Grafton Anthony Thomas - The crisis of the European mind, 1680-1715

PAUL HAZARD (18781944) 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 Collge 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. Hazards 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

16801715

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 Arthme Fayard

Introduction copyright 2013 by Anthony Grafton

All rights reserved.

First published in France as La Crise de la conscience europenne 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, 18781944.

[Crise de la conscience europenne. 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. EuropeIntellectual life. 2. Philosophy, ModernHistory. 3. Literature,

Modern18th centuryHistory and criticism. I. Title.

D273.5.H313 2012

940.2525dc23

2012036638

eISBN 978-1-59017-639-9
v1.0

I N 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 evidencearchaeological and literary, legal and religioustogether 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 disciplesabove all Fernand Braudel, who spent the 1930s exploring the archives of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean worldbecame 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 thats a pity. For French historians of literatureincluding a number who held chairs at the Sorbonne and the other bastions of high academic culturealso crafted new kinds of history. Gustave Lansona prominent Sorbonnisteargued 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 arguedVoltaire and Diderot, dAlembert and Montesquieudeveloped 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 Europes first great revolution. Ideas, Mornet held, destroyed the ancien rgime. 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 aimas is clear from the first pages of his booknot 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 Europes 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 workJohn Pocock, Jonathan Israel, Margaret Jacobcontinue 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 Republics industrious and committed elementary-school teachers. Studies at a series of lyces, each more illustrious than the last, brought him to the green quadrangle of the cole Normale Suprieure, Frances great forcing house of academic talent, where he excelled (he was ranked second in the nation in the agrgation, 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 lyces 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 Hazards academic career, he moved to the Sorbonne in 1919 and received a chair at the Collge de France in 1925. With Ferdinand Baldensperger he founded a pioneering journal of comparative literature, the Revue de littrature compare, while producing studies of French, Spanish, and Italian writers. A charismatic lecturer, generous with his time and attention, Hazard attracted crowds at the Collge 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.