Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-pftt2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-19T18:04:52.628Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

ERNEST RENAN'S RACE PROBLEM*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2015

ROBERT D. PRIEST Open the ORCID record for ROBERT D. PRIEST [Opens in a new window]
ROBERT D. PRIEST*
Affiliation:
Royal Holloway, University of London
*
Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey, tw20 oexRobert.priest@rhul.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This review revisits the role of race in Ernest Renan's thought by situating contemporary debates in a long perspective that extends back to his texts and their earliest interpreters. Renan is an ambivalent figure: from the 1850s onwards he used ‘race’ to denote firm differences between the ‘Aryan’ and ‘Semitic’ language groups in history; but after 1870, he repeatedly condemned biological racism in various venues and contexts. I show that the tension between these two sides of Renan's thought has continually resurfaced in criticism and historiography ever since the late nineteenth century. Renan's racial views have been subject to particularly close scrutiny following Léon Poliakov's and Edward Said's critiques in the 1970s, but the ensuing debate risks developing into an inconclusive tug-of-war between attack and apologia. I propose three fresh directions for research. First, historians should situate the evolution of Renan's ideas on race in closer biographical context; secondly, they must reconsider the cultural authority of his texts, which is often more asserted than proven; thirdly, they should pay greater attention to his reception outside Europe, particularly regarding his writing on Islam.

Type
Historiographical Reviews
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 58 , Issue 1 , March 2015 , pp. 309 - 330
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

The author wishes to thank Naor Ben-Yehoyada, Egbert Klautke and the journal's two reviewers for their generous comments and suggestions regarding this essay.

References

1 Zola, Émile, ‘Lettre à la jeunesse’, in Le roman expérimental (5th edn, Paris, 1881), p. 69Google Scholar.

2 Sternhell, Zeev, The anti-Enlightenment tradition, trans. Maisel, David (London, 2010)Google Scholar; originally, Les anti-Lumières: du XVIIIe siècle à la guerre froide (Paris, 2006).

3 Sternhell, Zeev, ‘In defence of liberal Zionism’, New Left Review, 62 (Mar.–Apr. 2010), p. 105Google Scholar.

4 Sand, Shlomo, The invention of the Jewish people (London, 2009), p. 269Google Scholar. The comparison would not have flattered Sartre, who quipped that ‘[Renan's] “beautiful style” offers all desirable examples of baseness and ugliness’: Qu'est-ce que la littérature? (Paris, 1964), p. 150.

5 Renan, Ernest, On the nation and the ‘Jewish people’, ed. Sand, Shlomo and trans. Fernbach, David (London, 2010)Google Scholar. I am grateful to Ben Walker for this reference.

6 Drumont, Édouard, La France juive: essai d'histoire contemporaine (2nd edn, 2 vols., Paris, 1887), i, p. 16Google Scholar, see pp. 12–16, 137–8 more generally.

7 For a striking example of the persistence of Catholic animosity towards Renan's name, see Paul Claudel's letter to Henriette Psichari, 7 July 1932, cited in Psichari, Henriette, Des jours et des hommes (1890–1961) (Paris, 1962), pp. 143–4Google Scholar; for the funeral speeches, see the supplement (‘Les obsèques de M. Ernest Renan’) to Le Temps, 8 Oct. 1892; the ship was the ‘Croiseur-cuirassé Ernest Renan’, in service 1908–36.

8 With the exception of the Corpus, all of these works are available in Renan, Œuvres complètes, ed. Henriette Psichari (10 vols., Paris, 1947–61) (hereafter OC).

9 Pitt, Alan, ‘The cultural impact of science in France: Ernest Renan and the Vie de Jésus’, Historical Journal, 43 (2000), pp. 79–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Priest, Robert D., ‘Reading, writing, and religion in nineteenth-century France: the popular reception of Renan's Life of Jesus’, Journal of Modern History, 86 (2014), pp. 258–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 See Renan's seminary notes on German literature, Travaux et jours d'un séminariste en vacances (Bretagne 1845), ed. Jean Pommier (Cahiers renaniens, no. 2, Paris, 1972).

11 OC, viii, pp. 146–55.

12 OC, viii, p. 577.

13 OC, viii, p. 139.

14 OC, viii, p. 140.

15 The fusion of races was, after all, a somewhat positive development for Renan, since it bequeathed Christianity. See the letters in OC, x, pp. 159–61 (19 Aug. 1854), 203–5 (26 June 1856); quotation p. 204.

16 OC, ii, p. 323.

17 OC, ii, p. 328.

18 OC, iv, p. 369.

19 E.g. OC, vi, pp. 46–67.

20 Strauss, David Friedrich, The life of Jesus critically examined, trans. Evans, Mary Ann (London, 1898)Google Scholar; originally Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (Tübingen, 1835); idem, Das Leben Jesu für das Deutsche Volk bearbeitet (Leipzig, 1864).

21 Renan's letters originally appeared in the Journal des débats, Strauss's in the Allgemeine Zeitung (Augsburg). They were republished as an appendix to La réforme intellectuelle et morale, in OC, i, pp. 437–63.

22 OC, i, p. 456.

23 OC, i, pp. 887–906; Anderson, Benedict, Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (2nd edn, London, 2006), pp. xivGoogle Scholar, 6, 199–203; as Pierre Birnbaum notes, ‘daily plebiscite’ is now a buzzword: ‘Le retour d'Ernest Renan’, Critique, 697–8 (June–July 2005), pp. 518–23.

24 Lazarus, Moritz, Was heißt national? (Berlin, 1880)Google Scholar; on this, Klautke, Egbert, ‘The French reception of Völkerpsychologie and the origins of the social sciences’, Modern Intellectual History, 10 (Aug. 2013), pp. 306–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 OC, i, pp. 941–2.

26 OC, i, p. 909.

27 OC, i, p. 921.

28 OC, i, p. 922.

29 Le Temps, 28 May 1883.

30 OC, viii, p. 577.

31 OC, iii, p. 1033.

32 OC, i, p. 390.

33 OC, iii, p. 723.

34 Barrès, Maurice, Mes cahiers (14 vols., Paris, 1929–57), i, p. 74Google Scholar; see also ii, pp. 119–20 (more praise for the Histoire générale); on this link, Sternhell, Zeev, Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme français (2nd edn, Paris, 2000), pp. 264–7Google Scholar.

35 Barrès, Mes cahiers, viii, pp. 218–19.

36 Soury, Jules, Campagne nationaliste, 1894–1901 (Paris, 1902)Google Scholar; see Harris, Ruth, The man on Devil's Island: Alfred Dreyfus and the affair that divided France (London, 2010)Google Scholar, ch. 10.

37 Psichari, Des jours et des hommes, pp. 44–8, ch. 3 more generally.

38 Charle, Christophe, Naissance des ‘intellectuels’ 1880–1900 (Paris, 1990), pp. 152–3Google Scholar.

39 See Rioux, Rémy, ‘“Saint-Monod-la-critique” et l'“obsédante affaire Dreyfus”’, Mil neuf cent, 11 (1993), pp. 33–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Séailles, Gabriel, Ernest Renan: essai de biographie psychologique (2nd edn, Paris, 1923)Google Scholar, originally published 1896.

40 Camille Mauclair, ‘L'Université courageuse’, Aurore (11 Dec. 1898), cited in Charle, Naissance, p. 153 n. 20.

41 See Cahier de l'inauguration du monument de Renan à Tréguier le dimanche treize septembre dix-neuf cent trois (Cahiers de la quinzaine, vol. 5, Paris, 1903).

42 Brunetière, Ferdinand, Cinq lettres sur Ernest Renan (2nd edn, Paris, 1904), p. 67Google Scholar. For Brunetière's complexities, see Antoine Compagnon's remarkable study, Connaissez-vous Brunetière? enquête sur un antidreyfusard et ses amis (Paris, 1997)Google Scholar.

43 Massis, Henri, Jugements I: Renan, France, Barrès (Paris, 1923)Google Scholar; Boulenger, Jacques, Renan et ses critiques (Paris, 1925)Google Scholar.

44 Charles Maurras, ‘Portrait de M. Renan’, Action Française (21 Apr. 1932); republished as a pamphlet, Portrait de M. Renan (Paris, 1932).

45 Guitton, Jean, Profils parallèles (Paris, 1970)Google Scholar, ch. 2; originally, La pensée moderne et le catholicisme: parallèles: Renan et Newman (Aix-en-Provence, 1938).

46 Boulenger, Jacques, Le sang français (Paris, 1943)Google Scholar.

47 Likewise, the idiosyncratic Benda, Julien, Le trahison des clercs (Paris, 1928), pp. 9–10Google Scholar, 91, 247.

48 Hérenger, Alexandre, ‘Renan et les Juifs’, La Revue juive de Genève, 37 (Apr. 1936), pp. 315–25Google Scholar.

49 Ibid.,p. 325.

50 Buré, Émile, Ernest Renan et l'Allemagne (New York, NY, 1945), p. 35Google Scholar.

51 Renan, Ernest, Le judaïsme comme race et comme religion (New York, NY, 1943)Google Scholar, from the Rand School of Social Science; Renan, Ernest, ‘Identité originelle et séparation graduelle du judaïsme et du christianisme’, ed. Pick, Robert, Contemporary Jewish Record, 6 (1943), pp. 436–48Google Scholar. On the latter, Shlomo Sand, ‘The unclassifiable Renan’, in On the nation, p. 29.

52 Arendt, Hannah, The origins of totalitarianism (New York, NY, 1958), p. 174Google Scholar; originally, The burden of our time (London, 1951).

53 Weinberg, Kurt, ‘“Race” et “races” dans l’œuvre d'Ernest Renan’, Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur, 68 (1958), pp. 129–64Google Scholar.

54 Poliakov, Léon, The Aryan myth: a history of racist and nationalist ideas in Europe, trans. Howard, Edmund (London, 1977), p. 206Google Scholar, and pp. 206–9 more generally; originally, Le mythe aryen, essai sur les sources du racisme et des nationalismes (Paris, 1971).

55 Mosse, George L., Toward the Final Solution: a history of European racism (London, 1978), pp. 129–30Google Scholar, quotation from p. 130.

56 Foucault, Michel, The order of things: an archaeology of the human sciences (London, 2001)Google Scholar, ch. 8; originally, Les mots et les choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris, 1966).

57 Said, Edward W., Orientalism (London, 2003), p. 141Google Scholar.

58 Ibid., pp. 149–50.

59 Olender, Maurice, The languages of paradise: race, religion, and philology in the nineteenth century, trans. Goldhammer, Arthur (London, 1992)Google Scholar; originally, Les langues du paradis: aryens et sémites, un couple providentiel (Paris, 1989); Todorov, Tzvetan, On human diversity: nationalism, racism, and exoticism in French thought, trans. Porter, Catherine (London, 1992)Google Scholar; originally, Nous et les autres: la réflexion française sur la diversité humaine (Paris, 1989).

60 Olender, Languages of paradise, p. 61.

61 Todorov's book first appeared in a series Said edited, and he also wrote the preface to the new French edition of Orientalism.

62 Todorov, On human diversity, pp. 50–5, 140–53.

63 Chadbourne, Richard M., Ernest Renan as an essayist (London, 1957), pp. 66–8Google Scholar; Wardman, Harold William, Ernest Renan: a critical biography (London, 1964)Google Scholar; idem, Renan: historien philosophe (Paris, 1979).

64 Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘Foreword’ to Olender, Languages of paradise, p. xi.

65 Benes, Tuska, In Babel's shadow: language, philology, and nation in nineteenth-century Germany (Detroit, MI, 2008), pp. 1–3Google Scholar, 221–8; similarly Heschel, Susannah, The Aryan Jesus: Christian theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Oxford, 2010), pp. 33–8Google Scholar.

66 Sales, Véronique, ‘Quand on pensait le monde en termes de races: entretien avec Pierre-André Taguieff’, L'Histoire, 214 (Oct. 1997), pp. 34–41Google Scholar.

67 Roger-Pol Droit, ‘Le réveil d'Ernest Renan’, Le Point (29 July 2010).

68 Sternhell, Anti-Enlightenment, p. 1.

69 Ibid., p. 5.

70 Ibid., pp. 241–59.

71 Ibid., pp. 248, 246.

72 Rétat, Laudyce, ‘A propos du prétendu racisme de Renan’, L'Histoire, 216 (Dec. 1997)Google Scholar; ‘Interview Perrine Simon-Nahum: “Renan n'est pas un conservateur”’, Le Point (29 July 2010).

73 Rétat, Laudyce, ‘Quand Renan dénonçait les “crimes contre l'humanité”’, Commentaire, 89 (2000), pp. 131–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, L'Israël de Renan (Bern, 2005).

74 See especially Rétat, ‘Quand Renan’, pp. 133–4.

75 Rétat, L'Israël de Renan, p. 41; idem, ‘Renan et la symbolique des races’, in Moussa, Sarga, ed., L'idée de ‘race’ dans les sciences humaines et la littérature (XVIIIe–XIXe siècle) (Paris, 2003)Google Scholar, pp. 321–8.

76 Moxnes, Halvor, Jesus and the rise of nationalism: a new quest for the nineteenth-century historical Jesus (London, 2012)Google Scholar, ch. 5.

77 Moxnes, Jesus, pp. 144–6.

78 Hayoun, Maurice-Ruben, Renan, la Bible et les juifs (Paris, 2008), p. 271Google Scholar.

79 Sand, ‘The unclassifiable Renan’, p. 22.

80 Rose, Paul Lawrence, ‘Renan versus Gobineau: Semitism and antisemitism, ancient races and modern liberal nations’, History of European Ideas, 39 (2013), pp. 528–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quotation from p. 540. Stefan Arvidsson has also sought to reject the ‘direct line’ between Renan's Aryanism and Nazi anti-Semitism, but his sensitivity leads to a certain inconclusiveness, and his suggestion of ‘anti-Jewish’ as a replacement for ‘anti-Semitic’ is unlikely to help clarify matters: Aryan idols: Indo-European mythology as ideology and science, trans. Sonia Wichmann (London, 2006), pp. 105–8 and ch. 2 more generally; originally, Ariska idoler: den indoeuropeiska mytologin som ideologi och vetenskap (Eslöv, 2000).

81 Trimbur, Dominique, ‘Renan, Ernest’, in Benz, Wolfgang, ed., Handbuch des Antisemitismus: Judenfeindschaft in Geschichte und Gegenwart (6 vols., Berlin, 2008–13)Google Scholar, ii, pp. 681–2.

82 Gossman, Lionel, ‘Review: Renan. Historien philosophe, by Harold Wardman’, History and Theory, 21 (Feb. 1982), p. 107CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

83 Sand, ‘The unclassifiable Renan’, pp. 32–5; Rétat, ‘Quand Renan’, p. 131; Moxnes, Jesus, p. 146.

84 Hayoun, Renan, p. 270.

85 A similar spirit guides the brief but subtle analysis in Manuel, Frank E., The broken staff: Judaism through Christian eyes (London, 1992), pp. 306–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

86 Todorov, On human diversity, p. xiv.

87 Kidd, Colin, The forging of races: race and scripture in the Protestant Atlantic world, 1600–2000 (Cambridge, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

88 Poliakov, , The Aryan myth, p. 206. Similarly, Michael Sutton, Nationalism, positivism and Catholicism: the politics of Charles Maurras and French Catholics, 1890–1914 (Cambridge, 1982), p. 39Google Scholar; Arvidsson, Aryan idols, p. 93; Manuel, The broken staff, pp. 307–10; and Sand, ‘The unclassifiable Renan’, pp. 10–12.

89 Said, Orientalism, p. 130. Moreover, Karla Mallette has demonstrated that such analyses underestimate the national variation in Orientalists’ conclusions about Islam: ‘Orientalism and the nineteenth-century nationalist: Michele Amari, Ernest Renan, and 1848’, Romanic Review, 96 (2005), pp. 233–52Google Scholar.

90 Havet, Ernest, Jésus dans l'histoire: examen de la Vie de Jésus par M. Renan (Paris, 1863), pp. 65–7Google Scholar; originally appeared as ‘L’Évangile et l'histoire’, Revue des Deux Mondes (1 Aug. 1863), pp. 564–96.

91 Heinrich Ewald, ‘[Review of] Vie de Jésus’, Göttingischen gelehrte Anzeigen (5 Aug. 1863), p. 1213.

92 Charle, Naissance, p. 152.

93 Silverman, Debora, Van Gogh and Gauguin: the search for sacred art (New York, NY, 2000)Google Scholar, partic. pp. 301–9.

94 Heschel, Susannah, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (London, 1998)Google Scholar, partic. pp. 154–8.

95 Geiger, Abraham, ‘Christliche Gelehrsamkeit in Beziehung auf Judenthum’, Jüdische Zeitschrift für Wissenschaft und Leben, 2 (1863), p. 295Google Scholar.

96 Steinthal, Heymann, ‘Zur Sprachwissenschaft’, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, 11 (1857), pp. 396–410Google Scholar; idem, ‘Zur Charakteristik der semitischen Völker’, Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, 1 (1860), pp. 328–45Google Scholar.

97 Graetz, Michael, The Jews in nineteenth-century France: from the French Revolution to the Alliance Israélite Universelle, trans. Todd, Jane Mary (Stanford, CA, 1996), pp. 235–6Google Scholar; originally published in Hebrew in 1982.

98 Collection Scheffer-Renan, Paris, MS 28.46, Joseph Derenbourg to Renan, 5 July 1863.

99 L. Lévy, ‘Étude israélite sur le livre de M. Renan’, Archives Israélites, 24, 18–21 (15 Sept.–1 Nov. 1863), p. 781.

100 Goldziher, Ignác, Renan als Orientalist: Gedenkrede am 27. November 1893, trans. Zalán, Peter, ed. Niewöhner, Freidrich (Zurich, 2000), pp. 37–40Google Scholar; originally, Renan mint orientalista: emlékbeszéd (Budapest, 1894). For discussion, see Conrad, Lawrence I., ‘Ignaz Goldziher on Ernest Renan: from Orientalist philology to the study of Islam’, in Kramer, M., ed., The Jewish discovery of Islam: studies in honor of Bernard Lewis (Tel Aviv, 1999), pp. 137–80Google Scholar; Olender, Languages of paradise, pp. 121, 129–31.

101 Goldziher, Renan als Orientalist, p. 40.

102 Darmesteter, James, ‘La vie et l’œuvre de Ernest Renan’, in Critique et politique (Paris, 1895), p. 30Google Scholar, originally read at the Société Asiatique in 1893.

103 Darmesteter, ‘Ernest Renan’, pp. 70–2.

104 Neubauer, Adolphe, ‘M. Ernest Renan’, Jewish Quarterly Review, 52 (1893), pp. 203–4Google Scholar. I am grateful to Theodor Dunkelgrün for this reference.

105 Said, Orientalism, p. 27; on this, Pasto, James, ‘Islam's “strange secret sharer”: Orientalism, Judaism, and the Jewish question’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 40 (1998), pp. 437–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

106 Moxnes, Jesus, p. 131.

107 OC, i, pp. 945–65.

108 OC, i, p. 957.

109 Keddie, Nikki R., An Islamic response to imperialism: political and religious writings of Sayyid Jamāl ad-Dīn ‘al-Afghānī’ (Berkeley, CA, 1968)Google Scholar, partic. pp. 84–95; Al-Afghani's text is reproduced pp. 181–90.

110 Habib, S. Irfan, Jihad or ijtihad? Religious orthodoxy and modern science in contemporary Islam (New Delhi, 2012), pp. 42–9Google Scholar; Mishra, Pankaj, From the ruins of empire: the revolt against the West and the remaking of Asia (London, 2012), p. 100Google Scholar and ch. 2 more generally.

111 Ballantyne, Tony, Orientalism and race: Aryanism in the British empire (Basingstoke, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zia-Ebrahimi, Reza, ‘Self-orientalization and dislocation: the uses and abuses of the “Aryan” discourse in Iran’, Iranian Studies, 44 (2011), pp. 445–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

112 Gershoni, Israel and Jankowski, James P., Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs: the search for Egyptian nationhood, 1900–1930 (Oxford, 1987), pp. 101–7Google Scholar.

113 Renan, Ernest, Philosophical dialogues and fragments, trans. Mukharjî, Râs Bihârî (London, 1883)Google Scholar; Ferreira, Ligia Fonseca, ‘Luiz Gama: um abolicionista leitor de Renan’, Estudos avançados, 21 (2007), pp. 271–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The limited work on the international reception of Renan largely focuses on his religious ideas and Vie de Jésus, see Bailey, Heather, Orthodoxy, modernity, and authenticity: the reception of Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus in Russia (Newcastle, 2008)Google Scholar; Burns, David, The life and death of the radical historical Jesus (Oxford, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, on the USA.

114 On this, see Boyarin's, Jonathan response to the Vernant quotation that was cited earlier in this article, in ‘The missing keyword: reading Olender's Renan’, Qui Parle, 7 (1994), p. 45Google Scholar.