Systems and Debates

by Alain de Benoist

On the 15th of July, having learnt of the French declaration of war against Prussia, he undertakes a voyage to the North Sea, accompanying prince Napoleon. Shortly after, he returns to Paris. In November, he is reinstated into the Collège de France. The sudden announcement of the French defeat ruins his hopes. On 16th September, 1870, in Le journal des débats, he addresses the following words to David-Friedrich Strauss: ‘The world’s greatest misfortune lies in the fact that France does not understand Germany, and vice versa’.

  The events that take place is 1871 impact him greatly: in The Antichrist, he develops the account of the last days of Jerusalem, under the influence of what he had witnessed during the two sieges of Paris.

  Many authors make the most of things to give their opinion of the times: Michelet (in La France devant l’Europe),255 George Sand (in Journal d’un voyageur pendant la guerre),256 Emile Montégut, Charles de Mazade, and others. Renan is also of the view that the time had come for him to publish some sort of manifesto. He proceeds to write La réforme intellectuelle et morale,257 a literary work whose publication on 6th December, 1871 probably prompted Gobineau to leave his manuscript entitled Ce qui est arrive à la France en 1870 unfinished.

  The United States of Europe

  In this book, Renan depicts a depleted country, wondering what causes have led to its decline. Denouncing Rousseau’s ‘false politics’, he condemns the ideas of 1789 that had once seduced him: ‘The France of the Middle-Ages is a Germanic construction, erected by a Germanic military aristocracy characterised by Gallic-Roman elements. France’s age-old effort consisted in expelling from its bosom all the elements deposited by the Germanic invasion, an endeavour that lasted until the Revolution, the last convulsion of the entire process. […] Had France not dragged the Languedoc and Provence into its sphere of activities, we would now be a serious, active, Protestant and parliamentary nation!’

  So as to offer an explanation for the fall of the monarchy, he resorts to the following image: ‘France was once an enormous shareholder company, established by the ancient, first-rate speculators of the Capetian House. The shareholders then beheaded the chief banking executive, believing themselves capable of performing equally well in matters of company business once the founders had been eliminated. All that the company now has to offer, however, is a share of shame and loss’.

  It is the democratic principle that he holds responsible for this development: ‘The France that has been shaped by universal suffrage has become profoundly materialistic: ancient France’s noble concerns, including patriotism, a passion for beauty and a love of glory, have vanished alongside the nobility whose members once embodied the very soul of France. The assessment and governance of things has been surrendered to the masses’.

  He then expands on things: ‘No one can discipline themselves. In the absence of a master, children left to their own devices receive no upbringing: all they do is play and waste time. […] A republican society is as weak as a military corps that nominates its own officers: the fear of not being re-elected paralyses all energy’.

  Railing against egalitarianism, he expresses his lack of esteem for the crowds, crowds that he is wary not to confuse with the people (from which he himself stems, as he constantly reminds us): ‘The original sin of every democratic institution lies in the sacrifices that one has to make in honour of the crowd’s superficial mindset… A sufficient amount of reason to govern and reform a people could never emerge from the masses… Intellectual culture ceases to ascend as soon as it aspires to spread’.

  In his Prayer on the Acropolis, the author had already stated: ‘Oh, Democracy! Teach us to extract a diamond from the impure masses!’

  Renan has no expectations with regard to the emerging republic: ‘The fate of the republic is to simultaneously cause anarchy and to repress it most drastically’. He adds: ‘As for Communism, not only do I regard it as an impossibility, but even as a folly, or, to express things more adequately, a fantastical creation’.

  As a result, Renan finds himself labelled a monarchist: ‘He thus espouses a doctrine which the Action Française would perhaps be inclined to support’, remarked Jacques Boulenger258 in 1925 (Renan et ses critiques).259

  How can the situation be remedied, then? Renan sinks into dreams: some regarding an erudite republic that is rather utopian, others centred upon a new nobility that would replace a questionable and adulterated aristocracy. He ultimately declares himself to be in favour of a constitutional monarchy supported by two representative chambers. All national bodies, social corporations and professional companies would be represented by the High Chamber. Opinion columns would be abolished and debates held behind closed doors, so as to avoid false eloquence and demagogy: ‘There is good reason to hope that both Chambers thus established would serve the purpose of liberal progress and not that of revolution’.

  Adopting an idea which Augustin Thierry260 had already expressed in 1814, he declares himself to be in favour of a ‘United States of Europe, whose members would be joined together by a federal pact’. He says: ‘Europe is a confederation of states united by a common notion of civilisation’. To begin with, what he proposes is an ‘alliance with Germany and England, the effect of which will be to guide the world along the paths of liberal civilisation’. He, furthermore, advocates the formation of empires: ‘Large-scale colonisation is a political necessity of the very first order. Any nation that does not colonise is inexorably condemned to embrace Socialism, a war between the rich and the poor’.

  Reviled by the clerics and consequently rejected by the republican camp, Renan would remain a ‘liberal conservative’ his entire life, convinced of the fact that ‘inequality is inherent in nature’ and supporting the establishment of an enlightened monarchy.

  A Parisian and Republican Monument

  In 1873, Renan takes over from Claude Bernard261 at the Académie Française (which allows him to highlight his debt to the experimental method) and publishes Marcus Aurelius, the 7th and final volume of History of the Origins of Christianity.

  On 11th March, 1882, he gives his famous speech entitled What Is a Nation at the Sorbonne. ‘The existence of a nation is — please excuse the metaphor — an everyday plebiscite, just as the existence of an individual is the perpetual affirmation of life’. At a later point, he would say: ‘What constitutes a nation is the fact of having accomplished great feats in the past and of longing to achieve equally great things in future’.

  In 1883, he is elected to the post of administrator at the Collège de France, becoming the president of the Asian Society a year later.

  Having done some soul-searching, he publishes his Recollections of Youth. ‘The world is heading towards a kind of Americanism that is detrimental to our own refined ideas’, he remarks.

  As Max Muller’s262 friend, he contributes to the development of Indo-European studies. He remains, in fact, highly aware of his own origins. A regionalist ahead of his time, he strives for the renewal of the Breton spirit, demonstrates his interest in Arbois de Jubainville’s Revue Celtique263 and makes sure he never misses the ‘Celtic dinner’ promoted by folklorist Paul Sébillot, an event that has been held at the Hôtel de la Marine, Boulevard du Parnasse, every year since 1879.

  In a magnificent essay on the Poetry of the Celtic Nations, he declares: ‘I prefer honest mythology with all its distractedness and wanderings to a theology that is so ungenerous, so vulgar and so colourless that it would be offensive to God to believe that, having bestowed upon the visible world such beauty, He could have chosen to make the invisible world so dully reasonable’.

  In 1886, he begins working on a new and final work of art: The History of the People of Israel, which is to comprise five volumes. It is a study of the ‘underground from which the roots of Jesus sprouted’. He will thus have authored a total of more than forty literary works.

  As written by Mr Jean Dutourd,264 it was in 1890 that Renan came to be ‘one of the monuments of Paris’. An official thinker and the patriarch of the
Republic, he was a caricatural representation of the ‘Louis-Philippian’ period, with his large nose, pear-shaped head, yellowed white hair and ten-button jacket. And yet, his swollen head displayed a pair of small and ever shining elephant eyes. For Renan was ever observant, always laughing to himself. His chair was an institution. At dinner events, his Bishop-like potbelly never suited his civil attire, and ‘his hand bestowed blessings with every spoken sentence’, says Barrès.

  Towards the end of his life, Renan, stricken with rheumatisms and deformed by gout in his small flat on Vaneau Street, sometimes espoused the notions found in Ecclesiastes when he spoke of universal vanity: ‘Life may ultimately not be a truly serious matter’. And it is himself that he describes when remarking the following with regard to Spinoza: ‘Being a free-thinker, he perceived himself obligated to lead the life of a saint’.

  Among his disciples, one finds both religious minds and rationalists, and an equal rate of aristocrats and republicans.

  Maurice Barrès once defined himself as Renan’s spiritual ‘grand-nephew’. It was through Renan’s works that he learnt to reconcile his detachment towards all dogma with a curiosity etched with sympathy for all forms of religious thinking.

  In May 1866, he published an account of his visit to Perros-Guirec (where Renan spent his summer on a yearly basis) in Voltaire.265 The master confided in him, saying: ‘Some of our ideas must be kept caged, just like the dogs that Mr Pasteur is working on’. These pages, in which admiration mingles with playfulness, constitute the contents of his work entitled Huit jours chez M. Renan.266 Further texts, gathered by Victor Giraud,267 were published in 1922 under the title Taine et Renan.268

  In May 1892, Renan still presides over a ‘Celtic dinner’, and undertakes an ultimate trip to Brittany in September. Upon his return to Paris, he is already severely ill. He makes the following remark in his notebooks: ‘To silently prepare oneself for death’. He passes away on the 2nd of October, unaided by religion. The next day, Maurice Barrès would write in Le Figaro: ‘Mr Renan belongs to those who have prevented the French spirit from relinquishing religious sentiments’.

  It is not a doctrine that Renan has bequeathed, but a state of mind.

  ***

  The Life of Jesus, an essay by Ernest Renan, Folio, 542 pages.

  The History of the Origins of Christianity (in its abridged edition, presented by Bruno Neveu as part of Pierre Gaxotte’s Great Historical Monuments collection), an essay by Ernest Renan, Laffont-Club français du livre, 832 pages.

  Recollections of Youth, an essay by Ernest Renan, Garnier-Flammarion, 312 pages.

  ***

  The Society of Renanian Studies (16 Chaptal Street, 75009, Paris, France), founded by Jean Pommier, includes Mr Jean Gaulmier and Louis Rougier among the members of its directorial committee and staff. It is responsible for the publication of the Renanian Studies quarterly. The Ernest Renan Circle (3 Récamier Street, 75007, Paris, France), hosted by Mr Georges Ory (author of Le Christ et Jésus,269 Pavillon, 1974), focuses particularly on the history of religions. With its close ties to the Rationalist Union, it has been publishing a bimonthly bulletin for as long as 25 years, in addition to releasing a total of approximately 100 ‘notebooks’.

  There is also an Ernest Renan Society, which was founded in 1919 and has unceasingly been compelled to become a French Society of Religious History. Its bulletin (including volume number XXV, 1976) has been released by PUF as part of its Revue d’histoire des religions.270

  Renan’s complete works, which were published by Calmann-Lévy in ten volumes between 1947 and 1962, are now partially sold out. In addition to Life of Jesus and Recollections of Youth, several works have been re-edited separately: The Future of Science (Larousse, 1957), The French Rabbis of the Early 14th Century (two volumes, Gregg, Farnborough, 1969), The Abbess of Jouarre (Vialetay, 1973), and Christianity and Judaism (Copernic, 1977).

  ***

  The French Socialists

  ‘There is a certain disagreement between the Proudhonian or Blanquist271 form of socialism and the Marxist one, a disagreement that is graver than any political quarrel or school rivalry. We are witnessing a confrontation between two temperaments, a conflict between two diverging conceptions of life’.

  The topic had already been covered before, particularly by Camille Bouglé (in Socialisme français,272 Armand Colin, 1932) and Maxime Leroy (in Les précurseurs français du socialisme,273 Temps présent, 1948). The author of various literary works on the Commune, the Knights Templar, the coup of eighteen Brumaire, Saint-Just, etc., as well as The History of Purification (A book that caused quite an uproar and was published by Fayard in 1968–1974), Robert Aron, who passed away in 1974, tackled the issue himself in Le socialisme français face au marxisme274 and presented the results of a ‘40-year research effort’.

  His book represents a historical review of the social issue, stretching from ‘proletarian prehistory’ to the present.

  The Old Regime distinguished between two major production sectors: light industry, which was organised into corporations and trades and whose members enjoyed a certain independence; and large-scale ‘factories’, whose subjection to royal authority was of a far stricter nature. The Revolution would subsequently cause the disappearance of both sectors. Another change that came about concerned the length of a week, which increased from seven days to ten. Additionally, workers were suddenly only entitled to three days off per month, compared to an annual total of eighty-four before the Revolution.

  ‘The “Le Chapelier” legislation, which was passed in 1791, abolished all corporations, thus submitting French worker institutions to statal control. It was in the name of liberty that a new form of oppression was being prepared’.

  At the dawn of the industrial age, ‘French socialism’ is born thanks to Babeuf (1760–1797). He is followed by Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Leroux, all of whom were prolific thinkers and utopians with a most fertile imagination.

  The Victims of the Paris Commune (1871)

  Second-generation theoreticians, namely Blanqui (1805–1881), Louis Blanc (1811–1882) and Constantin Pecqueur (1801–1887), were all men of courage and inventiveness, but they were not politicians. As written by Robert Aron, ‘they did not know what obscure, tortuous or divergent pathways a thought had to follow before being incorporated into practice’.

  Reviewing all the issues since the very beginning, they proceeded to polish immense theoretical edifices whose form was both immutable and perfect, inspecting every possible detail in the hope of constructing a doctrine that none would ever be able to undermine. Fourier declares: ‘There are 5000 years of misunderstandings between the Creator and the creatures’. As for Proudhon, he states that ‘God is the embodiment of evil’. On his part, Pierre Leroux makes the following remark: ‘It was previously assumed that every religious edifice was destined to vanish, as the caducity of the Catholic system had been successfully proven. Such an assumption was, however, mistaken: religion cannot vanish off the face of the earth; it can merely undergo a transformation’.

  Mr Aron has dedicated his book ‘to the communards of 1871, the victims of the Versailles reaction and of Marxist falsification’.

  Indeed, the event was a decisive one. Far from having been a ‘pre-Marxist’ movement, the Paris Commune was ‘a revolution motivated by patriotism and hostile to statal centralisation, a revolution whose failure Marx and Engels essentially wished for so as to ensure the hegemony of their own doctrine within the nascent socialist movement. Their wishes thus coincided with those of the bourgeoisie of Versailles’.

  The insurrectional movement’s management committee only comprised three Marxists, the majority of its members being either Blanquists or Proudhonians.

  The contradictions that characterised the period were symbolically epitomised by the tragic fate of Louis Rossel, a twenty-seven-year-old rebel who died at the hands of a firing squad on the Satory plateau. Edith Thomas275 writes: ‘Rejected by the admirers of the Commune, upon wh
om he had turned his back, and shunned by the heirs of Versailles, all of whom he had targeted with scorn, Rossel belonged to no one. And it is therein that his greatness lies’. (in Rossel, Gallimard, 1967).

  In 1866, Karl Marx passed the following judgement upon Parisian workers: ‘They are luxurious workers who unknowingly belong to the old offal, and very much so. They are ignorant, conceited, pretentious, turgid, and fraught with pomposity’. On 20th July, 1870, just before the outbreak of war, he declared: ‘What the French need is a good thrashing’. His next words provide the necessary clarification: ‘The German preponderance shall shift the European worker movement’s centre of gravity from France to Germany. This event shall simultaneously attest to our own theory’s prevalence over Proudhon’s’.

  With regard to Marx, Mr Robert Aron has detected a ‘metaphysical flaw’, which consists in believing, just as Descartes did, that ‘mechanical rules are identical to natural ones’. The truth, however, is not intellectual in essence. The intellect merely contents itself with ordering the natural facts that constitute reality in the manner that suits it best. Before being constructed, the world must first be perceived, and it is the manner in which one perceives it that determines its construction.

  Sorel and Proudhon

  Both of Marx’s principle adversaries are French: P.-J. Proudhon, a native of the Savoy region, and Georges Sorel, originally from Normandy. As the precursor of federalism and the ‘European revolution’, Proudhon proposes a new balance of social forces. Contrasting ‘a dialectic of life with the dialectic of death, which the Marxist scheme ultimately amounts to’, he defines socialism as the implementation of the ancient axiom suum cuique, meaning ‘to each his own’ or ‘to each their due’, in accordance with one’s capacities (in Mémoires d’un révolutionnaire).276 In 1850, he goes as far as to write: ‘Man is, above all, a warring animal: it is through war that he manifests the sublimity of his own nature’. In his Notebooks, he adds: ‘What medieval peoples bore instinctive hatred for is what I myself hate, though thoughtfully and irrevocably’.