The Crisis of the European Mind 1680-1715 Read online

  PAUL HAZARD (1878–1944) was an eminent French historian of ideas and a pioneering scholar of comparative literature. After teaching at the University of Lyon and the Sorbonne, he was appointed to the chair of comparative literature at the Collège de France in 1925 and in 1940 was elected to the French Academy. From 1932 on Hazard also taught at regular intervals at Columbia University, and he was in New York when the Nazis occupied France in 1940. He then returned to France to assume the rectorship of the University of Paris but was rejected for the position by the Nazis. Hazard’s reputation rests on two major works of intellectual history: The Crisis of the European Mind, from 1935, and its sequel, European Thought in the Eighteenth Century: From Montesquieu to Lessing, published posthumously in 1946.

  JAMES LEWIS MAY (b. 1873) was a British critic and translator, best known as a translator and biographer of Anatole France. His 1928 translation of Madame Bovary for The Bodley Head was for many years the standard edition. In addition to translating The Crisis of the European Mind, May translated its sequel, European Thought in the Eighteenth Century.

  ANTHONY GRAFTON is Henry Putnam University Professor of History and the Humanities at Princeton University. His most recent book is The Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe.

  THE CRISIS OF THE EUROPEAN MIND

  1680–1715

  PAUL HAZARD

  Translated from the French by

  J. LEWIS MAY

  Introduction by

  ANTHONY GRAFTON

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1961 by Librairie Arthème Fayard

  Introduction copyright © 2013 by Anthony Grafton

  All rights reserved.

  First published in France as La Crise de la conscience européenne in 1935

  This translation first published in England by Hollis & Carter in 1953

  Cover image: William Blake, Newton, c. 1805; Tate London/Art Resource, NY

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

  Hazard, Paul, 1878–1944.

  [Crise de la conscience européenne. English]

  The crisis of the European mind / by Paul Hazard; introduction by Anthony

  Grafton; translated from the French by J. Lewis May.

  p. cm. —(New York Review books classics)

  Original English translation published as: The European mind. New Haven:

  Yale University Press, c1953.

  Includes index.

  ISBN 978-1-59017-619-1 (alk. paper)

  1. Europe—Intellectual life. 2. Philosophy, Modern—History. 3. Literature,

  Modern—18th century—History and criticism. I. Title.

  D273.5.H313 2012

  940.2’525—dc23

  2012036638

  eISBN 978-1-59017-639-9

  v1.0

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  Preface

  PART ONE: CHANGING PSYCHOLOGIES

  I. The Ferment Begins

  II. The Old Order Changeth

  III. The Light from the North

  IV. Heterodoxy

  V. Pierre Bayle

  PART TWO: THE WAR ON TRADITION

  I. The Rationalists

  II. Miracles Denied: Comets, Oracles and Sorcerers

  III. Richard Simon and Biblical Exegesis

  IV. Bossuet at Bay

  V. An Attempt at Reunion and What Came of It

  PART THREE: THE TASK OF RECONSTRUCTION

  I. Locke’s Empiricism

  II. Deism and Natural Religion

  III. Natural Law

  IV. Social Morality

  V. Happiness on Earth

  VI. Science and Progress

  VII. Towards a New Pattern of Humanity

  PART FOUR: THE FEELINGS AND THE IMAGINATION

  I. The Muses Are Silent

  II. Pictures, Strange or Beautiful

  III. Laughter and Tears: Opera Triumphant

  IV. Influences, National, Popular, and Instinctive

  V. The Psychology of Uneasiness, the Aesthetics of Sentiment, the Metaphysics of Substance and the New Science

  VI. Souls of Fire

  Conclusion

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  IN THE 1920s and 1930s, French scholars created new ways to do social, cultural, and economic history. First at Strasbourg and then at Paris, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre showed students how to free themselves from the tyranny of the “Sorbonnistes” and re-create a past that did not have high politics as its core. They pieced varied forms of evidence—archaeological and literary, legal and religious—together into unforgettably colorful mosaics. Their re-creations of the practices of medieval farmers and craftsmen, the rituals of French kingship, and the religious lives of sixteenth-century intellectuals became models that were imitated for generations. Their journal, the Annales, provided a new space for intellectual explorers and a bully pulpit from which to denounce reactionaries. And their disciples—above all Fernand Braudel, who spent the 1930s exploring the archives of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean world—became the most influential historians in the world in the 1950s and 1960s.

  The accomplishments of the Annales school have cast the other kinds of history practiced in France in the same years into the shade. And that’s a pity. For French historians of literature—including a number who held chairs at the Sorbonne and the other bastions of high academic culture—also crafted new kinds of history. Gustave Lanson—a prominent Sorbonniste—argued that the historical study of literature needed to rest on a sociological framework. The historian must tease out both the ways in which social and cultural environments shaped texts and the ways in which texts in turn transformed the social and political world. Lanson became something of a figure of fun, but he helped to inspire some great enterprises. In 1933, for example, another Sorbonne professor, Daniel Mornet, offered a rich account of The Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution. The philosophes, he argued—Voltaire and Diderot, d’Alembert and Montesquieu—developed a new “critical spirit.” And in the last decades of the eighteenth century, social and political changes transmuted these ideas into the program of modern Europe’s first great revolution. Ideas, Mornet held, destroyed the ancien régime. Historians of the French Revolution still contend with his theory.

  No one did more to develop the methods of Lanson and other French critics than Paul Hazard. Almost eighty years after it first appeared, his Crisis of the European Mind remains one of the most readable, and one of the most revealing, works of intellectual history ever written. Hazard took aim—as is clear from the first pages of his book—not at the eighteenth-century Enlightenment itself but at the decades just before and after 1700. As he surveyed field after field, from history to physics and travel writing to opera, he became convinced that European thought turned critical and modern in these years: “One day, the French people, almost to a man, were thinking like Bossuet. The day after, they were thinking like Voltaire. No ordinary swing of the pendulum, that. It was a revolution.” Mornet, and many others after him, argued that the Enlightenment provided the dynamite and matches that exploded Europe’s old regime. Hazard, by contrast, insisted that the Enlightenment itself drew more from older traditions than the philosophes (or their historians) liked to admit. Eight decades on, some of the most learned historians
at work—John Pocock, Jonathan Israel, Margaret Jacob—continue to debate about the issues that he raised, and to support, as well as to modify, parts of his thesis.

  Like Bloch and Febvre, Hazard had to leap every hurdle that the French system of elite education could put in his way before he found a path of his own. Born in 1898, he was, like Marcel Pagnol, the son of one of the Third Republic’s industrious and committed elementary-school teachers. Studies at a series of lycées, each more illustrious than the last, brought him to the green quadrangle of the École Normale Supėrieure, France’s great forcing house of academic talent, where he excelled (he was ranked second in the nation in the agrégation, the competitive examination for secondary-school posts). A scholarship took him to the Villa Medici in Rome, where he spent three years soaking up Italian literature and culture. He taught at lycées and wrote a massive thesis on Italian responses to the French Revolution, which won him a doctorate and a chair at Lyons. Though World War I interrupted Hazard’s academic career, he moved to the Sorbonne in 1919 and received a chair at the Collège de France in 1925. With Ferdinand Baldensperger he founded a pioneering journal of comparative literature, the Revue de littérature comparée, while producing studies of French, Spanish, and Italian writers. A charismatic lecturer, generous with his time and attention, Hazard attracted crowds at the Collège de France, where attendance was purely voluntary, and as a professor at Columbia, where he taught every other year from 1932 to 1940. In January 1940 he was elected to the French Academy. When France fell, Hazard was in the United States, where he could have stayed. Instead, he returned to Paris, where he taught, in very difficult conditions, until he died in 1944.

  The Crisis of the European Mind marked a return to the erudite and wide-ranging scholarship that Hazard had practiced when young but largely abandoned in his middle years. It was an astounding accomplishment. Hazard traced the contours of European intellectual and cultural life in what he identified as its crucial decades: the years when classicism and orthodox theology collapsed, as suddenly and completely as Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “wonderful one-hoss shay.” He seems to have read everything relevant, from Bayle to Vico, in the original languages. And his choice of themes to emphasize was always intelligent and often prescient. Hazard recognized that late seventeenth-century intellectuals debated the value of historical sources and traditions, such as the ancient narratives of the founding of Rome, in ways so radical that they fascinated and horrified readers across Europe. He placed these apparently obscure arguments, and related ones about the character of the biblical text, at the start of his work—and by doing so made clear that, as historians like Dan Edelstein and Jacob Soll have argued very recently in more detail, the critical culture of the Enlightenment really was born in the learned world of late-Renaissance humanism.

  Intellectual history can be dry. Hazard, however, infused his complex and potentially difficult subject matter with rich human interest. Though he believed that a new, critical habit of mind took shape between 1685 and 1715, he knew that this was not the only, or the dominant, note of intellectual life. John Locke, for example, described the creative value of human emotions in a new way—one that Hazard connected, ingeniously, with everything from the rise of a taste for the passionate imaginary world of Italian opera to the spread of new forms of religious sentiment in German Pietism. He also enlivened and enriched his accounts of individual thinkers with vivid pen portraits that showed them thinking and working. Here he describes the indefatigable lexicographer and polemicist, Pierre Bayle, at work on his great Dictionary in Rotterdam, where he could write in French without being censored: “He wrote the ‘copy,’ he corrected the proofs, but he did not mind that; printer’s ink smelt sweet in his nostrils. No; but those captious readers, with their finicking objections, each believing that he had the whole truth on his side, gave one a pretty good idea of the depths to which human stupidity could sink; the endless correspondence he had to enter into—that was what wore him down.” Few historians of ideas have shared Hazard’s gift for showing the reader how past intellectuals actually lived and worked.

  The book is astonishingly cosmopolitan. Though Hazard believed that the northern nations, especially England, seized the intellectual leadership of Europe in these years, he also made clear that Italian freethinkers and Spanish moralists did their bit to tear down the enchanted castles of traditional dogma. And though many of his protagonists wrote more than any modern scholar can read, he showed again and again that he had mastered not only the great syntheses of international law and planetary theory but also the pamphlets and plays in which these new ideas reached the larger public.

  The larger webs of interpretation that Hazard spun were weaker than his readings of individual texts and traditions. At the start of his work, he proclaimed that the few decades on which he concentrated witnessed a great rupture in human thought. At the end, he admitted that the new “critical urge” of the seventeenth-century thinkers had originated in the Renaissance, where he detected “the same refusal on the part of the more daring spirits to subordinate the human to the divine.” Yet he nowhere explained how to reconcile what look like two very different theses. He was also less at home in some areas—such as the history of the physical sciences—than he was in the humanities. And he could not know what more recent scholars have discovered about—for example—the Enlightenment in Iberia, which he did not discuss.

  The greatness of The Crisis resides elsewhere: in Hazard’s astonishing command of materials from many countries and traditions; in the dexterity with which he orchestrated so many different stories; and, above all, in the passion that animated the whole enterprise. Hazard researched and wrote his account of early modern Europe’s intellectual crisis as famine gripped the Ukraine, the great corruption scandal known as the Stavisky affair shook the foundations of France’s government, and the Nazis took command of Germany—and as Roosevelt and the New Deal restored hope to the United States.

  In these dark years, Hazard found in the rowdy, critical thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as he found in America, sources of hope and models for emulation. In investigating the origins of Enlightenment, he told his readers, he hoped to understand how philosophers had created “a civilization founded on the idea of rights—rights of the individual, freedom of speech and opinion, the prerogatives of man as man and citizen.” After Hazard finished The Crisis, he continued to study its eighteenth-century aftermath, the high Enlightenment, to which he devoted a three-volume work that appeared after his death. He also attracted and helped to form such gifted students as the brilliant anti-fascist exile Franco Venturi, who after the war would dedicate his life to the study of the Enlightenment in Italy. When Hazard was elected rector of the University of Paris, the Nazis refused him permission to serve. They saw what he stood for. To read The Crisis is to learn an enormous amount about a crucial period in Europe’s past. But it is also to come into contact with the mind of a great European humanist—one who, like Marc Bloch, found in history not only a refuge from the smelly little orthodoxies of his time but also the arms with which to resist them.

  —ANTHONY GRAFTON

  PREFACE

  NEVER was there a greater contrast, never a more sudden transition than this! An hierarchical system ensured by authority; life firmly based on dogmatic principle—such were the things held dear by the people of the seventeenth century; but these—controls, authority, dogmas and the like—were the very things that their immediate successors of the eighteenth held in cordial detestation. The former were upholders of Christianity; the latter were its foes. The former believed in the laws of God; the latter in the laws of Nature; the former lived contentedly enough in a world composed of unequal social grades; of the latter the one absorbing dream was Equality.

  Of course the younger generation are always critical of their elders. They always imagine that the world has only been awaiting their arrival and intervention to become a better and a happier place. But it needs a great dea
l more than that, a great deal more than such a mild troubling of the waters, to account for a change so abrupt and so decisive as that we are now considering. One day, the French people, almost to a man, were thinking like Bossuet. The day after, they were thinking like Voltaire. No ordinary swing of the pendulum, that. It was a revolution.

  To account for it, to see how it all came about, we have had to explore some rather unfamiliar country. Time was when the seventeenth century was the favourite field of study. To-day it is the eighteenth. Between the two lies a vague tract, a sort of dubious no-man’s-land, in which all kinds of discoveries and unlooked-for adventures may await the explorer. We have made a survey of this territory, selecting as landmarks two dates more or less approximate, starting with the year 1680, or thereabouts, and ending with the year 1715. In the course of our journey we encountered Spinoza, whose influence was just then beginning to make itself felt. Then we fell in with Malebranche, Fontenelle, Locke, Leibniz, Bossuet, Fénelon, Bayle, to name but the most illustrious, to say nothing of Descartes, whose shade still haunted those regions. These intellectual giants were busy, each as his genius and his character inspired him, examining, as though they had just arisen, those problems by which the mind of man is everlastingly beset, the problem of the existence and nature of God, of reality and appearances, of free will and predestination, of the divine right of kings, of the formation of the social state. Vital problems, every one of them. What was man to believe? What should be his code of conduct? And, once again, the age-old question—albeit man had deemed it settled long ago—rose up anew, the question Quid est Veritas? What is Truth?

  To outward seeming, the Grand Siècle still lived on in all its sovereign majesty. Thinkers and writers for the most part deemed that what they had to do was to imitate, to reproduce, so far as in them lay, the masterpieces which yesterday had blossomed in such rich profusion. What more could they do, what more could be expected of them, than to write, or strive to write, tragedies like Racine’s, comedies like Molière’s, and fables like La Fontaine’s?