Edgar Quinet

TWENTY-FIRST CAHIER OF THE FOURTH SERIES

CAHIERS DE LA QUINZAINE appearing twenty times per year 8, rue de la Sorbonne, ground floor

We reproduce hereafter the opening lecture --- 9 December 1902 --- of the course taught at the Sorbonne by M. Henry Michel. M. Henry Michel teaches at the Sorbonne the course on the history of political doctrines. After having studied, in preceding years, the revival of the liberal idea under the Restoration; the thrust of the democratic idea under the July Monarchy, its advent with the Revolution of February; the crisis of 1849-1857, he chose as his subject, in 1901-1902, the contribution of Michelet and that of Quinet to the democratic idea, in the period 1820-1851. He wished, this year, to study them both, from 1852 to the end of their lives. He was able to fulfill his program, for Quinet, before Easter. He began, for Michelet, at the Easter return, but, after the first lecture, he was interrupted by illness. Next year he has already announced, as his subject, the political ideas of Auguste Comte and their influence. It is therefore probable that he will not return to the end of Michelet. He intends to publish this course on Quinet. He also intends to publish the preceding courses. He is completing, at this moment, a large volume on the Falloux Law, which contains unpublished documents, and which will shed some light on the question of the freedom of education, historically; it is a part of the course on the reaction of 1849-1850. Barring the unforeseen, this volume will appear in November.

M. Henry Michel was good enough to reread for the cahiers the proofs of this lecture.

EDGAR QUINET

Democracy celebrated, in 1898, the centenary of Michelet, poet, historian, moralist, plebeian and French soul, who, better than any other, knew how to speak of the people of France. Democracy owes to Edgar Quinet, to the faithful and upright citizen, to the exemplary republican, who carried to the point of heroism his devotion to his ideas, to the great heart, to the vast and powerful mind, to the intrepid confessor of the secular idea that Edgar Quinet was, the same reward, the same honors.

Michelet is more popular. Quinet exercised on the march of events and ideas an influence that, for having been slow to manifest itself, and for not having yet spoken its last word, is no less very profound. I should like to address here to public opinion, to the public powers, to the militants of the democratic idea and of social progress, an urgent appeal. It would be necessary that, on the coming 17 February, (1) the centenary of Edgar Quinet be celebrated with great pomp. The man and the work are worthy of it.

(1) Edgar Quinet was born at Bourg, on 17 February 1803 (and not at Strasbourg, as the German biographers have said). He died at Versailles on 27 March 1875.

The man --- I do not consider him in the rich variety of his gifts. I mean to speak only of the political philosopher. How was he formed? What is the dominant trait of his moral temperament, the characteristic tendency of his thought, and, if one may say, the natural bearing of his soul?

The father of Edgar Quinet, a distinguished mathematician, an original researcher, was a commissary of wars with the Army of the Rhine. When the child was three years old, Madame Quinet went to join her husband at Wesel. (1) They lived there in a palace filled with soldiers. They were cavalrymen who were returning from Austerlitz. They took the child into their affection. The child, on his side, did not want to leave them. He ate at the mess. He went to forage on a large sheep, bridled, harnessed. He returned to town with the regiment, to the sound of the trumpet. Then he made the litter, filled the rack of his beast, and went to bed as late as possible. Those were his first games. At eight years old, he entered the college of Charolles, and had there for master a former captain of dragoons. It sometimes happened to this master to teach his class. Then the time was spent “reviewing” the cavalry maneuvers in which he had taken part. With the smallest children’s grammars, he formed squadrons, regiments.

(1) These details are borrowed from the autobiography that Quinet left us under this title: History of My Ideas. This autobiography, written in 1858, concerns only the youth of Quinet, and stops at his seventeenth year. The History of My Ideas forms volume XV of the Complete Works of Edgar Quinet in the Hachette edition. It is to this edition that I refer, except for the Letters of Exile (4 volumes, Calmann-Levy).

All the elements of a complete biography are found in the works of Madame Edgar Quinet: Memoirs of Exile (first and second series), Paris; Journal of the Siege, Paths of France, Edgar Quinet Since Exile, Fifty Years of Friendship (with Quinet’s letters to Michelet). M. Vales, professor of history at the Lycee Voltaire, is preparing a life of Edgar Quinet that is about to appear, and in which he uses, besides the printed documents, still unpublished manuscripts of Madame Quinet.

At the beginning of 1812, the college of Charolles became a forage store for the horses of the Grande Armee. Classes were suspended. Soon it was the invasion. Still a child, at the age when sensibility is wholly open and vibrant, Edgar Quinet rubbed shoulders with Austrian soldiers, lodged in his father’s house. He thus had, in quick succession, the two visions of France: that of a conquering and invincible France, that of a vanquished and captive France. Whence the “magic” that, immediately, at the first awakening of passion, attached itself for him to this name of France. And this magic never dissipated. The foundation of being, in Quinet, is the national sentiment. Not a vague love, a sentiment so to speak reflected, but a sentiment born of the most distant and most obscure emotions, a love that attaches itself to very clear images, to concrete things. The fatherland, for him, is the Bressan earth, the meadows of Certines, where he tended the oxen with the village boys, the great cavalrymen of Austerlitz, and the corpses, the wounded, the weapons that he saw with his eyes, touched with his hands, in the winter of 1814, on the roads, at the edge of the woods.

A patriot first, and above all, Quinet does not forgive the Restoration the treaties of 1815. He weeps with joy to see the tricolored flag again, in July. (1) But the new monarchy shows itself weak and timid, abroad as at home, timid abroad because it is so at home, because the street, according to Quinet’s powerful expression, hides Europe from it. It allows displacements of material force or moral ascendancy, which weaken France, to occur around her. From 1831, Quinet points out, with astonishing precision, the peril that the ascending movement of Prussia creates for our country, as Prussia is going to realize German unity, by posing itself, in the face of retrograde Austria, as the representative of the new spirit. The study he publishes then, under the title: On Germany and the Revolution, is truly prophetic. One reads in it in advance the career of Bismarck, Sadowa, Sedan. Throughout the reign of Louis-Philippe, Quinet lavishes severe warnings, contemptuous exhortations to dare. And this, at the peril of his personal interest. In 1840, he is a professor at the Faculty of Letters of Lyon, and his friends are working to create for him a chair at the College de France. He writes the Warning to the Country, 1815 and 1840, redoubtable pamphlets, which yield nothing to those of 1831 (Germany and the Revolution, Warning to the Monarchy of 1830). In the second half of his life, after the coup d’etat, during exile, one may wonder what he forgives the Empire least --- is it its domestic policy, or its foreign policy? The Crimean War and the Italian War produce a wavering in democracy. The cannon thunders, the flag snaps in the wind. The military instinct stirs. It seems that the glory of arms is going to compensate, in some measure, the ignominy of the origins of power.

Quinet, though cocardier, is not for an instant shaken. (1) No doubt, he desired the emancipation of Italy and the creation of Italian unity. But, beyond the fact that it displeases him that the Empire should be working at it, he sees distinctly the entire import of the Roman question. (2) He foresees, he announces that Italy will not forgive France for having barred her the road to Rome, and that at the hours when France might need Italy, the latter will remember the threat and the affront, more than the succor. The Mexican expedition appears to Quinet, from the first hour, as it was to be, in effect: a criminal adventure that is going to engulf the wealth, the vital forces of the country. (3) The war of 1866 (4) only too fully justifies the predictions of 1831. And he announces that Prussia will not stop there, that the conflict is henceforth inevitable between her and us, that this conflict will turn out badly for us. If it is war, it is certain defeat. (5) War breaks out: what anguish, what grief in the house of the exile, at the announcement of the first disasters! What? Not a powerful recovery, not a “military idea”? (6)

On the morrow of the proclamation of the Republic, Edgar Quinet returns to Paris, with Victor Hugo. He too had made the vow not to see France again except on the day when she would have cast out the regime born of the coup d’etat. And this vow, he kept. He returns to Paris to take his share of the sorrows and privations of the siege, his share of the mourning of the fatherland. He drafts manifestos, newspaper articles. (1) He goes to see the members of the Government of National Defense, to persuade them to attempt an energetic military action. He reaches, not without difficulty, General Trochu. He sets forth to him the plan most likely to facilitate the march of a relief army. What despair, when he sees that this man does not understand, and does not wish to! What explosion of anger, at the news that Bourbaki is heading east! At the Assembly of Bordeaux, where the choice of Paris has just called him, Quinet demands the struggle to the uttermost, rejects with his vote the preliminaries of peace. The sacrifice once consummated, France reduced, mutilated, there remains to Quinet only one way to show her his filial tenderness: it is, after so many years of exile, to slowly retake possession of the soil, the atmosphere of his country. He goes, “by the paths of France,” (2) and it is an infinite sweetness for him to rediscover Normandy and Brittany, Touraine and Languedoc, la Bresse and the Pyrenees, to breathe this air, to contemplate this light, which seem to him better than anywhere in the world, because they come from the sky of France. There has never been a greater Frenchman than this great humanitarian. There is not, in all our language, a writer whose books teach with more persuasive force the fatherland, nationality.

Let us now go back to the childhood and youth of Quinet. What were his first intellectual impressions, those that determined the orientation of his mind?

Until 1815, Quinet had not studied. What was the use? How should parents have troubled to educate sons whom conscription was going to take, to send them to die some unknown death, in some unknown plain? It was only after the fall of Napoleon that one began to think of the cultivation of the mind.

However, the mother of Quinet, a woman of high and brilliant intelligence, had applied herself to forming her son’s soul through her conversations, through strong readings. (1) At seven years old, knowing nothing yet, the child knew La Bruyere, Racine, Corneille, the whole theater of Voltaire, some plays of Shakespeare. He also knew his mother’s idol, Madame de Stael. Quinet was raised in this cult. At fifteen, he tried to read the Considerations on the French Revolution, which had just appeared. He was obliged to renounce this reading, for want of understanding the language of the Revolution, the language of liberty. (2) The moment was approaching, however, when Quinet would understand Madame de Stael.

In 1820 --- he was then seventeen years old --- he went through an intellectual crisis, the crisis that many young men knew around that date. France, so diminished, must resume her rank. Her destinies, so humble under the Restoration, must shine anew with the most vivid brilliance. But with what brilliance? It would not be that of arms; it would be that of letters, of ideas. What ideas? Quinet, during the autumn of 1820, which he spent at his beloved estate of Certines, sought to see clearly in his own thoughts. He walked through the forest of Seillon, and there, “on the edge of the ponds, in the company of herons and teal,” he reflected. He discerned two directions, between which one had to choose. On one side, the way opened by Chateaubriand; on the other, the way opened by Madame de Stael. Chateaubriand, whose style pleased him more, was the past, the Middle Ages. Madame de Stael, who had neither the superb flight of the phrase, nor the color, was the future, the future through liberty. And the young solitary, anxious, trembling, said to himself: “That is where one must go, there is the century, there is life.” (1)

From that day, Quinet, surpassing, and by far, Madame de Stael, marched straight to the goal he had just perceived: the integral emancipation of the mind.

It remains, to have completed the analysis of the man, to recall what his religious education was.

The father of Quinet was, by birth, Catholic. His mother was Protestant. She nevertheless had the child baptized, Catholicism being the only religion practiced in la Bresse. As he received baptism, Quinet made his first communion. He was prepared for this religious act, less by the discourses of the Provencal missionary who taught him the catechism, than by his mother’s lessons.

Madame Quinet practiced the broadest and freest Christianity, the most indifferent to rites and formulas. Sincerely pious, she prayed often. She prayed wherever she found herself, in the fields, in her garden, varying each day her prayer, accommodating it to the needs, the sadnesses, the cares, the joys of the moment. The prayer of Madame Quinet was a conversation with God, in abandon and effusion of the heart. It was thus, “during the sweet spring of Certines, in the open air, among the flowers and the bees, in the shade of the lindens and willows,” that Quinet felt God. He knew the Church only through the masses of Father Pichon. Father Pichon was an old Trappist, who had passed the bad days of the Revolution in a hermitage, where he had almost unlearned human speech. He went from cottage to cottage, his sack on his back, begging his food. And on Sunday, he stuttered a hesitant mass, which Madame Quinet never failed to attend. (1)

Between the masses of the old Trappist and the prayers of his mother, Quinet had grown up without knowing, without suspecting the conflict of dogmas, and without suffering from it. A sort of spontaneous conciliation of Protestantism and Catholicism had taken place in him. The day he approached the mysteries of the Church, he brought to them a soul sincerely, but freely religious. That soul, he always kept. He was a resolute enemy of the Church, but he never believed that one could fight it with advantage without offering nourishment to those needs of the soul that the Church has been laboring for so many centuries to excite and to satisfy.

The history of Quinet’s thought, when one follows it between his years of youth and the period of the lectures at the College de France, from 1841 to 1846, shows how the fusion of the three elements that our analysis has just retraced was accomplished.

By the date of 1843 --- when the most famous of those lectures begin --- the fusion is accomplished. It will henceforth undergo no attack. It has produced what Quinet somewhere calls “the religion of the College de France.” (1) Here is very exactly what this religion consists in. France is not a vulgar nation. She has a “mission” to fulfill. The shocks that agitate her, the ordeals that, in the course of her history, have not been spared her, are the pledge and as it were the ransom of this mission. Far from her, the easy uninterrupted prosperities! Far from her, the calm and half-sleep of other nations! It is in pain that France will bring forth the new dogma. This dogma is contained in two words: democracy and liberty. Civil life has no other meaning, no other end. All peoples will one day know liberty and democracy, liberty through democracy. France was the first to know them, to experiment with them. She has suffered, in the course of these experiments. She will suffer still. But she will fulfill her task to the end. The French Revolution continues in hearts, as in events. Now the Revolution, far from being the negation of Christianity, constitutes one of the “epochs” of its development. The Revolution brings to light, clearer, more disengaged, more visible than it ever was, the very principle of Christianity, the spirit of life that animates it, sustains it, makes it endure, despite the Church: liberty. (1)

One sees how religious sense, liberalism, patriotism combine and organize themselves in this synthesis, whose formula is: “the magistracy of the world” exercised by the France of the Revolution, authentic heir and legitimate continuator of Christ.

The formula has aged, I know. That is no longer how the vanguard minds express themselves. But I am obliged to show Quinet as he was. One must, moreover, know this formula, to explain the angers, the vengeances that have pursued Quinet, and of which the most formidable is the organized silence around his work. If Quinet had been only a freethinker, he would have appeared infinitely less formidable to the Church. The Church has never forgiven him, she will never forgive him for having been a religious freethinker.

We know the man: let us pass to the work.

Here again, one must restrict oneself. I shall speak neither of the religious criticism of Quinet, although it preceded that of Renan, and blazed the trail for him, (1) nor of his criticism of the Revolution, (2) although it alone made possible the scientific study of the Revolution, as it is being elaborated before our eyes. Of the work attempted by Quinet, I shall retain only the points that have exercised, or that could exercise a direct influence on contemporary democracy. I shall cite only his views on popular education and the education of the people through secular morality, as well as his conception of the secular spirit.

The gratitude of democracy goes --- and will go ever more --- to the men who created the new school and developed the means of intellectual and moral culture for youth, upon leaving school: a Jules Ferry, a Jean Mace, a Felix Pecaut. Those are the most active or the greatest among the dead. There are also living men, whose names are on every lip. We are right to honor those dead and to love those living, but we must not forget the one who was their master to all, the true initiator of the movement they continued.

In 1850, Quinet publishes The Education of the People, which is one of his best books, and one of his most decisive acts. He shows there, with a rare power of logic and eloquence, that the secular school, the school where a secular morality is taught, is alone capable, in a country where several confessions exist, of making the union of citizens, indispensable to the common good. There is, in this book, a page that must be cited:

“For my part, I have always maintained that modern society possesses a principle that it alone is in a position to profess, and it is upon this principle that its absolute right of education in civil matters is founded. What constitutes the foundation of this society, what makes it possible, what prevents it from decomposing, is precisely a point that cannot be taught with the same authority by any of the official religions. This society lives on the principle of the love of citizens for one another, independently of their belief. Now, tell me, who will profess, not only in words, but in action, this doctrine that is the bread of life of the modern world? Who will teach the Catholic fraternity with the Jew? Is it the one who, by his very belief, is obliged to curse the Jewish belief? Who will teach Luther love of the papist? Is it Luther? Who will teach the papist love of Luther? Is it the Pope? And yet these three or four worlds, whose law is to execrate one another mutually, must be united in one same friendship. Who will perform this miracle? Who will unite these three bitter, irreconcilable enemies? Evidently, a superior and more universal principle. This principle, which is that of no church, there is the foundation stone of secular education.” (1)

Note the formula of Quinet. He does not say that the Catholic owes the Jew, or the Lutheran the Catholic, “tolerance.” He says that the three confessions --- and how can one not add a fourth, the confession of sincere souls who have no confession? --- must “love” one another, form what the language of old France called a “friendship,” a noble and charming expression, which Michelet noted, to apply it to the revolutionary federations. Now it is this “friendship” that the clergies and the confessional moralities are powerless to found. They can indeed advocate or accept tolerance, especially when they are the weaker party.