10 THE ENLIGHTENMENT–FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT– FRENCH REVOLUTION PARADIGM
Between Political Myth and Epistemological Impasse
I� ����� �� ������� the Enlightenment and create the epistemological premises or new directions o research, it is not enough to try and go critically beyond the Centaur based on a more up-toup-to-date date deense o historical knowledge that stresses the importance o the historian’s craf and methodology. On the contrary, one must concentrate on the rules to be ollowed i one is to respect the logic o context, and on the numerous interactions with the various mechanisms that determine the meaning o events.1 It is also necessary to reflect on the act that, while a historian’s ideas derive entirely rom history, a cultural phenomenon “can never be understood apart rom its moment in time,” 2 and that no point o view is ever neutral. Hence the necessity to avoid both the undamental danger o anachronism (omnia (omnia tempus habent ), ), when one is oering a critical interpretation interpretation o the relationship relationship between past and present, present, and the undisputed dominance o tradition. One must instead constantly scrutinize the validity o current research hypotheses, hypotheses, and especially call into question the extraordinary longevity o a historiographical paradigm that has dominated a large part o the international international debate, and continues to do so to this day. I mean the paradigm that rests on the link between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, whereby whereby the ormer is studied first and oremost oremost as the origin and genesis o the latter, thus denying the historical world o the Enlightenment its own autonomous and specific identity. Te first thing that must be said is that very little has been done so ar to question the obviously teleological nature o this research hypothesis that seeks to understand the past rom the point o view o uture developments—even developments—even
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though that teleological nature has always been evident to all. Te strength o the paradigm has not been diminished in any way, even though first Droysen and then many others consistently denounced in their handbooks the myth or “demon” o origins, as Bloch called it;3 that is to say, the dangers that are inherent in a disregard or the logic o context. It was almost as i the French Revolution was not subject to the same rules that apply to other undamental historiographical historiographical issues. In act, there were ar more complicated causes than a simple and neutral, albeit persuasive, research hypothesis behind the persistence o this paradigm, which soon became an immovable historiographical tradition and then a oundational element in the historical consciousness o the Western Western world, ollowing a process that has yet to be studied in all its details. At stake were extremely sensitive questions, relevant to the memory and national identity o republican France, the political myth o the demise o the An the Ancien cien Régime, Régime, or the political, social and ideological roots o virtually all the most important projects o emancipation produced by modern Europe as a republican and democratic entity. Indeed, there is no doubt that, as a momentous event that radically changed the whole history o Europe, the French Revolution immediately became a kind o powerul magnet capable o radically redefining a beore and afer, afer, and o transorming historical figures and events. In this context, the view o the Enlightenment as a specific and independent historical phenomenon, in its original cosmopolitan and European dimension, and nothing to do with the Revolution, did not stand a chance. It all began with the so-called so- called panth panthéonisa éonisation tion o Voltaire and Rousseau, in July 1791 and October 1794, respectively. In terms o propaganda and o political and ideological struggle both b oth within and outside France, France, those grand popuhes as lar ceremonies orever established the philosop the philosophes as athers o the French Revolution in the eyes o the t he whole world. Despite differing opinions opinions o everything hes to else, reactionaries and revolutionaries revolutionaries alike agreed in linking the philosop the philosophes the genesis o the Revolution.4 In the ollowing years, at every anniversary anniversary and through a variety o ceremonies and unveilings o monuments, they were made the object o obsessive declarations o perpetual hatred or sincere gratitude (depending on the point o view) in ront o huge crowds.5 With the Tird Republic, the Enlightenment-Revolution Enlightenment-Revolution paradigm became a sort o grand ideology o identity, supported by a militant Dreyusard historiography o State, and an essential component o the new civic religion o the secular republican republican homeland.6 In act, ever since the end o the eighteenth century, the progressive progressive diffusion and consolidation o the political and ideological use o the paradigm, with its attendant attendant pre-judgments and acritical acr itical deenses, was supported by the a series o prestigious and important historiographical
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studies. In the course o the nineteenth century every important French figure wrote on this, within and outside the academic world. Te Lumières, Lumières , seen as the breeding ground o the Revolution, became the object o justly amous analyses by Madame de Staël, Constant, Chateaubriand, Comte, Désiré Nizard, and Sainte-Beuve, Sainte-Beuve, down to Villemain’s research and the debate between Ferdinand Brunetière and Gustave Lanson.7 One went rom paranoid investigations o the conspiratorial and Masonic origins o the Revolutio Re volution, n, which Barruel B arruel athes,, to aine’s tributed to a direct intervention on the part o the hated philosop hated philosophes sophisticated sophisticated analysis o the ideological origins o an abstract and unhistorical esprit classique, classique, which had been embodied by Descartes, Voltaire Voltaire and Rousseau beore descending into its tragic but inevitable epilogue with Robespierre and the Reign o error. Tere ollowed Mornet’s analysis o intellectual origins, and finally, finally, on the occasion o ccasion o the bicentenary o the Revolution in 1989, Roger Chartier’s study o its cultural origins.8 One cannot but be amazed at the staying power o this paradigm, which was subject to metamorphoses but certainly never exhausted in its substance. Tis has led Roger Chartier to speculate, rather tongue-intongue-in-cheek, cheek, that the historiographical discourse on the Enlightenment might actually have been nothing more than an invention on the part o the Revolution itsel as it sought to create a noble origin or itsel. On a more serious note, however, however, Chartier also a lso acknowledged the existence o a problem: Whether we like it or not, then, we have to work within the terrain staked out by Mornet (and beore him by the revolutionaries themselves) and consider that no approach to a historical problem is possible outside the historiographical discourse that constructed it. Te question posed by [Mornet’s] Les Origines intellectuelles de la Révolution rançaise— rançaise—the question o the relationship o ideas ormulated and propagated by the Enlightenment to the occurrence o the Revolution Re volution— —will serve us as a set o problems that we both accept and place aside, that we receive as a legacy and continue to subject to doubt. 9
In act, beore definitely abandoning that road, we should perhaps evaluate more closely the pros and cons o that paradigm, and highlight both its appreciable—and appreciable—and established—historiographical established—historiographical results and its now obvious limitations. For instance, the paradigm has been useully applied by eminent scholars such as Robert Darnton to the study o the mechanism that leads to the ormation o a revolutionary mentality, or to gain a better understanding o such a crucially important event event as the rise o modern orms o “intellectual power” in the Western world, starting rom the role played by sel-conscious sel-conscious minorities in historical processes. 10 Tis hypothesis was first ormulated in 1790, in Edmund Burke’s amous Reflections on the Revolution in France, France, which within a ew years became a
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bestseller throughout Europe. Tis was an angry but intelligent denunciation o the philosophes philosophes,, assigning them direct responsibility or the overthrow o the old political and religious order through their conscious manipulation o a nascent public opinion. Burke saw this historical phenomenon as being limited to the French capital, and in particular to the specific social dimension o the philosophical party created by figures such as Voltaire and Diderot. Tose French “political men o Letters” had become a dangerously arrogant community, nity, thanks above all to the unortunate u nortunate cultural policies o control put in place by France’s absolute monarchy, which transormed the sixteenth-century sixteenth-century “Republic o Letters” with its essentially private nature into a belligerent Ancien Régime corporation that was independent and enjoyed public recognition via the system o academies and the workings o the State privileges and pensions originally instituted by Richelieu.11 Since then, the analysis o the ideas and actions o the party o philosop o philosophes hes,, headed by Voltaire and Rousseau, was a constant in all historiographical research on this matter. According to this theory, an intellectual movement made up o men o letters and philosophers at first arose alongside political society, and then took over, over, creating horrendous revolutionary allout with its abstract quality and its entirely literary mentality. Variously ormulated, this view is ound in Guizot, in ocqueville, in aine, and in many other writers. As conflicts grew more serious, this criminalization cr iminalization o intellectual power increasingly increasingly undermined historical truth. For instance, seen through the distorting lens o the political myth o the great Revolution and o the unleashing o contrasting ideological passions, the Enlightenment Enlightenment went rom rom being a great European phenomenon o a markedly cosmopolitan and reorming character to being a specifically French national event. Tis careless though understandable generalization turned the undoubted primacy o the Parisian Parisian scene in eighteentheighteenth-century century European culture into the natural basis or an overall Frankification o the Enlightenment. Finally, the tragic collateral effects o the instrumental use o the Enlightenment by the armies o the Grande Nation, Nation, determined to use their weapons in order to “export” the republic, democracy, and the values promulgated by Rousseau and Voltaire, urther overshadowed the importance o eighteenth-century eighteenth-century Enlightenment circles in places such as Naples, Milan, Madrid, Berlin, Saint Petersburg, Vienna, London, and Edinburgh. Afer Napoleon and his violent imperial wars o conquest, in every corner o Europe (rom Jovelanos’s Spain to Beccaria’s Italy, Lessing’s Germany, and Radishchev’s Russia), all ollowers o the glorious Enlightenment tradition were considered nothing more than slaves to the French invaders, who were antipatriotic and, at best, extraneous to the nascent cultural and political nationalism.
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Among the most significant consequences o the Revolution, and o the various orms that the paradigm took on in the course o time, we should also mention the beginning o a parallel process o “nationalization” o the Enlightenment at the historiographical level. Tis was done mostly with “good” intentions, with the aim o saeguarding at all costs certain established conquests, and eventually “going beyond,” in a positive way, those values o liberty and tolerance produced in the eighteenth century, with a view to new syntheses that would draw inspiration rom liberal, and thereore more moderate and balanced, attitudes. As a result, various schools o European historians o the Age o Restoration began to explore and underscore the national character o individual historical incarnations o the Enlightenment. Enlightenment. In act, Hegel himsel had opened the way to this process. With his Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, Geschichte, the German philosopher had been the first to establish a clear-cut historical distinction between the original traits o the Lumières, Lumières , with their anti-Christian anti-Christian and vehemently radical stance, and the religious, moderate character o the Auflärung Auflärung . In Germany this interpretative strategy asserted itsel especially afer Bismarck, when the need to construct a new national historical consciousness was elt with particular urgency. Tis strategy is thus present in the work o roeltsch and o Dilthey, and, in particular, in Friedrich Meinecke’s Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat , in which the Auf the Auflärung lärung was was presented as the noble and, though partial, dialectically indispensable premise, premise, o the t he birth o Historismus, Historismus, that great glory o post-Reormation post-Reormation Germanic Kultur .12 In Italy a similar attempt to distinguish between the dangero d angerous us abstractions o the t he French philosop French philosophes hes and the concrete and moderate reormist action o the Italian Enlightenment is ound in the early twentieth-century twentieth-century writings o Giovanni Gentile and Benedetto Croce.13 However, the most important and startling aspect o this nationalization o the Enlightenment is its persisten p ersistentt influence on the sophisticated but deceitul metamorphoses that concept underwent in the writings o Anglo-Saxon Anglo-Saxon and German historians. wo wo works that stand out in this respect are the Lexikon der Auflärung Auflärung , published in Munich in 1995, and the volume Te Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge, (Cambridge, 1981). Te theses expressed in those books, which privilege first and oremost studies o national maniestations maniestations o the Enlightenment, as opposed to its cosmopolitan dimension, have been rekindled by such authorities in the field as J. Pocock and P. Higonnet. 14 O course, there was no shortage o polemical replies. However, one has the distinct impression that the dangerous dangerous old nationalistic historiography historiography that caused so many problems in the past is not at all out o the picture yet. Far rom it. In its current travestied and adulterated maniestations, which are indirect and in any case negative outcomes o the Enlightenment-Revolution Enlightenment-Revolution paradigm, the debate on
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this matter is bound to remain alive and, i anything, to grow in the next ew years, given the tensions and unease it has brought to national communities searching or strong identity mechanisms at the historical level. In act, the first doubts about the truthulness and useulness o the Enlightenment-Revolution Enlightenment-Revolution paradigm had already begun to emerge at the start o the nineteenth century, and in France o all nations. However, they were no more than that. For instance, in her work De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales, sociales, Madame de Staël did not hesitate to describe the Revolution as a mortal danger or the Enlightenment Enlightenment itsel and or a proper understanding o it: that is to say, as a most regrettable interruption in that great independent emancipation emancipation project that had always been entrusted to writers and thinkers. Tere have always been numerous European historians o moderate and liberal persuasion who have viewed the Revolution as a setback in the Enlightenment’s progress towards reorm. However, this aspect has always been in the background, without leading to new research. Tis has been the case, or instance, with those theses that aim at separating the events o 1789 rom those o 1793, in an obvious attempt to somehow rescind all links between Voltaire’s world and the culture cu lture o the error error and reassert the independence o the ormer rom the latter. In Italy, on the matter o the autonomy o the Enlightenment as category, Benedetto Croce did not hesitate to write: “Te triumph and the catastrophe catastrophe o the [E]nlightenment was the French Revolution; Revolution; and this t his was at the same time the triumph and the catastrophe o its historiography.”15 In Germany, many, it was Nietzsche who first and most importantly denounced the artificial and ideological character o this paradigm, and its role as a serious epistemological block at a historical level, a position authoritatively reprised by Ernst roeltsch. In an important work o 1897, Die Auflärung , the great German historian asserted the ull autonomy o the historical world o the Enlightenment and its centrality as the very essence o the modern Western world. Tese research hypotheses were also supported by Dilthey’s reflections on the concept o epoch (Epochenbegriff (Epochenbegriff ) and on the need or historians historians to ocus oc us on “representations o the world” (Weltanschauungen (Weltanschauungen)) that did their work o interpreting the past while grounded in specific historical contexts. In France, the strongest criticism o the Enlightenment-Revolution Enlightenment- Revolution paradigm came rom Michel Foucault, who drew support rom Nietzsche’s reflections and rom an articulation o the need to eliminate a political myth that had by now become an obstacle to research.16 However, this polemic achieved only limited results. Although many important contributions contributions have been made in the twentieth century by both European and American historians (C. L. Becker, P. Hazard, F. Venturi, P. Gay, J. Starobinski, R. Mauzi, A. Dupront, to mention
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just a ew), who have sought to investigate investigate the peculiarities o the historical world o the Enlightenment, the paradigm’s field o attraction remains strong to this day. Far too strong, in act. It is true that a great historiography on the French Revolution Revolution has developed de veloped alongside the exponential growth o Enlightenment studies. And it is also true t rue that this historiography historiography has uncovered other and no less important intellectual “origins” o the Enlightenment, or instance in the field o religion, or that it has finally ocused on the specificity o the Revolution as a historical phenomenon.17 However, the political myth and the héonisation tion o the philosepistemological stumbling block created by the pant the panthéonisa the philosophes as athers o the Revolution still linger in the background: they remain part o our common historiographical historiographical grounding and continue to influence our very way o thinking o the history history o the Western Western world.18 In act, the t he way ahead or our uture research on the Enlightenment lies elsewhere. We must move away rom the abstract constructions o philosophies o history, as well as rom the temptations o a neonationalistic historical stance and rom the distortions o revolutionary historiography. Instead, we should be ever-mindul ever-mindul o the delicate balance that exists, in the realm o cognitive processes, between points o view and proos, and between the historian as a subject that observes and reflects on the past and an objective and measured perception o our operational domain. And we should finally acknowledge that the principal object o history is not the “spirit” but rather man in time, in his social and individual dimensions—including, dimensions—including, and indeed especially, when we are dealing with vast historical categories. categories. Instead, we have marginalized the primacy o context. We have orgotten that human beings resemble their own times more than they resemble their athers—as athers—as Bloch used to say, quoting an Arab proverb.19 Tis has lef the field open to widespread anachronism, and to new and more sophisticated Centaurs, creating a situation that discredits the whole idea o the t he study o the past. Our new working hypotheses, thereore, must be built on an awareness o the autonomy o the historical world o the Enlightenment and on the investigation o its specific qualities as both critique and product o the Ancien the Ancien Régime Régime in in its eighteenth-century eighteenth- century phase. We need to finally acknowledge the Enlightenment as an original cultural system that represented a major breakthrough in the comparative comparative history o modern Europe. We need to reconstruct the guiding principles o that historical world and uncover its value system, language, representations, practices, institutions, orms o sociability, and communication mechanisms. We must question its protagonists, keeping in mind the influence exercised by the context and the persistence o traditions, but also the creativity and originality o the new élites, paying attention to the emancipation projects that they represented, to their
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cosmopolitan and universal vocation, and to their t heir reormist drive as well as to their utopian views. Only a vast undertaking o this kind will be able finally to bring again to light the indelible signs o a great transormation, that is to say o the true cultural revolution that is at the basis o modern Western identity. Te study o that world in terms o cultural history might allow us to revisit the dawn o a new concept o man and o a new way to experience reality. reality.20 We may then gain an understanding o both the t he conscious and the unconscious aspects o a undamental venture in the history o European civilization: a project that, because o its multiaceted legacy both in the long and in the short term, is comparable only to Christianity’s break with the ancient pagan world.
