On the Situation Made for History and for Sociology in the Modern Times

De la situation faite à l’histoire et à la sociologie dans les temps modernes

on the situation made for history and for sociology in the modern times

I propose to investigate, up to a certain point, what is the situation made for history and for sociology in the modern times. It is an extremely difficult inquiry, and one that has not commonly been attempted, perhaps because it was particularly difficult. It is therefore an inquiry for which we shall doubtless receive no assistance, and for which in particular we can expect no assistance, neither from the historians, nor, still less, from the professional sociologists.

It is, finally, an inquiry that would be infinite if one had the presumption of proposing to pursue it, so to speak, across its whole breadth, of conducting it on its entire front, for then it would require nothing less than to gather up everything as one goes, as in Beauce one sees those yoked teams and those squads of mechanical harvester-binders advancing on a single oblique front at the pace of the horses, harvesting, gathering, and binding the whole vast world across a great breadth and right across the full breadth of a wheat field. Weaker harvesters, less mechanical too, and of a more rebellious world, and infinitely strong, and infinitely vast, we shall be constrained to proceed by the very dry linear methods, and not by the voluminous methods nor even the superficial; we shall be constrained to follow as if a thread; we shall be constrained to proceed by successive approaches and deepenings — which does not at all mean by successive approximations — by soundings that we shall push as far as we can, by tunneling, by mine galleries, and by all the means of sapping.

We shall not advance on a front, nor across any breadth; but we shall move in file; and we shall often have to slip past in single file.

We shall thus have to make a particularly fruitful, and moreover particularly unavoidable use here, of the method of rare cases, of unique cases, of eminent or representative cases, of extreme cases, of supreme cases, more particularly and properly of limit cases.

Thus linear, thus guided, our inquiries will be perpetually double inquiries, because we shall have to search separately what is the situation made for history in the modern times, and what is the situation made for sociology in those same times; history and so-called sociology maintain in fact such a relation that history forms a system of knowledge of the first degree or base degree, and that sociology would form a system of knowledge of the second degree, of a second degree or degree that would rest upon the first degree or base degree.

History and so-called sociology maintain such a relation that history forms a whole first system of knowledge, or base system, and that so-called sociology would form above it a second system of knowledge, a higher system, and one that would rest upon the first.

It follows that history and so-called sociology, considered as instituting two superposed systems of knowledge, and two systems in a sense independent of one another, maintain such a relation that: all that is gained in certainty for history is not thereby gained for the said sociology, and on the contrary all that is lost in certainty for history is automatically lost as well for the same sociology.

Sociology is a history claimed to be reformed. Wherever history is uncertain, automatically and with the same uncertainty sociology is uncertain. Wherever history is certain, it does not automatically follow that sociology is certain; rather it still and always has to make its proof.

It must always bring a proof of its own. It cannot share, like a loaf of bread, the proof of history.

If I do not know with certainty an event, it follows automatically that I cannot even imagine with certainty a law of which this event is the matter; if I believe that I know with certainty an event, it does not follow automatically — it remains to be proved — that I can imagine even with certainty a law of which this event is the matter.

If I do not know with certainty an event of the time of Charlemagne, or, as those facetious soldiers used to say, a man, a fellow of the type of Charlemagne, it follows automatically that I cannot even imagine with certainty a law that would cover, so to speak, this event, of which this event would be the matter; a tissue of which it would be the thread, a garment of which it would be the cloth; if I believe that I know with certainty an event of the time of Charlemagne, it does not follow automatically — it remains to be proved — that I can imagine even with certainty a law that would cover this event, of which this event would be the matter.

Thus as concerns certainty, history is independent of sociology and sociology is independent of history; each of the two has only its own certainty to look to. As concerns uncertainty, history is independent of sociology, but sociology is dependent on history.

History has uncertainty and has no certainty for sociology.

As regards certainty and uncertainty, history is equally independent of sociology; as regards certainty, sociology is still independent of history; but as regards uncertainty this independence ceases to function: sociology becomes dependent on history.

As regards certainty, sociology is independent of history in this sense that certainty does not rise back from history to sociology; as regards uncertainty, sociology is dependent on history, in this sense that all uncertainty rises back from history to sociology.

In the direction of the ascent, dependence operates only one time in two, and independence one time, the other time; there is automatic ascent of uncertainty; there can never be, there is never any automatic ascent of certainty.

History does not vouch for sociology.

The other question, of knowing whether reciprocally sociology vouches for history, whether certainty or uncertainty descends back or descends from sociology upon history, this reciprocal question is to be reserved for further study; it suffices for us in fact to know, to have obtained that sociology is not welded to history and does not automatically share its fate, in order to know that we shall have to pursue our linear inquiries along two files.

This is already here a question of the necessary and the sufficient; it is necessary that history be certain in order that sociology be certain, and it is not necessary that history be uncertain in order that sociology be uncertain; it suffices that history be uncertain for sociology to be uncertain, and it does not suffice that history be certain for sociology to be certain.

All that is gained by history is gained only for history, and all that is lost by history is lost at once for history and for sociology.

Every proof of certainty administered for history is valid only for history, and everything must begin again for the superposed sociology; every proof of uncertainty on the contrary administered against history is automatically valid and there is nothing more to begin again against the superposed sociology.

Every inquiry pursued upon history and upon sociology must be pursued separately upon history and separately upon sociology, and it must begin by history, and not undertake sociology save when it has exhausted what it has to obtain from history.

As there are two stories of difficulties, there must also be two stories of studies.

In a previous work, entitled Zangwill, to which one is permitted not to refer back, I had striven not to lose my footing by setting out from two illustrious examples, and I had been led to inquire what is the situation made for history in the modern times by setting out from Taine and from Renan; these two great masters had been to us, perhaps involuntarily, of some assistance; because they had been to us of some use; but it would be to lay oneself open to the gravest disappointments to imagine that in general one will receive from historians much assistance in this inquiry.

I mean the qualified or professional historians.

And it is perhaps because Taine and Renan were not, so much as one believes, so much as they themselves believed, so properly, so purely, so solely qualified and professional historians that they were then of some assistance to us, being of some use to us.

But the true qualified historians; the true professional historians.

The immense majority of historians are today recruited from the functions of teaching; and as there is nothing so contrary to the functions of science as the functions of teaching, since the functions of science require a perpetual disquiet, and the functions of teaching on the contrary require imperturbably an admirable assurance, it is not astonishing that so many professors of history have not been accustomed to meditate upon the limits and upon the conditions of historical science.

They scarcely do history, if they can do any, if they are equipped, situated to do any; let us not ask them to do criticism, philosophy, metaphysics. Let us keep to history.

Those who belong to primary teaching are officially charged, under the government of present-day prefects, with teaching the people a free, secular and obligatory history; under the government of the Republic they are required to teach the people a history of republican defense; under a reactionary government they would be constrained, still more brutally, to teach the people a history of reactionary defense. And even if they had the political and social liberty to teach a simply historical history, it is by no means proved that, save rare and very honorable exceptions, they would have the taste for it; the other liberty, the most important, inner liberty, the liberty of the mind. Primary teaching demands such a force of affirmation, were it only to maintain among pupils the most elementary discipline, and historical science demands on the contrary such a force of permanent hesitation, that a perpetual miracle would be needed for the same mind to hold both these attitudes at once.

Contrary to what is generally believed, it is in secondary teaching, and not in higher teaching, that there are today both the best historians, and the greater number of good historians. However balanced the secondary teachers may be between the forces of the primary, which draw them downward, and the forces of the higher, which draw them upward, between the force of affirmation of the primary and the force of hesitation of the higher, they nevertheless maintain a unique equilibrium, by this alone, that they lead a modest, poor life, and that they have remained in permanent contact with the realities of departmental life. This middle class makes the strength of the nation of historians. It is among them that one finds the most veritable historians, that is, men who passionately seek the truth of past events, particularly of human events, and who most ordinarily find it, in the measure in which we shall see that it is possible to find it.

When a young man, or a man of some maturity, wrests, snatches from the fatigues and the professional shortcomings a time, a mind that he then carries entirely over into the labors of historical research, one can be assured that he is doing history in order to do history, and not in order to have advancement in the functions of teaching history. We have no security on the contrary with those young men who slip directly into the higher teaching of history, carefully avoiding any contact with the disagreeable realities.

Realities of every kind, and above all economic and budgetary realities. The budgetary difficulties of the simple average French father of a family.

This is one of the capital errors of the modern times in the organization of historical work: one attributes to methods and instruments — which have their importance, a certain importance, but an importance wholly methodical and instrumental — a capital importance, and one so perfectly total that they must supply for everything. One thus obtains, and one launches into the circulation of higher teaching, those artificial little lean young men, who possess more or less approximately the instruments and the methods, but who possess no content. As if ignorance of the present were an indispensable condition for accession to the knowledge of the past. I say lean so that one cannot even suspect me of thinking of our good comrade M. Thomas. Who is, so I am assured, an agrégé of history.

It is, however, this ignorance that appears most commonly required by the government of the State for the choice of the functionaries it appoints and assigns to the State teaching of a State history.

How much more interesting, and how much more useful, generally and even much more for what we wish to do, are those young professors of the lycées and colleges who, daring to go and work in the provinces, and meeting life head-on, begin by knowing from an incommunicable personal experience — as men and as citizens — what the realities of the family and the city are, begin by knowing from this present experience what the present is, before going back, thus enlightened, to some study, some inquiry, some attempt at knowledge, and thus, they alone, to some knowledge of the past. These men, and not others, are truly the real reserves of science, of historical labor — these men, and not those who push themselves on from seminar to seminar. These men, who are near us, and not the others, are the true and autochthonous resources, those that spring from the soil; and when one wishes to revive somewhat a higher teaching that has become languishing, and a scientific labor that has become languishing, it is first and above all to secondary teaching — paradoxical conclusion — that one must give back life; but it asks for nothing else; when one wishes to gather harvests of science a little less cinereal, it is from the present personnel of secondary teaching that one shall have to ask them.

It is not by multiplying boarding-schools, institutes, sealed vessels, that one will ever obtain them: it is by honestly giving the means of living while working to those who have placed themselves in the conditions of life. A State that was truly concerned to regenerate scientific labor would have neither to imagine nor to multiply instruments of State. It would have only to give the means of living and of working to the personnel already existing, wholly devoted, of our actual secondary teaching. When, under the present conditions of their existence, one sees these professors strike off so considerable a scientific labor, one admires their energy, one is astonished, one admires their power, and one is at least assured that they do not do history in order thereby to advance on the road of fortune. One would have only to give them the means of living and of working, not to crush them under absurd tasks, under crushing social and professional charges, nor to withdraw them from all political and social servitudes — from the worst of all, the local servitudes — and from the servitudes and the cares of misery, by paying them enough. Not to add the imbecility of administrations that watch over them — instead of administering them — on top of the heavy imbecility of politicking parents. To give them, to them and not to others, some instruments, laboratories, libraries. Leisure, tranquility, repose. To give them the divine peace of mind. So far as one can have it in an ordinary life. For myself, at the beginning of this long inquiry, in which we are not sure of always finding our way again, I wish to declare how much information and instruction, what assistance I have received from this admirable personnel, generally in the form of confidences, sometimes of confessions, rarely or never in the form of written declarations, for they have wife and children.

These men, when they do history, know what history is, and what it is to do history. Precisely because they do it passionately, precisely because they are disinterested, they do it with knowledge of cause. Precisely also because in present reality they have operated, they continually operate the only grasp of reality that it has been given to man to receive. They do history as a fine and honest trade. When they do history, they know, they feel deeply what the conditions are and what the limits are, they know what one can and what one cannot do, what one obtains and what one does not obtain, what one will never obtain, and if they hardly ever write it out either, it is because, under the domination of the historian science, nothing would be so dangerous as an insubordination. A heresy, one would know well how to keep it from lasting. As for sociology, in the present state of our university knowledge, an author, a professor who would wish to lift off the yoke, only to shake his head, would be a man with a mania for suicide.

It is a capital error of the modern times in the organization of historical labor and in the estimation of historians to believe that the instruments and the methods are everything, and to imagine that probity would be nothing; it is probity on the contrary that is central; a man who has probity, lacking instruments, has many more chances of having access to some truth than a man who has only instruments, lacking probity.

Very great scientific discoveries, the greatest perhaps, at least up to now, have been made with instruments that today appear to us coarse. Great historical discoveries too have been made with relatively coarse instruments. To what point all the instruments in the world, modern, and all the apparatuses, when probity is null, no longer serve any purpose, do not serve for anything, as the old man said; to what point in a word — in a word of another old man, of an even older one — science without conscience is the ruin of the soul, one has seen this, recently, enough, by the scandal, perfectly useless moreover, provoked by that impostor Mathieu, or Matthieu, one of the greatest impostors the earth has ever borne. I am speaking naturally of the Mathieu who is neither bishop nor archbishop, at least in the Roman apostolic Church, nor cardinal, nor member of the French Academy.

The State on the contrary makes for itself, as it were, a cruel game — like all those games of State — of esteeming all its functionaries, and particularly its functionary-professors, in inverse ratio to what they are worth, exactly in inverse ratio to the sense they may have of reality. It distrusts every man, and still more a functionary, who has any sense of reality. And the professors. Just think: if they were to go and teach some atom of reality, to transmit some atom of sense of reality. To their pupils. There would no longer be any redoubtable enemy. Every bureaucracy, every administration, holds in horror and pursues with persecution that sentiment, that hostile sense of reality.

We shall have no less assistance from those few persons who, prepared to enter into teaching, namely into university teaching, have set out from it in order to institute, at their own costs, risks, and perils, and at those of their friends, outside the State, free instruments of high culture, of scientific labor and of outside teaching. We know in fact from the history of the arts, of philosophy, of the sciences, that most of the advances obtained in arts, in philosophy, in the sciences themselves, were begun and often even accomplished by persons who were not of the school or who at least, having come out of the school, did not operate within the school.

Far from being of any assistance to us, we shall find only hostility in those professionals of higher teaching, I mean in those young men who have never proposed to themselves, as the first end of man, anything other than to pass directly into higher teaching. The State is marvelously organized for them. Marvelously equipped. Heating chambers regularly arranged, juxtaposed end to end, with hermetic joints, a succession of communal, departmental, national, public, private, international scholarships, a careful pipework of houses and schools, all the way to the lukewarm sinecures of the secretariats and the libraries, conduct them, bring them through to the teaching of universal history without their ever having undergone the drafts of life. They are, finally, filiform creatures.

We shall on the contrary obtain a paternal and particularly precious assistance from those former university men who, having spent a long time in the duties and in the modest operations of secondary teaching, have arrived, by the natural play of advancement, of a slow and modest and honest advancement, at the leisures and the labors of higher teaching. The mere fact that they have surmounted the fatigues and the disappointments of secondary teaching, that they have not left all spring and all activity behind there, shows sufficiently what their power is. This power is the effect and as it were the work of a true survival. By this personal experience of secondary teaching, they have once for all acquired a personal knowledge of the immediate reality and of life, which allows them then to give themselves fruitfully, and with knowledge of cause, to the labors of disinterested research. Their experience has I know not what calm goodness; it receives, it gives, it communicates I know not what perpetual warning that erudition may nourish but will never replace.

That such is the organization or rather the command of the State in the teaching of history, is moreover what we shall have to examine very closely when, in the course of these studies, and reasonably near their completion, we come to explore what is the situation made, among other parts of the world, for history and for sociology in the modern State. And it is then that we shall meet again the filiform creatures. And we shall see in some detail how perfectly they are organized into a party of government. Into a political party of government.

Higher up and in the last analysis, in the last appeal and in the last degree of jurisdiction, shall we receive assistance from the professional historians themselves, from authors of histories, from authors of works, from authors of lessons and of published labors, from authors of contributions, as they say, finally from the masters of history. It is necessary here, and before any inquiry, to eliminate the maniacs of erudition. The maniacs of erudition, as such, were settled definitively by La Bruyère, and naturally also, that settlement served for nothing. Such settlements have never served for anything.

LXXIV, Hermagoras, says La Bruyère, “does not know who is king of Hungary; he is astonished to hear no mention made of the king of Bohemia: do not speak to him of the wars of Flanders and of Holland, at least dispense him from answering you; he confuses the times, he is ignorant when they began, when they ended; battles, sieges, all is new to him. But he is instructed in the war of the Giants, he relates the progress of it and the least details; nothing has escaped him: he unravels in the same manner the horrible chaos of the two empires, the Babylonian and the Assyrian; he knows thoroughly the Egyptians and their dynasties. He has never seen Versailles; he counts its steps; he knows how many architects presided over that work; he knows the names of the architects. Shall I say that he believes Henri (Henri the Great) to be the son of Henri III? He neglects at least to know anything of the houses of France, of Austria, and of Bavaria: what trifles! says he, while he recites from memory a whole list of the kings of the Medes or of Babylon, and while the names of Apronal, of Herigebal, of Noesnemordach, of Mardokempad, are as familiar to him as to us those of our own kings. He asks whether the emperor was ever married; but no one will teach him that Ninus had two wives. He is told that the king enjoys perfect health; and he remembers that Thetmosis, a king of Egypt, was valetudinarian, and that he had that complexion from his grandfather Alipharmutosis. What does he not know? what thing is hidden from him of venerable antiquity? He will tell you that Semiramis, or, according to some, Serimaris, spoke like her son Nynias; that one did not distinguish them by speech: whether it was because the mother had a male voice like her son, or the son an effeminate voice like his mother, he dare not decide. He will reveal to you that Nembrot was left-handed, and Sesostris ambidextrous; that it is an error to imagine that an Artaxerxes was called Long-Hand because his arms fell to his knees, and not because he had one hand longer than the other; and he adds that there are grave authors who affirm that it was the right; that he believes, however, that he is well founded in maintaining that it is the left.”

Hermagoras is not merely a maniac, and he is not merely, which is much more, a character of La Bruyère; he is a gift of the great centuries, and of the serious centuries, and notably he was a gift of our seventeenth century, among all others, that of not being able to refrain from indicating, at least in their works, the problems that will present themselves later in the subjects they treat. And even in those they do not treat: Hermagoras, once marked, will not cease to accompany us on the road of our inquiries. He will be our hero. Grotesque or heroic, according to the days, grotesque and heroic, like all heroes. It is with him himself that we shall generally have to occupy ourselves. But it will no longer be merely a question of knowing whether he is grotesque, and whether he makes a character, of knowing the Babylonian dynasties and not knowing the contemporary German imperial dynasties, or the French royal ones. It will be a matter of asking whether Hermagoras knows and can know the Babylonian dynasties, and above all of asking in what sense and in what measure he can know the German and French dynasties. In what sense and in what measure we ourselves can say that we know them.

From that study entitled Zangwill, where in order to set out we had taken our light from Renan and from Taine, and whose results have never been seriously contested, it resulted to the evidence that the ulterior motive of modern history was to exhaust the infinite detail of the proposed event. To this result we had been led by a somewhat pushed analysis of that so singular method of the inexhaustible circumnavigations of Taine. To this result we had been led much less by the procedures than by certain admissions of Renan.

Of all the modern historians Renan was eminently designated to perceive the immense metaphysical or physical, human or natural difficulties or impossibilities that stand opposed to the constitution of a historical science, modern, so understood. He was not of those historians who do not meditate. One might almost say on the contrary that meditation was his natural state, and moreover his state of predilection. Whether intellectual, whether sentimental. He was a Breton. He had been a Catholic. He was of Catholic race. He had remained Catholic and generally Christian somewhat more than he believed, much more than he said, even more than he gave to understand, infinitely more than we have been told since. He was a man of meditation. He had served a rather long apprenticeship in the sacerdotal life. He was not a man to forget an apprenticeship. He was at bottom, and beneath certain appearances of gaiety, a man of sadness, of the salubrious and wholly salutary sadness. All those appearances of gaiety were for his sadness only coverings of modesty. Sometimes almost immodest. In default of the gift of tears, he kept deeply, beneath all appearances, through so many insincerities — one might almost dare to say through all the insincerities, beneath all worldlinesses — he kept eternally that original and metaphysical gift of sadness; a long experience, a personal experience of religious life had irrevocably introduced him to metaphysical meditation; a perpetual concern not to be ridiculous, even before himself, and for this not to be the dupe even of himself, replaced almost advantageously in him a certain love of truth. Which one finds in many others, less innocent. By all these ways he was led to meditate, beneath his daily occupations, on the very object of those occupations. He was no stranger to all metaphysics. He understood what it was. He was very far from being ignorant of it. He needed it.

The other historians ordinarily do history without meditating on the limits and on the conditions of history. No doubt they are right. It is better that each man do his trade. There would be much time lost in the world if everyone did metaphysics, and Descartes himself wished that one did so only a few hours a year; in a general way it is better that an historian begin by doing history, without seeking so long. Otherwise nothing would ever get done. It is with history as with all the other human occupations. A mathematician who would remain fascinated all his life upon Euclid’s postulate and upon the other postulates and mathematical definitions would perhaps not make mathematics itself, the mathematical sciences, advance much. And perhaps moreover and over against this, to make up for it, he would not make metaphysics advance much either, if he were not a well-endowed metaphysician, if he were not a philosopher. An historian who would remain fixed on a meditation of the situation made for history would not make that history advance much. Nor metaphysics either, if he were not endowed, a philosopher and a metaphysician. They would be two men at a standstill, and not men who would work. In all human occupations the division of labor is normally made thus: situating themselves equally and together at the place of the postulates, principles, definitions, conditions and limits, of the situations made, the scientist and the artist, granting themselves all that very liberally — which is asked — considering all that as going of itself, as taken for granted, setting out from that precise point, descend forthwith the course of their respective sciences and of their arts. But situating himself equally and together with them at this same precise point, at this point of difficulty, the philosopher sits down there, and refuses to budge before having clarified these difficulties, which are generally unclarifiable. From which comes his dignity, his price, singular, his greatness and his lamentable misery. From which it comes that the others despise him and dread him, and sometimes hate him, shrug their shoulders, but sometimes lower their eyes. And he has it for his whole life, which is a poor life of a man, like the others, and he will never come to the end of it, for there would be enough for several lives; and no man will ever come to the end of it, for there would be enough for an eternity. For beyond the difficulties there are the impossibilities, and the insurmountable contrarieties. The others are men of facilities, of possibilities, of activity. The philosopher is a man of difficulties, of impossibilities, of inhibitions, a man of stoppage. An unpopular and disagreeable man. A failure in a certain sense, and almost by definition, since what he wishes to do is what will never be done, what no one will ever succeed in well or wholly; and he will never have a career, like the others, for there can be, there must be careers of scientists and of artists: there will never be careers of philosophers and of metaphysicians. And these two words swear at being even imagined together. He is therefore, deeply, almost by definition, eternally, a déclassé; I would say an idler, awkward and ill at ease, since he will never have his work to hand. The others descend with the stream of the water. He will no longer leave this post save to try, setting out from this point, to climb yet higher, turning his back deliberately upon the others who go down the current, to climb yet higher in regions still more inaccessible. The others descend the stream of being. He climbs back up the stream of being. If he can.

Such is the provisional precarious association, rather apparent, and immediately after such appears the deep eternal real dissociation of all human work: at the beginning all seems to go well; artists and scientists on the one hand, and on the other the lone philosophers, set themselves up together at the same point, like a friendly company. It is almost what we moderns call a cooperative, minus the quarrels. But an apparent association: immediately afterwards, at the first words of conversation, the eternal scission intervenes, instantaneous; artists and scientists, still together, descend the ease of the river; and turning their backs on them, the solitary philosophers undertake to climb back up. Few men — and shall we call them men only? — few men move about above this point of discernment. Above this point of rupture and of contrary opposition. Few men come and go at their pleasure above this point. Few men ascend and descend at their pleasure. But some go. And others come. Some ascend. And it is the others who descend. And the truly very great men are perhaps only those very rare geniuses who have the gift of going and coming like gods above this point of human rupture, of going and coming in their entire liberty above this point of fatal divorsion, in their entire unity above this point of dismemberment, in a continuous march above this point of capital discontinuity.

The others take up the occupations; the philosophers reserve for themselves, in all the etymological force of the word, the preoccupations. A man like Michelet cumulates, in a current and in a whirlwind of life of an insurmountable power, the occupations and the preoccupations.

The day that one will be willing to ask oneself a little profoundly what makes one of these essential men, an essential painter like Rembrandt, an essential musician like Beethoven, an essential tragedian like Corneille, an essential thinker like Pascal — and I stop at these few examples so as not to have to cite too great a number of our Frenchmen — the day that one will be willing to ask oneself a little profoundly what makes these essential works, the Pilgrims of Emmaus, the Ninth, Polyeucte, the Pensées, one will perhaps recognize that it is in particular this, that for such men and for such works this point of dislocation ceases to function — this point of dislocation that we recognize on the contrary as valid and capital, as given, as irrevocably acquired for the other men, for the immense common run of men and of authors, for the immense plebs of works of talent. Or rather of works (ouvrages), for it is better to reserve the name of œuvres for the works of genius. Thus would be verified once again, and very exactly, on this particular point, that general fact, and I will go so far as to say that law, in the only sense we can recognize for this word, that genius is not talent carried to a very high degree, nor even talent carried to the highest degree, nor even to its limit, but that it is of another order than talent.

A man like Michelet is an essential historian in the same title and in the same sense that Rembrandt is a painter and Pascal a thinker, as little displaceable; and a work like his Histories is made like the Ninth and like Polyeucte, as indestructible, as indiscussible; it is made of the same sort, and the reproaches that one hears made against Michelet, as against Corneille, as against Pascal, are very precisely those that someone who was not a musician would make against Beethoven, that someone who was not a painter would make against Rembrandt. That is to say, as we shall demonstrate, by someone of whom one has absolutely no need to occupy oneself.

For a man like Michelet this point of distraction, which exists and which is capital for all other men, does not exist.

Not only does it not exist for him in the sense that he would succeed in passing it, with a certain difficulty, by means of a certain effort, but it does not exist at all for him, in the sense that this passage corresponds in him to no difficulty, to no effort, requires nothing, does not exist. Means nothing. This passage that the others, the talents, cannot effect, cannot succeed in, at any price, genius does not even suspect. And he would be quite astonished if one spoke to him of it. It is truly genius that drinks up the obstacle.

Not only does this point of distraction, of quartering, absolutely not exist for him, but it also ceases absolutely to exist for whoever is with him; from which comes, for the reader, for the spectator, that easy enchantment that laborious talent will never give.

Those who are not Michelet do as they can. They divide up the work. The famous division of labor begins to function for them, but it only begins to function for them. It is some who go. And others who come. It is some who ascend. And others who descend. And no doubt it is better that it should be so.

We know from the history of the sciences, of the arts, and of philosophy, which is connex to the first two — or rather we know from the history of scientists, of artists, and of philosophers, which is connex to the first two — that scientists and professional artists who have wished to meddle with metaphysics have generally succeeded very badly at it, and the scientists, one must do them this justice, even much more badly, if it is possible, than the artists. It is most fortunate that the professional historians generally have no philosophy, for one sees no reason why they should have succeeded any better at it. And thus we might have much more metaphysics and philosophy, but it would be bad; and we should have, by so much, much less history, which is good.

The works of the others are such that one sees very well how an intelligent man, by dint of intelligence, could make as much. To strict measure, a prodigy of intelligence would suffice for it. On the contrary, those works that I have named essential, one sees absolutely not how they are made, they are of the given, like life itself.

Intelligence would rather harm them, that is about all that one can say of it. And one even has the impression that there is between them and intelligence an antipathy, deep, an invincible inner contrariety. All the intelligent folk we know — and that brood swarms in Paris, in France — mortally hate genius and the works of genius. It is even the only sincere feeling one knows in them.

Quite other is the situation of a Renan, and it is a situation almost truly unique. On the one hand, in fact, he is not one of those essential men, that is to say he is not one of those men in whom this point of rupture does not appear. And on the other hand, beneath aspects of frivolities which often went so far as to seem to become odious worldlinesses, it is constant that he had constant metaphysical, philosophical, religious preoccupations. But his occupations as historian and his preoccupations as philosopher did not communicate between them. At least thus. Sometimes he was on one side, sometimes he was on the other. Sometimes he moved in his occupations. Sometimes he moved in his preoccupations. He was two men. But not in a continuous march. Sometimes he was on one side of this point of discontinuity. Sometimes he was on another side, on the other side. Never did he obtain, never did he realize that total suppression, or rather that absolute non-existence of this very point of discontinuity, that absolutely free communication which makes a mark of geniuses.

It is for this reason that he will be particularly precious to us in our inquiries. A Michelet is not commodious for little folk like ourselves. From which comes his great present unpopularity, above all among our historians. But a Renan, precisely because of what he has of the discontinued, the disconcerted, the disarticulated, will be particularly useful to us in our inquiries. He will be for us as an anatomical plate prepared.

One must take great care not to confuse with the true geniuses those pseudo-geniuses who only give us a representation of them, a similitude, an image so to speak algebraic and intellectual, a non-equivalent symbol. The compounds symbolize with the simples. But they are not the simples. There are compositions that give the illusion for a time, and that furnish as it were a symbolization of genius; but they are not genius. Because one sees them sometimes on one side of the point we have recognized, and sometimes on the other, one naturally believes that they pass that point as they wish, like the true geniuses, that they walk about, precisely, at their pleasure, in short that this point does not exist for them either. Gross error: they never pass that point; but sometimes they are on one side, sometimes they are on the other, not being the same men, and having no communication with themselves. When Renan is haunted by metaphysical preoccupations, he is no longer, he is not an historian. When he gives himself to his occupations as historian, he is no longer, he is not a philosopher. His occupations and his preoccupations are not of the same world. A Michelet on the contrary is never discernible as historian from what he is as philosopher, nor as philosopher from what he is as historian. One can never take him in the act. He is never guilty. He is never seizable as the one or as the other. His work, in this sense, defies all analysis and presents itself as indissoluble.

It is for this reason that a man like Renan will bring us an assistance almost uniquely precious; his incessant jests, so often immodest, were yet only for modesty, and as it were a covering.

Their clothes are easy to make; for, in this mild climate, one wears only a piece of fine and light cloth, which is not cut, and which each one places in long folds about his body for modesty, giving it the form he wishes: that is, given by Fénelon, that Renan of the seventeenth century, an exact definition of our Renan. So many worldlinesses, so many weaknesses, so many concessions to the age, were only a covering. And the metaphysical concern was in the very organism.

Nowhere does this concern in Renan appear so much as in that singular book, singularly copious, unique of form and of tenor in all his work, that he himself entitled L’Avenir de la Science (pensées de 1848) — The Future of Science (thoughts of 1848). A testament before life, perhaps the most sincere of all, a testament at the threshold of his life as a man: it is he himself who tells us so: now this is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. A testimony from before life, to be published after his death, published at the completion of his life, because life was becoming long, because death was tarrying to come, because the eternity disavowed was keeping itself awaited. Or rather a testimony between two lives, a testament after the completion, after a first completion, that he could believe definitive, of the sacerdotal and religious life, before the beginning of the second career, before the inauguration of the scientific career.

I am almost afraid that your Highness may think that I do not speak here in earnest; but that would be contrary to the respect I owe you, which I shall never fail to render. And I may say, with truth, that the chief rule I have always observed in my studies, the one I believe to have served me most for acquiring some knowledge, has been that I have never employed but very few hours, per day, on the thoughts that occupy the imagination, very few hours, per year, on those that occupy the understanding alone, that I have given all the rest of my time to the relaxation of the senses and the repose of the mind; even I count, among the exercises of the imagination, all serious conversations, all that wherein one must have attention. It is this that has made me retire to the country (Adam-Tannery, Egmond du Hoef). Observandum, non adeo incumbendum esse meditationibus, nec rebus metaphysicis, [&c.; sufficit enim semel in vita eas cognovisse] — translation: one must observe, not so much give oneself over (incumbere, lie upon — far from our French incomber) to meditations, nor to metaphysical things, nor to work them up by commentaries and like elaborations — still less must one go to seek them out more deeply (further) than the author has done, as some attempt to do, for he himself has taken them (begun them) far enough. But it suffices to have known them once in their generation, (in their kind, in their class, in their place, in their formation and in their demonstration in order), and then (and thenceforward) to remember the conclusion; otherwise they too much withdraw the mind from physical and sensible things, and render it inapt to consider those (the physical and sensible things), which (consideration) one ought, however, to wish (choose) above all that men should engage in, because the utility for life would thereby be redoubled. But he himself has pursued metaphysical things sufficiently in his Meditations against the Sceptics, etc., and has established (administered, built up) their certainty, so that all are not bound to attempt and to undertake (attack) it, or in meditating they need to weary themselves long upon those things; it suffices to have known the first book of the Principles, in which are contained those (things) which, drawn from the Metaphysics for the Physics, etc., are necessary to know (Correspondance, DXIV, Entretien de Descartes avec Burman, 16 April 1648, text of Burman — with or without the collaboration of Clauberg — which I translate at my risks and perils).

Such are the limits and the conditions imposed by Descartes, in our general administrations. At least for the time, the importance, the relation. For the use, the utilization. But the metaphysical concern always emerges again, overflows the limits, breaks the conditions. It is difficult to make once for all, semel, one’s share to metaphysical disquiet. Descartes himself — we do not know whether Descartes has given only very few hours per year to the thoughts that occupy the understanding alone, and I know that the thoughts that occupy the understanding alone in Descartes do not by any means cover, far from it, all that we commonly call metaphysics; but in any case, of all Descartes what most struck no doubt even the people of his time, what in any case has remained most in the memory of men, what dominates today, is, by far, what we here call metaphysics, and it is truly what remains of him. So with Renan. His history will pass, it has already passed in its greatest part. But his preoccupations will not pass. What do we read of him today, save, at the two extremities of his life, the works in which he lets us see a little, very little, of his metaphysical ulterior thought. We do not read that intermediate stretch, that work of historian, that enormous labor, they say, which so to speak furnished out all the intermediate part of his life; but we read, we re-read the philosophies of the beginning and the philosophies of the end, the two extremities of life. Here again, in this order also, the two extremities join above the immense middle plateau, above the whole intermediate plain.

And one sees flame in the eyes of young men, But in the eye of the old man one sees light.

One sees no longer anything at all in the immense and intermediate maturity; we no longer read those long scientific elaborations; or if we read them, if we run through them, it is again by an ulterior concern, by an ulterior metaphysical and religious curiosity, with an ulterior thought of our own, to seek there, to find there from afar to afar those few outcroppings, those few bubblings up of the deep metaphysical sources. What we read are the initial metaphysics and the final metaphysics, that Avenir de la Science, and those Dialogues and fragments and poems or philosophical dramas, certainties, probabilities, dreams. Because we feel well that there, really, is the thought. At least what he is willing to let us see of it.

From the papers of Renan recently published in a certain number of reviews and in book form, letters or notes, it does indeed appear to result that the book published in Renan’s old age by Renan himself under this title L’Avenir de la Science would in fact date from 1848; in fact, that is to say as he tells us, everywhere and particularly in his preface. One might be permitted to doubt it, if we did not have these external supporting proofs, historical, so little does this book, so little does the text, on a reading somewhat deepened, appear like a book of a young man.

At first sight the Avenir de la Science is a book of a young man, above all if one compares it to the other works of Renan; a certain, a singular abundance, almost a redundance; as it were a heat, an enthusiasm; a perpetual commotion, a copious, generous movement, a movement of vibration and of perpetual coming and going upon itself.

It is indeed in this way, in this title and in this sense, that this book is generally read; and generally presented; it is thus that it became the breviary of a whole generation, of the generation precisely which carried the religion of historical science to its highest point of development, of the generation that immediately preceded us.

And yet this book, as we shall see in a somewhat pushed study, this book is at bottom a book of duplicity, a book of feigned ignorance, of feigned blindness, of feigned deafness, of feigned muteness before certain problems, before the only problems which, as if by chance, were embarrassing for him.

That too is eminently modern. And as he announced the moderns and prepared them, by the same gesture he represented them to us, by the same gesture he became, he made himself one of their most eminent, perhaps their most eminent representative. Among the classics, never would a book of feint and duplicity have been the book of a young man.

One can no longer represent to oneself today how a whole generation, the generation of the men who today are between thirty-seven and forty-eight years old, received the Avenir de la Science, how it recognized itself in it, saluted itself in it, and gloried in it. In that book it recognized its most secret aspirations. One can no longer imagine the enthusiasm with which that book was invoked. For us on the contrary, for the men of my generation, our enthusiasm, perhaps still more overflowing, was an enthusiasm of adolescence. In reality. In reality on the contrary, this book is an extremely wary book. All the talent, all the infinite suppleness of the author, of the young author, a whole erudition, immense for that age, or that wishes to pass itself off as immense, tends only to mask, to envelop, to drown the difficulties, the metaphysical impossibilities of history that had prematurely appeared to a forewarned intelligence. The whole book is full of these difficulties, of these impossibilities. All the under-tended effort of the book is to muddle them together. So that the reader, enthusiastic or charmed, may no longer find his way in them. It is an immense and perpetual diversion of enthusiasm — let us say the word — a veritable breach of trust, and there would even be, in the language of the correctional tribunals, a technical word, the name of a particular sort of theft, that would better designate, and that would suffice to designate, this kind of operation. It is already incredible that an intellectual should have been able, so constantly, to deploy, as they say, so much cunning. One would say of a peasant. The whole old craftiness of the seafaring and fishing ancestors and of the peasant ancestors must have maintained itself beneath, must have nourished its man, its old child, must have sustained the constancy of the obliterated defense. Such a cunning, such an artfulness, of such a constancy, of such a perfection, is much too accomplished to be a simple intellectual cunning. It must be a peasant’s cunning, a hereditary cunning that has remained ever vigilant, and indefatigable. I was born, goddess with blue eyes, of barbarous parents, among the Cimmerians good and virtuous who dwell on the edge of a somber sea, bristling with rocks, ever beaten by storms.

But above all it is almost incredible that a young man should have been able, in a whole book so voluminous, throughout a whole labor so copious, to deploy and maintain such a prudence of an old man. To pretend so constantly, so cautiously, so faithfully not to see, not to hear, not to understand, when he was so intelligent, so intellectually intelligent. Oculos habent. He who does not hear. And so obstinately not to answer, to pretend not to understand that he must answer, the question, what is at stake, what is asked of him, what he himself has never ceased to ask himself. As in this also, in this already, he announces, prepares, and at the same time represents well the modern world. This world of feint. This old-man world. Or rather this senile world. That is against nature, almost outside nature, and truly monstrous. He must also have kept, aggravated the ecclesiastical prudence. And finally there was at stake the very character of this man: here appears already, here appears in its perhaps gravest manifestation, that prudence of Renan, which prevents a man from putting himself on bad terms with the powers of the day, but which also saves him from attaining the truths, which are persecutions.

The very character of Renan would appear here in a rather ugly light. I am told moreover that no doubt one must not treat this book as a book of youth, despite appearances, and despite the presentation that Renan himself makes of it for us. At this date, I am told, Renan was no longer young, supposing — which is most contestable — that he had ever been young. He was twenty-five years old in 1848. But these were not the twenty-five years of everyone: they were Renan’s twenty-five years; and the seminary years had counted double. At least as warning, preterition, timidity, mistrust, turning back on oneself, and on others, distrust of oneself and of others, disenchantment, teaching of silence, lesson of extreme prudence. Knowledge of the world and of the dangers there are in life. That is to say, in the last analysis, as aging. Moreover his departure from the seminary, and thus from the Church, had been like an intellectual and moral death, a first death, a first completion, an end, consequently preceded by a first old age, had closed a first life. So he was no longer young. And it was not in vain that he had quitted the communion of the faithful for the agrégation of philosophy.

I would gladly rally to this explanation, to this lesson, to this version, to this sort of defense and plea. A man does not make, in his same life, two contrary conversions. Above all he does not make them within a few years’ distance. Few men are capable of breaking with their political friends for the invention, for the defense, for the maintenance, for the victory of truth once known, which is the first degree of courage. There is so to speak no man who, for the same truth, breaks anew with the new political friends he has made for himself in breaking, for this truth, with his former political friends. Which would be the second degree of courage. But I set down this second degree only for symmetry, and I do not conceal from myself that it is properly what mathematicians call an imaginary case. Not at all a real case.

I think one would easily find in the history of the world a very great number of examples of persons who, suddenly perceiving the truth, seizing it, or having sought it having found it, break deliberately with their interests, sacrifice their interests, break deliberately with their political friendships and even with their sentimental friendships. I do not think one will find many examples of men who, having accomplished this first sacrifice, and perceiving afterwards, as it commonly happens, that their new friends are no better than the old, that their second friends are no better than the first, have the second courage to sacrifice as deliberately their second interests, their second friendships. Woe to the man alone; and what they dread most in the creation is solitude. They are quite willing, for truth, to quarrel with one half of the world. All the more so since, in thus quarreling with one half of the world, not without a little resonance, they generally make for themselves partisans of the other half of the world, which asks nothing better than to be antagonist to the first. But if, for love of this same truth, they go and stupidly set about breaking with this second half, who will be left to them?

They are not friends of the human race, no, that would be unworthy of them. And of their courage. But they would very much like to remain the friends of half of the human race.

Of this veritable historical law, in the only sense we can recognize for this insidious expression of historical law, we have the most recent and the most eminent illustration in that affair which we now have the right to retain, now that a liquidation and a general rehabilitation has definitively made it enter into the domain of history, definitively fixed it, buried it in the past; we have thus of it the most illustrious example, the most illustrious exemplary case in that immortal Dreyfus affair, which will doubtless furnish the historian with the most striking illustrations of a very great number of laws, which we ourselves shall therefore retain and which we shall doubtless cite often — that, as concerns this one in particular, as concerns this law which we have found on the road of our inquiries, it made a show of dividing the old parties and really divided them, but only divided them, really, in order to institute new parties; and not, as had been hoped, as had been told us, and formally promised, a new humanity. So that humanity found itself appreciably as little advanced after as before that immortal affair. For the political Dreyfusists, having become victorious according to power, did not rest until they had in their turn made an antidreyfusist government. And the people naturally followed them. Because the people naturally goes on the side of power. And not on the side of justice nor of truth, except provided that they be accompanied by power, or that they promise, that they announce a very near accompaniment of power. The intellectuals followed the crowd which followed power; and all that together made a fine procession; and thus the intellectuals, of one following made two that are equally dear to them; for they equally love to follow the crowd, to accompany the largest number, to make the largest number, above all if it be very large; and to follow power.

And the intellectuals go naturally on the side of power. And not on the side of justice nor of truth, except provided that they be accompanied by power, or that they promise, that they announce a very near accompaniment of power. They very much like, all in all, they like above all to have, to exercise government. They have a weakness for government, but particularly when it is their own, and when there is no longer any question but of governing all the world. Now to exercise government, in our democratic societies, and even in the others, it is better to be on the side of power.

Such was the mechanism, schematized, of that immortal Dreyfus affair, such is the mechanism, schematized, of all the great human affairs, and also of all the small ones, which are much more numerous than the great, and supposedly much more important: one sees sometimes — not very often — conversions, sincere; one never sees, or so to speak never, counter-conversions, or over-conversions; that is to say ulterior and superior conversions, second conversions, conversions of the second order, in the contrary sense. Such will properly be one of the laws of conversions. They are operations of the sort that get done once, and even so. But there is no danger that one does them twice.

One does indeed cut the bridges behind one, at least some people do; but if you cut them in front as well, you would be in an island.

Such is exactly the mechanism, schematized, of those sorts of operations: a courageous man — and there are not many of them already — breaks for truth with his friends and his interests; thus is formed a new party, which is originally and supposedly the party of justice and of truth, which in less than no time becomes absolutely identical to the other parties; a party like the others, like all the others; as vulgar; as gross; as unjust; as false; then, at this second time, it would take a supercourageous man to operate a second rupture: there are so to speak no longer any. To cumulate the inexpiable enemies one has made for oneself by the first operation with the contrary enemies infinitely more inexpiable one would make for oneself by the second operation: who would dare? To add to enemies of one side as many and soon perhaps more enemies of the opposite side; infinitely more relentless, from then on; to add, to superpose against oneself double enmities, double hatreds, double resentments — the second elements of those doubles being infinitely stronger than the first — to make this singular addition, and upon oneself, this paradoxical summation of values which in themselves and mutually were of contrary signs; which naturally fought each other; to accumulate as if for pleasure, upon one’s unfortunate head, hostilities that everywhere else would contradict one another, war-deeds that everywhere else would mutually cancel out, to make for oneself a total of the same sign with two parts of contrary sign; to go, to one’s ruin, against all the rules of calculation; to hold to this mathematical wager: no one will lend a hand to it. Severely filtered through these two successive operations of contrary sense, only the poor truth, the poor justice, of which half a world had for an instant claimed itself, will continue as it can its miserable way. The strongest thing is that, ever since it has been thus making its way, it has never come to pass that, making its way thus at the hazards of human roads, it has been completely lost.

What there is of inexplicable in the world is not error, it is not so much truth, as that singular survival and that wending of the truth.

I say enemies infinitely more enemies, because if men do not pardon us for parting company with them after a long time of comradeship, after a whole beginning of life passed together, they pardon still infinitely less when, after all this, and after having broken together, after having kept them company in the rupture, one breaks company with them in the first rupture, and in the light accompaniment of misunderstandings that followed, by a second rupture. There come thence incredible hatreds. It seems that all the hatred of the first rupture, finding itself again, turning back and contradicting itself, multiplies itself infinitely, from going thus against the sense. Or rather when an old majority of men, following its political road, breaks company with truth, it does not pardon this to the little company which, breaking, accompanies truth. But this reprobation, this hatred and this resentment is nothing in comparison with that which this little company in its turn become great, this minority become majority, when in its turn it breaks company with the same miserable truth — bears against those who, breaking once more, are not afraid to continue to accompany a truth henceforth solitary. It seems that this second rupture, denouncing the first, going back upon it, disavows it as it were and makes as it were a double scandal of return back upon a scandal that seemed acquired.

It was so sweet to the others to legitimate, so to speak, that first rupture, to consolidate it, as one legitimates a revolution, as one consolidates a loan. See what their situation was. They had broken with power. They had made a revolution: in spite of themselves, no doubt, but in the end they had made a revolution. They had gone out. Not without an inquietude, a secret one, because it is sweet to be on the side of power, of conservation, of tradition. They were hastening therefore to consolidate all that. To make for themselves a new life, to make an end. They were forming themselves hastily into a party, political. They were hastily making their little restoration. They were becoming the potentates of truth, the dominators of justice, the tyrants of liberty, the kings of the republic, the conservators of the revolution, the librarians and the archivists of that revolution once made and perfected and which no one would start again, would dare to start again ever more. Unique situation: they cumulated, they joined together all the quiétudes that the established regime gives, power, domination, conservation, and all the inquiétudes, in reality all the imaginations of inquiétudes, that liberty, weakness, revolution leave. These two contrary enjoyments made one another stand out, multiplied one another infinitely, the one by the other. They could at once be as happy and more than conservatives, than the other conservatives, and, as revolutionaries, despise the former conservatives. And lo, in two or three years all this would be lost.

Just at the moment when they were beginning to make this end, when they were beginning to succeed.

No men are as basely conservative, as ferociously reactionary, as those traditional conservatives of the revolution, for, in proportion as their situation is a unique situation, in proportion they are relentless to defend it. They conform themselves thus to the great principle of conservation. They have at once all the advantages of solidity, political and social, and together all the incommutable joys of the old pride. They have been heroes, perhaps authentic — once in their life. But they did not know what it was, the first time, when they undertook to be heroes. And they had such fear, that time, when they had seen what it was, to be heroes, when they had seen how tiring it was, and dangerous, and that misfortune could befall you, that they have well sworn in the depths of their heart, to themselves, that there is no danger of their being caught at it again. But to keep all the same the pride, in their new situation, they have imagined making heroism for life into a function of State, and they made themselves and it is they who are the State conservators of heroism.

They have thus kept everything.

That is why they do not pardon those who make the second exit, the second leap. Just at the moment when their former revolution, having become quite conservatory and quite as it should be, was beginning to be received in the world. Well borne. Worn like one of those decorations of revolutionary chic, or socialistic. And lo, this latecomer, by his new exit, by his second leap, casts a vexing suspicion upon that first operation which you had made in common with him. Upon that originary operation, upon that operation from which finally you have come out, all the world asks for nothing better than to remember it. As is rightly said, one must always distrust one’s old accomplices. Such people would have one believe that this first operation, common to all, was a serious operation, and not a proper operation. Such sorts of people would have one believe that such an operation was an operation of little people, little itself, a vulgar operation, popular, a revolutionary operation in short, and not one of those revolutions that get confirmed, and that marry into the great world. They awaken, they reawaken truly vexing memories. They delegitimate, with a gesture, with a recall, a first operation that asked nothing better than to legitimate itself. They are the perpetual poor relatives, inevitable, of revolutions.

They are those whom one called: those sorts.

It has often been noted, and for a very long time, that religious sects, and in imitation of them political sects, pardon everything, that they can pardon infidelity, indifference, hostility, war, but that they will never pardon apostasy. They admit anything — that one be against them; to the strictest measure; as much as one wishes: but they do not pardon, they do not admit that he who has been in them goes off, exits, and be against them or even outside them; they will never pardon it, they will never admit it; it is an old fact of experience that religious sects, and in imitation of them political sects — the political sects having taken from the religious sects all that they had of bad, and naturally not having taken from them all they could have of good — hate and pursue no one so much as their former religionaries: it is here the first degree of resentment; a degree already very elevated; and it is also one of the reasons why the first degree of danger, the first degree of courage, is also to be once an apostate. One knows that one thus draws to oneself proper hatreds, and as it were hatreds of predilection. But it has perhaps never been noted how much the second apostasy is infinitely more dangerous, how much it demands an infinitely rarer courage, how much consequently it is itself infinitely rarer, to the point of so to speak never manifesting itself.

For the others, who are also apostates, who have committed with you this first apostasy, who have since founded a fidelity, a new loyalism, bear you a grudge, both as apostate, and as new apostate, and infinitely as having recalled, by your recent apostasy, that old, that first, that common apostasy that they were beginning to make forgotten. Being orthodox of recent stratum, they have a hatred itself new, an infinite hatred, a neophyte’s hatred against this new apostasy, against this second apostasy, against this relapsed apostasy which makes everybody say: it is their old friend. Or again: they used to do as he does, in the time.

And yet it must be that the life of the honest man should be, in this sense, an apostasy and a perpetual recantation, it must be that the honest man should be a perpetual renegade, it must be that the life of the honest man should be, in this sense, a perpetual infidelity. For the man who wishes to remain faithful to truth must incessantly make himself unfaithful to all the incessant, successive, untiring re-arising errors. And the man who wishes to remain faithful to justice must incessantly make himself unfaithful to all the incessantly arising injustices.

This perpetual infidelity is all the more difficult to keep — I mean this expression in the sense in which one says: to keep one’s faith — in that the modern powers have implacable sanctions. Generally all of them. But particularly the modern intellectual powers, become political, have sanctions still more implacable, and more dreaded, than the proper political powers. They have placed, they keep in their service all the different, all the ingenious apparatuses of the modern secularized social hell. Solitude first, the so-called splendid isolation, on the contrary so terrible, and so obscure, so stuffed with disquiet, and so commonly dreaded. The solitude that in other times nourished a man and gave him recoil, which conferred upon him a sort of standing aloofness and of present eternity; the isolation which in these modern times on the contrary kills its man, strangles him with misery, smothers him with shadow and silence. A perfect isolation, a total silence, a double isolation, for the new enemies go away from you, and the old enemies do not return to you for all that. A double and cumulated solitude, perfect. The new enemies former second friends make you in front a wall of solitude. The old enemies former first friends make you and had made you behind a wall of isolation. For friends may become enemies. And they do not deprive themselves of it. And enemies might become friends. And they deprive themselves of it. But former friends become enemies will nevermore become friends again. And they are on the contrary enemies of predilection. Thus there organize themselves in the modern world around a man, around a work, around a life, around an action, one of those perfect silences which for this sort are more deadly than death itself.

And there is besides the immense mob, the innumerable crowd, the incalculable plebs of all those who will never be either friends or enemies, indifferent dead. And there are also those who were enemies from before, in advance, before any beginning of life, before any explanation, so to speak by definition and by tradition, before any entry into the matter of youth itself.

The old censures, the Greek ostracism, the ancient exile, the extermination of the city, the placing under ban, the excommunication, the index were or comported redoubtable sanctions. Often mortal. Often they were capital. They reached perhaps less effectively their target. Surely their effect, if not their object — they reached far less gravely and far less definitively the intellectual liberties than they are reached by the learned boycotting organized in the modern world by the modern world against everything that would touch the domination of the modern. It is one of the reasons for which, and that without any doubt, intellectual activities are less numerous in the modern world than they have ever been, in any world, less considerable, less new, less gushing-forth. Much less than in any known world. Works, almost all works, and almost all authors, need, if not an enthusiastic welcome, in default even of simple goodness, in default of a simply benevolent welcome, at least a combat, a battle, war, debate, anything rather than one of those silences which the modern world alone has known how to organize around the works and the men who would only have the air of pretending to be capable of being suspected of wishing only to begin to march against the modern superstitions.

Modern intellectual hatreds have adopted, have borrowed the whole arsenal of ancient and modern political hatreds, and notably of modern political hatreds, which are particularly well equipped.

The modern world prided itself on having introduced into the world methods, what it called scientific methods, and more generally method. It has not lied for that particular method that the methodical organization requires, generally of hatred, particularly of hatred and of intellectual boycotting.

Thence comes in part this great intellectual indigence of the modern times.

Solitude would still be tolerable, and a particularly courageous man, or, as we have said, supercourageous, could bear isolation. But by isolation itself, and as its indispensable complement, the modern world here brings into play its second sanction, the one to which no one resists, for no one can resist: economic isolation, industrial boycotting, that is to say the most vulgar indigence, misery and hunger. The old sanctions, the properly penal sanctions, the antique and Christian sanctions, feudal and royal, and also the violences of popular sanctions, were evidently more brutal, more contusive so to speak, and thus they appeared much more crushing. But in reality they were less hermetic. Precisely by what they had of the pugilistic, they did not reach everything uniformly, and if they fell heavily on some parts, they let much more pass through. There was an anarchy in everything, and an ignorance, that recurred in the sanction. They let much more pass where they did not fall. The modern world can boast of having, here, introduced method, and nothing is comparable, as finish of execution, to certain boycottings organized in the modern world against the citizen who will not walk straight.

Other times have left us other masterpieces: temples, cathedrals, statues, tragedies; but this will properly be, before eternity, the masterpiece of the modern times.

At least the old sanctions were not hypocritical. They designated him whom they wished to strike.

Thus there have begun to appear to us, in the course of this first cahier, under this form, under this figure, the first lineaments of the mountainous massif; there have begun to be profiled upon the horizon of our inquiries the first profiles, and those teeth, those notches, those blue profilings, by which there are announced to the traveler on the march, to the man of the plain, the mobile mountains; thus there have begun to be sketched the first outlines of the enormous question, of the system, as our geographers say, of the powerful and statutory problem that will be as the central redoubt of these studies.

The old problem, the problem of the preceding generations, and notably of the generation that immediately preceded us, was to know how and why a whole world had separated itself from Christianity, particularly from Catholicism.

Very particularly and centrally the question was to know how and why Renan, at the beginning of all that world, how and why all that world, had separated itself from Christianity, particularly from Catholicism, how and why notably — for in his case the question took on this particularly eminent form — how and why he had quit the functions of the priesthood, the ecclesiastical ministry, the religious state.

This old question, this old problem, one may say it is today nearly entirely resolved. As to this particular question of Renan, as to this critical and central question, in these cahiers themselves we have the good fortune to read and to publish a solution, historical, appreciably complete, a statement, historical, appreciably perfect, in the cahier we made of the inauguration of the monument to Renan at Tréguier, from the hands of our collaborator and our friend René Litalien.

This particular question and the general problem that it introduces and represents has been on all sides so completely resolved that it has been so to speak almost too completely resolved. The solution has been so perfect that it is at last too perfect.

And above all in that it has so to speak killed the problem. The problem has not merely ceased to be interesting, for us. It has disappeared. It has been as if smothered, as if seated upon by the solution. The solution, too big a gossip, had inadvertently sat down upon the propounded dish.

Then there appears, in the silence and in the flattening of the old problem, in the effacement of that past, then there appears in the distance the new problem, the problem of the present generation, infinitely more difficult, were it only because it is a problem of comparison, of relation, and also infinitely less summary and gross, the problem of which we have just seen the first advances, introduced by their first explanations, to be profiled upon the horizon of our studies, the problem at last of knowing how and why all that world, and Renan as introducing and representing all that world, abjured the difficulties, the impossibilities, the metaphysical contrarieties of Christianity, and particularly of Catholicism, only in order to engage themselves, to vow themselves, to vow their faith and their life to difficulties infinitely more difficult, to impossibilities infinitely more impossible, to contrarieties infinitely more contrary, in short to metaphysics infinitely more gross — which are properly the difficulties, the impossibilities, the contrarieties, the metaphysics of history and of sociology in this modern age.

Instead of waiting, of living solitary, of doing anything else. Of seeing what would come. Of making it come. Of doing any other trade, which would have been honorable. Of making themselves, were it from very far, the announcers, were it very isolated, the preparers of another world, whatever it might be — it would always have been better than this modern world — the introducers, were it very distant and very lost, of any other world, to come, of a third world, of a third creation, of a third humanity.

All would have been worth more, and infinitely, than this modern world. If Renan as introducing and representing the entire modern world had not engaged themselves in this way of being the modern world, as we know it, as and such as we have made the ungrateful and the painful experience of it; if they had not made, instituted, introduced, imposed this most gross metaphysics of all, this most gross dogma of all, no problem would any longer pose itself for us. The old problem, I have said it, has been emptied. The old difficulties have been explained. Too explained. Too well. Too obligingly.

There would no longer be for us any problem. The situation, the already old and classic situation of a man who has quit the Church, who has lost the religious feeling, who has quit Christianity, who has particularly quit Catholicism, who has personally quit the ecclesiastical state, is today so perfectly known, with a knowledge so clear and so intellectual, we have known it through so many competent persons who have so obligingly enumerated it to us, that we can no longer, today, take interest in it. It is a received situation, established, acquired, usual, frequent. It is the situation of many men, and one might almost say today of many peoples.

But there appears, behind this old problem, a new problem, enormous, a problem of relation and of comparison, because by the same gesture by which they quit the Church, by the same movement, by the same curve by which they abandoned the Catholic dogma and generally the Christian dogma, by the same gesture, by the same movement, by the same accomplishment of the curve they invented, they founded, they imposed a dogma infinitely more authoritarian, infinitely fuller of infinite difficulties infinitely more difficult, of infinite impossibilities infinitely more impossible, infinitely fuller of infinite contrarieties infinitely more contrary, wholly summary in short, wholly full of grossnesses.

To give to my thought a form that responds fully to present preoccupations, I shall say that we accept perfectly that Renan should have unsubscribed from Christianity and particularly from Catholicism, from receiving and from giving the Christian and particularly the Catholic teachings. That, that is a closed affair. What is new, what makes a new fact, what makes the problem, what makes our astonishments — beginnings, if not of all science, at least of all study — is not this unsubscribing. It is that, on leaving this traditional subscription, this old subscription, he should have gone, among so many other potential ones, to take out this new subscription. That he should have subscribed to the insipid review which the modern world edits and plays for the annoyance of humanity. And not only is what makes the problem this singular new subscription. But it is the liaison, the relation of this unsubscribing to this new subscription.