LITMIR.BIZ

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for any student seeking certification as a teacher at the Sorbonne or the École Normale Supérieure.⁸⁵ Along with his friendships with national educational administrators like Paul Lapie, it was difficult not to perceive Durkheimian sociology as quite deliberately on the march: a sympathetic scholar like Steven Lukes concludes that Durkheim’s “overriding project was an imperialistic sociological penetration and co-ordination of the various social sciences.”⁸⁶

      Since 1897, French universities had been free to create degrees in various disciplines, including social sciences, at a time when universities in Paris and elsewhere also began to reward specialized research rather than knowledge of the humanities and teaching.⁸⁷ It was a period for founding new professional associations and journals, most famously the Année sociologique, which began publication in 1898, intended for both scholars and educated general readers. The task of the journal demanded a grasp of developments in international scholarship, especially work published in English, Italian, and German in addition to French.⁸⁸

      These changes were associated with the emergence of the New Sorbonne, dedicated to research and often to positivist methods of research and, in his tory, to what was thought to be a meticulously objective account of historical context. For example, the literary historian Gustave Lanson’s work on Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques in 1909 was a pure instance of its kind; Lanson claimed to want only to present “a commentary from sources, nothing more.”⁸⁹ In this way of thinking, the idea of historical differences made legible by referring any portion of it to a continuous human experience or “nature” was assumed to be implausible, unscholarly, and inclined toward a naïve aestheticism.⁹⁰

      Alongside these changes in higher education, reforms in 1902 created a sequence for secondary education that allowed students to avoid Greek and Latin entirely, in favor of a heavier emphasis on the sciences and to some extent modern languages as well. In terms strongly reminiscent of Frary’s exhortation seventeen years earlier, the instructions accompanying the decree made it clear that these changes would give to any student “the instruction most useful in view of his future career.”⁹¹

      This intellectual coalition constituted the disciplinary mainstream in diverse and prominent academic fields, it changed the shape of secondary education, and it enjoyed some considerable purchase and prestige in the more ambitious reaches of generalist intellectual journalism. Of course it was not the only sort of vibrant intellectual enterprise—or orienting constellation for experiences of culture, art, and life—available in an age of neo-Kantians, socialists, and anarchists, not to mention symbolists, impressionists and postimpressionists, naturalists, and many others. But this intellectual coalition enjoyed an unmistakable civic and institutional pride of place in the Third Republic—and to some considerable degree in an emerging international scholarly community as well. Others took their bearings from it, in appreciation or protest.

      Reaction

      The intellectual coalition found an adversary in an intensely political reaction. It self-consciously opposed the commitments of that coalition, as well as its association with the nascent egalitarian, positivist rhetoric of the Third Republic. It was directed against the intellectuals associated with that republic, and it did not hesitate to indulge in vitriol. “Agathon” (the collective pseudonym of the young Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde, both of them admirers of Charles Maurras) referred to Durkheim’s “intellectual despotism” over the academic life of the Sorbonne.⁹²

      Much of reaction was in fact devoted to expansive condemnations; with them came a rejection of universalism in favor of an exclusive and sometimes integral nationalism. The front page of the right-wing, anti-Semitic newspaper La Libre parole (Free Speech), founded in 1892, carried the motto “France for the French.”⁹³ In a campaign speech for the Chamber of Deputies in 1898, the author Maurice Barrès declared that France no longer needed “the Jew, the foreigner, the cosmopolitan”; the “foreigner, like a parasite, poisons us.” Whatever new energy France requires, “it will find in itself,” from its own “poorest [and] most downtrodden.”⁹⁴

      In particular, reaction found a common anti-universalist cause in a pervasive anti-Semitism.⁹⁵ It allowed right-wing movements with exiguous political appeal to engage in demagoguery targeting a vulnerable minority,⁹⁶ it drew upon a still potent Christian anti-Judaism, and it created conditions in which every Jewish person who enjoyed some success in the new republic could be scapegoated, forced into the role of villainous archetype, representing everything about modernity that reactionaries disliked.

      The rhetoric of anti-Semitic reaction was acidulous, and often inclined to scientific pretensions. For example, the putative Jewish “effect” on French life could be described by anti-Semites as analogous to the “breeding of microbes.”⁹⁷ Édouard Drumont’s La France juive—which sold over a hundred thousand copies within a year of its publication in 1886⁹⁸—included frankly racist ruminations, even though these were not systematic in the manner of the mid-century French racist Arthur de Gobineau or of twentieth-century racist “science.” Drumont claimed that the “Jewish conquest” was part of a transhistorical struggle between “Semites” and “Aryans,” a struggle that required not just ethnographic and psychological comparisons but “physiological” ones as well.⁹⁹ Drumont’s polemic careened from racism, to prolix reflection upon the allegedly baleful effects of Jews on French history (especially modern French history), to occasional moves in the direction of purported Christian grievances. Drumont variously implies and asserts that the Basque Ignatius of Loyola was a “pure Aryan,” that Jews inspired Luther and the Protestant Reformation, and that German Jews “organized” the notorious “Culturkampf” [sic] against German Catholics.¹⁰⁰

      Anti-Semitism had a poisonous efflorescence with the great event of Péguy’s youth, the Dreyfus affair. A distinguished young officer in the French Army, Alfred Dreyfus, had been falsely accused of treason in 1894; his Judaism motivated and sustained the campaign to convict him, to manufacture forged evidence against him, and to send him into solitary confinement on Devil’s Island, where it was hoped he would quickly die. Many associated with the republican intellectual coalition eventually became convinced that Dreyfus was innocent and worked as “Dreyfusards” to secure his release and ultimate exoneration. In contrast to them, French reactionary movements—including Catholic political conservatism, in the form of newspapers like La Croix (The Cross)—disgorged a torrent of anti-Semitic writing to vilify and calumniate Dreyfus, and in fact all Jews. The careers of far-right anti-Semitic intellectuals like Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrès were energized by the affair.

      If anti-Semitic politics was a shared base for French reaction in the Belle Époque, the theoretical justification for right-wing politics aspired to reach for wider and deeper accounts of history, culture, and politics, with a revealing relationship to the arts, to political economy, and to science.

      In The Future of Intelligence (1905), for example, Maurras, founder of the influential and extreme right-wing Action Française, rejects all manner of practices and commitments associated with the Third Republic. He has no use for democracy, and anticipates its end.¹⁰¹ He turns to parody to denounce a “government of opinion” in contemporary France,¹⁰² as well as a general, softening decadence he associates with romanticism, descended from traditions and authors “of foreign origin” like the Swiss Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Madame de Staël.¹⁰³ Quoting a contemporary critic approvingly, he finds French literary culture in need of “national discipline.”¹⁰⁴

      For Maurras, France has a culture of letters corrupted both by romanticism and by modern capitalism; the latter has control of both culture and government,¹⁰⁵ and force and interests in French society are no longer aligned with intelligence.¹⁰⁶ Yet an ongoing freedom of opinion is not the answer to this problem. Rather, there must be a concerted effort to take over some “citadel” of money and use capital against itself.¹⁰⁷ Hostile to freedom of opinion as an ideal, Maurras was also explicitly opposed to feminism, and he found in contemporary women poets the dangerous expression of a “feminized” culture.¹⁰⁸

      Amid these denunciations,

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