L' ‘Orphée’ de Ballanche: genèse et signification — Contribution à l'étude de la pensée de Giambattista Vico

Abstract

By Alan J. L. Busst. (Le Romantisme et après en France, 4). Bern, Peter Lang, 1999. 343 pp. Pb £35.00. Ballanche's reputation as a religious visionary with little grasp of historical realities was solidly established even before his death in 1847. Since then, the proverbial obscurity and density of his work have baffled and discouraged even his most sympathetic readers. Alan Busst's monograph is thus a welcome attempt to demonstrate the unity and coherence of Ballanche's literary output after his seminal third tour of Italy between 1823 and 1825. Busst argues that the suspended publication of Ballanche's Œuvres before the appearance of two volumes of Preuves was profoundly detrimental to the intelligibility of the Essais de palingénésie sociale, and of Orphée in particular. Intended as an appendix to the arcane or encoded allusions in the Essais, the Preuves were to comprise what Ballanche called ‘des dissertations, quelquefois des textes importants, quelquefois des indications d'analogies lumineuses’. The result of a largely unrecorded collaboration between Ballanche and an obscure Italian scholar called Fossati, the extant drafts of the Preuves are today held in the Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon together with other previously overlooked archival material. These documents help to clarify the extent of Ballanche's unacknowledged debt to Vico following his discovery of the Neapolitan philosopher's work in 1824. Busst claims that Ballanche's understanding of historical change was considerably influenced by both the Pythagorean doctrine of perfectibility which he found in De antiquissima Italorum sapientia and the analysis of social conflict contained in the Scienza nuova. Vico's portrayal of Roman civilization provided Ballanche with the idea of a permanent dialectical struggle in human affairs, the consequences of which were only fully comprehensible in terms of Christian revelation. Within Ballanche's system, the antagonism between the patricians and plebeians became a model of all social dynamism and at the same time a providential mechanism for the spiritual progress of mankind. Busst discusses the historico-metaphysical foundations of the Essais, but he also clarifies the relation between the Preuves and specific themes in Ballanche's later work, such as the Pelasgian migrations, the dogma of the hierarchy of souls, the ‘loi-mos’ (the long runic poem in Orphée), and the mythical interpretation of the Odyssey. In the final chapter, Busst shows that, despite the author's claims to the contrary, a first version of Orphée was significantly revised in order to accommodate the criticisms and suggestions of Fossati. While Busst makes a strong and persuasive case for the influence of Vico and Fossati upon Ballanche, he does not ignore the problematic nature of this influence, and he is careful to draw attention to anomalies and lacunae in the evidence. At the same time, he does not reduce Ballanche to a mere conduit for Vichean ideas, but rightly mentions his affinities with other syncretist religious thinkers of the early nineteenth century, such as Maistre, Lamennais, and Eckstein. Although marred by occasional repetitiveness and the inclusion of peripheral or superfluous quotations, this is a meticulous and thorough work of archival research that should stimulate new inquiries in Ballanche scholarship.