De Raison Research Articles

Histoire du Christianisme des origines à nos jours Sous la direction de Jean- Marie Mayeur, Charles et Luce Pietri, André Vauchez, Marc Venard

Histoire du Christianisme des origines a nos jours. Sous la direction de JeanMarie Mayeur, Charles et Luce Pietri,Andre Vauchez, Marc Venard. Tome IX: Lge de raison (1620-1750) sous la responsabilite de Marc Venard. (Paris: Desclee. 1997. Pp. 1216. 480 FE) LAge de raison (1620-1750), the ninth in a projected series of twelve tomes appearing under the general title Histoire du Christianisme, avoids strict historical narrative and presents instead a collection of well documented articles arranged along four broad thematic lines. Because of its institutional focus, L'Age de raison is mainly traditional in scope and it is the better for this. Those favoring esoteric investigations may not care for the book's organization or emphases, which are entirely in keeping with a survey of this type. However LAge de raison defies easy categorization because it follows the two preceding tomes surveying the Reformation era [t. 7, De la reforme a la Reformation (1450-1530) and t. 8,Le temps des confessions (1530-1620)],while also serving as the transitional volume to the revolutionary era (1750-1830) that is to be examined in the tenth volume of the series. Fortunately, contributors to the ninth tome include such seasoned scholars as Bernard Vogler of Strasbourg and Willem Frijhoff of Rotterdam, who have deliberately written in a straightforward descriptive manner that avoids polemics and builds upon the consensus of scholarly opinion. As a collaborative work, L'Age de raison primarily aims to synthesize. Each chapter contains extensive footnotes as well as selective bibliographies of mostly secondary sources in French. English titles, however, do not figure prominently, and the coverage of English history is less than satisfying. The volume's index also excludes subjects, thereby limiting its reference utility. In a volume that evaluates the entire Christian world, the paucity of reliable maps (only ten) is disappointing. On a positive note, the editor, Marc Venard, professor emeritus of modern history at the University of Paris and president of the Societe d'Histoire religieuse de la France, has assembled a readable, up-to-date survey of Christianity that covers the overlapping periods of Catholic Reformation and pre-Enlightenment. Professor Venard, who has contributed several pieces here, including a chapter on Christian culture and la morale (pp. 990-1033), has made use of nearly two dozen capable scholars, of whom all but six are French. Their emphasis is westcentral European. The majority of the chapters deal with Roman Catholicism. Protestantism is covered and the Eastern Churches receive some, though by no means sufficient, comment. Readers probably should not expect otherwise in a publication that is mainly the product of French scholarship. The only North American contributor is the University of Montreal's Professor Dominique Deslandres, who writes on Christianity in the New World. This chapter is lengthy but not out of place. It is, however, too ambitious, summarizing religious life in the different colonies (Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, Dutch), while also discussing Christian interactions with Native Americans and African slaves. Deslandres' description is included in Part III,Le Christianisme dans le monde, and therefore combined with two additional chapters: one of which is a brief description of Africa (examined by Philippe Denis of the University of Natal), the other a competent discussion of the propagation of the faith throughout the Far East and India. The latter is written by the Jesuit scholar Philippe Lecrivain, who offers a lengthy and conventional analysis of the Christian missionaries and their theological squabbling instead of focusing on the perplexing varieties of Asian Christianity. In a volume that seeks to cover almost every major development from the Counter-Reformation to the early stages of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, English readers will no doubt find L Age de raison puzzling as choice of title. …

Another Look at the Look of the Other Sartre's Presentation of Daniel in L'Age de raison

Whenever Daniel has been the focus of critical attention, he has invariably been seen within an ontological framework, in terms of a desire to ‘be’, in the Sartrean sense. It has now come to be regarded as a truism that Daniel’s attempts at self-punishment signify such a desire. The interpretation originates with Iris Murdoch who, quoting an extract from Le Sursis, in which Daniel expresses a desire ‘to be a pederast, as an oaktree is an oaktree’, concludes that ‘[Daniel] is never able to experience a pure coincidence with his vice; he remains detached from it, an observer, a possibility. His attempts to achieve coincidence take the form of self-punishment’.

Introduction: Locating Celtic Music (and Song)

All that emotion alone can do in the Celt has done; the very soul of emotion breathes in the Scotch and Irish airs; but with all this power of musical feeling, what has the Celt, so eager for emotion, that he has not patience for science, effected in to be compared with what the less emotional German, steadily developing his musical feeling with the science of a Sebastian Bach or a Beethoven, has effected? (Arnold 1910:87-88) Mas! elle est aussi condamnee ad disparaitre, cette emeraude des mers du couchant! Arthur ne reviendra pas de son ile enchantee, et Saint Patrice avait raison de dire ti Ossian: Les heros que tu pleures sont morts; peu vent-ils renaitre? (Renan 1947-64, vol. 11:253) We can smile at the antique rhetoric of nineteenth century enthusiasts, a rhetoric that linked Ossian and St. Patrick to King Arthur and a host of otherworldly characters who inhabit a magical, heroic past. Invoking the term Celtic, of course, has always been questionable because the concept is riddled with linguistic, cultural and ideological implications. If that is so, what might the much more specific notion of convey? Does such a thing exist, even as an abstract concept? Allowing for the moment that it does exist, even music in this context is not so simple, for in most European folk cultures the term signifies instrumental rather than vocal music. Music is often conceived in opposition to and this is no different in the handful of cultures with which we will be dealing here. The first issue, then-supposing that the concept of is a valid one-is its ambiguity of reference in comparison with song, which would presumably allude to songs in a language. Older rural concepts contrasted and song more readily than newer urban contexts, in which a healthy middle ground of song with instruments has developed, particularly since the eighteenth century. justifiably applies to such practice as much as to solo or concerted instrumental music. And music, as it is understood in today's urbanised world, can and does include song in usage. As a consequence, the second issue involves a widespread conception of which not only signifies different things to different peopleeven within the same country or culture area-but has an air of insubstantiality about it. Hence the locating as the title of this journal issue. But there is also the more complex issue of whether any made by indigenous musicians in a country with a living language can be called Celtic, whether classical or popular (e.g., Irish country-and-western). This issue has been raised elsewhere in regard to European folk as a whole and is significant simply because it defies neat cultural categories (Porter 1978). It lies, however, beyond the scope of the present discussion, which of necessity confines itself to that is traditional or is constructed in relation to a identity. The semiotic dimensions of the topic, and its conception both within and outside the communities which practise music, are problems that form the rationale for this issue of Western Folklore. THE CELTIC REVIVAL The idea of a Celtic music-whether it signifies bards, bodhrans, The Chieftains, Enya, Jest noz, triple harps, Riverdance, Alan Stivell, the Tartan Amoebas, or U2-is deeply and indelibly involved with the Revival in literature and the arts. For those who imprinted that Revival on public consciousness we should first look to the nineteenth century scholars who took it up: Matthew Arnold's views on literature, for example, are well enough known and have often been subject to scrutiny (e.g., Bromwich 1964, Durkacz 1983, Nutt 1910). Ernest Renan's La Po&ie des Races Celtiques (1854), which Arnold absorbed, is less well known but essentially involves the same aims and ideas. Renan and Arnold constructed a version of the world they derived from Ossian and from Herder's theories on poetry, thereby giving a substantial push to the Revival which is still in evidence today (Chapman 1978, Lang 1897). …

The Sartrean Viscous: Swamp and Source

As Jean-Paul Sartre's L'Age de Raison (The Age of Reason) opens, Mathieu learns that he has inadvertently impregnated his long-time lover, Marcelle. The primordial given of individual freedom, thrown into crisis by vagaries of human reproduction, constitutes guiding theme in this 1945 novel. The next several hundred pages are like a dissection table upon which Sartre lays bare workings of Mathieu's mind, where repulsion at female anatomy intermingles with horror at embryogeny. By end of ontological meanderings in L'Etre et le ndant (Being and Nothingness), published two years earlier, Sartre had managed to navigate beyond descriptions of for-itself's bodily life in everyday experience: he had readied his readers for a long-awaited landing in harbor of ethics. Yet Sartre is never far from carnal desire and puzzlement at how our body connects with world. The treatise's last chapter, entitled On Quality as a Revelation of Being (EN 661-78), proves to be an increasingly lurid account of means by which an unmistakably feminine slime may afford (masculine) for-itself that euphoric experience of total being. In a last stab at synthetically embodying ideal ontological totality, Sartre's famous surrogate in this odyssey of for-itself, Pierre, corporeally enters a netherworld where he knows that le visqueux (slime, or the viscous) will imperil his monolithic, existentialist freedom. Yet, risking his life, Pierre cuts deeply into this voracious quality of being, final metaphor for Other in L'Etre et le niant, managing to emerge unscathed by coital contact with dark side of being. But rather than recapture his stolen being by figuratively killing or ingesting Other in manner usual to Sartrean for-itself, Pierre will leave the viscous as an ever-thriving threat.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), nephew of the Alsatian theologian, Albert Schweitzer, was born in Paris, passed his agrégation at the Ecole Normale Superieure in 1929, and was a lycée teacher between 1931 and 1945. He was called up to the French Army in 1939, captured by the Germans in 1940 and released after the armistice. In 1938 he published a novel, La Nausée, translated by Robert Baldick as Nausea (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), and in 1940, L'Imaginaire: Psychologie phénoménologique de l'imagination, translated by Bernard Frechtman as The Psychology of Imagination (London: Methuen, 1972). His major philosophical work, L'Etre et le Neant, was published in 1943, and translated by Hazel E. Barnes as Being and Nothingness (London: Methuen, 1957). As a novelist he is best known for a trilogy, Chemins de la Liberté (Roads to Freedom), comprising L'Age de raison (1945) translated by E. Sutton as The Age of Reason (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), Le Sursis (1945), translated by E. Sutton as The Reprieve (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963) and La Mort dans l'āme (1949), translated by G. Hopkins as Iron in the Soul (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965). His main work of literary criticism is Qu'est-ce que la littérature? (1947), translated by B. Frechtman as What is Literature? (London: Methuen, 1950). Plays includeLes Mouches (1943) and Huis Clos (1944), both translated by S. Gilbert and published in one volume, as The Flies and In Camera (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1965).

Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), nephew of the Alsatian theologian, Albert Schweitzer, was born in Paris, passed his agrégation at the Ecole Normale Superieure in 1929, and was a lycée teacher between 1931 and 1945. He was called up to the French Army in 1939, captured by the Germans in 1940 and released after the armistice. In 1938 he published a novel, La Nausée, translated by Robert Baldick as Nausea (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), and in 1940, L'Imaginaire: Psychologie phénoménologique de l'imagination, translated by Bernard Frechtman as The Psychology of Imagination (London: Methuen, 1972). His major philosophical work, L'Etre et le Neant, was published in 1943, and translated by Hazel E. Barnes as Being and Nothingness (London: Methuen, 1957). As a novelist he is best known for a trilogy, Chemins de la Liberté (Roads to Freedom), comprising L'Age de raison (1945) translated by E. Sutton as The Age of Reason (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), Le Sursis (1945), translated by E. Sutton as The Reprieve (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963) and La Mort dans l'āme (1949), translated by G. Hopkins as Iron in the Soul (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965). His main work of literary criticism is Qu'est-ce que la littérature? (1947), translated by B. Frechtman as What is Literature? (London: Methuen, 1950). Plays includeLes Mouches (1943) and Huis Clos (1944), both translated by S. Gilbert and published in one volume, as The Flies and In Camera (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1965).

Alibis of the Police

Alibis of the Police D. A. Miller M URDER GETS PRIORITY,’’says a criminologist in a novel by P. D. James,1and indeed, whatever might be implied in the name of the genre, the so-called detective story (or, in French, “roman policier”) gives structural precedence not to the police (by which I mean here either official agents or the private detectives who often take their place), but to the crime whose violent yet mysterious commission authorizes their appearance. The activities of the police, however much in evidence, are strictly secondary, derived from the first, original fact of crime. The structure of detective fiction—act one, the crime; act two, the police—thus provides the police with a justification: that they “go after” a criminal most importantly signifies that they come afterwards, in response to an already demonstrated need for them. And if crime is the first fact in the structure of detective fiction, it is also in a sense the last. For it is with the full predication of crime, with all that is encompassed in the “apprehension” of its agent, that the detective story —along with, of course, the activities of the detective—comes to conclu­ sion. Having called for the police, crime as it were remains on hand to supervise their activities, orienting and limiting their intervention to a specific task that lasts only so long as its object goes unmet. Capable of conferring on the police their raison d’être, crime also grants them a raison de ne plus être, bringing them forth no more magically than it eventually arranges for them to disappear. A theory of detective fiction that is content to respect this structure finds no trouble in confirming both the priority of crime and the conse­ quent secondariness of the police. To take a single, but prominent exam­ ple, Tzvetan Todorov locates the structure of detective fiction in the asymmetrical interplay of two stories: “l’histoire du crime,” which is primary and essential, but unhappily missing or lacunary; and “l’histoire de l’enquête,” which is secondary and inessential, but fully in evidence.2 1. P. D. James, Death of an Expert Witness (New York: Fawcett Popular Library, 1977), p. 29. 2. Tzvetan Todorov, “Typologie du roman policier,” in Poétique de la Prose (Paris: Seuil, 1971), pp. 57-59. Vol.XXVI, No. 2 37 L ’E sprit C réateur The “plot” of the narrative (“l’histoire de l’enquête”) would consist in the pursuit of its own “story” (“l’histoire du crime”). Theoretically, too, the police are thus reduced to a mere instrumentality, what Propp would call a donor or Henry James a ficelle, whose function is exhausted in securing the full articulation of crime. In what follows, it will not be a question of denying the priority of crime in detective fiction, but rather of seeing this incontestable structural effect in terms of its strategic func­ tioning, as the keystone of a popular mythology, within the modern organization of social power. “Murder gets priority,” says the crim­ inologist in P. D. James; to which someone replies with relief, “Thank God something does.” It has always been a paradox that a genre con­ cerned with violent crime speaks so convincingly a rhetoric of reassur­ ance that few things in life are felt to be as comforting as settling down with “a good murder mystery.” From the perspective of the “strategic” reading of the genre undertaken here, this comfort will not be derived (as is usual) from the triumph of rationality, but instead from the successful occultation of power. And if comfort always also implies an anxiety that it allays, then the anxiety inspiring the genre will have its source less in the discrete moments of crime than in the continuous filiations of a general social discipline. To elaborate these issues, we take them up where detective fiction best raises them; in its notoriously, suspiciously secondary theme of the police. Regularly, of course, the theme of the police comes announced in detective fiction as the scandal of the police, their violent, violating presence there where they are not ordinarily supposed to be. “The police in the house!” The maids scream...

Art, Society, and the Bouguer Principle

excellent essay by Susan Rubin Suleiman, Writing and Motherhood, in Shirley N. Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether, eds., The M(other) Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985), 352 -77. 20. Theodore Agrippa d'Aubigne, Oeuvres completes, ed. E. Reaume and E de Caussade, 6 vols. (Paris, 1873-92), 1:122, 4:15-27. 21. Recit de la Maizon et origine des des Gouttes, Archives d'Etat de Geneve, fol. 19'. 22. Le Livre de Raison de sur l'Ephemeris historica de Beuther, ed. Jean Marchand (Paris, 1948); Montaigne, Essais, book 1, chap. 35, 221. 23. Ibid., book 2, chap. 8, 382. 24. On incest as a sin against charity, see Augustine The City of God 15.16; Emond Auger, Discours du saint sacrement de mariage, book 2 (Paris, 1572), fol. 38r; Davis, Ghosts, Kin and Progeny, 100-103. 25. Montaigne, Essais, book 2, chap. 8, 383. 26. On, Montaigne's considering repenting of his imaginary donation to his imaginary sons, see ibid., 372. On the law for the revocation of donations because of ingratitude, see Ricard, Donations, vol. 1, part 3, chap. 6. I discuss the general question of books as gifts in Natalie Zemon Davis, Beyond the Market: Books as Gifts in SixteenthCentury France, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 33 (1983): 69-88. Steven Rendell shows how Montaigne's use of the metaphor of mortgaging his text in his essay De la vanite (book 2, chap. 9) makes it impossible for the author to reclaim his text before he dies; Montaigne Under the Sign of Fama, Yale French Studies 66 (1984): 156-58. 27. Compagnon, Nous Michel de Montaigne, 215ff.

Quand on te donne un mari, ne le refuse pas.

J.-P. Eschlimann—Don't Refuse a Given Husband. The ideology and lineage strategy of preferential marriage, far from being univer-sally accepted in Anyi society, corne under constant internai contention. The matrilineal dominancy prevailing in the socio-political System is imperilled by centrifugal forces resulting from the behaviour of some lineage heads and by the fact that there are youth more sensitive to the attraction of their partner, or of personal freedom, than by the raison de lignage. A corpus of taies gives a tentative explanation of this ever renewed tension between the ideological norm and the actual practice of marriage strategy. The storytellers harp on the disorder resulting from the incautiousness of girls, their defiance of elders, and so forth. They also denounce the erring ways of such men as condone such behaviour—and often forfeit their life in consequence. Finally they describe the lineage elders' reaction to the disorder thus introduced by women. Lest the lineage stool, its riches and its tmity be put in jeopardy, elders need be attentive to unmask Death as it enters the lineage under the disguise of a beautiful Stranger. [pp. 517-547]

Le prieuré de Saint-Zacharie en i403 d'après le Livre de raison de son prieur

Saint-Zacharie is a small township northeast of Marseille, some kilometers from the main Aix-en-Provence-Nice road. In the middle ages it possessed a priory of Benedictine nuns of St Zacharias which was a dependency of the abbey of St Victor at Marseille. This abbey appointed a monk with the title of prior to administer the nunnery at Saint-Zacharie, while the nuns themselves elected a prioress. The Livre de raison drawn up by Jean de Assana, prior in 1402, allows us to establish the convent's budget. It reveals the efforts undertaken to restore a situation which had been severely shaken by the troubles of the fourteenth century, and in particular to develop the domain, which furnished the greater part of the convent's revenues from the production of corn and wine. Only corn provided a cash surplus. The economy of the priory was thus fragile because insufficiently diversified. The house faced other problems too. The development of its spiritual life was no longer a prime aim: the abbey of St Victor on several occasions arbitrarily limited the number of its nuns. There were ninety-eight of them in 1322; twenty-four in 1402; five in 1461. What is more, they were reduced to an income which provided only a bare living so that the convent's possessions appeared to be being exploited mainly as a source of profit for the prior and for the financial benefit of the mother house of St Victor, the archbishop of Aix, and the papal court.

Calepin

Since the last of these chronicles (New Blackfriars June 1967), I should no doubt have been spending my time dutifully reading the Goncourt prize entries, or the latest offering of the nouveau roman, I have in fact been doing nothing of the kind. If I were to look for the two most interesting novels recently written in French I would plump unhesitatingly for two quite different books, both by established writers, one experimental in style, the other rigorously traditional. The first is a fascinating exercise in science-fiction by Robert Merle, Un animal doué de raison (Gallimard, 1967), the second is Marguerite Yourcenar’s L’Oeuvre au noir (Gallimard, 1968).I haven’t, either, been doing much in the reading of the fifty-odd books which have appeared on ‘the events of May’, having a suspicion that more of the ideologies, at any rate, were represented in the graffiti on the walls of the Sorbonne, where plaintive practicalities (‘Baby-sitters wanted’) mingled with political exhortations and various kinds of contempt for the past (‘Dire qu’il y a toujours des chrétiens!’).This is not because I feel there’s a good deal of I told you so’ about the student revolt in Paris and elsewhere, but rather because I believe there is a much more profound revolt going on in the comparatively unnoticed depths of society in the French provinces. The latter-day chouans of Brittany are no doubt the most spectacular of these rebels against a hyper-metropolitan government which knows little about their problems and cares less; but there have been manifestations of an aggressive provincial counter-attack in other quarters too, and two books by Robert Lafont give an interesting analysis of this: ‘Paris versus the provinces’ struggle in terms of colonialism.

French-Canadian Patriotism

Development and the effects of French-Canadian patriotism furnish significant sidelights on an understanding of the local patriotisms of Europe. It is necessary to understand history to appreciate the situation. The first settlers were mainly Bretons and Normans; later there were Indian and Scotch accretions. A feeling of isolation developed, due to British conquest and to the American and French revolutions. The Quebec Act and the return of the lay leaders to France established clerical control. A hostile attitude toward France developed, and the patriotic mariage de raison with England. French-Canadians in Quebec hold a dominant position and have important influence throughout Dominion. The sources of their patriotism are historic, educational, and religious. The destiny of the race is bound up with Canada's future, yet they remain distinctly separatist. Their liberation may come through their sons and daughters who have immigrated to the United States.