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As Marc Fumaroli noted in introducing a 1982 Festschrift in his honor, Paul Bénichou is "one of the most respected and admired citizens of the Republic of Letters." {1} His work is well-known to students of French literature, especially to dix-septiémistes and dix-neuviémistes for its magisterial analyses of the thought of some of the leading writers of these centuries. {2} In the course of these writings, he was especially concerned to study the manner in which writers conceived their relations to the social realm, the realm that sustained their existence. The elevation of the secular author to high social standing has been a characteristic feature of modernity, and Bénichou made this a chief concern of his work. It does not follow, however, that, as Marc Fumaroli put it, "the central preoccupation of Paul Bénichou's work [is] the status of literature." {3} It is the purpose of this essay to demonstrate that a study of Bénichou's work and thought as a whole reveals his concerns to be much more vast. Bénichou's connected analyses of literary works brought him to consider philosophical questions that inform our understanding of subjectivity and the character of modern societies as well as those that concern literary criticism more directly.
The overarching general interest of Bénichou's work becomes apparent when his writings are read as a whole in conjunction with collateral statements given in the interviews that became an important addition to Bénichou's oeuvre during the last fifteen years of his life, as his stature grew and as his importance became more evident. But consciousness of the wider importance of his work is still likely to escape the reader of a single volume. I have attempted in an essay entitled The Difficult Ideal of Paul Bénichou to describe the modesty with which Bénichou presents his work. In an age of extravagant and excessive promotion by authors, critics, and publishers, whose shaping fantasies apprehend more than cool reason ever comprehends, Bénichou chose to speak with a still small voice. And he usually chose to describe the larger significance of his work with cautious understatement. Only in his last years did he speak more directly of the larger vision that subtends his literary studies.
Bénichou may be classed, more generally, with those who have attempted to understand the predicament of modernity in terms of secularization. His historical analyses demonstrate the acuteness with which the minds of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries tended to experience the decline of religion and the loss of confidence in social and personal links to a transcendent order. Grasping the ways in which writers have conceptualized this experience and its relation to the social order has been a vital and important undertaking of the twentieth century; high points of this discussion have been works by Carl Becker, Karl Löwith, Hans Blumenberg, and M.H. Abrams. {4} Paul Bénichou's work deserves to be better known as a contribution to this ongoing discussion.
This essay highlights two aspects of Bénichou's work which deserve more attention than they have received: his methodology and his historical vision. Both, it goes without saying, are linked to what he, himself, it seems, has considered more properly his task: the elaboration of detailed commentaries of the works of French literature from 1637 (Corneille's Le Cid) to 1898 (the death of Mallarmé). These studies are well-known to specialists and are not our focus here. Rather, it is the approach Bénichou has taken in writing them, and the larger vision of history that has resulted from them, that this essay seeks to describe.
Notes to Part
I
{1} Marc Fumaroli, ed., Le Statut de la littérature:
Mélanges offerts à Paul Bénichou (Geneva: Droz,
1982), p. ix.
{2} Paul Bénichou, Morales du grand
siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1948) [this volume has been
included
both in the series Idées (no. 143) and Folio/Essais
(no. 99); it has been translated into English by Elizabeth Hughes as
Man and Ethics: Studies in French Classicism (Garden City, NY:
Anchor Books, 1971)]; L'Écrivain
et ses travaux (Paris:
José Corti, 1967); Nerval et
la chanson folklorique
(Paris: José Corti, 1970); Le
Sacre de l'écrivain,
1750-1830:
Essai sur l'avènement d'un pouvoir spirituel laïque dans la
France moderne (Paris: José Corti, 1973; 4th ed.,
Gallimard,
1996); Le Temps des
prophètes: Doctrines de l'âge
romantique (Paris: Gallimard, 1977); Les Mages romantiques
(Paris: Gallimard, 1988); L'École du
désenchantement:
Sainte-Beuve, Nodier, Musset, Nerval, Gautier (Paris: Gallimard,
1992; Selon Mallarmé
(Paris: Gallimard, 1995);
Variétés
critiques: De Corneille à Borges (Paris: José Corti,
1996).
{3} Marc Fumaroli, ed., Le Statut de la
littérature,
p. ix.
{4} Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century
Philosophers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932); Karl
Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the
Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949);
Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M.
Wallace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983) [orig. ed. 1966]; M.H. Abrams,
Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic
Literature (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971).
Last Update August 21, 2001