Christophe Charle - Birth of the Intellectuals: 1880-1900

Christophe Charle

Translated by David Fernbach and G. M. Goshgarian

polity

First published in French as Naissance des intellectuels:
18801900 Les Editions de Minuit, 1990

This English edition Polity Press, 2015

The Introduction and Chapter 1 of this volume were translated by David Fernbach. Chapters 2 to 5 of this volume were translated by G. M. Goshgarian. The tables, graphs and General Conclusion were provided separately for this English edition.

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9039-1

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Charle, Christophe, 1951
[Naissance des intellectuels. English]
Birth of the intellectuals : 1880-1900 / Christoph Charle. -- English edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7456-9035-3 (hardcover : alkaline paper) -- ISBN 0-7456-9035-1 (hardcover : alkaline paper) -- ISBN 978-0-7456-9036-0 (paperback : alkaline paper) -- ISBN 0-7456-9036-X (paperback : alkaline paper) 1. France--Intellectual life--19th century. 2. Intellectuals--France--History--19th century. 3. Elite (Social sciences)--France--History--19th century. 4. Dreyfus, Alfred, 1859-1935--Influence. 5. Political culture--France--History--19th century. 6. Social classes--France--History--19th century. 7. France--Social conditions--19th century. 8. Europe--Intellectual life--19th century. 9. Intellectuals--Europe--History--19th century. 10. Elite (Social sciences)--Europe--History--19th century. I. Title.
DC338.C53 2015
305.552094409034--dc23

2014043774

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To the memory of my father (19141968), my mother and Martine

By the same author

Social History of France in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Berg, 1994)

(with J. Vincent and J. M. Winter) Anglo-French Attitudes: Comparisons and Transfers between English and French Intellectuals since the Eighteenth Century (Manchester University Press, 2007)

(with J. Schriewer and P. Wagner) Transnational Intellectual Networks: Forms of Academic Knowledge and the Search for Cultural Identities (New York: Campus, 2004)

What was aroused in me was the pride of the intellectuel, aware that society is stronger, but pointing out to it that it is not intellectual.

Julien Benda, La Jeunesse dun clerc

The intellectuels, both as a group and as an idea, present a historical paradox that is often misinterpreted. A word that has been in current usage for less than a century has become an indispensable term in political, ideological, sociological, historical and even psychological discourse. Yet, rendered tired and commonplace by abuse of its contradictory meanings, it continues to fuel scholarly controversies, as well as fashionable essays that relaunch it when the intellectual landscape becomes too dull. As a concept, the intellectuels has thus escaped the usual fate of neologisms coined to denote a social group, that of a gradual neutralization or, on the other hand, a historical anchoring that grows out of date.

To investigate the period of the birth of the intellectuels is to try to understand the origins of this paradox and the reasons behind it. Why, in the era of the stabilization of the Republic and democracy (18801900), did the intellectuels, in the sense of the Dreyfus Affair, appear as a group, as a schema for perceiving the social world and as a political category? Such is the object of the present book.

To break the vicious circle of abstract or normative definitions of the intellectuels that form the general starting point of any essay on them, the only consistent historical approach is to analyse the foundation document of their public existence, what has become known as the manifesto of the intellectuels. This manifesto was particular in two ways: it was not a political presentation but, in its original untitled version, a protest based on the constitutional right of petition, and it was transmitted to posterity under a different name, attributed to it by its opponents.

Seeking in this way the manner in which the intellectuels first appeared is not therefore to fall prey to the charge of adopting an exclusively political perspective or taking the assertions of the parties involved at face value; it is rather to find out the degree to which this document and its approach must have seemed singular to a reader of the time. If such a procedure has become commonplace, that is the very index of its success, and it masks from us today the rupture it introduced in the rules of public debate.

The celebrated petition in fact assumed three things: the right to scandal (its object was to support Zolas challenging article Jaccuse

To restore to the birth of the intellectuels its radical novelty does not by itself avoid the pitfalls of a subject that is only too familiar. The literature devoted to the intellectuels in fact follows a well-established tradition: on the one hand is the heroic history of intellectuals in general, even going as far as explicit eulogy, which cuts off great cultural figures from the social and historical context to which they belong or reduces this to a secondary appendix; on the other hand is the literature of denigration which, contrary to the former, gives itself the appearance of science and theory, the better to devalue its adversaries.

A sociological and historical approach to the intellectuels, at a given time, acquires its full sense only by locating these within the global space of contemporary power and, more generally, in relation to the transformations in the social recruitment of fractions of the dominant class. The intellectuels, as this book will seek to show, most commonly reject being assimilated to a social group, see themselves as different from other elites, sometimes even to the point of claiming to be the only genuine elite; more frequently still, they practise internal distinctions: true intellectuels versus false intellectuels, semi-intellectuels versus major intellectuels, writers versus academics, old versus young, avant-garde versus successful or scholarly writers, journalists versus poets, left versus right, and so on.