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CHAPTER 1

Modernity, Antimodernity, and Beyond

The standard model of historical explanation for turn of the last-century European culture proposes an amalgam of traditions and long-standing hierarchies, sunk in crisis, defensive, beset by anxiety, forced to fit within an emerging and very different order of things, in which those hierarchies and traditions had become dangerous. At the least, this amalgam left late modern Europe vulnerable to the catastrophes of the twentieth century.

A technocratic historicism has long sought for lattices of social and institutional practices, linguistic patterns, and phenomenological and conceptual structures that decisively shape and often determine thinking and its reception. We have already seen that contemporary scholars assume Péguy cannot partially and meaningfully break free from constrictive notions of identity and cultural “discourses” (often prejudices) that saturate his historical moment, despite his attempt to think beyond them.

To venture out toward this history without the usual assumptions requires us to alight upon popular understanding and rarefied learning and, not least, their attempted reconciliation; to traverse something of politics, culture, philosophy, and science, and sound some tensions in their depths. A few longstanding tendencies will allow us to orient ourselves as we embark.

France had long been considered a or even the preeminent culture for certain kinds of “high” or refined expression in the arts and in learned enquiry—not least by the French themselves. It was often assumed that France’s intellectual and political culture led the world, or served as a prophetic example for others.

Given the ongoing prominence of intellectual life at the center of French culture, and never far from politics, France’s humiliation by Prussia in 1870–1871 was a comprehensive shock, affecting the world of learning, education, and ideas no less than that of military strategy and ministerial politics. The young republic that followed immediately upon that shock was obliged to secure its legitimacy by negotiating the terms of defeat rather than victory, and to rule in the name of stability rather than revolution. That this same republic, in May 1871, brutally crushed a revolutionary insurrection in its own capital immediately after negotiating an end to the war with Germany severely complicated its relationship to France’s revolutionary past.

Yet the disorienting defeat to Prussia would not have had the cultural, social, and intellectual power it had in France—even accounting for the longstanding entanglement of political power, intellectual life, and elite culture in France, and especially in Paris—were it not for unsettled questions in the life of the nation and its educated citizens in particular. What is modernity? How modern ought France to be? Was France a revolutionary nation or not? Did France stand for a tradition of cultivated learning and a traditional and integral humanism, or was it dedicated to science and, in the achievement of beauty, an aesthetic of transgression? Was France the secular nation par excellence, or was it at heart Christian, even Catholic?

The answers to these questions in France since the Revolution had swung back and forth, and in recent decades had settled upon an unyielding commitment to ambiguity. The Revolution of 1848 drew inspiration both from the insurrectionary journées of the French Revolution and a Christian commitment to the least of these and the life of Jesus;¹ Napoleon III was an advocate of modern technology and industry, the practitioner of a conventional, accommodating piety, and yet by force of arms the defender of the Vatican under Pope Pius IX.

In only partial contrast to that partial piety, Auguste Comte’s “scientific” positivism had begun to exert considerable influence on French intellectual life, but Comte’s “religion of humanity” struck many of its sympathetic readers as too close to a substitute Catholicism, even as actual Catholicism had a vital ongoing presence in French life.

Within the world of letters, a reader of Charles Baudelaire’s great succès de scandale, Fleurs du mal—or of his The Painter of Modern Life—could be forgiven for thinking that modern art must transgress to say something powerful to its audience. Yet France was also an international capital of traditional artistic techniques and methods, in the visual arts and in monumental architecture, most notably at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. That in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the dominant philosophical movement in the French educational system was Victor Cousin’s revealingly named “eclecticism”—itself freely drawing upon Immanuel Kant and German idealism, English and Scottish empiricism, and Cartesian philosophy—expresses a willingness in speculative thought to affirm a combination of philosophies rather than to develop a rigorously unified philosophy, or in Cousin’s case, to open the way to a genuine pluralism of diverse and distinct commitments.

Many intellectuals whose careers took shape in the final decades of the nineteenth century believed that under the Third Republic the long-established tendency toward carefully maintained tensions, tactful mixtures, and studied ambiguity about France and the precise nature of its modernity had to end. Émile Durkheim said that the “shock” of defeat

was the stimulant that reanimated men’s minds. The country found itself with the same question as at the beginning of the century. The organization, or rather the façade, which constituted the imperial system [under Napoleon III] had just collapsed; it was a matter of remaking another, or rather of making one which could survive other than by administrative artifice—that is, one which was truly grounded in the nature of things. For that, it was necessary to know what this nature of things was: consequently, the urgent need for a science of societies made itself felt without delay.²

The stakes were high, not just for the survival of the French Republic, but also for the fundamental moral order and social cohesion of modern societies. Among others, Durkheim saw his age as one where, as he wrote in 1893, “our faith has been troubled; tradition has lost its sway; individual judgment has been freed from collective judgment … if this be so, the remedy for the evil is not to seek to resuscitate traditions and practices which, no longer responding to present conditions of society, can only live an artificial, false existence … [yet] it is not a new philosophical system that will relieve the situation.”³

Durkheim believed that France required nothing less than a science that could in turn lead to a new ethic: for “our first duty is to make a moral code for ourselves.”⁴

Many French intellectuals and political figures sought not only a new scientific and moral foundation for French education, but also a new emphasis upon learning of immediate economic and political utility. As Raoul Frary put it in The Question of Latin from 1885, in a democratic age when France faced a formidable military enemy across the Rhine, “The cult of the beautiful must not make us neglect the culture of the useful.”⁵

Where utility and a new ethic was sought, a very broad educational, political, and ethical inheritance was assumed to be no longer plausible. With that assumption, a desire for distinction and novel thinking entered even elementary moral education.

To trace this change, it is instructive to read two letters by two different ministers of education. Some forty years before the declaration of the Third Republic, in 1833, the education minister at the time, François Guizot, wrote a letter to teachers to accompany an educational reform law. In it, he takes for granted that these teachers will accept a given moral order distinct from but compatible with sacred order, founded upon “virtue and honor” that includes “faith in Providence, the sanctity of duty, submission to paternal authority, the respect due to the laws, to the prince, and to the rights of all.”⁶

In 1883, the republican minister Jules Ferry wrote a similar and yet very different letter to teachers. He thinks it necessary to say that there must be a kind of moral instruction “common and indispensable to all,” drawn from the common ethical teachings of parents.⁷ But, he tells the teachers, in fact “some say” that “your task of moral education is impossible to accomplish,” while others say “it is banal and unimportant.” He finds himself compelled to warn them away from the cliffs of theory, philosophy, and dissertations, and to encourage them to share simple and edifying moral precepts and examples proven by the broadest experience.⁸

Guizot writes an appeal to politically divided instructors who nonetheless cohere around a loose, eclectic moral and cultural consensus. Half a century later, Ferry writes to teachers who are tempted to introduce thoroughgoing forms of moral critique and innovation in primary and secondary schools, or simply to be indifferent to moral instruction as such.

Ferry himself had no doubt what ethics and politics he wished not just for France but for the world. He dedicated himself to secular education and a new French Empire; he told the socialist leader Jean Jaurès that his ultimate purpose was “to organize humanity without God and without a King.”⁹ Republican leaders and authors repeatedly sounded similar themes and pressed for far-reaching reforms of French education, weakening its connections to classical languages, Christianity, and humanism in favor of a secular education connected to science, modern commerce, and industry.

Not surprisingly, for Ferry and for others, the positivist Comte was a great influence; a fellow leader in the early Third Republic, Léon Gambetta called him “the most powerful thinker of the century.”¹⁰ In the same period, the positivist politician, lexicographer, and intellectual Émile Littré affirmed his support for a positivist science of humanity and society but renounced Comte’s “religion of humanity.”¹¹ As universities oriented toward specialized research flourished, in accordance with a pruned positivism in the manner of Littré, a statue to Comte was dedicated in 1903 in the Place de la Sorbonne.¹²

It was certainly not the case that Comte stood as some singularly exalted prophet of the new order of things, in some alleged “positivist age.” Durkheim among others was well aware of Comte’s limitations, including his assumption that history would end neatly with his “positivist” stage.¹³ In fact, two other French thinkers loomed very large in the consciousness of those who aspired to create a new settlement for France and, in time, for other nations and peoples..

The first of them was Ernest Renan, the scholar, ex-seminarian, and celebrated author of La Vie de Jésus. In the same year that Comte’s statue appeared, the town of Tréguier dedicated a statue to its native son Renan, with the novelist Anatole France as the featured speaker.¹⁴ In 1890, his The Future of Science had at last been published (Renan had written it in 1848, more than forty years earlier). For Péguy himself, Renan was a crucial figure; while Péguy expressed some early sympathy for him,¹⁵ he later became a sharp critic of Renan’s ambitions. For him, Renan was nothing less than “the leader, the boss, and the saint” of the “intellectual party” in modern universities, this party devoted to “modern superstitions” and the “superstition of science.”¹⁶ The Future of Science constituted the “very book of institution for the modern world.”¹⁷

For Renan, science is the source of all real, nonimaginary knowledge: “Without science he [‘Man’] loves only chimeras.”¹⁸ Renan claims that the childhood of humanity—especially its ancient past, but for Renan, really any past prior to a modern skeptical, critical turn associated with the eighteenth century—is most powerfully expressed in its myths and religions, which can be beautiful and charming. But the modern scholar understands that they are not true, except as a portrait of humanity’s own projected desires and quandaries in a purely human, historical time. Hence “the beauty of Beatrice belongs to Dante, not to Beatrice, the beauty of Krishna belongs to the Indian genius, and not to Krishna, the beauty of Jesus and Mary belongs to Christianity, and not to Jesus and Mary.”¹⁹

If until the eighteenth century it was “caprice” and “passion” that ruled the world, now “science contains the future of humanity.” In fact it will “organize humanity scientifically,” and with humanity, God.²⁰ “Science is therefore a religion … science alone can resolve for man the eternal problems for which his nature imperiously demands the solution.”²¹

With its advance, modern criticism will “destroy every system of belief marred by supernaturalism.”²² While religious orthodoxy “petrifies” thought, science is open to constant progress. Words like “decadence” have no meaning, and absolute meaning is found only in reason and science.²³

For Renan, the triumph of this “reason” will be accomplished neither by demonstrable proofs, nor by philosophical argument, nor by polemic in the manner of Voltaire, but by a kind of persistent indirection and suggestive rhetoric. He says,

[When] I want to initiate young minds into philosophy, I start by any subject, I speak in a certain sense and in a certain tone, I take little care that they retain the positive information to which I am exposing them, I do not even try to prove it to them; but I insinuate a spirit, a manner, a turn; then, when I have injected [inoculé] them with this new sense, I leave them to look for what they please, and to build their temple following their own style. Here begins individual originality which it is necessary to respect supremely … there is a religious way to take hold of things, and that way is mine.²⁴

If Renan’s manner of “scientific” instruction is allusive, gestural, and insinuating, the actual progress of science and learning will be secured by the bourgeois, rigorously specialized scholar. Renan has little use for aristocratic dilettantes, and for an unlettered “people.” They can be prepared for enlightened participation in public life and learning in some indeterminate future.²⁵ The meticulous scholar is a champion of “critique,” ready for the work of analysis²⁶ rather than creation. Critique can be applied anywhere and is often superior to its object, which may be a piece of culture without claims to artistic greatness: “a frivolous novel” or “a madrigal.”²⁷ Critique is quite pointedly not a form of rigorous philosophical skepticism but rather a continual examination of prior assumptions, toward a “more pure and advanced truth.”²⁸

Instead of seeking some creative synthesis—or an unfortunate declaration of first principles—the modern research scholar, Renan continues, should devote himself to a well-defined subdiscipline (it becomes “a little world where he encloses himself stubbornly and scornfully”) and produce specialized mono graphs within it, even as he shares his work with other scholars to produce further knowledge.²⁹ The scholar should not hope that his work will outlast him. He should be pleased to have, with a life’s labors, added “an obscure stone … without name” to the great “temple” of secular knowledge.³⁰

For Renan, the numberless monographs of modern scholars will be of inexpressibly greater use than a metaphysical statement about the nature of the world or being. The nineteenth century, claims Renan, is not a century of metaphysics, and certainly not of religion. In a circular thought, he believes that the historical moment demands critique, above all through historical and philological scholarship; they are the replacements for both religion and metaphysics, and should be.³¹

As the foregoing suggests, the argument of The Future of Science is not always remorseless in its rigor. After announcing that belief in God is implausible and discredited, Renan offers a conclusion that recalls the loss of his own faith with only a measure of irony, and plays with the possibility that he may be wrong to reject it.³² He claims there is nothing special, unique, or true (or, if one prefers, “true”) about classical civilization but then defends its contested prominence in education on linguistic and cultural grounds.³³ He writes boldly as a herald of the age of reason, but renounces speculative, philosophical reason, and commends insinuation as the most effective pedagogy for the emerging scientific age. Perhaps above all, despite the declared absence of metaphysics in modern thought, he also announces the very metaphysics to which he and other modern scholars have pledged and should pledge themselves. They work “to substitute the category of becoming for that of being, the conception of the relative for the conception of the absolute, movement for immobility.”³⁴

For Renan, the destination of this scientific world was entirely open; it would not serve or fulfill the human but perhaps transcend it entirely. The progress of knowledge might lead to a future in which humanity itself is superseded—in which “humanity will have disappeared”³⁵—a prospect he proposes with equanimity.

In addition to Comte and Renan, there was a final, more distant philosophical forebear who appears with considerable regularity among the writers, scholars, and publicists of these new settlements of culture, society, and politics in the Third Republic: René Descartes. For Durkheim, readers must remember that France is “the country of Descartes.” Hence France must, Durkheim says, “bring things back to definite notions.”³⁶ The search for a science of society must “systematically discard all preconceptions,” as Descartes and Francis Bacon did.³⁷ Descartes’ physiological speculations were still respectfully (if critically) addressed in articles about neuroscience as well. In January 1897, an academic journal usually dedicated to scholarship—the Revue de métaphysique et de morale—went further, and published a poem by Sully Prudhomme entitled “Descartes.” There the philosopher appears as hero, his “glory forever without rival / Tomorrow we will build, with all your writings / With the hands of France a triumphal arch / Through which the august army of minds will pass!”³⁸

Descartes, Comte, and Renan served as points of reference and inspiration for those seeking to build a new, self-consciously modern and scientific order in France in the late nineteenth century—but why? What possibilities did they hold within their work that other thinkers did not, and what was drawn from each of them?

For various scientific and social-scientific theorists of the Third Republic, Descartes in particular offered the assumed example of a radical break with a discredited past. Whatever intellectual historians might make of that dubious assessment, it clearly inspired Durkheim and others. To cast away assumptions in search of secure and certain knowledge was assumed to be an enterprise of immediate relevance.

Still more than in Descartes’ Discourse on Method, the break with the past would now be collective in form. Its rhetorical affect was that of meticulous exactitude in accord with consensual disciplinary boundaries, not bold and distinctive metaphysical argument, and it would vindicate its authority through the work of specialized scholars. For Descartes, Renan, and Comte alike, advances in the sciences would come through the accumulation of many individual studies, leading to a magnificent edifice—what Descartes called his rebuilt “house” of secure and certain knowledge, above all of medicine, that would be built while he lived provisionally by a more conventional morality,³⁹ and what Renan (as we have seen) called a “temple.” At the turn of the last century, some sought a science of society, others a physcial science of human being as such, as in psychomotor research and the workings of the brain. But for all their differences, the social and intellectual form for the acquisition and accumulation of knowledge—immanent, collaborative, credentialed, specialized—was assumed.

Yet Descartes was not quite the thinker to vindicate that change in every particular. Comte provided the means of exit from philosophy into the social sciences, above all via sociology. Durkheim remarked, in a Kantian turn of phrase, that sociology began under the “tutelage” of philosophy,⁴⁰ and historically, it was Comte who offered the path from that tutelage to a discipline that could in turn master philosophy. Durkheim certainly believed that sociology would be required to renew or even refound philosophy: “Nowadays it is universally agreed that philosophy, unless it relies upon the positive sciences, can only be a form of literature.”⁴¹ As for ethics, “it is social science that takes up the problems that up to now belonged exclusively to philosophical ethics.”⁴²

Similarly, through Renan, many writers, scholars, and theorists could find an expansive account of what science was and how it could best assure its progress. The days of Cartesian argument against radical skepticism, first principles, and metaphysics should serve as inspiration for precisely no one. In the “scientific” world Renan saw coming into being, one would simply assume that individual human agency counted for very little, that the idiom and methods of the modern bourgeois scholar were the best or at least the most lucid possible expressions of human understanding, that becoming and the relative were real, and that being and the absolute were superfluous or illusory.

These thinkers gave overlapping ambitions for many of the new intellectual and cultural settlements of the Third Republic. France—and ultimately the world—were ready to be organized by communities of scientists natural and social, and they were ready to enter into the domains of society, culture, humanities, the mind, the soul, and God.

These projects were loosely allied with one another but by no means the same, in method, cultural and political views, and in discrete professional ambitions. Durkheim was not a materialist, as many contemporary partisans of a fully naturalist account of the mind were; Marcel Mauss and others were socialists, Durkheim was not. Durkheimian sociology confidently asserted its authority over social facts without historical or geographic boundaries; but Durkheim also believed the nation-state to be a modern communal form especially well suited to address the problem of anomie, while Renan predicted the eventual attenuation of that same nation-state.

Amid all these differences, however, these thinkers tended to share certain assumptions. Important among them was an abiding sense that conscious experience, free will, and individual agency were of little import. As Durkheim put it on behalf of his own disciplinary commitments, “Individuals are much more a product of common life than they are determinants of it” and “the duties of the individual towards himself, are, in reality, duties toward society.”⁴³ For “everybody knows how full the consciousness is of illusions … every causal relationship is unconscious.”⁴⁴

Furthermore, in their scientific anti-pathos, they no longer spoke freely and rigorously of love, as so many of their freethinking predecessors had. It is this change that makes most sense of Péguy’s remark in 1913, “The world has changed less since the time of Jesus Christ than it has in the last thirty years,”⁴⁵ and that, “The free thinkers of that time were more Christian than our devout Christians of today.”⁴⁶ He perceived a sea change in modern secular notions of human fulfillment.

While different forms of modern skepticism and progress generally denied the possibility of divine revelation, through the middle decades of the nineteenth century, many Deist and atheist philosophies settled their ethics and philosophical anthropology upon assumptions drawn from Christianity, above all by affirming the ultimate importance of an at once personal and universal love, or charity.

At the very origins of modern philosophy and philosophies of science, the motives for modern ambitions are said to be charitable ones. The demands of Christian charity explicitly justify Bacon’s scientific investigation and call to complete the conquest of nature,⁴⁷ just as it is the goodness of God and the care of the body he has created in love that justify Descartes’s claim to acquire medical knowledge above all, since the health of the body is the “first of all human goods” and further, it is “greatly sinning” against the supreme commandment (that is, love of God and one’s neighbor) not to occupy ourselves with medical research.⁴⁸

During the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, even a vehemently anti-Christian materialist like Julien Offroy de La Mettrie carefully keeps open the possibility of personal immortality in L’Homme machine, as well as emphasizing the possibility of a natural reconciliation with one’s enemies through love and virtue.⁴⁹ In a different way, Kant argues that practical reason demands that we believe in an ultimate reconciliation of happiness and justice in a world where death is no more, guaranteed by God, in an infinite movement toward the Highest Good.⁵⁰ When Kant does reflect (with a certain playfulness upon a forbidding theme) upon the possibility of an eschatological end to history, it is possible, he says, only “should Christianity ever reach the point where it ceases to be worthy of love.”⁵¹

The Deist or atheistic desire to relate to a positive infinity, in the sense of a historical horizon that represents the complete fulfillment of human aspiration through benevolence to and love for others, reaches its apogee in the most eminent atheists of the mid-nineteenth century: Auguste Comte and Ludwig Feuerbach.

Feuerbach declares the advent of a new “religion of humanity,” whose acceptance would inaugurate an age of fully human flourishing, in which justice, creativity, and science would dwell as one upon a newly sacred earth, tended by an ultimately unified humanity freed from its ancient alienations, united by love.⁵² Similarly, Comte foretold an era of humanist priests attending his own religion of humanity, in which true knowledge of human beings and society would beget universal well-being and fraternal happiness founded upon “altruism,”⁵³ to use Comte’s neologism.

By the end of the nineteenth century these ordering temporal and humanistic unities—which sustained non-theological but exalted notions of positive, even infinite human flourishing through universal love—were decomposing in philosophy and the more exacting, elite forms of political and cultural criticism. It is not only that Émile Littré could defend Comtean positivism while repudiating Comte’s religion of humanity as an embarrassment. In his notebooks, Nietzsche mocked Feuerbach and others as thinkers who “reeked of theologians and Church Fathers,”⁵⁴ and elsewhere exhorted his contemporaries not to hold timidly to Christian morality and anthropology without faith in Christ, but to repudiate root and branch Christian notions of self, goodness, people, and purpose as well as Christian faith (even if one built upon their ruins, that is, upon the inward turn of will to power accomplished by Judaism and Christianity).

In Durkheimian social science, religion was not the gradual entry to some more “total” or “real” universal, even mystical or exalted love, nor did it require comprehensive study of the ongoing history of religion as a whole, as Benjamin Constant, Hegel, or Feuerbach did. It became an object of fascination for prominent sociologists through a meticulous, detached, putatively objective inquiry that methodically disassembled its most “primitive” forms and rejected mysticism.

Early sociology often occupied itself with religion; Durkheim remarked in a memorable turn of phrase that in the mid-1890s, the study of religion “was a revelation for me.”⁵⁵ For Durkheim and others, religion disclosed its essence in its most primitive states: it was first and finally a social, entirely immanent phenomenon, that was not on its way to some more perfect and expansive love. For the sociologist, there is no relation of love toward one’s subject, or toward the purpose of the enquiry: the same sort of objective method could be applied to locate elemental religious structures elsewhere, properly cleansed of their particularity, and allow them to be understood as general, social facts and forms. Social facts were common things—and things for Durkheim were “any object of knowledge which is not naturally penetrable by the understanding.” They had to be studied as such in a rigorous science of societies, which would rigorously dispense with all “preconceptions.”⁵⁶ This science would “avoid” all “mysticism,” with “constant care,” and even those sociologists ambivalent about the more robust Durkheimian assertions did not waver upon this question.⁵⁷

It is his study of religion among especially “primitive” peoples—the Aborigines of Australia—that (Durkheim believed) permitted him direct and objective access to the original essence of religious life, that is, as a social phenomenon dealing with the sacred and the profane. For Durkheim, “whenever we try to explain something human viewed at a particular point in time—whether a religious belief, a moral law, a legal precept, an aesthetic practice, or an economic system—we must begin by returning to its simplest and most primitive form.”⁵⁸

Whatever the possibilities of primitive religion, the organic, messy contingency of narrative history, with room for meaningful agency and free will, was for many sociologists no less suspect than mysticism or universal love. For example, the sociologist François Simiand (who worked closely with Durkheim) took to the pages of La Revue de synthèse historique in 1903 to criticize the practice of history precisely for its failure to consign events and personal agency to its own disciplinary past. For Simiand, historians should seek regularity and “if possible, laws” along with other “positive sciences.”⁵⁹ Durkheim and other social scientists agreed.⁶⁰

In his essay “Historical Method and Social Science,” Simiand instructs historians that, along with sociologists, we are to “clear our minds of these metaphysical relics” that lead them to assume that there are material facts but not social facts.⁶¹ The realm of the objective is that which is “independent of our individual spontaneity,”⁶² and thus social life can be considered objectively. All sciences use abstractions, but Simiand believes that “fortunate abstractions”⁶³ are those that lead to the establishing of regularities and ultimate laws—of natural science or social life. The notion of individual agency as a cause of change was naïve, and itself a late historical product of “social development”; the historian should be willing to apply an assertive skepticism (it seems almost an assumption of error) to the testimony of individuals in history trying to explain the reasons for their own actions. That is to introduce “explanation by final causes,” which is an “illusion” not acceptable in the “positive sciences.”⁶⁴

For Simiand, it may be true that particular historical events or the decisions of individual human beings in time can be unpredictable—and in that sense contingent—but Simiand believes that true history must not tarry over them. He scolds the historian Charles Seignobos for arguing that the political history of France—for example, in an account of the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848—had anything to do with the work of “obscure republicans” and “democratic and socialist agitators,” who, according to Simiand, are present in different nations and historical epochs without revolutions.⁶⁵ The scientific causes were the “social disintegration accomplished by the [French] Revolution” as well as, with the Restoration and July Monarchy, “the maladaptation of reestablished governments to new social tendencies, [and] a collective disposition of minds.”⁶⁶ While history cannot ignore events entirely, it must seek to obtain “stable and definite relations” independent of events,⁶⁷ and thus laws independent of temporal specificity or historical singularity.

In his ambitions for a comprehensively scientific account of the human in history and beyond, Simiand did not speak only for sociology. By the early years of the twentieth century, a scientific turn had left few disciplines untouched, from political economy to the humanities to psychology.

Léon Walras—who would later be lauded or condemned as one of the founders of efficient market economics—wrote a book attempting to reconcile his sympathies with liberalism and socialism⁶⁸—his Studies of Social Economy—in 1896. Among his goals was to abandon the moral and qualitative arguments of traditional political economy in favor of a rigorously demonstrable “scientific truth”⁶⁹ of economics.

Others would make even more expansive claims, as a “scientific” ethos spread to the humanities themselves. Gustave Lanson wrote that for reasons of intellectual honesty and national security alike, the scientific “esprit” should “predominate everywhere, even in literary education,” since “science alone imparts the taste and the sense of the truth.” Following a similar logic, historians like Charles Langlois and Seignobos rejected any role for aesthetics in history: a kind of denuded knowledge was the only purpose of their work.⁷⁰ Lanson went further: “The true modern humanities are the sciences.”⁷¹ In fact, Lanson said he had “no difficulty” in acknowledging that in contrast to those who work upon “the construction of laws and generalizations” above, those who “do literary history” properly “work in the basement of science.”⁷²

The natural sciences themselves—if one inexplicably persists in the puerile hope that the true humanities are the humanities—flourished in the New Sorbonne and the research institutes of Paris. In particular, they promised imminent breakthroughs in the study of human beings as scientific objects. For example, a breathless article by the biologist Alfred Dastre of the Sorbonne, entitled simply “The Nervous System,” was published in April 1900 in the widely circulated and intellectually prestigious journal Revue des deux mondes. Dastre declared, “One day, we can hope to know the laws that regulate the material states of the brain, the relations that exist among them, their sequences and their reciprocal influences. They will be the same laws, the same relations, the same sequences that will allow us to go to the other side of the ditch, into the psychological domain, to illuminate the functioning of the soul.”⁷³

According to Dastre, a host of findings from scholars around the world would take modern science to this seemingly ultimate materialism, in which the soul would be understood above all as matter in motion. Some excitedly reported results could seem rather modest: an uncharitable observer might conclude that the notion that frogs whose brains are removed have a sort of consciousness in their spinal fluid⁷⁴ and that degrees of consciousness ascend to voluntary movement, stands at some considerable remove from a materialist eschaton. But Dastre assures his readers that “no other scientific field is more investigated,” with “so many publications and papers.” One “could fill libraries with the ones that appear each year.”⁷⁵

Yet Dastre not only declared his confidence that materialism would only grow in explanatory power. He also, somewhat more discreetly, acknowledged his assumption that questions of volition and consciousness must be bracketed out of the field altogether (though the field was itself fascinated by consciousness). Dastre acknowledged this undemonstrable commitment. He wanted “to avoid entering into philosophical controversies” by limiting the discipline to physical motions and objects.⁷⁶

Similar projects that aspired to collapse mind into brain enjoyed considerable prominence in the early decades of the Third Republic. In 1881, Théodule Ribot published The Diseases of Memory,⁷⁷ in which memory was assumed to be an entirely physiological phenomenon: by 1906, it had gone through eighteen editions,⁷⁸ and by that time Ribot had long been a professor at the Collège de France. Other research in Paris—following some of the work done in Germany by Wilhelm Wundt (whose own positions were relatively nuanced)—became fascinated by the possibilities of physiology as a way to investigate the brain, itself the focus of an international community of researchers.⁷⁹ Consciousness was not a reliable or especially interesting witness to experience; rather, the trained scientist could disclose what personal, qualitative experience had long hidden.

Throughout higher education and educated commentary, the prestige of natural and social science, and their imitative forms in the humanities, had undergone a meteoric ascent between 1870 and 1900. Altering Péguy’s term slightly, one could speak of an intellectual coalition—less unified than Péguy’s own term “party,” more cohesive than a tendency—that had achieved great prominence at the start of the new century.

For all their differences, the members of this coalition conceived time in unwaveringly linear terms, and history as material, moral, social, and above all scientific progress along that temporal line. It inclined strongly to reject both religious revelation and “high” metaphysics as incredible artifacts of a more primitive past (“really” belonging to earlier points along that temporal line), and believed that accompanied by a scholarly affect of meticulous bourgeois sobriety—adopted by trained specialists engaged in the Cartesian crowd-sourcing of knowledge—a generally positivist notion of science would lead humanity forward. Freedom was not to be found in an affirmation of free will (now understood to be not only inflected or constrained but severely restrained or even determined entirely by either material or social laws); rather, it was to be found through a cumulative critique and repudiation of the past and its “illusions” in favor of brain studies and neurology, social fact, mathematically driven economics, history, and literature as scientific disciplines, and so on.

By pursuing these ends, both national and global society would embark upon a course of perpetual reformation, more just, more rational, and faithful to fact. New laws of nature and society—variously of history, technology, and money—would be the fundaments of novel and uncompromisingly modern orders of things. In particular, with rare exceptions, the thought and culture of all ages prior to the late eighteenth century now serve primarily as raw materials for academic industries of scholarship and science, rather than seeking out the work of a more distant history as a dialogical partner in understanding. In Renan’s radical forms of a “future science,” if human beings must eventually become raw materials in turn—for a science that conquers human nature as the last frontier in the conquest of nature—so be it.

Beyond their stated intellectual ambitions, the members of this broad intellectual coalition held very considerable influence over academic appointments, as well as ambitious reforms of French education, from primary school through university. This was especially true for Durkheim and his students.

The social sciences in particular began to institutionalize themselves in French education in the thirty years before the Great War. The theology faculty in French universities was abolished in 1885.⁸⁰ The next year, the École Pratique des Hautes Études founded a “fifth section” dedicated to the study of “religious sciences,” in which sociologists associated with Durkheim were soon appointed in significant numbers.⁸¹ The fifth section assumed the unique legitimacy of modern research methods and applied them to explain a past in modern social-scientific terms; in this sense, it was altogether different from a theology faculty, which tries to interpret an exemplary or revelatory past, through which the present can better understand itself.

Sociology positions had been almost nonexistent in French universities, and students trained by Durkheim and his circle began to occupy posts in “law, education, linguistics, religion,” and other disciplines, as well as teaching philosophy in lycées.⁸² This led many advocates of other disciplines to conclude that Durkheim and his circle were academic conquistadores, building their movement at the expense of their own.⁸³ The fact that there was a formal requirement for the president of the French Republic to approve academic appointments⁸⁴ gave the rapid ascent of Durkheimian sociology a political cast.

The ascent of Durkheim and his allies was particularly striking: by 1902, Durkheim was appointed to the chair for the science of education at the Sorbonne, and eventually his course on pedagogy was required for any student seeking certification as a teacher at the Sorbonne or the École Normale Supérieure.⁸⁵ Along with his friendships with national educational administrators like Paul Lapie, it was difficult not to perceive Durkheimian sociology as quite deliberately on the march: a sympathetic scholar like Steven Lukes concludes that Durkheim’s “overriding project was an imperialistic sociological penetration and co-ordination of the various social sciences.”⁸⁶

Since 1897, French universities had been free to create degrees in various disciplines, including social sciences, at a time when universities in Paris and elsewhere also began to reward specialized research rather than knowledge of the humanities and teaching.⁸⁷ It was a period for founding new professional associations and journals, most famously the Année sociologique, which began publication in 1898, intended for both scholars and educated general readers. The task of the journal demanded a grasp of developments in international scholarship, especially work published in English, Italian, and German in addition to French.⁸⁸

These changes were associated with the emergence of the New Sorbonne, dedicated to research and often to positivist methods of research and, in his tory, to what was thought to be a meticulously objective account of historical context. For example, the literary historian Gustave Lanson’s work on Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques in 1909 was a pure instance of its kind; Lanson claimed to want only to present “a commentary from sources, nothing more.”⁸⁹ In this way of thinking, the idea of historical differences made legible by referring any portion of it to a continuous human experience or “nature” was assumed to be implausible, unscholarly, and inclined toward a naïve aestheticism.⁹⁰

Alongside these changes in higher education, reforms in 1902 created a sequence for secondary education that allowed students to avoid Greek and Latin entirely, in favor of a heavier emphasis on the sciences and to some extent modern languages as well. In terms strongly reminiscent of Frary’s exhortation seventeen years earlier, the instructions accompanying the decree made it clear that these changes would give to any student “the instruction most useful in view of his future career.”⁹¹

This intellectual coalition constituted the disciplinary mainstream in diverse and prominent academic fields, it changed the shape of secondary education, and it enjoyed some considerable purchase and prestige in the more ambitious reaches of generalist intellectual journalism. Of course it was not the only sort of vibrant intellectual enterprise—or orienting constellation for experiences of culture, art, and life—available in an age of neo-Kantians, socialists, and anarchists, not to mention symbolists, impressionists and postimpressionists, naturalists, and many others. But this intellectual coalition enjoyed an unmistakable civic and institutional pride of place in the Third Republic—and to some considerable degree in an emerging international scholarly community as well. Others took their bearings from it, in appreciation or protest.

Reaction

The intellectual coalition found an adversary in an intensely political reaction. It self-consciously opposed the commitments of that coalition, as well as its association with the nascent egalitarian, positivist rhetoric of the Third Republic. It was directed against the intellectuals associated with that republic, and it did not hesitate to indulge in vitriol. “Agathon” (the collective pseudonym of the young Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde, both of them admirers of Charles Maurras) referred to Durkheim’s “intellectual despotism” over the academic life of the Sorbonne.⁹²

Much of reaction was in fact devoted to expansive condemnations; with them came a rejection of universalism in favor of an exclusive and sometimes integral nationalism. The front page of the right-wing, anti-Semitic newspaper La Libre parole (Free Speech), founded in 1892, carried the motto “France for the French.”⁹³ In a campaign speech for the Chamber of Deputies in 1898, the author Maurice Barrès declared that France no longer needed “the Jew, the foreigner, the cosmopolitan”; the “foreigner, like a parasite, poisons us.” Whatever new energy France requires, “it will find in itself,” from its own “poorest [and] most downtrodden.”⁹⁴

In particular, reaction found a common anti-universalist cause in a pervasive anti-Semitism.⁹⁵ It allowed right-wing movements with exiguous political appeal to engage in demagoguery targeting a vulnerable minority,⁹⁶ it drew upon a still potent Christian anti-Judaism, and it created conditions in which every Jewish person who enjoyed some success in the new republic could be scapegoated, forced into the role of villainous archetype, representing everything about modernity that reactionaries disliked.

The rhetoric of anti-Semitic reaction was acidulous, and often inclined to scientific pretensions. For example, the putative Jewish “effect” on French life could be described by anti-Semites as analogous to the “breeding of microbes.”⁹⁷ Édouard Drumont’s La France juive—which sold over a hundred thousand copies within a year of its publication in 1886⁹⁸—included frankly racist ruminations, even though these were not systematic in the manner of the mid-century French racist Arthur de Gobineau or of twentieth-century racist “science.” Drumont claimed that the “Jewish conquest” was part of a transhistorical struggle between “Semites” and “Aryans,” a struggle that required not just ethnographic and psychological comparisons but “physiological” ones as well.⁹⁹ Drumont’s polemic careened from racism, to prolix reflection upon the allegedly baleful effects of Jews on French history (especially modern French history), to occasional moves in the direction of purported Christian grievances. Drumont variously implies and asserts that the Basque Ignatius of Loyola was a “pure Aryan,” that Jews inspired Luther and the Protestant Reformation, and that German Jews “organized” the notorious “Culturkampf” [sic] against German Catholics.¹⁰⁰

Anti-Semitism had a poisonous efflorescence with the great event of Péguy’s youth, the Dreyfus affair. A distinguished young officer in the French Army, Alfred Dreyfus, had been falsely accused of treason in 1894; his Judaism motivated and sustained the campaign to convict him, to manufacture forged evidence against him, and to send him into solitary confinement on Devil’s Island, where it was hoped he would quickly die. Many associated with the republican intellectual coalition eventually became convinced that Dreyfus was innocent and worked as “Dreyfusards” to secure his release and ultimate exoneration. In contrast to them, French reactionary movements—including Catholic political conservatism, in the form of newspapers like La Croix (The Cross)—disgorged a torrent of anti-Semitic writing to vilify and calumniate Dreyfus, and in fact all Jews. The careers of far-right anti-Semitic intellectuals like Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrès were energized by the affair.

If anti-Semitic politics was a shared base for French reaction in the Belle Époque, the theoretical justification for right-wing politics aspired to reach for wider and deeper accounts of history, culture, and politics, with a revealing relationship to the arts, to political economy, and to science.

In The Future of Intelligence (1905), for example, Maurras, founder of the influential and extreme right-wing Action Française, rejects all manner of practices and commitments associated with the Third Republic. He has no use for democracy, and anticipates its end.¹⁰¹ He turns to parody to denounce a “government of opinion” in contemporary France,¹⁰² as well as a general, softening decadence he associates with romanticism, descended from traditions and authors “of foreign origin” like the Swiss Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Madame de Staël.¹⁰³ Quoting a contemporary critic approvingly, he finds French literary culture in need of “national discipline.”¹⁰⁴

For Maurras, France has a culture of letters corrupted both by romanticism and by modern capitalism; the latter has control of both culture and government,¹⁰⁵ and force and interests in French society are no longer aligned with intelligence.¹⁰⁶ Yet an ongoing freedom of opinion is not the answer to this problem. Rather, there must be a concerted effort to take over some “citadel” of money and use capital against itself.¹⁰⁷ Hostile to freedom of opinion as an ideal, Maurras was also explicitly opposed to feminism, and he found in contemporary women poets the dangerous expression of a “feminized” culture.¹⁰⁸

Amid these denunciations, he lavished praise upon a thinker who was an “enemy of democracy” and “Protestantism,” and who opposed the “doctrines” of the French Revolution.¹⁰⁹

Yet here things become considerably more complicated: the thinker of these thoughts is Auguste Comte. The Future of Intelligence is Maurras and French reactionary politics at its most theoretically ambitious, and in its pages Maurras bestows praise upon Comte at almost every opportunity, as liberally as many of his contemporary “progressive” antagonists in universities and letters alike. At the outset of the book, Maurras declares that it is “the genius of Auguste Comte” that “instituted the magnificent rule” known by “the name of Positivism.”¹¹⁰ There is “no name that one must pronounce with a more lively gratitude.”¹¹¹ For Comte sought a “science of societies”¹¹² and saw that the future must include the integrative, even supreme role of this science—sociology. He also understood that, in Comte’s own words, glowingly quoted by Maurras, “man must be more and more subordinated to humanity” (which Maurras interprets as individual submission to particular collectives). There is indeed progress, but as Comte said, “Progress is the development of order.”¹¹³

In a limited but surprising way, Maurras agrees with many of his adversaries in the preponderant intellectual coalition. For him as much as for Renan and Durkheim, the future is scientific, and social science is the key to realizing the possibilities of that future. Time, and with it history, is inexorably and progressively linear. Maurras quotes Comte in a manner that, absent the identifying source, would not have incurred the opposition of a sociologist like Simiand. There is no “freedom of conscience” in astronomy or physics, because there we have scientific principles established by “competent men.” It is different in politics because the old principles are gone, and new ones have not yet been secured.¹¹⁴ But Maurras, still quoting Comte, agrees that it is science that will find the principles of a new order and “reorganize society.”¹¹⁵

Of course, the Maurrassian vision is distinct: Maurras seeks a polity without elections, in which those who rule designate their own successors.¹¹⁶ Religion plays a prominent role, even without faith in God, in which humanity itself, in Comtean fashion, becomes an object of divine reverence.¹¹⁷ The past is indeed a yoke upon the present, but a “noble” one,¹¹⁸ integrated into the science of the future. Maurras, unlike someone like Littré, thinks that the late Comte was quite right to move in the direction of an allegedly scientific religion.

Maurras offers a reading of Comte in order to propose a future broadly “authorized” by Comte; many in the intellectual coalition warmed to the same task but emphasized a certain series of questions and methods extrapolated from Comte, rather than his discrete ambitions for an applied sociology instantiated in cultural and spiritual life. Their differences move amid many more affinities and homologies than one would assume. It is a disagreement about what precisely a truly scientific, truly modern future—drawn from and inspired by an inexorable sociological positivism—demands.

This should in no way be mistaken for the historically facile and morally irresponsible claim that in response to the immediate moral questions of their own time, right-wing reaction and the advocates of immanent becoming at the turn of the last century were the same. Among other things, the unifying importance of anti-Semitism among the acolytes of reaction is an enormous moral difference between the two groups, as is the clearly stronger commitment to due process among reaction’s opponents. Upon questions of method and argument, there are other distinctions: Maurras wrote belles-lettres, a genre of inquiry and reflection that Durkheim, for example, had detested from his student days. But for all that, it is essential to understand that on questions of science, sociology, and time, the work of Maurras and, say, Renan, Durkheim, and Simiand participated in shared, profound, and eminently debatable philosophical and historical assumptions.

What is still more remarkable is that this Comtean, sociological fascination, spreading its wings to cast its shadow across the political and cultural spectrum, became in that very moment the target of penetrating criticism. Furthermore, this critique of the “received” positivist account of science—of flat, linear time, of cumulative scientific progress in the formulation of demonstrable laws, of science as methodically secure and perpetually, progressively liberating itself from contamination by the archaic, the subjective, the uncertain and the imprecise, intended to make a science of society and an ethics for modernity to replace what had been definitively superseded—did not arrive only in the form of artistic protests by Montmartre bohemians, prompted by absinthe-infused dreams, laboring épater le bourgeois. It came from within the labor and reflection of science itself—and at the very highest levels.

Science Questioning Science; Philosophy Unbowed

In 1898, the mathematician and philosopher Gaston Milhaud published an article in the Revue de Métaphysique et de morale, entitled “La Science rationelle.” It expresses the unmistakable brio of a confident contrarian. Milhaud repeatedly emphasizes how science depends upon the given, including temporal givens. For example, we assume the notion of “succession in time” as when thunder follows lightning; we do not establish them in each instance.¹¹⁹ We cannot make a precise comparison of “consecutive duration,” nor can we know what “series of circumstances” would be required for perfect identities of temporal measurement.¹²⁰ (This is equally true in the twenty-first century: even with satellites and the Global Positioning System, time is a consensus among different time measurements, for “not all labs calculate their clock data exactly the same way.” In truth, “the algorithm” now used to calculate exact time requires “individual mathematical artistry” that gives an “exact” Universal Coordinated Time, about a month later, in the form of a newsletter.)¹²¹

Then there are those nontemporal elements that, “constructed,” are often “quite close to the given.”¹²² Nonspecialists assume that the planets move in a smooth ellipse around the sun, for example, but that depends upon the points used to chart a planet’s trajectory. We must acknowledge “with astronomers that the immobility of the sun is still only a fiction, and that, in sum, the movement of the planets as we represent it today is always a relative movement.”¹²³ Similar ambiguities surround the use of central concepts in physics, like “the proportionality of force to acceleration.”¹²⁴

Scientific instruments are assumed to endow measurement with perfect exactitude, but in actual experiments, instruments must be accompanied by “a host of corrections,” for “temperature, atmospheric pressure, air density, etc.”¹²⁵ There are theories devoted to standard formulae for correction, but absolute precision exists neither in the instruments themselves nor in the rules for their adjustment. Even the most rigorous experiments rely upon a mass of assumptions, postulates, and instruments that are all being tested in the experiment, rather than the test being confined to a single isolated variable or series of variables. Many different accounts of the same scientific observations can be given.¹²⁶ Given all these realities, the “postulates, concepts, [and] the constructions that we have indicated are indispensable to the understanding of these [scientific] laws” would “also well deserve the name of chimeras, if this word was reserved for all that is not directly verifiable.”¹²⁷

Milhaud awakens his readers from a Cartesian dream of demonstrable certitude, reconfigured by Comtean positivism and its descendants. Yet he calls upon a phrase in Comte’s own writing to undo what Milhaud called “the exaggerated promises of positivism,” since Comte once acknowledged that hypotheses are not necessarily a faithful, neutral representation of the real, and are chosen for their “advantages.”¹²⁸ Hence Milhaud does not argue for thoroughgoing skepticism about all knowledge, but he insists that science must recognize the “active intervention” and “creative intervention of the mind” in scientific research and experiment.¹²⁹ Scientists must accept imprecision and uncertainty as they work—and that as part of that work, their own creative powers are indispensable and cannot be relegated to some earlier stage of scientific inquiry. In this account of scientific rationality, science can legitimately approach “other forms of thought”—in particular, those with an “aesthetic character.”¹³⁰ In this way, Milhaud claims for physics an aesthetic attunement that Lanson, Seignobos, and others had sought to banish from the humanities themselves.

Milhaud’s account of science finding inspiration in individual creativity and aesthetics is not easily reconciled with the assumptions about “science” found in the work of Simiand, Lanson, Mauss, Durkheim, Maurras, and countless others within the republic’s intellectual coalition—or their reactionary enemies. Nonetheless, Milhaud was a philosopher, and, until 1909, a provincial one. When the renowned mathematician and physicist Henri Poincaré made distinct but congruent arguments, many unsettling possibilities entered broadly educated conversation, in France and beyond.

Around 1890, Poincaré’s mathematical forays into the application of differential equations to celestial motions involving three objects exerting a gravitational attraction (for example, an asteroid in relation to the sun, the moon, and the earth) led him to a surprising conclusion: stable orbits for, say, an asteroid were only mathematically probable, not certain. Space did not appear to obey the order and regularity that Poincaré had expected,¹³¹ a conclusion that quickly led him to similar conclusions about time.

In August 1900, Poincaré went further, claiming at a conference that “there is no absolute space, and we can only conceive of relative motion … there is no absolute time. When we say that two periods are equal, the statement has no meaning, and can only acquire a meaning by a convention.”¹³² Here, Poincaré in 1900 began to approach the theoretical innovations of Einstein. Whatever the precise extent of his prescience, that Poincaré found time to be a convention rather than an absolute had some troubling implications. What would become of the confident, at least broadly positivist metaphysical naturalism that gave many educated people the sense that a received materialism or a science of society, working in a commonsense time and space, was self-evident?

Taking his argument further in his popular Science and Hypothesis (1902), Poincaré repeatedly turned to the ways in which the fundamental assumptions of mathematical inquiry into space could be changed. He gave particular attention to the non-Euclidean geometry associated with Nikolai Lobachevsky, in which, setting aside a long-accepted axiom of Euclid, there can be more than one line drawn through a point B that will be parallel to line A, when point B is not on line A.¹³³ Drawing from the mathematical contributions of Bernhard Riemann, Poincaré goes on to show how our embodied experience gives us our given notion of space: in another world, with two-dimensional beings of circular shape living on a sphere, an arc would be the shortest distance between two points, and “in a word their geometry will be spherical geometry.”¹³⁴

In a neo-Kantian turn of phrase, Poincaré claimed that those who thought scientific reasoning gave access to things in themselves (that is, a kind of absolute and uniquely valid account of reality) were “naïve dogmatists,” since the immense power of science was predicated on its ability to make suppositions only about the relations among things.¹³⁵

Raising questions associated with the humanities as well as the sciences, Poincaré was also at particular pains to observe that the scientific emphasis on repetition (and with it, experimental confirmation) over time for the confirmation of hypotheses simply did not work as a way of inquiring about history.

For Poincaré, history deals necessarily with the unique and unrepeatable event rather than replicable experiments. Hence a secure science of historical development à la Comte or Simiand was impossible. As Poincaré puts it, moving from science to the world of Victorian letters, “Carlyle wrote somewhere something like this: ‘Only the fact matters. John Lackland passed by here: here there is something admirable, here is a reality for which I would give all the theories in the world.’” Poincaré adds, “That is the language of the historian. The Physicist would say rather, ‘John Lackland passed by here: it’s all the same to me, since he won’t pass by again.’”¹³⁶

Like Milhaud and Poincaré, the theoretical physicist Pierre Duhem also argued against Cartesian, Comtean, and Renanian notions, most notably in his Physical Theory: Its Aim and Structure. Duhem said that “a physics experiment is the precise observation of a group of phenomena, accompanied by the interpretation of these phenomena; this interpretation substitutes for the concrete data actually collected by observation abstract and symbolic representations that correspond to them by virtue of the theories of physics assumed by the observer.”¹³⁷

For Duhem, scientists must take into account the limits of observation and measurement. Mathematics may be exact, but neither human perception nor the scientific apparatus and instruments that assist that perception can be exact. Hence “the results of a physics experiment are only approximate.”¹³⁸ These conclusions naturally lead to a revision of scientific certainty in Duhem: as he puts it, “The goal of all theory in physics is the representation of experimental laws; the words truth, certitude have, in relation to such a theory, only one meaning: they express the agreement between the conclusions of the theory and the rules established by the observers.”¹³⁹

Certainly Poincaré, Duhem, and Milhaud were distinct thinkers: for example, Poincaré was careful to create a tiered protest against positivist accounts of science, arguing against Duhem that some hypotheses are, as Anastasios Brenner has said, “more conventional than others.”¹⁴⁰ Furthermore, Duhem, Milhaud, and Poincaré were not saying that all science is unreliable or a radically constructed fiction. They were saying that scientific work and experiment participates in a multiplicity of realities and an expansive plenitude of variables and assumptions. Our scientific knowledge is integrally connected to our embodied being and environment (as Poincaré observed with his notional spherical beings), and—especially for Milhaud—our aesthetic sense as well. Working with diverse theoretical constructions, embodied experience and aesthetic sense, reason can be both creative and strikingly plural in its accounting for all the scientific data upon different questions (the questions themselves being cooperative work involving creativity). Furthermore, unique, unrepeatable historical events are simply not amenable to the creation of immutable “laws,” which often are more mutable than advertised anyway, or at least dependent upon more assumptions and variables than is generally acknowledged.

In this way, Milhaud, Poincaré, and Duhem made several contiguous arguments about the construction of scientific knowledge, and attacked the notions of scientific certitude and objectivity within the natural sciences—notions that social scientists had assumed were “grounded” or endowed with “secure foundations” and could be straightforwardly transposed from the natural to the human sciences, from sciences of society to those of individual consciousness.

Péguy knew this work of critical reflection upon science and its methods well: he was an admirer (and near neighbor) of Henri Poincaré,¹⁴¹ as well as a reader of what he called Duhem’s “admirable work.”¹⁴² He knew that challenges to positivist assumptions popular with many of his contemporaries were not necessarily part of some “antiscientific” political reaction (a reaction that, as we have seen, could be frankly positivist in inspiration), but often came from scholars deeply engaged in new and demanding scientific and mathematical investigations.

From his student days, Péguy found his way to other sources of dissent, away from the regnant assumptions of the intellectual coalition. These included the neo-Kantian philosophy of Émile Boutroux, who had long been a prominent figure in French academic life. Among his earlier students was Durkheim, who credited Boutroux with teaching him about the nonreducibility of different forms of knowledge (not surprisingly for Durkheim, he came to this realization with some assistance from his own reading of Comte).¹⁴³ Boutroux’s own work went in a different direction: he presented another critique of an all-encompassing science of human being, in part through a course he offered on Pascal, which the young Péguy attended in the late 1890s.

In his Pascal, published in 1900, readers can find the Pascal taught by Boutroux. Péguy’s teacher gave sustained and positive emphasis to the ways in which, for Pascal, scientific knowledge, on the one hand, and moral and religious knowledge, on the other, operate in different domains of consciousness. In his account of Pascal’s thought, Boutroux argues that for Pascal, scientific knowledge belongs to reasoning from the senses, and morality and theology to an expansive faculty of memory.¹⁴⁴ Inquiry into matter in motion can dispense with precedent and provide its own ground through experiment to acquire knowledge cumulatively; but this form of knowledge cannot be applied to memory, just as the authority of memory has no place in the adjudication of scientific evidence.¹⁴⁵

According to Boutroux, to confuse these orders of understanding is either to make moral and religious knowledge impossible, or to stunt scientific discovery by deference to what stands outside its animating imperatives. Ultimately—and most important for Boutroux—our moral responsibilities cannot be justified scientifically or simply by disinterested reason; it is charity, or love, that uniquely fulfills human nature and directs human action toward the good.¹⁴⁶

This emphasis on love—from a neo-Kantian philosopher—was part of a deeper and broader current in French thought in the Belle Époque, very different from the positivist-inflected projects of Durkheim, Ribot, or Maurras.

The philosopher Félix Ravaisson, who found an appreciative reader in Péguy’s mentor Henri Bergson,¹⁴⁷ enjoyed, like Boutroux, a similarly intense affinity with Pascal, and was no less attracted to Pascal’s insistence upon a rigorous respect for different orders of knowledge. Pascal is unique, in Ravaisson’s view, since “no other philosopher, in fact, has had a sharper awareness of the difference of the two orders of things and faculties whose contrast corresponds to that of matter and spirit.”¹⁴⁸ Ravaisson appreciatively observes the metaphysical interval that Pascal asserts belongs to knowledge as such, including scientific knowledge: for Pascal, it is “the heart” that gives us our sense of time, space, and number, and these are the nondemonstrable preconditions of scientific knowledge rather than their “proven” and “secure” foundation. Ravaisson is grateful that Pascal “reduces the very knowledge of first principles to the heart.”¹⁴⁹ Furthermore, Pascal, along with Plato, argued that “everywhere in the universe the inferior is an image of the superior.”¹⁵⁰

Yet for Ravaission, this vertical ascent is a declaration of allegiance not to hierarchies of persons or peoples but to the exalted possibilities of being human, against those who would make a metaphysical desert and call it peace. Ravaisson’s Philosophical Testament was quite forthright about the contemporary effort, “much in favor today,” to become fascinated by the neurophysiological research that Dastre promoted, including “reflex movements, which would be absolutely machine-like responses of bodies fixed to impressions and solicitations from the outside … in such a way, everything in this world, except perhaps purely intellectual determinations, would be subject to an irresistible fatality, and there would be no point in invoking the mind.”¹⁵¹

The ambitions of this movement involved nothing less than the death of philosophy: “The idea that philosophy, bound within ever-narrower limits, will disappear one day is becoming a majority view.”¹⁵² Ravaisson, like Boutroux, found the distinction between intellect and matter indispensable, but this independence found its end above all in service of a transcendence without equal, for “the will … [has] its most intimate root in what in us has the most force and efficacy, namely love.”¹⁵³ For “we are in the world for no other reason than to love, Pascal said.”¹⁵⁴

Read within the rhetorical pathos of meticulous, secure scholarly distances, these enquiries into metaphysics and charity can easily seem rather like ungrounded Schwärmerei (passionate, undiscerning enthusiasm). But for Ravaisson, these questions are open: the secure, objective ground his opponents assume for their own views is not in evidence. In a clear allusion to Poincaré and others, he says, “The particular sciences prove with more or less convincing force, according to the nature of their objects: but of them it is true to say that they rest on hypotheses, or as the mathematicians often say today, on unprovable conventions.”¹⁵⁵

Bergson and the Freedom of Time

Above all, Péguy and many others owed the opening of their intellectual horizons to Henri Bergson. For Péguy, Bergson’s philosophy had liberated his generation, or as he put it, Bergson exposed a “universal laziness”¹⁵⁶ and “broke our chains.”¹⁵⁷

At first blush, Bergson’s philosophy appears to be another modern brief for the exaltation of becoming over being—and in some ways it is. But Bergson was not Renan or his diverse legatees. First, Bergson saw a vital absolute working through history, rather than upholding a purely immanent, linear historical becoming discoverable by the inexorable progress of “science.” As he put it in an important letter to the American philosopher Horace Kallen, “It is the ‘eternity’ of ancient philosophers that I have attempted to bring down from the heights where it resided in order to relate it to the duration, that is, to something that swells, grows richer, and builds itself up indefinitely.”¹⁵⁸

Through this—at least in this stage in his thought—immanent “eternity,” Bergson introduced into late modern philosophy a Neoplatonic strain totally foreign to Renan, Comte, Durkheim, and many others. It is in a certain sense cumulative but not “progressive”; rather, it integrated a continuous multiplicity of the past into the present. It was one dimension of Bergson’s effort to transform the understanding of time among his students, including Péguy and Proust. By 1900, when Bergson held a chair at the Collège de France, his lectures had become public events for many intellectually curious Parisians; he became an internationally famous philosopher and a regular, friendly correspondent with luminaries in France, Europe, and beyond, including William James.

For Bergson, the decisive error in human experience was to confuse time with space. The two are distinct, even though intellect cannot resist conflating them, and in fact this conflation is a practical necessity, drawn from the demands of action.

Bergson’s reading of evolutionary science took the opposite direction from the one taken by many of Bergson’s contemporaries (and ours). It was not that Charles Darwin had shown that a “disenchanted” rationality, devoted to the documentation of processes in linear time, could reliably disclose natural laws divorced from metaphysical speculation. If one took evolutionary theory seriously, it meant that our intellects evolved for practical purposes, involving our own well-being and survival—in particular in order to act upon our environment. To this end, time would be transposed and plotted, measured, divided, and assembled as space. In practical terms, these operations were entirely legitimate. But they did not come to be in order to afford us an encounter with the multiple plenitude of reality, and they did not give anything but a very incomplete and often distorted access to that plenitude.

Many well-established movements in European intellectual life that identified themselves as scientific were hence not really the terminus of “sober reason” at last “set free” from theology, putatively archaic effusions about love, and, above all, “metaphysics.” They were actually the latest iteration of a traditional, even primal misunderstanding of time, connected to the imperatives of practical action, which received its first philosophical expressions with Parmenides and Zeno of Elea.¹⁵⁹ For Bergson, “the elimination of time is the habitual, normal, banal act of our understanding.”¹⁶⁰

As long as the relation between objects remained the same in space, for the making of scientific laws, it would not matter if time drastically accelerated or slowed; it was as if time were not real at all. An encounter with time as time—that is, as durée, or duration—required a concentrated effort of intuition.

Bergsonian durée is an authentic temporality that does not involve measurement, juxtaposition, or stark separations. Rather, time is continuous and indivisible; it is necessarily mobile, and with it come both unity and qualitative (rather than quantitative) multiplicity, neither of which is prior to the other.¹⁶¹

Durée is difficult for Bergson to define, since spatial metaphors are irresistible to minds that have evolved to seek the fixed, homogenous, and manipulable (but not vital). He compares durée to the experience of hearing a melody: the melody can be experienced or understood neither as individual notes, nor as a succession of notes regardless of their temporal duration; its power and its reality as a melody depend upon its duration as a whole, its inescapably temporal flow, in which the past must be distinct yet continuous with the present for the melody to act upon us.¹⁶²

Qualitative multiplicity in particular manifests itself in duration, as our experiences—and the different motifs, timbre, and tones of those experiences—relate to one another simultaneously, prompted by the same perception in the same moment, and are yet distinct.

Our emotions, for example, may be prompted by a certain kind of event—say, falling in love—simultaneously toward gratitude, joy, confusion, a sense of awakening, sadness at the departure of different real goods preceding the life changes aborning, thrilled and nervous anticipation of those same changes, doubt, a sense of peace and acceptance oriented variously toward the past, present, and future. They are mingled, simultaneous, distinguishable and yet never entirely distinct from one another. They can harmonize into a fullness of greater sympathy for others, a sense of lucid happiness for what is given to us through life with all its fragility, that integrates many different dimensions of this multiplicity. But none of these can be simply “reduced” to the other or presented as “nothing more” than material-chemical quantities in the brain, or as neatly separable states, or states that causally determine one another in a temporal sequence.

For Bergson, to apply an often mathematical, homogenizing instrumental rationality to all experience—not just inert matter but living things as well, in a spatially reduced temporality—distorted the real and rendered it lifeless. Above all, it deprived human beings of their freedom. Furthermore, Bergson was convinced that a careful review of scientific evidence in contemporary neuroscience, biology, and other fields would not refute but substantiate his own arguments. This was the primary task of Matter and Memory, published in 1896, a book Péguy greatly admired (he was more reserved about Bergson’s later book, Creative Evolution).¹⁶³

For Bergson, both philosophical idealism and materialism had estranged mental life from the body, and endowed either matter or mind with miraculous powers. Either (for materialists) matter could somehow create consciousness and memory “corresponding” to “an independent reality,” or (for idealists) mind could somehow produce a “material world” that is “nothing but a synthesis of subjective and unextended states.” Ultimately, both doctrines assume “that our representation of the material universe is relative and subjective and that it has, so to speak, emerged from us, rather than that we have emerged from it.”¹⁶⁴

Bergson believes that previous “spiritualists” (roughly, antimaterialist philosophers) had turned matter into a “mysterious entity” that prevented them from refuting materialism. To do so, it must be understood that “there is one, and only one, method of refuting materialism: it is to show that matter is precisely that which it appears to be.”¹⁶⁵

That is, matter is really there, and through our nervous system we have access to the Kantian Ding an sich (thing in itself). Our ability to perceive “images” of the material world is connected to our nervous system and processed by our brain, always in connection to potential action. But materialism fails to explain consciousness, because consciousness is always suffused with memory, which constantly participates in perception but is not itself material. Bergson reviews the neurological literature being published in great quantities around him and concludes that it fails to uphold either Kantian arguments, or the materialism that had claimed that research as vindication. Rather, his own distinction between perception and memory finds experimental confirmation.

As Ribot himself acknowledged, perception is integrally connected to movement, hence the motor apparatus of one’s nervous system.¹⁶⁶ The research surrounding Ribot’s Law (about the patterns of memory loss in amnesiacs) shows that there is often a grammatical structure to the loss of word memory: proper names are the first to elude consciousness, followed by common nouns, and then verbs last of all. Bergson concludes that verbs are “precisely the words that a bodily effort might enable us to recapture when the function of language has all but escaped us.”¹⁶⁷ This suggests powerful connections among perception, memory and action, rather than some abstract idealist capacity of “representation” through, say, Kantian forms of intuition.

Bergson’s inquiry into other neurological research proves no less troubling for materialist explanations of consciousness. It does not appear that memories are localized in the brain (what is called cerebral localization—a claim received skeptically in critical accounts of contemporary trends in cognitive neuroscience as well).¹⁶⁸ In cases of aphasia (when one loses the ability to speak or understand speech), a “lost” noun can often be found by paraphrase, sometimes alighting on the noun itself. In other cases, a certain letter is lost—say, the letter F—but it is highly unlikely that such a precise incision into personal memory of the alphabet could be made without unconscious knowledge of that very letter and its exact place in countless words.¹⁶⁹ The “destruction” of memories is understood in closer alignment with evidence if it is understood not as a destruction of some part of the brain “in which memories congeal and accumulate” but rather as “a break in the continuous progress by which they actualize themselves.”¹⁷⁰

For Bergson, the brain has evolved to serve the needs of bodily action—those needs are “so many searchlights, which, directed upon the continuity of sensible qualities, single out in it distinct bodies.”¹⁷¹ Memory, however, retains a plenitude of experience; it finds itself slimmed and sharpened by the demands of possible action, but that immaterial plenitude remains.

At first, this suggests that Bergson has merely returned to older, rigidly dualist arguments, in which perception and the body work on one side and a remote, immaterial memory on the other. But Bergson turns to experiments by R. F. Müller and others to show that memory constantly participates in the instantaneity of the present rather than standing apart from it. For example, Bergson cites research establishing the fact that readers decipher words not “letter by letter” but through memory filling in what letters and phrases have followed from a similar prompt or pattern in the past.¹⁷² The immediate present is where memory and material perception constantly meet.

On the nature of the present, Bergson strikes notes that are characteristically attuned to both philosophy and contemporary scientific research. In the manner of Augustine in book XI of the Confessions, he writes that “when we think this present as going to be, it exists not yet, and when we think it as existing, it is already past.”¹⁷³ Yet he also observes that recent investigation has established that the smallest interval of a perceived present among human subjects is “.002 seconds.”¹⁷⁴ In such an instantaneity, there is no development of thought and no fulfilled intentional action, which always requires perception suffused with memory.

It is in this suffusion that body and soul are reconciled. The body is responsible for “directing memory toward the real and binding it to the present.” Memory is, through the combination of sensations and movements, “ever pressed forward into the tissue of events,” though as memory it remains “absolutely independent of matter.”¹⁷⁵ Memory is spirit, and can “unite with matter.” Idealism and materialism alike cannot think the “reciprocal influence” of mind and matter, and thus “sacrifice freedom.”¹⁷⁶ But for Bergson, once they are properly understood, we see “with memory, we are, in truth, in the domain of spirit,” and that our “past” is an indispensable part of our freedom. It is “that which acts no longer but which might act, and will act by inserting itself into a present sensation from which it borrows the vitality.”¹⁷⁷

Why has the unity of body and spirit not been obvious to us? Beyond philosophical errors, the shaping of the brain by the imperatives of security and control over our environment leads our minds to constantly posit “homogenous space.” If this space is immediately assumed to be the theater of all experience, it is because it allows us to be “masters.”¹⁷⁸

Once movement is turned over to space, it “abandons that solidarity of the present with the past which is its very essence.”¹⁷⁹ Yet when we escape the habitual assumption of homogenous space, we see that body and spirit meet temporally. There is always a certain durée in which memory participates, and hence we are able, with Bergson’s philosophy, to “compress within its narrowest limits the problem of the union of soul and body.”¹⁸⁰ (Though Bergson’s compression is not the same as a definitive resolution.) What is clear to Bergson is that the proposed solution on offer from many of his contemporaries does not hold: the collapse of conscious experience into material or sociological suppositions no longer appears as a bold extension of scientific reasoning but as the latest error in a long historical procession of errors designed to give human beings power rather than truth.

For Bergson, the intuitive knowledge of durée in turn relied upon a profound, participatory immersion in temporal mobility and flow (including but not limited to intuiting its presence in one’s self) that brought the intuitive mind in immediate and direct contact with reality and the multiplicity of things and states that participate in it.¹⁸¹ Durée afforded an encounter with something beyond the habitual or interested relation of the self to other selves, to society, to the world, and to itself.

Bergson argued that the self, drawing its life through durée and in memory, is constituted not as an object or discrete qualities or drives but as a mobile totality of its whole existence in time. As he put it in his first book, the Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, for Bergson the “fundamental self [moi]” can only be recovered by “vigorous analysis” in large part because “language cannot seize it without fixing the mobility of it.”¹⁸²

In Bergson’s account, the mind, like life itself, allows the present to express radical creativity from a real if discursively elusive multiplicity, a creativity whose profound continuities with the past are real but unforeseeable. According to the early Bergson, “Durée in all its purity is the form that the succession of our states of consciousness takes when our self lets itself live, when it abstains from establishing a separation between the present and anterior states.”¹⁸³ “A free act” is accomplished in such a state, when “the self alone will have been the author of it, since it will express the entire self … we are free when our acts emanate from our whole personality.”¹⁸⁴

In Matter and Memory, freedom is similarly manifest in moments where we live “with an intenser life” in which we, “creating acts of which the inner indetermination, spread over as large a multiplicity of the moments of matter as you please,” are able through memory to “pass the more easily through the meshes of necessity.”¹⁸⁵ Matter “repeats the past unceasingly” because it is subject to this necessity. But memory is “not a regression from the present to the past” but a “progression from the past to the present”: it is “spirit [that] borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom.”¹⁸⁶

In this way, freedom for Bergson is unpredictable, and is much more than the ability of the will to choose from different options.¹⁸⁷ Rather freedom is a kind of unifying integrity that draws upon the whole temporal reality of the self to express the new in surprising, sometimes even shocking continuity with the past, that expresses itself in and transforms the material world through the free meeting of matter and memory.

Bergson opened a spectrum of possibilities for his readers and his audiences radically distinct from those of both the intellectual coalition and of French reactionary politics. Evolution should lead us to question the “commonsense” habits of mind we bring to experience, since we understand them to be shaped by the imperatives of survival and control rather than the full expanse of reality. The Cartesian and popular-Comtean assumptions about “science” are not supported by actual scientific research, and the attempt to transpose these assumptions into “human sciences” is misbegotten and superficial. Determinism in particular is precisely what is vindicated neither by meticulous review of scientific literature nor by careful philosophical understanding. Properly understood, past and present, body and soul are integrated in our experience. Our freedom is temporally integrative and reconciles origins and originality; it is not finally transgressive and supersessionist.

Learning and Time

The philosophical differences we have explored logically entailed different positions within the white-hot debates about learning in the Belle Époque.

Specialized research had taken secure hold of the New Sorbonne in the Belle Époque. As we have seen, Lanson among many others praised the “faculties of specialists and scholars”¹⁸⁸ who were bringing the Third Republic’s educational system into a new century assumed to be ruled by objective methods drawn from science, particularly in its universities.

Bergson’s position was different. In 1882, Bergson gave a Prize Day speech at the lycée in Angers, where he then taught. While he argued that “the division of the disciplines is a natural thing” and its accomplishments in the arts and sciences demand “eternal gratitude,” he thought that it is “specialization [spécialité], that makes the scholar sullen.” For “in contact with the specialist, everything becomes dry and sterile.” Instead, we should remember it is animals who are specialized; “since the variety of abilities is that which distinguishes us, let us remain men.” Bergson ends the address with a warning against the peril of following specialization, et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas (“and for the sake of life lose the reasons for living”).¹⁸⁹

Bergson’s openness to nonspecialized inquiry remained a living possibility throughout the age. A leading socialist politician like Jean Jaurès could write a highly regarded multivolume history of the French Revolution,¹⁹⁰ and independent persons of letters like Salomon and Théodore Reinach could also make contributions to archaeology.¹⁹¹ For Bergson, nonspecialists often had a vitality and freshness of perspective that the professionally trained, bourgeois scholar often too quickly set aside.

Sometimes the dissenters from the broad intellectual coalition around the Sorbonne presented more pointed critiques of their opponents’ positions on education. Given his prominence as a mathematician and scientist—and as a graduate of the École Polytechnique—Henri Poincaré appeared to have little reason to involve himself in debates about liberal learning. But in fact, along with other members of the Académie Française, he joined the Ligue pour la culture française, in order to fight, in the words of the group’s manifesto, secondary education’s “corruption by the utilitarian and professional spirit.”¹⁹² Poincaré aligned himself firmly against Simiand, Durkheim, and other educational reformers—but for expressly scientific and mathematical reasons.

Poincaré wrote a brief for his concerns in his 1911 essay The Sciences and the Humanities. He argued that while an education in the humanities is not necessary for scientific achievement, in his experience it was extremely helpful. For Poincaré, the “spirit of analysis”¹⁹³ in, for example, the study of classical languages required a precision and mental agility that was very helpful for high-level mathematics, one that could be taught to children and adolescents in a way that high-level mathematics could not. For biologists, instruction in the development of words from different languages allowed for a morphological consciousness of reality useful for understanding the subtleties of biological development.¹⁹⁴ For Poincaré, the careful study of the liberal arts trained the student in conceptual dexterity—that is, moving concepts and ideas from one conceptual language to another. This dexterousness had a powerful relationship to scientific creativity.¹⁹⁵

As for Bergson, an education in the humanities was neither an act of dutiful reverence for the past nor an “objective” supersession of the past, but rather a living encounter with the past that opened new possibilities. In his speech “Good Sense and Classical Education” (delivered at the Sorbonne in 1895),¹⁹⁶ Bergson describes foreign tourists in Paris gathered “in front of our monuments and in our museums” reading guidebooks. He then asks the assembled students: “Absorbed in this reading, do they not sometimes seem to forget for its sake the beautiful things they had come to see? It is in this way that many of us travel through existence, eyes fixed on catchphrases [formules] that they read, neglecting to look at life.”¹⁹⁷

For Bergson, this “guidebook” approach to philosophy, literature, and history was disastrous, whether the guidebook consisted of novel or venerable formulae. Whatever its historical provenance, the knowledge of a single language or a single way of thinking (including “scientific” assumptions in a given discipline) created intellectual habits that made the infinite richness of reality a ready-made, easy-to-read—but dead—text. Such habits were lazy, very partial, and reductive—but once acquired, very difficult to break.

Bergson finds “precisely in classical education, before everything, an effort to break the ice of words and to find again beneath it the free flow of thought.”¹⁹⁸ He argues that foreign languages—especially ancient ones, with very different ways of “carving” the real—free us from “our conventions, our habits and our symbols,” all of which dull creativity and an interest in a living precision.¹⁹⁹ They require an intense effort to learn, and thus associate understanding with meticulous effort rather than the indiscriminate application of a few basic abstract ideas to the most diverse phenomena—those “ready-made” and “dead” ideas of which he is always skeptical.²⁰⁰ Among them, he writes, is a “serious error, which consists in reasoning about society as if [one were reasoning] about nature, to discover there I know not what mechanism of ineluctable laws, to in the end misunderstand the efficacy of good will [bon vouloir] and the creative force of freedom.”²⁰¹

For Bergson, a classical education “attaches no value to knowledge passively received.” It “dishabituates one from a certain excessively abstract matter of judging.”²⁰² For Bergson, classical education has an almost Aristotelian capacity to adjudicate between different kinds of judgment, allowing a discriminating bon sens to determine the sort of reasoning and degree of precision appropriate to it. It requires an attentive, free mind, analytically at work and yet also engaged by feeling, including and above all “the passion for justice.”²⁰³

Bergson’s emphasis on the unity of learning and feeling through classical education—and significantly, a passion for justice—was what had worried Thomas Hobbes earlier in the modern age: an emphasis on classical and sacred learning was likely to produce a desire for heroism, goodness, or sanctity that would lead to civil conflict and pervasive instability. But for Bergson, a classical liberal-arts humanism was an education in what Bergson would elsewhere call qualitative multiplicity, compatible with flourishing living and thinking—and, as he mentions with reference to France, “tolerance.”²⁰⁴ A hard-earned sense of the real (that is, not “ready-made ideas”) joined to “generous passions” is not a threat to peaceful coexistence but in fact its spring.²⁰⁵

It is anything but a coincidence that the opposite sides in the debate about educational reform were also on opposite sides of contemporary debates about the nature of time, including historical time. Whatever the possibilities offered by the study of ultimate origins, Durkheim, Simiand, Mauss, Lavisse, and others who favored “modernizing” educational reforms were happy to think of time as a linear, homogenous kind of space in which theoretical, “scientific” explanations account for events and change, in which the past was neatly differentiated from the present, which bore responsibility for the ultimate stop on the temporal line—“the” future.

Those unpersuaded by proposals to “rationalize” education and to make it “relevant” thought much more carefully about time. Henri Poincaré’s argument that there was no such thing as absolute time, and that history could never be a science, left the question of “relevance” far more open than many of his opponents assumed it to be. For a linear account of history and supersessionist progressivism, on the one hand, and backward-looking reaction, on the other, Bergsonian durée posed distinct but related problems. If our experience of time has been gravely damaged by confusing it with space, Bergson was more than willing to have deep, continuous, and distinct linguistic and temporal origins open up our durée, the fullness of time, and with it what he called “the free flow of thought,” in pursuit of a freedom that integrated different pasts with a present instantaneity. It could offer different possibilities for diverse futures. In various ways, Poincaré and Bergson—and Péguy—understood that different accounts of time produced different kinds of history, education, and culture.

Telling the Truth in Time

For all of Péguy’s acknowledged debts to scholars like Duhem, Poincaré, and above all Bergson—Péguy was a singular composite of philosopher, poet, and journalist. His was very different work from that of established institutional figures. Why did he devote his life to the Cahiers?

To understand Péguy’s ambition takes some mental effort for an educated person of the twenty-first century—it requires entering into the variety and intensities of temporal experience in the early twentieth century. Our experiences of time, or at least the ones most easily discussed in our culture, are often resolutely linear and intensely contextual historically (often subdivided by decades as one approaches the present).

This was not the case in the two decades before the outbreak of the Great War. As the possibilities, experience, and understanding of time underwent rapid change in the Belle Époque, many of the characteristic ways in which human experience had created a distinctively modern order in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries were beginning to be the subject of intense questioning among educated persons and intellectual subcultures. What was learning for, and to what end? How should we know the world, and ourselves? What was the relation between historically rooted communities and universal humanity? Were notions of personal or communal honor an integral part of being human, or archaic excrescences? What place was there for universal love, or for religious belief in an allegedly “mature” modern culture? In short, what did it mean to be modern, or antimodern, and was it possible to be something else altogether? The future appeared to many to be unsettled and therefore open to decisive human thinking and action.

It is not that Péguy would simply “choose” this or that position in the cultural, political, and philosophical worlds in which he worked; rather, he would try—in Bergsonian fashion—to integrate freely, to synthesize, to create, to draw upon distant and different pasts in order to open up futures different from the ones expected by the eminences of immanent becoming and from reactionaries. That attempt would in turn open up possibilities that others could fashion in their present toward still other futures.

Something indispensable can be grasped of that historical moment if we attend to a single thinker in Paris—one of the most energetic and vital points on earth for so many changes associated with the early twentieth century—engaged simultaneously with changes in culture, literature, daily politics, theology, and philosophy. As a way of thinking through and with these possibilities, Péguy would come to insist upon founding his own journal to give form to his thought.

In France, an ambition of this kind was made especially plausible by social and material circumstances at the turn of the last century. In the Belle Époque, the vast majority of the French population could read, an unprecedented situation in the history of the country. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, a profusion of newspapers became available in Paris and elswhere, as advances in printing and typography (and the Third Republic’s relaxed censorship and lower taxes on newspapers and journals) made possible the daily purchase of newspapers of diverse opinion even by very modestly compensated laborers.²⁰⁶ Paris in particular was soon flooded with newspapers: by the autumn of 1910, more than sixty daily newspapers were published in Paris, a startling increase from just thirty years before.²⁰⁷

Yet the hope that Péguy would live out through a journal had long been a venerable dream in France (and in Europe: the Viennese Karl Kraus was Péguy’s contemporary). For example, In Sentimental Education, Gustave Flaubert’s great historical novel of the 1848 Revolution, the friends of the protagonist hope to found a journal that would allow them to speak the truth hidden by established powers and secure for France a fully just and free regime. The dream foundered quickly because it had to work within the corruption of the present to tell the truth about the corruption of the present. In Flaubert, the hoped-for journal required a great deal of money, and honest wealth was not easy to find; what is more, those who dreamed of the journal were unwilling to make the daily sacrifices necessary to tell the truth. The time and treasure the journal would require to be something more than a dream were spent upon the social whirl of Paris and would-be lovers, squandered in the pursuit of more selfish ambitions, until the merest hope of the truth-telling journal was dead. At the end of the novel, the protagonist and his best friend are adrift in middle age, fondly reminiscing about an abortive early adolescent visit to a brothel.²⁰⁸

The dream remained in the 1897 novel The Uprooted by Maurice Barrès. There the protagonists leave their native Nancy (in Lorraine), and several of them ultimately work for a journal in Paris that they believe can transform France and realize their ambitions, fittingly bearing the title La Vraie République. Their ambitions meet with disaster as politics, love affairs, and persistent poverty lead several of them astray, even into crime. Amid Barrès’s anti-Semitism and denunciations of both Kant and Parisian corruption (in contrast to the “purity” of a traditionally “rooted” life in Lorraine), the “true” republican newspaper can barely be mentioned without references to the sums of money required to keep it going.²⁰⁹ But in a novel aspiring to express the dilemmas of a generation—written almost thirty years after Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, and set a half a century later—it says a great deal that the hope that through a journal the young intellectual could tell the truth to the present was as alive, and as futile, as ever.

For Flaubert and Barrès alike, the dream cannot be made real. The gravitational tug of greed, status-seeking, and egotistic passions will leave it inert or transformed into the opposite of what it was intended to be, so that in the end the dream is forsaken or one surrenders it, providing contemporaries instead with the expedient and reassuring falsehoods so many of them yearn to hear. Flaubert and Barrès leave room for little more than the notion that a true journal might be made real through a constantly renewed renunciation; a renunciation that for a young person would be without drama and color, and would offer instead only a life of grinding, relentless work.

Yet to give a different account of the present, without seeking to flatter ready-made ideologies, intellectual cultures, and coalitions, and to learn properly not just from Bergson and others but to integrate the fullness of Péguy’s own experience, and that of France, and that of philosophical argument, political reflection, and Christianity—these forms of integrative argument and creativity would inspire Péguy’s own journal. The Cahiers would be “inserted” (as Péguy would put it) into a unique historical moment, but with resonance in diverse pasts, and for different futures. It would be more than an intellectual proposition or a professional project. By his own principles, it would require him to wager his life.