Richard Wagner and Ludwig Schemann
Sometimes advantaged by the circumstances and sometimes not, Gobinian Studies has come up against a wide range of obstacles: ideological ones, of course, but also ‘historical’ ones, with a certain mystery still reigning supreme over the infancy and early years of Gobineau’s career.
Indeed, a tragic event seems to have impacted his beginnings. In the absence of his father, his mother had had an adulterine daughter who was then brought up with young Arthur himself. Having become aware of the situation at the age of thirteen, the latter was overcome with suspicion: was he another man’s child as well? Being of Norman descent and, as such, the heir of the Vikings, Gobineau felt compelled to respond to the question by inventing a mythical genealogy for himself, in which he traced his ancestors all the way to Odin, the Norse god (this was the subject covered in his Story of Ottar Jarl, the Norwegian pirate)!
Having come to Paris in 1835, Arthur de Gobineau had initially focused exclusively on literary works. In 1848, however, following the fall of the monarchy during the month of July, Alexis de Tocqueville, the French Minister for Foreign Affairs, began by appointing him as his special secretary before making him his chief of staff. Ten years later, it was once again under Tocqueville’s protection (a man with whom he was involved in a highly interesting correspondence) that he took his first steps in the diplomatic domain (at the time, his mother, who had been sentenced to 10 years in prison for aggravated fraud, was still serving her sentence).
During his career, which was marked by numerous travels, Gobineau struck up a friendship with Mérimée, Prokesch, Princess Mathilda, Richard Wagner, and Dom Pedro II, the emperor of Brazil. Forced into retirement by Decazes in 1877,214 however, he expired in 1882, following a final trip to Bayreuth.
It was, in fact, Richard Wagner,215 an attentive reader of Gobineau’s works, who would direct the attention of Ludwig Schemann, one of his admirers, towards the French writer’s original works. Schemann, who was a methodical Prussian man, then enabled the publication of Gobineau’s Essay in Germany in 1899. Additionally, he himself proceeded to publish several works on the topic of Gobinism and founded the Gobineau Society (Gobineau-Vereinigung), which subsequently enjoyed a certain amount of success. Four Frenchmen would join the Gobineau Society: Paul Bourget (author of The Disciple), Vacher de Lapouge (Social Selections), Edouard Schuré (Precursors and Rebels) and Florimond de Basterot.
In Germany, the small Gobinian chapel would flourish in the shadow of the great Wagnerian church: Gobineau ist unser,216 they said during World War I, and the popularity he enjoyed among our ‘traditional enemy’ remained enduringly harmful to the author of the Pleiades.
In 1905, however, Paris witnessed the publication of a book by Richard Dreyfus entitled La vie et les prophéties du comte de Gobineau217 (Calmann-Lévy), which adopted the topic of a lecture given at the School for Advanced Social Studies. Many other ones would follow.
Gobineau attached a great deal of importance to his Essay, which was penned between 1848 and 1851 and published from 1853 to 1855. The work is dedicated to George V, King of Hanover. There are several editions of it, including a two-volume version by Firmin-Didot publishing (1940), and numerous translations.
Divided into six parts, it opens with the following famous quote: ‘The fall of civilisations is the most striking and most obscure of all historical phenomena. Thanks to its ability to arouse fear in the human mind, this misfortune bears within it something so mysterious and so grandiose that thinkers never tire of pondering it, studying it, and revolving around its secret’.
Professor Gaulmier declares: ‘Gobineau’s Essay is, in fact, a grand romantic poem, yet one which, unlike the ‘classical’ form of French Romanticism, announces and senses humanity’s irreversible decadence, and not its continuous ascension’.
A more appropriate title for the book would have been An Essay on the Diversity of Human Races. Adopting various ideas that were widespread at the time (and that one even encounters in Kant’s views), Gobineau distinguishes three great races: the white, the yellow and the black one, each characterised by its own qualities and flaws. Although none of them is superior to the others in absolute terms, they all run the risk of losing their specific character should they embrace intermixing.
A Pessimistic Conclusion
If, on the one hand, human families are said to be equal, and on the other, some are frivolous, others composed; some greedy, others spendthrift; some energetically enamoured with struggle, others ever careful with their own hardships and lives, it stands to reason that these highly different nations must have very diverse and dissimilar destinies, ones that are, to put it bluntly, quite unequal’.
This does not hinder Gobineau from preaching mutual respect and reciprocal decolonisation. On 22nd March, 1855, while in Cairo, he wrote to Prokesch,218 stating: ‘Europeans are hardly commendable, and the disdain and hatred felt by the indigenous population seems justifiable at all times’. Incidentally, there is an entire chapter in his Essay (I, 6) that deals with the uselessness of ‘colonial policies’.
In Gobineau’s eyes, humanity’s decline has already commenced: it is thus delusional to hope to emancipate oneself from ‘universal democracy’, which shall render everyone equal from below.
Hence the following pessimistic conclusion: ‘Religion itself has not promised us eternity; by demonstrating that we have indeed begun at some point, however, science has always seemed to bestow upon us the promise of an end. There is, therefore, no reason for us to be surprised or overcome with emotion when faced with a further confirmation of a fact that has never been subject to doubt. It is not death that represents a saddening prediction, but the certitude of reaching it degraded; and were we not secretly horrified by the sensation of fate’s greedy hands already upon us, the shame that shall befall our descendants would perhaps leave us indifferent’.
In his Pleiades, however, Gobineau seems less bitter. Witnessing the triumph of the three categories of individuals that he despises (namely ‘brutes, fools and rascals’), he contrasts the latter with the ‘Pleiades’, meaning the ‘kingly Sons’ that have miraculously evaded the zeitgeist and act as an extension of the values that originate from the most ancient ‘golden age’ of Antiquity. The book is probably one of the few 19th-century novels that can compare to The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. Gobineau was, in fact, one of the very first to consider Stendhal219 a truly great writer, a writer through whom ideology was genuinely allowed to enter the realm of novels.
There is yet another illusion that one must relinquish: Gobineau did not invent his own racial doctrine. Indeed, he had several predecessors. One of the famous ones is Victor Courtet de l’Isle (1813–1867), to whom Mr Jean Boissel, professor at Saint-Valéry University in Montpellier and author of Gobineau polémiste220 (Pauvert, 1967), dedicated a highly significant essay.
Courtet, a Provençal originally from Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, was one of Saint-Simon’s disciples.221 In La science politique fondée sur la science de l’homme, ou Etude des races humaines sous le rapport philosophique, historique et social,222 which he penned at the age of twenty-five, he expresses his intention to apply the principles of compared physiology and anatomy to different peoples: ‘The purpose is to incorporate history into the field of natural sciences’. According to him, social inequalities correspond to certain ‘ethnic strata’. In order to ensure social justice through the circulation of elites, it is necessary to constantly stir the population’s biological components. His optimistic conclusion is in sharp contrast to Gobineau’s.
Beyond Saint-Simon and Courtet, one could, in fact, go even further back in time, until one has reached the very sources of the views espoused by Voltaire and ‘libertine’ philosophers, before the advent of the Revolution.
The ‘racial prejudice’ that characterised the French aristocracy of the Old Regime, for instance, is rooted in the clear awareness of our Frankish nobility’s Germanic origins. Long before
Taine and Augustin Thierry, a theoretical formulation had already been set down by Count de Boulainvilliers.223
In Le sang épuré,224 Mr André Devyver demonstrates that the ‘Germanic’ sentiment pervading the French aristocracy exerted great mental influence during the 18th century and accounts, at least in part, for the openly declared hatred felt by 1789 revolutionaries towards ‘Koblenz emigrants’. In his analysis of certain post-revolutionary extensions, the author also highlights the notions which Gobineau borrowed from Boulainvilliers’ theories and does not shy away from seeking in the latter the explanation for some of the antagonisms that manifested themselves during the Restauration period and at the time of the Franco-Prussian war (1870).
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Etudes gobiniennes,225 written by Jean Gaulmier, Klincksieck (11 Lille Street, 75007 Paris, France), 218 pages.
Le sang épuré, an essay by André Devyver, Université de Bruxelles editions (Leopold Park, 137 Belliard Street, 1040 Brussels, Belgium), 608 pages.
Victor Courtet, premier théoreticien de la hiérarchie des races — Contribution à l’histoire de la philosophie politique du romantisme,226 PUF, 225 pages.
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On 7th June, 1975, Mrs. Arlette Jouanna defended a crucial doctoral thesis at the Paris IV University, a thesis on The Notion of Race in 16th and Early 17th century France, 1498–1614 (three volumes, Honoré Champion, 1976). In it, she makes a precious contribution to our knowledge of the period’s French mental universe and demonstrates that the modern conception of race is somehow founded upon the acceptance of ‘lineage’, an acceptance that was commonplace back then (‘The very notion of race is embodied by the idea […] that the social character of ancestries has a biological basis that accounts for their continuity over the generations’).
In Roots of the Right, a project headed by George Steiner, Mr Michael D. Biddiss has published a collection of political texts authored by Gobineau: Gobineau — Selected Political Writings (Jonathan Cape, London, 1970 and 1971). It comprises several extracts from the Treatise on Inequality, The Pleiades, Renaissance and What Happened to France in 1870.
The 8th volume of Gobinian Studies (1974–75) provided us with some clarification regarding the three-volume publication of Gobineau’s selected works as part of the Pleaides collection (Gallimard). The first part shall contain the Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (presented by Mr Jean Boissel), in addition to Miss Irnois. The second shall include Three Years in Asia, The Religions and Philosophies of Central Asia, Adelaide, and Voyage Recollections. As for the third, it shall comprise The Pleiades, Asian Novellas, and Renaissance. Chronological order will thus have been respected.
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Ernest Renan
When asked about his opinion of the author of The Life of Jesus, Pope Pius IX gave his interviewer the following response: ‘Renan? What a brilliant star that fell from the heavens!’
The new edition of Recollections of My Youth, and especially that of The Life of Jesus (including a wonderful preface written by Mr Jean Gaulmier, a Sorbonne professor), has, once again, drawn attention to this great personality, to whom an entire exposition at the Bibliothèque nationale227 was dedicated in November 1974, with more than 700 documents, letters, and photographs.
Renan was born on 28th February, 1823 in Tréguier (Côtes-du-Nord) to a family of tillers and sailors, as the third child of Philibert Renan, a master mariner, and Magdeleine Féger Lasbleiz, originally from Lannion. His paternal ancestors were the descendants of one of the Welsh emigrant clans who, from the 4th to the 7th century, departed their own island so as to evade the Angl0-Saxon invasions: as stated in his Recollections of Youth, ‘they were good people who arrived from Cardigan around 480, under the leadership of a man called Fragan’. The author expanded on the issue, adding: ‘I think in their stead, for they live within me’.
His father achieved great distinction in the struggle against the British. In 1828, he vanishes while sailing the high seas. His lifeless body is found on a deserted shore near Saint-Malo. Was it an accident? Or perhaps suicide? The cause of death would forever remain unknown.
Facing a financial situation that bordered on misery, the Renan family seeks refuge in Lannion. Henriette, Ernest’s seventeen-year-old sister, pours her affection on her brother and monitors his education.
Young Ernest longs to join the Church. In 1838, while at the clerical school in Tréguier, he is awarded every possible prize. These awards attract the attention of Monsignor Dupanloup,228 who invites Renan to Paris. He joins the Saint-Nicholas-du-Chardonnet seminary, before moving on to that of Issy-les-Moulineaux in 1841 and Saint-Sulpice in 1843.
Although Renan achieves good success during the seminary, his ‘excellent mentors’ worry about him. Indeed, he is already afflicted by moral conflict.
It is a period marked by his first bouts of intellectual exhilaration. Renan develops a passion for history, in which he notices the jurisprudence of political action. He studies the Hebrew, Syriac and Chaldean language, learns the basics of Arabic and becomes aware of his own ‘instinctively philological’ abilities. It is philosophy, however, that garners his enthusiasm more than anything else. At a time when Romanticism is at the height of its popularity, he shares in the fascination of the literary and erudite world for the writings published on the other side of the Rhine. He admires Fichte (‘Fichte is the very reflection of my soul’), Schelling, Goethe, Kant, Herder, Schleiermacher, and Hegel.
On 24th August, 1845, he writes his fellow disciple, Father Cognat, the following words: ‘So as to grant me support, God has bestowed upon me an intellectual and moral endeavour. I have familiarised myself with Germany, which gave me the impression of entering a temple. All that I discovered there was pure, lofty, moral, beautiful and touching. Oh, my soul! Yes, indeed, it is a treasure, the very continuation of Jesus Christ. Their morality enraptures me. Oh, how gentle yet strong they are! I believe that this is where Christ shall come from’.
Renan is then overcome with an irrepressible need for rational analysis and free inquiry. He indulges in a libido sciendi.229 ‘We are fond of humanity because it gives birth to science, and we value morality because only honest men could ever be scientific. If ignorance were set down as mankind’s requisite foundation, there would no longer be any reason for us to value humanity’s existence’.
Christian dogmas are a combination of evangelical faith and Greek metaphysics. This is what accounts for the fact that, for some people, Jesus represents the Messiah above all else, while primarily acting as the embodiment of the Logos for others. Renan detects various contradictions and confluences between the two currents. It is the former, however, that seem the most pronounced to him. Whereas Saint Paul emphasises faith, hope and charity and defines the latter as the most beautiful of all virtues, Renan responds by considering the truth greater still. The entire history of theology is but a desperate attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable, he says.
This conflict between faith and reason is something that the young seminarist experiences most intensely, as he wages terrible inner battles against himself.
Mr Jean Gaulmier writes: ‘The young Sulpician divides orthodox theologians into two categories that he targets with equal contempt: the acritical ones such as Dupanloup, for whom Christianity is but a means that allows them to progress in the world, and the simple-minded ones, whose good intentions go hand in hand with absolute scientific nullity’.
In his extensive essay entitled La jeunesse d’Ernest Renan230 (1925), Pierre Lasserre231 remarks: ‘What occurred in Renan’s mind in the space of 4 years is a shortcut of all that took place in European minds over a period of 4 centuries’.
In the end, Renan gives in. Just like William of Occam232 and the advocates of nominalism, which marked the end of medieval scholasticism, he considers dogma to be indemonstrable, thus simultaneously losing ‘all confidence in the abstract metaphysics that claims to represent a science beyond all others and the sole solution to mankind’s greatest probl
ems’.
The Desert Is Monotheistic
On 6th October, 1845, having decided to no longer content himself with the reassuring answers he had hitherto given himself, Renan walks down the seminary steps for the last time. He breaks with religion but does not disavow it. A few months later, he pens his Psychological Essay on Jesus Christ, in which he pours out his heart. The work contains the following revelatory sentences: ‘The critique of Jesus Christ that I am now undertaking is not a historical one, but a psychological one. I do not consider Jesus Christ to be a person endowed with actual existence… To me, Jesus Christ embodies the moral and philosophical dimension that stems from the Gospel’.
The book would only be published in 1921, thanks to Jean Pommier, the future founder of the Society for Renanian Studies. It ends with the following words: ‘What we require is a rationalised Christianity — the Christianism of Germany. It will, admittedly, take some time for our old theologians to attain it. Once they do embrace it, however, mankind will have progressed’.
Next, Renan takes up the position of master at the Lycée Vendôme. This marks the beginning of his career. In 1847, he is awarded the Volney prize for a philological essay that would subsequently be published under the title Histoire Générale et système compare des langues sémitiques233 (1855).
An excellent Hebraist, Renan attempts to achieve, with regard to Semitic languages, what Franz Bopp had already done for Indo-European ones: to provide a general picture of the grammatical system through which a thought can be expressed within a given language family. In doing so, he connects the Jewish religion to the Orient’s landscape: ‘The desert is monotheistic in essence. Sublime in its immense uniformity, what it reveals to men is, above all, the conception of the infinite, yet one that lacks the feeling of an endlessly creative life which the presence of a more fertile nature has awakened within other nations’.
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