Charles Péguy·Cahiers de la Quinzaine

V-3 · Troisième cahier de la cinquième série · 1903-11-05

Le monument de Renan

Charles Péguy

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THIRD CAHIER OF THE FIFTH SERIES

TEXTS AND COMMENTARIES

CAHIER OF THE INAUGURATION OF THE RENAN MONUMENT AT TREGUIER, SUNDAY THE THIRTEENTH OF SEPTEMBER NINETEEN HUNDRED AND THREE

Editor’s Note

This cahier is not a cahier of Renan; we shall make a cahier of Renan, if we can, when his family and his publishers have completed the publication of his works; this cahier is a cahier of the recent inauguration of the Renan monument at Treguier.

The Renan monument at Treguier was inaugurated on Sunday, September 13 last; we borrow from Le Temps, issue dated Monday, September 14, supplement, the official account of this inauguration; at the beginning of the ceremony, Mademoiselle Moreno, of the Comedie-Francaise, recited the Prayer on the Acropolis:

Prayer That I Made on the Acropolis When I Had Arrived at Understanding Its Perfect Beauty

by Ernest Renan

O nobility! O simple and true beauty! Goddess whose worship signifies reason and wisdom, thou whose temple is an eternal lesson of conscience and sincerity, I come late to the threshold of thy mysteries; I bring to thy altar much remorse. To find thee, I needed infinite searching. The initiation that thou conferred on the Athenian at birth with a smile, I have won by force of reflection, at the cost of long efforts.

I was born, blue-eyed goddess, of barbarian parents, among the Cimmerians, good and virtuous, who dwell on the shore of a dark sea, bristling with rocks, forever beaten by storms. There the sun is scarcely known; the flowers are sea mosses, algae, and the colored shells found at the bottom of lonely bays. The clouds there appear without color, and even joy is a little sad; but springs of cold water flow from the rock there, and the eyes of young girls are like those green fountains where, on beds of waving grasses, the sky is mirrored.

My fathers, as far back as we can trace, were devoted to distant voyages on seas that thy Argonauts never knew. I heard, when I was young, the songs of polar voyages; I was cradled by the memory of floating ice, of misty seas like milk, of islands peopled with birds that sing at their appointed hours and that, taking flight all together, darken the sky.

Priests of a foreign cult, come from the Syrians of Palestine, took charge of my upbringing. These priests were wise and holy. They taught me the long stories of Kronos, who created the world, and of his son, who, it is said, made a journey upon the earth. Their temples are three times as high as thine, O Eurhythmy, and like forests; only they are not solid; they fall to ruin after five or six hundred years; they are the fantasies of barbarians who imagine that something good can be made outside the rules thou hast traced for thy inspired ones, O Reason. But these temples pleased me; I had not studied thy divine art; I found God there. They sang canticles there that I still remember: “Hail, star of the sea, queen of those who groan in this valley of tears,” or else: “Mystical rose, Tower of ivory, House of gold, Morning star.” See, goddess, when I recall these songs, my heart melts, I become almost an apostate. Forgive me this absurdity; thou canst not imagine the charm that the barbarian magicians have put into these verses, and how much it costs me to follow naked reason.

And then, if thou knewest how difficult it has become to serve thee! All nobility has vanished. The Scythians have conquered the world. There are no more republics of free men; there are only kings sprung from heavy blood, majesties at whom thou wouldst smile. Ponderous Hyperboreans call those who serve thee frivolous… A fearful pan-Boeotia, a league of all stupidities, spreads over the world a leaden cover beneath which one suffocates. Even those who honor thee — how they must make thee pity them! Dost thou remember that Caledonian who, fifty years ago, smashed thy temple with a hammer to carry it off to Thule? Thus they all do. I have written, according to some of the rules thou lovest, O Theonoe, the life of the young god whom I served in my childhood; they treat me like a Euhemerus; they write to me to ask what purpose I proposed to myself; they esteem only what serves to make their bankers’ tables bear fruit. And why does one write the life of gods, O heaven! if not to make people love the divine that was in them, and to show that this divine still lives and will live eternally in the heart of humanity?

Dost thou remember that day, under the archonship of Dionysodorus, when an ugly little Jew, speaking the Greek of the Syrians, came here, traversed thy courts without understanding thee, read thy inscriptions all wrong, and believed he found in thy enclosure an altar dedicated to a god who would be the Unknown God? Well, that little Jew carried the day; for a thousand years, thou wast treated as an idol, O Truth; for a thousand years, the world was a desert where no flower germinated. During that time, thou wast silent, O Salpinx, trumpet of thought. Goddess of order, image of celestial stability, one was guilty for loving thee, and today, when by conscientious labor we have managed to draw near to thee, we are accused of having committed a crime against the human spirit by breaking chains that Plato did without.

Thou alone art young, O Kora; thou alone art pure, O Virgin; thou alone art healthy, O Hygieia; thou alone art strong, O Victory. Thou guardest the cities, O Promachos; thou hast what Mars requires, O Areia; peace is thy aim, O Pacifica. Legislatress, source of just constitutions; Democracy, (1) thou whose fundamental dogma is that all good comes from the people, and that wherever there are no people to nourish and inspire genius, there is nothing — teach us to extract the diamond from impure crowds. Providence of Jupiter, divine worker, mother of all industry, protectress of labor, O Ergane, thou who makest the nobility of the civilized worker and placest him so far above the lazy Scythian; Wisdom, thou whom Zeus begat after withdrawing into himself, after breathing deeply; thou who dwellest in thy father, entirely united to his essence; thou who art his companion and his conscience; Energy of Zeus, spark that kindlest and sustainest the fire in heroes and men of genius, make of us accomplished spiritualists. The day when the Athenians and the Rhodians vied for the sacrifice, thou chose to dwell with the Athenians, as the wiser. Thy father, however, caused Plutus to descend in a golden cloud upon the city of the Rhodians, because they too had paid homage to his daughter. The Rhodians were rich; but the Athenians had wit, that is to say, true joy, eternal gaiety, the divine childhood of the heart.

(1) ATHENAIE DEMOKRATIAS. Le Bas, Inscr., I, 32.

The world will be saved only by returning to thee, by repudiating its barbarian attachments. Let us run, let us come in a crowd. What a beautiful day it will be when all the cities that have taken fragments of thy temple — Venice, Paris, London, Copenhagen — will make amends for their thefts, will form sacred processions to bring back the fragments they possess, saying: “Forgive us, goddess! It was to save them from the evil spirits of the night,” and will rebuild thy walls to the sound of the flute, to expiate the crime of the infamous Lysander! Then they will go to Sparta to curse the ground where that mistress of somber errors once stood, and insult it because it is no more.

Firm in thee, I shall resist my fatal counselors; my skepticism, which makes me doubt the people; my restlessness of mind, which, when the truth is found, makes me seek it still; my fancy, which, after reason has spoken, prevents me from keeping still. O Archegetes, ideal that the man of genius incarnates in his masterpieces, I would rather be the last in thy house than the first elsewhere. Yes, I will cling to the stylobate of thy temple; I will forget all discipline but thine, I will make myself a stylite on thy columns, my cell shall be upon thy architrave.

The Inauguration Ceremony

The program of the celebrations at Treguier, September 12, 13, and 14, 1903:

Saturday, September 12

  • At 2:30 p.m. — Grand theatrical matinee, with the assistance of artists of the Comedie-Francaise, the Opera, the Opera-Comique, various theaters, and the Naval Band. — Ticket prices: Front stalls, 5 francs; Second stalls, 3 francs; Third, 1 franc.
  • At 8:30 p.m. — Concert on the square, followed by a torchlight procession.

Sunday, September 13

  • At 10 a.m. — INAUGURATION OF THE RENAN MONUMENT, under the chairmanship of Mr. Chaumie, Minister of Public Instruction and Fine Arts, followed by a march-past of troops before the statue.
  • At noon — DEMOCRATIC BANQUET of 2,000 covers, offered by the Breton republicans to Mr. Combes, Minister of the Interior, President of the Council of Ministers. — Subscription price: 3 francs.
  • At 4 p.m. — Breton dances to the sound of the biniou. — Concert.
  • At 8:30 p.m. — Illuminations. — Venetian festival on the river. — Ball with grand orchestra.
  • At 10:30 p.m. — Fireworks, fired by Ruggieri.

Monday, September 14

  • At 10 a.m. — Departure of the Minister of Public Instruction. — Bowling games.
  • At 2 p.m. — Grand Breton wrestling contests. — 200 francs in prizes. — Various attractions and prizes.
  • At 4 p.m. — Grand bicycle races: 1st International: First prize, 50 francs; second prize, 30 francs; third prize, 20 francs. — 2nd Departmental: First prize, 30 francs; second prize, 20 francs; third prize, 15 francs; fourth prize, 10 francs.
  • At 8:30 p.m. — Ball with grand orchestra and electric lighting.

Table of Contents

Inauguration of the Renan Monument at Treguier, Sunday, September 13, 1903.

  • ERNEST RENAN. — The Prayer on the Acropolis
  • Mr. Paul Guieysse, Deputy for Morbihan, President of the Bleus de Bretagne, presents the monument to the Mayor of Treguier.
  • Mr. Guillerm, Mayor of Treguier, responds.
  • Speech of Mr. Chaumie, Minister of Public Instruction.
  • Speech of Mr. BERTHELOT.
  • Speech of ANATOLE FRANCE.
  • Mr. Psichari, son-in-law of Ernest Renan, speaks on behalf of the family.

Cahiers de la Quinzaine.

  • Rene Litalien. — The Religious Crisis of Renan.

Rene Litalien: The Religious Crisis of Renan

The struggle between the liberal spirit and the authoritarian Church had itself only a time in first place; the final victory truly belongs to the historical criticism of the sacred books, not to the metaphysical criticism of dogmas; if, in his letters to his sister, Renan could only indicate this, (1) he indicated it clearly; he did not consider Christianity as a system of doctrines, but as “an important historical point”; (2) and it was not forty years later that he wrote it, in order to compose an attitude before posterity; it was at the very moment when the crisis had just resolved itself. (3) His “distance from orthodoxy” (4) is not the last act of his theological education, but the first, and the most decisive, of his career as a historian.

(1) Renan was to be much more precise in his letters to Liart, his former schoolmate from Treguier and Saint-Nicolas, afterward a student at the seminary of Saint-Brieuc, who took orders, and died at Treguier in the last days of March 1845. Cf. Souvenirs, page 306, note: “His family returned to me, after his death, the letters I had written to him; I have them all.” They are still unpublished. (2) Lettres intimes, page 350. (3) October 31, 1845. (4) Lettres intimes, page 350.