Birth of the Intellectuals

1880-1900

Christophe Charle

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780745690360, 9780745690353
• eBook ISBN: 9780745690391
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Who exactly are the 'intellectuals'? This term is so widely used today that we forget that it is a recent invention, dating from the late nineteenth century.

In Birth of the Intellectuals, the renowned historian and sociologist Christophe Charle shows that the term 'intellectuals' first appeared at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, and the neologism originally signified a cultural and political vanguard who dared to challenge the status quo. Yet the word, expected to disappear once the political crisis had dissolved, has somehow endured. At times it describes a social group, and at others a way of seeing the social world from the perspective of universal values that challenges established hierarchies.

But why did intellectuals survive when the events that gave rise to this term had faded into the past? To answer this question, it is necessary to show how the crisis of the old representations, the unprecedented expansion of the intellectual professions and the vacuum left by the decline of the traditional ruling class created favourable conditions for the collective affirmation of 'intellectuals'. This also explains why the literary or academic avant garde traditionally reluctant to engage gradually reconciled themselves with political activists and developed new ways to intervene in the field of power outside of traditional political channels.

Through a careful rereading of the petitions surrounding the Dreyfus Affair, Charle offers a radical reinterpretation of this crucial moment of European history and develops a new model for understanding the ways in which public intellectuals in France, Germany, Britain, and the United States have addressed politics ever since.

Part I
Intellectuals before the Intellectuels

1
The Intellectuel:
A Historical and Social Genealogy

I do indeed maintain (and for me this must be a practical dogma in the life of an artist) that one has to divide one’s life into two parts: live as a bourgeois and think as a demi-god.

Gustave Flaubert¹

To understand the appearance of a new social and cultural figure such as that of the intellectuel in the 1890s, it is necessary to situate this in the historical and social context of the turn of the century. In the first place, its content and its function were determined by a succession of earlier representations of dominant cultural figures. Since the eighteenth century at least, each period has had its social ideal of the cultural producer. Convenience of presentation here requires us to analyse each of these as the result of a regular succession, analogous to a family tree, though it is clear that they were also, in their time, the issue in an intellectual struggle before winning temporary legitimacy in the intellectual field.² I will confine myself here, however, to this schematic vision, as what matters at this point is less to reconstitute the successive states of the intellectual field than to determine both the degree to which the intellectuels of the late nineteenth century could claim attachment to it and the historical circumstances at the origin of the substitution of one figure for another – the intellectuel being the latest example. This apparent continuity in fact conceals the transformation of the intellectual field during the last three decades of the nineteenth century, which was the essential cause of the ideological change.

The intellectuel in fact emerged at the end of a new phase of cultural life. The period during which he appeared was marked not only by an ideological or political crisis, as with the replacement of earlier figures by their successors, but also by a challenge to the very dimensions of the intellectual field, its structures and rules of operation. The elitism of earlier figures corresponded to a narrow intellectual field, closely tied to the privileged members of society. The figure of the intellectuel imposed itself after a phase of expansion of the intellectual professions, a broadening of the publics affected and a challenge to the most venerable cultural hierarchies (in particular the traditional university system). Nonetheless, this neologism entered the social vocabulary from the margins. The figure of the scientist, which had recently acquired the greatest legitimacy, could not play this role, as its elitism ran counter to the new ‘democratic’ conditions of intellectual life.

THE GALLERY OF ANCESTORS

From the ‘man of letters’ to the ‘poet’

Without going back to the Middle Ages,³ and keeping to the purely French genealogy that the Dreyfusard intellectuels claimed, the most direct ancestor of the intellectuel was the philosophe or ‘man of letters’ of the eighteenth century. Voltaire in particular, in his article on ‘men of letters’ in the Dictionnaire philosophique, written in 1765, gave a strangely pessimistic portrait. The man of letters was a martyr (‘every philosopher is treated as the Jews treated their prophets’). The examples he cites, taken from the seventeenth century, show that ‘man of letters’ had a much broader sense than it does today and included not just ‘literary’ writers but also philosophers and scientists (among the names Voltaire cites are Descartes, Gassendi and Arnauld). Above all, however, the term is defined in opposition to the decadent academics stuck in their jargon and to schools ‘where things are only said by halves’.⁴ Excluded from the dominant cultural institutions, the man of letters, according to Voltaire, was also on the margins of society:

The great misfortune still of a man of letters is generally to have nothing to hold on to. A bourgeois purchases a minor position and is supported by his colleagues. If he is treated unjustly, he immediately finds defenders. The man of letters has no support, he is like one of those flying fish: if he soars a bit, the birds eat him; if he sinks, the fish eat him.

This passage, with only slight alteration, could serve to define the intellectuel at the end of the nineteenth century. It also suggests how dearly the unattached intellectual has to pay for his claim to freedom and independence. If these structural conditions applying to the ‘man of letters’ in the eighteenth-century sense and confirmed by recent historical works⁵ enable us to conclude the existence of a certain kinship with the intellectuel, at least an ideological one, the change of perspective should not be overlooked, not to mention the evidently new social conditions of intellectual production after the Revolution. The philosophe’s claim to autonomy came up against the unbridgeable barriers of the old society. The success that a few of the philosophes had in ‘the world’ should not conceal the exclusion from the sphere of privilege and legitimate culture that the great number of men of letters encountered. These excluded ones formed the ‘literary bohemia’ which, according to Robert Darnton, took its revenge against academic literature in the course of the Revolution. Forerunners of revolutionary ideas, and in their final generation themselves actors in the Revolution, the ‘men of letters’ experienced the vagaries of the Revolution’s image after Thermidor.

We can follow here the demonstration given by Paul Bénichou in Le Sacre de l’écrivain.⁶ He explains how the ‘man of letters’, whom the author of Candide had endowed with all the symbolic attributes of the intellectuel, could not maintain this function in the early part of the nineteenth century. The man of letters was reduced to the banal condition of a literary professional (a sense that persists in the Société des gens de lettres).⁷ A liberal essayist such as Senancour, for example, distinguished the writer from the man of letters as follows: ‘I do not like to see scholars or great writers denoted in this way, but rather penny-a-liners, people who make a trade of it, or at most those who are precisely or merely men of letters.’⁸ The man of letters also suffered from political discredit.⁹ For the section of opinion hostile to the Revolution, he was made responsible for the excesses of the Terror, allegedly because of the philosophe’s claim to influence in public affairs.¹⁰ As Robert Darnton has shown, men of letters were able to find a new outlet in this activity as opinion leaders thanks to the multiplication of newspapers during the liberal phase of the Revolution and the disappearance of the corporative carapace that had controlled the book trade.¹¹ The authoritarian regimes that followed Bonaparte’s coup d’état always kept these spokesmen in a marginal position, no doubt exaggerating their political influence. On top of the fears aroused by too radical a drift from the man of letters to the partisan journalist, there was the moral contempt of the young generation of the 1820s for their elders, who had both managed to adapt to the various changes of regime and sung the praises of each in turn.¹²

The Romantics, in the first counter-revolutionary phase of the movement, rejected the philosophes’ claim to bring a rational truth to bear on the process of history, seeing this very ambition as the source of the catastrophes that France had undergone in the last few decades. But if the Romantic ‘poet’ rehabilitated religious sentiment and sensibility against Reason and the critique of dogmas, he soon came up against the narrowly reactionary politics of the Restoration, as did the whole generation of 1820. In order to fulfil completely his social ideal, the writer in Senancour’s sense, as well as the Romantic poet, and the scientist for Michelet and Saint-Simon, had to claim complete freedom of expression and thus indirectly inherit the political function of the philosophe. The diversity of these figures, of which each author had his own conception, itself explains their short symbolic life. Added to this is the contradiction between their elitism and their prophetic ambition to speak to all, at a time when a large number of obstacles deprived ‘the people’ of access to culture. These writers were generally aware of the problem: some denounced the iron laws of economics that made the poet’s survival impossible (cf. Vigny’s Chatterton); others, such as Michelet, attacked the cultural alienation of the people, with whom the scientist could not communicate – unless, like Saint-Simon, they held to the utopia of a union of scientists and industrialists against the parasitic aristocracy and clergy. The weaknesses of this old intellectual idea appeared when it was confronted with an intellectual field whose conditions were being rapidly transformed. It was finally ruined with the shipwreck of the illusions of 1848, which the majority of these men had shared, from Lamartine and Michelet to the utopian socialists. Relief came from a new direction, still more elitist, which deployed a different figure – that of the ‘artist’ – defined by reaction to the new social conditions of the intellectual profession in the era of ‘industrial literature’.¹³

‘The artist’

As Georges Matoré has shown, the modern notions of art and artist, as understood by champions of art for art’s sake in most of the nineteenth century, appeared in competition with their still existing forerunners, approximately in the era of the Restoration and the beginnings of Romanticism.¹⁴ The originality of their deployment, from Théophile Gautier to the Symbolists, lay in the transfer of these terms from the aesthetic to the literary order. They w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Part I Intellectuals before the Intellectuels
• Part II Intellectuels and the Field of Power
• Appendices
• Index
• End User License Agreement