Becoming French: Mapping the Geographies of French Identity, 1871-1914 [Hardcover ed.] 081013280X, 9780810132801

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Becoming French

Northwestern University Press www​.nupress.northwestern​.edu Copyright © 2016 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2016. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN 978-​­0 -​­8101-​­3280-​­1 (cloth) ISBN 978-​­0 -​­8101-​­3279-​­5 (paper) ISBN 978-​­0 -​­8101-​­3281-​­8 (e-​­book) Library of Congress Cataloging-​­in-​­Publication Data for this book are available from the Library of Congress. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—­Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–­1992.

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Chapter 1 A Geographic Shift

3

Chapter 2 Elisée Reclus and Paul Vidal de la Blache: Geography Personified

21

Chapter 3 Jules Verne’s Ego-​­Geography: Reading “Une Carte d’Identité”

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Chapter 4 G. Bruno’s Tour de la France: The Organic Bonds of a Geographic Narrative

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Chapter 5 Arthur Rimbaud’s Une Saison en enfer: What Does Colonization Feel Like?

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Conclusion

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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Acknowledgments

This book bears the name of one author but is without a doubt a team effort. I could not have accomplished this work without the constructive criticism, constant encouragement, and regular guidance of so many important people. First I would like to thank my very patient first readers, Janet Beizer, Tom Conley, and Patrice Higonnet, whose personal attention and rigorous reading of my work provided the encouragement and helpful detail that a writer craves. Their own work on the body, cartography, and French history proved such an inspiration to my thinking on the nineteenth century. This work undoubtedly bears their stamp. My years of research were facilitated by academics on two continents. The ideas in this book were refined through the insightful criticism of my many delightful colleagues, whose own work I respect so much: Jérôme Viala, Patrick Bray, Greg Cohen, Ji-​­hyun Kim, Régine Jean-​­Charles, Carmen Oquendo Villar, Antonio Cordoba, Mary Beth Clack, Dan Nolan, Milan Kovacovic, and Jake Juli Caceres, among others. I owe an especially large debt to Lia Brozgal, whose textual insight and marvelous sense of critical distance in academia kept me on track through the longest days. At home, I could not have accomplished this book but for the timely intervention of all the grandparents who have graciously lifted my parental responsibility for a series of brief but important periods. Most of all, however, I feel a deep appreciation for my lovely wife, Elise, who has taught me the meaning of trust, faithfulness and perseverance. And finally, to our three precious children—­Oskar, Ilsa, and Otto—­I dedicate this work to you. May it somehow inspire you to reach beyond what you think possible in your own life.



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Chapter 1

A Geographic Shift

The whole is the world, the stage on which we shall present all experience. —­I mmanuel Kant, 1768

The French Third Republic was assembled in 1871 from the detritus of defeat and disorder following the Franco-​­Prussian War and the Paris Commune. One of the first tasks undertaken by the newly appointed minister of public instruction, Jules Simon, was to commission a report by educators Auguste Himly and Emile Levasseur to investigate the possible reasons behind the humiliating French defeat at Sedan. Their report, published the same year, excoriated the public school system and, in particular, what they perceived as its two most egregious defects: inadequate instruction in modern languages and the geographic ignorance of its youth.1 The latter judgment spoke directly to French fears of German superiority and sparked an explosion of geographic activity in France that ushered in a long series of scholastic changes accelerating the geographic transformation of French society already underway. This transformation occurred in two intersecting spheres, the one political and the other social. Between 1871 and 1914 the geographical sciences took on a broader and more prominent role within French society. Already by 1860 the first signs of a geographical shift were starting to show. Historians obsessed with understanding the space of history became geographers. Such was the case for Levasseur, Paul Vidal de la Blache, and Ludovic Drapeyron. At the time of the report, Himly occupied the only geography chair in France.2 The Levasseur-​­Himly report called for the creation of a new chair at the Collège de France, a post that Levasseur filled immediately. There would be five new chairs within a decade. Geography was paired

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with history in the new school curriculum. Geographers teamed with publishers to print new materials for the republican program. First came the wall maps published by Levasseur at Delagrave, Vidal at Armand Colin, and Franz Schrader at Hachette. Then came the atlases by the same. School textbooks rounded out the curricular materials. The one geographical society in existence in 1871, the Société de Géographie de Paris (SGP), whose reports were debated by its members (including Elisée Reclus and Jules Verne) before publication in its Bulletin, welcomed another five geographical societies by 1880 in all the major cities, each of them advocating for a geography chair in their local university. Vidal and Pierre Foncin were named to fill the faculty positions at Nancy and Bordeaux, respectively. More important still, the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) began instructing its future teachers in geography. Vidal moved to fill the ENS chair in 1877. Drapeyron published France’s first geographical review, the Revue de Géographie, through Delagrave in 1877. Elisée Reclus, the socialist anarchist geographer exiled following the Commune, published La Nouvelle géographie universelle in nineteen volumes from 1876 to 1894. Vidal and Marcel Dubois launched their own journal, Annales de Géographie, in 1891. Vidal later moved to the Sorbonne in 1898 to fill the position vacated by Himly. Between his post at the ENS and the Sorbonne, Vidal trained an entire generation of geographers who would go on to elaborate on his thought, providing the theoretical basis for a new French school of geography that came to be known as la géographie humaine.

Theoretical Foundations of Geography If philosophy is an abstract way of thinking about the material world, organizing ideas into coherent patterns to reflect on existence, then theory works in the opposite direction, using knowledge in one concrete area to generalize outward toward the broader unknown. Human geography occupies a middle ground between philosophy and theory. A type of social theory, it deals more directly in the social, cultural, and political than either philosophy or theory and has been, from its inception, more politically motivated. This interest in the social, cultural, and political aspects of life has made it a useful bridging science, serving as a helpful conduit for the exchange of ideas between the natural and social sciences.3 The theoretical concerns and philosophical principles underlying French geography were the same forces motivating the rest of French republican society at the time. The moral principles that should govern

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French society, for example, were of great interest to the new republic. Once republicans started removing religious and aristocratic references from the schools, a new series of republican references were required. Kant’s moral philosophy with its emphasis on free moral agents proved more than adequate. His stress on individual agency provided an attractive alternative to the environmental determinism that dominated the positivist thinking of the period. Republican thinkers were attracted to Kant’s emphasis on hard work, initiative, associations and solidarity, all of them important elements in the French school of geography as well. French geography in the second half of the nineteenth century expressed a growing interest in the scientific consideration of the relationship between nature and society. The discipline reflected the general trend away from the positivist scientific observation and descriptions that had dominated geography for so many years. Rather than describe, geographers aimed to explain and analyze the complexities of nature-​­human interaction, often in smaller, more manageable studies; thus, the interest in regional studies with an eye toward landscape analysis. Geographers relied on the organicist metaphor to express the wholeness and interconnectedness of each landscape. In addition to these obvious manifestations of increased geographic activity within French society, we can also note the shift of what I call a “geographic sensibility.” Industrialization was shrinking French space through migration and new, more rapid transportation. A national press gave account of events throughout the country and indeed the world, while compulsory schooling and military service exposed local identities to each other and to a national discourse. This national discourse was built on narratives of national space designed to consecrate and give meaning to the new experience of space, creating a “French” space in the sense employed by Michel de Certeau, as “place made meaningful.”4 The idea of France ceased to exist as unrealized potential, as inert “place.” France, la patrie, l’hexagone became an intentional space of social interaction and negotiated movement that brought a certain (republican) order to life in France. The geographic shift at the political and social level profoundly influenced republican thinking about both self and society. With the reintroduction of the human into geography, social identity came to share in the same dualistic concerns of geography in general, namely environment/individual, or structuralism/agency.5 How a subjective identity forms becomes of interest to humanistic geographers because it has a direct relationship to the importance of nature as a determining factor. What, for example, makes the French . . . French? Structuralists, like environmental determinists, argue that circumstances by and large determine

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what people choose to do, while those who stress agency argue that people make their own choices, though bound by certain constraints. Many nineteenth-​­century historians, and certainly Michelet must be counted among them, described the character of the different French regions as if they were the immutable outcome of environmental conditioning factors at work for centuries. This tendency was not only a remnant of romanticism, but also a relic of a discarded social order that had a prescribed place for everyone. Much of the nineteenth century was spent negotiating this awkward transition from one paradigm to the next. The French novel, for example, is full of tragic characters who are out of place in the new world order of capitalist bourgeois culture.6 The interest in republican moral education, especially its emphasis on notions of responsibility and duty, is a response to this new understanding of each person as a unified center of choice and action. The locus of identity moved from something external (habits of action or birth) to something internal (intention or will) and set the stage for a century of identity crises, the search for the self.

Historical Influences Geography as a discipline, in particular its French incarnation under Paul Vidal de la Blache and Elisée Reclus, has been analyzed by several scholars in recent years, all of whom point to 1871 as the watershed moment after which the discipline of geography built its distinctive ideological foundation, inaugurating the “tradition” of geography recognized today as the French school of geography.7 French geographers responded to the demand for a new geographical understanding of the world by elucidating a new way of seeing the world, one infused with romantic, antimechanistic, and holistic notions. This visual approach led them to focus on landscape, what the eye can take in at a glance, as they sought to explain the complex interactions of humans with their environment. As such, art, science, and literature all came to represent the result of that interaction. In order to induce this new way of seeing, geographers relied on metaphor, in particular the organicist metaphor that viewed each landscape as a living organism, something we would refer to as an “ecosystem” today. A concern for articulating new ways of seeing explains in part geographers’ long embrace of neo-​­Kantian thought. For modern geography, the most important theories of space come 1716) and from the German philosophers Gottfried Leibniz (1646–­ Immanuel Kant (1724–­1804). The nineteenth-​­century formulations of geography are deeply indebted to Leibniz’s relational theory of space and

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to Kant’s tripartite classification of empirical phenomena or data according to their nature (logical) or their position in time and space (physical). Kant’s logical classification led to the systematic sciences of zoology, geology, and sociology, whereas physical classification led to the foundation of modern history and geography, the chronological and chorographical sciences. Since, argues Kant, objects in the world are experienced according to place, time, and logical classification, any study that helps us to locate objects in space is fundamental to knowledge. All data must be fixed spatially, that is to say, geographically. For four decades Kant taught a course in geography at the university in Konigsberg (1759–­ 99). The overlap between his geographical theories and his theory of space as developed in his critical philosophy is significant. Kant disagreed with the two commonly held theories of space popularized by followers of Newton and Leibniz. Newton and the geometricians believed space to be a real entity with a real existence independent of mind or matter: space exists whether occupied by objects or empty. Leibniz and the Germans, on the other hand, held that space was an idea rather than a thing, nothing more than a relationship between two objects: remove the objects and space disappears. Kant, seeking a third way, considered space a way of perceiving things rather than a thing to be perceived. Space does not represent any property of things in themselves [noumena], nor does it represent them in their relation to one another. That is to say, space does not represent any determination that attaches to the objects themselves, and which remains even when abstraction has been made of all the subjective conditions of intuition. . . . Space is nothing but the form of all appearances of outer sense. It is the subjective condition of sensibility, the sole condition under which alone outer intuition is possible for us.8 In this sense space, like time, is an a priori intuition that helps us put order to our sense experience, “a schema for coordinating with each other absolutely all things externally sensed.”9 To Kant the mind has built into it the concept of space, which acts like the graticules of a map projection, an early version of the mental map that would later become popular in geographical and psychological studies.10 Knowledge of the world, argued Kant, was only possible given this a priori framework. It is here that we can see the overlap of Kant’s philosophy and his geography: the “schema for coordinating with each other absolutely all things externally sensed” becomes the geographical “stage on which we shall present all experience.” The mind’s framework becomes the network of meridians and parallels across the earth’s surface: “Geography and history fill

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out the whole extent of our knowledge; geography namely that of space, history, that of time.”11 Together they provide the two axes that fix each data point, spatially and temporally. Rather than learn from experience (phenomena) that space exists “out there,” the individual is only able to perceive an outside world (noumena) because the structure of the human mind makes possible the perception of space. The human mind structures the very external world through intuition, by projecting onto the world its own structural order, the a priori. That structure is not relative, however, but absolute. Against this Kantian understanding of space as an organizing a priori, Henri Lefebvre has more recently argued for an a posteriori definition, one that draws inspiration from Leibniz, whose relational theory of space complicates Kant’s one-​­directional mental projection of space. For Leibniz, the individual (monad) does not so much project mental space as internalize space by interacting with other objects through movement. Thus, the individual is folded into the external world and vice versa.12 Bachelard refers to this intimate space as poetic, movement engraved in our muscles.13 Lefebvre went even further, calling space socially constructed, a product of living a physical existence. It does not exist independently of our experience of it.14 An understanding of space, in this sense, is most readily available through its praxis. Space is produced by its occupants and changes with their actions. Space is movement, actors acting. Such a dynamic understanding of space means that the space itself can never be fully controlled or colonized since it is always in process, hence always at stake. While Kant’s geography inspired the homogenizing efforts of republican geography, Leibniz’s understanding of space served as an inspiration to the many possible points of resistance to the same.

The Role of French Education The rapid rise of a republican teaching corps in France is without question one of the major reasons for the success of the republican school system. And the creation of a republican curriculum, which included geography as a central subject, was a major factor in the formation of new republican citizens. The creation of new “republican” traditions reinforced the politics of the new government, and geography was to play an important role in the colonization of space and time through the establishment of new landmarks of identity. Eugen Weber has documented the importance of the French language and history, too, to the creation of a modern French identity. The feeling of urgency associated with

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republican interest in geography produced an impressive response. Third Republic ideologues placed a new emphasis on geography as the space within which history unfolds. The Ministre de l’Instruction combined geography with history in the classroom, not as an entirely new discipline but rather as one with renewed vigor and urgency. A roll call of historians from this period shows many of them moving over to geography: Emile Levasseur, Ludovic Drapeyron, and Paul Vidal de la Blache among others. Both Michelet’s Histoire de France (1833) and Lavisse’s oeuvre of the same name (1903) used geography to introduce their work.15 If French history was a portrait of the person of France, then geography was meant to provide the roughly sketched parameters for this portrait. The nation needed a framework on which to paint the many colored temperaments of le peuple. “Geography determines the course of history,” wrote Daniel Nordman in his chapter on travel literature for Pierre Nora’s Lieux de mémoire.16 Nordman’s deterministic formulation of the role of geography during this period echoes a tendency inherited from the period’s positivist discourse, one on display in Hippolyte Taine’s famous race, milieu, moment.17 French geographers worked doggedly against this deterministic tendency for reasons we will explore throughout this study. The result of the aforementioned Levasseur-​­Himly report was to force the Ministry of Instruction to overhaul the geographic curriculum in the schools, moving it away from the traditional emphasis on measurement and astronomy and focusing instead on the individual. French pedagogues stressed observation and exploration of the world in a series of concentric circles moving out from the individual: “In geography, one makes the student aware first of what is within his field of vision: and then through analogy we make the student understand, by progressively expanding his horizon, all the broad phenomena that he cannot see with the help of those he can.”18 The vision progresses from familiar to foreign, foreground to background, and always in relation to the observer. This ritualistic “taking possession” of extended territory can be understood as a repetition of cosmogony, the creation of a sacred space, French space.19 In this mythmaking capacity, it more closely lined up with the aim of history and so quickly found itself coupled with the latter in the new republican curriculum.

Republican Geography The rise of history as a scholarly discipline during the nineteenth century was, as Janet Beizer has noted, a manifestation of the “attempt

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to secularize—­ and thus revivify—­ the spiritual, to refashion divine authority in temporal (generational) ordering, and to relocate lost origins.”20 The role of the history teacher was to inspire in the students a love for and understanding of the French nation. French nationalism/ patriotism was considered both a sentiment to aspire to and a duty to embrace. Teaching French history meant inspiring this sentiment and defining that duty, inculcating in the pupils a sense of their collective identity, not only synchronically as a relationship to their fellow citizens today, but also diachronically through an attachment to previous generations. Tout l’enseignement du devoir patriotique se réduit à ceci: expliquer que les hommes qui, depuis des siècles, vivent sur la terre de France, ont fait, par l’action et par la pensée, une certaine œuvre, à laquelle chaque génération a travaillé, qu’un lien nous rattache à ceux qui ont vécu, à ceux qui vivront sur cette terre; . . . Il y a donc une œuvre française, continue et collective.21 (All of civic instruction can be reduced to this: explaining that mankind, having lived on this earth for centuries, has accomplished, through thought and action, a certain work that each generation has contributed to, that a link attaches us to those who have come before and those who will come after . . . There exists, therefore, a continuous and shared French project.)

To make themselves the masters of memory and forgetfulness is one of the great preoccupations of the dominant classes and groups. There is great power for the group that controls the historical narrative. Governments in search of legitimacy are notorious for reading back into history their own ideological sensibilities. In this, the republican government was little different than the governments that preceded and followed it. In Benedict Anderson’s argument, the nation was born out of the collapsing universal worldviews of dynastic realms and universal religion.22 The church, in fact, provides the very model for the national community. At its height, the religious model provided a very convincing and very closed frame of reference for the community of believers. Its diminution during the nineteenth century invited participation or identification in and with other communities, most importantly the national community. But while Anderson focuses on the synchronic elements of identity, like a common language as expressed in newsprint and literature, he ignores the fullness of the present, pregnant as it were with the past. Renan’s response

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to his own question “What is a nation?” points toward a present folded in with the past. Or l’essence d’une nation est que tous les individus aient beaucoup de choses en commun, et aussi que tous aient oublié bien des choses, tout citoyen français doit avoir oublié la Saint-​­Barthélemy, les massacres du Midi au XIIIe siècle.23 (However, the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and that they have forgotten many things; every French citizen needs to have forgotten the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and those of the South in the thirteenth century.)

The actual community is only made possible through the selective remembering of events belonging to a common past, real or imagined. It would take a forceful but selective reading of French history to create a master narrative that made development read like progress and gave meaning to contingency. No historian took this sacred task more seriously than did Jules Michelet, who in his magisterial oeuvre Histoire de la France (1833) set himself the task not of identifying the sum total of French citizen-​­subjects but of identifying and tracing the evolution of the French nation-​­as-​­individual. Having conceived of France as “une personne,” Michelet proceeded to write her biography. Michelet felt it his duty to speak for previous generations, to explain their actions and reasoning. He collected disparate voices throughout France’s history, synthesizing them according to his republican proclivities into the greater oeuvre of the French nation. To the one character common to all national histories, inevitability, Michelet added an aura of universality: the French Revolution represented the highest achievement of humanity, “it contains the secret of all bygone times . . . The Revolution lives in ourselves—­in our souls; it has no outward monument. Living spirit of France, where shall I seize thee, but within myself ?”24 Michelet’s historic ventriloquism was, in a sense, an expression of his own romantic and spiritist sympathies, an attempt, as he himself admitted, to exhume the dead to commune with the living.25 The historian went one step further, claiming the duty to speak on their behalf, to explain ex post facto their actions as contributions to the greater French identity.26 Michelet’s France is every bit an imagined community: “Imagined because the members of even the smallest nations will never know most of their fellow-​­members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”27 Imagined too

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because such formulations of the nation represent an ideology of the type described by Louis Althusser, as an “imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” that requires stories or myths to give them meaning.28 Republican officials made a concerted effort after 1871 to build on the legacy of Michelet, transforming his mystical romantic sentiment into lessons in civic morality. Althusser famously identified the primary principle of ideology as “constituting concrete individuals as subjects” through interpellation. Individuals are called forth into this “becoming-​­subject” identity from an early age.29 Writing for Buisson’s Dictionnaire de pédagogie in 1882, geographer Franz Schrader transforms his readers into subject/citizens through this very mechanism of interpellation articulated most succinctly in the repeated use of the possessive pronoun: Among these different countries there remains one, dearest for us among all; our nest, our cradle, our fatherland: there it is, at the west of Europe; and we study this little piece of great Earth with care, with love, with devoted attention and patience, the piece where we find everything we love and everything that loves us.30

For the anthropologist Claude Lévi-​­Strauss, historians fall into the mythmaking rather than myth-​­interpreting category. Even those histories proclaiming to be universal, asserted Lévi-​­Strauss, are nothing more than the juxtaposition of local stories with more gaps than wholes. For the anthropologist, national history is never the history-​­of, but history-​­for.31 Hence, the Second Empire’s interest in imperial Rome and the republican interest in republican Rome, each government’s effort at unearthing “historical affirmations of contemporary policies” serving as a way of legitimizing power.32 Any history, therefore, reveals often less about the historical events in the text than the historical moment of its author. Nothing resembles mythical thought, after all, more than political ideology, which, once internalized, provides a cognitive map that filters perceptions of social reality imbuing it with meaning. Ideologies represent a symbolic basis of community inasmuch as they give their bearers a sense of commonality and a feeling of separation from those who hold different beliefs.33 Republican myths centered on mystical origins and a sense of duty to abstract notions of la Patrie. Historians like Ernest Lavisse and others emphasized carefully chosen exemplary historical figures, French children who sacrificed themselves for the greater good of the collective: Jeanne d’Arc, Joseph Bara, Joseph Viala.34 The short introduction to geography

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at the beginning of every history text served the double function of orienting the student to the cardinal points of physical geography and to the psychological coordinates of French identity. The wall maps themselves “contributed not only to the anchoring of the form of the national territory forever in memory, but also to inculcating more discreetly a certain model of state and administrative rationality, a political order whose structural logic is stressed.”35 National space was republican space. The Ferry Laws directly participated in the formation of the French republican citizen. Principally, the new laws necessitated the building of new schools to accommodate the influx of students. And here the political interests of the republican reformers intersected nicely with the philosophical interests of their intellectual allies. Republican officials went about constructing the republican space, paying attention to the most detailed minutiae: the size of classrooms; the placement of windows, blackboards, and maps; the position, number, and orientation of seats; the size of the courtyard. Each detail involved careful reference to a broader element that built on and sustained the greater republican project. The school became what Lefebvre identifies as the intersection between two modes of repetition: cyclical and linear.36 The goal of republican education was to overcode the organic lived space of the everyday with the socially engineered space of the nation. In Althusserian terms, the students were meant to internalize the ideology of the state institution. The daily repetition of a republican curriculum containing precise measurements of geography, history, literature, and language become ritualized gestures that effectively spin off into a myth that serves to resolve the social contradictions within society. As Anne-​­Marie Thiesse has pointed out, the success of the modern nation-​­state is due in part to the fact that “nation” has both a political and cultural definition. Its rise corresponds to the rise of the individual in Western society, both forms of contestation against monarchical rule as attempts to reimagine power relationships in the horizontal and vertical sphere. The waning authority of the crown, whose legitimacy derived from God, invited attempts at imagining a replacement. Eventually, the nation and its citizens overthrew a king and his subjects. Robespierre ably summed up the transition for many: “Louis must die because the patrie must live.”37 Much blood and ink was spilled and spent over the idea of the nation during the following century. The French republic eventually settled on Renan’s famous definition of a nation as a “daily plebiscite,” a particularly modern formulation of the individual’s relationship to the State, one that embodies the tension that exists between individual freedom and the general will.

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Inculcating a Republican Geography The State built schools that responded to its educational program, both manifestations of its own politics. Secularism (laïcité) was the new dogma. The school building was meant to be imposing, clean, and aesthetic. The lycée was balanced and elegant, the primary school recognizable by its steeple. In this new republic the school replaced the symbolic function of the chateau and the church. The message was clear: public education available to all in public buildings (whose importance in the community was immediately evident) in order to realize the goal of equality and secularism. French became the language of instruction, the various dialects banished and punished. The common tongue served to unite the French children across their regional differences. This common semiotic (new to 70 percent of the schoolchildren) forged a sense of strength and pride, which comes from that sense of belonging to a same community and country.38 Within this community, everyone had a role to fulfill and to that end they were prepared in the classroom—­the girls for motherhood, the boys for economic productivity. The school space was intended to form students versed in the rudiments of logic and knowledge and capable of fulfilling their duties and exercising their rights as citizens—­the republican ideal.39 In the villages with only one school, a courtyard wall separated girls and boys. In the larger towns with separate schools, the church or city hall stood between the buildings, serving as symbolic sites where later union might occur. The classroom was arranged so that the desks faced the blackboard and the teacher’s desk on the podium, dominated by the large map of France.40 Improved wall maps were introduced during this period. Educators wanted to keep the intended object of affection in front of the students. The maps likewise served the function of providing a means to immediately grasp the extent of French space. Aside from the obvious utility of geography, the discipline had to prove itself as an integral part of the formation of good French student/citizens. Utility alone did not merit inclusion in the republican program. Behind each element of the map the student was meant to perceive a certain reality. A map of a lake or river in Africa, for example, was an opportunity to talk about the differences between barbarism and civilization. Maps were not a part of geography, but its raison d’être. Geography was history applied to the earth’s surface.41 Buisson wrote of the wall map in his Dictionnaire de pédagogie: La carte est à l’enseignement géographique ce qu’est la collection d’images à l’étude de l’histoire naturelle, ce qu’est la collection des

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poids et mesures à l’étude du système métrique, ce qu’est encore le livre de lecture à l’enseignement de la langue. Ce n’est pas seulement un moyen de représenter les objets à étudier, c’est le seul moyen d’en acquérir une certaine notion, la condition sans laquelle on n’aura jamais que des mots dans la mémoire et non des idées dans la tête.42 (The map is to geographic study what the repository of images is to the study of natural history, what the collection of weights and measures is to the study of the metric system, or what the reading book is to the study of language. It is not simply a means of representing the object of study; it is the only means by which we may acquire certain notions rather than simply a head full of memorized words.)

Geography lessons were deliberately based on maps so as to familiarize students with such a useful logistical tool. Republican schools built after les lois Ferry were, in fact, designed to double as military barracks in a time of war, continuing the tradition of Napoleon who had turned the École Polytechnique into a military school. Republican ideology was not to be expressed in course content alone, but in the form and vehicle of this content. To this end, great care was paid to the development of a corps of teachers and to the construction of school buildings. The new teachers were trained in economic and topographical geography, and eventually demographic and statistical geography. The geographic experience was conceived, in short, as a means of forming France’s future citizens, but the effects were far more profound. To the student, the republican ideal meant recognizing and becoming the embodiment of an abstraction, the archetype of a French persona (un vrai français). But to identify this French persona is to attempt to construct a universal identity, a “classical” composite, which strikes one as convincing although a caricature, one used as a yardstick though never seen in reality. The French persona does not exist except as this defining metric against which all others are measured. The French pupil is no longer the one who simply is French, but the one who measures up to some idealized notion of what it means to be French. A national identity is achieved, not assigned. Being French is no longer inhabiting the French territory or paying one’s taxes to the French state. It is conforming to a historical identity—­studying the canon of French authors, speaking the French language, adopting French principles, participating in the French myth. It is, to paraphrase Deleuze, becoming-​­French rather than being-​­French. Republican geography had both a debilitating and restorative effect on the experience of space labeled as French. First of all, it destroyed the

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particular in that it negated the individual’s experience and phenomenological measure of the world, most effectively through the metric system, which supplanted the body as measuring stick by the universally applicable units arrived at through science.43 The earth as God’s creation was no longer mysterious in a secularized school system. Republican ideology looked to centralize and standardize space, “to mask and to crush the cycles,”44 divorcing the body from the experience of the everyday. Public schools served as the site of this semiotic overcoding, this reeducation of the perceptions whereby an entire population would be brought within the tent of homogenous, measurable time and space. Time was not immune to the republican influence either. It was also homogenized, cut loose from its experiential anchors in the seasons, the moon, the biology of the individual, and replaced by the clock, time divided into micro-​­units and assigned a value. School classes were given time allotments; work was compensated by time increments.45 Eugen Weber, among others, has shown the importance of the public schools and the military in the centralizing efforts of the Third Republic government. Both were used to eradicate the dialects in use in the provinces.46 Mandatory school and military service made exposure to the state’s system nearly inevitable. The Third Republic government fully intended to Gallicize the entire country, which meant to render it like Paris, that is, recognizable to the republican government. Language, heritage, history, borders, literature—­all of them had to be taught as if shared by the entire group. There was after 1871, as Zola wrote himself, “an entire France to remake.”47 Republican leaders called for a new curriculum emphasizing physical, intellectual, and moral development. The demand for new schoolbooks was accentuated by the influx in students after the Ferry Laws of 1882. The young publishing houses of Delagrave (1865) and Armand Colin (1870) focused on the need for texts on republican history, geography, and literature. Les Éditions Bélin (1877) published the period’s most successful republican narrative, Le Tour de la France par deux enfants by G. Bruno (pseudonym of Augustine Tuillerie), a story as familiar as the Bible to many Third Republic children.48 The author’s geographical narrative of France skillfully evoked French traditions like la route du compagnonnage while inducing in students a sense of belonging to both a local (la région) and national (la patrie) identity. During this period geographers would attempt to sacralize the national space. Henceforth it is only France within its recognizable geography that matters, and unlike the experience of the earth from which one can deduce universal principles, the geography of France inspires a love in only the

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French, hence speaks only to the French. Love for la patrie would come to replace a love for all of God’s creation.49 France is no longer a static place (Certeau), no longer an objective reality “out there” (Althusser). France becomes the product of a network of relations whose abstract nature is represented in concrete symbols: maps, hymns, images, books, buildings, monuments, and Marianne. Pierre Nora’s Lieux de mémoire enumerates the many symbols of this period that would become landmarks of republican identity.

An Approach to Analyzing the Geography of French Identity The mythical national narrative relies on a unified discourse of the variety that Michel Foucault famously laments in his Archéologie du savoir. This grand unified discourse, argues Foucault, is false since it is based on artificially constructed preconceptions that remain unquestioned. We tend to grant permanence and transcendence to things and ideas using words like tradition, development, evolution, progress, spirit and work, all notions that Foucault rejects. Each of these, in its own way, participates in the pursuit of lost origins and implies that there is in random elements some sort of cause and effect. What Foucault argues for is a reconfiguration of the spaces cleared by the rejection of these false notions, an account of the discontinuities within the grand narrative, a valorization of the shifts and ruptures that mark the awkward transitions from one épistémè to the next. Such a configuration examines the conditions of possibility within which agents make their choices instead of looking for a determined chain of events controlling actors: analysis rather than synthesis, a disparate collection of writings and sources rather than the “coherent” oeuvre. Once we renounce our unquestioned acceptance of these artificial unities, as Foucault suggests, we can begin to examine and reconfigure the myriad dispersed data. But how to reconfigure these data? One answer may be formulated with the help of a body of thought developed by Deleuze, which rests on the belief that meaning is not intrinsic to societies but produced or created by systems of signs of a cultural or political nature. Meaning is not a thing-​­in-​­itself but rather the product of a heterogeneous, contingent, and interwoven network of praxis, bodies, and movement, which make up a society’s signifying systems. Another prospective answer may be formulated with the help of a body of thought developed by Kant, who theorizes space and geography as conditions of possibility. Having abandoned the search for points of origin and deterministic relationships of cause and effect, we are free to explore the

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mutually conditioning interactions between data points, the nuances of meaning lying undiscovered in a text, the intentions of the author. It is within this realm of the possible that we discover the character of the French during the period under review. Kant wrote that “what nature makes of man belongs to temperament and only what man makes of himself reveals whether he has character.”50 David Harvey judiciously points out that Foucault, like the structuralists who formed him, believed that “man is what he makes himself.”51 And here we arrive at the very simple but very important point: history suggests that humanity makes itself differently in different places. The field of analysis taken up in the chapters that follow will explore the conditions of possibility for mapping different instances of French identity during the period 1870–­1914. In order to complicate the traditional reading of French mythos and identity during this period, I have chosen to focus on five popular writers from an unconventional perspective, unconventional in the sense that there resides within each of these authors some of the residue of a tense debate on what it means to be French. While we choose to see them as more or less canonical now, these authors in fact do not fit squarely into the French canon, a fact that underscores the difficulty of establishing a coherent French identity in a rapidly changing world—­both then and now. Elisée Reclus was an anarchist geographer exiled for his participation in the Paris Commune. Paul Vidal de la Blache was a professor of geography whose most famous works remain his pedagogical texts, wall maps, and an atlas of France. Each geographer was also the author of a tome on France that made of the nation “a geographic individuality” (une individualité géographique). Jules Verne was an immensely popular author who would lament to the very end that the literary establishment did not recognize his work as literature. The young poet, Arthur Rimbaud, was originally a social misfit who gave voice to the experience of the domestic colonization that served as a model for the eventual French colonization of other lands. Finally, Augustine Tuillerie wrote pseudonymously as a man (G. Bruno) in order to publish what became the period’s most popular schoolbook. Each of these authors had in common a pedagogical agenda and didactic tone that frequently mixed narrative voices, bringing the je of the author into the otherwise “objective” third-​­person narrative. Each of these authors also manifested a deep cartographic sensibility within his or her writing, expressing a desire to both measure and map the destabilizing experience of the modern individual. In their own ways, these five authors respond to what Reclus described as “our era in crisis, where society finds itself shaken, where the turmoil of evolution becomes so rapid that the individual, afraid and vertiginous, looks for

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new reference points for his life’s direction.”52 Each of these authors merits a close reading, given his or her role in forming or complicating the geographic sensibility outlined above. I have divided my study into four chapters. The first chapter deals with the geographical writings of Paul Vidal de la Blache and Elisée Reclus, the two most important French geographers of the late nineteenth century. I trace the rhetorical trope of the organic metaphor through their writing to the contemporary cultural transformations within French society. Chapter 2 contains an analysis of Jules Verne’s Voyage au centre de la terre in which I use the organicist metaphors from chapter 1 to read his journey figuratively as a journey to the center of the self. This reading of Verne, what I would like to call an organic reading, maps an ego-​ ­geography of the self that suggests a deep anxiety about the nomadic drifts and destabilizing encounters that characterize the experience of the modern individual amidst the failures of a mechanistic universe. Verne’s terrified protagonist, Axel, perched on the edge of a yawning abyss, perfectly captures the deep angst of the modern individual writing at the intersection of, in Balzac’s famous formulation, mensuration and madness.53 Chapter 3 provides a rereading of Arthur Rimbaud’s poetic voice in light of the unattributed influence of two important sources: Jules Michelet and Jules Verne. Their mapping of the individual psyche is, I argue, taken up and expressed in Rimbaud’s work, which gives voice to the colonized subject. Chapter 4 focuses on one of the most popular texts of the Third Republic, G. Bruno’s phenomenally successful schoolbook, Le Tour de la France par deux enfants. I demonstrate how Bruno’s geographical narrative makes use of Vidal’s genre de vie and his theories of organic harmony in order to manufacture a sense of solidarity akin to the “imagined community” described by Anderson. I argue that her position as a woman writing pseudonymously allowed her to introduce certain subversive elements into an otherwise ostensibly republican text. Finally, I show how the shared reading of the book as a gesture common to all the French schoolchildren helped to formulate this sense of a shared identity. In the conclusion, I take a step back from the nineteenth century in order to speculate on the sudden demise in the twentieth century of the various abstract and idealized notions discussed in this study. I trace briefly the loss of faith in nationalism, noting that the homogenized space that republicans forcefully read onto traditional notions of organic unity has been splintered by a cynical postmodern condition that no longer believes in grand unifying myths. Instead, philosophers like Deleuze posit

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notions like movement, Becoming, and nomads as ways of understanding a fluid existence, notions that bear a marked resemblance to the geography of Reclus and Vidal. In a study that relies so heavily on theories of space, the reader will understand my choice to begin with these two geographers, whose organicist and embodied metaphors would have such an important effect on the development of self and society in France.

Chapter 2

Elisée Reclus and Paul Vidal de la Blache Geography Personified

Apprendre à lire une carte, comme on apprend à lire le premier livre venu, tel doit être un des principaux buts que doit se proposer tout professeur de géographie.1 —­Bulletin de la Société Neuchateloise de Géographie, 1888

–Vous parlez comme un livre, Paganel, répondit Glenarvan. –Et j’en suis un, répliqua Paganel. Libre à vous de me feuilleter tant qu’il vous plaira. 2 —­Jules Verne, Les Enfants du capitaine Grant, 1867

In 1866 the geographer Pierre Vivien de Saint-​­ Martin expressed his indignation over “the poor state of geographical studies,” describing the geographic texts used in French public schools as nothing more than “never-​­ending word lists, dry and boring memorization exercises, nothing that speaks to the spirit or engages the intellect.”3 Geography instruction was so bad, he argued, that the only two geographic sources worthy of use in the classroom were the Lectures géographiques by Casimir Raffy and the novels of Jules Verne. Scholastic geography under the Second Empire consisted of the memorization of political and administrative borders, especially those of the Persian and Roman empires. Within a decade geography’s pedagogical lacuna would be identified by republican authorities, who saw in the discipline a sort of panacea for a French society traumatized by 1871.4 Historians and geographers became what French ethnographer Claude Lévi-​­ Strauss called “bricoleurs,” republican mythmakers, who

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attempted to formulate a unifying ideology from the bits and pieces of a shattered worldview.5 Geographers introduced a host of organicist and embodied metaphors that served as a conceptual basis for more abstract notions like la patrie, metaphors that rooted these metaphysical notions in the familiar “space” of the body, drawing on cognitive metaphors of orientation and biological theories of development to explain theories of organic harmony and order in the social sphere. The organic unity and inner harmony that geographers Elisée Reclus and Paul Vidal de la Blache ascribe to France in their respective work appears to participate in the formulation of this new republican “nation.” In many ways it does exactly that, but there exists a subversive element in each author that constantly complicates the homogenizing attempts of the totalizing myth by refusing to draw borders while emphasizing movement and points of resistance. The result is a network of French identities that are alternately subversive and supportive. In this chapter we will map out these points of resistance to the republican narrative of the French nation. Calling Reclus and Vidal bricoleurs and “mythmakers” presents a bit of a paradox since Lévi-​­Strauss contrasts le bricoleur with the more scientific engineer (ingénieur), the very term traditionally applied to the geographer. Les ingénieurs du roi were Napoleon Bonaparte’s geographers at the beginning of the nineteenth century. For Lévi-​­Strauss, the engineer and bricoleur are distinguishable by their function, the way they treat the particular and the whole. For the scientist, the whole gives meaning to the parts, whereas for the bricoleur, the parts give meaning to the whole. While the engineer interrogates the universe, the bricoleur is interested in “the residue of human output” (une collection de résidus d’ouvrages humains).6 This latter description applies to Reclus and especially Vidal who emphasized regional monographs as a means of understanding the universe. What makes Vidal and Reclus bricoleurs rather than engineers is their emphasis on connections between elements rather than the elements themselves. For the bricoleur, each element represents a network of relations, concrete and abstract, that can serve to build a narrative. Ultimately, however, both the engineer and bricoleur attempt to make sense of the universe through analogy and comparison. The dominant rhetorical trope in both Vidal and Reclus is the organicist metaphor. The nineteenth-​­century historian and mythmaker par excellence, Jules Michelet, makes full use of the rhetorical trope in his Tableau de France (1834). His biographical portrait of France-​­the-​­person (“La France est une personne”) marries romantic sentiment to republican convictions. Michelet’s rapid overview offers only enough geographic detail to confirm for each region the preconceived character traits that he finds in

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popular songs and proverbs.7 Not having been to most of the regions in question, Michelet finds the soul of each in the cultural production of le peuple. He begins each region with a summary statement of “the regional soul” (l’âme du pays), and proceeds with a list of supporting evidence. His study is far more a lyrical panegyric of the organic bond between a people and its soil than a geographic treatise, but it provides a rough itinerary through France that Vidal and Reclus would later follow. Despite the immediate popularity of Michelet’s discourse on French geography, the critical acclaim did not translate into geographical reform. Modern geography was taking shape across the Rhine through the combined efforts of the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt and the university professor Carl Ritter. Humboldt’s many travels taught him the importance of observation. By recognizing analogy in nature across altitudes and latitudes, he was able to discredit the long-​­held belief that climate was determined by latitude alone. Humboldt’s work rests on the author’s one methodological approach, observation, and on his two fundamental geographic principles, landscape harmony and unity. From the careful observation of geographic phenomena, Humboldt attempted to deduce underlying causes and attendant consequences. In his crowning achievement, Cosmos, Humboldt argues for an organic view of the earth and its interactions, declaring, “As in different organic beings we recognize a distinct physiognomy, . . . so there is also a certain natural physiognomy belonging exclusively to each region of the earth.”8 More importantly, Humboldt believed that all of these regions were interconnected, forming a whole earth. Ritter adopted Humboldt’s approach and applied it pedagogically, training a whole new generation of geographers through his position at the university, including Elisée Reclus, who attended Ritter’s class at the University of Berlin for six months in 1851.

Elisée Reclus (1830–­1905) Social Geography

The geographic thought of Reclus is dense enough that most references to his place in history mention his anarchist politics instead of his more abstruse but no less important geographic thought. His vision of human and natural solidarity put him at odds with the contemporaneous practice of slavery and racism, a practice and mindset that Reclus found abhorrently oppressive for their scornful classification of individuals according to some fixed social or ethnic hierarchy.9 His taste for geography came from the courses he followed with Ritter in Berlin during the 1850s,

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along with his work on the Guides Joanne at Hachette in the 1860s, and his activities in the Paris Geographical Society.10 From Ritter he inherited a totalizing vision of geography that reintroduced humankind into the cosmos, as well as an idea of organic harmony, and a teleological view of history. It was his anarchist tendencies that gave his geography its particular social tenor. For Reclus, humanity was part of the earth, not as some late addition or appendage but through and through, from the atomic to the abstract level. The circulation of water in the rivers, wrote Reclus, is analogous to the circulation of water in the human body. The same water runs in both. Semblable au ruisseau qui s’enfuit, nous changeons à chaque instant: notre vie se renouvelle de minute en minute et si nous croyons rester les mêmes, ce n’est que pure illusion de l’esprit.11 (Like the flowing river, we are constantly changing. Our life renews itself moment by moment and if we think we are continually the same, it is but an illusion.)

Terrestrial harmony for Reclus is found in applying to the sociopolitical sphere general laws (les lois générales) that allow for natural harmony in the plant world. The lessons learned from studying life on earth are essentially political in nature. Scientific progress, Reclus believed, should lead toward a better life for all through cooperation, liberty, and mutual assistance. For Reclus geography is an avenue toward human understanding. His emphasis on life finds fresh inspiration in the naturalists but not, as one might expect given the period, in Darwin. Reclus is focused on humankind’s action on the natural world instead of nature’s effect on humankind. The climate, terrain, soil, and topography are all geographical elements of interest inasmuch as they have presented throughout history obstacles to be overcome through the mutual assistance and cooperation of human society. The geographical serves to illuminate the political since, for Reclus, the geographical has often served as a cause for the spontaneous development of political organization. Neither Reclus nor Vidal wrote with the intention of presenting a systematic geographical thought, which is not to say that they lacked a coherent philosophy. Far from it, they were simply less concerned with broad theory and more interested in the practical application of geographic principles. Their vastly different legacies can be traced back to the fact that Vidal trained a whole generation of geographers from

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his post at the École Normale Supérieure–Rue d’Ulm and the Sorbonne while Reclus remained outside the academic environment save for a short stint at the end of his career at the New University of Brussels.12 Reclus lacked the advanced degree necessary to teach in France and possessed an anarchist’s distrust of established institutions, and so left the teaching to his contemporary, focusing instead on his prodigious output in writing (dozens of volumes) and on producing children (fourteen). This academic absence meant that he had no disciples to carry on his work or to systematize his theories. The energy that sustained his work died with him. Reclus’s geographical humanism languished in obscurity in the form of unread volumes in libraries and bookshops until Gary Dunbar’s 1978 biography brought a fresh perspective to the geographer and his work.13 Biogeographers have since embraced him as a kindred spirit. A prolific writer whose audience included both the elite and the peasants, Reclus was (and still is) praised for his approachable writing that brought the far corners of the globe to those people who could not afford travel beyond their European borders. He wrote pamphlets, travel guides, newspaper articles, and several multivolume works, including a nineteen-​ v­ olume treatise on the earth’s geography. Throughout his career, he never wavered from his one guiding principle that the social and the natural are one and the same: “L’homme est la nature prenant conscience d’elle-​ m ­ ême” (“Mankind is nature become aware of itself.”)14 Rather than talk about humankind’s ordering of the natural world as if humans operated somehow outside of nature, Reclus included humans as an integral part of that world. The order that he wrote of was not the end goal for Reclus as it was for the positivist sciences in general. Instead, order was but one component of the dialectic of order and chaos that governed the natural universe. In his early work, Reclus exhibited a romantic sensibility accompanied by a certain confidence in the positivist sciences. La science, qui transforme peu à peu la planète en un immense organisme travaillant sans relâche pour le compte de l’humanité, par ses vents, ses courants, sa vapeur d’eau, son fluide électrique, nous indique aussi les moyens d’embellir la surface terrestre, d’en faire le jardin rêvé par les poètes de tous les âges.15 (Science, which transforms little by little the planet into an immense organism working tirelessly on behalf of humanity by its winds, its currents, its water vapor, its electric current, also tells us how to embellish the earth’s surface, to make of it the garden dreamed of by the poets of every age.)

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This analysis differs markedly from his later more holistic view of the global organism, which integrates humanity seamlessly within it. Ritter’s teleology imbued Reclus to the very end when, in his final work, L’Homme et la terre, he returned to his long-​­felt wish “to one day be able to study mankind across the ages as I had observed on the various continents and to enunciate the sociological conclusions that I had been led to” (I, i). This final study was imbued with his trademark organicist rhetoric as well as subtle discursive resistance to dominant nationalist ideologies. Reclus attempts to retell the story of the development of humankind within the larger story of the development of the earth. The two could hardly be more intertwined than they are in Reclus’s thought. In his writing, Reclus intends to push humanity to realize its full potential as the self-​­consciousness of the earth. Reclus’s understanding of the earth as a living organism is not some simple rhetorical tool employed as a useful heuristic device. Reclus firmly believed that “the Earth should be cared for like a big body.” Well before twentieth-​­century biogeographers described rain forests as the lungs of the earth, Reclus found that “la respiration accomplie par les forêts se réglerait conformément à une méthode scientifique: [la terre] a ses poumons que les hommes devraient respecter puisque leur propre hygiène en depend” (VI, 255) (“the respiration accomplished by the forests regulates itself according to a scientific method: [the Earth] has its lungs that mankind should respect since their own well-​­being depends on it”). And unlike most other French geographers for whom geography was still the science of space and place, Reclus formulated what he called a “social geography” in which humanity does not so much emerge out of nature as emerge within it. He considered it presumptuous to deny the possibility of a soul to animals, plants, and minerals, among whom he saw a universal solidarity that extended to humanity as well. In short, humanity forms a dialectic relationship with the natural world in which freedom depends on the discovery of natural laws—­expressions of the natural order that governs the universe—­so that one can live in accordance with them: “c’est de l’action de la planète sur l’homme et de la réaction de l’homme sur la planète que naît cette harmonie qui est l’histoire de la race humaine”16 (“it is from the action of the planet on humanity and from the reaction of humanity on the planet that is born this harmony that is the history of the human race”). Throughout his work, Reclus attempts to formulate such natural laws based on his geographical research. The telos of Reclus’s work is the progression of humanity toward equality and harmony, evidence of which Reclus seeks in the natural world.

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Reclus’s social geography reveals three laws of the natural world: class struggle, the search for balance, and the sovereignty of the individual. The goal of all life is to live in harmony with these laws, which necessitates a struggle against the tendency in complex societies for one group or individual to dominate another. According to Reclus, the patient study of the earth explains the course of history, to the extent that history reveals humanity as the contingent element in a universe that naturally seeks balance and harmony. His idea of progress can be traced to eighteenth-​­ and nineteenth-​­ century naturalists and geologists who found in the accumulating historical record of natural phenomena an evolving level of complexity. Thus simple single-​­cell organisms are found in abundance in the most ancient strata of the earth’s geological record while increasingly complex organisms litter the subsequent geological strata right up to the present day (VI). Rather than draw conclusions about the superiority of one over the other, Reclus identifies the difference as simply an order of complexity. The only claim of superiority that modern society can make is in the area of complexity since it has a “broader scope, and has formed itself into a more heterogeneous body by successively assimilating juxtaposed groups” (VI, 518). Simple societies have the luxury of being coherent and consistent with their ideals, which are less complicated than those of a more complex society. But simple societies, like individuals and individual species, meet and encounter other individuals and species and consequently change. The interaction between them determines the eventual direction of that change. Perfection is not the result of complexity, but the ability to live in harmony with the laws of the natural world. Each species is perfect inasmuch as it recapitulates “within itself all the laws of the universe that contribute to its being” (VI, 518). Reclus was one of the few to recognize the inherent contradiction within the traditional views regarding social evolution within society, namely that the most ardent proponents of the “irresistible progress of humanity” are the very same people yearning for “a golden age.” One cannot simultaneously hold to the theory of progress as outlined by the historian Edward Gibbon17 while simultaneously decrying the increasing depravity of each new generation. Reclus believed, as the historian Ranke and philosopher Jean-​­Marie Guyau did, that “the very idea of progress is antagonistic to the religious idea.”18 Reclus explains Ranke’s view of history as one of successive periods, “each one having its own particular character and expressing itself through various tendencies, which gives it its own identity” (VI, 506). Reclus’s contribution is to underscore that each “civilized” society “se compose de classes superposées représentant

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dans ce siècle-​­ci toute la série de siècles antérieurs avec leurs cultures intellectuelles et morales correspondantes” (“is made up of superimposed classes representing in this century the entire history of preceding centuries with their corresponding intellectual and moral cultures”), with the result that “la société actuelle contient en elle toutes les sociétés antérieures” (VI, 504) (“the present society contains within it every previous society”). This recapitulationist formulation of history is central to Reclus’s geographical naturalism. In stating that humanity is the conscience of the natural world, Reclus is establishing a dialectic between nature and humanity that develops Hegel’s self-​­reflective Spirit in naturalistic and evolutionary terms that makes Marx’s formulation of nature as “man’s inorganic body” seem positively positivist.19 Humans alone are able to recognize the teleology of the human-​­nature dialectic, capable of appreciating the historical achievements and lapses of human society, and so work to develop the one while eliminating the other. For Reclus, the history of the earth is one long succession of dominant groups who, in the name of short-​­term interests, abused long-​­term relationships with the soil and their neighbors, thus contributing to their own eventual downfall. Among these dominant groups, Reclus lists various empires, monarchies, the capitalist system, and national governments. The purpose of history is to teach us the mistakes of our past so that we can finally overcome them. The goal of society is to continue to develop in the areas in which we have made progress while recognizing and eliminating our tendencies toward regression. Reclus argues that “l’homme moderne doit unir en sa personne toutes les vertus de ceux qui l’ont précédé sur la terre”20 (“modern man must unify within his person all the virtues of those who have preceded him on this earth”). For him, science and technology represent “progress” when they foster improved communication and understanding and generally serve as antidotes to disease, ignorance, dogma, superstition, need, and hunger. The humane application of science and technology could bring about harmony, beauty, and unity for a society fragmented by the capitalist order. But the scientific progress must be accompanied by moral progress or the result will be the disruption of the earth’s natural harmony. Reclus’s constant praise of the solidarity within primitive societies is a criticism of the perceived regression of modern capitalist society. Balance in nature is not the equilibrium of elements but a dialectic between order and disorder. The migration of living organisms from their own environment into the natural environment of other living organisms disturbs the natural system of that environment for a time as both species learn to adapt to one another. Unity is achieved through a recognition

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of diversity. Social imbalance arises out of the desire to impose a fixed hierarchical order on a dynamic society. Reclus lays stress on the adaptability of various species to different environments and organisms rather than the continual displacement of the latter and control of the former, as in Ratzel. According to Reclus, humanity needs to develop a critical consciousness vis-​­à-​­vis its past historical development if it ever hopes to move beyond its legacy of domination. Only by embracing the immense diversity of human experience, both historically and geographically, can humanity realize its full potential as the conscience of the earth. It is by forging an alliance with the past that humanity is able to move beyond its prior mistakes, to consider and explore the full array of human potential. Only then is humanity able to disengage from the straight line of history that the positivist age has drawn out for it and to link itself instead to “l’infini réseau des voies, parallèles, divergentes, entrecroisées, qu’ont suivies les autres fractions de l’humanité” (VI, 533) (“the infinite network of pathways—­parallel, diverging, criss-​­crossing—­that the other fractions of humanity have followed”). The very structure of Reclus’s geographical writing embodies his political philosophy. His work forms its own open system of thought that continually doubles back on lessons learned earlier, constantly refining them through the addition of new experience and insight so as to improve them. Reclus makes no attempt to formulate a hierarchical closed system of thought but rather allows his many travels between different countries and disciplines to express themselves freely in the peregrinations of his writing. Reclus’s cause was certainly not hurt by the fact that he was an incredibly gifted writer. A Literary Geography

Reclus’s geographic writing dates from the early 1850s when he contributed articles on his journeys to the American continent, in particular to New Orleans and Brazil, to French journals, including Le Tour du Monde and Bulletin de la Société de Géographie de Paris. After returning to Paris, fighting against the Germans and then on the losing side of the Commune, Reclus was nearly shipped off to New Caledonia but for the intervention of friends in the scientific community. Instead, Reclus found himself living in exile in Switzerland, where he undertook his immense project to catalog the known world. The result was his nineteen-​ ­volume masterpiece, Nouvelle géographie universelle (1875–­94). It was not intended to provide a rationale for the colonial powers who wished to extend their empire as other geographers had done.21 According to

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Wills and Blount, “Reclus sought to use geography as a means to improve understanding, and empathy across borders, eroding the power of the imperialist state by fostering universal humanitarian spirit between the peoples of each nation and territory.”22 Geography should teach young people to have respect for the natural world and to empathize with people of other cultures from around the globe. In this sense, geography was a political weapon used to undermine the dominant social structures of European capitalist society. To reach beyond academia required a fresh approach to make the subject more approachable to a broader audience. In his multivolume work, Reclus relies on his experience as a travel writer, beginning each regional epigraph with general observations before dissecting the most salient details in a closer analysis. This dialectic between observation and analysis drives his narrative forward, drawing in the reader by evoking wonder about the natural universe before analyizing it in search of the natural laws that govern it. Whether the topic is France or some exotic milieu (and to be sure parts of France’s extremities were just as exotic to a Parisian as any milieu in the New World), the goal was the same: to prod the reader to consider the natural world anew. To this end, Reclus relies on a host of metaphors to make the strange familiar and the familiar foreign. In an article written for Le Tour du Monde in 1855 describing his arrival in New Orleans, Reclus already demonstrates an ability to evoke wonder through the vehicle of metaphor. Upon arriving in the Caribbean, the author peers over the ship’s rail and is amazed to see rocks and marine plants so clearly in water twenty-​­six meters deep. L’eau était pure comme de l’air condensé; on eût dit que les poissons y volaient par secousses, et les requins si fréquents et si dangereux dans ces parages y semblaient suspendus au-​­dessus du vide; les prairies d’algues, les colonies de polypes, les bancs voyageurs de méduses défilaient tour à tour sous nos yeux, et sur le fond de la mer nous voyions ramper des assemblages confus et indécis de pattes énormes, de têtes monstrueuses.23 (The water was as pure as condensed air; the fish seemed to fly by, shaking, and the sharks, so numerous and dangerous in these waters, seemed to be suspended in nothingness; the prairies of algae, the colonies of polyps, the hordes of jellyfish laid out before our eyes, and in the deepest sea we watched unknown creatures with enormous claws and monstrous heads crawl across the sea floor.)

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Reclus denaturalizes the language of descriptive geography, writing in a more lyrical style. The transparency of the clear Caribbean Sea transmutes water as an element. From the moment water becomes condensed air, Reclus abandons the lexicon of liquid to paint the scene with colors from the palette of air and land. In Reclus’s writing, fish fly through prairies of algae and plants live in colonies. Reclusian metaphor serves the double function of educating and entertaining. This facility with metaphors serves him well in his work on France. Reclus’s portrait of France offers a vivid example of his geographical narrative.24 He begins by emphasizing the important role that the territory now called France has played throughout history, situating French space at the crossroads of civilizations, east and west, Latin and Germanic, maritime and landlubber. In doing so, he has announced his central thesis, that French space is a dynamic space of movement and interaction. He continues by drawing a brief sketch of France within its “compact form”: its regions, rivers, geology, climate, and population. Reclus’s anarchist spirit was deeply dismissive of the political borders that history had drawn up between human communities. In place of a detailed discussion of borders, Reclus describes the “natural” perimeter of French space as shaped like the harmonious figure of the octagon whose meridian cuts the country neatly in two.25 In fact, the diagonals formed by the geometric form not only bisect the country almost perfectly; the one line reunites (réunit) the lands of Belgium and Spain while the other rejoins (rejoint) the Atlantic and the Mediterranean seas. The diagonals of the harmonizing geometric form serve the paradoxical double function of dividing the national territory while linking up extraterritorial space through it. In his travel writings, Reclus had already shown himself quite capable with this specialized usage of the figurative trope. But this particular usage of the organicist metaphor seems more lyrical than useful. While Reclus’s organicism here is a rhetorical trope and entails no real ontological commitments, the metaphor provides a means of reading nature into the human sphere. Reclus’s metaphor is in fact political. The distance between nature and society is collapsed. By describing nature in social and biological terms, the harmony that Reclus ascribes to nature is read back into society. Paraphrasing Socrates and then Marx, Reclus writes that as important as it is for the individual to know him or herself, it is just as important for a people to do the same so that they may stop obeying unknown internal impulses and work together for the betterment of all.26 To this end, individuals do not exist in Reclus’s work, except as they have contributed to social progress (authors, scientists, artists) or as they represent a particular regional identity. Marot, Montaigne, and

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La Boétie, for example, all summarize Le Périgord. Identity in Reclus is nearly always social. In this dynamic harmonious space Reclus describes a land rich in contrasts; the north is unlike the south, the east unlike the west, the left bank is unlike the right. In addition to these popular divisions, Reclus identifies dozens more at the regional and local level. But in Reclus’s geographic vision, “l’ensemble présente une sorte d’harmonie dans les contrastes mêmes. Grande est la diversité, mais le tout garde son caractère d’unité géographique” (NGU, 11) (“the whole displays a sort of harmony in the very contrasts themselves. Despite its great diversity, the whole keeps its geographical unity”). The apparent contrast of diversity and unity serves as a central motif over Reclus’s nearly one thousand pages, and indeed throughout his work. In France, this means treating each region as a unique identity. In the preface to his own Etudes philosophiques, Balzac explains that les Études de moeurs was full of typified individuals (individualités typisées) whereas les Études philosophiques will focus more on individualized types (types individualisés).27 In neither case is there room for any actual individuals. His typology is firmly rooted in the study of physiognomy popularized during his lifetime. As such, it is long on observation and description and short on analysis. Tracing the lines of Balzac’s world through his characters and landscapes evokes the task of contemporary geographers who read the physiognomy of the earth’s individual regions through the flora of the various landscapes. Indeed, the very idea of landscape as a geographic unity—­an idea that had only previously been used by artists in the painterly genre—­was only introduced by Alexander von Humboldt around the turn of the century.28 Ritter, in his Die Erdkunde, called Europe the “Face of the Old World” from which the soul of humanity could look toward its future.29 Balzac, though, was not interested in the biological world but the artificial world of French society, which he divided like Reclus by region: J’ai tâché de donner une idée des différentes contrées de notre beau pays. Mon ouvrage a sa géographie comme il a sa généalogie et ses familles, ses lieux et ses choses, ses personnes et ses faits; comme il a son armorial, ses nobles et ses bourgeois, ses artisans et ses paysans, ses politiques et ses dandies, son armée, tout son monde enfin!30 (I have tried to give an idea of the different lands of our fine country. My work has its geography as it has its genealogy and families, its places and things, its persons and deeds; as it has its armorial, its

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nobles and bourgeois, its artisans and peasants, its politicians and its dandies, its soldiers, in short, a world of its own!)

Like Balzac in his Comédie humaine, Reclus deals in individual types, drawing up general characteristics for each regional identity. Balzac’s Rastignac is, for example, “one of these men who . . .” For Reclus’s l’Auvergnat is direct, hospitable, and introverted (NGU, 448), his Breton stubborn, opinionated and untiring (615), and les Basques are ignorant but ardent emigrants to the New World (87). As for “the old Norman type, [they are] tall and strong [with] pale blond hair, a long face, and clear blue eyes” (651). France is rather like a family whose good and bad traits distinguish a particular aspect of the unified French character.31 Given that Reclus identifies the French nation as “a collective individual” that expresses a certain “individualité nationale” (“national character”), it is hardly surprising that much of his work should be dedicated to the delicate work of discovering “la psychologie nationale” (50) (“the national psychology”). But in a country whose social cleavage runs north and south, east and west, and in every other direction, to what does Reclus attribute this national unity? Balzac found it in Geoffroy Saint-​­Hilaire’s “unity of composition,” which maintains that all life is derived from one particular organic form whose different manifestations can be attributed to differences in the milieus in which the single form has developed. Reclus finds only contrasts. One begins to see the softening of the various harsh provincial features in the fertile Loire Valley where, according to Reclus, “the harsh contrasts of the Briton and Provencal, the Bearnese and Lorain find themselves melted into an harmonious ensemble of common sense and goodwill, of spirit and intellect” (NGU, 532). Reclus credits in large measure the contribution of “the Garden of France” for the work of “francisation (Frenchifying) the neighboring provinces—­ the mores, language and civilizing principles of the north conquering the Plateau Central via the upper Loire, the deterritorialization of Brittany occurring via the lower Loire. Reclus finds the reconciliation between the north and south within the Loire Valley: “Le grand rôle des contrées de la Loire moyenne dans l’histoire spéciale de la France est d’avoir, plus que toute autre province, contribué à la naissance et au développement de la nation” (532) (“The major role played by the lands of the Loire in the history of France is to have, more than any other province, contributed to the birth and development of the nation”). But to really form an idea of the character traits of the French personnalité collective requires that one consider this “national character” in a milieu where it has been developed, the city.

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The City

The city provides the culmination of Reclus’s geographical thought, the social application of all of nature’s “general laws.” Against the dominant capitalist social order that wishes to reduce society to a collection of isolated individuals, Reclus holds up the example of the federated communes, which stress a dual allegiance within their communities, to both profession and neighborhood. The problems of urban centers are not unique. They are the same as those of society at large, inequality of economics and power. For Reclus, the massive cities represent the great positive poles of migration, centers of activity whose attracting force has decimated the provinces with its siren call to the nomads who dream of seeing the city, learning something, and improving their lot. The thousands of people who visit the city each day or migrate each year arrive via the various avenues of communication—­canals, roads, railways, and rivers—­with the produce to feed “these enormous stomachs” and are consumed themselves at an astonishing rate. Few are the emigrants who can realize their dreams, acknowledges Reclus. Numerous are those who find poverty, sickness and an early death. But—­and this is a rather astonishing “but” from an anarchist such as Reclus—­“at least those surviving have been able to broaden the circle of their ideas, see different worlds, and have been formed in contact with other people; they have become smarter, more educated, and all these individual advances constitute for the larger society a considerable advantage.”32 Despite living in a society that viewed the city as artificial, crowded, insalubrious, and potentially dangerous, Reclus was one of the few geographers to treat urban space as a natural geographical phenomenon, which is not the same as saying that he was the first to treat the city as an organic entity. Writers had been doing that for years, a point I will return to momentarily. Reclus’s geographical formulation of urban space merits our attention first. His naturalization of urban space predates the Chicago school’s work in urban sociology by several years.33 Reclus’s social geography culminates in the densely populated space of the city. Si l’on considère une nation comme un individu collectif, ce n’est pas la moyenne du nombre qu’il s’agit de trouver pour avoir une idée juste de son veritable caractère; il faut, au contraire, prendre cette individualité nationale dans un milieu où elle ait été développée, où elle se soit pour ainsi dire révélée à elle-​­même. C’est dans les grandes villes, surtout à Paris, que se montre le Français par excellence. (NGU, II, 49)

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(If we consider a nation as a collective individual, it is not the number of people that one must enumerate in order to identify its true character; rather, one must take this national individuality in the milieu that has birthed and sustained it, where it has been revealed, so to speak. It is in the great cities, like Paris, that the French character is revealed.)

Cities form the geographical equivalent of individual organisms for Reclus, forming at points of contact between separate societies. Reclus locates Paris “towards the middle of a concentric series of geological formations” and “at the convergence of two historic roads” of commerce, a strategic positioning of the capital so that it “embodies and individualizes all the forces of France in relation to her Western neighbors,” echoing Michelet, who called Paris the sensorium commune of France.34 Reclus’s description of Paris is at least as literary as it is geographic, Evoking Balzac’s depiction of the capital city as “la tête du monde” (“the head of the world”) (La fille aux yeux d’or) and “le plus délicieux des monstres” (“the most delectable monster”) (Ferragus), Reclus describes cities as “cancres sociaux” (“social ulcers”), “monstres, gigantesques vampires” (“monsters, gigantic vampires”) and “pieuvres” (“octopuses”) whose long tentacles reach into the countryside “suçant la vie des hommes” (V, 339) (“sucking the life from men”). But if Reclus sees cities drawing the worst of society (“the dregs, the depraved and decadent”), he also sees them attracting the best, “les meilleurs, ceux qui veulent apprendre et chercher des occasions de penser, de s’améliorer, de grandir en écrivains, en artistes, meme en apôtres de quelque vérité, ceux qui se dirigent pieusement vers les musées, les écoles, les bibliothèques, et ravivent leur ideal au contact d’autres hommes également épris de grandes choses” (V, 339) (“those who want to learn and seek opportunities to think, to improve, to grow as writers, artists, even as apostles of a certain truth; those who go piously to museums, schools, libraries, and reshape their ideals through contact with others who also esteem great things). Nineteenth-​­century French literature is filled with characters who have felt the pull of the capital: Eugène de Rastignac, Julien Sorel, and Frédéric Moreau, to cite only the most famous names. The terrifying, ugly, and rotten Paris of Balzac is present in Reclus, but so is Zola’s Paris of material wealth and industrial machinery. According to Reclus, cities represent an essential bellwether of human progress: “Quand les villes s’accroissent, l’humanité progresse, quand elles diminuent, le corps social menacé régresse vers la barbarie” (L’Homme et la terre, V, 339) (“When cities thrive, humanity progresses, when they fail,

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the social body is threatened and retreats toward a sort of barbarism”). This tension between progress and regression dominates Reclus’s urban vision. Reclus is not fundamentally concerned with the size of cities, but with their unequal socio-​­spatial organization. As urban organisms, cities are obligated to undergo change and growth in order to survive. The urban improvements of the bourgeoisie have the corollary effect of displacing or marginalizing the poor of society. Reclus was no fan of urban renewal: “Ce n’est qu’un demi-​­bien de transformer les quartiers insalubres, si les malheureux qui les habitaient naguère se trouvent expulsés de leurs anciens taudis pour aller en chercher d’autres dans la banlieue” (V, 367) (“It’s merely a cosmetic fix to transform slums, if the poor souls that once lived there are expelled from their former slum to find another in the suburbs”). Every city is a contrast in luxury and misery, “conséquence nécessaire de l’inégalité, de l’hostilité qui coupe en deux le corps social” (V, 367) (“an unavoidable consequence of the inequality and hostility that divide the social body”). The only way to truly free cities from a corrupt and oppressive society is to reclaim their rich cultural heritage and renew the bonds of local neighborhood communities. For all the beauty of these immense agglomerations, in Reclus’s eyes, each city has its own vices, visible or secret, a fatal defect, a chronic malady that will kill it if it does not succeed in reestablishing “la libre circulation d’un sang pur dans toute l’organisme” (V, 367) (“the free circulation of clean blood throughout the organism”) Each road, river, rail, or canal contributes to the health of the city, to its “Gallicization” as well. Like Balzac, Michelet, and even Charles Estienne in the sixteenth century, Reclus associates certain character traits with each region of France, from the sang-​­froid north to the passionate midi.35 The combination of these traits is what makes up the French national identity, “un individu collectif” (“a collective individual”) that is more than the sum of its parts. Reclus’s idea of French is defined by heterogeneity rather than homogeneity. The truly French person is an amalgam of different character types blending “dans son caractère national les contrastes des hommes du nord et de ceux du midi” (NGU, II, 50) (“in the individual French character the contrasting elements of the northern and southern personalities”). The French personality marries the Mediterranean with the Atlantic, the classical with the modern, the plains with the coast. The French personality recapitulates the ideas and sentiments present in the various regions because it understands and knows them all. Every local identity finds its echo in Paris where the national identity is located.

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Dans la cité commune à tous se rencontrent et s’influencent mutuellement les provinciaux de toutes les parties de la France, les méridionaux de Provence ou de Gascogne, bavards, agiles, toujours en mouvement; les hommes des plateaux, âpres au travail et lents à l’amitié; les gens de la Loire, à l’oeil vif, à l’intelligence lucide, au tempérament si bien pondéré; les Bretons mélancoliques, vivant parfois comme dans un rêve, mais soutenus dans la vie réelle par la plus tenace volonté; les Normands à la parole lente, au regard scrutateur, prudents et mesurés dans leur conduite; les Lorrains, Vosgiens, Francs-​­Comtois, ardents à la colère, prompts à l’entreprise. Tous ces Français de provenances diverses, réunis dans une grande ville comme en un lieu de rendez-​­vous commun, s’influencent mutuellement; leurs traits distincts prennent un air de famille; de leurs qualités et de leurs défauts s’est constitué, comme une résultante, le caractère général du peuple français. (NGU, II, 49) (In the common city to all, the provincial personalities of France meet and influence one another: the southern people from Provence or Gascony are talkative, agile, always moving; those from the Central Plateau are eager for work and slow in friendship; the people of the Loire are quick eyed, of clear intelligence, of a balanced temperament; the Britons are melancholy, sometimes living in a dream, but grounded by their most tenacious will; the Normans are slow in speech but observant, measured and cautious in their behavior; the residents of Lorraine, the Vosges, and Franche-​­Comté are both quick to anger and eager to join company. All these French from the diverse provinces, gathered together in a big city as if by a common destiny, influence one other. Their distinct traits take on a family resemblance and from their qualities and their defects is formed as a result the general character of the French people.)

If the French nation is the “personnalité collective” (“collective personality”) that best synthesizes the historical development of Western society, and Paris the city that best represents the French character, then the average French person is, according to this logic, the ideal representative historical personality, the one that recapitulates in toto humanity’s historical existence of acquired knowledge and character traits.36 Reclus’s Parisian, “le Français moyen” (“the average French person”), is the result of centuries of modification through contact with different cultures, the person in whom all the localized character traits, good and bad, are brought together. This Parisian “is essentially mobile,” both physically

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and metaphysically, a literary figure like Benjamin’s Baudelaire, given to “botanizing the asphalt.”37 Paris exists as a geographical and historical reality, but Reclus’s true Parisian, like Balzac’s typified individual, does not. Or more accurately, the physiological portrait of the Parisian that Reclus paints exists in the mind of the author, and most likely the reader, but as in landscape portraits, what the eye catches in a glance are pure impressions without details. Reclus’s portrait is an impressionist painting of French exceptionalism, full of sentiment and short on data.

Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845–­1918) Human Geography

Paul Vidal de la Blache was among the many geographers of his generation who came to the discipline via history. Having defended his thesis in 1872 at the Sorbonne, he was offered a position at the University of Nancy. In 1877 he assumed the chair in geography at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he remained until the Sorbonne offered him the position of chair in geography when Himly left in 1898. Uninterested in formulating totalizing theories on geography, Vidal instead focused on teaching, research, and publishing articles that encouraged a fresh look at the geographical sciences. In response to the republican call for better geography instruction in the classroom, Vidal worked closely with the publishing firm Armand Colin to put out a series of wall maps and a world atlas. Through these pedagogical tools and his teaching post, he would ultimately train a generation of young minds in what he called human geography. Vidal’s human geography is characterized by certain binary oppositions: social/environmental, necessary/contingent and general/particular. The first set of oppositions furnished Vidal with his problematic, the second his description, and the last his methodology. The human/environment opposition was extremely important for Vidal because it afforded him the opportunity to differentiate himself from the German school of geography and its main practitioner at the time, Friedrich Ratzel. Vidal claimed that Ratzel’s emphasis on the environment element led German geography into environmental determinism. In contrast, Vidal preferred to study the ways in which humans have been influenced by their environment and, more importantly, have influenced their milieu in turn.38 He went to great lengths to emphasize the freedom of individual human societies to develop each in its own way. For Vidal, “il faut partir de cette idée qu’une contrée est un réservoir où dorment des énergies dont la nature

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a déposé le germe, mais dont l’emploi dépend de l’homme”39 (“we must start from the idea that a country is a reservoir of potential energy whose seed is planted by nature, but whose development depends on humankind”). Vidal stressed that natural factors set the stage by establishing a certain realm of possibilities from which humans are then free to choose and so decide their own future. Vidal’s former pupil and future historian, Lucien Febvre, later gave it the term “possibilism” to distinguish it from determinism.40 For Vidal, geography is a science of landscape. By this he meant that geography should apply itself to individual case studies rather than continually formulating general theories. This emphasis resulted in his formulation of a regional approach that directly informed his general approach to the geographic sciences. Vidal’s regional approach was characterized by a keen interest in the practical experience of humans within their various local milieus, what Vidal referred to as genre de vie. Each genre de vie represents the collective expression of ways in which a specific population has come to interact with a particular geographic milieu. These expressions include traditions, religion, language, habits, dress, alimentation, habitation, agriculture, and so on. The various combinations of these elements give to each particular region its own “personnalité.” In his entire Tableau de la géographie de la France, not once does Vidal use the term nation in reference to France. It is clear that Vidal’s work was deeply influenced by, and influenced in turn, the political and intellectual climate of Third Republic France. In the postwar climate following the humiliating defeat of 1871, French republicans pushed for a more patriotic curriculum that emphasized pride of place and the mystical bonds of attachment to la patrie.41 Part of this is entirely expected following the Franco-​­Prussian defeat. The loss of Alsace-​­Lorraine certainly necessitated a new formulation of identity that included those territories that now fell outside political France. The bonds that geography came to formulate relied on a certain understanding of biological theories of development popular at the time. Darwinian evolution was certainly the most popular developmental theory at the beginning of this period, but the French, who admittedly misread much of Darwin, rejected him outright for his theory of natural selection, which they came to understand in Spencerian terms as “survival of the fittest”—­ not exactly a theory that provides a balm to the wounded ego following Sedan.42 There is little question that Vidal’s regional approach that sought out abstract qualitative connections was, at least in part, a response to this patriotic call. In Vidal, the unity of the national organism is expressed in the solidarity of the various landscapes (regions).

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Vidal viewed the solidarity of regions as the mosaic that made up the national tableau. The emphasis on the painterly genre is not an accident. The notion of landscape can be traced back through Humboldt to the landscape paintings of the eighteenth century that attempted to capture relationships that the eye could identify in one glance. Regional monographs of pays (cultural landscapes) are at the heart of Vidal’s work. The term pays shares a common Latin root (pagus: “country district”) with peasant (paysan) and pagan (païen) and carries with it a sense of security rooted in a common sentiment of a highly localized, familiar, durable, and socially bounded connection between people and the soil. Vidal’s use of pays extends as often to the former as the latter. The name given to a particular pays expresses “non pas une simple particularité, mais un ensemble de caractères, tirés à la fois du sol, des eaux, des cultures, des modes d’habitation”43 (“not just a feature, but a set of characters taken from the soil, water, crops, and modes of habitation”). These character traits provide an enchaînement that leads from the soil (pays) all the way to the peasant (paysan). Vidal paints a portrait of the local peasant “frappé à l’effigie du sol”44 (“struck in the image of the land”), evidence enough to claim that regional identity was “plutôt géographique qu’ethnique”45 (“more geographic than ethnic”). The connectedness between humans and their environment as expressed in Vidal’s genre de vie is deeply infused with nostalgia and folkloric overtones. This organic connection between the soil and society, writes Vidal, is “instictivement deviné par l’observation populaire” and only subsequently confirmed “par l’observation scientifique”46 (“instinctively arrived at through simple observation” . . . “by scientific means”). The purpose of science is to correct errant perceptions. The inspiration drawn from the natural sciences proved to be a very important feature of Vidal’s work, which shows clear affinities with the neo-​­Lamarckians who were operating in the political and scientific spheres of republican French society. Despite employing organicist metaphors that were far more synthetic than analytical, Vidal was adamant about the scientific status of geography: “la geographie est sans doute une science naturelle”47 (“geography is most definitely a natural science”). Specifically, Vidal sought a scientific understanding of the many divisions of “l’organisme terrestre” (“the terrestrial organism”). Each part, argued Vidal, has its own physiognomy, “physionomie; mais unies entre elles par des rapports faciles, toutes pénétrées d’influences générales, elles se combinent dans un ensemble qu’il ne faut pas morceler”48 (“bound together by individual relationships and imbued with a common interest. These combinations we should not seek to undo”). It was this secret unity of

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purpose and plan that Vidal meant to uncover in his geographical sciences. To do so required a better understanding of this idea of unity. According to Vidal, unity is the coordinated expression of the many that makes the whole more than the sum of its parts. The best way to arrive at an understanding of the whole earth is to study the individual regions that make it up. Likewise, to understand France requires a study of the various genres de vie that constitute it. Vidal’s focus, however, is not these individual “parts” but the connections between them. Vidal never isolates his objects; rather, he keeps them in constant flux so that geographical phenomena do not exist except as a series of relations that function to produce his genre de vie. Vidal’s formulation of geographic unity owes much to the biological unity that naturalists claimed to have identified in living organisms. The organicist metaphors of Humboldt and Ritter that inspire Vidal are drawn directly from the natural sciences: “dans l’objet de la géographie comme dans tout organisme, la partie ne peut être saisie que par l’ensemble vivant”49 (“in the study of geography as in any organism, the part can only be understood in relationship to the living whole”). And with the organicist metaphor comes the apparent dualism of the part and the whole, a principle motif in Vidal, along with organicism and the notion of enchaînement. The three are frequently expressed together, as in his opening statement in “Le Principe de la géographie générale,” published in 1896: L’idée que la Terre est un tout, dont les parties sont coordonnées, fournit à la géographie un principe de méthode dont la fécondité apparaît mieux, à mesure que s’étend son application. Si rien n’existe isolément dans l’organisme terrestre, si partout se répercutent des lois générales, de sorte que l’on puisse toucher à une partie sans soulever tout un enchaînement de causes et d’effets, la tâche du géographe prend un caractère différent de celui qui lui est attribué.50 (The idea that the Earth is a whole whose parts are coordinated provides geography with a methodological principle whose usefulness is underscored by the extent of its application. If nothing exists in isolation in the Earth’s body, if the effects of general laws are felt everywhere, so that we cannot modify any part without starting a chain of causes and effects, the task of the geographer takes on a character different from the one traditionally assigned it.)

As noted above, this opposition between general and particular provides Vidal with his methodology; the one is constantly informing the other as together they reveal the unity of the global organism. Vidal resolves the

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apparent dualism by claiming that “le rapport entre les lois générales et les descriptions particulières, qui en sont l’application, constitue l’unité intime de la géographie”51 (“the relationship between general laws and individual descriptions, which are the application of those laws, constitutes the very unity of geography”). Human geography, rather than being defined by this duality, resolves it instead. Unity is not found in the one or the other alone but in the relationship between the two. With this methodology, Vidal is able to interrogate the connection between humans and their natural environment. What concerns Vidal next are the general processes by which a given milieu or organism achieves unity, or balance. In general, Vidal shows, balance is realized through a growing interdependence among phenomena. In physical geography Vidal describes the balance achieved in nature between the mutually conditioning interaction between ocean currents, climate conditions, geological characteristics and other surface phenomena. Change cannot occur within one of these elements without it affecting the whole: Quum pars Oceani movetur, totus movetur.52 This mutually determined relationship between natural forces has of itself inspired analogies with the organism throughout history.53 Like Reclus, Vidal suggests that living beings constitute an integral part of the functioning terrestrial organism, through and through. However, whereas interrelationships in the physical world are implied as necessarily determined by natural laws, those within the human sphere are viewed as contingent. Human beings may or may not enter into relationships with one another depending on their own desires. Social organisms are formed as living beings who organize their own interrelationships according to desires, needs, and a variety of other conditions. Human geography, says Vidal, “n’envisage les humains que dans leur rapport avec cette surface où se déroule le drame multiple de la concurrence des êtres vivants”54 (“envisions humans in their relation to this surface where the multifaceted drama of competition between living beings takes place”). The result of such a formulation is an understanding of the earth as a social organism that relies less on mystical sui generis notions of connectedness and more on actual theoretical models from the natural sciences, in this case biology.55 Both Vidal and Reclus emphasize the integration of the human element into the natural order in their human and social geography, respectively. This integration introduces a host of organicist and embodied metaphors that serve as a conceptual basis for more abstract notions. In short, the metaphors root these abstract notions in the familiar “space” of the body, drawing on cognitive metaphors of orientation and biological theories of development to explain notions of organic harmony and order in the

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social sphere. Moreover, in their emphasis on the biological notions of association and solidarity, Vidal and Reclus express an internalized animosity toward biological theories of competition between individuals (Darwin and “natural selection”) that stems from 1871. A look at some of the metaphors will illustrate these claims. A Literary Geography

In Reclus, the organic metaphor is so omnipresent as to be a quasi-​ c­ aricature. In his explication of French geography in the second volume of his Nouvelle géographie universelle, Reclus notes that “la solide ossature du grand organisme français a son point d’appui dans le plateau central, et le système circulatoire vient converger vers le milieu de bassin de la Seine” (NGU, II, 13) (“the solid backbone of the great French organism has its fulcrum in the central plateau, and the circulatory system comes converging towards the middle of the Seine basin”). The River Rhône is “une veine d’eau” (“a vein of water”) and the “jumelle” (“twin”) of the Rhine, both of which “prennent naissance” (“are born”) in the glaciers of the Alps. L’Ourcq is “à la fois artère de trafic et canal d’alimentation” (681) (“both traffic artery and alimentary canal”). A mountain becomes “le squelette d’un ancien volcan” (“the skeleton of an old volcano”). Occasionally, Reclus hangs his entire geographical description on the figurative trope: “Toute la protubérance de ces roches primitives est le squelette autour duquel les terrains plus récents se sont formés, comme des tissus autour d’un os dans un corps d’animal: c’est le centre résistant de l’organisme” (11) (“Any protrusion of these primitive rocks is the skeleton around which these younger lands have been formed, like bone tissue around a bone in an animal’s body: it is the core strength of the organism”). The organicist metaphors apply to individual cities as well. In “The Evolution of Cities” published in 1895, Reclus’s “political organism” is “as simple, as sharply defined, and as one and indivisible as the individual himself.” He describes the urban spaces as “collective organisms” that “tend toward death” except through constant restoration (Paris is “old, encumbered, dirt-​­encrusted”). Like the individual, the city is composed of “cells.” In addition, the “urban organism” possesses a “sanguine and nervous circulation” and “seems to sweat mud and soot!”56 Reclus’s city, as we have seen, is a living, breathing entity whose health depends on good circulation, green spaces for fresh air, steady consumption, and the prompt evacuation of its waste. France is a living organism whose strength lies in its geography while its growth occurs in the cities, especially Paris.

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Vidal is no less restrained in his use of embodied and organicist metaphors. In addition to integrating humanity into the natural world as a geographic element as Reclus does, Vidal draws on a host of organic metaphors to suggest the personification of the natural world, including such expressions such as “organisme terrestre,” the “corps social,” “artères,” “veines,” “points d’ossifications,” the “physionomie” of a region, and “la cellule,” the last one in reference to a small community (“arteries, veins, bony points, physiognomy, and the cell”). Elsewhere he employs terms like “branches,” “ramifications,” “associations humaines,” and “plante vivace” (“branches, ramifications, human associations, and lively plant”). The lexicon of development is equally inspiring to him: “naissance,” “maturité,” “vieillissement,” “déchéance” (“birth, maturity, aging, degeneration”). In Vidal, the natural world is an active agent, at least as much as humanity, which it seeks to imitate: “le maïs dispute avec le blé,” “les arbres cherchent l’humidité qui se réfugie dans le sous-​­sol,” and “les rivières dérobent leurs eaux” (Vidal, Tableau, 43) (“the corn fights the wheat,” “the trees look for moisture hiding underground,” and “rivers carry away their water”). Vidal invests nature with agency, a less than subtle slight of those who ascribe to nature a passive role—­namely the many supporters of Darwin’s natural selection. In Vidal, nature’s elements represent active participants in the narrative of France, suggesting by their very personification that nature has the free will to dispute, search, and hide or to act otherwise. As I pointed out in the introduction to this chapter, the concept of an organic whole is almost entirely idiographic (regional) and contributes little if anything to the nomothetic (universal) sciences. It is also largely synthetic rather than analytic. The organicist metaphor is more metaphysical than scientific, answering no questions because it asks none. So why the organicist metaphors for a discipline that Vidal assures us is “definitely a science”? As Judith Schlanger has pointed out, metaphors in the sciences are normally employed to give an educated audience a frame of reference for new material, as a vehicle for making the unfamiliar more familiar.57 Based on recent studies in the cognitive sciences, several researchers are now proposing that abstract concepts are largely anchored in metaphors derived from bodily experience.58 Geographers have made this claim for centuries. Geographer Yi Fu Tuan notes that the first sense of spatial orientation of babies is derived from the left-​­right, front-​­back, top-​­bottom orientation of the body.59 The subjective reference points are identified by Kant in 1768:

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Even our judgments about the cosmic regions are subordinated to the concept we have of regions in general, insofar as they are determined in relation to the sides of our body . . . Our geographical knowledge, and even our commonest knowledge of the position of places, would be of no aid to us if we could not, by reference to the side of our bodies, assign to regions the things so ordered and the whole system of mutually relative positions.60

The individual projects his or her corporeal coordinates into space, giving body to the universe. A century after Kant, French pedagogues based an entire system of education on such spatial theories of knowledge. The overhaul of the geography curriculum that resulted from the Levasseur-​ Himly report brought an emphasis on praxis over theory. Educators ­ stressed observation and exploration of the world, asking the student to imagine a series of concentric circles moving out from the individual (bedroom, house, neighborhood, village, department, region, nation). Reclus’s friend and fellow anarchist, Petr Kropotkin, put it simply: “Each science must be taught in concentric, ever-​­widening circles. So it must be with geography.”61 These circles radiate out from the intimate center of the individual “I” toward the distant horizons, mapping a geography of knowledge from concrete to abstract, from phenomenological to theoretical. This ritualistic “taking possession” of extended territory (Deleuze calls it “territorialization”) can be understood as a repetition of cosmogony, the creation of a sacred space, French space.62 Geography’s organicist metaphors are embodied metaphors as well, employed to map the familiar body and its various functioning parts onto a more abstract whole whose mysterious working are made clear through the familiarity with one’s body. Embodied metaphors serve as a conceptual basis for more abstract notions. Mapping the self onto society is the mirror of the “somatic society,” which reads the human body as a set of maps and metaphors of the wider social body. In the latter case, the body represents a metaphorical map of social problems and boundary issues, including those that define marginalized individuals and groups. As popularizers of geography, Reclus and Vidal rely on embodied metaphors to emphasize the dualism inherent in the mind/body split, underscoring that there is a physical France and a spiritual France. In the embodied metaphor of the nation, apparent contrasts are upheld rather than resolved. The vertical axis that Michelet, Reclus, and Vidal identify splits France between east and west just as the body is split between left and right.63 But through the personification of France, the two sides of that rift are shown

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to be complimentary rather than antagonistic, allies rather than enemies. The same holds true for the north and south, coasts and mountains. The embodied discourse within geography expresses a deep obsession in French society with the birth rates, amputation (Alsace-​­Lorraine), orphans (“God is dead”), and physical education. The health and development of the social organism dominates the rhetoric. Through the use of embodied metaphors, geographers internalized the trauma of 1871 and mapped it onto the nation. French authorities welcomed immigration as a means to avert a demographic crisis; they described the loss of Alsace-​­Lorraine as an “amputation”; literature was filled with the tales of orphaned young boys; and embodied metaphors provided opportunities to talk about social and moral values in society. Of course, some took these metaphors of the nation to their logical conclusion, claiming that crimes against society were crimes against the nation since the nation was made up of society’s individuals. Criminals were traitors against the nation, infections in the body politic. Education took on the same role as Pasteur’s vaccine, to inoculate against diseases that attack the body. Embodied metaphors also provide a means to talk about civilization and progress with some sort of scientific cover. Both Vidal and Reclus supported certain aspects of the colonial effort because of the exchange of ideas between societies. Theoretical Sources

In order to make sense of Vidal’s organicist model, one needs to have a basic understanding of his theoretical inspiration, the French naturalist Jean-​­Baptiste Lamarck. Lamarck’s most famous work was his Philosophie zoologique (1809), in which he laid out evolutionary theories of adaptation based on use/disuse and the inheritance of acquired characteristics, his two principle theories explaining biological transformation. The former argues that organisms are not passively shaped by their environment but instead that changes in the environment create new needs (besoins), which in turn cause new behaviors (habitudes), which lead to physical changes in the organism through greater or lesser use of certain organs (use/disuse). The second principle holds that these changes are heritable. Lamarck believed that simple organisms respond more readily to the environment or, more specifically, that a changing environment causes more immediate changes in the needs of a simple organism. For Vidal and Reclus the simple biological organism was something akin to a simple society, a geographical organism whose social/human element was

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more susceptible to its physical environment. But as the level of complexity increased within society, so too did its immunity to environmental factors. Lamarck attributed the tendency toward complexity in the natural world to an unseen force, a life force (le pouvoir de la vie), which he explained through the hydraulic action of fluids, both observable and invisible, within the body. La vie, dans les parties d’un corps qui la possède, est un ordre et un état de choses qui y permettent les mouvemens organiques; et ces mouvemens, qui constituent la vie active, résultent de l’action d’une cause stimulante.64 (Life, where it exists in the body, is an order and state of being that involves organic movement, and these movements making up active life result from the action of a stimulating cause.)

The pouvoir de la vie relied on two elements, a provoking element or stimulating cause and an existing order within the organism that could respond to this cause. The results of these two elements were manifested in the growth and development of the individual organism, in particular, and the regular gradation of the scale of life, in general. In simple organisms the environment played a key role early on in stimulating growth, since these organisms were more susceptible to outside stimuli. Increased complexity meant increased autonomy over the growth process, since more complex organisms could actively provoke their own change. Simple societies are, like Lamarck’s simple organism, more susceptible to their milieus, responding to it rather than controlling it. As development occurs, however, the simple society becomes more complex and is eventually able to provoke its own growth. Hence the early influence of nature is overcome through the development of social relations; the natural organism becomes a social organism. The personality of that social organism comes from the geographic phenomena that it has had to overcome: hence Michelet’s aphorism that “history is above all geographic.” The diversity of the French personality is a reflection of its diverse regional landscapes. To the best of my knowledge, neither geographer ever cited Lamarck as a source of inspiration. Perhaps there was no need given the preponderance of neo-​­Lamarckian thought in the Third Republic. Regardless, the influence of Lamarck is unmistakable, as is the influence of neo-​­Lamarckianism:

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La science, qui transforme peu à peu la planète en un immense organisme travaillant sans relâche pour le compte de l’humanité, par ses vents, ses courants, sa vapeur d’eau, son fluide électrique, nous indique aussi les moyens d’embellir la surface terrestre, d’en faire le jardin rêvé par les poètes de tous les âges. (Reclus, La Terre, 757) (Science, which gradually transforms the planet into a huge organism working tirelessly on behalf of humanity, by its winds, its currents, its water vapor, its electric fluid, also tells us how to embellish the earth’s surface, to make of it the garden dreamt of by the poets of every age.)

Une individualité géographique ne résulte pas de simples considérations de géologie et de climat. Ce n’est pas une chose donnée d’avance par la nature. Il faut partir de cette idée qu’une contrée est un réservoir où dorment des énergies dont la nature a déposé le germe, mais dont l’emploi dépend de l’homme. C’est lui qui, en la pliant à son usage, met en lumière son individualité. Il établit une connexion entre des traits épars; aux effets incohérents de circonstances locales, il substitue un concours systématique de forces. C’est alors qu’une contrée se précise et se différencie, et qu’elle devient à la longue comme une médaille frappée à l’effigie d’un peuple. Ce mot de personnalité appartient au domaine et au vocabulaire de la géographie humaine. (Vidal, Tableau, 9) (A geographic individuality is not the simple result of combining geology and climate. Nor is it a given in nature. You must start from the idea that a region is a reservoir of potential energies into which nature has planted a seed, but whose development depends on human activity. It is humanity who, bending nature according to his needs, highlights this individuality. He establishes connections between diverse traits. In place of incoherent and local circumstances, he substitutes relentlessly competing forces. In this way a region differentiates itself, and it becomes a sort of medal stamped in the image of its inhabitants. Personality is a word that belongs to the vocabulary of human geography.)

Traces of Lamarck are ubiquitous in these two passages. Fluids are the essential milieu for Lamarck, a sort of amniotic fluid providing internal circulation for growth and bringing in new materials from the outside world. Fluids abound in these passages from Reclus and Vidal. “Fluide

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électrique” is another term for Lamarck’s “subtle fluids” that cause change in the organism. “Eau,” “courants,” “reservoirs,” and “cours” (“water, currents, reservoirs, and courses”) all evoke the amniotic milieu of the fetus, itself a product of “nature” that “a déposé le germe,” the seed. The fluid environment is critical to the geographers as well. In Reclus, rivers are essentially movement and life (Reclus, “Evolution of Cities,” 252). Fluids represent the necessary means for maintaining a healthy society. The passages are also noteworthy for the emphasis on division. The growth of an organism can only happen through repeatedly dividing itself. Reclus and Vidal inscribe this division in the very text itself, choosing words and phrases that either mean “the fold” (pliant) or that can be somehow be folded neatly in two: individualité, connexion, peu à peu. The stress on movement and division provides a subtle counter-​­narrative to the homogenizing discourse of the republican government. This theorization of fluid chaos was geography’s version of an emerging sentiment toward time and space as fluid and heterogeneous. Henri Bergson called it “duration” in his philosophy, while mathematicians were formulating what would later be known as chaos theory.65 A Dynamic Cartography

Vidal’s belief in the fluid connectedness between individuals and their natural environment structured his geographic thought. Support for such a claim can be found in the tracing of Vidal’s use of the “static” images of cartography—­maps. Vidal illustrated the textual descriptions of his geography with scores of maps and engravings. One of Vidal’s first commercially successful publications was his Atlas ​­général (1894). In it the geographer states in succinct terms the objective of his maps: . . . de saisir dans l’ensemble des caractères qui composent la physionomie d’une contrée, l’enchaînement qui les relie, et dans cet enchaînement une expression des lois générales de l’organisme terrestre.66 (. . . to grasp within the ensemble of characteristics making up the physiognomy of a country, the relationships that connect, and in this sequence of relationships an expression of the general laws of the terrestrial organism.)

Vidal’s work divides the geographic information into two main sections, the first composed of cartes historiques and the second of cartes

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géographiques. The historical section begins with Egypt and the biblical Holy Land. From there it passes to ancient Greece and the Mediterranean, the Roman Empire and barbarian kingdoms leading up to Clovis. It then shifts its focus to the development of French space through the various dynasties (Merovingians, Carolingians, Capetians) and wars (Crusades, Thirty Years’ War, 1789, wars of Napoleon) to the history of Paris. After touching on the history of cartography, Vidal finishes the first section with a brief summary of the formation of Germany, Italy, the United States, and Latin America. The final map is one of France’s Algerian conquests. Noticeably absent from this section is any discussion or even mention of the East. What he labels as “Histoire ancienne de l’Orient” is in fact a map of Persian conquest. The focus of Vidal’s historical maps is most definitely Western history. The second section on space offers a slightly wider perspective. Vidal’s geographic maps begin by introducing the reader to the various cartographic projections of the earth’s sphere (Mercator, conical, stereographic), followed by a mappemonde and a planisphere. Across the bottom of these pages run a series of Mercator projections showing the distribution of vegetation, races, religions as well as global currents, climates, rain, and winds. From there it turns to France, offering a series of subject-​­specific maps: geology, relief, agriculture, administrative, industry, navigation, and military. Vidal’s itinerary next takes the reader through France’s colonies before coming back to deal with Europe according to its relief, geology, and navigation. Vidal closes his description of Europe with Great Britain and the British Empire, which serves as an avenue toward geographic discussions on Australia and the East and to the United States and the Americas in the New World. While there is arguably less information on Vidal’s maps than the much-​ ­decorated Carte de l’État-​­Major produced by the French state, Vidal’s Atlas represents a growing trend in pedagogical geography. Reflecting the traditional military use of maps, the tendency of cartographers ever since Oronce Finé’s 1535 map of France had been to get as much information as possible onto the map, cramming cities, rivers, and mountains into a space circumscribed by the expanding and contracting political borders. As the newly formed disciplines of the positivist sciences provided more and more data through the nineteenth century, the French map became overburdened. Vidal de la Blache exploded the positivist map of France, using the resulting fragmented elements to reconstruct a layered portrait of France. Vidal drew up his wall maps and atlas for the classroom rather than for the military strategists, so they have a decidedly pedagogical tone. The intent was to bring together the vast quantity

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of information available on a given country in what Vidal called in his preface “une vue raisonnée” (“a rational view”). This rational geographic view involved placing “sous les yeux l’ensemble des traits qui caractérisent une contrée afin de permettre à l’esprit d’établir entre eux une liaison” (Vidal, Atlas général, preface) (“in one view all the traits that characterize a region in order to allow the mind to establish the links between them”). It is this notion of connection (connexité) that lies at the heart of Vidal’s geography. The many names and icons on the old maps represented isolated facts, in Vidal’s opinion, useless pieces of information without a narrative to connect them and give them meaning. Only by placing them within a metonymical relationship of cause and effect (enchaînement) or of part to the whole, is one able to draw meaning from the data. So rather than attempt to locate the greatest number of toponyms on a single map, Vidal’s Atlas provides a layered reading of space by separating the maps according to the various geographic expressions of the regional identity: geology, navigation, topography, political, hydrology, climate, agriculture, and commerce. The French geographic individuality, argued Vidal, expresses itself in the correlation of these phenomena so that one should “chercher dans la géologie et le climat les clefs du relief et de l’hydrographie, et dans les conditions physiques les raisons de la répartition des habitants et de la position des villes” 67 (“search in geology and climate for the keys to terrain and hydrography, and in the physical conditions for the reasons related to population distribution and the position of cities”). According to Vidal, only the layered geographic reading, informed by the many different disciplines of science and the humanities, can arrive at a true understanding of the physiognomy (personality) of a region. Vidal’s Atlas forms a dynamic composite of information compiled from a host of disciplines that together begin to formulate a narrative of French identity. As individual images, Vidal’s maps hold little information within themselves. Meaning comes from the links formed with other maps since each map of the atlas, like each of his wall maps, constitutes a frame within a larger spatial and temporal montage. Vidal’s geography functions as a proto-​­cinematic language in which each cartographic image constitutes what Deleuze calls a “narrative utterance.”68 Vidal’s “cinematic cartography” is not the digital image frozen in time that becomes its own object but rather analogical to the accompanying text, not as its representation, but forming a dialogical relationship to the explication that creates a fuller narrative. Vidal’s map (plan), like the cinematic shot (plan), has only two restrictions. The first restriction pertains to the register of symbols available to it; it must operate within the field

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of inherited signifiers. And secondly, the narrative must respond to the textual exigencies with which it works to produce meaning. Just as the cinematic image must correspond to the accompanying dialogue, so must the cartographic image dialogue with the narrative text around it. The maps of France taken together form both a temporal and spatial narrative, tracing the evolution of French space over time and its unity in the present. The historical maps recount the historical development of France as an individual from its inception (“France a l’epoque des Gaulois”) to its pinnacle (“France en 1789”). Such divisions respond to the period’s interest in evolutionary development, the division of time into micro units, and the parceling of space. The geographical maps suggest what Bergson called “an open totality.” French space is unified, but not by political borders. Rather, its unity comes from the links implied between maps. Vidal reads French space through a palimpsest of maps: physical, geology, climatology, hydrology, and the rest. The maps or sequence of maps are less important than understanding how the images are linked together and interconnected, and how these connections acquire meaning. Vidal is not asking the reader to separate out each genre de vie and to take it on its own terms, as a static image of a part of France. Rather, Vidal argues that each genre de vie only makes sense as it is related to the broader narrative of French modernity, urbanization, and republicanism. It is not as if one should stop at the map of France’s geology and study it for the story of France. To be sure, each image does possess an individual identity, but Vidal argues that that identity is dynamic and only acquires authentic meaning in its relationship through its connections to other maps, both historical and disciplinary. Likewise, the map of France is not a static image full of meaning. It represents instead an opening onto a network of relationships that the reader is free to explore. Those who would characterize Vidal’s regional geography as obsolete miss the dynamic nature of this work. Despite the rigorous borders of the map’s page, Vidal’s France is never completely closed. This openness is due in part to the fact that Vidal, like Reclus, eschewed political borders and therefore rarely included them. More importantly, however, each map is constantly referring to space outside the cartographic image, either to space outside of political France (across the Channel, the Alps, the Rhine) or to the same space located on a different map of France providing different information.69 Vidal’s “obvious” approach (une condition de clarté) with its constant reference to other disciplines and images creates a semantic field that extends beyond the individual image and keeps the reader’s mind alert and connected to other planes of information.

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The temptation is to equate Vidal’s images to linguistic signs, but such a formulation implies a predetermined form to be developed (the hexagon, for example) and subordinates all previous articulations to that form. The external structure provides a telos giving meaning to each image.70 Vidal, however, was adamant about the contingent nature of history and geography. Despite drawing up the portrait of France, Vidal never holds up France as the telos, only the way things have turned out so far. France is only France because of a balance struck between a whole host of mutually conditioning geographical factors (in the widest possible sense). The fact that humans and animate nature are contingent elements means that the organicism is never determined but always negotiable and in flux, always becoming-​­France rather than being-​­France. It is only our tendency toward lethargy and habit (routine) that gives the social organism an appearance of stasis. Vidal’s remedy for this stasis is the same one that biologists prescribe for a healthy organism: circulation. Only through the circulation of ideas and goods can humans be shocked out of their static routines into progress. Vidal’s geography complicates the strict homogenization of culture that typified this period of Western history. Implicit in Vidal’s geography, therefore, is a critique of the transcendent image of France as a predetermined form. The commonly reproduced static image of France limits the national expression of the nation to its form alone, leaving untouched or unexplored what Vidal refers to as its “living harmony.” Vidal was adamant about the possibilities open to the human individual to establish connections, both natural and social, and therefore to shape his or her space. I would suggest that each portrait of a genre de vie is also a movement-​ ­image that attempts to capture a historical relationship to the soil and to the other genres de vie within its orbit of influence. Moreover, each of these genres de vie is tied into the grand narrative of French identity, not in a teleological reading of what France was destined to become, but rather in a sort of dynamic Deleuzian rhizomatic relationship that philosopher Alfred Fouillée captures well with his description of France as “an association of associations.” Deleuze’s rhizome has no history; it has only a geography. French Geography

The many studies that have identified the work of Vidal and Reclus as historical portraits of a variegated rural France are only partially correct.71 The larger picture shows the two geographers to be uniquely concerned with the transition between a rural agricultural France and an urban industrial one. By 1910, Vidal saw that the increased mobility of

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humans (la puissance de transport) and the increasing exchange of commodities (la puissance de production) were changing life in the French provinces. Vast industrial regions were threatening to overwhelm the localized genres de vie, risking a transformation from traditional ways of life to a homogenized “monoculture.” Vidal felt that local life would continue to the extent that an effort was made to adapt to the changing conditions of modernity; new regional divisions would respond to the new reality. These new regional personalities would be dominated by what Vidal called “nodes,” centers of activity that defined a region. Vidal pointed to the historical importance of roads and cities, “great originators of unity” that created the solidarity of countries. These urban hubs served a primary role in the new form of progress as hubs of economic activity between the regions and international markets. Commerce was the modern form of circulation that would nourish the political body, which brings us back to the organism. Through their independent study of the natural world, both Reclus and Vidal place great importance on circulation as a factor for growth. Roads, railroads, canals, currents, and winds all serve to disperse the seeds of new contact across the globe. A static society is a dying society since “by the very fact of its development, the city [society], like any organism, tends to die” (Reclus, “Evolution of Cities,” 257). Only the dynamic survive. In fact, it is roads, canals, currents, and rivers that “hide,” “uncover,” “bring,” and “open onto” (déboucher). They are agents of change, bringing one geographical element into contact with another. Vidal views progress as stimulated by contact with foreign ideas. The natural tendency of human nature is toward indolence. “Humanity is bent toward inaction due to a natural inclination. Torpor is always haunting.”72 For Vidal, the creative spark abides within the human soul awaiting a stiff breeze from without to fan it into flames. What it needs is contact with new and inspiring ideas. In this sense, the lethargy and stasis that come from isolation are obstacles to progress. It takes a change in the environment for the organism to change its habits. The circulation of people and ideas exposes the individual organism to new ways of doing things. Each bit of contact is in a sense a micro-​­revolution. This chapter has examined the ways in which the geographical thought of Elisée Reclus and Paul Vidal de la Blache both contributed to and complicated the formation of a republican mythos in a young republican France. The formulation of a “social” or “human geography” based on “general laws” relied on organicist and embodied metaphors for their expression. These pages have demonstrated that the organicist and embodied metaphors that proved so useful in constructing the semiotics

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of the nation, by using the body as a conceptual basis for more abstract notions, also complicated and confused the republican homogenization of the nation by, among other things, emphasizing change, contingency, and chaos in nature. An exploration of the Lamarckian roots of Reclus and Vidal’s organicism allowed us to trace the various ontological commitments of the nation as organism. Ultimately, the two geographers known principally for their work on rural landscapes demonstrate a keen interest in the urban space of modern society. While republican officials adopted the organicist geography for their own ideological ends, several writers employed the same analogies to interrogate the self and society. Jules Verne was one such writer. I would like to conclude this chapter by pointing to a particularly apt literary reference to Reclus’s geographic thought in one of Verne’s Voyage extraordinaires. In Les Enfants du capitaine Grant (1867–­68), Verne includes among only a handful of principal characters a French geographer, Paganel, who typifies the bricoleur role that geographers were beginning to assume. Paganel belongs to the Société de Géographie de Paris, has written books on various parts of the globe, records his observations and measurements in a journal for later publication, manifests an obsession with maps, and is generally a fountain of knowledge for others to consult: —­vous parlez comme un livre, Paganel, répondit Glenarvan. —­et j’en suis un, répliqua Paganel. Libre à vous de me feuilleter tant qu’ il vous plaira.73 (“You speak like a book, Paganel,” noted Glenarvan. “But I am,” replied Paganel. “Feel free to leaf through my pages as long as you like.”)

Paganel is the embodiment of nineteenth-​­century geographical fantasies of exploration, field knowledge, pedagogy, and colonization through naming. His embodiment of the geographical sciences is manifested literally when the geographer, after having been captured by the “savage” Maori tribe in New Zealand, is tattooed by nature with his story.74 After tracing his itinerary across the surface of the natural world and filling in the blank spaces on his maps, the natural world, in the form of savage society, returns the favor by inscribing his identity across his epidermis. Nature maps the mapmaker. Verne’s work expresses the inherent tensions of the emerging geographic sensibility: the place and space of the individual within society, the emphasis on empirical versus experiential sources of knowledge, and the blurring of one’s horizons.

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If Protagoras was right in declaring man the measure of all things, then certainly someone should have thought to take the measure of man. And indeed, that is precisely what I am arguing that Jules Verne is doing in his widely read Voyage au centre de la terre. In the next chapter, I follow Verne into the depths of the human psyche where the difference between measurement and madness is a razor-​­thin line.

Chapter 3

Jules Verne’s Ego-​­Geography Reading “Une Carte d’Identité”

Qui sait tout ce que peut la réflection concentrée et s’il n’y a pas un nouveau monde intérieur qui pourra être découvert un jour par quelque Colomb métaphysicien? —­Maine de Biran, Pensées, 1857

The concept of a person is not a concept that stands still, hospitably awaiting an analysis of its necessary and sufficient conditions. —­A . O. Rorty, A Literary Postscript, 1976

Despite Jules Verne’s self-​­proclaimed status as a “geographical writer,” few studies of this father of science fiction have read his work in the light of the deeper geographical discourse of his period. Most analyses treat the author instead as a product of nineteenth-​­century positivism, a vulgarizer of scientific knowledge whose stories promote the ability of humankind to take the measure of the universe. The theme of science does indeed dominate his Voyages extraordinaires, which have been read by some as hewing closely to the period’s imperialist discourse.1 However, by using the social geography of Elisée Reclus as a lens through which to read Verne, we begin to sense that a more nuanced approach to Verne’s work is needed, one that takes into account geography’s emphasis on organicist metaphors and its limited faith in science to accurately and completely measure the universe. According to geographer Emile Levasseur, geography “is not a science. It has no methods; there are no geographical laws.”2 An understanding of Reclus, whose geographical thought viewed the

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earth as “a geographical individuality,” allows us to read Verne’s journey to the center of the earth as a journey to the center of the individual self. This “organic” reading of Verne maps an ego-​­geography that suggests a deep anxiety about the nomadic drifts and destabilizing encounters that characterize the experience of the modern individual amidst the failures of a mechanistic universe. Verne’s terrified protagonist, Axel, perched on the edge of a yawning abyss, ably captures the deep angst of the modern individual caught between reason and madness, or the scholar’s desire to measure and the fool’s desire to jump, to paraphrase Balzac.3 First published in 1864, Voyage au centre de la terre (Journey to the Center of the Earth) was received warmly by a public whose appetite for adventure had already been whetted by the first of Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires, Cinq semaines en ballon (1863; Five Weeks in a Balloon). In both stories, Verne uses the dialectic of geography and literature to bring forth from the distant past myths and legends that structure a certain way of comprehending the world. To be sure, the sciences figure prominently in Verne’s work. The goal of Verne’s writing, according to his editor Pierre-​­Jules Hetzel, was to “synthesize all the geographical, geological, physical, and astronomical knowledge brought together by modern science, and to remake, in his own engaging and colorful way, the history of the universe.”4 It was on these very terms that the literary elite of Verne’s generation dismissed the author as a popularizer of knowledge and a writer of children’s stories, disparaging his work for its lack of literariness. “A friendly popularizer” Zola called him, “without any literary importance.”5 Verne’s own friend and biographer Charles Lemire referred to him as “a teller of fairy tales making pseudo-​­scientific claims.”6 The British, whose pluck and sang-​­froid served as an inspiration for so many of Verne’s heroes, were no less harsh in their treatment of the author, calling him an “unliterary” writer producing in a “sub-​­literary genre.”7 Paradoxically, despite Verne’s express desire to become a great writer and to be recognized by the Académie as such, he too was an homme de lettres and so recognized and shared many of the establishment’s biases against his chosen genre, expressing to his editor Hetzel in a moment of extreme candor that “in the literary hierarchy, the adventure novel is less well esteemed than the novel of manners.”8 Furthermore, Verne wrote novels that some critics described as useful (utilitaires), the very definition of unaesthetic to the Parnasse crowd.9 Verne’s editor Hetzel published many of the early works serially in his Magazine d’éducation et de recréation, which doubled as advertising space for the author’s forthcoming works, of which there were many given Verne’s prodigious output. Hetzel marketed Verne as “entertaining

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instruction and instructive entertainment.”10 Such a utilitarian understanding of his work has led to his further mischaracterization as a literary functionary, more écrivant than écrivain, to use Barthes’s distinction.11 Verne’s unpardonable transgression was to write useful and popular stories during an era in which a good writer looked down on those who were buying his or her books.12 Nothing could be further from the perceived heroic simplicity of Verne who in his Voyages extraordinaires avoided the flawed heroic figure and other traits of the roman de moeurs. Rather, he stripped his characters down to stock figures: the heroic adventurer, the phlegmatic scientist/engineer, the faithful servant, the absent-​­minded professor, and the rogue villain. Verne’s use of stock characters allowed him the freedom to employ them as vehicles of information rather than as character studies, inserting in their dialogue the latest scientific debates and discoveries. Conceived as such, they serve merely as an expression of the thoroughly bourgeois men’s clubs taking shape across Europe, dedicated to the pursuit of science and exploration. Scientific observation and analysis required mens sana in corpore sano (a sound mind in a sound body). A flawed character was not an acceptable vehicle for sound science. Verne’s characterization as naive and unliterary among the Anglo-​ A ­ merican reading public is due in large part to the rather dreadful nineteenth-​­century translations that survived well into the twentieth century. The early 1970s produced a revolution in Vernian studies, through the publication of numerous serious studies on Verne, including those by Chesneaux, Vierne, Huet, and Serres.13 More recently, Verne has experienced a literary rehabilitation of sorts. In addition to the steady stream of scholarship coming from the journal that bears his name and a spate of dissertation theses in the last twenty years, the centenary of his death (2005) marked the publication of numerous new Verne studies as well as re-​­editions (including new translations) of much of his work.14 What the recent work all has in common is a firm desire to take Verne’s writing seriously as literature. Recent Verne scholars have demonstrated the ways in which Verne opened up the frontiers of literature through a surprising range of styles, narrative modes, voices, and materials. What studies of this “geographical writer” have tended to overlook is a broader consideration of the geographical discourse of the period, including and especially the very geographer for whom Verne expressed the most appreciation, Elisée Reclus. In the first part of this chapter, therefore, I demonstrate that Verne’s reading of the earth in Voyage au centre de la terre is remarkably similar to Reclus’s organicist understanding of the earth as “an immense terrestrial organism.”15 Such a bio-​­geographical

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formulation allows us to read Verne’s voyage figuratively, as a journey to the center of the individual self. I will show how this psycho-​­geographical reading helps to explain many of the texts’ perceived shortcomings, including the party’s sudden and premature exit from the earth, which prevents them from achieving their “central” objective (the center of the earth). In the second part of this chapter, I deal with the complications raised by my own geographical reading: the instability of scientific measure, the hovering specter of madness, and the intense psychological anxiety and release experienced by the novel’s narrator, Axel Lidenbrock. I argue that each of these elements works to inscribe the individual self at the juncture of two seemingly opposed forces, science and madness. A native of Nantes, Jules Verne moved to Paris in 1847 to study law. After passing the law exams, he abandoned the legal profession, devoting his life to literature and the theater. Verne’s first job was at the Paris stock exchange, whose income he supplemented with articles written for the journal Musée des familles. From the many long evenings spent poring over documents, newspapers, and scientific journals, Verne started to sketch a new and innovative type of novel whose narrative format would incorporate all this documentation, weaving fact into fiction, didacticism into adventure, and scientific data into literary motifs.16 Verne was an avid fan of the great maritime and overland explorers and read their accounts with excitement. Verne called geography his “great passion and study,” and confided in an 1895 interview to Marie Belloc that “I have always been devoted to the study of geography, much as some people delight in history and historical research. I really think that my love for maps and the great explorers led to my composing the first of my long series of geographical stories.”17 That first story was, of course, his Cinq semaines en ballon, in which the protagonists float across the African continent in a giant hot-​­air balloon. The following year he published Les Aventures du Capitaine Hatteras, a novel inspired by accounts of polar expeditions that recounted the obsessive quest for the North Pole of the novel’s eponymous protagonist. The influence of geography is evident. Both stories read like the personal reports of the European explorers recounting their adventures in front of the members of the various geographical societies of Europe.18 The societies published these reports in their respective bulletin under breathtaking titles—­like Verne’s own—­suggesting adventurous exploits. Recounting his own geographical interests in an interview for McClure’s Magazine in 1895, Verne states: I also read through the bulletins of the scientific societies, especially those of the Geographical Society . . . I have all Reclus’s works—­I

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have a great admiration for Élisée Reclus—­and the whole of Arago. I also read and re-​­read, for I am a most careful reader, the collection known as ‘Le Tour du Monde,’ which is a series of stories of travel.19

At nearly the same time that Hetzel was serially printing Verne’s Voyage au centre de la terre in his magazine, Elisée Reclus published Les Volcans et les tremblements de terre (1863) followed by La Sicile et l’éruption de l’Etna (1864). What evidence there is to link the two men at this stage is tenuous, but they would eventually meet through their mutual friend, the famed photographer Félix Nadar, and through their membership in the Société de Géographie de Paris. 20 The geography that scholars often ascribe to Verne is one based on a model of physical geography that views space as an absolute entity, often described as the science of place. Humanity had no place except as an instrument of measure. Reclus’s geography, inspired by Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Ritter, placed humanity squarely within the natural world. Ritter viewed the earth through the lens of comparative anatomy, claiming that “all the divisions of the earth, taken together in their internal and external connections, in their mutual action and reaction, constitute the unity of the globe, and make apparent that it is a simple organism.”21 Ritter introduced the notion of organic harmony and terrestrial unity to an entire generation of geographers, like the Swiss-​­born American geographer Arnold Guyot, who viewed every individual organism as forming “a part of the greater organism than itself.”22 Reclus would repeat this mantra of the earth-​­as-​­organism throughout his long career. From the very beginning of his work, Reclus expressed the hope that science would turn the globe into an immense organism whose parts worked in concert for the benefit of humanity.23 By reading Verne’s earth as an organism, we arrive at a layered understanding of his hero’s journey. The quest for and mapping of the core of the earth (geo-​­logy, geo-​­graphy) becomes a quest for and mapping of the core of the modern individual (ego-​­logy, ego-​­graphy).

Mapping the Self Verne’s Voyage is a relatively brief story.24 Axel, a German university student on the cusp of manhood, serves as Verne’s narrator. He lives and works with his uncle, a famous professor of geology, a man that Axel both fears and adores. This uncle, the professor Otto Lidenbrock, is a tall man of little patience and an iron will who possesses a volcanic temper and a stutter that results in an embarrassing inability to pronounce scientific

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terminology. The story opens with the professor bringing home a twelfth-​ c­ entury book written in Icelandic in which he discovers a slip of paper inscribed with a cryptic message. Axel breaks the code by chance, discovering that a certain Arne Saknussemm has found a route to the center of the earth which dares the “audacious traveler” to follow. Axel reluctantly reveals the secret message to his uncle, fearing that his uncle will pick up the challenge, which he does. The professor also insists that Axel accompany him. Terrified by the dangers and not wanting to leave his fiancée, Graüben, Axel tries to refuse. However, Graüben’s encouragement and the fear of his uncle’s wrath break down his defenses. After a brief stop in Copenhagen to acquire various scientific instruments and to train for the vertiginous descent by repeatedly climbing to the top of a Danish church, Axel and the professor arrive in Iceland, hire a guide, Hans, and begin the search for the traces of Saknussemm’s path in the crater of an extinct volcano, Sneffels. The “audacious travelers” are guided on their journey into the abyss by the initials “A.S.” scratched into the rock, evidence of Saknussemm’s previous voyage. Instead of finding a barren and dark interior within the volcano, the surprised travelers encounter subterranean vegetation, interior luminescence, a tropical climate, an inner sea, prehistoric beasts, a field of bones, a mummified human, and a giant herdsman tending living mastodons. During a crossing of the inner sea, Axel takes over the duty of recording observations into the journal du bord. His present-​­tense entries constitute four of the most exciting chapters of the tale, recounting a hallucinatory dream, a run-​­in with sea monsters, the discovery of a small island, and an encounter with ball lightning that disorients both humans and scientific instruments. Emboldened by these experiences and suddenly hungry for more, Axel confidently blows up an enormous boulder blocking their path. This action opens a huge hole into which the sea rushes, carrying their raft down the shaft until the water hits the entrails of an active volcano whose erupting lava pushes them up toward the surface and out onto the face of Stromboli in the Mediterranean. They return to Germany amid great fanfare. The professor continues his research, Axel weds Graüben (and presumably writes the story the reader has just read), and Hans returns to Iceland. Such is the story as Verne wrote it. Verne’s novel easily qualifies as one of the most straightforward of all the French initiatory novels during the nineteenth century. While others have elsewhere pointed out the myriad mythical and sexual themes of the work, what remains unexplored is the way in which the novel charts the period’s obsessive search for self.25 Given the turn toward humanistic geography in France, it is hardly a stretch to view the novel as an attempt

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to map the mobile self, to search for a core identity, to name a personal moral source by which choices are to be made. Verne had an insatiable thirst for the unknown. But with exploration having filled in many of the lands on the map labeled as “terra incognita” he looked for other uncharted lands. His first three novels include the still unknown center of the African continent (Cinq semaines en ballon), the as yet unexplored North Pole (Les aventures du Capitaine Hatteras), and the theorized center of the earth (Voyage au centre de la terre). By overlapping metaphors (earth-​­as-​­person, person-​­as-​­earth), Verne is able to use a rich set of geographic imagery and vocabulary to map the journey of self-​­discovery. In several lengthy segments throughout the text, Verne’s narrator paints a rich portrait of his uncle, the famed professor of geology Otto Lidenbrock, drawing clear parallels between the professor’s temperament and his academic discipline. According to Axel, his uncle is “a well [un puit] of science,”26 possessing “an iron constitution” (Voyage, I) and “a volcanic imagination” (V). He is extremely impatient (“every morning he habitually pulled on the leaves of his plants to hasten their growth,” I) and given to bursts of anger, most often as a result of his curious inability to pronounce scientific jargon. Axel describes the scene: Le professeur s’arrêtait court; il luttait contre un mot récalcitrant qui ne voulait pas glisser entre ses lèvres, un de ces mots qui résistent, se gonflent et finissent par sortir sous la forme peu scientifique d’un juron. De là, grande colère. (Voyage, I) (The professor stopped short, struggling against a recalcitrant word that would not slip between his lips, one of those words that resists, swells and eventually comes out in the unscientific form of a curse. And from this, always the angry outburst.)

He pauses over difficult words, stammers, and erupts in angry cursing to the general merriment of those around him. According to Axel, the public attends his lectures for the simple pleasure of viewing the spectacle of the “professor’s fantastic outbursts” (Voyage, I). Moreover, the professor’s detractors accuse him of being magnetized (aimanté), enough to attract metal filings. “Pure fiction,” is Axel’s response, “the only thing he attracted to himself was tobacco, and in great quantities to be quite honest” (I). Even the thought of smoke coming from the professor’s mouth evokes the image of a smoking volcanic cauldron. Just as Verne uses a geological discourse to “map” the professor, he draws a portrait of the volcano in biological terms. As he pores over his

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uncle’s map of Iceland, the narrator describes the volcanic island as “a kind of peninsula resembling a dry bone ending in an enormous rotator” (Voyage, VI). Once in Iceland standing in front of a range of extinct volcanoes, Axel imagines the enormous craters as “fiery mouths,” yawning and spewing lava and ash. Even on the dormant volcano, the evidence of former eruptions appears as “long lava flows spread across its face like thick hair” (XV). At the base of the volcano, the professor must once again assuage the fears of his nephew who has no intention of entering a live volcano. He calms him by describing the signs that would indicate an impending eruption. The professor’s very description of Icelandic fumaroles to Axel reads like a description of his own stammer and angry outburts: Si donc ces vapeurs se maintiennent dans leur état habituel, si leur énergie ne s’accroît pas, si tu ajoutes à cette observation que le vent, la pluie ne sont pas remplacés par un air lourd et calme, tu peux affirmer qu’il n’y aura pas d’éruption prochaine. (Voyage, XIV) (So if the steam remains in its usual state, if its energy does not increase, if you observe as well that the wind and rain are not replaced by a heavy, quiet air, you can say that there will be no next eruption.)

Reading the steam (ces vapeurs) as breath, the usual state (leur état habituel) means that speech is fluid and uninhibited. If they are interrupted by a heavy silence (the stammering pause), one should expect an imminent eruption, in Lidenbrock’s case, of cursing. The personification of geography and “geographication” of persons continues throughout the text: Axel’s hungry stomach becomes “a deep chasm” (Voyage, X); exhilaration overflows like lava (XI); the party “plunges into the bowels of the earth.” (XVIII); turtles resemble floating islands (XXXII); Axel imagines his body dissolved into the universe (XXXIII); he mistakes an island for a sea monster (XXXIV); a volcano pauses to catch its breath (XLIII); and Stromboli breathes like a whale (XLIV). Taken together, Verne’s images allude to the theory of geography outlined in the previous chapter. With one foot in the sciences and the other in the arts, and no disciplinary laws of their own to speak of, geographers adopted and adapted the various praxis and theory from other disciplines, folding them into a discourse that came to be termed “the geographical sciences.” Verne’s prose evokes this newly evolving geographical discourse that treats the Earth as an immense biological organism whose forests Reclus described

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as lungs and whose crust he considered a geological skin. Tracing the lines of Verne’s world through his characters and landscapes further evokes the task of geographers who read the physiognomy of the earth’s individual regions through the flora of the various landscapes. Indeed, Humboldt was the first to use the term “landscape” in geography as an expression of geographic unity.27 Despite the lack of a detailed description of the narrator, the reader is able to piece together a portrait of the narrator from details gathered here and there. Outwardly, he imitates many of his uncle’s gestures, including smoking, showing an interest in mineralogy, a facility in language (but with more fluid pronunciation), and a deep curiosity toward the natural world. The great difference, gleaned from Axel’s words, is the young man’s timid nature and consideration for other people, while the professor is described as reckless, selfish (égoïste), and miserly, someone who dialogues continually with himself. The first section of the book is a veritable battle of wills between a fearful Axel and his irascible uncle. It starts when the professor declares a fast in the entire house until he has deciphered the ancient scrawls that are “absolutely indecipherable” (Voyage, IV), and continues when hunger forces the young apprentice to reveal the deciphered message to his uncle: someone has taken a route to the center of the earth. “La folie!” (“Madness”) Axels calls it. “La science!” his uncle replies. Axel’s desire to satisfy his carnal appetites (to eat, drink, and get married) is countered by his uncle’s intellectual appetite for knowledge. These two characters establish a dialectic between the head and heart that weaves its way through the story. The geologist Otto Lidenbrock perfectly embodies the positivist spirit of the nineteenth century. “La science est faite d’erreurs,” he tells Axel, “mais d’erreurs qu’il est bon de commettre, car elles mènent peu à peu à la vérité” (Voyage, XXXI) (“Science is comprised of errors, but errors it is good to commit because these errors lead little by little to the truth”) (XXXI). Scientific error is an essential part of the path leading toward scientific progress. Despite the young Axel continually offering up a spirited antithèse to his uncle’s thèse, he inevitably submits to the elder’s will, described by Axel as “harder than granite” (XXXVII). Though he may find it difficult to pronounce scientific jargon, the positivist professor convinces Axel that “quand le science a prononcé, il n’y a plus qu’à se taire” (XIV) (“when science has spoken, there is nothing to do but remain silent”). It is this fundamental belief that “science is eminently perfectible” that drives the professor onward despite the great risks (VI). The mystery regarding the state of the earth’s interior propels the professor. Axel can only obey mechanically (machinalement), silently following his uncle.

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A Mythical Verne The popular reading of Verne that chooses to see in him a purveyor of imperialist dogma stops at this point, satisfied with reading the professor’s scientific method as the voice of Verne. The myth of his colonialist credentials is as enduring as the myth of his scientific prophecy. Neither, I believe, provides a satisfactory reading of Verne, whose insatiable appetite for information exposed him to a wide variety of ideas and statistics circulating in the twenty newspapers and innumerable scientific journals he subscribed to and read from daily. His meticulous notes, which Verne himself calculated in the tens of thousands, classified by subject and arranged in boxes in his personal library in Amiens, provided figures and ideas for each of his stories. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that, given his exposure to the wealth of new ideas gaining currency, Verne’s work represents a unique window onto the epistemology of his period. While it is true that many of the geographical society proceedings that he would have read promoted a colonial imperialist agenda for commercial reasons, these proceedings were hardly abundant in the 1860s when there was still only one French geographical society to speak of, La Société de Géographie de Paris (formed in 1821).28 Furthermore, Elisée Reclus, the geographer whom Verne spoke of as an inspiration, was decidedly not of an imperialist bent. Reclus’s work rested on three pillars: class struggle, the search for balance, and the sovereignty of the individual. As nature’s conscience, in Reclus’s view, humanity must have as its goal to live in harmony with these laws, fighting the tendency for one group or individual to dominate another. More important to any attempt at truly understanding Verne is the examination of a related thread within Reclus’s geography, his organicism. Following Humboldt’s creative use of Lavater’s pioneering study of physiognomy that used facial features to deduce character and temperament, Reclus looked at landscape physiognomy as localized expressions of an inner harmony.29 The observer looking for unity and meaning in the physical landscape latches onto historical, geological, biological, and botanical phenomena.30 Reading them together, one on top of the other, Reclus was able to deduce a relationship (enchaînement) of cause and effect that revealed an organic connectivity. In general, nineteenth-​­century French geography adopted this new interdisciplinary approach that used the maps of several different disciplines to read nature. The effect was both a layered understanding of the earth and a migration of concepts and notions from one discipline into another. This migration of ideas across disciplines would have profound effects into the twentieth century in the areas of psychoanalysis, sociology, and

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ethnography. One can trace the development of this interdisciplinary folding right up to the thought of twentieth-​­century French anthropologist Claude Lévi-​­Strauss, who in his Tristes tropiques observed that “any scene appears at first as a huge mess that is open to the mearning we prefer to give it.”31 Like Reclus, Lévi-​­Strauss looked for a deeper reading, something he calls reading against the grain (à contre-​­sens). The goal of such deep analysis is to recover “a dominant meaning [un maître-​­sens], obscure no doubt, but one for whom all others are but the partial transposition or distorted version of itself.”32 In fact, Lévi-​­Strauss traces his ideological roots back to Marxism, psychoanalysis, and geology, the first and last serving as muses for Reclus as well. Marxism, claimed Lévi-​­Strauss, helps to explain society while psychoanalysis sheds light on the individual. Geology sets the spatial limits for the study of humanity and points toward the innumerable strata that go into making up the earth and, by extension, society and the individual. Both the geologist and psychoanalyst “seek to project in time some fundamental properties of the physical and mental universe.”33 Freud’s theories represented “the application to humankind of a method whose canon was established in geology.”34 For Lévi-​­Strauss all three heuristics posed the same problem, “that of the relationship between reason [le rationnel] and sense-​­perception [le sensible],” and demonstrated that “understanding consists in the reduction of one type of reality into another.”35 We will come back to Lévi-​­Strauss’s dialectic of reason and feeling, but it is worth a moment of our time to explore the influence of Reclus on Verne’s work. Using Reclus’s metaphor of the terrestrial organism, Verne, in his Voyage, folds a geological and biological discourse into one another to produce both a language of myth and a map of the individual psyche that anticipates Freud’s later topographies of psychoanalysis. Verne’s narrative fits well within the familiar structure of a mythical rite of passage. As outlined by the French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep,36 the archetypal pattern of self-​­discovery involves a breakaway or departure from the social order, a long deep retreat inward and backward, a series of terrifying but ultimately centering encounters, and a rebirth of sorts into the social order. The late American mythologist Joseph Campbell called it “the hero journey,” a journey that unfolds in three phases described as separation, initiation, and return.37 Axel requires encouragement and threats to separate himself from his comfortable existence. Before his departure, Axel is a frail young man, intelligent enough but seriously lacking in experience. His fiancée, Graüben, encourages him in his anxious moment of doubt: “Il est bien que homme se soit distingué par quelque grande entreprise” (Voyage, VII) (“A man should try to prove

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himself by some great adventure”). To a surprised Axel, she adds pointedly: “Va, me dit-​­elle, tu quittes ta fiancée, mais tu trouveras ta femme au retour” (VII) (“Be off! You leave your fiancée, but you will find your wife upon your return”). Her words foreshadow the change effected by the journey inward. At the other end of the journey, her words of welcome serve as a bookend to the completed quest: “Maintenent que tu es un héros, tu n’as plus besoin de me quitter, Axel”) (XLV) (“Now that you are a hero, you have no more need to leave me, Axel”). In between these two moments occurs a veritable quest of self-​­discovery. The opening onto the hero’s journey is not a peaceful doorway, it is not calm in any way. The path toward knowledge passes through the most hostile terrain imaginable and brings Axel face to face with the monsters that lie within. The only opening into the inner self is through the chasm created by chaos.38 Axel expresses his anxiety as he peers into the dark depths of the Sneffels crater: Le sentiment du vide s’empara de mon être. Je sentis le centre de gravité se déplacer en moi et le vertige monter à ma tête comme une ivresse. Rien de plus capiteux que cette attraction de l’abîme. (Voyage, XVII) (The feeling of emptiness seized my being. I felt my center of gravity shifting and a dizzyness like drunkenness rose to my head. Nothing headier than this attraction of the abyss.)

The strong hand of Hans, the guide, brings him back from the edge and the intoxicating imbalance provoked by the mesmerizing call of the abyss. Already Axel is expressing the destabilizing nature of his modern identity. In addition to this familiar hero journey, Verne’s story also embodies within its structures certain elementary contradictions that Foucault, Lévi-​­Strauss, and others have identified as inherent to modern society. In the final chapter of The Raw and the Cooked, Lévi-​­Strauss presents what appears to be an apologia for the reign of reason in Western culture, claiming that the superiority of reason is due to its reliance on scientific knowledge and its rejection of all other modes of knowledge, especially the primitive modes of the past. In true modernist fashion, Lévi-​­Strauss argues that the success of science rests on superseding or overcoming the past. But he then goes on to argue that modern science must in fact reject this sense of rational superiority since true scientific progress requires the assimilation of primitive information previously rejected as irrational. A synthesis of myth and science reveals a similar knowledge structure. For

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Lévi-​­Strauss, science must rediscover the “inexhaustible lessons of the realm of sensibility.” He then proposes a sort of super-​­rationalism aimed at integrating sense-​­perception into reason. The unresolved conflicts that Levi-​­Strauss identifies in his structuralist anthropology exist as the binary opposites of science-​­madness and subject-​­object. The stakes of that quest are already drawn up in the dialectical back and forth between science and madness that weaves its way through Verne’s text. The author raises the specter of madness nearly two dozen times: . . . c’était folie. Folie surtout de prétendre atteindre le centre du globe! (Voyage, VI) “Est-​­ce que monsieur est fou?” me dit-​­elle. (VII) Mon oncle était-​­il fou? (XXI) Je crus que j’allais devenir fou! (XXIII) . . . c’est agir en fou que de tenter une seconde fois cette impossible traversée! (XXXVII)

(. . . it was madness, pure madness to think that we could arrive at the center of the earth! “Is Monsieur crazy?” she asked me. Was my uncle mad? I thought I was about to go mad! It would be an act of foolishness to attempt a second time this impossible crossing!)

And more than sixty times Verne’s narrative answers the text’s mindlessness (déraisonnement) with some form of reason (raison, raisonner, raisonnement): . . . ces raisons irréfutables . . . (Voyage, XXXVII) La Valkyrie se tint à une distance raisonnable des côtes. (IX)

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Vous avez raison. (IX) Rien de plus raisonnable dès lors que d’examiner . . . (XXXVII) . . . pour grandes que soient les merveilles de la nature, elles sont toujours explicables par des raisons physiques. . . . (XXXVII)

(. . . these entirely irrefutable reasons . . .The boat kept a reasonable distance from the coast. You are right. Nothing more reasonable at this point than to examine . . . No matter how grand the marvels of Nature, they can always be explained with physical reasons . . .)

Madness manifests itself in Axel in the form of fear, in particular the fear of the unknown represented by the image of a yawning abyss waiting to swallow the frail lad. In order to rid his nephew of this fear before their descent, the professor prescribes for him the aforementioned daily trek up the steps of a tall Danish church steeple to the sphere (boule) at the summit. The professor refers to it as “leçons d’abîme” (“lessons of the abyss”). After five days of “this vertiginous experience,” Axel makes a certain amount of progress in the art of “sublime contemplation” (Voyage, VIII), but upon leaving via the port of Copenhagen, the ever-​­timorous hero expresses his continued misgivings about their perilous undertaking by invoking the specter of the famous anguished Dane: Je m’attendais à voir l’ombre d’Hamlet errant sur la terrasse légendaire. “Sublime insensé ! disais-​­je, tu nous approuverais sans doute ! Tu nous suivras peut-​­être pour venir au centre du globe chercher une solution à ton doute éternel !” (Voyage, IX) (I half-​­expected to see Hamlet’s shadow stalking along the legendary terrace. “Sublime dreamer,’ I said. ‘You’d probably have given us your blessing! You might even have wanted to come with us to the center of the globe to seek a solution to your eternal doubt!”)

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Axel’s reference to Hamlet underscores the depth of his existential angst. At the base of the volcano, the appearance of the fumaroles outlined above affords Axel another opportunity to express his fears. He is compelled to continue by his affection for his uncle and the guilt of leaving him alone. The pattern continues of a young man needing to constantly conquer his fears. This constant voicing of his fear and angst, again expressed at the edge of the Sneffels crater, paints the image of a young man caught between madness and reason (“entre la toise du savant et le vertige du fou”).39 In fact, Balzac’s Théorie de la démarche serves as a useful yardstick for Axel’s dilemma: Un fou est un homme qui voit un abîme et y tombe. Le savant l’entend tomber, prend sa toise, mesure la distance, fait un escalier, descend, remonte, et se frotte les mains, après avoir dit à l’univers: “Cet abîme a dix-​­huit cent deux pieds de profondeur, la température du fond est de deux degrés plus chaude que celle de notre atmosphère.” Puis il vit en famille. Le fou reste dans sa loge. Ils meurent tous deux. Dieu seul sait, qui du fou, qui du savant, a été le plus près du vrai. (Balzac, Théorie, 18) (A fool is a man who sees an abyss and falls in. The scientist sees the fall, takes his measuring rod, measures the distance, builds a staircase, goes down, comes back up and rubs his hands, telling the world: “The hole is eighteen hundred and two feet deep, the bottom temperature is two degrees warmer than our atmosphere.” Then he returns to his family. The fool stays in his box. They both die. God only knows which one, the fool or the scientist, was closer to the truth.)

Where the professor sees the opportunity to further scientific knowledge with his tools (la toise), Axel sees only the vertiginous depths of madness. The narrator asks himself, “Venais-​­je d’entendre les spéculations insensées d’un fou ou les déductions scientifiques d’un grand génie? En tout cela, où s’arrêtait la vérité, où commençait l’erreur?” (Voyage, VII) (“Had I just heard the senseless speculations of a lunatic or the scientific analyses of a great genius? In all this, where did the truth end and illusion begin?”). The writing that intends to take the measure of the self with a probe leaves the reader with vertigo instead.40 Like Balzac before him, Verne maps the site where mensuration and madness fold into one another. If Balzac’s words are meant, as he intended, “for those used to finding wisdom in the falling leaves,” then they certainly apply to the

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uncle and nephew who see science in the parchment cipher that falls from the ancient Icelandic book. Balzac’s challenge to his readers reads like a subtext to Saknussem’s note: Je dois en prévenir loyalement celui qui veut me lire; il faut de l’intrépidité pour rester entre ces deux asymptotes. Cette théorie ne pouvait être faite que par un homme assez osé pour côtoyer la folie sans crainte et la science sans peur. (Balzac, Théorie, 19) Descends dans le cratère du Yocul de Sneffels . . . voyageur audacieux, et tu partiendra au centre de la terre. Ce que j’ai fait. (Verne, Voyage, V)

(“I must faithfully warn anyone who wants to read me; it takes bravery to stand between these two asymptotes. This theory could only come from a man daring enough to approach madness without doubt and science without fear.”) (“Go down into the crater of Snaefells Yocul . . . , O audacious traveller, and you will reach the center of the Earth. I did it.”)

Where is the author taking us? And what is the object of his study? The earth? The boy? Writing? Madness? Reason? Knowledge? In a novel with so many layers, who can be certain? Verne’s dialectic of reason and madness works like a motor driving the young man and the reader onward. Science and reason, the professor assures us, are the antidotes to the mysterious unknown. To know something is to observe, measure, and categorize it. To this end, he brings along the very best in modern scientific equipment: a compass, barometer, manometer, chronometer, and thermometer. Nothing is more reasonable than numbers in Verne because “with figures you can prove anything you want” (Voyage, VI). They imply that progress is quantifiable. Verne’s heroes are constantly checking their instruments, making calculations to judge their movement and placement. The professor Lidenbrock methodically takes down scientific readings and observations in his notes “pour pouvoir, au retour, tracer une carte [du] voyage, une sorte de section verticale du globe, qui donnera le profil de l’expédition” (XXV) (“in order to draw a map of our journey upon our return: a sort of vertical section of the globe giving the profile of the expedition”). The recording of measurements and observations is the responsibility of the professor until the party boards their makeshift

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raft to make their way across the inner sea, at which point the professor asks his apprentice Axel to take over. Axel’s diary account spans roughly four chapters and recounts the party’s “strange journey” across the mysterious inner sea, dubbed la mer Lidenbrock by the professor. Composed almost exclusively in the present tense and divided into loose chronological order by date of entry, this section of the book presents a clever mise-​­en-​­abyme of Axel’s mythical journey. Not only because these chapters neatly synthesize the contradictory elements of modern society, but also because Verne has succeeded in extracting a first-​­person account from his protagonist whom he has placed literally and figuratively within the abyss (mis en abîme). Verne draws clear borders around the maritime adventure through the metadiegetic intervention of his narrator who comments on the narrative structure of his own text: Je me bornerai donc à reproduire des notes quotidiennes, écrites pour ainsi dire sous la dictée des événements, afin de donner un récit plus exact de notre traversé. (Voyage, XXXII) Ici se termine se que j’ai appelé “le journal de bord,” heureusement sauvé de naufrage. Je reprends mon récit comme devant. (XXXVI)

(I will confine myself, therefore, to reproducing here those daily notes, written, as it were, at the dictation of events, in order to give a more precise account of our crossing.) (Here ends what I called the “ship’s log,” fortunately saved from the shipwreck. I proceed with my narrative as before.)

In the same way that Grauben’s words frame the mythical journey of initiation, the ship’s log frames the subjective experience of the narrator. Written almost exclusively in the present tense, Axel’s journal is characterized by blunt phrasing composed of subject-​­verb-​­object, and clipped sentences whose antecedents are often implied rather than named: “Je ne puis . . .” “On étouffe.” “Ah, quelle lumière intense.” “Où allons-​­nous?” (“I can’t . . .” “We’re choking.” “Oh, what an intense light.” “Where are we going?”). Verne’s use of the present tense gives Axel’s words an immediacy that the critical distance of the past tenses and indirect discourse fails to express, and leaves the reader with an impression of fragmentation that Verne freely acknowledges through his narrator.

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Ici mes notes de voyage devinrent très incomplètes. Je n’ai plus retrouvé que quelques observations fugitives et prises machinalement pour ainsi dire. Mais, dans leur brièveté, dans leur obscurité même, elles sont empreintes de l’émotion qui me dominait, et mieux que ma mémoire elles me donnent le sentiment de notre situation. (Voyage, XXXV) (Here my travel notes became very incomplete. I could only find a few fleeting comments written down mechanically, so to speak. But in their brevity, their obscurity, they are full of the emotion that governed me and thus offer, better than my memory, a truer account of my state in that moment.)

The result, both expressed by the narrator and experienced by the reader, is an intense sense of the present, an abruptness that deepens the emotional quality of the writing while paradoxically offering a more accurate and lucid record of the moment, one unfiltered by rational reflection. “Horror! We’re going to blow!” Axel writes (Voyage, XXXV). The use of the near future tense demonstrates the sense of doom and fear contained within that instant far better than would the more distanced and reflective “I got scared. I thought we were going to blow.”41 Without using the word, Verne is suggesting that the brief but obscured account transcribed “in the moment” is somehow closer to the truth of the moment than anything the memory can recall. The hand recording mechanically (machinalement) whatever events dictate recalls the Holy Scriptures dictated by the Holy Spirit. Are we reading nature’s scriptura or Verne’s formulation of surrealism avant l’heure, an early form of interior monologue or écriture-​­automatique? Certainly we can agree with Verne’s biographer, William Butcher, that Verne is introducing some radical ideas of subjectivity and perspective into the novel form.42 While Axel’s metadiegetic intervention clearly marks off the mise-​­en-​­abyme it simultaneously muddies the border between author and narrator.

Writing the Self Throughout his larger work Verne manifests a penchant for the present tense, having used it almost exclusively in three novels: Chancellor (1875), L’Ile à hélice (1895), and Face au drapeau (1896)—­and in long passages of many others.43 Butcher has performed the most detailed reading of this striking phenomenon in Verne. In addition to identifying Chancellor as the first French prose written almost entirely in the present tense, he concludes that its use by Verne is a subtle yet sophisticated criticism of the

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bourgeois novel’s closed tense system, one that he likens to the period’s closed social system. Butcher argues that both systems generate an existential feeling of claustrophobia and result in self-​­annihilating tendencies such as bored passivity, the complete opposite of the imperial and republican values of duty and usefulness.44 There exists ample evidence in Verne’s work to support such claims beyond Butcher’s analysis of verb tenses alone. While Verne depicts his scientists and engineers as productive heroes who use science and technology to propel the action of the novel forward and to solve the various narrative dilemmas, he paints the aristocrats, when he does paint them, as sterile or self-​­destructive. Nemo, the rebellious Indian prince and scourge of the British Navy, dedicates his life to fighting against the imperial colonizers who killed his family. Lord Glenarvan, the wealthy Scottish nobleman and proprietor of the ship searching for the lost Captain Grant, is the humble scion of a wealthy family with no heir of his own (without airs/ heirs). His nobility serves only to figuratively underscore the noble goals of the party: to rescue the shipwrecked Captain Grant. While the aristocracy serves a limited role, the engineers and men of science play a major part. The French geographer Paganel guides Glenarvan’s party along the 37th parallel while learning new languages, discoursing on geographical treatises, writing his own works, and generally filling in the blank spaces on the world map. Nemo, seeking judgment from the society of men at the end of L’Ile Mystérieuse, finds none from the lips of Cyrus Smith, Verne’s engineer/scientist par excellence. Butcher’s argument that Verne’s present tense constitutes a subversive social critique of fixed-​­class society seems to fit well. The island that crumbles around Nemo (Prince Dakkar) is a fitting coup de grâce to an ailing nonadaptive system. But what if the objective past tenses are not so much negated or rejected by the present tense, as Butcher’s analysis seems to suggest, but rather contained within it? I would argue that a close examination of Verne’s first sustained use of the present tense, the four chapters of the journal du bord section of Voyage au centre de la terre reveals rather an initial attempt to problematize the awkward position of the writer/scientist in relation to his or her work. In this sense the present tense represents the fullest expression of both being and knowledge, combining what Claude Lévi-​­Strauss refers to as sense-​­perception and reason.45 I would further posit that the use of the present tense is part of a larger Vernian project to expand the field of knowledge to include the self and obtain knowledge on the nature of the individual self through both reasoned analysis and subjective experience, a melding of “Jean-​­Jacques et le bureau des longitudes.”46 Narration in the past tense establishes a critical distance between the past and the

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present as well as between experience and analysis, but fails to grasp its own influence on these events. Axel’s account illuminates, however briefly, the complicated position of the writing or experimenting subject with respect to his or her work. Is the writer/scientist outside the work or within it? It is no accident that Verne’s most lyrical writing appears within the ship’s log. The diary begins with the measurements taken from the instruments (“Thermometer: + 32° centigr.”) and continues with a brief account of a fishing expedition that affords the scientists the opportunity to classify several fish belonging to extinct families (“To the order of ganoids, family of the Cephalaspis, genus . . .”). From there Axel descends into a state of oneiric contemplation (“Je rêve tout éveillé,” “I am dreaming entirely awake”) as the fossil world is reborn in his imagination. In his dream he views the entire history of the universe, from the present backward through each and every geological period, passing like a shadow through the biblical record to the dawn of the universe where his atomized body mixes with the gaseous vapors of the embryonic universe as a simple particle. Axel feels himself become a part of the universe he is supposed to be measuring, completely erasing the fine line between observation and participation. One can read the blurring of borders between observation and feeling throughout the text: “j’observe,” “je crois,” “Il me semble” (“I observe,” “I believe,” “It seems to me”). The objective observer finds intelligence overwhelmed by imagination: “tout ce monde fossile renaît dans mon imagination . . . toute la vie de la terre se résume en moi) (“This whole fossilized world is reborn in my imagination . . . all of life on earth is summed up in me”). Time is compressed: “les siècles s’écoulent comme des jours” (“Centuries flow like days”). Space collapses and then explodes: “Mon corps se subtilise, se sublime à son tour et se mélange comme un atome impondérable à ces immenses vapeurs qui tracent dans l’infini leur orbite enflammée!” (“My body is being refined, sublimates in turn and commingling like an imponderable atom with these immense clouds, which inscribe their fiery orbit on infinite space!”). And Axel ultimately loses himself in his hallucinatory dream: Quel rêve ! Où m’emporte-​­t-​­il ? Ma main fiévreuse en jette sur le papier les étranges détails ! J’ai tout oublié, et le professeur, et le guide, et le radeau ! Une hallucination d’est emparé de mon esprit . . . “Qu’a tu donc?” dit mon oncle. Mes yeux tout ouverts se fixent sur lui sans le voir. . . . “Est-​­ce qu’il devient fou ?” s’écrie le professeur. (Voyage, XXXII)

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(What a dream! Where is it taking me? My feverish hand jots down the strange details. I forgot everything—­the professor, the guide, the raft. My mind was lost to the hallucination . . . “What is wrong with you?” asks my uncle. My wide eyes are fixed on him but don’t see him . . . “Is he crazy?” cries the professor.)

The hand that began “objectively,” recording the dry data of science, finishes by scribbling down the fevered impressions of a powerful hallucination. The subject comes crashing into its object of analysis. Baudelaire experiences the same thing in his Confession of the Artist: “In the vastness of the dream, the self gets lost quickly” (car dans la grandeur de la rêverie, le moi se perd vite!). Here and elsewhere, Verne’s wording suggests a certain affinity for the biological theory of recapitulation expressed by the German naturalist Ernst Haeckel. The theory of recapitulation states that the successive stages of development in the individual embryo (ontogeny) reflect the evolutionary stages of the species as a whole (phylogeny); briefly stated, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. The theory was relatively quickly disproved in biology, but its rapid adoption into other fields guaranteed its longevity well into the twentieth century.47 As we saw in chapter 1, Reclus had expressed in his own work the belief that “the present society contains within it all previous societies.”48 Freud and Jung were also devout recapitulationists. Freud saw in it a particularly useful heuristic for understanding the neuroses of the individual as early stages of development that exist alongside later stages. In his Introductory Notes on Pschoanalysis, Freud states that “each individual somehow recapitulates in an abbreviated form the entire development of the human race.”49 Furthermore, Freud explained religion, “society’s collective hallucination,” through recapitulation. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud conjectures that the “oceanic feeling” of religiosity is quite possibly due to the preservation of a primeval ego-​­feeling within the individual, the residue of an ancient developmental phase in which the ego felt an immediate bond with the external world, unable to tell the difference between the ego and the non-​­ego.50 This early stage of development in the individual is characterized by a chaotic stew of libidinal forces in which the individual has no center of identity and indeterminate boundaries with the external world. Jung too accepted the theory of recapitulation in psychoanalysis.51 According to Jung the collective unconscious, composed of archetypes and instincts, represents the sum total of humanity’s historical experience, comprising in each individual a collective psychological inheritance from

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our ancestors. Archetypes per se are unknowable but give rise to symbols of a mythical nature that express a previously undifferentiated subject-​ ­object. Axel’s description of his atomized body mixing with the vapors of the universe could be qualified as an individual with no center of gravity (“I felt my center of gravity shift”) and indeterminate boundaries with the exterior world. Despite the nineteenth-​­century claims of positivist science of having arrived at a differentiated subject-​­object, Verne’s writing suggests that such claims are false. In Verne’s modern myth, the modern self is still very much a work in progress. The positivist nineteenth century would have liked nothing more than to take the measure of the self. However, the measure of the self remains beyond the reach of science alone. When the party attempts to “sound the depths” of the inner sea, they find them literally unfathomable (“No bottom,” Voyage, XXXIII). Axel’s first encounter with the vast inner cavern leaves him nearly speechless. If, as Verne suggests, “the words of the human language are insufficient for what lies in the depths of the globe” (XXX), then language is incapable of ordering the vast inner spaces of the human psyche. In the depths of their subterranean voyage the travelers encounter one such phenomenon that science cannot explain: the fireball (la boule de feu). Jules Verne professed a deep admiration for the geographers Reclus and François Arago and freely admitted having used their work to detail the geography of his Voyages extraordinaires that lay beyond his experience.52 Arago’s 1838 essay on thunder in which he discusses les éclairs en boule (ball lightning) is certainly a potential inspiration for Axel’s encounter with the flaming ball of electricity.53 Arago called the inexplicable phenomenon, which scientists still do not fully understand, a singular enigma before which “science is silent.”54 Verne’s boule de feu represents that enduring mysterious bit of the natural world that science cannot explain. This final maritime episode reinforces the understanding that the center of the earth is a place of inordinate chaos that presents unquantifiable phenomena that not only refuse measurement but also destroy the very instruments intended to take their measure. The boule de feu magnetizes the metal on the raft, causing the compass needle to flip its reading so that north becomes south, a sort of Rimbaldian “derangement of the senses” (dérèglement de tous les sens).55 Verne’s writing here tends toward the romantic, with its epic historic portraiture of paleontological debate. The motif of people on a raft, lost at sea and at the mercy of nature is a popular one in Verne. Axel’s narrative, in form and content, serves as a blueprint for a later attempt at such epic historic literature, Le Chancellor (1875). The story recounts in the form of a diary the epic struggle of a group of survivors from the sunken

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British ship, the Chancellor, who must battle against the natural elements and themselves. Verne’s use of the present tense gives an immediacy to the horrific suffering of the survivors as they lose their sanity and eventually, it is implied, their very humanity. Verne’s text also makes allusion to a real historical tragedy and its aesthetic representation, Géricault’s Le radeau de la Méduse (1819; The Raft of the Medusa) in which the artist depicts the desperate survivors of the French ship Medusa, which sank off the coast of Mauritanius in 1816 en route to Senegal.56 The reference to Géricault cannot but hint at the artist’s other work dealing with the mad and insane. The romantics of Géricault’s generation expressed an interest in mental aberration; like them, Géricault believed that the face revealed the true character of an individual, especially as in the state of madness or death. This art of physiognomy, and its pseudoscientific expression in phrenology, persisted into the twentieth century.57 From 1821 until his death in 1824, the artist painted a series of portraits of the mentally insane. This study of derangement and death went hand in hand with the romantic belief that involvement with nature would lead to the truth. A certain part of this romantic understanding of nature as formless and destructive survives in Verne’s work.

Arriving at the Center When the explorers of Voyage find their way inexorably blocked by a granite boulder, the professor cries out against the earth, wind and fire that “join forces to prevent my passage!” as he draws himself up to defy nature through a pure act of will. The futility of this Man vs. Nature encounter is obvious to the reader who has already seen a lost and terrified Axel bloody himself against the obstinate granite elsewhere and easily envisions the professor beating his head of facts against the unyielding and dumb stones. The narrator compares his uncle’s rage to that of Ajax who, shamed by Odysseus in the battle for Achilles’s armor, flies into a narcissistic rage against the social order, further compounding his shame so that eventually the sense of humiliation overpowers the forces that bind him to the society, leading inevitably to his suicide. The comparison is apt but proves insufficient in capturing the stubborn will of the scientist that Axel describes two lines later as “harder than granite.” In the new mythology, it is no longer the faith of a mustard seed but the industrious will of the engineer that moves mountains. In this case, industry and will come together in the form of an explosive charge. The explosion removes the obstacle blocking their path and, as with the uncle, unleashes the

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forces that carry them back to the surface through another volcano, this one active. The process, from impasse to expulsion, is the geological analogue of Lidenbrock’s psychological stutter. To understand it, we must briefly return to Balzac and to Freud. Balzac’s Théorie de la démarche (Theory of the Gait) proposes a modern reading of the individual that relies on scientific observation and the intuition of the artist. The theory is reminiscent of Lavater’s physiognomy, which attempts to trace external phenomena to internal causes, to arrive at the invisible via the visible. As Balzac wrote, succinctly summarizing Lavater, “everything about us has an internal cause.”58 The method involves accurately identifying the external manifestations (la démarche) of an inner condition (volonté). Balzac therefore emphasizes observation, analysis, and the skillful glance of the artist/geographer. The careful and skilled observer should be able to accurately analyze a person’s inner state from the slightest glimpse of any exterior manifestation, since our volonté is so ingrained into our gestures, breathing, and voice. Balzac refers to the gait (la démarche) as the body’s physiognomy, since like the face it naturally expresses an inner condition. Likewise, he refers to the voice as the gait of the heart (“la démarche du Coeur”) and the soul’s touch (“le toucher de l’âme”) (Théorie, 28). In fact, every corporeal gesture is an expression of the inner condition. Il n’y a pas un seul de nos mouvements, ni une seule de nos actions qui ne soit pas une abîme, où l’homme le plus sage ne puisse laisser sa raison, et qui ne puisse fournir au savant l’occasion de prendre sa toise et d’essayer de mesurer l’infini. Il y a de l’infini dans la moindre gramen.59 (Every one of our movements and our actions is a potential abyss, where the wisest man might abandon his reason, and which provide the scientist the opportunity to measure infinity with his instruments. Every particle is an infinity.)

Describing the earth as “paved with abysses,” Balzac describes every gesture or thought as its own abyss containing enough of infinity for the fool to leave his reason and the sage to measure its depth. Nature’s gift of a stutter to the professor should be read in this light, as an exterior manifestation that translates an inner condition. In the Psychopathology of Everday Life, Freud differentiates between a slip of the tongue (a lapsus) and the stuttering brought on by embarrassment. In the latter, “speech-​­disturbances . . . cannot any longer be

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described as slips of the tongue because what they affect is not the individual word but the rhythm and execution of a whole speech . . . But here, as in the former cases, it is a question of an internal conflict which is betrayed to us by the disturbance in speech.”60 To Freud, speech is an expression of the self in its most archaic, instinctual form. Hence, the stutter represents the manifestation of a deep struggle between the id and ego, between instinctual grunts and rules-​­based grammar. This conflict between instinct and reason relies again on Freud’s understanding of recapitulation. Freud recognized an essential difference between Haeckel’s physical recapitulation of ancestral forms and his own view of mental recapitulation of ideas and behaviors. Physical recapitulations are temporary stages that are left behind as later forms replace them. But the earlier stages of mind and action coexist with later ones. This difference became an essential argument in Freud’s theory of neuroses. In a neurotic person, an early stage of development continues to affect the mind, and in fact can repress later developments. Even in healthy adults, the primitive core of the brain continues to exert an influence, though surpassed by more recently evolved parts of the brain. Freud uses a vivid image to illustrate his point: “Imagine a modern city like Rome, with all its present buildings, and also all its previous buildings from Romulus to now, all perfectly preserved. Physically impossible, of course, since no two physical objects can occupy the same space.”61 According to Freud, in the mind such a preservation of all the earlier stages alongside the final form is entirely possible. Adult neuroses are atavisms held over from childhood development. Societal neuroses are atavisms held over from primitive societies. Freud’s general theory of psychoanalysis rests on this view of mental recapitulation of the historical (society) and biological (individual) evolution of consciousness. The professor’s stutter, then, can be mapped onto both the individual and society. For the individual, in this case Axel, it represents the need to explore and address the neuroses (atavistic fears) that keep one from functioning “normally” within society. For society, the stammer represents an epistemological blockage between traditional society and modernity. In addition, I read the inability of the man of science to pronounce scientific terminology, the very foundation of classification and order in the modern world, as a manifestation of an underlying suspicion of science and scientific classification in Verne’s writing. Verne’s Voyage is not an attempt to take the measure of the universe, as some scholars have suggested. Instead, Verne, writing at the intersection between mensuration and madness, demonstrates how fraught with peril such a scientific formulation really is.

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Verne’s genius lay in his ability to read information from one discipline into another, weaving it into a single story. In the case of Voyage au centre de la terre, the author layers a geological and biological discourse to produce a proto-​­psychoanalytic itinerary of subjectivity that hints at the problems inherent to the epistemological and ontological shifts of modernity. Verne’s writing subject operates from a displaced locus since any effort to “find his place” in the world is frustrated by the realization that the modern condition is one of movement and hence, by definition, offers no fixed address, just an itinerary. The identity that was handed to him in the traditional fixed-​­class society is now negotiable and dependent on connections made within the strata of social and political life. In this more fluid society, Verne’s Axel represents the universal figure of human action and knowledge expressing reluctance to engage within a society of fluid borders where there were formerly fixed horizons.62 My reading of Verne suggests that, despite the aura of “progress” ascribed by the positivist sciences, the transformations taking place within French society during the nineteenth century proved destabilizing and disorienting to both the self in particular and society in general. The traditional landmarks that oriented the individual within society (religion, estate, family) were being erased and replaced by new affiliations (urban capitalism, class solidarity, nation). The extent of this disorientation is evident in Verne’s writing when one considers the disappearance of borders. Within the four-​­chapter ship’s log alone, Axel notes the following observations: À ces paroles, je me lève, je consulte l’horizon; mais la ligne d’eau se confond toujours avec la ligne des nuages. (Voyage, XXXII) Samedi 15 août—­La mer conserve sa monotone uniformité. Nulle terre n’est en vue. L’horizon paraît excessivement reculé. (XXXIII) L’océan est uni jusqu’à sa ligne d’horizon. (XXXIV)

(At these words, I get up and scan the horizon, but the border between water and clouds is indistinguishable. Saturday, August 15—­The sea remains uniformly monotonous. No earth in sight. The horizon appears so very distant. The ocean is calm all the way to the horizon.)

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Verne’s rhetorical strategy creates a discursive space of considerable ambiguity by identifying the epistemological dilemma of the evolving geographic method, namely, that the “objective observer” once set apart from the field of observation is now affectively bound to it. Borders are blurred. He further blurs borders with his personification of nature and the “geographization” of persons. Verne uses the dialectic of reason and sentiment to plot an itinerary that explores the connections between exterior phenomena and their interior causes. Such an itinerary relies on a particular geographic sensibility that looks for Ritterian “internal and external connections” in the terrestrial organism. Reading Verne’s earth as a living organism, then, we can understand the “center” of Verne’s earth not as a physical center, but as something more abstract, akin to Lamarck’s sentiment intérieur or Claude Bernard’s milieu intérieur, a hypothesized biological locus of being that causes growth in the individual. Ce sentiment [intérieur], dans les êtres qui en sont doués, est la source des mouvemens et des actions.63 (Lamark) Tous les liquides circulant, la liqueur du sang et les fluides intra-​ ­organiques constituent en réalité ce milieu intérieur.64 (Bernard)

(This interior feeling, in those who are gifted, is the source of movement and action. All the liquids circulate, the bloody liquid and other intraorganic fluids constitute, in reality, this interior environment.)

Their general inability to explain the precise mechanism meant that it was more metaphysical than biological. Accordingly, philosophers like Emile Boutroux and Alfred Fouillée also identified an ontological core within the individual. According to Fouillée, the mutual cooperation of parts toward their unified development and preservation in the individual is an expression of an interior finality (“une finalité intérieure”), an internalized abstraction of the physical and social milieu.65 Boutroux called it the interior environment (“le milieu intérieur”). The point is that Verne’s literal, and literary, reading of this ontological core was very much in line with the period’s ethos. Verne’s Voyage can be read as a particular response to the philosopher Maine de Biran’s call, cited at the beginning of this chapter, for a new type of metaphysician-​­Columbus to explore the

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mysterious inner world of the individual.66 Verne’s distillation of the period’s geographic scholarship into his writing leaves for the reader traces of an itinerary, shared by many of his contemporaries, of this “search for the self” that produces an ego-​­geography of identity. Verne’s internal quest was repeated by other authors, perhaps none more famous than a certain poet who had read him in his youth, Arthur Rimbaud. But first, we turn to the period’s best seller, a school primer whose itinerary circumscribed a new French identity for schoolchildren across the nation.

Chapter 4

G. Bruno’s Tour de la France The Organic Bonds of a Geographic Narrative

Deus est sphera infinita cuius centrum est ubique, circum­ ferential vero nusquam.1

In terms of sales figures, the most successful French author of the last 150 years is not Hugo, Zola, Proust, or Verne. The most successful French author is not even a male. The honor belongs to a relatively obscure woman whose real name was not attached to her books until years after their publication. Her pseudonymously written best seller has to date outsold any single work by Verne, Zola, and Proust, and most of them combined.2 Between 1880 and 1945, nearly every child who passed through the public schools in France learned about French history and geography from a copy of her most successful work, the diminutive schoolbook that historians Jacques and Mona Ozouf have affectionately referred to as “le petit livre rouge de la République.”3 Le Tour de la France par deux enfants (The Tour of France by Two Children) by G. Bruno (née Augustine Tuillerie) has arguably done more to shape French identity since the Third Republic than any other book. This chapter will examine the nature of that influence and the role of geography in her work, from the Vidalian harmonie vivante that suffuses the pages to the biological theories of development that both inspire and complicate its ideology. This chapter further explores the ways in which the reading of Bruno served as a collective act that produced the gestalt of the nation through the performance of an ideal implied reader, while simultaneously undermining the particular identity of the individual readers. Finally, my reading points to the many instances of slippage in Bruno’s work in

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which the text betrays the violence of the republican discourse, and to the cracks in the edifice of that discourse that anticipate the limits of its success. Bruno’s text has long held a near-​­mythical status in the generations educated before 1945.4 In 1977 Les Editions Bélin published a centenary edition of the old French schoolbook, an occasion which stimulated a renewed interest in the text, predominately from those who view it as a cultural artifact. Few critics, in fact, have treated it as anything but. The cultural status of Le Tour was solidified when its 1984 homage (written by Jacques and Mona Ozouf) was included in Pierre Nora’s epic homage to France’s cultural patrimony, Les Lieux de mémoire. Other references and studies followed, most reading it as a pedagogical tool of the Third Republic.5 This study treats it as both a cultural and literary artifact, arguing that its estimation as a cultural icon depends in large part on its literariness. Bruno’s text, like the contemporaneous and evolving French literary canon, stitches together disparate elements of French society into a coherent narrative of identity. In order to see how, we must turn to a closer examination of the story and its author. Very little has been written about the author of France’s best-​­selling republican narrative in part because so few biographical details are available. G. Bruno was the author of two other beloved school texts, Francinet (1869) and Les Enfants de Marcel (1887), neither of which would match the success of her Tour de France.6 She was the mother of one son, Jean-​ ­Marie Guyau, who went on to a promising career in philosophy before his life was cut short by tuberculosis in 1884. With her young son she left her first husband, an abusive man several years her senior, to live with and eventually marry her first cousin, the philosopher Alfred Fouillée. Fouillée was installed as maître de conférences at the École Normale Supérieure in 1872, a position that allowed him to spend time in Paris and enjoy the company of his influential friends, most notably Victor Cousin, Hippolyte Taine, Ernst Renan, Jules Simon, and Léon Gambetta.7 It was through Fouillée’s connections at Bélin that in 1877 Bruno would publish pseudonymously her most successful work. Her anonymity was so successful that, in addition to the paucity of biographical details left behind, her works were erroneously attributed to Fouillée well into the twentieth century.8 The success and duration of Le Tour means that no other pedagogical text, save for perhaps Vidal’s wall maps or Lavisse’s many history textbooks, gave instruction to so many generations of French pupils. The text’s cultural legacy assured, it sits fittingly alongside historian Ernest Lavisse and geographer Paul Vidal de la Blache in Pierre Nora’s monumental Lieux de mémoire.

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The text itself is an admixture of novel, history, gazetteer, and encyclopedia, a collection of more than a hundred vignettes woven together through travels, lecture, and story, each one illustrating a particular moral or patriotic lesson. Like an instructor in the classroom it jumps seamlessly from the disinterested authority of the third-​­person narrative to the pedagogical and inclusive “nous” of the author’s voice. Its circular route imitated the ancient route de compagnonnage9 while its many stops had as their model Jules Verne’s Tour du monde en quatre-​­vingt jours, though it was far more didactic than the latter. Bruno’s Tour was perhaps more accurately the French equivalent of the McGuffey Reader in the United States; both were immensely popular and, in the case of Le Tour at least, highly influential in the shaping of a national identity through an emphasis on moral education and religious instruction using snippets woven together into a narrative. In order to accommodate the anticlerical forces in the republican ranks, Bruno gradually removed all references to religion so that in the 1907 edition, the first text after the 1905 laws of association, all references to God are gone.10 The religion of republicanism, however, more than made up for any deleted references to Dieu. Indeed, Bruno’s work fits well a republican trend that M. Martin Guiney identifies in his work on French literature from this period, namely that the State in rejecting the church’s dogma and catechism consciously (or not) adopted and adapted the very structures it purported to reject. French Minister of Education M. Spuller defined the mission of the professorate in 1894 as “non seulement intellectuelle et pédagogique; mais surtout morale et sociale. Il ne faudrait pas me presser beaucoup pour me faire dire que c’est une mission religieuse”11 (“not only intellectual and educational, but also moral and social. It would hardly be a stretch for me to say that it is a religious mission”). The sacredness of republican ideology is most easily visible in the very terminology used to describe the French mission civilisatrice aimed at bringing civilization to the “primitive” societies across the globe, including to those in the darkest corners of France itself.12 It may be said that the republican schools had erased God, but they certainly embraced the infrastructure of organized religion.

The Story Bruno begins her story with the titular enfants, two orphaned boys of school age—­Julien, 7 years and André, 14 years—­leaving their native Phalsbourg through the highly symbolic porte de France “through a thick September fog” [“par un épais brouillard du mois de septembre].” 13

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Phalsbourg occupies the part of Lorraine that was annexed by the victorious Prussians after 1870. The children, already without a mother, have just lost their widowed father to a work accident and promised him on his deathbed to rejoin their beloved France, that is to say, to contact their uncle in France and have him put their papers in order to keep their French citizenship. French identity conceived in this way is not passive but active, not being but doing, and represents a central motif that Bruno keeps returning to in her work. Bruno’s two duty-​­bound protagonists set out on their quest seeking assistance first from a good friend of their father’s, Etienne the clog-​­maker. The old friend and his wife warmly receive the boys and are moved by the pathetic story to offer whatever assistance they can: a warm meal, mended trousers, two five-​­franc coins slipped into a pocket, and provisions for the next leg of the journey. Unable to accompany them personally, father Etienne obtains for them transport to the border and a word recommending them to an acquaintance of his, someone to help them effect their clandestine border crossing: Fritz the forest ranger. Such is the rhythm of the story—­hope, disappointment, effort, generosity—­that the difficulties of each stage of the journey are overcome through the courageous effort of the two boys and the hospitality and generosity of their humble hosts. Each gesture comes from a sense of duty, to do for oneself and to assist those in need. The repetition of circumstances and action points toward a republican equation of ethical humanism: courageous effort + humble assistance = republican ideal.14 So it is hardly a surprise then that when the boys arrive at the house of Fritz, they find him unable to lead them across the border due to a broken leg their lodger had suffered in a fall. Again the boys’ moving story and their plucky determination procure for them just what they need, this time in the form of the wise counsel of the invalid forest ranger as they pore over a topographical map of the département. The orphans accomplish the initial border crossing without an adult guide but through the memorization of a simple but accurate wall map of the department. As republican fate should have it, it is education and not the hand of an adult that leads the boys across the border into France. Becoming an adult, notes Bruno through the protagonist of the invalid Fritz, means that “individuals must learn to deal with their own problems.” Growing up requires initiative, intelligence and the good graces of the authority figures, all of which André and Julien have or acquire in abundance. “What good would it be to finish first in school,” asks André, “if I could still not manage to find [reconnaître] myself on a map?” The literal map referred to by André is a departmental map, part of the recently minted Carte de l’État-​­Major (1866) originally commissioned by

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Napoleon in 1808 through his ingénieurs du roi at the Dépôt de la Guerre to replace the beautiful but aging carte de Cassini.15 La Carte de l’État-​ ­Major (1:80,000) took until 1866 to complete. Using the latest in geodesy and triangulation, geographers sought to represent more accurately the topography of France. The catalog of information on the map rendered it a rather dull but useful document that, as Zola noted in La Débâcle, proved to be regrettably in short supply during the Franco-​­Prussian War. André’s usage of the map refers expressly to the geographic education that, as the 1871 Levasseur-​­Himly report had pointed out, was also lacking in France. André’s map was helpfully hanging on the wall ready for use, as the reader’s would have been in the classroom. Figuratively, the map represents a certain idea of France. The only border that exists in the entire work is the newly negotiated border dividing the lost territories of Alsace-​­Lorraine from the rest of France. The orphaned children were not German, though they were now in German territory, nor were they entirely French, constrained as they were by the terms of the treaty with Germany, which had stamped French identity in the orphaned territories with an expiration date. Having promised their dying father to pursue the legal renewal of their expiring French citizenship, the boys set out for France across the one political border in the book because their French identity is no longer passively assigned; it must be actively pursued, involving in their case a return home, a reference both classical (Odysseus) and biblical (the prodigal son). By remaining passive and local, the orphaned children of France will lose their citizenship and revert to the status of the Other in relation to the French homeland. It is hardly coincidental that the first map encountered in the text is of the recently lost territories or, for that matter, that the two main protagonists are orphans from Lorraine. The orphaned children metonymically represent the “orphaned” territories and the deep desire to remain French. Under the ancien régime the king had claimed as “French” everything within his domain. No longer. Republican claims on Alsace-​­Lorraine came to rest on harmony, order, tradition, and the French language. These claims marked a clear return to the organicist metaphor of the nation. The French press and politicians expressed the trauma of losing Alsace-​­Lorraine in these terms, describing the lost space as amputated or orphaned. In the metaphor of anatomy, the lost territories still bore the mark of France despite their loss to Germany. George Cuvier, nineteenth-​­century naturalist, expressed in biological terms this correlation-​­of-​­parts theory whereby a person sufficiently fluent in the laws of organic structure in anatomy could, through the careful survey of a bone, reconstruct the whole organism to which that bone belonged. Republican claims to Alsace-​­Lorraine

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rested largely on a rhetorical version of Cuvier’s correlation-​­ of-​­ parts theory; synecdoche in the political sphere. This single border becomes, significantly, the very model of alterity for the rest of the narrative. Bruno’s pedagogical text intentionally inscribes French collective identity in the mind of the reader through a careful study in alterity. The various examples of estrangement offered by Bruno—­ orphans, races, strange dialects, and customs—­ are in fact the fictional frontiers that separate the French from themselves, borders that must be crossed or erased. The French Third Republic intended to assimilate these differences into one “organic” whole. Following the loss of Alsace-​­Lorraine in the armistice of 1871, political borders were suddenly obstacles to national cohesiveness. Erasing them meant overwriting the many regional identities with a forceful and persuasive narrative of French identity, a process Gilles Deleuze referred to as the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of the individual.16 Deleuze’s geographic terminology is appropriate given the newfound importance of geography to the Third Republic apparatus.

A Geographic Ethos The devastating Levasseur-​­Himly report (1871), in which Emile Levasseur, quoting Goethe’s assessment of the French, called his fellow countrymen quite smart, but entirely ignorant in geography (“le plus spirituel et le plus ignorant en géographie”), seemed to confirm the suspicion that ignorance of geography was at the heart of the humiliating defeat at Sedan. By 1882 the geographer Franz Schrader, writing the entry on geography in Buisson’s Dictionnaire de la pédagogie, summarized the consensus viewpoint that “l’étranger était géographiquement mieux préparé à envahir notre sol que nous à le défendre”17 (“foreigners were better prepared geographically to invade our soil than we were to defend it”). Geography would come to occupy a central tenet of republican education, making knowledge of the discipline one’s patriotic duty. The school reforms outlined in the Ferry Laws (1881–­82) required the building of many new public schools whose physical form followed the function of the curriculum, “de faire aimer et de faire comprendre la patrie”18 (“to build a love for and understanding of the nation”). Each physical structure was to embody the republican pedagogical goals emphasized in history and geography.19 Republican officials literally built their new schools around history and geography, placing the classroom for the dual disciplines at the center of the building and increasing its size in order to accommodate the new wall

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map of France, the same wall map encountered by Bruno’s André and later those drawn up by geographers Paul Vidal de la Blache and Emile Levasseur. As we saw in chapter 1, Vidal’s post at the École Normale Supérieure and the Sorbonne made him the most influential French geographer of the period, his name synonymous with the French school of geography that emphasized regional geography, and with its most iconic cartographic representation, wall maps. Vidal’s regional geography emphasized natural borders and communication instead of those created by humans, to the point that political borders were absent from the majority of his maps of France. Bruno published her school text in 1877, the same year that Vidal took up his chair at the École Normale Supérieure where he would formulate his geographical thought. Vidalian geography adopted the naturalists’ principle of studying the simple organisms to better understand the more complex, hence, Vidal’s stress on regional geography. Within this idiographic framework, Vidal was able to formulate his theory on genres de vie, or “ways of life,” which refers to the connected forms of livelihood that characterize any human group. Vidalian genres de vie represent the collective human organization of social, economic, and religious life that makes activities in the respective realms possible and gives them meaning. Based in large part on Lamarck’s understanding of an organism, Vidal’s genres de vie evolve over time, early on in response to the environmental (needs) and later through self-​­stimulation (will). At every stage, circulation fuels adaptation and growth. Genres de vie are perhaps best understood as cultural landscapes or pays. Pays, paysage, paysan and païen, of course, all share the same Latin root (pagus, “country district”). It is not mere coincidence that André and Julien feel the most connected to the peasant folk (paysans) they meet along the way. While acknowledging the deep structural dichotomy of French geology and its variegated surface, Vidal saw an underlying unity that ties it all together. France was, he wrote, geologically divided between central Europe and Mediterranean Europe, “mais l’individualité n’exige qu’une contrée soit construite sur le même plan; à défaut d’unité dans la structure, il peut y avoir harmonie vivante”20 (“but individuality requires that a nation be built on the same plan; in the absence of unity in structure, there may be living harmony”). His Tableau de la France, which introduced Lavisse’s multivolume history of France, was an effort to paint a unified geographical portrait of France tying together the various regions identified by nature and human interaction.21 Vidal’s “living harmony” provides a useful heuristic to examine the way in which Bruno’s text ties together the disparate elements of French society, redeeming Otherness

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geographically rather than chronologically as Michelet and Lavisse had done. Bruno divides her narrative into 121 vignettes, monographs on France’s various regions and on individuals or inventions that best represent them. The common thread tying them all together, aside from the boys’ itinerary, is the harmonizing idea of the French nation. When Bruno and republican leaders used terms like la nation or la patrie they were invoking Vidalian organic or spiritual unity. The spiritual tone can hardly be overemphasized. As Mona Ozouf has noted, “In secular schools the nation plays the role reserved for God in congregational school.”22 La patrie was similar to God in another way as well; it existed in the abstract, learned not by heart but in the heart. Bruno prefaced her work by acknowledging the mystical nature of la patrie, which “ne représente pour l’écolier qu’une chose abstraite à laquelle, plus souvent qu’on ne croit, il peut rester étranger pendant une assez longue période de la vie”23 (“represents an abstract idea that, more often than we like to think, students remain estranged to for much of their life”). In this rather anodyne statement Bruno is making a rather extraordinary claim, one that pertains to a certain idea of French identity and to foreignness. What one expects to read is that a child can be French while the idea of la patrie is still foreign to him or her. What one gets instead is a child who is both French (political) and foreign (ideal) until he or she understands what la patrie really means. It bears emphasizing that it is not the idea of la patrie that is foreign to a child, but the child that is a foreigner to this abstraction of France, an abstraction that demands a certain level of rhetorical fluency, which in turn causes familiarity with the French language to be the sine qua non of the republican project of assimilation.

A Grammar of French Identity In the alchemy of the French language, the contractual relationship between the State and its citizens became an organic tie between the nation and her children. Bruno’s philosopher-​­husband called it l’organisme contractuel, an organism born of an idea and sustained through a common desire.24 As conceived by the republican government, French identity emerges from a project of participation, or to use the vocabulary more in line with the civilizing mission, a conversion. The French school was the site and instrument of this conversion since the educational process was meant to familiarize the students with their idealized French identity. If history and geography provided a republican project of national identity

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in the schools, then the French language was meant to be the point of access into la patrie, “the very essence of French education.”25 For many schoolchildren in France, the two most iconic symbols of their collective French identity became Vidal’s wall map of France and the French language. This latter symbol in its literary form, however, “was as alien to the spoken tongue as spoken French itself was to their native dialect.”26 André and Julien experience this new diglossia when in the Rhône Valley they encounter an old woman who speaks only the local patois. “Dans un petit nombre d’années il n’en sera plus ainsi,” says André to Julien, “et par toute la France on saura parler la langue de la patrie” (Tour de la France, LXVIII) (“In a few years this will no longer be the case . . . because in all of France people will speak the language of the nation”). Children and parents will no longer be estranged by speech, nor areas by dialect.27 This acknowledgement of the different socio-​­semantic realities is but one aspect of the heteroglossic nature of Bruno’s text. The heteroglossia and alterity are, in fact, of a piece. The heteroglossia expressed in the text emphasizes the heterogeneous cultures within which the children circulate. The homogeneity of the French language was meant to cement together these heterogeneous elements, binding them together with a unifying idiom. The common practice of French among a new generation of schoolchildren was important enough, but republican affinity for the French language did not rest on this practical application alone. Knowledge of and fluency in the national idiom provided its own rewards beyond simple membership in the collective community. Beyond providing a point of access into the collective community, the language served as a model of and vector for morality. It did so in three ways. First, French was the language of instruction and therefore served as a conduit for the inculcation of morality and civic duty. Second, from exposure to French literature in the classroom, in particular the literary canon, l’élève est à même de comprendre et de goûter toutes les belles œuvres de notre patrimoine littéraire; il devient apte à suivre et à noter les progrès de l’esprit humain; il peut, au contact des bons écrivains, former son jugement, affiner son goût, trouver mille moyens d’orner son esprit, d’affermir sa volonté, de rectifier son caractère, d’accroître son sens moral.28 (the student is able to understand and enjoy all the beautiful works of our literary heritage, he becomes able to monitor and record the progress of the human mind and may, through contact with good

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writers, form good judgment, refine his taste, and find a thousand ways to adorn his mind, to strengthen its commitment, to rectify his character, and to grow his moral sense.)

Félix Hémon, inspector general for the Ministry of Education and author of a Cours de littérature, expressed this idea concisely: “The study of literature is the means and not the end.”29 Finally, the Ferry Laws that made education free (1881), secular, and obligatory (1882) also produced a prioritized curriculum, which placed the French language just behind moral and civic instruction on the list of state instruction priorities. The high priority of French can be attributed to these first two points, but also to a third: republican officials believed that the very logic of the French language imparted a certain morality. Republican ideology’s belief in the inherent morality of the French language clearly echoed Rivarol, for whom French was the most logical of languages and an expression of genius. Elle est de toutes les langues la seule qui ait une probité attachée à son génie. Sûre, sociale, raisonnable, ce n’est plus la langue française, c’est la langue humaine.30 (It is among all the languages, the only one to have a meausure of probity attached to its genius. Reliable, social, reasonable, it is no longer simply the French language but the language of humanity.)

Alfred Fouillée wrote in 1879 that “in a philosophical sense, grammar has its own morality.” Republican interest in the transformative powers of the French language marked a revival of Jacobin rhetoric from the revolutionary period, particularly its emphasis placed on form. Hémon observed of revolutionary instruction: “la grammaire est partout, la littérature nulle part” (“grammar is everywhere, and literature nowhere”). One hears the distinct echo of the famous definition of God (“Deus est sphera infinita cuius centrum est ubique, circumferential vero nusquam”) cited in Le livre des XXIV philosophes and cited by various authors, including the Italian philosopher and priest Giordano Bruno (the G. Bruno) and French philosopher Blaise Pascal, among others.31 French texts, according to Hémon, were intended to transmit “a clear idea of the French spirit” and “some general humane ideals,” guiding lights “to show the path to take (“la route à parcourir”).32 The route in Bruno’s text looked much like the route du campagnonnage of a bygone era. This educational tour of young apprentices learning their trade was the original

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Tour de la France and clearly served as a model for Bruno’s narrative. Bruno’s industrious orphans do not wander through France; they work their way from one destination to the next, making every effort to to be useful rather than a burden to their hosts. Bruno expresses often and everywhere a deep admiration for those individuals who strive to be useful since an industrious spirit makes one useful to others, while indolence makes one a burden. Utility in Bruno is more than mere service or brute force, but an awareness of its purpose. Bruno’s characters note that a good education should inculcate “the desire to one day be useful to the nation [la patrie],” especially through the model of others “who have proven themselves useful to their country and their fellow citizens.”33 Literature and history were opportunities to explore ideal republican models. Andre and Julien were themselves textual models of republicanism; they also provide the model of reading that text through the mise-​­en-​­abîme of a book on France. The first third of Bruno’s story recounts the adventures of the two boys on their way to Marseille to find their uncle. In order to traverse the Auvergne and Rhône Alps regions of France, the boys hire themselves out to a traveling merchant, M. Gertal. While making deliveries in Mâcon, Julien discovers that a customer, an older woman, has overpaid him. Despite his tired legs, the young apprentice marches back to her door to refund her the one franc that she has overpaid. Julien’s honesty impresses her deeply. As an expression of her gratitude, she gives him a book of French history: Tenez, mon enfant, lui dit-​­elle, je vous donne ce livre: il parle de la France que vous aimez et des grands hommes qu’elle a produits. Lisez-​­le: il est à votre portée; il a des histoires et des images qui vous instruiront et vous donneront, à vous aussi, l’envie d’être un jour utile à votre patrie.34 (Here, my child, she says to him, I give you this book: it speaks of the France you love and the great men it has produced. Read it: it is within reach for you. It has stories and images that will teach you and give you, too, the desire to be useful one day to your country.)

Bruno never reveals the donor’s name, a fitting gesture that reflects the author’s own anonymity and stresses the traditional role assigned to women in education, instructors in the private sphere. Women, like maternal France, are to produce great men, both literally and figuratively. The symbolic importance of this moment demands a close reading of

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these instructions. The book speaks of France and the great men it (she) produces (“les grands hommes qu’elle a produits”). This ordered relationship of the nation producing its great men implies reproduction with its inherent close family bonds. The reverse, great men producing the nation, implies industry. The latter case is a common metaphor of American progress and relies on a contractual relationship stressing investment and reward. American literature is filled with stories of conquering the wild frontiers, the self-​­made man, the labor invested in the building of the American nation. The connection to the land comes from the investment made in it. The French metaphor, on the other hand, is more intimate, relying on the tight bond forged between a mother and her child, and stresses filial duty: “La France veut que tous les enfants soient dignes d’elle”35 (“France desires her children to be worthy of her”). History and geography (stories and images) are meant to inspire this deep sense of duty, as well as both a nurturing and protective instinct.36 The gender switch from the maternal image of France to duty to your fatherland (à votre patrie) is not a rhetorical oversight but rather reinforces the completeness of the family metaphor at play. Within this one paragraph the anonymous woman evokes an entire family: a child (mon enfant), the mother figure (la France), and the father figure (votre patrie). The orphan-​ ­child is no longer an orphan within the French family. The goal of Bruno’s assimilation model is not to tell the French story, but to take measure of and to explore what Mona Ozouf calls “French heroicism” (l’héroïcité française), lining up the important figures geographically rather than historically because she understands that memory “s’accroche mieux aux lieux qu’aux dates”37 (“retains places better than dates”). Bruno’s tour is quite simply “an exercise in overcoming difference,”38 an exercise that, not coincidentally, reproduces mimetically the process of acquiring citizenship. Bruno presents each region as uniquely foreign in the eyes of the children, but essential to the greater collective identity of France: “Le plus beau des jardins c’est celui où il y a les plus belles et les plus nombreuses espèces des fleurs.”39 (“The most beautiful garden is the one with the most beautiful and most varied species of flowers.”)

Just as each region, according to Vidal, expresses its own genre de vie while simultaneously contributing to a larger French identity, so do Bruno’s cultural vignettes present the varied ways of life of the various French

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regions while connecting them through communication: travel—­roads, canals, sea routes, rail lines—­and the French language. In Bruno, active communication through contact overcomes the foreignness ascribed to each. The Alsatian cobbler, the Burgundian wine-​­makers and miners, the Alpine cheese makers, the silk weavers of the Rhône Valley, the Breton sailors: all participate in a larger project of identity. Bruno’s fragmentary text represented a trend in republican texts in general. While Bruno was stitching together the various fragments of French society, French publishers began printing literary manuals composed of various selections (morceaux choisis), textual excerpts whose only unifying element was a belief that they expressed in some fashion truth, beauty, and goodness (“le vrai, le beau et le bien”) that would lead to moral, esthetic or intellectual edification. Republican officials supported the use of French literary texts in the classroom for their emphasis on form over content. Good literary form could, it was believed, lead, inspire, and enlighten. This emphasis on style explains the corpus of authors in the republican curriculum. The French literary canon was officially formed in 1803 by the Commission des Belles Lettres when members began to replace the classical authors normally studied with comparable authors of French extraction emphasizing religious oration (Bossuet), classical theater (Corneille, Racine, Molière), and classical doctrine (Boileau).40 The nineteenth century’s quarrel of the ancients and moderns (querelle des anciens) diminished the role of both classical authors and languages. In general, the seventeenth century, understood to embody the order, style, and balance of Boileau’s Art poétique, dominated the new canon throughout the nineteenth century across imperial, royal, and republican governments. Each expressed a common valorization of French literature: Le patrimoine de la France est assez riche pour que notre race puise en elle-​­même des raisons de persévérer dans les voies glorieuses de son génie. Les chefs-​­d’œuvre de notre langue ne sont point inégaux aux chefs-​­d’œuvre antiques.41 (The heritage of France is rich enough to provide sufficient reasons to our nation to persevere in the glorious ways of our genius. The masterpieces of our language are not unequal to the ancient masterpieces.)

The names of authors taught in the classroom gleaned from the Programmes officielles between 1802 and 1925 shows a list dominated by Boileau, Bossuet, Corneille, Racine, Molière, and La Fontaine.42 Third Republic officials emphasized the “humanity” and “intelligibility” of the

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seventeenth-​­century authors and held as a basic assumption that these texts could stand in for the classical works, not that they could replace them, per se, but that knowledge of them proved one’s cultured status, as knowledge of the classical texts had done. The canon has always been more than a simple creation of the State, however. Canonicity implies an acceptance by the literary elite, the tastes of the masses, and the approval of the authorities. The canon serves as a model of the highest in literary achievement and contributes, as Gustave Lanson has noted, “to something of a national French spirit.”43 Literary anthologies included canonical authors in bits and pieces as morceaux choisis, excerpted passages standing in for entire works. Such a disassembling took the many parts of French literature and attempted to put them back together into something that equaled more than the sum of its parts, compounding the mystique and enigmatic quality of literariness. The implication is that no single author’s voice represents the breadth and depth of French literature. The French are not slow to point out that they have no Shakespeare, Goethe, Cervantes, or Dante. Even the grand admirer of Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, noted in his Préface de Cromwell that it would take three French playwrights to represent the whole of French theater as well as Shakespeare alone represents English theater.44 The polyphonic nature of the literary canon merely demonstrates the many voices that make up French identity and the common refrain of unity in difference. The idea of overcoming otherness, be it in language, customs, or literary style, came to represent a dominant vein of republican pedagogy.45 The literary canon, like Michelet in history, adopted dissenting voices into one unified whole: “Comme la France est plus grande que toutes les parties, le génie français est plus large que toutes les esthétiques”46 (“As France cannot be summed up in any particular region, the French genius cannot be summed up in any particular aesthetic”). The names associated with the various literary excerpts mimic the names identified with the various regions in Bruno’s text. Bruno’s text, through the mise-​­en-​­abyme of Julien’s book, identifies only five authors: Bossuet, Corneille, Racine, Boileau, La Fontaine, and Montesquieu. Montesquieu, alone among the philosophes, is noted for his love of humanity best exemplified in his “eloquent” writings against slavery, which persuaded others to condemn “cette barbarie à l’égard des noirs” (“this barbarity against the blacks”). The grands hommes serve as a means rather than an end, to illustrate important civic and moral lessons. According to Julien’s book, Montesquieu came from a family of judges and took up law himself. Bruno reminds her reader didactically that judges are those who enforce the laws. As writer and judge,

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Montesquieu set out to study the various laws of different societies around the world “to compare them and find the best.” The perfectibility of the law points to an important element Bruno leaves undeveloped, that the laws are not fixed but rather expressions of the sum total of historical experience in legal matters. Laws evolve and change, are made and unmade in response to the will of the people. Later in Paris, Julien and André visit the Sénat and Chambre des Députés where laws are debated and passed. Even when the laws are “difficult and painful” (dures et pénibles), warns Bruno, they must be respected because they are an expression of “la volonté nationale” an obvious reference to Rousseau’s volonté générale, which expresses itself in French law as an ideal, “what ought to be,” whether or not it can be realized in actual fact.47 Bruno’s volonté nationale expressed an ideal in its own right, but one less metaphysical and more properly defined as moral obligation. Bruno curiously avoids the ambivalent nature of the people’s will. In an age that made crowds and mobs famous, Bruno makes no mention of the tyrannical rule of the crowds identified in Gustave Le Bon’s celebrated study, relying instead on a Rousseauian understanding, the belief that education could align the individual will with the general. In Bruno, education stirs the “bonne volonté” (“good will”) of the individual to serve “la volonté” of the father, biological and heavenly.48 By the end of Bruno’s story Julien is fourteen years old, a young man with expressive and affectionate eyes who has finished his primary education in the best schools with “la meilleure volonté possible” (“a deep and passionate desire”). As the model republican citizen, he has become “un élément de valeur pour la société, une force utile mise par l’école au service du pays”49 (“something of value to society, a useful force turned out by the school to serve the country”). Julien as a pedagogical model is made all the more obvious by the fact that he is six years old when the story opens, the same age as the young student entering school for the first time. Later, when the author returns to the farm in Orleans to visit her protagonists six years after they first left Phalsbourg, Julien has inexplicably aged from seven years to fourteen and a half. Why the age discrepancy? Rather than see it as an error, I belieive Bruno’s miscalculation is a deliberate attempt to synchronize Julien’s journey of discovery and her reader’s academic journey. Like Julien, Bruno’s reader begins his or her search for French identity at seven years of age, the age of admission into primary school. The age of fourteen represents the completion of the first stage of French education, when young men and women transition into the workforce or into more schooling. André represents this next phase of education, the period of apprenticeship in preparation for a

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life of productive service to industry and the nation. At twenty years old, “he will soon be under the flag, . . . soon a soldier of France” (Tour de la France, 310). Bruno’s story offers the vicarious experience of taking the measure of France. The students, like the boys, are not mere travelers but surveyors of the intimately varied geography of French identity whose underlying harmony is expressed in the republican discourse.

A Republican Discourse A discourse represents the historically located coherent system of signs that produce meaning, creating what individuals perceive as “reality,” a mental map whose social boundaries define the territory of individual or collective identity. Semiotics studies the formation and communication of meaning, breaking down a discourse into texts, texts into phrases, phrases into words, words into signs.50 The expression of this meaning relies on effective and intentional communication: “Il est de nécessité que, derrière chaque ligne du livre et chaque mention de la carte, l’élève perçoit directement une réalité”51 (“It is necessary that behind every line of the book and each mention of the map, the student perceives directly a certain reality”). Pedagogy is the art of reproduction. Every regime must teach itself or perish and every regime lives or dies by the texts that make up its discourse. Bruno’s narrative and Vidal’s maps are discursive texts inasmuch as each represents a system of statements that participates in the production of a coherent ideological discourse within French society. French geography had its own semiotics. Geographers, for example, seized on the form of the hexagon to represent France because the hexagon expressed a certain harmony and order that geographers ascribed to France as well. Eventually, rather than pointing to the notions of harmony and order, the hexagon pointed directly to France, making equivalence read like cause and effect. The form of the hexagon came to symbolize French rational harmony and eventually simply France rather than harmonious form. In the manner of Barthes’s Mythologies, the hexagon’s signifier slipped from harmony to France, itself. So, the argument went, if the loss of Alsace-​­Lorraine disfigured the natural harmony of l’hexagone, then Alsace-​­Lorraine belonged rationally to France. Geographical maps are a means of communication complete with their own grammar and vocabulary.52 While the language of maps is similar to that of the written text, important differences are to be found. The latter, for example, requires that its reader start at the beginning and read through a prescribed route to a predetermined end point. Maps are far

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more flexible, allowing the reader to start almost anywhere and to follow any number of routes through the information. Maps are also more immediate. The map and literature come together in travel guides, which organize the cartographic information into individual itineraries creating narrativized spaces of identity. Bruno states in the preface that in order to make la patrie more visible and alive, her work takes advantage of the interest that children show for “les récits de voyage.” The ubiquity of Bruno’s work in Third Republic schools indicates its importance to the dominant republican discourse. Her work, however, is more than the collection of statements made by the pseudonymous author. The phenomenal success of her work suggests that the text was dependent as much on the extradiegetic reader (citizen) as the writer to give it meaning. Reading a text is not merely an exercise in subjective interpretation, but rather a collaboration between reader and writer. The account that Jacques and Mona Ozouf give of having read “le petit livre rouge de la République” has more to do with the idealized notion of a community of readers than with the actual text itself. While France is important as a social and political reality, what matters here is the manner in which its citizens participate in the formation of the discursive identity of la France. Roland Barthes and Wolfgang Iser, among others, have pointed out the importance of the reader in constructing meaning from a given text.53 For Barthes the reader provides the space of unity where all the elements of the text are reunited, whereas for Iser, who is concerned less with actual readers than with the ideal implied reader, the potential text is infinitely richer than any of its actual realizations. Reader-​­response theory assumes that readers attribute their own meaning to a text through the prism of their experience. In his phenomenological approach, Iser offers up what amounts to an organic theory of literature in which words and sentences form the component parts of the literary text. They do not, however, provide the unity of the text. In literature as in biology, it seems, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Iser sees the formation of literary gestalt in the space where the author’s intentions meet the reader’s expectations. The building blocks of any text are words and sentences. The connection between two words or sentences is both syntactic and semantic, based on rules of grammar and logic. In a given text each sentence looks both forwards and back, produces both anticipation and recollection. What the reader takes from one sentence follows from what precedes and entails certain expectations about what follows. The inability of the author to tell the whole story means that gaps are left in the text, gaps that interrupt a fluid reading and stymie reader expectations. The

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inevitable omissions or divagations by the author, however, provide the dynamic space of imagination. The frustrated expectations of the readers allow them to establish subjective connections filling in the gaps in the text.54 These gaps are the space of action described by de Certeau. The reader’s own preconceptions are revealed and changed in the act of making connections. The realization of any given text is not (pre)determined but open to many possibilities based on this kaleidoscope of connections perceived by the reader. The perceptions themselves are not divinely ordained but rather the result of an active grouping process guided by the assumptions of the perceiving individual. Consciously or not, the writer provides the preconditions, the terrain from which the ideas of the reader can grow. For Iser, reading a text is an act akin to looking at the stars. The words of a text are fixed like the stars.55 What one sees depends on what one is looking for: plow, bear, or dipper. What Iser describes is a sort of literary possibilism that resembles in large part the geographic possibilism of Paul Vidal de la Blache. Vidal outlined the possibilities open to any given geographical region whereby the geographic terrain, instead of determining human development, offered a series of possibilities from which human initiative could choose and develop. From the first pages of his Tableau: Une individualité géographique ne résulte pas de simple considérations de géologie et de climat. Ce n’est pas une chose donnée d’avance par la nature. Il faut partir de cette idée qu’une contrée est un réservoir où forment des énergies dont la nature a déposé le germe, mais dont l’emploi dépend de l’homme. C’est lui qui, en la pliant à son usage, met en lumière son individualité. Il établit une connexion entre des traits épars; aux effets incohérents de circonstances locales, il substitue un concours systématique de forces.56 (Geographical individuality is not born of mere considerations of geology and climate. It is not a given, not something determined in advance by nature. We must start from the idea that a country is a reservoir of potential energy in which nature has planted the seed, but whose development depends on man. It is he who, by bending nature to his own needs, highlights its individuality. He establishes a connection between scattered features. In lieu of the inconsistent effects of local circumstances, he substitutes a systematic competition of forces.)

Nature prepares the site, humanity creates the living organism. Vidal attributed to this organism “a personality,” echoing Michelet (France

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est une personne) and Renan (France est une âme). This interpretation departed markedly and intentionally from his German colleague, Friedrich Ratzel, who had theorized that in order to understand an individual one needed to understand his Lebensraum, the natural environment that influenced his development. Vidal stressed instead the influence of society on the natural environment: La vocation et les aptitudes d’une population sont sans doute liées au sol qu’elle habite, mais le parti qu’elle en tire dépend d’elle seule. . . . C’est l’homme qui possède la Terre, et non pas la Terre qui possède l’homme.57 (The vocation and skills of a people are probably related to the land they inhabit, but the exploitation of the land depends on them alone. . . . It is man who owns the land, not the Earth who owns man.)

According to Vidal, every society on earth, no matter how primitive, represents the sum total of its geographical knowledge, “humanizing surrounding nature for its own use.”58 In the spatial philosophy of Vidal, humanity’s mobility and initiative give individuals primacy over the environment. Vidal had observed that different geographical milieus with similar topography and climate did not necessarily contain similar populations. Vidal could just as easily be describing the relationship between a text and reader in which the development of meaning relies more on the contingent reader than on the fixed text. A reading of any one of the texts that made up the republican discourse should therefore be open to a multitude of readings. In the discourse of French society, however, the element of contingency was suspect. The republican narrative ordered random elements and gave meaning to contingency by making it read like necessity. It fixed the fluid nature of space and time (becoming) by translating a coexistence of moments and milieus (being) into a narrative of cause and effect. In Deleuze, becoming is about the many evolutionary possibilities based on encounters in life. The fluid individual life remains open to change through the multiple encounters, the static individual by closing oneself off to new experiences. The closing off of the individual occurs with the homogenization of space and time. The overlap between reading a map and reading a text is only too apparent in history and geography manuals contemporaneous to Bruno’s Tour. Each starts the same way, by orienting the individual in relation to the four cardinal points. Among the many binary oppositions that structuralism identifies in Western society, few are more powerful than the

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reflect developmental similarities in the evolutionary history of the organisms (phylogeny). Others were already expressing the same ideas in other disciplines: If there be an order in which the human race has mastered its various kinds of knowledge, there will arise in every child an aptitude to acquire these kinds of knowledge in the same order. . . . Education is a repetition of civilization in little.59

Once adopted in other fields, Haeckel’s theory proved extremely popular and, consequently, difficult to eradicate even years after it was proven false.60 The important point is that Haeckel’s theory of biological development informed republican colonial policy, both foreign and domestic, and helps to clarify the strangely similar policies meant to educate the ignorant child and to enlighten the ignorant peoples, a process described as “l’achéminement à la civilisation des peuples inférieurs”61 (“civilizing lesser peoples”). In his Teaching the Cult of Literature in France, Martin Guiney draws a parallel between the child as foreign/Other and the “incomprehensible other that lies at the center of France’s collective subjectivity”: the Gauls. The Gauls, states Guiney, are a people as different from the present-​­day French as the three foreign races that Bruno outlines in her text. Jules Payot calls French Gallic ancestry the original sin (la tache originelle),62 the unsavory antecedents that Rimbaud claims in his “Mauvais sang,” referring to them as “les écorcheurs de bêtes” (“the flayers of beasts”), whose unsavory bad blood carries a primitive past that only a civilized education can overcome. The Gauls are both recognizably foreign (“peau blanche, yeux bleus, longs cheveux blonds”) yet historically fundamental to French identity (“nos ancêtres”). Historian Jules Michelet excelled at appropriating the disparate voices throughout France’s history, synthesizing and sanitizing them into la plus grande oeuvre of the French nation. He felt it his duty to speak for previous generations, to explain their actions and reasoning. This sort of historical redemption of the Other is what Bruno repeats geographically rather than chronologically. The period 1870–­90 was one of the last in which philosophers elaborated entire systems of thought, since they believed, to the shock of our cynical age, that philosophy could have a direct and beneficial effect on society. They were among the last to believe in real social progress. It is hardly surprising then to see that from this bias Alfred Fouillée wrote prolifically on both philosophy and sociology. His sociological thought attempts to bridge the methodological debate between Proudhon, who

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favored a contractual model of society, and Comte, who favored the organicist model.63 Fouillée esteemed organicist theories for their emphasis on a sentiment of solidarity arrived at over years of evolution within the social body, and promoted contractual theories for their ability to produce sudden and meaningful ties through new ideas and acts of the will. He was equally aware of the dangers of each. Organic theories of the social body risked viewing relationships through the harsh prism of natural determinism while contractual relationships tended to marginalize organic relationships forged over time. Fouillée saw fundamental truths expressed in each theory (namely, solidarity and justice) and believed that “complete truth is the scientific synthesis of these two theories,” or what he called l’organisme contractuel.64 Fouillée’s philosophy, and in particular his notion of idées-​­forces, “a fluid union of thought, feeling and action,”65 placed a prime on the volonté, or individual will. The will was to Fouillée what the cogito was to Descartes, the ontological core of individual identity. And like the cogito, the volonté lay buried beneath layers of historical tradition.66 Philosophers, lamented Fouillée, were forever opposing culture to nature, describing as “natural” those things that he perceived as more likely the result of cultural accretion over centuries. Given the progressive nature of his relationship with his wife67 and his respect for her thought, it is hardly surprising that some of his analysis would deal with the place of women in society: Il est bien difficile de déterminer, parmi les qualités ou défauts de l’intelligence ce qui tient à la nature même de la femme, et ce qui teint aux effets accumulés d’une instruction inférieure, continuée pendant des siècles.68 (Among the qualities or defects of intelligence relating to the nature of women, it is difficult to determine what precisely is due to the accumulated effects of an inferior education continued over centuries.)

In this period of evolutionary zeal Fouillée intended to study nature by stripping away culture through the study of simple animal and plant life. In these simpler forms, Fouillée concluded, the female sex was defined by “propagation, nutrition and protection.”69 Society ought then to encourage these roles in women, reasoned Fouillée. The domesticity of women was supported by their tendency toward a “spirit of order, harmony, and economy.”70 This was not the traditional image of the feminine sex as weak and delicate. Fouillée saw in women the “moral sex” and

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found in them a model of ethics and morality that French politicians seemed incapable of providing.71 Fouillée so believed in the importance of these “naturally” moral qualities of women that he called for what could be characterized as the feminization of French society.72 Les progrès réalisés au sein de l’humanité par les grands moralisateurs, par les Bouddha, les Confuscius, les Socrates, les Jésus, ont, en grande partie, consisté à insinuer au cœur de l’homme quelques-​­unes de ces vertus fondamentales de la femme.73 (The human progress realized by the great moral teachers—­Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, and Jesus—­ has largely consisted of teaching men to adopt some of the fundamental virtues of women.)

Bruno’s André and Julien provide a pedagogical example of Fouillée’s feminized France. Bruno carefully mixes descriptors, showing youth instead of women as frail and innocent. She describes Julien as “a pretty child of seven, frail and delicate like a young girl.” The word naïf throughout the text is always and only applied to young Julien. Girls are jeunes and laborieuses. Jeanne d’Arc74 herself is described variously as simple, pauvre, and noble. Women are braves, excellentes, and héroïques without once being described as naive and weak. The female characters throughout Bruno’s tale provide direction to the erring orphans, a warm hearth for the working husband/fathers, and instruction to the children of France. Bruno’s women are kind-​­hearted and selfless. Their offers of assistance to the orphans are unsolicited and generous. The image of women in France as laborious and intelligent is perfectly illustrated at the end of Bruno’s story by Guillaume’s eleven-​­year-​­old daughter, Marie, who brings hot soup to the workers in one hand while holding her schoolbooks in the other, “for she goes from there directly to school”75 (figure 2). Women, to Fouillée, are not the penultimate step on the evolutionary ladder leading to man. Women are equally important, within their prescribed sphere. Bruno’s women are hardly meant to provoke; rather, they are meant to serve as models. They fit neatly within a French tradition of valorizing the qualities of women: Rousseau’s promeneur solitaire, it can be recalled, who enters nature’s garden not for the benefit of natural science but for reverie, or Bernardin de St.-​­Pierre’s Paul et Virginie, which included two women who raised their children alone. This is not to say that all of French society found this feminization acceptable. Rousseau felt harassed by his peers while Bernadin de St.-​­Pierre located Paul and Virginie on a distant island away from French society.

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explains their essence, and not their mechanical interaction. Might for might’s sake (action), understood as the German model, is then useless since it acknowledges no higher purpose. Plato’s ideal of le beau, le bien et le vrai exists as an inspiration to the individual. But one must do more than merely acknowledge this inspiration, one must respond to it: Video meliora, proboque, deteriora sequor.80 Boutroux goes on to draw an important distinction between German and French thought, specifically, that the former accepts action and will while refusing feeling. It is through feeling, argues Boutroux, that mankind finds individuality because it is feeling which prompts the individual to reach out to others. This valorization of feeling lay behind Bruno’s portrait of the noble defeat of the Gallic chieftain Vercingétorix who, responding to the bonds of fraternity with his kin, surrendered to Caesar in order to save the lives of the starving Gaulois at Alésia, a city “assiégée et cernée par le Romains, comme notre grand Paris l’a été de nos jours par les Prussiens”81 (“besieged and surrounded by the Romans, as our great Paris has been in our lives by the Prussians”). The comparison is clear, both here and elsewhere when it underscores one’s patriotic duty to defend la patrie. Having done his duty as a soldier and preserved his honor by sacrificing his life for his homeland, to paraphrase any of the many historico-​­ pedagogical accounts, Vercingétorix was carried off to Rome and then killed. Which would you rather have inside you, asks Bruno, “l’âme héroïque du jeune Gaulois, défenseur de vos ancêtres, ou . . . l’âme ambitieuse et insensible du conquérant romain?” (“the heroic soul of the young Gaul, defender of your ancestors, or . . . the ambitious and insensitive soul of the Roman conqueror”). Julien, of course, would rather “souffrir tout ce qu’a souffert Vercingétorix que d’être cruel comme César” (“suffer all that Vercingetorix endured rather than be cruel like Caesar”). In republican history le chef gaulois achieved mythical status; he became the model of French morality, the self-​­sacrificial soldier, might submitting to right. Other school texts contemporaneous with Bruno’s took up the case of Vercingétorix with equal vigor. The theory of recapitulation would, of course, necessitate the finding of an analogue for the assimilated barbarian. The Romans civilized the Gauls through instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic. Once the French had arrived at the “summit” of enlightened civilization in the form of the Third Republic, it becomes their duty to dispel the shadows of ignorance that rule people in the most remote and savage places, that is, the colonies or even the countryside that de Certeau described as “both primal garden and dark reserve of animal nature.”82 Lavisse’s Histoire de France opens with the defeat of Vercingétorix and closes with the civilizing mission of the French in its colonies,

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in particular the defeat of Abd el-​­Kader’s forces in Algeria. The two homologous events form neat bookends to the story of a mythical French identity, Rome colonizing the savage Gauls and the French colonizing the barbaric Algerians. The earlier moment establishes the mythical origins of French identity (savage Gauls) while the latter is meant to illustrate its progress (civilized France). The fact that the colonized have become the colonizer is elided in favor of a narrative of progress and civilization. Vercingétorix unites the various tribes to defend their homeland through an appeal to reason while Abd el-​­Kader unites Algeria’s warring tribes to attack the enemy by appealing to their religious fanaticism. Though only partially analogous, they do offer a reference point for French identity to the extent that nations are defined by the distance, and the quality of that distance, between the highest and lowest points of civilized achievement within their collective identity.83 It is useless to try to show that “cette mythologie nationale consacrée par l’école”84 (“this national mythology sanctioned by the school”) has no basis in fact, useless to appeal to truth or logic.85 Far more interesting are the instances of slippage in which the semiotics of national unity, the forceful narrative, betrays itself. The boys’ arrival in the industrial city of Saint-​­Etienne proves to be one such example of slippage in Bruno’s long consideration of the natural harmony of national unity. Bruno’s sustained treatment of associations throughout her work picks up on the notion of solidarity present in Fouillée and Boutroux. The Jurassian merchant, Gertal, expresses his admiration for “cette grande idée de s’associer”86 (“this great idea to form associations”). If men would simply combine their efforts and share their proceeds, “they would quickly triumph over their misery.” Again, it is André and Julien who provide the example through their work with M. Gertal: “Ce sera une sorte d’association que nous ferons ensemble” (“It will be a kind of association that we do together”). The French Revolution had sought to stamp out associations on ideological grounds as an intermediary between the State and the citizen and more practically as a potential source of unrest and challenge to their authority. The danger, of course, is that any random association should suddenly transform itself into a crowd that stands apart from or in opposition to the central authority.87 Bruno’s view of associations as expressions of social relationships between individuals closely resembles Fouillée’s characterization of the ideal society as “un vaste contrat d’association”88 (“a broad partnership agreement”). Her crowds are rational rather than emotional, economic and social rather than political. No mention is made of the leaderless masses that move about Zola’s novels. The closest Bruno comes is outside the Manufacture

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d’Armes Nationals at Saint-​­Etienne where Julien describes the mass exodus of workers at the day’s end as “une grande foule” (“a great crowd”). Hardly a threatening mob, and yet the sense of Marx’s alienation hovers over the workers. The romantic aura of rural France cannot cheer the miners who disappear into the pits, the silk workers who lose their sight, nor the foundry workers who mechanically operate their machines. André goes on to describe the many armaments manufactured within the factory and speaks admiringly of the small river, called the Furens, in which “on trempe l’acier des sabres et des épées; pour les rendre plus durs et plus flexibles” (“they quench steel sabers and swords to make them tougher and more flexible”). The reader imagines an association of workers using the natural environment to manufacture its noble arms to defend the nation, but the engraving on the following page betrays the text (figure 3). The romantic river has become a furnace and a tank of cold water between two smiths dunking the steel they have just stamped out. Bruno attempts to describe these crowds of workers as somehow analogous to the rural associations of individuals, only advanced because of the prosperity they bring to the growing industrial cities. But l’harmonie vivante of Vidal’s genres de vie is missing, as is the organicism of the rural associations. The author notes only “the monotonous noise of industry” in Saint-​­Etienne. Here and there glimpses of the grim realities of industrial life break through the carefully constructed fiction of Bruno’s romantic ideal. Elsewhere, the inclusion of ancien régime authors like Bossuet, Boileau, and Corneille as models of form fails to explain the paucity of enlightenment thinkers on the republican curriculum. Does it mean that suitable republican voices have yet to be found, as Jey suggests, or does it rather indicate a reluctance to synthesize all the voices of France within the organic whole? A clue to the answer rests in the archival documents of the École Normale d’Instituteurs de Paris at Autueil, which indicate that officials selected the bourgeois enclave as a site for a new school after 1871 because “il importait de soustraire des jeunes gens au contact trop immédiat de la population parisienne”89 (“it was important for the youth to avoid too close contact with the Paris population”). Republican leaders looked to build as far as possible from the center of Paris lest its corrupting influence cause a repeat of the recent violent events. Judging from the evidence, republican pedagogues were willing to accept contingency in theory, less so in practice. “La raison est scandalisée par l’apparence du hasard” (“Reason is offended by the appearance of chance”), wrote Boutroux in his thesis as a pointed criticism of the materialists’ endless search for cause and effect and their appeal to natural laws as the rational basis of the phenomenal world. Boutroux can agree with Fouillée that “la

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of this book. The landmarks of French republicanism have never been as stable or fixed as ideologues would have us believe. The very Lamarkian and Neoplatonic ideals that form the theoretical basis of French identity speak of movement and evolution and so work against any sort of fixed identity. France’s civilizing mission was based on this conflation of French values with universal values and was, therefore, doomed to fail. “Nos ancêtres les gaulois” is a reference point for the French alone. The French colonial policy that relied on these reference points failed miserably during the twentieth century. The seeds of that failure were sown here.

Chapter 5

Arthur Rimbaud’s Une Saison en enfer What Does Colonization Feel Like?

The relationship with hell is a relationship with oneself (La relation avec l’enfer est une relation avec soi).1

In 1868 at the age of fourteen, Rimbaud submitted a poem to the national Latin competition that won first prize—­ “Jugurtha.” In it, Rimbaud evokes the ghost of the eponymous Numidian king in North Africa who famously resisted the Roman army in the first century b.c. to encourage the heroic resistance of his modern reincarnation, Abd el-​­Kader, to the French colonizers in nineteenth-​­century Algeria. Nascitur Arabiis ingens in collibus infans, Et dixit levis aura: “Nepos est ille Jugurthae.” . . . At novus Arabii victor nunc imperat oris Gallia! . . . Tu, fili, si qua fata aspera rumpas, Ultor eris patriae . . . gentes, capite arma, subactae! Prisca reviviscat domito sub pectore virtus! . . .  O gladios torquete iterum, memoresque Jugurthae, Pellite victores, patria libate cruorem! . . .  (Dans les monts d’Algérie, sa race renaîtra: Le vent a dit le nom d’un nouveau Jugurtha . . . . . . Voici un nouveau vainqueur du chef des Arabes, La France ! . . . Toi, mon fils, si tu fléchis les destins rigoureux,

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Tu seras le vengeur de la Patrie! Peuplades soumises, aux armes! Qu’en vos coeurs domptés revive l’antique courage! Brandissez de nouveau vos épées! Et, vous souvenant de Jugurtha, Repoussez les vainqueurs! versez votre sang pour la Patrie!)2

(In the mountains of Algeria, a people is reborn: The wind brings the name of a new Jugurtha . . . . . . A new conqueror rules over the Arabs, France! You, my son, if you bend harsh fate, You will be your country’s redeemer! Let the defeated tribes take up arms! May your broken hearts rediscover the courage of yore! Take up your swords once more! And, remembering Jugurtha, Repel the conquerors! Spill your blood for the homeland!)3

This admonition to take up arms and fight the oppressor establishes a continuity between Rome and France, and between Jugurtha and Abd el-​ ­Kader. But as it was an official entry into a French national competition, the last twelve lines of the poem find Abd el-​­Kader defeated, sitting in Napoleon’s prison and receiving another visit from the ghost of the Arab emir who counsels his spiritual son to surrender “au nouveau Dieu” (“to the new God”) and accept the fruits of European colonization.4 Some see in this poem the simple desire of an adolescent to praise or at least to please the authorities by implying that imperial colonization is ultimately a good thing. Others see in it a provocation with real tones of antinationalism and anti-​­patriotism.5 My own reading sees in this poem one of the young Rimbaud’s first transgressive acts. He treats the myth without claims of untruth or nonsense. Rather than attacking authority from the front, Rimbaud was more interested in turning the very mechanisms of authority against itself. “Jugurtha,” in short, hints at many of the themes developed more fully in Rimbaud’s later work. Rimbaud was intelligent enough to understand the educational goals of the state, to produce loyal and productive subjects or citizens. He easily identified the church’s complicity in the matter and picked up on the hypocrisy of bourgeois society that taught one thing and practiced another. His adolescence was a training ground for irony and doublespeak. Already Rimbaud had spent his childhood reading the Bible “à la tranche vert-​­chou” (“with cabbage-​­green edges”) under the watchful eye of his mother. His education endured further ecclesiastical oversight when

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his Collège de Charleville, in an effort to save money, was combined with the nearby seminary, forcing the students of both to share classrooms. The 1869 publication of the Prix demonstrates Rimbaud’s gift as student and provocateur: he won eight prix from the Collège de Charleville, including the one that must have grated his new teachers, in Instruction religieuse. The fact that national history overlapped with Christian history was not lost on the young boy: “I recall the history of France, eldest daughter of the church” (“Je me rappelle l’histoire de la France fille aînée de l’église”). Here, it might be helpful to pause to address an apparent anachronism. Rimbaud, after all, spent his adolescence in Second Empire France, not in republican France. The fact that he was addressing imperial France and not republican France, however, misses the point. Rimbaud wrote with one foot in imperial and another in republican France, but the difference between the two is the same as that between Jugurtha and Abd el-​­Kader, or between France and Rome: none. For Rimbaud the historian, the past is continually reborn as the present through a sort of metempsychosis or palingenesis. The Third Republic is not a break from but a reincarnation of the Second Empire (both reincarnations of Rome) just as Abd el-​­Kader is the reincarnation of Jugurtha. The metempsychosis is clear through Jugurtha’s exhortation to avenge his loss to Rome by resisting France: “avenge us, my child!” (“venge-​­nous, mon enfant!”). Such a compressed view of history in this one geographical locale gives credence to Michelet’s claim that “history is above all geographic” (“l’histoire est d’abord toute géographique”).6 And Rimbaud had certainly read Michelet.7 Jugurtha’s ghost is not a historical presence as much as it is the spiritual manifestation of a geographically specific social interaction that is repeating itself, and destined to do so ad infinitum, in the same geographical space. The space of North Africa provides the point of continuity between all the different parties. In this sense “Jugurtha” serves as a displaced space of writing in which Rimbaud is allowed to work through his ideas of resistance to the dominant system of power, in particular the French state and the Catholic Church. The choice of Algeria as the terrain of writing most likely starts with his father, Captain Frédéric Rimbaud, career military man who had served in Algeria with the French forces that captured Abd el-​­Kader in 1847. Back in the Ardennes with his wife Vitalie by 1850, the two set about the business of raising a family, an endeavor for which he was apparently ill suited.8 Ten years and four children later, he left his family to rejoin his regiment, just before Arthur’s sixth birthday. It was 1860. The young boy never saw his father again. Graham Robb and Pierre Michon have argued that Rimbaud’s interest in Algeria stemmed from the young man’s desire to explore la patrie, the fatherland.9

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Among the few items that Captain Rimbaud left behind were two books that the young poet found to be quite useful. Each one was intended to structure the world, the one through images, the other through words. The first was a world atlas by Delamarche, the other a Grammaire Nationale under whose title the father had written: “Grammar is the basis and foundation of all human knowledge.” His poet son would later add in his own handwriting at the top of the same page: “Have whichever thoughts you like, but think carefully before you speak.” This maxim most certainly guided the young Rimbaud while composing “Jugurtha.” In sixty lines Rimbaud would both criticize French colonial policy, in a poem submitted to these same authorities, and invoke his absent father despite his mother’s every effort to erase his memory. In a life full of boundaries crossed and conventions challenged, this one must surely be one of the earliest and most successful. It is a testament to the poet’s talent that his work is nuanced enough to be celebrated by both the colonizer and the colonized.10 Rimbaud is exactly what his readers want him to be: patriot, rebel, son, orphan, atheist, and believer. His exploration of the striated space of French society allowed him to stomp across the borders that society erected. Rimbaud’s desire was to render sacred the profane. The word “sacred” comes from the Latin sacrare—­“holy”—­profane, from the Latin profanus—­“outside the temple.” Rimbaud was interested in making holy the space outside the temple, bringing the personal and profane into the consecrated space of the national narrative. To demonstrate how he went about doing so, I would like to offer an exploration of Rimbaud’s Une Saison en enfer (A Season in Hell) and, in particular, the poem “Mauvais sang” (“Bad Blood”).

“Mauvais sang” Rimbaud’s “Mauvais sang” is, in many ways, a very painful and personal profession of faith, an account of his artistic failures and a rebuke of Western civilization and its values. The collection of dense but poetic prose and verse represents his “carnet de damné” (“notebook of the damned”), the words of a distressed author in full spiritual crisis attempting to reconcile the dualism of the modern individual, “de posséder la vérité dans une âme et un corps” (“to possess truth in one body and soul”). His stubborn efforts to weave back together the schizophrenic self bequeathed by Descartes take him to the darkest corners of the psyche (“au plus profond de l’abîme”) as he repeatedly shatters and rebuilds “truth” from the fragments of once-​­dominant worldviews.11 Verlaine called Rimbaud’s Saison

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“une prodigieuse autobiographie psychologique” (“a prodigious psychological autobiography”) written in a style exclusive to its author.12 While that is undoubtedly true for great swaths of his work, a close reading of Rimbaud’s Saison finds a story of initiation like that of an author Rimbaud had clearly read, Jules Verne.13 The names given to the divisions of his poems alone trace an itinerary very similar to the voyage undertaken by Axel: “Jadis,” “Mauvais sang,” “Nuit infernal,” “Délires,” “Impossible,” “L’Eclair,” “Matin,” and “Adieu” (“In Olden Days,” “Bad Blood,” “Hellish Night,” “Delirium,” “Impossible,” “Lightning,” “Morning,” and “Farewell”). The poems are, much like Verne’s Voyage, a personal account of the journey inward toward self-​­discovery and about finding one’s place in society. Rimbaud embarks on his quest to become a seer-​­poet through the derangement of all normal structures of consciousness, experiencing a hellish descent into the depths of his mind, where he experiences a confusion of temporal horizons and a complete conflation of individual and collective memory—­memories of an uncontrollable, disorganized, and hallucinatory nature. His individual memory opens onto the historical memory of his civilization as he takes the reader through the various strata of his psyche: pagan Gaul, medieval France, the New World, Jerusalem. These are not Rousseau’s rêveries d’un promeneur solitaire. Rimbaud’s writings reveal the depths of the human psyche through his personal account of the conversion process effectuated by the State. In his work on the bildungsroman of the nineteenth century, The Way of the World, Franco Moretti calls Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man a sort of bricolage since it fails to weave back together the pieces of a fragmented society.14 In Moretti’s estimation, Joyce vacillates between the “insignificant everydayness” of Flaubert and the “meaningful revelations” of Rimbaud without choosing the one over the other. Moretti sees in Flaubert a world where the notion of personal development has ceased to exist. Rimbaud, on the other hand, is for Moretti the very archetype of the nineteenth-​­century “artist as a young man” who best expresses the trauma of self-​­discovery, specifically the trauma of becoming an adult. As Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell have reminded us, the individual is not born but becomes an adult member of society.15 The sacred space in which the novitiate will have to undergo his initiation has been, as we have seen, carefully selected by the State. Buildings, curriculum, and teachers have all been specially prepared for the desired outcomes. But in Rimbaud’s case, that sacred space has also been partially prepared by the poet himself. His famous letter to Paul Demeny, dated May 15, 1871 describes the process. “La première étude de l’homme qui veut se faire

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poète est sa propre connaissance, entière; il cherche son âme, il l’inspecte, il la tente, l’apprend” (“The first study of the man who wants to be a poet is the knowledge of himself, complete”). The poet wants to become a seer, makes himself a seer “par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens” (“through a long, thorough and rational derangement of all the senses”).16 Dérèglement is an important word here and has a sense difficult to translate from the French. Most often translators use “derangement” or “disordering.” It was not an uncommon word. Verne had used dérèglement in his Voyage to explain the disorientation of the compass caused by the lightning strike, am image that aptly illustrates the idea Rimbaud is expressing in his poem. But it gained in popularity after Durkheim used it as a way of explaining anomie as the “absence d’organisation, de coordination” in the twentieth century.17 Durkheim’s use of the word dérèglement as a synonym for anomie is revelatory. Anomie, according to Durkheim, is the negation of all morality. In religion, anomie is equivalent to sin, not only the willful transgressive kind, but also the voluntary and involuntary thoughts and attitudes that focus on defilement and profaning the sacred. In the religious sense, it is another word for sacrilege. For Durkheim then, anomie represents moral disorder. In this, he departed markedly from the person who introduced him to the term in his 1885 Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction, Jean-​­Marie Guyau, philosopher and son of Augustine Tuillerie. Guyau’s anomie morale is the absence of fixed dogmatic or universal rules. He believed that the ideal of any religion should bend toward “l’anomie religieuse,” or the freeing of the individual, the redeeming of his thoughts, and the suppression of all forms of dogmatism. We recognize Durkheim’s definition and its application to Rimbaud, but Guyau’s definition puts a rather more positive spin on Rimbaud’s use. Rather than a pure rejection of societal norms, Rimbaud is expressing a desire to think independently, to unmoor himself from the landmarks of French identity. It was Balzac who, as previously discussed, had proposed to measure the depths of the soul in his Théorie de la démarche, but it was Rimbaud who, like Verne, realized this enterprise.18 Rimbaud’s Season in Hell becomes a deterritorialization of the self, an individual effort to dissolve, disrupt, or otherwise resist assimilation into French society. In Deleuze, territorialization represents the traditional ways of ordering social space within society.19 It is synonymous with homogenization, control, and expansion, a practice common to the state apparatus in the West. The dynamic of official thought is such that by including only certain discourses, it excludes others. The totalizing discourse attempts to fix itself in codes, canons, and convention. While they

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all possess an aura of permanence, none of them is in fact static, fixed, or timeless. They are all human creations. If, as Deleuze and Guattari assert, history is always written from the sedentary point of view and in the name of a unitary state apparatus, then Rimbaud’s historical account expresses numerous points of resistance to that dominant discourse. Even in language, Deleuze and Guattari argue, the signifier is held to the signified by convention, not by any laws. The deterritorialization and reterritorialization of the individual was, according to Rimbaud’s account, extremely violent, leaving psychosomatic scars, exemplified in the polyphonic text of his “Mauvais sang.” While Rimbaud’s work rejects the type of discourse inherent in the spatial emphasis of Vidalian geography, its emphasis on social elements finds close affinity with Reclus, for whom geography was about social interaction. Rimbaud chose to situate his writing spatially and temporally, abandoning the quest for universal ideals favored by canonical literature. In many ways, Rimbaud is writing against the generalizing tendencies of the nomothetic tradition of history that seeks universal ideals in objective phenomena. Instead, Rimbaud prefers the contingent and accidental epistemology of the idiographic approach.20 The French literary canon was intended to be the point of assimilation into la patrie but was experienced as a colonizing force, a weapon, by Rimbaud. The deterritorialization of the French “harmonie vivante” disgorged his humanity and left him an empty tool of the republic. The poet’s response was to turn the republican tools against it, transgressing its core ideals, making sacred all things profane. Rimbaud’s criticism proved especially prescient given that he anticipated many of the core issues in the project of national identity. “Je est un autre” captures well the issues of alterity inherent in said project of national identity. Rimbaud was among the first to criticize French national identity for its violent reorientation of the individual’s senses and its co-​­opting of personal experience. Rimbaud’s resistance came less through overt political statements and more through subversive political gestures within his work, as in the “Jugurtha” poem. In Deleuze and Guattari, every aspect of language, every linguistic component works to either build up or tear down a system of power. Standardized usage is simply another way of describing an existing power structure. A change in form is itself a political statement. If linguistic form is indeed representative of political content, then any linguistic experiment in style translates automatically into a political critique. For Rimbaud, the formal and the political are inseparable. So while the State sought to harmonize the many voices within France, Rimbaud argued that each writer must find his own patois,21 or as Rimbaud calls it, “la langue païenne.”

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Linguistic Revolt Paul Verlaine famously called Arthur Rimbaud le poète maudit (“the cursed poet”), but not before Rimbaud had already applied the epithet to himself in his “Mauvais sang”: “Je suis maudit. Et j’ai horreur de la patrie” (“I am cursed. And I loathe my country”). Given the intent of republican education, “de faire aimer la patrie” (“to make one love one’s country”), and its moralizing tone, one who abhors the nation would most definitely be cursed. Rimbaud’s prose poem is one long, violent corrective to the “harmonie vivante” of the grand narrative written by the French authorities. It is the personal account of one individual and his experience of the conversion process. The epic historical voice of Michelet is constantly interrupted by the inconsistent and confused voice of the colonized pupil. The polyphony in Rimbaud’s poem comes from the poet’s refusal to have his voice co-​­opted. Rimbaud’s voice expresses the republican project half-​­digested, the individual only partially assimilated. The subversion of French history is evident from the very beginning: J’ai de mes ancêtres gaulois l’œil bleu blanc, la cervelle étroite, et la maladresse dans la lutte. Je trouve mon habillement aussi barbare que le leur. Mais je ne beurre pas ma chevelure. Les Gaulois étaient les écorcheurs de bêtes, les brûleurs d’herbes les plus ineptes de leur temps. D’eux, j’ai: l’idolâtrie et l’amour du sacrilège;—­Oh ! tous les vices, colère, luxure,—­magnifique, la luxure;—­surtout mensonge et paresse.

(From my ancestors the Gauls I have pale blue eyes, a narrow brain, and awkwardness in competition. I think my clothes are as barbaric as theirs. But I don’t butter my hair. flayers and hay-​­ burners of The Gauls were the most stupid hide-​­ their time. From them, I inherit: idolatry, and love of sacrilege;—­oh! all sorts of vice, anger, lust,—­terrific stuff, lust;—­and especially deceit and sloth.)

In Rimbaud, French invocation of “nos ancêtres les Gaulois” becomes “mes ancêtres gaulois,” and the nobility of his “pale blue eyes” is

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immediately undercut by his “narrow brain.” Instead of assimilating his ancestors through heroic deeds as Bruno’s text would do, Rimbaud identifies every last vice that he has inherited from them: “l’idolâtrie, l’amour du sacrilège, colère, luxure, surtout mensonge et paresse.” These are the very vices that republican moral instruction is supposed to stamp out. This last one in particular, laziness, was the very antithesis of the republican ideal of duty.22 Les ancêtres morts revivent . . . au plus profond de nous-​­mêmes. Nous avons dans nos instincts, dans nos sentiments, cette fâcheuse hérédité de violence, de cruauté, de paresses, de sensualité qui forme en nous ce que l’on a appelé la bête humaine . . . Ce sont nos ancêtres irascibles, explosives, sans volonté directrice qui font la loi en nous-​­mêmes; hérédité humiliante et inquiétante qui constitue véritablement notre tache originelle.23 (Our dead ancestors survive . . . in the deepest part of us. We have in our instincts, our feelings, this unfortunate heredity of violence, cruelty, laziness, and sensuality which forms within us what has been referred to as the human beast . . . These are our ancestors—­irascible, explosive, and without a guiding will—­who determine the law in us. This humiliating and disturbing heredity truly constitutes our original sin.)

According to republican moral instruction, Rimbaud’s laziness brands him as a savage barbarian. Laziness is, as it were, the natural state of the individual that he must constantly fight to overcome through an effort of the will: “Le paresseux s’inflige la vie la plus vile qu’il soit possible de s’infliger” (“The lazy person suffers the most vile life”).24 La patrie is a project of participation, one in which “the lazy will find no place.”25 Laziness is the very hallmark of uncivilized peoples (“des races barbares”). Language is the key to assimilation, so it is not surprising that Rimbaud identifies his patois, “ma langue perfide” (“my perfidious tongue”), as the cause of his enduring laziness. Laziness, in republican moral philosophy, represents the unwillingness to move up the ladder of civilization and to prosper through hard work. It is a short jump from laziness to criminality: “Nos criminels reproduisent les traits de caractère des ancêtres de l’âge de la Pierre, et l’horreur qu’ils nous inspirent prouve quelle progrès la majorité de la race a accomplie” (“Our criminals reproduce the traits of our Stone Age ancestors, and the horror that they inspire in us demonstrates the progress we have made as a people”).26 Rimbaud parrots this

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line of thought: “les criminels dégoûtent comme des châtrés” (“criminals are not men but eunuchs”). Incarceration is a form of castration. “Je suis intact” (“I am intact”), writes Rimbaud, as if to reassure himself of his freedom. The second section finds Rimbaud searching for his ancestors within French history and finding none. He no longer distinguishes between his race (“de la race inférieure”) and class (“le peuple”). Such a rhetorical shift mimics the contemporary reactionary discourse concerning the “classes dangereuses.” “Le peuple,” the urban masses, were barbarians within society animated only by the desire to profit from its demise (“piller”). What to make of the poet’s claim of ignorance concerning revolt? Is he not the very antithesis of the established order? (“j’ai horreur de la patrie”) But what is revolt if not an attempt to overturn that established order and replace it with yet another? Rimbaud’s apostrophe in praise of “la science, la nouvelle noblesse! le progrès” (“Science, the new nobility! Progress”) is undercut by his own “paroles païennes” (“pagan words”), an inability to master the jargon of progress. The use of “païennes” is undoubtedly intentional given its Latinate root, paganus, which translates as “paysan” in French and “peasant/ villager/rustic” in English. Paganus was also a term employed by the Roman army to designate civilians, a term adopted by the Christians to signify “heathen” or one not enrolled in the army of Christ.27 Rimbaud identifies himself by his pagan (or peasant) blood. “Païen,” according to Delvau’s nineteenth-​­century dictionary of street slang, was defined as a “débauché, homme sans foi ni loi, ne craignant ni Dieu ni diable” (“dissolute, lawless and faithless man, fearing neither God nor the devil”).28 “Sans foi ni loi” expresses the two types of authority, both moral, God and the State. In Rimbaud’s account, the gospel of Western civilization with its freedom and nobility is near but unattainable. Cursed, he will quit his homeland, which he now hates. Andre and Julien’s journey into is Rimbaud’s journey out of. Except that, he doesn’t go: “on ne part pas.—­ Reprenons les chemins d’ici” (“You cannot get away—­ Let us follow the roads here again”). The relentless march of civilization continues unabated, usurping his flight and bringing with it “La march, le fardeau, le désert, l’ennui et la colère” (“The march, the burden, the desert, boredom, anger”). All this sacrifice of bowing before civilization and what does he get, “La vie dure, l’abrutissement simple” (“The hard life, simple brutishness”). Later, the poet expresses an adolescent’s admiration for the convict (“Encore tout enfant, j’admirais le forçat intraitable sur qui se referme toujours le bagne”) and recounts his own attempts to sniff him

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out (“je flairais sa fatalité”) in the places made sacred by his passage, the hostels and seedy inns of the city.

A Geography of Morality Bruno’s example of the two orphans circumscribing French identity through their circular route is decidedly not Rimbaud. What the poet offers instead is a solitary voice, “pas même un compagnon” (“without even a companion”). Rather than the generous assistance of local peasants, Rimbaud finds himself “devant une foule exaspérée, en face du peloton d’exécution” (“in front of an infuriated mob, facing the firing squad”). He stands accused “comme Jeanne d’Arc!” claims Rimbaud, adopting the symbol of the French heroine to stand for those falsely accused of immorality.29 We should not overlook Rimbaud’s reference to this powerful symbol of French patriotism and sacrifice. Up until the nineteenth century, la pucelle d’Orléans had been remembered principally by the monarchy and Catholic Church as a defender of the crown and Christian faith, and more or less ignored by the Left. That changed in the nineteenth century when a series of books on la pucelle inspired the Left to embrace her as a daughter of the people, betrayed by her king and burned by her church. Her true accomplishment, it was now revealed, had been to unite a divided French nation against an occupying oppressor. Even the Catholic Church was won over by the republican sentiment, calling her a “queen of the civilized world,” ready to lead the other European peoples as a reward for her sacrifice.30 Rimbaud would have been well aware of this recuperation of the mythic-​­historical figure. Perhaps, he surmised, society would one day judge him differently too. Rimbaud addresses himself to the angry mob, an indistinguishable mass of authority figures: “Prêtres, professeurs, maîtres, vous vous trompez en me livrant à la justice. Je n’ai jamais été de ce peuple-​­ci; je n’ai jamais été chrétien; je suis de la race qui chantait dans le supplice; je ne comprends pas les lois; je n’ai pas le sens moral, je suis une brute: vous vous trompez . . .” Oui, les yeux fermés à votre lumière. Je suis une bête, un nègre. Mais je puis être sauvé. Vous êtes de faux nègres, vous maniques, féroces, avares. Marchand, tu es nègre; magistrat, tu es nègre; général, tu es nègre; empereur, vieille démangeaison, tu es nègre: tu as bu d’une liqueur non taxée, de la fabrique de Satan.—­Ce peuple est inspiré par la fièvre et le cancer. Infirmes et vieillards sont tellement respectables

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qu’ils demandent à être bouillis.—­Le plus malin est de quitter ce continent, où la folie rôde pour pourvoir d’otages ces misérables. J’entre au vrai royaume des enfants de Cham. (“Priests, teachers, masters, you are wrong to turn me over to justice. I have never belonged to this face. I have never been Christian. I am of the breed that sang under torture. I do not understand your laws. I have no moral sense. I am a brute. You are making a mistake.” Yes, my eyes are closed to your light. I am a beast, a savage. But I can be saved. You are false savages, you maniacs, wild and miserly. Merchant, you are a savage. Magistrate, you are a savage. General, you are a savage. Emperor, old mange, you are a savage. You have drunk untaxed liquor from Satan’s still.—­This people is inspired by fever and cancer. Invalids and old men are so respectable that they ask to be boiled.—­The shrewdest thing would be to leave this continent, where madness prowls about to provide hostages for these wretches. I am entering upon the true kingdom of the children of Ham.)

The mix of professorate and clergy is both a clever nod to his collège/ séminaire and a surprisingly deep understanding of their overlapping moral and intellectual authority in the Third Republic. Either way the poet sees error in the authorities’ accusations against him. If he is the brute that their politics make him out to be, his eyes closed to their light, and not one of their people, how is it that he is subject to their morality, their laws? The allusion to Rousseau is clear. Morality exists within society alone. The brute savage is a child of nature, amoral at heart. Of what, then, is he guilty? Rimbaud does not believe in the church, nor does he believe in the State. Rimbaud looks for redemption in authenticity, not among the population of “false savages” for whom religious devotion to the State means recognizing its moral authority to the point that an item without state sanction (“une liqueur non taxée”) is evil (“de la fabrique de Satan”). So be it. If this is the height of civilization, then Rimbaud will gladly embrace regression: “Je suis une bête, un nègre.” This is what it means to be a foreigner in your own land. Foreshadowing later events in his life (“c’est oracle ce que je dis”), he makes plans to leave for Africa (“au vrai royaume des enfants de Cham”), to join the rest of the “savages.” “Connais-​­je encore la nature?” (“Do I know nature yet?”) asks Rimbaud, “me connais-​­je?” (“Do I know myself?”) The questions are apt and perceptive. French educators approached moral education from the standpoint that each child possesses an innate moral core that could

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be developed through education.31 Primary education was intended to develop “les forces naturelles de l’esprit” (“the natural forces of the spirit”). But Rimbaud implies that French education attempts to map a particular geography onto the individual, territorializing him or her according to a dominant ideology despite claims that “it is . . . nature that guides him.”32 But what is nature? Is it a guide to human development to be followed or the primitive state of humanity to be overcome? Rimbaud verbalizes the general confusion inherent in the (over)use of this term. Rimbaud attempts to deterritorialize himself by fleeing to a geography of natural instinct, savage Africa, dominated by screams, drums, hunger, thirst, and dancing. The use of “children” hints at the double meaning of the kingdom of Ham, as both the physical space of Africa and psychical space of childhood, two geographies of the primitive individual in need of civilization. Each is qualified by a lack of language (“Plus de mots!”) and an allusion to cannibalism: “j’ensevelis les morts dans mon ventre.” Connais-​­je encore la nature? Me connais-​­je?-​­Plus de mots. J’ensevelis les morts dans mon ventre. Cris, tambour, danse, danse, danse, danse ! je ne vois même pas l’heure où, les blancs débarquent, je tomberai au néant. Faim, soif, cris, danse, danse, danse, danse ! (Do I know nature yet? Do I know myself?—­No more words. I will bury the dead in my belly. Yells, drum, dance, dance, dance, dance! I can’t even see the time when the whites will land and I will fall into the void. Hunger, thirst, yells, dance, dance, dance, dance!)

Nineteenth-​­century Europeans commonly identified cannibals as mute, in addition to the many other “savage” practices, as a means of drawing a picture of the total absence of civilized society. The designation of a tribe as “cannibal” by Europeans served to justify the slaughter of the dreaded savages in the name of conquest and civilization. Unable to “speak” for themselves, cannibals were evangelized, enslaved, or exterminated.33 Rimbaud positions himself spatially and temporally here, at the negative pole of civilization. Deleuze and Guattari call the primitive society a “presignifying society,” one characterized by a polyvocality of forms of expression: rhythm, dance, voice, gesturality, corporeality.34 The polyvocality is itself a means of resistance, since the many forms of expression intersect and form relays, refusing to be overcoded. Nothing is arbitrary within primitive space; words point directly to things, signifiers to signifieds. Yann

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Frèmy notes this same tendency in Rousseau, an author “who wishes to consecrate a speech completely connected to its subject, a mythical speech,” erasing the rupture between “writing and the world.”35 Cannibalism is a means of closing off a signifying system to universalizing abstraction, consuming the signifier to close off even the possibility. Engrossed in his primitive rhythms (“danse, danse, danse”), Rimbaud does not foresee the hour of his demise, the arrival of the “white men,” Western civilization. Existential nothingness (“néant”) is all that lies below the poet who has positioned himself on the lowest step of the ladder of civilization. But Rimbaud’s return to primitive nature is short-​ l­ived. Just as quickly as the poet abandons civilization, civilization comes to claim him: “Les blancs débarquent. Le canon! Il faut se soumettre au baptême, s’habiller, travailler” (“The white men are landing. The cannon! We will have to be baptized, get dressed, work”).36 Civilization arrives on a ship, what one of Verne’s scientific protagonists referred to as “the true vehicle of civilization!”37 For the Africans, the ship arrives carrying European explorers who convert the savages at the tip of the gun (the cannon). For the child, the ship comes in the form of the State, whose instructors convert the children to the state ideology through, among other things, the literary canon. Submission to the new authorities begins with baptism, what the Apostle Paul describes in the New Testament as the putting off of the old self, which belongs to the former way of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and the putting on of the new self, created after the likeness of God (or in this case, the State) in true righteousness and holiness.38 Bruno’s text may have adopted Vidal’s regional approach and an emphasis on genres de vie in her Tour de la France, but Rimbaud’s work was clearly in line with Reclus’s geography: sociopolitical, practical, and utilitarian. Rimbaud plays on this fluidity of signifiers when he writes, “Il faut se soumettre au baptême, s’habiller, travailler.” The passage recalls Montaigne’s cannibals who themselves had nuls vestemens.39 Here Rimbaud’s selection of words echoes the Renaissance effort to assimilate and civilize the barbarians, making them convert, dress, and work. But Rimbaud writes as the Other, as the barbarian within the borders of France living in a republican state of order and progress and feeling every bit the maudit. Rimbaud’s poetic ire was often directed at the church.40 The baptism he mentions here, however, is not a direct reference to the church, but rather to her fille ainée, the French state whose nationalistic zeal and devotion bore striking similarities to the missionary zeal of the church. Conversion to republicanism was no easy trick. It was, as we have seen, a violent realigning of the landmarks of identity.

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A Refusal to Assimilate Rimbaud’s lexicon is full of resistance. His “habiller” can be read in its popular sense, as “vêtir” (“to dress”), or in its original sense, “rendre habile, disposer à,” an archaic form meaning “to clean” or “to prepare” that the English verb “to dress” has kept as well.41 If, as Kristin Ross would have us believe, we are to take Rimbaud at his word, then reading “habiller” in this archaic sense becomes not only acceptable, but entirely likely.42 “To dress” here has less to do with clothes and more to do with cleaning game in the field. According to the Littré Dictionary, “on habille le lapin, de la volaille, le porc, la morue.” In dressing any game, one removes its entrails and cleans the cavity. Rimbaud, the young Gaulois, “flayer of beasts,” finds himself flayed by the centralizing authorities. The body is left with only bones and muscle, the very things that make it a machine in the Cartesian model. All the better to work (“travailler”) in a capitalist economy. Redemption would find the poet in the form of “le coup de la grâce,” killing his old self and making him new. La raison m’est née. Le monde est bon. Je bénirai la vie. J’aimerai mes frères. Ce ne sont plus des promesses d’enfance. Ni l’espoir d’échapper à la vieillesse et à la mort. Dieu fait ma force, et je loue Dieu. (Reason was born in me. The world is good. I will bless life. I will love my brothers. These are not the promises of a child. Nor the hope of escaping old age and death. God is my strength, and I give him praise.)

This is the sort of conversion that his sister Isabelle would point to after his death to argue that her brother was most certainly not an atheist. It is less a demonstration of her hope than a testament to her brother’s fierce irony. Atheist or not, Rimbaud’s Dieu was most certainly a God-​­less deity. The voice of the poet shows the burden of the incomplete conversion: “Assez!” he screams at himself. “This is my punishment, Get moving!” The lungs burn, the temples pound. He is now fighting for the forces of good, and regretting it. He is weak, a coward, suicidal. But the goal of republican education is to “transformer les plus précieuses qualités de la volonté en une seconde nature, c’est-​­à-​­dire en habitudes puissantes” (“transform the most precious qualities of the will into second nature, which is to say into powerful habits”).43 And so it shall.

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—​­Je m’y habituerai. Ce serait la vie française, le sentier de l’honneur! (— I’ll get used to it. That would be the French way, the path of honor!)

“I’ll get used to it,” concludes Rimbaud, resigning himself to the French path of honor, a geography of duty and honor that sounds very much like Bruno’s Tour de la France. In this prose poem Rimbaud raises two principal objections, the one expressed overtly, the other within the text itself. The first concerns the violence of the semiotic overcoding as experienced by the savage barbarian. Rimbaud’s text shows it to be a violent process that leaves the psyche divided against itself. Instead of encountering and assimilating the Other, as in Bruno’s text, Rimbaud recounts the psychological scarring that causes alienation from oneself: je est un autre. The second is Rimbaud’s playful attack on the semantic fixity of the text. French geographers had erased France’s political borders and drew instead the form of the hexagon, which stood for order and harmony. The corollary in poetry was the romantics’ fluid imagination and the Parnassian attempt to treat classical subjects in a rigid form. For Rimbaud, the text—­like the map of France for Vidal and Reclus—­should not be governed by political boundaries (author-​­ity) but by the natural limits of the page (terrain). Rimbaud’s space of identity is phenomenological, experienced through the body rather than memorized by the mind. The body learns to move in space, the mind intuits other spaces. We know enough to look for meaning beyond the words, the syntax, and grammar, to the mise en page of the work itself, its graphics.44 The spatial quality of the language is manifested in the graphics of the written word, which can work for or against the superficial discourse. Rimbaud’s Saison is a prose poem, a hybrid genre that involves a narrative voice and special attention paid to language, including an increased use of metaphor. As Sonya Stephens argues, “the prose poem challenges relatively stable generic categories which depend on the reader’s presupposition of a set of more or less established conventions.”45 This model of the prose poem as “textual assault” echoes the geographers’ attack on the fixed form of French identity. The State acts, to return to Deleuze and Guattari, as a stratifying machine organizing heterogeneous elements into a homogenous whole. Rimbaud on the other hand is more rhizomatic, making connections where he will without overcoding signifiers. Rimbaud paints history as an artificial narrative by sedentary societies to justify their importance and centrality.

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Rimbaud chooses to focus instead on the individual instances of identity since each person has his or her own geography, and is “traversed by lines, meridians, geodesics, tropics and zones marching to different beats and differing in nature.”46 Individuals are nodes. In the network of relationships that constitute collective identity, the links are more important than the nodes. Moreover, where authoritarian narratives seek legitimacy in genealogy, Rimbaud’s network seeks meaning in archaeology, by removing layers of accreted meaning.47 Rimbaud’s word choice in his poems expresses a keen interest in the way words were used in the street and a fascination with the meanings carried over in foreign words. Both interests demonstrate a desire to destabilize the totalizing discourse of the period. The poems that populate works like Saison rise up out of the dispersed text like islands of meaning. Each presents itself as an individual whose meaning relies on the connections made to other texts, words, or moments. Rimbaud seemed to understand that every word contains within itself the whole history of its usage. Each word has been territorialized by centuries of normative practice. Rimbaud’s subversive act is to deterritorialize a word within his work, to strip it of years of accreted meaning and to restore an older sense. The result is to destabilize the reading and disorient the reader, which brings us back to Jugurtha. If Rimbaud’s Saison is the personal account of the individual forming his own identity, then “Jugurtha” can be read as the formation of a national identity. “Submit,” the author seems to be saying. But is he? The new Jugurtha of which the poet speaks is, of course, the Algerian emir Abd el-​­Kader who led the struggle against French colonial invasion in North Africa. Abd el-​­Kader had surrendered to the French general Louis de Lamorcière in 1847 in exchange for the promise to release him to Alexandria or Acre. Public pressure forced the government to renege on that promise, keeping him a captive in France until Louis Napoleon finally freed him in 1852, allowing him to settle in Bursa, Turkey, and then Damascus, Syria. The reputation that he gained in France as a man of his word, respectful of his enemies and kind to his prisoners, is without equal in the history of France. He was a man who respected the religion of his captives, openly discussing with enemy officers the hand of God in the politics of France and Algeria. By the time of Rimbaud’s poem in 1869, Abd el-​­Kader had already cemented his reputation as “Commander of the Faithful” by defending the Christians in Damascus in July 1860 against riots incited by the local Druze population. The French press sang his praises: The emir Abd el-​­ Kader has immortalized himself by the courageous protection he has given the Syrian Christians. One of the most

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beautiful pages of the history of the 19th century will be devoted to him. (Le Gazette de France) When the carnage was at its worst, the emir appeared in the sreets, as if sent by God. (Le Pays, Journal de l’Empire)48

Many Algerians consider him the father of modern Algeria while the French see him, subsequent to his defeat, as “l’ami des Français” and as a “modern Jugurtha.” The parallels with Jugurtha, the Numidian king who heroically resisted the Romans, were evoked from the beginning. The image made its way into school manuals as early as 1848 in, for example, Mme la Comtesse Drohojowska’s L’Histoire de l’Algérie racontée à la jeunesse: On a comparé l’Emir à Jugurtha et aux anciens défenseurs du sol numide; d’autres, et nous partageons ce sentiment, évoquant à son occasion le souvenir des premières périodes de notre histoire, aiment à voir en lui une fidèle image de ce jeune héros des Arvernes, Vercingétorix qui lutta avec tant de courage contre les armées romaines.49 (The emir has been compared to Jugurtha and to other ancient defenders of the Numidian soil. Others, and we share this sentiment, evoking the memory of our earliest history, see in him the faithful image of the young hero from Arvernes, Vercingétorix, who fought with such courage against the Romans.)

Even Augustine Tuillerie (writing again under the pseudonym G. Bruno) made of Abd el-​­Kader’s defeat the very symbol of French superiority and its legitimate presence in Algeria: “Nous eûmes surtout à lutter contre un grand chef arabe, l’émir Abd-​­el-​­Kader, qui s’illustra par son courage et son habileté. Il finit par comprendre que la lutte était impossible et il devint plus tard un ami fidèle de la France” (“We had to battle a great Arab chief, the emir Abd el-​­Kader, who stood out for his courage and competence. In the end, he understood that the fight was lost and eventually became a faithful friend of France”).50 Did Rimbaud read works like Drohojowska’s at school? It is quite possible, even likely. Whatever his source, it is easy to see his interest in the heroic Arab in the land that swallowed his father. Here was a great irony, however, for Abd el-​­Kader was both a political and spiritual leader. In praising him, even subversively, Rimbaud seems to be praising the very conflation of French political and religious power that

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he would come to criticize in his later work. The truth is that Rimbaud was far more critical of the hypocrisy of the state and church officials and not necessarily their overlapping jurisdictions. What Abd el-​­Kader represented was a noble leader who operated according to deeply rooted principles that he was not willing to compromise for the least benefit. He was also someone who had no interest in colonizing the Other, but instead insisted on engaging the Other in conversations about faith and politics. He treated his prisoners with respect and fought his own kin in defense of Christians of many nationalities, including French, in Damascus. The poem “Jugurtha” is perhaps a hint at a motivation for Rimbaud, not only in his lost origins (in the father-​­land) but for his ideal father, as well. Perhaps Abd el-​­Kader is the model of the father that Rimbaud never had, and that the State was incapable of providing. Perhaps this helps to explain his motivations for choosing Abyssinia as his destination when he finally fled Western society.

Conclusion

The emphasis on the revised discipline of geography in the French school curriculum between 1871 and 1914 was, as we have seen, key to the formation of a new republican identity. Relying on the organicist and embodied metaphors employed by Elisée Reclus and Paul Vidal de la Blache, republican officials sought to forge a unified ideal against which particular instances of identity could be measured and eventually assimilated. The bricoleur-​­geography of Reclus and Vidal that I describe in chapter 1 was quickly adapted into an ingénieur-​­geography by the State. The idea of the average Frenchman invoked by Reclus was treated as an ideological ideal by republican officials who attempted to construct a universal identity, a “classical” composite. This idealized French person did not exist except as a defining yardstick against which all others were measured. The Français was no longer the one who defined “Frenchness” but the one who measured up to some idealized notion of what it meant to be French. Being French no longer meant inhabiting the French territory or paying one’s taxes to the French state, but rather conforming to a historical identity—­studying the canon of French authors, speaking the French language, adopting French principles. This average Frenchman was the embodiment of an idealized geographic France (l’Hexagone), whose body in turn was mapped onto the national space. This notion of an ideal France proved remarkably short-​­lived in the real world and amazingly durable in the imagination. This republican transformation (to use the Lamarckian term) began a century earlier when, as David Bell has pointed out, it became conceivable to “make French people, to give to the nation its own particular physiognomy.”1 But while Bell has argued that this thinking was possible due to a shift in the conception of the nation from organicist to political, à la Rousseau’s social contract, I have argued that its manifestation a century later marked a return to and a deepened awareness of that earlier organicist metaphor of the state, one marked profoundly by the period’s theories of biological development. Republicans meant to replace the myth of a static, hierarchical society, based on a strict system of classification, with a vision of nature as fluid and changing. Having rejected Darwinian evolution for its passive mechanism of change and for its emphasis on individual competition, republican mythmakers turned to

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Lamarck for his ideas of use/disuse and the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Neo-​­Lamarckian thinking produced a model of the individual whose active will could, in response to changing needs, form new habits, which, over time, become established within the physiological makeup of the individual and eventually heritable. In response to individual competition, republicans stressed the principle of association, in which the individual acted against his or her immediate interests for the survival of a larger social organism. This motif of altruism is, as we have seen, present in Reclus’s discourse on “mutual assistance” and Bruno’s discussion of “solidarity.” The geography that I have attempted to map in this work is less concerned with the physical coordinates of space and far more interested in the psychological coordinates of the individual within society in nineteenth-​­century France. I chose five authors—­geographers, writers, and pedagogues—­who represent, for me, the shifting geographic sensibility of the period. Geographers Paul Vidal de la Blache and Elisée Reclus provide the organicist and embodied metaphors that serve as the very foundation of every geography and history textbook in Third Republic France. French history and geography begin with the reader orienting him or herself according to the bodily coordinates mapped onto the landscape. Thus the first lesson of French geography is that the world is a living body, a personification of nature underscored by the geographers’ abundant use of organicist and embodied metaphors, including referring to the earth as “an immense terrestrial organism.” Exotic nature is made less strange through this analogy with the body; the foreign is made familiar. The body also provides the analogy for an understanding of the working of the natural world. Writers like Jules Verne also expressed this geographic sensibility, mapping the person onto nature and nature onto the person. An understanding of this personification of nature and geographization of the human body allowed us to read the earth in Voyage au centre de la terre as a metaphor of the self, turning Axel’s physical journey into a metaphysical voyage of self-​­discovery. Having discovered the ontological core of the individual, we were able to trace parallel journeys in the physical and metaphysical realms. Each physical event or phenomenon had its echo within the metaphysical journey: the terror of the abyss, the chaos and comfort of the inner sea, the descent into the past, and the disoriented compass. Moreover, through this psycho-​­geographic reading we have been able to arrive at an explanation of three items in Verne’s Voyage that most scholars have deemed as inexplicable or simply lapses in Verne’s writing: the professor’s stammer, the hasty conclusion, and the unrealized journey to the physical

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center of the earth. Against the traditional views of Verne as the author of children’s stories, such a reading suggests that Verne’s writing was deeply expressive of contemporary issues revolving around the modern self: the blurred horizons, the terrifying unknown, the weight of history, and the emphasis on movement. As I pointed out in my conclusion to chapter 2, the topography of Axel’s inner core anticipates in many ways the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Jung. While Verne’s Voyage used organicist and embodied metaphors to provide a geographic narrative of individual identity, Bruno’s writing relies on Vidal’s regional approach to construct a geographic narrative of society that emphasizes a decentralized network of associations whose circulation of goods, services, and ideas serves to glorify la patrie. As I demonstrated in chapter 3, the purpose of Bruno’s geographic narrative is to teach her readers that French identity is mobile rather than fixed, relying on the active participation of its citizens for its health and survival. Bruno’s geographic itinerary is conceived to initiate her readers “into a life both practical and civic, as well as moral” (Tour, preface). While her civic morality was deeply influenced by the philosophy of Emile Boutroux and Alfred Fouillée, her narrative was structured like the Tableaux of Reclus and Vidal. Bruno’s decentralized narrative stresses movement, participation, and a network of connected individuals (solidarity). Deleuze would later call these same motifs “fluidity,” “becoming,” and the “rhizome.” And finally, we have seen in Arthur Rimbaud an autobiographical account of the assimilation project as experienced domestically, the voice of the solitary figure giving account of the violent reordering of the senses effectuated through the school system. The voice of the unassimilated individual splinters in Rimbaud, leaving a cacophony of voices rather than a unified chorus. The voice of the young (orphaned) student in search of a father figure rejects the “patrie” as father and instead finds a paternal model in a noble enemy of France. And finally, we read Rimbaud’s Season in Hell as not only a coming-​­of-​­age story, but as a splintered voice of resistance to the colonizing machine that strips individuals of their humanity and makes them workers in a new capitalist economy. As I noted in my discussion of Bruno’s work, the end of the nineteenth century marked the last time that philosophers attempted to elaborate entire systems of thought. Up until that point, philosophers were convinced, to the disbelief of our cynical age, that philosophy could have a direct and beneficial effect on society. This age was the last to believe in real social progress. The presence of a progressive teleology rings false to our ears, making the anarchist sound strangely hopeful and the pedagogue seem hopelessly naive. Today’s cynical reader probably feels much

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more comfortable with Reclus’s ecology, for example, than with the idealized iterations of regional identity sketched out in Bruno’s geographic narrative of French space. Vidalian notions of an idealized identity based on a mosaic of various genres de vie seem totally foreign to the postmodern mind, and with good reason. The ways of life identified by Vidal seem at best quaint and at worst dangerous, because of their tendency to inspire either personal connectedness or pious nationalism. France’s rural population, and with it the rural “way of life,” plummeted with the industrialization of modern society. Recent census demographic surveys in France show that the French rural population now comprises just 2.6 percent of the national workforce, yet they along with their rural brethren in other EU countries receive more than 50 percent of the annual EU budget.2 These subsidies are vociferously defended by French leaders who fear the loss of a “way of life” whose principle manifestation is now at the Salon de l’Agriculture held each spring in Paris. The golden hues of regional geography have faded, though the Parisian cynic pauses long enough to claim his or her provincial roots and to pick up a copy of Bruno’s work as a nostalgic reminder of France’s rural origins. In addition, the abstract notion of la patrie that human geography helped to create fell into disfavor rapidly after World War II due to its connection to both Vichy and Nazi fascism. Likewise, the very success of the “civilizing mission” within France and the subsequent rejection of the nationalist proselytizing in the colonies that led to decolonization meant that the energy that sustained the missionary zeal was lost. More broadly, the fact that the nationalist creed was structured on the model of the religious creed proved problematic after two major wars, when Europeans turned a critical eye toward any totalizing teleology.3 Moreover, the twentieth century’s demographic explosion transformed the role of the teacher in the classroom. The enormous influx of students due to the postwar baby boom and the extension of mandatory schooling from fourteen to sixteen years of age resulted in a generalization of academic content and the transformation of the teacher’s role from the transmission of moral values to the inculcation of analysis and criticism.4 Rather than convey to students an “objective” (French) truth, teachers began to teach students to question and deconstruct truth claims. Read in this light, nineteenth-​­century theories of social progress seem as quaint as the folkloric traditions they helped to popularize. Today, French textbooks no longer deal with the glorification of French empire.5 Rather than construct a fictional France, schoolbooks in history and geography tend toward the subversive when it comes to globalization in general and to the present global empire

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in particular, the French press gracefully but not graciously combining them in “l’américanisation du monde.”6 French textbooks have a certain twenty-​­first-​­century sense of fatigue about them, having abandoned patriotism for cynicism.7 And yet amidst this cynicism, the thinking of Reclus and Vidal is strangely relevant again. Reclus’s thought is apposite to the ongoing discussion related to national identity and immigration in France. The question of what exactly constitutes French identity was raised quite publicly by Eric Besson, Sarkozy’s minister of immigration and national identity in 2009 when he launched the infamous débat sur l’identité nationale, a national conversation in local venues and online meant to “favoriser la construction d’une vision mieux partagée de ce qu’est l’identité nationale aujourd’hui” (“promote the construction of a more widely shared national identity than the current one”). The stated objective was a stronger sense of national solidarity, reaffirmation of republican values, and greater pride in being French. Of course, the reality was something else; the xenophobia expressed in the comment threads online and in the regional meetings led to the suspension of the debate after just three months. It never saw daylight again. In remarks made to the press in the Jura region, the president himself defended the national conversation, referring repeatedly to the special relationship the French have to the soil: J’ai envie de lancer un grand débat sur les valeurs de l’identité nationale, sur ce qu’est être Français aujourd’hui. La France a un lien charnel avec son agriculteur, j’ose le mot, avec sa terre. J’ai été élu pour défendre l’identité nationale française. La France a une identité particulière. Je ne comprends pas qu’on puisse hésiter à prononcer ces mots, “identité nationale française.” La terre fait partie de cette identité nationale française. Elle est constituée notamment du rapport singulier des Français avec la terre. (I want to launch a great debate on the values of our national identity, on what it means to be French today. France has a carnal relationship with his farmer, I dare say, with his soil. I was elected to defend French national identity. France has a particular identity. I don’t understand that one can hesitate to pronounce these words: “French national identity.” The soil is part of this French national identity. This identity is formed by the singular rapport that the French have with their soil.)

This discourse around French soil quickly becomes a conversation about immigration in France. During an economic recession, much of the

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population agrees with the sentiment expressed by the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut: “Il y a de plus en plus de territoires perdus de la republique. Il y a une crise de l’intégration” (“There are more and more lost territories of the republic. There is a crisis of integration”). Immigrants are made the scapegoats in tough times. The “lost territories” are, of course, both the geographical suburbs “lost” to Arab immigrants who keep their language, food, and customs, and also the loss of perceived deference towards the landmarks of French identity: the French language and republican values like equality, fraternity, liberty, and solidarity. Finkielkraut often sounds like a nineteenth-​­century republican official when he recites the landmarks of French identity: La grand civilisation française [est] la langue, les œuvres, les morts avec lesquels nous sommes en dialogue et dont nous devons essayer de nous montrer dignes. L’identité n’est pas une propriété. Ce n’est pas ce que nous sommes mais ce que nous ne sommes pas. Dans certains quartiers les Français de souche ont un sentiment très étrange, celui d’être minoritaire, c’est-​­à-​­dire ils se sentent autre sur leur propre sol. D’où le phénomène de fragmentation territoriale. J’ai une autre idée de vivre ensemble: la capacité de partager une mémoire commune pour aller au devant. Mais il faut avoir la gratitude de penser que c’est la civilisation française. (The greatness of French civilization lies in its language, its works, and its dead with whom we are in constant dialogue and to whom must show ourselves worthy. Identity is not property. It is not what we are but rather what we are not. In certain neighborhoods, the native French have a sense of being in the minority, of being other on their own soil. Hence, the phenomenon of territorial fragmentation. For me, living together means the capacity to share a collective memory so as to move forward. But you really should be grateful that it’s French culture.)

The conservative discourse expresses distinctly many elements from Michelet, Renan, and Bruno. But it is no more successful at producing a real French person than its predecessors. Through documentary proof it means to reconstruct the past, citing “republican documents” and “republican authors.” The notion of trace is fundamental but always produces a gap between the thing and its representation. Kant’s das ing in sich cannot be reproduced, only represented. The epistemological turn in the nineteenth century is this emphasis on documents as the source of

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knowledge. It is through story that history enters myth. Bruno’s narrative of French identity impressed on millions of young minds what it means to be French. Frenchness as an identity does not exist except as a notion or concept. Vidal’s geographic thought is germane to the understanding of the current obsession over food and wine in France. A host of books have been written on nearly every aspect of French cuisine, from the kitchen to the table. Adam Gopnik’s recent book, The Table Comes First: Family, France and the Meaning of Food, is exemplary of a genre that explores in detail the relationship between the French and their food, drawing a direct line from food and manners to family and, implicitly, to the nation. The infatuation with terroir in France, and in francophile Americans, is in many ways an expression of longing for traditional ways of life, Vidal’s genre de vie. There could hardly be a better exmple of Vidal’s geographic thought than the winegrower’s reliance on the notion of terroir in the description of any given wine, whose character, quality, and personality are said to be the result of the interaction between climate, soil, water, and human intervention. The great irony, of course, is that terroir is evoked most often and most solemnly among the urbanites, those ruing the loss of contact with some former rural self. This is the city that Vidal described in his work, a city at the crossroads, one that exposes the average person to the many different terroirs. The same could be said for globalization today. After the end of the Cold War, entire regions splintered into new countries along ethnic and sectarian lines. Yet other countries with some of the twentieth century’s bloodiest conflicts between them have forged a union in order to remain relevant on the world stage. Nationalism is giving way to an international regionalism whose claims of unity evoke nineteenth-​ ­century notions of organic unity. As Europe builds its European Union, it creates for itself the requisite symbols of unity: a flag, a hymn, a constitution, and a common currency. These many cultural manifestations of identity are ripe for their own reading. Commerce, more than anything, seems to represent the new unifying idiom, captured well in the national image that each country stamps on its own euros, which in turn circulate as currency in all the other member countries—­a tacit acceptance of each country’s national identity. More important than any unity imposed from the top down, however, is the grassroots drive that brings the Danish student to study in Spain, the German engineer to work in the United Kingdom, the Belgian family to vacation in Greece. It is social interaction that builds the ties that bind across borders. The sheer number of French, British, German, Spanish, and others who claim to feel a sense of European identity is astonishing. Whether or not this European embrace

142 Conclusion

is the result of the United States serving the role of hegemonic “Other” that the church formerly provided is open to debate, but the anecdotal evidence seems clear. Europeans are finally identifying themselves as such. David Bell concludes his 2004 study of French nationalism, cited above, by noting that if the nation is to remain an organizing principle within French society, “it will do so not as a field of homogeneity, but as a site of exchange, where different cultures meet and mix, in constant movement.”8 As if to paraphrase Reclus, Bell goes on to offer Paris as an example of this cultural exchange, with its global selection of music, food, and clothing. But in mapping a geography of European identity, which understanding of geography will Europeans use: the heterogeneous geography of Reclus and Vidal that emphasizes circulation and movement, or the homogenizing geography of the political apparatus? The question remains open.

Notes

Chapter 1 1. Emile Levasseur and Auguste Himly, Rapport général sur l’enseignement de l’histoire et de la géographie (Paris: Dupont, 1871). 2. That chair was created by Napoleon in 1809. 3. For Drapeyron, the political renovation that France so needed was only possible through the inspired leadership of geographers: “A country like France could have two or three times the number of scholars that it presently does despite a lack of political leadership, because working in isolation these scholars advance only the special discipline they are committed to. But were one scholar, just one, to commit to finding and coordinating the results of so much scientific research, it would change politics. However, it should be noted that this task can only fall to a geographer, for the simple reason that geography is the necessary contact point, the unique contact point, for so many divergent disciplines that, nevertheless, contribute in some way to our understanding of the earth and humankind, and by extension of politics.” Drapeyron, “Le But, la méthode et l’œuvre de la Revue de Géographie,” Revue de Géographie 9 (July 1881): 2. 4. Michel de Certeau, L’Invention du quotidien (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1980). 5. The overlap and subsequent turf war with sociologists underscores the interest in the human element. The main difference between the two was where they came down on this dualistic divide. Vidal and the human geographers stressed individual agency while Durkheim and his followers emphasized the determining role of society. 6. Characters in times of great social change or formed in one period and living in another are often tragic: Balzac’s père Goriot, Stendhal’s Mathilde de la Mole, Flaubert’s Frédéric Moreau. For a discussion of the evolution of individual identity, see Amélie O. Rorty’s “A Literary Postscript: Characters, Persons, Selves, Individuals,” in The Identities of Persons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 301–­23. 7. For the history of the French school of geography dating from this period, see Vincent Berdoulay, La Formation de l’école géographique française, 1870–­1914 (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1981), 50–­57, 130–­36; Paul Claval, Histoire de la géographie française de 1870 à nos jours (Paris: Nathan, 1998); Gary S. Dunbar, Elisée Reclus: A Historian of Nature (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1978). 8. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. K. Smith (London: Macmillan, 1950), 71. 9. See Immanuel Kant, Inaugural Dissertation, trans. William J. Eckoff (New York: Columbia College, 1894), 65. 10. Paul Richards, “Kant’s Geography and Mental Maps,” in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 61 (March 1974): 4.



143

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Notes to Pages 8–11

11. Immanuel Kant, Physical Geography, quoted in Richards, “Kant’s Geography and Mental Maps,” 7. 12. See Deleuze’s work on the notion of the fold in Leibniz, Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1988). 13. Gaston Bachelard, La Poétique de l’espace (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958), 91. 14. Lefebvre’s theory of space is most clearly outlined in the introductory chapter of La Production de l’espace (Paris: Éditions Anthropos, 1974). 15. Vidal wrote the introductory tome on geography for Lavisse. 16. Daniel Nordman, “Les Guides-​­ Joanne,” in Les Lieux de mémoire: La République, vol. 2, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1997), 1062. It is this link that Foucault turns on its head when he argues that geography rather than history is the open element while the latter is perhaps the static one. For Foucault on geography see Jeremy W. Crampton, ed., Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2007). 17. The immense influence of Taine’s thought on the period is beyond the scope of this work, but it does provide a useful context for the development of geography as a discipline and political influence. Taine argued that art, including literary production, was largely the product of its environment. “Race” was the inherited temperament of a people, “milieu” the environmental factors that conditioned this inherited disposition, and “moment” the cultural traditions within which it was situated. While Taine has been largely ignored by twentieth-​­century thinkers, his influence on the nineteenth century can hardly be overstated. Zola, for one, was profoundly influenced by the historian. 18. Ferdinand Buisson, “Méthode intuitive,” in Dictionnaire de la pédagogie, vol. 1 (1887), 1376. The move away from celestial mechanics toward the experience of the individual is also explored by Andrews, who describes the new program as one that “began in the youngest years with a study of the immediate vicinity of the child’s home, school, commune.” Howard Andrews, “The Early Life of Paul Vidal de la Blache and the Makings of Modern Geography,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographer, no. 11 (1986): 174–­82. David Livingstone notes this tendency in French geography as well: Livingstone, Geographical Tradition (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992), 266. 19. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Harcourt, 1959). 20. Janet Beizer, Family Plots (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986), 21. 21. Ernest Lavisse, “Histoire,” in Dictionnaire de pédagogie (Paris: Hachette, 1882), 1271. 22. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1983). 23. Ernest Renan, “Lecture at Sorbonne, 11 March 1882,” in Discours et Conférences (Paris: Caiman-​­Lévy, 1887), 277–­310. 24. Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française (Paris: Chamerot, 1847), preface. 25. Hayden White, Metahistory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 159. 26. “Il leur faut un Oedipe qui leur explique leur propre énigme dont ils n’ont pas eu le sens, qui leur apprenne ce que voulaient dire leurs paroles, leurs actes,

Notes to Pages 11–16

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qu’ils n’ont pas compris.” Cited in Roland Barthes, ed., Michelet par lui-​­même (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1954), 92. 27. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6. 28. See Louis Althusser’s “Idéologies et appareils idéologiques d’État,” in Positions (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1967), 67–­125. 29. Althusser would argue that it happens even before we are born by the mere fact that we bear the name of our father or mother. We are born into an identity, called forth, quite literally, into relationships that mediate our contact with the world. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review, 2001). 30. Franz Schrader, “Géographie,” in Dictionnaire, ed. Buisson (1882), 1156. Quoted in Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 353. 31.  Claude Lévi-​­Strauss, La Pensée sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1962), 257. 32. Michael J. Heffernan, “A State Scholarship: The Political Geography of French International Science during the Nineteenth Century,” Transnational Institute of British Geographers 19 (1994): 23. 33. Christopher Flood, Political Myth: A Theoretical Introduction (New York: Garland, 1996), 19. 34. Jeanne d’Arc is known, of course, for having united the flagging French defenses opposing the invading English. Bara and Viala were two young boys killed during the French Revolution, the first at the hand of reactionaries for reportedly not shouting “Vive le roi!” and the second for allegedly assisting the republican forces. 35. Jacob, The Sovereign Map, 353. 36. Henri Lefebvre, “Everyday and Everydayness,” Yale French Studies 73 (1987): 10. 37. Maximilien Robespierre, Discours et rapports à la Convention, ed. Marc Bouloiseau (Paris, 1965), 79, cited in David Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism: 1680–­1880 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 1. 38. Weber discusses the diversity of patois in France during this period in Peasants into Frenchmen (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1976), especially 67–­94. 39.  Marie-​­Christine Kok-​­Escalle, Instaurer une culture par l’enseignement de l’histoire: France 1876–­1912 (New York: P. Lang, 1988), 119. 40.  Kok-​­Escalle, Instaurer une culture, 120. 41.  Kok-​­Escalle, Instaurer une culture, 122. 42. Ferdinand Buisson, “Cartes,” in Dictionnaire, ed. Buisson (1882), 337–­38. 43. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 131–­35. French advocacy for the meter as an international unit of measure resulted in two international conferences (Commission Internationale du Mètre) in 1870 and 1872 to discuss its adoption. At a third conference in 1875, eighteen countries signed the metric treaty (Convention du Mètre) establishing the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures. See Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps (New York: Norton, 2003), 84–­92; and Josef Konvitz, Cartography in France, 1660–­1848: Science, Engineering and Statecraft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 41–­45.

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Notes to Pages 16–24

44. Lefebvre, “Everyday and Everydayness,” 10. 45. Kern, Culture, 10–­15. 46. Weber, Peasants, 299, 311. 47. “Toute une France à refaire,” in Émile Zola, La Débâcle (Paris: Gallimard 1984), 582. 48.  P.-​­J. Harvey, Le Cheval d’orgueil (Paris: Plon, 1975). 49. Maurice Crubellier, L’École républicaine, 1870–­ 1914 (Paris: Éditions Christian, 1993), 139. 50. J. A. May, Kant’s Concept of Geography and Its Relation to Recent Geographical Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 203. 51. David Harvey, “The Kantian Roots of Foucault’s Dilemma,” in Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography, ed. Jeremy W. Crampton (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2007), 44. 52. Elisée Reclus, preface, L’Homme et la terre, vol. 1 (Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1905), ii. 53. Honoré de Balzac, La Théorie de la démarche (Paris: Didier, 1951), 23. Chapter 2 1. Teaching a child to read a map, like teaching a child to read a book, should be one of the principal goals of every geography teacher. Bulletin de la Société Neuchateloise de Géographie 4 (1888): 278. 2. “You talk like a book, Paganel,” remarked Glenarvan. “But I am one,” replied Paganel. “Feel free to leaf through me as much as you like.” 3.  Pierre Vivien de Saint-​­Martin, L’Année géographique, 1866, quoted in André Meynier, Histoire de la pensée géographique en France: 1872–­1969 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969), 8. 4. “The horrible lessons of the 1870 war imprinted on France a profound interest in the study of the earth sciences, geography and topography.” Ferdinand Buisson, “Topographie,” in Dictionnaire de pédagogie (Paris: Hachette, 1887), 2881. 5.  Lévi-​­Strauss, La Pensée sauvage, 32. 6.  Lévi-​­Strauss, La Pensée sauvage, 29. 7. Charles Rearick has noted that Michelet was an early folklore enthusiast, having conspired as early as 1828 to assemble his own “Encylopédie des chants populaires.” Rearick, “Symbol, Legend, and Mystery: Michelet as Folklorist-​ ­Historian,” French Historical Studies 7 (Spring 1971): 73. An analysis of French folklore would have to wait until the twentieth century when Arnold van Gennep wrote his famed Manuel de folklore français (Paris: A. Picard, 1938), an ethnographic study of rural France that bears a strong resemblance to Vidal’s notion of the genre de vie. 8. Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 83. 9. Reclus was writing against slavery as early as 1860 in an article for La Revue des Deux Mondes: “De l’esclavage aux États-​­Unis. I. Le Code noir et les esclaves ,” La Revue des Deux Mondes 30 (December 15, 1860): 868–­901. 10. Reclus was admitted to the society in 1858. 11. Elisée Reclus, Histoire d’un ruisseau (Paris: Hetzel, 1869) 66.

Notes to Pages 25–32

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12. L’Université Nouvelle de Bruxelles was formed in 1894 following an incident involving Reclus at the Université Libre de Bruxelles where he had been invited two years earlier to give a series of lectures. In the intervening two years, Vaillant threw his anarchist grenade into the Chamber of Deputies and met the guillotine. The assassination of Sadi Carnot a few months later provoked harassment of every anarchist in Europe. When the Université Libre de Bruxelles attempted to rescind their offer to Reclus, the leftists on campus broke off to form their own university, which coexisted with the original school until 1919. 13. Gary S. Dunbar, Elisée Reclus: A Historian of Nature (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1978). 14. Elisée Reclus, preface, L’Homme et la terre, vol. 6 (Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1905). Hereafter, I will use a roman numeral (vol.) and number (page) to refer to Reclus’s six-​­volume work, L’Homme et la terre, 6 vols. (Paris: Librarie Nouvelle, 1905–­8). 15. Elisée Reclus, La Terre: Description des phénomènes de la vie du globe, 2 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1868–­69), vol. 1, 757. 16. Reclus, La Terre, vol. 2, 624. 17. In his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Edward Gibbon wrote that “since the beginning of the world, each age has increasingly improved the material wealth, the happiness, the scientific knowledge, and perhaps the virtue of the human species.” Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 3 (London: Everyman’s Library, 1910), 225. 18.  Jean-​­Marie Guyau, Morale d’Épicure (Paris: Librairie Germer Baillière, 1878), 157 (Reclus’s note). 19. John Clark, “Marx’s Inorganic Body,” Environmental Ethics 11 (1989): 243–­58. 20. Elisée Reclus, “Du sentiment de la nature dans les sociétés modernes,” Revue des Deux Mondes 63 (May 15, 1866): 380. 21. Reclus intentionally echoed Malte-​­Brun’s (1810–1829) Géographie universelle in order to overwrite the previous work’s imperialist sympathies with a new ethos stressing solidarity between humans and the earth. 22. Alison Blount and Jane Wills, Dissident Geographies (Harlow, Eng.: Prentice Hall, 2000), 5. 23. Elisée Reclus, “Fragment d’un voyage à la Nouvelle-​­Orléans, 1855,” Le Tour du Monde, vol. 1 (1860): 182. 24. The general portrait of France consists of the first fifty pages of La Nouvelle Géographie universelle, vol. 2 (Paris: Hachette, 1877), entitled La France. 25. Reclus was alone in proposing the octagon as the harmonizing symbol of French space. Reclus’s figure of choice lost out to the now very recognizable hexagon, which has achieved its own mythical status in France. 26. La Nouvelle géographie universelle, 50. Hereafter NGU. 27. Régine Borderie, Balzac, peintre de corps: La comédie humaine ou le sens du détail (Paris: SEDES, 2002), 178–­79. 28. Chunglin Kwa, “Alexander von Humboldt’s Invention of the Natural Landscape,” The European Legacy 10, no. 2 (2005): 149. 29. Carl Ritter, Comparative Geography, trans. William L. Gage (New York: American Books, 1865), 202.

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Notes to Pages 32–39

30. Honoré de Balzac, “Avant-​­Propos,” in La Comédie humaine (Paris: Le Seuil, 1965). 31. This sort of regional typology goes back to at least Charles Estienne’s De Praedium Rusticum (Paris, 1555), a work whose playful regional caricatures belie a message of underlying unity meant to heal the rifts of the religious wars tearing France apart at the time. See Tom Conley, “Civil War and French Better Homes & Gardens,” South Atlantic Quarterly 98, no. 4 (1999): 725–­59. 32. Reclus, “Du sentiment,” 365. 33. The Chicago school refers to the academic work going on at several of Chicago’s public universities during the 1920s and 1930s that treated the rapid growth of Chicago between 1860 and 1910 as a case study for urban sociology. In general, the Chicago school treated communities as super-​­organisms whose rapid growth allowed them to trace the evolution of society in a relatively short period of time. 34. Jules Michelet, Histoire de France, vol. 2 (Paris: Lacroix, 1867), 126 The quotation is from Reclus, “The Evolution of Cities,” Contemporary Review 67 (1895): 255. 35. Charles Estienne’s La Maison rustique (1564) deals in what Tom Conley refers to as the psychogeography of French characters: “Le Normand veut estre mené tout en paix, & le Picart tout chaudement; le vray François est prompt & inventif, mais il ne se haste qu’en necessité. Vous avez à choisir entre le fin Bryais & le sot Bryais. Le Limousin est soigneux & espargnant: mais si vous n’y prenez pas garde, il fera plustost son profit que le vostre. Le Gascon chaud & prompt à colere. Le Provençal hault, & qui ne veut estre reprins. Le Poitevin cauteleux, & l’Auvergnac endurant du temps & de la fortune: mais s’il sçait vostre gaing, il en participera s’il peult. L’angevin, Tourangeois, & Manceau sont fins, subtils & amateurs de leur proffit. Le Chartrain, Beauceron, & Solognois, laborieux, paisibles, propres & reservans. Le Champenois & Bourgignon francs, de bon coeur, mais arrestez en leur opinion, & les faut souvent laisser faire jusques à l’espreuve du contraire. A toutes lesquelles complexions non seulement le Pere de famille, mais encor’ le fermier se doit accommoder, & des pires en choisir le meilleur, & soy bien garder de ce qui luy peut nuyre, ou donner empeschement. Considerant que tout ainsi que les terres sont diverses & ayment particulierement ce qui leur aggree, aussi sont aucunes personnes plus propres à une chose que les autres.” Quoted in Conley, “Civil War and French Better Homes & Gardens,” 745–­46. 36. Michelet, “Chaque homme est une humanité, une histoire universelle,” in Histoire de France, vol. 4 (Paris: Flammarion, 1893), 103. 37. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire (London: NLB, 1973), 36. Reclus’s hasty regional typology evokes the physiological peregrinations of Baudelaire’s flâneur, the sauntering urban observer (voyeur) who specializes in the typological reading of his fellow urbanites. 38. Paul Vidal de la Blache, “Des divisions fondamentales du sol français,” Bulletin Littéraire 2, no. 1, 2, no. 2 (1888): 1–­7, 49–­57. 39. Paul Vidal de la Blache, Tableau de la géographie de la France, in Histoire de la France, by Ernest Lavisse (Paris: Hachette, 1903), 8. 40. The affinities between Vidal’s geography and the Febvre and Bloch’s Annales school of history are legion. Both Febvre and Bloch graduated agrégés in geography after having studied under Vidal and Lucien Gallois (a former pupil of

Notes to Pages 39–44

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Vidal’s) at the École Normale Supérieure. Both expressed a certain geographical mindset in their approach to history, in particular an interest in milieu, genre de vie, circulation, and personnalité. Febvre even claimed Vidal as the forefather of Les Annales. For more on this connection, see Stuart Clark, The Annales School: Critical Assessments (London: Routledge, 1999), 98–­108. 41. For a superb overview of the cultural and intellectual roots of the French school of geography, see Vincent Berdoulay, La Formation de l’école française de géographie: 1871–­1914 (Paris: Seuil, 1981). 42. Darwin published his Origin of the Species in 1858, but he was not translated into French until 1863. By then, the debate over his ideas was already plenty animated, with criticism and praise coming from across Europe. The result was that most French read criticism of Darwin’s ideas before having read his work for themselves. A very productive writer and avid supporter of free enterprise, Herbert Spencer was one of the principal purveyors of Darwinian evolution, in particular as it supported his social claims. For a vivid account of French neo-​ ­Lamarckian philosophy and its influence on republican policy regarding crime, education, and colonial policy, see Stewart M. Persell, Neo-​­Lamarckism and the Evolution Controversy in France, 1870–­1920 (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1999). 43. Vidal, “Des divisions fondamentales du sol français,” 1888. 44. Vidal, Tableau, 9. 45. Vidal, Tableau, 205. 46. Vidal, “Des divisions fondamentales”, 1888, 6. 47. Paul Vidal de la Blache, “Des caractères distinctifs de la géographie,” Annales de Géographie 22 (1913): 289–­99. 48. Vidal, Tableau, 1903, 58. 49. Carl Ritter, Die Erdkunde, 1815, trans. William L. Gage (New York: American Books, 1865), 103. 50. Paul Vidal de la Blache, “Le Principe de la géographie générale,” Annales de Géographie 5 (1896): 129. 51. Vidal, “Principe de la géographie”, 1896, 134. 52. “When one part of the ocean moves, the whole ocean moves.” Vidal quoting the seventeenth-​­century geographer Varenius, in “Le Principe,” 134. 53. Anne Buttimer, “Charisma and Context: The Challenge of La géographie humaine,”in Humanistic Geography: Prospects and Problems, ed. David Ley and Marwyn S. Samuels (London: Croom Helm, 1978), 58–­76; Clarence Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967); Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition. 54. Paul Vidal de la Blache, “La Géographie humaine: Ses rapports avec la géographie de la vie,” Revue de Synthèse Historique 7 (1903): 224. 55. Kevin Archer, “Regions as Social Organisms: The Lamarckian Characteristics of Vidal de la Blache’s Regional Geography,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 83, no. 3 (1993): 498–­514. 56. Reclus, “The Evolution of Cities.” 57. Judith Schlanger, “Metaphor and Invention,” Diogènes 18 (1970): 12–­27. 58. See in particular Antonio Damasio, Descartes’s Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (London: Penguin Books, 1995); Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden

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Notes to Pages 44–57

Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002); and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 59. Yi Fu Tuan, Space and Place (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 35. 60. Immanuel Kant, “On the First Ground of the Distinction of Regions in Space,” in Kant, Inaugural Dissertation and Early Writings on Space (1768). Quoted in Tuan, Space, 36. 61. Petr Kropotkin, “On the Teaching of Physiography,” Geographical Journal 4 (1893): 358. 62. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane. 63. This particular left-​­west/right-​­east orientation is deeply instilled through the ubiquitous wall maps, which inevitably show north as up, south as down, left as west, and right as east. 64.  Jean-​­Baptiste Lamarck, Philosophie zoologique, vol. 1 (Paris: Dentu et L’Auteur, 1809), 403. 65. Most historians now identify Jacques Hadamard’s 1898 article on the movement of billiard balls as the first theorization of a chaotic dynamical system. See Hadamard, “Les Surfaces à courbures opposées et leurs lignes géodésiques,” Journal des Mathématiques Pures et Appliquées 4 (1898): 27–­73. Henri Bergson first outlined his theory of duration in his doctoral thesis, Essais sur les données immédiats de la conscience (Paris: F. Alcan, 1889). 66. Paul Vidal de la Blache, “Préface,” in Atlas général (Paris: Armand Colin, 1894). 67. Vidal, “Préface,” in Atlas. 68. Gilles Deleuze, Cinéma 2: L’image-​­temps (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1985), 27. 69. The rise of French poetic realism in the 1930s seems to correspond to the generation of students raised on Vidal’s wall maps and Bruno’s Tour de la France. The nostalgic overtones and tragic realism suggest the confrontation of organic rural connections severed by a mechanistic industrial society. The emphasis on the proletariat can be traced back to Vidal’s paysan. 70. Subsequent French geography fell into this trap repeatedly, most graphically when it provides the outline of France to show how nature fulfilled its geographical destiny. 71. Buttimer reads in Vidal’s regionalism an “implicit anti-​­industrial, anti-​ ­urban tone.” Buttimer, “Charisma and Context,” 62. 72. Paul Vidal de la Blache, Principes de la géographie humaine (Paris: A. Colin, 1922), 203. 73. Jules Verne, Les Enfants du capitaine Grant, vol. 2 (Paris: Hetzel, 1867), xx. 74. According to one of Paganel’s lengthy discourses on Maori society, tattooing serves to identify Maori chiefs. The tattooed Maori chieftains recount the whole of their lives on their bodies. Chapter 3 1. There are those who still refer to Verne as a “chronicler of nineteenth-​ c­ entury science’s march across the globe,” and his work, “imperialist exoticism.” Chris Bongie, Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism and Fin-​­de-​­siècle (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), 48–­49.

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2. André Berthelot, Auguste Levasseur, et al., “Géographie,” in Grande encyclopédie, vol. 13 (Paris: Limarault et Compagnie ed., 1882), 767. 3. Balzac, Théorie de la demarche, 23. 4. Pierre-​­Jules Hetzel, “Avertissement de l’Éditeur,” in Voyages et aventures du Capitaine Hatteras (Paris: Éditions Hetzel, 1866), ii. 5. Émile Zola quoted in Arthur B. Evans, “Jules Verne and the French Literary Canon,” in Jules Verne: Narratives of Modernity, ed. Edmund J. Smyth (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 11–­39. Elsewhere Evans quotes Zola’s 1878 review of Verne in Le Figaro Littéraire: “The Extraordinary Voyages sell well, but so do ABC readers and parish hymnals. They are all of no literary importance whatsoever” (December 22, 1878). To Zola, popularizing science within the novel was not the same as applying science to the novel, as he would attempt to do shortly in his theory of the roman experimental. 6. Charles Lemire, Jules Verne (Paris: Berger-​­Levrault, 1908), 107. 7. In an 1895 interview with Marie A. Belloc, Verne responded to a query about the British extraction of so many of his heroes, saying, “I consider that members of the English-​­speaking race make excellent heroes, especially where a story of adventure, or scientific pioneering work, is about to be described. I thoroughly admire the pluck and go-​­ahead qualities of the nation which have planted the Union Jack on so great a portion of the earth’s surface.” Strand Magazine, February 1895. The disparaging comments of Verne are from George Orwell, “Two Glimpses of the Moon,” The New Statesman, January 18, 1941. 8. Letter reprinted in Charles-​­Noël Martin, La Vie et l’œuvre de Jules Verne (Paris: Michel de l’Ormeraie, 1978), 221. Verne expressed his literary ambitions in another letter to Hetzel: “Ce que je voudrais devenir avant tout, c’est un écrivain, . . . je cherche à devenir un styliste, mais sérieux; c’est l’idée de toute ma vie.” In Martin, La Vie, 138–­39. 9. “Only those things that are altogether useless can be truly beautiful; anything that is useful is ugly, for it is the expression of some need, and the needs of man are base and disgusting, as his nature is weak and poor.” Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin (Brussels: J. Delfosse, 1834), 22. 10. Hetzel, Hatteras, preface (ii). 11. For Barthes, l’écrivant produces; l’écrivain creates. Roland Barthes, “Ecrivains et écrivants” (1960), reprinted in Roland Barthes, Essais critiques (Paris: Seuil, 1964), 147–­54. 12.  Jean-​­Paul Sartre, Qu’est-​­ce que la littérature? (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 148. 13. Jean Chesneaux, Une Lecture politique de Jules Verne (Paris: Maspero, 1971); Marie-​­Hélène Huet, L’Historie des Voyages Extraordinaires (Paris: Minard, 1973); Simone Vierne, Jules Verne et le roman initiatique (Paris: Éditions Sirac, 1973); Michel Serres, Jouvences sur Jules Verne (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1974). 14. See Arthur B. Evans, Jules Verne Rediscovered (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1988); Andrew Martin, The Mask of the Prophet (London: Oxford University Press, Clarendon, 1990); and William Butcher, Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Self (London: Macmillan, 1990). 15. Reclus, La Terre, vol. 1 (Paris: Hachette, 1869), 757. 16. Arthur B. Evans, “Literary Intertexts in Jules Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires,” Science-​­Fiction Studies 23:2 (no. 69) (July 1996): 171–­87.

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17. M. A. Belloc, “Jules Verne at Home,” Strand Magazine 9 (1895): 209. 18. Verne himself gave a report before the Society on the International Date Line based on his research for his story, Le Tour du monde en quatre-​­vingt jours. It was later published by the society as “Les Méridiens et le calendrier,” Bulletin de la Société de Géographie (Paris) 6, no. 6 (July 1873): 423–­33. 19. R. H. Sherard, “Jules Verne at Home: His Own Account of His Life and Work,” McClure’s Magazine (January 1894). 20. Nadar was an avid balloonist who provided the inspiration for Verne’s Cinq semaines en balloon (1863) and served in the aerostat company alongside Reclus when war was declared against Prussia in 1870. As for membership in the Société de Géographie de Paris, Reclus obtained his membership in 1858–­59, Verne in 1865. For more information regarding the geographical connections between Verne and Reclus, see L. Dupuy, “De Jules Verne à Elisée Reclus: Aux origins de la géographie dans les Voyages extraordinaires,” Bulletin de la Société de Jules Verne 151 (2006): 25–­28. 21. Ritter, Comparative Geography, 186. 22. Arnold Guyot, The Earth and Man: Lectures on Comparative Physical Geography (Boston: Guild, Kendall and Lincoln, 1849), 78. 23. Reclus, La Terre, vol. 1, 757. 24. Published serially and in book form in 1864, it comprises roughly 300 pages (barely a third the size of Les Enfants du capitaine Grant). 25. Simone Vierne, Jules Verne et le roman initiatique (Paris: Editions Sirac, 1973); William Butcher, Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Self (Hampshire, U.K.: MacMillan, 1990). 26. Given the numerous editions of Verne’s work and the author’s helpful division of each novel into several small chapters, the common practice in Vernian studies is to cite simply the chapter from whence a quote is taken. 27. Chunglin Kwa, “Alexander von Humboldt’s Invention of the Natural Landscape,” in The European Legacy 10, no. 2 (2005): 149. 28. For the link between the various geographical societies and Third Republic colonial policy, see Agnes Murphy, The Ideology of French Imperalism: 1871–­ 1881 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University, 1934); and Dominique Lejeune, Les Sociétés de géographie en France (Paris: Albin Michel, 1993). 29. Johann Kaspar Lavater, L’Art de connaître l’homme par la physionomie (Paris: L. Prudhomme, 1806). 30. In Les Mots et les choses, Michel Foucault traces the roots of this inner vision to Cuvier’s reclassification of organic taxonomy. The “Cuvier transformation” abandoned classification by surface structures in favor of classification according to anatomo-​­physiological functioning, which in turn removed the epistemological blockage leading to theories like Darwinian evolution (Foucault, Les Mots et les choses [Paris: Gallimard, 1966]). 31.  Claude Lévi-​­Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1955), 59. 32.  Lévi-​­Strauss, Tristes Tropiques 59. 33.  Lévi-​­Strauss, Tristes Tropiques 50. 34.  Lévi-​­Strauss, Tristes Tropiques 59. 35.  Lévi-​­Strauss, Tristes Tropiques 61. 36. Arnold van Gennep, Les Rites de passage (Paris: E. Nourry, 1909).

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37. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972). See also Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By (London: Paladin Books, 1985), 163. 38. Chaos, from Greek khaos, “vast chasm, void.” 39. Balzac, Théorie de la démarche, 18. 40. It should be noted that in the original version of Verne’s previous novel, the protagonist, Captain Hatteras, takes his own life at the end of the novel by jumping into the volcano at the North Pole. Judged unfit for the intended audience, the ending was changed to include the Captain surviving his encounter with the North Pole but succumbing to “polar madness” back in Liverpool. 41. William Butcher considers these present-​­tense excursions a sort of “free style” characterized by commentaries on the inner self and an affinity for the continuous tenses (93). He has also noted the inherent difficulties of writing in the present tense, especially in the use of the le futur proche forms with aller. The written word is an act accomplished in the past. Any reference to impending doom on the part of the author is immediately discredited because the author obviously survived long enough to write the lines of impending doom. See Butcher, Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Self (Hampshire, Eng.: Macmillan, 1990), 98, http://​ home​.netvigator​.com/~wbutcher/books/vjcs.htm. 42. After a fair amount of research, Butcher concludes that Verne’s Chancellor is arguably the first French novel to be written almost entirely in the present tense. Butcher, Verne’s Journey, 89 43. Verne’s works using the present tense include Voyage au centre de la Terre (1863), Frritt-​­Flacc (1886), La Famille Raton (1891), Mistress Branican (1891), M. Ré-​­dièze et Mlle Mi-​­bémol (1893), L’Eternel Adam (1910), and La Mission Barsac (1920), as noted in Butcher, Verne’s Journey, 90. 44. See the introduction to Butcher’s excellent translation of Verne’s Voyage, in Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 45.  Lévi-​­Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, 61. 46. Balzac, Théorie de la démarche, 43. 47. In education for example: “If there be an order in which the human race has mastered its various kinds of knowledge, there will arise in every child an aptitude to acquire these kinds of knowledge in the same order. . . . Education is a repetition of civilization in little.” Herbert Spencer, Education (London: G. Manwaring, 1861), 5. 48. Reclus, L’Homme et la terre, vol. 6 (Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1905), 504. 49. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1989), 199. 50. Freud, a big proponent of the biological theory of recapitulation even long after it was proven erroneous, offered the analogy of the infant attached to the mother’s breast who makes no distinction between mother and baby, to illustrate and explain the first human societies that could not differentiate between objects in nature and themselves as subjects. 51. Freud’s work and his own led him to “draw a parallel between the phantastical, mythological thinking of antiquity and the similar thinking of children,

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between earlier human races and dreams.” Carl Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2003), 27. 52. In an interview with Robert H. Sherard for McClure’s Magazine in 1894, Verne responded to a question about his scientific studies by stating, “I have never studied science, though in the course of my reading I have picked up a great many odds and ends which have become useful. I may tell you that I am a great reader. . . . I also read through the bulletins of the scientific societies, especially those of the Geographical Society, for, mark, geography is my passion and my study. I have all Reclus’s works—­I have a great admiration for Élisée Reclus—­ and the whole of Arago.” Sherard, “Jules Verne at Home,” McClure’s Magazine (January 1894). 53. François Arago, “Notice sur le tonnerre,” in Annuaire du bureau des longitudes (Paris: Bureau des Longitudes, 1838). 54. Arago, “Notice,” 219, 221. 55. The Danish physicist and chemist Hans Christian Ørsted first published his findings on the principles of electromagnetism in 1820. 56. The incident resulted from the poor decisions of a politically appointed and incompetent captain. Géricault’s epic historical depiction of actual events provoked a scandal, both for its graphic realism and for its perceived antiroyalist political statement. Géricault’s pursuit of realism involved interviews with survivors and visits to the morgue for corporeal accuracy. In fact, Géricault avoided including murder, cannibalism, and the most horrific aspects of the ordeal—­ suicide—­and focused instead on a rare moment of hope when the survivors spotted a ship on the horizon. 57. Verne’s metaphysical search for the inner self is similar to the desire expressed in several nineteenth-​­century authors to “see the invisible, know the unknowable, and narrate that which lies beyond the limits of narration.” See, for example, Christopher Rivers’s Face Value in which he explores the nineteenth-​ ­century fascination with phrenology and physiognomy as the “study of man” undertaken by four nineteenth-​­century authors—­Marivaux, Gautier, Balzac, and Zola (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 7. 58. Balzac, Théorie de la démarche, 12. 59. Ibid., 18–­19. 60. Sigmund Freud, The Pyschopathology of Everyday Life (New York: Norton, 1989), 134. 61. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: Norton, 1930), 18. 62. Heidegger discusses this hermeneutic shift in Sein und Zeit (1927). In it, Heidegger argues that all meaning is context-​­driven and conditioned by the observer’s particular horizon, perspective, or background of intelligibility. The only way to overcome this false objectivity is to make an effort to encounter other horizons and to fuse with them. Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires bring the reader into contact with other horizons, in their own pedagogical and pleasing way. Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper, 1962). 63. Lamarck, Philosophie zoologique, vol. 2 (Paris: Chez Dentu et L’Auteur), 294. 64. Bernard, La Medicine expérimentale (Paris: J. B. Ballière, 1865), 109–­10. 65. Fouillée, Critique des systèmes de morale contemporains (Paris: G. Baillière, 1887), 27.

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66. “Qui sait tout ce que peut la réflexion concentrée et s’il n’y a pas un nouveau monde intérieur qui pourra être découvert un jour par quelque Colomb métaphysicien?” Maine de Biran: Sa vie et ses pensées, ed. Ernes Naville (Paris: J. Cerbuliez, 1857), 213. Maine de Biran’s collected thoughts are even organized like Axel’s, arranged by date in a journal intime. Chapter 4 1. From an anonymous medieval text, reprinted in Françoise Hudry and Marc Richir, eds., Le Livre des XXIV philosophes (Paris: J. Millon, 1989), 22. 2. Her one book has sold well over nine million copies. See J.-​­P. Bardos, “Postface,” Le Tour de la France par deux enfants, by G. Bruno (Paris: Bélin, 1977). 3. Jacques Ozouf and Mona Ozouf, “Le Tour de la France par deux enfants,” in Les Lieux de mémoire: La République, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 277–­301. 4. In 2001 while traveling through France with a colleague from Paris, I made the acquaintance of a relative of his in the Beauce region. In the course of discussion about education in the United States and France, the subject turned to textbooks. When asked if she had ever used G. Bruno’s Le Tour de la France par deux enfants, her face lit up and with great affection she reminisced about the physical book, the characters, and the story. It was clear to me that the act of reading the story, rather than the details of the story itself, had left the strongest impressions. She could recite certain passages, and what her memory lacked in accuracy it more than made up for in spirit. Her obvious delight intrigued me. I questioned others. This fond reminiscence of Le Tour as a rite of passage proved a popular response in the portion of the French population that passed through primary school before 1945. 5. For the initial criticism that launched the interest in Bruno’s text see D. Halévy, La République des ducs (Paris: Grasset, 1937). For a more affectionate account see Aimé Dupuy, “Les Livres de lecture de G. Bruno,” Revue d’Histoire Économique et Sociale 2 (1953): 129–­33; and Ozouf and Ozouf, “Le Tour de la France par deux enfants,” 277–­301; or Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–­1914 (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1976), 334–­43. For a more contemporary analysis of its role in French identity see J. Strachan, “Romance, Religion and the Republic: Bruno’s Le Tour de la France par deux enfants,” French History 18, no. 1 (2004): 96–­118; and especially, M. Martin Guiney, Teaching the Cult of Literature in the French Third Republic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 128–­37. 6. For purposes of clarity and continuity in this chapter I will refer to the author by her pseudonym, G. Bruno. 7. In or around 1871, Jean-​­Marie Guyau developed the first signs of tuberculosis. Mme Guyau and Alfred Fouillée moved south to be with and tend to her son. He became a true colleague to Fouillée, who later wrote with great affection about his relationship with his stepson whose career was cut short by the sickness that took his life in 1888. 8. As if to illustrate the point just made about authorial confusion, Harvard University’s library catalog still lists Alfred Fouillée as the author of Francinet. 9. Compagnonnage was a semi-​­secret association of the various craft guilds throughout France that dates back to the fifteenth century. Despite lacking any

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centralizing authority, the societies of compagnonnage functioned as a unit, influencing the setting of prices, offering assistance to members in need, and training new members as apprentices. This latter practice involved hosting an apprentice for a short period of time before sending him off to the next member. For an analysis of the rituals and myths associated with the practice, see Cynthia M. Truant, “Solidarity and Symbolism among Journeymen Artisans: The Case of Compagnonnage,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 21, no. 2 (April, 1979): 214–­26. 10. The steady secularization of the text was thorough enough to remove any and all references to God, going so far as to change the threatening mon Dieu! to the more innocuous parbleu! 11. Speech by M. Spuller to the general assembly of teachers at the Académie de Poiters, May 14, 1894. Quoted in Martine Jey, La Littérature au lycée (Paris: Klincksieck, 1998), 127. 12. For a discussion of the civilizing mission in Brittany, see Caroline Ford’s Creating the Nation in Rural France: Religion and Political Identity in Brittany (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993). 13. “Through a thick September fog . . .” Of this familiar beginning Ozouf writes, “qui ne s’en souvient?”—­evidence enough of its characterization as lieu de mémoire. 14. Repetition was a fundamental component of republican education. Shaped by neo-​­Lamarckian theories of development, republican pedagogues maintained that repeated external exposure to a “republican” environment would provoke republican habits. Jean-​­Marie Guyau, Bruno’s own son, wrote an entire book predicated on such ideas: “Beneath every moral or aesthetic concept is to be found as an essential element, the idea of order, arrangement, and symmetry. The aesthetic pleasure caused in us by order is explained by the pleasure of repetition; the repetition of an act, in its turn, is agreeable to us only from the facility attained—­a facility springing from habit. Order, then, reduces subjectively, in a great measure, to habit.” Guyau, Education and Heredity: A Study in Sociology (1889), trans. William John Greenstreet (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1903), 51. 15. La carte de Cassini was a map of France on the scale of 1/86,000. It represents the first geometric survey of the entire extent of France and took over four generations of Cassini geographers to complete. The survey of France was conducted between 1756 and 1789 while the 181 separate sheets of the map were published between 1756 and 1815. The map is still considered a national treasure for its precise detail of the historic pays of France. As a military tool, however, it was considered too large and cumbersome for field use. Thus the need for a new map. 16. Identity is a very fluid notion in Deleuze, who distrusts the tendency of identity to fix itself spatially and temporally in the here and now, implying a static state of “being.” Beings, according to Deleuze, are simply moments of relative stability in the flow of life. The static life is a fiction. All life is fluid, kinetic. Instead of making links between these fluid moments of French identity, the State apparatus tries to make them coexist simultaneously through deterritorialization and reterritorialization. For a broader discussion, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrénie: Mille plateaux (Paris: Éditions de Minuit,

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1980); translated by Brian Massumi as A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Subsequent references will be to the English translation. 17. F. Schrader, “Géographie,” in Dictionnaire de pédagogie, ed. Ferdinand Buisson (Paris: Hachette, 1882), 1187–­93. 18. Ernst Lavisse, Questions d’enseignement national (Paris: Armand Colin, 1885). 19.  Marie-​­Christine Kok-​­Escalle, Instaurer une culture par l’enseignement de l’histoire: France 1876–­1912 (New York: P. Lang, 1988), 110–­20. 20. Paul Vidal de la Blache, Tableau de la géographie de la France (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1903), 14. 21. In his spatial considerations, Vidal describes the earth, and more particularly France, as a book and a face. This portraitist perspective dates back to at least Ptolemy (after 83–­161 A.D.) who described geography as the depiction of the head and its sister science, chorography, as the representation of the various parts: ears and eyes. Geography, in short, is concerned with the whole (countries) while chorography is interested in the parts (regions, departments, cities, villages). 22. Mona Ozouf, L’École, l’église, la république (Paris: Colin, 1963), 125. 23. Bruno, “Preface,” Tour de la France (1877). 24. Alfred Fouillée, La Science sociale contemporaine (Paris: Hachette, 1885), 115. 25. Léon Flot, “Langue Maternelle,” in Dictionnaire, ed. Buisson (1882), 1454. 26. Weber, Peasants, 336. 27. Jules Ferry’s policy of French instruction in public schools relied on the work done almost a century earlier by the revolutionary bishop, L’Abbe Gregoire, who pushed to “anéantir” the many patois and to “universaliser” the French language. His work is beautifully summarized and analyzed in a work by Michel de Certeau et al., Une Politique de la langue—­La Révolution française et le patois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). 28. Flot, “Langue Maternelle,” 1455. 29. Félix Hémon, Recueil des monographies pédagogiques publiées à l’occasion de l’exposition universelle de 1889, vol. 3 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1889), 399. These pedagogical monographs were written for the centenary of the French Revolution. 30. Antoine Rivarol, Discours sur l’universalité de la langue française (Berlin: Bailly, 1784). 31. Hudry and Richir, eds., Le Livre des XXIV philosophes, 24. 32. Hémon, Recueil, 397. The reader who remains unconvinced by the link between God and grammar has only to consult the period’s great social critic, Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote in his Twilight of the Idols (1887), “I’m afraid we are not yet rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.” From the conclusion of point five in the section entitled “ ‘Reason’ in Philosophy” (New York: Macmillan, 1896). 33. Bruno, Tour, 248. 34. Bruno, Tour, 95. 35. Bruno, Tour, 41. 36. Protection meant military defense. Geography lessons were deliberately based on maps so as to familiarize students with such a useful logistical tool.

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Republican schools built after the Ferry Laws were, in fact, designed to double as military barracks in a time of war, continuing the tradition of Napoleon who had turned the École Polytechnique into a military school. Historian E. Lavisse penned with his colonel brother a very successful primary school reader entitled Tu seras soldat (Paris: Armand Colin, 1888). 37. M. Ozouf, L’Église, 283. 38. M. Martin Guiney, Teaching the Cult of Literature in the French Third Republic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 132. 39. Bruno, Tour, 248. 40. Jey, Littérature, 19. 41. A. Ribot in a series of depositions for his inquiry on secondary education of 1899, in Jey, Littérature, 188. 42. A complete list appears in Jey, Littérature, 21, 22. 43. Gustave Lanson, Histoire de la littérature française (Paris: Hachette, 1894), 52. 44. Corneille, Molière, and Beaumarchais, to be exact. 45. Guiney, Teaching, 132. 46. Lanson, Histoire, 1182. 47. “La loi se doit de dire ce qui doit être.” The formulation for “in actual fact” looks more like this: “La loi ne se doit que de reconnaître les faits.” The rivalry between the two understandings of law has most recently been playing out in the discussion over head scarves and immigrants. 48. Gustave le Bon, Psychologie des foules (Paris: F. Alcan, 1895). 49. Flot, “Langue Maternelle,” 1455. 50. See also Weber, “L’Hexagone,” in Les Lieux de mémoire: La République, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 97–­116. 51. R. Jallifier, Rapport sur l’enseignement de le géographie: Commission pour l’étude des ameliorations à introduire dans le régime des établissements d’enseignement secondaire, Ministère de l’Instruction Publique (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1885) 16. 52. The best dictionary of that cartographical lexicon is still François Dainville’s polyglot Le Langage des géographes (Paris: Picard, 1964). 53. Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1970); Wolfgang Iser, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” in Reader-​­Response Criticism, ed. Jane P. Tompkins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 55. 54. Wolfgang Iser, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” in Reader-​­Response Criticism, ed. Jane P. Tompkins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 55. 55. This metaphor comes from Kurt Koffka’s work in Gestalt psychology. See in particular Principles of Gestalt Psychology (New York: Routledge, 1955). 56. Vidal, Tableau de la géographie de la France. 57. Paul Vidal de la Blache, Leçons d’ouverture du cours d’histoire-​­géographie à la faculté de Nancy (Nancy: Berger-​­Levrault, 1873), 27–­28. 58. Paul Vidal de la Blache, Principes de la géographie humaine (Paris: A. Colin, 1922), 204. 59. H. Spencer, Education (London: Manwaring, 1861), 5. 60. Freud still cited the theory as the intellectual basis for much of his psychoanalysis as late as 1916, summarizing the theory concisely in his Introductory

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Lectures on Psychoanalysis: “Each individual somehow recapitulates in an abbreviated form the entire development of the human race” (Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis [New York: Norton, 1989], 199). 61.  Paul Leroy-​­Beaulieu, De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes (Paris: Guillaumin, 1882), 12. 62. Jules Payot, Cours de morale (Paris: Armand Colin), 1904. 63. For further discussion on this topic, see J. E. S. Hayward, “ ‘Solidarity’and the Reformist Sociology of Alfred Fouillée,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 22, no. 1 (January 1963): 205–­22. 64. Fouillée, La Science sociale contemporaine, 363. 65. Robert Good, “Good Women and Good Will,” Women in French Studies 4 (Fall 1996): 53. 66. The parallels between Fouillée’s “idées-​­forces” and Schopenhauer’s “will to live” and Nietzsche’s “will to power” are numerous. Each of them stresses an inner drive that produces an external effect. For Schopenhauer, all living matter in the universe expresses an inherent desire to avoid death and to procreate. This “will to live” precedes thought and so has primacy over it. Nietzsche was influenced by Schopenhauer’s “will to live” while formulating his own “will to power,” which represents both humanistic self-​­perfection and the deep desire for power or mastery over other beings. Fouillée’s “idées-​­forces” is more concerned with finding an explanation other than the passive mechanism of evolution to explain change and development in the individual and society. To think (desire) a thing already implies movement toward it. For Fouillée, ideas (idées) provide a vital link between the inner conscious and external movement. 67. Alfred and Augustine Fouillée lived together unmarried for twenty-​­eight years until a change in French law allowed her to obtain a divorce from her abusive first husband. Alfred submitted her work to the publisher Bélin so frequently that his name came to be associated with the pseudonym G. Bruno. She was also a regular participant in the salon-​­type discussions among university professors taking place at their home. 68. Alfred Fouillée, “Psychologie des sexes et ses fondements physiologiques.” Reveu des Deux Mondes 119 (1893): 418. 69. Good, “Good Women,” 54. 70. Good, “Good Women,” 54. 71. Good, “Good Women,” 53. 72. As one would expect, though he took great pains to point out that his feminine ideals were to be applied in the moral sphere, critics willfully read his work as a call to weakness and emotion. Given the intellectual context in which men were considered evolutionarily superior to women, this bias is hardly surprising. This reading persists today in the far right discourse of American politics, where the French are considered effeminate and cowardly. 73. Alfred Fouillée, La Démocratie politique et sociale (Paris: Alcan, 1877), 55. 74. “Jeanne Darc” in Bruno’s text. 75. Bruno, Tour, 309. 76. For an account of the dangers inherent in this emphasis on sentiment in a male-​­dominated bourgeois society, see Judith Surkis, Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France, 1870–­1920 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), especially 17–­42.

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Notes to Pages 108–117

77. Emile Boutroux, “The Relation between Thought and Action from the German and from the Classical Point of View,” in Herbert Spencer Lectures (Oxford: Clarendon, 1918), 21. Boutroux’s predecessor at the École Normale Supérieure expressed it as “la raison doit toujours avoir raison.” 78. Lucy Shepard Crawford, “Emile Boutroux,” The Harvard Theological Review 16, no. 1 (January 1923): 73 79. Plato, Philebus, 14c. 80. I see and approve the right way and follow the worse (Ovid). Note too the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans in which he laments that “what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do” (Romans 7:15 [NIV]). 81. Bruno, Tour, 134. 82. Michel de Certeau et al., back matter, Une politique de la langue—­La Révolution française et le patois. 83. Erik Eriksen, Childhood and Society (New York: Norton, 1950), 327. 84. Suzanne Citron, Le Mythe national (Paris: Les Éditions Ouvrières, 1991), 292. 85. Suzanne Citron, Le Mythe national, 292. 86. Bruno, Tour, 73. 87. Thus the illegal status and secret nature of the various societies of compagnonnage vis-​­à-​­vis the government. See Truant, “Solidarity and Symbolism among Journeymen Artisans,” 217. 88. Fouillée, La Science sociale contemporaine, 12. 89. La Mémoire d’Auteuil d’après les archives inédites du directeur de l’École Normale d’Instituteurs de Paris (Paris: École Normale, 1982) 12. 90. Boutroux quoted in Shepard Crawford, “Emile Boutroux,” 71. Chapter 5 1. Yann Frémy, Te voilà, c’est la force: Essai sur “Une saison en enfer” de Rimbaud (Paris: Éditions Classiques Garnier, 2009). 2. Arthur Rimbaud, “Jugurtha,” trans. Jules Mouquet, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1999), 100–­105. 3. Translation mine. In general, I have used Wallace Fowlie’s very faithful English translations of Rimbaud’s work in Seth Whidden’s Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Any exception, like this one, is noted. 4. It is hard to imagine this poem, with its theme of submission to authority, winning any sort of prize after 1871. 5.  Hédi Abdel-​­Jouad, Rimbaud et l’Algérie (New York: Les Mains Secrètes, 2002). 6. Jules Michelet, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 4 (Paris: Flammarion, 1893), 331. 7. A likely source of Rimbaud’s comment on Gallic tradition of buttering one’s hair (“Mais je ne beurre pas ma chevelure”) is a section in the first volume of Michelet’s Histoire de France in which he quotes the fifth-​­century Roman poet, diplomat, and bishop to Auvergne, Sidonius Apollinaris, commenting on the odd habits of the Burgundians: “il chante, lui, et graisse ses cheveux d’une beurre rance” (182). Rimbaud’s rancid “chevelure” contains none of the exotic perfume of Baudelaire’s “Chevelure” (“O parfum chargé de nonchaloir! Extase!”). 8. Graham Robb, Rimbaud: A Biography (New York: Macmillan, 2001), 12.

Notes to Pages 117–123

161

9. Robb, Rimbaud, 13. Michon’s psychoanalytic speculations associate the poet’s writing with the quest for the lost father (Rimbaud le fils [Paris: Gallimard Education, 1993]). There is perhaps something to be made of this given the century’s ubiquitous trope of the lost orphan searching for his true identity. 10. Abdel-​­Jouad’s tenth chapter outlines Rimbaud’s influence on Arabic literature in general and Algerian literature in particular. According to the author, Algerian writers, who value “Jugurtha” as a model of resistance, seem to know the poem far better than the French. 11. Eliade expresses this idea in his Images et Symbols: “Modern man is free to despise mythologies and theologies, but that will not prevent his continuing to feed on decayed myths and degraded images” (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 19. 12. Paul Verlaine, “Les hommes d’aujourd’hui,” in Oeuvres en prose complètes (Paris: Gallimard, La Pléiade, 1972), 802. 13. Rimbaud’s ties to Verne have been discussed elsewhere: Roland Barthes, “ ‘Nautilus’ et ‘Le Bateau Ivre’ ” in Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957), 75–­77; Émile Noulet, “Le Bateau ivre,” in Le Premier Visage de Rimbaud (Paris: Palais des Académies, 1953), 189–­280; and Dana Lindaman, “Une Saison en Enfer et Jules Verne,” Parade Sauvage no. 23 (2012): 173–­85. 14. Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (New York: Verso, 2000), 12–­14. 15. Mircea Eliade, Initiation, rites, sociétés secrètes, naissances mystiques: Essai sur quelques types d’initiation (Gallimard, 1976); Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New World Library, 2008 [1949]). See also Anne-​­Cécile Dumont’s excellent article, “L’Héroïsme en question dans Mauvais Sang,” in Je m’évade! Je m’explique: Résistances d’Une saison en enfer, éd. Y. Frémy (Classiques Garnier, 2010), 65–­81. 16. From Rimbaud’s famous letter to Paul Demeny dated May 15, 1871. 17. Emile Durkheim, Le Suicide (Paris: Lalande, 1926), 281. See also S. Mestrovic, “Durkheim’s Concept of Anomie as Dérèglement,” Social Problems 33, no. 2 (December 1985): 81–­99. 18. Balzac, Théorie de la démarche. 19. Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari, L’Anti-​­Oedipe: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972); Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. 20. The distinction can be applied to the question of whether or not Rimbaud was in Paris during the Commune, a question still unresolved. The nomothetist insists on his presence during the fateful months because Rimbaud belongs in that place at that historical moment. The idiographer considers the point moot since it is not that historical moment that defines the individual. 21. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, translated by Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 18. 22. Bruno closes her geographic morality tale, Le Tour de la France par deux enfants, with the words, “Devoir et Patrie.” 23. Payot, Cours de morale, 33. 24. Jules Payot, L’Education de la volonté (Paris: A. Colin, 1899), 7. 25. Bruno, Tour de la France, 308. 26. Payot, Cours de morale, 20–­21.

162

Notes to Pages 124–128

27. The Oxford English Dictionary identifies as a secondary definition of “pagan”: “A person of unorthodox, uncultivated or backward beliefs, tastes, etc.; a person who has not been converted to the current dominant views of a society, group, etc.; an uncivilized or unsocialized person, esp. a child.” OED, 3rd edition, “pagan.” 28. Delvau, Dictionnaire de la langue verte (Paris: Flammarion, 1883), 338. It should be recalled that before arriving at the title Une saison en enfer that Rimbaud had tentatively titled his collection Livre païen and then Livre nègre. 29. By 1884, republican sentiment was so favorable toward the young woman esteemed as a liberator of enemy-​­occupied French territory (thanks in large part to Henri Martin’s 1883 hagiographic account of Joan of Arc in his Histoire de France) that 252 deputies on the left signed a bill to institute a national holiday in her name. For further discussion, see Gerd Krumeich, “Joan of Arc between Left and Right,” in Nationhood and Nationalism in France: From Boulangism to the Great War, 1889–­1918, by Robert Tombs (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 63–­73. 30. Félix Dupanloup, Panégyrique de Jeanne d’Arc (Orléans: Gatineau, 1855), 3. 31. “L’enseignement moral . . . tend à développer dans l’homme l’homme lui-​ ­même c’est-​­à-​­dire un coeur, une intelligence, une conscience.” This moral core was believed to be innate but undeveloped so that exposure to a republican education would result in the development of a certain “republican” moral center. See Jules Ferry, “Arrêté du 27 juillet 1882 réglant l’organisation pédagogique et le plan d’études des écoles primaires publiques,” Journal Officiel, August 2, 1882, section III, article 1. 32.  Jules Ferry, “Instructions officielles 2 août 1882: écoles primaires publiques,” accessed online at http://​www​.samuelhuet​.com/paid/41-​­textes-​­officiels/941-​­io -​­ferry-​­ecoles-​­primaires-​­publiques​.html. 33. In Le Cannibale: Grandeur et decadence Frank Lestringant maps the linguistic and cultural evolution of the figure of the cannibal in European literature, from Montaigne’s eloquent New World cannibals who offer pointed criticism of “civilized” European customs to the modern European conception of them as dreadful mute savages, an image which, Lestringant argues, the West used to vilify the Other to justify the “civilizing” efforts of colonization (Paris: Perrin, 1994). 34. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 117. 35. Frémy, Te voilà, 49. 36. Translation mine. Fowlie’s translation, “The white men are landing. The cannon! We will have to be baptized, put clothes back on and work,” misses some of the nuances I am trying to draw out here. 37. “La mer! La mer! Répétait Paganel, c’est le champ par excellence où s’exercent les forces humaines, et le vaisseau est le véritable véhicule de la civilisation !” Verne, Les Enfants du capitaine Grant (1867), II, 3. 38. Ephesians 4:20–­24 (roughly paraphrased from the ESV). 39. Michel de Montaigne, Les essais, book 1 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999), 30. 40. Rimbaud’s anticlericalism runs throughout his work, but allow me to note by way of example the three poems inspired by his sister Isabelle’s communion

Notes to Pages 129–139

163

(May 14, 1871): “Chant de guerre parisien,” “Mes petites amoureuses,” and “Accroupissements,” in particular the latter for its debasing portrait of an abbé with diseased mind and bowels. It is probably sufficient, however, to mention simply “Les Premières communions,” a poem described by Graham Robb as “pornographic anticlericalism.” 41. Littré, “Habillement, habiller,” 52. 42. Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 47–­74. 43. Payot, Cours de morale, 21. 44. Gerard Genette, “La littérature et l’espace,” in Figures II (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 45. 45. Sonya Stephens, Baudelaire’s Prose Poems: The Practice and Politics of Irony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 73. 46. Deleuze and Guatarri, A Thousand Plateaus, 223. 47. In his essay on French verse Jacques Barzun notes this tendency in both Verlaine and Rimbaud. See Barzun, An Essay On French Verse (New York: New Directions, 1991), 99–­100. 48. Both remarks quoted in John W. Kiser, Commander of the Faithful (Rhinebeck, N.Y.: Monkfish, 2008), 301. 49. Mme la Comtesse Drohojowska, L’Histoire de l’Algérie racontée à la jeunesse (Paris: A. Allouard, 1848), .backp 50. G. Bruno (pseudonym of Augustine Tuillerie), Les Enfants de Marcel: Instruction morale et civique en action: Livre de lecture courante, cours moyen (Paris, Vve E. Belin et fils, 1887), 233. Conclusion 1. Marie-​­Joseph Chénier quoted in David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 199. 2. The actual figures amounts to 48 million euros of a 98 million budget. Information obtained from the website of the French embassy in the United States on 10/2007, http://​www​.ambafrance-​­us​.org/fr/aaz/social.asp. 3. A discourse like that of the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, with its echo of Michelet, is emotionally appealing to many but lacking in a certain academic rigor. 4. Henri Mendras, Social Change in Modern France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 91–­106. 5. Aside from the occasional maladroit attempt to require the teaching of the positive aspects of French colonialism in the classroom. 6. Of the numerous examples with the French press, I offer this one: “Il n’a pas fallu attendre l’effondrement de l’Union soviétique pour s’apercevoir que la globalisation des marchés, des capitaux, de la production, de la consommation, etc., était un ‘produit’ des États-​­Unis grâce, notamment, à la présence mondiale de l’US Army, de l’US Navy et de l’US Air Force. Cette présence a ouvert la voie royale à la ‘mondialisation’ de Coca-​­Cola, d’IBM, de Levi’s, de Walt Disney, de Ford, de GM, d’ITT, de McDonald’s et, plus près de nous, de Microsoft, d’Intel, de Cisco, d’AOL-​­Time Warner, de Citicorp, de Wal-​­Mart, de Fidelity.” Riccardo Petrella, “Violences à Gênes: Criminaliser la contestation,” Le Monde Diplomatique 8 (2001).

164

Notes to Pages 139–142

7. French textbooks regularly refer to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X as emblematic figures in black America, rather than noting the achievement and influence of a Colin Powell, Condeleeza Rice, Oprah Winfrey, or Barack Obama. See Dana Lindaman, History Lessons (New York: New, 2004), 284. 8. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France, 217.

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Index

Abd el-­Kader, 110, 115–­16, 117, 131–­33 Alsace-­Lorraine, 39, 46, 88, 89–­90, 100 Althusser, Louis, 12, 13, 17, 145n29 Anderson, Benedict, 10, 19 Andrews, Howard, 144n18 anomie, 120 Arago, Franςois, 78

colonialism, 29–­30, 66, 105, 109–­10, 113, 115–­16, 133, 138, 163n5 compagnonnage, 16, 87, 155n9 Comte, Auguste, 106 Conley, Tom, 148n35 Corneille, Pierre, 97, 98, 111 Cuvier, George, 89–­90, 152n30

Balzac, Honoré de, 19, 32–­33, 35, 36, 58; La Théorie de la démarche, 71–­72, 80, 120 Bara, Joseph, 12, 145n34 Barthes, Roland, 59, 100, 101 Baudelaire, Charles, 38, 77, 148n37, 160n7 Beizer, Janet, 9–­10 Bell, David, 135, 142 Belloc, Marie A., 60, 151n7 Benjamin, Walter, 38 Bergson, Henri, 49, 52 Bernard, Claude, 83 Bernardin de St.-­Pierre, Jacques-­Henri, 107 Besson, Eric, 139 Bloch, Marc, 148n40 Blount, Alison, 30 Boileau, Nicolas, 97, 98, 111 Bossuet, Jacques-­Bénigne, 97, 98, 111 Boutroux, Emile, 83, 108–­9, 111–­12, 137 Bruno, G. (Augustine Fouillée, née Tuillerie), 16, 18, 85–­86, 140–­41, 159n67; religion in, 87, 156n10 —­works: Les Enfants de Marcel, 86, 132; Francinet, 86; Le Tour de la France par deux enfants, 16, 19, 85–­ 112 passim, 123, 124–­25, 128, 130, 137, 138, 141, 150n69, 155n4 Bruno, Giordano, 94 Buisson, Ferdinand, 12, 14–­15, 90 Butcher, William, 74–­75, 153nn41–­42

Darwin, Charles, 24, 39, 43, 44, 135, 149n42 Deleuze, Gilles, 15, 17, 19–­20, 45, 51, 53, 90, 103, 120–­21, 127, 130, 156n16 Demeny, Paul, 119 Descartes, René, 106 determinism, 5–­6, 7, 9, 38–­39 Drapeyron, Ludovic, 3, 4, 9, 143n3 Drohojowska, Antoinette-­Joséphine-­Anne, Comtesse, 132 Dubois, Marcel, 4 Dunbar, Gary, 25 Durkheim, Émile, 120, 143n5

Campbell, Joseph, 67, 119 cannibalism, 127–­28, 154n56, 162n33 Certeau, Michel de, 5, 17, 102, 109 chaos theory, 49, 150n65 Chicago school, 34, 148n33

Eliade, Mircea, 119, 161n11 Estienne, Charles, 36, 148n31, 148n35 Febvre, Lucien, 39, 148n40 Ferry Laws, 13, 15, 16, 90, 94, 158n36 Finkielkraut, Alain, 140, 163n3 Flaubert, Gustave, 35, 119 Foncin, Pierre, 4 Foucault, Michel, 17, 18, 68, 144n16, 152n30 Fouillée, Alfred, 83, 86, 92, 94, 105–­ 8, 110, 111–­12, 137, 155nn7–­8, 159nn66–­67, 159n72 Franco-­Prussian War, 3, 39, 89, 90 Frèmy, Yann, 127–­28 French cuisine, 141 French educational system, 14–­16, 90, 92–­93, 99, 104–­5, 116, 123, 126–­27, 138, 162n31; repetition and habit, 88, 156n14; textbooks, 16, 21, 138–­39, 164n7 French language instruction, 92–­94, 157n27

177

178 Index French literary canon, 97–­98, 128 French Revolution, 11, 13, 94, 110, 145n34 Freud, Sigmund, 67, 77, 80, 153nn50–­51, 158n60 Gauls, 105, 109–­10, 160n7. See also Rimbaud, Arthur Gautier, Théophile, 151n9 Gennep, Arnold van, 67, 146n7 Geoffroy Saint-­Hilare, Étienne, 33 “geographic sensibility,” 5–­6 geography studies, 3–­17, 21–­23, 30, 90, 135–­36, 143n3, 157n21, 157n36 Géricault, Théodore, 79, 154n56 Gibbon, Edward, 27, 147n17 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 90 Gopnik, Adam, 141 Guattari, Félix, 121, 127, 130 Guiney, M. Martin, 87, 105 Guyau, Jean-­Marie, 27, 86, 120, 155n7, 156n14 Guyot, Arnold, 61 Haeckel, Ernst, 77, 81, 104–­5 Harvey, David, 18 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 28 Heidegger, Martin, 154n62 Hémon, Félix, 94 Hetzel, Pierre-­Jules, 58, 61 hexagon symbol, 100, 130, 135, 147n25 Himly, Auguste, 3, 4, 38 history education, 9–­13, 136 Hugo, Victor, 98 Humboldt, Alexander von, 23, 32, 40, 41, 61, 65, 66 immigration, 139–­40, 158n47 Iser, Wolfgang, 101–­2 Jeanne d’Arc, 12, 107, 125, 145n34, 162n29 Jey, Martine, 111 Joyce, James, 119 Jung, Carl G., 77–­78 Kant, Immanuel, 3, 5, 6–­8, 17–­18, 44–­45, 140 Kropotkin, Petr, 45 La Fontaine, Jean de, 97, 98 Lamarck, Jean-­Baptiste, 40, 46–­49, 55, 83, 91, 113, 136

landscape focus, 5, 6, 23, 32, 65; in Reclus, 66; in Vidal, 38, 39–­40 Lanson, Gustave, 98 Lavater, Johann Kaspar, 66, 80 Lavisse, Ernest, 9, 10, 12, 86, 91–­92, 109–­10 Le Bon, Gustave, 99 Lefebvre, Henri, 8, 13 Leibniz, Gottfried, 6–­8 Lemire, Charles, 58 Lestringant, Frank, 162n33 Levasseur, Emile, 3–­4, 9, 57, 90–­91 Levasseur-­Himly report, 3, 9, 45, 89, 90 Lévi-­Strauss, Claude, 12, 21–­22, 67, 68–­ 69, 75 Maine de Biran, François-­Pierre-­Gonthier, 57, 83, 155n66 Malte-­Brun, Conrad, 147n21 maps, 4, 13, 14–­15, 55, 100–­101, 130, 150n63; in Bruno, 88–­89, 91; la carte de Cassini, 89, 156n15; La Carte de l’État-­Major, 50, 88–­89; Vidal and, 38, 49–­53, 91, 93, 100, 130 Marx, Karl, 28, 31, 67, 111 Michelet, Jules, 6, 9, 11–­12, 19, 22–­23, 35, 36, 47, 92, 98, 102–­3, 105, 140, 146n7, 163n3; Rimbaud and, 117, 122, 160n7 Michon, Pierre, 117, 161n9 militarism and education, 15, 16, 157n36 Molière, 97 Montaigne, Michel de, 31, 128, 162n33 Montesquieu, Charles–­Louis de Secondat, 98–­99 Moretti, Franco, 119 Nadar, Félix, 61, 152n20 national identity. See republican values Newton, Isaac, 7 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 157n32, 159n66 Nora, Pierre, 9, 17, 86 Nordman, Daniel, 9 Other, the, 89, 91–­92, 105, 108, 140, 142, 162n33; in Rimbaud, 121, 128, 130, 133 Ozouf, Jacques and Mona, 85, 86, 92, 96, 101 Pascal, Blaise, 94 Paul, 128, 160n80 Payot, Jules, 105 Plato, 108–­9

179

Index positivism, 5, 9, 25, 28, 29, 50; in Verne, 57, 65, 78 possibilism, 39, 102 Protagoras, 56 Proudhon, Pierre-­Joseph, 105–­6 Ptolemy, 157n21 Racine, Jean, 97, 98 Raffy, Casimir, 21 Ranke, Leopold von, 27 Ratzel, Friedrich, 38, 103 recapitulation theory, 28, 77–­78, 81, 104–­ 5, 109, 153n50, 158n60 Reclus, Elisée, 4, 6, 18–­20, 22–­38, 42–­43, 53–­55, 57–­58, 66–­67, 77, 130, 135–­39, 142, 147n12, 147n21; on cities, 34–­ 38, 43, 54; on “mutual assistance,” 24, 136; on “social geography,” 26–­29, 34, 42, 57; figurative language in, 30–­31, 35–­36, 43, 45, 49, 54, 64–­65; organism model, 49, 54–­55, 59, 61, 66, 67, 135; Rimbaud and, 128; Verne and, 59, 60–­ 61, 64–­67, 78, 154n52 —­works: “The Evolution of Cities,” 43, 49, 54; L’Homme et la terre, 26; La Nouvelle géographie universelle, 4, 29–­30, 43; La Sicile et l’éruption de l’Etna, 61; La Terre, 48; Les Volcans et les tremblements de terre, 61 Renan, Ernst, 10–­11, 13, 86, 103, 140 republican values, 5, 9–­17, 39, 92–­94, 109, 112, 135–­36; bricoleur approach to, 21–­23, 55; in Bruno, 85–­86, 88, 92, 95, 97–­99; contemporary debates on, 139–­ 42; in Rimbaud, 123–­24; Reclus and, 31, 33, 36–­38 Rimbaud, Arthur, 18, 19, 115–­33, 137; anticlericalism, 128–­29, 162n40; “derangement of the senses,” 78, 119–­ 20; on the Gauls, 105, 119, 122–­23, 129; influence on Arabic and Algerian literature, 161n10; initiation in, 119; “pagan” qualities, 124, 162nn27–­28; Verne’s influence, 84, 119 —­works: “Jugurtha,” 115–­18, 120, 131–­33, 160n4, 161n10; “Mauvais sang,” 105, 118–­19, 121, 122–­30; Un Saison en enfer, 118–­20, 130–­31, 137 Ritter, Carl, 23–­24, 32, 41, 61 Rivarol, Antoine, 94 Rivers, Christopher, 154n57 Robb, Graham, 117, 163n40 Robespierre, Maximilien, 13

Rorty, Amélie O., 57 Ross, Kristin, 129 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 75, 99, 107, 119, 126, 128, 135 Saint-­Martin, Pierre Vivien de, 21 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 139 Schlanger, Judith, 44 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 159n66 Schrader, Franz, 4, 12, 90 Shepard Crawford, Lucy, 108 Simon, Jules, 3 Sociéte de Géographie de Paris, 4, 24, 55, 60–­61, 66, 152n18 Socrates, 31, 108 solidarity, 5, 82, 106; Bruno and, 19, 110–­ 11, 136; Reclus and, 23, 26, 28, 43; Vidal and, 29–­40, 43, 54 space, theories of, 6–­8, 16–­18, 45, 103–­4 Spencer, Herbert, 39, 149n42, 153n47 Spuller, Eugène, 87 Stephens, Sonya, 130 Taine, Hippolyte, 9, 86, 144n17 Thiesse, Anne-­Marie, 13 Tuan, Yi Fu, 44 Tuillerie, Augustine. See Bruno, G. typology, 32–­33, 148n35, 148n37 Vercingétorix, 109–­10, 132 Verlaine, Paul, 118–­19, 122 Verne, Jules, 4, 18–­19, 21, 55–­56, 57–­84, 151nn7–­8, 154n52; aristocrats in, 75; critical reputation, 58–­59, 137; initiation in, 62, 67–­68, 119; science and madness in, 19, 56, 58, 60, 65, 69–­72, 81; verb tenses in, 74–­75, 153nn41–­43 —­works: Les Aventures du Capitaine Hatteras, 60, 63, 153n40; Le Chancellor, 74, 78–­79, 153n42; Cinq semaines en ballon, 58, 60, 63, 152n20; Les enfants du capitaine Grant, 21, 55, 75, 128; Face au drapeau, 74; L’Ile à hélice, 74; L’Ile Mystérieuse, 75; Tour du monde en quatre-­vingt jours, 87, 152n18; Voyage au centre de la terre, 19, 56, 58–­84 passim, 120, 136–­37 Viala, Joseph, 12, 145n34 Vidal de la Blache, Paul, 3–­4, 6, 9, 18–­20, 22–­25, 38–­55, 86, 102–­3, 112, 135–­37, 141–­42; Annales school and, 148n40; on “human geography,” 38–­43, 48, 143n5; maps and, 49–­53, 91, 150n69;

180 Index Vidal de la Blache, Paul, continued organism model, 39–­42, 44–­49, 53–­54, 91–­92, 102, 135 —­works: Atlas général, 49–­51; “Le Principe de la géographie générale,” 41; Tableau de la géographie de la France, 39, 48, 91, 102–­3, 137

Weber, Eugen, 8, 16 Wills, Jane, 30 women and maternity, 95–­96, 106–­8, 159n72 Zola, Émile, 16, 35, 89, 110, 144n17; on Verne, 58, 151n5