
Etat originel; et telle fut parmi les hommes la premiere source de l'inegalite,
qu'il est plus aise de demontrer ainsi en general, que d'en assigner avec
precision les veritables causes (Preface. Discours, lvi).
As has been pointed out by several writers, Buffon's influence is clearly
evident in the Discours. Since Rousseau's primary aim is to locate inequality in the
etat social, he must argue that there was no inequality in the state of nature. In order
to do this, he makes the analogy with other species. He borrows from Buffon not
only elements from the passage cited above on the different races of man, but uses
the concept of perfectibility in a way that is considerably different. For Buffon, who
introduced the neologism “perfectionner,” the capacity for perfectibility is what
distinguishes man from other species.1 1 This capacity coincides with his capacity to
reason, both are inherent in the nature of man. For Rousseau, it is not so. Elsewhere,
he states explicitly that the capacity to reason is not inherent. What is really
significant about this passage is that in allowing for the possibility of perfectibility or
deterioration, as the source of individual variation, Rousseau anticipates Lamarck.
For Buffon, nerfectibilite is a function of the essential nature of man. In Rousseau, it
is consequent to circumstantial— climactic and other— conditions. These conditions
can also make man deteriorate. The concepts of degeneration, and deterioration, are
central to Buffon's work, but he was to publish De la degeneration des animaux
about ten years after Rousseau's Discours appeared. Elements of this theory are
present, in the important chapter, “De L'Asne” in volume four of the Histoire, which
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appeared in 1753. The donkey, on Buffon's view, appears at first to be a "cheval
degenere," but is, in fact, a different species, because although the horse and the
donkey can be mated and produce off-spring, the new individual cannot be
reproduced as a new species. The concept of degeneration here is almost
synonymous with variation.1 2
As far as the Discours is concerned, it is the manner in which Rousseau
juxtaposes terms in the phrase “s'etant perfectionnes ou deteriores” that makes this
opposition significant for evolutionary theory. Buffon too opposes “perfection” and
“degeneration” but, as Patrick Tort has pointed out in La Pensee hierarchique et
revolution, this is because of the creationist position that he reverts to. On Tort's
1 ” 3
view, perfection lies at the origin, and degeneration is its historical perversion. For
all that Rousseau shares Buffon's general epistemological framework, and even
nominally makes concessions to creationism, on the question of perfection, he differs
radically. In Buffon, the striving for perfection leads to greater and greater perfection
as human history progresses. For Rousseau, the progress of human history does not
represent greater perfection, because society is unequal today. One must seek the
origins of inequality, not in Nature, but at that point in time when man made the
transition from the etat de nature to the etat social. In the Discours there are two
kinds of origins: an “original” hypothetical etat de nature that has ceased to exist, and
an origin that is the source of man's present state. I shall discuss the question of
origins more fully below in the context of the nineteenth-century thinkers'
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preoccupation with origins. What is important here is that the origins of inequality lie
in the appearance of variations among men, with some becoming more perfect and
others deteriorating due to various reasons. However, Rousseau uses the reflexive
verb, “se perfectionner”. This implies that both chance and will could be causal
factors in variation. The capacity to make oneself perfect implies will and intention.
If one reads this notion of perfectibility with the idea of freedom, which is what
constitutes the metaphysical frontier between animal and man in the Discours, we
have the beginnings of Lamarck's transformisme.
The other motif that recurs in the Discours, the individu. can also be traced
back to the Histoire. Buffon uses the word “individual” in two different senses. In his
attempt to refute Linnaeus' system, he positions the individual, as I have pointed out,
in opposition to class, genus, and species. He also uses the concept of individuality to
oppose man to animal. Along with perfectibility, it is the individuality of each man
that makes him different from animals. He opposes this individuality to the
uniformity to be found within other species:
D'ou peut venir cette uniformite dans tous les ouvrages des animaux?
Pourquoi chaque espece ne fait-elle jamais que la meme chose, de la meme
fa?on? Et pourquoi chaque individu ne la fait-il ni mieux ni plus mal qu'un
autre individu? Y a-t-il de plus forte preuve que leurs operations ne sont que
des resultats mecaniques et purement materiels? Car s'ils avaient la moindre
etincelle de la lumiere qui nous eclaire, on trouverait au m oins de la variete si
l'on ne voyait pas de la perfection dans leurs ouvrages, chaque individu de la
meme espece serait quelque chose d'un peu different de ce qu'aurait fait un
autre individu; mais non, tous travaillent sur le meme modele, l'ordre de leurs
actions est trace dans l'espece entiere, il n'appartient point a l'individu, et si
on voulait attribuer une ame aux animaux, on serait oblige a n'en faire qu'une
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pour chaque espece, a laquelle chaque individu participerait egalement.
(Buffon, Histoire naturelle, 441)
He goes on to conclude that the infinite variety and diversity in the work of man is
due to the individual soul of each man. To the question why man prefers to innovate
rather than to imitate, he says "c'est parce que notre ame est a nous, qu'elle est
independante de celle d'un autre, que nous n'avons rien de commun avec notre
espece que la matiere de notre corps" (442).
This soul is what constitutes our individuality; it is also what allows us to
reason. Every individual in the human species is different, which is not true for
animals. There is a clear contradiction with the earlier statement, "il y a dans la
nature que d'individus et point d'especes." If there were no species, onto logically
speaking, the question of hypothetically attributing a soul to species in the animal
world could not arise. As I have remarked earlier, there is a tension between Buffon's
attempt to refute Linnaeus and his anthropology. The source of that tension lies in his
desire to reject any notion of evolutionism, as far as man is concerned.
Rousseau too uses the term individual in opposition to species, but since he
does so in the context of inequality, the "individu" becomes synonymous with
inequality, whereas equality and uniformity become one in the state of nature. This is
a consequence of the shift in the metaphysical frontier which places man in the etat
sauvage closer to the animal world. This is clear from the passage cited above.
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However, Roussseau goes one step further. In his desire to affirm that inequality did
not exist in nature, he makes differences among men a function of habit:
En effet, il est aise de voir qu'entre les differences qui distinguent les
hommes, plusieurs passent pour naturelles qui sont uniquement l'ouvrage de
l'habitude et des divers genres de vie que les hommes adoptent dans la
societe. Ainsi un temperament robuste ou delicat, la force ou la faiblesse qui
en dependent, viennent souvent plus de la maniere dure ou effeminee dont on
a ete eleve que de la constitution primitive des corps (Rousseau, Discours.
87)
Habit, as we shall see below, is a constitutive element of Lamarck's theory.
As far Rousseau's individual is concerned, the variation between individuals is
largely due to circumstance. Thus far, the term “individual” is used in the
classificatory sense. But Rousseau also posits the individual as standing in
opposition to society. Man in the etat sauvage was alone, wandering about in the
forest: "sans parole, sans domicile, sans guerre et sans liaisons, sans nul de ses
semblables, sans nul desir de leur nuire, peut etre meme sans jamais en reconnaitre
aucun individuellement" (85). Buffon's double-edged use of the concept of
individual recurs here, but we have a different kind of contradiction. On the one
hand, there were no differences between men in the state of nature, they were equal,
like other animals. The analogy with animal species is not just metaphorical.
Equality in this passage, and right through the Discours, is synonymous with
uniformity, in the biological sense. On the other hand, man in the etat de nature was
a solitary creature. In the Discours, the human species is constituted by individuals
who came together in their transition from the etat sauvage to the etat social.
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The implications of this concept of the individual are twofold. We have the
beginnings of the theory that Rousseau was to develop in Du Contrat social and that
was to be the object of attack in the next century. We also have elements of Darwin's
theory, in which individual variation is the key to transmutation of species. This is
not to suggest that there was an empirical influence. But in a hypothetical way,
Rousseau anticipates many of Darwin's notions. The individuality of man that
Buffon insisted upon as being an essential characteristic of the human species
becomes in Rousseau an ontological and material condition. Rousseau considers the
solitary individual man as being ontologically prior to species. Thus, the individual
in the classificatory sense and the individual as opposed to society become one and
the same in the person of man in the etat de nature. In the preface, this is stated fairly
explicitly. Having outlined what he undertakes to do, to trace the history of man in
nature, Rousseau address “Man”:
C'est pour ainsi dire la vie de ton espece que je te vais decrire d'apres les
qualites que tu as re?ues, que ton education et tes habitudes ont pu depraver,
mais qu'elles n'ont pu detruire. II y a, je le sens, un age auquel l'homme
individuel voudrait s'arreter; tu chercheras l'age auquel tu desirerais que ton
Espece fut arretee (Discours. 7)
Where Buffon assigned species an ambiguous ontological status, Rousseau
did not hesitate to say that the human species actually existed. However, it was
constituted, through social contract. The individual is prior. In this sense, Rousseau
anticipates Darwin too, although it is in Lamarck's theory that one may find
resonances of Rousseau. Lamarck did not focus on individual variation as much as
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4 0
Darwin did, but he did re-assert Buffon's statement that in nature, only individuals,
as against species had real existence.
Rousseau and Lamarck
Before I make the textual comparison between Rousseau's Discours and
Lamarck's Philosophie zoologique. I would like to sketch the broad outlines of
Lamarck's theory. In the Philosophie zoologique (1809), he sought to account for the
transformation of species from the simplest to the most complex of organisms within
a broader philosophical framework, hence his use of the term philosophie. The
question he sought to answer was: "en quoi consiste reellement la vie?"(54).
Lamarck's attempt in the Philosophie was to lay the foundations for biology as an
autonomous science. He is the inventor of the term biologie. Until then, in the
eighteenth century, in what we would today call the life sciences, the concern was
primarily with taxonomy. It was in the various attempts to classify species that the
question of their transformation arose. Until Lamarck articulated his theory, species
were considered immutable, the work of the Creator. For Lamarck though, it was
what all living organisms had in common that led him to believe that the more
complex organisms had developed out of the simpler ones. He noticed that the most
simple organism (which he also called organization) had no particular organ or
faculty of its own, only those shared by all living bodies. By considering the simplest
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41
of organisms that he felt that he could answer the question of what constituted the
conditions necessary for existence. Since these conditions were present in their
simplest form, he then wanted to know how such an organism, due to some kind of
change, was able to give rise to more complex organisms.
His answer: it was the continued and habitual use of an organ that led to its
development, strengthening, and growth in terms of size whereas neglect, and
habitual failure in its use led to its deterioration, reduction, and eventual
disappearance. From this he concluded that a change in circumstances forced the
individuals of a race of animals to change their habits, leading the less frequently
used organs to disappear, while the ones used more often would develop more and
acquire vigor, and a proportional dimension. Lamarck attributed to changing
circumstances the power to create new needs in animals which lead them to new
actions. New actions, when repeated, had the power to create new habits and
penchants. Finally, the more or less frequent use of an organ led to modification of
the organ, either by strengthening it and making it larger, or by weakening it, making
it thinner, and attenuating it, or even making it disappear altogether. This is the core
of Lamarck's evolutionary theory: the importance of circumstance, need, and habit,
the last being a function of volition. The other central tenet of his theory, which was
to become a bone of contention between Lamarckians and Darwinists a century later,
was that acquired characteristics could be transmitted to the embryo.
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I venture to suggest that in some of these ideas, Lamarck was influenced by
Rousseau. As I have remarked earlier, nineteenth-century writers such as Isidore
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and A. Giard have pointed out that Rousseau was a precursor
of evolutionary theory. The naturalist Bourguin has written on Lamarck's
accompanying the philosopher on his botanizing rambles.1 4 It is the conceptual
similarity that I wish to establish here. In the passages I have cited above from
Rousseau, the question of changing circumstances accounting for variability in the
human species is present, as are the ideas of habit, perfectibility, and deterioration. It
is however in the matter of volition that Rousseau's influence is most discernible.
The now-famous example of the giraffe, cited by most writers as being the pivot on
which the Lamarck-Darwin controversy turned in the mid-nineteenth century, may
be traced back to Rousseau.
In Part II of the Discours, the latter writes:
Telle fut la condition de l'homme naissant; telle fut la vie d'un animal borne
d'abord aux pures sensations, et profitant a peine des dons que lui offroit la
Nature, loin de songer a lui rien arracher; mais il se presenta bientot des
difficultes; il fallut apprendre a les vaincre: la hauteur des Arbres, qui
l'empechoit d'atteindre a leurs fruits, la concurrence des animaux qui
cherchait a s'en nourrir, la ferocite de ceux qui en voulait a sa propre vie, tout
l'obligea de s'appliquer aux exercices du corps; il fallut se rendre agile, vite a
la course, vigoureuse au combat. Les armes naturelles qui sont branches
d'arbres, et les pierres se trouverent bientot sous sa main. (Discours. 97)
In the Philosophie. in the chapter on habits (Pt I, 7), Lamarck cites the case of the
giraffe and attributes the development of its long neck and elongated forelegs to
habit and intentionality:
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Relativement aux habitudes, il est curieux d'en observer le produit dans la
forme particuliere et la taille de la girafe (camelo-pardalis): on sait que cet
animal, le plus grand des mammiferes, habite l'interieure de l'Affique, et qu'il
vit dans des lieux ou la terre, presque touiours aride et sans herbage, l'oblige
de brouter le feuillage des arbres. et de s'efforcer continuellement d'y
atteindre. II est resulte de cette habitude, soutenue, depuis longtemps, dans
tous les individus de sa race, que ses jambes de devant sont devenues plus
longues que celles de derriere, et que son col s'est tellement allonge, que la
girafe, sans se dresser sur les jambes de derriere, eleve sa tete et atteint a six
metres de hauteur (pres de vingt pieds) (Philosophie. 230; emphasis added)
The case of the giraffe is not just a fortuitous illustration of Rousseau's idea
that the height of the trees obliged the (human) animal to exercise its body. Lamarck
has devoted an entire chapter to volition. Lamarck's insistence on the importance of
milieu and environment may also be found in the Discours. In the next paragraph
after the one cited above, Rousseau writes of the difference in climate and terrain
determining the different ways of living among men. While Lamarck was
specifically writing as a zoologist, Rousseau shifts from animal to man quite easily,
as if evolution were implicit in his thought. Not only are the key elements of
Lamarck's theory (circumstance, habit, and volition) present in the Discours but also
the idea of feeling and the consciousness of existence marking the
transition from animal to man. Where Rousseau writes of a lente succession
d'evenements, Lamarck writes of four stages. In the scale from lower (les plus
imparfaits) to higher (les plus parfaits), it is the capacity to feel, and to have volition
that places them at different levels on the scale: 1) The lowest are those animals
which move because of an irritability, a reaction to something external. 2) The next
on the scale have some obscure feeling or sense of their existence but act out of some
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4 4
inner impulsion which leads them to some object or the other "en sorte que leur
volonte est toujours dependante et entrainee" (119). 3) Higher up the scale are those
animals which have the faculty to form ideas and act out a determining will (volonte
determinants but are still subject to penchants which incline them towards certain
particular objects. 4) Lastly, the most perfect are those who have the faculties that
lead them to think and to have a will that is less enchained and that allows them to
more or less vary their actions (120).
These four stages are implicit in Rousseau's succession: 1) at first man feels
only sensations (this corresponds to Lamarck's imtabilite); 2) then he runs into
difficulties (need, circumstances); 3) this obliges him to exercise his body
(Lamarck's organs, determining will) as a result of which, he learns to conquer nature
and other animals, and achieve a superiority which leads him to 4) reflection. Even
traces of the argument on the repeated exercise of an organ leading to its
development may be found in the Discours (33).
Rousseau attributes volition to man alone: "L'un choisit ou rejette par instinct,
l'autre par un acte de liberte"(30). For Lamarck, this volition is present in animals
too. In stating this, he breaks down the metaphysical barrier between man and animal
that Rousseau had erected in the form of freedom. Intention and will are so crucial to
Lamarck that he even uses language that could have been borrowed from Rousseau.
In describing the fourth class of animals, he writes that these higher animals have the
capacity to form ideas, "en un mot, de penser, et d'avoir une volonte moins
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45
enchainee, qui leur permet plus ou moins leurs actions"(120). A will that is not
chained is a definition of man that could have been taken from the pages of Du
Contrat social. But Lamarck is writing a philosonhie zoologique. about a scale in the
animal kingdom. In describing the fourth category, he does not say that it consists
exclusively of human beings. Even the animals in the third category possess a will
that is no doubt dependent, but nonetheless there is volition.1 5 The notion of will and
intention was not just explicitly laid out by Lamarck in his general remarks on
animals. The language of intention permeates the work, in the minute and detailed
descriptions of the habits of animals :
Cependant les serpents ayant pris l'habitude de ramper sur la terre, et de se
cacher sous les herbes, leur corps, par suite d'efforts touiours repetes pour
s'allonger. afm de passer dans des espaces etroits. a acquis une longueur
considerable et nullement proportionnee a sa grosseur. (Philosophie. 223;
emphasis added).
Lamarck and Darwin
Volition was exactly what Darwin and Arthur Wallace rejected in Lamarck's
theory. In considering Darwin's theory, one must keep in mind that independently of
Darwin, Alfred Wallace had come to the same conclusions and had articulated the
same theory. From Tecate in the East Indies, he wrote to Darwin in 1858, enclosing a
paper which he asked Darwin to forward to the geologist Charles Lyell for
publication. Darwin, realizing that Wallace's theory of variation and natural selection
was identical to his own, forwarded the paper to Lyell. Knowing that Darwin had
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4 6
been working on his theory for several years and had delayed publication in order to
gather more facts, Lyell and the biologist Hooker agreed to publish the paper
simultaneously with an extract from Darwin's own work. What is today known as the
Darwin-Wallace paper was presented at a meeting of the Linnaean Society of
London on July 1, 1858 and published in October under the title "On the tendency of
species to form varieties; and on the perpetuation of varieties and species by natural
means of selection."
For the purposes of my argument, this paper is important because it is
Wallace who directly refutes Lamarck, citing the case of the giraffe. Independently
of him, Darwin, in his correspondence with Hooker, and in his 1837 notebooks had
taken a clear stand against Lamarck on the question of volition . But Wallace's paper
is the first important public refutation of Lamarck's theory from within the
evolutionary school of thought:
The hypothesis of Lamarck- -that progressive changes in species have been
produced by the attempts of animals to increase development of their own
organs, and thus modify their structure and habits- -has been repeatedly and
easily refuted by all writers on the subject of varieties and species, and it
seems to have been considered that when this was done the whole question
has been finally settled; but the view here developed renders such an
hypothesis quite unnecessary, by showing that similar results must be
produced by the action of principles constantly at work in nature The
powerful retractile talons of the falcon- -and the cat-tribes- -have not been
produced or increased by the volition of those animals; but among the
different varieties which occurred in the earlier and less highly organized
forms of these groups, those always survived longest which had the greatest
facilities for seizing their prey. Neither did the giraffe acquire its long neck
by desiring to reach the foliage of the more lofty shrubs, and constantly
stretching its neck for the purpose, but because any varieties which occurred
among its anti-types with a longer neck than usual at once secured a fresh
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4 7
range of pasture over the same ground as their shorter-necked companions,
and on the first scarcity of food were enabled to outlive them. (Journal of
Proceedings of the Linnaean Society, iii, 61-62; emphasis added)
Darwin himself, in an 1844 letter to Hooker wrote that he had engaged on a
"very presumptuous w ork":
At last gleams of light have come and I am almost convinced (quite contrary to
opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder)
immutable. Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense of a 'tendency to
progression.' 'adaptations from the slow willing of animals' etc- -but the
conclusions I am led to are not widely different from his- -though the means of
change are wholly so- -I think I have found out (here's presumption !) the simple
way by which species become exquisitely adapted to various ends.
(Correspondence, vol 2,. 11 ; emphasis added)
Thus, while Darwin acknowledged his debt to Lamarck, he explicitly rejected the
idea of progress and will. This, as I shall argue below, has important consequences.
Darwin's own theory of evolution came from personal observation, whether of
domestic animals or on his now famous voyage on the Beagle.
Curiously enough, elements of the “struggle for life” and “natural selection”
are present in Rousseau's Discours. In this sense, he was a precursor of both Lamarck
and Darwin. As I have argued above, Rousseau's influence may be seen in Lamarck's
theory, and Darwin openly acknowledged his debt to Lamarck. But, it is precisely
the Rousseauist elements in Lamarck's theory that he rejected. There is no evidence
to indicate whether Darwin had read Rousseau or not. What is clear is that it is his
reading of Malthus that led him to the idea of natural selection.
Darwin became aware of the transmutation of species, he says in his
Autobiography, when, first, he discovered in the Pampean formation great fossil
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48
animals with armors that resembled those of existing armadillos, and second, by the
manner in which closely allied animals replaced one another whilst he was
proceeding southwards, and lastly by the South American character of the
“productions” of the Galapago archipelago, and by the slight variations from island
to island :
It was evident that such facts as these, as well as many others, could only be
explained on the supposition that species become modified; and the subject
haunted me. But it was specially evident that neither the action of the
surrounding conditions nor the will of the organisms (especially in the case
of plants) could account for the innumerable cases in which organisms of
every kind are beautifully adapted to their habits of life- -for instance, a
wood-pecker or a tree-frog to climb trees, or a seed for dispersal by hooks or
plumes. I had always been much struck by such adaptations, and until these
could be explained, it seemed to me almost useless to endeavour to prove by
indirect evidence, that species have been modified. (Darwin, Autobiography.
118-119; emphasis added)
Today, in the history of evolutionary theory, Darwin is known chiefly for
upholding the principle of natural selection as being the source of the transformation
of species. While this is true within the natural sciences as such, and in France in
particular, Darwin's theory has philosophical implications that are wide-reaching.
The response in England was very different from the one in France. Beyond
upsetting the clerical and creationist establishment, thinkers and writers were to draw
different implications from his theory. Friedrich Engels was quick to spot these
implications. "The end of teleology," he wrote to Karl Marx from Manchester. The
latter took up the question in a letter to Ferdinand Lasalle a year later:
Very significant is Darwin's book and suits me as a natural-history basis of
the historical class struggle. The crude English manner of development, one
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4 9
must naturally include in the deal. Despite all deficiencies, here for the first
time we have not only the death-blow of “teleology” in natural history, but
also the rational sense of the same explained empirically. (Correspondence
vol. I, 452)
Darwin, who claimed to have been inspired by Malthus, was schooled in the
empirical tradition although he had practically no philosophical formation
whatsoever. Marx's reaction was in terms of the German philosophical tradition and ,
Kantian notions of teleology. The idea of random variation in nature thus puts an end
to the idea of teleology. In England, the implications of Darwin's theory were drawn
by writers such as Eliot and Hardy also from the idea of variation and randomness,
the “entangled bank” and the multifarious ness of life.1 6
In France, because of the endemic problem of the Revolution, it was the
notion of the individual as being a variation of the species that was seized upon by
thinkers who wished to debunk Rousseau. Darwin's notion of the individual in the
animal kingdom as having a genealogy going back through species, genus, class, is
present in the historian Fustel de Coulanges' La Cite antique (1864), where the
genealogical individual is pitted against Rousseau's individual though no references
are made to Darwin. The situation was different with the historian Hippolyte Taine
and the philologist Ernest Renan. These two thinkers were already steeped in the
language of transformisme before the Origin was published. What was really
significant for them about Darwin was that his starting point was the individual.
Variation is the key to his theory, but it is from variations in individuals that he
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sought to explain variations in species. Before Darwin, the individual was not
considered an object of study worthy of the botanist or the zoologist. Linnaeus, for
instance said that the knowledge of individuals was that of a florist, not that of a
botanist.1 7 Although Lamarck did consider individual variation, he was more
interested in the similarity between individuals than the differences. His object of
study was collections of individuals, that is, species.1 8 With Cuvier's “fixisme” and
his insistence that species were all, the exclusion of the individual as the legitimate
object of scientific study was reinforced. It is Darwin's placing of the individual
center-stage, the stress on individual variation as being the key to variation among
species that makes his thought revolutionary. It was through the most minute
observation of each individual, of the slightest variation from individual to individual
that Darwin set about understanding the species.
Again, we have many slight differences which may be called individual
differences, such as are known frequently to appear in the offspring from the
same parents, or which may be presumed to have thus arisen, from being
frequently observed in the individuals of the same species inhabiting the
same confined locality. No one supposes that all individuals of the same
species are cast in the very same mould. These individual differences are
highly important for us, as they afford materials for natural selection to
accumulate... .These individual differences generally affect what naturalists
consider unimportant parts; but I could show by a long catalogue of facts,
that parts which must be called important, whether viewed under a
physiological or classificatory point of view, sometimes vary in the
individuals o f the same species. (45)
Darwin reiterated this point in the 1871 The Descent of Man:
If no organic being excepting man had possessed any mental power, or if his
powers had been of a wholly different nature from those of the lower
animals, then we should never have been able to convince ourselves that our
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51
high faculties had been gradually developed. But it can be shown that there is
no fundamental difference of this kind. We must also admit that there is a
much wider interval in mental power between one of the lowest fishes, as a
lamprey or lancelet, and one of the higher apes, than between an ape and man
; yet this interval is filled up by numberless gradations ( The Descent of Man
67)
In opposing Lamarck's idea of volition, and in making his theory hinge on
individual variation, Darwin simultaneously achieved two things: firstly, the
individual, in Darwin's theory, has no volition whatsoever. Secondly, natural
selection permits variation, and individual difference makes a particular individual
what it is and not another, while retaining all the characteristics of the species, the
genus and the order. Ontogeny contains phylogeny. The individual has a genealogy.
As Michel Foucault has pointed out, with Darwin, an epistemological threshold is
erased. Situating Georges Cuvier in the history of biology, Foucault states that
Cuvier's introduction of comparative anatomy erased an ontological threshold
between species and genus, order and class:
L'homogeneite ontologique va, des lors, de l'individu jusqu'a l'espece, au
genre, a l'ordre, a la classe dans une continuite sans interruption.. . .
L'individu dans son existence reelle, dans sa vie, ce n'est pas autre chose que
tout un ensemble de structures a la fois taxinomiques et anatomo-
physiologiques, c'est egalement cet ensemble present en quelque sorte dans
l'individu, a l'interieur d'un milieu donne. (Pits et Ecrits. 35).
B y creating this ontological unity, on Foucault's view , Cuvier made it possible for
Darwin to erase the epistemological threshold between individual and species, that
is, to consider the individual as a valid object of study. Epistemologically, this
ensemble present in the individual is what allowed for a concept of the genealogical
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individual. The individual with a genealogy had an ancestry that determined its
existence. The individual bore within it all the characteristics of its ancestry. This
concept in the natural sciences, when mapped on to human history by Fustel de
Coulanges and Taine, proved to be a most effective counter to Rousseau's concept of
the individual in the aftermath of 1848.
Darwinism and social-Darwinism
As I have already pointed out, in the history of the natural sciences, Darwin is
known for the principle of natural selection, based on a struggle for life, a term he
had borrowed from Malthus. Herbert Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the
fittest,” which is often wrongly attributed to Darwin, who incorporated it into later
editions of the Origin. Thereafter, theories of "social-Darwinism" abounded and were
re-interpreted, throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. This was
particularly true of France where the reception of Darwin's theory or what was
called transformisme darwinien was refracted by a prior ideological bias in the
person of Clemence Royer, Darwin's first translator and the "first authentic social
Darwinist," as Andre Bejin has noted.1 9 Her 1862 translation of the Origin of Species
was preceded by a fifty-page preface in which she articulated what, on her view,
were the moral, social and political implications of his theory. The fact that she was
not a naturalist is of great significance: long before Darwin's theory was officially
accepted, it had percolated into the work of economists, anthropologists,
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philosophers, writers, and historians, Taine in particular, as I shall argue below.
Royer was something of a dilettante, a liberal economist, as was her publisher,
G. Guillaumin. She was also a convinced transformiste. and in 1859 inaugurated a
seminar in Lamarckism at Lausanne.2 0 In her preface, she claimed to have
anticipated Darwin in her Lausanne seminar. Royer was not the only one to
ideologize the Origin and apply its theory to anthropology; Arthur Gobineau was to
make a similar claim. Gobineau, in a retrospective appendix to his Essai sur
l'inegalite des hommes, claimed to have anticipated Darwin. This, as Tort has
pointed out in his seminal work, La pensee hierarchique et revolution, is a gross
misreading of Darwin. On Tort's view, Darwinism and Gobinism are theories that are
mutually exclusive. More important however, is the fact that Royer's preface bears
the imprint of Gobineau and at the very outset, Darwin's theory was introduced in
France through the distorting prism of Royer's reading of Darwin in terms of
Gobineau's principles and with an a priori anti-Rousseau bias, as the title of
Gobineau's work makes explicitly clear. Because of the impact this was to have on
Taine and Renan, it is worth examining the preface to see how Darwin's theory was
assimilated in France.
The bulk of the preface is an eclectic survey of human knowledge from
Antiquity to contemporary times. Although only the last few pages are devoted to an
exposition of social-Darwinism, it is interesting that early on, Royer draws attention
to the fact that the Societe d'anthropologie de Paris had adopted Darwin's theory
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unquestioningly, whereas the leading French naturalists were strongly opposed to it.
At the outset, Darwin's theory is seen in anthropological terms. Despite the
meanderings of the preface, Royer is explicit in her appropriation of Darwin in anti-
Rousseauist, Gobinist terms :
Enfin la theorie de M. Darwin, en nous dormant quelques notions un peu plus
claires sur notre veritable origine, ne fait-elle pas par cela meme justice de
tant de doctrines philosophiques, morales ou religieuses, de systemes et
d'utopies politiques dont la tendance, genereuse, peut-etre mais assurement
fausse, serait de realiser une egalite impossible, nuisible et contre nature
entre tous les hommes ?(Royer, Preface, L'Origine des especes. 45)
Where Darwin excludes man, Royer sees notre veritable origine in terms of a
Gobinist perception of inequality between races. Darwin is therefore proof that
Rousseau's notion of equality is against nature. Echoes of this contre nature were to
resound in the au rebours of Taine's critique of the Jacobins, which I shall discuss in
Chapter III. In the very next sentence, Royer assimilates Gobineau, without naming
him, with Darwin: "Rien n'est plus evident que les inegalites des diverses races
humaines; rien encore de mieux marque que ces inegalites entre les divers individus
de la meme race” (45). Darwin's variation becomes inegalite. In a sense, Rousseau's
argument is turned on its head, Darwin becoming the instrument of such an
inversion. Rousseau had read inequalities between men in terms of transformiste
notions o f variations and had argued that the increased differences between men
corresponded to the passage to l'etat social. Here, the argument, to be taken up later
by Fustel de Coulanges, is that inequality existed from the very start, in nature itself.
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Within the natural sciences, the reception of Darwin's theory was slow, in the
first place because Cuvier's fixisme was the dominant current. Cuvier's successor at
the College de France and the Museum d'Histoire naturelle, Pierre-Marie Flourens,
strongly criticised the idea of natural selection and variability in his Examen du livre
de M. Darwin sur L'Origine des especes. published in 1864. In this he was strongly
supported by Antoine Fee, Etienne AdolpheD'Archiac and Armand de Quatrefages.2 1
It took at least ten years before Darwin's theory was officially accepted. In the
second place, there was strong clerical resistance to Darwin's theory. It was thus
through thinkers and anthropologists that the Origin was popularized, in
anthropomorphic terms. Where Darwin wrote of domesticated animals and species in
nature, when he described individual variation, writers ranging from Gobineau to
Fustel de Coulanges, Renan, and Taine had in mind man as an individual. The notion
of the individual as articulated by Darwin yielded, in philosophical terms, a
completely new notion of the individual, as having a genealogy that went back
through species, genus, family, order, and class.
The convergence between evolutionary narrative and counter-revolutionary
thought was well underway before Darwin's theory was introduced in France. The
language of the organic was already current then and had pervaded discourse outside
of the natural sciences. This was largely due to Cuvier and to the famous quarrel
between him and Geoffroy Sainte-Hilaire which had resonances in all fields. More
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importantly, recent advances in the natural sciences were being mapped on to
theories in history and political science. The events of 1848 and the recurring
problem of revolution brought a certain urgency to the matter. Arthur Gobineau's
Essai sur l'inegalite des races humaines (1854) is the first step in this direction. It is
in the first place a riposte to Rousseau. Although anterior to Darwin's Origin, it
borrows heavily from contemporary debate in transformiste and ethnographic circles.
The question of whether all races had a common origin is brought up in order to
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explain revolutions and wars. Writing a few years later, Alexis Tocqueville was
explicit in stating that the method in the natural sciences had to be emulated in all the
sciences.
II existe, dit Cuvier, une relation necessaire entre toutes les parties des corps
organises, de telle sorte que l'homme qui rencontre une portion detachee de
l'un d'eux est en etat de reconstruire l'ensemble. Un meme travail analytique
pourrait servir a connaitre la plupart des lois generates qui reglent toute
chose. (Tocqueville, L'Ancien regime. 74)
Not surprisingly, he says this in L'Ancien Regime. Yet the language and
methodology of the naturalists had the value of analogy and example in precisely the
same way that they did for Balzac, who mistakenly thought he was at one with
Geoffroy Sainte-Hilaire in the matter of transformisme.2 3 Nominally, it was Cuvier's
position that prevailed. Gobineau, in a footnote explicitly distances himself from any
transformiste position. And yet in the aftermath of 1848, the question of
methodology and the prevalence of the organic in discourse were indissolubly part of
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57
a rightward drift: the answer to the question of why revolutions occurred was
somehow to be sought in the natural sciences.
It is in this context that one must see the importance of the manner in which
Darwin's Origin was introduced in France. With Royer's Preface, the political and the
organic were made one. Evolutionary theory provided the objective scientific
justification for Gobinism. As Tort has pointed out, nothing in Darwin justifies
Gobinism, and yet several years later, Gobineau could claim that he had anticipated
Darwin.2 4
Origins and Ancestors
The question of origins, as several writers have pointed out, dogged the
thinkers of the nineteenth century. It is true that some thinkers of the
Enlightenment too considered the matter. In one sense, as Derrida has pointed out, it
is a major preoccupation in occidental culture, and from Plato to Rousseau, there is a
0 ( \
constant return to the origin. However there is a qualitative difference between the
concept of origins as articulated by certain thinkers of the Enlightenment and that of
the nineteenth-century thinkers under consideration here. In the eighteenth century,
"origin" was about causality. According to the linguist Sylvain Auroux, the term
origine is used in two distinct, if not independent senses. In the first place, it is
synonymous with a beginning. Origine is also synonymous with the cause of a
phenomenon. In the first sense, one may 1) assign a date to a phenomenon whereas
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in the second case, one may 2) speak of a set of phenomena that precede the
phenomenon. This would allow one to explain 3) its existence and 4) its
characteristics. Classical empiricism was preoccupied with the problematic of the
origin of knowledge. On Auroux's view, within this problematic, the study of the
origin of a phenomenon is also 5) a justification or a questioning of it. He cites
Rousseau's Discours as an instance of this fifth type.2 7
In sharp contrast, nineteenth-century thinkers such as Taine and Fustel de
Coulanges sought to explain, not natural phenomena, or the processes of the human
mind, but institutions in terms of genealogy. I shall show in the following sections,
how evolutionary theory was used by these thinkers to produce a narrative that
explained origins as pertaining to genealogy and ancestry.
Fustel de Coulanges
It is precisely the core idea in Rousseau's thought, that inequality came into
being with the passage to the etat social, that Fustel de Coulanges wished to counter
in La Cite antique. Inequality did not come into being with the founding of society; it
had always existed and its origins were genealogical, going back to a remote past.
Nor did men make a transition from a state of nature to a state of society. Social
inequality was determined by birth and ancestry.
In 1851-52, while still a student at the Ecole Normale Superieure, in his
Travaux d'Ecole Normale, Fustel wrote, in a essay entitled "De la Classe eclairee
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59
d'une nation," that throughout history, in all time, there were two classes, whose
interests were incompatible and who were destined to remain where birth had placed
them. There was the crowd, barely civilized, doomed to ignorance and toil, and there
was the petit nombre of others:
Au milieu de cette foule courbee vers la terre, eprise d'un bien-etre toujours
precaire, un petit nombre d'hommes a qui le sort a donne assez de loisirs pour
etre vraiment des hommes, connait d'autres besoins que ceux du corps, un
autre bien etre que celui dont la foule est jalouse, des desirs et des joies
qu'elle ignore. Pour cette rare elite, les mots de justice, de progres, de dignite
humaine ont un sens (Notes de Travail, Fonds Fustel de Coulanges).
This elite is what contstituted the classe eclairee of a nation. The future
author of La Cite antique wrote in 1851-52:
Dans les cites antiques, l'ineffafable distinction de l'esclave et de l'homme
libre maintenait la force du cote ou etait la lumiere. Le mepris, la cruaute, le
prejuge soigneusement entretenus d'une souillure originelle permirent aux
hommes libres de cultiver en paix, au dessus de la foule vouee au travail des
mains, la politique, les arts et la philosophie. Nulle transaction entre la foule
et ses maitres; elle servait et soufffait en silence, eloignee avec soin de tout
ce qui ennoblit l'espece humaine, portant et nourrissant la classe eclairee,
comme la racine cachee en terre porte et nourrit sa fleur. (Notes de travail)
Thus, an original souillure determined inequality. No causality can explain
why some men were free and others not. Only the classe eclairee was free, because
it was sustained and nourished by those who labored. We have here the first allusion
to the racine, a motif that was to be taken up and developed as the century
progressed.
The idea of liberty as accessible to all is alien to l'espece humaine. Although
Fustel was writing before Darwin's Origin appeared in 1859, the language of the
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organic had permeated discourse in disciplines outside the natural sciences. For
instance, in taking up the example of Sparta, where one race excludes the ilots from
the higher life, Fustel writes: "Sparte corrige les erreurs de la nature, comme le
prudent jardinier tranche les rejetons inutiles ou la seve de l'arbre etait egaree. Elle a
vecu ainsi, l'impitoyable cite dorienne."2 8
At this point, the organic and the botanical have the value of simile and
metaphor. By the time La Cite antique was published in 1864, Darwin had been
translated into French by Royer with her preface. Unlike Renan and Taine who
explicitly referred to Darwin, Fustel de Coulanges' way of assimilating evolutionary
theory was to point to the genealogy of the individual. What emerges from the Cite is
a concept of the individual that could be conceived in the wake of Darwin's having
made the individual an object of study. For Fustel, at all costs, the individual had to
be shown to have no existence apart from his ancestors. In La Cite antique.
individual, family, and property are indissolubly bound: "Pour la vieille religion
domestique, la famille etait le vrai corps, le veritable etre vivant, dont l'individu
n'etait qu'un membre: aussi le nom patronymique fut-il le premier en date et le
premier en importance” (124).
And again:
La propriete n'avait pas “ete con?ue, a l'origine, comme un droit individuel,
mais comme un droit de famille. La fortune appartenait, comme dit
formellement Platon et comme disent implicitement tous les anciens
legislateurs, aux ancetres et aux descendants. Cette propriete, par sa nature
meme ne se partageait pas.(La Cite antique. 100)
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Ancestry and descendance now have ontological value, in the same way that any
individual in Darwin's theory was a variation of species, itself a variation of genus,
class and order:
Ainsi la cite n'est pas un assemblage d'individus.. . . On voit dans les
orateurs attiques que chaque Athenien fait partie a la fois de quatre societes
distinctes; il est membre d'une famille, d'une phratrie, d'une tribu et d'une
cite. II n'entre pas en meme temps et le meme jour dans toutes les quatres,
comme le Fran9 ais, qui, du moment de sa naissance, appartient a la fois a une
famille, a une commune, a un departement et a une patrie.(145)
The language of the organic no longer has the value of analogy or even metaphor; it
is discreetly woven into the narrative as the organic bond which goes back in time to
the ancestor. As in the natural sciences, the individual's ontological status is
organically determined by ancestry and origin.
As the historian Franpois Hartog has pointed out, La Cite is also a way of
writing the present. In turning to Antiquity, Fustel's aim is to "correct" the Jacobins'
perception of Antiquity serving as model for revolution in the present. In his "Le9on
d'ouverture" at the University of Strasbourg, where he had been appointed professor
of history two years before the publication of La Cite antique, he makes clear who is
responsible for having created such a perception:
Veuillez remarquer, messieurs, qu'il n'est pas tout a fait sans importance
d'avoir une idee vraie de cette antiquite ou de s'en faire une idee fausse; il
n'est pas aussi indifferent qu'on peut le croire de se tromper sur elle ou de ne
pas se tromper. Les destinees de peuples modemes ont quelquefois dependu
de la maniere dont on a compris l’antiquite, et de grands malheurs ont ete la
consequence d'une erreur historique. La generation qui vivait en France il y a
quatre-vingts ans avait etudie l'antiquite avec un long prejuge d'admiration;
elle parlait sans cesse des forums, des consuls du senat, des tribuns. Elle
vantait beaucoup les vertus antiques et remettait en usage le nom de citoyen..
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.. Le jour ou la France se trouva presque sans institutions, au lieu de
chercher celles qui nous convenait le mieux, on songea a nous donner celles
des Romains et des Grecs.. . . Au nom de la liberte on a donne a l'Etat
l'omnipotence, on a gouveme par la dictature, et parce que les anciens
punissaient de mort tout homme qui etait repute ennemi de l'Etat, on a era
que e'etait un devoir et une vertu de faire mourir des adversaires politiques;
l'imitation maladroite de l'Antiquite nous a conduits a la Terreur. (“Choix de
texts,” Le dix-neuvieme siecle et l'histoire. 473)
There is no doubt who made the historical error: Rousseau, for having based
his notion of the social contract on models from antiquity and the Jacobins, for
having translated this into the Terror. Fustel de Coulanges warns against this
imitation of Antiquity in the introduction to La Cite antique: the system of education
had been such that a false understanding of antiquity, illusory notions of liberty
among the Ancients had led to liberty being imperiled in modem society. "Nos
quatre-vingts demieres annees ont montre clairement que l'une des grandes
difficultes qui s'opposent a la marche de la societe modeme est l'habitude qu'elle a
prise d'avoir toujours l'antiquite grecque et romaine devant les yeux "(La Cite 2)
In La Cite, Fustel's point is clear: in the beginning is ancestor-worship;
religion and family constitute the social bond. In linking Greek and Roman antiquity
with Aryan and Hindu institutions, in arguing that they came from the same source,
because of a common Indo-European racial origin, Fustel was able to foreground
ancestor worship, fire worship, the cult of the dead, and funeral rites by citing
examples from both civilizations. This in turn was linked to religion as a domestic
phenomenon. The cult of the dead was synonymous with ancestor worship; the
family, from father to son, from generation to generation passed on this cult of the
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63
worship of dead ancestors. But as Hartog has pointed out, "Qui dit tombeau dit
famille, dit aussi propriete. Qu'est-ce en origine que la propriete, sinon le champ ou
chaque famille enterre ses morts?” (Introduction, La Cite antique, xvii). Hartog, a
historian of antiquity, points to the lack archaeological evidence to support this claim
which, on his view, reveals a nineteenth century representation of death and a
growing cult of cemeteries among the positivists. He cites Comte: "les vivants sont
de plus en plus gouvemes par les morts, telle est la loi necessaire de l'ordre humain."
(xix)
Pierre Lafitte, one of the leading Comteans in the latter half of the century,
used this citation from Comte as an epigraph on the title page of his book
Considerations generates a propos des cimetieres de Paris (1872) which also carried
an epigraph from Dr. Robinet, Comte's personal physician: "II n'y a pas de cite sans
cimetiere." The latter had published Paris sans cimeteres in 1869. Although these
works appeared after La Cite antique, the positivist claim is that this cult had always
existed. Hartog believes that there are many parallels between Fustel de Coulanges
and the positivists. He cites an earlier text by J. Girard, dating back to 1801, in which
the author calls upon society to ask every ordinary man to place his tomb in his
family property: thus, the family tombs would have "le double avantage de nous
rattacher a la famille, a la propriete, a la patrie." Hartog, in an ironic comment on
Girard's text, writes: "Les Anciens, n'auraient-ils pas pratiques spontanement, a en
croire Fustel, ce que l'auteur du memoire ne fait que proposer?" (xxii)
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In La Cite antique Fustel de Coulanges engages in a double-edged
manoeuvre: in the introduction, he reinforces the point he had made earlier in the
Strasbourg Le"c'est presque toujours nous que nous voyons en eux.... Nous ne manquons guere de
nous tromper sur ces peuples anciens quand nous les regardons a travers les opinions
et les faits de notre temps" (2). He then proceeds to do exactly what he accuses the
thinkers and revolutionaries of the previous century of doing: he sees in Antiquity
imaginary institutions; specifically, a cult of cemetery worship that had begun to
grow in positivist circles in France. Beyond that, in his account of the revolutions
that took place with the entry into and the take-over of la cite by the plebeians, he
could well have been writing of the French revolutions:
Les vieux principes sur lesquels la cite romaine, comme toutes les cites
anciennes, etait fondee, avaient disparu. De cette antique religion hereditaire,
qui avait longtemps gouveme les hommes et etablit des rangs entre eux, il ne
restait plus que les formes exterieures. Le plebeien avait lutte contre elle
pendant quatre siecles, sous la republique et sous les rois, et il l'avait vaincue
(363)
Heredity, as we shall see in the section on Taine, is the recurrent motif, inseparable
from the notion of origins, whether of institutions or of individuals.
Renan
Ernest Renan, along with Taine, was steeped not only in scientism but very
specifically in evolutionary narrative. Both had read Darwin and were part of the
social-Darwinist trend. As I pointed out ( p. 5 above), Renan shared with Fustel de
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65
Coulanges the anti-Rousseau bias. He was to take this position explicitly only after
the annee terrible and the Paris Commune of 1871 although in 1869, he wrote an
article in which he distanced himself from his earlier liberal positions. Renan was a
far more complex figure than Fustel de Coulanges. His journey from a paternalist
liberal position in 1848 to the extreme right-wing stances he adopted in 1871 was a
tortured one. His immediate reaction to the June days of 1848 was a kind of
sympathy for the insurgents, whom he saw as preferable to the bourgeoisie. While he
is unambiguous about his class position, he clearly blames the bourgeoisie. On July
1, he wrote to his sister Henriette, expressing his ambivalent feelings:
Les personnes d'ordre, ceux qu'on appelle les honnetes gens, ne demandent
que mitraille et fusillade. . . . Je ne suis pas socialiste, je suis convaincu
qu'aucune des theories qui se posent comme devant reformer la societe
n'arrivera dans sa forme absolue, a triompher. Toute idee nouvelle doit
revetir la forme de systeme, forme partielle, etroite, qui n'arrive jamais a une
realisation pratique. Ce n'est que quand elle a brise cette premiere ecorce,
qu'elle est devenue dogme social, qu'elle devient une verite universellement
reconnue et appliquee. Qu'y a-t-il de plus systematique que la politique du
Contrat social ? Et pourtant tout le regime constitutionnel, qui desormais est
une verite acquise, qu'est-ce autre chose que cette politique, au systeme
pres? (Correspondance. 2)
He was to take a diametrically opposite position after the crisis of 1870-71. In
La Reforme intellectuelle et morale which appeared in November 1871, Renan,
while conceding that the beginnings of the revolution of 1789 were admirable, does
not hesitate to say what he thinks went wrong:
Mais la fausse politique de Rousseau l'emporta. On voulut faire une
constitution a priori.. . . On se laissa deborder par le peuple: on applaudit
puerilement au desordre de la prise de la Bastille, sans songer que ce desordre
emporterait tout plus tard. (La Reforme intellectuelle et morale, 597)
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Just as Fustel de Coulanges opposed the idea of the social contract with the
idea of ancestry, Renan turned to royalty. France had been created by the Capetian
dynasty. Paris was the capital of France not because of any convenience in
geographical location, but because it was home of the Capetians; it owed its
privileged position to royalty. But the men of the Revolution had tried to turn Paris
into the center of a republican utopia, whereas logically they should have created un
petit Washington at Amboise or Blois:
Voila ce que ne comprirent pas les hommes ignorants et homes qui prirent en
main les destinees de la France a la fin du demier siecle. Ils se figurent qu'on
pouvait se passer du roi; ils ne comprirent pas que, le roi, une fois supprime,
l'edifice dont le roi etait la clef de voute croulait. Les theories republicaines
du XVIII siecle avaient pu reussir en Amerique, parce que l'Amerique etait
une colonie formee par le concours volontaire d'emigrants cherchant la
liberte; elles ne pouvaient reussir en France, parce que la France avait ete
constmite en vertu d'un tout autre principe.(599)
Renan's diagnosis is simple: the social contract was not for France, and could
never be, given that it had been constituted by a dynasty. In words that echo the
passage from Fustel de Coulanges that I have cited above, he continues in Part II of
the Reforme. "Les Remedes":
La conscience d'une nation reside dans la partie eclairee de la nation,
laquelle entraine et commande le reste. La civilisation est a l'origine une
oeuvre aristocratique, l'oeuvre d'un tout petit nombre (noblesse et civilisation
est une oeuvre aristocratique aussi. (619)
The similarity with Fustel de Coulanges lies in the return to the past, to origins and a
genealogy. By laying it down that France was constituted by a dynasty, Renan posits
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67
the existence of an organic bond with the past that no social contract could rupture.
In this both Renan and Fustel are close to Tocqueville:
L'aristocratie avait fait de tous les citoyens une longue chaine qui remontait
du paysan au roi; la democratic brise la chaine et met chaque anneau a part..
. Ainsi, non seulement la democratic fait oublier a chacun ses aieux, mais elle
lui cache ses descendants et le separe de ses contemporains; elle le ramene
sans cesse vers lui seul." (L'Ancien regime et la revolution, p 267)
Of all the thinkers and writers of this period, it was Renan who had the most
overt fascination with evolutionary theory. Scientism does not just pervade his work;
for Renan, science was the only solution to humanity's present ills. Already, in 1848,
he had written L'Avenir de la science although it was to be published only in 1890.
Renan’s Histoire des origines du christianisme, a project that began with the
publication of La vie de Jesus in 1863 and ended with Marc-Aurele in 1882, is
essentially an attempt to make of history a science. Renan, in an Avertissement that
appeared in the popular edition entitled Jesus (1864), was explicit on this: "L'histoire
est une science comme la chimie, comme la geologie"(v). The enterprise here is not
just a methodological one, but an attempt to fuse religion and science:
Considerez l'horizon; on y sent poindre une aurore, la delivrance par la
resignation, le travail, la bonte, le soutien reciproque; la delivrance par la
science, qui, penetrant les lois de l’humanite et assujettissant de plus en plus
la matiere, fondera la dignite de tous les hommes et la vraie liberte.
Preparons, en faisant chacun notre devoir, ce paradis de l'avenir. (Jesus, 367)
By the time, he wrote Les Apotres (1866), Renan had moved from a diffuse
scientism to language that was explicitly evolutionary:
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Certes, la formation de l'humanite est la chose du monde la plus choquante, la
plus absurde, si on la suppose subite, instantanee. Elle rentre dans les
analogies generates (sans cesser d’etre mysterieuse) si on y voit les resultats
d'un progres lent continue durant des periodes incalculables. II ne faut pas
appliquer a la vie embryonnaire des lois de la vie de l'age mur. L'embryon
developpe, les uns par les autres, tous ses organes; l'homme adulte, au
contraire, ne se cree plus d'organes. (Les Anotres. 397)
It is clear from this passage that Renan has read Darwin. There is also a
discreet rejection of Cuvier's fixisme here, when Renan states that humanity wasn't
formed suddenly. Cuvier's fixisme was based on a theory of catastrophe, of the earth
being convulsed by a series of catastrophes which accounted for certain species
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disappearing. Both Lamarck and Darwin rejected the idea of catastrophe and
argued instead that the evolutionary process took place over incredibly long periods
of time. The passage cited above has resonances of Darwin him self: "The whole
history of the world, as at present known, although of a length quite
incomprehensible by us, compared with the ages which have elapsed since the first
creature, the progenitor of innumerable extinct and living descendents, was created"
(Origin, 488).
With Renan, evolutionary narrative is the very form of historiography. He
goes one step further than Fustel de Coulanges by explicitly using the language of
embryology. The philologist Renan, in fusing, by way of metaphor, the two different
disciplines gave evolutionary narrative a different ontological status. In 1882, in the
preface to Marc-Aurele, Renan explicitly stated that the purpose in writing the
Histoire was to trace the embryogenesis of religion:
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Plus que jamais, je pense que la periode des origines, l'embryogenie du
christianisme, si Ton peut s'exprimer ainsi, finit vers la mort de Marc-Aurele,
en 180. A cette date, l'enfant a tous ses organes; il est detache de sa mere; il
vivra desormais de sa vie propre. (512)
As we have seen, although Renan uses the term embryo genie explicitly only
in 1882 to describe his project, the narrative is evolutionary from as early as 1866.
To understand Renan's use of evolutionary language in a specifically political
context, one must keep in mind that Renan was not only a historian of religion or a
philologist, but wrote on a wide range of subjects. If we turn to his writings during
and after the crisis of 1870-71, we can see how the evolutionary narrative of the
Histoire is now used consciously as a political weapon.
In the Dialogues Philosophiques. although less explicitly than in the Reforme
written later in the year, the crisis of 1871 is nonetheless a major preoccupation. The
Dialogues were published in 1876, but written, on Renan's account, in May 1871,
possibly during the semaine sanglante. What is truly striking about the Dialogues is
that, here, evolutionary language is directly used as an argument against Rousseau.
Theoctiste, in the third Dialogue. "Reves," says: "Le principe que la societe n'existe
que pour le bien-etre et la liberte des individus qui la composent ne parait pas
conforme aux plans de la nature, plans ou l'espece est seule prise en consideration, et
ou l'individu semble sacrifie" (136). This statement is almost a paraphrase of
Royer's preface to Darwin’s Origin of Species. Where Royer draws anthropological
conclusions from Darwin's theory, in Renan, human history is made to fit into
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natural history and nature's scheme of things. There are several implications that can
be drawn from this.
Firstly there is the question of the individual. Rousseau's individual, in the
Contrat social appears to be the object of speculation here. In La Reforme, as I have
pointed out above, Renan's overt position was that democracy and the social contract
were not for France, because the Capetian dynasty had made of France an organic
entity with a genealogy: its royalty. In the Dialogues, this organic bond with the past
is posited through evolutionary language. What is curious about this passage is that
the overt position is seemingly one which is close to Cuvier's, for whom species was
all. But when Renan writes “l'individu semble sacrifie,” the implicit idea is that there
is an individual, but it is not like Rousseau's individual; it is part of species, but
subordinate to it. This brings Renan closer to a Darwinian position. Later, it is the
principle of natural selection itself that is invoked:
Une large application des decouvertes de la physiologie et du principe de
selection pourrait amener la creation d'une race superieure.. . . Ce serait la
des especes de dieux ou devas, etre decuples en valeur de ce que nous
sommes, qui pourraient etre viables dans des milieux artificiels. (Dialogues.
145)
Here, Renan goes one step beyond Darwin, and envisages a further stage in evolution
where man becomes a god. In this, he is a precursor of later, misleading
interpretations of Darwinism, including the one that sustained Nazi ideology.
As these passages indicate, Renan explicitly pits science against democracy
in the Dialogues. The characters, three philosophers Euthyphron, Eudoxe, and
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Philalethe, flee Paris in May 1871 and seek refuge in a remote park in Versailles and
begin a discourse on the Ideal. The three Dialogues have as titles, "Certitudes,"
Probability," and "Reves." Two other characters, Theophraste and Theoctiste, are
introduced in the second and third dialogues. While many themes run through the
Dialogues, the recurrent one is that of an Ideal, le Vrai and how it may be attained.
The answer, persistently: not through democracy and not through fanciful ideas of
equality. The anti-Rousseau tenor of the Dialogues, though more discreet than in the
Reforme, is unmistakable.
As did Fustel de Coulanges before him, Renan effectively argues against the
idea of a passage from an etat de nature to an etat social. It is already in the etat de
nature that the social bond is to be found. In the first of the Dialogues. "Certitudes,"
Philalethe, arguing against the mechanical materialism of the eighteenth century,
says that it was one of the greatest errors that were professed: "La nature, dans ses
combinaisons, parait avoir eu bien plus en vue un but social que la satisfaction de
l'egoi'sme des individus" (Dialogues. 95). Philalethe explains what Nature's design is
really about:
La nature veut la propagation des especes; elle emploie milles ruses pour
atteindre ce but. Une foule d'actes de l'etre vivant ne sont pas le resultat d'un
calcul d'utilite personnelle. La nature a mis dans l'animal juste ce qu'il faut de
desinteressement pour maintenir la tradition d'une vie superieure. (96)
Against the egoistic individual is pitted an all-powerful Nature: "On sent un immense
• -3A ,
nisus universel pour realiser un dessin "(94). This is the realization of a Vrai, and a
Beau that only a few are capable of achieving. In the second Dialogue. Euthyphron
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takes it upon himself to elaborate this ideal, which can only be attained if the
inequality of classes is maintained. The danger, he says, is that since most
individuals were absorbed by their egoism, if they should acquire a consciousness of
their rights, then it would be impossible for a disinterested thought to emerge, for
this alone could lead to the realization of the Vrai. The inequality of classes is the
secret of the movement of humanity. It is:
le coup de fouet qui fait marcher le monde, en dormant a la societe un but a
poursuivre. Qu'on se figure le spectacle qu'eut offert la Terre, si elle eut ete
uniquement peuplee de negres, bomant tout a la jouissance individuelle au
sein d'une mediocrite generate, et substituant la jalousie et le desir du bien-
etre aux nobles poursuites de l'ideal? (97)
Thus the argument is a negation of Rousseau's in the Discours, that inequality
did not exist in the etat de nature, but came into being in the etat social. No, says
Renan, inequality is in the nature of things. And the social bond in nature is organic.
Nature's aim is the propagation of species, and the individual must be sacrificed.
Taine
As the most influential thinker in the latter half of the century, Taine left a
deep imprint on the French Right. Ironically, his disciples, the writers Maurice
Barres and Paul Bourget, were to mock him cruelly in their novels Le Disciple and
Les Deracines for not having gone far enough in his critique of the Enlightenment. I
discuss Barres’ critique of Taine in Les Deracines in the next chapter. Taine Unlike
Fustel de Coulanges, Taine directed his broadsides at Rousseau only after 1871. He
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allowed the events of 1848 to pass him by. He did not vote in the elections of 1849
as he himself acknowledged in his preface to the Origines. The paroxysm of 1870-
1871 produced quite a different effect on him. Where Renan engaged directly in
battle, by entering the political arena with his Reforme. Taine went into a hermit-like
isolation and sought to account for the genesis of the mal francais by writing a
history of origins, in much the way that Fustel de Coulanges and Renan had done in
their respective fields. He took upon himself the monumental task of writing the
Origines de la France contemporaine. The Origines is an enterprise that encompasses
in scale and scope what Tocqueville, Fustel de Coulanges, and Renan attempted
separately in their works. It is the synergistic product of post-1848 attempts to
account for and do away with what was perceived by the 1870s as an endemic
malady of the French people: a propensity for revolution. It is also the work in which
evolutionary theory and bio-medical theories of degeneration become the form of
political narrative.
Taine, as I have stated earlier, was steeped in scientism. This was partly due,
on his own account, to his early years in the Quartier Latin, when he used to frequent
the company of young mathematicians, botanists, and medical students.3 1 There were
also his own attempts to reconcile various philosophical currents prevalent in France,
which he divided into sniritualisme and nositivisme. broadly corresponding to, but
not symmetrical with rationalism and empiricism. The young Taine was clearly in
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some confusion. At one level, he appeared to have inherited the preoccupation with
final causes. At another, he seemed attracted by Mill's empiricism, which he calls
positivisme. He characterizes positivist doctrine as one that excludes the possibility
that human intelligence could know causes. In the preface to the 1860 Les
Philosophes classiques du XlXeme siecle en France, his claim is to provide a
solution to these opposing trends by following Hegel's vision of nature : "On vient de
voir que cette philosophic a pour origine une certaine notion des causes. J'ai tache ici
de justifier et d'appliquer cette notion" (x).
At this point, Taine is still within philosophy in the sense that he is in search
of an answer to the problematic posed by Hume. On the one hand, he is within the
empirical tradition, Condillac being an important influence, and on the other, he
appears to be reluctant to abandon the idea of reason as a faculty of the mind.
"L'edifice du dix-huitieme siecle, quoique desert, est encore habitable, du moins en
partie "(7). We are a long way yet from the frontal attack on reason that constitutes
the core of the Origines. In turning to Hegel, he hopes to reconcile "ces analyses
inferieures qu'on appelle les sciences" with a superior analysis, which he still calls
metaphysique. This is his nominal enterprise.
In the essay on Pierre Laromiguiere, however, he states that "la philosophie
fut alors la maitresse des sciences." The conflict here, for Taine, is whether to
subsume the sciences under philosophy, or to ascribe to philosophy the status of
science. The rapid advances in the natural sciences had far outstripped any progress
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in philosophy. With Condillac introducing empiricism into France, Cartesian
metaphysics was in disarray. At the same time, Victor Cousin had begun teaching the
philosophy of Kant and Hegel in Paris, thus creating a kind of polarization which left
Taine's generation having to choose between opposing systems. Unable to wholly
abandon metaphysics, and the central role of reason, in order to embrace empiricism,
Taine displaced the problematic within philosophy and carried it over into the debate
on the relative status of the natural sciences in relation to philosophy. How does
Taine actually resolve the matter? By way of analogy.
As Peggy Kamuf has pointed out in The Division of Literature, analogy is a
- I '} >
pervasive feature of Taine's thought. While similes and metaphors abound in the
essays in the volume, it is in the chapter on method that Taine uses analogy to
displace a problem that he is unable to resolve within philosophy. This he does by
mapping the method used in natural sciences onto moral questions. In much the same
way that Buffon mapped the Enlightenment on to the natural sciences as a way of
closing off the implications posed by transformisme. that is, that man too was the
product of transmutation of species, Taine maps the method in the natural sciences
onto philosophy, but in order to do exactly the opposite of what Buffon did: displace
reason. He does so by turning to physiology. Mind becomes brain. In the essay on
Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard, Taine recounts a mock invasion of Flourens' laboratory
by a group of young philosophers who plead with him not to engage in the
vivisection of brains:
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Fermez vos bistouris, vos scalpels, rengainez vos scies, lachez vos poules,
vos lapins,vos chats, vos cochons d'Inde. Quoi! vous prouvez que la
destruction des hemispheres cerebraux detruit la memoire, les instincts, le
raisonnement, sans abolir la vie ni les sensations brutes! Vous attachez tel
groupe de facultes a tel morceau de pulpe cerebrale! Vous preparez les
experiences de ce medecin, qui pressant ou lachant la cervelle saillante d'un
trepane, supprimait et ranimait en lui la pensee, a l'instant, d'un coup de
pouce, ouvrant et fermant tour a tour l'intelligence aussi surement qu'un
robinet! (Les Philosophes classiques du XIX siecle 39)
Similar visits are paid to geologists and embryologists. Taine goes on :
A ces reclamations que diront les savants? D'avance vous les voyez sourire,
et reprendre l'un son scalpel, l'autre son marteau, l'autre son bocal. Faisons
comme eux et reprenons l'analyse. Desormais, a leur exemple, nous ne
craignons plus d'etre appeles temeraires et sceptiques.(41)
For all that the tone is ironic, it is clear that the issue being resolved is the
question of empiricism and the danger of extreme skepticism. The savants.
understood as scientists, do not have to have to fear the pitfalls that philosophers do.
Because they have infallible methods. They simply pick up the scalpel and carry on.
By turning to the natural sciences, Taine uses methodology as a way of resolving
questions of epistemology. His term for this operation is traduction.
In the chapter “De la methode,” the fictitious philosophe Pierre tells the
young Taine:
Analyser, a mon avis, c'est traduire.. . . Vous savez que les physiologistes,
apres avoir decrit, compte, classe les fonctions et les organes, concluent
ordinairement en admettant une force vitale. . . . Pour savoir ce qu'est une
nature, vous prendrez un animal, une plante, un mineral dont vous noterez les
proprietes, et vous verrez que le mot nature apparait au moment precis ou
vous avez fait la somme des faits importants et distinctifs. Partout enfin la
conclusion sera la meme et le mot produit par l'analyse designera une portion,
une combinaison, ou un rapport de faits. Portez-la dans le monde moral;
essayez de vous entendre quand vous parlez de la destinee d'un peuple, du
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genie d'une nation, des forces vives de la societe, de l'influence d'un climat ou
d'un siecle, de l'expansion d'une race, de la puissance des anciennes
institutions. (Philpsoghes, 323-329)
This method, as we shall see below, was put into application in his next work. More
significant for the purposes of my argument is the fact that when Taine applies the
analogy to comparative anatomy, he has opened himself to transformisme in a
way that allows him to later use evolutionary narrative to account for revolution and
degeneration (cf. Chapter III).
The other nhilosophe. Paul, extols the virtues of the scientific method, this
time using comparative anatomy as a model. Having talked of nutrition in various
species, he turns to destruction and dissolution:
Premiere verification: considerez la nature et les rapports des operations et
des organes. Si la decomposition est une cause, il y a un groupe d'operations
et d'organes institues et combines de maniere que le corps vivant puisse se
decomposer.
Deuxieme verification: si le deperissement est une cause, lorsque
d'espece en espece une de ces conditions change, les operations doivent
changer precisement de maniere a ce qu'il puisse encore s'accomplir. Or
l'experience declare qu'il en est ainsi. Fixez a des animaux differents sejours,
aussitot vous voyez que l'organe respiratoire se modifie precisement de
maniere a introduire l'oxygene destructeur. Le mammifere jete dans l'air
respire par des poumons que l'air vient baigner; les branchies du poisson
montent dans sa tete, vont toucher l'oygene dans l'eau qui le contient.. . .
Troisieme verification: si ce deperissement est une cause, lorsque
dans le meme individu, les conditions changent,les operations doivent
changer precisement de maniere a ce que la decomposition puisse encore
s'accomplir. (355-7)
I have cited this passage at length to show how analogy in method becomes a
way of assimilating tranformist categories— species/individual— into philosophical
narrative. These, as I shall argue below when discussing the Origines. are then
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mapped onto concepts of the individual in social contract theory. Although Les
Philosophes appeared in 1860, the year following the publication of Darwin's work,
the transformisme here is that of Lamarck and Sainte-Hilaire. In his next work, Taine
actually cites Darwin. Having outlined his "method" in Les Philosophes. he set out to
apply it in his first major work, Histoire de la litterature anglaise (1863). In the
introduction, he puts forward the hypothesis that it is race, milieu, and moment that
determine the individual. It is in his section on race that he first cites Darwin, and
• • • • •
Taine is probably one of the first writers in France to have read Darwin.
Writing on the lineaments of the Aryan race, on thirty centuries of
revolutions and change that have transformed a particular race to make it different
from all others, Taine argues that it is the communaute de sang which unites all its
reietons:
Si differents qu'ils soient, leur parente n'est pas detruite . . . les grands traits
de la forme originelle ont subsiste, et l'on retrouve les deux ou trois
lineaments principaux de l'empreinte primitive sous les empreintes
secondaires que le temps a posees par-dessus. Rien d'etonnant dans cette
tenacite extraordinaire. Quoique l'immensite de la distance ne nous laisse
entrevoir qu'a demi et sous un jour douteux l'origine des especes, les
evenements de l'histoire eclairent assez les evenements anterieurs a l'histoire,
pour expliquer la solidite presque inebranlables des caracteres primordiaux.
(Introduction, Histoire de la litterature anglaise. 14)
In a footnote, Taine cites both Darwin's Origin and Prosper Lucas' De
l'heredite. As with Royer before him, Taine reads Darwin's theory in Gobinist terms.
Race, understood in terms of a national heritage, is assimilated to ancestry,
understood in terms of Darwin's common ancestor. Histoire de la litterature anglaise
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appeared a year after Royer's translation of Darwin was published in 1862. As I have
pointed out earlier, the language of transformisme had permeated discourse outside
of the natural sciences. Like Renan, Taine introduces the immense time-spans that
Darwin writes of in Origin of Species (488). With Taine, Darwin's time-spans,
geologically established, become a way of introducing a pre-history for human races
that has no empirical basis other than events that are known. Thus analogy becomes
a way of creating an ontological basis for an ancestry that is derived from the
present. Where Fustel de Coulanges created such a mythical pre-history by merely
positing it, Taine cites scientific authority. At this point he is still concerned with the
genie nationale, a theme which is present in Les Philosophes. In the preface to the
Essais de critique et d'histoire (1866) the theme of race is continued in very
specifically Darwinian terms. The individual now appears on stage, but as the
continuation of species. In the preface, written in 1866, Taine fuses analogy and
metaphor so that evolutionary language becomes the form of narrative. By way of
analogy, Taine now has established that in history the method to be followed is that
of natural science:
Quand un physiologiste vous dit que les elements anatomiques se forment par
generation spontanee dans l'individu vivant, et que l'individu vivant est une
agregation d'individus elementaires doues chacun d'une vie propre et
distincte, vous croyez vous en droit de protester au nom du dogme moral de
la personnalite humaine? Ces sortes d'objections qui pouvaient se faire au
moyen-age ne peuvent se faire aujourd'hui dans aucune science, en histoire
non plus qu'en physiologie ou en chimie, depuis que le droit de regler les
croyances humaines est passe tout entier du cote de l'experience. (Taine,
Essais. xxi)
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History has now acquired the status of science:
La philosophic de l'histoire humaine repete comme une fidele image la
philosophie de l'histoire naturelle. Les naturalistes ont remarque que les
divers organes d'un animal dependent les uns des autres, que, par exemple les
dents, l'estomac, les pieds, les instincts et beaucoup d'autres donnees varient
ensemble suivant une liaison fixe.. . . De meme les historiens peuvent
remarquer que les diverses aptitudes et inclinations d'un individu, d'une race,
d'une epoque sont attachees les unes aux autres de telle fafon que l'alteration
d'une de ces donnees observee dans un individu voisin, dans un groupe
rapproche, dans une epoque precedente ou suivante determine en eux une
alteration proportionee de tout le systeme. (xxvii)
If Taine's starting point were to resolve the conflict between metaphysics and
empiricism by way of analogy, he has come a long way here. Michel Foucault had
pointed out that Cuvier's advances in comparative anatomy allowed him to erase an
ontological threshold that in turn allowed Darwin to erase the epistemological
threshold (cf. p. 48 above). Taine has instinctively seized upon this erasure of the
epistemological threshold for similar thresholds to be erased in history. By way of
analogy, by mapping Darwin's concepts onto human history, Taine has allowed a
new concept of the individual to emerge. Taine almost anticipates Foucault in the
way he describes the individual in the passage cited above: the individual's
ontological status is inseparable from the species (race). From there he goes a step
further, and introduces epoque as a category, as if temporality had the same status as
an organic physical bond within the individual and within the species.
The incredible time spans, geologically verified, are what allowed Darwin to
believe that gradual variation could lead to species being modified. The periods in
Darwin's theory are a way of pointing to variation. Taine has introduced the idea of
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system, of a whole. Taine proposes analogy after analogy with comparative anatomy
to lead up to a “scientific” social-Darwinist reading of Darwin:
Les naturalistes etablissent que dans une espece vivante les individus qui se
developpent le mieux et se reproduisent le plus surement sont ceux qu'une
particularite de structure adapte le mieux aux circonstances ambiantes; que
dans les autres, les qualites inverses produisent des effets inverses; que le
cours naturel des choses amene des eliminations incessantes et des
perfectionnements graduels; que cette preference et cette defaveur aveugles
agissent comme un triage volontaire, et qu'ainsi la nature choisit dans chaque
milieu, pour leur donner l'etre et l'empire, les especes les mieux appropriees a
ce lieu. Par des observations et un raisonnement analogues, les historiens
peuvent etablir que dans un groupe humain quelconque, les individus qui
atteignent la plus haute autorite et le plus large developpement sont ceux dont
les inclinations correspondent le mieux a celles de leur groupe; que le milieu
moral comme le milieu physique agit sur chaque individu par des excitations
et repressions continues. (Essais de critique et d’histoire. xxx)
Continuing what he calls the analogy, Taine now creates a structure in human
history that is identical to the one in natural history. Where comparative anatomy
allowed Lamarck and Darwin to base their theories on physical resemblance,
analogy is the means used by Taine ostensibly to create a science: "Dans l'une et
dans l'autre, l'objet est vivant, c'est-a-dire soumis a une transformation spontanee et
continue. Dans l'une et dans l'autre, la forme originelle est hereditaire, et la forme se
transmet en partie et lentement par l'heredite" (xxxi). It is at the very end of the
preface, when he still claims to be concerned with method, that Taine hints, in a
discreet phrase, at what his project is. Completing the analogy, he writes o f what
history can achieve by emulating the natural sciences:
Par une suite de recherches bien conduites, elle finira par determiner les
conditions des grands evenements humains, je veux dire les circonstances
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necessaires a l'apparition, a la duree ou a la mine des diverses formes
d'association, de pensee et d'action. (xxxii)
He does not name the event or the persons, but the word "association" is significant.
As I shall argue in the next chapter, it was to be turned against him.
Origins again
Taine, as I have pointed out above, was more than shaken by the events of
1870-1871. He buried himself in the Archives to write the history of the Revolution.
The first volume of the Origines de la France contemporaine was entitled L'Ancien
Regime and appeared in 1877. It is in volume two, in the chapter "L'Esprit et la
doctrine," that evolutionary narrative is overtly used to account for the aberration
that the Revolution represented. Like Fustel de Coulanges, Taine did not doubt who
was to blame. But unlike Fustel, he did not hesitate to name the culprit: Rousseau.
And unlike Fustel, who argued against the Rousseauist philosophy and not the
person, Taine was vituperative in his attack on Rousseau. Person and thought were
inseparable.3 4 As Thomas McClelland has pointed out, "In Taine one sometimes gets
the feeling that Rousseau caused the Revolution single-handed" (The French Right,
16).
Beyond the personal attack on Rousseau and the Jacobins, the Origines is a
critique of the spirit of the Enlightenment. On Taine's view, there was a certain
poison in the philosophy of the eighteenth century. It was the synergistic product of
two ingredients, which, taken separately, were salutaires but, combined, produced a
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compound that was veneneux. The two ingredients were the scientific discoveries of
the age and the classical spirit. The fusion of the two led to the revolutionary spirit.
For Taine, there were two kinds of reason. One was the raison of the classical
spirit, la raison qui raisonne. The esprit classique functions on a mathematical model.
It extracts, cicumscribes, and isolates certain simple and very general notions. It
ignores experience. The other raison was a raison qui s'ignore, rooted in tradition, a
prejuge hereditaire, which, with an accumulation of experience going back in time,
indissolubly bound up with tradition and religion, could belong only to a few. This
definition of a raison qui s'ignore is not unlike Fustel de Coulanges' genealogy. There
are resonances of La Cite antique in Taine's account of the prejuge hereditaire which
is the source of this raison. He himself (in the preface cited in the previous section)
had established heredity as constituting causality in human history.
Taine's reasoning goes thus: unfortunately, in the eighteenth century, reason
was classical. In the seventeenth century, reason was subaltern. Religion and
monarchy were the source of authority. In the eighteenth century however, the roles
were reversed, and reason took the upper hand. The grandiose discoveries of science
gave the philosophes a certain confidence and provided a certain basis for reason to
supplant the authority of tradition and gradually eliminate it. This allowed for the
possibility of a new spirit and a doctrine: the revolutionary spirit. This is the core of
Taine's analysis. A reason that was blind, that ignored the past and tradition, with its
mathematical constructions, could create an abstract man, by stripping men of all
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differences that separated them. Since liberty, equality, and fraternity were the
articles of faith of the social contract, and all men were equal, society was composed
of these abstract men. Although Taine devotes several pages to the other major
thinkers of the Enlightenment- -Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Diderot, there is no
doubt that it is Roussseau who is responsible for this doctrine:
Compose de theoremes prouves, le contrat social a l'autorite de la geometrie;
c'est pourquoi il vaut comme elle en tous temps, en tous lieux pour tout
peuple; son etablissement est de droit. Quiconque y fait obstacle est l'ennemi
du genre humain; gouvemement, aristocratie, clerge, quel qu'il soit, il faut
l'abattre.. . . A la souverainete du roi, le Contrat social substitue la
souverainete du peuple. Mais la seconde est encore plus absolue que la
premiere, et dans le couvent democratique que Rousseau construit sur le
modele de Sparte et de Rome, l'individu n'est rien, l'Etat est tout. (Origines,
183)
Having resolved the question of metaphysics in his earlier works by turning
to the natural sciences, having made of history a science, he is now in a position to
critique the social contract on methodological grounds. Because it is composed of
theorems, the social contract is abstract and metaphysical. The individual in the
social contract is an abstract construct, therefore he does not exist, and the State is
all. The recurring motif in the Origines is that of abstract geometry. In his chapter on
the Constituent Assembly, Taine uses the simile of a ship to describe the manner in
which a constitution was built until the Assembly became over-zealous.3 5 The
material was weighed and examined, neighboring ships were looked upon as models,
the procedure was tentative and slow:
Tout cela est arriere; le siecle de la raison est venu, et l'Assemblee est trop
eclairee pour se trainer dans la routine. Conformement aux habitudes du
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temps, elle opere par deduction, a la maniere de Rousseau, d'apres une notion
abstraite du Droit, de l'Etat et du Contrat social. De cette fa9on, et par la seule
vertu de la geometrie politique, on aura le navire ideal; puisqu'il est ideal, il
est sur qu'il naviguera, et bien mieux que tous les navires empiriques. (Ill,
1,190)
It is not only Rousseau who is under attack here. Behind Rousseau is Kant. But
Taine will not name Kant, in the Origines, except in passing. I shall discuss his
ambivalence on Kant in the next chapter. What is remarkable about the Origines is
that the attack on reason is directed at Rousseau. Writing of the revolutionaries,
Taine states:
Selon eux, leur droit et leur devoir sont de refaire la societe de fond en comble.
Ainsi l'ordonne la raison pure qui a decouvert les droits de l'homme et les
conditions du contrat social. Appliquez le Contrat social, si bon vous semble,
mais ne l'appliquez qu'aux hommes pour lesquels on l'a fabrique. Ce sont des
hommes abstraits, qui ne sont d'aucun siecle et d'aucun pays, pures entites
ecloses sous la baguette metaphysique. En effet, on les a formes en retranchant
expressement toutes les differences qui separent un homme d'un autre, un
Frangais d'un Papou, un Anglais modeme d'un Breton contemporain de Cesar,
et l'on n'a garde que la portion commune. (217; emphasis added)
Taine is reacting here not only to the Revolution, but to the philosophy of his youth.
In his essays on Cousin, in Les Philosophes classiques. he is acerbic in tone, critical
of Cousin, of abstraction, and of geometry. Taine alludes to Kant in relatively neutral
terms, even his references to Rousseau are mild. There is none of the fierce rhetoric
of the Origines. But the Paris Commune of 1871 was a reminder that the problem of
the recurrent Revolution would not go away as long as men believed themselves to
be free. By this time however, Taine has developed a theory of society and the
individual in the form of evolutionary narrative. Rousseau is blamed for the
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Revolution. Ideas of revolution come from minds that think in abstractions, that
imagine that individuals can form associations because of their capacity to reason.
Taine's anti-rationalism is a philosophical one, grounded in science. Through
analogy, he has made of history a science, as I have argued above. In the Origines.
evolutionary language is both argument and metaphor. Against the abstract
individuals who have modeled themselves on Rousseau's Contrat. Taine pits the real
Franqais of 1789, le peuple. Still on the subject of the Constituent Assembly, he
writes:
C'est pour eux seuls qu'on constituent; c'est done eux seuls qu'ils faut
considerer, et manifestement, ils sont des hommes d'une espece particuliere,
ayant leur temperament propre, leur aptitudes, leurs inclinations, leur
religion, leur histoire, toute une structure mentale et morale, structure
hereditaire et profonde, legue par la race primitive, et dans laquelles chaque
grand evenement, chaque periode politique ou litteraire, est venue, depuis
vingt siecles, apporter un croissement, une metamorphose ou un pli. Tel un
arbre d'espece unique, dont le tronc, epaissi par l'age, garde dans ses couches
superposees, dans ses noeuds, dans ses courbures, dans son branchage, tous
les depots de sa seve et l'empreinte des innombrables saisons qu'il a
traversees. Appliquee a un tel organisme, la definition philosophique, si
banale et si vague, n'est qu'une etiquette puerile et ne nous apprend rien.
('Origines. I, 219)
I shall discuss Taine's use of metaphor in detail in the next chapter. In terms
of evolutionary narrative, and Taine's anti-rationalism, this passage is critical. Man,
and men, in other words, Rousseau's individual, and socially contracted individuals
are abstractions of the mind. There exists only the evolutionary individual,
scientifically established by Darwin and the naturalists. This individual, human, is
part of a species, the human species. But within the human species, there are
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differences, different races, and these constitute sub-species. The French people of
1789 were a sub-species, who consisted of different individuals, different from the
point of view of class and fortune. Despite these differences, they had one thing in
common, which they derived from the fact of containing the species within each of
them. So that the reader is no doubt, he stresses :
Encore un trait, et le plus important de tous. Ces hommes si differents entre
eux sont bien loin d'etre independants et de contracter entre eux pour la
premiere fois. Depuis huit cents ans, eux et leurs ancetres font un corps de
nation, et c'est grace a cette communaute qu'ils ont pu vivre, se propager,
travailler, acquerir, s'instruire, se policer, accumuler tout l'heritage de bien-
etre et lumieres dont ils jouissent aujourd'hui. Chacun d'eux est dans cette
communaute comme une cellule dans un corps organise. Sans doute le corps
n’ est que l'ensemble des cellules; mais la cellule ne natt. ne subsiste. ne se
developpe et n'atteint ses fins personelles que par la sante du corps entier.
(Origines I, 220; emphasis added)
If Taine's critique of the Enlightenment begins with a questioning of the geometrical
analogy, he ends with the weight of the natural sciences behind him. From Darwin's
evolutionary ancestor, he infers the national ancestor. At the time of Taine's writing,
Jules Ferry had coined the phrase "Nos ancetres, les Gaulois," which was to become
the refrain in every primary school in France until a century later. By making
evolutionary theory the epistemological basis of human history, Taine does away
with reason and the social contract, on the one hand, and provides a scientific,
genealogical basis for an extreme nationalism on the other. Barres and Bourget, as
we shall see in the next chapter, carried this project through, even while reproaching
the old philosophe for not having wholly abandoned reason.
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Notes
1 For Buffon's views on the transmutation of species, see Buffon, Georges-Louis
Leclerc, Histoire Naturelle generate et particuliere (1749); Degeneration des
Animaux (1766). For Lamarck's transformisme. see Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste
Philosophie Zoologique (Paris 1809). I discuss both thinkers in Chapter I below. The
works by the following thinkers contain elements of the hypothesis that there was
gradation of species: Lyell, Charles. The Principles of Geology. London, 1830-33.
Chambers, R. Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. (London 1844). Gavin de
Beer's Introduction to the 1969 Leicester University Press edition of this work cites
Montesquieu, Observations sur l'histoire naturelle, de Maillet, Telliamed,
Maupertius, and Diderot as precursors. The introduction gives a very concise history
of transformisme and evolution before Chambers wrote his work. Immanuel Kant is
seen as a precursor by Ernst Haeckel and Fritz Schultze. Schultze, based on
Haeckel's work, wrote an essay, Kant und Darwin (Jena, 1875) as an introduction to
a selection of texts from Kant ranging from the Universal History of Nature and a
Theory of Heaven, the Idea of a Universal History. Conjectures on the Origins of
Human History, and finally the Critique of Judgement. In actual fact, Kant's interest
in evolutionary theory arose out of a controversy with Herder, whose Ideen zur
Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784) he had reviewed in the Jenaer
Allgemeine Litteraturzeitung. On Herder as a precursor of Darwin, see von
Barenbach, Herder als Vorganger Darwins, and Rouche's critique of Barenbach in
Herder, precurseur de Darwin? Goethe too is seen as a founder of evolution, having
arrived at his views independently of Lamarck. On Goethe's interest in the quarrel
between Etienne Geoffroy St.Hilaire and Cuvier, cf. Goethe's Gesprache mit
Eckermann. Aug 2, 1830. Also, for Goethe's views, see “General introduction to
Comparative Anatomy,” cited by Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in Histoire naturelle
generate des regnes organiques II, Paris, V. Massom, 1854-1862, p 406. Sainte-
Hilaire also points to a phrase by Rousseau which indicates how Rousseau saw
species: "Est-ce qu'a proprement parler, il n'existerait point d'especes dans la nature,
mais seulement des individus? " (Dictionnaire des termes de la botanique. art.
Aphrodite); also cited by Giard in Controverses transformistes. (Paris: Vaud,1904).
Buffon's role in transformisme has been discussed by Piveteau, in Oeuvres
philosophiques de Buffon (xxxii-iv). He also cites Diderot, without indicating which
work: "Ne croirait-on pas volontiers, qu'il y a jamais eu qu'un premier animal,
prototype de tous les animaux, dont la nature n'a fait qu'allonger, raccourcir,
transformer, multiplier, obliterer certins organes?"(xix). Diderot's Encvclopedie is
cited by Saint-Hilaire and de Beer, without reference to any specific entry.
2 Cited by Michel Foucault in Les Mots et les choses. 160.
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•j
On Buffon's influence on Rousseau, see Starobinski, "Rousseau et Buffon," in J-J
Rousseau et son oeuvre, 135-146.
4 Taine, in the Origines de la France contemporaine is at pains to show how this very
fact was an important element in the poison that Enlightenment thought represented,
cf p.81 below.
5 Denis Diderot, Pensees sur l'interpretation de la nature, XII. (1754) (Paris: Vrin,
1983).
6 Kant, Immanuel. Prefaces and Introduction to the first and second editions of The
Critique of Pure Reason: also "The Antinomies of Pure Reason" in the
"Transcendental Dialectic," The Critique of Pure Reason. Victor Cousin who taught
Kant’s philosophy at the Sorbonne, reproaches Kant with having displaced pure
reason, thereby turning to scepticism, cf. Cours de Thistoire de la philosophie
modeme. lere serie, V, 310-321. cf Chapter II, p. 101 below.
7 Cf. Chemi, Amor. “Degeneration et depravation: Rousseau chez Buffon,”in
Buffon 88, Actes du Collogue international, 143-154.
o
"Le systeme indique les plantes, meme celles dont il n'a pas fait mention; ce que ne
peut jamais faire remuneration d'un catalogue" in Linnaeus (Carl von Linne),
Philosophie Botanique, n.156, cited by Foucault in Les Mots et les choses, 159.
9 cf. Michel Foucault. Les Mots et les choses. 160.
1 0 Histoire naturelle generate et particuliere, Tome II, "Histoire naturelle de
l'homme." 438-440. In the famous chapter "De l'Asne" in volume IV, however,
Buffon reverts to the argument that "species" is an abstract category, 384.
1 1 The neologism is attributed to Turgot in the Encvclopedie universelle de
Philosophie. Starobinski believes that it is Buffon who coined the term. cf.
“Rousseau et Buffon” in Jean-Jacques Rousseau: la transparence et l’obstacle. suivi
de sept essays sur Rousseau, 384.
1 2 Histoire naturelle genenerale et particuliere, Tome IV, "De l'Asne," 377-389.
Buffon once again raises the hypothesis of the transformation of species, but refutes
it with the same argument used in the long passage cited above. "Si l'on admet une
fois qu'il y ait des families dans les plantes et dans les animaux, que l'asne soit de la
famille du cheval, on pourra dire egalement que le singe est de la famille de
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l'homme, que c'est un homme degenere "(382). In a sense, degeneration is the
opposite of evolution, because of Buffon’ s fixisme. Amor Chemi has made an
excellent comparision between the concept of degeneration in Buffon and that of
depravation in Rousseau. But he explicitly states that his intention is not to trace
empirically Buffon's influence on Rousseau but analyse the concept from the point of
view of method (cf note 14 above). For the purposes of my argument, the empirical
influence is of importance, because the implicit transformisme in Buffon is rendered
almost explicit because of the specific way in which Rousseau used these concepts.
1 3 Tort, Patrick. La Pensee hierarchique et revolution. 155.
1 4 Bourguin L. "Les grands naturalistes francais au commencement du XIX siecle:
Lamarck." Annales de la societe linneenne de Maine et Loire VI (1863), 185 -221.
1 5 Gillian Beer cites the case of the water-bird with the long legs: "Or, cet oiseau,
voulant faire en sorte que son corps ne plonge pas dans le liquide, fait tous ses efforts
pour etendre et allonger ses pieds" 226. (Darwin's Plots. 24).
1 6 Cf. Gillian Beer, Darwin's Plots, 19.
1 7 Cited by Michel Foucault in Les Mots et les choses. 161.
1 8 In the chapter on species, Lamarck's concern is to establish that species continually
vary, according to circumstances. He reasserts Buffon's statement that nature consists
of individuals only: "Ainsi parmi les corps vivants, la nature comme je l'ai deja dit,
ne nous offre d'une maniere absolue que des individus qui se succedent les uns aux
autres par la generation, et qui proviennent les uns des autres; mais les especes,
parmi eux, n'ont qu'une Constance relative, et ne sont invariables que
temporairement" (Philosophie Zoologique. 74). Unlike Buffon, Lamarck is perfectly
consistent. He has no metaphysical frontier between man and other animals,
therefore the individual exists in nature as an ontological entity, regardless of which
species it belongs to.
1 9 Bejin Andre, "Les trois phases de revolution du darwinisme social en France," in
Darwinisme et societe. 353-360.
2 0 Royer has been the object of recent scholarship in France. Cf. Bejin in note 27
above. On the reception of Darwin's theory, cf. Yvette Conry's L'introduction du
darwinisme en France au XIXe siecle. (Paris, Vrin 1974). Also Bemardini, J-M. Le
darwinisme social en France (1859-1918) (Paris: CNRS 1997).
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2 1 Conry, Le social-darwinisme en France, 309
2 2 Essai sur l'inegalite des races humaines. Editions de la Pleiade, I, xi The
“Dedicace” opens with a clear statement as to Gobineau's aim: to explain
n why revolutions, wars and upheavals occur. Book I draws heavily on contemporary
debate within transformisme with its overflow into ethnography.
9T
“Avant-propos a la Comedie Humaine.” Balzac mistook the “unite de
composition” in St. Hilaire's theory to be the bone of contention between St. Hilaire
and Cuvier. His own position was actually fixiste.
2 4 Patrick Tort, La Pensee hierarchique et revolution. 145.
2 5 Franfois Hartog. Le dix-neuvieme siecle et l'histoire, 82-90.
2 6 De la Grammatologie. Derrida's critique of Rousseau's Essai sur l'origine des
langues is a continuation of a critique of the philosophy of presence and of Western
logocentrism as a whole which Derrida elaborates in La Yoix et le phenomene . In
this work, the philosophy of presence as articulated by Husserl and the privileging of
the voice and phonetic writing is the object of critique, and in this sense, the critique
of Rousseau in the Grammatologie is a continuation of this enterprise. Derrida
believes that La Yoix et le phenomene can be considered a long note to the
Grammatologie. Cf. Positions, 6.
2 7 For a discussion of the question of origins, cf. the entry for "Origine" by Sylvain
Auroux in “Notions Philosophiques” II, ed. Sylvain Auroux in the Encvclopedie
Philosophique Universelle, 1833-4.
2 8 Note de travail, Fonds Fustel de Coulanges. Carton 1. This is clearly an allusion to
Rousseau’s second Discours . But where Rousseau cites Sparta in order to
differentiate between ancient times and the etat sauvage on the one hand, and the
present, Fustel uses the same analogy to affirm an immutable law of nature.
90
Les Revolutions du Globe, Microfiche, Bibliotheque Nationale de France.
30 A nisus is generally understood to mean an effort that is neither conscious nor
voluntary. Hume used the term to indicate a “strong endeavor” of which we are
conscious. An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, VII, I, note, 67.
3 1 Les Philosophes Classiques du XIX siecle, (1860) preface, undated.
3 2 Kamuf, P. The Division of Literature, 85
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3 3 Taine's biographer Franqois Leger has pointed out that as early as in 1850, in his
notes at the Ecole Normale Superieure, Taine had written that race, moment, and
milieu were dominant elements that allowed one to reconstruct history. Leger
believes that this is proof that Gobineau exercised no influence on Taine. cf.
Monsieur Taine, 54. While it is true that Taine may have arrived at the notion of
heredity independently of Gobineau, the fact remains that Royer's preface to the
Origin of Species led to an anthropological reading of the Origin.
3 4 In one of his notes de travail, Fustel de Coulanges had written equally harshly on
Rousseau. These were never published, cf. Fonds Fustel de Coulanges, Bibliotheque
Nationale de France. Carton 20.
3 5 Taine is ambivalent here when he writes of the Constitution. He is apparently
referring to the cahiers des doleances prepared by the tiers-etat early in 1789 in
which the question of a Constitution is brought up, and the American example is
invoked. Taine cites Burke, Jefferson and the American Ambassador. See also J.
Tulard, J-F Fayard and A Fierro, Histoire et dictionnaire de la revolution francaise,
33-34
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Chapter II
L’Arbre de M. Taine : Darwin contra Kant
Maurice Roehmerspacher, one of the seven lyceens from Lorraine who made
their way to Paris in Barres' Les Deracines was working at his desk one day in his
room in the Hotel Cujas when there was a knock on the door. A little old man
entered. Unlike Paul Bourget nearly a decade earlier, Maurice Barres does not
hesitate to name the philosophe: Monsieur Taine. The young student had written an
essay on Taine for the journal La Vraie Republique a couple of days earlier and it
had so impressed the philosophe that he decided to call on this young man of talent.
Inviting Roehmerspacher to join him on his daily constitutional, he led him from the
Quartier Latin to the square des Invalides. Pointing to a plane tree, he waxed
eloquent on the virtues of the tree. The tree was the destination of his daily walks;
regardless of the weather, he, Taine would never fail to visit the tree and commune
with it; it would be his friend and guide in his last days :
Sentez-vous sa biographie? Je la distingue dans son ensemble puissant et
dans chacun de ses details qui s’engendrent. Cet arbre est l’image expressive
d’une belle existence. II ignore T immobility. Sa jeune force creatrice des le
debut lui fixait sa destinee, et sans cesse se meut en lui. Puis-je dire que c’est
sa force propre. Non pas, c’est l’etemelle unite, l’etemelle enigme qui se
manifeste dans chaque forme. Ce fut d’abord sous le sol, dans la douce
humidite, dans la nuit souterraine, que le germe devint digne de la lumiere. Et
la lumiere alors a permis que la frele tige se devoloppat, se fortifiat d’dtats en
etats. II n’etait pas besoin qu’un maitre du dehors, intervint. Le platane
allegrement etageait ses membres, disposait ses feuilles d’annee en annee
jusqu'a sa perfection. Voyez qu’il est d’une sante pure ! Nulle prevalance de
son tronc, de ses branches, de ses feuilles; il est une federation bruissante.
Lui-meme, il est sa loi, et il l’epanouit. (Les Deracines. 153)
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9 4
The chapter in question is entitled “L’Arbre de M. Taine” and carries as an epigraph
a quotation from Paul Bourget: “M. Taine, sur la fin de sa vie, avait coutume chaque
jour de visiter un arbre au square des Invalides et de l’admirer.” 1
Barres uses the tree as a very dense and complex metaphor. There is a real
biography to the tree. Although he makes it a point not to allude to the Origines
when he is actually describing the tree in the square des Invalides, it is the image of
the tree repeatedly invoked by Taine in the Origines that Barres parodies here. For
Taine used the tree as a metaphor to critique the thinkers of the eighteenth century.
As he saw it, their turning to the natural sciences was one of the conditions that made
it possible for the revolutionary spirit to emerge. He specifically names Buffon and
Lamarck when he writes of the advances in the natural sciences. But even when he is
describing the "esprit" of the eighteenth century, he merges Darwin's evolutionary
theory with Enlightenment thought. For what exactly does he reproach the
eighteenth century thinkers with? With having reduced the individual to nothing. At
the same time, he accuses them of using man as the starting-point of their
investigations. As I have argued above, it is only with Darwin that the individual
became the object of knowledge. In his use of the tree as a metaphor, Taine
assimilates Rousseau’s individual with the evolutionary individual whose ontological
status was fully established only in the nineteenth century:
Enfin, voici, l’homme, le demier venu, eclos comme un bourgeon terminal a
la cime d’un grand arbre antique, pour y vegeter pendant quelques saisons,
mais destine comme l’arbre a perir apres quelques saisons, lorsque le
refroidissement croissant et prevu qui a permis a l’arbre de vivre forcera
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l’arbre a mourir. II n’est pas seul sur la tige: au-dessous de lui, autour de lui,
presque a son niveau, sont d’autres bourgeons nes de la meme seve; qu’il
n ’oublie jamais, s’il veut comprendre son etre, de considerer, en meme temps
que lui-meme, les autres vivants, ses voisins, echelonnes jusqu'a lui et issus
du meme tronc. fOri sines I, 274-5)
Nominally, Taine's intent here is to critique the social contract: "II n’est pas
seul sur la tige" is Taine's way of describing the notion of the social bond that
emerged with Rousseau's social contract. However, the image of the bud surrounded
by others, above, below and around it, has other resonances. A closer look at the
biography of the tree will indicate that Barres certainly knew why Taine used the
metaphor. Immanuel Kant, in the fifth proposition of The Idea of a Universal
History, uses the metaphor of a forest to describe the nature of the social contract.
The proposition states that the greatest problem faced by mankind is the question of
how a civil society governed by law may be attained. He then elaborates: it is only in
a society where freedom is subject to external laws that man can attain Nature’s end.
Man enters into a “civil association” with other men because he cannot live with
other men in a state of wild freedom. Yet the very inclinations that make men
unsociable in the “state of wild freedom” now, in civil association, produce positive
results :
It is just the same with trees in a forest, each needs the others, since each in
seeking to take the air and sunlight from others must strive upward and
thereby each realizes a beautiful straight stature, while those that live in
isolated freedom put out branches at random, and grow stunted, crooked and
twisted. ( Kant, On History, 17)
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I venture to suggest that Barres uses the metaphor of the tree to mock Taine
for not having shaken off the Kantian legacy. The critique is not only through the
metaphor. In Barres1 novel, the recurrent theme is an anti-Kantianism that is, in a
sense, the substance of the novel. Had the Kantian maitre Bouteiller not seduced the
young men with abstract Kantian ideas, they would never have left Lorraine and
become the deracines. Even before the nhilosophe and Roemerspacher reach the
square des Invalides, Taine suggests to the young man that he and his friends from
Lorraine should form a group. Ideas are abstract, he says, it would be an admirable
thing if, through his compatriots, he introduced a little "sociability" in his life. Now,
the key concepts in Kant’s Idea of a Universal History are sociability and
association. Man’s nature is unsociable, but, at the same time, there is the inclination
to associate with other men. It is the "unsocial sociability" of man that nature uses in
order to fulfill its design, which is the full development of the dispositions of human
nature. By attributing to Taine ideas that are derived from Kant, Barres effectively
says that his maitre has not succeeded in breaking with the Kantian tradition. He
even says so explicitly:
II n’en est pas qui contredise plus fortement Kant et Bouteiller.
Roemerspacher a reproduit et souligne, dans son article, les arguments par
lesquels l’historien condamne toute tentative de refondre les societes au nom
de la raison pure; et maintenant l ’illustre auteur des Origines lui devoile
brievement ses conclusions, lui indique comment la meilleure ecole, le
laboratoire social, c’est le groupement, l’association libre . . . (Les Deracines.
242)
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Barres and the French Right believed that universal legislation was neither
possible nor desirable. Values were nationally determined. In the same contemptuous
dismissal of Kant, Roehmerspacher cites Pascal as his philosopher: "Verite en-deca
des Pyrenees, erreur au-dela." It is the belief in a national heritage, independent of
social contract and universal moral laws, that drove Barres and his close friend
Charles Maurras to the extreme right-wing positions of L’Action fran^aise. I have
shown, in Chapter I, how Taine castigates the thinkers of the Enlightenment, and
Rousseau in particular, for having arrived at their truths through abstract reasoning,
le pur raisonnement. However, since he opposes the raison raisonnante with a reason
of his own, the raison qui s'ignore, Taine is para-rational rather than irrational.2 For
all that Taine may have been the thinker who shaped Barres and his generation, he
still maintained the distinction between the two kinds of reason. Barres rejected
Reason altogether, and as I shall argue below, reproached his master for not having
gone far enough in his rejection of the Enlightenment. The official philosophy of the
Third Republic was a neo-Kantianism, Charles Renouvier being largely responsible
for having introduced Kant into the curriculum. Barres embodied this Kantianism in
the character of Bouteiller, the young professor who uproots the lyceens from
Lorraine and sends them to their doom in Paris in Les Deracines. After the defeat of
France in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, and the loss of Lorraine, who could be
blamed but the philosopher d'outre-Rhin? The anti-Kantian rhetoric of Maurras' later
writings is matched by a more subtle irrationalism that permeates Les Deracines. It is
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not enough to condemn Bouteiller and Reason as such; the original source of an
irrationalist nationalism was Monsieur Taine. How could the maitre then talk of
association?
The idea of association here has to do with the social contract, originating
in Rousseau but developed by Kant with a specific political agenda. "II est une
federation bruissante" is both a mockery of Taine's discreet Kantianism, as Barres
sees it, and of Taine's genealogical metaphor. The essential thesis of Les Origines
de la France contemporaine is that the social contract was arbitrarily invented by
thinkers- - and here Rousseau is not alone to blame- -who, inspired by the
progress in the natural sciences, sought to account for human history in the same
terms. Taine’s condemnation is primarily of Rousseau and the thinkers of the
French Enlightenment. The raison he critiques is that of the esprit classique
which, when fused with the scientific discoveries, provided the basis of a
doctrine. He does not explicitly blame Kant, and this is the thrust of Barres' use of
metaphor. Barres and his generation had been formed by Taine and the sources of
their vehement anti-Kantianism lie in Taine's rejection of pure reason. What is
also at issue here is the eclecticism that Taine inherited from Cousin, which, on
Barres' view does not allow the philosophe to take the step that he and Maurras
did, reject Kant and reason altogether.
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In Les Deracines. before Roemerspacher and Taine reach the tree, the
question of Kant, pure reason and the categorical imperative has been dealt with
summarily. Young Roemerspacher pours scorn on the moral law:
"Agis de telle sorte que la maxime de ta volonte puisse toujours valoir en
meme temps comme principe de legislation universelle".. .. Je ne crois
pas qu'un seul de mes camarades ait prit au serieux la peripetie par
laquelle Kant ressucite la certitude. C'est bien theatrale! Et cela nous
rappelle que l'ennuyeuse tragedie philosophique du dix-huitieme siecle
avait deja des moyens de melodrame. Pour nous, l'imperatif categorique
est reduit a etre, comme on l'a dit, le "consultatif categorique." J'etais trop
votre eleve, monsieur, pour demeurer celui de Bouteiller et admettre une
formule qui implique la possibility d'une legislation universelle. (Les
Deracines. 239)
The ingenuity in Barres' use of the metaphor lies in explicitly naming Kant on the
one hand, when the discourse is literal and philosophical, and not naming any
philosopher when describing the plane tree in the Square des Invalides. The image of
the forest from the fifth thesis of Kant's Idea of a Universal History is not the only
one evoked here. In the sixth thesis, Kant turns the metaphor against itself. Mankind
is now made of such “crooked timber" that it is incapable of becoming straight on its
own and realizing its ideal. Now, “crooked” is the term Barres uses to describe
another lyceen from Lorraine, Racadot, who, in the struggle for life in Paris, does not
survive. He becomes a murderer and is hanged for his crime. The French translation
for Kant's krumm is courbu. La courbe is the term Barres uses to decribe Racadot in
his downfall. The unwitting use of Kantian metaphor in the description of Racadot's
degeneration shall be discussed in a later chapter. What is of significance here is that
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in the fifth thesis, Kant believes that association is the corrective that will allow for
universal legislation. In the sixth however, he says that man is made of such crooked
timber, he cannot straighten himself, without the external intervention of a master. In
the case of l'arbre de M. Taine, however, the situation is different. "II n'etait pas
besoin qu'un maitre du dehors intervint.. . . Voyez, qu'il est d'une sante pure! Nulle
prevalence de son tronc, de ses branches de ses feuilles; il est une federation
bruissante. Lui-meme il est sapropre loi." The metaphor is double-edged: Taine is
Kantian up to a point, but he does not go all the way with Kant. He, or rather the tree
he admires, does not need an external corrective in the shape of a master or a
categorical imperative: "Lui-meme est sa propre loi." The allusion here is also to
Spinoza, Taine's first maitre. Spinoza's axioms and Kant's maxims are exclusive in a
way that only a certain eclecticism could reconcile, and it is Taine's eclecticism that
is at issue here.
Taine's first philosophical influence was Spinoza. Soon, through his reading
of Laromiguiere, he came under the sway of Condillac's ideas. His proclivity for the
natural sciences led to his rejection of rationalism in favor of empiricism. However,
with Victor Cousin's eclecticism becoming the dominant philosophical trend, Taine
was at something of a loss in choosing his philosopher. He admired Hegel, but John
Stuart Mill too. Unable to be wholly empiricist, given that Condillac was officially
frowned upon, Taine turned to the natural sciences, and by way of analogy, claimed
to have come up with a philosophical method. In fact, the analogy itself turned into
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the method. The image of the organic, from the botanical to the zoological, when
read in terms of evolutionary theory, led to the idea of heredity and genealogy. This
method is put into practice in Histoire de la litterature anglaise. By the time Taine
wrote the Origines de la France contemporaine, he had postulated a preiuge
hereditaire which is the raison qui s'ignore that I have alluded to above and discussed
in Chapter I. His political opposition to the Enlightenment now took the form of a
philosophical opposition between genealogy (le preiuge hereditaire, la raison qui
s'ignore) and pure reason (la raison qui raisonne), a reason that constructs abstract
truths. The term "pure reason" is usually associated with Kant, but Taine is reluctant
to name the Konigsberg philosopher. He writes of the raison raisonnante and le pur
raisonnement. When he does name Kant, it is to make a comparison that is
unfavorable to Rousseau and the Encyclopedists, in terms of the simplicity of his
•3
life-style. When he does not name Kant, but actually paraphrases him is when he
describes the new “doctrine” that is synonymous with the philosophie du dix-
huitieme siecle:
De l’acquis scientifique que Ton a vu, elabore par l’esprit que Ton vient de
decrire, naquit une doctrine qui parut une revelation et qui, a ce titre,
pretendait au gouvemement des choses humaines. Aux approches de 1789, il
est admis qu’on vit "dans les siecles des lumieres," dans "l’age de la raison,"
qu’auparavant le genre humain etait dans l’enfance, qu’aujourd’hui il est
devenu "maieur." (Origines. 1,153; emphasis added)
This last phrase is from Kant's What is Enlightenment? Why does Taine not
name Kant? The obvious answer would be that the Jacobins did not claim to have
been inspired by him. Rousseau was their source of inspiration. I believe that the real
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reason is that Taine, while rejecting the Enlightenment, did not reject reason as such,
hence Barres' mockery. The very fact that he postulates another kind of reason, la
raison qui s’ignore, derived from tradition and the preiuge hereditaire, is indicative
of this. To name Kant and assimilate him with the French thinkers of the
Enlightenment as the cause of the Revolution was something Taine certainly was
reluctant to do.4 And this is precisely why Barres mocks Taine. For Barres, it is
reason itself that is at fault. His position is one of extreme irrationalism and it is the
disappointment with the thinkers who were his mentors at the university in Paris,
Taine foremost, that drives him to this position. Taine is caricatured for having failed
to carry through his critique of the Enlightenment. For Barres, Taine shared the
belief in reason with Kant and Rousseau. In his notebooks written in the summer of
1896, before Les Deracines was published, he spells this out clearly: “Un Renan, un
Taine, ont era a une raison independante, existant dans chacun de nous et qui nous
permet d’approcher la verite, les lois sises au sommet des choses et de la, descendant
dans les parties. C’est une erreur” fMes Cahiers. 77). Since Barres does not
acknowledge the kind of distinction made by Taine between the two kinds of reason,
Taine becomes something of a revisionist in terms of the Enlightenment. Thus Barres
permits himself to put these words into Taine’s mouth when the latter asks
Roemerspacher to accompany him to see the tree in the square des Invalides:
Voyez qu’il est d’une sante pure! Nulle prevalence de son tronc, de ses
branches, de ses feuilles, il est une federation braisssante. Lui-meme il est sa
loi, et il epanouit.. . . Quelle bonne legon de rhetorique, et non seulement de
Part du lettre, mais aussi quel guide pour penser! Lui, le bel objet, ne nous
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fait pas voir une symetrie a la ffancaise, mais la logique d’une arne vivante et
ses engendrements. Au terme d’une vie ou j ’ai tant aime la logique, il me
marque ce que j ’eus peut-etre de systematique et qui n’exprimait pas toujours
ma decision propre, mais une influence exterieure. En ethique surtout je le
tiens pour mon maitre. (Les Deracines. 53)
For after all, Kant evokes the image of the forest to describe the civil
association: the coming together of men in society. And a little while before the
scene in the Square des Invalides, Taine had asked young Roemerspacher to form an
association with the other young men from Lorraine. A federation is a coming-
together of separate elements, hence the forest in Kant's Idea is an appropriate image.
By turning the federation-forest into a federation-tree, Barres fuses Kant's metaphor
with Taine's metaphor to produce a new one, where the genealogical and the
contractual become one. Especially since Taine’s use of the metaphor in the Origines
alludes to the seve, the sap being the organic link between the different buds and
twigs, having him allude to the tree as a federation in Les Deracines is to attribute to
him Kantian notions.
Barres does not stop at this. Symetrie a la ffancaise is an allusion to Descartes
as well as to the System. In opposition to the System is the logic of a living soul and
its offspring. Philosophically, the living soul is that of Condillac and the sensationist
school, whom Taine had always upheld against the rationalists. The next sentence is
a particularly cruel jibe. “Au terme d'une vie ou j'ai tant aime la logique” mocks not
only Taine's essay on Mill's Logic, virtually a review, but also Taine's known
enthusiasm for Hegel's Science of Logic. Barres has touched on the core of Taine's
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eclecticism. There is a certain incompatibility between Taine's natural inclination
towards Mill's empiricism and Hegel's dialectic. The tree expresses the dialectic, and
as Taine apologetically confides, whatever was systematic in him was not due to his
own decision, but came as an influence exterieure. The external influence is two
fold: in the first place, Cousin, who was responsible for introducing German idealism
and that of Hegel in particular into France, was the major philosophical figure if
Taine's generation. External, because the idealism was German and outre-Rhin. The
unkindest cut is of course “en ethique surtout je le tiens pour mon maitre.” The tree
is a metaphor, and represents not Taine alone, but all the philosophers who have
shaped him. The il (the tree) is Spinoza, and lest the reader be in any doubt,
Roemerspacher tells Sturel, a fellow Lorrain:
A propos d'un arbre, il m'a presente de la fa?on la plus emouvante, avec des
images extremement fortes et vraies, un tableau de la vie tout spinoziste.
Evidemment il se rallie a la regie du devoir selon l'Ethique: "Plus quelqu'un
s'efforce pour conserver son etre, plus il a de vertu." (248)5
Taine, who, successively, with his reading of Laromiguiere, Royer-Collard, Maine
de Biran, and Cousin, moved from one philosophical school to another, would have
done so, on Barres' view, out of a sense of self-preservation.
Barres' ingenuity does not stop here. Having reproached the master for his
discreet Kantianism, he points to a neglected line of thought. The maitre who used
the term la raison qui s'ignore could surely not have forgotten la raison des effets, or
the opposition made by Pascal between the faculty of reason and that of the instinct.
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Pascal is opposed by Barres to Kant in a double-pronged offensive. French, home
spun philosophy is opposed to a cosmopolitanism that is outre-Rhin and Protestant.
Young Roemerspacher, Barres' creation and modeled partly on Maurras, traces his
genealogy to Pascal through an impeccable lineage, that of Montesquieu. Citing
Pascal, Roemerspacher informs Taine: "Les hommes de siecle...partant justes. Elies
sont la verite tant qu'elles sont necessaires".
This is more or less a paraphrase of Montesquieu's "Les lois sont les rapports
necessaires qui derivent de la nature des choses" C L’Esprit des lois.l). However,
with the reference to Pascal, Roemerspacher opens a new vein in the ore already
richly mined by Taine. It is, after all, Pascal who opposed Nature to Reason:
Instinct et raison, marque de deux natures... . Car nos connaissances des
premiers principes, espace, temps, mouvement, nombres, sont aussi fermes
qu'aucune de celles que nos raisonnements nous donnent; et c'est sur ces
connaissances du coeur et de l'instinct, qu'il faut que la raison s'appuie et
qu'elle y fonde tout son discours. fPensees. 89)
Pascal is also a source of la raison qui s'ignore. The opposition between Pascal and
Descartes, however, was not the issue for Taine. By the time he and his generation
had to address the question of reason in terms of its importance for the Revolution,
rationalism had more or less been displaced by empiricism, in England, certainly. In
France, alarmed by the excesses of the materialist tradition, Victor Cousin followed
Royer Collard in teaching Thomas Reid and the Scottish school of thought. Reid,
with his "common-sense" philosophy had sought to counter Hume's skepticism.
Following a visit to Germany and personal meetings with Hegel and Schelling,
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Cousin introduced German idealism in the curriculum as a way of stemming what he
perceived to be the skepticism that empiricism would lead to. Eclecticism became
the official philosophy. In Chapter I, I have shown how Taine, through his
eclecticism, made the journey from Condillac's materialism and empiricism to
genealogy. For Barres and his generation, this transition was a fait accomnli. The
travails of a Taine or a Renan leave Roemerspacher unmoved: "Qu'est-ce la
matiere?" he says to Taine at the Square des Invalides. For Barres' generation, the
choice was not between spiritualism and materialism, as it was for Taine. His
generation belonged to the relative. There was however, the need for an absolute
morality. Barres and Maurras found this morality in an extreme nationalism
grounded in an irrationalism, based on the idea, received from Taine, that universal
legislation and cosmopolitanism were a function of Pure Reason. Pascal is cited to
oppose Kant, the German Protestant. He is also the answer to Kant's Reason in a way
he could not be for Taine the materialist. Pascal opposed nature and instinct to
reason, by affirming all that was distinctive and particular. In this sense, Taine's
raison qui s'ignore does have Pascalian roots. Taine however could not overtly
acknowledge Pascal, for this would conflict with his avowed secularism. Yet, since
Taine's raison is synonymous with the preiuge hereditaire. Pascal's raison des effets
is transmuted into genealogy. The passage from empiricism to genealogy, which
takes place through the analogy with the natural sciences in Taine, is also a transition
from Pascal's instinct to a para-rationalism which, in Barres and Maurras, becomes
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full-fledged irrationalism. Irrationalism and genealogy are one in the nascent French
Right. For Taine, evolutionary narrative was the means of acceding to a
philosophical method which in the end turned itself into genealogy. For Barres, it is a
commonplace. The title of the novel is Les Deracines. Within this deracinement
grows l’arbre de M. Taine. “Sentez-vous sa biographie?” is also a way of describing
Taine's own life, in terms of both ontogeny and phylogeny. Phylogeny, in the first
place, because the image of the tree serves as a means to trace Taine's philosophical
ancestry.
In his days at the Ecole Normale, Taine was drawn to Spinoza. Soon, his
inclination towards the natural sciences led him to Condillac whose sensationism he
found attractive. However, with Victor Cousin becoming the dominant figure in the
Establishment, Cousin's philosophy of eclecticism became the norm. In his cours at
the Sorbonne, Cousin argued that the existing philosophical trends could broadly be
categorized into two schools of thought: materialism, and spiritualisme which
broadly corresponded to rationalism. Cousin took a strong position against
Condillac. His starting point was a fear of skepticism. On his view, the different
schools of thought, since Descartes, led to skepticism. His own reading of Kant led
him to conclude that the latter's rejection of the rationalists' claims on behalf of
reason led to skepticism. His own philosophy of eclecticism would take all the
positive elements of each school, while avoiding the pitfalls of skepticism. He
opposed materialism to spiritualisme. under which category, he included Rousseau.
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However, before his philosophy became the norm, in his early years at the Sorbonne,
Cousin had taught Kant. Cousin's eclecticism left Taine's generation in some
disarray. In Les Philosophes classiques du dix-neuvieme siecle, Taine attacks Cousin
in a series of five essays, particularly in the essay entitled "Theorie de la Raison
selon M. Cousin." He attributes to Cousin an excessive privileging of reason. When
la raison pure comes under attack in the Origines de la France contemporaine, I
believe it is Cousin's reason that Taine is targeting. Both in the "Theorie de la Raison
selon M. Cousin" and in the later work, Taine refrains from naming Kant except in
passing. It is this silence on Kant that Barres parodies in the chapter "L'Arbre de
Monsieur Taine." Before I elaborate further on Barres' use of the tree metaphor, I
would like to say a few words on Taine's position vis-a-vis empiricism, rationalism,
and reason.
Cousin had drawn the lines of polarization between empiricism and
spiritualisme in such a way that Taine, whose inclination was towards Condillac,
stood opposed to spiritualisme. Cousin had included Reid and Kant under the ecole
spiritualiste. notwithstanding the latter's stated aim of reconciling the claims of
empiricism and rationalism.6 For Taine, spiritualisme became symmetrical with le_
pur raisonnement. By associating Rousseau, not Kant, with the idea of la raison pure.
Taine, in the Origines. avenges himself against both Cousin and the Revolution . By
the time he wrote the Origines. in 1878, Taine, in a curious move, turned against
Condillac as well. He now sees in l’esprit classique the source of the poison that
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7 • • •
caused the revolution. This espnt classique encompasses the rationalism of
Descartes and the sensationism of Condillac. Taine holds the view that the
mathematical method, common to both schools of thought, effectively erases any
claim to difference between the two. Such a procedure of reasoning is common to
both the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries:
II lui est si bien inne, qu’on le rencontre egalement dans les deux siecles,
chez Descartes, Malebranche et les partisans de la sensation, du besoin
physique, de l’instinct primitif, Condillac, Rousseau, Helvetius, plus tard
Condorcet, Volney, Sieyes, Cabanis et Destutt de Tracy. Ceux-ci ont beau se
dire sectateurs de Bacon et rejeter les idees innees; avec un autre point de
depart que les cartesiens, ils marchent dans la meme voie, et comme les
cartesiens, apres un leger emprunt, ils la l’experience. Dans cet enorme
monde moral et social, dans cet arbre humain aux raciness et aux branches
innombrables, ils detachent l’ecorce visible, une superficie; ils ne peuvent
penetrer ni saisir au-dela; leurs mains ne sauraient contenir davantage. Ils ne
soupgonnent pas qu’il ait rien de plus; Tesprit classique n’a que des prises
courtes, une comprehension bomee. Pour eux, Tecorce est l’arbre entier, et
l’operation faite, ils s’eloignent avec l’epiderme sec et mort, sans plus jamais
revenir au tronc. Par insuffisance d’esprit et par amour-propre litteraire, ils
omettent le detail caracteristique, le fait vivant, Texemple circonstancie, le
specimen significatif, probant et complet. (Origines. I, 263; emphasis added)
The first thing to be noted here is that Kant is completely out of the picture,
as is Hume. On the other hand, Bacon is mentioned. The obvious conclusion to be
drawn is that Taine is taking an extreme empiricist position in the attack on
rationalism which, in Taine’s extraordinary claim, encompasses sensationism.
However, the failure to mention Hume implies a reluctance to adopt a Humean
position, for that would mean, in the French tradition, succumbing to skepticism.
There is, however, an equal reluctance to name Kant. What could the source of this
reluctance be?
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A closer scrutiny of this passage will reveal that Taine is making a move from
empiricism to genealogy. The recurrent motif of the tree has more than the value of
analogy. Now it is the moral and social world itself that is the tree: it has roots, a
trunk. The classical spirit, from Descartes to Condillac, is incapable of grasping the
fact that humanity is a living tree.
I believe that Taine's use of the tree as a metaphor has its sources in the
image of the tree invoked by Darwin which I shall cite below. It becomes the means
whereby Taine can move from an empiricist position to a genealogical one. For
Darwin, the tree was a metaphor that described the affinities of all living beings. For
Taine, it is what they do not have in common that makes the tree an image of the
individual with a genealogy. The esprit classique robbed the individual of his
particularity:
Au dix-huitieme siecle, il est impropre a figurer la chose vivante, l'individu
reel, tel qu'il existe effectivement dans la nature et dans l'histoire, c'est-a-dire
comme un ensemble indefini, comme un riche reseau, comme un organisme
complet de caractere et de particularites superposees, enchevetrees et
coordonnees. (Origines I, 258)
Taine constantly shifts from the empiricist to the genealogical and then back.
Writing on the thinkers of the eighteenth century, he states: "Jamais, avec eux, on
n ’est sur le terrain palpable et solide de Tobservation personelle et racontee, mais
toujours en Fair, dans la region vide des generalites pures"(263). He cites
observation as a method, but the appeal is to the genealogical. Describing the merits
of le prejudge hereditaire he writes:
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Quand on le considere de pres, on trouve que, comme la science, il a pour
source une longue accumulation d’experiences: les hommes, apres une
multitude de tatonnements et d’essais, ont fini par eprouver que telle facon de
vivre et de penser etait la seule accommodee a leur situation, la plus
praticable de toutes, la plus bienfaisante, et le regime ou dogme qui
aujourd’hui nous semble une convention a d’abord ete un expedient avere de
salut public. (Origines, I, 156)
The acquisition of inherited characteristics is one of the central tenets of
Lamarck’s theory. In Taine, this becomes an accumulation of experiences. Every
generation passed on to the next a memory of lived experience. These were traits that
could be inherited. And this is exactly what is at the core of Taine’s notion of
heredity. At the same time, the idea of adopting a practice because it was the most
bienfaisante corresponds to Darwin’s notion of adaptation. And yet Taine uses the
tree to equate the atomization of the individual, purportedly caused by a theory of
social contract articulated in the eighteenth century, with mid nineteenth-century
evolutionary theory. This is because the key element in his analysis of the esprit is
the discoveries in the natural sciences, which led to a rejection of religion. It is only
by pitting science against religion that Taine can explain the Enlightenment doctrine.
His own claims to scientism stand in peculiar contradiction to this position. At one
point he accuses Rousseau of not having any respect for science.8 At the same time,
he states that the Enlightenment doctrine arises because of the assimilation of
discoveries in science, reaching their zenith in evolutionary theory and represented
by the image of the tree in Les Deracines. It was not enough for Barres to re-create in
the person of Bouteiller his old lycee professor, Burdeau, who by teaching Kant’s
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thought, uprooted the young men of Lorraine and sent them to their decheance in
Paris. Barres’ critique of Kant does not stop with the lycee professor. In Paris, Taine
was the thinker who influenced Barres the most; and yet, for Barres, Taine did not go
far enough in his critique of the Enlightenment. In making him suggest that an
association libre become the means by which the young people of Lorraine could re
constitute the social bond, Barres is clearly saying that Taine and the thinkers of his
generation had failed to provide an alternative to eighteenth-century thought:
Rousseau and Kant. His reproach is that Taine was too abstract, that the scientism
advocated by Taine and Renan was not an adequate answer to metaphysics. On the
way to the square des Invalides, Roemerspacher says:
La grande affaire pour votre generation aura ete le passage de l’absolu au
relative .. . Permettez-moi de vous le dire, monsieur, c’est une etape franchie,
et nous sommes sur le point de ne plus comprendre Tangoisse de nos aines
accomplissant cette evolution. Ce n’est pas que nous voulions restaurer des
liens que vous avez coupes, mais enfin nous ne pouvons pas plus etre
materialistes que spiritualistes. Qu’est-ce que la matiere?... Le materialisme
est devenu pour nous une doctrine absolument incomprehensible. (Les
Deracines, 138)
While Barres is speaking for his generation, it must also be kept in mind that
his anti-Kantianism is of a different kind from that of his close friend Maurras. The
visit paid by Taine to Roehmerspacher is based on a real-life episode in which Taine
called on Maurras consequent to the publication of an article by the future leader of
L’Action Francaise. Although Barres has used this real-life incident in order to
critique Taine and his purported Kantianism, his objection to Kantian thought is not
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a critique of individualism as such, which it was for Maurras. For Barres, it is the
abstract nature of the moral law, the idea of duty and the unknowable that he rejects.
He reproaches Taine for being equally abstract in his scientism. The evolutionary
metaphor used by Taine becomes a way of tracing Taine’s genealogy back to Kant.9
However, Barres is not merely pointing to Kant here. He knows that the
tree had another biography. It had two kinds of roots so to speak. In his account of
evolutionary theory, Taine reversed chronology by suggesting that Rousseau and his
contemporaries were influenced by the theory. Not so Barres. He had his chronology
right, and although his disappointment with Taine might have made him stretch the
point a little, he made very ingenious use of the metaphor indeed.
Darwin, in the Origin, in explaining his principle of natural selection,
divergence of character, and extinction, drew a diagram which also explained
descent. Although he writes of descent, the form of the diagram is such that the
species that have survived through natural selection and divergence find themselves
at the top of the diagram, like the uppermost branches of a tree. And as if to make
this image more explicit, Darwin concludes the chapter on natural selection with a
simile:
The affinities of all the beings of the same class have been represented by a
great tree. I believe this sim ile largely speaks the truth. The green and
budding twigs may represent existing species; and those produced during
each former year may represent the long succession of extinct species. At
each period of growth all the growing twigs have tried to branch out on all
sides, and to overtop and kill the surrounding twigs and branches, in the same
manner as species and groups of species have tried to overmaster other
species in the great battle of life. The limbs divided into great branches, and
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these into lesser and lesser branches, were themselves once, when the tree
was small, budding twigs; and this connexion of the former and present buds
by ramifying branches may well represent the classification of all extinct and
living species in groups subordinate to groups. Of the many twigs which
flourished when the tree was a mere bush, only two or three, now grown into
great branches, yet survive and bear all the other branches; so with the
species which lived during long-past geological periods, very few now have
living and modified descendants. From the first growth of the tree, many
a limb and branch has decayed and dropped off; and these lost branches of
various sizes may represent those whole orders, families, and genera which
have now no living representatives, and which are known to us only from
having been found in a fossil stage. As we here and there see a thin straggling
branch, springing from a fork low down in a tree and which by some chance
has been favoured and is still alive on its summit, so may we occasionally see
an animal like the Ornithorhyncus Lepidosiren, which in some small degree
connects by its affinities two large branches of life, and which has apparently
been saved from fatal competition by having inhabited a protected station. As
buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these if vigourous, branch out and
overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has
been the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the
crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful
ramifications. (130)
It is clearly this image that Taine had in mind when he used the metaphor of
the tree in the Origines. Barres, in conjuring up the image of the arbre de M. Taine is
pointing to Taine’s confusion: Darwin’s tree and Kant’s forest have become one.
Now Barres had certainly read K ant.1 0 Given the intellectual climate in the lycee,
Kantian thought was all-pervasive. Federation, association, and sociabilite are
Kantian notions, grafted on to Monsieur Taine’s tree. It is equally evident that Barres
had read his Darwin. O f the seven lyceens from Lorraine, Racadot and Mouchefrin
fail to survive the rigors of Paris. In order to raise money to finance the journal that
the seven young men founded together, they murder a rich Armenian woman.
Shortly before his arrest, Racadot appears at a conference where he had been
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scheduled to speak. After advancing a theory of "parasitism," he alludes to l’arbre de
Monsieur Taine that Roemerspacher had often talked about, almost paraphrasing
Darwin:
Eh bien ! messieurs, j ’ai etudie ce platane, dont le developpement vaut selon
le celebre philosophe comme regie de vie: il n’a pu se conserver a l’existence
qu’en opprimant deux de ses voisins, et j ’ai lieu de croire qu’il en a supprime,
etouffe un troisieme que 1 ’administration des promenades a du faire enlever.
(Les Deracines. 442)
This is Darwin’s tree, where the vigourous branches overtop the feebler ones,
where many a branch has dropped off, doomed to extinction. It is also a tree that
grows among others, hence the image of the forest comes to mind. What Racadot is
saying, in effect, is that the mutual constraints that trees impose on each other do not
produce a harmonious association a la Kant. On the contrary, it is the most
vigourous- -in this case, l’arbre de M. Taine. that survives at the expense of its
neighbors. It is a case of survival of the fittest.
Paul Bourget, in the preface to his novel Le Disciple (1889) has pointed out
that for his generation and the circle he moved in- -Charles Maurras, Leon Daudet,
Anatole France- -the term “struggle-for-lifer” was their natural way of describing the
young men of their day. Through Taine, they had acquired evolutionary narrative as
a commonplace, albeit in Social-Darwinist terms. Yet, for all that Bourget claimed to
venerate Taine in later works, his characterization of Taine as Adrien Sixte, the
philosophe is cruel, even causing the latter considerable distress.1 1 The image of
l'arbre de M. Taine first makes its appearance in this novel. It is a cedar tree which
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Monsieur Sixte could see from his window. It cast a great shadow on all the other
trees of the Jardin des Plantes. It is not known at this point whether Bourget had
accompanied Taine to the Square des Invalides yet. He does not develop the
metaphor. However, he does so very fully in an appendix he added in 1897 to his
essay on Taine in Essais sur la psychologie contemporaine. In "Theories politiques:
un eleve de Taine," Bourget writes:
C’est avec une emotion singuliere que j ’ai retrouve dans le nouveau livre de
Maurice Barres, Les Deracines. une anecdote sur Taine qui va devenir
legendaire. Dans les toutes demieres annees de sa vie, le celebre ecrivain, qui
savait ses jours compte, avait l’habitude de diriger ses promenades vers le
petit square des Invalides. Arrive la, il s’arretait, durant de longues minutes,
en contemplation devant un arbre alors adolescent, aujourd’hui tres grand et
tres haut, dont la rare vigueur l’enchantait. C’etait a l’epoque ou il composait
son admirable Histoire des Origines de la France contemporaine. Les
conclusions auxquelles ce travail l’amenait sur Tavenir du pays
epouvantaient en lui un patriotisme d’autant plus pro fond qu’il en parlait
moins. II me repetait souvent, avec un hochement de tete que je vois encore :
‘Je mesure les cavemes d’un poitrinaire,’ et quand il avait trop
continumment, trop amerement etudie Terreur ffancaise, c'etait un repos pour
sa pensee tendue que le spectacle du jeune et bel arbre. ‘Allons voir cet etre
bien portant,’ me disait-il quand il me rencontrait ces jours-la, et il
m’entrainait vers ce miniscule jardin ou je suis retoume en pelerinage
combien de fois! . . . Nous ne serons plus seuls a nous y rendre maintenant,
nous les quelques fideles qui savions cette particularite de ses demieres
promenades, et je serais presque tente d’en vouloir au romancier des
Deracines d’avoir ce jardin et cet arbre a la curiosite des lettres, si je ne lui
etais plus reconnaisant encore pour les nobles pages ou il a evoque l’image
du maitre le plus venere que nous ayons eu. (Essais de Psychologie
contemporaine. 168)
The fact that Bourget proved to adopt an antithetical position to the one in
his novel is of secondary importance here. What is significant is his taking up
Barres’ metaphor to re-apply it to Taine. He traces Taine’s influence in Les
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Deracines and while lauding Barres for the solution he offers in the novel to le_
probleme politique, he makes it clear that he believes Taine to be the source of
inspiration. It is Taine who taught that the future of the patrie lay in the resurrection
of energies that were not dead, but dormant. Taine's body of work led in this
direction. Once again, it is the metaphor of the tree that Bourget appeals to. The
dying master was afraid that he would not live long enough to complete the Origines
and would go to the tree to rejuvenate himself:
Et j ’ imagine qu’a regarder cet arbre, cette federation bruissante le ravissait. II
reprenait confiance.L’unite de la seve vitale de ce tronc, qui circulait la seve
dans toutes les feuilles remuees, lui apparaissait comme le symbole de cette
autre unite, celle de la pensante, si Ton peut dire, qui fait qu’un meme esprit
circule a travers beaucoup d’ames d’une meme epoque. Seulement, la feuille
laisse s’accomplir en elle ce travail de la grande seve commune, et l’homme
veut le travail de ses pensees. (Essais de psychologie contemporaine, 171)
Both Bourget and Barres have made explicit references to Darwin.1 2 Yet in
this passage, Bourget chooses not to refer to Taine’s own use of the tree as a
metaphor in the Origines when he describes the scientific spirit and gives an account
of evolutionary theory. Instead he continues Taine’s use of the metaphor in what is
purported to be a piece of biographical nostalgia. The image of the seve is the one
used by Taine in the Origines. Where Taine had written of man being a bud, among
others bom of the same seve. Bourget writes of leaves. Taine uses the tree as an
image to describe not just the organic nature of the social bond but its genealogical
nature. Man is bound to other human beings because of a common origin: the same
seve : "II n ’est pas seul sur la tige: au-dessous de lui, autour de lui, presque a son
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niveau, sont d’autres bourgeons nes de la meme seve" (Origines. I,.274; cf p. 88
above).The confusion in Taine's metaphor is that he summons up a genealogical
image to describe the social contract. It is as evocative of Kant's forest as it is of
Darwin's tree.
The question that springs to mind is whether there was any basis for Barres
and Bourget to suspect Taine of a latent Kantianism. Taine certainly had an
ambivalent position vis-a-vis Kant. To grasp the nuances of Taine's ambivalence
here, one must turn to his notion of la raison qui s'ignore. As I have stated in Chapter
I, for Taine, there were two kinds of raison. One was the raison of the classical spirit,
la raison qui raisonne. The esprit classique, which Taine traces back to Descartes,
functions on the mathematical model and ignores actual experience. The French
language, with a certain oratorical style, writes Taine in "L'Esprit et la doctrine," is
the perfect vehicle for this type of reason:
Elle n'est que l'organe d'une certaine raison, la raison raisonnante, celle qui
veut penser avec le moins de preparation et le plus de commodite qu'il se
pourra, qui se contente de son acquis, qui ne songe pas a l'accroitre ou a le
renouveler, qui ne sait pas ou ne veut pas embrasser la plenitude et la
complexity des choses reelles. Par son purisme, par son son dedain pour les
termes propres et les tours vifs, par la regularite minutieuse de ses
developpements, le style classique est incapable de peindre ou d'enregistrer
completements les details infinis et accidentes de l'experience (Origines. I,
300)
For Taine, it is this raison raisonnante, in a synergistic combination with the
scientific discoveries of the age, which produces the poisonous compound that is the
Enlightenment mind. Such a mind thinks in abstract formulae, such a mind alone
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could produce Du Contrat social which, for Taine, is the embodiment of the raison
raisonnante. Against this raison pure of the Enlightenment, he opposes another raison
which he calls the raison qui s’ignore, or a preiuge hereditaire. It is an accumulation
of experience going back in time, it is the wisdom of the ages, transmitted from
generation to generation. The raison qui s'ignore is bound up with tradition, a certain
rootedness, and heredity:
Le prejuge hereditaire est une sorte de raison qui s'ignore. II a ses titres aussi
bien que la raison elle-meme; mais il ne sait pas les retrouver.. .. Ses
archives sont enterrees; il faut pour les degager des recherches dont il n'est
pas capable; elles subsistent pourtant, et aujourd'hui l'histoire les remet en
lumiere. ("L'Esprit et la doctrine", Origines. II, 7)
I have shown, in Chapter I, how this preiuge hereditaire becomes part of
Taine's evolutionary narrative. With regard to Reason, this raison qui s'ignore
becomes a way of countering the eighteenth century thinkers. For Taine, Rousseau
represented the archetype of the Enlightenment mind and the individual of the social
contract was an abstract fiction, a creation of la raison pure. Yet, he knew well that
this phrase was coined by Kant in his major work, The Critique of Pure Reason.
Taine uses the Kantian term la raison pure to describe rationalist, geometrical
reasoning. But Kant was arguing against the claims of rationalism in his attempted
synthesis of empiricism and rationalism.1 3 If one keeps in mind the fact that in
Taine's youth, it was Victor Cousin's translation and interpretation of Kant that
predominated, Taine's ambivalence vis-a-vis Kant is a little more understandable. In
Cousin's Cours. the broad outlines of Kant's theory are sketched out, but Cousin
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takes the view that Kant's philosophy led to skepticism, because of his position on
the questions of God and immortality.1 4 Kant, in the Transcendental Dialectic,
sought to refute the claims made on behalf of pure reason. Cousin reproaches Kant
with having not recognized that reason in the first place was something spontaneous.
II n'a pas saisi la raison a ce degre pur sublime ou la reflexion, la volonte
sont encore absentes. S'il avait connu cette intuition, cette revelation
spontanee qui est le mode primitif de la raison, peut-etre devant ce fait eut-il
renonce a son scepticisme. (Cours de Thistoire de la philosophie modeme,
serie i, tome v, 304-5; emphasis added)
It is not within the scope of this dissertation to go into the details of Cousin's
critique of Kant, which is based largely on the question of God As far as Taine is
concerned, it is Cousin's privileging of pure reason that is at issue. I have pointed out
above(p. 101), that in Les Philosophes francais du dix-neuvieme siecle, Taine
scathingly criticized Cousin, especially in the chapter "Theorie de la raison selon
Cousin." I venture to suggest that in the Origines. it is, in the first place, rationalism,
and in the second, Cousin's theory of reason that is under attack philosophically.
Politically, Taine's ire is directed at the author of the Contrat social, and since it is
the esprit classique and the raison raisonnante that have produced such a mind, la.
raison pure is associated with Rousseau. When Taine uses the term raison pure, he is
alluding to a reason that is a cross between the raison raisonnante and Cousin's pure
reason. If Taine is ambivalent on Kant, it is because he knows that Cousin's theory of
reason was not that of Kant.151 believe that Barres, whose own anti-Kantianism had
its sources in Burdeau/Bouteiller uprooting young provincials in the name of the
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moral law, attributes this ambivalence on Taine's part, to lack of nerve. There is
some basis for him to think so. In postulating a raison qui s'ignore. Taine did not
abandon reason as such. As McClelland has observed, Taine still shared some of the
values of the Enlightenment. For his successors, it was a no-holds barred assault on
reason.
Les Deracines was written in 1897, by which time Barres was politically
closely aligned with Maurras, their anti-Kantianism providing a shared philosophical
basis. Michael Sutton, in Nationalism. Positivism, and Catholicism, has stated that
by this time, Barres had come round to Maurras’ position on individualism.
However, even in Les Deracines. Barres has not entirely abandoned the
individualism of his early work. As late as in July 1896, Barres wrote in his Cahiers.
"Mon pauvre individualisme, ce sentiment personnel qui se met en travers du monde
et le nie, le reforme" (60). There was a great deal of confusion in the latter half of the
nineteenth century on individualism and the individual. On the one hand, there was
the growing individualism that arose from industrialization and the influence of
utilitarianism. On the other hand, there was Rousseau’s individual, vilified by most
thinkers, with Maurras being the most vociferous. The abstract individual of the
social contract was often assimilated to the selfish individual of industrial society.
This confusion is expressed in the scene at the end of the Les Deracines when two of
the young lyceens from Nancy commit a murder. Roemerspacher explains why he
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did not pressure Sturel to denounce Mouchefrin as an accomplice in the murder for
which Racadot is hanged:
J’ai hesite: j ’ai reconnu que la societe, dans ses rapports avec Racadot,
avec Mouchefrin, ne s’etait pas conduite selon le principe kantien... Si
l’individu doit servir la collectivite, celle-ci doit servir l’individu. J’ai
hesite a perdre un miserable en m’autorisant d’une doctrine dont on
n’avait pas songe a le faire beneficier: car, je le reconnais, s’il a tant
souffert et s’est ainsi degrade, c'est par le milieu individualiste et liberal ou
il a ete iete, quand il etait encore tout confiant dans les declarations
sociales du lycee. .. Cette consideration d’un cas particulier a prevalu,
bien a tort, je l’avoue, contre mon respect de l’interet general. (492;
emphasis added)
La Ouerelle du Peuplier
"Ne a Paris, d'un pere Uzetien et d'une mere normande, ou voulez-vous,
Monsieur Barres, que je m'enracine?" With this salvo, in a review of Les Deracines
that appeared in the same year, Andre Gide opened up a controversy that came to be
known as the Ouerelle du Peuplier. Gide took umbrage at the very concept of
deracinement. Expressing admiration for Barres' novel, Gide reproached the author
with overstating his case. Racadot, of the seven young men who left Lorraine for
Paris, does not survive and comes to an ignoble end. This is what "deracinement"
does to the young, concludes Barres. Gide disagrees. He points to Racadot as being
in fact the singular element that makes the novel interesting. "Votre livre, comme
malgre vous, semble prouver rien tant que ceci: ‘dans une situation ou il se trouve
souvent et qui pour beaucoup est la meme, l'organisme agit d'une faune situation qui s'offre a lui, il fera preuve d'originalite, s'il ne peut y
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echapper’"(440). Ironically, Gide is citing Max Nordau. What he is affirming here is
a Lamarckian truth. Under conditions of change, under new circumstances, the
(individual) organism adapts. For Gide, citing Nordau, the fact of change leads to
originality, and he expresses this explicitly: "Le deracinement contraignant Racadot
a l'originalite: on peut dire, en souriant, que c'est la le sujet de votre livre"(440).
Gide, the inveterate traveler, argues that it is the element of the foreign that
obliges the individual to modify itself and thus adapt to changing circumstances.
Deracinement fortifies the individual. On the other hand, the weak recoil from what
is foreign, because it requires of them an effort that they are incapable of.
Rootedness is for the weak. The opposition here is between Barres' claim that
Racadot was one of those who did not survive the struggle for life, and Gide's view
that Racadot in fact is of interest precisely because of the change in circumstances..
Barres' reading of evolutionary theory in social-Darwinist terms is the object of
Gide's attack. Gide himself clearly has a Lamarckian reading of evolutionary theory:
Par contre, plus l'etre est faible, plus il repugne a l'etrange, au changement;
car la plus legere idee nouvelle, la plus petite modification de regime
necessite de lui une vertu, un effort d'adaptation qu'il ne va peut-etre pas
foumir. (441)
The thrust of Barres' novel is that it was the abstract nature of Kantian
thought, the education imparted by Bouteiller, that was responsible for the uprooting
of the young men from their native soil and their subsequent degradation. Gide
inverts the metaphor. It is the weak who feel the need for enracinement. The
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Lamarckian underpinnings of the narrative emerge even more clearly as he
concludes :
— Oui, depaysement; ce qui exige de l'homme une gymnastique de
l'adaptation, un retablissement sur du neuf: voila 1 'education que reclame
l'homme fort, dangeureuse il est vrai, eprouvante; c'est une lutte contre
l'etr anger: mais il n'y a education que des que l'instruction modifie - Quant
aux faibles: enracinez! enracinez! Instruction, depaysement, deracinement
(1 6 ), — il faudrait pouvoir en user selon les forces de chacun; on y trouve
danger sitot que ce n'est plus profit. Et que les faibles y agonisent, c'est la ce
que montrent les Deracines: pour preserver du danger le faible, nous
aveuglerons-nous sur le profit du fort? Et que les forts s'y fortifient, c'est la ce
que montrent pas les Deracines- -ou du moins ce qu'ils ne montrent que
malgre vous.(444)
There is, seemingly, an acceptance of the idea of the survival of the fittest,
but the Lamarckian elements, derived I believe from Nordau, are preponderant:
gymnastique de l'adaptation and the idea of the strong fortifying themselves through
exposure to the milieu.
Gide's review, on his own admission, did not attract much attention and the
querelle du peuplier would not likely have taken place had Rene Doumic, in the
Revue des Deux Mondes (15 November 1897) not adopted a similar position and
rebuked Barres at length for, what, on his view, was an attack on education itself.
The review elicited a sharp reply from Charles Maurras in Le Soleil on 15
December. Gide himself became aware of this exchange on reading Barres' Scenes et
doctrines du nationalisme a little later. The footnote, alluded to above, was added by
Gide when he republished the review of Les Deracines . The note is of considerable
significance, since the quarrel, ostensibly about words, was personal and political.
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More interestingly, one may see how evolutionary narrative, at the turn of the
century, had become increasingly Lamarckian. In much the same way that Barres
had turned Taine's metaphor against the old philosophe. Gide turned Maurras'
metaphor (of the peuplier)against the leading anti-Kantian of the time. Gide begins
by citing Maurras on Doumic's review, before adding his comments, nicely tinged
with malice:
"M. Doumic dans la Revue des Deux Mondes admet la these suivante: 'Le
propre de l'education est d'arracher l'homme a son milieu formateur. II faut
qu'elle le deracine: c'est le sens etymologique du mot: "elever." ..' En quoi ce
professeur se moque de nous. M.Barres n'aurait a lui demander a quel
moment un peuplier, si haut qu'il s'eleve, peut etre contraint au
deracinement."
II coulait a ce moment, a propos de deracinement des flots d'encre; j'ai
trouve que celle de M. Maurras n'avait pas bien belle couleur. Je me permis
de lui faire observer l'imprudence de sa question; il etait en effet plus qu'aise
de repondre que ces peupliers exemplaires sortaient d'une pepiniere, tout
vraisemblablement- -comme celle, ajoutai-je, sur le catalogue de laquelle je
copie cette phrase:
"Nos arbres ont ete transplants (le mot est en gros caracteres dans le
texte), 2,3,4 fois et plus, suivant leur force, operation qui favorise la reprise;
ILS SONT DISTANCES CONVENABLEMENT AFIN D'OBTENIR DES
TETES BIENS FAITES (ici, c'est moi qui soulignais). (Oeuvres Completes.
401)
Maurras did not respond to this remark, because of a prior inclination to
underrate Gide, on the latter's view. However, Leon Blum, and Remy Gourmont
gave Gide's latest book which carried his article on Les Deracines. a favorable
review, and to Maurras' chagrin, cited the note in question. There followed a tirade in
the Gazette in which the latter demolished Gide in eighteen columns: "Je les ai
comptees" adds Gide. He restates his argument on enracinement as it was expressed
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in the original review and then takes issue with Maurras. "Et la querelle, qu'il ravive,
n'est pas sur le fond meme du sujet; lui-meme la baptise: c'est la querelle du
peuplier." Citing Maurras' caustic remarks on the lecon d'arboriculture given to him
by Gide, the latter points out that Maurras could not have known that he, Gide, was
an amateur gardener, and had been awarded a first prize for his nursery in
Normandy. Maurras had apparently reproached not only Gide but Emile Faguet and
Remy de Gourmont with confusing transplantation and deracinement. At this point,
Gide gleefully cites the opening paragraph of Gourmont's article:
Au mot imagine par M. Barres "les Deracines," il faudrait, je pense, en
opposer un autre, qui exprimerait la meme idee materielle, et une idee
psychologique toute differente: les transplants. On emploierait l'un ou
l'autre selon que l'on parlerait d'un homme a qui le changement de milieu a
ete mauvais, ou d'un homme qui a trouve une nouvelle vigueur par le fait
meme de sa plantation en un terrain nouveau. (405)
Gourmont cites Gide, or rather, Gide cites Gourmont citing him as the one
who led him to make this distinction. He then re-states Maurras' argument, in the
form of expert advice from an amateur gardener and man of letters, that
transplantation and deracinement were two different things:
"En somme, continue M. Maurras, relever, depiquer, repiquer, replanter,
meme arracher sont des operations qui n'ont rien de commun avec le
deracinement. On ne deracine que des arbres morts ou ceux qu'on sacrifie."
Et plus loin: "J'expliquai alors a mon jardinier ce qu'on appelle maintenant,
selon la forte et juste expression de Barres, un deracine. . . Je dis comment la
mauvaise education avait chez ces jeunes gens tranches les racines (ici c'est
M. Maurras qui souligne) qui les attachaient a leur Lorraine... etc., etc"
Nous y voila! "Deracine" signifie pour M. Maurras "dont on a tranche
les racines." Que ne le disait-il plus tot? J'aurais laisse son peuplier tranquil.
(408)
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Gide concludes that Barres' use of that particular metaphor was
understandable, and made abundantly clear in his writings. However, he says that it
is most unfortunate that in arboriculture, the word deracine has a very specific sense,
according to Littre, which is quite different from the one that Barres intended it to
have. 1 7 Maurras' folly in engaging in the querelle du peuplier was a futile attempt to
re-introduce the new sense of the term into arboriculture.
As I have pointed out, this quarrel is of significance in terms of evolutionary
narrative. In the Folio edition of Les Deracines. Jean Borie has suggested that Gide,
in support of his ideological position on deracinement. appeals to social-Darwinism,
then in vogue. I believe that first, such a statement re-iterates received wisdom in
France that Darwinism and social-Darwinism were one and the same, and secondly,
there is no distinction to be made at all between Darwin's theory and Lamarck's. The
subtleties of Gide's position are lost in such a view. It is Barres who deploys social-
Darwinism against Kant since it was Kant's notion of universal legislation, derived
from Rousseau, that was responsible for deracinement. Gide, on the contrary, while
making some concession to the struggle for life aspect of Darwin's theory, is really
affirming Lamarckian theory. By the time Gide was embroiled in the controversy,
Nordau’s Degeneration (1892), translated into French in 1895 as Degenerescence.
had been widely read, and Gide's own reading of evolutionary theory was colored by
Nordau's views, as may be seen in the passage cited above (cf p.l 16). Nordau was
overtly Lamarckian, and even cites the giraffe. I shall discuss the Lamarckian nature
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of Nordau's theory of degeneration in the following chapter. As far as the quarrel
between Maurras and Gide is concerned, the issues at stake are Kantianism,
cosmopolitanism, individualism and nationalism. That Maurras chose to inadroitly
continue with Barres' metaphor led to the quarrel. Gide's Protestantism may well
have fanned the flames. What is amply clear from Maurras' subsequent writings is
that the enemy was Protestant. For Charles Maurras, Protestantism was synonymous
with individualism and anarchy. Rousseau’s ideas were expressive of the Protestant
spirit and were therefore dangerous. The same was true of Kant’s moral philosophy.
The Kantian notion of man as an end in himself was tantamount to pure
individualism, since the emphasis on autonomy and the individual conscience made
of each person a self-centered being, a little god. This notion of the individual
negated the social existence of man. On Maurras' view, both Rousseau and Kant had
a conception of man that was abstract. The idea of Reason and Duty were abstract
ethical notions. Years later, well into the twentieth century, in Reflexions sur la
Revolution de 1789, Maurras writes that the Konigsberg philosopher was a
condisciple of the Constituants, since both were influenced by Rousseau.
L’idee originelle de la Critique de la raison pure, cette idee que la verite
certaine, universelle et absolue se decouvre non en la cherchant avec les yeux
de 1 ’ esprit, non en deployant sa raison, mais bien en descendant aux tenebres
du cceur pour y prefer l ’oreille a la voix de la conscience, cette idee se
retrouve mot pour mot dans certaines apostrophes de Jean-Jacques. II y
revient du reste assez volontiers. L’on comprend que l’homme nouveau, denu
de grande culture, laquais, vagabond, sans foyer et sans tradition, presque
sans nationality, d’abord protestant puis catholique, de nouveau protestant,
dut sentir une singuliere allegressse a mepriser ensemble ce qu’il avait ete et
ce qu’il n’avait pas ete, comme a proclamer l’autonomie et la superiority de
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129
cettte belle conscience. Venu au monde d’alors comme un barbare, Rousseau
s’eleva par effort de genie naturel a la philosophie morale de la barbarie.
(Reflexions sur la Revolution de 1789, 38-39)
Maurras is stating explicitly what Taine stopped short of saying, that
Rousseau was personally responsible for the Revolution :"Rousseau a ete, selon
nous, la cause formelle de la Revolution; il en ete Fame et le genie, excitant les petits
et endormant les grands, dormant a l’attaque revolutionnaire des forces, a la defense
traditionelle de la faiblesse"(37). The ruling class’s frivolity in allowing Rousseau
and the encyclopaedists to flourish was only a material cause, but "les materiaux
inflammables ne se seraient pas enflammes sans le boute feu. Ce boute feu, ce fut
Rousseau”. (37) On Maurras’ view, Burke, Taine and Le Play were right in blaming
Rousseau, but Rousseau’s error did not come from his deductive method; the error
was in deducing his system from a major bit of nonsense: " Si, au lieu de poser au
depart que ‘l’homme nait libre,’ il avait pose le contraire, Rousseau serait arrive par
sa logique rigoureuse a des conclusions tout a fait contraires aux siennes, c’est a dire,
a nos conclusions, c’est a dire a la verite “(38). Already, as early as in 1895, Maurras
had opposed Comte to Kant as a way of opposing Catholicism to Protestantism. In a
article entitled "Notre Religion nationale" in Le Soleil. 29 June 1895, he wrote:
Qu’une R'epublique juive manquat a toutes les traditions nationales, ce ne fut
pour personne un sujet de surprise . . . le judaisme est un signe de race plutot
que de religion. Mais les protestants! Incontestablement ce sont des Fran9ais
de France nes de la glebe nationale parlant la langue et les dialectes de notre
peuple. Trois cents ans de pratiques religieuses distinctes n’ont pas altere en
eux la physionomie nationale . . . etrangere, l’esprit etroit, confessionnel,
petit, sectaire de leur politique interieure... .Et les formes memes de leur
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pensee! Leur esprit suit des pensees que notre esprit ignore. Nos associations
d’idees les plus communes leur demeurent inconcevables. Nous n’avons plus
les cranes fait de meme. Chose plus grave! eux-memes, s’ils sont francs,
confessent leurs secretes affmites de reflexion et de reverie avec tel peuple
protestant du nord ou de Test de l’Europe. Pour prendre des exemples tout a
fait eleves, je dirai que les idees du Systeme de politique d’Auguste Comte,
limpides pour un catholique, sont intelligibles a un huguenot: c’est 1 ’inverse
pour la Critique de la Raison pratique. Les huguenots sont inondes de
lumiere chez Kant, pres de qui nos yeux ont de la peine a se faire a la demi-
ombre. Le principal organe du kantisme eeait naguere encore redige par des
protestants. Or, Kant, surtout sans son second ouvrage synthesise la
conscience de l’Allemagne du nord de l’Europe depuis Luther: Comte est un
classique fran9ais. (Le Soleil 29 June 1895,2; emphasis added)
If Taine were reluctant to name Kant, Maurras was not. Barres was extremely
tongue-in-cheek in "L'Arbre de M. Taine." If one considers an article translated by
his friend Marcel Schwob, and Barres's remarks pertaining to it, the subtlety and
malice of Barres' metaphor become even more apparent.
The Last days of Immanuel Kant
Marcel Schwob is a writer who is barely read today. In his time, though, he
enjoyed considerable success with his short stories and essays which appeared in
various journals and reviews. His circle of friends included the struggle-for-lifers, to
use Leon Daudet's phrase: Barres, Maurras, Leon Daudet, Anatole France at one end
of the political spectrum, and Gide at the other. He fell out with the latter over Les
Nourritures terrestres, claiming that the work had been plagiarized. He himself was
something of an Anglophile, and had translated Shakespeare and Defoe into French.
In 1899, he published a translation of a fragment by Thomas De Quincey, “The Last
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131
Days of Immanuel Kant.” The fragment was ostensibly an English translation of A.
Warianski's memoirs recording the last days of the Konigsberg philosopher. But as
Schwob reveals in a preface that accompanied his translation, De Quincey in fact
draws on several sources, including L.E Borowski and R.B.Jachmann. His ironic
footnotes and comments in fact make the fragment a work almost of fiction. Schwob
was well aware of this and says so in the preface:
Est-ce le "puissant, juste et subtil opium" qui tira souvent Thomas
Dequincey vers le plus acre des plaisirs- -la depreciation de l'ideal? Est-ce
la tenebreuse tentacule de vanite qui nous sert a aspirer avidement en nos
heros toutes les bassesses de leur humanite? Qui sait? Les oeuvres de
Thomas De Quincey sont toutes penetrees de cette passion.. . . parmi les
heros de Thomas De Quincey, sans contredit, le premier flit Kant. Voici
done quel est le sens du recit qui suit. De Quincey considere que jamais
l'intelligence humaine ne s'eleva au point qu'elle atteignit en Immanuel
Kant. Et pourtant l'intelligence humaine, meme a ce point, n'est pas divine
Non seulement elle est mortelle, mais chose affreuse, elle peut decroitre,
vieillir et decrepir. ((Euvres. 262)
Schwob, despite the company he kept, was not known to have political
positions. He was a scholar, a Latinist, and a medievalist. He is best remembered for
his work on Villon. Nevertheless he chose to translate this particular piece by De
Quincey. De Quincey, a problematic figure within English Romanticism, had a taste
for German philosophy. That is somewhat understandable, given Carlyle's influence
on him. His predilection for Kant, though, is mysterious, to say the least. German
idealism was more to his taste. But of all the German thinkers, it was to Kant that he
repeatedly returned, with an almost morbid fascination. Reasonably well-read in
philosophy, he opted to translate some of Kant's lesser known works, on the grounds
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132
that he wished to popularize the otherwise difficult thinker. In a letter to "Sir Ki'" he
explains his reasons:
I shall cautiously abstain from every part of his works which belongs to him
in his quality of founder of a new philosophy. The best way to a presumptive,
or analogical appreciation of a man's pretensions in matters which we do not
well understand, is to try him in those which we do ("Kant in his
miscellaneous Essays," 1 Works. 1)
If one were to take Schwob literally, all De Quincey wanted to do was to
debunk his heroes, making them more human and accessible. After all, he had done
so with Wordsworth and Coleridge too. De Quincey accused Coleridge of outright
plagiarism, of having copied Schelling verbatim. In his various translations of Kant,
De Quincey’s comments and remarks do not indicate that Kant was a hero of any
sort, on the contrary, he is acerbic in his comments. He characterizes Kant’s thought
as being not merely abstruse, but practically irrelevant: "It is not for its abstruseness
that we shrink from the Transcendental Philosophy, but for that taken in connection
with its visionariness, and its disjunction from all the practical uses of life." (“Kant
in his miscellaneous essays,” 105). In another curious judgment, he reproaches Kant
with being anti-Christian, with having lied to the King of Prussia, with attacking the
English for their Revolution of 1688. According to his biographer Horace Eaton, De
Quincey's attachment to Christian dogma made him find Kant hateful. It is not in the
scope of this thesis to evaluate De Quincey’s position vis-a-vis Kant in general, but
since Schwob did translate The Last Days of Immanuel Kant, it is of some
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133
importance since it has resonances in Barres’ work. Given the extreme malice of the
fragment, it is worth pondering the wider implications of the piece.
In the first place, it is symptomatic of the Romantic reaction against reason.
The translation by Schwob is faithful to De Quincey's fragment. Schwob himself, as
I have noted, had no known political views. His translation assumes significance
because it unwittingly articulates what the French Right, his colleagues Barres,
Maurras, Daudet were saying, namely, that the time had come to announce the
demise of Reason and the Enlightenment. In philosophical terms, the reaction to the
Enlightenment could take a variety of forms, from the mystical heights reached by
Blake to the extreme irrationalism of Schopenhauer or the existential discourse of
Kierkegaard. In political terms, irrationalism was the natural basis for the right-wing
reaction to the Enlightenment. If the Enlightenment led to the Revolution, then it was
Reason itself that had to be eliminated. We have seen how Maurras takes an
unambiguous position vis-a-vis Kant, even as his close friend Barres reproached
their common maitre with not doing so. In the case of Barres, there is the additional
influence of Schopenhauer, which led him to take an individualistic position in his
early work, Le Culte du Moi. Maurras had considerable difficulty persuading his
friend to move away from individualism towards the collective action that Action
Francaise called for. Nonetheless, as right-wing and nationalist positions crystallized
around and after the Dreyfus affair, Barres did rally round to the Catholic cause
Maurras. The shared basis of their political positions was a determined anti-
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134
Kantianism. And it is in this sense that the querelle du peuplier assumes a new
dimension. Schwob, according to his editor, Champion, published Les Demiers
Jours d'hnmanuel Kant in Vogue from April to June 1899. Yet, in an entry in Mes
Cahiers dated 13 November 1897, Barres writes: "L’arbre qu’aimait M. Taine, dit
Schwob, devra rester venerable dans nos memoires autant que les trois peupliers que
Kant voyait de sa fenetre et qui l’aidaient a penser" ( Mes Cahiers 217). The entry is
dated 13 November 1897, two days before Doumic's review appeared in Revue des
Deux Mondes and one month before Maurras used the unfortunate metaphor of the
peuplier in Le Soleil. A footnote to the reference in Mes Cahiers says simply that
Barres used to meet the Schwob fairly often. The question at issue here is not
whether Maurras was also privy to Schwob's intention to translate De Quincey,
whether the reference to the neuplier occurred in a conversation with Schwob, or
even whether Barres was mistaken about the date. Regardless of whether Schwob did
or did not utter the phrase from Mes Cahiers that I have cited above, the fact is that
the peupliers in Les Demiers Jours d’Emmanuel Kant have a different story to tell.
This part of De Quincey's narrative is actually a faithful translation of Wasianski's
memoir. Kant, after his famous constitutional, would read in his study until dusk. In
the fading light he would engage in tranquil meditation:
During this state of repose, he took his station winter and summer by the
stove, looking through the window at the old tower of Lobenicht; not that he
could be said properly to see it, but the tower rested upon his eye as distant
music on the ear— obscurely, or but half revealed to the consciousness. No
words seem forcible enough to express his sense of the gratification which he
derived from this old tower, when seen under these circumstances of twilight
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135
and quiet reverie. The sequel, indeed showed how important it had become to
his comfort; for at length some poplars in a neighbouring garden shot up to
such a height as to obscure the tower, upon which Kant became very uneasy
and restless, and at length found himself positively unable to pursue his
evening meditations. Fortunately, the proprietor of the garden was a very
considerate and obliging person, who had, besides, a high regard for Kant;
and accordingly, upon a representation of the case being made to him, he
gave orders that the poplars should be cropped. This was done; the old tower
of Lobenicht was once again exposed; Kant recovered his equanimity, and
once more he found himself able to pursue his twilight meditations in peace.
(“The Last Days of Immanuel Kant,” p 338; emphasis added)
We have seen how Barres inverts Taine's metaphor of the tree to reproach
him with, among other things, a discreet Kantianism. Writing in Mes Cahiers. long
after Taine's death, he cannot resist this parting shot: Monsieur Taine, like Kant,
admired a tree. Whether the phrase attributed to Schwob was uttered by him or not,
that is to say, even if it is Schwob who is the source of malice, the fact that Barres
cites him is of significance. For Kant did not admire the trees in question. The
poplars obscured his view of the tower. They were beheaded. Why did Barres alter
the facts? I believe that if one looked at the reasons for Kant having had the trees
cropped, one could better understand Barres' analogy. The poplar trees in the
neighbor’s garden had significance for the philosopher in only one sense: they
obscured the real object of his gaze. Now, underlying most of Kant's thought is the
notion o f purposiveness: there is a teleological view o f nature first outlined in the
Idea of a Universal History (1784T and then amplified in the Critique of Teleological
Judgment!1790). It is the tower that Kant wished to look at. If the trees obscured his
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136
view, that is, if his purpose in gazing out of the window was to look at the Lobenicht
tower, then the poplars had to make way for purposive rationality to prevail. Just as
the Kantian maitre Bouteiller, in pursuit of his moral law, had uprooted the young
men from Lorraine, so, before him, had his mentor caused trees to be cropped. I am
not suggesting that Barres consciously set out to critique Kant when he wrote the
brief note about Kant's poplars in Mes Cahiers. The fact that he was quick to spot
this one detail among so many others, and given the general anti-Kantianism that
prevailed in the French Right, and in Les Deracines in particular, such a reading of
the metaphor does suggest itself. By drawing the analogy between Taine's plane-tree
and Kant's poplars, when in fact they had contrary connotations, Barres gives a new
twist to Taine's metaphor. "L’arbre qu’aimait M. Taine, dit Schwob, devra rester
venerable dans nos memoires autant que les trois peupliers que Kant voyait de sa
fenetre et qui l’aidaient a penser" ( Mes Cahiers 217) is away of bringing together
two philosophers whose thinking was almost diametrically opposed. Kant's
perception of nature was teleological. Taine's was genealogical.
I shall conclude with a few remarks on the text itself, since in many ways, the
last days of Kant also correspond to the end of the Enlightenment. Wasianski's
Memoirs, as translated by De Quincey attest to a growing infirmity and weakening
of faculties:
The infirmities of age now began to steal upon Kant, and betrayed themselves
in more shapes than one. Connected with Kant's prodigious memory for all
things having any intellectual bearings, he had from youth belaboured under
an unusual weakness of this faculty in relation to the common affairs of daily
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137
life, and now, when his second childhood was commencing, this infirmity
increased upon him very sensibly. One of the first signs was that he began to
repeat the same stories more than once on the same day.. . . Another sign of
his mental decay was the weakness with which he now began to theorize. He
accounted for everything by electricity. (“The Last Days of Immanuel Kant,”
343-344)
De Quincey's ironic comments imbue these statements with sinister meaning.
Wasianski's innocuous and rather tedious rendering of detail, becomes, in De
Quincey's version, a way of bludgeoning the Konigsberg philosopher. When
Wasianski writes of Kant's loss of appetite, and his refusal to eat anything but
English cheese, De Quincey adds the following comment:
Mr W. here falls into the ordinary mistake of confounding the cause and the
occasion, and would leave the impression that Kant (who from his youth had
been a model of temperance) died of sensual indulgence. The cause of Kant's
death was clearly the general decay of the vital powers, and in particular the
atony of the digestive organs, which must soon have destroyed him under any
care or abstinence whatever.. . . In Kant's burdensome state of existence, it
could not be a question of much importance whether his illness were to date
from a 7th of October or from a 7th of November. (“The Last days of
Immanuel Kant,” 366)
De Quincey's own condition, as he recounts in the Confessions of an English Opium-
Eater in 1812 was not dissimilar to that of Kant. He situates the happiest day of his
life in 1813:
Now then, I was again happy: I now took only one thousand drops of
laudanum per day - - and what was that ? A latter spring had come to close up
the season o f youth. M y brain performed its functions as healthily as ever
before. I read Kant again; and again, I understood him, or fancied I did"
(Confessions. 402)
That understanding seemed to have taken a different turn in 1827
when he wrote the piece under discussion here. There is no hint of the idea of
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138
self-renewal in his comments. In a sense, he is anticipating the theories of
degeneration that were soon to surface in the nineteenth century. And,
intentionally or otherwise, this statement on the aging process is contrary to
one of the last works published by Kant in his lifetime. Kant was aware of
his declining powers. In a strange dialectic, he fought the body with the mind,
so to speak. As if Reason had to prevail, at all costs. About the time the
decline in his capacities began, he wrote an essay entitled On the Power of
the Mind to Master its Morbid Feelings by Sheer Resolution in January 1798.
It was published the same year in Jena in the Journal of Practical
Pharmacology and Surgery and later included, somewhat arbitrarily, in The
Conflict of the Faculties. The essay was written in response to C.W.
Hufeland's book Macrobiotics, or the Art of Prolonging Human Life which
the latter had sent to Kant. The ailing thinker, in his reply, wrote that he
himself had for a long time followed a regimen that confirmed Hufeland's
theory, that man's moral disposition had the power to animate the physical,
and had intended to write on the subject. The essay, written in the form of a
letter to Hufeland, is more than a description of the regimen. It is also an
affirmation of the power of reason against the empirical and the mechanical:
A regimen for prolonging man's life must not aim at a life of ease; for by
such indulgence toward his powers and feelings he would spoil himself. In
other words, it would result in frailty and weakness, since his vital energy
can be gradually extinguished by lack of exercise, just as it can be drained
by using it too frequently and too intensely. Hence the Stoic way of life
(sustine et abstine) belongs, as the principle of a regimen, to practical
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139
philosophy not only as the doctrine of virtue but also as the science of
medicine. Medical science is philosophical when the sheer power of man's
reason to master his sensuous feelings by a self-imposed principle
determines his manner of living. On the other hand, if medical science seeks
the help of external physical means (drugs or surgery) to stimulate or ward
off these sensations, it is merely empirical and mechanical. (The Conflict of
the Faculties. 183)
Until the end, Kant appears to be holding on to the idea that reason is
a unity that unifies not only mind and body but philosophy and medicine. Yet, even
as he affirms the power of reason, in a fragment that dates from the same period, he
uses evolutionary narrative to define what constitutes illness and health. Death is not
decay but a form of self-renewal.
The conformity to law of an organic being by which it maintains itself in the
same form while continuously sloughing off and restoring its parts is health.
As far as the whole of organic nature as such is concerned, this conformity to
law of an organic being and alteration of the vital forces imply that the
creature, after it has produced off-spring like itself, mingles as an individual
with unorganized matter and only the species endures. Growing old and
death. This is not disease, but consummation of the vital force. (Reflection #
1538, XV 2, 964-65)1 8
Kant was writing a few years before Lamarck published Philosophic
Zoologique. From his earliest writings to the work that was later published as Opus
postuum. Kant had had an abiding interest in physics and the natural sciences. He
had read Buffon and under the latter's influence written the Universal Natural
History and Theory of the H eavens. In the Idea of a Universal History and in his
review of Herder's Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind he had
advanced hypotheses that point towards the gradation of species approximating to
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140
the human species, but like Buffon, before him, without conceding that human
beings could have actually emerged from other species.
Franz Schultze, writing in the 1870s, had written a work Kant und Darwin
where he cites Kant as a precursor. The fragment I have cited above however, is
closer to a Lamarckian view of nature and the organism. The idea of regeneration is
present in the idea of an organism "restoring its parts." Atrophy is compensated for
by a restoration. The individual dies, but the species remains. In itself, it would
appear quite natural that writing before Lamarck, Kant came fairly close to his
notion of the organism. There is however an irony to this fragment that dates from
the period of The Power of the Mind. Long after Darwin's theory had come to be
widely accepted, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, amid growing bio
medical theories of degeneration, there was a revival of interest in Lamarck. An
important theoretician of degeneration was Max Nordau, whose work Degeneration
was influential with the French writers of the fm-de-siecle, Gide foremost. Nordau,
in a footnote to his account of the life of organism, cites Kant's Power of the Mind as
a work that anticipates his own theory. In the same footnote, he resurrects Lamarck.
Arguing that the capacity of the organism to adapt was a function of the will, and
that the mechanism by which the will operated lay in sending impulses to the organs,
he writes:
That such impulses can modify the anatomical structure of the organs,
Kant already anticipated when he wrote his treatise Von der Macht des
Gemuthes. . . . It was wrong to laugh at Lamarck for teaching that the
giraffe has a long neck because it has continually stretched it in order to be
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141
able to feed off the topmost foliage of plants with tall stems.
(Degeneration. 262)
Why Nordau should turn to Lamarck in a theory of degeneration that was far-
reaching in its scope will be the subject of my next chapter. What is of significance
here is that just as Barres wrongly cites Schwob to invert the significance of the
poplar trees for Kant, Nordau cites a work from the last days of Kant, altering its
meaning to fit his own theory. Kant, in his text does not say that impulses modified
the anatomical structure of organs. Will, for Nordau, is the dispenser of impulses.
For Kant, the power of the mind was the philosophical faculty, the ability to reason.
That both Barres and Nordau should be steeped in evolutionary narrative, that both
were important thinkers who sowed the seeds of fascism should not be surprising,
given the Gobinist reading of Darwin in France. What is truly ironic here is that
Nordau considers the early Barres as a case of degeneration in his Degeneration, as
he does Bourget. The new theories of degeneration did not spare even those who
were "struggle-for-lifers."
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Notes
1 Barres cites a title, Conversations de Paul Bourget, without a reference.
2 McClelland, in his introduction to The French Right describes Taine as an
irrationalist, but concedes that Taine's standards remain those of the Enlightenment. I
agree with McClelland that the raison qui s'ignore is not reason at all in the first
sense, of the raison raisonnante. I use the term para-rational, to distinguish Taine's
position from that of Barres.
•5
For la raison raisonnante, cf Origines, 1 ,145; For deduire par le pur raisonnement,
cf 151. Taine's direct reference to Kant is to oppose his life-style to that of the salons:
"un Kant qui se fait une langue a part, attend que le public l’apprenne, et ne sort de la
chambre ou il travaille que pour aller dans la salle ou il fait ses cours" 191-2.
4 McClelland believes that Taine is against Rousseau and for Montesquieu; cf. The
French Right. 2 2 .1 believe, that for all that Taine praises Montesquieu for his
restrained style, he is outraged by the critique of institutions in Lettres persanes:
"Des coups de forces et d’une portee extraordinaire sont lances, en passant et
comme sans y songer, contre les institutions regnantes, contre le catholicisme altere
qui ‘dans l’etat present ou est l’Europe, ne peut subsister cinq cents ans,’ contre la
monarchic gatee qui fait jeuner les citoyens utiles pour engraisser les courtisans
parasites" (Origines, I, 195).
5 Cf. Baruch Spinoza. Ethics, IV. xx. "The more every man endeavours, and is able
to seek what is useful to him- -in other words, to preserve his own being - -the more
he is endowed with virtue." Ethics. 202.
6 Cousin, V. Cours de l'histoire de la philosophie modeme, serie I, t. II, 5.
7 See p. 83 above
8 Taine writes in "L'Esprit et la doctrine," "A quoi bon les sciences? Incertaines,
inutiles, elles ne sont qu’une pature pour les disputeurs et oisifs,” Origines. I, 169.
9 This again is made explicit in Mes Cahiers. "L’arbre qu’aimait M. Taine, dit
Schwob, devra rester venerable dans nos memoires autant que les trois peupliers que
Kant voyait de sa fenetre et qui l’aidaient a penser."(1,217)
1 0 Shortly after the first installments of Les Deracines had appeared in a Paris review,
Bourget wrote to Barres in Provence, giving him a brief summary of Kantian
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143
philosophy. This appears to be in response to a request from Barres who had
apparently forgotten his Kant. Bourget also recommended a French translation by
Monsieur C. The allusion is apparently to Charles Renouvier. cf. Collection Bourget,
MSS Bibliotheque Nationale de France.
1 1 Cf. "Lettre a M. Paul Bourget, Vie et correspondance, IV, 287-293.
1 2 Le Disciple. 5. In the preface, Bourget alludes to Leon Daudet's definition of the
modem young man as "le struggle-for-lifer."
1 3 Cf. the Prefaces to The Critique of Pure Raison, 99-124.
1 4 Cf. "The Antinomy of Pure Reason" in the Transcendental Dialectic in The
Critique of Pure Reason. 467-469. Cousin's version of Kant's extremely complex
arguments hinges on the question of subjectivity.
1 5 Cousin believed that Kant’s rejection of the rationalists’ claims made on behalf of
pure reason amounted to skepticism, cf note 55 above.
1 6 At this point, Gide introduces a footnote alluding to Maurras and the peuplier. I
shall discuss it below.
1 7 Gide makes the point that “deraciner veut dire, ‘dont on arrache les racines.’"
1 8
Gessammelte Schriften, 15. cited by Mary MacGregor, Introduction, The Conflict
of the Faculties, 12.
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Part II: Degeneration and Regeneration
Chapter III: A Rebours
By the last decade of the nineteenth century, evolutionary narrative had
pervaded discourse to such an extent that it became a commonplace to use Darwinian
concepts such as "the struggle for life" and "survival of the fittest" to describe a
variety of social phenomena. In the previous chapter, I have discussed Maurice
Barres' use of evolutionary metaphor and shown how for Barres, Maurras, and the
French Right, Darwin's theory proved to be a useful weapon in their anti-Kantian
crusade. However, evolutionary theory was not the only form of organicist discourse
that prevailed in this period. In a parallel development, various bio-medical theories
of heredity and degeneration, articulated chiefly by Prosper Lucas and Benedict
Morel, penetrated disciplines beyond medicine and psychiatry. In this chapter, I
propose to show how these theories of degeneration converged with evolutionary
narrative in the last quarter of the century in different disciplines. In particular I will
show how Taine played a central role in the introduction of bio-medical theories of
degeneration into the discourse on the social bond. The Origines de la France
contemnoraine. as I have pointed out in a previous chapter, abounds in organicist
metaphor. In the section on the Jacobin conquest and the Terror, however,
degeneration becomes a causal explanation of historical events. I shall then turn to
Max Nordau's Degeneration (1892), which is a synergistic product of these various
elements, bio-medical, social, and philosophical. On Nordau's view, the emerging
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145
modernist trends in culture were symptomatic of degeneration. He goes so far as to
classify various writers and thinkers into different degenerate types. Although Zola is
the chief target of Nordau's attack as far as the French writers were concerned and is
the most commented upon writer in matters of degeneration and heredity, the focus
here will be on Nordau's treatment of Huysmans' A Rebours (1884). Taine in Les
Origines de la France contemporaine, uses the term au rebours repeatedly to
characterize the actions not only of the Jacobins but also of the Constituent
Assembly itself. I would like to show how the notion of degeneration became a
means, on the one hand, to account for the Revolution, and on the other, to account
for the nineteenth-century mal-de-siecle. Nordau also cites Taine as an authority,
among others. It is worthwhile enquiring into the sources of Nordau's theory of
degeneration, not by any means the only prevalent one, but one which, in the fin-de-
siecle, was influential.
There are two points I wish to make here. The first is that Taine had
already seized the implications of Lucas' theory in the mid 1850s but the
pathological aspect of heredity comes to the fore in Taine's work after 1871. The
second point is that Huysmans pushed the notion of atavism to a ridiculous point as a
way of breaking with naturalism. Nordau's misreading of Huysmans, and his citing
of Taine as an authority in his account of the psychology of egotism, is thus
indicative of the manner in which bio-medical theories of degenerescence permeated
discourse in many fields. As Daniel Pick has pointed out in Faces of Degeneration,
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the discourse on degeneration was not confined to any one discipline, nor was it
reducible to any single theory. In France, the single-most important work was
Morel's Traite des Degenerescences which appeared in 1857, two years before
Darwin's Origin was published. However, before Morel's work, Prosper Lucas' De
l'heredite (1847 -50) had already drawn some attention. Lucas, as I have stated, was
an important source for Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle. He was also a source for
Taine's thought, and later, Theodule Ribot. Henry Maudsley, the English psychiatrist
is also known to have cited him.
From "transformisme" to heredity: Prosper Lucas
Prosper Lucas, a physician, earned his degree in 1833 with the thesis entitled
De l'imitation contagieuse, ou de la propagation sympathique des necroses et des
monomanies. He practiced as a psychiatrist at Bicetre and the Hopital Sainte-Anne.
His Heredite naturelle appeared between 1847 and 1850. The work is something of a
synthesis, an update on contemporary and past theories of heredity, beginning with
Antiquity. More important, Lucas' starting point is a question of method, which may
well account for Taine's affinity with him. For Lucas, as for Taine, the starting point
is the empirical, and the next step is, the ordering of the facts in terms of rational
laws. He is also steeped in the language of transformisme and cites Lamarck, among
others, but he himself was a fixiste with Cuvier.
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He begins by distinguishing between three schools of thought among the
Modems on the question of heredity. The differences lie in the relative importance
they attach to the species and to the individual in heredity.
La premiere ecole, dont de Maillet, Baumann, Robinet et Lamarck sont restes
les organes, renversant comme fictive la bome qui separe le type SPECIFIQUE
de type INDIVIDUEL ouvre a l'heredite un horizon sans fin, sans lumiere et
sans base, ou passent et disparaissent, en se transformant comme de simples
etres , les especes elles-memes, devenues en quelques sorte des formes et des
moments de la vie successive de l'individu. (Heredite naturelle, viii)
If it is Clemence Royer's Gobinist reading of Darwin that Taine was to accede to
nine years later, the elements of heredity, and genealogy as inextricably bound to the
question of individual and species, are present here as early as in 1847-1850.1 shall
return to this point below. The two other schools Lucas identifies are that of
Helvetius, Charles Bonnet, and Frederick Wollaston, who limit heredity to the
species. The third school maintains the distinction between species and individual
made by the second, but differs in various ways on the question of the principles
governing the action of heredity.
Having given an account of transformisme. Lucas makes a move that is
crucial for Taine. He grafts his own study of morbidity on to transformiste theories.
In so doing, he makes it possible for Taine, in his political and historical account of
the Jacobins, to explain a certain type o f behavior as a function o f a pathological
heredity. Lucas, in his attempted synthesis of various transformiste theories is
concerned with two questions that had preoccupied Buffon and Lamarck
respectively. One is the question of epochs and the moment of creation of life and
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the other is the question of the organization of the living being (p 26). It is Cuvier to
whom he turns in the matter of fixisme. For this allows Lucas to argue for the
reproduction of a fixed espece maladive (53 and 66). Turning to Geofffoy St Hilaire,
he writes that the latter's error lay in mistaking uniformity for unity (p 80). Unity, he
says, is internal to the individual, not the species:
Dans l'organisation de l'individu, l’ unite de la vie n'est done que le rapport de
toutes les parties entre elles et de toute a l'ensemble; e'est a dire le rapport absolu
de principe et de finalite de tous les elements, de tous les instruments, de toutes
les fonctions, de toutes les activites, de semblables ou dissemblables de l'etre.
(90)
From here he goes on to argue 1) citing Cuvier, that species are fixed; 2)
citing Ancients and Modems, from Aristotle to Karl Friedrich Burdach, that there is
an infinite diversity in the animal kingdom, not only between species but within
species. Lucas then cites Aristotle and Burdach to affirm that the human species
contains the greatest diversity which he says "n'apparaft pas seulement chez les
individus, dans les differences de famille en famille, elle surgit dans le sein des
families elles-memes" (103).
With a fairly extensive survey of contemporary literature (Franz Josef Gall,
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Fritz Muller, among others), he enumerates instance
after instance of variation within species, first in the animal realm and then among
human races, citing Dr. Pritchard on the Sioux Indians. (130). It is at this point that
Lucas makes the important epistemological leap that will establish his theory of
heredity. Under diversity, he brings in anomaly:
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Beaucoup d'anomalies rentrent dans ce dernier cas. Nous y rangeons toutes
celles, qui ne proviennent point d'un pricipe morbide, ni d'un trouble exteme ou
interne posterieure a la fecondation; toutes celles qui ne trouvent leur explication
ni dans le physique, ni dans le moral, ni dans le genre de vie des peres et des
meres. (134)
Lucas' primary concern is to eliminate all circumstantial explanation of
characteristics, be they climactic, racial, or cultural. Through an exhaustive account
of observations made by contemporary physiologists and ethnologists ranging from
Isidore Geoffroy St-Hilaire to Burdach and Pritchard on anomalies ranging from
long-hairedness among the Sioux, albinism, hare-lippedness, and ectrodactylia,
Lucas eliminates any causal factor other than heredity:
La proposition formulee par Adams, que les vices par arret de developpement ne
sont pas transmissibles par la generation, croule done, de toutes parts, devant
l'experience; il reste au contraire completement demontre, par les faits qui
precedent, que le principe, quel qu'il soit, obeit a la loi de l'heredite. (313)
Other cases cited by Lucas pertain to monstrosities such as women with three
mammary glands, young boys with three testicles, persons with rudimentary tails,
Cuvier's Hottentot woman and a host of other cases.
For Lucas, heredity was the law that accounted for anomalies across the
globe. It was also the major cause, the preceding cause of mental illness of various
kinds, from dementia and mania to hallucinations. Thus, Lucas laid the ground for
later theories of degeneration where a range of social disorders could be explained
in terms of heredity.
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Morel
The more overt application of transformisme to pathologies, the relation
between heredity and criminality, was made by Benedict-Auguste Morel, in the work
entitled Traite des degenerescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l'espece
humaine (1857). Two years before Darwin published the Origin of Species, Morel
had established, or claimed to have established, the existence of degenerate species.
In his preface he states explicitly:
Ce livre est destine a demontrer l'origine et la formation des varietes
maladives dans l'espece humaine. II m'est impossible desormais de separer
l'etude de la pathogenie des maladies mentales de celle des causes qui
produisent les degenerescences fixes et permanentes, dont la presence, au
milieu de la partie saine de la population , est un sujet de danger incessant.
(Introduction, Traite. I1
As Daniel Pick has pointed out in his important work, Faces of Degeneration.
Morel's Traite des degenerescences was concerned with a network of disorders and
pathologies, unlike Lucas' insistence on the reproduction of anomalies
(degenerescences fixes et permanentes). Morel's starting point was cretinism and the
condition of inmates in mental asylums. On receiving his degree in 1839, he worked
for a while as a medical practitioner before turning to clinical psychiatry. With an
introduction from his friend Claude Bernard, he began to work under J-P.Falret at the
Salpetriere. A series of visits to other mental asylums in Europe convinced him that
the conditions in France obtained elsewhere. As he says in his preface,
Le type qui constitue l'alienation mentale se presente sur tous les points du
globe, avec cet ensemble de symptomes de l'ordre intellectuel, physique et
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moral qui caracterise les varietes maladives. Que Ton examine les alienes au
point de vue de leurs tendances et de leurs actes . . . que Ton etudie
l'expression de leurs traits et les formes memes de la tete, et l'on restera
convaincu qu'ils sont bien les representants d'une meme cause generatrice
sevissant partout, et toujours, d'une fagon identique. (Preface; emphasis
added)
The relation between the physical and the moral, established by Lucas, is
henceforth irrevocably bound up in an organicist discourse that increasingly sought
to account for social disorder in physiological terms. Even before Darwin's theory
was received in France the question of transformisme had already been permeated by
the idea of degeneration. Where Buffon used the term to mean modification, Morel
clearly intends degeneration to indicate an inherited morbid condition that accounts
for a range of behavioral maladies, from alcoholism and cretinism to revolt among
the slaves in the colonies.
As Pick has pointed out, "social questions involving crime, moral decadence
and racial pollution began to intersect more and more insistently around the middle
of the century" (Faces of Degeneration, p. 21). In such a situation, medical
practitioners and psychiatrists whose claims were philosophical could account for the
malaise in society in bio-medical terms and provide a physiological basis for
historical interpretation. Lucas' is a traite philosonhique. Morel's Traite is on
degeneresences physiques, intellectuelles et morales. In his definition of
degenerescence as a "deviation maladive d'un type primitif," he announces that he
will base himself on facts that have the triple sanction of revealed religion,
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philosophy, and natural history. There is a primary antagonism between inert beings
and living beings, he writes. Rousseau and Condillac, on his view, took the extreme
position of accounting for this antagonism in terms of social institutions in conflict
with nature. Others explain the phenomenon in terms of a moral depravity. Morel
claims that his intermediary position is closest to the truth: "C'est celle qui admet la
degradation originelle de la nature humaine, agissant seule ou avec le concours des
circonstances exterieures, des institutions sociales et de toutes les influences
occasionelle analogues” (3).
A few years before Morel, Fustel de Coulanges, in his notes at the Ecole
Normale, was writing of a souillure originelle that condemned certain classes to toil.2
Thus, at mid-century, there is a convergence of the discourses in natural sciences,
clinical psychiatry, and on the social bond. The revolutions of 1830 and 1848 were
the backdrop against which such discourse took place. As Daniel Pick has put it,
"The uniqueness of the present was no longer seen as the consciousness of
Revolution in absolute (as in the aftermath of 1789-1815), but the experience of the
pathological reproduction and transformation of revolution. This, I suggest, is a
crucial discursive site of Morel's degenerescence"(56). How crucial this site is
becomes dramatically clear in Taine's Origines de la France contemporaine. and in
his account of the Jacobins in particular.
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Taine's “Au rebours”
As I have pointed out in Chapter I, Taine's reading of Darwin was refracted
through Royer's Gobinist outlook. Simultaneously, his interest in physiology led him
to read Lucas. As early as 1863, Taine had cited Lucas in conjunction with Darwin
(Histoire de la litterature anglaise). The convergence of theories of heredity with
evolutionary narrative had already occurred in Taine. We have in Taine the
physiological and the psychological enmeshed in what is at this point still a search
for method. The idea of race, as Taine's biographer Francois Leger has pointed out, is
Taine's own. Before the appearance of Gobineau's work, Taine had jotted a few
notions in his notes at the Ecole Normale. These are the idea of race, milieu, et
moment as being the factors which determine a particular culture. Taine applied this
notion to the English race in the Histoire de la litterature anglaise. However, in citing
Lucas alongside Darwin in his preface, Taine is going much further, and there are
anticipations of his later account of the Jacobins. By 1881, Taine is very explicit
about his application of the notion of heredity as articulated by Lucas in (social)
Darwinist terms. In a letter to Taillandier, in response to a review by the latter of La
Conquete iacobine. he writes:
Je suis tres loin de revendiquer seulement "le droit de l'heredite" et de nier "le
droit de la vocation." Vous trouverez dans Darwin et dans Prosper Lucas les
raisons physiologiques et psychologiques tres fortes qui nous obligent a
donner du jeu aux vocations; dans les races les plus stables et les plus
uniformes, il se produit des combinaisons exceptionnelles, des individus
singuliers, et selon le mot de Darwin "des varietes individuelles".. . . Le vrai
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principe politique est qu'il faut utliser toutes les forces, celle de l'heredite et
celle de l'individualite. (Vie et Correspondance , IV, 127)
I shall briefly discuss the different elements of Lucas' De l'heredite and
Morel's Treatise to show how they converge in Taine's “La Conquete jacobine,”
which appeared in 1881, before Huysmans' A Rebours (1884). A close scrutiny of
La Conquete jacobine will reveal that Taine's narrative is permeated by the language
of degenerescence as articulated in the theories of the time.
Taine's eclecticism, his penchant for things scientific, allowed for a kind of
osmosis between the philosophical and the physiological. In the mid-50s, before he
had published Histoire de la litterature anglaise, one sees in his correspondence this
spilling over of the scientific into the philosophical and the literary. Even as he was
at work on Shakespeare, even as he was preparing to deliver his "coups de pattes" to
Cousin (cf. Chapter I above), Taine's interest in the physiological remained constant.
In a letter to Edouard Suckau, written in November 1854, well before Darwin's
Origin and Morel's Traite des Degenerescences had appeared, Taine attempts to
explain the difference between the English and French national characters in terms of
the scientific:
L'attention et la concentration produisent l'orgueil, la fermete, l'egoisme, la
tenacite, la prudence, l'esprit d'affaires, l'esprit anglais. Le manque d'attention
et de concentration produit la sociabilite, la vanite, l'inconstance, la
sympathie, la temerite, l'esprit de conversation, l'esprit ffan9 ais. Mais qui
produit l'instabilite et la legerete de la conception? II faudrait remonter ainsi,
jusqu'au point ou commencent les explications physiologiques, chimiques,
etc., et prouver qu'alors il ne reste plus que ces explications. (Vie et
Correspondance. II, 83)
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As I have remarked above (Chapter II), Taine's preoccupation with method in
philosophy and with the empiricist tradition led him by way of analogy to turn to the
genealogical. This statement to Suckau in 1854 is of importance since it is the first
time Taine articulates a method, which he was to theorize in the Histoire de
litterature anglaise. The preface to the Histoire was written after Darwin's Origin had
appeared. Of equal importance is the following sentence in a letter to Suckau written
two months later. Taine was later to use the same phrase in conjunction with Darwin,
in response to Renan's Dialogues nhilosophiques (1876):
Je me repete tous les matins la phrase suivante: une morue contient quatre
millions d'ceufs, deux cent arrivent a l'etat adulte. II est naturel que je sois
dans les trois millions neuf cent quatre-vingt-dix-neuf mille huits cents
autres." (Vie et Correspondance II, 95)
At this point, Taine was at his most eclectic. Still, one may see in his correspondence
and his writings of the period the elements that led to the convergence of
evolutionary theory and bio-medical theories of degeneration in his account of the
Jacobins. The first indication of his interest in bio-medical accounts of human
behavior is in a letter written in May 1855, once again to Suckau:
Je suis a la Salpetriere un cours sur les fous qui m'enchante; je le redige sur
place, je te le donnerai a ton prochain voyage. Entre autres faits, en voici un
curieux. D'une serie de mesures prises par Lelut, il resulte que le cerveau d'un
idiot differe en moyenne d'un cerveau sain par la depression non de la partie
anterieure, mais de la partie posterieure contenue sous l'occipital, et que la
courbe qui mesure cette region de la tete est de vingt et un millimetres moins
grande chez l'idiot que chez l'homme sain. On nous montre les folles une a
une, j'ecris leurs reponses. (99)
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A few days later, he writes again to Suckau on the subject of the mad women
at Salpetriere, citing cases. He then concludes:
II me semble que la folie a joue un tres grand role dans le monde. A propos
de Shakespeare, je viens de lire des documents sur les sorciers au moyen age;
dans notre siecle raisonnable, nous ne pouvons imaginer l'absurdite de nos
predecesseurs. Mes cours de physiologie m'enseignent l'histoire (100;
emphasis added)
The overlap between the physiological and the psychological had already occurred in
Taine's thinking. However, at this point, Taine had merely internalized what he
learned in his classes in anatomy and psychiatry and shared with Lucas a fascination
for the asylum. A few years later, with Royer's Gobinist reading of Darwin, Taine's
own views on heredity and race were reinforced. But it was not until the cataclysm
of the Commune that he thought of applying such notions to account for history in
terms of Lucas' and Morel's notions of degeneracy. Where contemporary responses
to the Commune attributed revolutionary behavior to the alcoholism of the
Communards as in the case of Maxime du Camp and Edmond de Goncourt, Taine
sought the etiology much further back: it was the Jacobins who were responsible for
this original souillure. to use Fustel de Coulanges' phrase.
At the time of this letter to Suckau cited above (this page), the history Taine
had in mind was still literary. He was still trying to complete the Histoire de la
litterature anglaise. He was also at work on what would later, in 1870, become De
l'intelligence. a physiological account of the human mind and the cognitive process.
Despite the early setbacks at the Sorbonne when his thesis had been rejected, Taine
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had always seen himself as a philosopher. His early work on the sensations was a
project he would never abandon, although his immediate commitments obliged him
to put it off. With De l'Intelligence, he had come close to resuscitating a materialism
that he had not been allowed to espouse in his youth. This materialism was
thoroughly imbued with the physiological, Taine having made the journey from the
empirical to the genealogical. Before Gobineau, he had articulated the importance of
race and milieu. The combined events of 1870-1871 gave an ideological dimension
to the physiological. Now, with the Paris Commune, the genealogical had to be
turned against itself to account for such a catastrophe. Hereditary property is the
basis of social order, therefore socialism is not natural and results in the horrors of
the Paris Commune.
It is this notion of the "not natural", the "against nature" that permeates the
Origines. We may now see in what manner evolutionary narrative and the idea of
regression is appropriated by Taine to write history. When the Origines were
written, various interpretations of evolutionary narrative, far removed from any
claim that Darwin had made of an anthropological nature, had become dominant.
Chief among these were the theories of degeneration and atavism I have discussed
above, theories that claimed to have a bio-medical basis. In one sense it could be said
that Lamarckian theory had re-emerged: Lamarck's privileging of effort allowed for
the possibility of regression as much as evolution.
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Such a theory finds full expression in Taine's narrative of the Jacobins.
Atrophy, decay, and mutation account for a certain type of political choice. A kind of
rottenness in the core of being led to the Jacobin type of political behavior. It was
against nature, and for Taine, this means tradition, to act in a particular way. The
refrain that runs through volume two of the Origines is au rebours. Although
Huysmans had used the phrase as the title of his novel, it must be remembered that
both Huysmans and Taine were writing in a climate where recourse to bio-medical
theories of regression became a way of allaying fears of social disintegration. In the
case of Taine, the fear is explicitly political and the account of the politically
aberrant is explicitly physiological. Taine's transition from the empirical to the
genealogical allowed him to give a physiological account of historical causality. That
physiology is now the basis for an explanation of aberrant behavior, that is, a
proclivity for revolution.
Historically, argues Taine, a leadership, a responsible government has always
acted in a certain manner. In a given situation, a responsible, sane leadership would
have taken certain measures, tentatively at first, measuring the success or failure of
each hypothesis. If any abstract principle, such as the sovereignty of the people is at
stake, the leadership would attempt to take into account the facts on the ground in its
application of the principle:
Lorsqu'un homme d'Etat qui n'est pas tout a fait indigne de ce grand nom
rencontre sur son chemin un principe abstrait, par exemple celui de la
souverainete du peuple, s'il l'admet, c'est comme tout principe, sous benefice
d'inventaire. A cet effet, il commence pas se le figurer tout applique et en
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exercice. Pour cela, d'apres ses souvenirs propres et d'apres tous les
renseignements qu'il peut rassembler, il imagine tel village, tel bourg, telle ville
moyenne, au nord, au sud, au centre du pays pour lequel il fait des lois. Puis, du
mieux qu'il peut, il se figure les habitants en train d'agir d'apres le principe, c'est-
a-dire votant, montant leur garde, percevant leurs impots et gerant leurs affaires.
De ces dix ou douze groupes qu’il a pratiques et qu’il prend pour specimens, il
conclut par analogie aux autres et a tout le territoire. Evidemmment, T operation
est difficile et chanceuse: pour etre a peu pres exacte, elle requiert un rare talent
d’observation et, a chacun de ses pas, un tact exquis: car il s’agit de calculer
juste avec des quantites imparfaitement percues et imparfaitement notees.
Lorsqu'un politique y parvient, c'est par une divination delicate qui est le fruit de
l'experience consommee jointe au genie. Encore n'avance-t-il que bride en main
dans son innovation ou dans sa reforme; presque toujours, il essaye; il n'applique
sa loi que par portions, graduellement, provisoirment, il en veut constater l'effet;
il est toujours pret a corriger, suspendre, attenuer son oeuvre. (22)
It is quite other with the Jacobins: "Tout au rebours le jacobin. Son principe est un
axiome de geometrie politique qui porte en lui sa propre preuve." The Jacobin cannot
see reality for what it is, complexe et ondovante because he himself is made of
geometrical axioms:
Car, comme les axiomes de la geometrie ordinaire, il est forme par la
combinaisons de quelques idees simples, et son evidence s'impose du premier
coup a tout esprit qui pense ensemble les deux termes dont il est
l'assemblage. L'homme en general, les droits de l'homme, le contrat social, la
liberte, l'egalite, la raison, la nature, le peuple, les tyrans, voila ces notions
elementaires. . . . Des hommes reels, nul souci: il ne les voit pas; il n'a pas
besoin de les voir; les yeux clos, il impose son moule a la matiere humaine
qu'il petrit. (23)
As I have pointed out in Chapter I, Taine has given a detailed account of the
formation of the Enlightenment mind in volume one of the Origines. "L'Esprit et la
Doctrine." At that point in the writing of the Origines, Taine was concerned
primarily with describing the arbitrary, abstract nature of the social contract. The
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Enlightenment mind was the product of two elements, the acquis scientifique, and
the esprit classique, the combination of which produced a poisonous compound. The
esprit classique which Taine associates with the mathematical, is completely cut off
from reality:
Quand viendra la Revolution, le retranchement sera plus grand encore.
Parcourez les harangues de tribune et de club, les rapports, les motifs de loi,
les pamphlets, tant d'ecrits inspires par des evenements presents et poignants;
nulle idee de la creature humaine telle qu'on l'a sous les yeux, dans les
champs et dans la rue; on se la figure comme un automate simple dont le
mecanisme est connu. Chez les ecrivains, elle etait tout a l'heure une serinette
a phrases; pour les politiques, elle est maintenant une serinette a votes, qu'il
suffit de toucher du doigt a l'endroit convenable pour lui faire rendre la
reponse qui convient. Jamais de faits; rien que des abstractions, des enfilades
de sentences sur la nature, la raison, le peuple, les tyrans, la liberie, sortes de
ballons gonfles et entrechoques inutilement dans les espaces. Si Ton ne savait
pas que tout cela aboutit a des effets pratiques et terribles, on croirait a un jeu
de logique, a des exercices d'ecole, a des parades d'academie, a des
combinaisons d'ideologie (316)
In terms of the causal account of how the Enlightenment mind, and
consequently, the Jacobin mind, came into being, the geometrical "esprit classique"
is the determining factor. In "La Conquete jacobine," the transition from geometrical
to genealogical, albeit arbitrary, is complete. Even as he gives the descriptive
account of the geometrical manner of thinking of the Jacobins in the passage cited
above from “La Conquete jacobine,” Taine's causal explanation is genealogical:
Ce sont la nos Jacobins: ils naissent dans la decomposition sociale, ainsi que
des champignons dans un terrain qui fermente. Considerons leur structure
intime: ils en ont une, comme autrefois les puritains, il n'y a qu'a suivre leur
dogme a fond, comme une sonde, pour descendre en eux jusqu'a la couche
psychologique ou l'equilibre normal des facultes et des sentiments s'est
renverse. (21)
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The genealogical is now seen purely in terms of the mutant. It is at this point
that the different theories that have informed Taine's thinking converge. I have
already cited the fact that both Darwin and Lucas were formative influences on
Taine. The crucial move here is that the bio-medical theory of heredity as a function
of especes maladives articulated by Lucas becomes a way of explaining the political
actions of the Jacobins, whereas in "L'Esprit et la doctrine," it was the esprit
classique. Bom in social decomposition, the Jacobins have a certain incapacity to
cognise concrete reality:
Si, par le canal des oreilles ou des yeux, l'experience presente y enfonce de
force quelque verite importune, elle n'y peut subsister; toute criante et
saignante qu'elle soit, il (le Jacobin) l'expulse; au besoin, il la tord et
l'etrangle, a titre calomniatrice, parce qu'elle dement un principe indiscutable
et vrai pour soi. Manifestement, un pareil esprit n'est pas sain: des deux
facultes qui devraient tirer egalement et ensemble, l'une est atrophiee l'autre
hypertrophiee; le contrepoids des faits manque pour balancer le poids des
formules. Tout charge d'un cote et tout vide de l'autre, il verse violemment du
cote ou il penche, et telle est bien l'incurable infirmite de l'esprit Jacobin. (24)
Atrophy, infirmity, inversion. These are contained in the germ and constitute
the biological causes that underlie a certain type of mind. What we have here is not
just Lucas' theory of heredity, but elements of Lamarckian transformisme. In Chapter
I, I pointed to the fact that one of the points of differences between Lamarckians and
Darwinists was the importance of milieu. By 1871, Darwin himself had
acknowledged that milieu was an important factor in accounting for transformation.
At the time of Taine's writing La Conquete jacobine. the importance of milieu in
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determining the growth of the organism was widely established. Taine incorporates
this element in accounting for the development of the Jacobin mind:
Une telle aberration d’esprit et un tel exces d’orgueil ne se rencontrent guere,
et pour les produire, il a fallu un concours de circonstances qui ne sont
assemblies qu’une seule fois. Pourtant, ni Pamour-propre exagere ni le
raisonnement dogmatique ne sont rares dans l’espece humaine. En tout pays,
ces deux racines de l'esprit jacobin subsistent indestructibles et souterraines.
Partout elles sont comprimees par la societe etablie. Partout elles tachent de
desceller la vieille assise historique qui pesent sur elles de tout son poids.
Aujourd'hui comme autrefois . . . il y a des Brissot, des Danton, des Marat,
des Robespierre, des Saint-Just en germe; mais faute d'air et de place au soleil
ils n'eclosent pas. (12; emphasis added)
But in 1789-1792, the unusual circumstances did exist that allowed the
Robespierres and Dantons to germinate. The air et aliment that was needed to
nourish these mutants was provided by the Constitution. Taine now makes the move
that privileges the regressive aspect of Lamarckian theory to make evolutionary
theory fit in with Lucas' account of especes maladives. Because the Jacobins are an
■ j
unhealthy species, the growth is of an abnormal nature. Evolutionary theory is now
read in terms of aberration:
Tout regime est un milieu qui opere sur les plantes humaines pour en
developper quelques especes et en etioler d'autres. Celui-ci est le meilleur
pour faire pousser et pulluler le politique de cafe.. .. Dans cette serre chaude,
la chimere et l'outrecuidance vont prendre des proportions monstrueuses, et,
au bout de quelques mois, les cerveaux ardents y deviendront des cerveaux
brules. Suivons l'effet de cette temperature excessive et malsaine sur les
ambitions et les imaginations. (16)
The result is the proliferation of a species of monstrous beings, the Jacobins,
whose defining characteristic is a certain presumption: l'outrecuidance :
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Au commencement, cette outrecuidance n'etait en lui qu'un germe, et en
temps ordinaire, faute de nourriture, elle serait restee a l'etat de moisissure
rampante ou d'avorton desseche. Mais le cceur ne sait pas les etranges
semences qu'il porte en lui-meme: telle de ces graines, faible et inoffensive
d'aspect, n'a qu'a rencontrer l'air et l'aliment pour devenir une excroissance
veneneuse et une vegetation colossale. (18)
As I have pointed out in Chapter II, the uprooting of the young men from
Lorraine in Les Deracines was due to Bouteiller, with his Kantian ideas. From the
image of the tree, rooted in its existence, Barres had derived the idea of
uprootedness, of young saplings losing their grip on the earth because of
cosmopolitan ideas imported from foreign parts. For the Anglophile Taine, however,
cosmopolitanism was no evil, far from it, he cites England as a model. The opposite
of rootedness, heredity, and genealogy could not be expressed in nationalist terms.
He therefore turned the metaphor on itself by way of inversion: as against the
blossoming of life in the form of the healthy tree, there is, in mankind, the seeds of
unhealthy and deformed growth. In the previous chapter, I have cited Kant's
metaphor where, in a forest, it was the struggle for light and air that straightened the
individual trees. For Taine, the lack of air and light prevents seeds from germinating:
from the tree we have moved to the root, and thence to the germ; the potential
Robespierres do not see the light of the day in other societies. For Kant, natural seeds
are developed to perfection by unsociableness becom ing an agent of sociability. The
struggle for light and air is what allows for perfection. For Taine, this struggle is
what allows for unnatural, monstrous growth when there are no constraints. The
desire for the social contract is in itself unnatural. The Jacobin spirit is a malady, une
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maladie de croissance. In well constituted societies, there are objective constraints in
the form of hierarchies that predetermine the fate of those who dream of re
structuring society on the basis of pure reason : "Dans les societes bien constitutes,
la maladie est benigne et guerit vite." The strength of the institutions guarantees
such an outcome. In the France of 1789, however, the new Constitution allowed the
ambitious to prevail and a cancerous growth to spread.
A Rebours
The various theories of degeneration, beginning with those articulated by
Lucas and Morel and culminating in the work of Cesare Lombroso, often
overlapped and overflowed national boundaries. When Max Nordau, then living in
Paris, wrote his Degeneration in 1892, the notion of degenerescence had become
widespread, and in a sense Nordau's Degeneration expressed a general European
disorder, to use Daniel Pick's expression. It is not in the least surprising that Nordau
should have dedicated his work to Lombroso, whose best known work is Criminal
Man. Lombroso's work on criminality had been published in the Revue
philosonhiaue and most French writers were acquainted with his theory.
The first thing to be noted about Nordau is that, for all that he was a social-
Darwinist and an important influence in the nascent fascistic tendencies of the fin-
de-siecle, he eventually turned to the Zionist cause. Bom into a Hungarian Jewish
family, he broke out of the narrow confines of this milieu, symbolically changing his
name from Sudfeld to Nordau. He lived for the better part of his life in Paris where
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he was both a journalist and a medical practitioner, having trained under Charcot. In
this sense, he resembled Taine, in that he had formal training in medical science,
although Taine did not work towards a degree. Nordau is chiefly known for his
Degeneration (1892) but long before the publication of this work, he had articulated
his social-Darwinist views, in The Conventional Lies of our Civilisation (1883) and
Paradoxes (1885). It is from the latter work that Gide drew his phrase in his
controversy with Barres regarding the person of Racadot, an indication that Nordau
was already fairly influential in the mid-1880s. It is in Degeneration however that he
made his sweeping attack on all the emerging fin-de-siecle trends, his victims
ranging from Ibsen, Nietzsche, and Wagner to Baudelaire, Gautier, Zola, Huysmans,
Barres, and others. If one turns to Huysmans' A Rebours. it is interesting to note that
the novel appeared in 1884, between the first two of Nordau's early publications. By
the time Nordau turned his attention to A Rebours. Huysmans was in a Trappist
monastery, undergoing the process of his dramatic conversion.
The most succinct account of Huysmans' rupture with Zola and the naturalist
school with the publication of A Rebours is to be found in the famous preface by the
author written twenty years after the event. Huysmans stifled in the atmosphere at
Medan and felt that that he had entered a cul-de-sac. Philosophically, what he was
experiencing was a disenchantment with Schopenhauer's pessimism, and in this
sense Nordau is fairly widely off the mark with his critique of A Rebours. That is to
say, Nordau's Weltanschauung rested on an optimistic nineteenth-century notion of
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progress, and not least among the objects of his scathing critique was Schopenhauer's
pessimism. But it is precisely Huysmans' disenchantment with pessimism and his
feeling that Zola's naturalism led nowhere that led the former to invest the novel with
something that went against the grain of contemporary trends.
In this sense, A Rebours is a very self-conscious statement, although
Huysmans himself says that it was an "unconscious" work. This may be true of the
way he went about writing it, in terms of content, the absence of plot and action. But
the choice of the title, the "coup terrible au naturalisme" to use Zola's phrase,
clearly indicates that the desire to go against the current of naturalism is the driving
force behind the novel, a point that Huysmans himself makes in the same preface:
“On etait alors en plein naturalisme; mais cette ecole, qui devait rendre Tinoubliable
service de situer des personages reels dans des milieux exacts, etait condamnee a se
rabacher, en pietinant sur place” (Preface, i). Ostensibly apolitical, A Rebours is
political in the wider sense, as a critique of the nineteenth century, with all its
cultural and philosophical ramifications.
The central character in A Rebours is the duke des Esseintes, the last
survivor of an aging line. Huysmans plunges straight into his genealogy in terms of
bad blood:
A en juger par les quelques portraits conserves au chateau de Lourps, la
famille des Floressas des Esseintes avait ete, au temps jadis, composee
d'athletiques soudards, de rebarbatifs reitres. . . . Ceux-la etaient les ancetres;
les portraits de leurs descendants manquaient; un trou existait dans la filiere
des visages de cette race; une seule toile servait d'intermediaire, mettait un
point de suture entre le passe et le present, une tete mysteriuese et rusee, aux
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traits morts et tires, aux pommettes ponctuees d'un virgule de fard, aux
cheveux gommes et enroules de perles, au col tendu et peint, sortant des
cannelures d'une rigide fraise. Deja, dans cette image de l'un des plus intimes
familiers du due d'Eperon et du marquis d'O, les vices d'un temperament
appauvri, la predominance de la lymphe dans le sang, apparaissaient. La
decadence de cette ancienne maison avait, sans nul doute suivi regulierement
so cours; l'effemination des males etait allee en s'accentuant; comme pour
achever l'ceuvre des ages, les des Esseintes se marierent, pendant deux
siecles, leurs enfants entre eux, usant leur reste de vigueur dans les unions
consanguines. Par un singulier phenomene d'atavisme, le dernier descendant
ressemblait a l'antique ai'eul, au mignon, dont il avait la barbe en pointe d'un
blond extraordinairement pale et l'expression ambigue, tout a la fois lasse et
habile. (A Rebours. 1-3)
All the elements of heredity, of degeneration, of bad blood in the Rougon-Macquart
cycle are present here, but presented in a tongue-and cheek way. The explicit use of
the term atavism, the inbreeding of the des Esseintes announces a novel that is to be
an aberration. The novel, as is well known, has practically no plot and is centered on
the idiosyncrasies of des Esseintes who, weary of the Parisian milieu he lives in, and
dissatisfied with men of letters, thinkers and women alike, decides to withdraw from
a world that he finds meaningless. He sells his family chateau, liquidates his assets
and with the proceeds of the sale of his inheritance invests his fortune in a remote
retreat at Fontenay-aux-Roses, away from the city. He refurbishes the house in
extravagant style and indulges himself in all manner of follies, eventually
succumbing to his excesses with a stomach disorder that seems incurable, despite
the fantastic concoctions prescribed by the doctor.
I shall not dwell here on des Esseintes' wild exploits; nor shall I take up the
sweeping critique of art, Latin and contemporary literature which des Esseintes
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engages in between his bouts of illness. I shall focus rather on Nordau's reading of
the novel. Nordau's extraordinary survey of art and literature rests on the hypothesis
that there is a certain type of “higher degenerate,” who manifests this degeneration in
culture.4 He classes degeneration in culture under three broad categories, mysticism,
egotism, and realism which often overlap each other. Ibsen, for instance, is both a
mystic and an egotist. Baudelaire (the diabolical) and the Pamassiens fall under
egotism. Huysmans, in his naturalist phase falls under realism and with A Rebours.
egotism.
In the chapter entitled “Ego-mania,” Nordau, after having castigated
Baudelaire and Gautier for launching the trend known as decadence, takes on
Huysmans, whom he considers a disciple of the other two:
First a word on the author of this instructive book. Huysmans, the classical type
of the hysterical mind without originality, who is the predestined victim of every
suggestion, began his literary career as a fanatical imitator of Zola, and
produced, in this first period of his development, romances and novels in which .
.. he greatly surpassed his model in obscenity. Then he swerved from
naturalism, by an abrupt change of disposition, which is no less genuinely
hysterical, overwhelmed this tendency and Zola himself with the most violent
abuse, and began to ape the Diabolists, particularly Baudelaire. (Degeneration.
302)
For Nordau, des Esseintes is the decadent par excellence. His taste for artifice is
derived from Baudelaire. The mechanical fish in the dining room aquarium are
indeed more remarkable than the latter's paysage a fer blanc in Reve narisien (111).
Nordau objects to des Esseintes' passion for creating elaborate mechanical
contraptions in order to enjoy small pleasures. The mouth organ made up of several
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barrels of various liqueurs, curagao corresponding to the clarinet, kummel to the
oboe, kirsch to the trumpet, his array of exotic perfumes, all these, for Nordau
represent the attempts of a sick and degenerate organism to seek stimulation because
of a fundamental biological disorder.
He also assimilates this tendency with that of l'homme banal to follow the
crowd. Ironically, it is the horror of mediocrity that led des Esseintes to seek a retreat
in Fontenay-aux-Roses. Nordau, however, sees in des Esseintes' withdrawal from the
world a symptom of the same phenomenon:
The ordinary man always seeks to think, to feel, and to do the same as the
multitude; the decadent seeks exactly the contrary. Both derive the manner of
seeing and feeling, not from their internal convictions but from what the crowd
dictates to them. Both lack individuality, and they are obliged to have their eyes
constantly fixed on the crowd to find their way. The decadent is, therefore, an
ordinary man with a minus sign, who, equally with the latter, only in a contrary
sense, follows in the wake of the crowd, and meanwhile makes things far more
difficult for himself than the ordinary man; he is also constantly in a state of
irritation, while the latter as constantly enjoys himself. This can be summed up
in one proposition- -the decadent snob is an anti-social Philistine, suffering from
a mania for contradiction, without the smallest feeling for the work of art itself.
(307)
In one sense, Nordau has indeed grasped the sense in which Huysmans conceived of
A Rebours. Des Esseintes does everything that is against nature; he sleeps in the
daytime and wakes in the evening, to dream and read. He eats little, drinks coffee,
tea, and wine in his extraordinary dining room. He gazes at his gilded tortoise, a
living creature he places on the carpet to off-set the too-loud colors of the carpet.
That is to say, he had initially chosen the tortoise for its muddy color, but its very
muddiness rendered the colors of the carpet even more strident. So he decides that
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he must do the opposite: gild the shell so that its dazzling reflections would mute the
silver of the carpet. Having done so, he is not satisfied and has the tortoise' shell
encrusted with exotic gems. He reflects on language, Latin in particular, and Redon's
paintings. Later when he suffers from an incurable stomach disorder, he reflects on
contemporary literature, names Flaubert, de Goncourt, and Zola. A Rebours is quite
unabashedly a critque of contemporary literary and artistic trends. Des Esseintes'
eccentricities are a mere pretext for a discourse that is essentially a revolt against
naturalism. Even though Huysmans wrote his preface twenty years later, the tongue-
in-cheek style of the novel is unmistakable.
As Jean Borie has pointed out in his chapter on modernity in Huysmans, the
most banal praise of modernity consists in lauding the triumph of science and the
notion of progress, something that Zola set out to do in his later work. Huysmans'
revolt against naturalism is equally a rejection of contemporary industrial
civilization. The deliberate introduction of artifice is not an uncritical embracing of
science and progress. As Borie has written:
Ce n'est pas qu'il s'enthousiasme pour la technique elle-meme, pour le travail,
pour la volonte de maitrise qu'il exprime. Plus qu'une maitrise, il voit dans la
modemite un affJanchissement, une denaturation- -qui est aussi un
apprauvrissement biologique, une fatigue, une debilite. II se declare pret a
aimer la modemite jusque-la, jusque dans le sceau maladif qu'elle imprime
sur le monde et sur les creatures. La m odem ite est le regne de l'humain: elle
signifie la civilisation, non pas tellement comme domination- -ce qui
n'interesse guere Huysmans- -mais comme separation de la nature. Dans le
monde modeme. le naturel a ete non seulement soumis, mais defait, refait,
remnlace. (Huysmans, 119-120; emphasis added)
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It is precisely in this sense that A Rebours as a title is double-edged. It is a literary
revolt, against naturalism, as Huysmans himself states in the preface, and as Zola
himself told Huysmans when the novel appeared.5
What made Nordau ignore the critical aspect of Huysmans' novel and take A _
rebours so literally ? When one considers Nordau's cultural background, his
cosmopolitanism and the fact that he was a medical practitioner, one sees the
convergence of several trends in the fm-de-siecle. As George Mosse has remarked in
his introduction to Degeneration Nordau typifies one aspect of his age and the men
who made it (Degeneration xiv). Yet the fm-de-siecle was beset with contradictions
where an emergent nationalism was at odds with modernist trends in art and
literature. There was Impressionism and Expressionism in art, a Symbolism that cut
across national boundaries. As Mosse has stated succinctly, "A young generation
was engaged in a search for its own identity, and directly opposed all that Max
Nordau stood for. Against this modernism Nordau struck back in his Degeneration
"(xiv). It is not surprising then, that in the very chapter where he lambastes
Huysmans, he directs his ire at Wilde as well. Decadents and esthetes are not the
only representatives of modernism whom Nordau attacked. Ibsen, Nietzsche,
Wagner are not spared. Nietzsche, in particular is perceived as the theoretician of the
degeneres.
Nordau's world-view was essentially a progressive, liberal nineteenth century
one. He was liberal in the nineteenth century sense of being a reformer. His
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aesthetics goes back to the earlier fin-de-siecle. Goethe, Kant and Schiller. There is,
for him, an essential unity in nature of the Kantian kind. Along with such a vision, he
held views not unlike those of Jeremy Bentham, and as Mosse has remarked, there is
a strong element of utilitarianism in his views. This vision of slow and steady
progress based on a scientific outlook, was threatened on all sides in the fm-de-
siecle. Nordau's own experience as a medical practitioner, his knowledge of the
natural sciences, the prevailing atmosphere where discourse in many spheres was
permeated by notions of degeneration grafted on to Social-Darwinist theories of
society as an organism led him to diagnose the mal-de-siecle in clinical terms.
Trends in art and literature reflected a fundamental biological condition, a cerebral
atrophy.
The solution, therefore had to be bio-medical. He concludes Degeneration
with a chapter entitled "Therapeutics" in which he says that in every branch of
medicine, social hygiene and preventive medicine have gained the ascendancy:
With us in Germany the psychiatrist alone fails as yet to concern himself with the
hygiene of the mind. It is time that he should practice his profession in this direction
also. A Maudsley in England, a Charcot, a Magnan in France, a Lombroso, a Tonnini
in Italy, have brought to vast circles of the people an understanding of the obscure
phenomena in the life of the mind, and disseminated knowledge which would make
it impossible in those countries for pronounced lunatics with the mania for
persecution to gain an influence over hundreds of thousands of electoral even if it
could not prevent the coming into fashion of the degenerate art. (559)
Nordau was to lose the battle against modernism, and he himself would turn
to Zionism. More important, even at the time of his writing, new theories were being
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articulated, based on the very notion of society as an organism, in which the idea of
regeneration was turned against degeneration. In the next chapter, I shall discuss
these theories of regeneration, in particular the work of Durkheim and his notion of
social solidarity as an organic bond.
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Notes
1 The introduction and the preface do not have any pagination.
2 Fonds Fustel de Coulanges, MSS Richelieu, Bibliotheque Nationale de France,
Paris, Carton 1, cf. Chapter I, p. 56 above.
Cf. Chapter I above, p. 41. The constant exercise of an organ led to its
development, its disuse to atrophy.
4 Nordau cites the psychiatrist Magnan as the source of this concept, cf
Degeneration. 18.
5 "Preface ecrite vingt ans apres," A Rebours. in Oeuvres completes VI, xxii
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Chapter IV: Solidarity, from the mechanical to the organic
II existe un modele excellent de la maniere dont une nation peut se relever
des demiers desastres. C’est la Prusse elle-meme qui nous l’a donne.
Ernest Renan, La Reforme intellectuelle et morale, 1872
C’est encore au professeur de philosophic qu’il appartient d’eveiller chez les
esprits qui lui sont confies l’idee de ce qu’est une loi; de leur faire
comprendre que les phenomenes psychiques et sociaux sont des faits comme
les autres, soumis a des lois que la volonte humaine ne peut pas troubler a son
gre et que par consequent les revolutions au sens propre du mot sont choses
aussi impossibles que les miracles
Emile Durkheim, L’Enseignement dans les universites allemandes, 1887
The annee terrible of 1870-1871, as I have argued above in Chapter I, was a
cataclysm for a generation of intellectuals. With the notable exceptions of Rimbaud
and those who actively participated in the Commune such as Courbet, Verlaine and
Valles, most writers and thinkers responded by adopting conservative or even
counter revolutionary positions. The soul-searching that followed the combined
effects of the defeat at Prussian hands and the working class actually taking over the
Paris Commune, was accompanied by a preoccupation with the social bond and
order and a fear of national degeneration. In the previous chapter, I have discussed
the way bio-medical theories of degeneration permeated discourse in disciplines
other than medicine and in particular I have examined the way in which Taine
applied such theories to history to account for the Jacobin Terror. In this chapter I
shall discuss the discourse on the social bond in the aftermath of the Paris Commune.
In particular I shall focus on the early work of Emile Durkheim and show how he
gave regenerative value to the language of the organic. I shall primarily discuss
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Durkheim’s theory of organic solidarity as articulated not only in De la division du
travail social (1893), but in certain articles published in various journals prior to the
publication of his first major work. The theory of organic solidarity is of importance
because it acted as a counterpoint to the theories of degeneration, which had come to
dominate discourse. Just as Hippolyte Taine and Theodule Ribot, editor of the Revue
nhilosonhiaue. chose to focus on degeneration, heredity, and mental illness with
consequences for the writing of history and psychiatry, Durkheim stressed the
capacity of the social organism to restore itself to health with positive consequences
for the new science of sociology.
I propose to argue that the underlying rationale of the theory of organic
solidarity was the republicans’ need for social stability in the Third Republic.
Durkheim’s theory had resonances in the theory of solidarity articulated by the
politician Leon Bourgeois and the movement known as solidarism. It is in this
period, at the turn of the century, that the movement for reform gained ground and
that some degree of consensus was achieved. As Jacques Donzelot, in his discussion
of Durkheim in L’lnvention du social, has observed:
Si Ton veut comprendre les raisons qui ont fait T opportunity pour la
Troisieme Republique de la notion de solidarity, mieux vaut sans doute
Tanalyser comme une invention strategique, comme la rationalisation d’une
pratique republicaine incertaine de son fondement et de son horizon, dans le
debat qui Toppose aux positions tant conservatrices que revolutionnaires. A
ce titre il conviendrait plutot de parler du social comme d’une fiction efficace
dont la portee explicative, quant au fonctionnent des societes, ne vaut que par
relation avec ces deux fictions que sont Tindividu en tant que principe
d’intelligibility de la realite sociale, et la lutte de classes en tant que moteur
de Thistoire. (L’lnvention du social, 77)
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Durkheim’s original intention had been precisely to write his doctoral
dissertation on individualism and socialism. It was following his visit to Germany
and his discovery of Albert Schaeffle's theory of society, in which he likened it to an
organism, that Durkheim modified his thesis to focus on the individual and society. I
shall simultaneously argue that the theory of organic solidarity as articulated by
Durkheim in De la Division du travail implicitly ruled out class struggle as Marx had
defined it, although in his early essay, which I have cited above, he does state
explicitly that revolutions were impossible. I shall discuss Durkheim’s silence on
Marx in some detail below. Before I discuss the theory of organic solidarity in the
context of the fragility of the Third Republic, I would like to make a few remarks on
the discourse on the social bond in general and the way in which it reflected the
preoccupation with order in the Third Republic.
At the political level, this search for order took the form of an uneasy
republican coalition that had to fend off the prospect of the Bonapartists and the
monarchists returning to power, on the one hand, and a resurgence of revolutionary
initiative on the part of the working class, on the other. For intellectuals, the search
for order led in different directions. Ernest Renan, who had lost his chair at the
College de France in 1862 for having offended the clerical party supporting the
Emperor, now urged a return to parliamentary monarchy and a strengthening of
institutions such as the Church.1 His Reforme intellectuelle et morale went to press
in 1871. It is both a diagnosis and a remedy: “On ne peut comprendre un seul de nos
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deuils contemporains sans en rechercher la cause dans le passe" (40). The past, of
course, meant the excesses of the Revolution. The king should never have been
beheaded. In Renan’s Reforme, monarchy and Catholicism were to be supplemented
by a colonial empire. Unabashedly racist, Renan explains why:
La colonisation en grand est une necessite politique tout a fait de premier
ordre. Une nation qui ne colonise pas est irrevocablement vouee au
socialisme, a la guerre du riche et du pauvre. La conquete d’un pays de race
inferieure par une race superieure .. . n’a rien de choquant. (62)
Renan, who had been a great Germanophile ("L'Allemagne avait ete ma maitresse")
saw the Prussian victory above all as an intellectual one :
Dans la lutte qui vient de finir, 1 ’inferiority de la France a ete surtout
intellectuelle . . . l’intelligence fran^aise s’est affaiblie.. . . Le manque de foi
a la science est le defaut profond de la France; notre inferiority militaire et
politique n ’a pas d’autre cause.. . . Notre systeme d’instruction a besoin de
reforme radicales. (63)
Such reform, as I shall show below, was to become official policy. The severe blow
to national pride following the defeat in the Franco-Prussian war and the loss of
Alsace-Lorraine led the major intellectual figures to re-define the French nation in
terms that would "de-Germanize" France. A broad consensus emerged among
liberals and conservatives, that, somehow, France had been defeated because
German science was better. Fustel de Coulanges, who was no republican, wrote in
La Revue des deux mondes in 1872: “Ce peuple allemand a dans l’erudition les
memes qualites que dans la guerre. II a la patience, la solidite, le nombre, il a surtout
la discipline et le vrai patriotisme. Ses historiens forment une armee organisee”
(“Choix de texts,” Le dix-huitieme siecle et l’histoire. 386). The focus in
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179
historiography shifted to the Middle Ages and to l’ancienne France, largely due to
the initiative of Fustel de Coulanges.2
Fustel de Coulanges, more than any other thinker, had had a humiliating
experience of what the French defeat meant. He was professor of history at the
Faculte des Lettres in Strasbourg until he moved to Paris, a few months before the
defeat at Sedan. It must have been galling indeed for him to see the Prussians
institute a Chair in Romance Philology in 1872 in the very university where he had
recently taught history. To add insult to injury, the German philologist Theodor
Mommsen published a series of articles in two Italian journals, in which he
proclaimed German superiority, and claimed that Alsace-Lorraine was German
because the population was ethnically and linguistically Germanic. He also
suggested that France's recent defeat may have been due to the loose morals that
prevailed in the Second Empire. Reacting to Mommsen’s diatribes against France,
Fustel wrote a Reponse a M. Mommsen. Refuting Mommsen’s claims, Fustel
argued that it was neither race nor language that constituted a nation, but something
like a set of common beliefs. Departing from the position he had adopted in La Cite
antique in 1864, where, in a palpably anti-Rousseauist vein, he had argued in favor
of the continuity of inherited tradition, he wrote in 1870:
Vous etes, Monsieur, un historien eminent. Mais quand nous parlons du
present, ne fixons pas trop les yeux sur l’histoire. La race, c’est de l’histoire,
c’est du passe. La langue, c’est encore de l’histoire, c’est le reste et le signe
d’un passe lointain. Ce qui est actuel et vivant, ce sont les volontes, les idees,
les interets et les affections. L’histoire vous dit peut-etre que l’Alsace est un
pays allemand; mais le present vous prouve qu’elle est un pays fran9ais.. . .
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Notre principe a nous est qu’une population ne peut etre gouvemee que par
les institutions qu’elle accepte librement et qu’elle ne doit aussi faire parti e
d’un Etat que par sa volonte et son consentement libre. Voila le principe
modeme. ("L’Alsace est-elle Allemande ou Fran9aise?" emphasis added)4
Fustel stops short of using the term "social contract," but one way of countering
German claims based on ethnicity was to offer the social contract as the basis on
which the modem nation-state was founded. The letter cited above was written in
1870, before the Paris Commune came into being. After the crushing of the
Commune, as the Third Republic was being constituted, Fustel de Coulanges was to
turn to the history of France, to her Roman and Gallic origins. As the historian
Francois Hartog has stated in Le dix-neuvieme siecle et l'histoire: le cas Fustel de
Coulanges:
Si pour quelque mois, le Moyen Age offfe a Fustel un refuge et, par une sorte
de court-circuit, un terme de comparaison direct avec le present mena9ant, il
s'impose surtout comme le lieu d'un enjeu historiographique et politique: il
est urgent de le faire connaitre, car "chacun se fa9onne un Moyen Age
imaginaire", et par la meconnaissance sourdent, pour une part, "nos"
divisions. "Le paysan ne sait pas ce qu'etait ces droits feodaux, dont il parle
tant; l'ouvrier serait bien deconcerte si on lui apprenait qu'une commune du
Moyen Age etait fort differente de ce qu'il s'imagine".. . . II est done du
devoir de l'historien de dissiper les illusions et d'eclairer pour concilier: a la
caricature il faut substituer une connaissance "exacte et scientifique, sincere
et sans parti pris" qui contribuera a "remettre le calme dans le present." Mais
on se contente de caricature par simple inversion de signes: au Moyen Age
noir se substitue un autre Moyen Age, une Arcadie feodale. (Le dix-neuvieme
siecle et l’histoire, 80)
The historiographic issue for Fustel de Coulanges, according to Hartog, is the
question of the social consequences of the Frankish occupation of Gaul. This
question in turn was linked to that of continuity between past and present:
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181
"Nos origines nationales" baignent de meme, dans la fausse clarte emise par
la Revolution. Pour des raisons evidentes, c'est autour de la questions des
invasions germaniques que se focalise alors l'interet des savants et leur
controverses: les Germains etaient-ils deja des Prussiens, les Prussiens sont-
ils toujours des Germains? En tout cas, la Germanie de Tacite etait le texte de
reference oblige pour instruire, et si possible, pour conclure le proces;
d'autant plus qu'il ne fallait pas laisser le monopole de son interpretation aux
philologues allemands qui s'y etaient installes comme chez eux. (82)
In 1874, the author of La Cite antique published the first of several fragments that
were later to become his monumental Histoires des institutions politiques de
1 ’ancienne France. La Gaule romaine et l’invasion germanique appeared in 1875 and
La Monarchie ffanque in 1888.
Such an attempt to reconstruct the past as a reaction to the Prussian victory
was not limited to the effort of a few individual scholars. It became official policy.
Betweenl876 and 1879, two hundred and fifty new chairs of literature and history
were endowed. French scholars were sent to Germany to learn what was considered
a German science, the study of ancient texts. In emulation of Gaston Paris who had
already been to Germany before the Franco-Prussian war, Gabriel Monod went to
Berlin to study paleography. History was now put to the service of the nation and
efforts were made to institutionalize the science of historiography. As R. Howard
Bloch has stated in "The First Document and the Birth of Medieval Studies" in The
N ew History o f French Literature:
French reaction to the losses of 1870 largely emulated the German model...
Journals dedicated to medieval culture came slowly into being.. . . Most of
all, however, the publication of Old French chansons de geste, intended to
rival German scholarly production, was accompanied by new ways of reading
France's oldest poetic work, the Chanson de Roland (ca 1100; Song of
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182
Roland), which, like the Strasbourg Oaths in the realm of linguistics, came to
constitute for literature the determining limit case. Hardly considered in a
patriotic context before the Franco-Prussian War, Roland came suddenly to
occupy pride of place in the French national heritage. (The New History of
French Literature, 7)
The Chanson de Roland became a key text in the university curriculum, first as part
of the program of the agregation in 1877, then of secondary education in 1880. In
addition to the institutional reconstruction of national pride, a number of reviews and
journals came into being, to complement the existing Revue des deux mondes and
the Revue des questions historiques, both anti-Revolutionary. These were the Revue
des langues romanes, (1870), Revue de Philologie Francaise et Provencale (1887),
Le moven age (1888) and Annales du Midi (1889).
This proliferation of journals spread beyond the historical domain. In 1876,
the publisher Felix Alcan established the Revue philosophique de la France et de
l’etranger. He appointed Theodule Ribot as its editor. It is of some importance that
Ribot was a leading proponent of the theory of degenerescence which I have
discussed in Chapter III. In De l'heredite (1885), a major work on the subject, Ribot
synthesized the bio-medical theories of degeneration of Lucas and Moreland
Spencer's theory of evolution. Ribot's thesis for his agregation was on psychological
heredity. From 1865 to 1889 he was charge de cours in experimental psychology at
the Sorbonne, and then chair of experimental and comparative psychology at the
College de France. His first work, La psychologie anglaise contemporaine appeared
in 1870, the same year as Taine's De l'intelligence. It is not surprising that among the
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183
first contributors to the Revue was Taine, since the latter too had a similar
preoccupation with the physiological and the psychological.
The aim of the Revue, as stated in the first issue, was to provide a forum in
which the different contemporary schools of thought could engage in a critical
exchange of views and ideas without the bitter polemical tone of publications in
existing journals committed to particular schools of thought. There is, however, a
preponderance of German thinkers, and reviews of German texts, published in
Leipzig, Vienna, and Cracow. Likewise, considerable attention is paid to
philosophical trends in England, these being dominated by the utilitarian and
evolutionist thinkers. Herbert Spencer had become an increasingly important thinker
in France because his reading of Darwin in social-Darwinist terms corresponded to a
similar understanding of Darwinism in France
It is of some interest to see how the prevalent theories of degeneration and
notions of regeneration intersected in the pages of the Revue Philosophique. As I
have remarked above, Ribot shared with Taine a preoccupation with the
physiological basis of psychology. The preoccupation with the physiological
becomes apparent if one considers some of the titles of the articles and reviews.
Apart from the articles by Taine that I have cited, the first issue of the Revue carried
an article by Ribot himself, "La duree des actes physiques," and reviews by Ribot of
Franz Brentano's Psycho logie au point de vue empirique, Adolf Horwicz' Analyses
psychologiques sur des bases physiologiques and J. Hughlings Jackson's Les
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184
localisations des mouvements dans le cerveau. The issue also contains an article,
"Des notions d'espece et de genre dans les sciences de la nature" by Louis Liard,
who, as director of higher education, was responsible for Durkheim and other
scholars being sent to Germany. Other articles pertain to the structure of the brain,
the organic basis of memory, and unconscious cerebration. Considerable attention is
devoted to reviews of foreign periodicals including The Journal of Mental Science
edited by Henry Maudsley, the English psychiatrist. And although there are articles
by and on Italian thinkers, the interest appears to be directed towards German and
English works on the subject of physiology and psychology. It is also in the very first
issue that there is an article by Herbert Spencer, for it is largely through the columns
of the Revue that Spencer was popularized in France. The article in question is a
translation of a lecture by Spencer addressed to the anthropological society of Great
Britain, translated as "Esquisse d'une psychologie comparee de l'homme." Spencer
had enthusiastically greeted Darwin's theory as a confirmation of his own theory of
evolution. As he himself recalled in the 1880 preface to First Principles, he had
already analyzed mental phenomena from an evolutionist point of view in an article
published in the Westminster Review in 1857, two years before the Origin of Species
appeared. What is of importance here is that Spencer, in the article cited above,
argued that the division of labor represented progress. In a climate where fears of
national degeneration found resonances in the articles and reviews that focused on
mental illness and the physiological basis, the publication of views that argued for
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185
progress is an indication that the idea of regeneration was also a concern. The notion
of progress becomes crucial when Emile Durkheim, the leading proponent of
regeneration, takes up the subject of the division of labor, a question I shall discuss
in some detail below.
Durkheim
Among the promising scholars sent to Germany in 1885-1886 was a student
of Fustel de Coulanges at the Ecole Normale Superieure: Emile Durkheim. The visit
had the backing of Louis Liard, Directeur de l’Enseignment Superieur, who was
later instrumental in institutionalizing Durkheimian sociology. In Germany,
Durkheim was drawn to the work of a school of moral theorists who had undertaken
to develop ethics as a special science. Chief of these were Wilhelm Wundt and
Albert Schaeffle. On his return to France, Durkheim published two articles, "La
philosophic dans les universites allemandes" (Revue intemationale de
l’enseignement. XIII, 1887) and "La science positive de la morale en Allemagne"
(Revue Philosophique, XXIV 1887). The first of these contains the sentence I cited
at the beginning of this chapter:
C’est encore au professeur de philosophie qu’il appartient d’eveiller chez les
esprits qui lui sont confies l ’idee de ce qu’est une loi; de leur faire
comprendre que les phenomenes psychiques et sociaux sont des faits comme
les autres, soumis a des lois que la volonte humaine ne peut pas troubler a son
gre et que par consequent les revolutions au sens propre du mot sont choses
aussi impossibles que les miracles. (Textes. 481))
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Not only does Durkheim spell out the task of the teacher, he articulates a notion that
was to become central to the theory of conscience commune put forward in De la
Division du travail social:
Un certain nombre de sentiments collectifs legues par la tradition, font
mouvoir d’un commun accord cette masse enorme de maitres et d’eleves...
.Si les Allemands adherent si facilement les uns aux autres c’est que les
differences individuelles y sont moins multiplies que chez nous... .Heredite
et individuality sont deux termes qui s’opposent et l’individu est peu de chose
quand la race est puissante. Voila ce qui incline si naturellement les
Allemands a la vie corporative. .. il n’est guere contestable que ce dont nous
avons besoin en ce moment c’est de reveiller en nous le gout de la vie
collective. ("La philosophic dans les universites allemandes," Textes. 482).
One may see here not only the organicist language of a Taine, and the importance of
heredity, but the idea that there is some notion of the collectivity that is inherent
within a race or a nation. Durkheim’s notion of the collective here still bears traces
of Fustel de Coulanges’ perception of the German nation, (cf. p. 169 above) By the
time Durkheim wrote De la division du travail social, his definition of collectivity
would change considerably and apply to industrial societies as a whole.
Before I discuss De la division du travail. I would like to make a few
remarks on the sources of Durkheim's thought. As I have stated above, his earlier
intention, in his third year at the Ecole Normale, had been to write his dissertation on
the theme of individualism and socialism. The two articles written on his return from
Germany reveal this preoccupation with individualism, then perceived as a threat to
social order. That Durkheim modified his dissertation to address the larger questions
treated in De la Division du travail social is as much a function of the political and
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187
institutional discourse of his times as it is of the purely philosophical discourse.
Bernard LaCroix, who attaches considerable significance to the German sources of
Durkheim's thought in Durkheim et le politique, points to the correlation between the
philosophical discourse on ethics and Durkheim's own preoccupation with the
precarious social conditions in France. LaCroix believes that the primacy that
Durkheim attached to faits sociaux is derived from the different thinkers whom
Durkheim studied in Germany.
De sorte que la rencontre avec la philosophic allemande suggere a notre
boursier en mission les elements d'une solution aux problemes politiques
fran9ais qui ne cessent de le hanter: la desunion nationale appelle a constituer
une nouvelle morale et a l'enseigner. La nation victorieuse se trouve etre le
pays d'une morale prospere et il n'est pas interdit de croire que ceci est lie a
cela. II est done "urgent" d'importer les sciences morales et sociales en France
car il serait utopique d'esperer vaincre les ferments de dissolution sans une
ferme doctrine qui les combatte. . . . Ou, decidement, l'individualisme doit
etre abattu. La patrie doit etre defendue. La loi doit etre respectee et la guerre
civile, ouverte ou larvee, proscrite. (Durkheim et le politique, 58; emphasis
added)
In much the same way as his predecessors Fustel de Coulanges and Renan
believed that German "science" had to be emulated in historiography and philology,
the young Durkheim sought to establish une science de la morale. He says so clearly
in the first preface to De la division du travail social: "Nous ne voulons pas tirer la
morale de la science, mais faire la science de la morale, ce qui est bien different"
(xxxvii). Durkheim's philosophical training had been under Charles Renouvier
whose neo-Kantianism had become important at the Ecole Normale. At the same
time, a certain scientism, above all the language of the biological, had permeated
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188
discourse in all disciplines. In Durkheim's early work, these strands of thought fused
with the theories articulated by the German thinkers, Schaeffle in particular to make
for a theory of solidarity. Durkheim was also drawn to the economists Gustav
Schoenberg, Adolf Wagner and Gustav Schmoller because they saw the socio
economic as wholly moral. They rejected the extreme individualism of the
Manchester school and the separation of political economy from morality. The term
"Manchester School" was coined by Benjamin Disraeli to describe the Free Trade
movement in Britain. The Anti-Corn Law League, which had been formed in
Manchester in 1836 by Richard Cobden and John Bright, argued for free trade
which the Com Laws severely restricted. The liberalism associated with the League
and the movement for laissez-faire and free enterprise capitalism came to be known
as the Manchester school, the term acquiring broad political connotations. Durkheim
appears to associate utilitarianism as a whole with this school. For the German
economists, society was an entity which was more than the sum of the individuals
who compose it, whereas for the utilitarians, it was no more than that. In contrasting
the German school with the English, Durkheim makes it clear why he opposes the
utilitarian position:
En d’autres termes, les grandes lois economiques seraient exactement les
memes quand mem e il n ’y aurait jamais eu au monde ni nations ni Etats; elles
supposent seulement que des individus sont en presence qui echangent leurs
produits. On voit qu’au fond les economistes liberaux sont des disciples
inconscients de Rousseau qu’ils renient a tort.. .comme Rousseau ils ne
voient dans le lien social qu’un rapprochement superficiel, determine par des
rencontres d’interets. Ils ne con?oivent la nation que comme une immense
societe par actions de laquelle chacun reipoit juste autant qu’il donne et ou
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Ton ne reste que si Ton y trouve son compte. (Revue Philosophique, XXIV,
1887, 37)
Thus the utilitarians had to be fought for their individualism as much as the
revolutionaries for their socialism. For both threatened the social bond and the
nation. If, for the neo-Kantian Durkheim, the academic socialists of Germany were
attractive, because they were morally driven, for the nationalist in him, they offered
the intellectual tools to counter a philosophical influence (utilitarianism) that was
gaining ground. These German thinkers served as models. Politically, they offered
the best means of neutralizing class struggle. In expressing agreement with
Schaeffle, Wundt, and Wagner, Durkheim is also quick to dissociate them from Karl
Marx. By 1893, when De la Division du travail social was published, Durkheim, in
the articles in the Revue philosophique I have cited above, had extensively discussed
the different schools of thought in Germany and the liberalism of the Manchester
school. Before I show how the different strands of thought fused to become the
theory advanced in De la Division du travail social I will briefly discuss the key
concepts in this work.
The Division of Labor: from mechanical to organic solidarity
The essential argument in De la division du travail social, is that increased
specialization in industry, which Durkheim calls the division of labor, far from
leading to individualism, a major concern with French intellectuals in the nineteenth
century from the Saint-Simonians to the Catholic Right, actually led to organic
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190
solidarity. The idea that the division of labor represented progress had already been
put forward by Spencer in the article I have cited above (p. 173, above). For Spencer,
progress is a kind of mental and moral evolution of the human species, with strong
elements of utilitarianism underpinning this evolution. As a way of countering
Spencer’s insistence on individual self-interest and free exchange as constituting the
social bond in industrial societies, Durkheim synthesizes different currents of
thought to argue that the difference between primitive societies and modem ones,
where the division of labor increases, leads to organic solidarity.
The key concepts in this theory are: 1) Social solidarity, which is the term
used by Durkheim to describe the social bond, and which is mechanical in primitive
societies and organic in industrial societies; 2) conscience commune or collective
consciousness, which is stronger in primitive societies and weaker in industrial
societies; 3) repressive law, which characterizes primitive societies and restitutive
law which characterizes modem industrial societies. 4) the division of labor, by
which Durkheim primarily means increased specialization of function and which
accounts for the transition from primitive to industrial societies. The central thesis in
De la Division du travail is that the division of labor leads to greater solidarity or
social cohesion because it is organic.
In order to prove this, Durkheim says, it is enough to study the law. For law
is a reflection of a society's morality, that which in primitive societies is expressed by
the conscience commune: "Puisque le droit reproduit les formes principales de la
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191
solidarite sociale, nous n'avons qu'a classer les differentes especes de droit pour
chercher ensuite quelles sont les differentes especes de solidarite sociale qui y
correspondent" (De la Division du travail, 32). Durkheim classes law into two
categories, the first is punitive law, and the second is restitutive:
On doit done repartir en deux grandes especes les regies juridiques, suivant
qu'elles ont des sanctions repressive organisees, ou des sanctions seulement
restitutives. La premiere comprend tout le droit penal; la seconde, le droit
civil, le droit commercial, le droit des procedures, le droit administratif et
constitutionel, abstraction faites des regies penales qui peuvent s'y trouver.
(34)
In advancing this argument, Durkheim borrowed concepts from Auguste
Comte, Alfred Fouillee, Albert Schaeffle, Wilhelm W undt, Ferdinand Tonnies,
Georg Jellinek, and Henri Marion and collapsed them together to create the
paradigm: social=moral=law. Although the division of labor is the starting point and
the nominal subject of Durkheim's dissertation, it is quite clear, very early in his
introduction, that what Durkheim seeks to affirm is the moral character of the social
as an expression of the need for order and for social solidarity. The social bond is
described as solidarite sociale in De la Division du travail. Solidarity of course, must
not be understood in the sense of the fraternal. It is quite simply that which makes for
social cohesion. The function of the division of labour is to create a sentiment of
cohesion. In making this affirmation, Durkheim acknowledges his debt to Comte
who was the first, according to the former, to see in the division of labour something
more than a purely economic phenomenon; that is, it is what constitutes social
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solidarity. Durkheim, however, goes further. For him the social is inseparable from
the moral: "Si telle est reellement la fonction de la division du travail, elle doit avoir
un caractere moral, car les besoins d'ordre, d'harmonie, de solidarite sociale passent
generalement pour etre moraux” (27).
Durkheim does not merely conflate the social and the moral, he also
makes law symmetrical with morality:
Mais la solidarite sociale est un phenomene tout moral, qui par lui-meme, ne
se prete pas a l’observation exacte ni surtout a la mesure. Pour proceder tant a
cette classification qu’a cette comparaison, il faut done substituer au fait
interne qui nous echappe un fait exterieur qui le symbolise et etudier le
premier a travers le second. Ce symbole visible, c’est le droit. (28)
In this schema, law and the need for order are directly a manifestation of the moral,
which is symmetrical with the social. That which assures social cohesion (solidarite
sociale) is moral and is reflected in the law. Where the bond is ruptured, it is a case
of anomie by which Durkheim means lack of regulation. I shall discuss Durkheim's
use of this term in a later section.
If we turn now to the works of Jellinek, Fouillee, Marion, and Tonnies, which
figure in the "Analyses et Compte-rendus" section of the Revue Philosophique, we
see the sources of Durkheim’s theory. In 1878, there appeared in Vienna a work by
Georg Jellinek, Die Socialethische Bedeutung von Recht. Unrecht und Strafe. A
review of this work, translated as La signification ethico-sociale du droit, du crime et
de la punition appeared in the Revue philosophique. According to the review,
Jellinek believed that there are egoistic and altruistic feelings in man, and it is from a
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balance between these two that morality and society arise. What makes for society is
the reciprocal solidarity between its members. Law is the ethical minimum needed to
maintain society. Individualist philosophy separates law from morality. Law,
however, preserves society: it is assentiment general and its development
corresponds to social and religious ideas. Crime is that which falls below the ethical
minimum and is an attack against the preservative function of law. Punishment is an
ethical necessity or a need of society even as it is a compensation.
Thus in 1878, Jellinek made the correlation between law, morality, and social
solidarity that Durkheim was to make in 1893. In the intervening period, the Revue
Philosonhiaue published a number of reviews and articles which addressed these
themes. Apart from Fouillee’s l’ldee modeme du droit, other works reviewed include
Marion’s De la Solidarite morale, essai de psychologie appliquee (1880). As the
reviewer Victor Brochard notes, the term “solidarity” is used not in the usual sense,
but has a specific meaning. Solidarity is determinism: one could say of actions that
they are solidaires when they are interdependent and form a tightly knit whole, a
solidum quid. The word was first given this meaning by Charles Renouvier, the
leading neo-Kantian thinker of the time, and Durkheim’s teacher at the Ecole
Normale. His work, La science de la morale, was one of the few indigenous works
on ethics to appear in France, the output on ethical theory being far more voluminous
in Germany. The first part of Renouvier's book is on individual solidarity and
examines the complex system of the different elements of heredity, physical milieu,
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economic conditions that make for an individual being; the second part, on social
solidarity, is devoted to the individual in his etat social where through sympathy,
imitation, habit, and custom, individuals are held together so that the parts of an
organism are physiologically solidaires and function in mutual interdependence. All
these elements may be found in the notion of solidarite articulated by Durkheim.
Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft
We see here the recurring theme of the social bond, which is both moral and
"organic" and articulated in different ways with different claims. Durkheim was to
synthesize all of these in De la Division du travail social. Take for instance the
opposition mechanical/organic. It is true that Durkheim uses these terms in his 1885
review of Schaeffle's Bau und Leben des Sozialen Korpers, but he does not oppose
them as he does in De la Division du travail. Durkheim first made this opposition in
1888 with the "Introduction a la sociologie de la famille," the opening lecture of the
1888-1889 course in Bordeaux on "La Famille: origines, types principaux."5 In 1887,
Tonnies had already made this distinction in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Tonnies
distinguishes between two types of societies, Gemeinschaft (community) and
Gesellschaft (society). On Tonnies’ view, the two terms were customarily confused
in scientific terminology and he therefore proceeds to contrast the two concepts in
the way they are rooted in the German language. "All kinds of social co-existence
that are familiar, comfortable and exclusive are to be understood as belonging to
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Gemeinschaft. Gesellschaft means life in the public sphere, in the outside world"
(Tonnies, Community and Civil Society 30). Using the language of the physical
sciences, Tonnies defines Gemeinschaft as the perfect unity of human wills, an
original or natural condition. Gesellschaft. on the other hand, is "the artificial
construction of an aggregate of human beings which superficially resembles the
Gemeinschaft in so far as the individuals peacefully live and dwell together" (52). In
Gemeinschaft. despite separating factors, the individuals remain united, whereas in
Gesellschaft. they remain essentially separated. The one is organic, the other
mechanical. Tonnies then goes on to elaborate his theory in terms of the evolution of
natural and positive law. He also explicitly addresses many of the questions raised by
Marx- -capitalist production, surplus value, labor. By exercising economic control
over the people, the merchant class is the agent of the transition from Gemeinschaft
to Gesellschaft. By harnessing the labor force of the nation, the merchants achieve
the national union of independent individuals: “The contract as such becomes the
basis of the entire system, and the rational will of Gesellschaft. formed by its
interests combines with the authoritative will of the state to create, maintain and
change the legal system” (251).
His conclusion is prophetic, in view of the evolution of the Soviet Union in
the next century:
The whole movement, from its first appearance and through all its subsequent
stages, can also be understood as a transition from original, simple, family-
based communism and the small-town individualism that stems from it- -
through to an absolutely detached cosmopolitan and universalist
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individualism and to the state-based and international socialism generated by
it (Community and Civil Society. 260).
The state, in Gesellschaft. would subjugate the individual will leading to an
aggregate of alienated individuals whose only social bond was the law.
What made Durkheim reverse the organic/mechanical co-relation in De la
Division du travail? Why, on his view, were primitive societies “mechanical” and
advanced societies "organic"? Given the timing of Durkheim's "Cours d'ouverture"
on the family in Bordeaux, 1888,1 believe that this is because Tonnies projected
exactly the nightmare scenario that the centrist intellectuals of the Troisieme
Republique feared most: increased individualism and the rise of socialism. In those
last decades of the nineteenth century, the Marxist leaders of the International were
the dominant representatives of socialist currents. Tonnies was not averse to
borrowing from Marx and even acknowledged his debt to Marx. As Harris has
pointed out in his introduction to a recent English translation of Gemeinschaft and
Gesellschaft. the depiction of modem industry echoes Book One of Marx's Capital
(Introduction, Community and Civil Society, p. xxii). More importantly, Tonnies
does not hesitate to state that one of the consequences of the development of
Gesellschaft was class struggle:
Thus the big city, and Gesellschaft conditions in general, are the ruin and
death of the people. They struggle in vain to achieve power by numbers, and
it seems to them that they can use their power only for riot and insurrection if
they want to be quit of their misery. The masses come to self-consciousness
with the help of education offered in schools and newspapers. They progress
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from class consciousness to the class struggle. This class struggle may
destroy the society and the state which it wants to reform. The entire culture
has been overturned by a civilization dominated by market and civil society,
and in this transformation civilization itself is coming to an end. (Community
and Civil Society. 257).
I venture to suggest that for Durkheim, it was important to prove that the
growth of industrial society did not inevitably lead to individualism or to class
struggle. I have already cited the early article in which Durkheim states that
revolutions were as impossible as miracles. In stating this, he echoed the republican
need for social consensus. Jacques Donzelot, in L'Invention du social, has pointed to
the fact that in the Third Republic, the state was poised precariously between the
liberals and the conservatives, on the one hand, and the Marxists and other
revolutionary groupings such as the Blanquists, on the other. The liberals, in the
name of the free market, and the conservatives, in the name of the family and
traditional values, were allies in a shared belief that private initiative as against state
intervention was the solution to social problems. The Marxists and revolutionaries,
despite their differences, were determinedly opposed to the state in their struggle
against the bourgeoisie. As Donzelot has put it:
Les republicans se situent en plein centre de ce dispositif, et se maintiennent
au pouvoir en jouant des contradictions internes a chacun des deux camps.
Mais faute d'une doctrine claire quant a la nature meme de leur Republique, a
ses fondements et a ses buts, ils ne se deflnissent que de maniere negative,
par le refus de l'affrontement des extremes qui menace leur regime. C'est en
etablissemant des ponts, des compromis circonstanciels entre ces deux camps
que les radicaux, et surtout les radicaux-socialistes gouvement. “Chaque
reforme est une arme otee au socialisme revolutionnaire, chaque jour sans
reforme une chance pour lui”dit-on dans les rangs du parti gouvememental.
(L'Invention du social. 79)
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Reform was a two-pronged affair, according to Donzelot. Professional trade
unions and groupings were encouraged so as to neutralize the revolutionaries, while
the state intervened in family life to protect children through reform in education.
Mais cette politique possede-t-elle pour autant une coherence d'ensemble, un
fondement durable, un horizon? C'est en fonction de ces questions que parait
bien s'organiser toute la pensee d'Emile Durkheim. Entre la nostalgie d'un
ordre fatal et la reverie d'un ordre purement volontaire, il faudrait choisir,
disent les conservateurs et les revolutionnaires. Mais pourquoi done? se
demande Durkheim, et d'entreprendre, avec la Division du travail social, de
recuser l'une et l'autre de ces deux options, comme egalement infondees au
regard de revolution effective des societes modemes. ('L'Invention du social
79)
The threat to social cohesion came not only from the revolutionaries, but
from increased individualism resulting from the division of labor and the specializing
of functions. Spencer had argued that the division of labor represented progress and
that social harmony arose out of it. For Durkheim, Spencer's notion of progress
where individuals exchanged their products in economic transactions, was not
enough to guarantee social cohesion. While expressing agreement with Spencer on
the progressive nature of the division of labor, Durkheim writes:
Mais si M. Spencer a justement signale quelle etait, dans les societes
superieures, la cause principale de la solidarite sociale, il s'est mepris sur la
maniere dont cette cause produit son effet, et par suite, sur la nature de ce
dernier. En effet, pour lui, la solidarite industrielle, comme il l'appelle,
presente les deux caracteres suivants:
Comme elle est spontanee, il n'est besoin d'aucun appareil coercitif ni
pour la produire ni pour la maintenir. La societe n'a done pas a intervenir
pour assurer un concours qui s'etablit tout seul. “Chaque homme peut
s'entretenir par son travail, echanger ses produits contre ceux d'autrui, preter
son assistance et recevoir un payement, entrer dans telle ou telle association
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pour mener une entreprise petite ou grande, sans obeir a la direction de la
societe dans son ensemble.” La sphere de l'action sociale irait done de plus en
plus en se retrecissant car elle n'aurait plus d'autre objet que d'empecher les
individus d'empieter les uns sur les autres et de se nuire reciproquement.
e'est-a-dire. qu'elle ne serait plus que negativement regulatrice. Dans ces
conditions, le seul lien qui reste entre les hommes, e'est l'echange absolument
libre. (De la Division du travail 177-178; emphasis added)
One way of arguing against the dissolution of the social bond through
increased individualism was by arguing that in fact, the individual, by his very
separateness, related to the collective in an organic way. To do this, Durkheim had to
develop a notion that would allow him to make primitive societies mechanical and
industrial societies organic. That notion is the idea of the conscience commune
which he first articulated in a tentative form in his review of Schaeffle’s Bau und
Leben des Sozialen Korpers in 1885 and which underpins the theory he later
advanced in De la Division du travail social:
La societe n'est pas une simple collection d'individus, e'est un etre qui a
precede ceux dont il est aujourd'hui compose et qui leur survivra, qui agit sur
eux plus qu'il n'agissent sur lui, qui a sa vie, sa conscience, ses interets et sa
destinee. (Revue philosophique. XIX, 1888, 84)
In this description of the bond between society and the individuals that compose it,
primacy lies with the social. Elements of organic solidarity are present here.
Moreover, Durkheim states at the outset that Schaeffle is writing about "les nations
actuelles." Another important element of his theory, that solidarity in primitive
societies is mechanical, may be discerned in this review as well:
L'esprit collectif n'est qu'un compose dont les esprits individuels sont les
elements. Mais ceux-ci ne sont pas juxtaposes mecaniquement et fermes les
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uns aux autres. Perpetuellement en commerce par l'echange des symboles, ils
se penetrent mutuellement. (92)
This is not an anonymous reviewer writing, but Durkheim, the pupil of Fustel de
Coulanges1 and an admirer of Gambetta, the man of consensus. It is equally
interesting to note that when he is describing the social bond in organic terms, the
theme of dissolution creeps into the discourse in conjunction with nationalism:
II y a deux especes de tissus sociaux. Les uns sont exclusivement destines a
relier entre elles les cellules sociales, a les reunir en masses compactes et
coherentes, a proteger, en un mot, contre toute dissolution, l'unite nationale.
Par eux-memes ils sont amorphes et indifferents. Ils n'ont ni fonctions, ni
formes speciales. D'habitude ils laissent au repos les individus qu'ils unissent;
mais la moindre excitation suffit pour les irriter et pour degager tout a coup
une activite cachee et qui s'organisent comme par enchantement. En temps de
paix, le patriotisme dort invisible au fond des consciences. Que la guerre
eclate, et e'est lui qui mene tout. (89)
Thus, in his first published work, Durkheim is drawn to the notion of the social bond
in which patriotism forms an organic link. In a few years he would conflate
Schaeffle’s notion of consciousness with Tonnies’ opposition organic/mechanical to
come up with a theory of consensus. In De la Division du travail social what
Durkheim sought was to prove scientifically that with the division of labor, organic
solidarity was form of the social bond, that revolutions were simply not possible.
Organic Solidarity
How precisely does Durkheim establish his argument? As I have noted
above, Durkheim likened society to an organism. With the division of labor, the
organism becomes more complex, but far from leading to the dispersion of its
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individual cells, the result is an organic unity. The first type of solidarity, that of
primitive society is one where similitudes, the resemblance of individuals, makes for
social cohesion with the individual absorbed into the conscience commune.
Conscience as used by Durkheim cannot be adequately rendered by either
consciousness or conscience. Anthony Giddens, in his Emile Durkheim, has quite
rightly remarked that neither term is an accurate translation. The conscience
collective refers to strongly held collective moral beliefs and is thus a moral
consciousness rooted in the collective. As society develops along more complex
lines, mechanical solidarity gives way to organic solidarity. Using the analogy of the
opposition between inorganic matter and organic matter, Durkheim explains why
primitive societies are mechanical:
Les molecules sociales qui ne seraient coherentes que de cette seule maniere
ne pourraient done se mouvoir avec ensemble que dans la mesure ou elles
n'ont pas de mouvements propres, comme font les molecules des corps
inorganiques. C'est pourquoi nous proposons d'appeler mecanique cette
espece de solidarite. Ce mot ne signifie pas qu'elle soit produite par des
moyens mecaniques et artificiellement. Nous ne la nommons ainsi que par
analogie avec la cohesion qui unit entre eux les elements des corps bruts, par
opposition a celle qui fait l'unite des corps vivants. (De la division du travail
social, 100; emphasis added)
By the time Durkheim was writing, the language of the organic had
permeated discourse in all spheres, as I have elaborated in the preceding chapters.
What is significant here is that Durkheim makes use of analogy in a particularly
compelling way. Inorganic matter is opposed to corps vivants. Here emerges the
possibility of regeneration. If restitutive law is what characterizes societies where the
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division of labor is highly developed, social solidarity makes for greater cohesion
because it is organic. Having established that the individual is nothing in mechanical
solidarity, Durkheim affirms:
II en est tout autrement de la solidarite que produit la division du travail.
Tandis que la precedente implique que les individus se ressemblent, celle-ci
suppose qu'ils different les uns des autres. La premiere n'est possible que
dans la mesure ou la personnalite individuelle est absorbee dans la
personnalite collective; la seconde n'est possible que si chacun a une sphere
d'action qui lui est propre, par consequent une personnalite.. . . En effet,
d'une part, chacun depend d'autant plus etroitement de la societe que le travail
est plus divise, et d'autre , l'activite de chacun est d'autant plus personelle
qu'elle est plus specialisee. (101)
Echoing a phrase he had used to describe German society and in direct contradiction
to his observations regarding that nation, Durkheim asserts, of industrial societies as
such:
Ici done, l'individualite du tout s'accroit en meme temps que celle des parties;
la societe devient plus capable de se mouvoir avec ensemble, en meme temps
que chacun de ses elements a plus de mouvements propres. Cette solidarite
ressemble a celle que l'on observe chez les animaux superieurs. Chaque
organe, en effet, y a sa physiognomie speciale, son autonomie, et pourtant
l'unite de l'organisme est d'autant plus grande que cette individuation des
parties est plus marquee. En raison de cette analogie, nous proposons
d'appeler organique la solidarite qui est due a la division du travail. (101;
emphasis added)
Where the German nation was solidaire because of a national propensity,("Si
les Allemands adherent si facilement les uns aux autres e’est que les differences
individuelles y sont moins multiplies que chez nous" (cf. p. 189 above), industrial
society, regardless of national boundaries is more cohesive precisely because of
greater individuation. The contradiction I point to here, between individualism
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perceived as a national trait, and individualism as a consequence of the division of
labor, is one that shows a certain evolution in Durkheim's own thought and marks an
ideological shift. At the time of his visit to Germany, Durkheim had just emerged
from the Ecole Normale Superieure and the influence of Fustel de Coulanges, who,
as I have argued above, saw in German science the causes of the German victory.
For the young Durkheim, the order in society and in social science in Germany must
have been impressive, and his article on the German universities that I have cited
above (174) reflects this admiration. By the time Durkheim wrote De la division du
travail, as I have argued above, in his attempted synthesis of various theories, his
primary concern was to establish the primacy of organic solidarity as the form of
social cohesion in industrial societies even as individuation was more developed.
Such a phenomenon could not be explained in terms of national character.
Class Struggle, Marx, and Anomie
The extreme revolutionism of the Marxist socialists had to be combatted as
much as the individualism of the utilitarians. The theory of organic solidarity as
outlined above excluded the atomization predicted by Tonnies, and the individualism
actually lauded by Spencer. But Durkheim had still to account for class struggle. The
claim to scientism, the appeal to facts, could not allow Durkheim to ignore the fact
that the working class was indeed exploited. But that, says Durkheim, is the
"anomic" division of labor. The term anomie in Durkheim’s early work, De la
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division du travail and Le Suicide, is sometimes used to denote social de-regulation
and sometimes the pathological. Within sociology, it has acquired many different
connotations and the Durkheimian scholar Philippe Besnard's excellent analysis of
anomie in L1 Anomie et ses usages covers the range of its many usages. His
discussion of anomie in Durkheim is centered on its more fully developed version in
Le Suicide. For the purposes of this chapter I would like to limit myself to the
manner in which Durkheim applies the notion of anomie to class struggle in De la
division du travail social. As Elwitt has remarked:
The political implications of Durkheim's treatment of capitalism become
readily apparent when, on the one hand, he dismissed it as a socially
irrelevant construct and, on the other, denounced Marxist socialists for
fomenting disorder by falsely characterizing it as an exploitative labor
system. (The Third Republic Defended, 47)
On Elwitt's view, Durkheim reduced capitalism to a more or less efficient and
complex organization that suited his goals of social cohesion, while socialism, in
Durkheim's sense, meant the rational organization of industrial relations. A
normative conclusion that followed was that the orderly division of labor was the
normal state of society while social disorder represented an anomic condition. (48)
Jean-Marie Guyau, in his 1875 Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni
sanction, set out to articulate an ethics which would avoid the pitfalls of both
empiricism and Kantianism. Taking up the Kantian notion of autonomy, he wrote
that his morale would be one of anomos as well as autonomos. He meant that, if
there were no categorical imperative, moral constraint would come from self-
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regulation (Guyau, 9). In borrowing the term from Guyau, Durkheim gave it a
negative connotation and used the term anomie to mean lack of regulation. Anomie
stood in opposition to the social. In the preface to the 1902 edition of De la Division
du travail du travail social. Durkheim repeatedly uses the term. His concern in the
second preface is to underscore the importance of professional groupings, such as
corporations, in economic life, which he says is in a state of anomie:
C'est a cet etat d'anomie que doivent etre attribues, comme nous le
montrerons, les conflits sans cesse renaissants et les desordres de toutes
sortes dont le monde economique nous donne le triste spectacle. Car, comme
rien ne contient les forces en presence et ne leur assigne de bomes qu'elles
soient tenues de respecter, elles tendent a se developper sans termes, et
viennent se heurter les unes contre les autres pour se refouler et se reduire
mutuellement. (iii; emphasis added)
Durkheim does not specify what the conflicts are, but he does write of both
the employer-employee relationship and of competition between industrialists. This
disorder in economic life can only be contained by society itself, which he also
describes as the collectivity. It is the collectivity which can introduce regulation in
economic life, not the state alone:
Elle est la premiere interessee a ce que l'ordre et la paix regnent; si l'anomie
est un mal, c'est avant tout parce qu'elle en souffire, ne pouvant se passer,
pour vivre, de cohesion et de regularite.. . . Pour que l'anomie prenne fin, il
faut done qu'il existe ou qu'il se forme un groupe ou se puisse constituer le
systeme de regies qui fait actuellement defaut. (vi)
It must be remembered that the second preface was written five years after Le
Suicide where Durkheim had fully developed his theory of anomie. As Besnard has
pointed out, there are differences in Durkheim's use of the term in De la Division du
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travail (1893) and Le Suicide (1897).6 For the purposes of this chapter, I will limit
myself to a discussion of anomie in relation to class struggle in the chapter entitled
“La Division du travail anomique.”
Durkheim carefully avoids naming Marx in his writings of the period, except
for the articles I have cited and a passing reference at the very end of De la Division
du travail. Durkheim’s theory of solidarity stands in opposition to Marx’s theory of
class struggle. This opposition emerges clearly in Durkheim's discussion of Albert
Schaeffle in "Les Etudes de science sociale" in the Revue philosophique. What is of
importance in this particular review article is that Durkheim makes one of his rare
references to Marx. The book by Schaeffle in question is Die Quintessenz des
Sozialismus (1885). Durkheim begins by stating that Benoit Malon's French
translation, no reference given, was inaccurate. Malon had been a leading
Communard, and was a member of the Parti ouvrier frangais, the French wing of the
Communist International. Durkheim makes no mention of this fact:
M. Malon crut reconnaitre en M. Schaeffle, malgre quelques dissidences de
detail, un collectiviste tres suffisamment orthodoxe et le presenta comme tel
au public frangais. La-dessus M. Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, dans sa Critique du
Collectivisme ne put faire autrement que de menager une place a Schaeffle
dont il refuta amplement le pretendu socialisme. Comment se fit-il que
personne ne protesta, nous n'en savons rien. Touiours est-il que dans le
courant de l'annee demiere M. Schaeffle publia une nouvelle brochure dans
laquelle il repoussa loin de lui l'accusation de collectivisme. ("Les Etudes de
science sociale," Revue philosophique 1887. 77; emphasis added)
Durkheim, who was later to consider himself a socialist, was not against socialism as
such. It is the brand of collectivism advocated by Malon and Marx that he considers
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as having negative value. Going on to elaborate what Schaeffle meant by socialism,
Durkheim makes one of his rare direct references to Marx
La question qui est posee dans La Quintessence pourrait se formuler ainsi:
Jusqu'ici la vie economique n'a ete qu'un ensemble de reflexes; que
deviendrait-elle, si on la rattachait aux centres conscients de l'organisme
social? C'est done une etude objective de l'idee socialiste. L'auteur se propose
d'en constater le contenu, den Inhalt des Socialismus zu constatieren: d'en
faire voir les avantages et les desiderata; de debarasser le terrain des
arguments mauvais et surannes que Ton echange de part et d'autre depuis si
lontemps, mais cela sans se prononcer sur le fond du debat. Aussi signale-t-il
a plusieurs reprises dans la doctrine socialiste des lacunes dont il ne cherche
pas le moins du monde a diminuer l'importance. II a indique, il est vrai, dans
le troisieme volume de son Bau und Leben des socialem Korpers. comment
ces lacunes pourraient etre comblees. Mais il n'est pas pour cela collectiviste.
II a trop le sentiment de la realite et de la complexity des choses pour
attribuer plus qu'une valeur logique a une simple construction de l'esprit. Sans
doute il inclinerait assez volontiers a croire qu'on pourrait debarsser la
conception socialiste de toute contradiction interne, a condition toutefois de
renoncer aux principes fondamentaux de la theorie de Marx, (p 77; emphasis
added)
I venture to suggest that this discussion of Schaeffle's notion of socialism has
discreet ideological underpinnings. Durkheim does not mention Malon's political
affiliations in a discussion of what is overtly political: Schaeffle's own understanding
of socialism. When he states that Schaeffle is too much of a realist to attribute more
than logical value to "une simple construction d'esprit," he is not specific. When this
statement is read in conjunction with the citation at the beginning of the chapter, that
"les revolutions sont des choses aussi impossibles que des miracles," the implication
would be that collectivism is a construction of the mind. Likewise, the reference to
the bad arguments that are surannes is not specific, but when read in conjunction
with the last sentence of the above citation, where the "principes fondamentaux de la
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theorie de Marx" (also unspecified) are to be discarded, it is, I believe, a discreet
reference to class struggle. In the earlier article he had written on his return from
Germany, "La Science positive de la morale en Allemagne," Durkheim explcitly
states that Schaeffle is not be associated with Marx, though he makes this statement
in the context of his discussion of the Kathedersocialisten. the academic socialists
Wagner, Schoenberg, and Schmoller and the excessive role they attribute to
legislation.
M. Schaefffle est le premier qui ait degage les consequences morales de ce
mouvement economique, tout en les debarrassant, au moins en grande partie,
de la grave erreur que nous venons de signaler. Ce n'est pas a dire que M.
Schaeffle soit un kathedersocialist; il se separe tout autant de M. Wagner que
de Karl Marx, et n'est, quoi qu'on en ait dit en France, ni un collectiviste ni un
socialiste d'Etat. ("La Science positive de la morale en Allemagne," Revue
philosophique. 1887, 45)
In clearly dissociating Schaeffle from Marx, Durkheim neutralizes the question of
class struggle. The "quoi qu'on en ai dit" is an allusion to Malon, and in the next
article in the Revue which I have cited above, Durkheim raises the matter again, this
time naming Malon.
In De la Division du travail. Durkheim mentions Marx only once, at the tail
end of the chapter on the anomic division of labor. But in the preface to the first
edition, he alludes to certain subversive theories.
Mais si la science de la morale ne fait pas de nous des spectateurs indifferents
ou resignes de la realite, elle nous apprend en meme temps a la traiter avec la
plus grande prudence, elle nous communique un esprit sagement
conservateur. On a pu. et a bon droit, reprocher a certaines theories qui se
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disent scientifiques d'etre subversives et revolutionnaires: mais c'est qu'elles
ne sont scientifiques que de nom. (xl; emphasis added)
This statement is a reaffirmation of the juste milieu position which is the one
adopted by Durkheim in De la Division du travail. As Besnard has noted:
La conception du bonheur social et individuel qui ressort des premiers ecrits
de Durkheim peut etre decrite comme une philosophic du juste milieu: rien
de ce qui est extreme ou excessif ne saurait produire quoi que ce soit d'utile
ou d'agreable. ("L'anomie chez Durkheim," L'Anomie et ses usages. 86)
Besnard alludes to the first article by Durkheim on suicide, in 1888, written long
before his major work on the subject. In an article on suicide and natality, Durkheim
makes a co-relation between the birth-rate and suicide. Already in this article,
Durkheim articulates what is his guiding principle in the early years: "1 1 y a pour tous
les phenomenes de la vie une zone normale en de?a et au-dela de laquelle ils
deviennent pathologiques" fRevue philosophique. 1888,460). At the same time, it is
clear that he is willing to recognize that there is a reality to which he cannot afford to
be indifferent. Durkheim will still not use the term "class struggle" to which he
attributes quite a different meaning in a later chapter, but instead alludes to a doctrine
on which the aforementioned theories rest, a doctrine which stands opposed to the
existing moral order:
La morale reellement pratiquee par les hommes n'est alors consideree que
comme une collection d'habitudes, de prejuges qui n'ont de valeur que s'ils
sont conformes a la doctrine; et comme cette doctrine est derivee d'un
principe qui n'est pas induit de l'observation des faits moraux, mais
empruntes a des sciences etrangeres, il est inevitable qu'elle contredise sur
plus d'un point l'ordre moral existant. (xli)
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Durkheim does not name this doctrine, nor specify what the “sciences
etrangeres” are. His own claim is to establish a science de la morale, and in the
process, he discusses the Manchester school and Spencer's views on the division of
labor (cf p. 177 above). The only theory or doctrine that laid claim to being scientific
and that had been characterized as "subversive" that Durkheim does not discuss is
that of the Marxist school. I suggest that Durkheim's silence on Marx has
ideological underpinnings of a conservative nature. There are very few direct
references to Marx in the works in question. As Dominick LaCapra has phrased it,
there is a "ritual avoidance of Marx":
For very often the absence of Marx or, conversely, the hidden presence of
Marx as a silent pariah interlocutor haunted Durkheimism. When he did
address himself to Marx's thought, Durkheim attempted to situate Marxism as
an ideology while ignoring Marx's theoretical contribution. This attitude
toward Marx exacerbated some of the greatest defects of Durkheim,
especially his inadequate treatment of the role of the economy, of classes, and
of group conflict in social life. One problem to which Durkheim never
convincingly addressed himself was central: whether a Marxist-type analysis
was in significant measure still relevant to the understanding of antagonisms
in society under advanced industrialism, and if it was, how it could be related
to the issues which for Durkheim were paramount. This was a problem which
remained even if the conception of class struggle and its revolutionary
potential in the specific form in which Marx presented it was becoming
increasingly irrelevant. (Emile Durkheim. Sociologist and Philosopher, 23)
Despite this silence on Marx, Durkheim was aware that conflict between
labor and capital did exist. If one closely scrutinizes the chapter which Durkheim
calls the division du travail anomique. one may see that some of the issues raised by
Marx are addressed here in a somewhat oblique manner. It is towards the end of the
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Division de travail that Durkheim considers what he calls the pathological forms of
the division of labor. For Durkheim, with the increased division of labor, the social
bond became organic, by virtue of analogy:
lei done, l'individualite du tout s'accroit en meme temps que celle des parties;
la societe devient plus capable de se mouvoir avec ensemble, en meme temps
que chacun de ses elements a plus de mouvements propres. Cette solidarite
ressemble a celle que Ton observe chez les animaux superieurs. Chaque
organe, en effet, y a sa physiognomie speciale, son autonomie, et pourtant
l'unite de l'organisme est d'autant plus grande que cette individuation des
parties est plus marquee. En raison de cette analogie, nous proposons
d'appeler organique la solidarite qui est due a la division du travail. (De la
division du travail social. 101; emphasis added)
Having described in considerable detail in what way organic solidarity resulted from
the division of labor, Durkheim extends the analogy to consider cases where this is
not the case. Here we see how the preponderance of studies on the pathological in
the pages of the Revue philosophique find resonances in the theory of the thinker
who has insisted on the restitutive and organically healthy aspects of society.
In the preface, Durkheim had insisted that moral facts were facts like any
other, and that the moral and the social were one. In the chapter entitled "La division
du travail anomique," he states:
Jusqu'ici, nous n'avons etudie la division du travail que comme un
phenomene normal; mais tous les faits sociaux et plus generalement, comme
tous les faits biologiques, elle presente des formes pathologiques.. . . La
pathologie, ici, comme ailleurs, est un precieux auxiliaire de la physiologie.
(343)
Durkheim proposes to study the deviant or pathological forms in order to understand
not only what causes them, but also to better understand how solidarity can be
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maintained. He makes a distinction between criminality and deviant forms, likening
the former to a cancerous growth in society. Crime and cancer represent
differentiation, not division (of labor and cells), a distinction which, on his view,
Spencer fails to make:
Mais, a parler exactement, il n'y a pas ici division du travail, mais
differentiation pure et simple, et les deux termes demandent a n'etre pas
confondus. C'est ainsi que le cancer, les tubercules accroisssent la diversite
des tissus organiques sans qu'il soit possible d'y voir une specialisation
nouvelle des fonctions biologiques. Dans tous ces cas, il n'y a pas partage
d'une fonction commune, mais au sein de l'organisme, soit individuel, soit
social, il s'en forme un autre qui cherche a vivre aux depens du premier. II n'y
a meme pas de fonction du tout; car une maniere d'agir ne merite ce nom que
si elle concourt avec d'autres a l'entretien de la vie generale.(344)
In making this distinction Durkheim brings regenerative value to the language of the
organic. In a footnote where he refers to Spencer's assimilation of the two terms,
Durkheim states: "Cependant la differentiation qui desintegre (cancer, microbe,
criminel) est bien differente de celle qui concentre les forces vitals” (Division du
travail, 344). The division of labor is in itself a vital process. It consists of a constant
renewal of the organism, as individual cells come together in organic solidarity.
There are however, instances when this does not occur. Durkheim calls these the
abnormal forms of the division of labor.
Durkheim distinguishes between three abnormal forms of the division of
labor, the first being the anomic form. Durkheim situates 1) the frequent industrial
and commercial crises and 2) the antagonism between labor and capital under the
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anomic division of labor. He recognizes the material fact that there are crises and that
the antagonism between labor and capital is real, yet he will not name Marx:
Un premier cas de ce genre nous est foumi par les crises industrielles ou
commerciales, par les faillites qui sont autant de ruptures partielles de la
solidarite organique; elles temoignent en effet que, sur certains points de
l'organisme, certaines fonctions sociales ne sont pas ajustees les unes aux
autres. Or, a mesure que le travail se divise davantage, ces phenomenes
semblent devenir plus frequents, au moins dans certains cas. (344)
But beyond stating that from 1845 to 1869, the number of crises had
increased by 70 percent, and that these crises cannot be attributed to economic
growth since industry was concentrated, Durkheim does not offer an explanation as
to why they occur. Turning to the question of the antagonism between labor and
capital, Durkheim acknowledges that with increasing specialization, that struggle
(lutte) becomes more intense. He comes as close to stating his argument against
Marx as he has until now, but chooses to cite another writer, Hubert Valleroux.7
Describing the growth of corporations since the fifteenth century, he writes:
Cependant, les choses etaient loin d'en etre venues des lors "au point ou nous
les voyons a present. Les compagnons se rebellaient pour obtenir un salaire
plus fort ou tel autre changement dans la condition du travail, mais ils ne
tenaient pas le patron pour un ennemi perpetuel auquel on obeit par
contrainte. On voulait le faire ceder sur un point, et s'y employait avec
energie, mais la lutte n'etait pas etemelle: les ateliers ne contenaient pas deux
races ennemis: nos doctrines socialistes etaient inconnues.(346: emphasis
added)
What is at issue here are two fundamental tenets of Marxism. One is Marx's
affirmation that the periodic crises of capital would recur with greater frequency. The
other is that the history of man was the history of class struggle. The convergence of
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the two would result in the overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat and the
setting up of socialism. Durkheim does not address these issues as raised by Marx
and the Parti ouvrier francais. Instead, he states that the anomic division of labor
arises because of insufficient regulation:
Or, dans tous les cas que nous avons decrit plus haut, cette reglementation ou
n'existe pas ou n'est pas en rapport avec le degre de developpement de la
division du travail.. . . Les rapports du capital et du travail sont, jusqu'a
present, restes dans le meme etat d'indetermination juridique. Le contrat de
louages de services occupe dans nos Codes une bien petite place, surtout
quand on songe a la diversite et a la complexity des relations a regler. (359)
This lack of regulation arises because the existing regulation has failed to keep pace
with the division of labor. Class struggle as understood by Marx is no more than a
manifestation of this lacune as Durkheim puts it:" Au reste, il n'est pas necessaire
d'insister sur une lacune que tous les peuples sentent actuellement et s'efforce de
combler" (359).
Durkheim then turns to the second abnormal form, la division du travail
contrainte. where the other extreme prevails, excessive regulation. In the forced
division of labor, the excess of regulation leads to class struggle, where "class" for
Durkheim is synonymous with caste. Class struggle as defined by Marx falls into the
category of the "anomic division of labor" that I have discussed above. By using the
term lutte de classes to describe another set of social relations, Durkheim effectively
neutralizes the political significance of Marx's theory of class struggle and its very
real manifestations in industrial conflicts. As I have stated above, for Durkheim, the
conflict between labor and capital arises from the lack of regulation in economic life.
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Class struggle, as defined by Durkheim, pertains to a hereditary division of labor. By
law, the attribution of functions as hereditary resulted in certain castes being forced
to perform certain tasks. When transformations occurred in society, the strict
regulations were inadequate to meet these changes and the result was strife.
Durkheim cites the example of the plebeians:
Quand les plebiens se mirent a disputer aux patriciens l'honneur des fonctions
religieuses et administratives, ce n'etait pas seulement pour imiter ces
demiers, mais c'est qu'ils etaient devenus plus intelligents, plus riches, plus
nombreux et que leurs gouts et leurs ambitions s'etaient modifies en
consequence.. . . La contrainte seule, plus ou moins violente et plus ou moins
directe, les lie a leurs fonctions; par consequent, il n'y a de possible qu'une
solidarite imparfaite et troublee. (369)
The third abnormal form of the division of labor occurs when the functions
are distributed in such a way that there is not enough work for the worker. There is
waste and lack of coordination. In an enterprise where such an uneven division of
labor occurs, the worker's activities are diminished below what should be the normal
level and as a result, solidarity weakens. Durkheim's notion of solidarity rests on the
idea that social cohesion involves a continuity of interaction between the workers
and between the functions: "Les differentes fonctions alors trop discontinues pour
qu'elles puissent s'ajuster exactements les unes aux autres et marcher toujours de
concert; voila d'ou vient l'incoherence qu'on y constate” (387).
Once again we have this theme of society moving as an ensemble, the whole
and the parts in harmony with each other. Normally, the division of labor tends to
increase activity with increased specialization. Durkheim, in a rare reference to
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Marx, places him among the economists who have established the reasons for this
phenomenon:
l.Quand les travaux ne sont pas divises il faut sans cesse se deranger, passer
d'une occupation a l'autre. La division du travail fait l'economie de tout ce
temps perdu; suivant l'expression de Karl Marx, elle reserre les pores de la
joumee. 2. L'activite fonctionelle augmente avec l'habilite, le talent du
travailleur que la division du travail developpe; il y a moins de temps
employe aux hesitations et aux tatonnements. (388)
I believe this unusual reference to Marx, whom he does not name in the
preface, or in the chapter on the anomic division of labor, is one way of neutralizing
Marx and his theory of class struggle. Not only in The Communist Manifesto, but in
most of his writings on wage labor and capital, Marx repeatedly emphasizes that the
division of labor makes class struggle even more acute.8 By citing Marx, without a
reference, as an authority on the positive, or normal aspects of the division of labor,
Durkheim rules out class struggle, in the Marxist sense, as being inevitable. He states
that none of these pathological forms arise due to the division of labor itself, which
in its normal form, promoted social cohesion.(Division du travail 343)
As Lukes has pointed out, Durkheim’s opposition of the "normal" with the
"pathological", in the face of the facts, and increased working class militancy,
implied that the normal condition was some kind of ideal one, to be arrived at in the
future, since the present continued to exhibit pathological features (Lukes, Emile
Durkheim. his life and work. 175). Durkheim could not explain working-class
militancy in terms of false consciousness, an argument that Marx could use, because
Durkheim did not allow for more than one kind of consciousness, that of the
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collective, within which the individual consciousness was subsumed. In his
conclusion he claims to have resolved the problem that he had raised at the
beginning of his work:
S’il est une regie de conduite, c’est celle qui nous ordonne de realiser en nous
les traits essentials du type collectif.. . . D’autre part, nous avons montre que
cette regie avait pour fonction de prevenir tout ebranlement de la conscience
commune et, par consequent, de la solidarite sociale. (392)
However, Durkheim had to also take into account the division of labor, and
the fact that in industrial societies, there were conflicts between labor and capital on
the one hand, and the extreme isolation of the individual, on the other. Therefore he
had to conclude:
Or, la regie contraire, qui nous ordonne de nous specialiser a exactement la
meme fonction. Elle aussi est necessaire a la cohesion des societes, du moins
a partir d’un certain moment de leur evolution. Sans doute, la solidarite
qu’elle assure differe de la precedente; mais si elle est autre, elle n’est pas
moins indispensable. Les societes superieures ne peuvent se maintenir en
equilibre que si le travail y est divise. (392)
Solidarism
The theory of solidarity articulated by Durkheim found a political equivalent
in the movement known as solidarism. The Radical-Democrat politician, Leon
Bourgeois, who is associated with the movement, theorized and concretized the
regenerative aspects of Durkheim's theory in Solidarite (1896). As Elinor Accampo
has pointed out in Gender and the Politics of Social Reform in France, this
movement shared some of the same etiology as the social theory of degeneration and
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indeed, complemented it. I have shown above how theories of degeneration and
pathology intersected in the pages of the Revue philosophique with Durkheim’s
theory of restitution and regeneration. Within society, the solidarist movement
articulated the republican concern with preserving society. Bourgeois, in Solidarite,
put forward a theory that was clearly inspired by Durkheim, although curiously, he
does not cite him. On Bourgeois' view, the doctrine of solidarity was gradually
formed and came from a variety of sources:
C'est que cette notion de la solidarite sociale est la resultante de deux forces
longtemps etrangeres l'une a l'autre, aujourd'hui rapprochees et combinees
chez toutes les nations parvenues a un degre devolution superieur: la
methode scientifique et l'idee morale. (Solidarite. 6)
As Judith Stone has pointed out in "The Republican Brotherhood: Gender
and Ideology," Bourgeois intended his theory of solidarite to provide a new set of
principles for Radicals enabling them to transcend liberal individualism and refute
class conflict (Gender and the Politics of Reform in France. 49). Bourgeois is very
explicit on this question:
Les economistes condamnent toute intervention de l'Etat dans le jeu des
phenomenes de production, de distribution et de consommation de la
richesse; les lois qui reglent ces phenomenes sont, disent-ils, des lois
naturelles, auxquelles le legislateur humain ne doit et d'ailleurs ne peut rien
changer.. . . Les socialistes exigent, au contraire, l'intervention de l'Etat dans
les phenomenes de la vie economique; c'est faute d'une legislation sur la
production et la distribution de la richesse que, malgre les conquetes
merveilleuses de la science, le bien-etre de l'immense majorite des hommes
n'a pas sensiblement augmente. (8)
The opposition here, as in Durkheim's early work, is between the liberal economists
on the one hand, and the socialists on the other. The dilemma of the republicans was
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to decide on the degree to which the state should intervene or not. Durkheim's
solution was a theory of solidarity that ruled out such an opposition and, as he
spelled out in his 1902 preface, that privileged the role of professional groupings
and corporations. For Leon Bourgeois, solidarity was founded on a fusion of reason
and morality, reason being on the side of the economists and morality with the
socialists.
Ainsi se trouvent reunies les deux conditions du probleme. La raison, guidee
par la science, determine les lois inevitables de faction; la volonte, entrainee
par le sentiment moral, entreprend cette action. Les socialistes- -non pas ceux
qui hai'ssent et qui prechent la violence, mais ceux qui veulent la paix et qui
aiment- -ont raison de condamner l'indifference et de poursuivre la guerison
dumal; les economistes ont raison de soumettre aux regies de la science des
faits toute tentative de remede. (16)
As with Durkheim, one sees here the emphasis on regeneration, on the well-being of
society.
The intersection of theories of degeneration and regeneration may be best
seen in the solidarist approach to the question of national decline in terms of the
falling birth rate. The various theories of degeneration accounted for l’annee terrible
and a range of social disorders, including alcoholism and political militancy, as
indicative of a national degenerescence. However, the need for national revival and
regeneration expressed itself also in the political sphere. As Stone has pointed out,
Bourgeois was prominent among those politicians who identified the declining birth
rate as a major problem. The fact that Germany had a higher birth-rate contributed to
a feeling that national decline was inextricably linked to the low birth-rate, infant
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mortality, and the health of the reproductive female. If national cohesion were to be
maintained by seeking a consensus with the working class, it equally involved a
consensus with women, on the question of women’s rights. Labor legislation was
oriented towards ensuring “the vigor and future of the race, by organizing social
hygiene” (Stone, “The Republican Brotherhood,” Gender and the Politics of Reform
in France. 49).
The language of the organic, which now wholly pervaded discourse,
assumes a new significance. If political extremism were explainable in terms of the
pathological, then its opposite had to be a kind of moderate politics, the normalcy of
a social organism that was healthy. Solidarism embodies this state of health.
Solidarist politics was much like Durkheim's juste milieu. Anything above or below
the norm was to be avoided. Precisely because national decline was correlated to
natality, the health of society now became the health of the woman. The image of the
woman as mother was consciously projected by the republicans. Bourgeois' rhetoric
alternated between the image of the healing physician and the le bon pere de famille.
If the birth rate was to stop falling, if families had to produce children, then the
conditions of family life had to be improved. This in turn led to a further dilemma: if
the state was to legislate on marital issues, marital failure being thought of as a cause
of the low birth rate, the republicans would be infringing on individuals' rights.
Such dilemmas notwithstanding, there was perceptible improvement in
women's rights. The 1884 divorce law was intended to ease marital conflict, but did
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221
not include divorce by mutual consent, for this would have hastened the dissolution
of marriages. Likewise, gender-specific legislation meant to protect women
inadvertently led to legislation that gave working-men rights in precisely the way
that the republicans feared and that Jules Guesde had predicted. The reduction of the
working day for women in turn led to the limiting of the working day for men. Jules
Ferry, who was no liberal, introduced reforms in education that led to the passing of
a bill in 1881 that provided for free secular education for girls. It was hoped that a
little education would further the cause of consensus, and in this sense, the
republicans treated women in much the same way as they did the workers, social
groups whose cooperation was necessary to prevent national decline, and to whom
some minimal concessions had to be made.
In the search for peace and order, the leaders of the Third Republic were
obliged to take measures that would forestall the kind of confrontation that the Paris
Commune had represented. If women were actively protected so as to protect a
national resource, the working class could not be alienated either. The series of
militant strikes in the 1880s was a warning sign that the specter of the Commune and
the working class in power was never far away. As Elwitt has remarked, battalions of
businessmen, reformers, and politicians threw their weight behind a concerted effort
to forestall a full-scale eruption of labor against capital:
Their efforts, which reflected various ideological persuasions and practical
considerations, took many forms: social engineering, profit sharing, working-
class housing, cooperatives, company unions or union-busting, adult
education and technical training. (The Third Republic Defended. 7)
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The result was that the leaders of the Third Republic actively sought to
improve workers' rights in what is known as "republican paternalism." The resulting
consensus was never the harmonious "organic" movement of society as a whole, as
envisaged by Durkheim. However, despite the Boulangist crisis, and the Dreyfus
Affair, the Third Republic did manage to survive as the longest lasting (so far) of the
French Republic without a repetition of the cataclysms of 1848 and 1871.
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Notes
1 At the “Lefon d’ouverture” at the College de France in 1862, Renan had stated that
Jesus was un homme incomparable. The course was canceled, cf. Ernest Renan.
Centre d’etudes du dix-neuvieme siecle francais Joseph Sable. 2001
%E9n%E9ral/bios/rena.htm>
2 Cf R. Howard Bloch, "The Birth of Medieval Studies" in A New History of French
Literature. 7
3 The articles, "Aux Italiens" were published in two Milanese journals and were
considered a gross anti-French manifesto. For a discussion of the response to
Mommsen's articles, cf. Francois Hartog, Le dix-neuvieme siecle et l'histoire. le cas
Fustel de Coulanges. 49-52.
4 First published as a Lettre by Dentu in 1870, and later in Questions historiques in
1893; Also in "Choix de textes de Fustel de Coulanges" in Hartog, op cit., 381.
5 Durkheim was appointed charge de cours at the Faculte des lettres at Bordeaux in
1887. cf Stephen Lukes,. Emile Durkheim. his life and work. 95.
6 Besnard, Pierre, L’Anomie et ses usages. 48.
7 Durkheim's sources are Hubert Valleroux, Les Corporations d'arts et de metiers and
E. Levasseur, Les classes ouvrieres en France iusau'a la Revolution, cf. Durkheim,
De la division du travail social. 345-6.
o
The Communist Manifesto. 489 ; Preface to the First German edition and
Afterward to the Second German edition of Capital. Vol 1 ,15-16 and 24-25
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Epilogue
In this dissertation I have argued that following the working class
uprisings of 1848 and 1871, the episteme in mid and late nineteenth-century
France, particularly in historiography and sociology, had ideological
underpinnings. It does not follow that the sciences that developed necessarily
followed the ideological course of the thinkers who had provided the basis for
them. This is especially true of Fustel de Coulanges and Durkheim. In his
early years, Durkheim was influenced by the former, both in his conservatism
and on questions of method. In political terms, by the turn of the century,
Durkheim had moved to more liberal positions and on the question of
Dreyfus, he was a Dreyfusard. His own thinking in the early 1880s may have
corresponded to the republican need for an ideology that would counter both
Marxism and utilitarianism. Yet, once Durkheim began teaching sociology
and founded L'Annee sociologique. his interest in the science assumed an
autonomy. His primary concern as he stated in his early work, was la science
de la morale.
For Durkheim, the moral and the social were one. In trying to found
the science of ethics, he founded a new school of sociology.
Methodologically, he combined empiricism with his own commitment to
rationalism. But Durkheim's rationalism, as Lukes has observed, was not
abstract and deductive.1 He believed that there was nothing in reality that was
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beyond the scope of human reason. Yet, social facts were facts like any other
and had to be studied. The object of knowledge was not Society in general,
but real human beings. This "real man" with a family, a city, and a nation
sounds remarkably like the genealogical individual of Fustel de Coulanges
and Taine, which I have discussed in Chapter I. But that is precisely what he
is not, and that is the difference between Durkheim and Taine. Taine, as we
have seen, applied science to the study of history to oppose Rousseau and the
Enlightenment. Durkheim may have been a conservative thinker, and his
early writings, as I have stated, reflect this conservatism. Durkheim's belief in
science itself was absolute and uncompromising. Unlike a Taine, whose
search for a method led him to make a peripatetic journey to genealogy,
Durkheim actually founded the science, and practiced it. As several Durkheim
scholars have pointed out, the range of subjects covered by Durkheim in his
writings during his fifteen years at Bordeaux is remarkable. He lectured and
wrote on social solidarity, education, the family, suicide, criminology,
psychology, and religion2. Durkheim's concern was to study society, the
society he lived in. As early as in 1888, he had published a study on suicide
which was to develop into his major work on the subject. Durkheim's concern
was not merely to study social facts, but also to find solutions to problems in
society. As he asks in his 1902 preface to De la division du travail social, "le
mal constate, quelle en la cause et quel en peut etre le remede?" (v)
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It was not within the scope of this dissertation to consider Durkheim's
work as a whole. I have limited myself to a discussion of the ideological
underpinnings of his early work in Chapter IV. Leading Durkheim scholars
have underlined Durkheim's conservatism. But as both Lukes and LaCapra
have pointed out, with time, Durkheim's concerns widened. As Lukes has
stated,
Yet, by the mid-nineties, they [the conservatism and the view of morality]
were tempered by a critical concern for social justice and the advocacy of
extensive social change, as well as by a wider definition of morality,
involving explicit reference to social ideals as well as social discipline, to
values as well as norms. (Emile Durkheim. p. 78)
This critical concern is very clearly articulated in the 1902 preface to the second
edition of De la Division du travail. Durkheim proposes in this lengthy preface
the privileging of corporations in social and economic life. I have argued above
that Durkheim's silence on Marx was a way of wishing away class struggle. In
the chapters on the abnormal forms of the division of labor, class struggle
understood in the Marxist sense is categorized as "anomic." In the 1902 preface,
"anomie" is present at top of the agenda:
C'est a cet etat d'anomie que doivent etre attribues, comme nous le
montrerons, les conflits sans cesse renaissants et les desordres de toutes sortes
dont le monde economique nous donne le triste spectacle. Car, comme rien ne
contient les forces en presence et ne leur assigne de homes qu'elles soient
tenues de respecter, elles tendent a se devolopper sans termes, et viennent se
heurter les unes contre les autres pour se refouler et se reduire mutuellement.
(p.iii)
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The solution, says Durkheim, lies not only in state intervention, but in the
formation of groupements professionnels. in the workplace. If, in his earliest works,
such as the articles written on his return from Germany, the emphasis was on
solidarity and the social bond, by 1902 Durkheim was aware that concrete measures
had to be taken to ensure that this bond was real. Corresponding to these measures,
non-governmental initiatives introduced reform. Thus, in the case of Durkheim, the
theory he put forward resulted in a social movement that translated some of the
measures he advocated .
The legacies left by Fustel de Coulanges and Hippolyte Taine diverge and
converge somewhat curiously. Although both wrote monumental histories of France,
they did not leave their impact on historiography4. If Durkheim's political trajectory
diverged from that of Fustel de Coulanges, methodologically, in the sociology of
religion, he owed a great deal to his former mentor and acknowledged the debt.
There are resonances of La Cite antique in Les Formes elementaires de la vie
religieuse written towards the end of the sociologist's life. As I have pointed out, in
Chapter I, La Cite antique is permeated by an anti-Rousseauist bias. Yet the method
used in that work became the basis on which Durkheim opened new avenues in the
science of sociology. Durkheimian sociology advanced into areas far removed from
the ideological sources of the science.
On the other hand, an article written by Fustel de Coulanges in 1872, "De la
maniere d'ecrire l'histoire en France et en Allemagne depuis cinquante ans," became
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the bone of contention between L'Action frangaise and liberal historians in what
came to be known as la baearre Fustel. As I have pointed out in Chapter II, Taine
was a major influence on Barres and Maurras. But, as Maurras and Barres moved
progressively to the right with L'Action frangaise, they found in Fustel de Coulanges
the "national historian." The case of the baearre Fustel is illustrative of the way
history, historiography, and nationalism were caught in the vortex of political
passions in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair.
The baearre was triggered by the celebrations on the centenary of Michelet’s
birth on 13 July 1898. In addition to a ceremony at the Pantheon in which students
paid their hommage to Michelet's bust in the presence of Felix Faure, there was
another at Pere Lachaise. On the same occasion, the historian Gabriel Monod chose
to speak at a conference at the Odeon where he contrasted the two ceremonies,
describing the first as "penible et froide." Monod stated that the Pantheon ceremony
was cold because of the contrast between the ideas that Michelet had stood for, and
those put into practice by the very people who claimed to honor him. The allusion
was to the Dreyfus affair. Monod was a Dreyfusard and Zola had published J'accuse
a few months earlier.
For Maurras, Monod symbolized all that was anti-French, because he was
both a Dreyfusard and a "sentinelle allemande dans l'Universite."5 In the years that
followed, in the fall-out of the Dreyfus Affair, L'Action frangaise came into being.
As Hartog has pointed out, L'Action frangaise was in need of an intellectual
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2 2 9
legitimation in the order of history. Maurras and his friends chose, in 1905, to
commemorate Fustel de Coulanges' seventy-fifth anniversary as the "national
historian." A comite d'honneur was set up, including, among others, Bourget, Barres,
and Daudet as its members. The 1872 article, "De la maniere d'ecrire l'histoire en
France et en Allemagne depuis cinquante ans," was to be published. L'Action
fran^aise's decision to claim Fustel as its own elicited a strong response in the press.
Jaures, in a long editorial in L'Humanite, argued strongly against any attempt by the
league to appropriate Fustel. Several committee members withdrew, including
Fustel's widow. The Journal des Debats, Le Temps. L'Humanite, and Le Figaro
entered the fray and published Mme. Fustel's letter. The commemoration went ahead
and the Action frangaise had laid claim to another ancestor.
The event is of interest because L'Action fran9aise was attempting to re-play
the Dreyfus affair in the domain of historiography. The re-publication of 1872 article
put the liberal historians in an embarassing position. Some of them were former
pupils of Fustel, and Le Temps, in its report of the meeting, carried a letter of protest
by Fustel's former pupils against the attempt by a small coterie to exploit a great
name. The historians had neglected Fustel because of differences on questions of
method. With L'Action fran9aise bringing up the Fustel of 1872, a strongly virulently
anti-German Fustel, the question of method was now bound up with the question of
nationalism. In the article in question, Fustel reproaches French historians with not
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2 3 0
being patriotic enough. Yet, since he had always argued that science did not have a
patrie., the contradictions in the position emerge:
Nous continuons a professer, en depit des Allemands, que l'erudition n'a pas
de patrie. Nous aimerions qu'on ne put pas la soupfonner de partager nos
tristes ressentiments, et qu'elle ne se pliat pas plus a servir nos legitimes
regrets qu'a servir les ambitions des autres. L'histoire que nous aimons, c'est
cette vraie science frangaise d'autrefois.. . . L'histoire en ce temps-la ne
connaissait ni les haines de parti, ni les haines de race; elle ne cherchait que
le vrai, ne louait que le beau, ne haissait que la guerre et la convoitise. Elle ne
servait aucune cause; elle n'avait pas de patrie; n'enseignant pas l'invasion,
elle n'enseignait pas non plus la revanche. Mais nous vivons aujourd'hui dans
une epoque de guerre... II est bien legitime que nos historiens repondent
enfin a ces incessantes aggressions, confondent les mensonges, arretent les
ambitions, et defendent, s'il en est temps encore, contre le flot de cette
invasion d'un nouveau genre, les frontieres de notre conscience nationale et
les abords de notre patriotisme. ("Choix de Textes", Le Dix-neuvieme siecle
et l'histoire. p. 392)
It is little wonder that Maurras and L'Action frangaise chose Fustel de
Coulanges as their historien national and this text in particular. Science and
nationalism became one, and L'Action fran9aise concluded that "par rapport a la
France, la science est nationaliste" et "le nationalisme scientifique."6 The
Dreyfusards could neither disavow Fustel, nor defend the historian, for Maurras'
charge was that they, Monod in particular, practised German science. Yet was it not
with Fustel's encouragement that young scholars like Camille Jullian and Emile
Durkheim were sent to Germany?
The basarre Fustel may not have been the grand sequel to the Dreyfus affair
that Maurras wanted it to be, but it is indicative of the way that historiography
followed its own course. The liberal historians, especially Monod, clearly distanced
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231
themselves from the 1872 text and the call to defend the boundaries of national
consciousness in their writing of history. It was left to Maurras to carry the burden of
Fustel's anti-Rousseauist and anti-German legacy.
Maurras was not a historian but his Reflexions sur la Revolution de 1789 is
of importance because the different strands of discourse that I have discussed above
converge in this work. I have pointed to the ideological underpinnings of the writings
of conservative thinkers in the nineteenth century. In Maurras the ideology emerges
as an overt counter-revolutionary nationalist doctrine. Superficially, Maurras' anti-
Rousseau tirades appear to be a pastiche of phrases borrowed from Fustel de
Coulanges and Taine ("laquais," "vagabond"). In actual fact, Maurras pushed
through the logical implications of the anti-Enlightenment positions of the thinkers I
have discussed. In Reflexions sur la Revolution, Maurras too reaffirms rootedness,
genealogy, heredity. He takes a position against reason, the reason of the
Enlightenment. But the implications of taking a position against reason and the social
contract, of opposing heredity is that the question of choice does not arise.
Rootedness, for Maurras, implied an absence of freedom. For all that Taine blamed
the esprit of the Revolution, he did make the analogy with ship-building. One
measures, one plans, one constructs, slowly and patiently. Taine had England in
mind, and the slow process of building democracy. For Maurras, being French
excluded any possibility of democracy. Being French meant being Catholic and
monarchist. Everything else was foreign. Rousseau was essentially foreign to France.
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2 3 2
He was Swiss and Protestant. The three ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity were
Swiss:
Des trois idees suisses que nous avons tracees sur nos murs, la premiere, le
principe de la liberte politique, constitutif du systeme republicain, tue la
soumission du citoyen.. . . La seconde des idees suisses, le principe d'egalite,
constitutif du regime democratique livre le pouvoir au plus grand nombre.. . .
Enfm, la troisieme idee suisse, le principe de fratemite, constitutif du regime
cosmopolite, impose, d'une part, une complaisance sans bomes pour tous les
hommes a condition qu'ils habitent fort loin de nous, nous soient bien
inconnus, parlent une langue distincte de la notre, ou, mieux encore, que leur
peau soit d'une couleur differente; mais, d'autre part, il nous presente comme
un monstre et comme un mechant, quiconque, fut-il notre concitoyen et notre
frere, ne partage les moindres acces de cette rage philanthropique.
('Reflexions sur la Revolution de 1789. 15)
Therefore, democracy was not French. The ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity
had been imported from Geneva by the Protestant Rousseau.
For Maurras, Protestantism was not the only enemy. An anti-Dreyfusard, he
was virulently anti-Semitic. Maurras merged all that was foreign into an Other, le
barbare semite ou germain. Patriotism meant that to be French was to be Catholic
were the same thing. At the turn of the century, it was still possible to express
patriotism by being anti-Semitic and anti-German. Maurras1 destiny was to take a
curious turn though. He lived long enough to side with the Petain regime in the
Second World War. After the war, he was tried and imprisoned for being a
collaborator. The thinker who had pushed the logic of nationalism to its extreme
limits found himself, in 1945, arraigned as a traitor.
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233
Notes
1 Stephen Lukes, Emile Durkheim. his life and work, 80. Before Durkheim, Auguste
Comte and Herbert Spencer were the leading figures in sociology. Durkheim,
however distanced himself from both. Both Lukes and Dominick LaCapra believe
that he did so because he was too much of a rationalist to be labeled a positivist, cf.
Dominick LaCapra, Emile Durkheim. sociologist and philosopher, 6.
2 Cf. Lukes, 100. LaCapra, 2.
3 In the 1902 preface, Durkheim puts forward a set of proposals the implementation
of which would ensure that class struggle would go away and harmony in the
economic sphere would prevail. Cf. Sanford Elwitt, the Third Republic defended. 48.
4 According to Francis Hartog, the historians considered Fustel declasse, cf. Le Dix-
neuvieme siecle et l'histoire, 184.
5 Quand les Franfais ne s'aimaient pas, 67.
6 cf. Hartog, Franfois, op cit., 180.
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2 3 4
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Creator Sadagopan, Shoba (author)

Core Title Darwin contra Rousseau: Evolutionary narrative and the discourse on the social bond in nineteenth-century France

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Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag history of science,literature, romance,OAI-PMH Harvest,Philosophy

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Advisor Kamuf, Peggy (committee chair), Accampo, Elinor A. (committee member), Starr, Peter T. (committee member)

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