Paris and French Nationhood

Rosenstock-Huessy deals with a number of interrelated issues in a section of Out of Revolution dealing with Paris and the French notion of nationhood: He talks about the establishment of Paris as the intellectual center of France and of Europe; about the division between Paris and Versailles as background to the Revolution; and about the French conception of “nation.”

Paris became the intellectual center of Europe during the Middle Ages with the establishment of the university of Paris. And the university’s existence arose out of the presence of Abelard and the development of the scholastic method. Sexually frustrated and then castrated, Abelard unsurprisingly threw himself “into the arms of the Spirit, and called his home the house of Paracletus.” He was the first to name a church after the Holy Spirit, and this spiritualization of faith was evident in his obsession with the life of thought. Abelard was also the founder of the method that established the possibility of science. Accepting the authority of the first millennium of the church, he urged his contemporaries to listen to the totality of the past: “He refused to listen to any single authority,” be it Augustine or Origen, and instead found freedom in the sometimes contradictory heritage of the church. This “simultaneous representation of contradictions was the dawn of science,” and the “summa” form, with its sic-et-non movements, provided space for the free exercise of theological judgment. Totality – accepting the whole of the Christian past, in all its variety – was not stultifying but liberating.

This side-by-side method of scholasticism expressed itself institutionally in the fact that “in Paris two great schools existed in the same place.” This was the condition of possibility for the establishment of a university, which sees thought “created and promoted in a dialectical process, polarities and paradoxes, in a dialogue between pro and con.” Contrary to some portrayals, Rosenstock-Huessy argues that scholasticism was not aiming at a wrong-headed “totalization” or “total system,” but was founded on the assumption that humans always grasp truth in fragments. Rosenstock-Huessy points to the popularity of images of mirrors and prisms in the medieval world, suggesting “the prismatic and fragmentary aspect of scholastic truth.” Everyone who thinks is a “shareholder in the truth,” but as such he “never owns the whole capital of truth. We are thrown others; our thought provokes other and contrary thought!”

The French Revolution, Rosenstock-Huessy argues, arises in part from the eclipse of Paris by the newer universities of the Reformation – Wittenberg, Heidelberg, Marburg – and by the confinement of Paris to France. Paris ceased to be a universal city, and came to represent merely the French nation. Instead of being a place of dialectical inquiry, it became a rigid bastion of orthodoxy, and “the despotism of the most Catholic University of Paris made it impossible for the French Government to come to terms with the Protestants,” finally resulting in the tragic attacks on and expulsion of the Huguenots: “In the last hour of her theological sovereignty, Paris was more papal than the Pope.” The central importance of the University’s theologians ended when Henry IV decided Paris was worth a Mass, following the advice of pragmatic “politiques” rather than the university theologians. To find freedom to think anew, Descartes had to leave Paris for Holland.

Descartes’s departure from Paris and its theological tradition also meant, however, that a secular notion of “l’esprit” replaced the central role of the Holy Spirit established by Abelard. The question facing France between Descartes and the Revolution was the “reconciliation between ‘esprit’ and Paris . . . As soon as Paris would incorporate and politically organize this spirit of the modern world, its international and European role could be resumed. The French Revolution was to be this fusion.”

In the meantime, however, Paris lost its centrality in French culture. Between 1594 and 1789, the center of gravity, both politically and culturally, shifted to Versailles, where the king established residence: “Between 1675 and 1805 no new building was done on the royal palace, the Louvre, in Paris.” French Kings were suspicious of Paris. In this, Rosenstock-Huessy sees an effort to move beyond France’s Christian past and achieve a “regeneration of a pre-Christian order of things.” Absolutism was a revival of Caesarism: “The tendency of this policy pointed from the traditional rights of an anointed King over clergy, nobility and cities of a Christian realm to the absolute power of a Caesar over Gaul.” In fact, the absolute monarch was not always his own man; lazy, weak, or young kings became the playthings of priests, relatives, and nobility. Versailles became widely known as a center of corruption, and the French people, always pro-monarchy, resented the king’s subordination to others. Even after the Revolution, the King remained in power until 1792, and France soon returned to quasi-monarchy in Napoleon: “France was not and is not anti-royal, but anti-clerical, anti-aristocratic, and anti-dynastic.”

The problem was that the nobles who eventually assembled at Versailles had privileges, including privileged access to the King, but little function or responsibility for how France went. In Paris, society functioned, but Parisians lacked the privileges granted to nobility. This asymmetry is one of the key background issues leading up to the Revolution. The Revolution meant that the bourgeois in Paris – standing between privileged nobles and “a denuded class of peasants” – took the risk of becoming more than bourgeois; they turned into citizens.

The treatment of the Huguenots and the Jesuits is a central part of the story. The expulsion of the Huguenots was a triumph of theology over political reason, but even after their expulsion in 1685, about 10,000 remained in Paris. The Jesuits were opposed for nationalistic reasons, as outsiders, and because they controlled and manipulated the king. The expulsion of the Jesuits from France in 1761 was critical for the King’s relationship to Paris; in losing the Jesuits, he lost one of his staunchest allies against Parisian intellectual life. Diderot said, “With the suppression of the Jesuits, absolute monarchy in France is ended.”

The formation of the bourgeois into citizens took place through the formation of what the French described as a “nation” and a civilization. For the French, “peuple” is not identical to “nation.” There is a “people” in Paris, in Flanders, in each individual regional “pays” or fatherland. When the people are purged of their ancient habits and superstitions, and when reason and speech are added, they are formed into a nation. Nation is “the glory of a natural humanity which also bears the torch of enlightenment.” Rosenstock-Huessy shows that French political terms are used throughout Europe, but says that these are often inappropriate. America is not, he argues, a “nation” but a collection of nations.

The formation of the French nation was the work of intellectuals, and was distributed to the French through the theater, which became “an institution for the political education of the nation.” To illustrate, he reviews the career of Caron de Beaumarchais, and particularly the up-and-down stage history of his play, The Wedding of Figaro. The play expressed the revolutionary formula, “Inspiration alone can change everything.”

Rosenstock-Huessy claims that this expresses the French intellectual conviction that moral virtues depend on “esprit,” which he describes as “the translation of the Holy Ghost into its most personal and single-minded form, that of the inspired individual. The thunderbolt, the flash, may burst out through any person. Government by inspired individuals becomes the endeavour of the national society.” This is hardly a formula for absolute monarchy. Remarkably, after being censored and banned, The Wedding of Figaro was performed before Louis XVI, who once denounced the play by saying “That shall never be acted! The Bastille would have to be destroyed, to make the performance of this play anything but an act of the most dangerous inconsistency” but now placidly sat watching the play beside the playwright. More remarkably, the lead female part was played by Marie Antoinette, on the very evening that the Bastille was destroyed. When Figaro said, “Since they cannot humiliate l’esprit, the genius, they take their revenge by torturing him,” the audience burst into applause. Rosenstock-Huessy commes that “The theatre changed the audience” and the “stage was a training camp for the new equality of citizenship.” Men of esprit, working behind the scenes of the theater, could “change everything.”

The notion of genius or esprit, which is mediated through language and literary art, is central to the French notion of nationhood. This accounts for the French fanaticism about the purity of language. Ecrivains constitute “a civilized nation” by expressing and offering “standards to the national existence.” Language unifies but language itself won’t unify peoples into a civilized nation; that language must be filled with inspiration in a literature. In sum, Rosenstock-Huessy says, “A nation is not a geographical or racial fragment. Nations are divided from barbarian tribes by the one reality of Inspiration. Where a nation organizes its inspiration into an endless stream of literary production it becomes civilized, it counts, it belongs to humanity in the sense of the humanism of the French Revolution.” France’s “constitution” requires “this endeavour to keep true inspiration alive, to keep pouring into the body of the nation the living breath of divine genius.”

France in this way gives a universal gift to humanity: “There are no established privileges, no water-tight compartments in the world. ‘L’esprit seul peut tout changer.’ Inspiration is at work all the time changing the surface of the earth and the essence of things and men.”